· TRANSLATOR’S PROLOGUE AN attempt has been made in the following pages to transfer the thought...

TRANSLATOR’

S PROLOGUE

AN attempt has been made in the followingpages to transfer the thought of M.

Loisy’

s La Religion d’

Isra'

e’

l into English ; so thatits fine scholarship may be available to readerswho are not on easy terms with the original.French prose is the most perfect instrument ofthought and speech that the modern world hasgiven us. Indeed, it might be argued that it ismore perfect, in some of its qualities, than evenGreek and Roman. Though it may not have allthe force, weight, and brevity of the latter, northe opulent variety and the subtil distinctionsof the former, yet in lucidity, precision, irony,and above all in lightness of touch , it yields toneither. In these respects, it is far superior toall other ex isting European languages, and evento those curious variations in one of them whichare being manufactured so capriciously in Australasia,

South Africa, and North America.

In that great age “ when letters were polite,French was the language of ambassadors and

Translator’s Prologue

the medium of international courtesy ; and itis still the language in which urbanity prevails,not merely as a tradi tion, but as a livingpractice. Therefore it is most desirable thattheological discussions should be carried on,whenever it is possible, in French ; so that thelanguage itself may help to assuage the proverbial heat of religious controversy. MostEnglishmen are said to write in a rage. Ourdivines and politicians are, indeed, often angryenough ; but they are generally even moreculpable through being dull and heavy-handed.

To these faults the Germans usually add anobscurity

,an obtuse rudeness , and a laughable

want of tact, which are all their own. Againstthese defects, the urbanity, the clearness, thepractical common-sense, and the lightness of

French are the best preventives ; and all thesegood qualities are met with invari ably throughout M. Loisy

’

s w ritings.As a prose writer, so far as an Englishmanis able to judge, M. Loisy carries on that hightradition which through Montaigne

,Pascal,

Fenelon, Voltaire, Talleyrand, Merimee, Renanhas come down, unbroken and unharmed, intoour own time, and is being worthily continuedby many learned and charming authors. It isnot only impossible to estimate the living

,but

it is invidious to enumerate and class them ; still


it would be allowed, perhaps on all hands, thatM. Anatole France personifies best in himself,and exhibits most happily in his art

,those finer

qualities of French prose to which we havealluded, as they are illustrated by the greatmasters whom we have named. As an exampleof the more solid and monumental virtues ofFrench writing, we should point to MonseigneurDuchesne, now deservedly a member of theAcadémie Francaise in succession to the wittyCardinal Mathieu . M . Duchesne’s great bookhas been described felicitously as “ Une histoireancienne de l

’

Eglise raconté e avec toute lascience du vingtieme siecle dans la langue dudix-huit ieme e t a la barbe des théologiens duseizieme. This epigram, which might also beapplied to M. Loisy, we owe to the AbbeHoutin,

himself the master of a biting and witty prose,in which he has exposed many antique fraudsand immortalized innumerable dunces . It willbe seen from these examples that the Church ,at any rate in France, has been able so farto maintain her long connexion with humaneletters

,in Which she can boast of so many

illustrious names . Whether that tradition willsurvive the dissolution of the Concordat isperhaps as dubious as the connexion of someof these writers with the Church. Howeverthis may be, M. Duchesne has not succeeded to

viii Translator’ s Prologue

Cardinal Mathieu’s vacant Hat, nor is he likelyto under the present Pont ificate , which i s

mortally afraid ofwit and scholarship , especiallyin historians .It may be questioned, also, whether any of

our own existing divines and historians arecapable of writing, like Monseigneur Duchesne,dans la langue da dix—huitieme si ‘ecle, orWhether they would understand precisely whatis meant. If the great age of prose, or perhapsrather if its traditions, be still surviving andeven flourishing in France it is because, for onereason, as Renan says so finely, “ la languefrancaise est puritaine

"

: it is exclusive, reverent,scrupulous ; and its best writers still exercisethemselves deliberately in those great traditionswhich, as Pope warns us, and as our currentliterature shows, can not ever be neglected withimpunity. Through these methods France canstill produce authors who, without pedantry,artificiality, or stifine ss, are able to give us somuch of the form and spirit which are inheritedfrom the delightful and cultured age of LouisXV. In English, the accomplished negligenceof Goldsmith comes nearest to that fascinatingand artless manner ; and Goldsmith himselfwould have been the ideal translator of M.

Loisy.

For all these reasons, it has been a work of

Translator’ s Prologue ix

unusual difii culty to turn M. Loisy into English.

All translation is at best elusive and disappointing. It resolves itself ultimately into an adoptionof what seems least unsatisfactory, and Proteushimself is not more volatile than language.To transfer thought from one language intoanother is the best way to realize Homer’sdeeper meaning when he says that words arewinged. The present translator knows as wellas most of his readers and possible critics thatany given sentence may be turned in at leasthalf a dozen ways ; and if he has had to chooseone of them finally, it has never been withoutrecognising that there are several others equallyaccurate and sound. But, since this translationhas had the benefit of M. Loisy

’

s friendly andvery careful supervision, it may be claimed thathe, at any rate, finds no posit ive error of detailin the attempt to convey his meaning ; and hehas been good enough to add that, as a composition

,it seems to him readable, flowing, and

successful. If that be the general verdict, thetranslator may be fairly satisfied. He hasaimed

,so far as possible, at keeping to the

form of M . Loisy’

s sentences, and to the orderof his words ; but French has more inflectionsthan English , and they enable it to be grammat ical and clear in many cases where ouruninflected language would be confused. In

X Translator’s Prologue

some few passages, therefore, it has beenthought advisable to break up and shorten M .

Loisy’

s sentences, or to transpose the order ofhis clauses

,though never it is hoped with any

alteration of the meaning.

It may be remembered that Gibbon wrotemuch and easily in French . Indeed, he waveredlong between composing his Decline and Fallin that language or in English. Those whohave studied Gibbon’s method w ill have seenhow forcibly and concisely he makes a story te llitself by his moving and spirited use of verbs,and how his careful choice of epithets has oftensaved him a long paragraph of description in our

more slovenly and effusive modern style . Bythese meansh e was able to convey,wi th singularminuteness, the history of the whole civilizedworld for nearly fifteen centuries, in rather lessspace than is occupied by Froude or Gardinerfor about sixty years of British history alone.By similar means, M. Loisy is able to tell hislong story in a more condensed way than mostEnglish writers could have used. Because he isshort, it must not be inferred that he is slightor superficial, for the precise contrary is true ;and the translation, probably, is very near tothe original in length.

M. Loisy has christened hi s book The Religion

of Israel. 80 refined and scrupulous a scholar

Translator’ s Prologue xi

does not use words carelessly ; and his volumeneither is, nor professes to be, an History ofthe Jews, in the ordinary meaning of that term.

There are many such histories, more or lessapocryphal, and there is no need for anotherof the same kind in English. M . Loisy hasgiven us something much better. He explainshow the religion of Israel has grown up ; analysing it, so far as that is possible, into its earliestand simplest elements ; marking its probableorigins, and setting it in that larger scheme ofcomparative religi on, which is one of the mostimportant and fruitful branches of our modernhistorical science. He thus traces Judaism toits beginnings, follows out its growth, andshows its extraordinary developments . Logicaland entirely natural as the whole process hasbeen, as one looks back, using the proper clue,it must be admitted that the religion of Israelcontains a great deal which would be inexplicable and surprising to its primitive initiators,and much also that is hardly understood asyet by its existing adherents, whether Mosaistsor Christians.The chief clue which M. Loisy possesses is hisoriental scholarship , which enables him to judgethe Hebrew records with first-hand authority,and with unrivalled knowledge. He gives tohi s readers, in the clearest form and in a

xii Translator’s Prologue

wonderfully short space, the latest and soundestresults of the higher criticism with regard to

cal and the deutero-canonical books. Thesepages alone would make his volume of theutmost interest and value to many Englishreaders. To some, perhaps, who are not versedin scriptural studies , M. Loisy may appear arbitrary or revolutionary ; but any one who isfamiliar with the vast literature of the Biblicalproblem will be impressed more by his sobrietyand caution. In addition to his profound scholarship and his practical common-sense, M . Loisyhas a way of looking all round a question, andseeing it in every point of view, before hepronounces judgment. This makes him a safeteacher and a very awkward antagonist. EvenProfessor Harnack, in spite of all his learning,was shown that he had missed the essentialpoint of Christ’s teaching when the argumentsof L ’Evcmgile et L

’E’glise were applied to Whatis ChristianityThe question of what Christianity really ishas come to be asked in our days with moreand more persistence ; and the answer is beinggiven with an always fuller knowledge, and amore rigorous application of scientific methods.M . Loisy has done more than almost any othersingle writer to give an answer which may


satisfy the intelligence and scholarship of thistwentieth century. In his two great works,Le Quatriéme Evangile and Les Evangiles Synoptiques, he has explored the mysteries whichhave enveloped the composition and spirit ofthe Gospels . In his Religion d

’

Israe'

l, he hasexamined and explained the foundation uponwhich the whole Christian super-structure hasbeen raised. Whether it be acceptable or not,the foundations of both Judaism and Christianityhave been altered bymodern investigators.The old notions about the origin , authorship,date, order, and contents of the Hebrew recordscan not be maintained by any competent scholar.

The general results of criticism must be, andare, accepted, whatever controversies and un

solved problems may remain about secondarydetails ; and archaeology bears out the generalresults of grammatical and historical criticism.

The old view, besides being irreconcilable withour present knowledge of the universe and ofits laws

,presented a general scheme of Jewish

history which swarmed with contradictions, improbabilities , difficulties, absurdities, even impossibilities. As we have now come to read thebooks

,the whole history is made intell igible and

coherent ; and the religion, which is presentedthrough the history, becomes more interestingthan ever as a factor in the education of

xiv Translator’ s Prologue

mankind,and as an illustration of the

process .M

.Loisy ends his story, significantly, Wi th a

chapter on messianism, into which the Jewishhistory belonging to the old world disappeared,and out of which the Christianity of the newworld has emerged. The problem which, aboveall others, engages New Testament scholars atpresent is the true relation of Christ to themessianic kingdom, and his attitude towardsthe person and prospects of the messiah. Withthis problem is bound up the secret of his mind,and the whole question of Christian ethics .It used to be thought, especially by Anglicantheologians, that in matters of criticism theNew Testament could be separated from theOld, and that scholarship could be pull ed upshort at the end of Malachi. We have come tosee, however, that the whole of Judaism is onelong , gradual, and natural evolution, from thetribal God of nomad Semites in the desert tothe universal God of the later prophets,who was modified again by Platonic andAlexandrian metaphysics. Whatever elseChristianity may be, it is an He llenistic structure built on a Jewish foundation, which wasitself considerably Hellenised long before theChristian missionaries appeared. Criticism,

then, has not stopped, and cannot stop, at

Translator’s Prologue xv

Judaism and the Old Testament ; but it is farmore constructive than destructive, and one ofits positive results may be to reconcile Judaismto Christianity

,when each of them is under

stood better. And a farther result may evenbe to reconcile the warring Christian sects,when scholarship dissolves, as it will inevitably, the ecclesiastical and theological barriersbetween them. Though M. Loisy ends thisvolume with messianism, as it was taken overand adapted by the earliest Christian preachers,he has in theprolegomena to his Synoptic Gospelssketched a most illuminative and fascinating“ Life of Christ. This is now being disengagedfrom its rather formidable setting

,and with

some necessary alterations will form a separatework, which may probably be published soon .

And all readers of this Religion of Israel willdesire, it may be hoped, to have it presented tothem in due time in English.

With regard to a few details in the presenttranslation, it should be pointed out that all therenderings of Scripture are from one or otherof our current English versions, the Authorizedor the Revised, except in some few cases whereM. Loisy

’

s translation has diflered from themsubstantially, and so is presumably nearer to theoriginal. In the usage of proper names, ourcurrent English spelling has been followed in

xvi Translator’s Prologue

variably. Noah, for instance, has become anEnglish word ; Noe has not , and probably neverwill

,nor has Moyses or Cham and so of many

other names with which the Authorized Biblehas familiarized our Protestant Church andNation

,until they have become household words .

In many ways it is a pity that these familiarnames are not employed uniformly throughoutthe whole Bible

,instead of the Greek forms

under which some of them are disguised in theNew Testament. In Egyptian and in all othernon-scriptural names , M . Loisy

’

s gallicised formof spelling has been retained. All educatedpersons unite in rejecting the incorrect Jehovah ,so dear to lurid theologians ; but, for veryobvious reasons, the form Yahweh has beensubstituted for M . Loisy

’

s Jahve’

, though theword Jahvism remains unaltered. The Bibleand the Prayer Book have also been followedin their consistent rejection of capital lettersfor pronouns and adjectives which refer to theDivinity. It is significant that their soberusage is ignored so flagrantly in modernpractice, espe cially in clerical publications .An English Bible is very much to be desiredin which the names Yahweh and Elohimare restored frankly to all the passages wherethey once existed in the original. This wouldadd enormously to an honest and historical


understanding of the text ; and these benefitswould be more than doubled if the compositenature, the various authorship , and the probabledate of the several writings could be indicatedby some clear and simple method of typography.

When all is said and done, it still remainstrue that man cannot live by bread alone. Theletter cannot satisfy him and he requires thespirit. He must have an ideal ; but the ideal isnot lowered, it is heightened, by a proper understanding of the religion and history of Israel ;for no other people has lived so completely inand by its ideals, or has evolved so splendid andstirring a romance out of its history. The flameof its poets and prophets almost blinds us totheir intellectual poverty.

The ideal, in any case, is not to be found ina discredited and incredible theology, supported by the brute force of an oppressive andobscurantist clergy. M. Loisy has borne aforemost and distinguished part in that greatstruggle which at present is dissolving, andin the future may shatter, the largest of theChristian organizations. Fortune has been kindby liberating him, in spite of himself, fromclerical fetters upon his thoughts and words ;and still more by enabling him to speak freely,not only with all his own authority as one of the

1 as

xviii Translator’s Prologue

best living orientalists, but with all the dist inction and weight conferred by the ProfessorialChair of t History of Religions in the Collegede France.

PREFACE

HE modest work of which a second editionis now offered to the public was written

for the Revue da Clerge’

frangais . One partonly, which made a first article, was able toappear in that periodical , in October, 1900 ;

two other articles would have followed it.The whole, with a preface in which an endeavour was made to harmonise the conclusionsof criticism with the principles of Catholictheology, was issued as a pamphlet in theearly months of 1901 . The edition of threehundred copies, which was sold out immedi

ately, was not for public circulation.

A new edition seemed to be called for,

because our literature is not well suppliedwith specialist works on this subject ; and themost undeniable results of criticism arescarcely popularised in our country. But, onone hand , it was thought well to abridgecertain arguments of an apologetic nature,which were appropriate in a work meant toacquaint the Catholic clergy with the assured

xx Preface

or the probable conclusions of Biblical crit i

cism and at the same time to reconcilethem with the official teaching of Catholi

cism. La Religion was the continuation of some articles about religion andrevelation which were published in the samereview ; and it would have served as theintroduction to some others , on the originsand development of Christianity, which hadappeared , in a different form , in the worksentitled L ’E’vangile et L

’E’glise and Au tour d’

un

Peti t Livre. The anx iety of adapting Catholicism to the modern spirit being henceforthindifferent to the author, he now abstainsnaturally from arguments which were meantto interpret the teachings of the Churchaccording to the demands of modern thought.On the other hand, it was thought indispensable to give more space to the historicalexposition. The religion of Israel is the sourcefrom which the Christian religion has flowed.

The two are only one religion among theothers which have divided, and still divide,mankind. It is no longer the business of thehistorian to prove that this religion is true

,

and all the others false ; but his function is , sofar as possible , to determine its place in

history, and its relation to worships whichhave pfieceded it, or with which it has been

https://www.forgottenbooks.com/join

xxii Preface

of Chaldaea into Canaan, and eaten with himunder the oak of Mamre, he was interestedin his descendants : he rescued the Hebrewsfrom Egypt

,and made them cross the Red

Sea dry-shod,and fed them in the wilder

ness during forty years with a manna whichtumbled from the sky every morning ; he waseven able, afterwards , to make Balaam’

s

donkey speak, to stop the sun at the command of Joshua, to keep Jonah alive threedays and nights in the stomach of a greatfish, where the prophet composed a hymn inhis praise ; he preserved the three young menin the fiery furnace which had been lit by Nebuchadnezzar ; he carried Habakkuk by the hairof his head from Judaca to Babylon, with foodready cooked for Daniel in his lions’ den.

We have been driven to see that the Bibleis not a book which was composed in asuperhuman way, but a collection, of veryunequal values, though always dominated bythe same religious spirit, in which, for theadvantage of a creed, historical facts, legendarytraditions , absolute myths, have all beenutilised ; and they can be distinguishedfrom one another, as in the case of any otherancient book, by the methods which are usuallyapplied to the criticism of texts. The greaterpart of the books of the Old Testament cannot

Preface xxiii

be accepted as homogeneous writings ; nor, onthe whole, as contemporary evidence for thefacts which they narrate. Tradition has beenmuch too facile in settling the authorship ofbooks : giving the Pentateuch to Moses , becausethe Law, which was said to have been promulgated by the old prophet in the name ofGod, was contained in it ; the Book of Joshuato the hero whose actions it describes ; Judgesto Samuel, because he was the last personagewho bore that title .

It has been established without difficultythat the so-call ed historical books were originally anonymous compilations , based on oldersources, of exceedingly various origin and

worth, which have been very freely combinedand arranged by the Israelitish hagiog'

raphers :

that a third only of the Book of Isaiah waswritten by that prophet ; that Daniel is an apocryphal writing , composed during the persecutionof Antiochus Epiphanes ; that the so-calledPsalms of David were most of them, if not all ,written after the captivity in Babylon ; thatthe writings issued under the patronage ofSolomon are of the same epoch as the Psalms ;and so of all the rest.This upheaval of the received notions aboutthe origin of the books as a natural couse

quence revolutionised our way of understand

xxiv Preface

ing the history and religion of Israel. Insteadof beginning with clear and definite information about the earliest ages of mankind andthe birth of the Hebrew people, the sacredhistory gives us consistent facts only afterthe establishment of monarchy in Israel.Moses

,Deborah

,Gideon, even Samuel, can

hardly be disengaged from legend. Abraham,

Isaac, Jacob and his families , and still moreAdam and Eve, Cain and Abel , Noah and hischildren

,the Creation and the Flood, the Tower

of Babel,all slip back into mythology . The Law,

proclaimed by God from Sinai or in the plainsof Moab, was all elaborated in the last years ofthe monarchy, or after the captivity : the Mosaicrevelation was nothing more than a theologicalromance. Instead of the prophets having comeafter the Law, it was they who inspired it.The religion of Israel survived neverthelessas a great and an astonishing fact, both initself, and through its ulterior manifestation asChris tianity. But, far from being the firstreligion in its antiquity, it only appearedmany thousands of years later than thevenerable beliefs of Egypt and Chaldaea. Itwas no longer the perfect type

,of which all

other religions were only caricatures madeby human ignorance and passion, if not ratherby the promptings of the devil. On the con

Preface xxv

trary, it depended itself upon a past whichwas mythological and pagan ; and it issuedfrom it by a gradual evolution, without ever(and how could it ?) becoming wholly detached.

And as it was drawn closer to the otherreligions, as it was seen to be one of them,

and to have no right to a place apart fromor above all the others , its story was boundsooner or later to be fitted into the generalfabric of the history of religions, making onlyone chapter in it, and that neither the leastcurious nor the least important.It is thus that a divine epic, which had no

mysteries so long as faith was prostratedbefore its wonders, has become a portion ofhuman history, inevitably complex, obscurein many of its parts, and swarming withinfinite problems. Because now , since thisreligion did not fall from heaven ready-made,and was not maintained by repeated miracles ,it is necessary to know whence came thedetail s of its worship and beliefs , and inwhat circumstances it transformed itself duringthe progress of the centuries.Our ultimate knowledge about the history ofreligions, especially in what relates to the oldestOriental worships , will no doubt throw lightupon many of the questions which stillpuzzle us in the religion of Israel. For the

Preface

present,many of these questions , and above

all some of those which are connected wi ththe origins

,remain undecided. What is cer

tain is, that the religion of Israel was produced in a relatively modern epoch, and ina peculiar environment ; that its evolutiondepended on the actual history of the peopleamong whom it originated or developed ; thatthe miraculous in its legends, like that inall other religions, was a product of thebelieving imagination ; that what characterisesit in comparison with others is not a seriesof more or less extraordinary prodigies, likethe changing of the Nile waters into blood

,

or the mysterious hand which wrote the fateof Babylon on the wall during Belshazzar’sfeast, but the force of the moral instinctwhich drew up out of the worship of Yahweh

,

the special God of Israel, a conception of auniversal God, and an ideal of perfect justice :which made religion a duty, and duty areligion ; which operated or prepared themetamorphosis of a national and exclusivereligion into a religion both universal andardently proselyt ising.

We are compelled, then, in this new edition,to present the religion of Israel as it appearsnow to the historian, both in itself and inits own development, as well as in its rela

Preface xxvu

tion to the other religions of antiquity, andto the general history of religion . Thereader must please admit that a summaryexposition, such as this is , will not allow ofarguments, nor of special proofs , nor evenof references beyond those to the Biblicalsources . We have tried to show as much as ispossible the degree of certainty or of probability which pertains to our varying conclusions .Many of these can only be hypotheses. Thosewho are thereby astonished, and who find thata solid tradition is thrown over for mereguesses, will show only that they do not yetunderstand the real nature of the traditionwhich they extol , and of the evidence whichthe historian must interpret. A plausible conjecture is always worth more than a falseassertion, even when it is traditional . Andwhat is really important in such matters is thegeneral truth of the landscape, notwithstandingsome inevitable haziness in the details.It is natural that an attempt of this natureshould appear extremely rash to people whoaccept all the narratives of Scripture as literalhistory, and who take refuge, for matterswhich concern the origins of religion, in thepoint of view set forth by Bossuet in hisDiscours sur l

’

Histoi're Universelle. Faith isnever disproved ; and we have no intention ofrefuting either Bossuet or his modern followers.

xxvii i Preface

But,looking only at the probability of opinions ,

one may hold such a refutation to be superfluous ;because it has been done long ago , and it wouldbe useless to do it over again.

Others,perhaps

,will pronounce us sufficiently

retrograde,or at least too cautious , since we

do not overflow with pan-babylonism, as it

has been made fashionable by learned Assyriologists, or even with such and such a systemof religious philosophy, quite novel doubtless,and full of promise .The life of the Israelite religion did notconsist in a series of annexations from neighbouring worships ; and, though foreign influ

ences cannot be denied, the fundamentalcharacter of Jahvism must be sought elsewhere than in its assimilative powers. Thequestion of borrowing , then, is secondaryit cannot, either, be decided without directevidence, certain connections, and detailed analogies ; certainly not by coincidences which maybe fortuitous, or by superficial resemblances.An Assyriologist of great eminence has beenable to maintain that the Babylonian epic ofGilgamesh inspired all the Biblical story,including the Gospels , and even the Greekmythologies : proofs have been brought forward ; but the system is not proved, and everything looks as though we should have to waitfor that. Another Assyriologist, who is not less


xxx Preface

lowly as totemism ; and that everywhere apreoccupation with natural forces, or the wor

ship of spirits, of animals, of springs and stones,has preceded the worship of gods , and aboveall of God. It seems not less certain thatreligion is a primordial factor in humansociety

,and that it was really the sacred bond

of the first groups, families , and tribes, inwhich humanity began to be conscious ofitself. And the laws of these societies wererules , according to our View more or lessarbitrary and superstitious, which resembledclosely the tabus of savages ; commands whichwere at once religious, moral, and socialin their rude and ignorant simplicity. But itwill no doubt be advisable, until evidence,and above all ancient evidence, which is continually becoming more full and better studied,shall have enlightened the subject, not toimagine too great a uniformity in the religiousevolution of the primitive peoples. It is truethat analogous conditions of living produceanalogous institutions . However, analogy isnot identity. Has not the human spirit infinite resources for varying the idola of itsthought and imagination, or even the principlesof its conduct and the forms of its socialrelationships ? Let us, then, study the historyof religions according to historical methodsand by historical evidence : being sure that

,if

Preface

all the other sciences are able,on occasion

and in a certain way, to serve historical oriticism, as it can also in the same sense be ofhelp to them, no other science can supply thewant of that which is the very substanceof history, namely, evidence and proved facts.An exhaustive bibliography of the subjecthere treated would fill volumes . It must beenough to point out those recent works whichcan be studi ed with most advantage, andwhi ch have been used most for the presentpublicationfi

‘ We make no claim to supersedethem. Nor do we think we have eitherfollowed them blindly or diflered from themwithout good reason . The finest independencein such matters is, perhaps , to eschew anysystem, and to keep as nearly as possibleto the sources ; so that the mutual balancebetween the old documents and their newinterpretation may be adjusted, as thoughautomatically, before the eyes of the reader.

Lagrange , Etudes snr les religions sé'mi tiques (second

edition, Smend, Lehrbuch der alttestamentI/tchenReligionsgeschichte (second edit ion, Stade ,

Biblische Theologie des A lten Testaments, i . E.

Meyer, Die Israeli ten und ihre Nachbarstoemme

Bousset , Die Rehigion des Judentmns i/m neu testament

lichen Zeitalter Schuerer, Geschichte des JndischenVolkes imZeitalter Jesu Christi , third edit ion(1898Volz, Jil

'

d/ische Eschatologie e on Daniel bis Akiba

C HA P T E R I

THE SOURCES

HE principal, and one might almost say theonly, source for a history of the religion

of Israel, before the Greek domination,is that

collection of books which Christian traditionhas defined as the Old Testament ; and thosebooks are preserved, for the most part in theiroriginal language, in the Hebrew Bible. It isof these documents especially, which are heldsacred by Jews and Christians , that we havenow to estimate the contents and value. Theother writings , numerous as they are, whichdeal with the history of Judaism under Greekand Roman domination, until the final overthrow of the Jewish nationality, either bearonly upon the external history of religion, ordo not present the same diffi culties of analysisand interpretation as do the biblical records .

Moreover,they are submitted by everybody,

without hesitation , to the ordinary laws ofa

4. The Religion of Israel

criticism. Besides, if the religion of Israel stillpresents

,during this period , many problems of

which the solution is dubious, nevertheless itsgeneral position is suffi ciently clear, and isknown with certainty. Outlines and summaries,then

,may suflice for the non-biblical sources ; and

we shall devote ourselves , rather, to a criticismand examination of the biblical authorities.

1

The collection or canon of the Old Testamentwas not settled definitely until near the beginning of the Christian era. The compilation ofthe five books of Moses, so-called, or thePentateuch, was made about the year 400This is the Law, which is the earliest andthe fundamental part of the Hebrew Bible.The second part embraces the series of writerswho are known as the ancient prophets : thebooks of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings ;and the farther series known as the laterprophets : Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and thetwelve minor prophets. In spite of his subjectand purpose, Daniel did not get into this secondseries, which probably closed before he wasmade public ; but he found his way into thethird part of the collection, which was calledthe Sacred Writings, or the Hagiographa. Thisthird part includes the Psalms

,Proverbs, Job ,


6 The Religion of Israel

and that in certain books, in Jeremiah for instance, there were recensions or versions whichdifi ered considerably from one another. Thesedifferences, slight as they may be, were the cont inuat ion, in some sense, of that long work ofediting and compiling , out of which process thechief books in the sacred collection have issuedin their present form.

Certain popular songs , such as the paean ofDeborah or David’s elegy on the death of Sauland Jonathan, may be considered the mostancient documents in the Hebrew li terature.From the times of David and Solomon thekings had offi cial archives , and historicalrecords soon came into ex istence. But fromthese sources, which were more or less secular,the pious writers who culled from them haveutilised only those outlines and quotations whichthey could adapt to their purposes of edification.

The first experiment in a religious literaturemay be placed, it would seem, in the ninthcentury, to which date we may assign theoldest fragments which have entered into thecomposition of the Hexateuch (that is , the Pentateuch and Joshua), viz ., the Jahvistic andElohistic histories .This designation of the historical sources isborrowed from the divine names which areused in them respectively. The Jahvistic history

The Sources 7

begins with the creation of the world, andthenceforward employs the name Yahweh asthe proper designation of God, implying thatthis name was known to mankind from thebeginning. The Elohistic history only beginswith Abraham, the supposed ancestor of theHebrew people, and it assumes that the nameYahweh , the exclusive title of the God of Israel,was revealed only to Moses, the organiser of theIsraelitish nation and the founder of its religion.

These two histories were collections of legendsabout the origins of the Hebrew people and oftheir religious practices. They have as theirjoint foundation the cycles of patriarchal andMosaic traditions . Though they seem to differin appearance, the purpose of these two cyclesis in reality the same ; they both aim at explaining and legalising the settlement of theIsraelites in the land of Canaan. The patriarchal legends present Israel through itsmythical ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,without laying much stress upon the sojournof the Hebrews in Egypt ; while the Mosaiclegends

,on the other hand, are written with

a view to the conquest of Palestine, since theymake the exodus from Egypt their basis. Thestory of Joseph reconciles these two legendary cycles, without, however, concealing their

parallelism.


The Jahvistic history contains an earlier cycleof legends about the origins of mankind ; averitable mythology, of whi ch the foreignsource cannot be doubted, although the tradition of Israel has chastened the polytheism,

and to a large extent has recomposed thematerial according to its own spirit. The storyof the flood was taken certainly from Chaldaea,and a narrative more ancient than that in theHebrew story' has been found among the cuneiform inscriptions. The afiinity is much lessclose between the Jahvistic histories of thecreation and of the first sin and variousBabylonian fables. Since Palestine had feltBabylonian influences from the earliest times

,

we cannot assign a precise date to these borrowings, which we need not suppose to have beenmade either di rectly from or contemporaneouslywith the documents which have led to a beliefin them.

It has been possible to discriminate betweenthe Jahvistic and Elohistic sources, as well asto discern the other elements which have beencombined into the Pentateuch, and to reconstruct them, more or less, because the work of

compilation was eflected by quite elementaryprocesses, which left unaltered the particularstyle of each contribution. Pains were notalways taken to avoid duplications whenever

The Sources 9

the texts gave parallel accounts, and thecompilers were not embarrassed even by con

tradictions when they were not too glaring.

Nevertheless, the dexterity of the joinings ,deliberate omissions, glosses , and editorialmanipulations have all made the connexionand position of many details extremely dubious .The sources , moreover, are not individualcompositions, but collections which had alreadybeen tampered with before they were submittedto a common editorship . So that behind theJahvist ic and Elohistic documents we can guessat the work of an earlier writer, who madethe original draft, combining his material withmore or less freedom, arranging the old legendary traditions with more or less originality,fitting into his narrative old popular songs andeven such other literary matter as he had at hisdisposal . But this first attempt would be addedto and rehandled continually by other persons ,who worked in the spirit of the original editor,and who belonged

,if one may so express it, to

his school. It is not probable that the Jahvisticand Elohistic histories were wholly independentof one another. Both have, in spite of certainspecial tendencies, the same religious character.In certain places the Elohistic history seems

more archaic, though many believe in the

priority of the Jahvistic history, and consider

IO The Religion of Israel

the Elohistic to be in some way dependent onit. The Jahvistic history must have beenwritten in Judah and the Elohistic in Israel.Both of them are connected with those collectionsof precepts which w ere the nucleus of the Law.

That version of the Law can be dated whichwas found in the temple at Jerusalem, in 621B .C. , under King Josiah ; and it is preserved forus in Deuteronomy. Everything leads us tobelieve that it was composed for the purposeof that reformation which its discovery produced. But the primitive text, even of thisdocument, has been added to like that of theothers ; and it was manipulated again beforebeing mingled with the Jahvistic and Elohistichistories during the times of the captivity. Itwas in the spirit and temper of Deuteronomythat that re-editing of Judges, of Samuel, andof the Kings was carried out, in which ancientdocuments, heroic and prophetic legends,extracts from the chronicles and memoirs ofthe kings, were all squared with theologicaland pietistic interests.The chief part of the Law, which dealsmainly with ritual, and which fills a portion ofExodus , the whole of Leviticus , and the largerpart of Numbers, contains a compilation styledby critics the Law of Holiness.* This was

The Sources I I

arranged at Babylon, during the captivity.

Besides this, there is material similar, at anyrate in plan, to the Jahvistic and Elohistichistories, and which is known as the Sacerdotal History. It begins with the creation of

the world and continues till the division of

Palestine among the tribes, under the leadership of Joshua. It does not linger among theantique legends, which are collected in theearlier sacred histories, farther than is necessary to connect the chief institutions and

religious customs with decisive events in thepast. Thus, the sabbath is connected with thecreation of the world ; the abstinence fromblood, with the deluge ; circumcision, withAbraham ; the whole system of sacrifices andritual, with the revelation at Sinai. Finally,additions were made, according to need andopportunity, to the legislative code which wasformed by mingling the Sacerdotal Historiesw ith the Law of Holiness. Many of theseadditions would seem to be later than thepromulgation of the Sacerdotal Code, whichwas made by Ezra in 444 R C. As the legalprecepts of the Jahvistic record were supposedto have been dictated by Yahweh to Moses onSinai

,and those of the Elohistic records on

Horeb,and Deuteronomy in the plains of Moab,

so the ritual of the Sacerdotal Code had also

1 2 The Religion of I srael

been taught by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.It is well known that the Code of Hammurabi,which has been discussed so frequently of late,was revealed in a similar way to the K ing ofBabylon by the god Shamash .

The Scribes who flourished after Ezradetached that part of the Sacerdotal Codewhich was concerned with the division of thePromised Land, and then, by amalgamatingthe two compilations formed from joining theJahvistic and Elohistic history on to Deuteronomy, and uniting the Sacerdotal History withthe Levitical Legislation , they made up thePentateuch .

The utterances of the prophets seem to havebeen collected at once by their disciples , andpreserved. The most ancient collection is thatof Amos (about which has received onlyslight and unimportant additions. The collec

tion ofHosea’s utterances, which is a little later,has come to us under very similar conditions .The Book of Isaiah consists of two parts, whichcan be distinguished easily : i ., chapters 1-39,and ii., chapters 40-66 . Not a line of the secondpart can be attributed to the prophet whowas a contemporary of Hezekiah . Two-thirdsof this part were written shortly before Cyrustook Babylon , and the remaining third wascomposed in the times of the Persian domina


I4. The Religion of Israel

utterance has been lengthened by two psalms,one as a prologue and the other as a kind ofepilogue . Obadiah and Joel both lived afterthe captivity. Haggai was contemporary withthe rebuilding of the temple under Darius I.Zechariah belonged to the same period ; butthe second part of his titular book is not his ,and seems to have been written under theGreek domination. The so-called Book ofMalachi is anonymous, and was undoubtedlywritten shortly before the promulgation of theSacerdotal Code by Ezra. The romance ofJonah must have been composed about theyear 300, and the psalm which that prophet isimagined to have composed in the stomach ofhis fish was added later.

Thus, the handling of the prophets’ books wasvery similar to that of the books which arecalled historical. They were all utilised for theedification of the Jewish community ; and, forthis purpose, they were pitched in the key, soto speak, of the religious evolution. The multiplication of anonymous prophecies, after thecaptivity, bears witness to the decay of theprophetical ministry ; and the number ofpseudonymous prophecies in the apocalypticliterature, which begins with Daniel, is a consequence of its total disappearance, thoughanonymous fragments were still added ’ by

The Sources I5

collectors of prophecies to writings which borethe name of some author. The fortune ofthese apocrypha depended on the credencewhich was g iven them.

After a certain period of hesitation, mostcritics have decided to bring down the composition of the Psalms, except perhaps of a veryfew, to a date after the ex ile, under the Persiandomination, and even into the times of theMaccabees. The whole of the sapiential booksappear to be later than the captivity. TheBook of Job was written under the Persiandomination, and it is not all from a single hand.

The collection of Proverbs is apparently of thesame age. Ecclesiastes is later, and must havebeen composed in the times of the Greekdomination, probably towards the close of thethird century. The Proverbs got into thecanon as a production of Solomon, and sodid Ecclesiastes, though it was not admittedwi thout serious difii culty. Attributed also toSolomon, a collection of songs for weddingfeasts was able to get into the Bible, and tohold its position there ; the Song of Songs, aswe have it now, is also of the third or secondcentury B .C. It has no bearing on religioushistory, except through its allegorical interpretations ; or, rather, through the complete inversion which has transformed it into a sacred

1 6 The Religion of Israel

and pious writing. The Book of Ruth wouldseem to have been written for a controversialpurpose by a contemporary of Ezra andNehemiah . Esther is certainly later than thepersecution of Antiochus Epiphane s and theestablishment of the Asmonaean dynasty.

Towards the middle of the third centurymay be placed the composition of thathistorical summary, edited in the spirit andstyle of the Priestly Code, which containedoriginally the Chronicles as well as the Booksof Ezra and Nehemiah . The Lamentationsattributed to Jeremiah are not by that prophet.They were written partly during the exile andpartly after the return. The Book of Danielwas composed during the persecution byAntiochus Epiphane s, probably in the earlypart of the year 164 . It was issued under thename of a legendary personage, who was madecontemporary with the last Kings of Judah ,with Nebuchadnezzar and the last King ofBabylon, and with Cyrus .The First Book of the Maccabees tells thehistory of the Jewish people from the accessionof Antiochus Epiphane s until the death of theHigh Priest Simon Maccabaeus. It is the finestpiece of historical writing that Jewi sh antiquityhas bequeathed us ; but, at the same time, it isalmost a secular production. The author wrote

The Sources I7

near the opening of the first century before thepresent era. With the Second Book of theMaccabees, which deals only with the earlyperiod of the Maccabaean rising, we are takenback into the atmosphere of edifying literature.The editor lived before the taking of Jerusalemby Titus, and he professes to abridge an earlierwriter, Jason of Cyrene, who must have composed his work in the latter half of the secondcentury B .C. The Book of Tobit is a piousnovel, founded on a popular story ; it wascomposed probably in the second century beforeour era by some Jew of the dispersion.

Judith is also a romance, but more nationalthan pious ; it is very similar in tendency toEsther, and is most probably of the sameperiod. The Epistle attributed to Jeremiah is aproduction of Hellenistic Judaism, and it is notpossible to date it even approximately. Thewhole of Baruch seems to have been writtenafter the destruction of Jerusalem by theRomans in A.D. 70. The Book of Ecclesiasticuswas put together about the year 200 B .C. ; itwould have been admitted into the Hebrewcanon, with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, if theauthor, instead of advertising himself, hadplaced his work under the patronage ofSolomon. The author of Wisdom took thatcourse ; but, as he wrote in Greek, he was only

3


able to get into the canon of the ChristianChurch .

In conclusion , it will be fitting to mentionhere the psalms attributed to Solomon, andwhich were written about the year 50 B .C. , aswell as the pseudonymous apocalypses, whichfollowed the precedent of Daniel , those of themat least which preceded the arrival of Christianity. The Book of Enoch is a collection ofwritings which are later than Daniel ; but mostof them, if not all, are earlier than the Christianperiod. The Assumption of Moses was issuedearly in our era ; and there are compositionsof Jewish origin in the Sibylline Books. Manyother apocryphal writings are lost. From thetime of Antiochus Epiphane s more especially,Hellenistic Judaism was most prolific in pseudepigraphical writings , which were composedfor purposes of controversy and edificat ion.

One may assert, without being paradoxical , thatimpersonality has been the leading characteristic of Israelitish literature from its beginningbut that anonymity prevailed in ancient times,while in Judaism, and since the Greek domination, pseudonymity grew to outrageous proportions . This habit is not without significancefor the historian ; neither has it failed to raisemany problems for the critics .

The Sources I9

§ 2

It was neither a simple nor an easy task toconstruct a consistent and fairly certain historyfrom this chaos of traditions, which weremanipulated and changed perpetually : from this massof writings which were without author or dates,unless they were spurious and misdated.

It is not surprising that several scholars havethought it impossible to find a key to thereligious history of Israel before the Babyloniancaptivity and that, relying upon the tone and certain peculiarities of the final re -editing, they havemaintained that all the books of the Hebrewcanon were composed after the exile. ThisView would simplify the task of the historianenormously ; but it would mean a considerablesuppressing of criticism, and so of history. Acloser study of the peculiar genius of thisliterature, more attention to the processes ofediting and of construction, and to the variouselements which are combined sometimes inthe same book and even on the same page,enable us, it would seem, to acknowledge moregenuine material , and to derive from it a richerstore of information.

No text,really, can be worthless to an his

torian ; because his first business is to settleits meaning, and then , if he can, to discover


its origin. For instance, a story about thecreation of the world, which one may readin the Bible or elsewhere, may not be historical in itself ; but it does express the beliefsand thoughts of given times and circumstances. The Book of Job is not a recordof patriarchal history, but it does inform usabout the problems which were being stirredin Jewish minds under the pressure of theLaw. Stories like Esther and Judith , or Jonahand Tobit, if they be taken literally, give usonly false notions about the relations of Israelwith Nineveh and the Assyrian monarchy, orwith the Kings of Persia and their court atSusa but they are invaluable witnessesto the religious and moral atmosphere, or tofamily relations , or to the bitterness of nationalfeeling, in the Jewish community at certaindefinite epochs. The history of primitive agesin the sacerdotal documents of the Hexateuchis a tissue of exaggerations and impossibilities ;but how much does it not reveal to us aboutthe mentality of the Jews as they returnedfrom exile? And do not all the primitive legendsenable us to realize in a living way the timeswhich preceded the theological reformationand the predominance of the Law ? Thus thechaos becomes a veritable mine for those whounderstand how to work it.



by all the evidence which we have, both sacredand profane, for the last period of Jewishhistory, that is to say after the captivity. Buttradition asserts that this fact, which was

equally strange and undeniable, was of Mosaicinstitution ; though this did not hinder the avowalthat it was not the ancient practice. For itnames the King who destroyed the sanctuariesoutside Jeru salem, namely Josiah ; and it goeson to describe the occasion : the priest Hilkiahfinding in the Temple a book of the Law whichprescribed this rule. Josiah had no knowledgethat Yahweh had made this revelation to Moses,and all his predecessors had been as ignorantof their duty as himself. Tradition also afiirms

that they had not carried it out . Deuteronomy,too, does not require this unity of sacrificialservice as a thing natural and needing no explanation ; it describes it, rather, as a measuredirected against the innumerable sanctuarieswhich existed throughout the country. Fromthis clue, and from many others whi ch aresubsidiary to it, we can see that Deuteronomy,at any rate in its chief contents , was the verybook of which the discovery caused the actionof Josiah . Deuteronomy, moreover, in styleand language has the closest similarity toJeremiah, who was the leading prophet of thatage .

The Sources 2 3

A reformation postulates an existing statewhich it is desirable to change

,because it is

unsatisfactory. Before Josiah, every town or

hamlet possessed its own place of worship ,where it sacrificed to the national God. Acollection of laws, which was shorter and morearchaic in form than Deuteronomy, the Bookof the Covenant, embedded in E xodus, authorizessacrifice “ in every place where Yahweh hascaused his name to be Besidesthis, Amos and Hosea, who preached in Ephraim,

did not require that men should go to Jerusalemto sacrifice. They protested against sacrificesin general, because they saw that there was abetter and more efficacious way of serving God.

The legends of Samuel and Elijah exhibit thoseprophets themselves sacrificing away from thesanctuary of the ark, and in a manner notprescribed by the ritual attributed to Moses .It is not less significant that the Jahvistic andElohistic histories take the patriarchs to thevery sanctuaries which were condemned byDeuteronomy to Bethel, to Shechem, toHebron, to Beersheba, as though to dedicatethem in perpetuity to the worship of Yahweh .

To these patriarchal and prophetic legends mightbe added legends from the heroic days of theJudges

,which bear witness to religious practices

Exodus xx. 24 .


very diflerent from those which are authorizedby the legislation of Deuteronomy and of thePriestly Code.The various documents fall into groups , andthrow light upon one another. Ezekiel is aprelude to the Sacerdotal Code which guidedthe reformation of Ezra and Nehemiah ; andthe Chronicles depend on it, as giving a misrepresentation of history in agreement withthe sacred legislation. Jeremiah goes withDeuteronomy, which was ushered in by theministry of Amos , Hosea, and Isaiah ; and

which itself inspired the commentary on thetraditions deposited in the books of Judges,Samuel , and Kings . Taken out of their setting, these traditions and the patriarchal legendsgive some notion of the religion of Israel beforethe literary prophets , and before any offi cialpromulgation of a law attributed to Moses.These legends themselves justify certain de

ductions, more or less probable, concerning theorigins of the Israelite people and religion.

They were not imagined altogether by thecontemporaries of the early Kings of Israel andJudah ; but they represent national memories,more or less vitiated and transformed by thelapse of time . Al though the patriarchal legends,for instance, teach us nothing about the personages who figure in them, for the good reason

The Sources 2 5

that they never existed ; yet they do inform us,not only about the genius of ancient Israel, butabout its origins, about the events whichmoulded it into a people, and about its relationswith its neighbours or with the populationswhich preceded it on the soil of Palestine .None of these things can be indifl erent to thehistory of a religion which has been modifiedby these circumstances and connex ions . If thedeductions, which have been mentioned, cannothave either the precision or the certitude ofdirect and authentic evidence they do not ceaseto be legitimate, provided they are used withtact. Indeed, they constitute the history oftimes which are wanting in more exact information. Abraham and Sarah are mythicalpersonages ; but their legend proves the importance of the sanctuaries at Hebron, and theannexation of them to the God of Israel. Forthese holy places existed before the coming ofthe Hebrews, and they belonged to the Godswhich were specially venerated by the populat ions of Canaan. It is hardly rash to guessthat Abraham and Sarah were the ancientdivinities of the district, who were harmonisedin the legend so as to be subordinated to theGod who supplanted them. We are told thatJacob , after wrestling with Yahweh througha whole night, was called Israel by the God


who failed to conquer him. This miraculouscontest is no more historical than the battleof the Titans with Jupiter ; but it enables usto see clearly that the tribes who were considered the posterity of Jacob only took thename of Israel at the period of the conquest. Italso leads us to suspect that Jacob himself wasa divine personage ; and , as the memories of

the patriarch are connected with the sanctuaryof Bethel, his place of worship probably wasthere. Abraham never went into Egypt ; butthe fable which brought him there was madeto support the Mosaic legends, as they requiredan old connexion of the Hebrews, while stillnomads , with the land of the Pharaohs . Thelegend of Joseph has a similar meaning ; andas it was pretended that the tomb of thispatriarch was at Shechem, it came about thatShechem had a sacred cave like that of Machpelahat Hebron ; and the hero said to be buried init no doubt originated also in a God. Thelegend of Isaac, which gravitated round Beersheba, leads us to suppose that Isaac also hadbeen the divinity of that shrine.As the old population of Canaan was notexterminated

,as it should have been, by the

invading tribes, but was progressively conqueredand assimilated by them, so the religiouscustoms, the myths, the Gods, of the Canaanite

The Sources 2 7

sanctuaries, entered little by little, and bytransforming themselves, into the traditions ofIsrael. This double assimilation is revealedand witnessed to by the ancient narratives.The original meaning of these ancient legends ,so far as it can be restored conjecturally,would be no longer intelligible, even to thesharpest criticism, if a comparison with otherreligions of antiquity

,and even with the non

semitic ones , did not help us to discover and

interpret it. But analogous cases are notwanting to us . Jacob and his twelve sons,who are the twelve tribes of Israel , have justas much reality as the forefathers of theGreeks ; as Hellen and his posterity, Dorosand B olos, Xuthos, Ion, and Achseus. Theeccentric and ancient customs, circumcision,abstinence from blood, distinctions of cleanand unclean, of purity and impurity, seemopen to at least a satisfactory explanationwhen the same or analogous practices are metwith among other primitive peoples. Not onlythe artless cosmogony of the Jahvistic historian ,but the more advanced theory of the sacerdotalhistory

, and the story of the flood as well,have their parallels and their originals , at leastas to the frame-work of the narratives, inold eastern mythologies, and especially in theChaldaean. And the nabi of Israel, the wild


and half-mad prophe t, has his brethren inother religions. Moses h imself, with hismagician’s rod, is like those divining priestswho are found more or less anywhere. Thestrange oracle consulted by Saul and David,and which answered the questions put to itby throwing lots

,has its resemblances else

where. If the religion of Israel reaches a greatheight in its prophets of the seventh andeighth centuries, in its psalmists, and in theauthor of Job, nevertheless its origin was veryhumble. The farther back one explores towardsthat origin, the more do possibilities of com

parison abound ; and they make up, in somedegree, for the ominous gaps and obscuritiesin the evidence.

Some questions, however, of extreme gravityremain

,and always probably will remain, with

out any certain answer. Of this nature arequestions about the sojourn of Israel in Egyptand the exodus, to point to the most glaringinstance since they bear upon the actual originof the worship of Yahweh . The most ancienttradition was from the first over-burdened withcontradictory legends. Neither the details of

the sojourn in Egypt, nor of the coming of



nexionwith Egypt was maintained ; a connexionwitnessed to by the legends of Abraham,

Joseph , and Moses . Still these legends are butlegends : the artificial and accumulated detailswhich they may exhibit, which assuredly theydo exhibit, prevent us from judging with anycertainty about their real and historical significance .

In any case it seems plain that the memoriesof Egypt, “ the house of bondage, and of theexodus, acquired through tradition an importance which was always growing, and whichthey did not have in the beginning. Theconquest of Canaan was made from the east,by crossing the Jordan, for the occupation of

the country held by those tribes to which thename of Israel more properly belonged ; andfrom the south , by way of the desert, for theterritory which afterwards became Judaea.

The northern tribes, nevertheless , had the sameGod as Judah ; and it was in the precedingconditions of a common life that Israel andJudah had accepted this worship . The conditions of their nomadic life had brought theminto contact with Yahweh, who, we cannotdoubt, was the divinity of Sinai. The connexion between the tribes and the God can beexplained without reference to Egypt ; but ourconcern is not with possibilities. The tribes

The Sources 3 I

in their wandering life became acquainted withthe God Yahweh . Since they all believedthemselves related to this God, a sort of confederation was doubtless formed among themin the beginning under the name and patronageof the divinity. The occasion of this treatymay have been possibly an emigration of tribesleaving the north-eastern territory of Egyptto join their fortunes with the allied tribeswho lived in the desert. It was in the nameof Yahweh that the exodus was effected, andthat the league of tribes was negotiated.

Certain assyriologists have argued that Egyptwas not Egypt, but the Sinaitic peninsula,which bore in the cuneiform inscriptions thename of Mnsri, and was thus confused byIsraelitic tradition with the name of Egypt,Misraim. Some have gone so far as to assertthat David must have been originally the rulerof Caleb , in the district of Hebron ; that hesubmitted, first Judah , and then the othertribes, to his authority ; and that it was hewho imposed on all Israel, the Israel which hehad just consolidated, the religion of Yahweh,a divinity who was venerated on Mount Sinai,in the land of Mnsri, by the Arabian t ribes.But this hypothesis hardly needs refuting.

Israelitic tradition knew quite well what itunderstood by the word Misraim ; and the


records about the times of the Judges are sufficiently reliable to guarantee the existence,before David, of the worship of Yahweh by thetribes who were settled in Canaan.

It is true, however, that tradition hasfluctuated about the locality of Sinai . The“ mountain of God," according to the mostancient texts, was not in the southern regionof the Sinaitic peninsula, where for centuriesthat high peak was sought from which thecovenant between Yahweh and Israel hadbeen proclaimed. Moses met with Yahweh inthe land of Midian,* which was in Arabia, on

the eastern shore of the Elanit ic gulf. It wasfrom thence, according to the song which in

troduces the blessings of Moses, that Yahwehhad come to find Israel

Yahweh is come from Sinai ;He hath appeared to them from Se ir ;

He shined forth from Mount Paran,

And he is come to Meribah-Kadesh ."

To go from the traditional Sinai to Kadesh ,which was in the desert south of Judah, onewould not travel by Seir and Paran. Thedirection indicated requires a starting-point

Exodus 11. 15 ; iii. 1 , 2 .

Deut . xxxii. 2 . The last line is restored from the

Septuagint , as the Hebrew does not make sense .

The Sources 33

in the extreme north-west of Arabia. Again,it seems established now that the most ancientlegend about the exodus, of which the versejust quoted is an echo, did not take Israelfrom Egypt to Mount Sinai, but straight toKadesh, where Moses explained to Que peoplethe w ishes of Yahweh .

Moses bore, according to all probability, anEgyptian name. If it be thought that thetradition of a sojourn in Egypt and an exodusmust be denied altogether, one is led on alsoto hold that the personality of Moses is fict itious, as that of Aaron seems to be, who isgiven him as a brother. On the other hand,his Egyptian name may validate the traditionof a sojourn in Egypt ; although the story ofthe child Moses exposed on the Nile, and savedas it were by miracle, may be rightly suspect ;since it is constructed out of fabulous materialsfor which there are many other applications,from the legend of the old Chaldaean king Sargonto that of the child Jesus flying from the rageof cruel Herod. The argument brought forwardjust now in favour of a meeting of the tribesin the desert

,for the inauguration of the people

and religion of Israel, might be urged as wellin support of the traditions about Moses.As the establishment of a common worshipseems to be connected with certain special

4


circumstances, so it is not incompatible withthe functions of a person who may have been,in these circumstances, the leader in establishing a national and religious unity, as well asa priest and prophet of Yahweh. This personage may have been the intermediary betweenthe tribes of the desert and those in Egypt ;and it would be he who, in the name ofYahweh , led the latter to Kadesh . The treatywhich united the tribes in the worship ofYahweh may have been ratified near thatsacred spring, whose waters Moses is said tohave brought from the rock by striking it withhis magician’s wand.

To this example, from which some notion canbe formed as to the extreme complexity of theproblems, and the measure of probabilityattaching to their solution, it would beeasy to add a very large number whichare only hinted at in the following chapters. There are other problems which it isnow impossible to decide. Granted that thelegends of the patriarchs symbolise chiefly thesettlement of Israel in Canaan, it is useless toinquire in what conditions Abraham, Isaac, andJacob were enabled to sojourn in the countrywhich their descendants held afterwards, or

what worship they practised. There is nointerest either in searching out the primitive

The Sources 35

origins of the tribes of Israel, or their possiblemigrations before the period when they are

found on the borders of Palestine, and alreadyorganized for its conquest. The stages in themigration of Abraham, who was thought tohave been born in Ur of the Chaldees

,then to

have come to Haran in upper Mesopotamia, andat length from there into the land of Canaan

,

are perhaps nothing more than editorial combinations to make a fictitious link with thecycle of legends about the creation, the flood

,

and the genealogies of the nations. Theselegends would seem to be less ancient in Israel

,

or at any rate to have another source, thanthose which deal with the settlement in Canaan ,and the cycle of patriarchal and Mosaic legendswhich are concerned with the occupation ofPalestine. No doubt Israel belongs by race andspeech to that group of peoples called Semitic,who came very early into Chaldaea, and thenfounded the empire of Nineveh, who populatedthe coast towns of Phoenicia, and the territoryof Canaan ; who established on the frontiers ofPalestine the little kingdoms of Idumaea, Moab,and Ammon ; who furnished later the Aramaeanmigration,

and who are represented finally inthe history of the world by the Arabs. But itwould be vain to pretend to try to fix the time ,the place

,or the circumstances, in which the

36 The Religion of I srael

ancestors of Israel were merged with those ofthe nations just enumerated. All that can besaid plausibly is that the Hebrew migrationhappened soon after the Canaanite, and waslike an advance-guard of the Aramaean. Thecommon cradle of them all was Arabia.

The proved usage, during the fourteenthcentury before our era, in the various countriesbetween the Euphrates and Egypt, of the Babylonian language and of cuneiform writing forwhat may be described already as a diplomaticcorrespondence between the rulers of thosecountries and the King of Egypt, who was thentheir suzerain, is a fact of the highest importance for the history of the ancient peoples ofWestern Asia. One may deduce from it a longand vigorous domination, and therefore a lastinginfluence by the Chaldaean Empire over all theseterritories during the centuries which precededthe domination of the Egyptians. But it is notpossible to say whether the ancestors of theHebrews had their fortunes linked in any waywith this Chaldaean supremacy. It seems evenvery hazardous to establish any connexionbetween this Chaldaean predominance and theorigin which the Bible attributes to Abraham.

The ancient hegemony of Babylon did not ceaseto affect the history of Israel and its religion,since the Chaldaean influence was exercised over



names is only guess-work. Let us say at leastthat the condition of Palestine at the Openingof the Israelite invasion is not a matter ofindifl erence to our knowledge, because whateverwe can di scover about the political situationhelps us to understand the progress of theconquest ; and all that we can get to knowabout the religious condition throws light alsoupon the ultimate relations between Jahvismand the worships of the Canaanites.There is much less knowledge to be drawnfrom Egyptian evidence. The mention ofIsrael among the Palestinian populations, inan inscription of King Minephtah, in thetwelfth century before our era, tells us nomore than that of the Chabiri from El-Amarna.

The inscription seems to refer to tribes whichare still nomadic rather than to a people settledin towns. The names of Jacobel and Josephelin an inscription of Toutmosis only provethe usage of these names to describe someCanaanite places, at a time when without anydoubt there was no question of a people ofIsrael. And there are reasons for thinking that

geschichte. (3rd edn.) II. 35 2— 3 . The translat ion givenof Achiyami

’s letter is far from certain in its details .

Sixteenth century B .C. The names may be resolvedinto Jacob-El El rewards or supplants, and Joseph-El

El assembles.

The Sources 39

the shortened forms, Jacob and Joseph, stand forthe eponymous divinities of towns or tribes.ale

In comparison with the very ancient civili zations from which these evidences come, Israeland its religion are wholly modern. It is this,above all, which is revealed to us by an historyof the East, reconstructed in its essentials bythe amazing archaeological discoveries of lastcentury.

See E. Meyer, 281-2 , 292 .

CHAPTER II

THE ORIGINS

HE roots of the Israelite worship go downto the common hot-bed of all the Semitic

religions. At the same time, since it was in itsbeginnings the religion of nomads it differs notonly from religions with a lettered mythologyand an elaborated ritual, like those of Babylonand Nineveh ; but also from the religion of thePhoenicians who were addicted to shipping andtrade, as well as from that of the agriculturaland settled populations of Palestine : and itapproaches nearer to the religion, or perhaps tothe forms of religion, which prevailed amongthe Arabs before Islam. It must be observed,however, that the notions and religious customsof Israel, though resembling those which musthave prevailed in very early times among allthe Semites, yet have many points of analogywith those of non-civilized races, and must becompared with the rudimentary worships ofprimitive humanity.

The Religion of Israel

According to the favourite theory of the lastfew years, the most ancient religions wereforms of animism, of spirit-worship ; and thepractices of this worship were analogous tothe fetishism of savages. Later on, under thepressure of various circumstances, by the mingling of tribes, by migrations and conquests, bythe development of society, an hierarchy wasconceived among the spirits the personality ofspecial Gods, the Gods of tribes and cities andpeoples, was indicated more and more clearly :and this led to polytheism. A feeling of nationalpride or of theological fanaticism may have ledcertain groups of men to the worship of a singleGod, to monolatry ; and by a subordination of

the Gods to a supreme head, by varying systemsof a divine monarchy conceived after the fashionof earthly kingdoms, there may be found therudiments of monotheism. Thence, either byan intellectual process as among the Greekphilosophers, or by the influence of a strongmoral feeling as with the Hebrew prophets,men were led on to an exclusive monotheism.

It is, however, proper to observe, that animismitself means a process of reflection, and is therefore a form of religious consciousness which hasnot been identical throughout the human family.



confined exclusively to the category of thingssacred. Magic becomes superstition as soon asreligion is born, just as a lower form of religionbecomes superstitious in comparison with ahigher. Magic may have the fear of its object,but neither reverence nor love for it. Neverthele ss it means already precaution, regularity,even hope, in the face of what is mysterious ;one may not say as yet in view of the infinite.The concept of a religious evolution is, properlyspeaking, nothing but an hypothesis ; a convenient theory to make a setting for the datawhich are given us by the study of religions.So far as this, it may help us to a classificationof the recorded facts . But we must be on ourguard not to mistake this mere abstract settingfor an inevitable law or the infallible plan of allreligious history ; since history does not showus the undeviating application of this pretendedlaw. The fetishism of savages has probably forhundreds or thousands of years been such , ornearly such , as it may be seen to-day. Theancient polytheistic religions did not transformthemselves gradually into monotheism. And asthe higher religions have experienced incontestably their alternating periods of progress andof decadence, so the lower religions have knowntimes of growth, of impulse more or lessconscious towards a better state, and then a

The Origins

recoil, brought on either by external circumstances, or by that dull stagnation which isinherent in all religious traditions that are oncestereotyped ; and finally they may go through along decrepitude, which resembles the perpetualchildhood of peoples without a future.The monotheism of the Greek philosopherswas not a natural fruit of Hellenic religion : onemight as well say that the spiritualistic philoSophy of Victor Cousin and Jules Simon wasa product of Christianity. These resul ts ofrationalistic speculation may depend in someways upon the religious doctrines which existedpreviously to them ; but they do not followfrom them, since they are wholly outside theliving religion. They are perhaps remains ofbeliefs which it has been hoped might be transformed into rudiments of science ; but theyhave in them no element of reformation or ofreligious progress, and they hardly appertainto the hi story of religion. The Gresco-Romanpaganism in the course of its existence wentthrough many changes and adaptations ; but itremained until the very end a polytheisticreligion. It yielded to Christian monotheism,

having been unable either to absorb or totransform it ; or to assimilate to it, at any ratedirectly, by transforming itself.On the other hand, the religion of Israel, as


we know it by the Bible , was certainly amonotheism, in which progress may assuredlybe seen ; but it does not appear as the logicaland natural evolution of an earlier polytheism.

The exclusive worship of Yahweh, which was afundamental principle of the Israelite

,

religionafter Moses, did not grow out of a polytheisticworship by eliminating Gods who had beenconceived formerly as equals of the God of

Israel, then as his inferiors, and who were stillhonoured in his company. Yahweh, in Scripture, will not tolerate the association of strangeGods with himself ; but he does not seem toremember that he had to expel any Gods whohad formerly been jointly with him the traditional and lawful protectors of his people .It is a proved fact that ignorant savageshave still no other religion than animism andfetishism. It is also certain that the civili zedpeoples of antiquity nationalized their Gods,and formed an hierarchical notion of the divineworld, in which the God of the ruling city or ofthe conquering race occupied the highest rank.

And it is affirmed, on the other side, that clearminds, already cul tured though in polytheisticsurroundings, recognised or foresaw that thebalance of the world could only be maintainedby a single principle or by one sovereign master.Only all these facts, which are dressed up by the

The Origins 4 9

historians of religion, do not amount to amathematical series, in which every stage issuesfrom that which preceded, and will result inthat which follows, according to the logicalrequirements of an evolutionary system. Theevolution doubtless is real, but it does notfollow a regular progression ; and its variousmanifestations shatter all the theories by whichwe may endeavour to confine it.All the polytheistic religions have been moreor less fetishist, but thi s has not kept themfrom showing a certain tendency towardsmonotheism

,by an hierarchical subordination

of the individual Gods to a supreme head,the sovereign of the other Gods. The majorityof known religions have been formed outof many discordant principles, through themingling of tribes and nations ; and the inferior elements which one may meet with ina religion are not necessarily its most ancientparts. For they may have been brought intoit by the influences of an older worship ; andby a kind of survival, which often seems outof harmony with the principles of the religionin which it occurs. Because the higher religionsare not produced spontaneously by the lower ;and although reformers usually go to the

traditions of the past for their foundation,

although for their success they need a support5


from the hopes and feelings of their owntime, yet their personal action, inspiration, andexperiences count high among the causes whichhave produced new religions. But , as there isnever any complete innovation, so neither isthere any uninterrupted progress towards anideal conceived by the founders of religions.Preceding worships never cease to maintainthemselves, in spite of everything, in higherand newer religions. Polytheism has a tendencyto survive in monotheism ; while fetishism, andeven magic , are able to lodge themselves moreor less in religions which profess a theoreticalmonotheism, and which were established onthat principle .

On the other hand, the mul tiplicity, thevariety, and even the external coarseness ofthe symbols are not so incompatible as mightbe thought with simplicity of faith andpurity of religious feeling. That primitiveman, or man come to the earliest stage ofreligion, has conceived of the divinity as theimmediate cause of natural phenomena,

andat the same time as a spirit, a kind ofattenuated genius, who moves freely throughspace ; that he has thought to put himselfinto relation with it by means of a materialobject, by a fetish of any description ; this isin accordance with all the probabilities : since,

The Origins 5 I

without referring to pagan mythologies, astorm is still considered a theophany in theBible ; and the God of the patriarchs usedconsecrated stones for his shrine and symbol.But if the materialised forms of the religiousthought be put aside

,the rudimentary notion

of an all-powerful God can be detected inthe natural agent

,and the germ of God the

Father may be discovered in an anthropomor

phic spirit.It has often happened that the fatherhoodof a God has been conceived as real andphysical , not merely as a moral relationship ;and the tutelary God of a tribe has beenimagined as its primitive ancestor. Neverthe

less a moral notion of some sort did existunder this childi sh fancy, and the physicalpaternity was only a material explanation ofit. Fetishism is a tangible witness to the divinepresence . Whatever one may do, there canbe no religion wi thout images . The highestconception that man can form of God is stillan idol, in the first meaning of the word

,

within which he tries to bound the infinite.He desires to feel God at his disposal ; andinasmuch as he does not know how toconceive of him as present, within himselfand in his conscience, he imagines him byhis side, and wishes to control him under


his hand. He wishes also to have him on hisside and generally, in practice, he does not splitup his worship among many supernaturalbeings, whom he mi ght think equally powerful and equally interested in his affairs ; buthe has a spirit or a God who is his ownspecial guardian, or that of his family, histribe, his nation, if the sphere of his relationshipsbe enlarged. This God is in fact the soleGod for him ; and polytheism should beascribed rather to the mentality of the worshipper than to his religion.

A worship, then, comparatively pure canexist early, and among tribes far removedfrom civilization ; under forms of ritual andin company with notions which to us aredownright stupid or even shocking, but whichare congruous w ith the mental state and thematerial circumstances of those who find inthem a God and a religion. A species of tradit ional monotheism was thus able to establishitself among tribes which were cut ofi fromthe movements which produced the earliestnations and civilizations, as well as the firstdurable systems of polytheistic religion. Theworld, no doubt, swarmed with spirits ; butthe tutelary genius of the family or tribe was,from the religious point of view, the onlyone which existed for it, which had in


5 4. The Religion of Israel

because he is aloof and sacred. But neitherhis goodness nor his holiness are conceivedas fundamental attributes : they are ratherqualities and motions , physical as much asmoral properties, and their various aspects arenot clearly separable. In polytheistic religionsthe Gods of light are the Gods of justice ;and even in Job the sun shaketh the wickedout of the earth . This is because physical candorand moral purity were formerly associatedin men’s nthoughts : because the shining God,the foe of darkness and confusion, who scattersw ith his beams the chaos of night, theimmaculate God, whose very nature abhorsall corruption , was, at the same time and, itmay be added, for these reasons , the enemyalso of dark and maligant actions . Andwhy is it also in Leviticus ’

r that Godrequires unblemished victims, why does heexclude from his priesthood the blind andmutilated, why does he ban the lepers ? Itis

,declares the sacred book, because he is

holy ; and the same reason is given, in thesame terms, to forbid theft, murder, andadultery .

Acts which hurt the welfare of the tribeand the goods of its members, which hit atthe God himself through his family and

Job xxxviii. 12- 15 . Levit icus xix.-xx .

The Origins 5 5

clients,were regarded formerly as specially evil

and punishable. But it is obvious that thiscondemnation was not based on a reasonedexperience nor on profound arguments. Thatwhich we now describe as superstition held alarge place in it. A man exposed himself tothe anger of the spirits by doing such or

such a thing ; he was liable to a murderousexplosion of that divine electricity which wasdiffused everywhere : his way was barred bya defensive prohibition, absolute or relative,enacted by the heads of the family or clan,or even by the priests, who were still more orless wizards and magicians ; and such a prohibition was sacred, both in itself and by theceremonial of its proclamation. For theearliest laws, it would seem, were tabus thenotification of things which must not bedone. The penalty was joined to the probibition. Whosoever violated the latter wasenveloped in a divine curse, outlawed for atime or permanently, according to the natureof the case, devoted to the harmful powers,expelled from his tribe to which he had becomea danger. Personal, family, and social moralitywas thus a religious morality ; and it was asrudimentary as the religion.

It is from this foundation of confused notions,

in which spirit hardly disengages itself from


matter, or an abstract notion from sensuousfeelings , from a mass of customs which to usare strange and superstitious that there emergessuddenly the religion of Israel : the exclusiveworship of a single God who has

,like others

,

a personal name, since he is called Yahweh ;but who soon separates himself from the othersby preventing them from holding a placebeside him.

§ 2

Patriarchal elohism has formerly been discussed at length. And it is less needful todelay over it now, because we talk no longerabout Hebrew patriarchs, but about Semiticnomads ; and we no longer try to establish atheory, about the primitive religion of theSemites, on the Biblical usage of the wordElohim.

That word is used, practically, to mean God ;although the plural form seems to requirethat it should be translated “ the Gods,"

and it often has this meaning in Scripturewhen there is a question of alien Gods. Somepeople have wished to see in this a proof ofpolytheism among the forefathers of Israel.Old grammarians and apologists of the Biblethought they removed the difficulty by assertinggravely that the word Elohim was applied to

The Origins 5 7

the true God as a plural of majesty. Othershave imagined that the plural number symbolised the multiplicity of attributes or perfections in God ; but this explanation is alittle too metaphysical and subtil. There is adetail too

,which complicates the problem .

The Singular Elch, which is found in otherSemitic languages

,is not met with in Hebrew,

except in poetry,to signify God, and then

with precisely the same meaning as Elohim ;

it is never used with the meaning of “ aGod. It would seem that in Hebrew theplural was older than the singular ; the latterbeing derived, as to its usage, from theformer ; and the use of the singular beingrelatively new

,limited, and almost unnatural.

The use of the plural, then, is not aclear proof of polytheism, as if the wordexpressed inevitably a multiplicity of persons .On the other hand, the plural cannot havebeen originally a term of unity. It musthave conveyed formerly an impersonal notion,though doubtless not an abstract one. It isnot the spontaneous definition of a rigorouslymonotheistic notion. The etymological senseof the word is not clear : it must be relatedto the word E l, which means “ God or “ aGod and which forms its plural regularly

,

Elim, divine beings. Force seems to be the


primitive notion attached to the word E l, andit must have had at first a concrete andpersonal meaning ; an El is a very strong ,supernatural, and divine being. But we mustnot conclude that E l was formerly a sort ofproper name,which afterwards became common.

The use of this word as a proper name, oras the equivalent of a divine personal name,is not more significant than the usage of theword baal,

“ Lord," under similar conditions.And the etymology derived from the notionof guidance or mastership , “ he to whom oneis driven by longing, or “ close to whom onegoes for protection, even if it were as certainas it is unlikely, would not prove that El

was formerly the proper name of the Godof the Semites. For this etymology would notinvolve an unity of being ; and it certainlyis arbitrary to pre-suppose a time when theancestors of all the Semitic peoples formeda homogeneous society worshipping a singleGod.

E lohim,as a noun of quality, might mean

a terror," a dread power." Hebrew isinclined to use the plural to embody psychological impressions and general notions . Ifthe existence of plurals of majesty be exceedingly dubious , emphatic plurals cannot bechallenged. The same tribes who from of old

The Origins 59

employed the word El to describe their Godor some special God

,and the word Elim to

describe “ the Gods,might well understand by

Elohim the divine power, without troublingabout the unity or the multiplicity of the divinebeings. In Israel

,where the personality of

Yahweh absorbed the totality of divine power,it became habitual to apply the word E lohimas a term of unity to Yahweh or to any otherGod

,and as a collective or plural noun to Gods

in general .Nomads have a religion of the clan. Thetribe is a social and religious unity. The groupis responsible for the individual , and theindividual belongs to the group . This spiritof solidarity

,which makes of the tribe a petty

world, with strict internal obligations, but withnone at all outside itself, is summed up , as onemay say, in the tutelary genius of the tribe,who is its father and ruler. As it does nottrouble about the rest of the world, so it doesnot conceive of its God as occupying himselfwith what goes on upon earth and in the skies.Heaven and earth are filled with divine beingswho ordain what happens. The scene of actionof the God does not over-pass the limit ofextension of his human family. He has hisspecial name, and his favourite place : a spring,a tree, or a grove, a stone, or a mass of rock.


The poem which Deuteronomy has givenus as the blessings of Moses to the tribes stilldescribes Yahweh as “ him that dwelt in thebush "

; and it is clear that this bush, in whichthe God of Israel made himself known to hisprophet, was considered at first as his usualabode. That is why Moses was warned to takeoff his shoes before approaching it, if he wouldavoid being treated as sacrilegious.

’r

The sanctuary of the God is a place markedout for acts of worship. The rites practisedthere have for their sole end the maintenanceof relations, the community of life, so to speak,between the God and his clients. And as itis a tie of blood which unites them, so it isin blood that they communicate most willingly.

It is often by a pledge of blood that theaddition of a new member to the tribe isratified, and also the all iances of tribes withone another, if it so happen that severalcoalesce under the auspices of their variousdivinities, or of the God of a leading tribe.The common meal which took place on thoseoccasions was not merely a sign of fraternity :it was understood as a participation m thesame sacred life which had its highest source inthe God.It may be asked, whence came this God of

Deuteronomy xxxiii. 16 . 1 Exodus iii. 2— 5 .



the spirit may have given himself to the tribe,so far as a spirit can give himself. Or

,rather

,

the question is not one to be asked or settled ;certainly not with the implication that one

can imagine a society without any religion,

and adopting a tutelary spirit for the solepurpose of having a God : and is the personalityof the God to be explained by the way inwhich the tribe organized itself into a conscioussocietyThe state of the evidence, it would seem,

does not warrant us in affirming that theSemi tic tribes went through a period oftotemism, strictly speaking, in which everyclan worshipped some kind of animal, to whichit thought itself related. Nevertheless it isnot fitting to be too sceptical in this matter,nor to assert that nothing analogous is to befound among the ancestors of Israel. If theBible is accurate in connecting w ith thememory of Moses the brazen serpent whichwas the obj ect of a special worship in thetemple of Jerusalem down to the time of

Hezekiah, although the story in Numbers ’“about the cures worked by this fetish mayonly be a mythical explanation of the traditional worship, yet one may infer that thetribe of Moses held the serpent as a sacred

Numbers xxi. 6—9.

The Origins 63

animal : that the brazen serpent had been asymbol of Yahweh , as the bull was in thedays of the kings of Israel ; and that Yahwehhimself in his beginnings may have been asnake God.

*

If we imagine several tribes preserved bytheir way of life and their isolation from therelationships and the commingling whichgenerate a practising polytheism, in which thelife of the clan ensures to the tutelary Godthe advantage of an almost exclusive w orship ;Where there still remains more of animismthan of polytheism and mythology in themodern sense of those words ; where the Godis distinctly personal without being whollydisengaged from nature ; where he is not thehead of a divine family, but the parent ofhis worshippers ; where the metaphysical unityof God is not conceived more clearly than theactual unity of the world, or than the physicaland moral unity of mankind in its variousbranches ; where the tribe forms, as it were,a world and a humanity limite d by its Godthrough these comparisons, we should probably

See E. Meyer, 1 16 , 4 26— 7 . This author asks if themagic rod of Moses, which changed itse lf into a snake ,was not in fact the brazen serpent ; and also the signor standard (nee) which gave its name to the altar of

Yahweh-missi .


get the least imperfect and inaccurate notionthat we can frame of the very singularenvironment in whi ch germinated the worshipof Yahweh, the God of Israel, and afterwardsthe universal God.

§ 3

Before working out the historical growthand progress which were attained by thesenotions of God, it may be advisable to glanceat the details of worship which

,though insisted

upon by the Jahvist traditions, betray the signsnevertheless of a more distant origin, andshow in their own way that the religion ofMoses and the prophets came to light throughless pure traditions, which never ceased toaffect the external forms of Israelite monotheismdown to the overthrow of the Jewish nation,and even right on to our own times.The chief practices of the Mosaic religiondid not come from the notion of one spiritualGod, infinitely just and beneficent , but fromconceptions which were far less exalted ; andif the original meaning of these practices wasmodified in the course of time , under theinfluences of a highe r ideal, their primitivecharacter is not less recognisable. Regardedin the light of these fundamental practices,the religion of Israel may be reduced to

i

The Origin 6 5

circumcision, rules concerning things clean and

unclean, sacrifices, the sabbath, the prescribedfeasts, and the ark of Yahweh . Now not oneof these details is attached necessarily to thenotion of a God who is supremely just, andto whom one becomes acceptable only by purityof heart, for they all, on the contrary, belongrather to the notion of a tribal . or national God.

They pertain, also, to the notion of a God ofnature, who lives with his people and as theydo, supplying them abundantly with the fruitsof the earth, and the fruitfulness of their cattle.And behind these notions even earlier tracescan be detected, reaching back into the periodwhen magic was confounded with religion.

Some people have aimed at giving a physicalreason for the origin of circumcision. Butgranted that there was in fact such a reason,which is at best uncertain,

the men who firstadopted this custom were incapable of understanding it as a medical practice or as a matterof common utility. They mingled with itsuperstitious fancies which for us must depriveit of any exalted symbolism. To do violenceto the human body, especially in a part of itwhich was sacred before it was shameful and

to draw blood from it, could not be an ordmary

act,but was a sacrament of the highest efficacy ,

whatever else may have been its purpose.6


It has been imagined, too, that circumcisionmight have been formerly a mutilation inflictedon prisoners of war, and that it was afterwardsexplained as a token of submission, or ofconsecration to the Gods. But circumcisionseems never to have been regarded as a markof subjection ; and the story of the hundredPhilistines whom David mutilated, after killingthem, cannot be utilised in support of thishypothesis. David, in fact, did not circumciseagainst their will a hundred living Phili stines :he brought to Saul the material evidence ofhis exploit, namely the slaughter of a hundreduncircumcisedfi‘

The most ancient writings already attributeto this rite a capital importance. It is enoughto recall the adventure of Moses, when he wasattacked by Yahweh himself in the wilderness,and delivered by the intervention of his w ifeZipporah, who, having circumcised their boywith a flint, touched her uncircumcised husbandwith the shred of flesh taken from the child,so that Moses himself might have the appearance of being circumcised." It may be admitted

1 Samue l xviii. 27 .

1: Exod. iv. 24 , 25 . The text is doubtful, and it mightread that the mark was imprinted on Yahweh himselfby Zipporah, who says to God, not to Moses, “

A bloodyhusband art thou tome .

"See E. Meyer, 59.

The Origins 67

will ingly that the Jahvist historian, to whomwe owe this narrative, has wished to demonstrate how in Israel the circumcision ofchildren was substituted for the earlier customof circumcising youths at the age of puberty.

The obligation of the rite may have been heldbinding in itself, without having any need ofjustification, by the natural exclusion of an

uncircumcised person from every relation withYahweh. In any case, the meaning of thissavage incident would be less high . On thisoccasion Yahweh did not behave as God, butas a ferocious being appeasable by blood.

The basis of the equally ancient narrative inJoshua,

* about the circumcision of the Israelitesafter crossing Jordan, enables us to infer thatin order to hold the land of Yahweh lawfullythe children of Jacob had to submit to a sacredmutilation. It compels us also to suspect thatcircumcision was not practised in Israel beforethe arrival in Canaan, although it was customarywith the Egyptians. We have seen that theJahvist historian takes it back a little farther,to Moses, but not into patriarchal times.In the priestly document of the Hexateuch,circumcision is presented with another explanation, as being the indispensable condition oflegal purity, and the sign of the alliance

Joshua v. 2— 9.


between God and the posterity of Abraham.

The divine preference appears as the onlyreason for the necessity of the custom. But,whence the reason for so whimsical a choice ?The efficacy which the writer attributes to it,by reason of its divine institution, is wholly inthe moral sphere,and does not come in any sensefromthe rite itself, as in the earlier accounts.Possibly because he holds the custom to bemore ancient than Moses, or rather becauseAbraham is for him the real father of theHebrews, who must have borne the sign ofelection ; and so he attaches the precept of

circumcision to the call of the patriarch.

In reality, circumcision was known elsewherethan in Israel, and was practised before thesupposed date of Abraham. It was habitualin Egypt from the earli est antiquity, and itmay be supposed, with sufficient probability,to have been an old custom of the Africantribes, made known through the Egyptians tosome of the western Semites. It was not aSemitic practice, because the Semi tes of Mesopotamia appear to have bee n completely ignorantof it ; and even the priestly writer does notimagine that Abraham could have known it inthe country of his birth. It belongs undoubtedlyto that kind of trial, often strange and sanguinary, by which among half-civilized peoples the



national religion. It was desirable to assurethe advantages of this initiation as early aspossible , to those capable of receiving it, andthence came the circumcision of children. Theuse of sharpened flints for the operation witnesses to the hoary antiquity of the custom.

The choice of the eighth day after birth mayhave some relation to the ancient practice ofimmolating the first -born .

The distinction between things clean andunclean, between states of purity and im

purity, which fills so great a place in theMosaic legislation, belongs to the same orderof naturalistic conceptions . We are guilty ofa foolish anachronism if we imagine that theterms pure and impure were, in the beginning,equivalents of clean and dirty

, or healthy andunhealthy . The notion of pure and impure inthe Bible is exclusively religious : it is neithermoral nor utilitarian . If certain legal commands or prohibitions resulted in good physiological consequences , that was not the motivewhich decided the order or the prohibition. Themeaning is to be sought in the ancient notions ofholiness. Holy things were those of which theusage was withdrawn, wholly or in part, fromman

,and reserved to the divinity . Impure

things were those which the divinity abhorred,and which for that reason were not tolerated

The Origins 7 I

in his service. Between the two are thingscommon, simply pure or indifferent, whichmight occasionally be infected by worship orimpurity. It is in these forms, and with thesegeneral applications, that notions of holiness,of purity, of impurity, appear not only in thereligion of Israel, but in many other religions.A thing impure would often seem to besomething connected with a foreign or a lowerreligion ; for instance, to the worship of spiri ts,or of the dead. Consequently

,that which has

become impure was in its beginning sacred, ina w ider sense, as a habitation of spirits, ora receptacle of supernatural activity Thedistinction of holy and impure was madeafterwards , between things which were relatedto the Gods and became appropriated to theirworship, and those which continued more orless in the usage of spirits or of magic Theprimitive identity of holy and impure is shownin that both are contagious in the sameway ; and that the touching of holy thingsrequires a ceremony of purification, or if youwill of de-consecration, similar to that which isrequired by the touching of impure things .Thus the same ritual ablutions are used in thetwo cases.Why were certain kinds of animals held tobe impure, and certain conditions of man and


of woman, and corpses ? It may be said,speaking generally

,that the reason was a

superstitious fear,which counselled a tem

porary or a permanent interdict of certainpersons, animals, and things. A harmfulplant, a mischievous or repulsive beast, wasmistrusted formerly as the incarnation of adangerous spirit ; or even a certain animalmay have been held so sacred that man hadnot ordinarily a right to touch it. Everythingwhich related to generation, to illnesses, and todeath has been thought by early peoples to beinvolved in the working of unseen and terribleforces, contact with which was not free fromdanger. Hence have come the rules aboutsexual relations, the impurities of man andwoman , abstinence from blood, conceived asthe seat of life and the containing vessel ofthe spirit, about the handling of corpses, andthe treatment of diseases which were regardedas a species of diabolic possession.

Everywhere primitive medicine was made upof exorcisms , and the doctors were priests, atleast when they were sorcerers and wizards.If the Mosaic regulations about lepers be readwith care, it will be seen easily that the end

in view was neither the healing of thedisease

,nor properly speaking the measures to

be taken against contagion, but the state of



is not merely a guarantee against the divine,but is also a means of appropriating it, sosacrifice was not only a simple way of buying from the Gods a little security, but thenotion of communion was associated with thenotion of offering. The supernatural efii cacyof sacrifice did not come solely because it wasa gift accepted by the deity, but because itwas also the means of forming, carrying on,strengthening, and renewing the active tiewhich united the God to his worshippers. Themost ancient sacrifices were not meals servedup to the God alone ; they were banquets inwhich the God had, as was right, the betterpart, but to which he admitted his servitorswith himself it was not only homage that wasrendered him, but there was an efficacioussacrament of his all iance with his followers.It is true that in historical times, afterIsrael was established in Canaan, and Yahwehhad become Lord of the country, the wholemass of sacrifices and ritual offerings wasconceived as a tribute pertaining naturally tothe deity. But the usual participation of theofferer, the prescribed conditions for beingadmitted to the sacred feast, the character ofholiness that was attached to the thingsofi ered, and especially to the sacrificial vi ctims,all show that the feeling of a divine com

The Origins 7 5

munion still survived. St. Paul was arguingentirely according to ancient notions whenhe wrote “ The bread which we break is itnot a communion of the body of Christ seeingthat we who are many are one body, onebread, for we all partake of the one bread.

Behold Israel after the flesh : have not theywhich eat the sacrifices communion with thealtar ? The Apostle ought to have said“ mess-mates of God "

; respect for the Eternalattenuated here the wording of the principle on which the whole argument rests .“ But I say that the things which the Gentilessacrifice

,they sacrifice to devils, and not to

God : and I would not that ye should havecommunion with devils. Ye cannot drink thecup of the Lord and the cup of devils . Yecannot partake of the table of the Lord, andof the table of devils .Amos declares that the Israelites in thewilderness offered no sacrifices to Yahweh ;

l

But his assertion is contradicted by the mostancient legends, and by all the probabilitiesit does prove, however, that there was noknowledge in the time of this prophet of anyMosaic legislation about sacrifices ; and itmeans that the ritual of sacrifices, in the eighthcentury before our era, was, for the most part,

1 Cor. x. 16— 21 . 1“ Amos v. 29 .


that which Israel had borrowed from theCanaanites , not that which its nomadic an

cestors had practised formerly. Certain narrabives appear to suggest the vague memory of anevolution . Thus the legend connected withthe altar of Yahweh-Shalom at Ophrahmay be meant to explain the substitution ofholocausts and offerings by fire for the presentat ion of food : Gideon had made ready a kid,and was bringing it all prepared for the God

,

with unleavened bread ; but Yahweh madehim put everything on the sacred stone , thenhe touched the food with his staff, and im

mediately flame burst out of the rock, themeats disappeared, and Yahweh with them) “It might be argued from this that the oldcustom of the place authorized the presenting ofcooked food as an offering , but that the Israelitecustom substituted for such offerings the burning of victims, or of the portions of victimswhich were set apart for Yahweh. But thissubstitution was not peculiar to Israel ; andthere remained in the worship of Yahweh sometraces of primitive custom, since the dailyoffering of the shew-bread was continued untilthe destruction of the second temple.We may infer that the method of conveyingto the God his portion would vary with the

Judges vi . 17— 24 .



the same conceptions. It is not easy to saywhether the notion of sacrifice as an offeringpreceded or followed the notion of sacrifice asa communion ; or whether, indeed, the twonotions are not equally old, though perhapsthey may have originated formerly in differentcircumstances, or even possibly in the same.Nomadic Israel must have practised the sacrifice of communion before learning the systemof offerings which it got to know in Canaan.

The sacrifice of communion, too, is congruouswith the life of a tribe. The worship of spiri tsleads more naturally to simple oflerings. Andcertain sacrifices would seem to have no connexion with the notion either of offering or ofcommunion. There are some which do not

reflect the usual intercourse of a family withits divine father, or of a people with itsheavenly master and guardian.

Human sacrifices were not unknown toancient Israel. The legend of Jephthah, whichmust be the mythical explanation of some localworship , does not fail to show that the immolation of a human victim was allowed, atleast in exceptionally grave circumstances.The legend dealing with the sacrifice of Isaacis not less significant ; for it is evidentlymeant to show that Yahweh deigned to besatisfied with animals, and that he did not

The Origins 79

insist upon the children of his worshippers ,though he had the right to exact them. Thesenotions and prepossessions imply an earlier andregular practice of human sacrifices, especiallyin the sanctuary of E l More

’ at Shechemfi"whither Elohim had led Abraham for thesacrifice of his son. The sanctuary, in fact, wasCanaanite but the legend is not very old anddeals with a worship practised by Israel inimi tation of Canaan. This worship is reproved,in addition, with singular moderation ; and weshall see farther on that the sacrifice of thefirst-born may have been practised in Israelfor longer and far more generally than isusually admitted. Human sacrifice was therule in Canaan at the foundation of towns, andeven of houses. It is hardly probable that theIsraelites never followed this example. WhenHiel the Bethelite rebuil t Jericho in the days ofAhab

,he sacrificed his eldest son at its founda

tion,and his youngest when he set up the gates ."

In the affair of Jephthah it may be said that

The reading Moriah, in Genesis xxn. 2 is faulty . One

should read, probably, “in the land of the Amorites.

"

It was a quest ion of conse crating the holy place of

She chem, and the text seems to have been changedbecause of the Samaritans.

" Kings xvi . 84 . The Biblical tradit ion Wishes toimply that these youths died through a curse uttered

formerly by Joshua (vi. but the original meaning


the human sacrifice was thought to be anunusual method of propitiation. But why hadhuman blood so high an efficacy ? As to sacrifice s of foundation, when the victim was laidunder the building, we are led naturally tosuppose that they were connected rather withthe spirits of the place than with a deity.

Nevertheless the prevalence of the custom ata time and with surroundings in which theworship of the Gods had long flourished does notallow us to doubt that the practice was adaptedto their service ; just as it is certain that thesacrifice of the first -born was ofl’ered to Yahwehin the decline of the Davidic monarchy. Incon

testably, too, the Gods liked blood.

The rite of the Passover is older than thesettlement of Israel in Canaan : older, even,than the worship of Yahweh by Israel. It wascelebrated by night ; and the blood on the doorposts was for the spirit who went his rounds inthe darkness

,as he attacked men under cover

of the gloom. The liking of the Semitic Gods,and even of Yahweh , for blood, was it nota legacy to them from the spirits ? The tabuof blood supposes a pre-existing custom. The

cannot be doubted. After the recent excavations at

Taanech, for instance , it may be asserted that the bodyof the e lder son was put under the foundation-stone , andof the younger below the gates .



the Kings , who hardly knows to what influenceto attribute the panic of the besiegers

,but who

does not doubt that the sacrifice of Mesha le tloose against his enemies a supernatural forcewhich put them to flight. Mesha certainlyoffered the sacrifice to his God, Chemosh ; butit was not done to present him with his son asan offering or as food, it was to determine thevolition of the God , to force the hand of destiny.

Perhaps in these extraordinary cases theoriginal notion that was attached to bloodysacrifices reappears ; and thus perhaps humansacrifices may be explained, of which the originis not necessarily later than that of animalsacrifices . On one side human sacrifices maybe connected historically with the worship ofthe dead, to whom it was desirable to givecompanions and servants ; but these butcherieswere not as yet strictly speaking sacrifices,and a reason for the special efficacy attri

buted to the ritual offering of men and animalsmust be sought elsewhere.The conditions in which the sacrificers livedmust have influenced the choice of victims.That choice was determined also by specialconsiderations

,such as the sacred character

attributed to particular kinds of animals.Any victim, even a human one, was suitablefor magic purposes and the nourishment of

The Origins 83

spirits. In the worship of a tribe organizedunder the protection of a God, the domesticanimals serve for the sacrifice of communion.

Finally every rite, the grossest, the most absurdand cruel, which had none of these qualitiesfor those who first adopted and handed it on,maintained itself when once established, and

was perpetuated by the influence of tradition ;it changed its significance according to need,but it lived on, and was held to be a necessaryelement in the social fabric or an essentialingredient of religion. This power of religioustradition was needed to make the sacrifice ofa living being, which was a magic rite originally and in its first conception, a regular meansof divine communion and propitiation ; and tocontinue it in the religion of Israel, evenwhen its notions of God had made suchpractices superfluous, and might seem ratherto exclude them ; and to propel, the theoryat least, right into the Christian theology,which has contrived to find in the death ofthe Christ an ofi ering upon which the wholescheme of salvation depends.The Sabbath was an application of thatreligious interdict which we have seen exer

cised in regard to things and persons. InBabylon

,the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first ,

and twenty-eighth of each month, intervals


corresponding to the phases of the moon , weredays either holy or nefasti , according to thepoint of view from which the prohibition ofcertain works or occupations was looked at.As there are certain holy places into whichaccess is not allowed to ordinary mortals, or

only under certain fixed conditions,so there

are also holy seasons,which are violated by

various human acts . In its origin,the mean

ing of the sabbath among the Israelites wasnot different. To sanctify the sabbath was torespect the prohibition in which that day wasInvolved , by abstaining from work ; by working, one profaned, or soiled, or violated thesabbath day . The sabbath was holy in itself,through its divine institution, as the precinctsof a shrine are holy through their appropriation by the God who chooses to dwell in them.

The obligation to observe it is not based uponhumanitarian or moral reasons, but on areligious motive after the manner of antiquity.

It is hardly necessary to say that the sabbathexisted before the explanation which is givenof it in the Biblical story of the creation. But,in the story itself the consecration of thesabbath is not an appropriation of that dayto works of piety, it is the tabu which theCreator is held to have put on that day, whichhenceforth belonged to him exclusively, and



in the Israelite worship down to the periodof the exile. It was the feast of the openingmonth ; and its object formerly was to welcomethe reappearance of the moon. It goes backwithout any doubt to the nomadic time, and itwas stamped with a naturalistic characterwhich gradually faded out of it.The feasts which are far better known, thePassover, Pentecost, Tents or Tabernacles, hecame solemn commemorations of the exodus,of the giving of the Law, of the sojourn inthe wilderness, though at first they hadother meanings. The feast of the Passoverhad acquired its traditional interpretationbefore the captivity but the historical explanation of the two other feasts is less ancient.The ritual of all three shows that they wereconnected originally with the progression ofthe seasons and of the crops, and with theincrease of cattle. Thus the Passover is thefeast of spring and of renewal ; Pentecost, thefestival of harvest ; the feast of Tabernaclescelebrates the gathering in of fruit and thevintage. The spiritual meaning came later.The sacrifice of the paschal lamb, a rite whichcontrasts so frankly with the ordinary ways ofsacrifice in the levitical code, is a family sacrificefor the new year. The victim, a lamb or a kidof the previous spring, would be just fit to in

The Origins 87

augurate the new year. The blood on thedoor indicated then t he consecration of thehouse and all the family, of goods and persons .The Law forbad eating the lamb uncooked, orbreaking its bones, while it ordained that itshould be eaten wholly at one meal : possiblybecause in an earlier time the victim was eatenraw ,w ith its bones pounded. From all its details,this practice must have gone back to the timewhen the forefathers of Israel lived as nomadicshepherds. It was a sacrifice of communion,not connected specially with the worship ofYahweh, but which may in primitive timeshave been connected with the worship of spirits,but not necessarily derived from totemism,

with which there has sometimes been an effortto connect it.The feast of Unleavened Bread, which lastedseven days, was formerly distinct from thesacrifice of the paschal lamb. It belonged, likePentecost and Tabernacles , to the series ofagricultural feasts which Israel annexed fromthe Canaanites. It was the feast of the newbread, and consecrated the opening of harvest,as Pentecost did the close. The usage of breadwithout leaven, the only sort allowed by theMosaic liturgy, is explained in the old textsby an accidental circumstance in the exodusfrom Egypt : the flour being carried away in


the kneading-troughs without having had timeto ferment .’le But a general principle excludedall fermented products from the sacrifices , asbeing corrupt, and repugnant to the deity.

With regard to bread specially, the Bible leadsus to think that anciently all bread was madeunfermented, and baked in the ashes : religiouscustom, which is essentially conservative, re

tained as a sacred rite what had been theordinary custom.

In Hebrew, the word which means “ feast(chag) has etymologically the signification“ dance the feast being designated by themost prominent thing in the primitivesolemnity

,namely the sacred dance, the

rhythmic march , accompanied by cries or chants,and executed round the altar or the place ofsacrifice

,while the victims were being pre

pared and killed. Men still danced round theark at Shiloh ; and David, too, danced beforethe ark when he brought it up to Zion." Thesacrificial meal crowned the festival.To understand the real meaning of the ark,

which is described as “ of the covenant," thestrange narrative of Exodus must be read ;

‘

I

in which Yahweh, on Horeb, made known to

Exod. x11. 34 .

Judges xxi. 19— 21 2 Sam. v1 1. 12— 14 .

IExod. xxxiii. 12— 17 .



or even touch on the coffer of the God. Whenthe ark was carried about it was thought thatYahweh was carried too. The ark was takeninto battle to ensure the direct protection ofthe God of Israel .Such campaigns were not always fortunate.It is recorded that Yahweh was once takenby the Philistines, but that he did so muchmischief to Dagon, the God of Ashdod, in thetemple where he had been put

,and afflicted

the Philistines with so many plagues,that they

were obliged to send him back .

* The ark thusreturned, and after diverse wanderings, alloweditself to be brought to Jerusalem by David,and was afterwards set up in Solomon’s temple.After that time all trace of it is lost ; and we donot know Whether it perished with the templein 586, or whether it had vanished earlier.It is doubtful whether the ark had aecom

panied the Israelites from the desert. It is apiece of sacred furniture which does not agreealtogether with the worship of nomads. Thetradition which connects Moses with the holyplace of Kadesh seems to ignore the ark, andto recognise only a tent with an oracle ofYahweh

,which possibly was the magic rod,

but more probably the famous oracle of thelots

,the ephool with the urim and thummim,

1 Sam. iv.— vii . 1 .

The Origins 9 I

which Moses made speak. It has been thoughtthat the ark was the palladium of the tribesof Joseph , and that it may have belongedformerly to a Canaanite God. An ark musthave ex isted at Shechem

,to which it is said

Joseph’s bones were carried out of Egypt."6This ark never

, probably, contained bones , andit is not more certain that it came fromEgypt ; but if it belonged to a Canaanite Godof vegetation, who died and rose every year,like Adonis , it might be taken for both thedwelling and the coffin of the God. May itnot have been the dwelling-place of the protector of Shechem, El or Baal-Berith, the Godof the covenant ; and may it not have beenattributed to Yahweh when the God of Shechemwas identified with the God of Israel, and

then moved to Shiloh ? However, it alwaysappeared formerly as a veritable fetish , asmuch venerated and feared as a divine image.A point less commonly noticed than theforegoing, and which brings the ancient religionof Israel very near to the primitive worships,and even to magic, is the power attributed tocertain formu lae. The blessing or the curse ofcertain persons, and in certain conditions, areconceived as dooms of fate which no powerdivine or human can change. When Isaac

Gen. 1. 26 ; Josh. xxiv. 32 .


blessed Jacob , thinking to bless Esau, he couldnot take back his words, or one might say thehappy fortunes which he had bestowed errone

ously on his second son ; and he does notdream of retracting them

,nor of praying

Yahweh to revoke a grant which to us wouldhave been invalidated by the fraud. He hasno escape but in a secondary blessing

,which

only gives to the hapless Esau something thatis not excluded by the privileges given to thefortunate Jacobfi" The curse of Noah weighsfor evermore on Canaan ." When Balaam setsout to curse Israel, Yahweh is compelled tohurry before him, to stop him on the way, andto put words of blessing into the mouth ofthe oracular wizard. 1 For the curse onceuttered

,Yahweh himself could not avert the

consequences . It is the magic power of asacred incantation which thus passes into thewords of fathers or the oracles of prophets,and we may add into the judgments of priestsand chiefs

,when they pronounce grave sen

teh ees and utter laws. The word is thus asupernatural power. Something divine worksin its formu lae. It disposes of things and ofmen ; and if things be sometimes refractory,men at least obey their own commanding voice.

Gen. xxvii. 1—40. i Gen. ix. 25 .

INumb. xxn. 2-35 .


CHAPTER III

THE OLD JAHVISM

OTHING is more dubious than the chronology of Israel before the time of the

Kings . The accession of David may be placedabout the year 1000B .C. The reign of that princemarks the finishing of the conquest, and theestablishment of an Israelitish nation ; but wedo not know how to make any probable estimate of the time which had elapsed since thetribes first invaded Canaan. According to theAssyrian and Egyptian evidence already ment ioned,

it is possible those invasions had begunabout the close of the fifteenth century. Thestories in Judges, which have some historicalconsistency

,seem to refer to the later period

of those obscure times rather than to theearlier. Moses would have appeared at theopening of that period as a somewhat hazyfigure

,but the foundation of Jahvism is in

separable from his name. The assimilation of95


the Canaanite religions to the worship of

Yahweh is rather indicated than formally at

tested, but it was the natural and inevitablesequel to the conquest. From the tenth centuryto the middle of the eighth there was a nationalworship , and only some few traits foretold theevolution which was to transform it into amonotheism with universalistic sympathies.

l

The God of Israel had a name, just like theGod of Moab and the God of Ammon. In facthe could not do Without one, and he calledhimself Yahweh It is not known where hegot this name. According to all probability itexisted before Moses. It may be that Yahwehwas the God of Sinai ; the God, that is, ofvarious tribes who lived in the neighbourhoodof the sacred mountain ; the tribe , for exampleof the Kenites or of Cain, with which an oldtradition connects Moses, before he led theIsraelites out of Egypt. Perhaps Yahwehwas the particular God of the Israelite clan,whence Moses issued ; and his name may havebeen one of the divine titles which the ancestorsof the Hebrews had brought from their original

It is no doubt superfluous to remind the reader that

the name Jehovah is a barbarism, which has not eventhe privi leges of antiquity.



into Egypt to deliver his brethren.

“ AndMoses said unto God, Behold, when I comeunto the children of Israel, and shall say untothem, The God of your fathers hath sent meunto you ; and they shall say to me, What ishis name ? what shall I say unto them ? AndGod said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : andhe said, Thus shalt thou say unto the childrenof Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

this is my name for ever, and this is mymemorial unto all generations. Yahweh giveshis answer while withholding it. He says,further, that there is no necessity for knowinghis name ; and the reason for withholding itis the very puissance and sanctity of that consecrated name, which ought not to be handedover to men to be used at their caprice. Butsince , after all, a name is indispensable, the Godplaying upon the assonance of the nameYahweh with the word ehie, I AM, which hehad just used when he declared I AM THAT IAM

,said that Moses to indicate the deity who

was sending him should employ the phrase justuttered

,by using its equivalent Yahweh This

Exod. iii. 18— 15 . The reply IAM hath sent me is

obscure and inaccurate . For Yahweh means It is,"not

“

I am,

" if the etymology be admissible at all. It is

possible that ehie has in this passage replaced Yahweh,when the divine name ceased to be pronounced in reading

The Old Jahvi sm 99

does not mean that the God of Israel was takenfor absolute being, but that he was a mysteriousbeing, who owed no responsibility for what hewas to any person. Let them call him Yahweh,without prying farther. The old author would,probably, not have been sorry to find a morepicturesque explana tion of the divine name ;but he does not appear able to have seen moreclearly than our modern critics into the originalsignification of the word. It cannot even bedecided whether the form Jahu, which is metwith in compound personal names, is older thanthe form Yahweh or is shortened from it.What appears historically probable is thatthe departure from Egypt, and the federationof leading tribes which resulted later in theIsraelitish people , was effected under the patronage of thi s divine name ; that Yahwehbecame thenceforward the God of those tribes,and their sole protector. Moses accomplishedthe deliverance of Israel by invoking the powerand authority of Yahweh . He thus foundedtogether the religion and the nationality of

Israel, by uniting the tribes in the worship of

Yahweh : the exclusive worship of a deity whoseems never to have been represented under a

Scripture , because the usual Adonai or Elohim could not

be subst ituted here . Kautzsch , Die hei lige Schrift (3rd.

91 .


human form. Statues were not manufacturedin the wilderness. Yahweh is the God of Israel ;Israel is the people of Yahweh

,and must

worship none but him : these were the principles of the Mosaic religion. They are notformed upon philosophical reasonings, nor uponmetaphysical conceptions of the divine unity ;but upon a very active religious instinct, andupon the very clear notion which Moses himself had acquired of Yahweh , of his nature, andof his moral character.The religion of Moses was far from being arigorous monotheism . To find such a monotheism in the original texts , it has to be readinto them arbitrarily. But a people whichconceived of Yahweh as a spirit of the night,battling with Jacob and with Moses himself,stopping Balaam’

s ass, travelling in the ark,and if he were not actually the brazen serpentyet owning a name

,like his neighbour Gods,

and having like them too a people to watchover

,conceived of him obviously as a definite

and limited God,very powerful no doubt within

his own sphere of action , and working marvelsin the interest of his worshippers, but still aGod amongst other Gods, though undoubtedlythe strongest

,the greatest, and perhaps already

the best. It is, then , superfluous to point

to the stage of monotheism which had been



Rechab, by the side of Jehu when there wasa question of extirpating the religion of Baal.The Rechabites were fanatical and immovableJahvists : they held to the custom of the desert,and continued to live in tents. The spirit of

this venerable tribe is an important clue tothe nature of primitive Jahvism. The clanof Rechab owed nothing to the prophets of thegolden age, but it followed the way of lifewhich was their ideal ; and, like the prophets,it chose to know none other God but Yahweh .

Its dogged fidelity to the ancient religion aidsthe historian to understand how the notionof a worship , which excluded every otherdivinity but the national God, was able toexist from the beginning and to maintain itselfin Israel. It explains also the attitude and thegrievance of the prophets .The God of Israel opposed himself to theGods of the foreigner. By so doing, heacknowledged their existence ; and was thenunable to pose as the only God, beside whomnone other could exist. Israelites wereforbidden to worship the Gods of theirneighbours ; but these Gods received thelawful homage of their own people. Jephthahdid not shrink from saying to the King ofMoab

,

“Wilt not thou possess that whichChemosh thy God giveth thee to possess ?

The Old Jahvism 1 o 3

So whomsoever Yahweh our God hath dispossessed ‘ from before us, them will w e

In a foreign country, one is farfrom his presence, and has to recogniseother Gods . The holiness of Yahweh consistsin his inviolability and inaccessibility

,in his

power to make his will respected, but notin the moral perfection of his nature. Hischaracter, it has been said, shows a fewmoral qualities, but is not precisely moral.His power, his knowledge, and above all hisgoodness , are limited. The God who is thoughtto have killed out-right those who peepedinto his ark, or who stretched out a handto save it from tumbling, is not a judge whoadjusts his punishment to the crime, but aterrific being whom one irritates by approaching too closely. The least infraction of hiswill, the slightest attack on the majesty ofhis name , drives him into a phrensy ; but hepunishes or ignores such offences accordingto his whim. He is implicated in the pettiesttricks in the story of Jacob ; and it is narratedthat he became an accomplice in theft forthe benefit of his people, when he showedthem a way of filching valuables from theEgyptians : when, through signal cowardice,both Abraham and Isaac lent themselves to

Judges xi . 24 .


the stealing of their w ives, the ways in whichhe vindicated their honour, are not far fromridiculous .His justice is the attribute of a God whomakes his clients successful, who does rightto Israel by giving him a prosperous life andvictory in battle. He is guardian of the nationallaw, which is held to be just and good, and isalso the expression of the divine will . So faras he punishes the violation of this law he isprotector of the social order. As his name isinvoked in oaths, he is terrible to perjurers .He avenges the shedding of blood, but heavenges it by blood ; and it may happen thathe avenges it on the guiltless. It was he whoordered the immolation of some descendantsof Saul, to expiate the wrong done by theirancestor to the Gibeonites .* Nevertheless heis a defender of the weak, the widow, and theorphan ; but this quality, which is in conformitywith the social conditions of Canaan, onlyappeared perhaps after the conquest.In the same way , a peremptory choice of bothgood and evil , even moral evil, is attributed tohim. The more terrible a catastrophe is, themore surely is his intervention recognised.

It was thought quite natural that he shouldexterminate in a single night all the first-born

2 Sam. xxi. 14 .



Moses , the priest of Yahweh , who was theGod of Levi, was the leader of the fugitivetribes , and brought them out to their kinsmen.

In gratitude to Yahweh , who had deliveredthem by his servant, perhaps in extraordinarycircumstances and through dangers happilyovercome, they entered by a solemn covenantinto a federation which was ratified in thename of the mighty God of Kadesh and Sinai.An act of this nature may explain thepersistence of the religious tie which neverceased to unite the tribes, in spite of theseparations and political divisions which werecaused later. But the object of the union hadnothing mystic about it ; because it does notseem to have been formed only by reason ofthe accomplished exodus ; but with a view todefence against other tribes, who were alien tothe religion of Yahweh, and especially againstAmalek : perhaps, also , with a view to theinvasion of Canaan, which soon began. Theconquest

,in fact, was carried out in the name

of Yahweh, who was held to be the actualleader of the adventurous wars. When theyhad entered Canaan it was always under theinvocation and protection of Yahweh thatthe scattered tribes reassembled to face thecommon danger. The Wars of Yahweh was thetitle of one of the oldest books written in Israel.

The Old Jahvi sm 10 7

Yahweh, as the God of Israel , had his offi cialinterpreters ; his priests , his seers. Moses wasthe first of them. The priestly families, whichserved the sanctuaries of Shiloh and of Danlater on, professed to be descended from him.

Not one of the legal collections inserted intothe Pentateuch can be attributed to him ; theyall pertain to an Israel established in Canaan .

Moses does seem, however, to have founded theTora, the instructions of Yahweh ; because hegave decisions in his name about matters ofright and justice . These decisions were dictatedto him by the oracle which was kept in a tentpitched near the sacred spring of Meribah , atKadesh. The actual name of Meribah means“ strife." The name of Massah, a place nearMeribah , means “ trial, " and may thus havesome connexion with that ancient tribunal ,which certainly was not unacquainted withordeals. And the divine word Yahweh-nissi ,

which belongs to the same set of institutions ,may have an analogous meaning) “Moses figures in an old story about the battleof Rephidim

,which may have been taken from

“ The Wars of Yahweh . There he does notappear as a military leader, which certainly

Nissi may be conne cted with the same radical asMassah . The Bible points to another derivat ion : see

above , p. 63, note .


he never was, but as a wizard priest. WhileIsrael, under the leadership of Joshua, foughtwi th Amalek, Moses was on the hill above,with God’s rod in his hand. And it came topass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israelprevailed : and when he let down his hand,Amalek prevailed.

" He was, therefore, supported until the evening, and Israel’s victorywas complete.Did he still accompany the tribes whoassembled themselves on the banks of Jordan,to invade Canaan from the east ? The want ofevidence about the place of his tomb is urged ina contrary sense. But the texts on this pointare , rather, dubious and contradictory. Weread at the end of Deuteronomy

’r that Moses

was buried near Beth-Peor, but that the placeof his burial is not known. The first information is precise enough to exclude the second.Perhaps it was believed formerly, and accordingto a sound tradition, that they possessed histomb ; and the prophets, to discourage theworship of Baal-Peor, denied that Moses layin the place mentioned. His name, therefore,remained always connected with the religionof the desert.A new period began for the worship of

Yahweh by the settlement in Canaan. The

Exod. xvii. 8— 13 . 1 Dent. xxxiv. 6.


1 1 0 The Religion of Israel

The influence of an encompassing polytheismwas only overcome at last by the fall ofJerusalem and the exile to Babylon ; but ithad lasted sufiiciently long and gone sufii

ciently deep to leave ineffaceable traces evenafter the establishment of legal judaism

.

The Deuteronomist interpretation of thelegends about the Judges suggests a very falsenotion of the religious history of Israel at thetime of the conquest. It makes out a recurringseries of complete apostasy

,alternating with

periods of fidelity not less complete ; Yahwehwas abandoned for the Baals of Canaan ; heavenged himself by sending a foreign conqueror ; enslaved Israel cried to its God, andYahweh raised up a deliverer who inaugurateda time of pure religion . Now Yahweh wasnever abandoned as the special God of theIsraelitish tribes ; and it is most significantthat his worship was maintained after theentry into Canaan, and amid populations morecivilized than Israel, from whom Israel learnttheir civilization. Nothing shows better theextraordinary force of the religious impressions which were stamped upon the tribes bythe desert. But in times of peace, and indistricts where the Israelite clans were intermingled with Canaanite populations, the worship of local Gods became associated necessarily

The Old Jahvism I 1 1

w ith the worship of Yahweh : according to theaccepted beliefs, these Gods were lords ofthe soil and dispensers of the riches of theland, and they could not be ignored. In courseof time they were assimilated by Yahweh , andabsorbed by him but, prior to the assimilation,

there was an approximation and a mingling ofthe worships. It was only in times of war,when the fate of the clans was at stake, thatthe God of Israel took exclusive possession ofhis own people, and that his worship waspractised with intolerance. The old YahwehSabaoth , the God of Hosts,* reappeared at thehead of his troops and led them to victory. Bythe final success of the invasion he triumphed ,and suppressed the Canaanitish deities , whowere wholly eclipsed in the splendour of thevictorious God.

Let Yahweh arise , and let his enemies be scattered,

Let them also which hate him flee before him.

"

Such was the battle hymn with which the arkof Shiloh was greeted, when the armies of

Yahweh-Sabaoth is a divine t it le compounded likeYahweh-Shalom, Yahweh-nissi . It designates Yahweh

as God of a special sanctuary, which may have beenShiloh, where the ark was . Yahweh of the Armies means

probably the divine leader of the Israe lite hordes. The

name is very old and perhaps it was only later that therew ere dreams of celest ial armies.


Israel moved against the enemy. And whenthey halted, to encamp after the battle :

Halt "Yahweh,

With the battalions of Israel. "

On these occasions Yahweh fought for hispeople, less ostentatiously than the HomericGods, but just as the God Ashur did with theAssyrians, and Ammon of Thebes with Rameses .At Gibeon, he killed more enemies with hishail-stones than the warriors of Israel didwith their swords .The book of The Wars of Yahweh must havedescribed the wonders accomplished by Israelunder the leadership of its God, from theperiod of the desert until the establishmentof the monarchy. If only a few attenuatedextracts have come down to us from thisgrandiose romance, it is doubtless because inthe end its contents were found more scandalous than edifying. It remains, however,that Yahweh was mighty in Hewas stronger and more redoubtable than allthe Baals of Canaan, who were the petty andpacific Lords of agricultural populations . It

Literally, w ith themyriads and thousands of Israel(Numb.

x . 35 In verse 36 the text reads shuba,

return but it would be better to read sheba, rest ."

i Psa. xxiv. 8.


1 1 4. The Religion of Israel

rebuilt until the days of the kings. Men andbeasts were killed ; the whole town was burnt,including the houses with all their furniture

,

except obj ects of gold, silver, bronze, and iron,which were reserved for Yahweh .

This terrible curse was not pecul iar toJahvism, and it would be a mistake to see init an unusual exhibition of religious intolerance. That which fell under the cherem wasnot what was vowed to Yahweh , but ratherwhat was not included in the vow ; and thedestruction of men and cattle should not beregarded as a monstrous holocaust. Thecherem, in old times, was rather a solemnmalediction, involving in a pernicious influence,as magical incantations did, everything includedin it. Yahweh, like his worshippers, abhorredwhat was tainted by a cherem, and he wouldnot accept it. It is even related, in connexionwith the taking of Jericho, that the nextexpedition failed because an Israelite had keptback certain objects from destruction : the wholecamp was polluted

,Yahweh would not go out

with the warriors ; and matters were only putinto a normal state again by burning thecriminal with his plunder, his children, hiscattle, his tent, and covering all their remainswith a great heap of stones Yahweh was

Joshua vu.

The Old Jahvism 1 1 5

thus made the custodian of a practice olderthan himself. He held things under a cherem

as things unclean ; and the cherem was onlyunclean because sacred, but in the evil sense,through possession by a spirit of death . Thetribes had known the cherem before enteringCanaan, before belonging to Yahweh : theyemployed it now, and Yahweh with them, forthe honour of the God and the furtheranceof his cause.However, a system of life in common wasbound to be established , and was establishedsoon, between Israel and the Canaanite population, as groups of Israelites settled amongthe people of Canaan : and it was impossibleto exclude religion from that common life .

We know already what the religion of Israelwas . The worship of Canaan was a lowpolytheism , which concealed only superficiallya basis of animism and fetishism, the inheritance from old times, and perhaps also in partfrom the shadowy peoples who had lived inthe country before the Canaanites possessed it.Each locality had a special God, its Baal,whose worship was associated with that of aspring, a rock, a tree, a cave, all sacred. Thealtars were cut in the rock, or made of hewnstones

,and were generally on a height. By

the altar were the sacred pillar and stake,


the masseba and the ashera, legacies of primitive religion, but now indispensable accessoriesof worship , and always a sign of the divinepresence. They symbolised the Baal of theplace, and the Ashera or Astarte, his consort.Gods and Goddesses should have special namesand it was easy to distinguish them by addingthe name of their high place : the Baal of onecity is not to be confounded with that of aneighbouring city, any more than the citiesthemselves are to be confused. The divisionof the country into petty lordships, more orless independent, explains this multiplicationof Gods .The worship corresponded to the agriculturallife of the population . The great feasts commemorated the gathering in of harvests andfruits. It was usually a joyous worship ;because the Baals were nearly always kindly,and did not grudge the fruits of the earth.

Nevertheless,the sacrifice of new-born children

was frequent,and probably did not cause the

least repugnance . For the most part thebodies were not burnt, as in Judah later, underthe last kings

,but were deposited in earthen

vessels round the altars . We cannot say ifthis was an ofl’ering of the first-born. In anycase the practice is rather a survival of oldanimistic and magical religions than a product



Israel. But these imagined ancestors werenone other than the Gods themselves

,identified

at once with Yahweh who replaced them asa tutelary God, and transformed into heroes ,the servants of Yahweh, and the first disciplesof his religion : it was Yahweh who had beenworshipped by other titles before his namehad been uttered in Canaan. The ancient localfables were re-edited, so far as was necessary,to make up the legend of the sole Yahweh andhi s only people. The Canaani te divinities, whowere considered the fathers of their people,were transformed as Gods into Yahweh ; and,in their capacity of ancestors , they were graftedon to the pedigree of Israel. Yahweh did noteven neglect to multiply himself a little, likethe ancient Baals, according to the sanctuaries :at Shiloh, Yahweh-Sabaoth was worshippedYahweh-Shalom at Ophra, and Yaweh-nismat Kadesh . But the personality of the Godremained indivisible in the national consciousness

,and we may say that he only multiplied

himself for the convenience of his worshippers.The substitution of Yahweh for the ancientGods was at times very rapid : before theclose of David’s reign the God of Israel hadannexed the holy places of Jerusalem. Withthe sanctuaries

,their rites and customs passed

over to the worship of Yahweh. Even the


consecrated prostitution went on as areverend practice. The legend of Judah andTamar shows that it was not thought shameful. Deuteronomy was obliged to forbid itwithin the temple at Jerusalem, where it wascontinued until the reformation by Josiah ,although it had been opposed by the prophets,at least after Amos and Hosea.

Yahweh without as yet severing himselfwholly from Sinai became an inhabitant ofCanaan and of its shrines : he was both seigneur (baal) and king (melelc). It was he whopresided over agriculture, and gave the rainin its season ; he received the first -fruits of theearth ; he adopted the Canaanite feasts ofharvest and vintage, and probably also thesabbath which the prophet Hosea mentionsamong the customs of the Baals, and whichwas really one of the Canaanitish customsintroduced into the worship of Yahweh .

The simplest relations of Israel with itsneighbours involved a certain communion inworship . Joining in the same meal formed areligious connexion. The legend of Josephremarks that the Egyptians did not eat withstrangers, but the Israelites made no scruple .

The smallest contract required the intervention of the Gods for the oaths, sacrifices, and

Gen. xxxviii.


meals which it entailed. Marriages betweenIsraelites and Canaanites brought the customsof the two worships right into the household.

Thus everything conspired to make a fusioninevitable.That this syncretism did not result in a polytheistic religion, with a pantheon ruled by asupreme God, was due to the religious andpatriotic feeling of Israel, which was summedup by faith in Yahweh , and was strong enoughto prevent the maintenance of the Canaani tishdeities alongside the God of Israel. Religiousunity went parallel with national unity : as thelatter was brought about by Israel, and to itsadvantage ; so the former was accomplishedby Yahweh, and for his benefit. The old Godsrepresented a local autonomy which had todisappear before a political unification underthe leaders of Israel : Yahweh representedthe unity and the domination of a con

quering people. With his oracula, and theTorah of his priests : with his warlike temper,which made him the veritable captain ofIsrael’s armies ; with the system of holy warswhich transformed the Israelite warriorstemporarily into a kind of military order,subjected to very strict mili tary regulations,which were its discipline ; with his enthusiasts,of whom we shall speak presently, and who,



had not dared to keep it, because of the deathswhich happened in the neighbourhood

] andthey offered it to the dwellers in KirjathJearim in Judah ; where it was lodged witha certain Abinadab, whose son was deputedto minister to Yahweh in his sacred chest. Itwas there that David came to fetch it. Theidentity of the ark of Kirjath Jearim withthat of Shiloh may be doubted. David, however, seems to have been most eager to transferthis ark to Jerusalem, which would be hardlyexplicable if" the sacred object had no t a wellknown past. At Shiloh, the ark had belongedto the tribes of Joseph. If its fortunes hadbrought it into Judah, it would seem to havebeen rather neglected there, all the more thatthe places where it sojourned remained more orless, as it would seem, in the power of thePhilistines until the reign of David. He wasable to recover it as a symbol of the unitywhich was effected between the northerntribes and Judah . His priest, Abiathar, adescendant of Eli, had charge of the ark ofShiloh.

And David went with all his household toBaal of Judah (the place was named Kirj athJearim,

“ Town of the Woods, or Kirj ath-Baal

“ Town of Baal," and it may be asked if the

latter name has not some connexion with the


sojourn of the ark) to bring thence the arkof God, who is called Yahweh-Sabaoth. Andthey set the ark of God upon a new cart, andbrought it out of the house of Abinadab thatwas in the hill, and Uzzah and Ahio the sonsof Abinadab drave the new cart. And Davidand all the house of Israel danced before Yahweh with all their might, and sang with lyres ,and harps, and tambourines , and castanets, andcymbals. At a certain place the cartthreatened to over-turn ; and Ahio who waswalking in front reached out his hand to savethe ark, and he fell down, smitten. David, infear, renounced for the present bringing theark into the city ; and left it with a foreigner,Obededom of Gath. After only three months,since no accident had happened to Obededom,

and Yahweh had blessed him, the king resolvedto house the ark with himself. These detailsare most significant : it may be said that Davidhad not been familiar with the worship of theark, and that he did not adopt it withoutsome hesitation.

Thenceforward the alliance between Yahwehand the house of David was sealed, and it wasas profitable to the deity as to the dynasty.

David won the prestige which secured his posterity on the throne of Judah till the overthrowof Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans . Yahweh gained


from it the assurance of his permanent triumphover the Gods of Canaan, for the monarchy ofIsrael meant the reign of Yahweh over a submissive and united country. Nevertheless

,if

the king were vicar of Yahweh,the religion had

flourished for so long before the establishmentof the monarchy that the sovereign did notbecome in Israel, as he might have otherwise,the incarnation of the national God

,and the

supreme authority in matters of religion.

Jahvism made use of him gave him authority ;and it was no small advantage for him to beYahweh’s anointed ; he was a consecrated person.

But he was not the high priest of his God, andthe Torah of Yahweh was not at his diSposal.Never did a King of Israel or of Judah receive,like Hammurabi, a revealed code to promulgate. The law of Yahweh had other interpre ters. The priesthood and prophetism, twoinstitutions which did not issue from Israel’sroyalty

,and which survived it, were the channels

of religious tradition. We shall have now todiscuss them both .

The origins of the Levitical priesthood arenot wanting in obscurity. There did exist atribe of Levi allied closely to Simeon, and it lostas he did

, and even more, its territorial importance. The blessing of Jacob ’“attributes the

Gen. xlix. 5 - 7 .



ministry wherever it could be found, evenamong other tribes . It would be because theywere a Mosaic tribe, and specially Jahvist , ifwe may so express it, that they enjoyed thispreference and credit. They possessed thetraditions of the worship that was proper forYahweh. One may, then, see in them thedescendants of the ancient priests of Levi

,who

had ministered, after Moses, in the shrine atKadesh : driven thence by Amelek, and dispersed through Israel after the destruction oftheir tribe, the priests of Levi would havebecome types of the genuine priesthood. Certainly, however, they did not minister in all thesanctuaries, and all the priests of Israel in thetime of the kings were not real Levites .Zadok the priest of Solomon was not. Butthe name soon went with the function ; and thepriests who were not Levites by origin werenone the less attached to the sacred tribe.The blessing of Jacob ignores this development.The blessing of Moses endorses it. The personality of Aaron is like a doubling of Mosesbut in the end he becomes ancestor of the houseof Zadok, which held possession of the priesthood in Jerusalem, and all other sacerdotalfamilies were simply grafted on to Levi .The blessing of Moses defines thus thepriestly functions

The Old Jahvi sm 1 2 7

May thy urim and thy thummim be w ith the kindredof thy servant .

Whom thou has proved at Massah ,

With whom thou hast striven at the waters of

MeribahFor they have kept thy word

And have observed thy law .

They have taught thy judgments to Jacob,And thy commandments to Israe lThey offer the incense to thy nostrils,And the sacrifice upon thy altar.

"

The servant is Moses ; his kindred are theLevites ; the origin of the priesthood is attachedto the sanctuary of Kadesh by the referenceto Massah and Meribah . The text refers to someetymological legends which have not beenpreserved in the Biblical tradition : in ourrecords it is not Moses, but Yahweh , who istried, and with whom there is a disagreement.Sacrifice is put in the last place because itwas not yet the chief duty of the priests. Forthey were not very numerous in old times andsacrifice was ofi ered by families or clans ,without the indispensable ministration of apriest. There was no priest where there wasnot a “ house of God, " a shrine with an oracle .

It was the oracle of Yahweh which was thebusiness of the priest, the reason for his ex istence and the cause of his reputation. Theanswers of the oracle are the judgments and


the Tora of Yahweh. It was the oracle whichbuilt up the customary law of Israel and theMosaic tradition

. It was consulted, too, forprivate as well as public matters

.Divination

was concerned with affairs of another kind.

It was the oracle which was held to havedenounced the violation of the cherem atJericho ; to have indicated Saul for themonarchy ; to have revealed Jonathan’s ihvoluntary disobedience to a prohibition by Saul ;to have enlightened David beforehand aboutthe resul t of his plans. The priests must alsohave been medical exorcists ; if the examinationof lepers was deputed to them by the Mosaiclaw, it was doubtless because they had at alltimes been concerned with illnesses. Theirjurisdiction extended also to every case oflitigation, not only in matters of ceremonialand religious observance, but also in matters oflaw, custom, and behaviour. In matters of law,

the monarchy must have curtailed their dutie s ;for it was the function of the king, too, tojudge, and his rulings were not subjected tothe revision of the priests. Religious and moraleducation was entirely in their hands, for theprophets often rebuked them for neglect of

duty in this matter. The one who is knownby the name of Malachi exhibits the priests asinculcators of a good life, as depositaries of



legend, and they were enthusiasts , or it migbe said individuals divinely possessed, whomade a profession of that state , and werefrankly nothing else. In those days

,the type

of Israelite prophet, which was realised inAmos and his successors , had not yet beenevolved. The prophets of the eighth centuryhad still something of the soothsayer, butnothing of the priest. Samuel was a little ofboth . The prophets of his t ime, it would seem,

were not descended from one or the other,although they were servants of Yahweh.

During the time which extends from Samuelto Elisha, seers and prophets were approachingone another, until they coincided in the personof Elijah’s disciple. But what Renan describesas the corybantism of the prophets was verymuch weakened. The prophets became seersbecause they had ceased to be outside thedomain of reason, and they received the communications of Yahweh by visions ; and theantique seers acquired up to a certain pointcharacteristics of prophets which were moreextravagant and odd than those attributed toSamuel in the old narratives.The seer must have been prior to Jahvism.

He was concerned with many things whichhad no direct connexion with Yahweh andhis governance of Israel. He might be con


sulted about strayed cattle, just as much asabout public affairs. Balaam was a seer, andhe does not come to us out of an Israelitishtradition : Israel knew of seers among theneighbouring peoples . The seer is rather thediviner who speaks in the name of a divinity ,

according to certain signs or internal visions ,than a man possessed, if by that term beunderstood an ecstatic or a corybant. Thus theantique prophets of Israel, like Deborah andSamuel, were seers : they were successors ofMoses, and gave oracles in the name ofYahweh . They could, when required, uttereffi cacious blessings or cursings , as Balaam did ;for they were also, to some extent, sorcerers .Wh en Deborah wished to send Barak againstSisera, in the name of Yahweh , he refused tomarch unless the wise woman came w ith him "

“ And she said , I w ill surely go with theenotwithstanding the journey that thou takestshall not be for thine honour ; for Yahweh shalldeliver Sisera into the hands of a woman .

“

It is believed commonly that the nabi onlyappeared after the time of the conquest, and

under Canaanitish influences ; and it may benoticed that Baal had his inspired followers ,according to the legend of Elijah . But thoughthe evidence is unassailable , it does not follow

Judges iv. 8- 9.


that Israel had not nabis long before the timesof Samuel, and that Jahvism did not producethem spontaneously. Amos

,who repudiates

being a nabi or the son, that is the disciple, ofa nabi , attributes the institution of prophets toYahweh, without hesitation , and of naziritestoo ) “ The nabi wore a dress of skins

,and

this may be a relic of the desert : he belongedwholly to Yahweh , like the nazirite, and thetwo may both have been originated by Jahvism.

The ancient nazirites would seem to havebeen men possessed by Yahweh for the holyWars. They let their hair grow long, anddrank no strong drink. These were perpetualnazirites, by the vow of their parents. Later,the condition of a nazirite became a form ofasceticism

,undertaken for a time, as a pious

work.By a freak of the legends, the ideal

nazirite,the champion of Israel and of its

God,became associated with the more or less

fabulous history of Samson.

The nabis were fanatics of another sort, butnone the less fanatics of Yahweh. Theyswarmed at the time of the war against thePhi listines ; they reappeared again, simultaneously with the Rechabites , at the period ofthe Syrian war and the all iance with Tyre,under Ahab.

Amos ii . 11— 12.



Israel, had a minstrel brought before he gavehis answer. “ And it came to pass when theminstrel played, that the hand of Yahweh cameupon him. And he said, Thus saith Yahweh.

"

In the days of Samuel and Elisha, the nabisformed a sort of community, under themanagement of a head. Marriage was notforbidden to them. They gave themselves upto symptoms which so nearly resembled madness that the Hebrew word which describesthem is the same as that used for insanity.

They went about in troupes, accompanied bymusicians. Their folly was catching. It isnarrated that Saul, after his first meetingwith Samuel, falling in upon his way with atroup of nabis, was drawn to them by thedivine spirit, and joined in their clamour.Whence the popular saying .

“ Is Saul alsoamong the pr0phe ts ?

Jr It is obvious that

such people were feared as channels of thespirit

,and a little despised on account of their

extravagance. The officers of Jehu did not

hesitate to describe as a madman the discipleof Elisha who promised the sovereignty ofIsrael to their captain ; but when they knewwhat he was urging , they hastened to proclaimas king him who was pointed out by Yahweh :

2 Kings iii. 15— 16 . f 1 Sam. x. 10— 12.

I2 Kings ix. 4 — 13 .

The Old Jahvi sm 1 35

At times of crisis,under an able head , the

association might play a leading part inpolitics, while seeming only to defend thenational religion . The house of Ahab learntthis to its cost.The separation between Israel and Judah ,after the death of Solomon, was due topolitical causes. The northern tribes borew ith impatience the supremacy of Judah , andabove all the fiscal system established byDavid’s successor. It is possible that theprophets encouraged the secession, less becauseof the foreign worships authorized by Solomonin the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, than byhis general attitude, which was that of a prophane monarch influenced by the civilizationof the neighbouring peoples. In any case ,Jeroboam, the leader of the rebellion, wasrather supported than disowne d by the prophets.

The worship organized in the new kingdomwas independent of the temple which had justbeen built in Jerusalem , and was not difl erentfrom that practised in the country beforeDavid, as well as during his reign and inSolomon’s . The worship of Yahweh on thehigh places of Gilgal, Shechem, Bethel, andDan was traditional, and had been held aslawful as that which was practised at the


sanctuary of the ark. Until the times ofAmos and Hosea, the prophets did not inveighagainst that worship . Even the representationof Yahweh under the form of a bull does notseem to have caused the opposition and scandalwhich it produced later. Doubtless it wentbeyond the traditions of ancient Jahvism , andthat is why it was condemned by the reforming movement of the eighth century. But itmay be doubted whether it was inauguratedby Jeroboam. The intention attributed to him,

by the Deuteronomist compiler of the Bookof Kings , of hindering his people from goingto Jerusalem for the feasts, is a sheeranachronism ; the northern sanctuaries havingbeen frequented from times far more ancientthan Solomon’s temple, which was only areligious centre for the House of David, and

for the town where it was built. And it wasnot necessary, either, to invent images ofYahweh to replace the ark. Symbols of thedivine presence ex isted everywhere. That ofthe bu ll might have been adopted as well asthe stone of Bethel, and it was not moreblamable in itself than the brazen serpent.The reproach of having appointed to the divineservice men who were not Levites is no betterfounded, since the priesthood was not yet anhereditary privilege of the real or imaginary



to be honoured as such by Ahab and his twosons who reigned after him. That the opposition of Elijah was not founded upon anyprinciple of rigorous monotheism is proved bythe fact that, according to his legend, he livedwithout scruple at Sarepta, in pagan territory,with a widow who certainly practised theworship of her country. But all the policy ofAhab , which was wise to those who thoughtonly of the prosperity of the kingdom , wasequally condemned by the zealots of Jahvism,

because their God refused to share any of hishonour with o thers. And Yahweh, who wasthe only lawful master of Israel, was he notable also to protect it ?Nevertheless, Ahab was popular, and all

the prophets were not against him. It was onlyunder Joram, his son, and his

'second successor,that an army plot, encouraged or even provoked by Elisha, set Jehu on the throne.Jehu was the candidate of the prophets ; andthe motto of the revolution was a rupturewith fi re , and the expulsion of its Baal. TheJahvist reaction was stained by the mostodious murder, and was practically limited to anexpulsion of the foreign worship. Jehu washelped in his bloody task by Jonadab, the chiefof the Rechabites. If there were then noreformation of the national worship, it was

The Old Jahvism 1 39

because the most zealous Jahvists did not seeany need for it . The Ephraimite kingdomwas none the less enfeebled, and it was onlyunder the grandson and the great-grandson ofJehu that it rallied for a time

,when the power

of Damascus was broken by the Assyrian conquerors. The old Elisha, as long as he lived,supported the house of Jehu. It is said thaton his death-bed he foretold the victories ofIsrael over the Syrians . King Joash, grandson of Jehu

,had come to see him ; and the

nabi , in this instance one might still say themagician, ordered him to strike some arrowson the ground : Joash obeyed, and smote thrice ;“ And the man of God was wroth with him ,

and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five orsix times ; then hadst thou smitten Syria tillthou hadst consumed it : whereas now thoushalt smite Syria but thrice. "

From these times onward, it is clear thatprophecy and royalty will be unable to agree,if royalty considers its interests, seeks necessaryalliances abroad, and if it does not reckon withthe sentiment of the men of God. The force ofthe religious tradition which , by the prophets,overthrew the dynasty of Ahab in Israel,re -established by the priests the family ofDavid in Jerusalem, after the usurpation of

2 Kings xiii . 19.


Athaliah . Everywhere the religious questionintruded, became more and more acute, andrendered impossible the normal working of asecular monarchy. Jahvism prepared the ruinof the Hebrew states . It may be pointed out,in compensation, that these petty kingdomsmust inevitably have perished, like their neighbours ; and the prophets secured the perpetuation of Israel, through its religion.


CHAPTER IV

PROPHECY

NE of the most singular characteristics ofJahvism is assuredly the evolution

which out of the seer, diviner, and sorcerer,out of the raving enthusiast, produced theprophet of the last period of the monarchy ;the judge of kings, the defender of the poor,the preacher of righteousness , always pre

occupied with a future by the traditions ofhis office, but subordinating his predictions tohis moral teaching. Prophecy became theinterpreter of a religion that condemned all

methods of divination, using the term accurately. Nevertheless , some traces of its originremained until the last vestiges of a Jewishnationality had vanished. The religious idealwas being continuously purified ; but the schemeand notion of a future, whose course it wasthought possible to fix , survived in a Judaismpetrified under the Law, and even under the

143


Gospel though it had shaken off the legalfetters . An imperious preoccupation with thefuture fell away from Judaism and Christianityonly when they had become religious organizations without any national setting, and hadthus transfused the greater part of theirexpectations into an immortality w hich isimagined to provide an equitable and immediate compensation for the present life, byatoning for its miseries and injustice. Thezenith of prophecy in Israel was attained atthe epoch of the Assyrian invasions, and itdid not last after the destruction of theJudaic monarchy by Nebuchadnezzar. Thiswas the period of the prophets who wrote ,and it was also the beginning of the Law.

1

The intrusion of Assyria into Palestinianaffairs drove the prophets to look far beyondthe frontiers of Israel and to frame larger anddeeper conceptions of the world and of mankind

,and consequently of God. Their political

horizon,was enlarged indefinitely : their con

ception of the providential government, of itslaws and plans

,widened in proportion ; but

Yahweh still held the primacy which had beenhis formerly. Whence came this victoriouspeople ? Who gave it its high fortune ? Why



always merely the God of Israel : he is reallyoccupied with his own people alone, and isonly concerned with other nations so far as touse them as instruments for those designs .And when, after the terrible judgment whichthey predicted for that guilty people, theyforesaw a restoration, it is always Israel that isin question, and not mankind. No doubtYahweh had separated himself so far from theother Gods that it was no longer possible toconsider him in the same rank with them, andhe had left them scarcely any influence in theadministration of the universe . But these Godswere not yet reduced to the rank of inferiorspirits : they were not yet condemned to nonexistence, though they were Gods for whomthere was not any farther use.While the prophets of the eighth century,Amos

,Hosea, Micah, required that men should

obey the Law of Yahweh, they do not refer toany written law . It seems that only a part,and not the least important, though the leastconsiderable in bulk, of the statutes which arenow in the Pentateuch was written in theirtimes. If one or other of those first collectionsare found more or less in agreement with whatthe prophets held to be the religious , moral, andsocial duties of every Israelite, they did not constitute the whole Law of Yahweh ; for that also

Prophecy 1

included the teaching given by the prophetsthemselves in the name of the God of Israel.It may be admitted freely that the Jahvistdecalogue, which is contained in the thirtyfourth chapter of Exodus, and that part of thesame book which is known as The Book of the

Covenant, represented for the eighth and ninthcenturies the written commandments of thedivine Law.

The decalogue may have been constructedthus

Thou shalt not worship any foreignGod.

Thou shalt not cast any molt en Gods.

Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread.

"Thou shalt give]me all the first -born.

Thou shalt solemnize the feast ofweeks,And the feast of the vintage at the year’s end.

Thou shalt not mix with leavened bread the blood of

my victim.

Noth ing of the Paschal vict im should remain t ill themorning

Thou shalt bring the first-fruits of thy harvest intothe house of Yahweh thy God.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk .

Exod. xxxiv. 14— 26. The text has been liberally commentated , and the reconstruct ion of the ten pre cepts ishypothet ical. The commandment about the Sabbath is

omitted here , v. 21 , because it is not in its place between

instruct ions about the three great feasts, and it is rather a

commentary on the Sabbath than a commandment . The

command about the first -born is retained, because it is not


This little Torah is exclusively ritualisticwe may believe it is of priestly origin, and nu

doubtedly it is earlier than the first writingprophets, who attached no importance to ritual.But it displays the exclusive worship of Yahweh,by ordaining the feasts which we may describe asnational : the Passover and the Unl eavenedBread, the feasts of the harvest and the vintage.The prohibition of molten images may bedirected already against the bulls of Dan andBethel. If the document did not originate inJerusalem, the house of Yahweh would meanevery sanctuary whither first -fruits could bebrought to the priests.The Book of the Covenant * lays down theprinciples of domestic and social morality, andat the same time the essential regulations ofworship . Unity in the place of worship isexpressly denied. An altar of earth shaltthou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereonthy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings,thy sheep, and thine oxen in any place whereI cause my name to be remembered I will

unconne cted with the Paschal vict im but the text seemsto be vitiated, and the words thou shalt give have beenaddedfor the sake ofthe paralle lism,according toExod. xxii.28. The original meaning of this commandment wi ll beshown later.

Exod. xx . 22 ; xxiii. 23 .



villages, though with a decided preference forcertain shrines which were specially venerated.

It is no less true that the prophets afte r themiddle of the eighth century condemned theworship that was practised in their time ; andwhich, for the most part, resembled that whichwas sanctioned by the documents just quoted.

Nevertheless, they are not conscious of innovating, though they rebuke a religious,political, and social state to which the preceding centuries had conformed. Their claimof going back to the beginning is usual amongreligious reformers. It involves, none the less,an impossibility. The past can never berevived, except under new forms ; and theprophets in efie ct renewed the meaning of theold creed : Yahweh is the God of Israel, andIsrael is the people of Yahweh . For therequirements of God had risen into the moralorder, and were no longer chiefly ritual ; andthe morality in question was not identicalwith custom . It was acquiring the absolutecharacter of ideal justice, though it was of

necessity still affected by date and environment. Yahweh was considered as united toIsrael by his free choice, which he could withdraw

,and not by a kind of natural and irre

vocable fatality. He explained contemporaryevents by means of his prophets, according to

Prophecy I5 I

the principles of wisdom and justice ; for theyare no longer manifestations of a more or lessarbitrary decree.The notion of the ruin of Israel by thejudgment of its God could never have beenformed by the old Jahvists : nor was itaccepted, any more, by the mass of peoplewho were upbraided by the prophets for theirinfidelity. Nevertheless the prophets did notallow that an opinion other than their ownmight be held on all these questions. Thefaith which possessed them was a hindranceto grasping the reality of the past, or thetrue relation of the present to that past whichthey interpreted capriciously through theirown conceptions of it. They did not speak ofIsrael’s life in the desert by any reliable tradition ; but they fashioned an ideal for themselves

,which they contrasted with the abuses

of the present.They must not, however, be imagined asentirely aloof from the ordinary beliefs oftheir time. Hosea, for instance, describing thefuture condition of Israel in exile, speaks thusof the offering of the first-fruits , and of itsnecessity

They shall not pour out wine to the Lord.

Ne ither shall they be pleasing unto him


The ir sacrifices shall be unto them as the bread of

mourners

A ll that eat thereof shall be pollutedFor the ir bread shall be for the ir own appe titeIt shall not come into the house ofYahweh .

"

As it was impossible to offer the first -fruitsof the harvest, all the produce of the earth iscontaminated, like the bread used at funeralbanquets : they themselves are not holy, butimpure, like everything belonging to the spirits.These uncompromising believers are quiet

Spirits compared with the frenzied nabis informer times. They bore, however, the samename and dress . They were always visionaries,who mistook for revelations of Yahweh theconceptions which swarmed in their own

heads . Their symbolical actions are anotherproof of their excitability. Isaiah walkedwithout clothes and shoes in the streets ofJerusalem, like a prisoner of war, to show thefate of those who would oppose the King of

Assyria. Jeremiah carried a yoke on hisshoulders

,to show the necessity of submitting

to the King of Babylon : another prophet toreoff his yoke and smashed it, to proclaim thedeliverance. Ezekiel went still farther ; buthe belonged to the decadence of prophecy, andmany of his figurative acts were probably

Hosea ix. 4 .


I 54. The Religion of Israel

tions, so that their accuracy might be provedby the event.Nothing was impossible to faith : thataccuracy, almost invariably stultified by facts ,did not fail to be asserted by Jewish andChristian tradition . The texts have been frequently corrected or completed afterwards ,and the interpretation was always indulgent.And even at present, when it is asserted thatthe utterances of the prophets were a preaching, and when this characteristic is exagger

ated, it is urged freely that their threats andpromises were conditional, and that their aecomplishment depended on the repentance or theobduracy of Israel. That condition may befound in some cases ; but more often theprophets thought they were making certainand absolute predictions. Their credit restedon their supposed knowledge of the future. Itwas by reason of this imagined knowledgethat they were consulted, and in their confidence of that knowledge they answered. Andordinarily, as was natural, the event did notconfirm either their menacing or their favourable provisions, in the ways they had indicated.As far as regards particular predictions aboutindividuals, the prophets were only experienceddiviners, who were dominated by considerationsof morality. It can hardly be said that they

Prophecy I 5 5

foresaw the future of their religion ; for thehistories of Judaism and of Christianity havedifi ered widely from their preconceptions .What is true is that their glowing hope hasin a certain measure created the object of it,by ensuring the preservation of their beliefs .

§ 2

Sure ly the Lord Yahweh will do nothing ,

But he reveale th his se cret with his servantsprophets

The lion hath roared, who w ill not fear ?The Lord Yahweh hath spoken, who can

prophesy

So says Amos , of Tekoa in Judah, whom thedivine inspiration had taken from his flocks,to lead him to Bethel, and to make himprophesy there against Ephraim, in the timeof Jeroboam II. Before him, the day ofYahweh meant the triumph of Israel overits enemies. For him “ the day of Yahweh "

is the day when the God of Israel chastises hispeople. A nation whom he does not name,but which can only be Assyria, will come andremove Israel out of its country. Worship iscorrupt, the great men are greedy and oppressthe small : Israel is of no more account with

Amos iii. 7— 8.


Yahweh than the Philistines and the Aramaeansit will be exterminated from the earth .

Amos is all pessimism. His successors are noless ; but they do not rest, and could not rest,in the prospect of a ruin which would leaveYahweh without any worshipper on earth. Areign of justice will come after the great catastrophe . The notion of chas tisement is not lessconspicuous among the prophets before thecaptivity. Their passion in foretelling thedestruction of their country seems at firstinexplicable . Is it an understanding of thesituation, and of the political future of theEast ? Certainly they guaged the inevitablefate, which awaited the petty states of Palestine,better than the sovereigns and their ministers .Though it was evidently not their clear visionwhich made them pessimists, but their pessimismwhich made them see clearly. They thinkeverything goes from bad to worse in religionand society : menace from abroad comes abund

antly to satisfy their appetite for chastisement.Neither should the grim character, whichJahvism drew from its origins , be forgotten,nor the ferocious temper of its God. Themoment his people were thought not to begiving him satisfaction, the rage of Yahwehknew no half measures. Possibly he had becomeeven more terrible since he had learnt to be



divine judgments : the King of Assyria . Duringhis time, in fact, Menahem was tributaryto Tiglath Pile ser. Hosea condemned theefforts made to propitiate that earthly ruler,though the King of Samaria could not helphimself. But help should not be sought fromany human power. Yahweh alone is thesufficing aid .

This repudiation of foreign alliances was notdue only to trust in the God of Israel, but to thefact that alliances with the foreigner meantalso a covenant with his Gods, and an offi cialrecognition of them. The good feeling and therelations that followed would certainly leadon to acts which would be blamable by faith .

But it is evident that the policy of the prophetswas not politic, and that it must end in the

ruin of the state.Notwithstanding these gloomy prognostications

,Hosea was not hopeless The recon

ciliation which was made in his own household

prefigured that which would occur betweenYahweh and his people, after the impendingpunishment . This was the earliest outline ofthe kingdom of God ; but the conceptionremained vague ; and the future happinesswas limited to Israel , but an Israel purified.

Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem about theyear 740, and he was prophesying still in 701.

Prophecy 1 5 9

He had seen the destruction of the kingdom ofIsrael by Sargon, in 722 , and twenty-one yearslater the devastation of Judah by the armies ofSennacherib . In the earlier time

,condemning

the state of religion , almost as Amos and Hoseahad, he foretold the ruin of Israel and Judah bythe Assyrians . He saw corruption and injusticeeverywhere. Yahweh will punish , but notwithout relenting and making exceptions . Ason of the prophet was named Shear-Jashub,

the remnant shall return, to show that a bodyof righteous persons w ill survive the great trialand perpetuate the chosen race. Belonging toa country in which monarchy was powerful andreverenced, be conceived the Israel of the futuregoverned by a blameless king. He evenregarded Yahweh as a king who, from histhrone, governed all the dwellers upon earth ;and it has been said, with reason, that theuniversal monarchy of Assyria helped him toimagine the universal monarchy of God.

*

Like Hosea, he wished to supersede all politicsby trust in Yahweh . In 7 the very existenceof Judah was threatened by a coalition betweenRezin King of Damascus , and Pekah King ofIsrael . By the rules of common sense, thekingdom could only be safe under the protectionof Assyria, and by giving tribute to Tiglath

Smend, 220.


Pileser. Isaiah wished that there should be nodealings with him. By order of Yahweh hepresented himself, with “ The-Remnant-ShallReturn, " before Ahaz, and assured him that hisenemies could not prevail against him. As aguarantee of the divine word, he offered theking a choice of miracles . Ahaz, whose mindwas made up, and who shrunk from seeing amiracle, evaded skilfully by saying he would nottempt Yahweh . This roused the anger of theprophet, who predicted the near ruin ofDamascus and of Israel, and the laying wasteof Judah . The prudent policy of Ahaz havingborne its fruits, and the threatened dangerproving imaginary so far as Judah was concerned

,Isaiah recommended submission to the

King of Assyria, and resisted the plan of anEgyptian alliance

,which was formed later with

a view to regaining independence . Yahwehhimself would destroy Assyria after his peoplehad been sufficiently punished. Hezekiah alliedhimself to Egypt, and revolted definitely againstSennacherib : and Isaiah blamed him forwishing to be saved by human means ; he gavewarning of a certain disaster, but asserted thatJerusalem and the temple would not perish.

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help ;And stay on horses, and trust in chariots,Because they are many ;


1 6 2 The Religion of I srael

Zion shall be come a ploughed fie ld,

Jerusalem shall be a heap of ruins,And the temple bill a h igh wood.

"

But, if Micah had been right, the Jahvism ofJudah would not have left more trace in historythan that of Israel. It remains that Hezekiahcarried out a reformation of worship accordingto the wishes , apparently, of the prophets.We cannot say with confidence what was thepurpose of this reform ; as the records whichwe have of it are not contemporary. Perhapsthe king wished to do in reality, though withless rigour in detail , what was done afterwardsby Josiah ; to destroy idolatry, and to centralise the Judaean worship in Jerusalem.

But it is well to notice that if the reformationhappened immediately after the deliverance ofthe city, in 701 , Hezekiah then possessed nomore than his capital ; and we do not knowwhen or how the towns captured by theAssyrians were restored. The most certainand striking incident of this purification ofworship was the destruction of the brazenserpent, which had never ceased to be worshipped in the temple. War, then, was declaredagainst images of the deity.

The movement had no permanence ; perhaps

Micah iii . 12 .

Prophecy 1 6 3

because a sufficiently high sanction was notattached to the new state of things. Thereformation does not seem to have been autho

rized by any traditional record of undisputedweight, nor to have been embodied after theevent in a Law which the prophets could backup as an expression of the divine will. It

was the personal action of Hezekiah and hisspiritual advisers ; it fell with the king whohad supported it, and the polytheistic leaningswhich had been shown slightly under Ahaz ,perhaps in consequence of the relations withAssyria, reappeared and triumphed politicallyunder Manasseh .

§ 3

As the domination of Assyria continued toextend, the almighty power of Yahweh wasnot proved so clearly. For the first time,probably, polytheism was introduced into thetemple of Zion. Manasseh admitted there theworship of the stars, after the manner ofAssyria, and especially the chariot of Shamash,the Sun-God ; and he ventured to place the“ Queen of Heaven by the side of Yahweh.

The people joined willingly in these novelties ;on the roofs of the capital , they set up altarsto the Gods of the sky. This invasion ofAssyrian worship was not caused only by the


private taste s of the king ; but was due as wellto the political situation of the kingdom

, whichwas more strictly subjected to the kingsEsarhaddon and Assurbannipal, who were forlong masters of Egypt, than it had been toTiglath-Pileser, Sargon , and Sennacherib .

Assyria overran Jerusalem with its armies,its civilization, and its Gods : Manasseh andhis people served the new maste rs, both earthlyand heavenly. We do not know how theworship of these strange Gods was combinedwith that of Yahweh , who remained thenational God. Perhaps a kind of local hierarchywas arranged, in which Yahweh kept the firstplace, and this may not have been withoutinfluence upon the conceptions of the followingage ; perhaps the foreign Gods may have beenmade into celestial spirits, to whom Yahwehdelegated the government of the peoples.The tradi tions of Canaan were not neglecte d.

The sacrifice of the first-born was a customregularly practised. If we may believe theprophets

,the sacrifices were made toMoloch. But

the same prophets make us understand that thosewho followed this practice believed they werehonouring Yahweh . Certain critics are notwilling to admit the antiquity of this customin Israel ; and some even challenge what theBook of Kings relates of Ahaz, who sacrificed



such The precision of his language raises thesuspi ci on that a text ex isted in the Law,

containing the traditional formu la on thismatter. And such a text did exist. We readin The Book of the Covenant :

“ Thou shalt notdelay to offer the first -fruits of thy threshingfloor and wine press . Thou shalt give me thefirst-born of thy sons ; and thou shalt do thesame with thy cow and thy sheep . He shallbe seven days with his mother ; and on theeighth day thou shalt give him to me. " Thetext is clear, and the assimilation to the firstborn of the flock is suffi ciently eloquent.Doubtless, the compilers of the Pentateuchinterpreted this order by others, where there isa question of ransom ; but the text in itselfdoes not provide for this substitution, and one

may add excludes it. The formula of the oldestdecalogue

,quoted previously : Every first-born

belongs to me, i had originally the same interpre tation ; and the adapter of the passageunderstands it indifferently of men and cattle,though he is careful to note the obligation ofransom for men .

It should be noted, too, that the combinationof ransom or of a substituted offering could onlyoriginate in minds to which the notion of immolat ing was familiar and natural . Nothing

Exod. xxii . 29— 30. 1‘Exod. xxxiv 19

Prophecy 1 6 7

is gained by saying that the regulation whichis admitted for the produce of cattle was onlyapplied systematically to man as a reminderof duty. The very assimilation reveals amentality still very near to that of peoplewho found it equally needful and believed itequally expedient to sacrifice to Yahweh theirfirst child as to ofi er him the first-born oftheir cow or their goat .

We have already considered the historicalbearing of the legends about Jephtha

’

s daughterand the sacrifice of Isaac The failure toprotest among the prophets of the eighthcentury cannot be alleged as disproving thecustom of sacrificing children in their time ;for they may have been less shocked by itthan we are willing to admit. Hosea seems

to allude to it .

* Micah iL speaks of the sacrifice

of a first -born as of a thing just as normalas the sacrifice of a calf or a lamb : he putsit aside on precisely the same grounds , by sayingthat it is necessary to practice righteousness .Isaiah himself, who must , it is said, have protested

, if Ahaz had really sacrificed his son ;

(and may he not have done it without the

Hosea xiii . 2 , a dubious text .

Micah vi . 7 . The passage is not less striking even ifit be by another prophet , a contemporary of Manasseh , as

some allow .


fact of his protest coming down to us ?) Isaiahspeaks of tophet as a man who is not o therwise scandalized by it : he wishes to see allthe Assyrians burnt in it as a splendid holocaust to the Holy One of Israel

A tophet is prepared of old

Yea for the king it is made ready.He hath made it deep and large ,Straw and wood in masses

The breath of Yahweh, like a sulphurousShall kindle

From this passage it may be inferred thatthe tophet existed in the time of Hezekiah,and doubtless long before. Isaiah does notshrink from the pyre of Moloch being kindledby Yahweh himself ; and this approximationwould be impossible, even metaphorically orjestingly, if Yahweh were not Moloch. ButIsaiah knows Yahweh-Melek.

"

Though the state of the documents does notallow us to affirm, it does at least enable usto conjecture, that the tophet of the valley of

Hinnom, the future gehenna, was a holy placein Jerusalem before the conquest of the cityby David ; and that human sacrifices wereoffered there, especially the sacrifices of childrenand first-born, to the God of the city, to its

Isa. xxx. 33 .



order the whole religious life of persons,

localities , and of the nation itself. Thus mightbe explained the origin of Deuteronomy

,and

the great movement which caused its invention,

in the days of Josiah .

This book was found in the temple,as we

know, by the priest Hilkiah , in 621 ; was presented to the king as the Law of Yahweh

,

which Moses had promulgated before his death,

in the plains of Moab ; was accepted by Josiahas a divine revelation, and used by him to carryout a more extensive and minute reform thanany which had been ventured on before. Everything was foreseen the execution was prompt ;and it was indeed a new system which wasinaugurated in place of the old. The story inKings leaves not the smallest doubt as to this.atIt is certain that the matter of this Law wasfor the most part new to Josiah and his contemporaries. If the pious king had knownthe wishes of Yahweh earlier, he would havecarried them out ; he did not think he wasofi ending Yahweh by not forbidding in thehigh places a worship that had been alwayspractised, except perhaps during a few yearsin the reign of Hezekiah ; by tolerating, more

2 Kings xxii. 2— 13 .

Prophecy 1 7 1

or less, the worship of strange gods , as almostall the kings had done since Solomon . Ifthis existence of a Law of Moses were not

unknown , if it were admitted that the priestswere its holders and interpreters, then the wholebearing of that which Hi lkiah said he hadfound had been ignored. Besides, though theBook of Kings speaks of a Law of Yahweh ,it does not say that Law had been written byMoses ; still less does it imply that the bookinvented by Hilkiah was the original manuscriptof a Mosaic work, stored away for centuriesand at last forgotten near the ark .

It has been guessed that Deuteronomy waswritten under Manasseh , forgotten in thetemple, and found accidentally? a few yearslater. This hypothesis is unlikely, because theroll could not have remained unnoticed in theshrine of Yahweh ; and the text of K ingsdoes not lead us to suppose that it was foundin any out-building of the sacred edifice . Ifone wishes in this affair to distinguish betweendeceivers and deceived, it is a very small matterwhether Hilkiah and Shaphan, the official ofJosiah who brought the book to him, werethe first dupes instead of being the firsttricksters . Deuteronomy, either the first draft,or the fundamental document of the bookwhich has come to us under that name, must


have been written to be deposited in thetemple : its discovery cannot have been accidental. From a literary point of view, it waslike a new edition of the old texts, especiallyof the Book of the Covenant, worked out withan eye to existing needs . The author, speakingin the name of Moses, wrote what Moses wouldhave said, what he would not have failed toteach , in the present circumstances : he considered his work as an oracle of Yahweh

,and

undoubtedly he could not conceive of it otherwise. The readers for whom the book wasintended would have been unable

,too , to con

sider it good and true unless it had been presented to them in this way ; it seemed alsoperfectly simple and guileless to refer it backto Yahweh, its principal author. In the veryprobable case that the editor plotted withHilkiah to deposit the precious writing inthe shrine, that which seems to us, and whichwould be for us, a trick might be done withoutthe personages in question having the leastconsciousness of the fraud which they werecommitting against the people and the king.

The divine threats,which made so great an

impression upon the mind of Josiah, weresimilar to those which the prophets had beenaccustomed to make use of in the name ofYahweh.



to everything which it had pleased him toordain.

There were precedents for this in the texts,if not in fact. The Jahvist decalogue and theold Book of the Covenant were described asagreements of this kind ; we do not knowwhether they were ratified under the sameconditions . The Book of Kings mentions asworn agreement for extirpating the worshipof Baal , at the accession of Josiah ; but itwould be rash to assimilate that proposal toeither one or other of these instances. Themost pertinent passage is, perhaps, that inwhich we see Joshua assembling the childrenof Israel at Shechem, before his death ; and,after reminding them of Yahweh ’s favours, aswell as of his requirements, putting beforethem the choice between this exacting Godand the Gods which their fathers had worshipped beyond the river, or the Gods ofthe Amorites, the ancient Gods of the countryand the people declares that it wishes to serveYahweh

,and is eager to reject the other Gods.

Then Joshua made a covenant with the people,gave it laws and ordinances, and set up a pillarto be a witness of the agreement which hadbeen undertaken .

* Now that stone happenedJoshua xxiv. The narrative belongs to the Elohist ic

source of the Hexateuch, but the edit ing is not perhaps

much earlier thanDeuteronomy.

Prophecy 1 7 5

to be under the sacred tree of Moreh , whosedeity was most probably none other thanEl-Berith, “ the God of the Covenant, theancient deity of Shechem . It was, then, fromthe old sanctuary of Shechem, where Yahwehidentified himself with “ the God of theCovenant, that the notion of an alliance mayhave come, as well as some of the oldest textsin which the regulations imposed on Israel byYahweh are summarized.

at The solemn formsof agreement undertaken by Josiah and his

people create somehow a perpetual and sacredobligation, and the violation of it enables allthe national misfortunes to be explained as ajust vengeance of heaven.

This Law of Yahweh was not a ritual, nora volume of doctrine, but a complete manualof theocratic government . The will of theGod regulated everything autocratically : re

ligion, policy, morality, social and internationalrelations . The supreme unity of the God ofIsrael, if not his absolute monotheism, was

formulated in the clearest terms, and everypractical consequence was deduced from it.The centralization of public worship wasestablished in principle , and at once, by theprohibition to sacrifice outside the temple of

Several crit ics think the Book of the Covenant was

formerly united to Joshua xxiv. in the Elohist ic source .


Jerusalem, the place which Yahweh has chosento put his name there." Formerly everydomestic animal kill ed for ordinary use, or

for family rejoicings, was a kind of sacrifice.As a proof, we may recall a well -known episodein the wars of Saul against the Philistines : ’rthepeople had taken many oxen and sheep in theenemy’s camp , and, being famished after a longbattle, they kill ed the beasts and eat them onthe spot. Great was the emotion of Saul whenhe learned this profanation ; he had a largestone brought, which became an altar, and onit was poured out the blood of all the animals tobe eaten. According to Deuteronomy, as thekilling for sacrifice might only be done henceforth in Jerusalem, it is allowed that domesticanimals, oxen, sheep, goats, may be killed forordinary use, but without any sacrifice, speakingstrictly : care is taken, however, to point outthat the animal must always be bled, and thatthe blood must be poured out with certain precautions, so that even ih ordinary butcheringthere remained a notion of primitive sacrifice ,and of the portion due to Yahweh. It was asuppression of sacrifices by family and clan ; ifprivate sacrifices were still al lowed they couldonly take place in the national sanctuary, wherethey must be much less frequent, and where

Deut . xi i . 5 . i 1 Sam. xiv. 32-5 .



it afiected every interest in the national lifeit was, rather, a teaching for all religiousconsciences, from the sovereign downwards.One may, in short, estimate the progress madesince the days of Elijah by the contents of thenew decalogue, reproduced in Exodus, beforethe Book of the Covenant, and in Deuteronomyfi‘

The two versions proceed from a single source,probably a little earlier than the reformationof Josiah, and which aimed at improving theold Jahvist decalogue, or rather at supersedingit. The ten commandments must have beenthus formulated originally :

I am Yahweh thy God, who brought thee out of the

land of Egypt , the house of bondage .

Thou shalt have no other God but me .

Thou shalt not make idols for thyse lf.Thou shalt not utter vainly the name of Yahweh thy

God.

Remember the seventh day, to sanctify it .

Honour thy father and thy mother.

Thou shalt not kill .Thou shalt not commit adultery.Thou shalt not steal .Thou shalt not be a false witness against thy neighbour.

Thou shalt not covet anything of thy neighbour’

s.

The absolute prohibition of divine imagesshows a progress in the Jahvist reaction. The

Exod. xx. 1— 17 Deut . v. 6—21.

Prophecy 1 79

absence of any strictly ritual commands isanother proof. The substitution of moralobligations for ritual practices is most signifi

cant. The majority of these regulations hadbeen long accepted , at any rate as betweenmembers of the same clan and between Israelites .But the novelty consisted in generalizing theirobligations, and in presenting them as thegenuine service which Yahweh demanded. Itis the application of the prophets’ maximjustice rather than sacrifice .But, as a religion lives by ritual traditions andnot only by moral precepts , the establishedworship had to be reckoned with. It had beenmaintained by so regulating it as to take awayeverything which was stultified by the idealof the prophets. Deuteronomy was a law ofpriests drafted by prophetical inspiration. Thereformation could not have succeeded withoutthe help of the Jerusalem priests, and to themthe centralization of worship could not be displeasing. In the compromise between ritualand spiritual religion, the priest was bound togain more than the prophet ; and it may evenbe said that the book itself which canonizedthe essential matters in the prophetic teachingwas a preparation for the end of prophecy. Assoon as the will of Yahweh was fixed inwriting

,there was no more need to evoke it


perpetually by inspired men : the book wasalways there. And Deuteronomy

"which re

cognised the prophets as channels of Yahweh,

placed them under a rule which could notbut impede their action : the prophet

,whose

prediction did not come to pass , must die.We may believe, however, that no prophetwas executed for this crime. What killed theinstitution was that the Torah of Yahweh,which the prophets had almost taken awayfrom the priests, was submitted again to thelatter by this book ; until by the doctors ofthe book it was taken away finally from the

priests.According to the Book of Kings, Josiah notonly reformed the popular religion, abolishedthe tophet in the vale of Hinnom, and destroyedall places of worship outside Jerusalem, buthe went and profaned the holy place of Bethel,in the ancient territory of the northern kingdom. He even took measures to eradicate allidolatry from private worship. Thus be re

moved the teraphim, a species of domestic idol,of which the usage had hitherto been common,and uncensured as it would seem by the prophets. The teraphim were probably a relic ofspirit worship : they were the kindly genii

of a house ; but there is no proof that theywere ancestral spirits. Their images must have



certain external order had been established ,minds were not regenerated . The mass ofthe population,

’ which was idolatrous underManasseh and Amon , had not been taken witha sudden fervour of monotheism because a bookof the Law had been found in the temple ;because Josiah had chosen, conformably to thatbook and to the exhortations of the pr0phets,to honour Yahweh in such or such a manner,and to the exclusion of any other God. It isprobable that the people at first, like theking himself, had been frightened by the threatscontained in the book, and which had beenbrought home to them by current politics theymay have believed, too, that they had recoveredtheir ancestral religion, and that they wouldearn the favour of Yahweh by carrying it out.But these impressions were not lasting. Theidolatrous spirit was repressed for only a fewyears

,and it continued to indulge itself by

private superstitions. The true worship ofYahweh, the love of his glory and of justice,which Deuteronomy aimed at implanting,flourished only in a weak minority. Then therecame the catastrophe of Megiddo, which seemedto ruin for ever the experiment of Josiah.

The religious establishment which he had triedto found could only be solidified by time, bysustained effort, and by the help of favouring

Prophecy 1 83

circumstances. The sad end of the pious kingwho, strong in his faithfulness to his God,was driven audaciously to meet the Egyptianarmy, and who fell a victim to his confidence,through unwillingness to treat with foreigners ,seemed to be the condemnation of his work.

Jeremiah himself, who loved him, seldom recallshis memory ; because this model of princes hadbecome through his death an argument againstGod. There was no return, however, to theidolatrous excesses of Manasseh’s reign : theworship of the temple remained pure ; butevery one recovered his liberty, and foreignworships had a renewed freedom of action.

There was not, therefore, less confidence inYahweh , and the indestructibility of the templewas believed in. That is why they venturedtwice to oppose Nebuchadnezzar, though relyingtoo upon Egypt.Deuteronomy and Josiah had travailled onlyfor the future : the volume, in fact, remained,with a remembrance of the experience gainedby it ; and it never had to be found again ,because it was never suffered to be lost. Thefaithful servitors of Yahweh knew whence theycould draw upon the Law of their God : theyknew, too, that that Law had been actuallypractised ; and they were able to discern whatwas still wanting for the perfect regulation of


Israel ’s life as the people of God. The pointhad been gained that the religion of Israelwas founded upon a revelation unique inhistory ; that Israel was, by election of thetrue God, a people promoted above all others ;that even its past was unique by reason of thewonders which Yahweh had wrought for itsnecessities, and in its favour. By managingto place the Jews outside the ordinary waysfollowed by nations destined to survive

,

Deuteronomy founded Judaism ; because itprepared the organization of a religious community whose existence did not depend onthe life of a Judaean state.

5

If the religious history of Israel, in the yearswhich immediately preceded the taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, is not comprisedentirely in the life and activity of Jeremiah,at any rate the fortunes and the writings ofthat prophet give us the truest notion of it.Jeremiah , even before the death of Josiah, didnot believe in the conversion of the people. Hedid not cease to foretell the ruin of the nation,even at the risk of drawing upon himself thevengeance of the sovereigns and the hatred ofthe mob. He was frankly unpopular, as Isaiahnever was, and he said everything to make him



and it was in fact that band of exiles whichsaved the religion of the prophets. He didnot see the restoration of religion ; and theJews who took him into Egypt were by nomeans obedient to his words. Whatever hisactual end, he was the martyr of his destiny ;because he strove all his life for a cause thatperished, so to speak, in his hands ; and if henever ceased to believe in the triumph of God,he only experienced for himself the bitternessof defeat.His attitude to the reformation of Josiah isobscure in the history. He seems to have hadlittle or no part in it, to have expected nothingfrom it, to have been dissatisfied by it. Interpre ters are not agreed about the meaning whichshould be given to a passage in his prophecies,when he says

Even the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointedt imes,

And the turtle , and the swallow and the craneobserve the times of the ir coming ;

But my people know not the ordinance of Yahweh .

How can you say W e are wise ,

And the law of Yahweh is w ith us ?

But , behold , the false pen of the scribesHath wrought false ly .

Certainly this is little flattering, on any hypoJer. viii . 7— 8.

Prophecy 1 87

thesis, to the written Law. The prophecymay have been uttered before the publicationof Deuteronomy ; but it was not recorded,probably, until long after, and the languageof the prophet is very difficult to explain ,if be recognised any writing whatever asthe Law of Yahweh . Many have refusedto think that he could treat as a fraudthe publication of the book found by Hilkiah . But it is not precisely the literaryforgery, nor the artifice of its discovery, whichhe thus appreciates : it is the actual matterof all the received texts, which seems to himeither to correspond imperfectly with the willof Yahweh , or to order things contrary to it.Jeremiah appears to be acquainted with noother Law than the teaching of the prophets.He judges the Torah of the priests severely,and Deuteronomy may have been for him, asit is really in many ways, a priestly law. Theman who could make Yahweh say, I spake not“ unto your fathers , nor commanded them inthe day that I brought them out of the land

“ of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifice s : but this thing I commanded them

“ saying, Hearken unto my voice, and I willbe your God, and ye shall be mymay well have disapproved a regulation of

Jer. vii . 22— 3 .


worship which was alleged to have been promulgated in the land of Moab . Even the centralization of worship at Jerusalem would notappeal much to the prophet who never ceasedto announce the approaching ruin of the townand temple. The nabis who helped the refor

mation were those rather who, like Isaiah,believed the inviolability of Zion. They werethe nationalist and optimistic prophets, whomJeremiah treated as false prophets, althoughthey might be as sincere as himself in theirconvictions.As a matter of fact, to secure the future ofJahvism, it was not enough to criticise ex isting abuses according to the standard of a purereligion . Religions, in history, are not theories,nor sentiment, nor mystical aspirations, but thetraditions of social life guaranteed by the consecration of a ritual. A spirit animates suchinstitutions but the institutions give con

sistency to the spirit, and keep it in touchwith life. It has been said often that thereligion of the prophets was materialized, narrowed, and lowered by the Law. Properlyspeaking, a religion of the prophets has neverex isted ; any more than a religion of Jesus hasexisted ; but there was a large and strenuouseffort to raise the worship of Israel towardsan ever-growing perfection in all that concerns




Assyria had settled them, so the Judaeans whosereligious faith was not strong and pure ceasedquickly to be Jahvists. But there remained afaithful band in whom the spirit of the prophetsand the Law survived. It lived on memory andh0pe. The book of Ezekiel and the second partof Isaiah (xl.- lv.) show us what were then thethoughts and aspirations of pious Israelites

.

They waited for the restoration,and prepared

for it. When it was carried out,it followed a

plan arranged, so to say, beforehand ; and whichwas influenced by other considerations than theactual position created for the remnant of Judahby the political situation of the time.

From the point of view of antiquity nothingcoul d be more abnormal than the religiousposition of the believing exiles who were theguardians of Jahvism. The principles andteaching of the prophets did not allow themto serve the Gods of Chaldaea : on the otherhand, Judaean tradition, strengthened yet moreby the Deuteronomic reformation, fixed Yahwehin Zion. It was impossible to organize inBabylon a system of worship whose only lawfulseat must be at Jerusalem. Thus they clung allthe more strictly to those religious practices

Judaism 1 9 5

which could survive on a foreign soil : it wasnow that the sabbath and circumcision acquiredtheir supreme importance as characteristicJewish practices.They were convinced, by the exhortations ofthe prophets, and by Deuteronomy, that themisfortunes of the nation had been causedbecause its worship was not blameless ; and

they believed, always according to the prophets ,that the religion of their ancestors had beenlittle better than infidelity from the beginning.

Thus they were brought to imagine for thefuture Israel a pure religion that would guardits professors against a repetition of the divinechastisement. It is so that we must explainthe making of rituals, which could have noimmediate usage, but whi ch would be utilisedby the re -established worship . Up to now oraltraditions and practice had been sufficient ; but,now the temple worship had ceased, the new

ritual could only exist in writing . Thereforethey set to work and codified the ancientpractices ,making them agree with the propheticstandards ; for now it was above all thingsnecessary to conciliate the requirements ofthis moral religion with the traditional andpopular practices of worship . Priests werebetter qualified for this task than any one elsethat is why the achievement of this age is


personified best in Ezekiel, who was a priest,a prophet, and one may say an editor of Law.

As a prophet, Ezekiel still taught ; but hisliterary activity was greater than his preaching.

He is, so far as we know, the first of the studentor bookish prophets who wrote apocalypticvisions. The priest in him is revealed becausethe prophet is a ritualist, which Jeremiah wasnot at all, though of sacerdotal origin" ; neitherwas Isaiah, nor Amos, nor Hosea. It requireda priest to conceive the messianic reign in themodel of a precise liturgy, subordinated narrowlyto the ritual of the temple. As a moralist,Ezekiel enforced vigorously the doctrine ofindividual responsibility, which scarcely agreeswith older notions about the chastisement ofIsrael as a people, and for the sins of its fathers.He conceived the relation of Israel with Yahwehas a covenant

,made in the desert, for a

ritualistic purpose, and especially for theobservance of the sabbath, which seemed tohim the essential mark of Jahvism ; and it iswith respect to those old laws that he speaks ofthe malicious commandments which were givenby Yahweh to Israel for its destruction i Difier

But Jeremiah did not belong to the Jerusalempriesthood. Perhaps this fact should be we ighed whenwe tryto explain his complete indifierence about the temple .

See above , p. 165 .



Zion and he had become too great to be sent backinto the wilderness . Though Ezekiel abhorredstrange worships his imagination was filled withmythological subjects. The usage of pagan mythsin apocalyptic writings begins with him. Heseems to have made the Gods into auxiliariesof Yahweh ; the seven celestial beings whocarried out the destruction of Jerusalem* mightbe the Gods of the seven planets, and the onewith an inkhorn would be Nabu. Was themind of the Jahvist priest fertilized in Babylonby these materials borrowed from polytheism ?It may be admitted freely. But would it not bemore likely that in the reign of Manasseh, therewould be formed in the temple at Jerusalema kind of gnostic syncretism,

which the

Deuteronomic reformation did not attack, orwhich was only pruned and not eradicated ?The Jahvist story of the flood, which is not veryold, might come from this period.

By the anonymous author, who is usually

known as the Second Isaiah , the purely ideal

treatment of Jeremiah is revived ; but thedecadence of prophecy is shown by the

author not making himself known . His work

is no longer an exhortation, nor even an

original prophecy. It consists of eloquent

displays about the approaching deliveranceof

Ezek. ix.

Judaism I99

Israel ; and, however remarkable it may be, inthe sentiment which inspires it and by itsmusical style, it depends very much for itsmatter on the prophetic writers of the past.The author never says anything by his own

inspiration, though he speaks often in thename of Yahweh. He is a prophet, since heannounces and interprets the plans of God,but he is very little of a visionary. Insteadof being, like Ezekiel, a man of the futureLaw, h e is merely a man of hope ; and hedraws freely on every subject that canstimulate and nourish confidence.In him, at length , we find the expressionof an absolute monotheism : Yahweh alonehas made the world, and directs history ; heonly is God, and the strange Gods, whomthe author identifies with their images , area mere nothing . This latter notion did notprevail, at least not wholly, over that ofEzekiel. The Gods survived in the conditionof spirits subordinated to the sole God. Itwas allowed that

When the Most High formed the nations,

When he separated the ch ildren of men,

He sett led the borders of the peoplesA ccording to the numbers of the sons of God ;

For the port ion of Yahweh was Jacob,And his inheritance was Israel.*

Deut . xxxi i . 8—9, following the Septuagint .


Then two notions mingled ; and it was

held that the Gods of the nations did notreally exist, but that they were spirits whomGod had entrusted with the care of thepeoples, or who had taken it upon themselves ;and that they had performed their dutiesbadly.

While insisting upon the creation of theworld by Yahweh, the Second Isaiah had nophilosophic theory of creation, that is of aworld drawn out of nothing. Yahweh organizod chaos, and even triumphed over it.Though his mind was not tinged withmythology like Ezekiel’s, the anonymous writeracknowledges a struggle of Yahweh againstthe power of darkness, whom the Demiurgehad to overcome before he could organizethe existing world.

Awake , awake , put on strength

0 arm of Yahweh ;

Awake as in the days of old,

The generations of ancient times "

Is it not thou who hast split RahabAnd pierced the dragon

Rahab is the redoubtable Tiamut , whom the

Babylonian Demiurge,Marduk, cut in two, to

make heaven and earth. This myth may

Isa. li. 9-10.



and perfect, represented formerly without anydoubt by the righteous and the pr0phets,

which has sufi ered in their persons all thetribulations that have affl icted the chosenpeople, but to which above all the futurebelongs , since it will emerge from death toenlighten the nationsIt is too small a thing to establish the tribes of JacobAnd

'

to bring back the survivors of Israe lI make the e the light of the Gent iles,So that my salvat ion may go to the ends of the earth .

*

Ezekiel segregated Israel from the Gentilesin his city of the future, and the Lorddivided him from them in the actual world .

The Second Isaiah amalgamates pagans and

Israelites, and even foresees, a little rashly,the conversion of Cyrus. A privilege,however, is reserved to the people of Godit will reign over the converted Gentiles .The reality cannot fail to be short of so

fine a dream ; but, possibly, not a less ardenthope was required to bring about a new andvoluntary migration of these exiles who hadtaken root in the land of their enemies, andwho in the end had done so well there.When Cyrus granted them leave to go backinto their own country, they did not all availthemselves of it ; and many Jews, who

Isa. xlix. 6 .

Judaism 2 o 3

remained faithful to Yahweh and in communion with their brethren in Palestine, con

tinued to live by the waters of Babylon. Thefortunes of Judaism were long precarious in

Jerusalem ; and the Babylonian colony supportedit by encouragement, by its faith , by its favourwith the rul ers , and also with its money. Theexiles who returned, under Zerubbabel, to settlein Jerusalem and to rebuild the town, and thenthe temple , were few in number, and theywere soon isolated in the midst of a populationwhich had not learnt the lesson of the captivity.

,The smaller peasantry, which had remainedin the land, had not forgotten Yahweh,but its religion was that of the time beforethe ex ile ; and it had neither the zeal nor

the legalist temper of the Jews who camefrom Babylon. Thanks to the help whichcame thence, the Jerusalem settlement was bydegrees consolidated ; and when its piousfervour grew timid or seemed to wane theexiled beli evers provided for its needs. Fromthe exile there was "imported by Ezra, and

under the auspices of Nehemiah, that Lawwhich finally moulded Judaism.

§ 2

If the last chapters of Ezekiel, (xl.— xlviii .)in which the status of the future Israel is


planned, had not been attached to the writingsof a known prophet, and if their author hadnot covered them with the name of Moses

,by

presenting them as a revelation made to Israelin the wilderness, they might have figured inthe Law. Other heirs of the sacerdotal tradi tion, working in the same spirit, elaborateda ritual which has been incorporated in thatdocument of the Hexateuch whi ch is knownas the Priestly Code. This document has beenstyled by writers The Law of Holiness, becauseof the theory which dominates it : to makeIsrael a holy people and worthy of the Godwhom it serves, by the practice of a worshipregulated down to its minutest details. Thesacerdotal point of view is betrayed by thi sanxiety ; for the holiness does not consist solelyin moral perfection, but also, and it might evenbe said chiefly, in a ritual purity which dependson primitive notions about the purity andimpurity of things, whose relation to the deityis conceived in a wholly material way. Ancientsuperstitions, otherwise harml ess in themselves,thus take on the appearance of divine prohibitions : as for instance the forbidding to sowtwo kinds of grain in the same field, or touse two different kinds of material in theweaving of a cloth ; or, it may be, that common

See above , p. 31 .



of suppressing in the patriarchal history everything contradictory to his systematic theory.

Through the Pri estly Code, the same temperof idealism and ritualism has afiected the finalcomposition of the Law and of the wholePentateuch.

It may be seen, from the Book of Nehemiah,that the promulgation of the Law by Ezra wasmade under similar conditions to the promulgation of Deuteronomy by Josiah ; and thatthe priestly legislation, as a whole, was notknown previously by the community whichbound itself so solemnly to observe it. AsJosiah had rent his clothes, in sign of poignantgrief

,when he had heard the reading of

Deuteronomy,overwhelmed as he was by the

wrath of Yahweh for the neglect of thisLaw by the former generations, who had beenignorant of it, so the people assembled byEzra was dissolved in tears when it acquireda knowledge of the new code. And as Josiahand the people had sworn to observe the Lawof Hilkiah, so Nehemiah and the assembledJews swore to keep the Law of Ezra. Thistime the undertaking was even put downin writing : Nehemiah signed it, so did thepriests and nobles ; and the mul titude followedtheir leaders

,promising “ with curse and oath

to walk in Yahweh’s Law, which had been

Judaism 2 07

given by Moses the servant of Yahweh .

"

Finally, in the same way as the author ofKings observed, with profound truth , that neversince the time of the Judges (nor even beforeit), had a Passover been celebrated like thatheld by Josiah in the eighteenth year of hisreign, so the Book of Chronicles points out,rightly, that neither since the time of Joshua(nor in any other time), had the children ofIsrael kept the Feast of Tabernacles as theydid after the promulgation of Ezra’s Law .

’r

The practical conditions by means of whichIsrael shall be truly Yahweh’s nation, the priestlynation which it ought to be for the God who ,by a special choice, has separated it from allthe peoples, are laid down with the utmostdetail in the Levitical code. The land occupiedby the children of Jacob is holy, as the propertyof God but even more holy is the tabernacle,that is the temple, the only place in theworld where the divine worship may be celebrated, and where Yahweh becomes present toreceive the offerings due to him. Holy arethe seasons which God sets apart as belongingspecially to himself, and in particular hissabbaths . But the sabbatical system grewto extravagant proportions : the earth itself

Neh . x. 29.

1 See 2 Kings xxiii. 22. Neh . viii. 17 .


must have its sabbath, and rest untilled everyseventh year ; and at the end of seven sabbatory cycles, there must be a great sabbath,the year of Jubilee ; also a rest for the soil,and a season when alienated estates must goback to their original owners. This curioussocial economy was meant to prove the sovereignrights of Yahweh, the only real proprietor ofIsrael’s land. A whole system of dues wasorganized to acknowledge this right : first-fruits,tithes, and a regulated series of offerings inthe temple. Holy must be all the children ofIsrael by the rigorous observance of circumcision,and of all the commandments about clean andunclean things, about states of purity andimpuri ty. They were truly a nation of priests,and they proclaimed it. But as all could notcarry out the special conditions of purity whichwere necessary for the divine service, the peoplewere represented, in matte rs of worship, bythe priests, who were held to be descended fromAaron by hi s two sons Eleazar and Ithamar ;and by the Levites in the lesser ministries ofGod’s house, and as attendants on the priests .The latter had a chief, a high priest, thesupposed successor of Aaron, who became theleading personage in the new community.

Before Josiah’

s reformation, the sacerdotalbody had no single head, though the first



But the religious importance of this pontificate was not equal to its political greatness.

This had not been foreseen by the theoristsof the Levitical code, who were chiefly preoccupied with the centralization of worship ,with the unity of the sanctuary and of thesacerdotal hierarchy. The regulation of thepriesthood was a part of the system whichorganized the life of the community theocrat ically, it might even be said ritualistically.

That system is now perfected : it is composedalmost wholly of ancient materials, but it isnew by the spirit which animates it all, andgives a meaning to every part.On one hand, it would seem that the overthrow of the first temple and the temporarysuppression of sacrifice efi ected a purifying andspiritualizing of the conceptions of Yahweh.

Yahweh is no longer, and above all things,the God of Israel ; he is God, simply : he isno longer represented as talking familiarlywith men, and the priestly writer is careful tosuppress the infantile story of Eden, as wellas most things in the patriarchal legends ;storms are still instruments of divine manifestation, but because God wills it so, notby any natural affinity ; God withdraws himself from the world, and from external intercourse with men, to communicate only with

Judaism 2 1 1

their spirit, perhaps more with their spiritthan their heart. To this tendency, which isslightly intellectualist, we owe the fine storyof the creation which now opens the Bible, aswell as the philosophy of the old sacred history,

and the notion of successive agreements withAdam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses . Nothingcould be less true as history ; but it was astriking production of rationalizing theology.

It was all reasoned until it seemed to be mostreasonable. On this foundation, Jewish and

Christian monotheism has built a generalphilosophy of the universe and of historywhich was able to impose itself on the ancientworld, and which has been seriously challengedonly by the scientific labours of recent centuries.On the other hand, one seems to watcha materializing of worship that contrastsstrangely wi th the spiritualization of belief.Nevertheless Ezra’s Law did not materializethe worship except in relation to us , so tospeak, and not in comparison with what hadexisted previously. This Law did not materialize worship so far as we compare it withthe actual religion of the prophets , remembering that there never was any propheticalreligion

,but only a criticism by the prophets

of a worship thoroughly engrained withidolatry and superstition : it is this worship


that we must compare with the worship ofthe Levitical code if we would appraise thelatter justly. At that time, and in those surroundings , it could not have entered the mindof any religious legislator that the system of

sacrifices should be abolished. The sacerdotalcode appears to recommend a more externaland ritualistic religion than Deuteronomy,because the introduction of many customsand Observances into its rules was thoughtdesirable, and especially all the details of theliturgical service : of these things, the authorsof Deuteronomy had not thought it advi sableto speak, though they existed none the less,and they were bound to attract the legists ofthe exile. The rules about things clean andunclean, and the whole of the sacrificial liturgy,are only the codification and systematizing ofa very ancient usage. Everything that clashedwith the monotheistic faith was eliminated, aswell as practices obviously tainted with idolatryand superstition, or which were connected withdivination and worship of the dead. Of all therest

,out of everything which could be regarded

as an element of worship, was made a cycleof Observances, minutely thought out, in whichwas perceived a way of recognising the sovere ignty of God by a service of perpetualobedience. And it never happened that for the



submitting to a severe and complicated rule.“ Religions, says Renan, “ often gain a conservative power from the very fetters whichthey Less shut in by the Law, the

Jewish community would have been more liableto temptations from without, and might easilyhave been diverted from its contribution to thereligious history of mankind. It is true thatthis crushing law could only be made efficaciousby being accepted ; but it always had zealouspartizans to ensure its triumph , even byforce if necessary, should its authority seemthreatened.

There was one practice, namely, fasting,which is hardly mentioned in the Law, sinceit is inculcated only for the solemnity of theExpiation," on the tenth day of the seventhmonth, but which acquired nevertheless aprominent place among the religious customsof the Jews after the exile . It seems thatthey used to commemorate in this way, duringthe captivity, their melancholy anniversaries .Before that, fasts had only been ordered forpublic calamities ; but fasting was a usualcustom in the burial rites , and perhaps inits origin it was connected with worship ofthe dead. In public fasts the same ceremonial

Histoire da Peuple d’Israel, 11 . 465 .

i' Neh . ix. 1 .

Judai sm 2 1 5

was observed as for mourning. For instance,on the occasion of promulgating Ezra’s Law,

“ The children of Israel were assembled with“ fasting, and with sack cloth, and with earthupon them.

" At that period every importantmatter was prepared for by fasting . It wasan exhibition of repentance

,to which was added

a public acknowledgment of national sin, andit soon grew into a fashionable habit of privatedevotion. The misfortunes of the nation andthe spirit of post-exilic Judaism are undoubtedlyenough to explain the diffusion of the practice.

§ 3

After the reformation of Ezra and Nehemiah,Judaism was settled, and it tended progressivelyto harden. Up till then,

it had been on thedefensive against the petty nations round it, andagainst the inhabitants of the former kingdomof Samaria : the material interests of the community in Jerusalem led them to open theirgates to their neighbours , and to be on friendlyrelations with them. These necessities were acounterpoise to the exacting and exclusivereligious feeling which the old ex iles hadbrought back from Babylon. It can be seenclearly that the priests of the temple hadscarcely reached a position of privilege andprofit before they showed themselves less


fanatical and narrow than the legists who camefrom Babylon, like the scribe Ezra, or thanthe pious laity, who also came from abroad,like Nehemiah.

On the question of marriage, especially, withnon-Jewish women, the priests and inhabitantsof Jerusalem had not the scrupulosity of thereformers. The Book of Ruth would seem tohave been written against the measures thatzealots for th e holiness of Israel wanted toenforce. As primitive Jahvism was above allthings a religion of men, which troubled aslittle about women as about slaves, marriageswith non-Israelite women had long been permitt ed without scruple. But such marriageshad become irreconcilable with the notions thathad been formed about the holiness of Israel ,and about the entire repudiation of all foreignworship. Polygamy remained licit in theory,but was little practised ; divorce was wholly atthe will of the husband ; but the blood of thechosen race must remain pure , and neithersuperstition nor idolatry should invade thehome. A struggle was bound to come betweenthe party of freedom and the zealots of theLaw.

The Samaritan schism owed its beginning tothese diflerences. We have seen already thatthe majority of the antique Israelites and



Samaritans was organized, whose sanctuary wasat Shechem, on mount Gerizim,

one of the holyplaces of the old kingdom of Israel.The rupture could not have been at first socomplete as it grew to be in the course of time.We may hold . that the Judaeans of Samariakept up some intercourse and connexion withtheir native country. The schismatic priestsaccepted the Law, as it had been made by Ezra,and after him by the scribes who edited thecompilations of the Pentateuch. But the establishment of a rival worship so near Jerusalemcould not be efl’ected without hostility, whichsoon broke out. The Samaritans accepted onlythe Law, and not the collection of the Prophets,which was made about a century later : nor,with better reason, that of the Hagiographa.

Their worship was always a strict monotheism,

according to the tenour of the Law ; but itwas a religion without enthusiasm, and therefore it never showed any capacity for proselytizing. It may be noticed that the Sadducees

,the sacerdotal aristocracy of Jerusalem,

undertook also to base their religion solelyupon the Law, and that they were wantingaltogether in religious zeal . This parallel isnot without historical significance. Samaritanism was the antithesis of a proselytizingorganization : it was an association of reason

Judaism 2 1 9

able believers protesting against what seemedto them an intolerant fanaticism. Great re

ligious creations do not issue out of suchconditions. The Samaritan body was nothingbut a Judaic sect, which in no sense continuedthe traditions of the old ' Israelitish monarchy.

That sect broke away from Judaism at the verytime when the latter was becoming self-concentrated and vigorous , and was about to exertthe force of its propaganda on the world.

At Jerusalem prophecy was extinguished. Atthe beginning of the restoration, while thetemple was rebuilding , a few authoritativevoices were heard, those of Haggai and

Zechariah. By the time of Nehemiah, theinstitution was dead. Nehemiah , to be ac

curate, s till mentions prophets ; but, accordingto him, they were people paid by his opponentsto frighten him wit i s

‘ untrue announcements.“ Remember O my God, writes the piousgovernor, Tobiah and Sanballat, according tothese their works, and also the prophetessNoadiah, and the rest of the prophets thatwould have put me in fear." Henceforth,prophecy was only carried on by stealth

,in

the pseudonymous literature of. the apocalypses.There is no longer any prophetical teaching.

Sacerdotal instruction vanished, too, in likeNeh. vi. 14 .


manner. The ministerial duties of the priestconsisted only in performing a very complicatedritual . The future belonged to scribes, doctorsof the Law, moralists, casuists. The scribe outlived, not only the prophet, but the priest ; andit was by him, with his intangible Law, thatJudaism itself was able to survive. About theyear 200, when Ecclesiasticus was written, hewas already in great repute. He was the sage,the master, credited with a knowledge of thingsdivine and human. All this knowledge, however, was co-ordinated with and subordinatedto a proficiency in the Law of God : in time, itwas not thought well to have any other knowledge. The scribal institution was definitelyestablished in the time of Herod the Great,when Hillel and Shammai, the famous headsof the two schools, were flourishing. Theywere then, and they tended to become moreand more, the spiritual guides of the Jews.Ezra’s Law made Judaism ; but we must notbelieve that it succeeded in eliminating allthose elements of the older religion which ithad proscribed or dropped. In the same waythat the old patriarchal legends survived inthe form given to the Pentateuch by thesacerdotal code, so many primitive beliefs werefitted on to the transcendental God. That Godwas self-sufli cing : he created the world by



until it pleases him to enforce it on earth as

in heaven.

And the divine world is not filled by Godalone. The sons of God had functions thatwere but ill-defined alongside of the oldYahweh : they seem to have belonged chieflyto an old popular mythology, which did notcome through an exclusively Jahvist tradition.

Henceforward, the members of the divineclan are the servants of God : they are alwaysastral powers, patrons of the nations, and thesoldiery of heaven. It was imagined sometimesthat Yahweh condemned them, imprisonedthem, killed them, or at least reduced themviolently to obedience when he was displeasedwith their behaviour. The theory of Danielwas more correct. In him, each kingdom has itsheavenly chief ; and the empires succeed oneanother as their patron becomes most powerfulon high. Michael is the patron of the Jewishpeople : Gabriel , the angel of revelation.

Gabriel fights with the angel of Persia, becausethat kingdom is condemned to perish ; but, ashe does not succeed in conquering, Michael goesto help him. The same thing happens whenthe angel of the Greeks has to be put down ;and Gabriel had helped Michael when he hadfailed to end the Chaldaean empire. For theangels of the empires do not despoil one another

Judaism 2 2 3

of the primacy : Michael and Gabriel deposethem in succession when the hour fixed bythe prophetic word has rung .

Legions of celestial spirits, as unnumberedas the stars, with which they are more or

less identical, encompass the throne of God.

Their function is to praise the creator withoutceasing : to make up for the homage thatpaganism robs him of on earth . Angels arethe messengers and interpreters of thedivine revelations . Ezekiel still saw Yahwehhimself, as Isaiah had seen him ; but angels ,the executors of the divine will, have comealready into his visions. Zechariah saw onlyangels : and angels instructed Daniel . Theangels thus watched over all things : over theguidance of man, as of the elements. God isnow too great to make the rain and snow fallhimself, or to speak to men . Inferior ministerssee to all things, according to his orders.Thus, on one hand, the primitive Gods andsome of the primitive spirits, to

' which mustbe joined the cherubim and seraphim, whoseem originally to have been personifications

of storm clouds and lightnings, at least if theywere not simply guardian genii , conceived inthe shape of fantastic beasts, all came to beformed into a body of celestial powers, ruledby God ; and very many of them were con


fined to the ministry of punishment. On theother hand, on the borders of that regionwhere the divine influences were exercised

,in

the lower World, the spirits of the earth werestill active and unquiet : those which delightedin waste places, in ruins and in deserts ; thespirits also of the maladies which affl ict mankind. They, too, like the angels, formed amultitude without number, all ready to beenlisted in Satan’s army.

§ 4

Moreover, it has been believed too easily thatpost-exilic Judaism is to be found wholly inthe Law. Undoubtedly the Law moulded thedomestic life of the Jews more and more, alsotheir social arrangements, and their nationallife so far as they had one. Until the risingof the Maccabees, Judaism was a petty ecclesi

astical and theocratic State under the suzerainty of Persia, and then of Macedonian conquerors. The entry of Pompey into Jerusalem

(in 64 B .C.) marks the close of a short periodof independence, which was not revived by thereign of Herod. But the Asmonaean monarchyexisted only to secure the supremacy of theLaw

,since it was born of a revolt against

Hellenism,which first encroached and then

persecuted. It is in this direction that Jewish



does not wish to exclude any one from the sameadvantage. Jewish piety was more filled withhope than with generosity ; with only somerare exceptions, it remained more or less persuaded that the possession of God was anational and hereditary possession of its ownIn reading the Psalms, one is forced to ownthat, for all pious Jews, it was good to liveunder the Law

The Law of Yahweh is an undefiled Law,

Converting the soul

The testimony of Yahweh is sure ,

And giveth wisdom to the simpleThe statutes of Yahweh are right ,

And rejoice the heart ;The commandment of Yahweh is pure ,

And giveth light unto the eyes ;The fear of Yahw eh is clean,

And endureth for everThe judgements of Yahweh are true ,

And righteous altogetherMore to be desired are they than gold,

Yea than much fine goldSweeter also than honey,And the honey-comb

Moreover by them is Thy servant taught ,And in keeping of them.

There is great reward.

*

Messianism was the answer to the problem,

which troubled the sages, about the destiny

Psa. xix. 7— 11.

Judaism 2 2 7

of man, and the justice of God. The Lawcompelled this question to be raised. Itpromised life to every one who followed itsprecepts ; but what it contemplated above allwas the national prosperity, the rewarding ofthe fidelity of all. The same principle ofstrict retribution did not fail to be applied toindividuals ; but, if it were already puzzling todiscover the fulfilment in the course of history,it was far more disconcerting to prove thetruth in individual cases. A belief in theresurrection of the dead only appeared late,and later still was any notion of the im

mortality of the soul . The prophetic religionbanned any worship of the dead, and it wouldhave thought it an outrage to God to declaremen immortal.

The dead praise not the e , Yahweh ,

Ne ither all they that go down into silenceFor Sheol i‘ cannot praise the e ,

Death cannot ce lebrate theeThey that go down into the pit

Cannot hope for thy truth .

The living , the living , he shall praise thee .

Thus spake the psalmists , continually, in

pious emulation. Ancient Israel had known

Psa. cxv. 17 . i‘ The abode of the dead.

IIsa. xxxvi ii . 18— 19.


the worship of the dead, and the practicesusually connected with it among the noncivilized. The dead were assimilated more orless to the spirits, and they were dealt withaccordingly. Even the calling up of the deadhad been practised, though it was soon heldto be unlawful . That kind of divination bordered on magic , and became easily suspectedby religion . It is related that Saul had putaway those who had the secret of it ; but, onthe eve of his death , before engaging in hislast battle with the Philistines, being unableto get any oracle out of Yahweh, he went toEndor, to consult a witch , who, in spite of theroyal prohibition, went on exercising her

trade. The scene of the calling up , whetherhistorical or no, does not cease to be instruotive. “What seest thou ? " said Saul to thewoman — “ I see a God coming up out of theearth .

" What form is he of — “ An oldman cometh up ; and he is covered with arobe. And Saul perceived that it wasSamue lfi" Thus the dead was an elohim, asupernatural being, a spirit of the grave, whichdid not hinder him from keeping the samedress as when he lived ; and his first word wasto complain of being troubled, like a manwhose slumber is disturbed. Neither the priests

1 Sam. xxvi ii. 13— 14 .



dead, neither punishment nor reward. Remuneration, therefore, had to be placed in thislife.By the progress of civilization and themovement of thought in the times of thePersian and Greek domination

,and doubtless

also by the growth of individual piety, itcame to be asked how providential justicecould be demonstrated by facts, or evenadjusted with realities . Psalms and sapientialbooks testify that the grave scandal of thattime was the mi sery of the just and thefelicity of the wicked. Perhaps it is not superfluous to say that by the “ just here mustbe understood above all the observers of theLaw ; and by the “ wicked, similarly, not onlycriminals of high and low degree, but menwho were too free in thought and practice.The eyes were shut as much as possible to theevidence ; and men repeated after the psalmists :

I have been young, and now am old,

Yet saw I never the righteous forsaken.

They repeated that the prosperity of thewicked is fleeting ; and passing, too, is thetribulation of the godly man : that the latteris blessed after his death, and in his posterity ;

Psa. xxvu. 25 .

Judaism 2 3 1

that the former is cursed in his tomb, andpunished in his descendants. But all therighteous did not die old, and some of themperished in misfortune. Was, then, the sin

cerity of their goodness to be suspected, orthe reality of their deserving ?The problem, as we know, is magnificentlyset forth in Job, where an old legend is usedas a framework for the discussion. The friendsof Job support the common thesis, that goodness is always recompensed : and Job urgesthe objections. Against those who wish tobelieve him guilty because he is unfortunate,Job does not rely on the witness of his own

conscience : he appeals to a divine witness,which in the end is given him. But there isno solution. Yahweh , who intervenes to windup the debate, only declares the mystery : hisjustice is as unfathomable as his creativewisdom and the efi ects of his power. It mustbe believed, though it cannot be proved. It isonly asserted that a good man may be hurtwithout his innocence being suspected, andwithout being justified himself in arraigningGod. Ordinary faith could only raise itselfto this height with difficulty. We can seehow the mass of believers, in a crisis like thepersecution by Antiochus Epiphanes, came toaccept the theory of a resurrection.


Formerly there were sages who, withoutspeculating diflerently about the justice ofGod, professed to teach men the art of

happiness . It was the art of right living.

But the sages formerly did not understandit altogether as the doctors of the Law did,though, in Ecclesiasticus, sage and doctorcoalesce. From the standpoint of the Law andof piety, sin is a fault against God : from thestandpoint of wisdom it is a folly ; piety thusbecomes prudence, and duty interest. Allwisdom, however, is a gift of God, and revelation itself is wisdom, since it teaches how tolive properly. God having become absolutelytranscendent, they finished— and was it onlyby some Hellenic influence ? We may guessit, though it is less easy to prove— they finishedby conceiving Wisdom as an intermediarybetween God and man : it was she who hadcreated the world, and who taught men. Thusthey went towards the conception of a supremereason, the cause and standard of all inte lligence. But philosophical speculation wasbound to be arrested sooner or later, as soonas it was clearly understood, and the authorof Ecclesiasticus so taught, that the highestand fullest manifestation of wisdom is contained in the Law. Ultimately, the optimismof the sages who wrote the Proverbs and



hensible ; therefore let us fear God, and enjoylife wisely. But feeling for religion waneswhen the community is wanting. Koheleth isno longer a Jew, but he is not yet a citizenof the world. He has not the religion ofhumanity. All he stands for is a transcen

dental egoism. We learn from him how theJewish faith could destroy itself. We mustsearch elsewhere to know how it could preserveitself, and triumph.



actually in the contradiction between facts andtheory, when the latter was faced impartially,and its principles were applied to individuallives . But, in spite of everything, h0pe in thetriumph of a nation which had ceased to existwas maintained by means of the religion whichbecame the only stay and tie for the remnantsof the ancient people. The dream was aparadox, but it was not therefore sterilized,since Christianity issued from it. And now itis advisable that we should examine it.

1

The messianic theory exists in germ in thatfeeling of confidence which is inspired byprayer ; that feeling especially which a religous

body,a tribe or a nation, cherishes with

regard to its heavenly protector : the theoryis identical

,in its essence, with that trust in

the divine protection which is at the rootof all worship. The expectation of gloriousdestinies for Israel corresponded to the exaltednotions which had been formed of Yahweh. Itwas not possible to imagine an exceedinglypowerful God whose people would not bedowered with good fortune. But if the expec

tation of Israel had depended only on thatconviction, it would have differed little fromthe trust which the Assyrians placed in their

Messianism 2 39

God Ashur, or Nebuchadnezzar in his GodMarduk, or the Romans in the Gods of theCapitol and in the Genius of the Eternal City.

Yahweh was not only a very great God, buta just God, who was not satisfied with themere external dues of worship, but whose chiefrequirements were in the moral sphere . Thatis why, as soon as clear hopes were formedabout the glorious destinies of Israel, the fulfilment of those h0pes was made dependent onmoral condi tions, namely on the practice ofri ghteousness or, rather, the proclamation ofthe triumph was subordinated to that of achastisement. The latter, indeed, it would seem,

must precede the former ; and it was far moreprominent in the message of the prophetsuntil the fall of the Judaean monarchy. Therewill be a great judgment by Yahweh of hisfaithful people : when that people has beenduly crushed, the righteous, the minority, whoshall have survived the trial, will enjoy theirGod in peace, and will taste on earth an

unmixed happiness, every trouble being expe lled out of the world along with its wickedness.This conception of Israel’s future may beseen in the prophets of the eighth century.

But it is plain that, in earlier times, theIsraelites had counted more upon Yahweh’s


help in battle, notwithstanding some defeats,

and on his material benefits, in spite of naturalvisitations, than they dreamed of moral conditions being attached to his favours. The hopecould not be purer than the religious conception. For long, no doub t, it was held thatfat victims were the surest means of gainingthe divine support. The messianic notion hadits course of evolution, like the conception ofGod ; and they grew concurrently.

The felicity of the righteous was the definiteobject of the messianic kingdom ; but it wasconceived primarily as the reign of God

,and

formerly as the overwhelming victory ofYahweh . And had not Yahweh always beenthe God of glorious battles The prophetshad never ceased to conceive him as a re

doubtable warrior. It is he who breaks,when

he wills,the pride of the conquerors whom

they call Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, orAntiochus . In the threats which Isaiah flungat the King of Assyria, in those of theprophets who foretold the ruin of the Chaldaeanpower

,in the account of the defeat which,

according to Ezekiel, Gog the fabulous Kingof Magog is to suffer in Palestine, in thepremonitions of Daniel about the death ofAntiochus Epiphanes, Yahweh shows himselfas the invincible enemy of every pagan king



were stronger than the spirits of death anddarkness , that light, order, and life were produced in the world. Creation was nothing elsethan this great work in its beginning

,when

the Gods made the first day issue out of darkness when the shapes of heaven and earthwere first moulded ; when the vernal foliagesprang first out of the soil ; when the fish tookpossession of the waters, the birds of the air,

men and beasts of the solid earth : in spite ofthe opposition raised at the beginning by themonstrous deities of chaos, with an audacitythat was all the greater because hitherto ithad been invincible. Yahweh, too , had himselfbeaten Rahab and his allies : he held the seaenchained . When the great day of his gloryshall come, he will complete his work in nature ;and then nothing dark, harmful , or unpleasingwill be left in it.For these reasons, Isaiah describes ferociousbeasts as changed suddenly into harmless beings,as no doubt it was imagined that they had beenat first ; the anonymous prophets of the captivitymade the wilderness blossom solely in honourof the exiles ’ return ; Ezekiel made the holyland into a paradise, where even the tree of lifewill grow and

,what we do not find in our

stories of Genesis,a well or stream of life

Daniel promises an even greater marvel, the

Messianism 2 4. 3

victory of Yahweh over death , and the re surrection of the just ; the seer of the Apocalypse goesfarther, and at the end of time has the sea itselfdestroyed, that last remnant of the chaoticocean, the haunt of the beaten Dragon, whichwill serve him no longer as a refuge, since itwill have vanished, and the Dragon himself willbe cast into the fire.The oppressor of Israel appeared as the repre

sentative of the paganworld in rebellion againstYahweh ; he was, in the political and religiousspheres of contemporary history, what Tiamut

Rahab were in the order of nature, and inlegends of the cosmogony. He was naturallycompared to them, and then identified withthem. It was not arbitrarily, with the capriceof a symbolist poet, that Daniel figured thepagan empires under the shapes of animals.They were the successors , so to speak, of themonsters which the traditions of cosmogonyhad banished to the frontiers of creation, and

which re -entered with them again into historyso as to be crushed finally by the hand of thealmighty God. While it was Satan himselfwho, for a still better reason, was identifiedwi th the old enemy, the idolatrous and persecut ing empire was always the Beast, the mon

ster who represented on earth the power ofthe Dragon, and who must share in his ruinas he had shared in his proud impiety.


The characte r of Satan grew in the courseof centuries . He appeared first at the returnfrom the captivity. Then he was only a member of the celestial society

,who had his place

among the sons of God, the beings who formthe court of Yahweh. He exercised over mena sort of inspection, whi ch was not tutelary,be cause at the di vine tribunal he was theaccuse r of the gui lty and the recommender ofpunishment. He impersonated in some way anaspect of the divi ni ty which the character ofYahweh had ended by out-growing, namely asort of jealous curiosity which spies out humanweaknesse s and arranges trials to show themup , rather than to give men the opportunityto surmount them. Such he appears in theBook of Job. And it may be said that hisfunct ion as a rather ill-natured critic tended tochange him into a declared enemy of thosewhom he accused : final ly, he became theenemy of God himself, being opposed to all

his merciful plans for his own people and formankind. He was identified with the snakeof Eden and the monster of chaos, so that hecame to represent in the world and in historythat evil power which is opposed to the reignof God. He became the head of the wickedspirits. All the elements of his personality aremythological

,but they are taken from various



ness, the Gentiles have no share : the foreignersmust be kept in awe, or destroyed by the Godof Israel, or driven out by fear, or struck withwonder by the puissance of Yahweh. Of theirconversion, properly speaking, there is no question.

When Jerusalem had fallen, and the restora

tion of the Davidic monarchy appeared eitherimpossible or hardly desirable

,the messianic

notion was changed in form. Ezekiel gave onlya very attenuated function to the prince of thefuture Israel : he gratified himself by imagininga religious society, living round the temple, consecrated as it were to its worship, happy in itsseparation from the world ; a kingdom of liturgical felicity, whose coming Nehemiah, Ezra,and the Law itself, tried to bring about : thenations would not succeed in troubling it ; theinvasion of Gog, the King of Magog, symbolisesthe last attempt of oriental paganism againstthe kingdom of the saints ; and this attack,which the author of the Johannine Apocalypsewill reproduce later, is a kind of tragic interludein the happiness of the elect, which nothingafterwards shall disturb .

In the Second Isaiah , the triumph of Yahwehis confused with the return from exile and therestoration of Jerusalem : God will guide hispeople through the wilderness the nations will

Messianism 2 4 7

partake in the happiness of Israel, but ratheras clients and tributaries, than as people admitted to a full share of messianic prosperityThose parts of the book, however, which dealwith the Servant of Yahweh present Israel asthe missionary of God to the Gentiles, whose conversion is announced. The ideal and righteousIsrael has atoned by sufi ering for the historicaland sinful Israel. Yahweh will return againto Zion, and his faithful will come back withhim. No uncircumcised shall tread the groundof the holy city. There shall be no more sorrowsand tears. Jerusalem will be the paradiseof God.

The Messianic king reappears in the secondportion of Zechariah .

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion ;Shout with joy, 0 daughter of Jerusalem l

Behold, thy king come th unto thee :

He is just and conquering ;Low ly, and seated upon an ass,

Even upon a colt , the foal of an ass,

He wi ll cause to disappear the chariots of Ephraim,

And the horses of Jerusalem ;

The bow of war shall be destroyed.

His dominion shall be from sea to sea,

And from the river to the ends of the earth .

The failure of these gorgeous hopes was noZech . ix. 9— 10.


discouragement to faith. Israel, stirred up byits reformers, entered resolutely on the practiceof the Law, convinced that the divine promiseswould accomplish themselves when the peoplehad risen to the height of their providentialvocation. Above all, in critical times, theyconsulted the ancient books, so as to draw fromthem consolation for the present and encouragement for the future. They believed that nota single word of those oracles would fail

, and

they waited with a feverish anxiety for thefulfilment which always lingered. The way inwhich Daniel interprets the seventy years

,

which Jeremiah had fixed as the duration ofthe captivity, shows how they applied ancientprophecies to new circumstances, by methodsof symbolical interpretation the seventy yearsof the captivity, which ought to end in thekingdom of God, are seventy weeks of years,which must elapse between the exile and thegreat event. The Book of Daniel was writtenin view of the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, as the second part of Isaiah was witha foresight of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus.Nevertheless, they expected the salvation ofGod in the immediate future. The more imminent their peril became, the nearer theythought mus t be Yahweh’s miraculous intervention. They imagined the time had come



trouble, such as never was since there was anation even to that same time : and at thattime thy people shall be delivered

,every one

that shall be found written in the book. And“ many of them that sleep in the dust of theearth shall wake, some to everlasting life, andsome to shame and everlasting contempt.And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament ; and they that turn

“ many to righteousness , as the stars for everand ever. " The last verses which have beenadded to the Book of Isaiah, and which mustbe of about the same period as Daniel, explainthe fate of the damned, and make their sufl’erings an ingredient in the happiness which awaitsthe elect. “And it shall come to pass, that“ from one new moon to another, and fromone sabbath to another, shall all flesh cometo worship before me, saith the Lord. Andthey shall go forth, and shall look upon the

“ carcases of the men that have transgressed“ against me ; for their worm shall notdie, neither shall their fire be quenched ;

“ and they shall be an abhorring unto all“ flesh.

‘r It is evident that the unlimited

burning of these corpses is the punishment ofthe individuals of whom they were the bodies .The inferno of the damned exists alongside of

Dan. xi l . 1—3 . i Isa. lxvi. 23—4 .

Messianism 2 5 I

Jerusalem the blessed, and the fire of Gehennaburns now in the same place where the pyresof Moloch used to flare. Thus eschatologyacquired the ingredients which were yet wanting to it : resurrection and judgment, everlasting happiness of the good, everlastingtorment of the wicked. These are the subje cts which the greater number of the apocalypses will work out, though for a long timea certain vagueness adhered to these beliefs ,and they were not added immediately to thegeneral and ordinary faith of the Jews. Tobit ,even Baruch , the Assumption of Moses, theFirst Book of Maccabees ignored the resurrec

tion : the Second Book of Maccabees mentionsit, but in the manner of an apologist whoargues with objectors. In fact, not only theSamaritans, but the Sadducees, the Jewishpriesthood, did not accept it.This theory of the resurrection appears allat once in Daniel in a form which betraysits origin , one might even say its necessity.

It is not yet all men who rise, but “ many ofthe dead those who had held relations withthe God of Israel, either by obeying or byopposing him, that is the righteous and theirpersecutors. Neither the resurrection nor thejudgment is universal. Each is referred directlyto the welfare of Israel, but is not applied


generally. It is a solution of the special crisisand problem which Judaism has to face in thepersecution of Antiochus Epiphane s. Thereare martyrs now ,

and they are dead ; but whowill venture to say that they will have nopart in the Kingdom of God, which is sonear ? They should be among the first in it :therefore they will live again . There werealso renegades , who denied the religion oftheir fathers , and who helped the enemy inpersecuting their brethren ; can it be thatthose of them who are dead, too, will by thatdeath escape the punishment they deserve ?The latter will come back also, to undergothe eternal shame that is their due. It is thespontaneous demand of faith . When judgmentand resurrection come to be spoken about forall the human race, the notions will be at

tached to an end of the world, and a cosmicregeneration. Here a certain reflection ismanifested, and the direct influence of someforeign teaching may be more easily admitted.

Even so far as it bears on the fate of Israel,the resurrection implies a complete evolutionin the ancient beliefs about the dead, andin the very notion of God . Formerly thekingdom of the dead was a region into whichthe power of Yahweh had not extended ; andthe dead might be treated as spirits, they



themselves to the end ; to that divine intervention which would turn the anguish of therighteous into final happiness, and into everlasting punishment the exalt ing insolence ofthe wicked. The imagination revelled in theprovidential circumstances of that happy event,which was decreed in heaven, of which theprophetic indications were searched out fromthe sacred books. Elijah, for instance, who hadbeen taken to heaven , must return even beforeDaniel, there were speculations about it. Thelast verses of Malachi, which seem to havebeen added later

,though the author of Eccle

siasticus knew them, attributed to him aministry of reconciliation before “ the greatand terrible day of Yahweh.

" Ecclesiasticusadds that he will “ restore the tribes of JElsewhere it is an angel who inaugurates thereign of God : in Daniel, it is Michael, theangel of the chosen people. These interventions replaced that of the messiah-king ; butthe apocalyptic tradition found a way ofamalgamating the two notions.One of the Psalms of Solomon, so-called,expresses itself thus about the messianic king

Be careful , O Lord, to raise up their king, the son of

David,

Mal. iv. 23- 24 , 1 Ecclus. xlviii. 10.

Messianism 2 5 5

At the time appointed by thee , so that he may rule

Israe l thy servant .Gird him with power, to crush the unrighteous tyrants,To clear Jerusalem of the heathen who oppress it

miserably.In wisdom and just ice may he lay waste the country

of the sinners ;

May he break the pride of sinners like the potter’

s

vesse l ;With a rod of iron he shall destroy the ir being,And with the breath of his mouth will he utterly

destroy the heathen.

May the nat ions at his threatening flee before him,

And may he punish the sinners for the imaginationsof their heart .

Then will he gather an holy people , and rule overthem in righteousness.

And he wi ll judge the tribes of the people who are

sanctified by the Lord, his God.

He will not suffer unrighteousness to remain amongstthem,

And no man given to wickedness shall dwe ll among

themFor he shall know them all as the sons of God.

He shall divide them the land according to the ir tribes,Ne ither sett ler nor stranger shall dwe ll among them.

He shall judge peoples and nat ions with equity and

wisdom.

So long as they serve him, he will hold the Gentiles inhis yoke

And he will extol the Lord openly be fore the whole earth.

He will cause Jerusalem to be pure and holy, as at

the beginning ,

So that the Gent iles shall come from the ends of the

earth to behold her glory,


And the ir enfeebled children shall bring presents ;

And they shall see the glory wh ich the Lord, his God,

hath fulfil led in him.

And he shall be the righteous king over them, taught

by God ;

No iniquity shall be among them in his time ;

For they shall all be holy, and the ir king shall be theanointed of the Lord.

He shall not trust in horses , in horsemen and bows ;

He shall not heap up gold and silver for his warfare ,Ne ither w ill he put his trust in numbers in the day of

batt le .

He shall himse lf be free from sin, to rule a mightypeople ,

To chast ise the ir leaders, and to destroy sinners by the

power of his word .

Wh ile he liveth he shall not be feeble in the serviceof his God,

For God wi ll strengthen him w ith his holy spirit ,And make him w ise in counse l w ith strength and

righteousness.

The blessing of the Lord shall make him of a good

courage ,And he shall not fail .*

This is a modest ideal and sparing in the miraculous, it is due rather to the prophetic literature than to Daniel and the apocalypses . TheMessiah is the king and type of righteousness,but he is not raised above humanity. He is apersonage less supernatural and transcendentthan Elijah or Michael. He is given difi erently

Psa. of Solomon xvu. 2 1—33 , 36—38.



the person of the Messiah did not count formuch . But it appears certain that the peoplewere more occupied than the books with theexpected liberator, and that for him thenational independence was a matter of the firstimportance. The pious and righteous prince ofthe Psalms of Solomon was acceptable to thedevout, and the heavenly man of Enoch to thetheologians but the first-comer who spokeabout the liberty of Israel was the favourite ofthe populace. The historian Josephus recordsmany instances of adventurers who thus gainedcredit. Judas the Galilean, who stirred up arevolt over the enrolment of Quirinius, declaredthat it was shameful and heinous to pay taxesto the Romans , considering that the Jewsshould have no master but God. Thosewere the principles which roused uneducatedbelievers. During the siege of Jerusalem byTitus, they never tired of waiting for a manifestation from heaven , to save the city and thetemple . In the time of Hadrian, Barcochba gothimself recognised as Messiah, and he wasgreeted in that capacity by Akiba, one of themost learned rabbis of his age. The ideal ofJesus was only popular through the simplicityof its conceptions : it was not so at all throughthe purity of its moral characteristics, nor bythe depth of its religious sentiment, whi ch relied

Messianism 2 5 9

upon God alone for the avenging act by whichthe natural freedom of the kingdom of the justwould be established.

Speaking generally, it may be said that allthose who talked in those days about the kingdom of God and its coming, about the Messiahand his reign, were sure to find some believers.No one was exacting about proofs and evidenceonly the conclusion mattered. If, by an impossibility, any one had come forward to exposethe spurious Daniel, by showing that he was anignoramus in his history of the kings of Babylon ; that he was mistaken when he introducedan empire of the Medes between the Chaldmanand Persian empires ; that he did not knoweven the duration of the latter, the censorwould have merely wasted his time over thislearning and criticism. The dark language ofthe apocalypses always lends itself to the sub

t iltie s of exegesis and the subterfuges of apologists. A people that is greedy in hopes does nottrouble about the foundation for the promisesmade to it. At the time of Antiochus, messianichope did not lead to a kingdom of God, but to atemporary restoration of the Jewish nationality.

Undeniably it harboured a great deal of illusion ; and if it could inspire much heroism, itcould also lead by blind fanaticism to thegravest disasters.


The popular imagination was assuredly morestirred by the material forms in which theannouncement of God’s kingdom was expressedthan with the spiritual and moral bas is whichunderlay the apocalyptic visions, as formerlythe message of the prophets. They ponderedmore upon the revolution that God was thoughtto be preparing than upon the conditions ofrighteousness which were necessary for sharingin the kingdom of the saints. The messianichope roused the Jews against the Romandomination, and the results were other than inMaccabaean days. The inward quality of thish0pe, a faith solely religious and moral , anaspiration for goodness through truth andjustice, were mingled with hopes of a brilliantfortune in this world, of Israel’s material victory over the Gentiles, of the vengeance of thenational God on those who had oppressed hispeople. The Gospel of Jesus made the Spiritualelement prevail over the material ; but it wasonly the crucified Messiah who caused thenotion of an earthly, national, and politicaltriumph to disappear among his followers .Christianity issued, so to speak, from theambiguity to which Jesus owed his death.

And one may assert, too, that messianismkill ed the people which aimed at its literalfulfilment.


2 6 2 The Religion of I srael

story of the apostle Paul. It may be said thatwherever that missionary of the Gospel carriedthe faith of Christ he found organized synagogue s, which had not only their Jewi sh following , but also other adherents , recruited frompaganism , and composed especially of thosewho feared God "

; that is of persons who,without entering the Jewish community throughcircumcision, accepted monotheism, attended theservices of the synagogue , and observed certainrules of the Law. It was in this half-Jewishworld that the Christian preaching won itsearliest recruits .The older Judaism had favoured to someextent a propaganda among the Gentiles. Wehave seen what were the hopes of the SecondIsaiah . The same notions are also found inthe closing chapters of the book (lvi.which are from a later writer, and in certainpsalms . The prophet, who is known by thename of Malachi, in his criticism of contemporary Judaism , goes so far as to set paganson the same footing as Jewish believers, and

to say that the Gentiles pay God a homagethat is equally acceptable to him, if not evenmore so, than the sacrifices of the temple . TheBook of Jonah has something of the same kind.

The Wisdom literature had at first a tendencyto conceive of religion as a moral belief

,more

Messianism 2 6 3

or less disengaged from the Law . The persecution of Antiochus Epiphane s stirred up arevival of the Jewish spirit ; and, in Palestineat least, there was a strong reaction againstthe spread of pagan thought and manners ;but proselytism of the Gentiles did not ceaseto be carried on . In the method of treatingthem, two tendencies were soon developedamong the doctors of the Law : one, moreliberal

,facilitating intercourse with non-Jews ,

and helpful to proselytizing ; this was the wayof Hillel and his school : the other was narrower,and scrupulous in all intercourse with pagans ,and really opposed to any propaganda ; thiswas represented by Shammai and his disciples .It was the latter method which prevailed finallyat the time of the revolt against Rome. TheBooks of Esther and Judith Show that mistrustof the heathen could easily pass into hatred .

Judaism had, to favour it, the fascinationthat all the eastern religions then exercised overthe Roman world, which could no longer satisfyits religious aspirations by its traditional worships : and it had an advantage over theother eastern religions in its loftier teaching ,its genuine morality, its tougher and moreextended organization . All the synagogues ofthe dispersion, not only within the empire butbeyond it, used the same sacred books ; they


all, even those which were most accessible topagans , were zealous for the Law ; they wereall in touch with Jerusalem by their regularcontributions and pilgrimages . And a strongfeeling of brotherhood , instead of hierarchicalfetters, united all these scattered communitiesinto a religious society filled with vitality andstrength .

But Judaism had against it certain practices,several of which were annoying and eccentriccircumcision especially was a practice whichthe heathen considered ridiculous . The Law hadmoulded Judaism in such a way that withoutbeing either a nation or a church , strictlyspeaking, it was a kind of national churchinto which people could not be admittedwithout becoming Jewish : to belong to it was,so to speak, for a man to proclaim himselfin his own country a member of an aliensociety. It was not thus with the other andless exclusive oriental worships , which mightbe adopted without breaking from paganism.

That rupture, which Judaism enforced sharplyby its external modes of living, was based alsoupon the demands of monotheism. And monotheism thus interpreted was precisely whatthe heathen understood least. What the mostenlightened pagans said about the God of theJews, and about their ofiensive disdain for all



Jews : God had abandoned the Gentiles toignorance and error, while it pleased him toinstruct Israel . Placed before the pagan civilization,

the Jews seemed inclined for a timeto appropriate it, but only by affecting torediscover in it their own property. Never wasthere seen such a torrent of apocryphal andspurious literature as was produced by theHellenistic Judaism : as much to heighten itsimportance with the pagans, to silence theirobjections, to humiliate them in that whichthey considered their most valuable possession,namely science and philosophy, as to extendamong them a propaganda of Israelitishmonotheism. Marvellous legends concerningthe origins of the Greek translation of thescriptures, the Septuagint, forged quotationsfrom classical authors, deceptive fables aboutthe heroes in the Bible, fictions of every kindfor the greater glory of Israel and its religionnothing was overlooked which could serveto exalt the Jews above the pagans . All theancient civilizations had been schooled by Israeland its ancestors all the philosophers of Greeceand Rome owed to the Law whatever theyknew about truth. The Jews really believedthat they were the light of the world ; butthey understood the question rather differentlyfrom the old prophets. If, then, the choicest

Messianism 2 67

spirits of antiquity were unable to appreciatethe religious value of Judaism , it was partly,perhaps, because the way in which it waspresented was not likely to give them a highnotion of it. The Jewish literature inspiredthem with little esteem or trust ; and so theydid not try to solve the riddle which the Jewishreligion presented to them : the striking contradiction between its national worship ,

andits universal God. The petty aspects of thesystem were far more visible.The reign of Herod was the most prosperoustime of Judaism under the Roman domination.

Herod, understanding the people whom he hadto govern, ordered his administration so asnever to wound their religious prejudices ; apolicy of which the imperial government showeditself incapable when it ruled directly. By hispolitical shrewdness he was able to acquire asort of protectorate over all the Jews whow ere scattered through the Roman world ;this both strengthened their position in theempire, and was most favourable to theirpropaganda. He guaranteed the safety of theJews abroad while he repressed their fanaticismat home . After him, that fanaticism brokeloose. The first act of the Roman authority,whenArchelaus the tetrarch of Judaea was deposed ,was a census for levying taxes, which


immediately stirred up a rebellion : it wasintolerable to the people of God to feel themselves subjected so completely to a foreign rule.This was a prelude to the troubles whichunder Nero and Hadrian, brought about theruin of Jerusalem, and separated Judaism fromthe land in which it had waited so long andvainly for the kingdom of Yahweh. As faras religious history is concerned, it is suffi cientto add that the enmity against Rome wasalways growing, and that hatred of the pagansdestroyed proselytism. After the war whichended in the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus

,

monotheistic propaganda became the work ofChristianity, which was now separated fromJudaism and rejected by it. Judaism thenceforward was barred against all externalinfluence : it regarded all profane culture withhorror, and absorbed itself in a microscopicstudy and a scrupulous observance of its Law.

§ 4

And, what is more extraordinary, messianismalso fell, as though exhausted or played out

,

in the last convulsions of Jewish nationalism,

under Hadrian. The subject of the Messiahwas no more than a thesis for rabbinicaldiscussions, like any other point of Biblicaldoctrine ; but the messianic fever, which had



Jesus of Nazareth appeared, various tendenciesprevailed among the Jews, and a sort ofcompromise was reached which kept the peoplemore or less in a complete and voluntarysubmission to the Romans . The party whichwe may describe as messianic , and which hadreconquered the national independence by armsin the days of the Maccabees , lived on chieflyamong those who were called Pharisees, thatis the devout and zealous , the separated " fromthe profane world ; who clung to a rigorousobservance of the Law, and who saw in thata pledge of deliverance for Israel. Full ofhatred and contempt for paganism, they borethe yoke of the foreigner impatiently

,while

waiting for God to liberate his people. Manyof them, especially among the doctors of theLaw, who were the most enlightened part ofthe Pharisean sect, drew sufficient inward joyfrom the study and practice of the commandments, and they had no wish at all toprecipitate God’s hour, nor to encourage anymovements of revolt, which the most ordinaryprudence would have disapproved. The populace was urged on without thinking

,by the

ardour of its faith , and by an immoderate desirefor a victory by God, which would have wonthe national independence from the conqueredGentiles . The notion of a resurrection of the

Messianism 2 7 1

just having penetrated since Daniel into thepopular beliefs, they flattered themselves thatGod would soon crush the foreign oppressor,send his Messiah , and establish again the throneof David ; and that the righteous dead wouldrise and take their place among the elect in thenew kingdom.

Nevertheless the Pharisees, whether moderates or zealots , were not officially the religiousheads of the people. The Sadducean priests ,the real or imaginary descendants of Zadok ,

did not share their inflated and risky hopes .In the time of Antiochus Epiphane s, severalmembers of the higher priesthood werefavourable to Hellenism ; and, in the timeswhich followed, the priests of Jerusalem, whowere rich and well endowed, seemed alwaysmore anxious to maintain their ex istingsecurity than to toil for the coming reignof the saints. The present, in fact, was tooprofitable for them not to mistrust a futurebrought in by revolution. Under the variouspowers which had followed one another, theposition of the priests had always been betterthan that of the people. The state of thingsby which they profited, and about whichthey had little to complain, was good for

them to preserve. If the national independence could have been gained without running


too many risks,they would have preferred

independence to subjection ; when fanaticismbroke bounds

,at the end of Nero’s reign,

they followed the movement in spite of themselves, trying always to restrain it, afterhaving done their utmost to hinder it. Asthe Law was Israel’s single rule of life, andwas also the source of their own revenues,they made a profession of respecting theLaw, and of not looking beyond it for truthsand hopes : they thus came to oppose thetheory of a resurrection

,which was the

corner-stone of current messianism ; and, withthe resurrection

,the waiting for a kingdom

of God. Politicians invested with a sacredcharacter, the Sadducees had ceased to bea religious influence. Their only powercame from their social position ; and theystrove, for very human motives, to cool thereligious and national sentiment which wasinflamed by messianic expectations. Theywere implacable enemies to the personificationof these hopes, when it presented itself beforethem, simple and unarmed, in the featuresof Jesus.Such were the two great parties beforewhom Christ found himself, and they bothrejected him. They were not two separatesects within Judaism : rather, they were two



secret books. They kept the sabbath .

Marriage was repudiated by them ; butJosephus says that some of them allowedit under certain conditions. They condemnedoaths

,except that oath which they took

upon entering the order, after a preparatorynoviciate. The existence of such a sect,whose origin was prior to the close of the secondcentury before Christ, shows at least thatstrange developments could be produced inJudaism, notwithstanding the tyranny oftradition. The Essenes do not seem to havebeen condemned, but rather esteemed, byorthodox Judaism. On the other hand, theydo not seem to have had any profound effectupon it : nor does Christianity seem , at anyrate in the beginning, to have had any connexion with the Essenes.Thus the work of Moses and the prophetshad reached the stage of maturity, if it had notpassed it : all progress became impossible underthe yoke of the Law ; and religion tended tolose itself, on one hand in extravagance, on theother in worldliness. To continue growing

,it

had to burst its traditional covering,as the

germ that wishes to expand must split the seedwhich contains it. It was through Christianitythat the religion of Israel conquered the Romanworld. But, independently of that success,

Messianism 2 7 5

which was not altogether its own, its particularhistory is extraordinary enough ; and the moralrenovation of the ancients’ Jahvism by theprophets is one of the most fruitful incidentsfor the historian of religions. Perhaps thereis not another which shows more clearly thatthe phenomenon of religion cannot be reducedto another form of human activity, nor explainedsolely by causes pertaining to the social order ;but that it expresses, in its purest manifestations, an endeavour to attain, beyond what isreal and tangible

, an ideal or a transcendentreality, conceived as the principle and goalof a moral life.It is almost useless to ask whether Judaismby itself could have accomplished the work ofChristianity. What Judaism could do of itself,it did. A religious society so strongly constituted was not really free to transform itselfinto another society, with the same expressionof belief and the same moral principles, butwithout the same obsolete practices and thesame exclusive spirit. We cannot imaginethe authorities of Judaism, its priests anddoctors

,deciding to sacrifice the letter of the

Law,to suppress the traditional Observances,

to transform themselves into an universalchurch

,which would accept pagans without

branding them by the Jewish circumcision.


Such a metamorphosis would have been aSuicide of the old religion. A society cannoteither wish or effect a suicide of that kind, evenif it be the indispensable and certain conditionof a renewed life. The individuals could notall see

,either at the same time or clearly

enough,the need for such a transformation ;

the mass of believers would never understandthe necessity those who led them wouldneither dare nor wish to discuss it. Nothingcould make a form of religion, which stillsatisfied the majority of its adherents, althoughrunning a proximate risk of losing them,

suddenly become something difierent fromwhat it actually was .Christianity owed its success to its separationfrom Judaism, which treated it as a heresy.

If, by an impossibility, all the Jews had acceptedJesus for their Messiah when he went up topreach in Jerusalem, the war of exterminationwhich ended in the catastrophe of A.D. 70wouldhave broken out thirty years earlier ; and therewould have been no Christianity. Jesus could nothave been then accepted ; because the circumstances and conditions of his appearance did notendorse his message, which was the announcement of God’s kingdom : he did not wish to

lead the people into a revolt against Rome ; andhe was not able to make the priests and scribes


INDEX

INDEX OF PERSONS

Baal-Berith, 91

Aaron, 33, 126, 208 Baal of Judah , 122

Abiathar, 122 Baal-Melcarth, 137Abimelech, 113 Balaam, 92, 100, 131, 133

Abinadab, 122, 123, 125 Barak, 131Abraham, 7, 11 , 25 , 26, 30, 34

—6, 68 Barcochba, 258, 269

79, 103, 211 Baruch, 13

Achaeus, 27 Baruch , Apocalypse of, 269Achiyami , 37 Beast , the , 243Adam, 211 Bossuet , 249Adonis, 91E olos, 27

Ahab, 79, 132, 135 , 137— 9 Caleb, 31Ahaz, 160, 163—4 , 167 Canaan, 91Ahio, 123 Canaanites, 76Ahriman, 245 Chemosh , 82 , 102

Akiba, 258 Christ , 262 , 272Al exander Jannaaus, 257 Cousin, Victor, 47Ammon, the God, 112 Cyrus, 12, 16, 202, 209,Amon, 169, 182

Amos, 12, 23—4 , 75 , 132, 136,

146, 149, 155

Antiochus Epiphanes, 16, 18, 231 , Dagon, 90240, 248, 252 , 259, 262, 269, 271 Darius, 14

Archelaus, 267 David, 21 , 28, 31-2, 66, 88, 90,Ashera, 115 109 , 118, 121

-2 , 128, 181 , 271

Ashur, the God, 112, 239 Deborah, 37, 131, 241Assurbannipal , 164 Doros, 27Astarte, 115

Athaliah, 140Rl-Berith, 91 , 117 , 175

Eleazar, 208Baal, 102, 131 Eli , 121Baals, 110, 112, 115-19 E liashib, 209

2 80 Index of Persons

Elijah, 23, 130—1 , 133, 187-8, 253—4 ,

256

Elisha, 130, 133—4 , 138-9El-Shaddai , 117

Enoch,253

Esarhaddon, 164

Esau, 92

Ezekiel, 152, 165 , 194 , 196—8, 240,242 , 246

Ezra, 11 , 12, 14 , 16, 24 ,

215—17 , 246

Ezra, Apocalypse of, 269

GGabriel, 22—3, 24— 9Genius ofRome , the , 239Gideon, 76Gog, 240, 246

Habakkuk , 13Hadrian, 258, 268Haggai, 14 , 219Hammurabi, 12 , 124Hell en, 27Herod, 33, 209, 220, 224 , 266, 269Hezekiah, 12 , 62, 160—2 , 167, 170Hiel, 79Hilkiah , 22, 170—2Hillel, 220, 262Hosea, 23—4 , 119, 136, 146, 149, 151157-8, 167 , 181 , 196, 245

IAM , 98

Ion, 27

Isaac, 26, 34 , 78, 92, 103, 157

Isaiah , 13 , 24 , 152 , 158—68, 188, 196,

229 , 240, 242 , 245

Isaiah , the Second, 198—203, 24 6,248, 250

Isaiah," the author of 1vi.— lxvi .,262

Israel (Jacob), 25 , 26, 68

Israel, the people, passimIthamar, 208

K

Koheleth, 223, 234

JJacob, 25 , 26, 27 , 29, 34 , 92 , 100Jacobel, 38Jahvism,passimJason of Cyrene , 17Jehoiakin, 1 53, 185

Jehu, 99, 101— 2, 134 , 138

-9

Jephtha, 78—9, 102 , 167Jeremiah, 13 , 16, 24 , 152-3, 165 , 1185—9, 24 5

Jeroboam, 135—6

IL , 155

Jesus, 33, 258, 260, 265 , 270, 272, 2277

Jews,passimJoash, 139

Job, 229, 231

Joel, 14Jonadab, 101 , 138Jonathan, 128

Joram, 138

Joseph , 26, 29, 30, 91 , 105 , 119

Josephel , 38Josephus, 258, 274Joshua, 11 , 108, 174

the Priest , 209Josiah, 10, 13, 22—3, 119, 170—5 , 18229

Judah, 105 , 109,passimJudaism, passion

Judas, the Galil ean, 258Judges, the , 23, 32 , 110Jupiter, 26


Index of Places

Yahweh-Shalom, 76, 118

Yahweh, loves blood, 79—80theName of, 89the Angel of, 89, 221captured byPhil istines, 90meaning of the name, 96

100

equivalent to It is not

to IAM

a spirit of the night , 100his early character, 101aMountainGod, 101

a Fire God, 101a StormGod, 101

non-moral, 103irritable and frantic, 103,156

tricky and thievish, 103kill sEgyptian First-born,

104

his Passing Through, 105the God ofLevi, 106the God of Kadesh and

Sinai, 106The Wa/rs of, 106, 107 , 112aWarGod, 111 , 240, 241

mi ghty inbattle , 112Yahweh-Sabaoth, 111 , 118, 123, 241Yahweh-Nissi , 107 , 118Yahweh, supplants C anaani t eBaals, 117— 18

becomes an inhabitant ofCanaan, 119

becomes aBaal, 119

Yahweh , becomes aMalek, 119 , 165jealous, exclusive , 121takes possession of Zion121

demands First-born children

,149

the Day of, 15 5

his ferocityandrage ,156—5Moloch, 164 , 167orders holocausts ofFirstborn, 165

Yahweh-Melek, 168-9Yahweh, his Law

“ found," 170a theocracy, 175

becomes homeless, 193spiritualizedand enlarged210

his name not uttered, 22]eludes the problemofJob

231

loves fat victims, 240vanqui shes Chaos, 241ordersNature , 242the Servant of, 247the great and terrible Dayof, 254

Z

Zadok, 126, 177 , 271Zechariah, 14 , 219, 24 7Zedekiah, 185Zephaniah, 13Zerubbabel, 203, 209Zipporah, 66

INDEX OF PLACES

Amalek, 106, 108, 125—6Ammon, 35Ammonites, 113Amorites, 174

Arabia,32—3, 36, 97

Arabian Desert, 29Arabian tribes, 31 , 69Ashdod, 90

Assyria, 21, 144 , 16

Index of Places

Baal-Pear, 157Babylon, 11 , 12, 21 , 36, 43, 83, 110,

152 , 261

Bethsheba, 23, 26, 117Bethel, 23, 26, 148,

180

Beth-Peor, 108Beth-Shemesh, 122

0

Canaan, 32, 35 , 37, 74 , 78-9, 113conquest of, 30, 37, 95 , 106,108

settlement of, 34-5 , 108,

115

Chaldees , 85Chaldze anEmpire, 36Capitol, the, 239

DDamascus, 21 , 137, 139, 160Dan, 107, 135 , 149

Eden, gardenof, 197, 210

Edom, 241

Egypt , 26, 29—31 , 33—4 , 36, 87, 91 , 9698—9, 105 , 160, 183

sojourn in, 28—9, 33, 68—9Egyptians, 119El-Amarna, 37-8Elamitic Gulf, 32El-Moré , 79

Ephraim, 21 , 23, 155

Endor, 228

Eternal City, the, 239Euphrates, 36

GGehenna, 168, 251Gerizim,

218

Gibeon, 112Gilgal, 135

2 83

Goshen, 29, 105Greece, 21

Haran, 35Hebron, 23, 25 —6, 31, 117Hinnom, 165 , 168, 180Horeb, 11 , 88I, J , K

Idumsea, 35 , 97

Jericho, 71, 113-14 , 128Jerusalem, 17 , 23, 90, 109, 110, 118,

139, 149,—1 , 164 ,

193, 251 , 258, 261, 264 , 268—9

Jordan, 30, 67, 108Judaia, 30Judah, 21 , 30-2, 122, 135 , 160, 237Kadesh, 32—4 , 90, 96, 105 , 107 , 118,126—7

Kirjath-Baal, 122Kirjath-Jearim, 122

N 0, P,R

Nineveh, 13, 20, 35 , 43Nile , 33Ophra, 76, 118Palestine, 11, 25 , 35 , 38

Macpelah, 26

Magog, 240, 246Massah, 107 , 137Medes, 259

Megiddo, 182Meribah-Kadesh, 32,Mesopotamia, 35 , 68Midian, 32, 97Midianites, 113Mizraim, 31

Moab, 35 , 81 , 170

Moabites, 113Moreh, 175

Musri, 31

Index of Subject s

Paran, 32 Sheol, 227 , 233Persia, 21 Shiloh , 91 , 107 , 111 , 118, 122Philistines, 66, 90, 113, 121, 132, 156 Sinai, 11 , 12 , 29-33, 89, 96,176, 228 241

Phoenicia, 35 , 137 Susa, 20Phoenicians, 43Promised Land, 12Rephidim, 107 Taanak, 27

Rome, 21 , 239, 263 , 266, 268, 276 Tekoa, 155Romans, 209, 239, 258—9, 267 , 269—70 Temple , the , 22 . 90. 119, 136, 149

153, 160, 193 , 269

Town-of-the-Woods, 122, 125Samaria, 137 Tyre , 132. 138

Sarepta, 138Seir, 32 , 241 U, z

Shechem, 23, 26, 75 , Ur of the Chaldees, 35174-5 , 218 Zion, 88, 121 , 188, 198

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Assyrianmonarchy, 20, andpasac'Amos,

"12 Assumption ofMoses,

"

251

Animism, 44 , 48, 63, 81 , andpassimAngel, of the Greeks, 222 B

ofPersia, 222 Baal, baals,passimofYahweh, 221 Babylonian Captivity, 19

Anti-Semitism, 265 language , 36“Apocalypse , ofEzra, 269 Baruch

,

"5 , 17 , 25 1

Apocalypse , ofBaruch,269 Blessings irrevocable , 91

Apocalypse , of John," 243, 246 Blood,passim, and see YahwehApocalyptic literature , 14 abstinence from, 11 , 27

Apocalyptic writing, begins WithU ofierings of, 81

Ezekiel, 196 Bondage , the house of, 30Apocryphal writing, passion, and Brazen Serpent , 62, 100, 162265—7 Bull God, 63

Arabs, 35 , 43

Aramaeanmigration, 35—6 0

Aramaeans, 156 Cain, tribe of, 96Archives, 6 Canaan, religions of, 115— 21Ark, 65 , 88 111 , 121

— 23, 136 Canon,of Q T . settled, 4

Ass, Balaam’s, 100 Casuistry, dates fromEzra, 213

Ashera, 116 Chebiri, the, 37—8Asmonaean dynasty, 224 , 237 Chaldaeanmythology, 27, 35


Index of Subject s

KingdomofGod, the ; 252 ,

Habakkuk, 13Haggai ," 14 Kings, " 4 , 10, 13, 24 , 82Hagiographa, the , 4 , 5Hebrews, the , 37 , 68Hellenism,

22 4,233 , 271Hexateuch ,6,20, 67

Hiero-Douloi , 117High Priesthood, originates,Homeric Gods, the, 112

LLamentations," 5 , 16

Law the ,passimof Holiness," 10, 11 , 204Yahweh,

“ found, 170

the , a summary of all wisdom“ Hosea," 12

Itables of, 89Lepers, 72—3

Idols, indi spensable .51 Levi tribe ofImmortahty, 227 Levites, 125 , 177183 6 0, the fearOf, 117 Levitical legislation,

12

‘

I‘

S

ianliff 4 13 22 25

Leviticus," 10saia i L th 257

xl .— lv., 194 0908 ’ 6 ’

JJacob, the blessings of, 124 , 126Jahvism, passion

Jahvistic history, the 6, 9—12 , 23, 27Jehovah, the term inaccurate , 96Jeremiah," 4 , 6, 13

epistle of, 5 , 17

Job,"4 , 15 , 19, 20, 54 , 200, 229,

231

Joel," 14Jonah, 14 , 20, 262

Joseph, the tribes of, 132Joshua, " 4 , 6, 67 , 109Judaism,passimJudges, 4

,10, 24 , 95 , 113

Judith ," 5 , 17 , 20, 262Just , the ," 230

$ 9

Kenites, 96, 101 Moses, 100

Kingdomof God, the ; germs of in Morality, 53Hosea Moses, Assumption of,"] 8, 251

becomesuni Mountain of God, 32versal in Isaiah Mourning, 215 , 219

Malachi," 14 , 2541 Maccabees," 16, 2512 Maccabees, 17 , 251

Maccabees, the , 5 ,Maccabaean rising, 17 , 224 , 260—1269

Magic, passimMasseba,

115

Messiah, the , 257— 60, 268—70, 271

a crucified, 260Messianic hope, 225 , 260

notion, its growth, 240King, 24 7 , 254—6Prince , 157

Messianism,pass'i/m

“ Micah," 13Monolatry, 4 4Monotheism,passim

not the religion 0

Index of Subjects

NNabi , 27, 121 , 129, 131—4 , 139, 152,188

Nabis, unruly, put in stocks, 153" Nahum,

"13

Nazir, 121 , 132 , 133“Nehemiah,

"5 , 206

New Moon, 85—6

Numbers,"

10, 62

Obadiah,

"14

Oracle , 120, 127-9, 131 ,181 , 228

Paganism, 47Panthe ism, 101Paschal Lamb, 86, 87Passover, 80, 86, 148Parables ofEnoch, 257

Pamh'

pomena, 5Pentateuch," 4 , 6, 12, 97, 107Pentecost , 86— 7Persian domination, 12 , 15 , 230Pharaohs, the , 26Pharisees, 270—1 , 273Piety, personal, 225Polygamy, licit , 216Polytheism, 44 , 52-3, 56, 63

in the Temple , 163Popular songs, 6Priesthood, the Levi tical ; its originand functions, 124—9

reorganized, 177Priestly Code , the ," 21 , 24 , 204—6Prophecies, anonymous, 14

pseudonymous, 14Prophecy,passi/mProphetism,passim, and 129—40Prophets, theirhabitual inaccuracy,154— 5

writing or literary, 153themodernity of, 19

2 87

Prostitution, Sacred, 117Proverbs," 4 , 15 , 17 , 232Psalms,

"4 , 15 , 225

— 6 , 230Psalms of Solomon,18

,258

Purity and impurity, 27 , 70-73

R

Rahab, the monster, 200

Rechabites, the , 102 , 132, 138Religion,passionResurrection of the dead, 227,271

R06 2 a seer, 129

Ruth,

"5 , 16, 216

SSabbath, 11 , 65 , 83

— 5

a Canaanite custom, 119

Sabbatarianism, growth of, 207— 8

Sacerdotal Code ," 11 , 12 , 14 , 24 ,

204—5 , 213

Sacerdotal History, 11 , 12 , 27

Sacrifices, 65 , 73—8, andpassimhuman, 78—80

of Christ , 83domestic and not sacer

dotal , 127 , 176Sadducees, 218, 251 , 271— 3Samaritan Schism, 216-19, 25 1

Samuel," 4 , 10, 24Scribes the , inaugurated, 220, 276Seers, 129, 132Semites, 56 68

Septuagint , the , 5 , 266

Seraphim, the , 223

Serpent , the Brazen, 62Servant ofYahweh , the , 247Shew bread, 76Sibylline Books, 18Snake ofEden, the , 244Snake God, 63Solomon, Psalms of,

" 18, 254

Son ofMan, 257

2 88 Index of Subject s

Song of Songs," 5 , 15 U

Spirit worship, 44 Unleavened bread, 87—8, 148Superstition, 5 5Synagogue, 85 , 262

WTabernacles, feast of, 86—7 , 207 Wars Of Yakweh, the ,

"106-7

Tabu ,

‘

80, 84

Tattooing, ofprophets, 205 Wicked the , 230

Teraph/im,180—1 Wisdom,

"5 . 17Wisdom personified and Judaised

Ti tans, 26 232 , 865

Tobit ," 5 , 17, 20 25-1 Witch ofEndor, 228

Tophet, 165 , 167—8, 180

Torah, the , 107 , 120, 124

Totemism, 55, 62 , 87 Zechariah," 14Tribes, the twelve , 27 Zephaniah," 13

UNWINBROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.

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