1. “Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty?
Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness,
Fearful in praises, doing wonders!”(462)
Thus sang Israel at the Red Sea in words which are constantly reëchoed in
our liturgy. Nothing impresses the religious sense of man so much as
unusual phenomena in nature, which seem to interrupt the wonted course of
events and thus to reveal the workings of a higher Power. A miracle—that
is, a thing “wondered” at, because not understood—is always regarded by
Scripture as a “sign”(463) or “proof”(464) of the power of God, to whom
nothing is impossible. The child-like mind of the past knew nothing of
fixed or immutable laws of nature. Therefore the question is put in all
simplicity: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”(465) “Is the Lord’s hand
waxed short?”(466) “Or should He who created heaven and earth not be able
to create something which never was before?”(467) Should “He who maketh a
man’s mouth, or makes him deaf, dumb, seeing or blind,”(468) not be able
also to open the mouth of the dumb beast or the eyes of the blind? Should
not He who killeth and giveth life have the power also to call the dead
back to life, if He sees fit? Should not He who openeth the womb for every
birth, be able to open it for her who is ninety years old? Or when a whole
land is wicked, to shut the wombs of all its inhabitants that they may
remain barren? Again, should not He who makes the sun come forth every
morning from the gates of the East and enter each night the portals of the
West, not be able to change this order once, and cause it to stand still
in the midst of its course?(469)
So long as natural phenomena are considered to be separate acts of the
divine will, an unusual event is merely an extraordinary manifestation of
this same power, “the finger of God.” The people of Biblical times never
questioned whether a miracle happened or could happen. Their concern was
to see it as the work of the arm of God either for His faithful ones or
against His adversaries.
2. With the advance of thought, miracles began to be regarded as
interruptions of an established order of creation. The question then
arose, why the all-knowing Creator should allow deviations from His own
laws. As the future was present to Him at the outset, why did He not make
provision in advance for such special cases as He foresaw? This was
exactly the remedy which the rabbis furnished. They declared that at
Creation God provided for certain extraordinary events, so that a latent
force, established for the purpose at the beginning of the world, is
responsible for incidents which appeared at the time to be true
interferences with the world order. Thus God had made a special covenant,
as it were, with the work of creation that at the appointed time the Red
Sea should divide before Israel; that sun and moon should stand still at
the bidding of Joshua; that fire should not consume the three youths,
Hananel, Mishael, and Azariah; that the sea-monster should spit forth
Jonah alive; together with other so-called miracles.(470) The same idea
occasioned the other Haggadic saying that shortly before the completion of
the creation on the evening of the sixth day God placed certain miraculous
forces in nature. Through them the earth opened to swallow Korah and his
band, the rock in the wilderness gave water for the thirsty multitude, and
Balaam’s ass spoke like a human being; through them also the rainbow
appeared after the flood, the manna rained from heaven, Aaron’s rod burst
forth with almond blossoms and fruit, and other wondrous events happened
in their proper time.(471)
3. Neither the rabbis nor the medieval Jewish thinkers expressed any doubt
of the credibility of the Biblical miracles. The latter, indeed,
rationalized miracles as well as other things, and considered some of them
imaginary. Saadia accepts all the Biblical miracles except the speaking
serpent in Paradise and the speaking ass of Balaam, considering these to
be parables rather than actual occurrences.(472) In general, both Jewish
and Mohammedan theologians assumed that special forces hidden in nature
were utilized by the prophets and saints to testify to their divine
mission. These powers were attained by their lofty intellects, which
lifted them up to the sphere of the Supreme Intellect. All medieval
attempts to solve the problem of miracles were based upon this curious
combination of Aristotelian cosmology and Mohammedan or Jewish
theology.(473) True, Maimonides rejects a number of miracles as contrary
to natural law, and refers to the rabbinical saying that some of the
miraculous events narrated in Scripture were so only in appearance. Still
he claims for Moses, as the Mohammedans did for Mohammed, miraculous
powers derived from the sphere of the Supreme Intellect. In a lengthy
chapter on miracles Albo follows Maimonides,(474) while his teacher
Crescas considers the Biblical miracles to be direct manifestations of the
creative activity of God.(475) Gersonides has really two opinions; in his
commentary he reduces all miracles to natural processes, but in his
philosophical work he adopts the view of Maimonides.(476) Jehuda ha Levi
alone insisted on the miracles of the Bible as historic evidence of the
divine calling of the prophets.(477) To all the rest, the miracle is not
performed by God but by the divinely endowed man. God himself is no longer
conceived of as changing the cosmic order. Both He and the world created
by His will remain ever the same. Still, according to this theory, certain
privileged men are endowed with special powers by the Supreme Intellect,
and by these they can perform miracles.
4. It is evident that in all this the problem of miracles is not solved,
nor even correctly stated. Both rabbinical literature and the Bible abound
with miracles about certain holy places and holy persons, which they never
venture to doubt. But the rabbis were not miracle-workers like the Essenes
and their Christian successors.(478) On the contrary, they sought to
repress the popular credulity and hunger for the miraculous, saying: “The
present generation is not worthy to have miracles performed for them, like
the former ones;”(479) or “The providing of each living soul with its
daily food, or the recovery of men from a severe disease is as great a
miracle as any of those told in Scripture;”(480) or again, “Of how small
account is a person for whom the cosmic order must be disturbed!”(481)
Thus when the wise men of Rome asked the Jewish sages: “If your God is
omnipotent, as you claim, why does He not banish from the world the idols,
which are so loathsome to Him?” they replied: “Do you really desire God to
destroy the sun, moon, and stars, because fools worship them? The world
continues its regular course, and idolaters will not go unpunished.”(482)
5. In Judaism neither Biblical nor rabbinical miracles are to be accepted
as proof of a doctrinal or practical teaching.(483) The Deuteronomic law
expressly states that false prophets can perform miracles by which they
mislead the multitude.(484) We can therefore ascribe no intrinsic
religious importance to miracles. The fact is that miracles occur only
among people who are ignorant of natural law and thus predisposed to
accept marvels. They are the products of human imagination and credulity.
They have only a subjective, not an objective value. They are
psychological, not physical facts.
The attitude of Maimonides and Albo toward Biblical miracles is especially
significant. The former declares in his great Code:(485) “Israel’s belief
in Moses and his law did not rest on miracles, for miracles rather create
doubt in the mind of the believer. Faith must rest on its intrinsic truth,
and this can never be subverted by miracles, which may be of a deceitful
nature.” Albo devotes a lengthy chapter to developing this idea still
further, undoubtedly referring to the Church; he speaks of miracles
wrought by both Biblical and Talmudic heroes, such as Onias the
rain-maker, Nicodemus ben Gorion, Hanina ben Dosa, and Phinehas ben Jair,
the popular saints.(486) In modern times Mendelssohn, when challenged by
the Lutheran pastor Lavater either to accept the Christian faith or refute
it, attacked especially the basic Christian faith in miracles. He stated
boldly that “miracles prove nothing, since every religion bases its claims
on them and consequently the truth of one would disprove the convincing
proof of the other.”(487)
6. Our entire modern mode of thinking demands the complete recognition of
the empire of law throughout the universe, manifesting the all-permeating
will of God. The whole cosmic order is _one_ miracle. No room is left for
single or exceptional miracles. Only a primitive age could think of God as
altering the order of nature which He had fixed, so as to let iron float
on water like wood to please one person here,(488) or to stop sun, star,
or sea in their courses in order to help or harm mankind there.(489) It is
more important for us to inquire into the law of the mind by which the
fact itself may differ from the peculiar form given it by a narrator. With
our historical methods unknown to former ages, we cannot accept any story
of a miracle without seeking its intrinsic historical accuracy. After all,
the miracle as narrated is but a human conception of what, under God’s
guidance, really happened.
Accordingly, we must leave the final interpretation of the Biblical
narratives to the individual, to consider them as historical facts or as
figurative presentations of religious ideas. Even now some people will
prefer to believe that the Ten Commandments emanated from God Himself in
audible tones, as medieval thinkers maintained.(490) Some will adopt the
old semi-rationalistic explanation that He created a voice for this
special purpose. Others will hold it more worthy of God to communicate
directly with man, from spirit to spirit, without the use of sensory
means; these will therefore take the Biblical description as figurative or
mythical. In fact, he who does not cling to the letter of the Scripture
will probably regard all the miracles as poetical views of divine
Providence, as child-like imagery expressing the ancient view of the
eternal goodness and wisdom of God. To us also God is “a Doer of wonders,”
but we experience His wonderworking powers in ourselves. We see wonders in
the acts of human freedom which rises superior to the blind forces of
nature. The true miracle consists in the divine power within man which
aids him to accomplish all that is great and good.