_THE DECALOGUE--ITS SUBSTANCE_
That the Decalogue in any of its forms must have been the work of
one mind, and that a very great and powerful mind, will be evident
on the most cursory inspection. We have not here, as we have in
other parts of Scripture, fragments of legislation supplementary to
a large body of customary law, fragments which, because of their
intrinsic importance or the necessities of a particular time, have
been written down. We have here an extraordinarily successful
attempt to bring within a definite small compass the fundamental
laws of social and individual life. The wonder of it does not lie
in the individual precepts. All of them, or almost all of them, can
be paralleled in the legislation of other peoples, as indeed could
not fail to be the case if the _fundamental_ laws of society and
of individual conduct were aimed at. These must be obeyed, more or
less, in every society that survives. It is the wisdom with which
the selection has been made; it is the sureness of hand which has
picked out just those things which were central, and has laid aside
as irrelevant everything local, temporary, and purely ceremonial;
it is the relation in which the whole is placed to God,--these give
this small code its distinction. In these respects it is like the
Lord's Prayer. It is vain for men to point out this petition of that
unique prayer as occurring here, that other as occurring there,
and a third as found in yet another place. Even if every single
petition contained in it could be unearthed somewhere, it would
still remain as unique as ever; for where can you find a prayer
which, like it, groups the fundamental cries of humanity to God in
such short space and with so sure a touch, and brings them all into
such deep connection with the Fatherhood of God? In both cases, in
the prayer and in the Decalogue alike, we must recognise that the
grouping is the work of one mind; and in both we must recognise also
that, whatever were the natural and human powers of the mind that
wrought the code and prayer respectively, the main element in the
success that has attended their work is the extraordinary degree in
which they were illumined by the Divine Spirit. But where, between
the time of Moses and the time when Deuteronomy first laid hold
upon the life of the nation, are we to look for a legislator of
this pre-eminence? So far as we know the history, there is no name
that would occur to us. So far as can be seen, Moses alone has been
marked out for us in the history of his people as equal to, and
likely to undertake, such a task. Everything, therefore, concurs to
the conclusion that in the Decalogue we have the first, the most
sacred, and the fundamental law in Israel. Here Moses spoke for God;
and whatever additions to his original ten words later times may
have made, they have not obscured or overlaid what must be ascribed
to him. He may not have been the author of much that bears his name,
for unquestionably there were developments later than his time which
were called Mosaic because they were a continuation and adaptation
of his work; but we are justified in believing that here we have the
first law he gave to Israel; and in it we should be able to see the
really germinal principles of the religion he taught.
Now, manifestly, a religion which spoke its first word in the ten
commandments, even in their simplest form, must have been in
its very heart and core moral. It must always have been a heresy
therefore, a denial of the fundamental Mosaic conception, to place
ritual observance _per se_ above moral and religious conduct, as
a means of approach to Yahweh. On any reading of the commandments
only the third and fourth (two out of ten) refer to matters of
mere worship; and even these may more correctly be taken to refer
primarily to the moral aspects of the cultus. All the rest deal with
fundamental relations to God and man. Consequently the prophets
who, after the manner of Amos and Hosea, denounce the prevailing
belief that Yahweh's help could be secured for Israel, whatever
its moral state, by offerings and sacrifices, were not teaching
a new doctrine, first discovered by themselves. They were simply
reasserting the fundamental principles of the Mosaic religion.
Reverence and righteousness--these from the first were the twin
pillars upon which it rested. Before ever the ceremonial law, even
in its most rudimentary form, had been given, these were emphasised
in the strongest way as the requirements of Yahweh; and the people
whom the prophets reproved, instead of being the representatives of
the ancient Yahwistic faith, had rejected it. Whether the popular
view was a falling away from a truer view which had once been
popular, or whether it represented a heathen tendency which remained
in Israel from pre-Mosaic times and had not even in the days of Amos
been overcome, it seems undeniable that it was entirely contrary
to the fundamental principles of Yahwism as given by Moses. Even
by the latest narrators, those who brought our Pentateuch into its
present shape, and who were, it is supposed, completely under the
influence of ceremonial Judaism, the primarily moral character of
Yahweh's religion was acknowledged by the place they gave to the
ten commandments. They alone are handed down as spoken by Yahweh
Himself, and as having preceded all other commands; and the terrors
of Sinai, the thunder and the earthquake, are made more intimately
the accompaniments of this law than of any other. Unquestionably
the mind of Israel always was, that here, and not in the ceremonial
law, was the centre of gravity of Yahwism. In the view of that
fact it is somewhat hard to understand how so many writers of our
times, who admit the Decalogue to have been Mosaic, or at any rate
pre-prophetic, yet deny the prevailingly moral character of the
early religion of Israel. When this law was once promulgated, the
old naturalism in which Israel, like other ancient races, had been
entangled was repudiated, and the relation between Yahweh and His
people was declared to be one which rested upon moral conduct in the
widest sense of that term. And the ground of this fact is plainly
declared here to be the character of Yahweh: "I am the Lord thy God,
that brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage." He was their deliverer, He had a right to command them,
and His commands revealed His nature to His people.
The first four commandments show that Yahweh was already conceived
as a spiritual being, removed by a whole heaven from the gods of the
Canaanite nations by whom Israel was surrounded. These were mere
representatives of the powers of nature. As such they were regarded
as existing in pairs, each god having his female counterpart; and
their acts had all the indifference to moral considerations which
nature in its processes shows. They dwelt in mountain tops, in
trees, in rude stones, or in obelisks, and they were worshipped
by rites so sanguinary and licentious that Canaanite worship bore
everywhere a darker stain than even nature-worship elsewhere had
disclosed. In contrast to all this the Yahweh of the Decalogue
is "alone," in solitary and unapproachable separation. Amid all
the unbridled speculation that has been let loose on this subject,
no one, I think, has ever ventured to join with Him any name of
a goddess, and He sternly repudiates the worship of any other
god besides Him. Now, though there is nothing said of monotheism
here, _i.e._ of the doctrine that no god but one exists, yet, in
contrast to the hospitality which distinguished and distinguishes
nature-worship in all its forms, Yahweh here claims from His people
worship of the most exclusive kind. Besides Him they were to have no
object of worship. He, in His unapproachable separateness, had alone
a claim upon their reverence. Further, in contrast to the gods who
dwelt in trees and stones and pillars, and who could be represented
by symbols of that kind, Yahweh sternly forbade the making of any
image to represent Him. Thereby He declared Himself spiritual, in so
far as He claimed that no visible thing could adequately represent
Him. In contrast to the ethnic religions in general, even that of
Zarathushtra, the noblest of all, where only the natural element of
fire was taken to be the god or his symbol, this fundamental command
asserts the supersensuous nature of the Deity, thereby rising at one
step clear above all naturalism.
So great is the step indeed, that Kuenen and others, who cannot
escape the evidence for the antiquity of the other commandments,
insist that this at least cannot be pre-prophetic, since we have
such numerous proofs of the worship of Yahweh by images, down at
least to the time of Josiah's reform. But, by all but Stade, it is
admitted that there was at Shiloh under Eli, and at Jerusalem under
David and Solomon, no visible representation of Deity. Now the
same writers who tell us this everywhere represent the worship of
Yahweh by images as existing among the people. According to their
view, the nation had a continual and hereditary tendency to slip
into image-worship, or to maintain it as pre-Mosaic custom. And it
is quite certain that up even to the Captivity, and after, when,
according to even the very boldest negative view, this command had
been long known, image-worship, not only of Yahweh, but also of
false gods and of the host of heaven, was largely prevalent. Only
the Captivity, with its hardships and trials, brought Israel to
see that image-worship was incompatible with any true belief in
Yahweh. Undeniably, therefore, the existence of an authoritative
prohibition does not necessarily produce obedience; and the Biblical
view that the Decalogue is Israel's earliest law proves to be the
more reasonable, as well as the better authenticated of the two.
If, after the command beyond all doubt existed in Israel, it needed
the calamities of Israel's last days, and the hardships and griefs
of the Exile, to get it completely observed, and if in Jerusalem
and at Shiloh in the pre-prophetic time Yahweh was worshipped
without images, there can hardly be a doubt that this command must
have existed in the earliest period. For no religion is to be
judged by the actual practice of the multitude. The true criterion
is its highest point; and the imageless worship of Jerusalem is
much more difficult to understand if the second commandment was
not acknowledged previously in Israel, than it would be if the
Decalogue, essentially as we now have it, was acknowledged in the
days before the kingship at least.[25]
[25] Granting that the commandment did not exist, one asks, _What_
was it in Yahwism which determined the Jerusalem Sanctuary to be
imageless?
The arguments advanced by Kuenen and Wellhausen for a contrary
view, beyond those we have just been considering, rest on an undue
extension of the prohibition to make any likeness of anything.
They adduce the brazen serpent of Moses, and the Cherubim, and the
brazen bulls that bore the brazen laver in the court of the Temple
at Jerusalem, and the ornaments of that building, as a proof that
even in Jerusalem this commandment cannot have been known. But, as
we have seen, the original command prohibited only the making of a
_pesel_, _i.e._ of an image for worship. The making of likenesses
of men and animals for mere purposes of art and adornment was never
included; and the whole objection falls to the ground unless it be
asserted that the bulls under the basin were actually worshipped by
those who came into the Temple!
The supersensuous nature of Yahweh must, therefore, be taken to be a
fundamental part of the Mosaic religion. But besides being solitary
and supersensuous, Yahweh was declared by Moses, perhaps by His
very name, to be not only mighty, but helpful. The preface to the
whole series of commandments is, "I am Yahweh thy God, who brought
thee forth out of the land of Egypt." Now of all the derivations of
Yahweh, that which most nearly commands universal acceptance is its
derivation from _hayah_, to be. And the probabilities are all in
favour of the view that it does not imply mere timeless existence,
as the translation of the explanation in Exodus[26] has led many to
believe. That is a purely philosophical idea entirely outside of
morality, and it can hardly be that the introduction to this moral
code, which announces the author of it, should contain no moral
reference. If the name be from Qal, and be connected with _ehyeh_,
then it means, as Dillmann says (_Exodus and Leviticus_, p. 35),
that He will be what He has been, and the name involves a reference
to all that the God of Israel has been in the past. Such He will
be in the future, for He is what He is, without variableness or
shadow of turning. If, on the other hand, it be from Hiphil, it will
mean "He who causes to be," the creator. In either case there is a
clear rise above the ordinary Semitic names for God, Baal, Molech,
Milkom, which all express mere lordship. No doubt Yahweh was also
called Baal, or Lord, just as we find Him in the Psalms addressed as
"my King and my God"; but the specially Mosaic name, the personal
name of the God of Israel, does undoubtedly imply quite another
quality in God. It is the Helper who has revealed Himself to Israel
who here speaks. Hence the addition, "who brought thee out of the
land of Egypt." It is as a Saviour that Yahweh addresses His people.
By His very name He lifts all the commands He gives out of the
region of mere might, or the still lower region of gratification at
offerings and precious things bestowed, into the region of gratitude
and love.
[26] iii. 14.
Further, by issuing this code under the name of Yahweh Moses claimed
for Him a moral character. Whether the Hebrew word for holy,
_qādhōsh_, implied more in those days than mere separateness, may
be doubted; but it is impossible that the idea which we now connect
with the word "holy" should not have been held to be congruous
to, and expressive of, the nature of Yahweh. Here morality in its
initial and fundamental stages is set forth as an expression of His
will. And similarly, righteousness must also be an attribute of His,
for justice between man and man is made to be His demand upon men.
He Himself, therefore, must be faithful as well as holy, and His
emancipation from the clinging chain of mere naturalism was thereby
completed. The Yahweh of the Decalogue is therefore absolutely
alone. He is supersensuous. He is the Helper and Saviour, and He is
holy and true. These are His fundamental qualities. Such qualities
may be supposed to be present only in their elements, even to the
mind of Moses himself: yet the fundamental germinal point was there:
and all that has grown out of it may be justly put to the credit of
this first revelation.
A moment's thought will show how the teaching that Yahweh alone was
to be worshipped broke away from the main stream of Semitic belief,
and prepared the way for the ultimate prevalence of the belief that
God was one. That He was supersensuous, so that He could not rightly
or adequately be represented by any likeness of anything in heaven
or earth or sea, left no possible outlet for thought about Him,
save in the direction that He was a Spirit. In essence consequently
the spirituality of God was thereby secured. Still more important
perhaps was the conception of Yahweh as the Helper and Deliverer,
the Saviour of His people; for this at once suggested the thought
that the true bond between God and man was not mere necessity, nor
mere dependence upon resistless power, but love--love to a Divine
Helper who revealed Himself in gracious acts and providences,
and who longed after and cared for His people with a perfectly
undeserved affection. Lastly, His holiness and faithfulness, His
righteousness in fact, held implicit in it His supremacy and
universality. As Wellhausen has said, "As God of justice and right,
Yahweh came to be thought of as the highest, and at last as the only
power in heaven and earth." Whether that last stage was present to
the mind of Moses, or of any who received the commandments in the
first place, is of merely secondary importance. At the very least,
the way which must necessarily lead to that stage was opened here,
and the mind of man entered upon the path to a pure monotheism, a
monotheism which separated God from the world, and referred to His
will all that happened in the world of created things. God is One,
God is a Spirit, God is Love, and God rules over all--these are
the attributes of Yahweh as the Decalogue sets them forth; and in
principle the whole higher life of humanity was secured by the great
synthesis.
Like all beginnings, this was an achievement of the highest kind.
Nowhere but in the soul of one Divinely enlightened man could such
a revelation have made itself known; and the solitude of a lonely
shepherd's life, following upon the stir and training of a high
place in the cultured society of Egypt, gave precisely the kind
of environment which would prepare the soul to hear the voice by
which God spoke. For we are not to suppose that this revelation
came to Moses without any effort or preparation on his part. God
does not reveal His highest to the slothful or the debased. Even
when He speaks from Sinai in thunder and in flame, it is only the
man who has been exercising himself in these great matters who can
understand and remember. All the people had been terrified by the
Divine Presence, but they forgot the law immediately and fell back
into idolatry. It was Moses who retained it and brought it back to
them again. His personality was the organ of the Divine will; and
in this law which he promulgated Moses laid the foundation of all
that now forms the most cherished heritage of men. The central thing
in religion is the character of God. Contrary to the prevailing
feeling, which makes many say that they know nothing of God, but are
sure of their duty to man, history teaches that, in the end, man's
thought of God is the decisive thing. Everything else shapes itself
according to that; and by taking the first great steps, which broke
through the limits of mere naturalism, Moses laid the foundation of
all that was to come. There was here the promise and the potency
of all higher life: love and holiness had their way prepared, so
that they should one day become supreme in man's conception of the
highest life: the confused halting between the material and the
spiritual, which can be traced in the very highest conceptions of
merely natural religions, was in principle done away. And what was
here gained was never lost again. Even though the multitude never
really grasped all that Moses had proclaimed Yahweh to be; and
though it should be proved, which is as yet by no means the case,
that even David thought of Him as limited in power and claims by the
extent of the land which Israel inhabited; and though, as a matter
of fact, the full-orbed universality which the ten commandments
implicitly held in them was not attained under the old covenant at
all; yet these ten words remained always an incitement to higher
thoughts. No advance made in religion or morals by the chosen people
ever superseded them. Even when Christ came, He came not to destroy
but to fulfil. The highest reach of even His thoughts as regards
God could be brought easily and naturally under the terms of this
fundamental revelation to Israel.
The remaining commands, those which deal with the relations of men
to each other, are naturally introduced by the fifth commandment,
which, while it deals with human relations, deals with those which
most nearly resemble the relations between God and man. Reverence
for God, the deliverer and forgiver of men, is the sum of the
commandments which precede; and here we have inculcated reverence
for those who are, under God, the source of life, upon whose love
and care all, at their entrance into life, are so absolutely
dependent. Love is not commanded; because in such relations it is
natural, and moreover it cannot be produced at will. But reverence
is; and from the place of the command, manifestly what is required
is something of that same awful respect which is due to Yahweh
Himself. The power which parents had over their children in Israel
was extensive, though much less so than that possessed, for example,
by Roman parents. A father could sell his daughters to be espoused
as subordinate wives;[27] he could disallow any vows a daughter
might wish to take upon her;[28] and both parents could bring an
incorrigibly rebellious son to the elders of the city[29] and have
him stoned publicly to death. But, according to Moses, the main
restraining forces in the home should be love and reverence, guarded
only by the solemn sanction of death to the openly irreverent, just
as reverence for Yahweh was guarded.
[27] Exod. xxi. 7.
[28] Numb. xxx. 6.
[29] Deut. xxi. 8.
There was here nothing of the sordid view, repudiated so
energetically by Jewish scholars like Kalisch,[30] that we ought
"to weigh and measure filial affection after the degree of
enjoyed benefits." No; to this law "the relation between parents
and children is holy, religious, godly, not of a purely human
character"; and it is a mere profanation to regard it as we in
modern times too often do. In our mad pursuit after complete
individual liberty we have fallen back into a moral region which it
was the almost universal merit of the ancient civilisations to have
left behind them. It is true, certainly, that there were reasons for
this advance then which we could not now recognise without falling
back from our own attainments in other directions; but it was the
saving salt of the ancient civilisations that the parents in a
household were surrounded with an atmosphere of reverence, which
made transgressions against them as rare as they were considered
horrible. The modern freedom may in favourable circumstances
produce more intimate and sympathetic intercourse between parents
and children; but in the average household it has lowered the
whole tone of family life; and it threatens sooner or later, if
the ancient feeling cannot be restored, to destroy the family, the
very keystone of our religion and civilisation. This commandment
is not conditioned on the question whether parents have been more
or less successful in giving their children what they desire, or
whether they have been wise and unselfish in their dealing with
their children. As parents they have a claim upon their respect,
their tenderness, their observance, which can be neglected only at
the children's peril. Even the average parent gives quite endless
thought and care to his children, and almost unconsciously falls
into the habit of living for them. That brings with it for the
children an indelible obligation; and along with the new and wiser
freedom which is permitted in the modern home, this reverence should
grow, just as the love and reverence for God on the part of those
who have been made the free children of God through Christ ought far
to exceed that to which the best of the Old Testament saints could
attain.
[30] Kalisch, _Exodus_, p. 364:--yet taught in all Victorian State
schools under the vicious system at present admitted.
Want of reverence for parents is, in the Decalogue, made almost one
with want of reverence toward God, and, in the case of this human
duty alone, there is a promise annexed to its observance. The duty
runs so deep into the very core of human life, that its fulfilment
brings wholesomeness to the moral nature; this health spreads into
the merely physical constitution, and long life becomes the reward.
But apart from the quietude of heart and the power of self-restraint
which so great a duty rightly fulfilled brings with it, we must
also suppose that in a special manner the blessing of God does
rest upon dutiful children. Even in the modern world, amid all its
complexity, and though in numberless instances it may seem to have
been falsified, this promise verifies itself on the large scale.
In the less complex life of early Israel we may well believe that
its verification was even more strikingly seen. In both ancient
and modern times, moreover, the human conscience has leaped up
to justify the belief that of all the sins committed without the
body this is the most heinous, and that there does rest upon it
in a peculiar manner the wrath of Almighty God. It is a blasphemy
against love in its earliest manifestations to the soul, and only by
answering love with love and reverence can there be any fulfilling
of the law.
After the fifth, the commandments deal with the purely human
relations; but in coming down from the duties which men owe to God,
this law escapes the sordidness which seems to creep over the laws
of other nations, when they have to deal with the rights and duties
of men. The human rights are taken up rather into their relation
to God, and cease to be mere matters of bargain and arrangement.
They are viewed entirely from the religious and moral standpoint.
For example, the destruction of human life, which in most cases
was in ancient times dealt with by private law, and was punished
by fines or money payments, is here regarded solely as a sin, an
act forbidden by God. The will of a holy God is the source of these
prohibitions, however much the idea of property may extend in them
beyond the limits which to us now seem fitting. They begin with the
protection of a man's life, the highest of his possessions. Next,
they prohibit any injury to him through his wife, who next to his
life is most dear to him. Then property in our modern sense is
protected; and lastly, rising out of the merely physical region, the
ninth commandment prohibits any attack upon a man's civil standing
or honour by false witness concerning him in the courts of justice.
To that crime Easterns are prone to a degree which Westerns, whom
Rome has trained to reverence for law, can hardly realise. In India,
at this hour, false witnesses can be purchased in the open market
at a trifling price; and under native government the whole forces
of civil justice become instruments of the most remediless and
exasperating tyranny. So long as the law has not spoken its last
word _against_ the innocent, there is hope of remedy; justice may
at last assert itself. But when, either by corrupt witnesses or by
a corrupt judge, the law itself inflicts the wrong, then redress
is impossible, and we have the oppression which drives a wise man
mad. Both murder and robbery, moreover, may be perpetrated by false
swearing; and the trust, the confidence that social life demands, is
utterly destroyed by it.
But it is in the tenth commandment especially that this code soars
most completely away beyond others. In four short words the whole
region of neighbourly duty, so far as acts are concerned, has been
covered, and with that other codes have been content. But the laws
of Yahweh must cover more than that. Out of the heart proceed all
these acts which have been forbidden, and Yahweh takes knowledge
of its thoughts and intents. The covetous desire, the grasping
after that which we cannot lawfully have, that, too, is absolutely
forbidden. It has been pointed out that the first commandment also
deals with the thoughts. "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,"
separated from the prohibition of idol-worship, can refer only to
the inward adoration or submission of the heart. And in this last
commandment also it is the evil desire, the lust which "bringeth
forth sin," which is condemned. In its beginning and ending,
therefore, this code transcends the limits ordinarily fixed for
law; it leads the mind to a view of the depth and breadth of the
evil that has to be coped with, which the other precepts, taken
by themselves and understood in their merely literal sense, would
scarcely suggest.
This fact should guard us against the common fallacy that Moses and
the people of his day could not have understood these commandments
in any sense except the barely literal one. In the first and tenth
commandments there is involved the whole teaching of our Lord that
he that hateth his brother is a murderer. The evil thought that
first stirs the evil desire is here placed on the same interdicted
level as the evil deed; and though until our Lord had spoken none
had seen all that was implied, yet here too He was only fulfilling,
bringing to perfection, that which the law as given by Moses had
first outlined. With this in view, it seems difficult to justify
that interpretation of the commandments which refuses all depth
of meaning to them. The initial and final references to the inner
thoughts of men, the delicate moral perception which puts so
unerring a finger on the sources of sin, show that such literalism
is out of place. No interpretation can do this law justice which
treats it superficially; and instead of feeling safest when we find
least in these commandments, we should welcome from them all the
correction and reproof which a reasonable exegesis will sustain.
Some of those who adopt the other view do so in the interests of
the authenticity of the commandments. They say, We must be careful
not to put into them any idea which transcends what was possible
in the days of Moses; otherwise we must agree with those who bring
down the date of these marvellous ten words to the middle of the
seventh century B.C. But there is much ground for distrusting modern
judgments as to what men can have thought and felt in earlier and
ruder stages of society. So long as the _naïve_ interpretation
of the state of man before the fall prevailed, which Milton has
made so widely popular, the tendency was to exaggerate the early
man's moral and spiritual attainments. Now, when the most degraded
savages are taken as the truest representatives of primitive man,
the temptation is to minimise both unduly. How often have we been
told, for example, that the Australian is the lowest of mankind,
and that he has no other idea of a spiritual world than that when
he dies he will "jump up" a white man! Yet Mr. A. W. Howitt,[31]
an unexceptionable authority, as having himself been "initiated"
among the Australian blacks, tells us that they give religious and
moral instruction to their boys when they receive the privileges
of manhood. His words are: "The teachings of the initiation are in
a series of 'moral lessons,' pantomimically displayed in a manner
intended to be so impressive as to be indelible. There is clearly a
belief in a Great Spirit, or rather an anthropomorphic Supernatural
Being, the 'Master of all,' whose abode is above the sky, and to
whom are attributed powers of omnipotence and omnipresence, or,
at any rate, the power 'to do anything and to go anywhere.' The
exhibition of his image to the novices, and the magic dances round
it, approach very near to idol-worship. The wizards who profess to
communicate with him, and to be the mediums of communication between
him and his tribe, are not far removed from an organised priesthood.
To his direct ordinance are attributed the spiritual and moral laws
of the community. Although there is no worship of Daramülun, as, for
instance, by prayer, yet there is clearly an invocation of him by
name, and a belief that certain acts please while others displease
him." To most it would have seemed absurd to attribute religious
ideas of such a kind to a people in the social and moral condition
of the Australian aborigines. Yet here we have the testimony of a
perfectly competent and reliable witness, who, moreover, has no
personal bias in favour of theologic notions, to prove that even in
their present state their theology is of this comparatively advanced
kind.
[31] _Journal Anthropological Institute_, May 1884, p. 28.
Many critics like Stade, and even Kuenen, would deny to Israel in
the days of Moses any conception of Yahweh which would equal the
Australian conception of Daramülun! Not to speak of the "regrettable
vivacities" of Renan in regard to Yahweh, Kuenen would deny to the
Mosaic Yahweh the title of Lord of all; he would deny to Him the
power "to go anywhere and to do anything," binding Him strictly to
His tribe and His land; he would make His priests little more than
the Australian wizards; and purely moral laws like the Decalogue
Wellhausen would remove to a late date mainly because such laws
transcend the limits of the thought and knowledge of the Mosaic
time. But can any one believe that Israel in the Mosaic time had
lower beliefs than those of the Australian aborigines? In every
other respect they had left far behind them the social state and the
merely embryonic culture of the Australian tribes. Moses himself is
an irrefragable proof of that. No such man as he could have arisen
among a people in the state of the Australians. Even the fact that
the Hebrews had lived in Egypt, and had been compelled to do forced
labour for a long series of years, would of itself have raised them
to a higher stage of culture. Moreover they built houses, and owned
sheep and cattle, and must have known at least the rudiments of
agriculture. Indeed Deut. xi. 10 asserts this, and the testimony of
travellers as to the habits of the tribes in the wilderness of the
wanderings now confirms it. Further, they had been in contact with
Egyptian religion, and they had been surrounded by cults having more
or less relation to the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia. Under
such circumstances, even apart from all revelation, it could not be
assumed that their religious ideas must needs correspond to modern
notions of the low type of primitive religions. On the contrary,
nothing but the clearest proof that their religious conceptions
were so surprisingly low should induce us to believe it. On any
supposition, they had in the Mosaic time the first germs of what
is now universally admitted to be the highest form of religion. Can
we believe that only 1300 years B.C., in the full light of history,
coming out of a land where the religion of the people had been
systematised and elaborated, not for centuries, but for millenniums,
and only 600 years before the monotheistic prophets, a people at
such a stage of civilisation as the Hebrews can have had cruder
notions of Deity than the Wiraijuri and Wolgal tribes of New South
Wales![32] It may have been so; but before we take it to have been
so, we have a right to demand evidence of a stringent kind, evidence
which leaves us no way of escape from a conclusion so improbable.
[32] See Page Renouf, _Hibbert Lectures_.
Moreover the acceptance of the view now opposed does not get rid
of the necessity for supernatural enlightenment in Israel. It only
transfers it from an earlier to a later time. For if the knowledge
of Israel in Moses' day was below the Wolgal standard, then it
would seem inexplicable that the ethical monotheism of the prophets
should have grown out of it by any merely natural process. If there
were no inspiration before the prophets, though they believed and
asserted there was, then their own inspiration only becomes the
more marvellous. It is not needful to deny that the Hebrew tribes
may at some time have passed through the low stage of religious
belief of which these writers speak. But they err conspicuously in
regarding every trace of animistic and fetichistic worship which can
be unearthed in the language, the ceremonies, and the habits of the
Hebrews at the Exodus, as evidence of the highest beliefs of the
people at that time. As a matter of fact, these were probably mere
survivals of a state of thought and feeling then either superseded
or in the process of being so. Besides, the mass of any people
always lag far behind the thoughts and aspirations of the highest
thinkers of their nation; and if we admit inspiration at all as a
factor in the religious development of Israel, the distance between
what Moses taught and believed himself, and what he could get the
mass of the people to believe and practise, must have been still
greater. If he gave the people the ten commandments, he must have
been far above them, and dogmatic assertions as to what he can have
thought and believed ought to be abandoned.
Granting, however, that all we have found in the Decalogue's
conception of Yahweh was present to the mind of Moses, and granting
that the commands which deal with the relations of men to each
other are not mere isolated prohibitions, but are founded upon
moral principles which were understood even then to have much
wider implications, there still remains a gap between the widest
meaning that early time could put into them, and that which Luther's
Catechism, or the Catechism of the Westminster Divines, for example,
asserts. The question therefore arises whether these wider and more
detailed explanations, which make the Decalogue cover the whole
field of the moral and religious life, are legitimate, and if so,
on what principle can they be justified? The reply would seem to
be that they are legitimate, and that the ten words did contain
much more than Moses or any of his nation for many centuries after
him understood. For any fruitful thought, any thought which really
penetrates the heart of things, must have in it wider implications
than the first thinker of it can have conceived. If by any means a
man has had insight to see the central fact of any domain of thought
and life, its applications will not be limited to the comparatively
few cases to which he may apply it. He will generally be content
to deduce from his discovery just those conclusions which in
his circumstances and in his day are practically useful and are
most clamorously demanded. But those who come after, pressed by
new needs, challenged by new experiences, and enlightened by new
thoughts in related regions, will assuredly find that more was
involved in that first step than any one had seen. The scope of the
fruitful principle will thus inevitably widen with the course of
things, and inferences undreamed of by those who first enunciated
the principle will be securely drawn from it by later generations.
Now if that be true in regard to truths discovered by the unassisted
intellect of man, how much more true will it be of thoughts which
have first been revealed to man under the influence of inspiration?
Behind the human mind which received them and applied them to the
circumstances which then had to be dealt with, there is always the
infinite mind which sees that
"Far-off Divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
The Divine purpose of the revelation must be the true measure of the
thoughts revealed, and the Divine purpose can best be learned by
studying the results as they have actually evolved themselves in the
course of ages. Consequently, while the fundamental point in sound
interpretation of a book such as the Bible is to ascertain _first_
what the statements made therein signified to those who heard them
first, the second point is not to shut the mind to the wider and
more extensive applications of them which the thought and experience
of men, taught by the course of history, have been induced, or even
compelled, to make. Both the narrower and the wider meanings are
there, and were meant to be found there. No exposition which ignores
either can be adequate.
That all works of God are to be dealt with in this way is
beautifully demonstrated by Ruskin (_Fors Clavigera_, Vol. I.,
Letter V.). In criticising the statement of a botanist that "there
is no such thing as a flower," after admitting that in a certain
sense the lecturer was right, he goes on to say: "But in the deepest
sense of all, he was to the extremity of wrongness wrong; for
leaf and root and fruit exist, all of them, only--that there may
be flowers. He disregarded the life and passion of the creature,
which were its essence. Had he looked for these, he would have
recognised that in the thought of nature herself, there is, in a
plant, nothing else but flowers." That means, of course, that the
final perfection of a development is the real and final meaning of
it all. Now any thought given by God in this special manner which we
call "inspiration" has in it a manifold and varied life, and an end
in view, which God alone foresees. It works like leaven, it grows
like a seed. It is supremely living and powerful; and though it may
have begun its life, like the mustard seed, in a small and lowly
sphere, it casts out branches on all sides till its entire allotted
space is filled. So in the Decalogue; the central chord in all the
matters dealt with has been touched with Divine skill, and all that
has further to be revealed or learned on that matter must lie in the
line of the first announcement.
It is not, therefore, an illegitimate extension of the meaning
of the first commandment to say that it teaches monotheism, nor
of the second that it teaches the spirituality of God, nor of
the seventh that it forbids all sensuality in thought or word or
deed. It is true that probably only the separateness of God was
originally seen to be asserted in the first, and the words may
possibly have been understood to mean that the "other gods" referred
to had some kind of actual life. The second, too, may have seemed
to be fulfilled when no earthly thing that was made by man was
taken to represent Yahweh. Lastly, those who say that nothing is
forbidden in the seventh commandment but literal adultery have much
to say for themselves. In a polygamous society concubinage always
exists. The absence of the more flagrant of what in monogamous
societies are called social evils does not in the least imply the
superior morality, such as many who wish to disparage our Christian
civilisation have ascribed, for instance, to Mohammedans. The
degraded class of women who are the reproach and the despair of our
large towns are not so frequent in those societies, because all
women are degraded to nearer their level than in monogamous lands.
Both lust and vice are more prevalent: and they are so because the
whole level of thought and feeling in regard to such matters is much
lower than with us.
Now, undoubtedly, ancient Israel was no exception to this rule.
In it, as a polygamous nation, there was a licence in regard to
sexual relations with women who were neither married nor betrothed
which would be impossible now in any Christian community. It may
be, therefore, that only the married woman was specially protected
by this law. But in none of these cases did the more rudimentary
conception of the scope of the commandments last. By imperceptible
steps the sweep of them widened, until finally the last consequences
were deduced from them, and they were seen to cover the whole sphere
of human duty. It may have been a long step from the prohibition
to put other gods along with Yahweh to St. Paul's decisive word
"An idol is nothing in the world," but the one was from the first
involved in the other. Between "Thou shalt not make unto thee a
graven image" and our Lord's declaration "God is a Spirit, and
must be worshipped in spirit and in truth," there lies a long and
toilsome upward movement; but the first was the gate into the path
which must end in the second. Similarly, the commandment which
affirmed so strongly the sacredness of the family, by hedging round
the house-mother with this special defence held implicit in it all
that rare and lovely purity which the best type of Christian women
exhibit. The principles upon which the initial prohibitions were
founded were true to fact and to the nature both of God and man.
They were, therefore, never found at fault in the advancing stages
of human experience; and the meaning which a modern congregation
of Christians finds in these solemn "words," when they are read
before them, is as truly and justly their meaning as the more meagre
interpretation which alone ancient Israel could put upon them.
How gradually, and how naturally, the advancing thoughts and changed
circumstances of Israel affected the Decalogue may be seen most
clearly in the differences between its form as originally given, and
as it is set forth in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. If the original
form of these commandments was what we have indicated (p. 69),
they corresponded entirely to the circumstances of the wilderness.
There is no reference in them which presupposes any other social
background than that of a people dwelling together according to
families, possessing property, and worshipping Yahweh. None of the
commandments involves a social state different from that. But when
Israel had entered upon its heritage, and had become possessed of
the oxen and asses which were needed in agricultural labour and in
settled life, this stage of their progress was reflected in the
reasons and inducements which were added to the original commands.
In the fourth and tenth commandments of Exodus we have consequently
the essential commandments of the earlier day adapted to a new
state of things, _i.e._ to a settled agricultural life. Then,
even as between the Exodus and Deuteronomic texts, a progress is
perceptible. The reasons for keeping the Sabbath which these two
recensions give are different, as we have seen, and it is probable
that the reason given in Deuteronomy was first. To the people in the
wilderness came the bare Divine command that this one day was to be
sacred to Yahweh. In both Exodus and Deuteronomy we have additions,
going into details which show that when these versions were prepared
Israel had ceased to be nomadic and had become agricultural. In
Deuteronomy we find that the importance and usefulness of this
command from a humane point of view had been recognised, and one
at least of the grounds upon which it should be held a point of
morality to keep it is set forth in the words "that thy manservant
and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou." Finally, if the
critical views be correct, in Exodus we have the motive for the
observance of the Sabbath raised to the universal and eternal, by
being brought into connection with the creative activity of God.
If the progression now traced out be real, then we have in it a
classical instance of the manner in which Divine commands were
given and dealt with in Israel. Given in the most general form at
first, they inevitably open the way for progress, and as thought
and experience grow in volume and rise in quality, so does the
understanding of the law as given expand. Under the influence of
this expansion addition after addition is made, till the final form
is reached; and the whole is then set forth as having been spoken by
Yahweh and given by Moses when the command was first promulgated.
In such cases literary proprietorship was never in question. Each
addition was sanctioned by revelation, and those by whom it came
were never thought of. It would seem, indeed, that nothing but
modern sceptical views as to the reality of revelation, the feeling
that all this movement to a higher faith was merely natural, and
that the hand of God was not in it, could have suggested to the
ancient Hebrew writers the wish to hand on the names of those by
whom such changes were made. Yahweh spoke at the beginning, Moses
mediated between the people and Yahweh, and the law thus mediated
was in all forms equally Mosaic, and in all forms equally Divine.
One other thing remains to be noticed, and that is the prevailingly
negative form of the commandments. Of the ten only the fourth and
fifth are in the affirmative. All the others are prohibitions, and
we who have been taught by Christianity to put emphasis upon the
positive aspects of duty as the really important aspects of it,
may not improbably feel chilled and repelled by a moral code which
so definitely and prevailingly forbids. But the cause of this is
plain. A code like that of the Twelve Tables published in early Rome
is only occasionally negative, because it rises to no great height
in its demands, and is intent only upon ordering the life of the
citizens in their outward conduct. But this code, which seeks to
raise the whole of life into the sacredness of a continual service
of God and man, must forbid, because the first condition of such a
life is the renunciation and the restriction of self. Benevolent
dreamers and theorists of all ages, and men of the world whose
moral standard is merely the attainment of the average man, have
denied the evil tendency in man's nature. They have asserted that
man is born good; but the facts of experience are entirely against
them. Whenever a serious effort has been made to raise man to any
conspicuous height of moral goodness, it has been found necessary
to forbid him to follow the bent of his nature. "Thou shalt not"
has been the prevailing formula; and in this sense original sin has
always been witnessed to in the world. Hence the Old Testament, in
which the most strenuous conflict for goodness which the world in
those ages knew was being carried on, could not fail, in every part
of it, to proclaim that man is not born good. However late we may be
compelled to put the writing of the story of the fall as it stands
in Genesis, there can be no question that it represents the view of
the Old Testament at all times. Man is fallen; he is not what he
ought to be, and the evil taint is handed on from one generation
to another. Every generation, therefore, is called, by prophet and
priest and lawgiver alike, to the conflict against the natural man.
The truth is that all along the leaders of Israel had a quite
overawing sense of the moral greatness of Yahweh and of the
stringency of His demands upon them. "Be ye holy, for I am holy,"
was His demand; and so among this people, as among no other, the
sense of sin was heightened, till it embittered life to all who
seriously took to heart the religion they professed. This feeling
sought relief in expiatory sacrifices, like the sin offering and
the guilt offering; but in vain. It then led to Pharisaic hedging
of the law, to seeking a positive precept for every moment of time,
to binding upon men's consciences the most minute and burdensome
prescriptions, as a means of making them what they must be if they
were to meet the Divine requirements. But that too failed. It became
a slavery so intolerable that, when St. Paul received the power of
a new life, his predominant feeling was that for the first time he
knew what liberty meant. He was set free from both the bondage of
sin and the bondage of ritual.
To the religious man of the Old Testament life was a conflict
against evil tendencies, a conflict in which defeat was only too
frequent, but from which there was no discharge. It was fitting,
therefore, that at the very beginning of Israel's history, as the
people of God, this stern prohibition of the rougher manifestations
of the natural man should stand.
But it is characteristic of the Old Testament that it states
the fundamental fact, without any of the over-refinements and
exaggerations by which later doctrinal developments have discredited
it. There is no appearance here, or anywhere in the Old Testament,
of the Lutheran exaggeration that man is by nature impotent to all
good, as a stock or a stone is. Keeping close to the testimony of
the universal conscience, the Decalogue, and the Old Testament
generally, speaks to men as those who can be otherwise if they
will. There is, further, a robust assertion of righteous intention
and righteous act on the part of those whose minds are set to be
faithful to God. This may have been partly due to a blunter feeling
in regard to sin, and a less highly developed conscience, but it
was mainly a healthy assertion of facts which ought not to be
ignored. Yet, with all that, original sin was too plain a fact ever
to be denied by the healthy-minded saints of the Old Testament.
Fundamentally, they held that human nature needed to be restrained,
its innate lawlessness needed to be curbed, before it could be made
acceptable to God.
Among the heathen nations that was not so. Take the Greeks, for
instance, as the highest among them. Their watchword in morals was
not repression, but harmonious development. Every impulse of human
nature was right, and had the protection of a deity peculiarly its
own. Restraint, such as the Israelite felt to be his first need,
would have been regarded as mutilation by the Greek, for he was
dominated by no higher ideal than that of a fully developed man.
There was no vision of unattainable holiness hovering always before
his mind, as there was before the mind of the Israelite. God had
not revealed Himself to him in power and unalloyed purity, with a
background of infinite wisdom and omnipotence, so that unearthly
love and goodness were seen to be guiding and ruling the world. As
a consequence, the calling and destiny of man were conceived by the
Greeks in a far less soaring fashion than by Israel. To put the
difference in a few words, man, harmoniously developed in all his
powers and passions and faculties, with nothing excessive about him,
was made God by the Greeks; whereas in Israel God was brought down
into human life to bear man's burden and to supply the strength
needed that man might become like God in truth and mercy and
purity. It is of course true that both conceived of God under human
categories. They could not conceive God save by attributing to Him
that which they looked upon as highest in man. It is also true that
the higher natures in both nations, starting thus differently, did
in much approach each other. Still, the immense difference remains,
that the impulse in the one case was given from the earth by dreams
of human perfection, in the other it came from above through men who
had seen God. The Greeks had seen only the glory of man; Israel had
seen the glory of God.
The result was that human nature as it is seemed to the one much
more worthy of respect and much less seriously compromised than it
did to the other. Comparing man as he is, only with man as he easily
might be, the Greeks took a much less serious view of his state than
the Hebrews, who compared him with God as He had revealed Himself.
The former never attained any clear conception of sin, and regarded
it as a passing weakness which could without much trouble be
overcome. The latter saw that it was a radical and now innate want
of harmony with God, which could only be cured by a new life being
breathed into man from above. And when Europe became Christian,
this difference made itself felt in very widespread religious and
theological divergences. In the South and among the Latin races the
less strenuous view of human disabilities--the view which naturally
grew out of the heathen conception of man as, on the whole, born
good, with no very arduous moral heights to scale--has prevailed,
and in those regions the Pelagian form of doctrine has mastered the
Christian Church. But the Teutonic races have, in this matter, shown
a remarkable affinity with the Hebrew mind and teaching. The deeper
and more tragic view of the state of man has commended itself to
the Teutonic mind, and the depth of the moral taint in the natural
man has been estimated according to the Biblical standard. It is
not only theologians among the Northern races who have been thus
affected. The higher imaginative literature of England gives the
same impression; and in our own day Browning, our greatest poet, has
emphasised his acceptance of the Augustinian view of human nature
by making its teaching as to original sin a proof of the truth of
Christianity.[33] At the end of his poem "Gold Hair: a Story of
Pornic," in which he tells how a girl of angelic beauty, and of
angelic purity of nature as was supposed, is found after her death
to have sold her soul to the most gruesome avarice, he says:--
"The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays and Reviews' debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight:
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin:
'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie--taught original sin,
The corruption of man's heart."
[33] Browning's _Poetical Works_, vol. vi., p. 69.
But the Pagan view always reasserts itself; and modern Hellenists
especially, in their admiration of the grace which does undoubtedly
go with such conceptions of goodness as the Greeks could attain, are
apt to look askance at the harshness and strenuousness which they
find in the Old Testament. For the most pathetic and pure of the
Greek conceptions of the gods are those which, like Demeter, embody
mother's love or some other natural glory of humanity. Being thus
natural, they are set before us by the Greek imagination with an
unconstrained and graceful beauty which makes goodness appeal to the
æsthetic sense. To do this seems to many the supreme achievement.
Without this they hold that Christianity would fail to meet the
requirements of the modern heart and mind, for to interest "taste"
on the side of goodness is, apparently, better than to let men feel
the compulsion of duty. Reasoning on such premisses, they claim
that Greek religion gave to Christianity its completion and its
crown. This is the claim advanced by Dyer in his _Gods of Greece_
(p. 19). "The Greek poets and philosophers," he says, "are among
our intellectual progenitors, and therefore the religion of to-day
has requirements which include all that the noblest Greeks could
dream of, requirements which the aspirations of Israel alone could
not satisfy. Our complex life had need, not only of a supreme God
of power, universal and irresistible, of a jealous God beside whom
there was no other God, but also of a God of love and grace and
purity. To these ideal qualities, present in the Diviner godhead
of the Gospels, the evolution of Greek mythology brought much
that satisfies our hearts." The best answer to that is to read
Deuteronomy. The Hebrews had no need to borrow "a God of love and
grace and purity" from Greek mythology. Centuries before they came
in contact with Greeks, their inspired men had painted the love
and grace and purity of God in the most attractive colours. Nor
did they ever need to unlearn the belief that Yahweh was merely
a supreme God of power. In the course of our exposition we shall
have occasion to see that the worship of mere power was superseded
by the religion of Yahweh from the first, and that the author of
Deuteronomy gives his whole strength to demonstrate that the God of
Israel is a "God of love and grace and purity." But perhaps "grace"
means to Mr. Dyer "gracefulness." In that case we would deny that
"the Diviner godhead of the Gospels," as revealed in Jesus Christ,
had that æsthetic quality either. There is no word of an appeal
to the sense of the artistically beautiful in anything recorded
of Him; but neither in the Old Testament nor the New is there any
want of moral beauty in the representation given of God. Moral
beauty alone has a central place in religion; and when beauty that
appeals to the senses intrudes into religion, it becomes a source of
weakness rather than of strength. There may be a few people who can
trust to their taste to keep them firm in the pursuit of goodness,
but the bulk of men have always needed, and will always need, the
severer compulsion of duty. They need an objective standard; they
need a God, the embodiment and enforcer of all that duty demands of
them; and when they bend themselves to the yoke of obligation thus
imposed, they enter into a world of heavenly beauty which seizes and
enraptures the soul. The mere æsthetic beauty of Greek mythology
pales, for the more earnest races of mankind at least, before this
Diviner loveliness, and it is the special gift of the Hebrew as well
as of the Teutonic races to be sensitive to it, just as they fall
behind others in æsthetic sensitiveness. Wordsworth felt this, and
has expressed it inimitably in his "Ode to Duty"--
"Stern Lawgiver! yet Thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon Thy face."
That expresses the Hebrew feeling also. Drawn upwards by the
infinite and unchangeable love and goodness of Yahweh, the Hebrews
felt the clog of their innate sinfulness as no other race has done.
The stern "thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue consequently found an
echo in their hearts. Won by the beauty of holiness, they gladly
welcomed the discipline of the Divine law, and by doing so they
established human goodness on a foundation immeasurably more stable
than any the gracefulness of Greek imaginations could hope to lay.