Israelites must be ranged. They were polytheists, in so far as they
admitted the existence of other Elohim of divine rank beside Jahveh; they
differed from ordinary polytheists, in so far as they believed that Jahveh
was the supreme god and the one proper object of their own national
worship. But it will doubtless be objected that I have been building up a
fictitious Israelitic theology on the foundation of the recorded habits and
customs of the people, when they had lapsed from the ordinances of their
great lawgiver and prophet Moses, and that my conclusions may be good for
the perverts to Canaanitish theology, but not for the true observers of the
Sinaitic legislation. The answer to the objection is that--so far as I can
form a judgment of that which is well ascertained in the history of
Israel--there is very little ground for believing that we know much, either
about the theological and social value of the influence of Moses, or about
what happened during the wanderings in the Desert.
The account of the Exodus and of the occurrences in the Sinaitic peninsula;
in fact, all the history of Israel before the invasion of Canaan, is full
of wonderful stories which may be true, in so far as they {189} are
conceivable occurrences, but which are certainly not probable, and which I,
for one, decline to accept until evidence, which deserves that name, is
offered of their historical truth. Up to this time I know of none.[53]
Furthermore, I see no answer to the argument that one has no right to pick
out of an obviously unhistorical statement the assertions which happen to
be probable and discard the rest. But it is also certain that a primitively
veracious tradition may be smothered under subsequent mythical additions,
and that one has no right to cast away the former along with the latter.
Thus, perhaps the fairest way of stating the case may be as follows.
There can be no _a priori_ objection to the supposition that the Israelites
were delivered from their Egyptian bondage by a leader called Moses, and
that he exerted a great influence over their subsequent organisation in the
desert. There is no reason to doubt that, during their residence in the
land of Goshen, the Israelites knew nothing of Jahveh; but, as their own
prophets declare (see Ezek. xx.), were polytheistic idolaters, sharing in
the worst practices of their neighbours. As to their conduct in other
respects, nothing is known. But it may fairly be suspected that their
ethics were not of a higher order than those of Jacob their progenitor, in
which case they might derive great profit from contact with Egyptian
society, which held honesty and {190} truthfulness in the highest esteem.
Thanks to the Egyptologers, we now know, with all requisite certainty, the
moral standard of that society in the time, and long before the time, of
Moses. It can be determined from the scrolls buried with the mummified dead
and from the inscriptions on the tombs and memorial statues of that age.
For, though the lying of epitaphs is proverbial, so far as their subject is
concerned, they give an unmistakable insight into that which the writers
and the readers of them think praiseworthy.
In the famous tombs at Beni Hassan there is a record of the life of Prince
Nakht, who served Osertasen II., a Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty, as
governor of a province. The inscription speaks in his name: "I was a
benevolent and kindly governor who loved his country.... Never was a little
child distressed nor a widow ill-treated by me. I have never repelled a
workman or hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow and to the
married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small in my gifts."
And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel Birch for the
statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty abound in
injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry, give drink to
the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally serve the king,
formed the first duty of a pious man and faithful subject."[54] The people
for whom these inscriptions embodied their ideal of praiseworthiness
assuredly had no imperfect {191} conception of either justice or mercy. But
there is a document which gives still better evidence of the moral standard
of the Egyptians. It is the "Book of the Dead," a sort of "Guide to
Spiritland," the whole, or a part, of which was buried with the mummy of
every well-to-do Egyptian, while extracts from it are found in innumerable
inscriptions. Portions of this work are of extreme antiquity, evidence of
their existence occurring as far back as the fifth and sixth dynasties;
while the 125th chapter, which constitutes a sort of book by itself, and is
known as the "Book of Redemption in the Hall of the two Truths," is
frequently inscribed upon coffins and other monuments of the nineteenth
dynasty (that under which, there is reason to believe, the Israelites were
oppressed and the Exodus took place), and it occurs, more than once, in the
famous tombs of the kings of this and the preceding dynasty at Thebes.[55]
This "Book of Redemption" is chiefly occupied by the so-called "negative
confession" made to the forty-two Divine Judges, in which the soul of the
dead denies that he has committed faults of various kinds. It is,
therefore, obvious that the Egyptians conceived that their gods commanded
them not to do the deeds which are here denied. The "Book of Redemption,"
in fact, implies the existence in the mind of the Egyptians, if not in a
formal writing, of a series of ordinances couched, like the majority of the
ten {192} commandments, in negative terms. And it is easy to prove the
implied existence of a series which nearly answers to the "ten words." Of
course a polytheistic and image-worshipping people, who observed a great
many holy days, but no Sabbaths, could have nothing analogous to the first
or the second and the fourth commandments of the Decalogue; but, answering
to the third, is "I have not blasphemed;" to the fifth, "I have not reviled
the face of the king or my father;" to the sixth, "I have not murdered;" to
the seventh, "I have not committed adultery;" to the eighth, "I have not
stolen," "I have not done fraud to man;" to the ninth, "I have not told
falsehoods in the tribunal of truth," and, further, "I have not calumniated
the slave to his master." I find nothing exactly similar to the tenth
commandment; but that the inward disposition of mind was held to be of no
less importance than the outward act is to be gathered from the praises of
kindliness already cited and the cry of "I am pure," which is repeated by
the soul on trial. Moreover, there is a minuteness of detail in the
confession which shows no little delicacy of moral appreciation--"I have
not privily done evil against mankind," "I have not afflicted men," "I have
not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings," "I have not been idle," "I
have not played the hypocrite," "I have not told falsehoods," "I have not
corrupted woman or man," "I have not caused fear," "I have not multiplied
words in speaking."
Would that the moral sense of the nineteenth {193} century A.D. were as far
advanced as that of the Egyptians in the nineteenth century B.C. in this
last particular! What incalculable benefit to mankind would flow from
strict observance of the commandment, "Thou shalt not multiply words in
speaking!" Nothing is more remarkable than the stress which the old
Egyptians, here and elsewhere, lay upon this and other kinds of
truthfulness, as compared with the absence of any such requirement in the
Israelitic Decalogue, in which only a specific kind of untruthfulness is
forbidden.
If, as the story runs, Moses was adopted by a princess of the royal house,
and was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, it is surely
incredible that he should not have been familiar, from his youth up, with
the high moral code implied in the "Book of Redemption." It is surely
impossible that he should have been less familiar with the complete legal
system, and with the method of administration of justice, which, even in
his time, had enabled the Egyptian people to hold together, as a complex
social organisation, for a period far longer than the duration of old Roman
society, from the building of the city to the death of the last Caesar. Nor
need we look to Moses alone for the influence of Egypt upon Israel. It is
true that the Hebrew nomads who came into contact with the Egyptians of
Osertasen, or of Ramses, stood in much the same relation to them, in point
of culture, as a Germanic tribe did to the Romans of Tiberius or of Marcus
Antoninus, or as Captain Cook's Omai did to the English of George the
Third. But, {194} at the same time, any difficulty of communication which
might have arisen out of this circumstance was removed by the long
pre-existing intercourse of other Semites, of every grade of civilisation,
with the Egyptians. In Mesopotamia and elsewhere, as in Phenicia, Semitic
people had attained to a social organisation as advanced as that of the
Egyptians; Semites had conquered and occupied Lower Egypt for centuries. So
extensively had Semitic influences penetrated Egypt that the Egyptian
language, during the period of the nineteenth dynasty, is said by Brugsch
to be as full of Semitisms as German is of Gallicisms; while Semitic
deities had supplanted the Egyptian gods at Heliopolis and elsewhere. On
the other hand, the Semites, as far as Phenicia, were extensively
influenced by Egypt.
It is generally admitted[56] that Moses, Phinehas (and perhaps Aaron), are
names of Egyptian origin, and there is excellent authority for the
statement that the name _Abir_, which the Israelites gave to their golden
calf, and which is also used to signify the strong, the heavenly, and even
God,[57] is simply the Egyptian Apis. Brugsch points out that the god Tum,
or Tom, who was the special object of worship in the city of Pi-Tom, with
which the Israelites were only too familiar, was called [=A]nkh and the
"great god," and had no image. [=A]nkh means "He who lives," "the living
one," a name the resemblance of which to the {195} "I am that I am" of
Exodus is unmistakable, whatever may be the value of the fact. Every
discussion of Israelitic ritual seeks and finds the explanation of its
details in the portable sacred chests, the altars, the priestly dress, the
breastplate, the incense, and the sacrifices depicted on the monuments of
Egypt. But it must be remembered that these signs of the influence of Egypt
upon Israel are not necessarily evidence that such influence was exerted
before the Exodus. It may have come much later, through the close
connection of the Israel of David and Solomon, first with Phenicia and then
with Egypt.
If we suppose Moses to have been a man of the stamp of Calvin, there is no
difficulty in conceiving that he may have constructed the substance of the
ten words, and even of the Book of the Covenant, which curiously resembles
parts of the Book of the Dead, from the foundation of Egyptian ethics and
theology which had filtered through to the Israelites in general, or had
been furnished specially to himself by his early education; just as the
great Genevese reformer built up a puritanic social organisation on so much
as remained of the ethics and theology of the Roman Church, after he had
trimmed them to his liking.
Thus, I repeat, I see no _a priori_ objection to the assumption that Moses
may have endeavoured to give his people a theologico-political organisation
based on the ten commandments (though certainly not quite in their present
form) and the Book of the Covenant, contained in our present book of
Exodus. But {196} whether there is such evidence as amounts to proof, or, I
had better say, to probability, that even this much of the Pentateuch owes
its origin to Moses is another matter. The mythical character of the
accessories of the Sinaitic history is patent, and it would take a good
deal more evidence than is afforded by the bare assertion of an unknown
writer to justify the belief that the people who "saw the thunderings and
the lightnings and the voice of the trumpet and the mountain smoking"
(Exod. xx. 18); to whom Jahveh orders Moses to say, "Ye yourselves have
seen that I have talked with you from heaven. Ye shall not make other gods
with me; gods of silver and gods of gold ye shall not make unto you"
(_ibid._ 22, 23), should, less than six weeks afterwards, have done the
exact thing they were thus awfully forbidden to do. Nor is the credibility
of the story increased by the statement that Aaron, the brother of Moses,
the witness and fellow-worker of the miracles before Pharaoh, was their
leader and the artificer of the idol. And yet, at the same time, Aaron was
apparently so ignorant of wrongdoing that he made proclamation, "To-morrow
shall be a feast to Jahveh," and the people proceeded to offer their
burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, as if everything in their proceedings
must be satisfactory to the Deity with whom they had just made a solemn
covenant to abolish image-worship. It seems to me that, on a survey of all
the facts of the case, only a very cautious and hypothetical judgment is
justifiable. It may be that Moses profited by the opportunities afforded
him of {197} access to what was best in Egyptian society to become
acquainted, not only with its advanced ethical and legal code, but with the
more or less pantheistic unification of the Divine to which the
speculations of the Egyptian thinkers, like those of all polytheistic
philosophers, from Polynesia to Greece, tend; if indeed the theology of the
period of the nineteenth dynasty was not, as some Egyptologists think, a
modification of an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic doctrine of a long
antecedent age. It took only half a dozen centuries for the theology of
Paul to become the theology of Gregory the Great; and it is possible that
twenty centuries lay between the theology of the first worshippers in the
sanctuary of the Sphinx and that of the priests of Ramses Maimun.
It may be that the ten commandments and the Book of the Covenant are based
upon faithful traditions of the efforts of a great leader to raise his
followers to his own level. For myself, as a matter of pious opinion, I
like to think so; as I like to imagine that, between Moses and Samuel,
there may have been many a seer, many a herdsman such as him of Tekoah,
lonely amidst the hills of Ephraim and Judah, who cherished and kept alive
these traditions. In the present results of Biblical criticism, however, I
can discover no justification for the common assumption that, between the
time of Joshua and that of Rehoboam, the Israelites were familiar with
either the Deuteronomic or the Levitical legislation; or that the theology
of the Israelites, from the king who sat on the throne to the lowest of his
subjects, was in {198} any important respect different from that which
might naturally be expected from their previous history and the conditions
of their existence. But there is excellent evidence to the contrary effect.
And, for my part, I see no reason to doubt that, like the rest of the
world, the Israelites had passed through a period of mere ghost-worship,
and had advanced through Ancestor-worship and Fetishism and Totemism to the
theological level at which we find them in the books of Judges and Samuel.
All the more remarkable, therefore, is the extraordinary change which is to
be noted in the eighth century B.C. The student who is familiar with the
theology implied, or expressed, in the books of Judges, Samuel, and the
first book of Kings, finds himself in a new world of thought, in the full
tide of a great reformation, when he reads Joel, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,
Micah, and Jeremiah.
The essence of this change is the reversal of the position which, in
primitive society, ethics holds in relation to theology. Originally, that
which men worship is a theological hypothesis, not a moral ideal. The
prophets, in substance, if not always in form, preach the opposite
doctrine. They are constantly striving to free the moral ideal from the
stifling embrace of the current theology and its concomitant ritual. Theirs
was not an intellectual criticism, argued on strictly scientific grounds;
the image-worshippers and the believers in the efficacy of sacrifices and
ceremonies might logically have held their {199} own against anything the
prophets have to say; it was an ethical criticism. From the height of his
moral intuition--that the whole duty of man is to do justice and love mercy
and to bear himself as humbly as befits his insignificance in face of the
Infinite--the prophet simply laughs at the idolaters of stocks and stones
and the idolaters of ritual. Idols of the first kind, in his experience,
were inseparably united with the practice of immorality, and they were to
be ruthlessly destroyed. As for sacrifices and ceremonies, whatever their
intrinsic value might be, they might be tolerated on condition of ceasing
to be idols; they might even be praiseworthy on condition of being made to
subserve the worship of the true Jahveh--the moral ideal.
If the realm of David had remained undivided, if the Assyrian and the
Chaldean and the Egyptian had left Israel to the ordinary course of
development of an Oriental kingdom, it is possible that the effects of the
reforming zeal of the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries might
have been effaced by the growth, according to its inevitable tendencies, of
the theology which they combated. But the captivity made the fortune of the
ideas which it was the privilege of these men to launch upon an endless
career. With the abolition of the Temple-services for more than half a
century, the priest must have lost and the scribe gained influence. The
puritanism of a vigorous minority among the Babylonian Jews rooted out
polytheism from all its hiding-places in the theology which they had
inherited; they created the first {200} consistent, remorseless, naked
monotheism, which, so far as history records, appeared in the world (for
Zoroastrism is practically ditheism, and Buddhism any-theism or no-theism);
and they inseparably united therewith an ethical code, which, for its
purity and for its efficiency as a bond of social life, was and is,
unsurpassed. So I think we must not judge Ezra and Nehemiah and their
followers too hardly, if they exemplified the usual doom of poor humanity
to escape from one error only to fall into another; if they failed to free
themselves as completely from the idolatry of ritual as they had from that
of images and dogmas; if they cherished the new fetters of the Levitical
legislation which they had fitted upon themselves and their nation, as
though such bonds had the sanctity of the obligations of morality; and if
they led succeeding generations to spend their best energies in building
that "hedge round the Torah" which was meant to preserve both ethics and
theology, but which too often had the effect of pampering the latter and
starving the former. The world being what it was, it is to be doubted
whether Israel would have preserved intact the pure ore of religion, which
the prophets had extracted for the use of mankind as well as for their
nation, had not the leaders of the nation been zealous, even to death, for
the dross of the law in which it was embedded. The struggle of the Jews,
under the Maccabean house, against the Seleucidae was as important for
mankind as that of the Greeks against the Persians. And, of all the strange
ironies of history, perhaps the strangest {201} is that "Pharisee" is
current, as a term of reproach, among the theological descendants of that
sect of Nazarenes who, without the martyr spirit of those primitive
Puritans, would never have come into existence. They, like their historical
successors, our own Puritans, have shared the general fate of the poor wise
men who save cities.
A criticism of theology from the side of science is not thought of by the
prophets, and is at most indicated in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in
both of which the problem of vindicating the ways of God to man is given
up, though on different grounds, as a hopeless one. But with the extensive
introduction of Greek thought among the Jews, which took place, not only
during the domination of the Seleucidae in Palestine, but in the great
Judaic colony which flourished in Egypt under the Ptolemies, criticism, on
both ethical and scientific grounds, took a new departure.
In the hands of the Alexandrian Jews, as represented by Philo, the
fundamental axiom of later Jewish, as of Christian monotheism, that the
Deity is infinitely perfect and infinitely good, worked itself out into its
logical consequence--agnostic theism. Philo will allow of no point of
contact between God and a world in which evil exists. For him God has no
relation to space or to time, and, as infinite, suffers no predicate beyond
that of existence. It is, therefore, absurd to ascribe to Him mental
faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to those of men;
He is in no way an object of cognition; He {202} is [Greek: apoios] and
[Greek: akatalektos][58]--without quality and incomprehensible. That is to
say, the Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the
reasonings of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is
the Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert
Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition of the Supreme Being would not be
inconsistent with that "substantia constans infinitis attributis, quorum
unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit," given by another
great Israelite, were it not that Spinoza's doctrine of the immanence of
the Deity in the world puts him, at any rate formally, at the antipodes of
theological speculation. But the conception of the essential
incognoscibility of the Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo was
too thorough an Israelite and too much the child of his time to be content
with this agnostic position. With the help of the Platonic and Stoic
philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, if not comprehensible,
quasi-deity out of the Logos; while other more or less personified divine
powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval between God and man;
between the sacred existence, too pure to be called by any name which
implied a conceivable quality, and the gross and evil world of matter. In
order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive
naturalism of many parts of {203} those Scriptures, in the divine authority
of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been
in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which
they had forged with infinite pains and skill--the method of allegorical
interpretation. This mighty "two-handed engine at the door" of the
theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or
intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is
otherwise said, "poetically," or, "in a spiritual sense," the plainest
words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. In
Biblical phrase, Zeno (who probably had a strain of Semitic blood in him)
was the "father of all such as reconcile." No doubt Philo and his followers
were eminently religious men; but they did endless injury to the cause of
religion by laying the foundations of a new theology, while equipping the
defenders of it with the subtlest of all weapons of offence and defence,
and with an inexhaustible store of sophistical arguments of the most
plausible aspect.