Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or
egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia,
which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball,"
should be found really resembling Judæa, whose national greeting was
"Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and
thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity;
whose mediæval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might
be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned
in secret, performed in daring." And, as a matter of fact, some of
these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic
prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework:
the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is
to be avenged is the blood of martyrs "who went through fire and water
for the sanctification of Thy name."
But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore--as
completely as Jesus did--that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had
been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early
Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy
of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the
Lord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck
over Belgium and not of a mediæval Jew over the desolated home of
Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the
other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she
would like to kill every German--man or woman--with her own hand!
And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its
historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James
Hinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it."
And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen
People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can
give us the clue to the Bible. This is the only "Guide to the
Perplexed," and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when
by allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he
laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the
effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The
_Baraitha_ of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third
text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that
distorted dialectic known as _Pilpul_. The only true "Conciliador" is
history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing
rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere--or rather everywhere. The
same method that softened the Oriental amorousness of "The Song of
Solomon" into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in the
hands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church.
But if Reason cannot always--as Bachya imagined--_confirm_ tradition,
it can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands
from the higher in that motley collection of national literature
which, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with
strayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the
apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes of
even a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when
put forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as
uniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people
that produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and
canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because
occasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths
there is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery.