_THE HISTORIC SETTING OF DEUTERONOMY_
Whatever may be the date of the first publication of Deuteronomy,
there can be no doubt that it was accepted by Josiah and the people
of his time with an energy and thoroughness of which we find
no previous example. Its main lessons were learnt and put into
practice by them, and from that period the religious conceptions
of Deuteronomy dominated and formed the Hebrew mind in a manner of
which we have no earlier trace. For practical purposes, therefore,
we may say that this was the Deuteronomic period. The book gathered
up and embodied the higher strivings of that time; and to understand
it thoroughly we need to know the history of which it was, in part
at least, the outcome. Indeed, on any supposition as to age and
authorship, a study of the history of Judah from the end of the
eighth century B.C. to the end of the seventh is indispensable if we
would adequately understand our book, for that was the time when the
book is seen entering as a living force into the history of Israel.
Unfortunately, however, there are few periods of Israelite history
as to which we have less of reliable information. During much of
the period the main currents of the national life ran contrary to
all better influences, and in such epochs the compilers of the Book
of Kings took no interest. For the most part they were content
to "look and pass," gathering up the results of such times of
declension in a few condemnatory words. It is only when the nation
is on the upward slope that they enter into details. They wrote at
a time when the purpose of God in their national life was becoming
clear, and the splendour of it possessed them so that nothing else
but the increase of this purpose seemed worthy of any intenser
contemplation. Victories and defeats, successes and failures, and
last of all the tremendous catastrophe of the Exile, had taught them
this discernment; and they pressed forward so eagerly to record
the deeds and thoughts of those who had learned the secret of
Yahweh that they had eyes for nothing else. Consequently the eighty
years after the fall of Samaria, which for our purpose would be so
extremely instructive, are passed over in all our sources, almost
without mention. But there are some facts and events of which we
can be entirely sure; and from these it is possible to conceive in
outline the way in which things must have shaped themselves in these
eventful years.
Brought about as it had been by the appeal of Ahaz to the king of
Assyria for help against the continual aggressions of Syria and
Israel, the fall of Samaria must have come to the king and people
of Judah as a relief. Their enemy had fallen, and they would
henceforth be free from the anxiety and harassment which Israel's
enmity had caused. But those must have been blind indeed with whom
this feeling was permanent. Very soon it must have become apparent
to all thoughtful men in Judah that, if they had been freed from
the worrying and exasperating enmity of their kindred, their very
success had brought them into the presence of a much more serious
foe. With Assyria on their immediate frontier, settled in the lands
both of Damascus and Samaria, they must have felt themselves exposed
to chances and dangers they had never hitherto had to face. Under
the old conditions, except during comparatively short periods when
there was actual war between the two kingdoms, Israel had stood
between Judah and any danger from the North. But now the people of
the Southern Kingdom were summoned from "the safe glad rear to the
dreadful van." Henceforth no patriot could fail to be haunted by
fear of that ambitious and conquering Assyrian nation. The whole of
Hezekiah's reign was filled with more or less convulsive efforts
to maintain the independence of Judah. These were giving but faint
promise of success, when the great deliverance of Jerusalem foretold
by Isaiah gave the king a breathing space, and raised the highest
hopes in the minds of his people. It seemed for a little quite
possible that the ancient independence of Israel might be restored.
To many it seemed that the Messianic times were at hand; faith in
Yahweh carried all before it. But Hezekiah died not long after; and
in the succeeding reigns of Manasseh and Amon the whole temper and
policy of Israel underwent a most serious and reactionary change.
The causes of this are not far to seek. During the greater part
of Hezekiah's reign Isaiah had received only moderate support.
According to his own vision of his future work, he was to preach
without success; he was to say, "Hear ye indeed, but understand
not; and see ye, but perceive not"; and, so far as the mass of
the people were concerned, that prevision was justified. Only the
astounding success with which his opposition to the Assyrians had
been crowned had turned the tide of popular opinion in his favour.
It was probably, therefore, only then that Hezekiah's reforms were
instituted. They had been too short a time in force at his death to
have sent out their roots into the national life. But that was not
all. One of the most characteristic points in all prophecy was that
the _time_ when the full Messianic Kingdom should appear was never
clearly defined. Neither the Prophet nor his hearers knew when it
would be. It loomed always as a bright but vague background to the
deliverance which lay immediately before them; and in almost every
case neither speaker nor hearers had any conception of the long and
weary way which divided those sunlit mountain peaks from the dark
and threatening pass which they were approaching. Now the literal
interpretation of Isaiah's prophecies with regard to the deliverance
from Assyria had inevitably led the mass of the people to believe
that the raising of the siege of Jerusalem would mean the immediate
destruction of Assyria, and the advent of the Messianic day of
peace and glory for Israel. But the facts completely falsified that
expectation. Instead of being destroyed Assyria only grew more
powerful, and instead of the Messianic time there was only the old
position of vassalage to Assyria. So men grew weary, and said then
as they have said so often since, "All things are as they have been
from the beginning, and where is the promise of His coming?" The
true-hearted said it with sadness; and the false-hearted, saying it
in mockery and unbelief, fell back upon the old heathenish test, and
said, "The gods of Assyria are stronger than Yahweh, and we must
give them a place in our adoration." With the bulk of the people
this required no really great change in their point of view. They
had believed in Yahweh and agreed to purify His worship, because He
had proved Himself stronger than Sennacherib and his gods; and now
when, in the long run, Assyria was triumphing, they must have seemed
to themselves only to be following the teachings of experience in
giving the host of heaven equal honour with their own ancestral
God. The reaction, therefore, was more in the outward expression
than in principle, and we can easily understand how it was so swift
and so universal. Manasseh, Hezekiah's son, had probably opposed
his father's policy, as the heir-apparent has so often opposed the
policy of the reigning monarch; and if, as many suppose, Hezekiah
lived for sixteen years after the destruction of Sennacherib's host,
Manasseh came to the throne just when men's minds were most weary
with hope deferred, and when the Assyrian success was about to reach
its highest point before its final fall.
Accordingly Manasseh would seem to have undone at once all that his
father and Isaiah had accomplished. Nay, he went further in the
introduction of idolatry than any even of the idolatrous kings who
had preceded him. In the Book of Kings the charges made against
him are three:--1st, that he introduced the worship of the host of
heaven according to the Assyrian ritual; 2nd, that he took part in
the Moloch-worship; and 3rd, that he restored the old semi-Canaanite
worship which it had been Isaiah's most strenuous effort to root
out. And this policy, evil as it was in the eyes of all who cared
for the higher destinies of Israel, had at once great and striking
external success. For it meant complete submission to Assyria, a
willing vassalage from which even the wish for independence had
disappeared. The heart of the old Israelite independence had been
faith in Yahweh and confidence in Israel's calling as His people.
Even so late as Isaiah's day it had been faith in Yahweh which had
kept Hezekiah steady in his opposition to apparently overwhelming
force. But now Manasseh and the people who supported him exalted
the gods of Assyria as an even surer refuge than Yahweh had been.
Having made that admission, there was nothing left for them but to
humble themselves under the mighty hand of the great king and his
great gods. And this Israel under Manasseh did most thoroughly. As
Stade has strikingly said, "The Temple of the one God of Israel
became a Pantheon." The feeble attempts which Ahaz had made in
the same direction were utterly swept out of men's memory by the
completeness of Manasseh's apostasy. With this degradation of
the religious faith there also came, naturally, an intellectual
degradation. Superstition, baser even than idolatry, seized upon
the minds of men, and illegitimate efforts to pry into the future
or to influence the destinies of men by magic and incantations
became part of the popular fashion of the day. The old religion of
Israel had sternly set itself against all such debasing practices.
Alone amid the religions of the ancient world, it had relentlessly
refused the help of necromancy and magic generally. But the barrier
the religion of Yahweh had erected fell at once when its purity
and uniqueness had been sacrificed, and Manasseh gave himself up
to "practise augury and to use enchantments, and to deal with them
that had familiar spirits and with wizards." And to superstition he
also added cruelty. Not content with his signal victory over all
the best impulses of the past, not content with the applause of the
multitude who gladly followed him to do evil, he endeavoured to
force those whose work he had destroyed to bow before the gods they
both hated and despised. We know too little of the circumstances of
the time to be sure of his motives, but his action may have been
founded upon a craven fear that if he did not suppress the voices of
those who spoke for freedom, he might be visited with the anger of
the Assyrian king. Or it may have been that feeling, so powerfully
expressed in Browning's poem "Instans Tyrannus," which makes a
tyrant feel that all his life is made bitter to him if there remain
within his power one free man whom he cannot bend to his will. In
any case it is certain that he attacked the prophetic party with
sanguinary fury. Though he had the gods of the great battalions on
his side, he was dimly afraid of the power of ideas; and, so far
as faithful men were concerned, he instituted a "reign of terror."
According to the graphic statement of the historian, "he filled
Jerusalem with innocent blood from lip to lip," and for the time at
least was able to silence righteousness so far as public utterance
was concerned. There is a tradition that even Isaiah fell a victim
to his fury, being sawn asunder between two planks at his command.
It is perhaps not likely that Isaiah had survived so long. But,
beyond all doubt, many suffered for their faithfulness to God;
and it seems probable that the wonderful picture of the Suffering
Servant in the Deutero-Isaiah owes much of its colour to the
pathetic and painful memories of this evil time.
All this apostasy brought with it worldly success. Manasseh reigned
long, and under him the land had peace. Assyria _could_ have no
quarrel with a people and a king who anticipated its very desire
by eager submission. Peace brought material prosperity. The land
was so naturally fertile that it always grew rich when war was
kept from its borders. We may surmise, too, that a kind of bastard
culture became popular when the Jewish mind had opened to it, for
good and evil, a world of myth and song and legend which, if known
before, had until now been barred from complete and triumphant
entrance by faith in a living God. Once only would Manasseh appear
to have asserted himself, and, according to the Book of Chronicles,
he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem by the master he had served so
well, and learned to know in the bitterness of a Babylonian prison
that sycophancy does not always lead to safety. And the wisdom he
learned went further even than that. At the end of his life he
appears to have wished to undo, at least in some measure, the evil
he had laboured throughout his reign to establish and make strong.
But he found that to be impossible; and if his repentance was deep
and sincere he must have learned how severely the heavenly powers
can punish, by opening a man's eyes to the evil he has done when
it cannot be undone. Nor did his late repentance affect his son,
for under Amon all things continued in their previous evil course.
Indeed the prevailing idolatry had rooted itself so firmly that
even in the early years of Josiah, when the prophetic influence was
beginning to reappear, it still retained its hold with unshaken
power.
But what of the prophetic party during those evil days? Precipitated
from power in an instant at Hezekiah's death, it had at once become
feeble and obscure. Its leading supporters, we may well believe,
had to seek safety in hiding or in flight; and after some of its
chief speakers had been cut off, the once dominant party had to
take the position of persecuted remnants for whom all public work
was impossible. Under such circumstances what could these faithful
men do? They could only wait and pray, and prepare for that better
day of whose return their faith in Yahweh would not suffer them to
despair.
From the position afterwards taken up by the high priest, it would
seem probable that the Temple clergy were in full sympathy with the
prophetic movement. We need not suppose that that sympathy arose
wholly from the tendency of prophetic thought and effort towards the
suppression of the High Places. We should probably do the better
spirits among the priesthood grievous wrong if we thought that
their personal interest was their main motive in supporting even
that reform. Notwithstanding the earlier prophets' denunciation of
the priests as a class, there can be little doubt that they had
advanced, with the better classes of their nation generally, in
their appreciation of spiritual religion. And we may well believe
that the sight of the havoc which the now degraded worship at the
High Places was working in the popular mind made them earnest in
their endeavours to restore the true faith. Privileged as they
were, they would naturally be sheltered from the full fury of the
persecution. Consequently, when the time came for the supporters
of true religion to take their place in public life again, it was
natural and inevitable that the priests should be at their head.
The fact, too, that Josiah at his accession was a child, for whose
guardian no fitter person could be found than the chief priest, gave
the future into their hands. But they did not move prematurely. So
long as Josiah was a minor they contented themselves with instilling
their principles into the mind of the king. In outward political
life, so far as we can ascertain, they did not interfere at all, and
the ground was moved away from beneath the feet of the idolatrous
party, while they thought themselves firmly established. In Josiah's
eighteenth year the results of this quiet preparation appeared. In
that year Hilkiah, the high priest, told Shaphan the scribe that
he had found "the Book of the Law" in the Temple. That this was
Deuteronomy, if not altogether, yet practically, as we have it
now, there can be but little doubt; and it immediately became the
text-book of religion for all that remained of Israel.
Now it is obvious that the whole hopes of the religious party would
naturally be fixed upon it. They would turn to it as eagerly as
the Reformers turned to the Bible, after it had been rediscovered
by Luther at Erfurt. For obviously, if the people could be got to
acknowledge the law, the axe would be laid at the root of every evil
which they deplored. The High Places would be destroyed; the primacy
of the Temple at Jerusalem would be secured; and the prophetic
teaching, with its insistence upon judgment and the love of God as
the essentials of true worship, would, for the first time, become
the dominant influence in civil and religious life. Never since
Israel was a nation had the condition of the people called so
loudly for the enforcement of such a law, and now for the first time
was there hope that it might be actually enforced. The character
of the evils that afflicted the nation, the history of the last
half-century, and the teachings of the great canonical prophets had
all converged, as it were, to this one point, and we can understand
how all who strove for the higher life of Israel would strive
that Deuteronomy, whether ancient or modern, should be neglected
no longer. The result was that the whole power of the State was
thrown into the struggle against idolatry and the half-heathen
Bamoth-worship. The prophets and the priests joined hands to spread
the principles of the true religion, as voiced by Deuteronomy.
Professor Cheyne, in his _Jeremiah_, conjectures, with considerable
likelihood, that the break in that prophet's activity which occurred
at this time is to be accounted for by the zeal with which he
devoted himself to Deuteronomic propaganda throughout the land. In
any case, for the moment the purer worship obtained a completer
victory than ever before. Unfortunately it came too late and proved
too evanescent. But in the inward sphere, the Deuteronomic view of
religion as having its centre in love to God, the tender, thoughtful
evangelical spirit which distinguishes the whole outlook of its
author, laid hold upon all the higher minds that came after it. To
Jeremiah and to St. Paul alike, it, _par excellence_, represented
the law of God. Produced, or at any rate first prized, at a time
when Israel had fallen very low, when evil was triumphant and good
persecuted, it recommended and exemplified a cheerful courage, born
of faith in the high destiny of Israel and the truth of God. That,
more than anything else, helped to bear the ark of the Church over
the tumultuous centuries which separated those two great servants of
God, and when Christ appeared it was seen that this book, more than
any in the Old Testament save perhaps the Psalms, had anticipated
His cardinal teachings regarding the attitude of man to God and
of man to man. The conflicts and needs of the seventh century
B.C., which are so clearly reflected in it, gave inspiration the
opportunity it needed to reveal that inner secret of God's Kingdom.
Out of defeat and disaster this revelation came, and through times
of defeat and backsliding it proved its Divine origin by keeping
steadfast and calm those who specially waited for the coming of the
Messiah.