INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWS DURING THE PERSIAN PERIOD
The Jews took to Babylon a highly complicated body of civil law and
religious doctrine. The essence of the latter was an exclusive
monotheism, and that belief was not the possession of a cultured few,
but the accepted credo of the entire nation. No doubt, among the common
people, practices still existed that implied the recognition of
polytheism. No doubt, too, words and phrases occurred in common speech,
in poetry, and in ritual, which had arisen in polytheistic times, and
are fully intelligible only with a polytheistic background. But these
phrases and practices do not imply the survival of polytheism, either as
a whole or in rudimentary form, any more than using the names of the
Teutonic gods for the days of the week commits us to the worship of
those gods, or the various funeral superstitions still in vogue allow
the inference that our present-day religion is a worship of the Di
Manes.
Just as the Jewish religion was in a highly developed form at the time
of the Exile, so the Law was very fully developed. That the entire Law,
as embodied in the Pentateuch, was promulgated by Moses is not
altogether likely, but that any considerable fraction of it is later
than 586 B.C.E. is equally unlikely. Interpolations doubtless occurred
often. To insert into an authoritative text an inference from the words
which the interpolator honestly believed to be true, was not a generally
reprehended practice. Perhaps some of the emphasis upon sacerdotal
organization which parts of the Pentateuch show, may have so been
imported into the constituent codes of the Torah. But on how slight a
scale this was can be readily seen by comparing the Pentateuch with any
of the apocryphal books consciously designed to magnify the
priesthood.[66] The actual civil law bears every mark of high antiquity.
The religious law is at least not inconsistent with such antiquity.
Now neither in civil law nor in religious thought did the community that
slowly formed itself about the acropolis of Zion remain stationary. We
must suppose that the energies of the returning exiles were pretty well
concentrated upon the economic problems before them. But an actual
community they were from the start, and although the communal life was
far from attaining at once to the richness of former days, it contained
all the elements necessary. Without a common law, _i.e._ a regulation of
conflicting claims to property, and without a common cult, _i.e._ a
regulation of the communication between the divine and the human members
of a state, no state was conceivable to the ancient world. Changed
conditions will infallibly modify both, and some of these modifications
it will be necessary to understand.
We possess in the book known as Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus,[67] an
invaluable and easily dated record of life as it appeared to a cultured
and wealthy inhabitant of Jerusalem about the year 200 B.C.E. The
incidental references to past time and, above all, the inferences which
may legitimately be drawn about the origins of a society so completely
organized as that of Judea at that time, render recourse to the book a
necessity at many points of our investigation. While accordingly we find
it a convenient terminus in both directions, we must make large
individual qualifications. Ben Sira does not fully represent his time or
his people. He belonged to a definite social stratum. His own studies
and reflections had no doubt developed conclusions that were far from
being generally shared. But he is an eloquent and unimpeachable witness
that the Biblical books had already reached a high measure of sanctity,
and the division later perpetuated in the tripartite canon of Law,
Prophets, and Writings, already existed; and, if nothing else, the
single reference to Isaiah as the prophet of consolation renders it
probable that even so heterogeneous a corpus as the canonical Isaiah was
already extant much as we have it now.[68]
Opinions may differ as to the length of time necessary to permit this
development. But that a very few generations could have sufficed for it
is scarcely credible. Since even the Secondary Canon, that of the
prophets, had already become a rigid one, in which historical
differences in parts of the same book were ignored, the Law must have
been fixed for an even longer time, and the process of interpretation
which every living code requires must have gone on apace for very many
years indeed.
We know very little of the actual agencies by which this process was
effected. The second great code of the Jews was not finally fixed till
200 C.E. We are, however, measurably familiar with the organization of
the judiciary for some two centuries before, but even here there are
distressing gaps, and for the time before Hillel the tradition is
neither clear nor full. All, therefore, that concerns the organization
of the judicial bodies that framed and applied the Law must be
conjectured, and the earliest conjectures embodied in Talmudic tradition
are perhaps as good as any. The development of “houses of prayer” was a
necessity where so many Jewish communities were incapacitated from
sharing in the great cult ceremonies at Jerusalem, and these houses
became a convenience within Palestine and Jerusalem itself. But the
creation of houses of prayer demanded local organization, and with that
local organization gradations of members and the establishment of local
magistrates. There can be little doubt that the organization of the
Greek city-state, familiar to the East for many years, became a model
for these corporately organized communities. Now the judicial function
inherent in the character of ancient magistrates of all descriptions
might easily have been the means of originating that long series of
responsa from which the later Mishnah was finally winnowed. With every
increase of population, power, and governmental machinery, the judicial
system increased in complexity, and the intimate relation which the
civil code bore to the ancient sacred code, as well as the close
penetration of life by religion, tended to render the complexity still
more intricate.
But if the origin of the oral law, in its application at least, can be
made clear to ourselves only by means of such imaginative
reconstruction, we are helped on the side of Jewish religious
development by the possession of at least one fact of prime importance.
The religious system of the Bible knows of a life after death, in Sheol,
but does not know of a survival of personality. Warlock and witch, by
such incantations as were used by Odysseus at the mouth of the dread
cave, or by the wise woman at En-Dor, could give the shadowy ghost
enough outline to be recognizable under his former name, but for the
most part all these flitting spirits were equal and indistinguishable.
But about 100 B.C.E. there was current generally, although not
universally, a very different belief, to wit, that in Sheol, or the
grave, personality was not extinguished, but at most suspended; and that
under certain conditions it might, or certainly would, be permanently
continued. In other words, between the deportation to Babylon and the
culmination of the Hasmonean rule, the belief about life after death had
very considerably changed for most people. And the change was of a
nature that must inevitably have affected conduct, since the
acceptability of man’s life could no longer be proved by the naïvely
simple method of Eliphaz the Temanite,[69] nor yet by the austere
consciousness of rectitude that was the ideal of the prophets.
Transferred to a world beyond perception, reward and penalty gave the
Torah a superhuman sanction, which must have been far more powerful than
we can now readily imagine.
It is idle to look for the origin of this belief in any one series of
influences. For many generations poets and philosophers had swung
themselves in bolder and bolder imagery up to the Deity, which they, as
Jews, conceived in so intense and personal a fashion. Very many passages
in the Bible have seemed to imply a belief in personal immortality and
resurrection, and perhaps do imply such a belief. Nor is it necessary to
assume that these passages are of late origin. Some of them may be, but
one would have to be very certain of the limitations of poetic
exaltation to say just what definite background of belief metaphor and
hyperbole demand. We shall not go far wrong if we assume that even
before the Exile, individual thinkers had conceived, perhaps even
preached, the dogma of personal immortality. Its general acceptance
among the people occurred in the period previously mentioned. Its
official authorization took place much later in the final triumph of
Pharisaism.
Personal immortality and resurrection of the body are kindred, but not
identical, conceptions. Of the two, resurrection is probably the older,
and resurrection, we may note, implies a real suspension of personality,
when the body is dissolved in death. But the body may be recombined,
and, when that occurs, the personal life is renewed. The exact time must
have been very differently conceived by different men. A great many,
however, had already very definite fancies—one can hardly say beliefs—as
to the great day that would deliver the souls from Sheol. That such a
great day would come, on which the whole cosmos would be permanently
readjusted, is the essence of all eschatology. It was only natural that
all other hopes of the people should tend to be combined with it; and of
these hopes the principal one was the Messianic hope.
It is obvious that no adequate discussion of the development of this
hope can be given here, even if our fragmentary sources permitted such
discussion. The most that can be done is to state the situation briefly.
It is all the more important, as the Messianic idea was the source of
the most powerful political movements among the people, and the direct
occasion of at least one of the desperate insurrections of the Jews.
Many nations look back to a golden age of power and prosperity, and
forward to a future restoration of it. The Jews likewise never forgot
the kingdom of David and Solomon, and saw no reason to despair of its
return. As a matter of fact, the Hasmonean rule at its greatest extent
was practically such a restoration. But conditions and people had
radically changed between David and Alexander Jannai. In 1000 B.C.E. it
was a mighty achievement for the small tribal confederation to have
dominated its corner of the Levant, to have held in check the powerful
coast cities of Philistia, to have been sought in alliance by Tyre and
Egypt. In 100 B.C.E., men’s minds had long been accustomed to the rise
and fall of great empires. Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Macedon, Egypt,
Syria, Athens, and Sparta, and in the distant west Carthage and Rome,
had at different times been lords of many lands. The Judean kingdom
itself had arisen from the wreckage of such an empire. It was
accordingly a different political ideal that filled the imagination of
every nation at this time. To secure and maintain the independence of a
few square miles of semi-arid soil between the Jordan and the Sea was no
deed to puff men with inordinate pride, however difficult of actual
accomplishment it was. As a step toward larger deeds, however, it was
notable enough.
What was the larger deed, and how was it to be accomplished? However
disproportionate it may seem to us, it was nothing else than the
dominion over the whole world, to be accomplished by sudden and
miraculous conversion of men’s souls for the most part, or by force of
arms, if it should prove necessary. And, as was natural enough, it was
in the ancient royal line, the stock of David, that the leader, the
Anointed of God, was to be found.
The family of David, which was still important and powerful when
Zechariah xii. was written (perhaps the fourth century B.C.E.), had
evidently since fallen on evil days. It cannot, of course, have entirely
disappeared, but no member of undoubted Davidic lineage arises to make
political pretensions. It is even likely that, in the absence of
adequate records, and with the loss of importance which the family
suffered during the fourth and third centuries B.C.E., it had become
impossible for anyone to prove descent from David.
None the less, perhaps because of the decline of the family, popular
imagination clung to the royal house. In the bitter days of exile, the
writer of Psalm lxxxix. loses no faith in the destiny of David’s line:
I have made a covenant with My chosen,
I have sworn unto David, My servant,
Thy seed will I establish forever,
And build up thy throne to all generations.
So the author of First Maccabees, a loyal supporter of a non-Davidic
dynasty, puts in the mouth of the dying Mattathiah the acknowledgment of
the ultimate sovereignty of the ancient house: “David for being merciful
possessed the throne of an everlasting kingdom” (I Macc. ii. 57).
The certainty of this high destiny grew inversely with the political
fortunes of the people. But when even the Hasmoneans fell, and Judea, so
far from increasing the possessions of Solomon, found herself a
hopelessly insignificant fraction of a huge empire, it was not merely
the political side of the Messianic idea that fed upon its
non-realization. Obscure economic and religious factors had long been
operative, and all these raised popular temper to a point of high and,
as it proved, destructive tension. It must always be remembered that
those who undertook to lead the people against the Romans did not aim at
the restoration of the Hasmonean or even Solomonic kingdom. The
establishment of a throne in Jerusalem was the first step of that
triumphant march through the world which would inaugurate the reign of
the God-anointed son of David. The Judean zealots fought for no mean
prize.
The Jews who came into contact with Greeks and Romans were a people
whose development had been continuous from the earliest times. The
cataclysms of their history had produced disturbances, but no break in
their institutional growth. To the civil codes of the ancient polity
they were in the process of adding a new body of law based upon judicial
decisions. To the ethical monotheism of their former development the
popular mind was adding a belief in personal immortality and bodily
resurrection. Folk-lore and superstitions on one side, and speculative
philosophy on the other, were busy here, as they were busy everywhere,
in modifying the attitude of the people toward the established religion.
Finally the Messianic idea was gaining strength and form. In essence a
hope for future prosperity, it had united in itself all the dreams and
fancies of the people, which had arisen in many ways. It became in the
end the dream of a world-monarchy, in which a scion of David’s line
would be king of kings and give law to the world from Jerusalem. The
ushering in of that era soon became a great day of judgment affecting
the whole universe and ardently desired to correct the oppressive evils
of actual life.
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