1. Scripture speaks frequently of the anger and zeal of God and of His
avenging sword and judgment, so as to give the impression that “the Old
Testament God is a God of wrath and vengeance.” As a matter of fact, these
attributes are merely emanations of His holiness, the guide and incentive
to moral action in man. The burning fire of the divine holiness aims to
awaken the dormant seeds of morality in the human soul and to ripen them
into full growth. Whenever we to-day would speak of pangs of conscience,
of bitter remorse, Scripture uses figurative language and describes how
God’s wrath is kindled against the wrongdoing of the people, and how fire
blazes forth from His nostrils to consume them in His anger. The nearer
man stands to nature, the more tempestuous are the outbursts of his
passion, and the more violent is the reaction of his repentance. Yet this
very reaction impresses him as though wrought from outside or above by the
offended Deity. Thus the divine wrath becomes a means of moral education,
exactly as the parents’ indignation at the child’s offenses is part of his
training in morality.
2. Thus the first manifestation of God’s holiness is His indignation at
falsehood and violence, His hatred of evil and wrongdoing. The longer men
persist in sin, the more does He manifest Himself as “the angry God,” as a
“consuming fire” which destroys evil with holy zeal.(276) The husbandman
cannot expect the good harvest until he has weeded out the tares from the
field; so God, in educating man, begins by purging the soul from all its
evil inclinations, and this zeal is all the more unsparing as the good is
finally to triumph in His eternal plan of universal salvation. We must
bear in mind that Judaism does not personify evil as a power hostile to
God, hence the whole problem is only one of purifying the human soul.
Before the sun of God’s grace and mercy is to shine, bearing life and
healing for all humanity, His wrath and punitive justice must ever burst
forth to cleanse the world of its sin. For as long as evil continues
unchecked, so long cannot the divine holiness pour forth its
all-forbearing goodness and love.
3. On this account the first revelation of God on Sinai was as “a jealous
God, who visiteth the sins of the fathers upon the children and the
children’s children until the third and fourth generation.” So the
prophets, from Moses to Malachi, speak ever of God’s anger, which comes
with the fury of nature’s unchained forces, to terrify and overwhelm all
living beings.(277) Thus Scripture considers all the great catastrophes of
the hoary past,—flood, earthquakes, and the rain of fire and brimstone
that destroys cities—as judgments of the divine anger on sinful
generations. Wickedness in general causes His displeasure, but His wrath
is provoked especially by violations of the social order, by desecrations
of His sanctuary, or attacks on His covenant, and His anger is kindled for
the poor and helpless, when they are oppressed and deprived of their
rights.(278)
4. Thus the divine holiness was felt more and more as a moral force, and
that which appeared in pre-prophetic times to be an elemental power of the
celestial ire became a refining flame, purging men of dross as in a
crucible. “I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger,” says the
prophet, “for I am God and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee, and
I will not come in fury.”(279) So sings the Psalmist, “His anger is but
for a moment; His favor for a life-time.”(280) In the same spirit the
rabbis interpreted the verse of the Decalogue, “The sin of the fathers is
visited upon the children and children’s children only if they continue to
act as their fathers did, and are themselves haters of God.”(281)
The fact is that Israel in Canaan had become addicted to all the vices of
idolatry, and if they were to be trained to moral purity and to loyalty to
the God of the Covenant, they must be taught fear and awe before the flame
of the divine wrath. Only after that could the prophet address himself to
the conscience of the individual, saying:
“Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?
Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?
He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly;
He that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands
from holding of bribes,
That stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his
eyes from looking upon evil;
He shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the
munitions of rocks;
His bread shall be given, his water shall be sure.
Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold a
land stretching afar.”(282)
Here we behold the fiery element of the divine holiness partly depicted as
a reality and partly spiritualized. The last of the prophets compares the
divine wrath to a melting furnace, which on the Day of Judgment is to
consume evildoers as stubble, while to those who fear the Lord He shall
appear as the sun of righteousness with healing on its wings.(283)
5. The idea as expressed by the prophets, then, was that God’s anger will
visit the wicked, and particularly the ungodly nations of heathendom, and
that He shall judge all creatures in fire.(284) This was significantly
altered under Persian influence, when the Jew began to regard the world to
come as promising to the righteous greater bliss than the present one.
Then the day of divine wrath meant doom eternal for evil-doers, who were
to fall into the fiery depths of Gehenna, “their worm is never to die and
their fire never to be quenched.”(285) This became the prevailing view of
the rabbis, of the Apocalyptics and also of the New Testament and the
Church literature.(286) The Jewish propaganda in the Hellenistic
literature, however, combined the fire of Gehenna with the Stoic, or
pagan, view of a general world-conflagration, and announced a general
doomsday for the heathen world, unless they be converted to the belief in
Israel’s one and holy God, and ceased violating the fundamental (Noachian)
laws of humanity.(287)
6. A higher view of the punitive anger of God is taken by Beruriah, the
noble wife of R. Meir,(288)—if, indeed, the wife of the saintly Abba
Helkiah did not precede her(289)—in suggesting a different reading of the
Biblical text, as to make it offer the lesson: “not the sinners shall
perish from the earth, but the sins.” From a more philosophical viewpoint
both Juda ha Levi and Maimonides hold that the anger which we ascribe to
God is only the transference of the anger which we actually feel at the
sight of evildoing. Similarly, when we speak of the consuming fire of
hell, we depict the effect which the fear of God must have on our inner
life, until the time shall come when we shun evil as ungodly and love the
good because it is both good and God-like.(290)