_LOVE TO GOD THE LAW OF LIFE_
DEUT. vi. 4, 5
In these verses we approach "the commandments, the statutes, and
the judgments" which it was to be Moses' duty to communicate to
the people, _i.e._ the second great division of the teaching and
guidance received at Sinai. But though we approach them we do not
come to them for a number of chapters yet. We reach them only in
chapter xii., which begins with almost the same words as chapter vi.
What lies between is a new exhortation, very similar in tone and
subject to that into which chapters i-iii. have been transformed.
To some readers in our day this repetition, and the renewed
postponement of the main subject of the book, have seemed to
justify the introduction of a new author here. They are scornfully
impatient of the repetition and delay, especially those of them who
have themselves a rapid, dashing style; and they declare that the
writer of the laws, etc., from chapter xii. onwards cannot have
been the writer of these long double introductions. _They_ would
not have written so; consequently no one else, however different
his circumstances, his objects, and his style may be, can have
written so. It is true, they admit, that the style, the grammar, the
vocabulary are all exactly those of the purely legal chapters, but
that matters not. Their irritation with this delay is decisive; and
so they introduce us, entirely on the strength of it, to another
Deuteronomist, second or third or fourth--who knows? But all this is
too purely subjective to meet with general acceptance, and we may
without difficulty decide that the linguistic unity of the book,
when chapters vi. to xii. are compared with what we find after xii.,
is sufficient to settle the question of authorship.
But we have now to consider the possible reasons for this second
long introduction. The first introduction has been satisfactorily
explained in a former chapter; this second one can, I think, quite
as easily be accounted for. The object of the book is in itself
a sufficient explanation. To modern critical students of the Old
Testament the laws are the main interest of Deuteronomy. They are
the material they need for their reconstruction of the history of
Israel, and they feel as if all besides, though it may contain
beautiful thoughts, were irrelevant. But that was not the writer's
point of view at all. For him it was not the main thing to introduce
new laws. He was conscious rather of a desire to bring old laws,
well known to his fellow-countrymen, but neglected by them, into
force again. Anything new in his version of them was consequently
only such an adaptation of them to the new circumstances of his
time as would tend to secure their observance. Even if Moses were
the author of the book this would be true; but if a prophetic man
in Manasseh's day was the author, we can see how naturally and
exclusively that view would fill his mind. He had fallen upon evil
times. The best that had been attained in regard to spiritual
religion had been deliberately abandoned and trodden under foot.
Those who sympathised with pure religion could only hope that a
time would come when Hezekiah's work would be taken up again. If
Deuteronomy was written in preparation for that time, the legal
additions necessary to ward off the evils which had been so nearly
fatal to Yahwism would seem to the author much less important than
they appear to us to be. His object was to retrieve what had been
lost, to rouse the dead minds of his countrymen, to illustrate that
on which the higher life of the nation depended, and to throw light
upon it from all the sources of what then was modern thought. His
mind was full of the high teaching of the prophets. He was steeped
in the history of his people, which was then receiving, or was soon
to receive, its all but final touches. He was intensely anxious that
in the later time for which he was writing all men should see how
Providence had spoken for the Mosaic law and religion, and what the
great principles were which had always underlain it, and which had
now at last been made entirely explicit.
Under these circumstances, it was not merely natural that the author
of Deuteronomy should dwell with insistence upon the hortatory part
of his book; it was necessary. He could not feel Wellhausen's haste
to approach his restatement of the law. To him the exhortation was,
in fact, the important thing. Every day he lived he must have seen
that it was not want of knowledge that misled his contemporaries.
He must have groaned too often under the weight of the indifference
even of the well disposed not to be aware that that was the great
hindrance to the restoration of the better thoughts and ways of
Hezekiah's day.
He had learned by bitter experience, what every man who is in
earnest about inducing masses of men to take a step backward
or forward to a higher life always learns, that nothing can be
accomplished till a fire has been kindled in the hearts of men which
will not let them rest. To this task the author of Deuteronomy
devotes himself. And whatever impatient theorists of to-day may
say, he succeeds amazingly. His exhortation touches men from one end
of the world to the other, even to this day, by its affectionate
impressiveness. His exhibition of the principles underlying the
law is so true that, when our Lord was asked, "Which is the first
commandment of all?" He answered from this chapter of Deuteronomy:
"The first of all the commandments is this, The Lord our God is
one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. The second is
this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none
other commandment greater than these." Now these are precisely the
truths Deuteronomy exhibits in these prefatory chapters, and it
is by them that the after-treatment of the law is permeated. The
author of Deuteronomy by announcing these truths brought the Old
Testament faith as near to the level of the New Testament faith as
was possible; and we may well believe that he saw his work in its
true relative proportions. The hortatory chapters are really the
most original part of the book, and exhibit what was most permanent
in it. The mere fact that the author lingers over it, therefore, is
entirely inadequate to justify us in admitting a later hand. Indeed,
if criticism is to retain the respect of reasonable men, it will
have to be more sparing than it has hitherto been with the "later
hand"; to introduce it here under the circumstances is nothing short
of a blunder.
In our verses, therefore, we have to deal with the main point of our
book. Coming immediately after the Decalogue, these words render
explicit the principle of the first table of that law. In them our
author is making it clear that all he has to say of worship, and of
the relation of Israel to Yahweh, is merely an application of this
principle, or a statement of means by which a life at the level
of love to God may be made possible or secured. This section,
therefore, forms the bridge which connects the Decalogue with the
legal enactments which follow; and it is on all accounts worthy of
very special attention. Our Lord's quotation of it as the supreme
statement of the Divine law, in its Godward aspect, would in itself
be an overwhelmingly special reason for thorough study of it, and
would justify us in expecting to find it one of the deepest things
in Scripture.
The translation of the first clause presents difficulties. The
Authorised Version gives us, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is
one Lord," but that can no longer be accepted, since it rests upon
the Jewish substitution of Adhonai for Yahweh. Taking this view of
the construction, it should be rendered, "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh
our God is one Yahweh"; and this is the meaning which most recent
authorities--_e.g._ Knobel, Keil, and Dillmann--put upon it. But
equally good authorities--such as Ewald and Oehler--render, "Yahweh
our God--Yahweh is one." This is unobjectionable grammatically.
Still another translation, "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God,
Yahweh alone," has been received by the most recent and most
scholarly German translation of the Scripture, that edited by
Kautzsch. But the objection that in that case _l'bhaddo_, not
_'echādh_, should have been used, seems conclusive against it.
The two others come very much to the same thing in the end,
and were it not for the time at which Deuteronomy was written,
Ewald's translations would be the simpler and more acceptable.
But the first--"Yahweh our God is one Yahweh"--exactly meets the
circumstances of that time, and moreover emphasises that in Israel's
God which the writer of Deuteronomy was most anxious to establish.
As against the prevailing tendency of the time, he not only denies
polytheism, or, as Dillmann puts it, asserts the concrete fact that
the true God cannot be resolved in the polytheistic manner into
various kinds and shades of deity, like the Baalim, but he also
prohibits the amalgamation or partial identification of Him with
other gods. Though very little is told us concerning Manasseh's
idolatry, we know enough to feel assured that it was in this fashion
he justified his introduction of Assyrian deities into the Temple
worship. Moloch, for example, must in some way have been identified
with Yahweh, since the sacrifices of children in Tophet are declared
by Jeremiah to have been to Yahweh. Further, the worship at the
High Places had led, doubtless, to belief in a multitude of local
Yahwehs, who in some obscure way were yet regarded as one, just as
the multitudinous shrines of the Virgin in Romanist lands lead to
the adoration of our Lady of Lourdes, our Lady of Étaples, and so
on, though the Church knows only one Virgin Mother. This incipient
and unconscious polytheism it was our author's purpose to root
out by his law of one altar; and it seems congruous, therefore,
that he should sum up the first table of the Decalogue in such a
way as to bring out its opposition to this great evil. Of course
the oneness of deity as such is involved in what he says; but the
aspect of this truth which is specially put forward here is that
Yahweh, being God, is one Yahweh, with no partners, nor even with
variations that practically destroy unity. No proposition could
have been framed more precisely and exactly to contradict the
general opinion of Manasseh and his followers regarding religion;
and in it the watchword of monotheism was spoken. Since it was
uttered, this has been the rallying point of monotheistic religion,
both among Jews and Mohammedans. For "there is no God but God" is
precisely the counterpart of "Yahweh is one Yahweh"; and from one
end of the civilised world to the other this strenuous confession
of faith has been heard, both as the tumultuous battle-shout of
victorious armies, and as the stubborn and immovable assertion of
the despised, and scattered, and persecuted people to whom it was
first revealed. Even to-day, though in the hands of both Jews and
Mohammedans it has been hardened into a dogma which has stripped
the Mosaic conception of Yahweh of those elements which gave it
possibilities of tenderness and expansion, it still has power over
the minds of men. Even in such hands, it incites missionary effort,
and it appeals to the heart at some stages of civilisation as no
other creed does. It makes men, nay, even civilised men, of the wild
fetich-worshipping African; but for want of what follows in our
context it leaves them stranded--at a higher level, it is true, but
stranded nevertheless--without possibilities of advance, and exposed
to that terrible decay in their moral and spiritual conceptions
which sooner or later asserts itself in every Mohammedan community.
Israel was saved from the same spiritual disease by the great
words which succeed the assertion of Yahweh's oneness. The writer
of Deuteronomy did not desire to set forth this declaration as an
abstract statement of ultimate truth about God. He makes it the
basis of a quite new, a quite original demand upon his countrymen.
Because Yahweh thy God is one Yahweh, "thou shalt love Yahweh thy
God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
might." To us, who have inherited all that was attained by Israel
in their long and eventful history as a nation, and especially in
its disastrous close, it may have become a commonplace that God
demands the love of His people. But if so, we must make an effort
to shake off the dull yoke of custom and familiarity. If we do, we
shall see that it was an extraordinarily original thing which the
Deuteronomist here declares. In the whole of the Old Testament there
are, outside of Deuteronomy, thirteen passages in which the _love_
of men to Yahweh is spoken of. They are Exod. xx. 6; Josh. xxii. 5,
xxiii. 11; Judges v. 31; 1 Kings iii. 3; Neh. i. 5; Psalms xviii.
2, xxxi. 24, xci. 14, xcvii. 10, cxvi. 1, cxlv. 20; and Dan. ix.
4. Now of these the verses from Nehemiah and Daniel are manifestly
later than Deuteronomy, and of the Psalms only the eighteenth can
with any confidence be assigned to a time earlier than the seventh
century B.C. All the others may with great probability be assigned
at earliest to the times of Jeremiah and the post-exilic period.
Three of the passages from the historic books again--Josh. xxii. 5,
xxiii. 11; 1 Kings iii. 3--are attributed, on grounds largely apart
from the use of this expression, to the Deuteronomic editor, _i.e._
the writer who went over the historical books about 600 B.C., and
made slight additions here and there, easily recognisable by their
differing in tone and feeling from the surrounding context. Indeed
Josh. xxii. 5 is a palpable quotation from Deuteronomy itself.
Of the thirteen passages, therefore, only three--Exod. xx. 6,
Judges v. 31, and Psalm xviii. 2--belong to the time previous
to Deuteronomy, and in all three the mention of love to God is
only allusive, and, as it were, by the way. Before Deuteronomy,
consequently, there is little more than the mere occurrence of the
word. There is nothing of the bold and decisive demand for love to
the one God as the root and ground of all true relations with Him
which Deuteronomy makes. At most, there is the hint of a possibility
which might be realised in the future; of love to God as the
permanent element in the life of man there is no indication; and
it is this which the author of Deuteronomy means, and nothing less
than this. He makes this demand for love the main element of his
teaching. He returns to it again and again, so that there are almost
as many passages bearing on this in Deuteronomy as in the whole Old
Testament besides; and the particularity and emphasis with which he
dwells upon it are immeasurably greater. Only in the New Testament
do we find anything quite parallel to what he gives us; and there
we find his view taken up and expanded, till love to God flashes
upon us from almost every page as the test of all sincerity and the
guarantee of all success in the Christian life.
To proclaim this truth was indeed a great achievement; and when we
remember the abject fear with which Israel had originally regarded
Yahweh, it will appear still more remarkable that the book embodying
this should have been adopted by the whole people with enthusiasm,
and that with it should begin the Canon of Holy Scripture; for
Deuteronomy, as all now recognise, was the first book which became
canonical. I have said that the conception was an extraordinarily
original one, and have pointed out that it had not been traceable to
any extent previously in Israel's religious books or its religious
men. It will appear still more original, I think, if we consider
what a growth in moral and spiritual stature separates the Israel of
Moses' day and that of Josiah's; what the attitude of other nations
to their gods was in contrast to this; and, lastly, what it involves
and implies, as regards the nature of both God and man.
As we have already seen, the earlier narratives represent the men
to whom Moses spoke as acknowledging that they could not, as yet at
any rate, bear to remain in the presence of Yahweh. Between their
God and them, therefore, there could be no relation of love properly
so called. There was reverence, awe, and chiefly fear, tempered
by the belief that Yahweh as their God was on their side. He had
proved it by delivering them from the oppressions of Egypt, and they
acknowledged Him and were jealous for His honour and submissive to
His commands. So far as the record goes, that would seem to have
been their religious state. Progress from that state of mind to
a higher, to a demand for direct personal relations between each
individual Israelite and Yahweh, was not easy. It was hindered by
the fact that Israel as a whole, and not the individual, was for a
long time regarded as the subject of religion. That, of course, was
no hindrance to the development of the thought that Yahweh loved
Israel; but so long as that conception dominated religious thought
in Israel, so long was it impossible to think of individual love and
trust as the element in which each faithful man should live.
But the love of Yahweh was declared, century after century, by
prophet and priest and psalmist, to be set upon His people, and
so the way for this demand for love on man's part was opened.
Man's relations with God began to grow more intimate. The distance
lessened, as the use of the words "them that love Me" in the song
of Deborah and the Davidic word in Psalm xviii., "I love thee,
Yahweh my rock," clearly show. Hosea next took up the strain, and
intensified and heightened it in a wonderful manner, but the nation
failed to respond adequately. In the later prophets the love and
grace and longsuffering of Yahweh and His ceaseless efforts on
behalf of Israel are continually made the ground of exhortations,
entreaties, and reproaches; but, as a whole, the people still did
not respond. We may be sure, however, that an ever increasing
minority were affected by the clearness and intensity of the
prophetic testimony. To this minority, the Israel within Israel,
the remnant that was to return from exile and become the seed of a
people that should be all righteous, the love of Yahweh tended to
become His main characteristic. That love sustained their hopes; and
though the awe and reverence which were due to His holiness, and the
fear called forth by His power, still predominated, there grew up in
their hearts a multitude of thoughts and expectations tending more
and more to the love of God.
As yet it was only a timid reaching out towards Him, a hope and
longing which could hardly justify itself. Yet it was robust
enough not to be killed by disappointment, by hope deferred, or
even by crushing misfortune; and in the furnace of affliction it
became stronger and more pure. And in the heart of the author
of Deuteronomy it grew certain of itself, and soared up with an
eagerness that would not be denied. Then, as always where God is the
object of it, love that dares was justified; and out of its restless
and timid longings it came to the "place of rest imperturbable,
where love is not forsaken if itself forsaketh not."[36] From
knowledge, confirmed by the answering love and inspiration of God,
and impelled consciously by Him, he then in this book made and
reiterated his great demand. All spiritual men found in it the word
they had needed. They responded to it eagerly when the book was
published; and their enthusiasm carried even the torpid and careless
masses with them for a time. The nation, with the king at their
head, accepted the legislation of which this love to God was the
underlying principle, and so far as public and corporate action can
go, Israel adopted the deepest principle of spiritual life as their
own.
[36] Augustine's _Confessions_, p. 64.
Of course with the mass this assent had little depth; but in the
hearts of the true men in Israel the joy and assurance of their
great discovery, that Yahweh their God was open to, nay, desired and
commanded, their most fervent affection, soon produced its fruit.
From the fragments of the earliest legislation which have come down
to us, it is obvious that the Mosaic principles had led to a most
unwonted consideration for the poor. In later days, though the
ingrained tendency to oppression, which those who have power in the
East seem quite unable to resist, did its evil work in both Israel
and Judah, there were never wanting prophetic voices to denounce
such villainy in the spirit of these laws. The public conscience was
thereby kept alive, and the ideal of justice and mercy, especially
to the helpless, became a distinguishing mark of Israelite religion.
But it was in the minds of those who had learned the Deuteronomist's
great lesson, and had taken example by him, that the love which came
from God, and had just been answered back by man overflowed in a
stream of blessing to man's "neighbours." Deuteronomy had uttered
the first and great commandment; but it is in the Law of Holiness,
that complex of ancient laws brought together by the author of P,
and found now mainly in Lev. xvii.-xxvi., that we find the second
word, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."[37] If we ask,
Who is my neighbour? we find that not even those beyond Israel are
excluded, for in Lev. xix. 34 we read, "The stranger that sojourneth
with you shall be unto you as the homeborn among you, and thou shalt
love him as thyself." The idea still needed the expansion which it
received from our Lord Himself in the parable of the Good Samaritan;
but it is only one step from these passages to the New Testament.
[37] Lev. xix. 18, 34.
From the standpoint of mere fear, then, to the standpoint of love
which casteth out fear, even the masses of Israel were lifted, in
thought at least, by the love and teaching of God. And the process
by which Israel was led to this height has proved ever since to
be the only possible way to such an attainment. It began in the
free favour of God, it was continued by the answer of love on the
part of man, and these antecedents had as their consequence the
proclamation of that law of liberty--for self-renouncing love is
liberty--"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Without the
first, the second was impossible; and the last without the other
two would have been only a satire upon the incurable selfishness of
man. It is worthy of remark, at least, that only on the critical
theory of the Old Testament is each of these steps in the moral
and religious education of Israel found in its right place, with
its right antecedents; only when taken so do the teachers who were
inspired to make each of these attainments find circumstances
suited to their message, and a soil in which the germs they were
commissioned to plant could live.
But great as is the contrast between the Israel of Moses' day and
that of Josiah's, it is not so great as the contrast between the
religion of Israel in the Deuteronomic period and the religion of
the neighbouring nations. Among them, at our date 650 B.C., there
was, so far as we know them, no suggestion of personal love to God
as an effective part of religion. In the chapters on the Decalogue
the main ideas of the Canaanites in regard to religion have been
described, so that they need not be repeated here. I shall add
only what E. Meyer says of their gods: "With advancing culture the
cultus loses its old simplicity and homeliness. A fixed ritual was
developed--founded upon old hereditary tradition. And here the
gloomier conception became the ruling one, and its consequences
were inexorably deduced. The great gods, even the protecting gods
of the tribe or the town, are capricious and in general hostile to
man--possibly to some degree because of the mythological conception
of Baal as sun-god--and they demand sacrifices of blood that they
may be appeased. In order that evil may be warded off from those
with whom they are angry, another human being must be offered to
them as a substitute in propitiatory sacrifice--nay, they demand
the sacrifice of the firstborn, the best-loved son. If the community
be threatened with the wrath of the deity, then the prince or the
nobility as a whole must offer up their children on its behalf."[38]
This also is the view of Robertson Smith,[39] who considers that
while in their origin the Semitic religions involved kindly
relations and continual intercourse between the gods and their
worshippers, these gradually disappeared as political misfortune
began to fall upon the smaller Semitic peoples. Their gods were
angry and in the vain hope of appeasing them men had recourse to the
direst sacrifices. Hints concerning these had survived from times
of savagery; and to the diseased minds of these terror-stricken
peoples the more ancient and more horrible a sacrifice was the
more powerful did it seem. At this time, therefore, the course
of the Canaanite religions was away from love to their gods. The
decay of nationality brought despair, and the frantic efforts of
despair, into the religion of the Canaanite peoples; but to Israel
it brought this higher demand for more intimate union with their
God. Whatever elements tending towards love the Canaanite religions
originally may have had, they had either been mingled with the
corrupting sensuality which seems inseparable from the worship of
female deities, or had been limited to the mere superficial good
understanding which their participation in the same common life
established between the people and their gods. Their union was
largely independent of moral considerations on either side. But
in Israel there had grown up quite a different state of things.
The union between Yahweh and His people had from the days of the
Decalogue taken a moral turn; and gradually it had become clear
that to have Abraham for their father and Yahweh for their God
would profit them little, if they did not stand in right moral
relations and in moral sympathy with Him. Now, in Deuteronomy, that
fundamentally right conception of the relation between God and man
received its crown in Yahweh's claim to the love of His people. No
contrast could be greater than that which common misfortune and
a common national ruin produced between the surrounding Semitic
peoples and Israel.
[38] _Geschichte des Alterthums_, p. 249.
[39] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 330.
But besides the small kingdoms which immediately surrounded
Palestine, Israel had for neighbours the two great empires of Egypt
and Assyria. She was exposed therefore to influence from them in
even a greater degree. Long before the Exodus, the land which Israel
came afterwards to occupy had been the meeting-place of Babylonian
and Egyptian power and culture. In the fifteenth century B.C. it
was under the suzerainty if not the direct sovereignty of Egypt;
but its whole culture and literature, for it must have had books,
as the name Kirjath-Sepher (Book-town) shows, was Babylonian.
Throughout Israel's history, moreover, Assyrian and Egyptian manners
and ways of thought were pressed upon the people; and we cannot
doubt that in regard to religion also their influence was felt. But
at this period, as in the Canaanite religions, so also in those of
Assyria and Egypt, the tendency was altogether different from what
Deuteronomy shows it to have been in Israel.
In regard to Egypt this is somewhat difficult to prove, for the
Egyptian religion is so complicated, so varied, and so ancient,
that men who have studied it despair of tracing any progress in
it. A kind of monotheism, polytheism, fetichism, animism, and
nature-worship such as we find in the Vedas, have in turn been
regarded as its primitive state; but as a matter of fact all these
systems of religious thought and feeling are represented in the
earliest records, and they remained constant elements of it till the
end.[40] Whatever had once formed part of it, Egyptian religion
clung to with extraordinary tenacity. As time went on, however, the
accent was shifted from one element to the other, and after the
times of the XIXth dynasty, _i.e._ after the time of the Exodus,
it began to decay. A systematised pantheism, of which sun-worship
was the central element, was elaborated by the priests; the moral
element which had been prominent in the days when the picture of the
judgment of the soul after death was so popular in Thebes retired
more into the background, and the purely magical element became
the principal one. Instead of moral goodness and the fulfilment of
duty being the main support of the soul in its dread and lonely
journeys in the "world of the Western sky," knowledge of the proper
formulas became the chief hope, and the machinations of evil demons
the main danger. In the royal tombs at Thebes the walls of the long
galleries are covered with representations of these demons, and the
accompanying writing gives directions as to the proper formulas by
knowledge of which deliverance can be secured. This, of course,
confined the benefits of religion, so far as they related to the
life to come, to the educated, and the wealthy. For these secret
spells were hard to obtain, and had to be purchased at a high price.
As Wiedemann says, "Still more important than in this world was the
knowledge of the correct magical words and formulas in the other
world. No door opened here if its name was not known, no dæmon let
the dead pass in if he did not address him in the proper fashion, no
god came to his help so long as his proper title was not given him,
no food could be procured so long as the exactly prescribed words
were not uttered."[41] The people were therefore thrown back upon
the ancient popular faith, which needed gods only for practical
life, and honoured them only because they were mighty.[42] Some
of them were believed to be friendly; but others were malevolent
deities who would destroy mankind if they did not mollify them by
magic, or render them harmless by the greater power of the good
gods. Consequently Set, the unconquerable evil demon, was worshipped
with zeal in many places. With him there were numerous demons, "the
enemies," "the evil ones," which lie in wait for individuals, and
threaten their life and weal. The main thing, therefore, was to
bring the correct sacrifices, to use such formulas and perform such
acts as would render the gods gracious and turn away evil. Moreover
the whole of nature was full of spirits, as it is to the African of
to-day, and in the mystic texts of the Book of the Dead, there is
constant mention made of the "mysterious beings whose names, whose
ceremonials are not known," which thirst for blood, which bring
death, which go about as devouring flame, as well as of others which
do good. At all times this element existed in Egypt; but precisely
at this time, in the reign of Psamtik, Brugsch[43] declares that
new force was given to it, and on the monuments there appear, along
with the "great gods," monstrous forms of demons and genii. In fact
the higher religion had become pantheistic, and consequently less
rigidly moral. Magic had been taken up into it for the life beyond
the grave, and became the only resource of the people in this life.
Fear, therefore, necessarily became the ruling religious motive, and
instead of growing toward love of God, men in Egypt at this time
were turning more decisively than ever away from it.
[40] Cf. Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, p. 3.
[41] Wiedemann, p. 1, 35.
[42] Cf. Meyer, p. 71.
[43] _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Brodick's edition p. 423.
Of the Assyrian religion and its influence it is also difficult
to speak in this connection, for notwithstanding the amount of
translation that has been done, not much has come to light in regard
to the personal religion of the Assyrians. On the whole it seems
to be established that in its main features the religion of both
Babylon and Assyria remained what the non-Semitic inhabitants of
Akkad had made it. Originally it had consisted entirely of a spirit
and demon worship not one whit more advanced than the religion
of the South Sea islanders to-day. As such it was in the main a
religion of fear. Though some spirits were good, the bulk were
evil, and all were capricious. Men were consequently all their
lifetime subject to bondage, and love as a religious emotion was
impossible. When the Semites came at a later time into the country
their star-worship was amalgamated with this mere Shamanism of the
Akkadians. In the new faith thus evolved the great gods of the
Semites were arranged in a hierarchy, and the spirits, both good
and evil, were subordinated to them. But even the great gods remain
within the sphere of nature, and have in full measure the defects
and limitations of nature-gods everywhere.[44] They are not entirely
beneficent powers, nor are they even moral beings. Some have
special delight in blood and destruction, while the cruel Semitic
child-sacrifice was practised in honour of others. Again, their
displeasure has no necessary or even general connection with sin.
Their wrath is generally the outcome of mere arbitrary whim. Indeed
it may be doubted whether the conception of sin or of moral guilt
ever had a secure footing in this religion. It certainly had none in
the terror-struck hymn to the seven evil spirits who are described
thus:--
"Seven (are) they, seven (are) they.
Male they (are) not, female they (are) not;
Moreover the deep is their pathway.
Wife they have not, child is not born to them.
Law (and) order they know not,
Prayer and supplication hear they not.
Wicked (are) they, wicked (are) they."[45]
[44] Meyer, p. 117.
[45] Sayce, _Babylonian Literature_, p. 36. Both poems here referred
to are pre-Assyrian, being found as translations in the library of
Assurbanipal. But Assyrian religion made no progress; it seems to
have remained always dependent on Babylonian, even in details.
There is here an accent of genuine terror, which involved not love,
but hatred. Even in what Sayce calls a "Penitential Psalm," and
which he compares to the Biblical Psalms, there is nothing of the
gratitude to God as a deliverer from sin which in Israel was the
chief factor in producing the response to Yahweh's demand for the
love of man. Morally, it contains nothing higher than is contained
in the hymn of the spirits. The transgressions which are so
pathetically lamented, and from the punishment of which deliverance
is so earnestly sought, are purely ceremonial and involuntary. The
author of the prayer conceives that he has to do with a god whose
wrath is a capricious thing, coming upon men they know not why. So
conceived God cannot be loved. It is entirely in accord with this
that in the great flood epic no reason is given for the destruction
of mankind save the caprice of Bel.[46] The few expressions quoted
by Sayce from a hymn to the sun-god--such as this, "Merciful God,
that liftest up the fallen, that supportest the weak.... Like a
wife, thou submittest thyself, cheerful and kindly.... Men far
and wide bow before thee and rejoice"--cannot avail to subvert
a conclusion so firmly fixed. These are simply the ordinary
expressions which the mere physical pleasure of the sunlight brings
to the lips of sun-worshippers of all ages and of all climes.
At best they could only be taken as germs out of which a loving
relation between God and man might have been developed. But though
they were ancient they never were developed. At the end as at the
beginning the Assyrio-Babylonian religion moves on so low a level,
even in its more innocent aspects, that a development like that in
Deuteronomy is absolutely impossible. In its worse aspects Assyrian
religion was unspeakable. The worship of Ishtar at Nineveh outdid
everything known in the ancient world for lust and cruelty.
[46] Meyer, p. 178. Cf. however Sayce, _The Higher Criticism and
the Monuments_, p. 114. Sayce maintains that the Assyrian epic
attributes the flood to the moral guilt of men. But that is by
no means proved, for it is more than doubtful whether sin to the
Assyrian was not always mainly a ceremonial matter.
On this side too, therefore, we find no parallel to Israel's new
outgrowth of higher religion. Comparison only makes it stand out
more boldly in its splendid originality; and we are left with the
fruitful question, "What was the root of the astonishing difference
between Yahweh and every other god whom Israel had heard of?"
Precisely at this time and under the same circumstances, the ethnic
religions around Israel were developing away from any higher
elements they had contained, and were thereby, as we know now,
hastening to extinction. Under the inspired prophetic influence,
Israel's religion turned the loss of the nation into gain; it rose
by the darkness of national misfortune into a nobler phase than any
it had previously known.
But perhaps the crowning merit of this demand for love of God is
the emphasis it lays upon personality in both God and man, and the
high level at which it conceives their mutual relations. From the
first, of course, the personal element was always very strongly
present in the Israelite conception of God. Indeed personality was
the dominating idea among all the smaller nations which surrounded
Israel. The national god was conceived of mainly as a greater and
more powerful man, full of the energetic self-assertion without
which it would be impossible for any man to reign over an Eastern
community. The Moabite stone shows this, for in it Chemosh is as
sharply defined a person as Mesha himself. The Canaanite gods,
therefore, might be wanting in moral character; their existence
was doubtless thought of in a limited and wholly carnal manner;
but there never was, apparently, the least tendency to obscure the
sharp lines of their individuality. In Israel, _a fortiori_, such
a tendency did not exist; and that a writer of Matthew Arnold's
ability should have persuaded himself, and tried to persuade others,
that under the name of Yahweh Israel understood anything so vague
as his "stream of tendency which makes for righteousness," is
only another instance of the extraordinarily blinding effects of
a preconceived idea. So far from Yahweh being conceived in that
manner, it would be much easier to prove that, whatever aberrations
in the direction of making God merely "a non-natural man" may be
charged upon Christianity, they have been founded almost exclusively
upon Old Testament examples and Old Testament texts. If there was
defect in the Old Testament conception of God, it was, and could
not but be, in the direction of drawing Him down too much into the
limits of human personality.
But though the gods were always thought of by the Canaanites as
personal, their character was not conceived as morally high. Moral
character in Chemosh, Moloch, or Baal was not of much importance,
and their relations with their peoples were never conditioned by
moral conduct. How deeply ingrained this view was in Palestine
is seen in the persistency with which even Yahweh's relation to
His people was viewed in this light. Only the continual outcry of
the prophets against it prevented this idea becoming permanently
dominant even in Israel. Nay, it often deceived would-be prophets.
Clinging to the idea of the national God, and forgetting altogether
the ethical character of Yahweh, without, perhaps, conscious
insincerity, they prophesied peace to the wicked, and so came to
swell the ranks of the false prophets. But from very early times
another thought was cherished by Israel's representative men in
regard to their relations with God. Yahweh was righteous, and
demanded righteousness in His people. Oblations were vain if offered
as a substitute for this. All the prophets reach their greatest
heights of sublimity in preaching this ethically noble doctrine;
and the love to God which Deuteronomy demands is to be exhibited in
reverent obedience to moral law.
Moreover, that God should seek or even need the love of man threw
other light on the Old Testament religion. If, without revelation,
Israel had widened its mental horizon so as to conceive Yahweh as
Lord of the world, it may be questioned whether it could have kept
clear of the gulf of pantheism. But by the manifestation of God
in their special history, the Israelites had been taught to rise
step by step to the higher levels, without losing their conception
of Yahweh as the living, personal, active friend of their people.
Moreover they had been early taught, as we have seen, that the deep
design of all that was wrought for them was the good of all men. The
love of God was seen pressing forward to its glorious and beneficent
ends; and both by ascribing such far-reaching plans to Yahweh, and
by affirming His interest in the fate of men, Israel's conception
of the Divine personality was raised alike in significance and
power; for anything more personal than love planning and working
towards the happiness of its objects cannot be conceived. But the
crown was set upon the Divine personality by the claim to the love
of man. This signified that to the Divine mind the individual man
was not hid from God by his nation, that he was not for Him a mere
specimen of a genus. Rather each man has to God a special worth, a
special character, which, impelled by His free personal love, He
seeks to draw to Himself. At every step each man has near him "the
great Companion," who desires to give Himself to him. Nay, more,
it implies that God seeks and needs an answering love; so that
Browning's daring declaration, put into the mouth of God when the
song of the boy Theocrite is no more heard, "I miss My little human
praise," is simple truth.[47]
[47] Browning's Poems, "The Boy and the Angel."
But if the demand illustrates and illuminates the personality of
God, it throws out in a still more decisive manner the personality
of man. In a rough sense, of course, there never could have been any
doubt of that. But children have to grow into full self-determining
personality, and savages never attain it. Both are at the mercy
of caprice, or of the needs of the moment, to which they answer
so helplessly that in general no consistent course of conduct
can be expected of them. That can be secured only by rigorous
self-determination. But the power of self-determination does not
come at once, nor is acquired without strenuous and continued
effort; it is, in fact, a power which in any full measure is
possessed only by the civilised man. Now the Israelites were not
highly civilised when they left Egypt. They were still at the stage
when the tribe overshadowed and absorbed the individual, as it does
to-day among the South Sea islanders. The progress of the prophetic
thought towards the demand for personal love has already been
traced. Here we must trace the steps by which the personal element
in each individual was strengthened in Israel, till it was fit to
respond to the Divine demand.
The high calling of the people reacted on the individual Israelites.
They saw that in many respects the nations around them were inferior
to them. Much that was tolerated or even respected among them was an
abomination to Israel; and every Israelite felt that the honour of
his people must not be dragged in the dust by him, as it would be
if he permitted himself to sink to the heathen level. Further, the
laws regarding even ceremonial holiness which in germ certainly, and
probably in considerable extension also, existed from the earliest
time, made him feel that the sanctity of the nation depended upon
the care and scrupulosity of the individual. And then there were
the individual spiritual needs, which could not be suppressed and
would not be denied. Though one sees so little explicit provision
for restoration of individual character in early Yahwism, yet in
the course of time--who can doubt it?--the personal religious needs
of so many individual men would necessarily frame for themselves
some outlet. Building upon the analogy of the relation established
between Yahweh and Israel, they would hope for the satisfaction
of their individual needs through the infinite mercy of God. The
Psalms, such of them as can fairly be placed in the pre-Deuteronomic
time, bear witness to this; and those written after that time show a
hopefulness, and a faith in the reality of individual communion with
God which show that such communion was not then a new discovery.
In all these ways the religious life of the individual was being
cultivated and strengthened; but this demand made in Deuteronomy
lifts that indirect refreshment of soul, for which the cultus and
the covenants made no special provision, into a recognised position,
nay, into the central position in Israelite religion. The word,
"Thou shalt love Yahweh thy God," confirmed and justified all these
persistent efforts after individual life in God, and brought them
out into the large place which belongs to aspirations that have at
last been authorised. By a touch, the inspired writer transformed
the pious hopes of those who had been the chosen among the chosen
people into certainties. Each man was henceforth to have his own
direct relation to God as well as the nation; and the national hope,
which had hitherto been first, was now to depend for its realisation
upon the fulfilment of the special and private hope. Thus the old
relation was entirely reversed by Deuteronomy. Instead of the
individual holding "definite place in regard to Yahweh only through
his citizenship," now the nation has its place and its future
secured only by the personal love of each citizen to God. For that
is obviously what the demand here made really means. Again and again
the inspired writer returns to it; and his persistent endeavour is
to connect all else that his book contains--warning, exhortation,
legislation--with this as the foundation and starting-point. Here,
as elsewhere, we can trace the roots of the new covenant which
Jeremiah and Ezekiel saw afar off and rejoiced at, and which our
blessed Lord has realised for us. The individual religious life
is for the first time fully recognised for what ever since it has
been seen to be, the first condition of any attempt to realise the
kingdom of God in the life of a nation.
And not only thus does our text emphasise individuality. Love with
all the heart, and all the mind, and all the soul is possible only
to a fully developed personality; for, as Rothe says, "We love only
in the measure in which personality is developed in us. Even God can
love only in so far as He is personal."[48] Or, as Julius Muller
says in his _Doctrine of Sin_, "The association of personal beings
in love, while it involves the most perfect distinction of the I
and Thou, proves itself to be the highest form of unity."[49] Unless
other counteracting circumstances come in, therefore, the more
highly developed individuality is, the more entirely human beings
are determined from within, the more entirely will union among men
depend upon free and deliberate choice, and the more perfect will it
be. In being called to love God men are dealt with as those who have
attained to complete self-determination, who have come to completed
manhood in the moral life. For all that could mix love with alloy,
mere sensuous sympathy, and the insistent appeal of that which is
materially present, are wanting here. Here nothing is involved but
the free outgoing of the heart to that which is best and highest;
nothing but loyalty to that vision of Good which, amid all the ruin
sin has wrought in human nature, dominates us so that "we needs must
love the highest when we see it." The very demand is a promise and a
prophecy of completed moral and religious liberty to the individual
soul. It rests upon the assurance that men have at last been
trained to walk alone, that the support of social life and external
ordinances has become less necessary than it was, and that one day
a new and living way of access to the Father will bring every soul
into daily intercourse with the source of all spiritual life.
[48] _Theol., Ethik_ i., p. 515.
[49] _Doctrine of Sin_, vol. i., p. 114.
But this demand, in affirming personality of so high a kind, also
re-created duty. Under the national dispensation the individual
man was a _servant_. To a large extent he knew not what his Lord
did, and he ruled his life by the commands he received without
understanding, or perhaps caring to understand, their ultimate
ground and aim. Much too of what he thus laid upon himself was mere
ancient custom, which had been a protection to national and moral
life in early days, but which had survived, or was on the point of
surviving, its usefulness. Now, however, that man was called upon to
love God with all his heart and mind and soul, the step was taken
which was to end in his becoming the consciously free _son_ of God.
For to love in this fashion means, on the one hand, a willingness
to enter into communion with God and to seek that communion; and on
the other it implies a throwing open of the soul to receive the love
which God so persistently has pressed upon men. In such a relation
slavery, blind or constrained obedience, disappears, and the motives
of right action become the purest and most powerful that man can
know.
In the first place, selfishness dies out. Those to whom God has
given Himself have no more to seek. They have reached the dwelling
"of peace imperturbable," and know that they are secure. Nothing
that they do can win more for them; and they do those things that
please God with the free, uncalculating, ungrudging forgetfulness
of self, which distinguishes those fortunate children who have
grown up into a perfect filial love. Of course it was only the
elect in Israel who in any great degree realised this ideal. But
even those who neglected it had for a moment been illuminated by
it; and the record of it remained to kindle the nobler hearts of
every generation. Even the legalism of later days could not obscure
it. In the case of many it bore up and transfigured the dry details
of Judaism, so that even amid such surroundings the souls of men
were kept alive. The later Psalms prove this beyond dispute, and
the advanced view which brings the bulk of the Psalter down to
the post-exilic period only emphasises the more this aspect of
pre-Christian Judaism. In Christianity of course the ideal was
made infinitely more accessible: and it received in the Pauline
doctrine, the Evangelical doctrine, of Justification by Faith a
form, which more than any other human teaching has made unselfish
devotion to God a common aim. It would hardly be too much to say
that those philosophical and religious systems which have preached
the unworthiness of looking for a reward of well-doing, which have
striven to set up the doing of good for its own sake as the only
morality worthy of the name, have failed, just because they would
not begin with the love of God. To Christianity, especially to
Evangelical Christianity, they have assumed to speak from above
downwards; but it alone has the secret they strove in vain to
learn. Men justified by faith have peace with God, and do good with
passionate fervour without hope or possibility of further reward,
just because of their love and gratitude to God, who is the source
of all good. This plan has succeeded, and no other has; for to teach
men on any other terms to disregard reward is simply to ask them to
breathe in a vacuum.
In the second place, those who rose to the height of this calling
had duty not only deepened but extended. It was natural that
they should not seek to throw off the obligations of worship and
morality as they had been handed down by their ancestors. Only an
authoritative voice which they were separated from by centuries
could say, "It hath been said by them of old time, ... but _I_
say unto you"; and men would be disposed rather to fulfil old
obligations with new zeal, while they added to them the new duties
which their widened horizon had brought into view. It is true that
in course of time the Pharisaic spirit laid hold of the Jews, and
that by it they were led back into a slavery which quite surpassed
the half-conscious bondage of their earlier time. It is one of
the mysteries of human nature that it is only the few who can
live for any time at a high level, and hold the balance between
extremes. The many cannot choose but follow those few; and the
dumb, half-reluctant, half-fascinated way in which they are drawn
after them is a most pathetic thing to see. But too often they
avenge themselves for the pressure put upon them, by taking up the
teaching they receive in a perverted or mutilated form, dropping
unawares the very soul of it, and suiting it to the average man.
When that is done the bread from heaven becomes a stone; the message
of liberty is turned into a summons to the prison house; and the
darkness becomes of that opaque sort which is found only where the
light within men is darkness. That tragedy was enacted in Judaism
as rarely elsewhere. The free service of sons was exchanged for
the timorous, anxious scrupulosity of the formalist. How could men
love a God whom they pictured as inexorable in claiming the mint
and cummin of ceremonial worship, and as making life a burden for
all who had a conscience? They could not, and they did not. Most
substituted a merely formal compliance with the externalities of
worship for the love to God and man which was the presupposition
of the true Israelite's life, and the mass of the nation fell away
from true faith. Strangely enough, therefore, the strength of men's
love for God, and of their belief in His love, gave an impulse to
the legalistic Pharisaism which our Lord denounced as the acme of
loveless irreligion.
But it was not so perverted in all. There always was an Israel
within Israel that refused to let go the truths they had learned,
and kept up the succession of men inspired by the free spirit of
God. Even among the Pharisees there were such--witness St. Paul--men
who, though they were entangled in the formalism of their time,
found it at last a pedagogue to bring them unto Christ. We must
believe therefore that at the beginning the attainment marked by
the demands of Deuteronomy and the Law of Holiness existed and
was carried over into the daily life. As the national limits of
religion were broken down, the word "neighbour" received an ever
wider definition in Israel. At first only a man's fellow-tribesman
or fellow-countryman was included; then the stranger; later, as in
Jonah's picture of the conduct of the sailors, it was hinted that
even among the heathen brethren might be found. Finally, in our
Lord's parable of the Good Samaritan the last barrier was broken
down. But it needed all St. Paul's lifework, and the first and
most desperate inner conflict Christianity had to live through, to
initiate men into anything like the full meaning of what Christ
had taught. Then it was seen that as there was but one Father in
heaven, so there was but one family on earth. Then too, though the
merely ceremonial duties by which the Jew had been bound ceased to
be binding on Christians, the sphere for the practice of moral duty
was immensely widened. Indeed, had it not been for the free, joyous
spirit with which they were inspired by Christ, they must have
shrunk from the immensity of their obligation. For not only were
men's neighbours infinitely more numerous now, but their relations
with them became vastly more complicated. To meet all possible
cases that might arise in the great and elaborate civilisations
Christianity had to face and save, our Lord deepened the meaning of
the commandments; and so far from Christians being free from the
obligation to law, immeasurably more was demanded of them. To them
first was the full sweep of moral obligation revealed, for they
first had reached the full moral stature of men in Jesus Christ.