_The era of the great prophets, before the exile:_ B.C. 800-586.
In the southern Pacific, where coral islands are slowly forming beneath
the surface of the sea, he who is curious to study the process of the
making of an island must send the divers down to bring up broken bits of
coral, snatched from the dark depths in a painful labor. After the ocean
mountain thrusts its top above the surface of the sea the work of
exploration is easy enough, and we may walk over hard ground as we study
the new formation in the sunlight. Hitherto, in our desire to learn the
secrets of the growth of Israel, we have been like men peering over the
sides of their tiny boats into the depths of a sea that covers fascinating
mysteries; watching the labors of the adepts who ever and anon bring up to
the light some fresh fragments of a buried world. In the epoch that we
have now reached Israel's growing life lifts itself above the level of
tradition, and stands forth as solid history, on whose firm ground we can
study for ourselves the making of a nation's religion.
Israel's literary period opens for us with the prophets. Literary
fragments float up to us from earlier days, but now, for the first time,
we have whole books about whose date and authorship we are reasonably
certain. The prophets introduced the literary craft. They wrote out, in
their later years, the substance of the messages which they had borne the
people. These brilliant pages teem with graphic descriptions of the actual
usages, social and religious, of their age, so that there is no difficulty
in reproducing with fair accuracy the salient features of the period.
The popular religion was that composite of heathenisms already sketched
in considering the previous period. The people continued to worship the
Power which all felt and owned, under the manifold forms which this Power
assumes in nature's processes. Sun and moon and stars still arrested the
awe which through them groped after God, and drew upon themselves the
worship of the imagination. The worship of Jehovah had a special honor as
the State religion, but it stood contentedly amid other forms of religion.
In the service of Jehovah local shrines developed special usages. The
"Uses" of Israel were as varied as the "Uses" of England before the
Reformation. No act of Uniformity was in operation in the realm. Idolatry
was not the exception but the rule. The most popular symbol of Jehovah was
an image of a bull. To the higher minds this bull was doubtless merely a
symbol, expressive of a striking phase of the sun's force, but to the mass
of men it was probably the actual object of their adorations. The
symbolism of the Jerusalem Temple was thoroughly idolatrous; as, for
example, the twelve oxen upholding the laver, and the horns of the altar,
symbols drawn from the prevalent bull-worship; the two columns in the
court, and the cherubs, or cloud-dragons in the most holy place; the
_chamanim_, or sun-images representing the rays of the sun in the shape of
a cone, and the chariots and horses of the sun, a very ancient symbol
familiar to us in Guido's Aurora.[43]
Nor did the allegiance to Jehovah bar private usages of an idolatrous
nature. The home of the average Israelite had its _teraphim_ and other
domestic divinities. The darker aspects of the popular religion still held
their ground against the growing light. Beneath the shadow of the Jehovah
of the Ten Words, stood, unmolested, the images fashioned by the appetites
and passions; and men and women surrendered themselves to drunken orgies
and sensual debauches, in honor of the deities of desire. As late as the
time of Jeremiah, after nearly two centuries of prophetic teaching, there
were in the sacred precincts of the temple the _asheras_, or tree-poles,
by which the priestesses of passion, as part of their religious offices,
sold themselves to the frequenters of Jehovah's house.[44] Below the holy
city, King Manasseh reared the image of Moloch, and human sacrifices were
offered to placate the wrath of the Power which they ignorantly
worshipped.
Where religion was so largely a worship of the physical powers of nature,
the life of the people would of necessity show an undeveloped ethical
state. Drunkenness and debauchery continued common, the marriage bond was
very elastic in the polite society of the capital, and selfishness
haughtily overrode all considerations of _meum_ and _tuum_ in the mad
chase of wealth.
Unsatisfactory as the morals of the influential classes of society were,
there is, however, no indication of any such "ooze and thaw of wrong" as
indicated a moribund condition in the nation.
We must not make the mistake, so common concerning reformers, and regard
the evils that were justly lashed by the prophets as prevailing throughout
society. Had this been the case, where would the ethical forces of a new
and higher life have risen? Single preachers of social righteousness might
have arisen, like Savonarola in Florence, under such conditions, but no
general reform could have developed. The steady growth of the movement
initiated by the great prophets shows that it sprang from no individuals,
but from society; that they merely led the reserve forces of virtue in the
nation. The heart of the nation was doubtless sound, and growing more
vigorously virtuous. Professor Thorold Rogers reminds us that the period
when a great outcry is heard against any social evil, is not that wherein
the evil is at its height, for then there would probably be no power of
protest, but rather that in which the recuperative forces of society are
rallying to throw off the disorder from the body politic. Morality was in
advance of religion at this time in Israel, and this interprets the
movement which ensued to place religion in its proper position at the head
of the march of progress.
It was amid such a state of affairs that the great prophets appeared upon
the stage of action, calling the nation to a higher religion. They were
not so much philosophers, reasoning out a lofty intellectual conception of
God, as preachers of righteousness, vitalizing from the moral nature the
sense of the purity and justice of the Power in whom men lived and moved
and had their being They turned the light of the inward law upon God, and
revealed Him as its author. They led Virtue into the Temple, touched her
lips with a live coal from off the altar, and from a tongue of fire men
heard, "Thus saith the Lord." They revived the true Mosaic priesthood,
which set apart conscience as the mediator between God and man. The seed
that Moses planted budded and swelled toward its bloom. The prophetic
writings show us men a-hungered after righteousness breathing out the
worship of Jehovah into the worship of the Eternal, who loveth
righteousness.
Isaiah carries this message from God:
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?
I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts.
And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.
When ye come to appear before me,
Who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?
Bring no more vain oblations;
Incense is an abomination unto me;
The new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure;
It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;
They are a trouble unto me;
I am weary to bear them.
And when ye spread forth your hands,
I will hide mine eyes from you:
Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear:
Your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean;
Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes:
Cease to do evil; learn to do well:
Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed,
Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.[45]
Micah voices the questions that men raised in his day, answering them with
the new thought:
Wherewithal 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,
Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He hath showed 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?[46]
Two features of the work of the prophets bring out clearly their ethical
inspiration. Israel was at this period being drawn, for the first time,
into the currents created by the strife of the mammoth empires of Assyria
and Egypt, in whose maelstrom she at length went down. Public affairs were
becoming matters of international relationship. The prophets threw
themselves heartily into the national politics, standing between the party
of Assyria and the party of Egypt, as independents concerned with the
interests of neither faction, but seeking to lift both sides above the
shifting sands of policy upon the firm ground of principle. They sought to
lead the nation to turn aside from its dazzling dream of a brilliant
foreign policy to the humbler tasks of internal reform; to induce the
State to busy itself with the labor of redressing civic disorders and of
building a community of sober, pure, and just citizens, cultivating peace
and equity with other peoples, and fearing God. They were preachers to the
corporate conscience of Israel, and dealt with subjects which the modern
pulpit effeminately shuns. In strains of pure and passionate patriotism,
they delighted to vision before the people the ideal State and its ideal
King; thus to lead the aspirations of the nation to a higher ambition
than martial prowess and diplomatic craft.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,
And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord:
And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,
Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:
But with righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.
And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,
And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,
And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.[47]
These Hebrew prophets made the right administration of public affairs the
essentially religious service which their devout student Gladstone
declares them now to be. Because of this inspiration of civic life with
religiousness, their books have become, as Coleridge called them, the
Statesman's Manual.
At this period in Israel's history the social revolution attending the
progress of all peoples from a simple to a complex organization was
entailing its usual excesses, and alarming symptoms were showing
themselves in the commonwealth. In earlier days Israel's tenure of land
had been, like that of all peoples, communistic. Proprietorship of the
land was vested in the family, and then in the village community. There
were no private fortunes and no private poverty. Life was simple and
contented, and dull. Under the action of the usual social forces, this
system had been gradually breaking up, through many generations. Property
had mainly passed into personal possession Society had recrystallized
around the individual. Individualism had developed its customary
tendencies to inequality. The ancient equality of the free farmers of
Israel was already disappearing. Fortunes, undreamed of a couple of
centuries earlier, were becoming common. Greed was pushing men beyond
legitimate acquisition into respectable robbery. The old-time rights of
commonalty were disappearing in pasture, and farming land, and forest. The
village commons were being "enclosed" by local potentates. Monopolies of
the natural resources of all wealth, the inalienable dower of the people
at large, were working their inevitable consequences. Below the wealthy
class, which was rising to the top of society, there was forming at the
bottom a new and unheard-of social stratum, the settlings of the struggle
for existence; a deposit of the feebleness and ignorance and innocence of
the people. In the loss of the old sense of a commonwealth, the nation was
breaking up into classes, alienated, unsympathetic, hostile. Selfishness
was threatening ruin to the State.
In the midst of these dangerous social tendencies the prophets came
forward as "men of the people." Like brave Latimer at Paul's Cross, these
fearless preachers stood in the marketplaces to denounce monopoly and the
tyranny of capital. They were not affrighted by the hue and cry that, if
human nature was the same then as now, was raised against them, in the
name of the sacred rights of property. They were not beguiled by the
sophisms of those who doubtless proved conclusively that the best
interests of the people were being furthered by the fullest freedom of the
able and crafty to enrich themselves _ad libitum_. They could not have
stood an examination in political economy, but they knew the heart of the
whole matter, in a world whose core is the moral law. They saw, more or
less clearly, that there could be no lasting wealth in a society which was
not based upon a wide, deep common-wealth. They felt that the one clue to
follow in every social problem was held by conscience. So they struck
boldly at existing wrongs in the name of the Eternal Righteous One.
Woe unto them that join house to house,
That lay field to field
Till there be no place,
That they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!
* * * * *
The Lord will enter into judgment
With the ancients of his people and the princes thereof:
For ye have eaten up the vineyard;
The spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,
And grind the faces of the poor?
Saith the Lord God of hosts.[48]
One word, constantly recurring through the prophets, reveals the secret of
their enthusiasm. They lifted above the people the august and holy form of
Justice, and called on men to follow her. They appealed to a force in men
mightier than selfishness. They kindled the passion which had been always
latent in Israel, since the day when Moses led forth the slaves of Egypt
to found a nation of freemen. A new and lofty ideal mastered the minds of
the better natures among the people. Over against the darkness of their
age there rose a vision of a good time coming, when Justice should be
throned on law, and selfishness be exorcised from the hearts of men who
had learned the secret
Of joy in widest commonalty spread.
And this they did in the name of Jehovah. From Him they came with these
messages concerning social obligations. The Eternal One who loved
righteousness could be served in no other way than in furthering justice.
Religion became social reform, aflame with the enthusiasm of holy ideals;
of ideals seen to be eternal realities, as the shadows cast by The Living
God, moving on to accomplish the good pleasure of His will.
To conserve the new spirit of brotherhood which they awakened, they
embodied in the book of the Law, that constituted the Magna Charta of the
Reformation, a development of a gracious usage of the people. From
immemorial antiquity there had been a recognized right of the populace to
the natural yield of the soil in every seventh year. This common law they
formally re-enacted, in the name of Jehovah, and added to it a provision
for the release of debtors in the sabbatical year.[49]
We shall see in the nest period the fruitage of this new religion of
social righteousness, in the remarkable legislation of the Restoration.
In these serious, strenuous secularities--so often neglected by the
religious, or even opposed as irreligious--which now were consecrated to
the service of Jehovah, religion found its true sphere, and developed its
latent forces. A new era opened. The abominations of religion in former
times became the exceptions rather than the rule, and gradually
disappeared from society. After Jeremiah we hear no more of impurities
hiding under the altar, or of savage superstition seeking to please
Jehovah by outraging the holiest instincts of human nature. Jehovah became
the name for a conception of Deity so spiritual, so holy, that henceforth
the student of Israel's history should substitute--God.
It is a most interesting study to place these great prophets in their
chronological order, and trace the development of this ethical religion.
As one after another they come upon the stage of action they take up the
great words of their masters and repeat them in their own way; take up the
great tasks of their predecessors and carry them on toward completion;
leading religion into an ever deepening spirituality. The prophets of the
eighth century group around Isaiah, under whose influence Hezekiah
attempted a partial reformation of the popular religion. The prophets of
the seventh century group around Jeremiah, the master-spirit in the more
thorough reformation carried out under Josiah. This second reformation
achieved an institutional organization of ethical religion, that came just
in time to create a body capable of holding the people together in loyalty
to the true God, amid the break up of the nation.