THE MORAL EVOLUTION IN ISRAEL: AN IDEAL OF OBEDIENCE TO A REVEALED LAW
I. THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF HEBREW MORALITY
[Sidenote: Introductory: Israel’s
historic task a moral one]
To the pious Hebrew the rainbow, which to the esthetic Greek was merely
the beautiful pathway of Iris, the messenger of Olympus, was Yahweh’s
bow hung out from the dark retreating thundercloud as a sign of
righteous anger spent and the pledge of a divine covenant and promise.
In this ethical interpretation by the Hebrew spirit of this portent
is foretokened the history and mission of ancient Israel. It was her
allotted task to interpret in ethical terms the phenomena of the world
of nature and the drama of human life and history. And it was her happy
lot to become the teacher to mankind of the truth of an alone and
righteous God, and to be the creator of a moral ideal which is to-day
the highest ethical standard of all the races of the Western world, and
the most vital moral force at work in universal history.
In the short account which we shall give of Hebrew morality we shall
adopt a mode of treatment somewhat different from that followed in
describing the moral systems of the peoples already passed in review,
for the reason that in the case of the ancient Hebrews the historical
material is sufficiently abundant to enable us to trace step by
step the development of the ethical ideal and to watch the gradual
clarification of the moral consciousness of the race.[334] Hence,
after speaking of the religious ideas which formed the basis of the
moral code, we shall sketch briefly the evolution of the rudimentary
morality of the tribal age of the nation into the high ideal of the
prophets of the later time.
[Sidenote: The conception of
deity; monolatry and monotheism]
We have seen how the Persian view of deity molded Persian morality. In
a still more decisive way did the Hebrew idea of God, of his character
and his relation to Israel and the world, shape and mold the moral
ideal of the race.[335]
When the Hebrews in the second millennium before Christ appeared in
history, they were in possession of a stock of ideas concerning the
gods which was, in all essentials save one, altogether like that held
by their Semitic kinsmen of the various lands of southwestern Asia. The
single essential point of difference between their religious belief
and that of their neighbors was this: the nations about them were
polytheists; they were monolatrists; that is, the Hebrews, while they
believed in many gods, worshiped only one god, their tribal god Yahweh.
As Stade expresses it, “the old Israelite was a theoretical polytheist,
but a practical monotheist.”[336]
There is scarcely need that we add in qualification of this, that when
the Hebrews first appeared in history they were not all monolatrists.
The multitude were then, and for a long time thereafter, polytheists.
All that can be affirmed is that in the earliest times of their history
there were among them teachers of monolatrism, teachers who inculcated
the duty of worshiping a single god, the patron and champion of the
nation.
Through what experiences and under what tuition these teachers of
Israel made the passage in thought from polytheism to monolatrism we
need not now inquire. For our purpose we need simply note the fact and
emphasize its supreme historical importance. It marks the beginning of
a divergent evolution in religious belief and ethical conviction which
in the lapse of time was to lead Israel far apart from her Semitic
kinsmen, and make her the standard bearer of a universal religion and
a universal morality. For monolatry was with the prophets and seers
of Israel only the first step toward monotheism, the doctrine that
there is only one God, the Universal Father. This idea of deity was
not reached much before the time of the Second Isaiah. Along with
this later view of Yahweh there came the thought and conviction that
he is a God of absolute righteousness. This conception of God and of
his character was, as we shall see, an idea charged with the deepest
significance not only for the ethical development in Israel but for the
moral life of all mankind.
[Sidenote: The belief in a
supernaturally revealed law]
After this conception of Yahweh, first as a jealous tribal deity
and later as the sole God and Universal Father, the belief in a
supernaturally revealed law wherein all the duties of man were made
known was the most potent force in molding the moral ideal of Israel.
It was this belief which made the chief duty of man to be unquestioning
obedience to the divine commandments; for the revealed law was the
measure of duty--what it enjoined was right, what it forbade was wrong.
This investiture of an outer law, conceived to be of supernatural
origin, with sovereign authority over man’s every act, and the
subordination to it of the inner law of the individual conscience, had
consequences of vast importance for the ethical evolution not only
in ancient Israel but also among all the peoples whose moral ideal
was essentially an inheritance from her. For where the full duty of
man is made to consist in obedience to the minute requirements of an
external law there is inevitably created a morality made up largely
of artificial ritual duties, and as intelligence grows and the moral
consciousness deepens and clarifies, there necessarily arises a
conflict between this conventional morality and the natural morality
of the human reason and conscience. In such a conflict, in this way
created, within the moral life of Israel centers the dramatic interest
of her moral history.
[Sidenote: Special ground of the
Israelites’ feeling that obedience
to the law was their highest duty]
There was a special reason why the Israelites felt that their first
duty was absolute obedience to the revealed will of Yahweh. They
possessed a tradition which told how their fathers were serfs in the
land of Egypt; how Yahweh, through his servant Moses, had intervened in
their behalf, and with a strong arm and with mighty signs had brought
them up out of the land of bondage; and how at Mt. Sinai he had entered
into a covenant with them in which he pledged to them his powerful
protection on condition of their fidelity in his worship and obedience
to all his commandments.
This belief was the germ out of which grew most of what was unique in
the ethical development of Israel.[337] It played exactly the same
part in creating and molding the religious conscience of Israel that
the Christian’s belief in the descent of the Son of God into the world
and his voluntary death to effect man’s deliverance has had in molding
the religious conscience of Christendom. As we advance in our study we
shall see how largely the moral consciousness of the Israelites was a
creation of this belief in a most sacred covenant between Yahweh and
their fathers at the “Terrible Mount” in the wilderness.
[Sidenote: The rite of sacrifice]
We have seen that religion on the lower levels of culture consists
largely in sacrifice; that is, in gifts or offerings either to the
spirits of the dead or to the gods. The religion of the ancient Hebrews
did not differ in this respect from the religion of other peoples
in the same stage of culture.[338] But the evolution of the rite of
sacrifice among the Israelites differs from its development among all
other peoples in that, under the influence of the Hebrew spirit, the
rite was gradually reduced to symbolism and spiritualized. In this
process it underwent the most remarkable metamorphoses. Beginning with
meat and drink offerings from man to God, it ends with God giving
himself a sacrifice for man. The system thus transformed became the
great inspirer of ethical sentiment and a unique vehicle of moral
instruction.
[Sidenote: The vagueness of the
belief in an after life]
The Israelite’s thought of death and of the after life also reacted
powerfully upon his moral feelings and colored all his ethical
speculations; for, like the conceptions held of God, the notions
entertained of man’s lot after death, as we have seen in the case of
the ancient Egyptians, has far-reaching consequences for the moral life.
Now the Hebrew conception of the future state was the same as the
Babylonian. Sheol, like the Babylonian Arallu, was a vague and shadowy
region beneath the earth, a sad and dismal place which received without
distinction the good and the bad. The same fate was allotted all who
went down to the grave: “The small and the great are there; and the
servant is free from his master.”[339] There was no return there for
good, or for evil: “But the dead know not anything, neither have they
any more a reward.”[340] Memory and hope were there dead: “For in death
there is no remembrance of thee.... They that go down into the pit
cannot hope for thy truth.”[341]
We shall see later how this vague and feebly held idea of the future
life reacted upon the evolution of the moral consciousness in Israel,
how deeply it influenced the troubled ethical speculations of the more
thoughtful minds of the nation, and how it inspired theories of the
moral order of the world which have not yet lost their power over the
thoughts and the conduct of men.[342] We need in this place merely to
point out how it was the absence of a clearly defined belief in a life
of rewards and punishments in another world that created, or helped to
create, the Messianic ideal, one of the most fruitful conceptions, in
its ethical outcomes, that ever entered into the mind of man.
II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL IDEAL
_1. The Development up to the Exile_
[Sidenote: The primitive moral
code]
The history of Hebrew morals is the record of a long and slow
evolution. The primitive code with which the development began was
the code of Semitic nomadism. It was essentially the same as that
which to-day governs the conduct of the practically unchanged kinsmen
of the Hebrews, the Bedouin of Arabia and neighboring lands. It was
the morality of the kinship group.[343] The principle of communal
responsibility, which affords the key to a large part of the moral
history of Israel, had not yet been challenged as unethical, and
blood revenge was a most sacred duty. The circle covered by the moral
feelings was still narrow; there was practically no sentiment of duty
or obligation toward tribes or nations outside the group of tribes
constituting the people of Israel. The conception of Yahweh as a
jealous national god prevented the growth of feelings which might have
formed the basis of a true international morality. The wars which the
Israelites waged against their enemies were wars of ruthless slaughter
and rapine.
This rudimentary morality is summarized in the Decalogue,[344] for the
Ten Commandments are indisputably of a high antiquity. One mark of the
primitive character of this legislation is the negative form of the
commandments.[345] Where there is need of the “thou shalt not,” the
moral life is still on a low plane. The aim and purpose of the law
thus worded are restraint and repression. There is a wide interval in
moral chronology between the morality of the Ten Words and that of the
Sermon on the Mount. In this earlier code there is only the slightest
recognition of the truth that the truly moral life consists not in
refraining from evil but in doing good. The nomads of the desert for
whom these negative commands were framed, forbidding mostly crude,
coarse crimes, were evidently a long way yet from that level of moral
attainment where the only law is the law of love and liberty.
[Sidenote: The moral anarchy of
the age of the Judges]
That period of transition which marks the passage of the Israelite
tribes from the nomadic pastoral life of the desert to a settled
agricultural life in Palestine may be instructively compared with that
transition period in the history of Europe which followed the migration
of the German tribes and their settlement in the provinces of the
disrupted Roman Empire. It was an epoch characterized by the rapid
decay of the clan and tribal organization, with an accompanying loss of
the rude virtues of the nomadic and pastoral life, and the acquisition
of the vices of the civilized or semicivilized communities among which
they had thrust themselves and whose lands they had forcibly seized.
Especially upon the religious system, which in Israel was ever closely
bound up with morality, was felt the reaction of the new environment.
Many foreign elements adopted from the Canaanite peoples were
incorporated with it, while the national god Yahweh, as conceived by
the popular imagination, tended to become sanguinary, capricious, and
unjust. He became eminently a god of war, and is for his people right
or wrong. Thus a chief bulwark of morality was impaired. The result was
a moral interregnum. The old standards and rules of conduct lost their
sanction. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.[346]
[Sidenote: Prophetism: its
different elements]
The necessities of the situation called into existence the monarchy
(about 1050 B.C.). Then followed the disruption of the kingdom (about
953 B.C.). The significant matter in the moral domain during the
period of the united and the divided kingdom[347] was the appearance
of teachers called prophets or seers, men who were believed to speak
the word given them by Yahweh. This emergence of prophetism in Israel
is beyond controversy one of the most important phenomena in the moral
history of the world.
There were in this prophetism various elements.[348] First, it
contained a nomadic element; that is, some of the prophets were men
who looked backward to the simple pastoral life of the desert as the
ideal moral life. They regarded civilization as the sum of all evils.
Their reading of history was, in the words of Wellhausen, that “as the
human race goes forward in civilization, it goes backward in the fear
of God.” Second, there was in it a socialistic element. These prophets
were the first socialists. Theirs was the first passionate plea for
the poor, the wretched, and the heavy-burdened. Third, it contained a
predictive element. The prophets were regarded as seers, as foretellers
of future events. Fourth, there was in this prophetism an element of
pure intuitional morality which was in irreconcilable antagonism to all
legal ritual morality. Fifth, it contained a monotheistic element. The
later prophets were distinctively teachers of the doctrine that there
is only one God, beside whom there is no other.
Of these several elements the predictive, or prophetic in the popular
sense, has been given such undue prominence that Hebrew prophetism
in the minds of many stands for little else than a supernatural
forecasting of future events. But, in truth, this is the element of
least importance. In the words of Kuenen, the business of the prophets
was “not to communicate what shall happen, but to insist upon what
_ought_ to happen.”[349] They were preachers of individual and social
righteousness. It is this ethical element, forming the very heart and
core of their message, which makes the appearance of prophetism in
Israel a matter of such transcendent importance for universal history.
Our main task in the following pages of this chapter will be to point
out this moral element in the message of the prophets, to show how the
conception of Yahweh was by them moralized, and how the morality they
inculcated became purer and more elevated as the centuries passed,
till the evolution culminated in the lofty teachings of the Prophet of
Nazareth.
[Sidenote: The beginnings of
historical prophetism: Elijah and
Elisha]
The real history of Hebrew prophetism opens with the appearance in
the northern kingdom, about the beginning of the ninth century B.C.,
of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. It was the moral degeneracy
of the times of the monarchy, the inrush of the hateful vices of
civilization,--the greed of land[350] and of wealth, the cruel
inequalities of the new society, the selfish luxury of the rich, the
harsh oppression of the poor, the forgetting of men’s kinship, the
substitution of the worship of other gods for the sole worship of
Yahweh,--it was all this which called out the vehement protest of these
teachers of social justice and national righteousness.
It was, however, a very different prophetism from that of the later
seers of Israel which was represented by these early teachers. There
was in it a large nomadic element. Its representatives looked back to
the times of the simple pastoral life of the fathers as the Golden Age
of Israel. They hated civilization, that grossly material civilization
which Israel, under the lead of an idolatrous and luxurious court, was
now adopting from the surrounding nations, and looked upon it as “the
sum of all evils.” They were, furthermore, monolatrists rather than
monotheists. They believed in sacrifice; but sacrifices must not be
offered to strange gods--only to Yahweh. They were fanatical in their
zeal for the worship of Israel’s patron God; but even here there was
an ethical element, for in their view the triumph of the worship of
Yahweh over that of the Baals meant a triumph of the simple, severe,
desert morality over the voluptuousness and the nameless vices of the
Canaanite civilization.
This early prophetism, in a word, was a sort of Puritanism. Renan
calls it “this terrible prophetism.” It was fierce, cruel, fanatical,
intolerant, like English Puritanism. Indeed, it can best be studied
in this modern seventeenth-century prophetism, which was essentially
a revival of it. But notwithstanding the imperfect character of
this early prophetism, because of the true ethical element it
contained,[351] its appearance in Israel and its successful fight
against a sensuous idolatry was a matter of vast moral import, for
here in this narrow, intolerant monolatry is the real historical
beginning of that long religious-ethical development which lends chief
significance to the story of Israel, and constitutes a main interest
of the history of European civilization. In the words of Renan, “The
prophetism which struggled under Ahab and triumphed under Jehu is ...
upon the whole the most decisive event in the history of Israel. It
forms the commencement of the chain which, after nine hundred years,
found the last link in Jesus.”[352]
[Sidenote: The moral advance
represented by Amos (760 B.C.) and
Hosea (738–735 B.C.)]
The second link in this chain was formed by the prophets Amos and
Hosea, who delivered their message about the middle of the eighth
century. Amos was the earlier. There is in his message the note of
true prophetism. His thought of Yahweh is that he is a God who hates
iniquity and loves righteousness. What angers him is not idolatry or
the worship of other gods, but social wrongs and injustice--wickedness
in every form. He is angry with Israel[353] because there has been
stored up violence and robbery in the palace;[354] because of the
luxury and self-indulgence of the rich; because of the treading upon
the poor and the taking from him burdens of wheat; because of the
taking of bribes and the turning aside of the poor in the gate from
their right;[355] because of the falsifying of the balances by deceit
that the poor may be bought for silver and the needy for a pair of
shoes.[356] And what pleases Yahweh is not fast days and sacrifices,
but justice and righteousness: “I hate, ... I despise your fast
days,”[357] declares Yahweh. “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and
meat offerings, I will not accept.”[358] “But let judgment run down as
water and righteousness as a mighty stream.”[359]
A generation later the prophet Hosea repeats the same message; namely,
that what angers Yahweh is moral evil--lying, swearing, stealing, and
killing. He puts in the mouth of Yahweh these words: “For I desire
mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt
offerings.”[360]
There is here a notable ethical advance over the word to Israel of the
prophets of the preceding century. The thought of Amos and Hosea that
it is social wrongdoing that angers Yahweh is indeed no new thought,
for we meet with this conception of the moral character of God in the
teachings of the earlier prophets; what is new is the emphasis which is
laid upon it. Here we reach ethical monolatry;[361] ethical monotheism
lies not far in the future.
[Sidenote: The ideal of the
brotherhood of nations and
universal peace]
The morality of Amos and Hosea infolded the germ of ethical
cosmopolitanism. The conviction that the government of Yahweh is
founded on absolute justice and righteousness led to the conviction of
its ultimate universality, “for right is everywhere right, and wrong
is everywhere wrong.” The political situation in the Semitic world at
this time fostered the thought thus awakened. The predominant fact in
international relations in the latter half of the eighth century was
the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In its expansion it had already
engulfed many of the smaller states of western Asia, and Assyria had
become a world power. Political unity suggested now, as it did when
Rome had established a world empire, religious and ethical unity.
Yahweh, Israel’s God of justice and right, is the suzerain of all other
gods and peoples. He will establish a world-wide kingdom, and all
nations shall acknowledge his righteous rule.
As representatives of this broadening vision we have the great prophets
Isaiah and Micah, who, proclaiming the universal reach of the law of
right and justice, held aloft a noble ethical ideal of the brotherhood
of nations and universal peace. Seers by virtue of their conviction of
the absoluteness, the oneness and sovereignty, of the moral law, they
foretold the coming of a time in the last days when all the nations of
the earth should form a federation under the suzerainty of Israel with
Jerusalem as the world capital: “Out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge among the
nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more.”[362]
This is the first distinct expression in Hebrew literature, or in that
of any race, of the idea of the brotherhood of man and a federated
world. The lofty ideal has never faded from the eyes of men. It has
inspired all the noblest visions of world unity and peace through
the war-troubled ages, and is in the world of to-day the source and
spring of much of that ethical idealism which with prophetic faith
and conviction proclaims a federated world, with the nations dwelling
together in peace and amity, as the one divine event toward which all
history moves.
With this lofty ethical universalism in the teachings of Isaiah and
Micah was joined a simple personal and social morality of the human
heart and reason. These prophets were at one with Amos and Hosea in
proclaiming that what Yahweh delights in is not sacrifices and the
observance of new moons and Sabbaths, but cleanliness of life and
services of love. Hear Isaiah as he repeats the words of the Lord: “I
delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats....
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.... Cease to
do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”[363] And listen to Micah:
“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high
God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a
year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams and with ten
thousands of rivers of oil?... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[364]
[Sidenote: The prophetic spirit
creates a unique ethical
literature]
The prophets of the eighth century were the first of the literary
prophets; that is, the first of those who employed literature as
the vehicle of their message to Israel. Hence here our attention is
called to a matter of supreme significance for universal morality--the
ethicalizing of the mythology and traditional history of the Hebrew
people.
It was during the age of the kings that the mass of cosmological myths
and legends borrowed from Babylonia,--doubtless largely through contact
with Assyria,--the traditions of the patriarchs, and the story of the
sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus, all of which had been transmitted
from the foretime orally or in writing, was worked over and edited
afresh, in which process it received the indelible stamp of the deeper
and truer moral consciousness of this later age. For though probably
little of this work was done by the prophets themselves, it was done
by men who wrote under the inspiration of the new thoughts of God and
of his moral government which had been awakened in the souls of the
great teachers of Israel. The polytheistic elements of these myths and
traditions and their grosser and more archaic immoralities were pruned
away, while at the same time they were given a monotheistic cast and
a truer morality was breathed into them. In a word, all this literary
material was censored by the growing moral consciousness of Israel.
The outcome was the creation of a literature absolutely unique in its
moral educative worth.
Thus the remolded and moralized Chaldean account of the creation of the
world and the beginnings of human history came to form the basis of
the opening chapters of Genesis, whose influence upon Hebrew morality,
through molding Israel’s idea of the character of Yahweh and of his
relations to man, it would hardly be possible to exaggerate. Also the
tradition of the Exodus, given now its final form and received by the
later generations of Israel as an historically true account of the
experiences of their fathers, left an ineffaceable impress upon the
mind and heart of the Hebrew nation, determining largely their ideas
as to their chief moral obligations as the chosen and covenanted
people of Yahweh. It was this tradition of their heroic past which was
the inspiration of the moral strivings of the nation. Furthermore,
all this literary material, thus reshaped and colored by the growing
monotheistic ideas of the teachers of Israel and bearing the stamp
of their gradually deepening moral consciousness, and in this form
transmitted to the Aryan nations of the West, was destined to become
one of the most important factors not merely in the religious but
especially in the moral life of the European peoples.
[Sidenote: The ethicalizing of
pagan festivals and cults]
Just as the myths and traditions, in part borrowed from neighboring
peoples and in part transmitted from Israel’s own foretime, were
transformed and moralized by the ethical genius of the Hebrew spirit,
so were the institutions and festivals borrowed by the Israelites
from kindred Semitic peoples, and particularly from the Canaanites,
transmuted and moralized.[365] Permeated by the ethical spirit of
Israel’s great teachers and transformed into moral symbols, these
originally nonethical agricultural cults and festivals were given a
distinct educative value.
Among these pagan institutions thus moralized was the festival or rest
day of the Sabbath.[366] Filled with ethical meaning and consecrated
to a religious-moral purpose, this originally pagan lunar festival was
made a most important means of moral instruction and discipline.[367]
This borrowing and moralizing by Israel of this festival has an almost
exact parallel in the later borrowing and moralizing by the Christian
Church of the pagan festival of the winter solstice, which has given
Christendom one of its most beautiful anniversaries, one which takes
precedence of all others in its power to evoke the tenderest altruistic
sentiments.
As with the Sabbath, so was it with all the festivals which the
Israelites, after their settlement in Palestine and during the period
when they were passing from the nomadic to the agricultural life,
adopted from the Canaanite peoples among whom they were dwelling. All
of these in the course of time were turned from their original purpose,
were cleansed of immoral and sensuous elements, and were thus made the
means of awakening moral feelings and developing moral character.
This transforming power of the ethical genius of Israel finds a true
historical parallel in the esthetic genius of ancient Hellas, which,
receiving from every side elements of art and general culture, inspired
them all with the beauty and energy of her own spirit.[368] “Israel,”
as Cornill finely says, “resembles in spiritual things the fabulous
King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold.”
[Sidenote: The dual morality of
the Deuteronomic code]
The effect of the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and
the carrying away into captivity of the flower of the Ten Tribes was to
put an end to prophetism in the North and to make Judah in the South
the center of the movement which had such significance for the moral
life of the world.
During the century and a half that passed between the fall of the
northern kingdom and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian
King Nebuchadnezzar, only one great prophet appeared in Judah. This was
Jeremiah, who prophesied in the reign of King Josiah, just a little
time before the Captivity.
It was during the reign of this king that there appeared a book which,
excepting the Gospels of the New Testament, has had a greater influence
upon the general evolution of morality than any other book ever
written. This was a work known as the Book of Deuteronomy, that is, the
repetition of the law. Before the discovery of the Laws of Hammurabi
this was the oldest known code of laws.
The book contains much archaic material--traditions, customs, judicial
decisions, laws, and rituals--manifestly handed down from the earliest
times in Israel, with additions made at the moment of its appearance,
and all bearing plainly the stamp of the spirit and temper of these
later times. Hence it comes that there are two moralities embodied
in the work--an atavistic ritual morality and a progressive social
morality.
[Sidenote: The ritual ethics of
the code]
In that part of the code which has to do with the ethics of ritualism
the dominant motive of the editors or compilers springs from a dread
and abhorrence of idolatry, like the dread and abhorrence of heresy
in medieval Christendom. Yahweh will divide his worship with no other
god. Israel had gone after other gods and Yahweh had given her into
the hands of the Assyrians. A like fate awaited Judah if she served
any other than him: “Ye shall not go after other gods, or the gods
of the people which are round about you, lest the anger of the Lord
be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the
earth,”[369] is the first commandment with threatening.
Fear that Yahweh would do unto Judah as he had done unto Israel
awakened the conscience of the nation. Idolatry was suppressed; the
high places on which incense was burned unto the Baals were defiled,
and the altars and the images of the strange gods were broken down and
ground into dust.
This reform movement practically ended the long struggle which had
gone on now for six hundred years and more between polytheism and the
rising monotheism of the people of Israel. But unfortunately while
the monotheistic element of the religion of Yahweh was brought out by
the reform in sharper outline, the ethical element was obscured. The
religion that was now made the exclusive worship was really little
more than a pagan cult. It consisted in the careful keeping of feast
days and the observance of the rites and sacrifices of the Temple--an
inheritance largely from the heathen nations around about Israel.
Nothing could have been more opposed to true prophetism. It was the
triumph of reactionary ritualism.
This victory of ritualism has exerted an almost incalculable influence
upon the development of morality from the time of King Josiah down to
the present day. The immediate effect upon prophetism in Judah was most
lamentable. “Deuteronomy simply confirmed the belief that religion
was concerned with ritual rather than with morality.”[370] And so the
outcome of the promulgation of a written revealed law was, in the words
of Wellhausen, “the death of prophecy.”[371]
But this fatal effect was not felt at once. In the dark days of the
Exile, now just at hand, there was a revival of true prophetism; but
after the return from the Captivity, as we shall see, the prophetic
spirit was almost stifled by the rigid legalism of the Temple cult.
And it was this same Deuteronomic law which, in the hands of medieval
inquisitors, stifled awakening prophetism in Europe and delayed for
generations true moral reform after the stirring of the European mind
by the Renaissance.[372]
The intolerant spirit of this narrow, rigid religion of ritualism
found specially sinister expression in Israel’s war ethics. Instead of
promoting international amity and good will, it deepened intertribal
prejudices and hatreds and intensified the barbarities of war. “Thou
shalt save alive nothing that breatheth;”[373] “thou shalt smite them
and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor
show mercy unto them,”[374] were the commands to Israel regarding the
nations round about her who were the worshipers of other gods than
Yahweh.
Thus religion was made an active principle of international savagery.
It made it, in the words of Cheyne, “difficult, if not impossible,
... to love God fervently without hating a large section of God’s
creatures.”[375] Under the influence of the fierce ordinances of the
Deuteronomic code the war practices of the Israelites became more
ferocious and savage than those of any other nation of antiquity,
unless it be those of the Assyrian kings. Their enemies, who were also
the enemies of Yahweh, they smote with the utmost fury, putting to the
edge of the sword men, women, and the little ones, and taking as booty
the cattle and the spoils.
[Sidenote: The social ethics of
the code]
But, as we have said, there were two spirits striving together in
this strange Deuteronomic code. In opposition to this spirit of stern
fanatical intolerance there was a spirit of tender sympathy for the
unfortunate, the poor, and the oppressed.[376] Along with this priestly
morality, based on a certain conception of Yahweh and of his relations
to Israel, there was another wholly different morality--a social
morality whose chief sanctions were the natural impulses and sentiments
of the human heart and conscience.
This code of social ethics bears witness to a progressive development
of the moral consciousness in Israel. The ethical advance is
unmistakably registered in various ameliorations effected in the crude
customary law of earlier times. One of the most noteworthy of these
mitigations concerned the primitive blood revenge. In common with other
peoples in the kinship stage of culture, the early Hebrews in their
pursuit of blood vengeance made no distinction between intentional
and unintentional homicide. The regulations of the Deuteronomic code
regarding the so-called cities of refuge[377] bear witness to a growing
power of moral discrimination; for these cities are made inviolable
sanctuaries whither might flee the manslayer who had slain his neighbor
unawares and hated him not in time past.[378]
Especially is the humanitarian advance shown in the provisions of
the code which relate to the poor, the debtor, and the bondsman. We
meet here some of the most humane regulations to be found in any of
the codes of antiquity. Social morality is almost made to consist in
consideration for the poor: “If there be among you a poor man ...
thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him”--so the law enjoins--“and
shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need.”[379] Things that
were necessities to the poor man were not to be taken as security
for a loan: “No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to
pledge.”[380] If a garment be taken as security, this must be returned
before night, in order that the man may sleep in his own raiment.[381]
The widow’s raiment must not be taken in pledge at all.[382] The wages
of the poor and needy must be promptly paid: “At his day thou shalt
give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is
poor, and setteth his heart upon it.”[383]
The law goes even further in its humane endeavor to prevent the
oppression of the needy. The loaning of money in ancient times was
in general a very different thing from similar money transactions
in this commercial and industrial age of ours. Those seeking loans
were the very poor, who were forced to borrow to meet domestic
necessities. Under such conditions the taking of interest would
naturally be denounced, and those who did so would come to be regarded
as extortioners, and robbers of the poor. Hence the prohibition, “Thou
shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; ... unto a stranger thou
mayest lend upon usury.”[384]
This legislation, well adapted to the times and the conditions of the
society for which it was enacted, became centuries later, through its
adoption and attempted enforcement by the medieval Church, a source of
grave mischief. It constituted a heavy drag for centuries upon the
industrial development of European civilization.
The same spirit of tenderness toward the portionless and needy is shown
in the provision concerning the ingathering of the harvest: “When thou
cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in
the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it; it shall be for the
stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.”[385] This tender
consideration for the poor speaks from one of the most beautiful of
Bible pictures--that of the Moabitess Ruth gleaning in the fields
after the reapers, who “let fall some of the handfuls of purpose for
her.”[386]
The social conscience awakening in Israel, to which the above
regulations and commandments bear witness, finds further expression in
the provisions of the code effecting ameliorations in the lot of the
unfortunate bondsman. The master is enjoined to see that the Sabbath
is observed by his slave as well as by himself and his family, and the
reason assigned is the humanitarian one--“that thy manservant and thy
maidservant may rest as well as thou.”[387] And a limitation was set to
the time that a person could be held in bondage: “And if thy brother,
an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee
six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from
thee.”[388] Furthermore, the law is solicitous respecting the welfare
of the bondsman even after emancipation: “And when thou sendest him
out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty. Thou shalt
furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy threshing floor,
and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath
blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.”[389]
To these ameliorative measures effect is sought to be given through
a revival of memories of the past. The masters are enjoined to be
compassionate to their bondsmen because they themselves had been worn
and bruised in bondage: “Remember,” says the lawgiver, “that ye were
bondsmen in the land of Egypt.”[390]
_2. The Morality of the Prophets of the Exile_
[Sidenote: The effects of the
Captivity upon the moral evolution
in Israel]
We have reached now a turning point in the moral history of Israel.
Speaking of the effects of the Exile upon the inner life of Israel,
Renan uses these words: “Twice it was the fate of Israel to owe its
salvation to that which is the ruin of others, and to be recalled by
the crushing of its earthly hopes to a sense of its great duties toward
humanity.”
The mission of Israel, her duty toward humanity, was, as we have said,
to interpret life in ethical terms. As the story of the exilic and the
postexilic period unfolds, we shall see how the sad experiences of the
Exile purified and deepened the moral consciousness of Israel, and
prepared her for the great part she was destined to play in the moral
education of mankind.
It was the great unknown prophet of the Exile, the so-called Second
Isaiah, who wrote just after the capture of Babylon by the Persian king
Cyrus (539 B.C.), who was the representative of the essentially new
conceptions of Yahweh and of the requirements of the moral law which
characterize this ethical development.[391]
[Sidenote: Ethical monotheism at
last; religion and morality at one]
Shut out from participation in political affairs, the best energies
of the exiled community seem to have been turned to the things of the
inner life, and consequently the development in the religious and moral
spheres went on apace. The conception of God--of what is pleasing to
him and what he requires of man--was elevated and purified.
We meet now for the first time monotheism pure and absolute. Yahweh is
conceived as the only God; the gods of the other nations are no gods
at all. Some of the earlier prophets had, it is true, caught sight of
this lofty truth; but the multitude of the people certainly had no such
idea of their patron god. The prophets of the Exile are the first to
proclaim this doctrine with such emphasis as to cause it to become a
part of the indestructible religious consciousness of Israel.[392]
One cannot read the declarations which the unknown prophet puts in the
mouth of Yahweh--“Before me there was no God formed, neither shall
there be after me;”[393] “I am the first and I am the last; and besides
me there is no God;”[394] “I am Yahweh who wrought everything, who
stretched forth the heavens above, who spread forth the earth--who
was with me;”[395] “I am Yahweh and there is none beside me;”[396]
“I am God, and there is none else, I am God, and there is none like
me”[397]--one cannot read these declarations without being convinced
that they were not phrased by one to whom the idea of the unity of God
had become a commonplace, but rather by one to whom the thought was
something in the nature of a discovery.[398]
But it was not merely the idea of the oneness of deity, of Yahweh as
the sole God, that was the element of supreme significance in this
practically new thought of God. There is nothing unethical in the
belief in many gods; nor, on the other hand, is there anything ethical
in the belief that there is only one God. The historically important
thing about the monotheism of Israel is that it was ethical monotheism.
Up to the time of the Exile the multitude in Israel, notwithstanding
the teachings of the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, had
never thought of Yahweh as an absolutely just god, but rather as one
who would favor his people under all circumstances. Put in the language
of to-day, they conceived Yahweh as a partisan, who would be for his
people right or wrong. But under the discipline of the Exile the
more spiritual-minded of the nation came to accept the teaching that
Yahweh’s favor “is conditioned by a law of absolute righteousness.”[399]
This conception of God marks a turning point in the moral evolution
of humanity. It lifted a new ethical standard. It effected a union of
religion and morality. This, it is true, was not a wholly new thing in
history. In the worship of the good Osiris in Egypt these elements had
been united; in the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda they had also
been brought together; and at this very time in Greece there was an
effort being made to unite them in the worship of the Delphian Apollo.
But the union effected by the prophets of Israel was the only one
destined to have large and permanent historical consequences. Because
of the ethical content given the god idea by them, their conception
of deity constituted the most precious part of the spiritual heritage
bequeathed by Judaism to Christianity.
[Sidenote: Repudiation of
the doctrine of collective
responsibility]
The progressive clarification of the moral consciousness in Israel
disclosed by this truer conception of the divine character is further
shown by the definite and emphatic repudiation by the prophets of the
Exile of the doctrine of collective responsibility.[400]
There was an ironical proverb current in Israel, which, expressing
bitter protest against the unequal ways of Yahweh in visiting the sins
of the fathers upon the children,[401] ran thus: “The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”[402] The
prophet Ezekiel says to the people that they shall not have occasion
any more to use this proverb.[403] With clear moral vision he sees
how impossible it is that the moral government of Yahweh should rest
upon the principle of collective responsibility, and that the innocent
should be punished for the guilty. Declaring that the ways of God are
just and equal, he annuls all earlier provisions of the law by boldly
proclaiming that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,
neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.[404]
It marks a great moral advance when guilt comes thus to be viewed as
a personal and not a communal thing. But unfortunately the ground
here gained for morality was lost when the theologians of the early
Christian Church, reviving the outgrown conception of collective
responsibility, formulated the dogma that all the generations of
men--such being the solidarity of the human race--are partakers in the
sin of the first parents and under condemnation therefor.[405]
[Sidenote: The doctrine of the
sufferings of the righteous as
vicarious and expiatory]
But the decisive rejection by the deepening moral consciousness in
Israel of the doctrine that under the moral government of Yahweh the
innocent are punished for the guilty left still unsolved the problem
of the sufferings of the righteous--that problem which had at all
times so troubled the pious Israelite, and for the solution of which
so many different theories had been framed. The new teaching, or the
implication of the new teaching, that such sufferings are not penal
in character, that they are no sign of God’s displeasure with the
sufferer, while a teaching of consolation, contributed nothing to the
actual solution of the problem. But a new theory now offers a new
interpretation. This theory assumes that all transgression must be
atoned for by suffering, but teaches that this suffering may be borne
vicariously by one not the transgressor, and the guilt thereby expiated.
This idea worked itself out in the sorrow-burdened souls of the pious
exiles in Babylon. Never did acquaintance with bitter sorrow yield
sweeter fruit. The thought finds expression in Chapters LII and LIII
of Isaiah.[406] The righteous Servant of Yahweh, who is despised and
rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, is the
personified community of the pious Israelites, who are wounded for the
transgressions and bruised for the iniquities of the nation.[407]
Of all the ethical products of the troublous life of Israel, this
idea that under the moral government of the world one may vicariously
bear the burden of another’s fault and thus atone for it was the most
important in its historical consequences. Six hundred years after
the utterance of this message of consolation to the pious Israelite
exiles, the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, thus held aloft
by the Great Unknown, was incarnated, so it was believed, in Jesus of
Nazareth. Clothed in actual flesh and blood, the sweet persuasiveness
of the ideal--the nobility and divineness of suffering voluntarily
borne in the stead of another--made unwonted appeal to the heart of
humanity, and for eighteen hundred years and more, accepted as a true
symbol and interpretation of the moral order, it has been a chief
molding force in the moral life of the Western world.
_3. The Moral Life in the Postexilic Age_
[Sidenote: A ritual morality]
The chief moral fact in the postexilic period[408] was the putting
into strict practice of the Levitical and Deuteronomic law, and the
consequent triumph of ritual morality. From the establishment of this
law till the rise of Christianity, orthodox morality in Judah consisted
in the careful observance of the thousand and one minute rules and
requirements of this Temple code. The good man was he who kept the law
of the Lord.[409] All duties were in a sense religious duties; they
were acts performed simply because of the supposed divine command that
they should be performed.[410]
Such dependence as this on rules and forms and rites is of course
disastrous to all true morality. It fosters the idea that morality
consists in the performance of certain outer acts, instead of being the
attitude of the soul toward the good and the right inwardly discerned.
It substitutes an outer standard for the individual conscience.
Conscience disused loses its power of discrimination and becomes
atrophied. The ethically indifferent is made the all-important, and
thus all moral values are confused.
What confusion resulted in Israel is revealed in the denunciations
of this rigid, mechanical legalism by the Prophet of Nazareth: “Woe
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint
and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the
law, judgment, mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not
to leave the other undone.”[411] “Not that which goeth into the mouth
defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth.... To eat with
unwashen hands defileth not a man.”[412]
The Sermon on the Mount announces the awakening of the true prophetic
spirit in Israel after a sleep of five hundred years.
[Sidenote: An intolerant
nationalism]
A sinister phase of the orthodox religious-ethical system of the
postexilic age was its narrow, intolerant nationalism. To be an enemy
of Israel was what was believed to constitute wickedness, and to
excite the wrath of Yahweh, just as later in the ethics of certain
systems of Christian theology the unbeliever or pagan, merely because
of his unbelief or paganism, was regarded as wicked and as deserving
of eternal punishment. In psalms which date from this period these
enemies of Yahweh are cursed with a fierce hatred which spares not even
the children, but pronounces happy him who shall take up and dash the
little ones against the stones.[413] Nowhere in history do we meet with
a more fanatically intolerant nationalism.
[Sidenote: The relation of the
synagogue to the moral evolution]
It was only a comparatively small part of the Jewish nation whose
home was the city of Jerusalem in the later postexilic period. The
Israelite community was now widely scattered in the cities of the East
and the West. One important outcome of this, in its bearings upon the
moral life of Israel and of the nations that were to receive ethical
instruction from her, was the establishment of the synagogue.[414]
For the Deuteronomic code had made religion to be something connected
with the Temple, something separate and apart from true morality,
whose root is in human relationships. Now the Dispersion, tearing the
Israelites away from the Temple, tended to bring into prominence those
religious exercises and those duties which had nothing to do with the
Temple service. This was favorable to the religion and morality of
the prophets, as opposed to the religion and morality of the priests.
The services of the synagogue took the place of the ceremonies and
sacrifices of the Temple.[415] These services consisted in the
reading and translation of a portion of the Scriptures with comments
thereupon.[416] This meant the incoming of a new and powerful agency
in the promotion not only of the religious but also of the moral
education of humanity, for this custom “was the origin of the homily
and sermon.”[417] The synagogue was the prototype and precursor of the
Christian basilica and the Puritan meetinghouse.
[Sidenote: The new doctrine of
immortality: its ethical import]
The reëstablishment of the Law we have pronounced the chief ethical
fact in the history of Judaism after the return from the Babylonian
Captivity. And this is true if it is the history of the Jews alone that
we have in mind; but regarding the moral evolution in the world at
large there is another fact belonging to this period of even greater
importance. This was the incoming of the doctrine of immortality.[418]
We have seen that from the first the Hebrews, like the Babylonians,
held a belief in a sort of shadowy existence after death;[419] but of a
belief in personal immortality in our sense of the word, of a life of
rewards and punishments beyond the grave, there is no certain trace in
Hebrew literature until about the third or second century B.C.[420]
Different influences had concurred to create this new conception of
the hereafter and to secure for it by the end of the Greek period a
wide acceptance. First, there was what has been called the subjective
sense of fellowship with God. During this period of Israelite history
there was engendered in select souls a passionate outreaching after
divine companionship. This feeling is revealed in many a postexilic
psalm, as where the psalmist exclaims, “For thou wilt not leave my
soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one [beloved] to
see corruption.”[421] This was the divination of love like that of the
old mystic who exclaimed, “O God, if I should die, Thou couldst not
live.”[422] It was such filial love and trust as this, which found its
divinest expression in the life of “the Sublime Mystic of Galilee,”
that created in many a devout soul in Israel that larger hope which
gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.
But while it was probably deep religious feeling, the soul’s
recognition of its sonship to God, that called into existence the idea
of personal immortality, it was the ethical necessity created by a
profound faith in God’s absolute justice, an irrefragable conviction
that under the moral government of the world well-doing will be
rewarded and evildoing punished, that gained for the doctrine its wide
acceptance. That good men should be afflicted and wicked men should
enjoy prosperity, has in all ages of reflection caused questionings
and murmurings. But this ethical problem filled with peculiar unrest
the souls of the Israelites, first, because more than any other
people they felt the need of a just God; and second, because of their
lack of belief in a future life of rewards and punishments in which
the wrongs and inequalities of this life might be righted. Hence
the many different solutions of the problem which they thought out,
and through which they sought to justify the ways of God to man. So
long, however, as life practically ended at the grave, the problem
remained insolvable. But the doctrine of another existence in which
the righteous man should receive compensation for his sufferings here,
and the evil man just retribution for his deeds, offered a reasonable
solution of the problem that had so troubled the conscience of Israel.
It was this undoubtedly that caused the teaching to gain popular
currency.
The doctrine, however, was not wholly the product of the religious
and ethical development within Israel. Its growth was fostered by
various outside influences. Among these was the Persian doctrine
of the resurrection and a future life of retributive justice, with
which the Jews became familiar at the time of the Exile in Babylon or
later in the Persian period. Then again the development of the idea
was stimulated, after the third century B.C., by Greek philosophy,
particularly the Platonic.
But far more influential than either Zoroastrian teachings or Greek
philosophy must have been the thought and conviction of ancient Egypt.
After the founding of Alexandria, toward the end of the fourth century
B.C., a vast number of Jews were settled in that capital; and though
the positive evidence here is very meager, still we have a right to
something more than a conjecture that in that city Judaism was deeply
influenced by the ancient Egyptian doctrine of immortality.[423]
Under these various influences this doctrine rooted itself firmly among
the Jews, and by the time of the appearance of Christ had become a
distinctive tenet of a large and influential party among them.[424]
After the conception of a just God and the ideal of the suffering
Servant of Yahweh, this doctrine of immortality, with its correlate
teaching of future rewards and punishments, was perhaps the most
important product, in its moral consequences, of the life and ethical
experiences of ancient Israel. It exercised little or no influence, at
least no decisive influence, upon the moral evolution in Judaism, but,
adopted by Christianity, it was given new force and currency, and for
eighteen hundred years and more has been one of the great bulwarks and
sanctions of morality in the Western world.
[Sidenote: The expansion of
the moral sympathies in the
Hellenistic Age]
We have spoken of the rigid legalism and the narrow nationalistic
spirit of orthodox postexilic Judaism. But it must not be thought
that in these last days the spirit of prophetism was dead. Hidden
beneath this hard rind of legalism there pulsed a true moral life. This
life found expression in a movement toward ethical universalism. To
understand this movement we must recall the great political revolution
of this epoch.
Almost exactly two centuries after the return of the Jews from the
Babylonian Captivity, all the political relations of the Semitic East
were abruptly ended and new relations established by the conquests of
Alexander the Great. Hellenism, the most powerful solvent of history,
now came in contact with Hebrew life and thought both in Palestine
and in Egypt. The effect upon the ethical development in Judaism was
profound. With the expansion of the political and mental horizons
the moral sympathies of men were widened. The wall of separation
between Jew and Gentile was thrown down. In Alexandria and in the
many new Hellenistic cities in Asia, the nobler spirits of dispersed
Israel, casting aside their narrow racial prejudices, with enlarged
mental vision and widened moral sympathies, came to read with new
understanding their great prophets who had preached the universality of
the moral law and the brotherhood of nations.[425] Hebrew literature
registers the change. This new spirit of internationalism, of
kindness and justice even to enemies, breathes from many of the later
psalms[426] and speaks from many a passage of the so-called “wisdom
books” of the period. The allegory of Jonah embodies the liberal spirit
of this new Judaism. The great lawyers Hillel and Shammai,[427] who
laid emphasis upon social duties and human service, represented the
humanitarian phase of the age movement. Philo, the Alexandrian Jew,
represented its philosophical side. The way was being prepared for the
incoming of the ethical universalism of Christianity.