This book of the law of Moses, according to tradition, had been lost; had
been lost so long that its provisions had dropped into disuse, into
oblivion; an oblivion so complete that the nation's religion ignored and
violated the whole system of that law; had been lost so long and so
thoroughly that the very existence of such a law had passed from the
memory of man.
This was the book that Hilkiah claimed to have re-discovered in the temple
archives. It was at once read to the excited king. It made a profound
impression upon him by its revelation of the apostasy in which the nation
was living, and by its solemn threatenings upon such apostasy.
It came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the book of
the law, that he rent his clothes.
For, said he:
Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our
fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according
unto all that which is written concerning us.
The devout young king threw himself into a thorough reformation of the
prevailing religion. All local altars were swept away, all idolatries were
cleared from the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood was centred in the
capital and more thoroughly organized; in short, as our fathers read the
story, Mosaism was re-established, after some seven centuries of partial
or total disuse.
Through processes which we cannot now follow, our later critics have, I
think, fairly established the proposition, that this book of The Law was
none other than the substance of our book of Deuteronomy, then for the
first time written. The plans of the prophetic reformers had contemplated
the sweeping changes described above, in the interests of an ethical and
spiritual religion. They felt that they were but carrying out the
principles of the nation's great Founder. Of his original conception of
religion, bodied in The Ten Words, their aspirations were the legitimate
historical development; as the leaf and bud are the growth of the far back
roots. This programme of the prophetic reformers, presented in its true
light as a development of the ideas of Moses, was, by the priest Hilkiah,
sent to the king as the law of the nation's Founder, with the results
sketched above.
Read in this light, the book takes on a fresh and fascinating interest. It
marks the organization of the movement toward a higher religion which had
been started by the great prophets of the preceding century. It becomes
the Augsburg Confession of the Jewish Reformation, from which dates the
gradual possession of the institutions of the nation by ethical and
spiritual religion.
The lofty character of this book, the "St. John of the Old Testament," as
Ewald called it, is thus rendered intelligible; as it stands for the
aspirations of the noblest movement in ancient Jewish history. It is the
issue of a long travail of soul to whose words we hearken in such a truth
as this:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy might.
Placed in this position, the book of Deuteronomy becomes the key to
Israel's history, by which criticism is reconstructing that story, on the
lines of the great laws of all life, with most significant consequences to
the cause of religion. The ideas and institutions known to us as The
Mosaic Law come forth now as the crown and culmination of a long historic
development. Israel's story is that of a slow and gradual education under
the divine hand; not a relapse, but a progress, not an apostasy but an
evolution. Israel takes its place in the general order of humanity's
movement. With it religion sweeps at once into the pathway of progress
which science has shown to be the order of nature; and the historic
revelation is seen to be, like the revelation in nature, a gradual,
progressive manifestation of Him "whose goings forth are as the
morning"--its orbit the sweep of the ascending sun.
With such mighty secrets does this little book grow luminous when placed
in the light of its real belongings.
The Book of Ezekiel, whose historic position was never disputed, becomes
of new value in the light of a fuller knowledge of its period. It presents
to the science of Biblical criticism the missing link in its theory of
Israel's development. It shows the process of transformation, out of which
issued during the exile the elaborate, hierarchical system known to us as
Mosaism. The new criticism seems to me to have reasonably established the
theorem, that the priestly cultus embodied in the legislation of the
Pentateuch was first systematized into the form it there presents during
the exile, and was first set up as the national system on the return to
Judea. It is not claimed that it was a new manufacture of that period. As
such it would be inconceivable.[35] It is simply claimed that it was a
thorough codification, for the first time, of the scattered and
conflicting codes of conduct and systems of worship of the various local
priesthoods of Israel, as handed down by tradition and in records from
ancient times; a codification animated by the centralizing and
hierarchical tendencies working in the nation; which tendencies were
themselves the result largely of the prophetic spirit, and its
aspirations for a nobler religion.[36] It is not difficult to account for
this remarkable priestly movement.
The institutional organization of religion that began under Josiah had
continued, with various fortunes, the aim of the higher spirits of the
nation down to the exile. The movement of life was in the direction of
uniformity and order. There was much in the circumstances of the exile to
stimulate this movement. The priests were left without their temple
worship, and, in the absence of outward interests, must have turned their
thought in upon their system itself, studying it as they had not done in
the midst of its actual operation. Like all wrongly lost possessions, it
became doubly dear. The Jews were placed in the midst of an ancient and
highly organized priestly system in Babylonia, whose benefits to culture
and religion they must have noted and pondered. In the national
humiliation and the personal sorrows of such a wholesale carrying away of
a people from their native land, a wide-spread awakening of the inner life
was experienced, a genuine revival of religion. A new wave of prophetic
enthusiasm rose in the strange land, lifting the soul of the nation to
heights of spiritual and ethical religion never reached before.
This revival was stamped with the impress of the intellectual influences
which were working upon the Jews in Babylonia. Some of the extant writings
of this period, alike in literary style, in moral tone and in religious
thought, mark a new era. Israel's genius flowered in this dark night--true
to the mystic character of the race. This highest effort of prophetic
thought and feeling appears to have quickly exhausted itself. In reality,
it followed the usual order of religious movements, and turned into a
priestly organization. The group of prophets around the first Isaiah
prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed a century later.
The group of prophets around the second Isaiah prepared the way for the
priestly movement that followed close in their steps. First comes always,
in religion, an epoch of inspiration, and then comes a period of
organization. The organization never bodies fully the spirit of the
inspiration. The ideal is not realizable in institutions. Institutional
religion is always a compromise, a mediation between the lofty conceptions
and impatient aspirations of the few who inspire the new life, and the low
notions and contented conventionalisms of the many whom they seek to
inspire. The compromise is necessarily of the nature of a reaction; but
the interplay of action and re-action is the law of ethical as of chemical
forces.
Israel really needed the conserving work of a great organization. The
prophetic religion was far in advance of the popular level. The high
thoughts and lofty ideas of the prophets needed to be wrought into a
cultus, which, while not breaking abruptly with the popular religion,
should imbue the conventional forms with deeper ethical and spiritual
meanings; should, through them, systematically train the people in ethical
habits and spiritual conceptions; and should thus gradually educate men
out of these forms themselves.
In the providence of God, and under the influences of His patient Spirit,
this needful system was developed in the exile: a system whose symbolism
was so charged with ethical and spiritual senses that it led on to Christ;
as the Epistle to the Hebrews rightly shows and as Paul distinctly
declares. As the first priestly period, following the first prophetic
epoch, bodied that double movement in a book--Deuteronomy; so the second
priestly period, following the second prophetic epoch, bodied this double
movement in a book, or group of books--the present form of the Pentateuch.
The traditions and histories and legislations of the past were worked over
into a connected series of writings, through which was woven the new
priestly system, in a historical form. On the restoration to Judea, this
institutional reorganization was set up as the law of the land, and
continued thenceforward in force--the providential instrumentality for the
_ad interim_ work of four centuries. Such a remarkable process of
development, so deepening in us a sense of the guiding hand of God, ought
to show some sign of its working, in the literature of the period. However
clear, from our general knowledge, the tendencies which were at work in
that period, we could not feel assured of our correct interpretation of
this most important epoch, in the absence of some such sign, in a writing
of that date.
The Book of Ezekiel supplies the missing link. The writer was a
prophet-priest, who went into the exile, and wrote in Babylonia. In the
earlier part of his life-work, recorded in the earlier portion of his
book, he was thoroughly prophetic, intensely ethical and spiritual,
breathing the very spirit of his great master, Jeremiah. In the latter
part of his career he was visited with dreams, such as are plainly
indicated to us in the remarkable vision occupying the concluding section
of his book. The fortieth chapter opens thus:
In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me
upon a very high mountain, upon which was as the frame of a city on the
south.
Then follows, through eighteen chapters, a sketch of the temple system in
the expected restoration. It is a thoroughly ideal sketch, a vision
destined to take on much simpler and humbler proportions in its
realization; a picture probably not intended for copying in actual
construction, but, like all ideal work, a powerful stimulus to the
aspirations it expressed.
It is a free sketch of the New Priestly System, on the easel, awaiting
correction and completion at the hands of Ezra and others. It reveals to
us the visions that were occupying the minds of the best men in the latter
part of the exile, and the work they were essaying. Thus we are prepared
for the final issue.
The Book of Daniel has been wrongly placed, traditionally, with most
serious consequences to the character of the book, and, through this
misconception to Christianity. Dated from the early part of the sixth
century before Christ, its story of Daniel's experiences read as literal
history, and its visions appear as actual predictions of long subsequent
events.