HB-05-Judaism
Judaism
Encounter
with One God in Nature and the Social Process
It
may be said that one great theme dominates the course of Jewish religion. This
is the theme that a single, righteous God is at work in the social and natural
order. This theme was not immediately arrived at, but somehow it seems implicit
from the beginning. Only morally and socially sensitive minds could conceive
of history in such terms or develop a group consciousness of such a god.
Being socially
sensitive, the Hebrews were historical‑minded, and not in any casual or
intermittent way but steadily. This fact needs stressing. The Hebrew scriptures
are as complete a record of the nation's history as the Hebrew historians could
make them. That their work, from the eighth century B.c. onward, was
fundamentally sound is more and more evident as modern archeological research
proceeds with the task of unearthing the vestiges of the early Palestinian
cultures. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that the Hebrews wrote religious,
not secular, history, and the facts they cited and the traditions they invoked
no longer have quite the values for us that they had for them. In fact, their
narratives contain hidden meanings and significances to which they paid no heed
because they took them for granted. But we must bring these matters out into
the light. It is highly rewarding to do so. When the necessary interpretations
and reconstructions have been made, the scriptural record gains in meaning.
Known to the
Christians as the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures have been regarded as
"God's word"; for in the belief of the devout, these writings are a
revelation of the will of God not only to the Jews but to all mankind. Taken
together, from Genesis to Malachi, they form a sacred canon; that is to say,
they have been accepted as standard texts of the faith, having passed tests of
their authenticity and been pronounced inspired and absolutely authoritative.
We shall see later
how and when these sacred texts were written. Some centuries after the last of
them was set down in writing, they were all gathered together into the present
canon at a synod of rabbis held at Jamnia, in Palestine, about 90 A.D.; after
this the canon became "fixed," that is, no longer subject to change
and limited to these works only. Some books that were rejected as not fully
meeting the standards for true revelation had nevertheless enough value to
acquire the status of semi‑sacred or semi‑canonical writings.
Christians later
gave them the Greek name the Apocrypha, and the Roman Catholic Church admitted
them to its canon as a separate collection.
The Jewish canon,
like the New Testament, has been
submitted to the most minute examination by both the "lower" or
textual and the "higher" or historical and literary "criticism."
In the process each book has been taken apart and examined piecemeal, tested
against archeological research, assigned to this or that tradition or
authorship, and relegated, part by part, to this or that date or era. This
testing has shattered some of the claims originally made for the canonical
books, but historians are now confident that the Hebrew and Christian
scriptures are better and more truly known and understood than ever before.
I The Religion of the Pre‑Mosaic Hebrews
The
origin of the biblical Hebrews, who belonged to the peoples speaking Semitic
languages, can be traced to the Syro‑Arabian desert, in which they
wandered for centuries. As have other Semitic groups before and since, they
camped on Arabia's northern steppes, beside oases or in areas of sparse
vegetation, crossing and re-crossing the desert's undulating wastes of flat
stone, thinly covered with pebbles or shifting sand. At each encampment they
erected straggling camel‑ or goatskin tents, pitched close to the ground.
Under such shelter their communal life ran its self‑contained course.
Each tribe lived to itself, and the day's routine was ordered by a single
authoritative voice, that of the ruling elder or patriarch, to whom the Arab
word shaykh is now applied. In those
far‑off times the implements and weapons they possessed were of stone,
and their beliefs were still in their formative stages. Suspicious of all
strangers, and yet open‑handed to a fault to any they received into their
tents, they huddled together in the vast expanse of the desert, as if back to
back against a hard and grudging world.
The Desert Heritage of the Biblical Hebrews
The biblical
Hebrews (or Israelites) owed a great deal to their desert‑bred
forefathers, even though their monotheistic faith stood in sharp contrast to
their desert heritage of polytheism, for elements of this heritage, reduced
indeed to a minor role, remained in Israelite religion for a long time. As one
reads the Bible (or for that matter the Qur'dn) one finds vestiges (and also repudiations)
of the beliefs and practices we are about to review.
Among the Semites
of the desert of the period of about 2000 B.C. the veneration of stones and
pillars was all but universal. Certain heaps of stones were particularly viewed
with respect. A desert people will honor its landmarks. The Semitic name for a
pillarlike rock that was sacred (mazzebah)
was often on the lips of the earliest Hebrews, and the word gilgal, used later by the Hebrews as the
name of a town in Palestine, meant a circular series of pillars. Stones and
pillars provided convenient objects around which religious ceremonies and
sacrifices might be conducted, but originally they had their own awesome
significance, perhaps because of their odd shape, or suggestively human
appearance, or striking position on a mountain top or athwart a much traveled
way. Often godlings and goddesses were thought to make their habitation there.
It was natural
among a desert people, unused to seeing enough of them, that wells, springs,
and streams had a specially sacred character and usually were credited to the
creative power of spirits or gods that had brought them into being and could
readily, if angered, dry them up again.
Trees in general,
but evergreen trees in particular, were, it was felt, full of spirit‑energy.
Groves became holy places. But trees were sometimes as much dreaded as beheld
with rejoicing, for a desert people must fear being entangled in a thicket‑the
lair of wild beasts and the ambush of demons‑and, moreover, trees may
draw down the lightning or even be animated demonic beings themselves. On the
other hand, some trees whispered wisdom in the rustling of their leaves. They
were protective spirits, giving relief and shelter, and under certain
conditions they were capable of delivering oracles, should the rare individual
who could understand their language be there to hear.
Of the "beasts
of the field," serpents were universally feared (and as universally
revered) for being demoniacally sly. Goats were regarded as incarnations of
"hairy ones" (Hebrew se'irim). As
for the untamable wild things of the desert‑the panthers, leopards,
hyenas, wolves, and foxes‑they were the savage flock of demon‑gods
of the wasteland. The swift‑footed ostrich and birds of prey were
demonic, too.
But the desert Semites
believed in many spirits besides these. Some more or less fearsome spirits had
a human shape but a nonhuman character, like the jinn of later Arabia. There
were seductive female night demons, like the hairy Lilith who, according to
later Hebrew tradition, led Adam astray. The raging desert wind that brought
the sandstorm was a malevolent demon; he was connected with pestilence and
ruin. There were others of a like evil disposition; but the beneficent spirits
far outnumbered them.
And here we come upon
a fact of some importance in the present study. Many spirits that possessed a
high degree of power or dynamism were given a name universally current among
Semitic peoples‑it was el or eloah (sing.) or elim or elohim (pl.), a
word with the general meaning of "superhuman being" or
"divinity." This term was broad and inclusive; it was applicable to
major and minor divinities alike, and although it usually designated the more
beneficent powers, it was also applied to demons. As a rule it referred to no
specific supernatural individual, unless hyphenated with a descriptive
adjective or with the name of a locality. This held good until among the
Aramaeans and the Hebrews it came to mean, whether in its singular or plural
form, but one God.
{How
the plural of eloah (elohim) could st
and for one being may perhaps be explained thus: the many gods were eventually
considered to be names of but one true God (as we have already seen happen
elsewhere in the world), and then the plural term signified "the One who
is All," "the All‑god," or "the Totality of the
Divine." This word has the distinct connotation of "the real god." In contrast, the word
most used in the Hebrew scriptures for idols is efilim, which means the "null‑gods" or "non‑gods."}
Other words used as
appellations of the gods in the Semitic world were Adonis or Adoni (Hebrew,
Adonai) meaning "Lord"; Malak or Moloch (Hebrew, Melech) meaning
"King"; Bel or Baal meaning "Land‑Lord" or
"Possessor of the Land"; and 'Ab, meaning "Father," or
"Head of the Family."
These names for the
gods point to a significant fact. The relationship between gods and men was
comparable to that of kings, landlords, and heads of families with their
subjects and dependents.
{As
has been pointed out, the gods of Mesopotamia were associated in heaven as men
were associated or organized on earth.} Of course, the higher in heaven the gods or
the more extensively developed the polytheisms, with their proliferating
mythologies and cults, the less close and personal the relationship. Among the
desert tribes, on the other hand, the divine‑human bond was warm,
intimate, and personal. Perhaps the desert simplified the relationship of god
and man by reducing nature to an empty waste. At any rate, the desert Semites
adopted toward their gods an attitude that was not like that of frightened or
wondering humans approaching the more or less impersonal and mysterious powers
of nature, but rather like that of subjects in the presence of a king or, more
intimately, like that of sons before a father.
By the time this
point was reached, we note further, a distinctive choice had been made, either
by the gods or by men. Not all the gods could be "father" or
"personal lord" to the same men; intimacy cannot be general. What
happened was this: one, or at most several, gods chose, or were chosen by, a
larger or smaller group of men (a clan) for closer, more intimate connection
than that of all the gods to all men. The bond was "peculiar" and
familiar and tended to be binding on both sides.
From the beginning,
the Hebrews seem to have had this sense of being "chosen" and of
making a choice. The case of Abraham is instructive.
Abraham and the Migration to Palestine
Abraham stands in a
somewhat new light today. Recent discoveries of long‑buried documentary
material in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine have placed him in a rather exciting
setting, highly fluid and shifting. As the biblical tradition tells us, his
forefathers pressed out of the desert in the same way that other Semitic groups
had done‑the groups that earlier became Babylonians, Aramaeans,
Phoenicians, Amorites, and Canaanites. His tribe dwelt for a time in Babylonia,
near a place called Ur of the Chaldees, and there Abraham is said to have been
born. Under the leadership of their patriarchs his people migrated along the
border of the Mesopotamian plain northwestward to Haran, a semi‑barren
caravan center on the extreme northern verge of the Arabian Desert. This
migration was made along a familiar caravan route. The social situation in
Haran was disturbed, however; and the tribe of Abraham seems not to have stayed
long, partly perhaps because of the promise of better conditions far to the
southwest, partly because of the general social condition of uneasiness and
dread.
Briefly, in the
nineteenth century B.C., in the
latter half of which Abraham apparently came to maturity, the whole Near East
was in a state of flux and tension. The Kingdom of Mari, in whose northwestern
region Haran was located, was in constant peril of being overrun by Akkadians
to the east. {In fact, this happened a
century later (ca. 1700 B.C.) when the great Amorite king, the law‑giver
Hammurabi, established the first or Old Babylonian Empire. } Both in turn were threatened by hordes of
Hurrians, poised for invasion from the Armenian mountains to the north. These
"barbaric" hordes were themselves being pushed toward a movement
southward. Behind them was the enormous pressure of a chariot‑borne Indo‑European
(Aryan) irruption into the southlands. (Once more we are confronted by these
extraordinary people, whom we have already followed into India and Iran, and.
whose fellow Indo‑Europeans we found in Greece, Italy, and northern
Europe.) Syria and Palestine were equally, if not more, disturbed. Eventually,
the Hittites and Hurrians of eastern Asia Minor were driven, the former
westward, the latter southward. The population of Palestine was swollen with
refugees of many kinds: Hurrians (the biblical Horites), Amorites, Aramaeans,
and non‑Semitic peoples from further north. And, apparently, the early
nomadic tribe with which tradition has associated Abraham had already arrived
and was about to be swept along in the general movement southward. A moving
group of associated peoples, most of them Semitic, whom the Egyptians were to
call Shashu, the Greeks Hyksos, were gathering and surging toward the Nile.
The story of
Abraham as told in Genesis is the interweaving of several‑ strands of
tradition of varying age. This has led some historians to doubt all that is
told about him. But so great a degree of scepticism seems, on present evidence,
unwarranted. It is fairly certain that he was not the only tribal leader of the
Hebrew (Habiru?) {Abraham is the first
Old Testament figure to be called a Hebrew. His descendants were commonly
called after his grandson Jacob or Israel and thus bore the name the children
of Israel or Israelites. This last name is preferred by many recent scholars to
Hebrews.} migration, but he may have
been so typical of his group that legend later centered on him. The gist of the
story is this: Abraham's personal religious experience led him to place all his
faith in a single protective deity, whom he chose, or who chose him, an El whom
he called EI‑Shaddai (of uncertain meaning; perhaps "the El of the Rock or Mountain"), who far overshadowed
the ancestral spirits or household gods represented by the teraphim‑the
wooden or stone images kept by his family for use in domestic magic and
worship. When he longed to migrate with, the group of which he was the leader
to the safer and more favored grazing lands in the southwest, El‑Shaddai
encouraged him to go there. It is clear in the biblical account that Abraham
gave his allegiance to this one being alone; that by a personal commitment he
bound himself to follow the "way of" El‑Shaddai, which was to
do kindness, and practice justice and righteousness; and that Abraham was
himself generous, hospitable, and forgiving. (See the story of his intercession
for the Sodomites in Genesis 18:23 f)
The tradition tells that when El‑Shaddai demanded the human sacrifice of
his son Isaac, he set out to obey, but his experience ended in his substituting
a ram for his son (Gen. 22). (The
story may reflect the ancient substitution of animal for human sacrifice.)
Furthermore, EI‑Shaddai promised him and his descendants a permanent home
in the Land of Canaan. So Abraham took the long journey there, with complete
faith in the promises made to him by his divine patron (whose favor he enjoyed
to such a degree he is called in the old tradition "the friend of God"),
and with his flocks and herds and the members of his small tribe came to the
land where the Canaanites dwelt. Once safely there, he made his home on the
limestone ridge that forms the main contour of the land, and after his death
his place was taken successively by his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob.
Then, according to
the tradition, a terrible famine smote the land. Unable to eke out an existence
any longer, the descendants of Abraham migrated once more, this time to the
borders of Egypt‑here the story of Joseph explains the sequence of events‑where
lay the fertile Land of Goshen.
Historians are now
inclined to supplement this account considerably. They suppose Abraham to have
migrated from Haran at the time when an Indo‑Iranian invasion seemed near
(about 1750 B.C.). He may have been
in the forefront of the push of displaced peoples toward the south. Scattered
groups of these peoples, coalescing into the invaders called the Hyksos
("Foreign Rulers"?), pushed past his descendants, who were still on
the hills, down along the sea to Egypt, which they mastered and continued to
dominate from about 1750 to about i58o. The tribe of Abraham, and no doubt
others, were drawn along, or simply followed behind, to the more fertile lands
of the Nile delta, where the Hyksos treated them as allies. At any rate, the
Hyksos used Semitic terms for the names of towns and appointed Semites as
officials under them (as in the famous case of Joseph).
For generations all went well. The Israelites in particular prospered and multiplied. Then the Egyptians arose and expelled the Hyksos (1580‑1560 B.C.) and recovered control of the whole eastern Mediterranean coast. The Israelites were not included in this expulsion of the hated ruling caste. For a century and a half no attempt was made to reduce them to a status below that of their Egyptian neighbors. But there came to the throne of Egypt a mad pharaoh, Ramses II (1304-1237 B.C.), whose passion was the building of great public works, including whole cities and monumental temples. Needing large forces of drafted or unpaid labor, he turned his eyes toward the northeastern border upon the Israelites, pounced on and made slaves of them. They were compelled, under the lash, to give their forced labor to the pharaoh's public works. Nothing appeared able to save them except either a catastrophe overwhelming Egypt or a leader arising in their own midst to rescue them from their plight. One at least, if not both, of these conditions for their escape was met.
II Moses and the Covenant with Yahweh (about 1250
B.C.)
The
high place that Moses has held in Hebrew-Jewish devotion is richly deserved.
Recent scholarship, though denying to him the authorship of the Pentateuch and
the extremely complicated legal provisions of the Law (the Torah),
{Here and in the rest of
this chapter the Law or Torah is identified with the first five books of the
Bible (the Pentateuch, the written Law), unless otherwise stated. It should be
said that Jews use the word Torah more broadly to mean God's teaching or
guidance, and thus use it to refer to all of the Hebrew scriptures plus their
accompanying traditions (preserved in the Talmud) or even to the Jewish faith
as a whole.}
has
vindicated his place of highest honor in the early history of Israel. He was a
creative personality of the first order. He revolutionized the religious
orientation of his people by persuading them to adopt the basic idea of
Israelite religion, namely, that for them there is but one God, supreme over
their history and their lives. This God had chosen Israel to be his people and
desired to make and abide by a covenant with them, a mutually binding pact.
Thereafter God would be active in their history, to bless or to punish them
according to their faithfulness to him. Elements of the ancient desert heritage-demonology,
magic, and divination‑remained in the new orientation, but they survived
now as recognitions of realities present in the physical world under God. The contrast with Semitic
polytheisms was sharp: the gods and myths of the polytheistic faiths were
henceforth to be given no hearing; they were to be ignored. Israel had but one
god.
The story of Moses has come down to us in the
narratives (known to scholars as "J" and "E") intertwined
in Exodus and Numbers. The written form of these traditions dates from four‑to
six hundred years after his time. They have preserved for us the famous tale of
Moses' infancy.
Then
a new king arose over Egypt, who ... said to his people, "See, the
Israelite people have become too numerous and too strong for us; come, let us
take precautions against them lest they become so numerous that in the case of
a war they should join forces with our enemies and fight against us." . .
.
So Pharaoh commanded all his people,
"Every boy that is born to the Hebrews, you must throw into the Nile, but
you are to let all the girls live." Now a man belonging to the House of
Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son,
and seeing he was robust, she hid him for three months. When she could no longer
hide him, she procured an ark of papyrus reeds for him, and daubing it with
bitumen and pitch, she put the child in it, and placed it among the reeds
beside the bank of the Nile. His sister posted herself some distance away to
see what would happen to him. Presently Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe
at the Nile, while her maids walked on the bank of the Nile. Then she saw the
ark among the reeds and sent her maid to get it. On opening it, she saw the
child, and it was a boy crying! She took pity on him, and said, "This is
one of the Hebrews' children." Thereupon his sister said to Pharaoh's
daughter, "Shall I go and summon a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, to
nurse the child for you?" "Go," said Pharaoh's daughter to her.
So the girl went and called the child's mother, to whom Pharaoh's daughter
said, "Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will pay the wages
due you." So the woman took the child and nursed him; and when the child
grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She
called his name Moses (drawn out); "For," said she, "I drew him
out of the water"
{A sounder view derives the name Moses (Hebrew Moshe) from the Egyptian mesu,
meaning "son."}
The
tradition continues that Moses, when grown to manhood, saw one day an Egyptian
beating an Israelite, “one of his people." Moved by ungovernable rage, to
which he allowed full scope because they were in a lonely place, he smote the
Egyptian and killed him. The next day, finding that the deed was becoming
known, he fled eastward beyond the Red Sea to the land of Midian, where, while
in hiding, he joined the household of a Midianite priest by the name of Jethro (or Reuel). He married Jethro's
daughter Zipporah and had two sons by her.
"In the course
of this long time," continues
the story, "the king of Egypt
died," and far away in Midian the greatest single event in Hebrew history
took place.
While
Moses was tending the flock of his father‑in‑law, Jethro, the
priest of Midian, he led the flock to the western side of the desert, and came
to the mountain of God, Horeb. Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a
flame of fire, rising out of a bush. He looked, and there was the bush burning
with fire without being consumed! ... When the Lord saw that he turned aside to
look at it, God called to him out of the bush "Moses, Moses!" he
said. "Here I am!" said he. "Do not come near here," he
said; "take your sandals off your feet‑, for the place on which you
are standing is holy ground." . . . Then Moses hid his face; for he was
afraid to look at God. "I have indeed seen the plight of my people who are
in Egypt," the Lord said, "and I have heard their cry under their
oppressors; for I know their sorrows, and I have come down to rescue them from
the Egyptians and bring them up out of that land to a land, fine and large, to
a land abounding in milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, Hittites,
Amorites, Perizzites, Hivvites, and Jebusites.... So come now, let me send you
to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." .
. . "But," said Moses to God, "in case I go to the Israelites
and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they say to
me, 'What is his name?' what am I to say to them?"
The
reply of God to Moses' question is a very important one, no less to the modern
historian than to the Moses of this
tradition, who did not know the answer.
"I
am who I am," God said to Moses.... God said further to Moses, "Thus
you shall say to the Israelites: 'Yahweh ... has sent me to you."
That
this was a new name for the Israelites to give to the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob seems evident. Little doubt now exists that Moses introduced them for
the first time to the worship of Yahweh (or Jehovah, as another vowel pointing
reads). It is significant that in Exodus 6:3 Yahweh is seen admitting that
though he appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El‑Shaddai, he was not
known to them as Yahweh. The word Yahweh can
be variously translated as meaning "I will be what I want to be" or
"I am that (or who) I am," or yet again "I am he that causes to
be," i.e., the Creator. Jews have long considered the word too holy to
pronounce, and when they come to it in their reading, they say instead
"Adonai," "Lord."
Behind the
elaboration of later tradition embroidering the original historical incident,
we may perceive the element of fact. Moses had had a direct, personal
experience with a god of strong and determined character. It became evident
that this vital being, Yahweh, was not just a nature‑god, although he
dwelt on the wild slopes of a wilderness mountain and descended upon it in fire
and smoke.
{The
ascriptions of nature‑power are vivid enough. According to Exodus ig:i8,
"Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the Lord had
descended upon it in fire." in Deut. 4:9‑12, passim, we reack
"Take care ... that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes ... ; but that you impart them to your
children and your children's children‑the day that you stood before the
Lord your God at Horeb ... at the foot of the mountain, while the mountain
flamed with fire up to the very heart of the heavens, shrouded in darkness,
cloud, and gloom." Similarly, we read in Exodus 24:17: "The glory of
the Lord looked to the Israelites like a consuming fire on the top of the
mountain."}
These elements of nature were his instrumentalities; he himself was
distinct from them' a god behind the scenes, who could take into his keeping
the destinies of a whole nation and swear a solemn compact with them, promising
to give them in return for their loyalty and obedience peace, prosperity and
plenty, rain and sun in their season, cattle on a thousand hills, victory in
war, children, and long life. He was a just god, but a god of strong feelings,
happy in the loyalty of those who obeyed him, but disturbed if they were
unfaithful.
Traditional Mt.
Sinai. According to long‑standing tradition it was on the top of this
forbidding mountain that Moses met with Yahweh, and received from him the
tablets of the Ten Commandments. A Christian monastery huddles under the
mountain to be near the place of Gods descent.
The
full character of Yaliweh was, of course, not known to Moses at once. Moses'
experience simply made him aware of a task, this task being the leading of the
Israelites out of Egypt to Sinai, where the God who wanted a people could make
a covenant with the people who needed a God.
It is not necessary
here to go into the well‑known story of how Moses hurried to Egypt to win
the Israelites over to his plan, how during their farewell Passover Yahweh,
according to Exodus 12, "passed over" them but slew Egypt's
firstborn, and how Moses finally led the exodus by crossing the Red (or Reed)
Sea with all his people, just before the pursuing Egyptians drove up in their
chariots in the attempt to turn them back. Apparently, the Egyptians could not
spare enough fighting men to prevent the Israelites' escape. There seems to be
some historical warrant for saying that the exodus came at a time when
catastrophe threatened Egypt from the north and west, as a result of invasions
of barbaric enemies from Libya and of pirates sailing up the mouths of the Nile
to lay‑waste the wealthy cities along its banks. The distraction of Egypt
by these dangers could have, and perhaps actually, furnished the Israelites
with their opportunity.
However, the
leadership of Moses made its greatest contribution not in Egypt, but at the
foot of the sacred mountain, called in one strand of tradition Sinai and in
another Horeb. The exact location of this mountain is still debatable. It has
traditionally been located on what is known as the Sinaitic Peninsula, but many
recent scholars place it nearer the head of the Gulf of Aqaba or in the region
of Kadesh‑Barnea, a little to the southwest of the Dead Sea. The location
matters little. What took place, in any event, is that Moses served as the
intermediary between his followers and Yahweh, the God who had sent Moses to
deliver them out of Egypt, had thus far saved them from all their perils, and
now desired to make a covenant relationship with them. According to the
tradition, the terms of the covenant were made known in the following manner.
Leaving the people at the foot of the mountain, Moses went up the slope to
commune with Yahweh, and after some days he returned with the knowledge of
Yahweh's will for the people. This will, summarized in "commandments"
inscribed on two tablets of stone, was subsequently amplified into the many
provisions of the Torah or Law.
Two lists of
commandments are given in the records. One, the formulation of a high ethical
code, is familiar to us as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). It is doubtful,
however, that we have it in its original form. Evidently what we have is the
full and elaborated form of later days, when it was finally the general
conviction among Israelites that Yahweh was not just Israel's god but the
creator of the entire physical world, the maker of sky and earth and sea and
all that they contain. Furthermore, it is evident that the commandments assume
that the Israelites live in homes, own livestock, and must deal with aliens in
the community.
The other list of
commandments, as found in Exodus 39, is largely ritualistic in character. Some
scholars, seeing in this fact evidence of priority in time, prefer it as the
earlier list. It is very interestingly introduced in the records thus:
The
Lord said to Moses,
"Cut two stone
tablets
{The account adds,
"like the former ones." This is considered by scholars an editor's
addition necessitated by the earlier use of the story (from the "E"
narrative) telling of the inscribing by Yahweh's finger of the Ten Commandments
on two tablets of stone, tablets which Moses later broke (see infra). The
account here quoted is from the "J" narrative, the older of the two
traditions.}.. and in the morning ascend Mount Sinai, and
present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. No one is to ascend
with you, nor is anyone to be seen anywhere on the mountain, nor must the
flocks and herds graze in front of that mountain."
So Moses cut two
stone tablets ... and rising early next morning, he ascended Mount Sinai, as
the Lord had commanded him, taking the two stone tablets in his hand. Then the
Lord descended in a cloud, and took up a position with him there, while he
called upon the name of the Lord. The Lord passed in front of him, proclaiming,
"The Lord, the
Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness
and fidelity, showing kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving
iniquity, transgression, and sin, without leaving it unpunished however, but
avenging the iniquity of fathers upon their children and grandchildren down to
the third or even the fourth generation.
Then Moses quickly bowed his head to the
ground, and made obeisance.
This
passage is followed by Yahweh's announcement that he wishes to make a compact
or covenant with the Israelites in the following specific terms:
You
must not make any molten gods for yourselves.
You must keep the
festival of unleavened cakes, eating unleavened cakes for seven days, as I
commanded you....
Whatever first
opens the womb belongs to me, in the case of all your livestock that are male,
the firstlings of oxen and sheep; a firstling ass, however, you may redeem with
a sheep, but if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck; any first‑born
son of yours you may redeem.
None may visit me empty‑handed.
Six days you are to
labor, but on the seventh day you must rest, resting at ploughing‑time
and at harvest.
You must observe
the festival of weeks, that of the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and also
the festival of ingathering at the turn of the year; three times a year must
all your males come to see the Lord God, the God of Israel....
You must not offer
the blood of a sacrifice to me with leavened bread.
The sacrifice of
the passover feast must not be left over night until morning.
The very first of
the first‑fruits of your land you must bring to the house of the Lord
your God.
You must not boil a
kid in its mother's milk.
Very
clearly, however, this could not have been the original compact with Yahweh,
because, like the Ten Commandments, it presupposes an agricultural, not a
nomadic, community, and one, moreover, long established in its own land.
The precise terms
of the covenant are therefore irrecoverable. Later tradition has too thoroughly
obscured the original situation. Nevertheless, the nature of the ceremony by
which the pact was sealed between Yahweh and those who were thenceforth to be
his people may be preserved in this important passage:
Then Moses ...
recounted to the people all the regulations of the Lord and all the ordinances;
and the people all answered with one voice,
"All the
regulations that the Lord has given we Will observe."
So Moses . . .
built an altar at the foot of the mountain, along with twelve sacred pillars,
one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent the young men of the
Israelites to offer burnt‑offerings and to sacrifice oxen as thank
offerings to the Lord, while Moses himself took half of the blood, and put it
in basins, dashing the other half on the altar. He then took the book of the
covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people, who said,
"All that the
Lord has directed we will obediently do."
Then Moses took the
blood and dashed it on the people, saying,
"Behold the
blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you on the basis of all
these regulations"
Later
times were well aware of the significance of such a ritual. One and the same
blood was splashed on Yahweh's altar and on the people, and this made them
"of one blood," that is, indissolubly joined in a single whole and
made one body. It was a very solerrin act of union and community. Other Semitic
groups sometimes practiced rituals similar to it. This covenant had a markedly
legal and contractual character. The people bound themselves to Yahweh by a
solemn legal agreement, such as men might contract with each other and ratify
in blood.
When the Israelites
prepared to journey on, they had the problem, not so much of leaving Yahweh
behind on his mountain (for they believed he could go with them in spirit and
power), but the problem of providing a medium of communication with him. At
Sinai Moses went up the mountain, and God talked to him. If they left the
mountain behind, what then? The solution of the problem was the ancient one of
providing a meeting‑place for God and his people, that is, a shrine or
sanctuary. So they devised a portable "tent of meeting" (the
"tabernacle of the Lord") and reserved it for purely sacred use. At
each encampment it was set up by ritualistically proper persons (tradition says
these were members of the tribe of Levi, from whom sprang the priests of later
days), and in the silence of its interior Moses was able to listen as Yahweh
spoke to him.
It is quite unlikely that the tabernacle had
an unfurnished interior. The persistent and early tradition may be accepted
that within it stood a box or chest in which were contained two stone tablets
marked with the terms of the covenant. This was the famous Ark of the Covenant,
which played such a vital part in later
Hebrew
history. In Moses' day, tradition insists, whenever the Israelites were on the
march, they reverently bore the ark in the van. Carried into battle, it gave
strength to the warriors' arms. So holy a thing did it become that none but
priests dared to touch it, for fear of being felled by the power it possessed.
In a very natural
way a ritual of worship was developed that became more and more elaborate with
the passing of years. The oldest elements of this ritual were the annual
celebration of the Passover and the weekly observance of the Sabbath. The
Passover was an ancient Semitic festival appropriated to Israelite uses.
Through it they celebrated the memory of their escape from Egyptian bondage. It
was a spring festival, taking place during the night of the full moon nearest
the spring equinox, and centering in each family's hurried eating between
twilight and dawn of a sacrificial sheep (or goat) taken from the flock, whose
blood was ritually smeared on the door‑posts of the tent or on the lintel
and doorposts; at the entrance to the house. The whole sheep was to be
consumed, either by the eaters or in the fire, nothing was to be left over. The
Sabbath day also appears to have an ancient date, originating long before the
time of the exodus, from the custom of taking one day of every "moon"
for worship and recreation. Gradually, it became customary to set aside the
seventh day of the week as a pious period of rest, sacred to the Lord.
Of an early origin
also were the new‑moon festivals (more or less frowned upon and modified
by the strict of later days), the feast of sheep‑shearing, circumcision
(common to most Semites and to adjacent peoples), the taboo upon food before
battle, and blood revenge.
In considering these adaptations of ancient
rites to new purposes, it should be emphasized that through Moses' leadership
Israelite religion successfully made the transition from polytheism to
monotheism. And yet, despite his leadership, his people were not immune, in his
own and in later times, to temporary relapse into polytheistic practices. This
was partly due to the hold of older habits on their behavior and partly to the
fact that the monotheism of Moses was initially one of loyalty and practice
rather than one affirming explicitly and theologically that only one god
exists.
{Scholars are
divided on whether or not Moses believed that the gods of other peoples were
fictions and non‑existent. It would seem that such an assertion was
implicit in his position but was not explicitly made until the time of the
literary prophets.}
That
the people were not quite prepared in his own time for constancy in the
practice of a strict ethical monotheism is implied in the story of the apostasy
of Aaron at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The story
{So much edited by later hands as to contain
obviously selfcontradictory elements.} runs that when Moses went up the mountain
for forty days and forty nights, the people became restive.
When
the people saw that Moses was long in coming down from the mountain, the people
gathered about Aaron, and said to him,
“Come, make us a
god to go ahead of us; for this is the way it is with Moses, the man who
brought us up out of the land of Egypt,‑we do not know what has become of
him."
So Aaron said to
them, "Tear off the gold rings which are in the ears of your wives, your
sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me."
So all the people
tore off the gold rings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron,
who took the material from them, and pouring it into a mold, made it into a
molten bull, whereupon they said,
"Here is your
god, 0 Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!"
On seeing this,
Aaron built an altar in front of it, and Aaron made proclamation,
"Tomorrow a feast shall be held to the Lord."
So next day the
people rose early, and offered burnt offerings, and presented thank‑offerings;
the people sat down to eat and drink, after which they rose to make merry.
Then the Lord said
to Moses, "Go down at once; for your people whom you brought up out of the
land of Egypt have acted perniciously. . . ."
Moses then turned
and descended from the mountain....
As soon as he came
near the camp, he saw the bull and the dancing, whereupon Moses' anger blazed,
and he flung the tablets [of the Commandments which he was carrying] from his
hands, and broke them at the foot of the mountain; then he took the bull which
they had made, and burned it up, and grinding it to powder, he scattered it on
the surface of the water, and made the Israelites drink it. Then Moses said to
Aaron,
"What did this
people do to you, that you have let them incur such great guilt?"
Aaron
said, "Let not my Lord's anger blaze; you know yourself how bad the people
are. They said to me, 'Make us a god to go ahead of us!' . . . So I said to
them, 'Whoever has any gold, let them tear it off '; and when they gave it to
me, I threw it into the fire, and out came this bull!"
This
sort of apostasy was to be not infrequent in the years to come.
III Yahweh and the Baals
After
wandering in the wilderness for a number of years (forty, according to
tradition), the Exodus Hebrews or Israelites felt themselves strong enough to
invade Canaan.
It is not easy to
reconstruct the story of the "conquest" from the accounts of Joshua
and the Book of judges. According to them, the main assault of the invaders was
led by the "Joseph tribes," Ephraim and Manasseh, which fought their
way across the Jordan under the generalship of Joshua,
{Moses' successor. Moses
died just before these events. The time was about 1200 B.C.} took Jericho, and from this base spread
their bloody conquest through central Palestine, in time capturing Shechem,
Shiloh, and Samaria, to make good their control of the central territory. Judah
and Simeon, invading from the south possessed themselves of the highlands in
the vicini~ of the walled city of the Jebusites (Jerusalem). In this they were
assisted by the non‑Hebraic Kenites on the south. Two tribes, Reuben and
Gad, remained behind or turned back to their "portion" east of the
Jordan. Others made their way among the northern Canaanites (with less of
fighting than immigrating), slowly penetrating and permeating the valley of
Esdraelon and the north country. Dan, after an abortive settlement in the
south, eventually occupied the extreme north, and Zebulun went northwestward
toward the Phoenician coast and came to amicable terms with the Hittites. Still
other tribes, like Issachar, Asher, and Naphtali, occupied the fertile lands
around the Lake of Galilee. In the process of occupying the land some of the
tribes were either dissipated or absorbed, like Simeon and Benjamin.
The tradition does
not hide the fact that this was a long process. The Canaanites had strong walls
around their principal cities and villages and possessed chariots and arms far
superior to the crude weapons of the Israelite fighting men. On the heights
where Jerusalem stood, a powerful tribe of Jebusites lived secure within the
city's thick stone walls and repelled every attack made on them for two hundred
years. Elsewhere as well, the Israelites had to content themselves with
possession of the open country, because the Canaanites beat off their attacks
on the towns from the top of their battlements. Fortunately, the Israelites
learned to insure their survival by using cisterns lined with waterproof lime
plaster to impound the water from rains. But in the end, by whatever means,
whether by dispossession, annihilation, expulsion, or accommodation, they made the land theirs.
Their dominance of
the land was not secure, however, until their external enemies were beaten off.
This was a long‑drawn‑out struggle. Their Semitic enemies from the
east, the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites, constantly harassed them by
seeking to enter the land. But the most formidable enemies were the
Philistines, a non‑Semitic people who had descended upon the southwestern
coastal plain from the islands of the Mediterranean. Their original home, we
learn from other sources, was Crete, and when driven out of it, they turned
pirates. They may actually have assisted the Israelites in their escape from
Egypt by harrying the cities of the lower Nile. Unable to make a landing in
Egypt, they sought a territory to colonize further north and found it on the
south Palestinian shore. Gradually they spread inland and, with five fortified
towns at their back, began to ascend the hills. The Israelites fought with them
for generations and barely held them off.
This story is now
being amended and supplemented by historians, who do not question its substance
so much as its narrowing of attention too exclusively to but one group‑the
Israelites or Exodus‑Hebrews. New evidence has come to light of turmoil
within Canaan caused by "outsiders" or "wanderers" known as
Habiru, some of whom may be unhesitatingly identified as non‑Exodus‑Hebrews,
who had not gone down to Egypt but who joined forces with the Exodus‑Hebrews
(the Israelites) when they entered Canaan. Others of the same or similar
grouping had for years been appearing in Mesopotamia, Syria, and northern
Egypt. They were probably Semites from the desert who had originally been
engaged in conducting caravans along the desert trade routes but who, when
these routes were closed, had no fixed location or occupation but wandered
about, sometimes as shepherds, sometimes as musicians, smiths, and craftsmen,
and sometimes as mercenaries for hire or free‑roving guerrillas. (The
Akkadians called them Khapiru and the Egyptians Apiru.) They were often very
troublesome to local authorities and needed only organization into a group with
common beliefs and purposes to be a menace. The famous Tell‑el‑Amarna
Letters, found in Egypt by a peasant woman in 1887 and identified as dispatches
sent by the Egyptian governors and minor officials in Canaan to the pharaohs
from about 1400 to 1350 B.C., contain frantic appeals for help against groups
of Habiru who were coming from the east and northeast and threatening to
overrun the country.
"There are no lands left to the king, my lord. The Habiru plunder all the countries of the king!"
"The country
of the king is fallen away to the Habiru. And now also a city of the country of
Jerusalem (its name is Beth‑Shemesh), a city of the king, has gone over
to the men of Keilah. May the king send mercenaries that the land may remain
unto the king. If there are no mercenaries, lost is the land of the king to the
Habiru!"
The alarm of the officials gradually subsided. The Habiru did not make a conquest. Their inrush was an infiltration process in the main, for the Canaanites were able to retain a string of fortresses and walled towns across the land, while the semi nomadic "migrants" settled in the unoccupied hill country and made themselves at home.
Some time later, if
our reconstruction‑a precarious matter at best‑is correct, the
Exodus‑Hebrews, inspired by the Mosaic faith in Yahweh, entered the land,
made common cause with the Habiru (whence their own later name of Hebrews?),
and by vigorous assaults on important Canaanite towns put themselves in the
position to become masters of the whole land eventually, and what is even more
important for our story, so impressed their Habiru allies with their superior
dan that Yahweh was adopted by the latter as their own Lord of Hosts.
{All
this must be regarded as conjectural. There are other
interpretations of the historical evidence. Some authorities would make the
Exodus‑Hebrews enter the south a century or so after the Habiru, led by Joshua, invaded the central areas of Canaan.
More recent views support the order of events suggested in the text above.
(recent) books achieve a reconciliation of the biblical narratives with the
latest archeological findings. W. F.
Albright and the Israeli scholars, B. Mazar and S. Yeivin, consider that the
conquest of Canaan occurred in two or more waves and was carried out by different
groups of tribes over several generations, first by the Joseph (or Rachel)
tribes, then by the Leah tribes.}
But this, assuming
it occurred, was not the only triumph of the Exodus‑Hebrews. As the years
passed, they succeeded in imbuing their Canaanite neighbors as well as
themselves and their allies with a sense of nationhood. The increasing menace
of the Philistines (beginning about 1150
B.C.) caused the feeling of difference to be forgotten, especially when,
under the seer Samuel and the first king, Saul, strong efforts were made to
throw the Philistines back upon their coastal plain. These efforts began to
bear fruit at last, for though in the generation before Saul the Philistines
had captured the Ark of the Covenant in battle (and then, in fear induced by
bad luck, had returned it in a cart drawn by cows turned loose across the
frontier), they now began to taste repeated defeat. Saul took his own life when
defeated at Mt. Gilboa, but his successor, David, finally routed the
Philistines and broke their fighting spirit.
David also captured at long last, about 1020 B.C., the city of the Jebusites (Jerusalem), made it his capital, and planned a temple in it to house the Ark of the Covenant properly, a project that was left for his son Solomon to carry out, as indeed he did.
All this while, the
Israelite community had undergone many changes, resisted many more, and risen
to new heights of insight.
Changes were
necessarily involved in the passage from nomadic to agricultural and urban
life. When the Israelites came in from the desert, they moved among a people
with a well‑developed culture and religion. They had much to learn from
their new neighbors.
The Canaanites had
developed a thorough‑going nature‑religion, growing out of their
agricultural life. Their gods were, in general character, farm‑gods. The
class name by which they were known was baal, which, as we have seen, means
"owner" or "possessor" (of the soil). Every stretch of
fertile ground owed its fertility to the presence of some baal, who held sway,
like a feudal lord, within his own boundaries, though, like a feudal lord, he
himself was in ‑turn subject to the two supreme lords of all lesser
baals, the elevated but inactive god El, who, if we can judge from recently
recovered documents, resided in the "Source of the Two Deeps" in
highest heaven, and the subordinate but active storm‑god and chief of the
lower gods, the great Baal of Heaven. El's consort was Ashirat, known to the
Hebrews as Asherah, and the great Baal was associated with his sister Anath and
the virgin but fertility giving Astarte, who were aspects or even earthly forms
of Ashirat. As to the males, one may conclude that these heavenly powers were
represented on earth by baals acting in the soil, and that each earthly baal in
his sphere of operation at will imparted or withheld fertility power in the
soil. The plant‑cycle was so closely associated with him that its various
stages were considered his birth, life, and death and were ritually celebrated.
At his death (the decay of vegetation)
{In Palestine vegetation
dried up at the beginning of summer and revived with the autumn rains.}
those who owed most to him ceremonially wept at the remembrance of his past
goodness. In a number of districts it was even the custom to tear the hair in grief
at his passing. At his birth (revival), it was common to hold festivals of
rejoicing during which, in their gayest attire, the celebrants streamed
together to the nearest shrine, to dance and sing and give themselves up to
orgiastic ceremonies, designed in part to assist him and in part to make
recognition of his fertility power renewed in them.
The numerous baals
whose presence was recognized on the hill tops, in the valleys, and at springs
and wells all over the land had each their places of worship. On elevated
ground, either within the walls or upon a nearby dominating height, each city
built a sanctuary in honor of its patron baal, whose name was hyphenated with
that of the city. The priests in charge of these bamoth or high‑places conducted the worship in an open‑air
court facing the shrine of the god. An image of the god might occupy the shrine
and be din‑fly seen by the worshipers, and near the altar outside stood a
stone pillar, the mazzebah, a phallic symbol of the god. Perhaps also there
would be a wooden column or pole, called the asherah, representing the goddess who was the god's consort (the batilah). Many sanctuaries boasted also
bull‑images and bronze snakes, these being very popular representations
of the fertility‑power of the god.
Sacrifices were of
two kinds: (i) gift sacrifices, either of the first‑fruits of field or
tree (a debt necessarily owing) or of animal flesh burnt upon the altar, and
(2) communion sacrifices, through which the god and his people partook together
of the sacrifice and thus strengthened the bond between them.
There were three
main festivals, in spring, early summer, and fall, and during them the role
played by the fertility‑goddesses was given prominence. By far the most
important was Astarte (Hebrew, Ashtoreth; Babylonian, Ishtar). She embodied all
the qualities of the Egyptian Isis, the Grecian Demeter, and the Roman Venus.
The cypress, the myrtle, and the palm were sacred to her, as being evergreen,
and her special symbol was a two‑horned cow. In her own person, she was
usually represented naked, like Anath
{It
seems likely that Anath and Astarte were the same goddess, Anath being the proper name and Astarte
(Ashtoreth) the epithet, with the meaning "she of the womb,"
i.e., the goddess who gives women fertility.} and other baalahs, who played similar
roles. Nor was she always thought of as gentle and kindly. There was something
of the uncontrollable about her; she was, when roused, a very primitive force
and, like Kali in India, had a black or terrible side: she sometimes took sword
in hand, sprang naked upon a horse, and rode forth to bloody slaughter‑perhaps
because sex has its deadly as well as life‑giving side. It was in
connection chiefly with her worship that the Canaanites practiced temple‑prostitution.
The women attendants who ministered in her sanctuaries for this purpose were
called Kedeshoth, meaning "consecrated women," a euphemistic term of
respect. In the divine marriage between Astarte and Baal, which the Canaanites
celebrated in the autumn, she was literally the soil become a wife, and he was
the husband of the land who fertilized her.
Wavering Israelites found it natural to adopt
some of these beliefs and practices. The strict monotheists considered these
waverers apostate. Among those who remained true to the Mosaic faith were the
herdsmen of the hills, still in a semi‑nomadic condition, who felt no
need of other help than that given by Yahweh, the god of mountain and storm,
who had been their guide in the wilderness and was mighty still in war and in
peace. But those who took up agriculture found themselves in a different case.
Although some knowledge of agriculture may have existed, especially among the
aged who remembered Egypt, the younger generation had to acquire the art of
Palestinian husbandry almost in its entirety. The educational feat here
required was as great as that which would confront a Texas cowboy taking up
farming in Connecticut. The analogy is far from perfect, however, because,
though the modern farmer must know his tools and seeds and have at least a
rudimentary knowledge of the chemistry of the soil, the ancient farmer had to
have in addition to an understanding of his materials a thorough grasp of the
spirit‑lore of his locality, and this involved so much of magic and religion
as to make it difficult for him to resist taking over the whole of the local
religion. This is why, in the more fertile north, Israel
{The ten northern
tribes.}
was
less true to the religion of Yahweh than were the people of rock‑bound
Judah, with its large class of shepherds, not dominated by Canaanite
influences. Without resigning their faith in Yahweh as the God who presided
over the destiny of the whole people and guided them in war, the Hebrew farmers
went with the Canaanites to the village high‑places, gave of their first‑fruits
to the local baals and ashtoreths, brought gift offerings and peace offerings,
and learned how to make whole burnt offerings. They also observed the festivals
of their Canaanite neighbors at the beginning and end of the wheat harvest and
in the autumn.
Those who were
faithful to Yahweh, on the other hand, had no doubt that Yahweh controlled the
processes of agriculture as well as the events of the nation. This insight
never left those on the highlands and in the border regions who remained true
to the Mosaic tradition, but it also dawned as well on others who participated
freely in baal‑worship, but who saw for themselves: "Under these
forms of baal‑worship we worship Yahweh, for he is the Baal of Heaven and
all the power behind the ashtoreths." Though in the period of the Book of
Judges the Yahweh shrine at Shiloh held only the Ark of the Covenant, in later
times the sanctuaries at Bethel and at Dan contained bull‑images (golden
calves), which were regarded as symbols of Yahweh. This could have only one
meaning, namely, that Yahweh had taken over in addition to his older functions
those that the bull represented: the God who had led the Israelites through the
desert was now proving his capacity to bring fertility to field and flock.
And yet it looked
for a time as if Yahweh was not assimilating baalism to himself but was instead
being absorbed by it, even submerged beneath it. Hence the prophet Hosea was
moved vehemently to exclaim:
"My people ask
a piece of wood to guide them, a pole gives them their oracles! For a harlot‑spirit
has led them astray, they have left their God for a faithless way; they
sacrifice on mountain heights, and offer incense on the hills, below the oak,
the terebinth, the poplar so pleasant is their shade. So your daughters play
the harlot, matrons commit adultery. But I will not punish your daughters for
harlotry, nor your matrons for adultery, when the men themselves go off with
harlots, and sacrifice with temple‑prostitutes. This brings a senseless
people to their ruin liquor and lust deprive them of their wits."
At long last,
inspired by a conception of Yahweh that made him greater than he ever was
before, the prophets had risen to protest.
IV Prophetic Protest and Reform
The
danger that lay in the baalization of Yahweh has been well expressed by several
modern scholars. It might be called the danger of naturization, that is, of a
sorption into the agricultural milieu. As Max Loehr puts it: "Baalism saw
the activity of the god in natural phenomena. In the annual cycle of the
sprouting and decay of vegetation, in the fertilizing rain and the destructive
heat of the sun, in the swelling and ripening of the fruits of garden and
field, or in their destruction by the forces of nature, the benignant or wrathful
god made himself known, the god whom the Old Testament usually names Baal. It
was a nature religion whose worship issued in the materializing of the godhead.
Genuine Yahwehism, on the other hand, regarded history as the sphere of divine
action. It separated nature and God."' Rudolph Kittel says even more
emphatically: "Those who take a short‑sighted view of the period
succeeding the death of Moses always take it amiss when it is described as a
retrograde period. This was the fact.... The nature‑elements in Yahweh,
instead of being overcome by the higher aspect of his being, were associated in
Canaan with the nature elements in Baal and threatened to submerge the moral
and spiritual elements.... This was the situation in Israel against which the
later prophets waged so fierce a war; for they saw that the exalted God of
Moses was in danger of being degraded into a mere local nature power. This then
was the root cause of the appearance of the great prophets and of their
frequent opposition to their nation."
The Origin of Hebrew Prophecy
The great prophets
did not appear suddenly without a background of preparation. Predecessors
"made straight the way" for them. These early "prophets"
came during the time of the Book of judges, before 1000 B.C., and were known as
nebiini.
{This is the plural of nabi, which in Hebrew and Arabic seems basically to mean
"one (divinely) called to speak out (for God)." In later times it was
translated by the Greek term prophet meaning
"one who speaks for (God)." It was characteristic for a nabi to begin
his message by saying, "Thus says the
Lord."}
Like the dancing dervishes of the Orient today, they were ecstatics, who
felt that when they were excited with religious frenzy they were full of the
spirit of Yahweh and had access to his truth.
In I Samuel 10:5 f, Saul, who had just been anointed as the future
military leader of the Israelites, is sent off by the aging Samuel with this
prediction: "As you approach the town [of Gibeah], you will meet a band of
dervishes [nebiim] coming down from the height with lutes, drums, flutes, and
lyres playing in front of them, while they prophesy; the spirit of the Eternal
[Yahweh] will then inspire you till you prophesy along with them and become a
different man." But when this befalls Saul, he learns that he has not won
favor with the people. They say scornfully, "Is Saul now numbered among
the prophets?"
The early pre‑literary
nebiim, leaping in exaltation, vere given to ecstatic utterance, unintelligible
even to hemselves, but alongside of and perhaps associated vith them arose men
of a cooler spirit, who were the eal predecessors of the later prophets: such
were Nathan in the time of David, and Ahijah in the time of Solomon, prophets
who appeared before kings and )eople to speak the unvarnished, sensible truth
from (ahweh. Their intelligent and inspired behavior may iave in part resulted
from a type of association that ias only recently come to light. Analysis of
the documentary finds of archeologists during the last half century points to the
strong probability that most, if iot all, of the Hebrew nebiim belonged to cult
associations or guilds that contributed personnel to the working staff of the
larger temples on "high‑places," or 'heights." (Samuel, we
have seen, told Saul the nebiim. vould come down from "the height.")
It is presumed know that the more accomplished nebiim were given a place in the
cultic rites and other activities of the temples as the "religious"
ones who were in direct ouch with God. In one sense or another, they were 'possessed"
by Yahweh, often to the point of exaltation. Some found that music and group
dancing led o possession, with ecstatic and generally unintelligible results.
Others, apparently, chose solitary meditation as he means to being possessed by
Yahweh; after experience of which, they were able to say what God wished o
communicate through them. It appears possible, too, hat the regular rituals of
worship made room for their 'revelations." All this corresponded with
practices elsewhere in the Semitic world.
But what may have
been unique about the Hebrew situation is that the "prophets" were by
no means of one mind about Yahweh's message and will. They contradicted each
other freely on many issues. It is usual to divide them into true and false prophets;
and in this case one or both of two criteria are applied: (1) the true
prophet's message proved true, less in its Particulars than in its general or
universal sense, while he false prophet's proved mistaken; and (2) the true
Prophet spoke out boldly without considering his own popularity among his
fellow prophets or among the 'princes" and the people, since the source of
his message was Yahweh alone, whereas the false prophets roiced the popular
hopes and backed up official policies. The possibility of venality on the part
of the false prophets must be recognized, but probably both kinds of prophets
were convinced of the verity of their prophecies. Those we now call the false
prophets probably thought at the time that the true prophets spoke falsely!
The words of the
true prophets were recorded for posterity, fragmentarily or fully. For after
the earlier period when no separate record was made (as in the cases of Elijah
and Elisha), there arose the literary Prophets, whose prophecies were written
down either by themselves or by their followers.
Elijah and Elisha
With Elijah,
the prophetic protest against degrading he ethical religion of Yahweh to a mere
nature religion was begun in earnest. Appearing in the northern kingdom in the
time of King Ahab, when that monarch was yielding to the strong pressure of his
'wicked" wife, Jezebel, to make the Tyrian variety of baalism dominant in
Israel,
{Baal‑Melkart,
god of Tyre, was the deity she favored.} Elijah made a truly noteworthy stand in
behalf of the Mosaic tradition. The
Hebrew historians say that when he began his reforming work there were
only seven thousand men in Israel who had not bowed the knee to the Tyrian
Baal, nor kissed him, but that before he was done he had reduced he worshipers
of this Baal to so much less than that number that they could be crowded into
one building. he was not a merciful man. Yahweh was to him a god of stern,
unyielding righteousness and justice. When Jezebel contrived to have Naboth
stoned, so that Ahab could take his vineyard, Elijah stormed into the presence
of the king standing in the vineyard and uttered such terrible imprecations in
the name of Yahweh that he king rent his garments, hastened away to put on
sackcloth, and fasted in terror. In the story of the trial if the respective
powers of Yahweh and the Tyrian Baal in Mt. Carmel, which, as it stands, is one
of the most dramatic in religious literature, Elijah keeps to the stark issue‑who
is real, Yahweh or Baal‑Melkart?‑and makes good his claim that
Yahweh is real and Baal-Melkart is not.
But
during Elijah's lifetime no substantial progress could be effected in
permanently discrediting baalism. The opposition of the royal house was too
strong, and the people as a whole were hard to change. When Elijah suddenly
and, it was felt, supernaturally disappeared, his reforming work was continued
by his disciple Elisha, who encouraged a certain Jehu to carry out a sweeping
political and religious revolution. This was one of the most bloody in Hebrew
history. Jehu, a violent man, whose headlong charioteering gave rise to the
saying, "He drives like Jehu," annihilated the royal house and then
destroyed every vestige of the cult of the Tyrian Baal. So great was the
slaughter that a century later Hosea denounced it.
The sum of the
matter is this: baalism in general received a very telling blow from the
activities of Elijah and Elisha, yet not a death blow; it recovered. One
permanent and important result, however, was accomplished‑the right of
Yahweh to supremacy in Palestine was never afterward denied or even doubted.
Baalism could be practiced only as a local cult, either because Yahweh's
function was not conceived to be locally agricultural or because Yahweh was
held to have made over the local baals into his ministrants. This was a great
gain for the stricter followers of Yahweh, for it put them in a tactically good
position. On the other hand, it was a gain that was not immediately apparent.
Too large a loophole had been left for the continued practice of Canaanitish
rites, and during the next century some of the common people, reluctant to part
with the baals, availed themselves to the limit of their opportunity in this
direction.
Or so Amos and his successors charged.
Amos
With
a voice sturdily independent of king or guild, Amos, the first of the literary
prophets and perhaps the greatest, came from the borderland of the south, where
the debasement of Mosaic religion to the level of a nature‑cult had not
progressed as far as elsewhere. He thus resembled in place of origin his great
predecessor Elijah, who also sprang from the borders of Canaan, from the town
of Tishbe, beyond Jordan. This fact suggests that prophetic reform was
motivated by the more spiritual insights of the outlying districts that had
remained true to the Mosiac tradition. Amos came from Tekoa, a small town about
twelve miles south of Jerusalem, and was by occupation a herdsman and pruner of
sycamore trees. In marketing sheep he drove them to the populous commercial
centers of the north
{The
Northern Kingdom (Israel), formed by the rebellion of the ten northern tribes
against Rehoboam, the son of Solomon.} and thus became acquainted with social and
religious conditions there. This was about the year 760 B.C., during the reign
of Uzziah in Judah and Jereboarn II in Israel. What he saw set him to brooding.
As a herdsman who enjoyed social equality among his fellows in Tekoa, he could
not fail to note that under the more complex economic conditions of the north
the independence of the farmers had been destroyed in the rise of great
landlords, who had bought up farm after farm and who manipulated the grain
markets to their own enrichment. The whole social structure had become
abnormal. The wars of the past had nearly wiped out the middle class. Rich and
poor alike were morally adrift. There was increasing laxity in religion and
morals everywhere. Integrity was gone, and justice, mercy, and spiritual
religion with it. While he reflected upon all this, suddenly he had visions
foretelling the doom imminent over the north. Though he came from Judah, he did
not hesitate. He hastened into the Northern Kingdom. Yahweh had called him to
prophesy.
What he said in
Bethel and elsewhere he (or some associate) set down in writing, casting his
messages into poetic diction and rhythm to give them a high literary quality
and a measure of permanency. His thundering words were a prophecy of doom
grounded in deeply significant convictions.
That he was appalled at the social injustice
and moral laxity on every hand is evident from the strength of his
condemnation:
The
Eternal
{This is one
possible translation of
Yahweh.}
declares:
"After
crime upon crime of Israel
I will not relent,
for they sell
honest folk for money,
the needy for a
pair of shoes,
they trample down
the poor like dust,
and humble souls
they harry;
father and son go
in to the same girl
(a profanation of
my sacred shrine!),
they
loll on garments seized in pledge,
by every altar,
they drink the
money taken in fines
in the temple of
their God. . . .
"Woe
to the careless citizens,
so confident in
high Samaria,
leaders of this
most ancient race,
who are like gods
in Israel! –
lolling on their
ivory diwans,
sprawling on their
couches,
dining off fresh
lamb and fatted veal,
crooning to the
music of the lute,
composing airs like
David himself,
lapping wine by the
bowlful,
and using for
ointment the best of the oil—
with never a single
thought
for the bleeding
wounds of the nation!"
To punish these
social sins and injustices, Amos predicted, the dreaded Foe from the north
would overrun the land, laying its forts level, plundering the palaces, and
carrying the citizens away into exile.
But his indictment
did not rest on charges of social iniquity alone. Amos declared that Yahweh was
sick of the national apostasy in religion and despised the heathenish temple
rites, even though they might be offered in his name.
"Your
sacred festivals? I hate them, scorn them;
your sacrifices? I will not smell their
smoke;
you offer me your
gifts? I will not take them;
you offer fatted
cattle? I will not look at them.
No more of your
hymns for me!
I will not listen
to your lutes.
No. Let justice
well up like fresh water,
let honesty roll in
full tide.
No wonder that
Amaziah, the high priest at Bethel, feared the fiery prophet from Judah and
charged him in the king's name: "Be off to Judah and earn your living
there; play the prophet there, but never again at Bethel, for it is the royal
shrine, the national temple." But Amos answered: "I am no prophet, no
member of any prophets' guild; I am only a shepherd, and I tend sycamores. But
the Eternal took me from the flock; the Eternal said to me, 'Go and prophesy to
my people Israel.' Now then, listen to what the Eternal says .... " He had
his say. He would not rest with less.
Amos
opens a new epoch in creative religion. In the course of uttering his fearsome
indictment, he revealed a conception of the nature and jurisdiction of Yahweh
implicit in the Mosaic tradition but not clearly stated before. Yahweh was
going to send the foe from the north,
and was about to punish, along with Israel, the Philistines, the Ammonites, the
Moabites, and the people of Damascus. Phoenicia and Edom. were not beyond his
chastisement. Unlimited power over the forces of nature was his; he had brought
on a drought three months before the harvest, smitten the fields with blight
and mildew, settled a cloud of locusts on the land, slain the soldiers of the
army of Israel with an Egyptian plague, and sent a shattering earthquake,
resembling the shaking of Sodom and Gomorrah. His might had been exhibited on a
world‑wide arena. Even more sweeping is the assertion made in Amos 5:8:
it is the Lord (Yahweh) who made the Pleiades and Orion, and it is he who turns
darkness into morning and day into night.
Monotheism was thus
no longer a matter primarily of loyalty and practice; it became also a far‑ranging
theological conviction, a faith that Yahweh is the creator and sovereign lord
of the universe.
Amos says, however,
that only Israel knows this, not other nations, for Yahweh says: "Only you
have I known out of all the nations of the earth" (3:14).
Hosea
If Amos was the
prophet of the righteousness of God, then a younger contemporary of his, Hosea,
must be called the prophet of God's love. Unlike Amos, Hosea was a native of
the north and accustomed to the social conditions there. Because he thought
disloyalty to God was the central issue, his deepest concern was religious. The
state of the text of his prophecies leaves us in some doubt as to the exact
circumstances of his personal life.
{Our uncertainty is increased by the distinct
possibility that there was an earlier and a later Hosea. Chapters 1‑3 and
4‑14 may be by different hands. If so, the first part of our present
account is concerned with events from an earlier date than the second part.}
It seems probable, on the basis of the first
three chapters, that he married a woman who was unfaithful to him and left him.
He could not acknowledge her children as his own; yet, after years of apparent
infidelity on her part, he was able to take her back into his home, reclaimed
and regenerated. As Hosea contemplated his domestic trials, it would appear
that he began to see a similarity between his inner history and the experience
of Yahweh with Israel. Yahweh, too, suffered on account of the unfaithfulness
of his people. Unfaithful they were in more than one way. Too blind to see that
the political and social doom overhanging them was the inevitable result of
abandoning the true God, they were seeking to forestall disaster by the
political device of running after "foreign lovers," one party
courting Damascus, another Egypt, a third climbing to the throne through
alliance with Assyria. Religiously, they were wooing alien gods and futile
native baals, their unholy religious paramours. Hosea put into Yahweh's mouth
these woeful words, ending on the note of inalienable love, anxious still to
forgive:
"Bid her
{Israel} clear her face of harlotry,
and her breasts of
adulterous charms;
or I will strip her
naked,
bare as the day she
was born;
I will make her
like a land forlorn....
On her children I
will have no mercy,
for they are born
out of wedlock;
their mother has
played the harlot,
she who conceived
them has been shameless;
she said, 'I will
follow my lovers,{the Baals}
who give me my
bread and water,
my wool, flax, oil,
and wine.' . . .
Little she knew it
was I who had given her
the grain and oil
and wine....
"I will bring
all her gaiety to an end,
her festivals, new‑moons,
and sabbaths,
to punish her for
all the days
when to the Baals
she offered incense,
decking herself
with rings and jewels,
running after her
lovers,
and forgetting
me," says the Eternal.
"Now then I
will block up her path
with a thorn‑hedge,
and bar the road
against her,
till she cannot
find her way;
she will pursue her
lovers and miss them,
seek them and never
find them.
Then at last she
will say,
'Let me go back to
my first husband,
I fared better with
him than today.'
"So I will
allure her ....
and speak to her
heart; ...
then shall she
answer me
as in her youthful
days,
when she came up
from Egypt's land....
"On that day,
the Eternal declares, she shall call me,
'My husband,' no more 'My Baal';
I will betroth her
to me for ever,
betroth her in a
bond
of goodness and of
justice,
in kindness and in
love."
In the later sections
of the prophecy (Chapters 4‑4) there is the same conviction: that Yahweh
had been hurt by his people's disloyalty but would forgive them if they
repented. However, if the nation remained corrupt and unrepentant, the national
structures were doomed and would be swept away; kings, priests, and people
would dwell in tents again (12:9) and become wanderers among the nations
(9:17). Yet should this come to pass, there was still hope; for if disaster
proved disciplinary rather than irreversible, and the people returned to their
God in purity of heart and the old loyalty, he would re‑establish the
bonds that had once mutually held them.
It is doubtful
whether Hosea received in his time the hearing that Amos did. He quotes his
contemporaries as shouting angrily: "A prophet is a crazy fool, a man
inspired is a man insane!" He
discovered that within the very temple of God men are hostile to the prophet,
God's watchman. Surely, if he lived to see the holocaust of the Assyrian
conquest of the Northern Kingdom, he must have felt that the God of love had
wooed Israel in vain, and that all he had predicted in that event had been
fulfilled.
Isaiah
The Southern Kingdom, meanwhile, came in for
its share of prophetic admonition. About 742 B.C., at the close of the reign of
King Uzziah, a young man of good family appeared on the streets of Jerusalem in
a prophetic role. His name was Isaiah. He had in youth an experience of the
reality of Yahweh that had moved him deeply. He told of it in these awe‑struck
words:
"In the year
that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; his
trailing robes spread over the temple‑floor, and seraphs hovered round
him, each with six wings‑two covering the face, two covering the body,
and two to fly with. They kept calling to one another.
'Holy,
holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts,
his
majestic splendour fills the whole earth!'
At the sound of the
chant, the foundations of the threshold shook, and the temple began to fill
with smoke. Then I said, 'Alas! I am undone! man of unclean lips that I am,
living among a people of unclean lips! I am undone, for mine eyes have seen the
King, the Lord of hosts!' But one of the seraphs flew towards me with a live
coal in his hand, which he had lifted with tongs from the altar; he touched my
mouth with it, saying,
'Now
that this has touched your lips,
your
guilt is gone, your sin forgiven.'
Then
I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
'Whom
shall I send?
Who
will go for us?'
I
answered, 'Here am I; send me."'C7
Conscious of his
divine commission, Isaiah remained active for nearly forty years as prophet to
the people at large and special adviser to the Judean kings. In a time of
uncertainty he stood unswervingly for trusting in the providence of God. He was
the prophet of faith, of confidence in Yahweh beyond doubt or shaking, and he
was forever warning the rulers of Jerusalem that the city's safety lay in
ceasing to make leagues with the nations round about and relying upon the only
trustworthy ally, Yahweh. "Your strength," he warned, "is quiet
faith."" In giving advice to Judah's kings this was his constant
declaration. Thus,‑ when the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed by the
Assyrians (722 B.C.), and the Assyrians were camped before Jerusalem under
their mighty general, Sermacherib, he sent panic‑stricken King Hezekiah,
who besought him to call upon Yahweh, assurances that the city would not be
taken.C9 His prophecy was wondrously fulfilled. The Assyrians suddenly raised
the siege.
{According
to tradition, a plague struck them. But there is evidence that Sennacherib
accepted a heavy ransom to withdraw his forces.}
But Isaiah was
certain that the faithless and wicked would not survive to enjoy future
security. They would perish by the sword or languish in miserable exile, far
from the comfortable hills of home. As he looked about him, he saw many who
were doomed to death or exile. In the manner of Amos, he saw nothing but woe in
store for the socially sinning "soldier and warrior, governor and
prophet, seer, sheikh, and official," for "the men who add house to
house, who join one field to another, till there is room for none but
them," for "those who get up early for a drinking bout, who sit far
into the night, heated by their wine," or for "those who think
themselves so wise, . . . who let off guilty men for a bribe, and deprive the
innocent of his rights ... .. the unruly men," the rulers of the city,
"hand in hand with thieves, every one fond of his bribe, keen upon fees,
but careless of the orphan's rights, and of the widow’s cause."
Like Amos, too, he
records Yahweh's impatience with the elaborate ritual of the temple.
Slaughtered rams, the fat from fatted beasts, the blood of bullocks and goats,
offerings, the smoke of sacrifice, gatherings at the new moon and on the
Sabbath, fasts and festivals are "a weariness" to Yahweh. Though the
worshipers stretch out their hands, he will never look at them, and though they
offer many a prayer, he will not listen. Their hands are stained with blood!
They are not really true to Yahweh!
It is not just
blind fate that determines events. Yahweh is the moving force and contriver
behind human history. He even considers Egypt "my people" and Assyria
"my handiwork" (9:25). But he will punish and destroy the wicked
everywhere, in Moab, in Edorn, in Damascus, in Egypt, but no less in Judah. The
wicked will destroy each other by Yahweh's contrivance. Assyria is doomed like
all the rest, but meanwhile Yahweh has use for this exterminator of the
nations, a use like that of a club swung in anger or a rod wielded in wrath. It
will do its work well. justice will be done even in the plundering and spoiling
of the nations.
If Isaiah was as
inflexible as Amos in the pronouncement of doom, he saw, however, like Hosea,
that pity and love are at the heart of Yahweh's divine plan. The purging of the
nations is in the interest of spiritual betterment, a kindlier world.
"Come,
let me put it thus,"
the
Eternal argues:
"Scarlet
your sins may be,
but
they can become white as snow,
they
may be red as crimson,
and
yet turn white as wool.
If
only you are willing to obey
After the day of
doom, there will be a return of blessedness to the "remnant" who have
lived through all the trouble and relied upon Yahweh for all good. Peace,
prosperity, and health will be theirs. Upon them Yahweh will have mercy; them
he will abundantly pardon.
And here we come to
the passages in Isaiah that have had great historic importance‑the golden
dreams of the new age that §hall dawn after the terrible day of wrath and doom
is past. After‑generations lingered over them and relied upon Isaiah's
authority in indulging the eager hope of their fulfillment. Some scholars, it
is true,, and with good warrant, dispute the authenticity of these passages.
In them Isaiah is seen, perhaps before the time was ripe for such prevision,
painting a rosy picture of a warless world and of the benign rule of a great
prince of peace, the Messiah, who should spring from the seed and lineage of
David and bring in the new day. But these poems of hope and vision came out of
the afflictions of his period in history, and so, for our interests in this
study, it matters little whether they are from Isaiah's own hand or not. Isaiah
was a grieving witness of the spoliation and dismemberment of the Northern
Kingdom, and he would quite naturally have dreamed these dreams and seen these
visions, which forecast the gathering together from the four corners of the
earth of the scattered both of Judah and of Israel too.
Of the prophecies
attributed to Isaiah, consider the two notable passages that follow, both
perhaps reworked or even written by later hands, although this is far from
certain, the first dealing with the New Jerusalem, the second with the peaceful
prince who is to sit on David's throne in the new age.
In after days it
shall be
that the Eternal's
hill shall rise,
towering over every
hill,
and higher than the
heights.
To it shall all the
nations stream,
and many a folk
exclaim,
"Come, let us
go to the Eternal's hill,
to the house of
Jacob's God,
that he may
instruct us in his ways,
to walk upon his
paths."
For instruction
comes from Sion,
and from Jerusalem
the Eternal's word.
He will decide the
disputes of the nations,
and settle many a
people's case,
till swords are
beaten into ploughshares,
spears into pruning
hooks;
no nation draws the
sword against another,
no longer shall men
learn to fight.
0 household of
Jacob, come,
let us live by the
light of the Eternal!
From the stump of
Jesse [the father of David] a shoot
shall rise,
and a scion from
his roots shall flourish;
on him shall rest
the spirit of the Eternal,
and the spirit of
wisdom and insight,
the spirit of
counsel and strength,
the spirit that
knows and reverences the Eternal....
justice shall gird
him up for action,
he shall be belted
with trustworthiness.
The wolf shall couch
then with the lamb,
the leopard's lair
shall be the kid's;
the lion shall eat
straw like any ox,
wolf and lion shall
graze side by side,
herded by a little
child;
the cow and the
bear shall be friends,
and their young lie
down together;
the infant shall
play at the hole of an asp,
and the baby's feet
at the nest of a viper.
None shall injure,
none shall kill,
anywhere on my
sacred hill;
for the land shall
be as full of the knowledge of the
Eternal as the
ocean‑bed is full of water.
And the scion of
Jesse who is to rally the peoples,
him shall the
nations then consult,
and his seat shall
be famous.
Micah
Inspired by Isaiah,
a young man who came up from the country to Jerusalem, Micah by name, began to
prophesy on the eve of the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C. The
prophecies attributed to him are remarkable for two utterances, here quoted,
one against the prophets who truckled to popular self‑complacence about
the supposed inviolability of Jerusalem, the other a notable definition of the
essence of spiritual religion.
"And as for
the prophets," the Eternal says, "who lead my folk astray, who cry
'All's well’ if they get food to eat, and open war on any who refuse them, it
shall be night for you, devoid of vision, so dark you cannot divine; the sun shall
set upon the prophets, daylight shall darken over them, till seers are shamed,
and the diviners blush, in mourning, all of them, because no answer comes from
God." .... Listen to this, you.... priests pattering oracles for pay,
prophets divining for money, ... saying, "Surely the Eternal is among us;
no evil can befall us!" Therefore on your account shall Sion be ploughed
up like a field, Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, the temple‑hill
a mere wooded height.
How shall I enter
the Eternal's presence, and bow before the God of Heaven? Shall I come to him
with sacrifices, with yearling calves to offer? Would the Eternal care for rams
in thousands, or for oil flowing in myriad streams? Shall I offer my first‑born
son for my sin, fruit of my body for guilt of my soul? 0 man, he has told you
what is good; what does the Eternal ask from you but to be just and kind and
live in quiet fellowship with your God?
The Deuteronomic Reform
After Micah, the
prophets were silent for seventy years. Were they suppressed? That seems
likely. For, when the danger of an Assyrian siege of Jerusalem had passed, and
King Manasseh sat upon the throne, a serious relapse from ethical monotheism
again set in. Two factors seem to have been in operation. One was a popular ebb‑movement
back to the Canaanitish form of Yahweh worship. The people were loath to give
up the festive gaiety of the high‑places and altars. They feared the
possible ill effects of relinquishing the magic arts, amulets, household
spirits, and images on which they had depended for so long. Besides, the
sternly ethical religion of the prophets appeared to them bare and cold
compared with the half‑heathenish syncretistic religion that so pleased
their senses and their imagination. Apostasy became widespread.
The other factor in
the relapse was an official sponsoring of Assyrian cults for reasons of state.
Judah was, it must be remembered, a tribute‑paying vassal of Assyria. In
the very temple itself, therefore, shrines were erected and offerings made to
the gods and goddesses of Assyria. Something like this had happened before,
but not to the same extent. In an earlier time Solomon had sought to please his
many wives by filling Jerusalem with shrines to foreign deities, but he had not
erected them in the temple area, and at best they had only a sub‑rosa
status. When King Ahaz, in Isaiah's day and against the protests of that
prophet, tried to savejudah by accepting vassalage to Assyria and paying
tribute for the "protection" of the great king, the obsequious
monarch set up an altar before the temple that was a faithful copy of those
used in the imperial Assyrian worship. The old Yahweh altar was put to one
side; images of Assyrian sun‑steeds were given a place in the temple
area, and an arbor for the worship of Tammuz (Adonis) was erected on the roof
of a temple building. These profanations of Yahweh's holy shrine were
suppressed in the puritanical reforms instituted under Isaiah's guidance by the
next monarch, Hezekiah, but Assyrian pressure and popular religious laxity
sufficed to restore them in the reign of King Manasseh, which followed. But
Manasseh went far beyond the point reached by his grandfather, Ahaz. He built
altars for the sun‑ and star‑gods of Babylon and Nineveh in both
the inner and the outer courts of the temple. He sat up an asherah within the
temple area in honor of Ishtar, queen of heaven, to whom the people flocking
there burnt incense, poured out libations, and offered cakes baked with her
image on them. Not neglecting the nearer Semitic deities, Manasseh erected
altars to various Baals and sacrificed a son by giving him to the fires of the
child‑devouring Molech.
Between the state
policy of fostering Assyrian forms of worship and the popular drift away from
strict ethical conduct, the religion of Yahweh seemed about to suffer entire
eclipse.
But not so. Two
things happened. Suddenly the prophets began to find again their voices‑Zephaniah,
Habakkuk, Nahum, and the greatest of all, Jeremiah. And as the Assyrian world‑empire
began crumbling and falling, the grandson of Manasseh, the good King Josiah,
directed a great religious reform.
King Josiah's
reform came in this way. In 621 B.C. the king authorized the high priest to
make a number of overdue repairs on the temple, and the high priest
subsequently reported a momentous "find." A previously unknown
"'book of the Law" had, he said, been discovered, laid away in a
hiding place. This book, he declared, dated from the Mosaic era.
{Now embodied in the Book
of Deuteronomy, this document is known to scholars as "D" or the
Deuteronomic code. It was undoubtedly a contemporary attempt to codify Hebrew
ethical law; its "finding" was possibly a pious fraud, honestly
intended to promote the public good.} When the king saw it and heard its
provisions, he rent his garments and charged his councilors to find out from
Yahweh if it was genuine, a true statement of divine law. The councilors
consulted a prophetess called Huldah, who vouched for its authenticity. The
king then summoned the people to a great assembly and led them in swearing a
solemn covenant to keep with all earnestness and zeal the statutes written in
the newly discovered code.
The reform thus
determined upon began with a clean sweep of all the religious practices
condemned by the code. The Second Book of Kings gives, without being strictly
chronological about it, a vivid account of this phase of the reform:
Then the king
commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the second priest and the keepers of
the threshold to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were
made for the Baal and the Asherah and for all the host of the heavens; and he
burned them outside Jerusalem in the limekilns by the Kidron, and carried their
ashes to Bethel. He also removed the idolatrous priests ... and those who offered
sacrifices to the Baal, to the sun, the moon, and the constellations, and all
the host of the heavens.... He tore down the houses of the devotees of the
fertility cult which were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove tunics
for the Asherah.... He tore down the high places of the Satyrs, which stood at
the entrance of the gate of Joshua.... He also defiled Topheth, which is in the
valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter
pass through the fire to Molech. He took away the horses which the kings of
Judah had given to the sun, . . . and he burned the chariots of the sun with
fire. Also the altars which were on the roof, and the altars which Manasseh had
made in the two courts of the house of the Lord the king demolished and beat
them down there, and cast the dust into the Brook Kidron. Moreover the high
places that were east of Jerusalem, which Solomon had built for Ashtart, the
abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for
Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites, the king defiled. He shattered the
sacred pillars, and cut down the sacred poles, and filled their places with the
bones of men.
The
king did not stop with Jerusalem and its immediate environs. He ranged through
the whole of Judah and as far as Bethel, demolishing and beating to dust the
altars, pillars, and asherahs of the high‑places and sanctuaries.
One very important
feature of the reform followed upon this. The king fetched away all the priests
from the sanctuaries of Yahweh outside of Jerusalem and centralized sacrifices,
the priests' unique function, at Jerusalem. It was held that proper sacrifices
could be offered only there.
Further phases of
the reform were‑ concerned with the ethical injunctions of the Deuteronomic
code. A new social idealism spread through the land. The code called for
greater humanitarianism toward slaves, more consideration for the needs of the
poor. The old law of blood‑vengeance stood condemned in the light of the
new law, running: "Everyone is to be put to death for his own sin."
A' Though savage and cruel elements still remained to mark the new code with
reflections of a more primitive era, there was genuine ethical advance toward
justice and righteousness.
But the reform
begun with such thoroughness failed of complete success. This was in large part
due to its too great severity in one respect‑the centralizing of religion
in Jerusalem. This had the effect of subtraction from the local community for
the sake of addition to Jerusalem. The Jerusalem priesthood now had an absolute
control over the Mosaic tradition and, moreover, a vested interest in it. The
rural and village priesthoods were abolished, and the rural common people,
expected now to go to Jerusalem "to find their chief joy," suffered a
greatly diminished sense of the immediacy of the divine presence in their
localities. Yahweh, truly enough, had become ineffably holy and transcendent,
and his stern will was clearly known from the pages of a sacred book, but he
was a less intimate presence, not so near as before. Some of the common people,
finding it hard to attain to so high and dedicated a faith, relapsed all too
easily, but without abandoning Yahweh, into the more emotionally satisfying
rites, outlawed now by the king's law and the Deuteronomic code as well as by
the prophets.
Jeremiah (fl. 600 B.C.)
This
great prophet Jeremiah, a man of intensely human quality but condemned by
circumstances to the distasteful public role of a Cassandra, began to prophesy
when in his early twenties. He came of a priestly family, which before the
Josianic reforms ministered in the sanctuary at Anatoth, a small town four
miles northeast of Jerusalem. Stirred by the disaster threatening his wayward
nation, he felt called by Yahweh to prophecy.
The word of the
Lord came to me, saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew
you,
And before you were
born I set you apart,
I appointed you a
prophet to the nations."
Then said I,
"Ah, Lord God!
I cannot speak;
For I am only a
youth."
But the Lord said
to me,
"Do not say,
'I am only a youth’,
For to all to whom
I send you shall you go,
And all that I
command you shall you speak
Then the Lord
stretched forth his hand,
and touched my
mouth.
And the Lord said
to me,
"See! I put my
words in your mouth."
The prophetic
ministry that Jeremiah performed was mostly that of warning the nation‑always
in vain‑of disasters that might be forestalled or averted with Yahweh's
help. So difficult was his task that at times, in later days, his heart failed
him, and he gave vent to very human outbursts at the thanklessness of it all.
I have become a
laughing‑stock all day long,
Everyone mocks me.
As often as I
speak, I must cry out,
I must call,
"Violence and spoil!"
... If I say,
"I will not think of it,
Nor speak any more
in his name,"
It is in my heart
like a burning fire,
Shut up in my
bones;
I am worn out with
holding it in ...
Cursed be the day
on which I was born,
The day on which my
mother bore me‑
Let it not be
blessed!
Cursed be the man
who brought the good news to my father,
"A son is born
to you'~‑‑
Wishing him much
joy!
... Why came I out
of the womb,
To see trouble and
sorrow,
That my days might
be spent in shame?
But
although he became highly unpopular, Jeremiah never shrank from saying exactly
what he felt the Lord meant him to say. When kings consulted him, he never
broke the bad news gently. No threatening mob could make him speak softly. He
was not an ingratiating person. Only one loyal friend stood by him through all
the bitter days when he was reviled by kings, princes, common people, and
fellow prophets. This was Baruch, his private secretary, the man who wrote down
Jeremiah's prophecies at the prophet's dictation and afterward added valuable
biographical notes to explain how the prophecies came to be uttered and what
consequences then ensued.
Jeremiah came at
one of the most difficult and perplexing periods in Judah's entire history. He
began his career when the Assyrian empire was in decline and a terrifying
invasion of Scythian plunderers swept down through Syria and along the
Palestinian coast toward Egypt. Judah was in a panic of fear. Not long after
the Scythian hordes withdrew into the north, a momentous change occurred in the
east: Nineveh fell, and the Assyrian empire gave place to the Babylonian. Immediately
there began a titanic contest between Egypt and Babylon for supremacy in the
east. Judah became the seat of international intrigue, Egypt hoping to win to
its side the little hill country, with its almost impregnable fortress‑capital,
and in good part succeeding. Yet during the tortuous contest the good King
Josiah, apparently siding with Babylonia, fell in battle against the very
Egyptians who proposed to be his allies. Shortly afterward, Egypt met with a
stunning defeat at the hands of the Babylonians at Carchemish. Judah, now
bereft of its good king and of its boastful ally from the Nile, came again
under the control of an Oriental power. Heavy annual tribute was exacted of her
by the Babylonians. Then Egypt resumed her intrigues, making fresh promises. In
Jerusalem king and people, hoping for relief from the paying of tribute, lent a
ready ear.
But Jeremiah had
the clear eye and good sense to see the folly of rebelling against the mighty
Chaldaean power. He aroused the fierce displeasure of his compatriots by
denying that Yahweh would keep the city inviolable, should Judah rebel and the
Babylonians attack. Rather the contrary, he declared. He appeared one day in
the temple to deliver a scathing arraignment of the apostate people, and
shouted: "Thus says the Lord: 'I will make this house like [ruined]
Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth."'
His‑life was immediately in danger, for we read:
When
Jeremiah had finished speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak to
all the people, the priests and the prophets laid hold of him, saying,
"You shall
die! How dare you prophesy in the name of the Lord, saying, 'This house shall
become like Shiloh, and this city shall become an uninhabited waste'?"
Thereupon all the
people crowded around Jeremiah in the house of the Lord.
When the princes of
Judah heard the news, they came up from the palace and took their seats at the
entrance to the new gate of the house of the Lord. Then the priests and the
prophets addressed the princes and all the people saying,
"This man
deserves to die; for he has prophesied against this city in the terms which you
have heard."
Then Jeremiah
addressed the princes and all the people, saying,
"The Lord sent
me to prophesy against this house and this city all the words which you have
heard. But now, if you amend your ways and your doings, and listen to the voice
of the Lord your God, the Lord will repent of the evil which he has pronounced
against you. As for myself, see! I am
in your hands. Do to me as you think right and proper. Only be well assured of
this, that, if you put me to death, you will be bringing innocent blood upon
yourselves, upon this city, and upon its people; for the Lord has truly sent me
to you, to speak these words in your hearing."
This firm speech
completely changed the situation. Jeremiah was saved.
Then the princes
and all the people said to the priests and the prophets,
"This man does
not deserve to die; for he has spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God.
It required only
that the elders of the land should remind the assembly how Micah had prophesied
in an earlier day that Jerusalem should become a ruin,
{Micah 3:9‑12.} and Jeremiah was released.
It will be noted
that Jeremiah's fellow‑prophets united with the priests against him.
Their constant opposition was a sore point. On one occasion he appeared in the
streets with a wooden yoke upon his neck. This, he said, symbolized the yoke of
the king of Babylon that would be laid upon the necks of the people. While he was
walking through the temple, a rival prophet named Hananiah stepped forward,
bringing an opposite word from the Lord. He took the yoke from Jeremiah's neck
and broke it, saying: "Thus says the Lord: 'So will I break the yoke of
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, from the neck of all the nations within two
years."' Jeremiah retired to ponder this, and then came back to cry out
that Hananiah, the false prophet, had made the people trust in a lie, and that
the Lord would bind them with iron. He would put an unbreakable "yoke of
iron on the neck of all the nations," that they might "serve
Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon."
The other prophets
in Jerusalem seemed to Jeremiah no better than Hananiah. He pronounced severe
judgment on them:
Thus says the Lord
of hosts:
"Listen not to
the words of the prophets who prophesy to you!
They fill you with
vain hopes;
They speak a vision
from their own minds,
Not from the mouth
of the Lord....
"Behold, I am
against the prophets who deal in lying dreams," is the oracle of the Lord,
"and tell them, and mislead my people by their lies and their bombast‑when
I neither sent them nor commissioned them.
When
Judah recklessly revolted against Babylon and the city was invested by the army
of Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah exhausted the patience of the princes by openly
telling the people that the city was doomed, and that those who stayed in it
would die by the sword, famine, and pestilence, but those who would go and
surrender to the Babylonians would escape and have their lives given them as a
prize of war. The princes of Jerusalem naturally complained to the king that
Jeremiah was disheartening the soldiers defending the city, and they urged that
he be put out of the way. So Jeremiah was thrown into a dry cistern in the
court of the royal guard, where he sank in the mud and was left to die. Had not
an Ethiopian guard pricked the king's conscience with a description of
Jeremiah's plight, he would surely have perished; as it happened, the king had
the prophet secretly drawn up to terra firma. He was not set at liberty again
until the city fell to the Babylonians.
This was not the
first nor the last time Jeremiah was in danger. Once he had been arrested and
put in the stocks for twenty‑four hours; at another time his fellow‑townsmen
at Anatoth had plotted to put him to death. He and Baruch had had to go into
hiding during the reign of King Jehoiakim after that monarch became coldly
enraged during a private palace‑reading of a scroll of Jeremiah's
prophecies; the king cut up the scroll with his penknife piece by piece as it
was being read to him and flung the pieces into the fire in the brazier before
him, and then ordered Jeremiah's arrest. The prophet went into hiding; the
danger passed; but he was never to know peace thereafter. When Jerusalem was
destroyed in 586 B.c., Nebuchadnezzar freed him as a friend and allowed him to
remain in Judah along with the handful of citizens‑the lower classes
really‑who were not taken into exile. Jeremiah tried to reconcile those
left behind with him to their lot, but Gedaliah, the governor appointed by
Nebuchadnezzar, was assassinated, and the conspirators kidnapped Jeremiah and
carried him to Egypt, where he prophesied briefly before he came to his
unknown, perhaps violent, end.
A reading of
Jeremiah's sermons brings clearly before us his forthright, gloomy, suffering
personality. The passages in which he predicts dire doom are still barrowing to
read and must have been almost unendurable to hear. Certainly they burn with
the prophet's own anguish. Yet Jeremiah was not an ultimate pessimist; he had
grounds for hope. He predicted that after Yahweh had finished using Babylon as
the means of accomplishing his just punishment of the nations, Babylon itself
would be punished. Then the people of Judah, and those also of Israel, would
"serve aliens no more" but would return to Judah to "serve the
Lord their God, and David their king," whom Yahweh would raise up for
them.
"For I am with
you to save you,"
is the oracle of
the Lord;
"And I will
make a full end of all the nations
among whom I scattered you;
But of you will I
not make a full end.
Having
corrected them "in just measure," Yahweh would make a "new
covenant" with his people, Jeremiah said.
At this point
Jeremiah made a distinctive, if not original, contribution to the prophetic
tradition. The new covenant that was to be made was to be between Yahweh and
redeemed individuals. Former prophets
had concentrated on the public, socially experienced relationship between
Yahweh and the Hebrews‑the basis of the old covenant. Jeremiah advanced
the idea of a valid, subjective experience of relationship between Yahweh and
the individual.
"Behold,
days are coming," is the oracle of the Lord, "when I will make a new
covenant with the household of Israel and with the household ofJudah, not like
the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day that I took them by the
hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt‑that covenant of mine which
they broke, so that I had to reject them‑but this is the covenant which I
will make with the household of Israel.... I will put my law within them, and
will write it on their hearts.... And they shall teach no more every one his
neighbor, and every one his brother, saying. 'Know the Lord'; for all of them
shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them."
Jeremiah
accompanied this prediction with a succinct statement of individual
responsibility:
"in those days
shall they say no more,
'The fathers have
eaten sour grapes,
And the children's
teeth are set on edge';
But everyone shall
die for his own guilt‑everyone who eats the sour grapes shall have his
own teeth set on edge.
In other words,
Jeremiah brought men face to face with God as individuals who were responsible
directly to him for their conduct. They could no longer say that he dealt with
men only through their group relationships; they were individually responsible.
This was a
proposition of great importance, for its logical corollary was: if the human
relationship to God is a direct and personal relationship, then the approach to
God through temple sacrifice may not be all‑important, may even be no
longer requisite to the highest spiritual living of the individual.
V The Babylonian Excile
As
so often happens with fanatical nationalist groups, the pro‑Egyptian
party in Jerusalem brought about the very disaster they most hoped to avert‑the
collapse of Hebrew national sovereignty. They persuaded the aging King
Jehoiakim. to withhold tribute from Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and to
make a stand for national independence, relying upon Egypt's military backing.
When Nebuchadnezzar learned of this, he moved quickly, displaying in every
decision an unyielding determination to crush Judean rebelliousness for good
and all. In 597 B.C., he invested Jerusalem with his full forces. After a three
months' siege the new king, Jehoiakin, who had just succeeded to the
throne,
{Jehoiakim. died
during the siege.}
surrendered the city in order to avoid its total destruction.
Nebuchadnezzar looted the temple and carried away captive to Babylon the king
and ten thousand of the citizens, or, as the Second Book of Kings describes
them, "all the nobles, and all the renowned warriors, and all the
craftsmen, and all the smiths," as well as "all the strong men fit
for war."A16 At Babylon the king was thrown into prison and the people
were settled as colonists on the river Chebar, a large canal running to the
southeast out of Babylon. Those who were left behind in Judah were placed under
the rule of the deported king's uncle, Zedekiah, the third son of Josiah. In
588, after nine years of wavering loyalty to Nebuchadnezzar, Zedekiah too
rebelled. This time Jerusalem was not spared. In 586 B.C. after a siege lasting
a year and a half, during which the Egyptians coming up to relieve the
beleaguered city were decisively driven back by the besiegers, Jerusalem was
taken. The Babylonians and their allies
{The Edomites, Samaritans, Ammonites, and others
who came in for the kill.}
systematically looted, burned, and destroyed all the buildings in the
city, including the temple, whose holy ark was never again heard of, and they
laboriously tore down the city walls. The city was so thoroughly laid in ruins
that it was not completely rebuilt for over a century and a half Before being
carried away in chains to Babylon, King Zedekiah was forced to witness the
execution of his sons and then had his own eyes put out. All of the inhabitants
of Jerusalem, except Jeremiah and the poorest and lowliest citizens, were
taken away. The towns around Jerusalem were drained of their upper classes.
Meanwhile, many of those who could do so fled southward toward Egypt. The
nation was disrupted. One part was in Babylonia; another portion reached Egypt
and settled in scattered communities along the Nile and its delta; a third portion
stayed on in the ruined homeland. So profound was the change in national status
that historians referring to the people who survived the fall of Jerusalem in
586 drop the name Hebrew and speak of them hence forward as Judeans or Jews.
Yet the Babylonian
exile was not as disastrous to the Judean captives as the Assyrian deportation
had been to the lost ten tribes. Nebuchadnezzar's hostility was of a political
kind; it had been directed only against the continuance of Hebrew national
sovereignty and not against the people as individuals. Once the Jews had been
transported to the environs of Babylon, he allowed them comparative freedom.
They could live together and follow their old ways of life and culture without
disturbance. The region in which they were settled was part of a rich alluvial
plain, intersected by irrigating canals, and therefore from an agricultural
standpoint far superior to Palestine. Moreover, it lay between two of the
greatest cities of the world Babylon and Nippur‑and hence provided economic
advantages of an unusual kind, so that those who made themselves at home and
developed their opportunities throve wonderfully.
At
first, of course, it was hard to feel at home. Of this we have the clearest
sort of evidence. The Old Testament contains no passage so full of mingled
pathos and unhappy rage as the Psalm that runs:
By the rivers of
Babylon,
There we sat down,
and wept,
When we remembered
Zion.
Upon the poplars,
in the midst of her,
We hung up our
harps.
For there our
captors
Demanded of us
songs,
And our tormentors,
mirth:
"Sing us some
of the songs of Zion."
How could we sing
the songs of the Lord
In a foreign land?
If I forget you, 0
Jerusalem,
May my right hand
fail me!
May my tongue
cleave to my palate,
if I do not
remember you;
If I set not
Jerusalem
Above my highest
joy!
Remember, 0 Lord,
against the Edomites,
The day of
Jerusalem!
They who said,
"Raze it, raze it,
To its very
foundations!"
0 daughter of
Babylon, destructive one,
Blessed be he who
requites to you
The treatment that
you dealt out to us!
Blessed be he who
seizes your little ones,
And dashes them to
pieces upon a rock!
But the mood of irreconcilability with their lot passed. Economically the situation became better than tolerable. Those who farmed the rich soil found themselves harvesting big crops. Stony Judah had never yielded such. Many Jews, freed from farming, entered government service as soldiers and officials. Others, turning their economic opportunities to advantage, became merchants and traders, following a direction that many of their ethnic brethren were even then pursuing in Egypt and Syria and were to pursue increasingly down the centuries. It would not be long before their great success would lead a Jewish writer (the author of Esther) to recognize the existence of anti‑Semitism in Babylonia. He would make Haman say to King Xerxes in Susa: "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples throughout all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from every other people.... If it please the king, let it be prescribed that they be destroyed. The Jews had entered upon the long and troublous course of anti‑Semitic persecution across the face of the earth.
The Origin of the Synagogue
The religion of the
Torah and the prophets had now to pass a crucial test. Would the exiled people
consider that their Palestinian God had failed them and that the deities of
foreign peoples were greater? Or would the viewpoint of the major prophets,
that Yahweh was with his people everywhere and directed the destinies of other
peoples besides the chosen race, prevail? Apparently, some gave up Yahweh to
follow the gods that had prospered Babylon. An older apostasy recurred in
Egypt. Among the refugees who kidnapped Jeremiah and dragged him off to Egypt
were men and women who thus defied the old prophet: "We will not listen to
you, but will assuredly ... [offer] sacrifices to the queen of the
heavens,
[Asherah, the
Canaanite mother‑goddess (=Ishtar).} and ... [pour] libations to her, as we did,
both we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and
in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty to eat, and were well, and
met with no trouble; but since we gave up offering sacrifices to the queen of
the heavens ... we have been destitute of all things, and have been consumed by
sword and famine." These folk were
lost to Jewish religion. But those with whom the future of Judaism lay were not
shaken in their faith: it widened and deepened. Yahweh was in Egypt and in
Babylonia with them; of this they were assured.
To the faithful in
Babylonia there was only one place in the world where sacrifices could be
offered to Yahweh, and that was on the altar in the temple at Jerusalem. This
means of approach to the High God was now denied to them. But they could draw
near to him in other ways. They could, for example, gather together on the
Sabbath day in their homes, read to each other the scrolls of the Torah and the
writings of the prophets. Besides these they could read aloud the early
histories of their people, in various recensions, not yet finally combined into
a canonical text. After reading from these texts, someone might lead in prayer.
It became a practice to hold such gatherings every Sabbath day.
{Some authorities think
this custom had already been begun in the villages of Judah after the
Deuteronomic reform, as an attempt to worship God without animal sacrifice.} Out of them came the synagogue standardized
by the Pharisees in later days. The sermon so familiar to Christian church‑goers
had its origin in the exposition and interpretation of selected portions of the
sacred texts during the Sabbath meetings of the Jews in Babylonia.
Along with the
establishment of this form of worship there came a marked increase in literary
activity. Copies of the older writings were prepared for use on the Sabbath day
and during the festivals of the Jewish year, and those who feared that the new
generation growing up in Babylon might forget the traditions that were still
unrecorded made haste to write these traditions down and to revise and enlarge
the older histories and codes by addition and expansion. Writings also appeared
reflecting contemporary religious insights. Many psalms, such as the one quoted
on a previous page, were composed. And two great prophets appeared to pour out
their inspired thoughts in speech and writing.
Ezekiel
Very
little is known positively about the life of Ezekiel. It is possible that some
of the book credited to him was written in his name at a later time. He was
apparently a leader of what has been called the Deuteronomic circle among the
exiles‑those who leaned heavily upon the Deuteronomic code and
interpreted the whole of Hebrew history in its light, going so far as to
rewrite much of judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings in accordance with
Deuteronomic value judgments. Ezekiel came of a priestly family of Jerusalem,
was carried captive to Babylonia in 597 B.C., and lived in the Jewish community
by the river Chebar. For twenty‑two years or more he was active as
prophet and self‑styled "watchman to the household of Israel,
exercising pastoral oversight and care over his fellow‑exiles and
dreaming always of the restoration and regeneration of his people.
In his earlier
visions and allegories, written down in fervid and florid phrase, Ezekiel
firmly prophesied the utter destruction of Jerusalem‑a prophecy that was
fulfilled in 586 B.C. Thereafter a major concern emerged: when the exile should
end, as it soon would, and the people returned to the homeland, what was to be
the constitution under which they were to live, and especially, how were the
services in the restored temple to be conducted? Here Ezekiel showed himself to
be what he has been called, "a priest in the prophet's mantle." Whereas Jeremiah realized in his day that
the temple and its divine services would soon come to an end, but that he could
do without them, Ezekiel knew that "it was only a question of time before
the temple and its divine services would be restored, and he could not do without
them." So he concentrated on envisioning their restoration and did it in
detail and with great enthusiasm. His descriptions of the temple-to‑be
and its ceremonies and his statement of the philosophy of worship that inspired
him, while never accepted as a program that was to be exactly carried out, had
a very great influence on the attitudes and spirit of later Judaism.
Ezekiel's
philosophy of worship combined the new emphasis on individual responsibility‑new
since Jeremiah and the issuance of the Deuteronomic code‑with an exalted
conception of Yahweh as a being sublimely transcendant and holy. The sinner
needing pardon would not find Yahweh melting with love and forgiveness at the
first sign of remorse. The holiness of Yahweh required the sacrificial approach
of chastened individuals gathering in the temple in a state of physical and
ritual purity, under the guidance of expert priests. In his infinite sanctity,
Yahweh had now withdrawn so far from the world of men that it was only through
intermediaries, human and divine,
{Priests
and angels.}
that he could be reached.
Perhaps this
emphasis on the remoteness and absoluteness of the Lord God was an effect of
the expanding view of his movements in history that the exiles had. Did not the
Lord God rule the nations with a rod of iron? Was he not using individual men
and single nations as means to inscrutable but holy and righteous ends? Was he
not bent upon making his name known to all mankind? Questions such as these
oppressed the minds of Ezekiel and his contemporaries. and made them aware that
God had other objects in view than just the showing of loving kindness and
tender mercy to a chosen few. Ezekiel expressed their awareness in one saying
of his:
"Thus says the
Lord God: It is not for your sake that I am about to act, 0 household of
Israel, but for my holy name which you have caused to be profaned among the
nations to which you came.... and when I restore my holiness in their sight,
through my dealings with you, the nations shall know that I am the Lord."
Ezekiel thus
alerted Israel to the fact that Yahweh would restore them to their homeland,
whether or not they repented, but not for their sake, rather for his own: to
sanctify his name in the eyes of the on looking nations. The central facts of
history were that God's purposes are just and holy, and that he acts out of
strength‑"with a strong hand and an outstretched arm"‑for
the sake of establishing his glory throughout the world.
Nevertheless, the
temple alone could offer the conditions of a proper approach to such a God‑an
approach of purified persons, in the beauty of holiness, seeking to add to the
glory of God by fulfilling his will.
Deutero‑Isaiah
To Deutero‑Isaiah,
the great unknown prophet of the exile, scholars have given a cumbrous name meaning
Second Isaiah. His prophecies are preserved in the latter part of the book of
Isaiah, approximately from the fortieth chapter on. Nothing about his life or
identity is known, but fortunately his mind and spirit do not thus elude us.
In ethical and religious insight his prophecies bring us to the culminating
point of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The central problem
with which Deutero‑Isaiah was concerned loomed large in the minds of the
exiled Jews. It was the problem of the evil that had befallen them. Why had
Yahweh brought so much suffering upon them? The old answer that it was because
of their sins, although acknowledged to explain much, was not wholly
satisfactory, for it was evident that the people of Babylonia, who now
prospered, were as bad as, even worse than, the Jews had ever been. Deutero‑Isaiah
did not reject the conventional explanation; he saw truth in it. But he did not
think the sufferings of the Jews could be entirely explained on that basis. He
set his people's trials against a world background. They were, he declared, a
part of Yahweh's plan of eventual world redemption.
The conception here
is magnificent in scope. The Lord becomes without any qualification the only
God: "there is no other." His sphere of action is the whole world.
Whatever he does must be seen against a cosmic background.
Have you not known?
have you not heard?
The Lord is a God
everlasting,
The Creator of the
ends of the earth.
He is the first, and the last: "before me was no God formed, and after me there shall be none." He alone created the heavens and the earth, and he gives breath to the peoples. He controls all history, forms the light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates evil. This holy Lord of Hosts, who says from his seat of world power, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts," nevertheless dwells as an immanent savior and redeemer in the hearts of the contrite and humble in spirit.
For thus says the
high and exalted One,
Who dwells
enthroned for ever, and whose name is Holy:
"I dwell
enthroned on high, as the Holy One,
But with him also
that is contrite and humble in spirit.
Furthermore, God's redemptive purpose is not limited to one area or one people. It is universal; he means to save all mankind, Gentiles as well as Jews.
At this point
Deutero‑Isaiah brought forward his most original conception, the finest
fruit of his experience of living among the Gentiles. To bring the saving
knowledge of himself and his holy will to all mankind God needs a messenger, a
servant. Israel is that servant and may say:
Listen, you coast
lands, to me;
Hearken, you
peoples afar!
The Lord called me
from birth,
From my mother's
womb he gave me my name....
He said to me,
"You are my servant,
Israel, through
whom I will show forth my glory."
"I the Eternal
have called you of set purpose,
And have taken you
by the hand;
I have formed you
for the rescuing of my people,
For a light to the nations."
The Jews were thus a chosen people, chosen not to be the recipients of unearned favors, but to serve as bearers of light. It was not that they were to be active missionaries, it would seem, but that in their history the nations would see the presence of the Lord.
But, alas, they had
been blind and deaf to their world mission and had had to be refined and
purified "in the furnace of suffering." The Lord had to give up the
chosen people to spoilers and plunderers because they had sinned and would not
walk in his ways, nor listen to his instructions. "So he poured upon them
the heat of his anger, and the fierceness of war." This punishment had to
be. It was forced upon God by the chosen people's sins. But the prophet brought
comforting word that the Lord God now declared that Jerusalem's guilt was paid
in full, and her people would therefore not have to suffer any more
afflictions; their suffering was over.
The suffering had not been in vain. It had purified the nation and it had astonished and affected the on looking Gentiles deeply. This conception is wrought out in one of the greatest religious odes ever written. The nations of the earth are heard saying of the Suffering Servant:
He was despised,
and rejected of men;
A man of sorrows,
and acquainted with grief.
And as one from
whom men hide their face he was despised,
And we esteemed him
not.
Surely he hath
borne our griefs,
And carried our
sorrows:
Yet we did esteem
him stricken,
Smitten Of God, and
afflicted.
But he was wounded
for our transgressions,
He was bruised for
our iniquities:
The chastisement of
our peace was upon him;
And with his
stripes we are healed,
All we like sheep
have gone astray;
We have turned
every one to his own way:
And the Lord hath
laid on him
The iniquity of us
all."
Deeply
moved, the Gentile kings and their people have understood at last that the
sufferings of God's servant, Israel, were those of the innocent for the guilty.
Before long, they would come with untold wealth from every direction to rebuild
Jerusalem's walls and stand in the blazing light of the glory of God on Mt.
Zion.
Thus Deutero‑Isaiah
justified the ways of God to the Jews. But he not only looked into the past, he
saw into the future. The next phase of God's redemptive plan, he declared, was
a glorious restoration of the Jews to Jerusalem, where the work of redemption could
proceed into all the world as from a center, amid the joy of all believers.
This was to be effected through Cyrus, the Persian war‑lord, who by God's
direction would tread down rulers as a potter tramples clay, overthrow Babylon,
and release the Jews. (We shall see that Cyrus fulfilled these expectations.)
Then, after their return to the homeland, the Jews would minister to the
nations in the Lord's name. All the world would flock to Jerusalem to worship
God, saying,
"With you
alone is God, and there is no other,
no God besides;
Truly with you God
hides himself,
the God of Israel
is a savior."
But not only would the world come to Jerusalem; Israel would find acclaim out in the world.
Thus says the Lord
God:
"Behold! I
will lift up my hands to the nations....
And they shall
bring your sons in their bosom,
And your daughters
shall be carried on their shoulders.
And kings shall be
your foster fathers,
And their queens
your nursing‑mothers."
The salvation of
and by Israel would affect the whole of mankind.
Through the appeal
of his high moral idealism, Deutero‑Isaiah was to have a great influence
on the best minds of later Judaism, and he was also to influence early
Christianity. Some understood him; others did not. His prophecies were searched
again and again by those who waited expectantly for the coming of a Messiah.
His descriptions of the suffering servant were so concrete and individualized
that later generations readily concluded that he was speaking in them not of
the ‑exiles but of a Messiah, and so they looked for a person who should
some day redeem the world through his suffering. The early Christians found in
fesus of Nazareth one who, in their eyes, fitted these descriptions perfectly.
VI The Rise of Judaism in the Zestoration Period
In
53 8 B.C. Cyrus the Great took Babylon and made the capital of a new empire,
which was ultimately a stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea and rom
the Indus River to the Greek cities on the Ionian oast. When he looked about
him, he found grouped together in the heart of Babylonia an unassimilated
captive people, with ways different from the ways of there peoples, and on
inquiring about them, he heard their plaints. In order to win their friendship
and at the same time to have them go off to the border near Egypt and set up a
buffer state, he gave them permission to return to Jerusalem. The return so
longed for by the first generation of exiles was now possible.
The Return to Judah and Jerusalem
An expedition of returning Jews was organized at
once. According to later Jewish historians, Cyrus issued decree giving them a
privileged status; he not only restored to them the temple vessels carried away
by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C., but even made funds available for the expedition
and its goal, the rebuilding of the temple. Apparently, the leaders of the
return were two: Zerubbabel, a grandson of King Jehoiakin and hence as a lineal
descendant of King David a person with Messianic possibilities, and Joshua, a
priest of the highly revered Zadokite branch of the Levite tribe. Though it was
evident from the first that many Jews were not going to return, for Babylonia
was their home now, thousands did. The latter were idealistically described by
Ezra a century later as those "whose spirit God had aroused to go up to
build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem.
Upon arrival at
Jerusalem, the first act of the returning exiles was to erect an altar on the
site of the ruined temple and begin regular morning and evening sacrifices. The
rebuilt altar was made the center of a communal life organized on lines like
those suggested by the prophet Ezekiel. The temple area was gradually cleared of debris, and amid shouts of joy
and the weeping of the older folks the foundation stone was laid for the
reconstruction of the temple.
But the community soon proved unable to proceed with the task. Most of the people chose to live in the surrounding fields and villages, not in Jerusalem itself, where the heaps of burnt ‑ over ruins discouraged home‑making. But conditions outside of Jerusalem were scarcely better. Virtually no economic opportunities awaited the newcomers. Moreover, the "peoples of the land," that is, the non‑exiles, had taken possession of the properties of the exiled upper classes and were undoubtedly annoyed to see so many returning claimants to old homesteads, for they could themselves claim sixty or seventy years of squatter's rights. But here were further factors of contention. The returning exiles had for decades idealized Jerusalem and the Law, and they looked with disdain upon the non‑exiles because they had lapsed from the Deuteronomic standard and had, moreover, intermarried with Edomites, Ammonites, and Samaritans. So, on their part, the non‑exiles, disgruntled at being treated as religious and social inferiors, withheld cooperation from the rebuilding of the temple and other reconstruction projects. No wonder, then, that a stubborn depression, both spiritual and economic, overwhelmed the community, and for fifteen years the temple lay untouched.
Then, at the urging
of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the rebuilding was resumed. Haggai had
indignantly scolded: how could the people expect prosperity as long as they
left the Lord's house in ruins? Both prophets encouraged the community to
resume the work quickly because of the great hope they held out: there would be
a shaking up of the world powers and Judah would again become an independent
kingdom, with Zerubbabel, the descendant of David, becoming their crowned head
as Yahweh's Messianic “Chosen One." This hope animating them, the Jews
made haste to complete the temple. It was not like Solomon's, but it was
strongly built and in the correct dimensions. Then they settled back to wait
for signs of the Lord's favor. And no change in the situation came.
A century passed.
The prophetic hopes concerning the restoration were plainly unrealized. Were
they unrealizable? Some apparently thought so, for on every hand there were
multiplying signs of ebbing faith. The writer of the book of Malachi, who
prophesied at this time, accused the people of slackening zeal, of cynicism, of
lack of respect for Yahweh. He said they did not pay their tithes properly,
brought defective animals to the sacrifices, were not reverent during the
temple ceremonies. How could they hope for the Lord's blessing?
When knowledge of
this state of affairs reached Babylonia, the faithful Jews there were
disturbed. One of their number, a young man who was a favorite cup‑bearer
to King Artaxerxes (I or IV), on receiving fresh reports of the woeful
condition of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, came before the king at Susa with a
sad countenance. The king inquired the reason for his melancholy and, learning
the cause, generously sent the young man, whose name was Nehemiah, upon a
special mission, with the powers of a governor, to Jerusalem to oversee the
rebuilding of the city's walls and to reorganize the community. Nehemiah set
out for Jerusalem, accompanied by army officers and horsemen and provided with
enabling letters to the authorities. Before or about the same time Ezra the
Scribe and some seventeen hundred Babylonian Jews, many of them handpicked for
the work of reform, left for Jerusalem to push the spiritual renewal that was
to parallel Nehemiah's rebuilding of the walls.
{It is here assumed that Ezra and Nehemiah were in
Jerusalem about the same time. The facts are open to another interpretation. It
is possible that Ezra arrived first and that Nehemiah came later and completed
the work which Ezra had begun. Scholars are divided on the sequence of events.} The story of Nehemiah's successful
leadership is dramatically told in the autobiography bearing his name. It was
due entirely to his executive genius and energy that the breaches in the walls
and the burnt gates of the city were repaired at last, after over 150 years of
lying in ruin.
The Establishment of a Priestly State,
Seeking the spiritual renewal of the
community, Ezra the Scribe summoned the Jews before the Water Gate. Here the
assembly heard read to them a book of the Law (presumably the holiness code
from Leviticus) {Leviticus xvii‑xxvi.}
and bound themselves by a solemn covenant and oath to observe its provisions. A
new theocratic state was inaugurated, with power vested in the priests. It
reestablished the Mosaic covenant, but it might be called a new one at the same
time. What occupied the center of attention‑then and for the next four
hundred years‑becomes clear in the following quotation from the pledge
the assembly adopted under oath:
"We make and
sign a binding covenant ... and take oath, under penalty of a curse, to walk in
the law of God which was given by Moses the servant of God, and to be careful
to observe all the commands of the LORD our Lord, and his ordinances and his
statutes; and that we will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or
take their daughters as wives for our sons; and that, if the peoples of the
land bring wares or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from
them on the Sabbath or on a holy day; and that in the seventh year we will leave
the land fallow and refrain from the exaction of any debt.
"We also lay
upon ourselves the charge to give the third part of a shekel yearly for the
service of the house of our God, for the bread that is arranged in layers, and
for the regular burnt‑offering, for the sabbaths, the new moons, the
fixed festivals, and the holy things, and for the sin‑offerings to make
atonement for Israel, and for all the work of the house of our God. Moreover,
we will cast lots, the priests, the Levites, and the people, concerning the
wood‑offering, to bring,it into the house of our God, . . . to burn upon
the altar of the LORD our God ... ; and to bring the first produce of our
ground and the first of all fruit of every kind of tree year by year to the
house of the LORD; also the first‑born of our sons and of our cattle, as
it is written in the law, and the firstlings of our herds and our flocks, ...
and our first batch of baking, our contributions, the fruit of every kind of
tree, the wine, and the oil, to the priests in the chambers of the house of out
God, and the tithes of our ground to the Levites, since they, the Levites, take
the tithes in all the cities dependent on our agriculture. Now the priest, the
son of Aaron, shall be with the Levites, when the Levites tithe, and the
Levites shall bring up the tithe of the tithes to the house of our God, to the
chambers into the treasure house."
In
thus laying primary stress on first‑fruits, and tithing, and sacrifices,
and fixed festivals, the Jews of Ezra's time established upon the foundation of
the old pre‑exilic faith‑called, conveniently, the Religion of
Israel‑a religiously and morally demanding way of life. Its central
concern was faithful adherence to the standards of the Mosaic Torah. It seemed
in that difficult time that this could best be brought about by obedience to
the scriptural mitzvoth (precepts of the written Torah), strict carrying out of
the requirements of the newly sworn covenant before the Water Gate, and
avoidance of all impurity before God. And when, after a struggle in which Ezra
and Nehemiah had to exert utmost pressure, foreign wives were divorced and sent
back to their fathers' homes with their children, the Jews adopted for that
time the goal of becoming an ethnically as well as religiously restricted
group.
Much future
history, however, is anticipated in a revealing passage from Nehemiah, written
of his second governorship, when presumably Ezra was dead and he himself had
been away in Susa:
In these days I saw
in Judah men treading wine presses on the Sabbath and bringing heaps of grain
loaded on asses, also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens which they
brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day; and I protested on the day when they
sold provisions. Tyrians also dwelt therein, who brought in fish and all kinds
of wares, and sold them on the Sabbath to the Judeans and in Jerusalem. Then I
contended with the nobles of Judah and said to them,
"What evil
thing is this that you are doing, and thereby profaning the Sabbath day? Did
not your fathers do this and did not our God bring all this misfortune upon us
and upon this city? Yet you are bringing more wrath upon Israel by profaning
the Sabbath."
Accordingly when
the gates of Jerusalem began to be in darkness, before the Sabbath, I commanded
that the gates be shut; and I gave orders that they should not be opened until
after the Sabbath. Also I put some of my servants in charge of the gates, that
none should bring in a burden on the Sabbath day. Then the traders and sellers
of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. So I warned them
and said to them,
"Why do you
lodge in front of the wall? If you repeat it, I shall arrest you."
From that time on
they came no more on the Sabbath. {Nehemiah found to his horror that the
portion of the Levites had not been given them, so that the Levites and the
singers at the services in the Temple were obliged to cultivate their own
fields for a living. So he had to bring pressure upon the Judeans to pay their
tithes. Also he found that some Jews had married foreign women, and that their
children spoke foreign languages and "none of them could speak in the
Jews' language." Here he felt he had to take direct action, reporting: "I contended with
them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair and made
them swear by God”; after which they sent their foreign wives off. He even
found prominent priest married to a foreign woman and exiled him.}
These details have been given to show the situation. The common people continued to err, and yet the way of life established for them in law and in authority was laid inescapably upon their consciences and dominated all thought. As time went on it would claim them more and more. In considering the postexilic period down to the end of the fourth century B.C., we cannot fail to see that however great their laxity at times, the people gave their increasing loyalty to the regular round of religious duties prescribed for them. The weekly Sabbath day observances drew them to the temple at Jerusalem or to the gathering places in the outlying towns and villages that later acquired the Greek name for such places, synagogues. The annual festivals and fasts became a matter of ingrained custom. These were the week‑long Passover, including the Feast of Unleavened Bread, in the first month of the year (March or April); the Feast of Weeks (or First‑Fruits) occurring in the late spring; and the Feast of Trumpets (later called "Rosh Hashanah" or New Year), followed ten days later by the fast of the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, and five days after that by the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles, all in the seventh month (September or October). The purely ethical religion of the prophets could not by itself firmly hold the common people, but these observances did.
Further, as the
years passed, the self‑preservative exclusiveness of the Jews threw them
more and more upon their own religious authorities, both human and literary.
Their supreme ecclesiastical personage was the high priest, who lived in the
temple at Jerusalem. He was a descendant of Zadok, a royally appointed priest
of King David's time, said to be descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses. He
was both the religious and the civic ruler of Jerusalem. Under him were the
ordained priests, who ministered in the temple during religious ceremonies, and
the Levites, who had the status of temple servitors and were in charge of the
musical services and the temple property. Authority was also vested in the
learned profession of scribes, from which the rabbis sprang. The scribes had
once been a more or less secular order, but they were now a religious class
(the Sopherim) devoted to copying and
interpreting the Torah and other sacred writings. Those of their number who
developed a special talent for preaching came to be known as rabbis or
"teachers." The rabbis performed a double service for the common
people, which gave them increasing importance as time went on. In the first
place, they met the growing need for a professional exposition of the sacred
books, all the more necessary because Hebrew was being superseded as a spoken
language by Aramaic, the vernacular that prevailed throughout Syria and
Palestine, so that the common people could no longer fully understand their own
Hebrew writings without the aid of an interpreter.
{A translation of important texts into Aramaic was
finally made and called the Targum. An earlier translation into Greek, begun in
the third century B.C. in Alexandria, is known as the Septuagint.} In the second place, the rabbis helped to
decentralize religious worship and make genuine group religious experience
possible again in the villages something that King Josiah's reformation in 621
B.C. had made difficult.
The priests and the scribes were not idle in
providing authoritative religious literature for the people. Though the days of
oral prophecy had virtually ended, testifying through the written word to the
power of the holy and transcendent God of Israel in nature and history had
become more and more common. In Babylonia and in Jerusalem the priests and
scribes were diligently engaged in literary labors. They circulated copies of
the writings of the more recent prophets‑Malachi, Obadiah, Ezekiel,
Haggai, Zechariah, and Second Isaiah‑and they re‑edited the
writings of the older prophets. The five books of the Mosaic Torah were being
finally completed: Ill, "E," and "D" were dovetailed into
one complete work, then recombined with "P" or the priestly code.
This last document, newly written, furnished the strictly monotheistic first
chapter of Genesis and many legal provisions interspersed through the five
books, including "H," the holiness code used by Ezra and Nehemiah in
their reforms. Joshua, judges, Samuel, and Kings were further revised and
expanded by the addition of new material. A group of priests, with a
Deuteronomic slant, worked on Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The singers in
the temple were using and composing the chants that were later to furnish much
of the Book of Psalms. Quite another type of poetry, originally erotic but
interpreted as symbolizing the love‑relationship between God and Israel,
is found in the Song of Songs. Fully two thirds of the Hebrew canon as we know
it today was in existence.
The significance of
the new shift in interest has been well stated by a Jewish historian, thus:
All
through the 5th century there was a steady reaction against religious laxness,
a reaction sponsored by the scribes, who were becoming ever more influential.
The scribes, forerunners of the Pharisees, were the interpreters of the law,
the leaders in the synagogues. . . . "Turn it and turn it again," the
scribes admonished their people, "for everything is in it." And the
Jews responded with unparalleled devotion. All existence was centered in the
law. The Jews became a people of the book. The early Hebrews had created the
Bible out of their lives; their descendants created their lives out of the
Bible.
Or,
as a group of Jewish scholars has pointed out in commenting on the effects of
Ezra's reform:
Henceforth, the
distinguishing mark of a Jew would not be political identity but adherence to
the Torah, even if he lived outside Palestine and did not participate in the
Temple cult. After the Exile, Jewish nationality became identified with ethnic
solidarity‑common descent, destiny, religion, and culture‑rather
than territorial status.
"Schools
of expounders" arose to deduce new laws from the old, in order that the
ancient Torah might be made applicable to and practical in the life of later
generations. These schools of the scribes were ultimately to become the solidly
learned Pharisaic schools of the second and first centuries B.C. From the first
they provided valuable insight on the problem of devising workable laws for
conditions not dreamt of in the day of Moses. Improvements were made in civil law
and Sabbath practices. But that there were drawbacks is also indicated by the
historian we quoted above:
It
was inevitable that the endless spinning of meanings from the old texts should
go to extremes and become burdensome. The Biblical law which prohibited the
eating of meat torn in the field was based upon the sensible hygienic principle
that carrion was dangerous as food. In the hands of the dialecticians the law
was elaborated into a complex dietary machinery. If meat torn in the field was
prohibited, why not also meat torn in the city? But what was torn meat? If it
were not properly slaughtered, it was surely torn. What was proper slaughter? A whole code, the basis for the practice
of Shehita (ritual slaughter), grew
up to meet these problems‑rules governing the knife to be used and the
manner of using it, rules governing the competency of the ritual slaughterer
and his training, the prayers to be recited when the throat was cut and when
the blood was covered with ashes
{Without such slaughter the flesh would not
be kosher or "fit."} A simple Biblical precept grew into a
labyrinth of observances.
VII New Trends of Thought in the Greek and
Maccabean Periods
In 332 B.C. the Palestinian theocracy came under a new control‑that of far‑away Greece. Alexander the Great drove the Persian armies out of Asia Minor and Syria and then seized Palestine on his way to the conquest of Egypt. After founding on the Egyptian coast, and naming after himself, the new city of Alexandria, which he hoped would become a culture center that would revolutionize the civilization of the regions bordering on the southeastern Mediterranean, he turned his attention to what was left of the Persian empire and brought it tumbling down at his feet.
General Characteristics of the Hellenistic Influence
In Alexander's motivation his personal
ambition played the more considerable part without a doubt, but he also started
out with an uncritical and altruistic passion for the spread of Greek
civilization through the Near East. Yet he had no notion of imparting Greek
civilization by force. He believed in the self‑evidencing power of truth
and planned to convert the world to the Greek view of life by education and
example. So, in Alexandria and at other strategic points heordered the establishment
of new cities, which were to be laid out by Greek architects and provided with
colonnaded municipal buildings, gymnasiums, open‑air theaters, and
libraries like those at Athens. He encouraged Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and
Jewish colonists to live in these model cities, under municipal governments
that allowed each national group to live in its own quarter of the city and yet
have a democratic share in certain processes of city government.
{For example, each city was to be ruled by a council annually elected by the
people.}
Of course, no little pressure was brought to
bear on each citizen to induce him ‑ entirely of his own free will -- to
put on Greek dress, speak in Greek, build and furnish his home in the
Hellenistic modes, and read and discuss Greek philosophical and political
works, so far as his education allowed.
In his short reign
(his death in Babylon was sudden) Alexander seemed to respect and favor the
Jews. He wanted them in Alexandria, and in later days they filled two of the
city's five sections. (They may have numbered one million souls there!) He
hoped to make places for them elsewhere. The Jews, for their part, were more
influenced by his cultural proposals than by those of any foreigner in their
whole history. For one thing, the Hellenism for which he stood combined a new
breadth of culture with unprecedented religious and racial tolerance. For
another, it seemed to hold a great promise of vital world relationships
overflowing into the economic and political back‑eddy that was Judah. The
Jews wanted to be on good terms with the rest of the world. They may have been
suspicious at first of the Hellenic colonists set up in model communities
throughout Palestine, but these colonists proved after all to be persuasive
exponents of Hellenism, because they were amusing, fraternal, and peaceful. In
three generations the higher‑class Jews were freely admitting Greek words
into their everyday speech and calling their children by Greek names. The
cultured classes, and especially the Jerusalem priests, were, as might be
expected, more profoundly influenced than the common people. Without giving up
their religion, they welcomed the external features of Hellenistic
civilization, so much so that in the heyday of the Greek influence the
sacrifices were sometimes left half‑burnt on the altar at Jerusalem while
the priests rushed off to some stadium to see the Greek athletes performing in
the games! Yet there was a strong counter‑current. The plain people were
slow as always to adopt foreign ways. And the scribes and rabbis held back.
With an unyielding loyalty to the Torah and the Jewish way of life, they kept
resistance to Hellenism and all its ways and works alive among the "quiet
in the land," the conservatively Jewish "pious ones" or hasidim, as they were called then and
later.
The process of
Hellenization was retarded but not interrupted by the contention for the
possession of Palestine that followed Alexander's early death in Babylon.
During a hundred years unhappy Palestine was overrun again and again by the
armies of the Seleucids (of Syria) and the Ptolemies (of Egypt). Though the
latter, the kindlier and therefore the preferred overlords of the Jews, were in
the ascendancy most of the time, at the beginning of the second century B.C.
the Seleucids finally triumphed. There was peace after that for a while, and
Palestinian Judaism might have gone over even more completely to Hellenism
than had yet been the case had not a headstrong Seleucid king caused his Jewish
subjects to revolt against him and return to the ways of their fathers.
The Period of Independence Under the Maccabees
It had now become a
fact that as long as their religious life was not interfered with, the faithful
Jews endured a good deal of oppression, but when their religion was endangered,
they never hesitated to rebel. This was something that Antiochus Epiphanes,
king of Syria, did not understand. Anxious to hasten the lagging process of
welding all the peoples of his kingdom into a Hellenistically‑minded
whole, he determined to use force to make the Jews worship Zeus, of whom he
claimed to be the earthly manifestation (hence his title of Epiphanes,
"God‑made‑manifest"). He therefore forbade the Jews, on
pain of death, to keep the Sabbath, own any copies of their sacred writings, or
practice circumcision. He erected on the altar of burnt offering in the temple
at Jerusalem an altar to Zeus of Olympus, and here sacrificed pigs (always an
abomination to the Jews). Further, he commanded all Jews to join in similar
sacrifices, not only at Jerusalem but in the villages. The horror and
indignation of the faithful led to rebellion. When, then, an aged priest called
Mattathias was ordered by a Syrian commissioner to participate in a sacrifice
to Zeus at the village of Modin, he murdered the commissioner and raised the
standard of revolt. With his five sons at his side, and backed by many
followers from among the Jews who rushed to him from every quarter, he took his
stand in the wilderness. His able son Judas Maccabeus astounded the Syrian
commanders by defeating four of their armies and forcing a fifth to retreat. In
165 B.C. Judas accomplished the surprising feat of recapturing all of Jersualem
except its garrisoned castle. The temple was then purged of its
"abominations," and the Jewish worship restored. Palestinian Judaism
had been saved. In the subsequent phases of the campaign, the Syrians were
obliged to quit Judea. Judas was killed in 161 B.C., and the leadership passed
to his brother Jonathan, and after him to the last of the brothers, Simon, who
was made high priest. Simon's son, John Hyrcanus, imperialistically added
Idumea (Edom), Samaria, and Perea (the region beyond Jordan) to Judea, so that
his kingdom approached King David's in size. He forced the Idumeans to accept
Judaism at the point of the sword‑a bad precedent. Though the Jews seemed
here to be overreaching themselves, the period of Jewish independence lasted to
63 B.C., and might have lasted longer had it not been for the strife that broke
out between divergent parties among the Jews themselves.
Before we tell that
story and add the tragic aftermath, we need to examine the foreign ideas and
modes of thought that now made an influx into Judaism and laid the basis for
the rise of the postexilic Jewish parties.
Gentile Influences on Thought During the Greek and
Maccabean Periods
In the theology and
literature of these periods may be seen the influence of Greek and Persian
ideas about nature and history. Written or being written were the books of
Proverbs, job, and Ecclesiastes, now in the Bible, and Ecclesiasticus and the
Wisdom of Solomon, contained in the Apocrypha. Considered together, they are
usually referred to as the Wisdom Books. Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and the Book of
Psalms made their appearance at this time, too. The last of the Jewish
canonical scriptures to be completed was Daniel, and along with it a host of
extra‑canonical books in like vein, giving expression to fervid Messianic
hopes.
The Wisdom literature shows the influence of
Greek ideas, although one cannot say that these ideas were either dominant or
the basic motivating factors. One may only say that Hellenism confirmed many
thoughtful Jews, discouraged by the trend of their history, in their
disillusionment and quiet scepticism, and that, beyond this, it developed in them
the rationalistic attitude of submitting every belief to the test of reason,
and thus encouraged a taste for the more intellectual types of speculation. To
take an example, the latest portions of Proverbs assimilate certain speculative
concepts of Greek philosophy. Most of Proverbs is very old. Some of it may have
had its origin in the days of Solomon as a translation and paraphrase of
Egyptian collections of wise sayings about the nature and conduct of life.
Solomon is said to have been attracted to these sayings and to have added some
generalizations of his own. The collection grew slowly with the years by the
accession to it of other independent collections, until by about 250 B.C. it
assumed its present form. On the whole, it is pitched in a key of quite
unecclesiastical lay‑wisdom, in the spirit of Poor Richard's Almanack, Benjamin Franklin's contribution to the
practical wisdom of early America. Morality is for the most part regarded not
so much as the law of God (though that is not denied, certainly) but as the
demand of reason and common sense. In its latest sections, however, Wisdom is
personified as God's consultant at creation‑a Greek notion, the word for Wisdom being Sophia or Logos, and signifying in either case a combination of
reason and sound judgment.
Another book that
requires for its explanation the presence, if not the direct influence, of
Hellenism is Ecclesiastes. The writer seems to have had a knowledge of both
Judaism and Hellenism, but to have been thrown into such mental confusion by
the attempt to reconcile them that he could see no worth in human thought or
effort. All that seemed to him good he summed up in such words as these:
"I know there is nothing good for man but to be glad and enjoy himself
while he lives." Everything else involved futility, a vain striving to
hold the wind. Perhaps the writer had read the older book, job, and had been
unable to solve its fundamental problem: Why does not God make it the rule that
the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer? But no, the righteous suffer and
the wicked prosper. Ecclesiastes only vaguely catches job's suggestion that the
wise and pure in heart may transcend their suffering by rejoicing in the wisdom
and majesty of God revealed in the awesome design of the world.
The
Hellenistic influence on Judaism reached its height at Alexandria in Egypt
rather than in Palestine. There near the time of Christ it made itself felt in
the book called the Wisdom of Solomon and in the writings of the Jewish
philosopher Philo, who consciously tried to synthesize Greek andjewish thought
by identifying the Wisdom of Jewish theology with the Logos of Greek
philosophy. His teaching that contact with the Supreme Being, in the fullest
spiritual sense, was the work of the divine Logos as the mediator of the power
or activity of God was to have great influence on the thought‑forms to be
found in the prologue of the Fourth Gospel and in the writings of the early
Christian Fathers.
Another effect of the pervasive Greek
influence was the translation of the books of the Old Testament into Greek by a
group of scholarly translators, traditionally said to have numbered seventy
(whence the name of the translation, the Septuagint). This translation was
begun in the third century B.C. and was completed in the second.
{A word should be said
about the importance of this translation. It is now apparent that the
translators used only the most authentic manuscripts. Scholars have long
believed this to be the case. The Septuagint proved to be the most reliable
check they had upon the accuracy of the Hebrew manuscripts that had survived up
to 1947, none of which could be dated before the tenth century A.D. The
discovery from 1947 on of the Dead Sea Scrolls has confirmed this earlier
belief, for these oldest of Hebrew manuscripts (dated from the two centuries
before Christ) are in accord at nearly every point with the Septuagint.
It may be added that the
Dead Sea Scrolls have also confirmed the belief that the Latin translation (the
Vulgate) made by St. Jerome in the fourth century A.D. was the result of his
careful choices among variant readings in the Hebrew manuscripts he was able to
gather.}
But the influence
of Hellenism on the religious conceptions of the main body of Jews was less
enduring than that of Zoroastrianism, chiefly because the former was
philosophical and secular in spirit, whereas the latter was religious and could
offer supplementation to already existing beliefs.
It is easy but
hazardous to seek exact conclusions concerning so elusive a thing as
"influence," but the Jews came to know Zoroastrianism from
observations near at hand in Babylonia, and certain Persian beliefs about
Satan, the angels, the after‑life, and the Messianic deliverer supplied
what must have seemed missing elements in the old Jewish beliefs. Before they
met the Satan of the Zoroastrians, the Jews had pondered the old stories about
the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the fallen angels who had taken wives
from among the daughters of men before the days of Noah. Then, too, there was
the Adversary among the heavenly beings surrounding Yahweh who obtained
permission to afflict job and make him curse God. These stories antedated the
exile, and in none of them is there the suggestion that the Spirit of Evil is a
cosmic being, manifested from the beginning of time, and of a strength and
creative power almost equal to that of the Spirit of Good. But after the exile
the Adversary among the heavenly beings became, for at least some of the Jews,
an evil and infinitely malicious power, wholly in opposition to God, with
attendant devils to match the angels who stood before God. In another
direction, She'ol, the shadowy land of the dead, was replaced by a heaven and a
hell, and some Jews began also to speak of a resurrection from the dead at the
last day and of a last judgment, a final reward of the good and condemnation
of the evil. Long before the exile the prophets had foretold, of course, a day
of doom and a purging of the nations, but now many Jews believed this with
Persian alterations. Let us see what some of these changes specifically were.
1. The ancient
Hebrew belief in demons, which scarcely rose above the animistic level and
never implied strong resistance to Yahweh, much less a systematic or sustained
opposition, now became the belief that the demons were organized; they had a
leader, a head. This head was variously named, but the most common name for him
was Satan. One of his first appearances under this name is in a passage in the
prophecies of Zechariah, where he is described as contending with an angel‑messenger
of the Lord. As the Tempter, he was also read back by editors and revisers into
the historical books, and the writers of "P" put him into the Garden
of Eden. But he retained the character of a folklore figure.
2. The angels who,
according to old belief, were Yahweh's divine messengers now were thought of as
arranged in a hierarchy. In the Hellenistic and Maccabean periods this
hierarchy consisted of seven archangels: Raphael, Uriel, Michael, Raguel,
Saraqiel, Gabriel, and Rerniel. The most prominent of these was Michael, with
Gabriel coming next in importance.
3. The older Jewish
belief that the dead descend to a colorless existence in the pit of She'ol, a
land of forgetfulness not unlike the Greek Hades and the Babylonian Aralu, was
in large part superseded by a belief in the resurrection of the body to an
after‑life of full mental vigor and awareness.
4. The prediction
of the older prophets that there would be a Day of judgment in which the
enemies of Israel would be carried down to doom, after which a new kingdom
would be set up with a Messianic king of Davidic lineage on the throne,
underwent a radical change. This may have been a natural development and not a
Zoroastrian suggestion; probably it was both. At any rate, the older hopes
being unfulfilled and seemingly unfulfillable, the expectation now was that the
coming of God's agent of deliverance would be from the clouds of heaven at the
end of the world.
5. It looks as if
the idea of a last judgment, a comparatively new concept, was taken over into
Jewish apocalypticism with little basic change from Persian sources, although
the locale was shifted.
This must suffice
as a brief and somewhat speculative account of the influx of alien thought into
Judaism. It raises a question for us. Was there, then, little opposition among
the Jews to Gentile thought‑pressures? Not so, at all. Considerable
opposition did arise, as we shall see in the next section. Yet, as one might
suspect, attitudes were sharply divided. Some did not accept anything alien;
some did. The books of Esther, Ruth, and Jonah reflect these differences.
Esther was written by a Jewish nationalist, fired by wrath at the peoples who
had anti‑Semites among them. But the more tolerant and forgiving view
toward aliens was given immortal expression in two stories, one concerning
Ruth, the beautiful Moabitess, who found acceptance among Jews, married one of
them, and became an ancestress of King David, and the other concerning Jonah,
the rebellious and anti‑Gentile prophet, whom the Lord firmly bent to his
more inclusive purposes.
The Rise of the Postexilic Jewish Parties: The
Sadduccees
Had Judea remained
isolated from the rest of the world, there might perhaps have been among its
people no divisions into parties. There might have been only the old clash
between the popular majority and the prophetic minority that existed in the pre‑exilic
era.
Choices between
cultures are seldom clear and simple. In any one instance of choice it is not
often possible to leave out the bearing of what is desired by parties in power
and what coincides best with local opinion, personal popularity, and means of
livelihood. In Judea it was the priests, or at least the higher orders of the
priesthood, who were the internationalists. This certainly seems a paradox, for
priests are notoriously conservative and careful in their tolerances. But in
this case the priests were the party in power. The high priest had become the
civic as well as religious head of the country and raised taxes, collected
tribute money, and grew wealthy along with the other members of the high
priestly families. His actions were subject to some slight check by the
Gerousia, the council of Jewish elders later known as the Sanhedrin, but in
most respects he was archbishop, prime minister, and foreign secretary all in
one. This meant that the higher orders of priests were constantly engaged in
regulating the international relations of Judea. The psychological effect of
this was to make them discriminate for purposes of official policy between the
essential or unchangeable in Judaism, as they saw it, and the matters that
seemed open to change and compromise. The practical rule that they evolved was
this: ideas in religion, local or foreign, not found in the written Torah were
to be frowned upon, but cultural innovations promising to improve relations
abroad and living standards at home were to be welcomed.
Out of this rose
the important party of the Sadduccees (a
term derived from "Zadokites," designating the group of great
families that formed the ruling clan of priests). The members of this wealthy,
aristocratic, and somewhat worldly group dissociated themselves from the hopes
of the masses and believed in the "reasonable" views of the ancient
fathers as embodied in the written Torah, especially "the Books of
Moses." They held that these last should be construed literally. In the
realm of religion, therefore, they rejected the popular belief in angels, the
new apocalyptic ideas, and particularly the conceptions of the resurrection of the
body to full consciousness in after‑life. In matters of culture, however,
they were so liberal to foreign points of view that they were called
"Hellenizers," the implication being that they were active
propagandists for the Greek way of life. As patriots who wished to preserve
their country, they compromised with the Romans to save their Jewish
institutions from the destruction that threatened them.
The Pharisees
Compromise was
religiously abhorrent to the Hasidim, the "pious ones" or
"puritans" already mentioned, who were described as "the quiet
in the land." These were the ones who rallied so quickly to fight beside
Judas Maccabeus in the war for independence. They had no interest in politics
as such, much less in internationalism or Greek culture. Their one major
intellectual passion was the Jewish religion. From their ranks sprang the
powerful party of the Pharisees, to
which most of the scribes and rabbis and many of the lower orders of the
priesthood belonged.
The Pharisees were
as devoted to the written Torah as the Sadducees were, but they approached it
more open mindedly as something of vital importance whose application to
current life had to be continuously worked out; it had to be interpreted and
made applicable before it could be as scrupulously observed as they in fact did
observe it. They therefore paid great attention to the oral tradition that
accompanied the written Torah, that is, the expositions, interpretations, and
commentaries of scribes and teachers (rabbis). Their attitude was not nearly as
literalist as the Sadducees'; it was in fact quite liberal in accepting ideas
that supplemented and expanded the written Torah. For them, the total Torah was
a two‑fold body of precepts whose oral form was at times even more
important than the written.
They believed that
the world with which the Sadducees had so often compromised was under a
sentence of doom; God meant to destroy it and bring in a new age. The Pharisees
embraced the new Messianic concepts involving the resurrection of the dead and
zhe last judgment. Yet their dreams were harnessed to some very practical
considerations. In the interim before the end of the world, which would come
only when God judged the time was ripe, they believed their prime duty was to
be loyal to the Law "written" and "unwritten." That meant
not only study of the scriptures and "traditions," but also moral
obedience, ceremonial purity (they had to keep themselves unspotted from
unclean persons and things), and, above all, spiritual growth and development,
the result of "living unto the Lord." It meant a life of continuous
prayer, of remembrance of the dead, who, hopefully, had been righteous enough
to deserve resurrection and reward at the last judgment; it meant also struggle
here on earth for liberation from the worldly powers that restricted one's
freedom to live a life of joyous obedience to God's will, and it meant
willingness to die rather than to compromise the holy faith.
When John Hyrcanus
and his Maccabean successors became too enamored of their despotic power and over‑sympathetic
with Sadducean ideas, the Pharisees swung from support of the ruling family to
fierce opposition. Sporadic open revolt was met with violent suppression and
bloody massacre. When, in their turn, the Pharisees won an advantage, they took
revenge in retaliatory bloodshed. The final result was civil war. But a
stalemate resulted, and the Roman general Pompey, then resident in Syria, was
called upon to arbitrate the issue. In 63 B.C.,
Pompey came down from Syria and promptly took the country over. It became a
Roman province.
VIII The Roman Period to 70 A.D.
The
Romans had been called in to umpire a dispute. That they seized the opportunity
to make themselves masters of Palestine hardly pleased the Jews. The swift and
bewildering succession of political changes that followed increased the sense
of frustration and outrage. One source of deep resentment was the fact that a
certain Antipater, an Idumean, who even though he professed Judaism, was
unacceptable to the Jews, had been active behind the scenes in winning Roman
favor and gaining personal power. The grudging approval he won from the Jews
when he got the Romans to make Hyrcanus II, of the Maccabean family, the high
priest was withdrawn after the overthrow of Pompey, when Julius Caesar rewarded
him for his services by making him a Roman citizen and the procurator of Judea,
for thus an Idurnean became the civil ruler of Judea and the political superior
of the high priest. In 40 B.C. Antipater's
son Herod, whose favorite wife was a Maccabean princess, was chosen by Augustus
Caesar to be king of Judea. It took three years of fighting, but Herod
established himself as the absolute ruler of Palestine. In spite of the peace
and prosperity that he brought and his remodeling of the temple into a thing of
marble beauty, the Jews hated him because of his cruelty and inhumanity. When
he died horribly of a cancer in 4 B.C., they
rejoiced loudly.
Meanwhile,
significant factors in the religious situation were operating.
The Messianic Expectation at Its Height
From
the coming of the Romans to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70
A.D., the Messianic expectation
increased its hold on thousands of suffering Jews. Deep in their hearts was the
feeling that if God cared at all for his chosen people, he would act soon. The
ardent hope of a supernatural deliverance from their unmerited suffering grew
by what it fed on‑an increasing flood of apocalyptic literature. Most of
it followed the pattern of Daniel,
{Written
during the early years of the Maccabean revolt.}
which had set the fashion of rehearsing the history of the Jews, from the exile to the time of writing, in the cryptic terms of beasts with wings and images breaking under blows, to signify in symbols the end of the wicked world order and the resurrection of the righteous dead to join the righteous living in the enjoyment of a better world. There is not space here, nor necessity, to mention by name and assign to their decades the books that followed Daniel's pattern. {Many of the books were lost, and the dates of those existing are hard to determine in any case.} It will be enough to give a general picture of the Messianic expectation when it reached its height.
The central belief
was that divine intervention would bring about a radical change in the world
order. Through his Messiah, God was going to gather together "his own," both living and dead, and live
with them in blessedness forever. That necessitated first the "end of the
age," as some held, or the end of the world, as others believed. The
"end" would be foreshadowed by certain last evils‑wars and
rumors of wars, distress, fear, famine, plagues, the rise to power of even more
wicked rulers on the earth, and the like. The discerning would recognize in
them the “signs of the end." At the last moment, with the sounding of
"the last trump," the Messiah would appear in the clouds, with all
the heavenly angels round him. He would be a supernatural personage, someone
"like a man," and to be called the Son of Man, but bearing as well
other titles, such as the Elect One, the Son of David, the Lord's Anointed, the
Righteous judge, the Prince of Peace, and the like. At his appearing the
righteous on earth would be caught up to him in the air (many said), and the
dead would rise from their graves. The older views held that only the justified
Jews would join the Messiah, but later expectations offered hope to the
righteous Gentiles that they also would be among the redeemed. Finally, the
Zoroastrian view was accepted that all human souls, good and bad, would be summoned
to a last judgment. Before the Messiah's seat they would be separated into the
redeemed and the lost. The bad would be sent away into everlasting hell‑fire,
and the good would enter a state of blessedness with their Lord and King. This
state of blessedness was variously conceived. Some writers thought it would be
enjoyed on earth in a restored Garden of Eden, an earthly paradise; others
placed it in one of the lower heavens. (There were thought to be seven heavens
in all, God occupying the highest level along with his attendant angels.) Some
combined the divergent conceptions, picturing an earthly paradise centered in
a New Jerusalem to be inhabited by the Messiah and his chosen ones for a
millennial period before the last judgment, and a heavenly paradise to be
occupied by the redeemed after judgment was given. The heavenly paradise was
most enthusiastically described as a place of green meadows, flowing streams,
and fruit trees, where the righteous would banquet together with great joy and
sing to the glory of God forever.
So great was the
distress of many devout Jews in the period we are describing, and yet so high
their faith, that the fulfillment of these dreams soon seemed completely
reasonable. In fact, the world would not have seemed rational otherwise.
But not all the
Jews believed alike about these matters. Many subscribed to these views only
tentatively; others considered them quite dreamlike.
New Jewish Parties in the Roman Period
Throughout this
period the old parties continued to unction. The Sadducees were more concerned
than ver in politics, and the Pharisees, with a majority representation in the
Sanhedrin, the deliberative body of organized Judean Judaism, regarded
themselves as the true carriers of the Jewish religion. The schools that the
latter maintained were the best in the Jewish world and boasted such great
teachers as Hillel and Sharnmai.
But two new parties
with a distinct political orientation now sprang up. One, a minor group, went
by the name of Herodians, because they
supported the house of Herod. They came into existence as a party in 6 A.D.
when Augustus Caesar, at the request of a Jewish deputation, deposed Herod's
son Archelaus as ethnarch of Judea and appointed a Roman procurator in his
stead. The Herodians were not inhospitable to Greco‑Roman culture, but
they wanted home rule at all costs.
A
far different and much larger group were the Zealots. They were passionate upholders of a policy of rebellion
against Rome. The northern district of Galilee was their home base and
stronghold. As an organized group they made their first appearance in 6 A.D.
under the leadership of a certain Judas the Gaulonite or Galilean, who led a
revolt against the taking of a
census by the Romans. The revolt was bloodily
suppressed by the Roman general Varus, but this did not bring to an end the
Zealot agitation. The Zealots all believed that meek submission to "Roman
slavery" meant forsaking God, their only Lord and Master, and they were
convinced that by taking the sword they could hasten the Messiah's coming or
even be rewarded by finding the Messiah in their midst. (On occasion they
thought one of their own number was the Messiah.) The Romans called these super
patriots, who hid out in the hills and fought in guerrilla fashion, "bandits"
and "robbers" ‑a not unfamiliar proceeding among conquerors.
A third new group, which entirely dissociated itself iom
politics, bore the name of Essenes. They
lived in various places throughout Palestine, some in the villages, others in
the open country. In preparation for he Messiah's coming, they withdrew from
the "corruption" of civilized society into monastic seclusion, where
they fasted and prayed, ate together, washed themselves frequently in
prescribed ceremonial ablutions, observed the Sabbath strictly, and engaged in
daily chores of farming and handicraft. They practiced non‑violence,
meekly awaiting the world's end. As we learn from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls,
the main group withdrew to a level hill top near Qumran under the cliff’s
rimming the western shore of the Dead Sea. As early as in the second century
B.C. they sought this especially barren and isolated site in order to remain
unmolested in their utter absorption in religious study and devotion. The
founder of the community, as an expounder of the Law or Torah, bore the name
"the Teacher of Righteousness." From his time on they held property
in common, ate common meals, and worshiped and studied together, devoting
themselves especially to copying scrolls for their library on a long table of
solid plaster. Under the regimen described in the scroll known as the Manual of
Discipline, they formed a decidedly other‑worldly covenant community.
They practiced baptism as a rite of cleansing following on confession and
repentance of sins, and it was repeated in individual cases whenever this
seemed spiritually necessary. They called themselves, in a manner anticipating
the early Christians, followers of "the way" and "sons of
light," for they conceived themselves to be under the rule of "the
Prince of Light" and opposed themselves therefore to the "sons of
darkness" under the "Angel of Darkness"‑a set of concepts
with a Zoroastrian rather than Hebrew coloring. Leadership of the community,
until its complete destruction in 68 A.D., during the Jewish War, by a Roman
legion, was exercised by a group of chosen priests and laymen, perhaps twelve
in number. {If we are to go by a
rather obscure reference in the Manual of Discipline, twelve may have been the
number, but this is conjectural.}
And then, as always,
there were the unorganized common people, many of them indifferent to religion,
though keeping up some of its forms like circumcision and hanging up the
mezuzah on the doorpost. Others were pious in a quiet way. Some of these, when
confronted by the challenging point of view of a young carpenter from Nazareth,
listened to him gladly, just as with some astonishment they had earlier given
ear to the prophetic personality John the Baptist, who counseled repentance
because, he insisted, the end was near. Both won followings, but Herod Antipas
beheaded the one, and Pontius Pilate ordered the other crucified. The
mainstream of Judaism was tending elsewhere, irresistibly, toward catastrophe.
IX The Great Dispersion
The
discontent of the Jews had been leading steadily to a gruesome climax.
Bloodshed and turmoil, with only brief intervals of quiet, kept all Palestine
seething for sixty years after the desperate revolt of Judas the Galilean in 6
A.D. The Romans were aware that the one indispensable condition of keeping the
peace was to let the Jewish religion alone, and they made it their policy to do
so. In other directions they used grim force. At the beginning of the first
century Palestine was divided into four districts‑three ruled by sons of
Herod, the fourth (Judea, Idumea, and Samaria) governed by a Roman procurator
residing at Caesarea on the coast below Jerusalem. In deference to Jewish
feeling the procurators did not bring the Roman imperial standards with their
image of Caesar into Jerusalem, nor require that the statue of the emperor be
erected in the temple and made the object of worship. They were satisfied
officially with the Jewish agreement to offer a daily sacrifice for the emperor
on the temple altar. But the Jews were extremely sensitive when their Temple
was interfered with. Pilate thought that he might meet with no objection if he
brought the imperial standards into Jerusalem in the darkness of the night,
but he found he had failed to reckon with Jewish alertness. When, again, he
assumed that the Jews would take no offense at his seizing and applying temple
funds to the extension of an aqueduct into Jerusalem, he discovered they were
offended to the point of revolt. A slight improvement of the condition of ill‑will
came during the reigns of Caligula and Claudius when Herod Agrippa I, a
grandson of Herod the Great, ruled the whole of Palestine and the procurators
were recalled. But when the well‑liked Herod Agrippa died, the sending of
procurators was resumed. As one succeeded another, disorder mounted; there were
"bandits" everywhere, and rioting broke out in Jerusalem; a lax high
priest was assassinated; there was conflict between Jew and Gentile, Jew and
Samaritan, Jew and Roman. A frightened people was struggling desperately for self‑determination.
The stage was now
set for open rebellion. It came in 66 A.D., toward the close of Nero's reign.
The war was begun with terrible determination on both sides. The Jews had been
divided among themselves about having a war at all, but once the issue was
joined, they entered the struggle
together, still quarreling. The Romans on their part had lost all patience and
would
stand for no more "folly." Their
forces were led by Vespasian, until Nero's death took him to Rome to be crowned
emperor; he then appointed his son Titus to subdue the Jews. Titus did so. The
struggle was unbelievably savage and bitter. After Titus finally invested
Jerusalem, he more than once pled with the Jews to surrender, but they would
not. The superhuman resistance of the city's defenders nearly baffled their
besiegers, even though the Roman catapults threw huge stones a quarter of a
mile into the defenses, and the battering‑rams, devastating in their
weight and force, broke down wall after wall. Yet, as soon as one wall was
breached, another was found behind it. The defenders, starving and half‑maddened
with horror, were driven back until they were at bay within the temple area.
The heroic resistance continued even after a brand hurled through the air set
the temple on fire and the assaulting forces broke into the enclosure. Then the
defenders retired to make a last stand in the upper city. At the end of another
month they could resist no more. Amid indescribable slaughter, the city was
razed, and Titus, having executed great numbers of Jewish captives by
crucifixion, went away to Rome, laden with plunder, to be borne in triumph
under the beautiful arch that bears his name and stands proudly still in the
ruins of the Roman Forum, a mute testimony to Jewish valor.
The Rock Fortress
of Masada. This was the site of major drama three years after the fall of
Jerusalem, in 70 A.D., when the last remnants of Jewish troops and insurgents
committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.
More than the city
was destroyed. The priests and their sacrifices, and with them the Sadducean
party, passed from the scene of history, never to have importance, or even
reality, again. The Zealots, Essenes, and Herodians were the next to follow
them off the stage. Only the party of the rabbis‑that is, the Pharisees
and a rising heretic sect called the Christians were destined to wield
influence through the coming years. The Romans had succeeded, for the moment,
in decentralizing the Jewish religion. The bonds joining each outlying
synagogue with the temple were sundered. Set adrift, the Jews had no reason to
turn their faces in worship to Jerusalem, except in sorrow and mourning.
After 70 A.D. the
Jewish dispersion reached the proportions of a national migration. Some of the
inhabitants of Jerusalem fled east to Babylonia and southeast into the Arabian
Desert, where they were beyond the power of Rome. Others went to join friends
and relatives all over the Mediterranean world. Many who had no such ties
emigrated to Jewish communities in Syria, Asia Minor, Rome, Egypt, North
Africa, and far‑off Spain.
But not all went
away. Some retired to the rural parts of Palestine; hoping to be able to go
back to Jerusalem some day and restore it. The Zealots, unwilling to believe
their cause hopeless, continued active in the hills. Three years after the fall
of Jerusalem, one grim band of insurgents on a mesa at Masada, far down the
Dead Sea, fought heroically and then committed suicide.
The Western Wall
of Jerusalem. One of the most sacred of all Jewish sites is this west wall, all
that remains of the temple begun by King David, completed by his son Solomon,
razed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., and finally destroyed by the Romans in 70
A.D. For many centuries Jews have come to it to pray and recite from the Torah.
In 1967 the wall for the first time since the first century came into Jewish
hands.
Then, sixty years after the fall of Jerusalem, a last, bloody revolt broke out in Palestine. On a visit to Judea the Emperor Hadrian had seen for himself that Jerusalem still lay in ruins after over half a century and had reissued his previous order, drawn up in Rome, that the city be rebuilt and that a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus be erected on the site, of the razed Jewish sanctuary. As soon as Hadrian left Syria, Judea rose to arms. The most learned Jew of the day, Rabbi Akiba, had urged a Messianic aspirant called Bar Kochba to be the military leader of a new war for liberation. In high anger Hadrian ordered the Jews to be butchered into submission, at the same time intensifying their opposition by forbidding the observance of the Sabbath, the practice of circumcision, and the study of the Torah. The struggle lasted three and a half years. Judea was virtually depopulated. The Romans then proceeded to the rebuilding of Jerusalem as planned, but it was constituted a Roman colony in which only non‑Jews were allowed to live, and its name was changed to Aelia Capitolina. With despairing eyes the patriots who drew near the city beheld the new temple to Jupiter standing where the old sanctuary had been, but they were forbidden by imperial edict to set foot in the city or linger near it, on pain of death. Only on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple‑the ninth day of the month Ab ‑ were they permitted to pay the sentries for the forlorn privilege of leaning against a remnant of the foundation wall of the old temple and bewail the loss of their national home and the complete dispersion of their nation. This lamentation at the Wailing Wall, begun then, continued, except when interrupted, until recent times. But now, as a result of the Israeli victory in the war of June, 1967, the Western Wall is in Jewish control for the first time since 70 A.D.
X The Making of the Talmud
But
the Jews would not give up. Although they lost their national independence,
they remained faithful to the memory of life in the Holy Land. They held
themselves together by a religious and cultural cohesion, a form of non‑violent
resistance, under the direction of their intellectual and moral leaders, the
rabbis, that was destined to survive every persecution of the future.
In the year 69
A.D., while Titus was before Jerusalem, a leading rabbi, with the name of
Johanan ben Zakkai, escaped through the Roman army to the town of Jabneh
(Jamnia) on the coastal plain, where he began teaching in a "house of
learning"
{Or "school," such as existed in
connection with most synagogues throughout the Jewish world.}
in a far‑sighted endeavor to save
Judaism from extinction by systematizing its laws and doctrines and adapting it
to the changes now upon it. He was a follower of the great sage and teacher
Hillel (died ca. 10 A.D.) and was himself a leader. Not only did he gather
about him students and scholars who were to devote themselves earnestly to
study and interpretation of the scriptures and the traditions, but now that the
Sanhedrin was defunct, he organized the leaders among them into a new council
to fix the dates of the Jewish calendar‑a :ask that had to be done each
year‑and to make such necessary regulations for Judaism as a whole as
needed to be made. Gradually, this body became the one recognized authority
throughout the Jewish world that could pronounce on the true meaning and right
practice of Judaism. Its president, with the title of Nasi (prince or patriarch),
was officially recognized by the Romans (until 425 A.D.) as the supreme head of
all the Jews in the Roman empire.
The Final Selection and Delimitation of the Hebrew Canon
One of the urgent
tasks of the Jabneh scholars was :o submit to critical examination the writings
honored ind read in the synagogues as sources of teaching and inspiration, for
it had become important and necessary .o determine which were to be regarded as
true scripture and which as failing to reach such quality. The central question
was, which of them could be judged is revelation, that is, writings divinely
inspired and not written from wholly human motivations.
We have already
seen that fully two‑thirds of the Hebrew canon existed in the period
following the time of Ezra. Many books had been written since then, some of
them in continuation of the Hebrew tradition, some sententious examples of
wisdom literature, some wildly extravagant anticipations of the end of the
world. Broadly, the scholars at Jabneh dealt with three groups of writings: (1)
the Torah or the basic literature centering in the Mosaic covenant, (2) the Nebi'im or the literature stemming from
the prophets, and (3) the Kethubim or (miscellaneous) writings
that had gained a sacred or semi‑sacred status.
Five books formed the "written” Torah
(they came to be called "the Books of Moses") ‑ Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy ‑ whose scriptural status went back to the fifth century
B.C.; and the scholars of Jabneh included them in the canon as a matter of
course. The books of the prophets had had canonical status since the third
century B.C. They fell into three groups: (1) the historical books that told in
part of the pre‑literary prophets‑Joshua, judges, Samuel, and
Kings; (2) the writings of the prophets leaving a major literary legacy‑Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; and (3) the briefer prophetic writings, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum,
Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. There was no difficulty in accepting all three groups as
divinely inspired. The Jabneh scholars had more difficulty finally determining
the status of the books of the Kethubim, the writings that Jesus son of Sirach
in the preface to the Ecclesiasticus (now
in the Apocrypha and written about 180 B.C.) called "the other writings of
our ancestors." The scholars, after scrutiny, accepted into the canon I
& II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah,
Psalms, Proverbs, job, Ruth, Lamentations, Daniel, Ecclesiastes, The Song of
Songs, and Esther, the last three
being somewhat hesitantly included, but accepted finally under the conviction
that Ecclesiastes was by King Solomon, that The Song of Songs had a deeper
meaning than its erotic contents at first sight indicated, and that Esther,
with some chapters excluded, reported a series of events that were historically
important. The Jabneh scholars set aside as useful and instructive but not of
scriptural calibre I & II Esdras;
Tobit; Judith; the excluded chapters of Esther;
The Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus; Baruch coup led with A Letter of Jeremiah; The Song of the Three;
Daniel and Susanna; Daniel, Bel, and the Snake; The Prayer of Manasseh; and
I & II Maccabees, which last
dealt with the liberation of Judea in the second century B.C.
{This last group of books
acquired the Greek name Apocrypha ("kept
back," i.e., not given prominence). Later on, the Roman Catholic Church
adopted them, with the exception of I and II Esdras, into their own canon.
(There was also a New Testament
Apocrypha, but the Roman Church, never gave it canonical status.)}
Taken together, the
books admitted to the Jewish canon (about 90 A.D.) were considered "the
Word of God," and formed thenceforth a "fixed canon," that is,
one not to be altered or added to. The Jews have ever since regarded the books of
the canon as their distinctive scriptures. Among Christians it acquired the
name Old Testament, or in a more
accurate translation Old Covenant, in
distinction from the New Testament or
New Covenant, both being accepted by
Christians as the word of God.
The Mishnah
During the sixty
years of the Jabneh school's existence far more than the fixing of the Jewish
canon was accomplished. In addition to making a detailed study of the written
Law (the Torah), the school exactly recorded and defined the unwritten Law (the
Halakah) conveyed through the traditions of the past and in the interpretations
and opinions (the Midrash) of learned rabbis. This produced a vast accumulation
of rules and judgments, which had at last to be sorted out. It was Rabbi Akiba
(the same who backed up Bar Kochba in the disastrous rebellion during the reign
of Hadrian) who discovered how to group the material of the unwritten Law under
six major heads, and thus simplified the task of classifying and codifying the
whole body of tradition.
The repressive
measures following in the train of the war under Hadrian brought a sudden end
to the school at Jabneh. Akiba perished during the conflict, and other rabbis
and scholars lost their lives. But those who survived carried the Jabneh
records into Galilee, where work on them was presently resumed at Usha, in the
interior, and then later at various other places, such as Sepphoris and
Tiberias, further inland. Such repeated removals only increased the rabbis'
sense of urgency.
The schools in Galilee developed outstanding
"masters," chief among them being Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Judah.
{Who was also patriarch.}
Their names are associated with the
compilation of the Mishnah ("Repetition" or "Study"), a
collection, under Akiba's six headings, of some four thousand precepts of
rabbinic law, intended to "interpret" and adapt the original Torah to
the conditions of the second century. The Mishnah was a large and detailed work
that contained references to the legal decisions of the outstanding rabbis of
past generations, pausing sometimes to give the varying points of view of noted
rabbis on disputed points. After it left Rabbi Judah's hands, it acquired an
authority almost as great as that of the Torah itself Certainly it met a real
need. With the Temple destroyed, it was no longer possible to carry out the
traditional ritual sacrifices; even the Torah's civil law provisions, conceived
for an earlier agricultural society, had to be adapted to the complex realities
of the money economy of the Roman world. Completed by about 220 A.D., the
Mishnah contained the decisions and judgments of almost i So of the most
revered teachers (Tannaim) of Israel and gathered its material from a period of
several centuries. The range of its subjects was great, as may be seen by a glance
at its contents. One section was concerned with the seasonal festivals and
fasts; another with prayers, agricultural laws, and the rights of the poor; a
third with "women," that is, the laws relating to marriage and
divorce; a fourth with civil and criminal law; a fifth with "consecrated
things," particularly the ritual of offerings and sacrifices; a sixth with
laws respecting what was clean and unclean in persons and things and
prescriptions as to how a Jew was to purify himself when polluted.
One reads the Mishnah's pages with a sense of wonderment at its microscopic examination of every phase of Jewish life and cannot withhold his sympathy, in spite of the overstrained interpretations and involved reasoning. It may even seem, as one modern Jew suggests, that some laws of the Mishnah were an overreaction on the rabbis' part. "But they were very sane, those rabbis. They saw how near their people were to death. Panic‑stricken, they clutched at every imaginable regulation that might keep Israel alive."
The schools in
Galilee flourished for a century and then declined in importance. The Mishnah
proved to be their one magnum opus. The
economic and spiritual inanition of the war‑ravaged East somehow operated
to rob them of their creative power. Their schools continued to exist for two
centuries more and made a contribution to Jewish learning through the
Palestinian Talmud, but this was an incomplete if important work. Intellectual
leadership had long since passed to the scholars of Babylonia.
The schools in Babylonia
were of long standing. They were the expression, in fact, of an uninterrupted
community life going back as far as 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar carried away
into exile the greater part of the people of Jerusalem. It is estimated that
after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. the refugees who fled to
Babylonia swelled its Jewish population to nearly a million persons. The
importance of this group was increased during the Parthian dominance of
Babylonia by the fact that the government recognized a Jew of reputedly Davidic
lineage, called the Resh Galuta or Chief of the Exile, as their civil head. But
far greater importance for Judaism at large can be claimed for the deep
learning and great ability of the rabbis in the Babylonian schools. Out of their
labors came the voluminous work known as the Gemara (or Supplementary
Learning).
The Gemara and the Talmud
The
completion of the Mishnah did not bring an end to the process of exploring and
defining the details of orthodox Jewish religion and life. Indeed, the Mishnah
itself became the basis of further commentary for in many parts it was so
concise as to be very nearly cryptic, and therefore itself in need of
elucidation. Moreover, it was devoted chiefly to the study of the unwritten Law
(the Halakah) and contained a relatively small portion of the oral traditions
that the Jews called the Haggadah, a name by which they meant the non Juristic
traditions, the historical, moral, and religious instruction included in
rabbinic lore. The Haggadah was the remembered substance of countless school
and synagogue homilies. In itself it was more interesting by far than the
Halakah or legal traditions, for its purpose was the instruction and
edification, if not entertainment, of the layman through graphic discourse illustrating
the meaning of moral and religious truths. It abounded in stories from Jewish
history, anecdotes of great and wise men, vivid anticipations of reward and
punishment here and hereafter, and pithy comments on Bible truths by the great
rabbis and teachers of Israel. Therefore, when the basic and indispensable
Mishnah was completed, the Palestinian and Babylonian scholars busied
themselves with recording and coming to agreement on the unrecorded portions of
the Haggadah and indeed of every scrap of Jewish learning that was not in the
Mishnah, so that nothing might be lost.
Then, in the second
quarter of the third century, just after Jewish intellectual leadership had
passed to the scholars of Babylonia, the tolerant Parthian rule was replaced by
the severe reign of the Sassanian dynasty dominated by the Magi‑that is,
the Zoroastrian priesthood. After centuries of security and prosperity the
Babylonian Jews began to experience persecution. They were forbidden to bury
their dead in the ground, because in the Zoroastrian view that would pollute
the soil, and were ordered to send in a portion of all their table meat to be
sacrificed on the Zoroastrian altars Because the Magi of that period had a
fanatically high regard for fire as a symbol of deity, they prohibited its
religious use by all non‑Zoroastrians. Immediate difficulties with the
Jews arose as a‑ result, for the Mishnah instructed them to light a
Sabbath candle before dark on Friday and to kindle tapers when the holy day
ended, observances practiced to this day. Attempts to enforce the prohibition
led to rioting and massacre. In the ensuing troubles some of the schools and
academies were raided and closed.
The upshot of the
new difficulties‑which, however, never reached the proportions of an
annihilating persecution‑was a still greater zeal to preserve Jewish
learning. The vast accumulations of rabbinic commentary were at last put in
order. All unrecorded Halakah and Haggadah were brought together in the Gemara,
the magnum opus of the Babylonian schools. When this was combined with the
Mishnah, the Talmud was the result.
The Talmud was
completed by the end of the fifth century. It marked an epoch in Jewish
history. In all the years since its completion it has never been superseded as
an authoritative compendium or even encyclopedia of descriptions and
definitions in detail of every aspect of orthodox Jewish belief and practice.
Its six major parts and sixty‑three tractates have been as meat and drink
to the persecuted Jews who fled from east to west and back again during the
long ordeal of the Middle Ages. Its physical bulk has had‑and this
constitutes a rather exceptional circumstance‑no little relation to its
spiritual inexhaustibility. It has served as a rampart of moral resistance that
rose higher and stood firmer than the brick and stone of the ghetto walls that
Europe raised to hem the Jew in. Though mistakenly adjudged magic and devil's
lore, burned in the market‑places by angry civil authorities or torn
apart page by page and thrown on the waters, the Talmud always survived to feed
the souls of a persecuted people determined to live by its regulations or have
no further part in life. Others might laugh at what was contained in it, but to
the Jew it was the wisdom that is of God.
XI The Jew, in the Middle Ages
At
the beginning of the Middle Ages the situation of the Jewish people was
profoundly affected by the impact upon them of two religions, Christianity and
Islam. The first was inclined to be hostile; the second tolerant, if not
friendly.
The relationship
between the Jews and the Christians had never been good, even from the
beginning. From the first century on, the attitude of Judaism was
authoritatively defined by the rabbis, who rejected the Christian claim that
Jesus was the Christ, that is, the Messiah, from the moment it was made. The
Christians, however, never quite gave up the hope that the Jews might be
eventually persuaded to accept Jesus as the Christ. For two centuries and more,
their missionaries and apologists tried with earnest persistence to win the
Jews over to their faith, but their success was small in proportion to the
efforts they expended. The Jews were for the most part not convinced by the
Christian teaching, especially after St. Paul carried the Christian gospel into
Europe and the Greeks who entered the Church, in giving expression to their
flair for philosophical interpretation, placed the life of Jesus in the
cosmological setting of Greek philosophy and developed a theology around the
figure of Jesus that was daring in its speculative sweep. At the same time St.
Paul produced further alienation by claiming that Christians were not expected
to observe all the regulations of the Torah, as Jews were. It should be remembered
that the rabbis, primarily concerned as they were with saving Judaism from
dissolution seldom strayed from the study of conduct of life. Meticulous in
details, they kept their eyes on what was in the written Torah, not disdaining
to be common‑place in their interpretations. The Talmud is proof that they
took off on no high flights of theological speculation. Consequently, they
viewed "the Hellenizing of the Christian religion" with a certain
distaste. Why should they accept the vague and cloudy propositions of
theological speculation in exchange for the concrete ethical realities of a
holy way of life sanctioned by long tradition and deriving from God? The
antagonisms implicit in this situation became a political actuality after the
conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 3 12 A.D. and the subsequent elevation
of Christianity to the status of the state religion. The Christian bishops, who
now became great powers in the world, were in no amiable mood when they found
that the Jews only stiffened their resistance to Christian pressure with the
state behind it. As the Middle Ages advanced, the hostility of Christians to
Jews intensified and occasionally broke out into violence.
The Muslims treated
the Jews better. In Palestine, Syria, and Babylonia they displayed toward the
Jews not only tolerance but kindness, partly because the Jews looked upon them
as deliverers from the Christians and Zoroastrians and therefore lent them
their service as spies and scouts, and partly for the reason that culturally,
racially, and religiously there was a marked resemblance between them. The
rabbinical schools in Babylonia therefore throve once more. The "Prince of
the Exile" (the exilarch) became a powerful figure in the Muslim court at
Baghdad, and the Jewish traders, following in the wake of Muslim conquerors, turned
almost overnight into wealthy merchants who trafficked from one end of the
Mediterranean world to the other. But it was too good to last. Economic
conditions took a turn for the worse. The Turks came; the Jews again began to
be oppressed. So, in the tenth and eleventh centuries many Babylonian scholars
set forth with their folk for Spain, at the other end of the world, where,
since the eighth century, Jewish learning had been enjoying a heyday under the
tolerant rule of the Moors. Here they joined forces with their Spanish
brethren in creating the "golden age" of Jewish science, religious
philosophy, and mysticism in the West.
New Thought in Babylonia and Spain
It took the combined resources of Eastern and
Western Judaism to produce this notable Spanish interlude. Jewish scholarship
in the West had at least these advantages: it was the beneficiary, first of
Arabic science, which excelled in mathematics and astronomy and had
rediscovered Aristotle, and next of a renaissance of Jewish poetry and belles‑lettres, then in progress
(eleventh century). But the scholars from Babylonia were also ripe for creative
advance. They were not narrow Talmudists; something had happened to them before
they left Babylonia ‑that freed them from too confined an adherence to
the Talmud's text. This was the Karaite heresy and the corrective reaction, led
by the great scholar Saadiah, which followed in its wake.
Acceptance of the
Talmud as an infallible guide of life never was universal throughout the Jewish
world. Occasionally, Messianic aspirants would release their followers from
obedience to its regulations and lead them "back to the Torah." But
this was perhaps the least important reaction against the Talmud. There was
greater disturbance when it was argued that the Talmud was a departure from the
truths divinely revealed to ancient Israel. A significant protest of this kind
was led by the scholar Anan ben David of Baghdad, a candidate for the title of
exilarch, rejected (767 A.D.) for his heretical views, who declared that the
supreme authority in Jewish life was the Hebrew canon, particularly the five
books of the Torah, and not the Talmud. The new sect he founded was nicknamed
"the Children of the Text" and more commonly bore the name of
Karaites (Readers). As a movement, it resembled in some respects the Protestant
Anabaptist reaction against Catholic scholasticism and ritual, though it was
even more extremely literalistic. Generally, among the Karaites the eating of
almost any meat was forbidden, the Sabbath lights enjoined by the Mishnah were
not kindled, recourse to physicians was regarded as lack of faith in the
scriptural promise "I am the Lord that healeth thee," and many
ancient practices that had fallen into disuse were revived in spite of the
anachronisms involved. Although, because it stressed the full validity of
individual interpretations of the ancient scriptures, it broke up into many
divergent sects (like Protestantism again) and subsequently declined, the
Karaite sect spread thinly through the Jewish world and up into Russia. Its
chief historical importance lies in the fact that it awoke orthodox Jews from
their complacency with strictly logical juristic deductions from divine Law and
stimulated a re‑examination retrospectively of the Talmud's indebtedness
to the Hebrew canon and, in terms of contemporary interests, of its general
suitability to the times. just this was attempted by Saadiah ben Joseph (8 8 2‑942
A.D.), head of the Sura Academy in Babylonia.
Saadiah, realizing
that the Karaites were obeying a sound impulse in returning to the original
Hebrew scriptures, began the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Arabic,
in order to make them available both to interested Muslims and to those Arabic‑speaking
Jews who had difficulty reading them in the original Hebrew. He also wished in
his writings to demonstrate the reasonableness of the Talmud by references both
to the Hebrew scriptures and to the increasing number of Arabic translations of
Greek philosophical and scientific works. Revelation and reason (scripture and
philosophy) were, he said, complementary; both were needed. So he attempted a
new systematization of Jewish thought, harmonizing it with the best in world
thought, and thus became the father of medieval Jewish philosophy.
When the Babylonian
scholars migrated to Spain, they took Saadiah's liberal conceptions with them,
and these ideas of his helped to shape the course taken by enlightened Jewish
opinion there.
In Spain, the
fruitful meeting of Eastern and Western influences produced a mental quickening
so marked that Spain quickly became the chief center of Jewish learning and
culture. In the Jewish Academy of Cordoba, founded in the tenth century, a
succession of distinguished scholars encouraged the fresh expression of Jewish
learning and insight in literature. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Ibn
Gabirol, Judah Halevi, and the two Ibn Ezras wrote books of verse and learned
treatises with great clarity and power. So deeply devotional were many of their
hymns and religious essays that portions of them have since found their way
into the liturgy of the synagogues.
Moses Maimonides
Even more famous
was the great twelfth‑century scholar Moses ben Maimon (1135 ‑
1204), who is usually called Moses Maimonides. Born in Cordoba, he and his
family fled during his youth from a persecution (this time at the hands of
conservative Muslims) that drove them from Spain across the Mediterranean to
Cairo, where he became a trusted court physician to the ruler of Egypt, Saljuq
Saladin. There he became known throughout the Jewish world for three great
treatises. The first was a commentary on the Mishnah, in which he sought to
summarize and clarify its complicated provisions, emphasizing its ethics and
its basic reasonableness. He considered that the Mishnah in seeking to define
in practical and reasonable terms the Judaic way of life adhered to the Greek
principle supported by Aristotle, "Nothing in excess." Wishing to
make his work as widely available as possible to Jews living in Muslim lands,
he wrote the commentary in Arabic. He introduced at its close his famous
statement of the thirteen cardinal principles of the Jewish faith, to which he
also adhered.
{These were in brief. "I believe with perfect
faith that God is the creator of all things and he alone; that he is one with a
unique unity; that he is without body or any form whatsoever; that he is
eternal; that to him alone is it proper to pray; that all the words of the
prophets are true; that Moses is the chief of the prophets; that the law given
to Moses has been passed down without alteration; that this law will never be
changed and no other will be given; that God knows all the thoughts and actions
of men; that he rewards the obedient and punishes transgressors; that the
Messiah will come; that there will be a resurrection of the deact". It is
interesting that these articles appear in the Jewish Daily Prayer Book (in a
more amplified form and in rhyme) to serve as an introduction to the morning
service, although they have never been completely accepted and are in no way
binding.}
His
second work was immediately accepted as authoritative, although it did not
escape severe criticism. It was written for its Jewish readers in Mishnaic
Hebrew and bore the name Mishneh Torah ("second
Torah" or "companion to the Torah"). Rational and liberal in
treatment, it was a redaction of the written Torah and the Talmud, with great
weight given to authorities (the Tarmaim, Amoraim, and Geonim of Palestine and
Babylonia), whose names, however, for the sake of simplicity were omitted. He
did not hesitate to make decisions on his own authority and even added new laws
that complemented or even contradicted the Talmud; but he succeeded in making
the Torah, taken in its widest sense, comprehensible and easier to follow
without puzzlement. The puzzled were much on his mind. His third and greatest
work, written in Arabic to capture a wide readership, was called Guide for the Perplexed, a rational
examination of the Jewish faith, conceived in a spirit more than cordial to
Aristotle, even while it stood firm on the doctrine of the divine revelation of
the Hebrew Torah. His purpose was to reconcile religion and science, faith and
reason, Judaism and philosophy. Revelation, certainly, is made to faith, he
said; but reason also reaches truth. For reason can take one far, to the point
in fact where revelation comes to supplement it. Such revelation, when it
comes, cannot be contrary to reason but is rational in all its parts. Miracles,
being contrary to reason, should be explained rationally, and the anthropornorphisms
of the scriptures so interpreted that they become figures of speech, charged
with ethical meanings. The account of creation in Genesis must be interpreted
allegorically. By such use of our understanding we get to know the highest
truth about God and his will for mankind.
But many Jewish
scholars were not taken with Maimonides' rationalism. They would have none of
him, in spite of the mental stimulus his works provided. Religion, they said,
was mystical and dealt with hidden meanings not accessible to reason but known
only to the truly devout. The most able spokesman for these views was
Nahmanides (1195‑1270), born in Gerona, Spain, who felt that man cannot
compass God's truth with his finite and fallible reason; to know the truths of
religion there is only one way: one must have faith and deep feeling that God
is all in all. In similar vein, Hasdai Crescas in the fourteenth century
contended that man can reach God only through love and submission, not through
a purely rational search.
The Kabbala
But the conviction
that religion has hidden meanings was to receive another kind of statement‑that
of the Kabbala, a system of speculative theology and mystical number symbolism
that gave new currency to old accumulations of secret wisdom and esoteric lore
and that fascinated many by mysterious arrangements of words and numbers,
purporting to reveal the "deeper meaning" in the Hebrew scriptures.
The fact that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet also stand for numbers (aleph is 1, beth is 2, gimel is 3, etc.) enabled interpreters
to turn any word or sentence into a number series, and this seemed to the
Kabbalists to yield significant results in the case of the various names and
attributes of God. Even rabbis and scholars of note gave themselves up to acrostic
anagrams and other forms of esoteric word‑play.
The Kabbala, whose
most important book is the Zohar, said
to have been written in the 1280's by Moses de Leon in Spain, is fundamentally
an expression of a deep need not fully satisfied either by close adherence to
the Talmud or by the cool rationalism of Maimonides. It has sought religious
experience of hidden spiritual forces in the world‑as is true also of
Christian mysticism.
But the Kabbala
also addressed itself to serious metaphysical problems, the problem, for
example, of how a perfect God could produce an imperfect or incomplete world,
or, to put it in other terms, how the Infinite could bring forth the finite
without damaging subtraction from himself. In finding a solution of this
problem in the theory of emanations, the Kabbala went back ultimately to such
ancient sources as Philo and the Gnostics. A typical line of speculation
started with the concept of God as the Boundless (EnSoph). From him, as light
springs from a sun, proceeded various emanations, called the Ten Sephiroth (literally, "ten
numbers" but understood as standing for "spiritual entities"),
such as the Divine Will, which generated Wisdom (male) and Knowledge
(female),
{There
is a tendency in the Kabbala to accent the interaction of male and female
principles operating in the order of the world. There is even an introduction
(or reintroduction, since in Biblical and Talmudic times it did play a certain
role) of the feminine principle into the concept of divinity, in the form of Matronit,
the mystical divine spouse of God the King. Compare this with Hindu and
Buddhist recognitions of the feminine principle in deity.} these in turn generating Grace (male) and
Power (female), which latter by their union produced Beauty; from the last three
sprang the natural world. Not to carry the matter further, the upshot of these
speculations was the conviction that man, who has all these qualities, is the
universe in miniature, a microcosm filled with magical cosmic forces, the
direction of which can be controlled by efficacious formulas, names, and
symbols. The Messiah himself will be identified at his coming by his mysterious
name and symbol.
The exciting
implications which flowed from these considerations produced in central Europe
an abundant crop of false Messiahs who only disappointed the faithful. Since
the middle of the sixteenth century Kabbalism has had its chief center in Safed
in northern Galilee.
The Crusades and the Ghettos
The Jews had by
this time long since spread out into France, England, and the Rhineland, where
they settled in little clusters, followed similar occupations, and remained
true to their faith. Because their religious ceremonies were carried out in
virtual seclusion and never came under the direct observation of the general
public, they excited curiosity and suspicion. Many on the outside took the
attitude that the Jews were a secret order of conspirators against the public
welfare. They were charged with every form of malevolent purpose. The launching
of the Crusades at the end of the eleventh century produced such excitement
against "infidels" that an open butchery of the Jews began, starting
Torah Scrolls and
other Holy Objects The opened ark shows
us sacred scriptures that are read in the synagogue services. This photograph
was taken in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the Ohel Mohed Sephardic Synagogue.
In
Germany, where, wholesale massacres took place, and speading to the rest of
Europe. After the butchery ran its
course, orders of expulsion followed. In Germany one town after another drove
the Jews out, at least in law. They were expelled from England in 1290, and two
centuries of periodic expulsion and restoration, in 1394 they were denied
residence in France. In Spain persecution of the Jews accompanied the expulsion
of the Moors, and in 1492 all unconverted Jews were ordered driven out.
Fleeing in the only
direction open to them, eastward, the Jews of' Spain and southern European,
areas found refuge in Turkey, Palestine, and Syria (where they spoke Ladino,
basically a Spanish dialect interspersed with Hebrew). These Jews of the, Near
East have acquired the name Sephardim, Their
tendency has been to develop on the base of' the Torah and Talmud an intense
mysticism and speculation, KabIndistic in form. The Jews of northern areas went
in large numbers to Poland and neighboring areas, where they brought the
welcome arts of trade and money‑lending to culturally backward villages.
They spoke a dialect compounded of German and Hebrew, called Yiddish. they have
come to be named Ashkenazirn, and account for more than seventy per cent of
today's Jews, Their orientation on the
whole, has been provided by the Talmud and is highly regulated way of life,
although there have also been mystics among them.
As for those who
remained in Italy and the towns of Austria and Germans, that had not totally
excluded them, they were forced to live in segregated quarters called ghettos,
usually located in the worst part of town. To add to their distress, in most
places where the Catholic Church was supreme, there was enforcement of the
thirteenth‑century law forbidding Jews on pain of death to appear on the
streets without the Jew badge ‑ a colored patch of cloth sewn on to their
clothing. This badge became a mark of shame. In many towns high walls were
built around the ghettos, and the Jews were locked in at night. To be seen
abroad after dark often meant death, and always a fine.
The Medieval Festivals and Fasts
Meanwhile,
the calendar of Jewish festivals and fasts had undergone development and reinterpretation.
The ancient Palestinian and Babylonian liturgies, somewhat divergent to begin
with, were further but not radically modified to meet the particular needs or
preferences of the Jews of Spain, Italy, North Africa, Turkey, Persia, and
central and western Europe, or to admit Spanish, Kabbalistic, and other
devotional materials. Of great importance was the fact that the agricultural
interests expressed in the ancient Hebrew rites and ceremonies were no longer
in the forefront, and therefore the inherited forms had to be charged with
historical and ethical meanings that would call out the continued loyalty and
devotion of the Jews in every sort of occupation and environment.
The chief festivals
and fasts of the year were assigned the procedures, meanings, and dates
(determined according to the lunar calendar) that have been standard from
Talmudic days to the present.
{Since
Jews throughout the world have used practically the same prayer book
(originally set up by Saadia ben Joseph, 882‑944 A.D.), uniformity of
ritual has marked Jewish worship through the centuries. Differences arose at
times, like those between Sephardic and Ashkenazic rituals, but they have been
minor.}
They had by now taken approximately the following forms
(which are in use today):
In late March or
during April, Passover (Pesakh), "the anniversary of Israel's liberation
from Egypt," initially a spring festival of thanksgiving for the birth of
lambs and the sprouting of grain, was ritually associated with the idea of
individual and group liberation and renewal, in all periods, beginning with the
Exodus and continuing through history. As in the ancient period, nothing
leavened was eaten for a full week (whence its other name "the Feast of
Unleavened Bread"). The biblically prescribed eating of the paschal lamb
had from the time of the great dispersion been set aside, and the chief event
of Passover had become the Seder Feast, observed on the eve of the first (or
the first and second) day, when the whole family assembled together, some from
a distance, in the home. A brief booklet or liturgy containing the Haggadah or
Narrative was read throughout the ceremony. After drinking of the first cup of
wine, the male head of the family washed his hands and assumed the function of
family priest. Parsley dipped in salt water was eaten by each participant in
remembrance of the trials of captivity. At other intervals each partook of
further cups of wine, bitter herbs, roots, and unleavened bread. Accompanying
these symbolic acts was the running account of the Haggadah, designed to retell
the story of the Exodus and explain the purpose of the Passover rite itself‑that
is, its challenge ever to seek freedom from any bondage. Psalms were sung, and
finally the evening meal was served. Afterwards a door was opened, amid a
recitation of Psalms and lamentations, and Elijah, the hoped‑for
precursor of the Messiah, was invited to come in and drink of the Elijah Cup,
which had stood untouched on the table during the preceding rite. The service
ended with a psalm of praise, a prayer, or the recitation of a grace. The
solemnity then melted into general rejoicing in which the children present were
encouraged to take a leading part.
For forty‑nine
days after the Seder Feast, except at the new moon or on the thirty‑third
day, no joyous occasions, including marriages, were allowed. Then on the
fiftieth day came Shebhuoth‑the Feast of Weeks (in the New Testament
called Pentecost), a day of joy once set aside to commemorate the first‑fruits
of the spring wheat harvest, then modified to include thanksgiving for the
giving of the Law at Sinai, which was held to have occurred at the same time of
year.
The Shofar or Ram’s Horn. The old
man is reverently praying while preparing the shofarfor use in the synagogue.
Following ancient custom going back at least to Joshua's time, the holy ram's
horn is blown during the services of New Year's Day (Rosh Hashanah), at the
conclusion of the Day of Atonement, on the seventh day of the Feast of
Tabernacles, and during the entire month of Elul after the supplications. It
has a loud, piercing tone and symbolizes God's call or summons.
The next great
holiday came in September (or early October). It was Rosh Hashanah, or New
Year's Day. This name took the place of the ancient biblical names, Day of
Memorial and Day of Blowing the Trumpet (signalized by the sounding of the shofar or ram's horn, a custom still
solemnly observed as a means of summoning the Jew "to ponder over his
deeds, remember his Creator, and go back to Him in penitence"). In
recognition of the significance of the day, the Talmud called it the Day of
judgment. After it followed the Days of Repentance, and on the tenth day the
solemn Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), during which "repentance, prayer,
and righteousness" were enjoined upon all the participants in the fast,
who, as free agents, were urged to exert their wills to turn from wrong doing
and in true atonement for sin do God's will henceforth.
Five days later
came Succoth, the eight‑day Feast of Booths or Tabernacles, basically a
thanksgiving festival devoted to expression of gratitude for the autumnal
fruits of vine and tree, and now associated with the thought of God's provident
goodness in the days of Israel's wandering in the wilderness and during later
times. In addition to the decoration of the synagogue with all sorts of fruits
and flowers, a feature of the services was the ritualistic carrying in
procession of four products of Palestine tied together, namely, a citron and a
palm‑branch bound with branches of the myrtle and the willow. Those who
could do so erected a booth or tabernacle in their courtyards or next to their
homes and ate their meals there. (Some even slept there.)
The last day of the
festival was the Simkhath Torah (Rejoicing Over the Torah), featuring the
carrying of the scrolls from the ark in procession around the synagogue.
Two festivals not
directly based upon the ancient Mosaic tradition were the Hanukkah in December
and Purim in February or March. The former‑the Feast of Lights‑was
celebrated for eight days, one light being lit in the synagogues and in every
home on the first night, two on the second, three on the third, and so on, this
being interpreted to commemorate the rededication of the temple by Judas
Maccabeus in 165 B.C.
Purim or the Feast
of Lots was associated with the biblical Book of Esther and thus was made to
celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from persecution through Esther's
patriotic intervention. Gifts were exchanged within the family and sent to
friends and to the poor, in the spirit of carnival. There was dancing and
singing in the homes.
XII Judaism in the Modern World
The
Protestant Reformation was the product of many causes. Not least among the
contributing factors was the return by the Reformers to the study of the Bible
in the original Hebrew and Greek. So impressed was Luther in his earlier years
by his discovery of the close genetic relation of the Jewish and Christian
faiths that he published in 1523 a pamphlet Jesus
Was Born a Jew, in which he pleaded: "They (the Jews) are blood‑relations
of our Lord; and if it were proper to boast of flesh and blood, theJews belong
to Christ more than we.... Therefore it is my advice that we treat them
kindly.... We must exercise not the law of the Pope, but that of Christian
love, and show them a friendly spirit. . . ." But Luther retraced in his own life the first three centuries of
the Christian era. When he found the Jews solidly resistant to conversion, his
anger slowly mounted, until in his later years he began to abuse them savagely.
In a pamphlet Concerning the Jews and
Their Lies (1542) he repeated in a passion of credulous rage all the old
rumors concerning theJews that they poisoned the wells of the Christians or
that they murdered Christian children (presumably, as the current rumor had it,
to get blood for the Passover). In his last sermons he hinted that Jewish
doctors knew and therefore practiced the art of poisoning their Christian
patients. "If the Jews," he growled, "refuse to be converted, we
ought not to suffer them or bear with them any longer!
Luther was typical
of his age in this. The Reformation brought no permanent improvement in the
condition of the Jews of Europe. In fact, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries their fortunes reached a very low point, as low as any in their
history. Not only did they live in physical ghettos devised by their
oppressors, but they themselves retired into mental ghettos of their own
creation, which shut the world out‑its science, art, and culture as well
as its hostility and evil. Improvement in their lot came, but came slowly.
Eastern Europe
In Eastern Europe
the Jews remained on the whole true to their heritage of ancient patterns of
thought and life, until Soviet repression hampered their religious practices
and Hitler's fanatic racism led to the killing of six million Jewish men,
women, and children.
Not that the Jews
of eastern Europe ever had an easy time of it. In the seventeenth century a
terrible pogrom was wreaked upon them, especially in Poland, by the Cossacks,
when these furious Russians rose in rebellion against their feudal lords and
went on to slaughter five hundred thousand Jews. This and other pogroms have
only confirmed the eastern Jew in his unrelaxing grip upon every article of his
inherited faith. But there were characteristic differences in the different
areas. In Lithuania and White Russia the emphasis has been on intellectual
study of the Talmud and the original Hebrew texts. In these regions the Jews
have been consistently anti‑mystical; meticulous scholarship has been
rated above emotional fervor. Their characteristic personality was the
eighteenth‑century scholar, Elijah of Vilna, who became their ruling
rabbi. He was an intellectual giant, at once Hebrew grammarian, astronomer,
author, and critic of the mystical Hasidim (about to be described). In his
honor an academy rose to which students came from all over Europe during the
nineteenth century to study the Talmud in the traditional manner of the
Babylonian schools of over a thousand years earlier.
South of the Pripet
Marshes, in southern Poland and the Ukraine, eastern Talmudism took a warmly
emotional and mystical turn which seemed to but did not really abandon the
Talmudic point of view in its joyous espousal of the pantheistic slant of the
Kabbala. Messianism ran riot for awhile, and more than one unstable soul
encouraged by the‑hopeful ran a career among them as Messiah, only to
dash their hopes at last by some false step that brought ruin or disgrace.
However, one notable religious personality emerged among them, Israel of
Moldavia, affectionately renamed Baal Shern Tob, "the Master of the Good
Name (of God)," a kindly itinerant faith‑healer of the eighteenth
century, who scorned the Talmudists for studying the Law so narrowly that they
had no time to think about God. Thinking about God meant to him realizing that
God is everywhere‑in nature, in human life, and in every human thought.
Religion was feeling God in everything and praying joyously in the wholesome
consciousness of God's indwelling. "All that I have achieved," he
used to say, "I have achieved, not through study, but through
prayer."" Reviving a name used in postexilic times two thousand years
earlier, he called his followers, who were mostly common people, Hasidim or
"Pious Ones." Hence, the movement initiated by him is called
Hasidism.
Central and Western Europe
In
central and western Europe the matter of chief import during the last two
centuries has been the experience of slow but exhilarating liberation from
civil disabilities, followed by what might be called "a return to the
world." The justice of such a liberation was admitted by the leaders of
the European Enlightenment during the eighteenth century and was made an
actuality by the revolutionary movements in France and Germany in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The rationalism and
scepticism of the eighteenth century intellectuals in Europe, which tended to
hold all religions up to mockery, led to a lowering of religious and class
barriers in the centers of culture. It was thus that Moses Mendelssohn, one of
the greatest of modern Jews, broke through the restrictions barring Jews in
Berlin and reached the center of its intellectual life. While pursuing his
studies there, he became the friend of Lessing, the literary lion of Berlin,
and was accorded the signal honor of having the liberal drama, Nathan the Wise, Lessing's masterpiece,
created around his personality. That the great Lessing should choose a hump‑backed
Jew as his intimate and enshrine him in a serious work of art was at first
astounding, then thought‑provoking. Mendelssohn wrote German, not as the
Jews spoke it, but as the Germans themselves desired to write it. A dialogue on
immortality, which he composed on the Platonic model, was read throughout
Europe. In the hope of doing a service to his fellow Jews, he translated the
Pentateuch and other parts of the Hebrew canon into accomplished German prose
(written out in Hebrew characters) and added a commentary of an advanced
liberal character. But the chief work of his life was his earnest pleading in
behalf of his people, that they might be freed from the ghettos to enter the
stream of modern life on a basis approaching equality with other people. He did
not live to see this happen, but in his own person he showed Europe how worthy
the Jews were to be freed.
Liberalism and Reform
The revolutionary
changes wrought by the rise of democracy in America and Europe eventually gave
the Jews their full civil freedom. The American Revolution established the
political principle that all men are created free and equal. During the French
Revolution the Jews of France received the rights of full citizenship. Wherever
Napoleon went, he abolished the ghettos and released the Jews into the world at
large. After him reaction set in. All through Europe the Jews were faced with
the choice: back to the ghettos or assimilation to European (nominally
Christian) culture. Many, under the pressure, chose the latter alternative;
others submitted to the reimposition of restrictions but entered avidly into
all underground revolutionary movements looking toward the overthrow of
reactionary governments, thereby providing conservatives and future reactionaries
with the argument that Jews are by nature subversive. (Those Jews who had never
tried to enter European life but clung to their ancient ways had, of course, no
part in this.) Finally came the social up heavals of 1848 and after, which had
as their consequence, for the Jews of most countries of western and central
Europe, the granting of complete equality with other men before the law. The
universities opened their doors. From them Jewish doctors, politicians,
dramatists, professors, and scientists poured forth into the communal life of
Europe. In the vast processes of change accompanying the victory of political
democracy, the Jews stood to benefit most.
Not least among the
far‑reaching consequences of the freeing of the Jews was the effect upon
Judaism itself. The Jews found themselves in a world fast throwing aside the
vestiges of the past that stood in the path of the liberal movement, and it was
natural that they should consider doing the like among themselves. The educated
Jew, engaged in the activities of the modern world, began to feel that Judaism
should no longer stand aloof behind self‑protective barriers but should
resume its ancient progressive character. One result of this realization was
the movement called Reform Judaism. It made a beginning in the German
synagogues whose rabbis, imbued with the spirit of modernity, could persuade their
congregations to go along with such innovations as simplifying and modernizing
the synagogue worship. The Sabbath service was condensed, and most of it was
translated into the vernacular. References to the coming of the Messiah, the
resurrection of the dead on the last day, or to the re‑establishment
ofJewish nationality and of the sacrificial rites of ancient Palestine were
stricken out. Organ and choir were installed, and hynms in the vernacular were
sung. The fundamental conviction of the movement was stated by Abraham Geiger,
its leading exponent, in the words: "Judaism is not a finished tale; there
is much in its present form that must be changed or abolished; it can assume a
better and higher position in the world only if it will rejuvenate itself."
There were both moderates and radicals in the Reform movement. The latter
shocked the Jewish world by declaring in 1843 that their principles were:
"First, We recognize the possibility of unlimited development in the
Mosaic religion. Second, The collection
of controversies, dissertations, and prescriptions commonly designated by the
name Talmud possesses for us no authority from either the doctrinal or
practical standpoint. Third, A
Messiah who is to lead back the Israelites to the land of Palestine is neither
expected nor desired by us; we know no fatherland but that to which we belong
by birth and citizenship."" But after 1848 the conservatives fought
the Reform movement to a halt, and even drove it into retreat. The movement
then transferred itself largely to America. There it has moved away from such
extreme pronouncements as the 1843 declaration
toward positions, in regard to ritual, beliefs, and supportive attitudes toward
Israel, resembling those of the modern Conservatives, whose principles are outlined
below.
The Orthodox Jews
earnestly fought Reform from its beginning because it denied the orthodox view
that the divine revelation in the Torah is final and complete and awaits only
its fulfillment. But the proposed changes in belief seemed less dangerous than
the threatened changes in way of life. It is perhaps fair to say that the
Orthodox Jew of today lays a heavier emphasis on practice than on belief One
need not believe exactly as the rabbis do, but one should adhere with absolute
fidelity to the practical admonitions of the Torah, as they are interpreted and
applied to daily life by the Talmud: the Sabbath lights should be lit and the
Sabbath kept as of old; none of the ancient Jewish festivals should be skimped
or abbreviated; the dietary laws, with their prohibitions of certain foods and
their regulations as to kosher meat and the non‑mixing of milk and meat,
requiring different sets of plates for serving meat and dairy products, should
be observed.
It should be said,
however, that most Orthodox Jews in America have moved away from extreme
positions in these matters toward allowing more freedom in exceptional or
difficult circumstances.
Zionism and the Establishment of a New Nation
Neither Reform nor
Orthodox Jews have had plain sailing, however. The racial theories of
nineteenth century extremists basing themselves on misinterpretations of
Darwinian biology, as well as the astonishing economic and professional
successes of the Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century stirred up a
new wave of anti‑Semitism in Europe, where pogroms in Russia, vindictive
Jew‑baiting in Germany, and the famous Dreyfus case in France convinced
many Jews that their only hope of permanent security lay in the re‑establishment
of a national home in Palestine. A landmark in the crystallization of this
viewpoint was the book by Theodor Herzl, on Thejeuish
State, issued in 1896. Based on
its premises, a Jewish movement called Zionism rose rapidly to international
notice. From the start it gained wide support among Orthodox Jews and has by
now won over most Reform Jews, who at first opposed it as reactionary and
impracticable. The Balfour Declaration during World War I, to the effect that
the British government viewed with favor "the establishment in Palestine of
a national home for the Jewish people" and would seek to "facilitate
the achievement of this object," changed the political status of the
movement overnight. Thousands of Jews went to Palestine during the next two
decades, and under the protection of the British Mandate laid the foundations
of Jewish national life there. The monstrous genocide of six million Jews in
central Europe by the Nazis, together with the displacements of World War II,
accentuated the pressures already brought to bear toward the formation of an
independent Jewish state. The United Nations Assembly finally, in 1947, voted
to partition Palestine and make a Jewish state an actuality. The new state
calls itself Israel. It has maintained itself as a nation with vigor and
success. Yet the intensity of Arab opposition has not abated. The wars that
have occurred and the guerrilla raids that continue across the frontiers augur
stormy times still ahead for the eastern Mediterranean littoral.
A Contemporary Jew Praying at the
Western Wall. In these times he is probably praying for the security of Israel.
Many of those who come to pray write their prayers on slips of paper and insert
them in the crevices of the ancient stones.
Other Developments
Meanwhile,
the need to find a median position between Orthodoxy and Reform resulted in the
establishment of neo‑Orthodoxy and Conservatism in Europe. These
movements were founded in the mid‑nineteenth century and made some
headway. In America the Conservative movement experienced a rapid growth. With
its own seminary in New York City, and its congregations organized into the
United Synagogue of America, it has striven to find common ground between
extreme Zionism on the one hand and the position taken, say, by the Conference
of Reform Jews meeting in Chicago in 1918 some six months after the Balfour
Declaration, at which time (it reversed itself later) that body announced:
We
hold that Jewish people are and of right ought to be at home in all lands.
Israel, like every other religious communion, has the right to live and assert
its message in any part of the world. We are opposed to the idea that Palestine
should be considered the home‑land of
the Jews. Jews in America are part of the American nation. The ideal of the Jew
is not the establishment of a Jewish state‑not the reassertion of Jewish
nationality which has long been outgrown. . . . The mission of the Jew is to
witness to God all over the world.
The
Conservatives see no inherent contradiction in witnessing to God all over the
world and having a Jewish state in Palestine as a center from which Jewish
culture may be disseminated among the nations. In effect, the Conservatives
endorse the religious aspects of both
right and left. In an essay surveying "Current Philosophies of Jewish
Life," Milton Steinberg says:
Conservative
Judaism had its origin simeltaneously in America and Western Europe among those
Jews who either in theory or practice could no longer be orthodox, and who yet
refused to accept what they regarded as the extreme non traditionalism of
Reform.... Two motifs dominate conservative Judaism. The first is the assertion
of the centrality of religion in Jewish life.... The second theme, heavily
underscored, is the sense of tradition, of history, of the continuity of Jewish
life both through time and in space. It is this feeling of the organic unity of
one Jewry with other Jewries which Professor Solomon Schechter, the leading
figure in American Conservatism, caught in the phrase "Catholic
Israel." This phrase is more than a description. It is intended to serve
as a norm for the guidance of behavior. That shall be done by Jews, it implies,
which is normal to Catholic Israel: ... to hold on to the traditional, to
sanction modifications slowly, reluctantly, and, if at all possible, within the
framework of Jewish law.
Recently,
a group a little left of center has arisen among the Conservatives calling
themselves the Reconstructionists. They advocate wide liberty in doctrine and
"creative adjustment" to the conditions of modern life.
The future of Judaism
would seem to lie between these divergent groups, each as yet feeling its way
more or less anxiously to solid foundations in a tragically unstable modern
world. These groups are not sharply divided from each other, for each yearns to
have its unity with the others made possible in word, deed, and faith.