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Library of the
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The Books of
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Winkley Professor of
Biblical Theology

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CENTURY BIBLE HANDBOOKS
List of the Volumes Issued and in Preparation
THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
By Rev. Prof. Owen C. Whitehouse, M.A., D.D.
•THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
By Rev. Prof. G. Currie Martin, M.A., B.D.
•APOCRYPHAL BOOKS (Old Testament and New
Testament). By Rev. Prof. H. T. Andrews, B.A.
•OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY.
By Rev. Prof. W. H. Bennett, M.A., D.D., Litt.D.
•THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL.
By Prof. Peake, M.A., D.D.
•LIFE AND TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST.
By Rev. Principal W. B. Selbie, M.A.
*LIFE AND TEACHING OF PAUL.
By Rev. Principal A E. Garvie, M.A, D.D.
ST. JOHN AND OTHER NEW TESTAMENT
TEACHERS. By Rev. Prof. A. L. Humphries, M.A.
•THE EARLY CHURCH.
By Rev. R. F. Horton, M.A, D.D.
•THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF CHRIST.
By Rev. Principal Adeney, M.A., D.D.
•THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINES OF MAN.
SIN, AND SALVATION.
By Rev. Robert S. Franks, M.A., B.Litt.
"CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
By Rev. Prof. Robert Mackintosh, M.A., D.D.
Those marked • are issued.

CENTURY BIBLE HANDBOOKS
General Editor
Principal WALTER F. ADENEY, M.A., D.D.

THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL

THE RELIGION OF
ISRAEL

A. S. PEAKE, M.A., D.D.
PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL EXEGESIS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
TUTOR IN THE PRIMITIVE METHODIST COLLEGE, MANCHESTER, AND
LECTURER IN LANCASHIRE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE J SOMETIME
FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, AND LECTURER IN
MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD
YALE MIKITY SCHOOL]

^av_eiuC°# LONDON
T. C. isf E. C. JACK
16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
AND EDINBURGH 1910

NOTE
This work is not a Theology of the Old Testament,
but a History of the Religion of Israel. It is concerned
with the development of the religion as a whole, not
with the growth of individual doctrines. For two
omissions the limits of space are responsible. It was
necessary to leave out a sketch of Semitic religion, and
to refrain from giving any but the slightest account of
the religious institutions of Israel.
A. S. P.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE
I. THE RISE OF THE RELIGION ... I
II. THE SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN AND TRANS
FORMATION OF THE RELIGION . . -27
III. FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA . . . -41
IV. AMOS AND HOSEA  52
V. ISAIAH AND MICAH  69
VI. THE DEUTERONOMIC REFORMATION . . 82
VII. JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE .... 89
VIII. THE EXILE  103
IX. EZEKIEL  I IO
X. THE SECOND ISAIAH . . . . . Il8
XI. THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM . . . -125
XII. THE WANING OF PROPHECY . . -138
XIII. SAGES AND PSALMISTS .... 145
XIV. THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM . . -157
SELECTED LITERATURE . . . . 171
INDEX  J73

THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF THE RELIGION
In the strict sense of the term, the religion of Israel
came into existence with Moses. But no religion can
make an entirely new beginning. Every religion must
link itself on to the past, taking up into itself older cus
toms and beliefs. Some of these may be assimilated
without difficulty. But others will be directly contrary
to its genius. Such, however, is the conservatism of the
religious instinct that practices belonging to a lower type
of religion will survive long after the religion out of
which they sprang has given place to a higher. These
incompatible elements may long exist side by side,
though logic at last inevitably accomplishes its work, and
the inharmonious survival must be either transformed or
eliminated. When, therefore, the Hebrews, under the
leadership of Moses, entered on a new stage of religious

2 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
development they did not make a complete breach with
the past. It was in the name, not of a new God, but of
the God of their fathers, that Moses lit the flame of hope
in the crushed and desponding slaves who toiled in the
brickfields of Egypt. And behind what we call the
patriarchal period there lay a long history which left its
mark permanently on the religion of Israel. The Hebrews
belonged to that racial group which we are in the
habit of calling the Semitic peoples. And when they
emerged into a distinct nationality, they still retained
much of the common stock of Semitic custom and belief.
And this in its turn went back largely to a type essenti
ally savage. Many of these savage elements persisted
into the religion of Israel and Judaism, where they are
found in connection with lofty spiritual conceptions, with
which they are altogether out of harmony. They can be
explained only as relics of an extremely ancient way of
looking at things, the almost indestructible survivals of
primitive religion. It must of course be recognised that
the higher religion of Israel did not consciously tolerate
heathen elements, but elements which in their origin
were heathen survived and received a spiritual interpre
tation. It is, unfortunately, impossible in our space to
sketch the Semitic background to the Hebrew religion.
It made itself felt especially in the ceremonial institutions,
such as sacrifice, circumcision, and the laws of unclean-

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 3
ness. We must pass on at once to the religion of
Israel in the strict sense.
The very difficult historical problems raised in con
nection with the residence of the Hebrews in Egypt and
the Exodus must here be completely passed by, and
their religious significance alone be taken into account.
The truth of the story that they were slaves in Egypt is
confirmed by the consideration that no people would
invent the fiction that it had descended from a horde of
bondsmen. It is natural that many should have attri
buted to the stay of the Hebrews in Egypt much in the
religion of Israel. It is, however, antecedently improb
able that the mass of the people should have derived
anything in this way from the Egyptians, with whose
religion they would not be brought much in contact. It
is otherwise with Moses, who, if we can accept the
romantic story of his early life, would be familiar with
the doctrines and rites of the religion of Egypt. But
conscious borrowing in his case is very unlikely. Re
ligion inspired the movement which freed Israel from
the yoke of Egypt, and therefore from the outset the
religion of Israel was antagonistic to the religion of
Egypt ; it is accordingly much more likely that Egyptian
elements were deliberately rejected by Moses. This
does not preclude the possibility of unconscious in
debtedness, but the best Old Testament scholars agree

4 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
with competent Egyptologists, that an examination of
the religion of Israel reveals no traces of Egyptian
influence worth speaking of. The worship of the
golden calf should not be so interpreted. The Egyptians
worshipped living animals, and Aaron's words, " This is
thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the
land of Egypt," would be very inappropriate if spoken
of an Egyptian deity.
It is from Moses that the religion of Israel may be
said to have derived its origin. On this all the four
main sources from which the Pentateuch has been com
piled are agreed. The two great convictions which he
stamped into the consciousness of his people were these :
Yahweh is the God of Israel; Israel is the people of
Yahweh. With these great truths he inspired these
downtrodden and despairing slaves with a new hope and
with a sense of national unity. He knit by the power
of religion the loose and disorganised elements into a
firmly consolidated people, conscious of itself and
dimly conscious of its destiny. They were one people
for they had one God, who had chosen them to be
peculiarly His own. This new conception of their
dignity as the people of Yahweh led them to expect and
strive for a position worthy of their high destiny.
Moses is the supreme figure in the history of Israel and
its religion, for he created the national consciousness

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 5
and linked it inseparably with a great religious idea
capable of immense enrichment. This conviction of its
election by Yahweh remained throughout the national
history permanent and indestructible. The indissoluble
union of the national with the religious consciousness
was at once the strength and the weakness of the
religion. It was its strength, for the religion gained in
intensity because the national was taken into the religious,
while the identification of religion and patriotism caused
the nation and the religion to share in the aggrandise
ment of each other, and bound in mutual help two of
the strongest passions of human nature. But while
religion consecrated and helped forward the unification
and development of the nation, and these in their turn
raised the prestige of the religion, this proved ultimately
the fatal weakness of the latter. For when the time
came for the advance from a national to a universal
religion, the racial element proved too strong for it to
be made. It is none the less true that the religion
could have reached its high development only through
union with the national idea, and for this reason Moses
is pre-eminent because he made it possible.
But this union of nation and religion by no means
explains why the religion of Israel became what we know
it in history to have been. It was common enough for
a people to have its own God. The problem is to ex-

6 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
plain why the religion of the peoples allied to Israel,
such as Moab and Edom, never rose above a quite ele
mentary stage, while the religion of Israel reached the
development we find reflected in the loftiest parts of the
Old Testament. We need not deny that in Israel a
higher receptivity was to be found, which justified its
selection as the vehicle of revelation. But it may be
doubted whether this was at all considerable. Are we,
then, to find our answer in the superiority of the national
God of Israel, or, to speak according to our modern
habit, in the higher conception Of God? The religion
of Israel was the religion of Yahweh, and naturally the
question arises whether the name gives us a clue to the
explanation. The antiquity of the name Yahweh is just
now a matter of keen controversy. It is thought by
some that the name was known to the Kenites, and
there are several points which suggest this. Still there
are difficulties in the way of this suggestion which must
not be overlooked. Some Assyriologists have asserted
that the name was well known a long time before Moses
in Babylonia and Assyria. At present the evidence
must be regarded as indecisive, though it is by no means
improbable that it was at one time more widely diffused
than it came to be later.
The question as to the meaning of the word Yahweh
is very difficult. In the first place we have to remember

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 7
the possibility, and perhaps the probability, that if the
name was very ancient, and centuries or thousands of
years earlier than the time of Moses, its meaning may
be altogether lost. It is a question whether we should
explain it from Hebrew at all. It may have originated
in a language in which it would bear an altogether dif
ferent meaning from what it would bear in Hebrew.
But even if we derived it from Hebrew, we have still
numerous possibilities. In form the word is a third
person singular, but it is uncertain whether it belongs to
the kal or the hiphil conjugation, that is to say, whether
it expresses the simple idea of the verb, or whether it is
a causative. For example, if we connect it with the verb
meaning to be, we are still uncertain whether it means
"he who is" or "he who causes to be." It is, however,
by no means certain that the name was derived from
the verb that means to be at all. It may be connected
with a verb which means "to fall." And here there
are two possible suggestions. The thought may be of
Yahweh as a storm-God who casts down rain and
lightning, snow and hail, upon the earth. This would
be in harmony with much that we find in the Old Testa
ment. In the revelation at Sinai we read that on the
morning of the third day "there were thunders and
lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the
voice of a trumpet exceeding loud," and a little later we

8 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
read, "And Mount Sinai was altogether on smoke,
because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the
smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and
the whole mount quaked greatly." When Yahweh
makes a covenant with Abraham we read, " And it came
to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark,
behold a smoking furnace, and a flaming torch that
passed between these pieces." In the Song of Deborah
we learn how when Yahweh came from His Edomite
home He was accompanied by storm and earthquake.
In the 1 8th Psalm the poet describes how Yahweh
came forth to deliver him. The passage is too long to
quote, but earthquake, fire and smoke, the wind and
darkness, the thick clouds that were dispersed at the
brightness of His presence, hailstones and coals of fire
and the fiery shafts of His lightning, are the accompani
ments of the theophany. Similarly, in the song of
Habakkuk we read how the appearance of Yahweh is
accompanied by the pestilence and the earthquake, the
lightning and the tempest. So it is characteristic that
when Yahweh answers Job it is out of the roaring of the
storm. When Elijah goes to seek Him at His ancient
seat of Horeb we are not surprised to be told of the
mighty wind that rent the mountains and broke the
rocks, of the earthquake and the fire, for it was Yahweh's
manner thus to manifest His presence. What is perhaps

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 9
more surprising is that the narrator should insist that
Yahweh was not in any of these elemental phenomena,
they were but the harbingers of His coming. It was in
the still small voice that He was revealed, or, to take the
literal rendering, " the sound of a gentle whisper." He
is represented as dwelling in the radiant light, shrouded
in thick darkness and hurling the lightning to its mark.
He rides swiftly upon the thunder-cloud and flies upon
the wings of the wind. When He comes forth to dis
comfit His enemies He takes His war-bow in His hand
and the lightning flashes are His fiery arrows, but when
the judgment has been executed He lays aside His bow
and sets it in the clouds, so that the rainbow is the token
that He is reconciled to man. Now all this evidence
forcibly suggests that the Israelites thought of Yahweh
as manifesting Himself especially in storm, so that the
interpretation of Yahweh as meaning one who casts down
the rain and snow, the hail and the lightning, to the
earth, finds no little support from the Old Testament
representations. Yet we must beware of describing
Him as a storm-God, since, as Robertson Smith has
pointed out, the Semites did not regard their deities as
presiding over separate departments of Nature. Others,
however, who also translate "He who causes to fall,"
think that the meaning is " overthrower " or "destroyer."
The thought is, then, that Yahweh overthrows cities or

,o THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
armies. No doubt this suggestion finds a measure of
support in some Old Testament passages, but it does
not grow out of them so naturally as the former. Others,
again, think that the word is connected with a verb
meaning " to breathe " or " to blow." The thought
would in that case be that He is a wind-God, who
might manifest Himself not only in the tempest, but in
the gentle rustling of trees, so that the sound of march
ing in the tops of the mulberry trees would suggest that
He had passed on to battle before His people. This,
however, is closely connected in essential meaning with
the conception of Yahweh as a storm-God.
If we connect the meaning with the verb " to be " we
have still several possible interpretations. We may take
it as a causative, hence some have found in it the mean
ing, " He who causes to be," that is, the Creator. The
verb, however, does not mean " to be " so much as " to
become" or "to come to pass," so that if we adopt
this view we should more probably explain the name to
mean " He who brings His purpose to pass," or " He
who accomplishes what He has promised." It is, how
ever, more probable, perhaps, that we should not treat
it as a causative, since in the words translated " I am,
that I am," and similarly in the phrase, "I am hath
sent me unto you," we have our oldest explanation of
the meaning of the term. Of course this does not

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION n
necessarily prove that such was the original meaning of
the term. It would be by no means unexampled in the
religion of Israel for an older term to be taken up and a
newer and a fuller meaning given to it. All that is in
tended is that this was the meaning given to the name
in the religion of revelation. But we are by no means at
the end of our quest when we have decided to adopt
this significance, for the meaning of the word translated
" I am " is itself quite uncertain. To us the most natural
suggestion of " I am" is the self-existent one. But the
Hebrew religion was not a religion of abstract speculation.
It did not concern itself with metaphysics, and such an
idea as the self-existent one would have been very
foreign to its mode of thought. It is more probable
that we should lay the emphasis on moral than on
metaphysical character. Moreover, the use of the im
perfect tense makes it probable that in accordance with
the general Hebrew idiom we should represent the
Hebrew by the English future, and instead of " I am,
that I am," translate " I will be what I will be." The
phrase then contains a great religious truth. Yahweh
does not define what He will be, since no human language
is capable of expressing all that He will prove to be to
His people. This is much more likely than any meta
physical truth to have been revealed to Israel, the strength
of whose genius lay on the religious rather than on the

12 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
speculative side. Accordingly we may conclude that
the sense which the word bore in Hebrew religion is
best interpreted for us in Exodus iii. 13-15, where God
reveals Himself as Yahweh and declares that His name
is " I will be what I will be." If so we ought to trans
late Yahweh not " He is," but " He will be." The word
is therefore incomplete and needs something to be sup
plied, but it is in the very incompleteness that the
religious suggestiveness largely resides. For it sets the
man who utters it thinking what Yahweh will be. He
may have gone into battle with the name of his God on
his lips meaning, " He will be with us." And indeed
in all the difficulties of life there would come to him
the great assurance, He will be all that I need, whatever
He has promised to be to His people and more than all
He has been able to promise.
From this survey it is clear that we cannot build with
any confidence on the meaning of the name Yahweh.
We should probably accept the view that the moral
character attributed to Yahweh from the earliest period
was the differentiating element which made possible the
subsequent high development. The presence of this
ethical element in the rehgion as founded by Moses is
disputed by some, and cannot be strictly proved. But
it is at least highly probable. It is thus that we best
can account for the ethical monotheism of the prophets :

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 13
it must have had its roots in the earliest history of the
religion. And this is confirmed by the fact that the
prophets themselves are conscious that they are not
innovators ; their conception of Yahweh agrees with that
held by Israel from the first. To prove the ethical nature
of Yahweh, scholars have often pointed to His close
association with the administration of justice. Budde
has recently challenged this view. He argues that while
morality may create law, law cannot create morality.
Further, Yahweh's function in this matter is not moral
but intellectual. He is called in, not to express His
will that the criminal should be punished, for that is
well understood. It is rather His duty, as one who
possesses Divine knowledge, to indicate by the oracle who
the criminal is. And similar oracles were given in other
religions, which yet did not become ethical religions.
Accordingly Budde, while asserting the ethical character
of the primitive religion of Israel, refuses to explain it
by the ethical conception formed of Yahweh. He argues
at length for the view, previously put forward by Stade,
that Yahweh was originally the God of the Kenites,
among whom Moses lived with Jethro the priest. In
spired with the conviction that Yahweh would rescue
Israel from Egypt, Moses induced his people to accept
Him as their God. They did so, and the Exodus was
successfully accomplished. Then at Sinai Israel entered

14 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
into covenant relations with its new Deity. Thus Israel
and the Kenites both worshipped the same Deity. But
the relation to Yahweh was altogether different in the
two cases. Yahweh was to the Kenites simply what
Chemosh was to Moab. The relationship between them
was purely natural. But in the case of Israel it was
otherwise. The God of another people and not their
own had delivered them, and they had freely chosen
this God to be theirs. They were bound to Him by
the closest ties of gratitude. Thus there was an ethical
element present in the relationship between Yahweh
and Israel, such as was to be found in the case of no
other people and its God, and in this relationship Budde
finds the secret of the ethical character of the religion
of Israel. His view, however, is open to criticism. It
is by no means certain that Yahweh was a new God to
the Hebrews in the time of Moses. It is true that both
the Pentateuchal documents commonly designated by
the symbols E and P represent the name of Yahweh as
unknown to their ancestors. But P is so late that its
evidence can hardly be taken into account, and against
E we can set the document known as J, which represents
the name as in use from the earliest period and as con
stantly employed by the patriarchs. Further, while E
represents the name Yahweh as unknown, it regards
Yahweh Himself as the God of the patriarchs, though

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 15
known to them as Elohim. And it may be questioned
whether Moses would have been more successful in
appealing to the Hebrews in the name of a hitherto un
known God than in telling them that the God of their
fathers had taken pity on their distress. That Sinai
was thought to be Yahweh's home is clear enough from
many passages, and that the Kenites were His worshippers
is by no means improbable. It is possible, however,
that He may have been worshipped by several tribes
in that neighbourhood, and that the ancestors of the
Hebrews who were delivered from Egypt may have been
among them. But whatever be the ultimate verdict on
these disputable points of Budde's theory, it is at any
rate clear that the relation the Hebrews sustained to
Yahweh was believed to rest on a free choice on His
part met with free acceptance on their own. He was their
God not by nature but by covenant. And the Exodus
assured them at once of His might and His good will,
and united them to Him by the strongest bonds of grati
tude. And when we inquire as to the truth of this
belief, we are safest even on the ground of history if we
share the conviction of Moses that we have to do with a
direct revelation made to him by God Himself. Thus
we have a cause adequate to the great tasks it accom
plished, the creation of a national consciousness, the
deliverance from Egypt, and the birth of the religion

16 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
of Israel. It was thus a real choice of Israel by God to
be the vehicle of His revelation.
How Yahweh was conceived in the earliest period of
Israel's religion we have little knowledge. The great
ness of His power had been proved by the deliverance
from Egypt, and this had equally manifested His favour
towards Israel. And since this relationship was for
Yahweh not a necessity of nature but an act of choice,
it must have led to a deeper consideration of His char
acter, and a more anxious desire to do His will. And
this all the more, because stress seems to have been
laid on the sterner side of His character., He dwelt on
Sinai, and manifested Himself especially in the thunder
storm. Although we should not speak of Him as a
storm-God, elemental phenomena are the usual ac
companiments of a theophany in the Old Testament.
Further, He is quick to resent and punish any violation
of His holiness; thus, the men of Beth-shemesh are
smitten for lack of reverence towards the ark, and
Uzzah for incautiously touching it. His action seems
at times to be regarded as unaccountable. No reason
is given why His wrath should be kindled against Israel
when He incited David to number the people. And in
I. Sam. xxvi. 19, David seems to think that Saul's per
secution of him may be due to Yahweh's similarly un-
motived prompting of Saul against him. It was natural

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 17
that Yahweh should delight in war. War was looked
upon as a sacred function, and warriors as consecrated
to the service of Yahweh. He bids His people go forth
to battle, puts their enemies to flight before them, often
pronounces the ban or decree of extermination upon
them. So much are Israel's wars His wars, that we
even read of the Book of the Wars of Yahweh. It
was a fortunate thing for the religion of Israel that no
goddess was conceived to stand by His side, for thus
occasion would have been given, as in so many other
cults, for the inrush of degrading immorality.
While Yahweh was originally thought of as resident
on His own mountain, He was not believed to be con
fined to it. He smote the Egyptians with plagues and
led forth the Hebrews, and afterwards fought for them
in Palestine, which soon came to be regarded as His
own proper home. Still, the other view long survived ;
we meet with it in the song of Deborah, and even Elijah
in his despondency goes to Horeb to find Him. Not
only was Yahweh conceived as possessing a local habita
tion, but corresponding to this an external form. In
one very anthropomorphic passage we read that Moses
and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders
of Israel went up the mountain and beheld God and did
eat and drink (Exod. xxiv. 9-1 1). Even in Exod. xxxiii.
20-23, where it is said that no man can see God's face

18 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
and live, Yahweh covers Moses with His hand while He
passes by him, and then removing His hand permits
him to see His back. How old the conception is that
Yahweh dwells in heaven is disputed. Some consider it
to be quite late, but it is found in passages that there
seems to be no reason for regarding as late. Of course,
we have no literary attestation for it so early as the
time of Moses, and it may be a later development. It
is, however, convenient to speak of it here. The refer
ence in Deborah's song to the stars from heaven fighting
against Sisera (Judges v. 20) should not, perhaps, be
pressed. But the references to Yahweh's coming down
to see the city and tower (Gen. xi. 5), to His raining
brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from
heaven (Gen. xix. 24), to the ladder which reached from
earth to heaven, with Yahweh standing at its head (Gen.
xxviii. 12), to Yahweh's descent on the summit of Mount
Sinai (Exod. xix. n, 20, xxxiv. 5), all testify that this
belief was held in Israel at a quite early period. At a
comparatively early period, also, we have Micaiah's vision
of Yahweh sitting on His throne with the host of heaven
standing by Him (I. Kings xxii. 19). Gunkel, who ad
duces these and other passages, says that the neigh
bouring peoples had this belief, and the Canaanites
certainly long before the Israelites ; it would be strange,
therefore, if it was not known to ancient Israel, though

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 19
it is true it became a prominent article of belief only in
the later period.
We are, however, on secure ground when we connect
with Moses the ark of Yahweh. It is possible, but by no
means certain, that this was older than the time of
Moses. It is highly probable that the earliest documents
of the Hexateuch contained a narrative of its construc
tion, though if so this has been displaced by the account
of P. It was a portable box of acacia wood, perhaps
without the golden plating or cherubim ascribed to it in
P. It was the most sacred object in ancient Israel, for
it was identified in the closest way with Yahweh Himself,
who was supposed to be actually present in it. Thus in
Num. x. 35, 36, we read that when the ark set forward
Moses said, " Rise up, Yahweh, and let Thine enemies be
scattered," and when it rested he said, " Return, Yahweh,
to the ten thousands of the thousands of Israel." The
whole story of the fortunes of the ark in the Books of
Samuel reflects the same conception. It is taken to the
field of battle, and inspires the Israelites with confidence
of victory, while the Philistines are dismayed at the
thought that God had come into the camp, and fight
with the courage of desperation. When the Philistines
have captured the ark it works them nothing but mischief.
When the men of Beth-Shemesh are smitten they say,
" Who can stand before Yahweh, this holy God ? and to

20 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
whom shall He go up from us?" clearly regarding
Yahweh Himself as present in the ark. On a later
occasion Yahweh is said to have broken forth upon
Uzzah, where also there is the idea of Yahweh's energy as
resident in the ark. So David's dancing before the ark
is spoken of as a dancing before Yahweh. In the same
way the wonder-working power of the ark at the crossing
of the Jordan and the capture of Jericho is to be
explained. What, then, constituted the peculiar sanctity
of the ark, and its identification with Yahweh ? A box
has ordinarily no importance in itself; its importance
consists in what it contains. The explanation that the
sanctity of the ark consisted in the fact that it contained
the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were
written is unsatisfactory. For this does not explain the
universal belief of the ancient Hebrews that the ark was
a dwelling-place of Yahweh Himself. Many scholars
believe that the ark contained one or two sacred stones,
perhaps meteoric in origin, in which Yahweh's presence
was supposed to be manifested. Such a survival of
fetishism would be parallel to Mohammed's incorpora
tion in his religion of the Black Stone of the Kaaba.
This would be in harmony with the importance attached
to sacred stones in Semitic religion and in the religion
of the Hebrews ; it would account for the identification
of the ark with Yahweh, and for the substitution of the

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 21
theory that the stones were the tables of the Law, when
the original gross conception could no longer be
harmonised with more refined religious sentiment. On
the other hand it lies open to the objection that it is
difficult to think of Moses as countenancing such a
superstition, and placing it in the centre of the religion.
Moreover, while the evidence for the view that the
stones were the tables of the Law is late (Deut. x. 1-5),
it may possibly rest on the older sources. The later
history of the ark is quite obscure. The prophets ignore
it as a rule, and Jer. iii. 16 speaks of the time when it
shall no more be mentioned or remembered. It may
have disappeared before the destruction of the Temple by
Nebuchadnezzar, perhaps captured in some invasion, or
fallen to pieces through age. It is not mentioned among
the Temple spoils carried to Babylon, and was not in the
Second Temple. A difficulty is raised by the double
conception that Yahweh dwelt in Sinai and that He
resided in the ark. It was solved by the statement that
while Yahweh Himself would not, in consequence of the
sin of Israel, go with them, He promised that His Angel
or His Presence, not quite to be identified with Yahweh,
but yet not readily distinguishable from Him, should go
with them, and, following this, we have the instruction
to Moses to make the ark, the intention, no doubt, being
thus to secure the fulfilment of Yahweh's promise. The

22 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
Tent of Meeting pitched outside the camp, of which
Joshua was the keeper, was apparently the home of the
ark, to which Moses went to consult Yahweh.
This brings us to the question whether we are justi
fied in ascribing the Decalogue in Exod. xx. to Moses.
We have another version in Deut. v. characterised by
important differences. These make it unlikely that the
present form in either of these chapters can be due to
Moses. But they may be reasonably accounted for by
the supposition of subsequent expansion of originally
very brief commandments. That they were brief is sug
gested by the title, " The Ten Words," which is given to
them. A much more serious difficulty is created by the
apparent existence of another Decalogue in Exod. xxxiv.
17-26 (now expanded into twelve commandments)
quite different from that in Exod. xx. Yet apart from the
prohibition of images in general, not merely of molten
images, the latter is not less primitive than the former.
In Exod. xxxiv. 27, 28, we read* " And Yahweh said unto
Moses, Write thou these words, for after the tenor of
these words I have made a covenant with thee and with
Israel. And he was there with Yahweh forty days and
forty nights ; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water.
And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant,
the ten words." The natural sense of this passage
is that Moses wrote on the tables of stone ten com-

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION 23
mandments which had just been given him. When we
examine what immediately precedes we can without
difficulty disengage twelve commandments ; accordingly
if a Decalogue originally stood here it has been ex
panded by the insertion of two additional command
ments. The original collection has been plausibly
restored as follows : —
1. Thou shalt worship no other God.
2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep.
4. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day
thou shalt rest.
5. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks ;
6. And the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of any sacrifice with
unleavened bread.
8. The sacrifice of the Passover shall not be left until
the morning.
9. The first of the firstfruits of thy ground shalt thou
bring unto the house of Yahweh thy God.
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.
This Decalogue is assigned by scholars to J ; the Deca
logue in Exod. xx. is assigned to E. The majority of
critics regard J as the older document, and on that
ground, as well as on account of its less advanced theo-

24 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
logical and ethical character, they consider j's Decalogue
to be the earlier. But even in it we have regulations
which are suited only to a settled people practising
agriculture. The prohibition of molten images is not
necessarily to be taken as the prohibition of images alto
gether, so that there is less difficulty in recognising the
Mosaic origin of this commandment than that of the
more general prohibition of images in E's Decalogue.
The possibility, however, may be left open that originally
J possessed the same version of the Decalogue as E, and
that the editor, when he combined the two documents,
struck this out as unnecessary repetition, inserting the
ritual precepts of Exod. xxxiv. 17-26 in its place.
Apart from the prohibition of images, there is less in
E's Decalogue in its brief primitive form to conflict with
Mosaic origin than in the Decalogue assigned to J. It
does not necessarily involve so advanced an ethical
standpoint as to force us to derive it from the teaching
of the prophets. We are apt under the conditions
through which we approach its precepts to read more
into it than it conveyed to those who first received it.
Its commandments and prohibitions were all directed
against trespass on the rights of God or one's neighbour.
But we may recognise the Providence of God in that
the Decalogue, while designed to guide men at a com
paratively low level, yet was so formulated that later

THE RISE OF THE RELIGION -25
generations found it an adequate compendium of their
religious and moral duties. Yet is it more needful for
us to be reminded that we must not overrate its value.
The place it has held in the presentation of Christianity
by the Church cannot be reconciled with the New Testa
ment attitude to the Law. And even within the Old
Testament itself it is surpassed by much in the later
writers. None of the Codes of Law in the Pentateuch can be
attributed to Moses. This is clear from the fact that
even the earliest presupposes a people settled in Palestine
and engaged in agriculture. But we need not doubt that
some of the laws embodied in these Codes date from his
time. Moses is associated in Hebrew tradition with the
giving of the Law, and the position he held as judge in
volved the formulating of elementary principles of justice
between man and man, such as we find in the oldest
legislation. The acceptance of Yahweh as the national
God would also necessitate some simple regulation as to
the proper modes to be adopted in worshipping Him.
In both of these respects Moses drew on the traditional
customs of the Semitic peoples. We find many elements
in Hebrew ritual derived from the common Semitic body
of ceremonial, and many of the regulations prescribed
even in the latest document must be very old. And
similarly with ruvil law. Recently there has been dis-

26 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
covered the Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon
(date ?B.c. 1900). This exhibits striking similarities
with the Book of the Covenant, through it contemplates
a much more advanced and complex civilisation. The
relations between the two are not clear, and hasty and
far-reaching theories on this subject are to be deprecated.
One thing is clear, that Babylonian and Hebrew Codes
alike incorporate elements of immemorial antiquity.

CHAPTER II
THE SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN AND
TRANSFORMATION OF THE RELIGION
That the Hebrews did not first become worshippers
of Yahweh after they entered Palestine is proved not
simply by the fact that they made good their foothold
in the land under the inspiring conviction that they
fought under His banner, but especially by the fact
that the religion of Yahweh was a wilderness religion,
and that the settlement in Canaan constituted an ordeal
for it of the most critical kind. It had the most im
portant consequences for nation and religion alike. It
is the imperishable glory of Moses that he created the
nation and based its national on its religious conscious
ness. The unity of Israel was guaranteed by the con
viction that it had been called by Yahweh to be a
people peculiarly His own. The national unity and
the religious consciousness were alike affected by the
settlement in Canaan. Were the common impression
correct, that the Hebrews poured into Canaan as a
mighty undivided host and swept the inhabitants away

28 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
by their irresistible force, the history of nation and
religion alike would have been very different from what
they actually were. But the impression derived from
the Book of Joshua must be rectified by the old and
valuable narrative preserved in the first chapter of
Judges and related passages in the Book of Joshua
itself, and by numerous other passages in the early
historical sources. Whatever may have been done by
united effort in defeating the Canaanites, it is clear that
most was left to the action of individual tribes. And
they were by no means always successful. For a long
time they could gain little firm foothold in the plains ;
it was in the mountainous districts that they were best
able to establish themselves. And here they fell appa
rently into three isolated groups. In the south there
was Judah with the remnant of Simeon, in the centre
the Rachel tribes, and in the north Issachar, Zebulun,
Naphtali, and Asher. At an early period Dan, unable
to maintain its position in the south, came for the most
part north and captured Laish. Reuben and Gad
remained on the east of the Jordan. In this way the
settlement in Canaan profoundly affected the political
life of Israel. The national unity, which Moses had
created, gave way under the stress of the new con
ditions. The song of Deborah, which is one of the
oldest, perhaps the oldest poem in the Old Testament,

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 29
and of the utmost historical value, though obscure in
details and corrupt in text, celebrates the sole instance
known to us of united action on the part of several
tribes. Yet various tribes are reproached for holding
aloof, although they are reckoned as belonging to Israel.
But Judah is not even mentioned, as if it were not part
of Israel. It is quite clear from these facts that the
nation was in danger of complete disintegration. And
since nation and religion were inseparably united the
break-up of the nation would have meant the probable
disappearance of the religion. Strictly speaking, there
was no Hebrew nation during this period, but only a
loose agglomeration of tribes. Nevertheless these tribes
had the memories of Egyptian oppression and their
wonderful deliverance by Yahweh to keep alive their
devotion to Him, and through it their sense of brother
hood. The song of Deborah itself reveals with what
intensity the flame lit by Moses glowed in the poet's
heart, and its passionate expression of patriotism and
religion shows that both still survived in Israel, in spite
of all the forces which conspired to suppress them.
The sense of unity, however, never came to adequate
expression, and normally it fell far short of what was
realised for one splendid triumph over Sisera and his
host. While the religion was thus threatened from the

30 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
political side, it was exposed directly to a much more
serious danger. Far from extirpating the Canaanites,
the Hebrews had to settle down with them, and they
did not always have the upper hand. Through alliance
and intermarriage the two peoples began to amalgamate.
Quite apart from this, the Hebrews had taken one of
the most momentous steps in their history. From being
a pastoral they became largely an agricultural people.
It was from the Canaanites that they had to learn how
to till the soil and secure bountiful harvests. The
cultivation of the olive and the vine, in particular,
demands advanced knowledge and a settled civilisation.
Lore of this kind implied to the ancients much more
than it would to us. Fertility was regarded as the gift
of the local Baalim, or divine powers which haunted
each fruitful district, and they had from time immemorial
been worshipped with' rites designed to win from them
their blessing on the crops. It was natural, then, that
when they learnt the art of agriculture the Hebrews
should learn and practise the religious rites on which
its success depended. This worship might be directed
to the Baalim, or it might be offered to Yahweh
Himself. In the first instance it is probable that the
Baalim were its recipients. So the Book of Judges tells
us. It is true that the cycle of apostasy, oppression,
repentance, and deliverance found by the editor in the

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 31
history really presents us with a selection of facts fitted
into a systematic plan rather than with a complete
history. His aim was to edify his reader, and he chose
those incidents which served to point his moral. But
when this is fully allowed for, we may recognise that
worship of the Baalim was present in Israel. This is
confirmed by Hosea, who speaks of the people as
attributing to them the gift of the corn and wine and
oil. And in the period when Yahweh was regarded
as a wilderness deity, living on Sinai, it was not probable
that the gift of the fruits of the earth would be ascribed
to Him, especially while Palestine remained largely in
possession of the Canaanites. Their tenure of the
more fertile districts favoured the worship of the Baalim.
It was full of danger. The cult of the powers of
fertility shows a constant tendency to slide into re
pulsive immorality. It is notorious that with the
Canaanites it did so. It can hardly have failed to be
disastrous to Israel in the same way, but the ethical
character of its own religion must have protected it
from the worst excesses. In course of time, however,
Yahweh came to be regarded as the lord of Palestine.
It thus became easy for the rites connected with agricul
ture to be directed to Him, and all the more so since
He was Himself spoken of as a Baal or lord, a usage
in itself quite innocent, but leading to the assimilation

32

THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL

of Him to the Canaanite Baalim. When, however,
Yahweh was worshipped as the giver of fertility the
peril was very great that His worship should be con
taminated by the impurity of the rites, and the whole
conception of His character degraded. It is, therefore,
not surprising that some rejected the whole agricultural
life as incompatible with loyalty to Yahweh, and the
pure practice of His religion. The Nazirites have
been thought by some scholars to represent this type
of strict Yahweh worshippers. It is, however, far from
clear that this can be made out. We cannot identify
the later Naziritism of the Priestly Code, which con
templated simply a temporary vow, with the lifelong
Naziritism exemplified in the cases of Samson and
Samuel. The temporary Nazirite was defiled by touch
of a dead body, but Samson was constantly brought
into contact with them, while Samuel hewed Agag in
pieces before Yahweh. Each, it is true, kept the hair
uncut while he remained a Nazirite. But the temporary
Nazirite did not cut it, because it was dedicated to
Yahweh and was to be offered to Him as a sacrifice
at the termination of the vow. The lifelong Nazirite
in the nature of the case could never make this sacrifice
to Yahweh, and the preservation of the hair seems not
to have been due to the dedication of it to Yahweh,
but to the feeling that the loss of it robbed a man of

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 33
an integral part of his personality. This is especially
clear in the case of Samson. His strength resides in
the hair; it may not be cut on pain of his becoming
weak. The treatment of the hair rests, then, on different
principles in the two cases, and both for the dedication
to the Deity culminating in a sacrifice of the hair, and
for the preservation of it as a part of the person which
cannot be taken away without serious loss, we have
analogies among many peoples. It is probable that
the similarity in the treatment of the hair led to the
transference of the name from the early permanent to
the post-exilic temporary vow. This distinction between
the two types is important for its bearing on the question
whether the early Nazirites repudiated the agricultural
life. This view is supported by the prohibition of wine,
wine being pre-eminently the gift of the Baalim. But
the taboo on the vine with all its products is imposed
on the temporary Nazirites. We are far from certain
that it was so with the permanent Nazirites. It is true
that Amos ii. 12, "Ye gave the Nazirites wine to drink,"
naturally suggests that wine was forbidden to them,
though the next clause, " and commanded the prophets,
saying, Prophesy not," compared with Isaiah xxviii. 7,
might favour the interpretation, You gave the Nazirites
wine to make them incapable of fulfilling their sacred
functions. It seems, however, probable that in the
c

34 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
time of Amos wine was forbidden to the Nazirites.
The prohibition of strong drink and unclean food, and
any food that came from the vine, to Samson's mother
seems to carry it back to his time, though the command
to the mother is not necessarily binding on the son.
But in any case it is difficult to think of Samson as
himself abstaining from wine at the drinking feast he
gave on the occasion of his wedding. We cannot, then,
safely regard the Nazirites as representatives of the
belief that the agricultural life involved disloyalty to
Yahweh, and as expressing their protest in a refusal to
drink wine. It is probable, however, that this position
was actually taken by the Rechabites. In Jer. xxxv.
the Rechabites refuse to drink wine because their
ancestor, Jonadab the son of Rechab, had bidden them
drink no wine, build no houses, sow no seed, plant
no vineyards nor possess them, but dwell in tents. It
is clear from this that they renounced agriculture and
a settled life altogether, and lived as nomads. Jonadab
is known , to us as a hearty sympathiser with the
atrocities committed by Jehu under cover of zeal for
Yahweh. We may, therefore, see in him a fanatical
devotee of Yahweh, who rejected the agricultural life as
involving unfaithfulness to Him. It is clear that while
this attitude was in a measure justified by the popular
religion, it meant the purchase of religious purity with

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 35
a very heavy price. For it implied nothing short of a
renunciation of civilisation with all its blessings. The
people generally took over the culture and civilisation
of the Canaanites, without intentional unfaithfulness to
Yahweh, even when they worshipped the local Baalim
side by side with their national God. Hosea condemned
the whole view that the Baalim were the givers of the
corn and wine and oil, and ascribed all these blessings
to Yahweh. In this way he threw the sanctions of the
pure and lofty prophetic religion over civilisation, and
thus performed a service of inestimable value. Yet he
was so conscious of the perils which the agricultural life
brought to religion, that he looked for Israel's reform to
come through return to the desert, and only after she
has in this way returned to Yahweh does He restore to
her the corn and wine and oil.
Three agricultural feasts are prescribed in the earliest
legislation. It is highly probable that these were
adopted from the Canaanites into the religion of Yahweh.
The first was the feast of unleavened bread, when the
corn was first cut in the spring and the first-fruits were
offered. Seven weeks later, at the end 'of harvest, the
second feast was celebrated, the harvest festival, or feast
of weeks. In the autumn there was the feast of taber
nacles, or the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
While in the earliest legislation all three stand on the

36 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
same level, the historical books mention the last only,
and speak of it as " the feast " or " the feast of Yahweh,"
and probably it was the most important of the three.
There was no sanctuary with an exclusive legitimacy
in the sense that all other sanctuaries were an infringe
ment of its monopoly. No doubt the home of the ark
enjoyed great prestige, but the places of worship were
innumerable. The sanctuaries at the Bamoth or high
places would usually be rude and primitive structures,
but there were others, such as those at Bethel or
Beersheba, of more than local repute, which attracted
worshippers from other places in large numbers. The
sanctity of the high places dated in many instances from
Canaanite times ; the earlier documents of Genesis
connect it frequently with revelations of God to the
patriarchs. There were, no doubt, priests at the larger shrines.
While it may be taken for granted that nothing was
known till long after of any exclusion from the priestly
office of all members of the tribe of Levi save the
descendants of Aaron, it is not clear what was the
precise relation of the Levites to the priesthood.
Apparently Simeon and Levi were nearly exterminated
in consequence of a treacherous attack on Shechem
(Gen. xxxiv., xlix. 5-7). Owing, perhaps, to the fact
that Moses had been aLevite, the scattered, wandering

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 37
members of the tribe naturally turned to the priesthood
for a living. In the family and clan of Moses the
priestly tradition as to the service of Yahweh would be
preserved, and a Levite would be preferred by those in
search of a priest. The narrative in Judges xvii., xviii. is
most instructive on this point. Micah, an Ephraimite,
made his son priest of a private sanctuary he had estab
lished, and therefore the priesthood was not confined to
the Levites. Later, however, a Levite wandering from
Bethlehem to find a situation is engaged by Micah as
his priest, and Micah is sure that Yahweh will do him
good because he has a Levite for a priest. From this it
is clear that while a non-Levite might become a priest,
a Levite was greatly preferred. This Levite was the
grandson of Moses, and having stolen Micah's images
he accompanied the Danites to Laish, and there founded
the sanctuary and priesthood of Dan. It is likely that
other members of the tribe similarly became priests, and
even such priests as were not of the tribe of Levi would
probably in course of time style themselves Levites.
The duties of the priests were varied and important.
They had the care of the ritual observances and sacrifices.
since they knew the correct way in which Yahweh
should be worshipped. They were also constantly
consulted by those who wished to know the Divine will,
or to ascertain if an enterprise would have a successful

38 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
issue. In giving oracles of this kind they often used
mechanical means, such as the lot. One of their most
important functions was that of pronouncing judgment.
Although Budde is correct in regarding this as part
of the previously named duty of giving oracles, yet it
was not the mere declaration of the criminal's identity
that constituted the whole of their work. Malachi
sketches a lofty ideal of the priests' duty (ii. 1-9), and
though he is a post-exilic writer the fact that Hosea
confirms this (iv. 1-10), in his denunciation of their
unfaithfulness to the ideal, warrants us in regarding it as
recognised by priest and people alike. It was their
function to declare that knowledge for lack of which the
people were perishing. This knowledge, as we see from
Hosea, was ethical in character. And this function
deepened the ethical character of the religion and
emphasised the morality of Israel's God. In so doing
it quickened the movement towards universalism. Other
religions were tribal or national, their rites known
exclusively to the initiated, the men of the tribe. They
bound men into a close corporation, made them sectarian
and exclusive, and thus worked against universalism.
But moral principles work in the opposite direction.
They are not the property of a nation or a clan, but
express the common duties of man to man, and are
universal in their obligation. A religion which incor-

SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN 39
porates them into itself and gives them its sanction
is, even in spite of itself, leavened inevitably though
perhaps slowly with universalism. If there are different
gods of varying character, it is natural to infer that
there are different standards of right and wrong. But
when it was recognised that the distinction of right and
wrong was an absolute distinction, independent of time
or place or people, a new conception would arise. If
right conduct was of universal validity and obligation,
and if moral law was the expression of the Divine
will, then monotheism followed. For in that case one
standard of morality implied one God.
Early Hebrew sacrifice was essentially a clan- feast, in
which the worshippers had festive communion with each
other and their God. Only such animals as were used
for food were sacrificed. The idea of a meal dominates
the ritual. The part of the victim given to God is
cooked, just as that eaten by the worshippers. The
usual accompaniments of a meal are added — bread, wine,
oil, and salt. It was a popular notion that wine cheered
gods as well as men. Drunkenness was not unknown,
and even so late as Deuteronomy the standing expres
sion for a sacrifice is " to eat and drink before Yahweh."
The offerings were in the later ritual spoken of as the
bread of God. In the table of shewbread we have a
survival of the custom of spreading a table for the Deity.

40 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
First-fruits and other vegetable offerings were of the
nature of tribute to God for the use of the fertile soil.
Human sacrifice was apparently not unknown. We
should probably interpret the story of Jephthah's daughter
in this sense, and the story of the sacrifice of Isaac seems
to attest the feeling that such a sacrifice was not regarded
as out of the question. It was probably, however, quite
rare in the early period. It became more frequent at a
later time, in the gloomier state of feeling caused by the
break-up of the smaller states in conflict with Assyria
and Babylonia.

CHAPTER III
FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA
The disintegration of the nation, which has already
been described, made it impossible for the Hebrews
successfully to resist the Philistines. It was their abject
failure here that stung them at last into action. And
as we should expect, we find religion and patriotism
going hand in hand. For it is at this juncture that
the prophets emerge into the clear light of history, and
the monarchy is established, while Saul forms a signifi
cant link between the two elements. These prophets,
who resembled the dancing dervishes of a later day,
were probably zealous devotees of Yahweh, and incited
the people to serve Him more faithfully. They may, as
Budde thinks, have reflected on the double fact that
Israel was under the Philistine yoke, and that the for
tunes of the ark had proved that Yahweh was mightier
than the Philistines, and have reached the conclusion
that their evil plight was due not to the weakness but
the anger of their God. If this conclusion were true,
then the remedy lay in fuller devotion to Him. And

42 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
this naturally had its political aspect. The zeal of the
prophets for Yahweh was expressed in this, that they
kindled in the breasts of their countrymen the flame of
patriotism and revolt. They were patriots in so far as the
feeling had taken possession of them that Israel ought
to be free. They had felt the bitterness of the foreign
yoke, and had set themselves to stimulate resistance and
prepare for a revolt. And this patriotism could not be
other than religious, for it is especially true of Israel
that the religious and the national were inseparably
associated. The programme of the early prophets pro
bably expressed two convictions, that Israel should be
free, and that more zeal should be shown in the worship
of Yahweh. Apparently the older seers attached them
selves to the prophets. They would bring the light of
cooler reason, and would catch the glow of enthusiasm
and the patriotic interest in the fortunes of Israel, rather
than in the more personal and professional subjects that
had hitherto engaged their attention.
The prophets impressed their countrymen by their
abnormal physical and psychical conditions. Thus they
were stimulated by music, and their ecstasy suggested to
many that they were mad. Their enthusiasm was con
tagious, as we see from the story of Saul and the
messengers whom he sent to capture David. Whether
prophecy was borrowed from the Canaanites we cannot

FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA 43
say. We do not know of Canaanite prophets. Those
who confronted Elijah on Carmel were Phoenicians.
The character of prophecy will become clear as we
proceed. We shall watch its transformation as it emerged
from the lower type which meets us in the time of Saul
till it reaches the wonderful heights attained by an Amos
or a Jeremiah. Here it will be enough to mention a
few salient points. The prophets were preachers who
delivered the message of God to the nation. It was
their aim to regenerate social conditions, and bring them
into harmony with God's will. This involved an
attitude to both internal and foreign politics. They
spoke to their own age, and so far as they dealt with the
future it was with a future which sprang directly out of
the present. With what lay behind their own age they
concerned themselves but little. They were sensitive to
events which were soon to happen, because they had
hearkened in the council of God. They were poets,
and must be read as such. We may be betrayed into
many misunderstandings if we insist on a too prosaic
literalism. The establishment of the monarchy was a great
advance. It gave to the disorganised and isolated tribes.
a rallying-point and centre of unity. Saul, who at the
beginning of his career became a prophet, was a zealous
devotee of Yahweh, as several incidents show, and he

44 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
was also the patriot who snapped the Philistine yoke.
His prestige was much increased by his successful
campaigns, in which he was greatly indebted to David's
military genius. His jealousy of David, magnified no
doubt by the insanity to which in his later years he fell
a victim, cost him his ablest general, and he died,
disastrously defeated by the Philistines. A division
of the kingdom now took place. Judah, which had been
loosely attached to Israel, made David king, while
Ishbaal held his father's position east of Jordan. Both
kingdoms were probably under Philistine suzerainty.
David at last secured undivided sovereignty, regained the
independence of Israel, and began a series of successful
campaigns, which won for him a large and powerful
kingdom. It was an epoch-making event when he
captured Jerusalem, made it his capital, and installed
the ark there, as we can see when we remember what
Jerusalem has been in the religious history of the world.
Although David kept teraphim in his house, and his
religious ideas were so crude that he regarded expulsion
from the inheritance of Yahweh as tantamount to a com
mand to go and serve other gods (I. Sam. xxvi. 19), he was
unquestionably an ardent worshipper of Yahweh, whose
prestige had been so increased by his victories. Solomon
had no inclination to war, and his foreign policy is open
to effective criticism. The tendency to disruption,

FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA 45
which had been present in David's reign, grew stronger
under Solomon, and was held in check only while he
lived. He governed Israel in the interests of Judah and
Jerusalem. He exacted forced labour from the other
tribes to make his capital splendid, to build his palace
and his temple. Revolt thus became inevitable, if no
change toward an equitable policy were introduced and
the undue favouritism to Judah did not cease. As
Rehoboam declared his intention of increasing the
burdens of the other tribes, the northern kingdom was
established. It soon gained preponderating power, and
became much the stronger and more splendid of the
two. Jeroboam imitated the example of Solomon, by
trying to rival the splendour of the royal temple at
Jerusalem. Though Yahweh was worshipped under the
form of a bull, there was in this no conscious apostasy.
We know very little about the history of the prophets
during the period from David to Ahab. We may
suppose that the companies of prophets continued to
exist, and the fact that Amos is master of a technical
religious vocabulary suggests that in the meantime the
work of the prophets had continued, so that when Amos
appeared he found the prophetic speech ready formed for
his use.
They emerge into prominence again during the-
dynasty of Omri. The political situation changed with

46 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
his accession in a way that disastrously affected the
religion. He strengthened the northern kingdom by an
alliance with Tyre, while his son Ahab married Jezebel,
the daughter of the Tyrian king. In this way the
worship of Melkart, the Baal of Tyre, was introduced
into Israel, for political alliance often carried with it in
antiquity the mutual adoption by each party of the
worships of the other. But this was in radical antagonism
to the fundamental character of the genuine religion of
Israel. It was not a question here of the worship of
family deities, which might easily exist alongside of the
worship of Yahweh without any sense that it trenched
•on His exclusive domain ; but it was the question of
.admitting a foreign deity to stand by the side of Israel's
God. And although it was not the intention that
Melkart should be a rival to Yahweh, but rather that
the two deities should stand in friendship side by side,
it was felt by many that this was an intolerable innova
tion. In his despondency, when he thought himself to
be the only true worshipper of Yahweh, Elijah was told
that seven thousand had not bowed the knee to the Baal.
But it was in Elijah that their dumb protest found
articulate expression. He clearly recognised that the
true formula was not Yahweh and Melkart, but Yahweh
or Melkart ; his ruling conviction was that the two were
mutually exclusive; the people must choose between

FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA 47
them, for Yahweh would tolerate no companion or rival.
But while Elijah was the defender of the sole right of
Yahweh to be the God of Israel, he denounced with
equal passion the judicial murder of Naboth. In him
we see religion and morality inextricably blended.
Whether he had formulated a belief that Yahweh was
the only God we do not know. Nor is the question of
importance. For what the crisis demanded was not a
speculative belief. It was that, whether other gods
existed or no, Israel was Yahweh's people, and should
serve Him alone. But this service was not completely
rendered in acts of worship; it included as essential
elements the fulfilment of the common duties of man to
man, especially justice and the avoidance of oppression.
But Elijah was not the only true prophet of that time,
though incomparably the greatest. Just before the
battle in which Ahab fell, we find him consulting four
hundred prophets, who, one and all, prophesy success.
Jehoshaphat is struck with their suspicious unanimity,
and asks if there is no other prophet. Ahab admits
that there is Micaiah, but he hates him because he
always prophesies evil. The messenger who fetches
him counsels him to speak as the others have spoken,
but he replies that he will speak what Yahweh says to
him. When he comes to the king he sarcastically bids
him go, for he will prosper. Then, on the king's adjura-

48 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
tion that he shall speak the truth, he tells him that
Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouth of the
prophets, to lure Ahab to his ruin. Here we have the
first instance of a phenomenon that in later times
became of great importance, the distinction between the
false prophets and the true. The false are the courtier
prophets, who speak smooth things, which will flatter
the prejudices of their hearers, or secure gain for them
selves. Over against them stand the true prophets, of
whom Micaiah is the type, who speak the word of
Yahweh without regard to its pleasant sound. Un
fortunately it seems to have been the case during the
pre-exilic period that the false prophets were in a majority,
often in an overwhelming majority. Probably it was the
members of the prophetic guilds — the official prophets, so
to speak — who had settled down to repeat such things as
would please their hearers. They stood in the official
prophetic succession. But the future rested with those
who belonged to no official order, and could claim no
human -sanction for their message, but, conscious of
their own immediate call and inspiration, spoke with
undaunted boldness the truths which God Himself had
revealed to them in the experience of their hearts. Yet
we must not be unjust to those whom we must call false
prophets. It is not likely that they were to any great
extent conscious impostors. In some cases, no doubt,

FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA 49
they were blinded by self-interest, in others by a mis
taken patriotism, or by a religious conservatism that led
them to cling to doctrines or rites, which the higher
religion of their time had left behind.
The labours of Elijah achieved but little during his
lifetime : the accomplishment of his ideals he left as a
legacy to his successors. At the bidding of Elisha, Jehu
overthrew the dynasty of Ahab, and extirpated the
worship of Melkart. The revolution which placed him
on the throne meant, from a religious point of view, the
exclusion of a foreign cult from Israel. Henceforth it
was burned into the consciousness of the nation that
Yahweh was a jealous God, who would brook no divided
allegiance. Whether beyond this there was any im
provement may be questioned. The new dynasty was
for a long time less powerful than that which it had
supplanted. The political fortunes of Israel grew darker
and darker. Jehu and his earlier successors fared much
more disastrously than Ahab in the Syrian wars, and
speedily lost, and far more than lost, the ground which
he had gained. The desperate extremities to which
Israel was reduced may have chastened its conduct and
purified its belief. When it seemed as if all hope was
lost, deliverance came through Assyria. The great
empire had exhausted the strength of Syria. Joash and
Jeroboam II. were able to turn the tide against her.

50 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
They regained what she had wrested from Israel and
added new territory to the northern kingdom. Assyria
sank into a condition of lethargy, so that no trouble was
felt from her during the long period in which Israel con
solidated her conquests and reached a pitch of prosperity
such as she had not enjoyed since the reign of Solomon.
The national life expanded, and wealth enormously in
creased. Externally all seemed well. Syria, the old
rival of Israel, was at last humbled. Assyria, the
dreaded military empire, had come into but fleeting
contact with Israel, and its inactivity quickly caused the
terror of it to be forgotten by a people which had risen
so rapidly to the zenith of its power. Yet a clear-sighted
observer could hardly fail to recognise that, after no long
interval, Assyria would resume her march of conquest,
and Israel would have to fight or submit. And beneath
the surface the internal condition of Israel was far from
satisfactory. The best strength of the nation had been
drained from it in the long struggle with Syria. The
sturdy, virtuous peasants who lived and laboured on the
small homesteads they had inherited from their ancestors
had largely disappeared. Wealth increased, but was
accumulated in comparatively few hands. The poor
grew still poorer ; what little they possessed was often
filched from them, and the law-courts gave them no
redress against oppression and injustice. The wealth

FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA 51
wrung from these hapless victims was lavished in riotous
living, so that the economic progress of the country was
retarded by unproductive expenditure, while luxury sapped
the character of the ruling classes. And this was all the
more hateful that ruthless oppression and shameless vice
were combined with fervent and punctilious performance
of religious ceremonies. The dark picture will come
before us in fuller detail as we proceed to study the
early canonical prophets, and observe how it excited the
scorching indignation of Amos and the heart-breaking
sorrow of Hosea, and filled them with the foreboding
of swift judgment at Yahweh's hands.

CHAPTER IV
AMOS AND HOSEA
Two of our canonical prophets, Amos and Hosea,
worked in the northern kingdom, though Amos was a
native of Judah. The earlier prophets had for the most
part been content to utter the spoken word, and leave it
to chance whether it was recorded or not. But from
Amos onwards we have a succession of writing prophets,
who not only spoke the prophetic word, but enshrined
it in a permanent form. We do not know what led
them to supplement oral by written prophecy, whether to
show the truth of their predictions by leaving them in a
form whjch enabled them to be tested by the event, or
whether the opposition they excited led them to commit
to writing what they were forbidden to speak.
Amos was a native of Tekoa, a little town six miles
south of Bethlehem, on the edge of the wilderness. He
was a shepherd and a dresser of sycomore trees, the
fruit of which was coarse, and was used only by the
poorest people. He was not a member of one of the
prophetic guilds. He had come from Judah under

AMOS AND HOSEA 53
direct Divine impulse to announce the impending de
struction of the northern kingdom. His utterances at
the royal sanctuary of Bethel created such a sensation
that Amaziah the priest complained to Jeroboam II.
that his prophecies were treasonable, and bade the
prophet himself return to Judah. The date of Amos is
uncertain, but probably it was about 760 B.C.
He came to a society morally rotten and more than
ripe for judgment. Material prosperity had sapped the
integrity of the nation. Life had become for the rich
very luxurious, and with the contempt of a hardy
countryman for the self-indulgent dwellers in palaces,
Amos tells of the summer and winter houses sumptu
ously furnished with silk and ivory, of the idle songs
sung to the sound of the harp, of the musical instruments
invented by the revellers. He describes their banquets,
for which the choicest foods were prepared, at which,
instead of sitting, they had adopted the fashion of
reclining; their drunkenness, so abandoned that they
drank their wine out of bowls rather than out of cups ;
the costly ointments with which they were anointed.
In these revels the proud ladies of Samaria, as well as
their husbands, shared. But there are graver sins than
these, which do not merely excite the prophet's scornful
disgust, but kindle his flaming indignation. These were
the terrible social wrongs inflicted on the poor by the

54 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
rich. Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb reflects only
too truly the constant relations between rich and poor in
the East, and social wrongs are continually referred to
by the prophets. Luxury was costly, and much of the
cost of providing it was wrung from the poor. Amos
describes how the rich store up violence and robbery in
their palaces, oppress the poor and crush the needy, sell
the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes.
While the rich rob and oppress the poor, the merchants
cheat them with false weights and measures. Another
constant feature in Oriental society meets us in Amos,
as in many other prophets. It was very difficult for the
poor to secure from the judges redress against their
oppressors. Justice was perverted by bribery, and the
needy were turned aside from their right.
Their flagrant crimes did not prevent them from being
very religious. They were punctilious in bringing their
tithes, they were lavish of burnt offerings, meal offerings,
and peace offerings. A splendid worship went on, with
costly sacrifices and feasts and music. It was the wor
ship of Yahweh, not of other gods, and was regarded as
the certain means of securing His favour. Yet this
worship was stained by revolting vice, introduced from
the foulest paganism into the religion of Israel.
As the Book of Amos is at present arranged, the
prophet begins with prophecies against the nations. Of

AMOSANDHOSEA 55
the six non- Israelite peoples on whom judgment is de
nounced, five are condemned for cruelty. The sixth
was Moab, whose sin was that it burned the bones of the
King of Edom into lime. This would be regarded as
an outrage on the sanctity of the dead, but it was also a
carrying of vengeance and hatred to an illegitimate point,
and this brings it within the same class as the others.
Outrage on our common humanity would cover all the
cases mentioned. It might seem that little significance
should be attached to the condemnation of such sins in
the heathen, since they could not be blamed for idolatry,
never having received the revelation of Yahweh. But
this would be a mistaken view, since Israel, Yahweh's
people, is condemned for just the same kind of sins,
though Israel's sin is against its own people, while that
of the rest is sin against other nations. Probably the
condemnation of luxury and drunkenness is aimed less
at these sins in themselves than at the oppression which
they entail. The prophet's indignation is stirred above
all by cruelty and inhumanity ; his blood boils at tyranny
and atrocities.
This implies a specific conception of the character of
Yahweh, which stood in the sharpest contrast to that held
by the Israelites generally. There was no controversy
as to the fundamental truth that Yahweh was Israel's
God and that Israel was Yahweh's people. Elijah had

56 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
stamped this truth too deeply into the popular conscious
ness for Amos to need to convince his hearers of it.. The
question between them was rather how this relationship
should be conceived, and what was its bearing on practi
cal conduct. If Yahweh stood so little above the tribal
gods of surrounding peoples, if He was so identified with
His worshippers in character and fortunes that His destiny
was linked with theirs, then He could not look on their
sins with any degree of severity, except when they indi
cated disrespect qr disloyalty to Himself or the people,
and He could never for His own sake contemplate the
destruction of Israel. The popular view might not have
been expressed so crudely as this, but practically it
amounted to this. Though Yahweh had chosen Israel,
having the power to choose any people, yet the fact that
He had chosen Israel, and not another, seemed to mean
that Israel was His favourite, and would be treated with
the utmost indulgence. The nation could count on His
help and protection, if it performed its religious duties,
and that quite irrespective of the justice of its cause.
Amos also held that Yahweh had elected Israel. But
He might have chosen any other nation, for all were sub
servient to His will. With a far-reaching glance over the
peoples and a wide knowledge of their past, the prophet
asserts that they, too, as well as Israel, have been within
the sphere of Yahweh's working, and are instruments

AMOS AND HOSEA 57
for the accomplishment of His plans. If He brought
Israel from Egypt, He also brought the Philistines from
Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir. His choice of Israel
had not, therefore, been due to any necessity, but was
His own free act. This choice implied no favouritism
on Yahweh's part towards Israel, but rather a higher
standard and a severer retribution. From the familiar
premises the prophet draws a new and startling conclu
sion : " You only have I known of all the nations of the
earth, therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities."
All this presupposes a view of Yahweh's character. H e
is above all things a moral God, and what specially rouses
His anger is cruelty or oppression of the weak by the
strong. The utmost zeal in the ritual service weighed
as nothing against the flagrant injustice of the upper
classes. Hence the prophet speaks of the sacrifices with
bitter sarcasm and with passionate hate. "I hate, I
despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your
solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt
offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them,
neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat
beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy
songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But
let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as
an ever-flowing stream." So sacrifices and feasts and
sacred music availed nothing to win His favour, as,

58 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
indeed, they might have known from hunger and drought,
mildew and pestilence. But now a more terrible judg
ment is in store for them. The people talked with eager
expectation of the Day of Yahweh, when they expected
Him to crush the enemies of Israel, and place her in a
Splendid and unassailable position. Amos also looks
forward to the Day of Yahweh. But it will be a day
of darkness and not light. It will come as an unwelcome
surprise, a crushing judgment rather than a crowning
victory. But Yahweh is not simply the righteous God of Israel.
He is the God of Nature and the God of History. He
has guided the destinies of other nations in the past ;
and Assyria is the instrument of judgment in His hand.
The rain, the blight and the palmerworm, famine and
pestilence, are all at His disposal. Even if with several
scholars we regard as later insertions the three passages
in which Yahweh is definitely affirmed to be the Creator
(iv. 13, v. 8, 9, ix. 5, 6), it is not because they are out of
harmony with the prophet's conception of His relation
to the world. The formal statement of monotheism may
be wanting in the utterances of Amos ; the thing itself is
there. Such, then, is Yahweh's nature and character, a moral
God with all forces under His control. It is not doubt
ful to Amos how He will deal with a nation like Israel.

AMOSANDHOSEA 59
They may still seek Yahweh and live. But this is not
the seeking of Him in the sanctuaries or offering abun
dance of sacrifices. They seek Yahweh by seeking good
and hating evil. And this is closely connected with
establishing judgment. To seek good is to seek justice
for the wronged and the oppressed. To seek Yahweh
is to bring their conduct into harmony with His
character. But the prophet is under no illusions as to the re
sponse of Israel to his warning, or the fate that is to
come upon it. Again and again he predicts death and
captivity. Whether he regarded the overthrow of Israel
as final and complete is a question which depends for
its solution on the acceptance or rejection of ix. 8-15.
As the text stands, the issue of the judgment will be that
all the sinners will be exterminated, but a righteous
remnant will survive to form a new Israel. The nation
will pass through a long process of sifting, till all the
chaff is gone ; yet not the smallest grain will be lost.
The new Israel will be set in its own land, the tabernacle
of David will again be raised, and the surrounding nations
become tributary. All nature will be marvellously fruitful,
the nation will rebuild the waste cities and live in peace
ful and perpetual possession of its land. It is probable,
however, for the reasons first given by. Wellhausen, that
we should regard ix. 8-15 as substituted for the original

60 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
conclusion of the book. This luscious description stands
in so sharp a contrast to the prophet's declaration of
irretrievable ruin, that we can hardly suppose that he
would have broken the force of his warning in this way.
It is, moreover, pitched on too low a note for the austere
and strenuous Amos. He seems to have expected a
judgment, which would leave not even a remnant beyond
the range of its execution.
When Amos uttered his sentence of doom on the
northern kingdom, he left the minister of God's judg
ment unnamed. But while Israel had never seemed so
secure, the certainty that on a people so depraved de
struction must swiftly come, made him sensitive to signs
of change, which passed unheeded by all save himself.
He turned towards Assyria, and as he listened he heard
the giant stir in his slumber, and he knew that his waking
was near. It came when Tiglath Pileser, one of the
ablest of Assyrian kings, ascended the throne in 745 b.c.
Soon after, the long and glorious reign of Jeroboam II.
came to an end. When his strong hand was removed,
the forces of disorder broke loose, and the kingdom
rapidly fell into a state of anarchy. Six kings followed
him on the throne of Israel, and four of these were
murdered. In less than a quarter of a century Samaria
was captured (722 B.C.), the northern kingdom was
destroyed, and the people were carried into captivity.

AMOSANDHOSEA 61
Henceforth the northern tribes lose all significance for
universal history.
Before the catastrophe, however, another prophet
laboured in the northern kingdom. Hosea, unlike
Amos, himself belonged to it, and speaks of it with far
less detachment than his predecessor. While Amos
seems to have prophesied only during the reign of
Jeroboam IL, Hosea's ministry fell partly in his reign,
partly in the troubled period which followed his death.
Since he makes no allusion to the coalition of Syria and
Ephraim against Judah, it is probable that none of his
prophecies are later than 735 b.c
His characteristic teaching was the creation of his own
experience. His wife Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim,
proved unfaithful to him and at last left him. When
she had fallen into misery through desertion by her
lovers, and was to be sold as a slave, he bought her
back and took her home. Keeping her from her old
evil associations, he hoped at last to bring her to peni
tence, and on her reform to restore the old relations.
In this tragedy which had blighted his life, he found his
message ; for in his own relations to his faithless wife he
saw a reflection of the relation of Yahweh to faithless
Israel. Several have regarded the whole account of his
marriage and the unfaithfulness of his wife as an alle-

62 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
gory. It is true that his three children bore symbolical
names. But so also did the children of Isaiah, who
were not merely allegories, since one of them accom
panied his father to his memorable interview with Ahaz.
It was quite natural for a prophet to express his leading
doctrines in symbolical names given to his children.
What seems to be fatal to the allegorical interpretation
is that no symbolical meaning can with any plausibility
be attached to the names of the wife or her father. It
is further urged that God cannot have directed Hosea to
marry a woman of immoral life. But there is no need
to suppose she was such when he married her, for this is
not the only example in which a prophet does something
at Yahweh's command, as he tells us, and yet it is only
later that he recognises that there has been any Divine
impulse at all (cf. Jer. xxxii. 8). It is also necessary to
assume the wife's purity at the time of marriage, since
otherwise she would not have represented Israel in her
¦early purity, when Yahweh won her for His bride.
Wellhausen, followed by Nowack, argues that Hosea may
not have recognised his wife's unfaithfulness so early as
the birth of his first-born. Since he gave this son a
symbolic name we may infer that he had already become
a prophet, so that if Wellhausen is correct it would not
be his wife's misconduct that caused him to become a
prophet. This is, in fact, very likely, but it does nothing

AMOSANDHOSEA 63
to diminish the importance of her unfaithfulness for the
origin of his characteristic teaching. It may, indeed, be
plausibly argued that this teaching only slowly emerged
into consciousness, and was not fully wrought out till
he saved his wife from slavery and brought her back to
his home. What is of vital importance is not what first
made him a prophet, but what it was that made him the
prophet of Yahweh's inexhaustible love. He may have
begun as a prophet of judgment, but, if so, his only
significance during this period lay in the fact that he
continued the work of Amos. What gives him his
unique position in the development of the religion of
Israel is that he preached Yahweh's unfailing love for
Israel and therefore its inevitable reformation. And it
was his own experience which gave him this insight into
the love of God.
The prophecy is peculiarly difficult from the broken
and disjointed style. The deep sorrow of the prophet
for his wife's sin and for Israel's, for his own pain and
for God's, makes his language at times almost incoherent,
and it is all the more obscure on account of its con
ciseness and fulness of meaning. The text has also suf
fered much corruption in the process of transmission,
and several passages are supposed to be later additions.
The saying that Amos is the prophet of morality but
Hosea is the prophet of religion is not strictly accurate,

64 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
but it indicates the real distinction between them. To
Amos God is righteous, and conduct is the nation's
supreme concern; to Hosea God is love, and every
thing depends on Israel's relation to Him. The in
dividual finds no place in either Amos or Hosea, but
only the nation. Thus it is Israel, and not the individual
Israelite, who is the object of Yahweh's love. The
relationship is expressed under two metaphors, which
mean the same thing essentially, but state it from
different points of view. One was familiar before his
time. Yahweh was Israel's Father. When he was a
child He had loved him and called His son out of
Egypt. He had tended him with affectionate care, but
the Father's tender love had been repaid with ingratitude
and unfilial disobedience. The other metaphor, while
suggested by the custom of regarding a god as the hus
band of his land, was really given to the prophet in his
own experience. The popular conception opened the
way for false and degrading ideas, which are associated
generally with nature worship, where the god is regarded
as the giver of fertility to the land. Such a religion is
naturally deeply stained with immorality. The prophet
purifies the conception by lifting it from the physical
into the moral domain. Marriage is an ethical relation
ship ; when the ethical element is absent there can be
no true marriage. He had learned from his own bitter

AMOSANDHOSEA 65
sorrow what marriage was, and it was the depth of his
insight into the true nature of marriage, which' he had
gained in this tragic way, that qualified him to interpret
aright God's marriage to Israel. As he pondered on
his own lot, he saw that what controlled his attitude to
his wife was a love which would not give the offender
up, but with untiring patience and persistence laboured
and suffered that she might be won back to purity.
But as he had loved Gomer, so Yahweh had loved
Israel. And since Yahweh was God and not man, it
followed that the noble and generous qualities present
in the prophet were present in Yahweh in an incompar
ably higher degree. Thus he rose to the great thought,
" If my love still survives this wound ; if, however often
trampled on, it still springs up anew ; how much more
must Yahweh's love be lavished on sinful Israel, un-
crushed by the grossest ingratitude, accepting no defeat,
but moving patiently to its goal, shrinking from no
punishment of the offender that may serve His end,
till she is restored to her early purity and meets the
love of Yahweh with whole-hearted loyalty ? " So while
Amos strikes the keynote of his prophecy in the words :
" You only have I known of all the nations of the earth,
therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities," the
keynote of Hosea is struck in the words, " How can I
give thee up, Ephraim ? "

66 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
But while the love of Yahweh is Hosea's fundamental
doctrine, this love was not conceived as a weak tender
ness for Israel's sin. Just as the doctrine of the Divine
Fatherhood involves a more stringent ethical ideal than
the doctrine of the Divine Sovereignty, so the love of
Yahweh demands a higher ethical standard than His
righteousness. For righteousness is concerned especially
for conduct, hence Amos bends his energies to secure
a well-regulated State, in which oppression and cruelty
have ceased and impartial justice is done. But love
seeks for its object the highest good, and since Yahweh
is Himself the Holy One of Israel, He cannot be satisfied
till the people that He loves is pure. His love is
penetrated by an ethical spirit, and its manifestations are
controlled by the imperious claims of morality. It is
not simply an outwardly correct conduct that He requires,
but a heart wholly at one with His own. And just
because there is no severity like the severity of love, the
demand of Hosea is more searching and penetrating than
that of Amos. The latter sees the mischief before his
eyes, but he does not seek into its cause. Hosea probes
below the surface, and finds the spring of all the evil in
the false relation in which Israel stands to Yahweh. She
had broken the conditions of the marriage covenant,
and the priests especially were to blame that the people
perished from lack of knowledge. Want of true morality

AMOSANDHOSEA 67
arose out of a want of true religion. Hence Hosea
does not, like Amos, urge the people to change their
conduct so much as to return to Yahweh, when right
conduct would follow of itself. The people probably
regarded themselves as zealous worshippers of Yahweh.
But this worship was so contaminated by heathen
elements, that Hosea could see nothing in it but worship
of the Baalim. In other words, he did not recognise
their Yahweh as the true Yahweh at all ; though they
named him Yahweh, he was no better than a Baal.
His own experience may have made him more keenly
sensitive to the evils of his time. As he looked around
he saw that his own was no isolated case. The whole
land was full of open and flagrant sin. There was
nought but swearing and breaking faith, and killing and
stealing and committing adultery (iv. 2). And beneath
this open manifestation lay a complete absence of truth
and mercy and the knowledge of God.
While Amos saw no way of mending the condition of
things save by extermination of Israel, this solution of
the problem was impossible to Hosea. Though he was
even more sensitive to the sin of Israel, the love of
Yahweh assured him of her ultimate amendment. But
between the terrible present and the happy future lies
the period of chastisement. The settled agricultural
life in Canaan had led to the intrusion of elements into

68 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the religion of Israel borrowed from the Canaanites.
Israel must therefore be wrenched away from the soil,
that a complete breach with all these abuses might be
secured. Then in the desert, where agriculture could
not be practised, she would return to Yahweh, who would
speak to her heart as in the .old desert life after the
Exodus, and she would make answer as in the days of
her youth, when Yahweh brought her out of Egypt. He
would heal all her backslidings and she would be freely
forgiven and loved. Then Yahweh would once more
betroth her unto Him in loyal love, and bring her back
to her own land. And in it the soil would again be
tilled, and she would know that it was Yahweh and not
the Baalim who gave her the corn and the wine and the
oil. Thus Hosea disengaged the life of civilisation
from the perils which threatened the religion, and suc
ceeded in making an alliance between civilisation and
the religion of Israel.

CHAPTER V
ISAIAH AND MICAH
With the fall of Samaria the task of preserving the
higher religion of Israel was entrusted to the southern
kingdom. We know but little of the history of its
religion during the period from Rehoboam to Uzziah.
In one respect Judah fared more favourably than the
sister-kingdom. It enjoyed greater political stability,
for the permanence of the Davidic dynasty largely
secured it against the shock of constant revolution and
civil war. Life seems to have been simpler and more
frugal. It was also tamer, without the stir and colour
which lent it a richer interest in the north. Of its
religious quality much the same thing may probably be
said. It was the northern kingdom which produced
Elijah, Elisha, and Hosea. It is true that the two
former were called to their work by a crisis which had
no counterpart in Judah, for Athaliah's reign was a
mere episode, and the worship of Melkart remained an
excrescence, foreign to the religious temper of the people.
Israel seems to have been more hospitable to this
69

70 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
worship, but even here it is easy to exaggerate. What
proves most conclusively where the centre of gravity
really lay is that Amos, though he belonged to Judah,
was sent not to his own countrymen but to Israel. Yet
it was not the destruction of Samaria which was respon
sible for the rise of a great prophet in Judah. For
when Samaria fell, nearly half of Isaiah's prophetic
career had run its course. And while it was largely true
that the tides of life ran more swiftly in the north, yet
during the half century which preceded the call of
Isaiah a similar expansion of wealth had been experi
enced, with the social evils which came in its train. It
was to the conditions thus created that the ministry of
Isaiah and Micah was addressed.
The starting-point for the interpretation of Isaiah is
the vision in which, about 740 b.c, his call and his mes
sage came to him. Standing at the Temple threshold
he passes into an ecstasy, in which he has a vision
of Yahweh exalted in majesty. His greatness is pro
claimed by the attitude of the attendant seraphim, who
do not venture to look upon Him and shroud them
selves from His gaze, while they are alert to do His will.
His holiness is proclaimed by their unceasing cry, " Holy,
holy, holy, is Yahweh of hosts.'' At this cry the founda
tions quiver beneath Isaiah's feet, and the Temple is filled
with the smoke of Yahweh's wrath that an unclean man

ISAIAH AND MICAH 71
should have dared to cross the threshold of His house.
Isaiah is crushed by the sense of his own uncleanness
as he gazes on the holy God, and of the uncleanness of
those in whose midst he dwells. Then the humbled
and penitent man is touched by the living coal, and his
lips are thus fitted to join in Yahweh's praise. At last
he is fit to hear God's voice and receive His call. So
he offers himself for the mission of which as yet he
knows nothing, and is bidden preach to the people, with
the assurance at the outset that the message will but
harden them in their evil ways, and that his mission will
prove a failure.
In this vision Isaiah's most characteristic doctrines
are revealed. Yahweh's majesty fills him with a sense
of the insignificance of earthly things, even the greatest.
Because he has seen Yahweh high ~and lifted up, he
knows that there is to be a Day of Yahweh on all that is
high and lifted up on earth. All human magnificence
will be abased when Yahweh rises to judge the world.
He has realised the holiness of Yahweh, and in the light
of it has understood as never before the uncleanness of
Yahweh's people. But a holy God cannot permanently
tolerate an unclean people. And since the prophet is
convinced beforehand that the people will not accept
his message, the only solution is a judgment in which
the sinful will be destroyed. Assyria is the instrument

72 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL

in Yahweh's hands to effect this cleansing. Whether
his characteristic doctrine of the remnant was expressed
in his vision is not clear. If with the Septuagint we
omit the words, " So the holy seed is the stock thereof,"
the chapter leaves us with a picture of unrelieved
desolation. Yet the doctrine must have been formulated
so early in his ministry that it is simplest to refer its
origin to his vision. For he gave his son, who cannot
have been born long after, the name Shear- Yashub,
which means that a remnant will return to Yahweh, and
expresses a foreboding of terrible judgment, lightened
by the belief that a very small remnant would escape.
Even if not directly given in his vision, the doctrine of
the remnant may have arisen out of reflection on it. As
he had turned to Yahweh and realised the forgiveness of
his sin, so others like-minded with himself might also
turn and live. Moreover, in spite of the example set by
Amos, it was intrinsically more probable that he should
adopt this view than that he should look for the com
plete extermination of Israel. The election of Israel
meant that the nation had a place in the Divine plan,
which would be thwarted if its existence came to an end.
Or if it was not ultimately thwarted, since Yahweh might
choose another people to serve His purpose, yet this
would cast a reflection on His wisdom in choosing a
nation that proved unequal to His demand. Moreover,

ISAIAH AND MICAH 73
since it was in the temple of Jerusalem that Isaiah had
seen Yahweh, he felt that because Zion was Yahweh's
throne it could not be destroyed. And the indestruc
tibility of Zion may have seemed to imply the indestruc
tibility of Israel.
The present condition of His people he views in the
light of Yahweh's holiness, i.e. not simply of His
righteousness or His love, but His character taken in its
completeness. The sins of Judah are similar to those
of Israel, except that the former seems to have been less
tainted with sins of impurity. Isaiah denounces in the
strongest terms the oppression of the poor and defence
less by the rich and powerful, the shameless perversion
of judgment and the corruption of the government, the
adding of house to house and field to field, the riotous
living of the men and luxury of the women. He attacks
their superstition and idolatry, their resort to soothsayers
and necromancers. Their whole attitude to Yahweh is
full of sin. They do not repay the care He has lavished
upon them, but are rebellious and ungrateful. Their
worship is full of formality, their service of Yahweh with
sacrifices most assiduous, but they have no care for
justice or morality. Some have sunk to such a depth
that they make themselves the slaves of sin, and impiously
defy Yahweh to do His worst. Their treatment of the
prophets is part of their treatment of the God who has

74 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
sent them. They forbid them to speak right things, and
beg them to prophesy lies. They scornfully mock their
message, and profanely imitate Isaiah's mannerisms and
the repetition of his words. The politicians seek to
conceal from him their negotiations for an alliance with
Egypt (a striking proof of his political influence), and
their conduct is tantamount to an attempt to conceal
them from Yahweh. They are haughty and conceited, and
victims of such infatuation that in presence of the greatest
danger they preserve an attitude of carelessness, as though
all must come right in the end, and believe they have
secured immunity from death. There was also great
perversion of moral distinction, a calling of good evil
and evil good. And sin had reached well-nigh the
lowest depth in its utter shamelessness.
Although the prophet does not believe that the
problem presented by the sin of Judah will be solved in
any other way than by the extermination of the sinful,
he yet urgently counsels reformation. They might wash
and be clean, cease to do evil, learn to do well, and
uphold the cause of justice. They might walk in the
light of Yahweh, and turn to Him from whom they
had so deeply revolted. But since few would do this,
judgment was inevitable. And the instrument of judg
ment the prophet saw in Assyria. This brings us to a
consideration of Isaiah's foreign policy.

ISAIAH AND MICAH 75
The question of Judah's relation to Assyria rose
quite early in Isaiah's ministry. To repel the coalition
of Syria and Ephraim against Judah about 735 b.c,
which was probably intended to force her into an alli
ance against Assyria, Ahaz in a panic proposed to call in
the aid of Assyria. This meant the subjection of the
petty State to the great Empire, and the tribute exacted
would press most heavily upon the poor, already ground
down by the wealthy. Thus internal reform, Judah's
sorest necessity, would become more difficult. Whereas
Amos and Hosea held aloof, so far as we know, from
politics, Isaiah played a prominent part as a statesman.
He consistently advised Judah to remain quiet and
avoid entanglement with great empires. So small a
State should renounce the ambition to shine in the
politics of the world, or she would be caught into a
current too strong for her, and lose all power of inde
pendent action. When the king, under the pretext of
piety, refused the sign offered him by the prophet for
his choice, Isaiah sought to shame his unbelief by the
faith of the mother who would express in the name
Immanuel, which she would give to her child, the con
fidence that God was with His people. But it was in
vain that he dissuaded Ahaz by this example from call
ing in Assyria, and assured him that Syria and Ephraim
were too insignificant to harm him, and would soon be

76 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
brought to nought. Assyria suppressed the coalition,
as her own interests would speedily have forced her to
do, but Ahaz bought relief with the independence of his
country. Judah soon began to fret under the Assyrian
yoke, and formed plans of revolt with the smaller nation
alities of Palestine or with Babylon. These were sedu
lously fostered by Egypt, which used these smaller
nations to weaken for its own ends the power of Assyria.
A strong party in Judah favoured an Egyptian alliance
and a spirited foreign policy. Isaiah, in the presence of
this infatuation, stood firm to his policy of acquiescence
in things as they were. Now that his advice had been
disregarded he condemned all attempts to extricate
the nation from its connection with Assyria. They
could only make matters worse. The keynote of his
whole policy is struck in the words : " Returning and
resting shall ye be saved, in quietness and confidence
shall be your strength." No human power could stay
Assyria's onward march; only when the task assigned
it by Yahweh was complete could it be overthrown.
Judah must wait patiently, confident that Zion could
not be destroyed, and that at the right moment Yahweh
would break Assyria's power. We can easily see how
the policy of Isaiah grew out of his vision. Yahweh's
majesty had filled him with a sense of His might and
glory and the utter emptiness of all human greatness.

ISAIAH AND MICAH 77
Even Assyria could not overawe him after that. But
when Assyria had entered into the politics of Judah, his
certainty that it was the rod of Yahweh's anger made
him counsel submission and steadily discourage the
policy of an Egyptian alliance. Nevertheless, when,
after the death of Sargon, the movement for revolt could
no longer be held in check, and the madness of Judah's
politicians was demonstrated by terrible disaster, his
conviction that Zion would not be destroyed and that
a remnant would survive assured him even in the
darkest hour that Assyria would be broken on Yahweh's
mountain. The doctrine of the happy future that was to follow
does not spring directly out of his vision. Yet it
followed from Yahweh's dwelling on Zion and the sur
vival of a holy remnant. When the sin of Judah had
been removed, Yahweh's reign over it could not be other
than full of blessedness. Unhappily much uncertainty
hangs over any detailed presentation of the prophet's
views on account of the critical problems raised about
many of the eschatological passages. It may be re
garded as settled that the following sections are not by
Isaiah: chaps, xii., xiii. i-xiv. 23, xxi. 1-10, xxiv.-
xxvii., xxxiv., xxxv., xl.-lxvi. But to this list a good.
deal more may be added with considerable probability,
including ii. 2-4, iv. 2-6, xi. 10-16, xix. 18-25, xxxiii.,

78 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
possibly also xxxii. This position is conservative com
pared with that held by critics like Duhm, Hackmann,
Cheyne, Volz, and Marti, though Duhm regards chap. ii.
2-4 as by Isaiah, and with reference to several other
questions adopts a less radical view. Especially is this
the case with the most important of all the problems
concerned, that of the authenticity of the two Messianic
passages, chaps, ix. 1-7 and xi. 1-8. The arguments
urged against Isaiah's authorship are not at all con
clusive, and there are serious objections to placing them
in the post-exilic period. It was natural for Isaiah, with
the Davidic monarchy before him, to anticipate its per
petuation in the era of blessedness that he expected
soon to open, when the sinful had been slain by Assyria,
and Assyria in her turn had been destroyed. Moreover,
if the passages had been written in the later period we
should have expected prominence to be given to the
restoration to Palestine of the Jews from the Dispersion,
but this is quite absent from them. Accordingly it is
best to regard them as by Isaiah. He speaks in lofty
language of this king, whom for convenience we may
call the Messiah, though Isaiah does not use the term.
He springs from the stock of Jesse, and bears a wonder
ful name. He passes through battles and victory to a
reign of peace and righteousness. The spirit of Yahweh
will rest upon him and equip him with all the qualities

ISAIAH AND MICAH 79
necessary for right government. He will defend the
meek and slay the wicked.
Little need be added on Micah, who was Isaiah's
contemporary, and, as we learn from Jer. xxvi. 18,
prophesied in the reign of Hezekiah. The northern
kingdom had not fallen when he began his work, and he
predicts its utter overthrow. For the most part he is
concerned with Judah, his native country. He was a
man of the people like Amos, and, like him, looked at the
oppression of the poor by the governing classes from the
point of view of the class oppressed. The sins of which
he accuses them are those attacked by Isaiah, but he is
more definite in his description and more scathing in his
denunciation. He had no belief in the indestructibility
of Zion, but predicts that it shall be ploughed as a field
and the temple laid in ruins. We learn from the Book
of Jeremiah that this had a salutary effect upon Judah.
Like Isaiah, he gives a very unflattering account of the
prophets of his time, and asserts his own inspiration to
declare his message of judgment. Whether he added
to this a message of consolation is very uncertain.
There is at present a strong tendency among scholars to
restrict Micah's own work to the first three chapters of
the book that bears his name.
The close of the eighth century proved extremely
critical. The restive politicians of Judah made a vain

80 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
attempt to win back from Assyria the freedom which
Ahaz had bartered for the relief she had afforded from
Syria and Ephraim. In 701 Sennacherib invaded Judah.
He inflicted irreparable damage on the country, took
away more than two hundred thousand captives to
Assyria, and exacted an enormous indemnity. Not con
tent with this, he demanded the surrender of Jerusalem,
which alone of the cities of Judah remained uncaptured,
and purposed to carry the inhabitants into exile. The
faith of Isaiah that Jerusalem could not be taken
received a splendid vindication. Judah thus gained a
respite which saved her religion for the world. The
overthrow of Samaria and the captivity of northern
Israel meant the disappearance of its religion, so far as
can be seen, and had Judah gone into captivity in 701,
the religion of Israel would have become altogether
extinct. As yet the higher religion had barely taken
root ; it could not have survived the terrible ordeal of
transplantation. The religion was so inextricably united
with the nation that to have been plucked up by the
roots with it would have involved, as it did for the
northern tribes, the destruction of nation and religion
alike. It was largely due to Isaiah that when, rather
more than a century later, Jerusalem was captured and
destroyed and the people were carried into captivity, the
religion survived the shock. He seems to have entrusted

ISAIAH AND MICAH

his teaching to a band of disciples, who worked for the
realisation of his ideals. Even in his lifetime it bore
fruit in the reformation of Hezekiah. This was but the
forerunner of a far greater achievement, which was of
truly epoch-making significance for the development of
the religion.

CHAPTER VI
THE DEUTERONOMIC REFORMATION
It may seem at first sight surprising that the vindica
tion of Isaiah by the fulfilment of his predictions should
have been followed by the reaction under Manasseh,
during which the old abuses crept back and new cults
were imported from abroad. We must, however, re
member that matters were in the most deplorable con
dition. Jerusalem, it is true, remained standing and the
Temple was untouched. But the population was terribly
reduced by the loss of more than two hundred thousand
captives, and the wealth of the country was depleted by
payment of an enormous indemnity. The Assyrian yoke
remained fixed as firmly as ever. To a people thus
exhausted and despondent the gods of the oppressor
seemed mightier than their own. It was therefore not
unnatural that foreign cults made their way into Judah
in a manner hitherto unexampled. Manasseh, who came
to the throne quite young and reigned for about half a
century, actively fostered this new movement, and seems
to have instituted a violent and relentless persecution,
82

DEUTERONOMIC REFORMATION 83
in which many who held fast to the exclusive worship of
Yahweh suffered martyrdom. The adoration of the
heavenly bodies, and especially of the Queen of Heaven,
received great prominence, and the hideous custom of
child-sacrifice attained dimensions never before reached
in Israel. We need not assume that the worship of
Yahweh was suppressed. These practices were regarded
as compatible with an adherence to the national Deity.
The so-called sacrifices to Moloch were probably really
offered to Yahweh under the title of Melek or King.
The successors of Isaiah were thus driven from public
life to work in secret, and prepare for a great reform
when the time was ripe. It is perhaps from the reign of
Manasseh that one of the greatest among the prophetic
utterances has come to us. In reply to the question
with what costly offering, with what sacrifice, even of his
dearest, man could win the favour of God, the word is
spoken : " He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good,
and what doth Yahweh require of thee, but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? "
Here with unclouded insight, and with a simplicity of
expression which matches the grandeur of the thought,
we find the essence of the prophetic teaching. Vain are
all material offerings, the blood of victims or rivers of
oil. Vain, too, the surrender of the first-born that the
soul's guilt might be purged away. Yahweh asked

84 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
nothing for Himself, save a reverent humility of spirit,
and conformity with His character. But justice to the
wronged, mercy to the helpless and oppressed, duties
so flagrantly forgotten, those were His requirements, and
for failure to fulfil them no extravagance of ritual could
atone. It is perhaps also to this period that we should
assign the composition of the book which subsequently
gave the impulse to Josiah's Reformation. Many
scholars believe that it was deliberately composed during
the reign of Josiah with a view to bringing about the
Reformation. We cannot very well understand, if this
was the case, why, with so well-disposed a king on the
throne, and in view of the uncertainties of life, the
Reformers should have permitted so long a period to
elapse that they did not produce their book till the
eighteenth year of Josiah's reign (621 b.c). More
over, the fact that where the interests of the priests at
Jerusalem were touched the Law-book failed to secure
obedience, seems to make it unlikely that its discovery
was planned with their connivance. It is more likely
that the book was older, and that its discovery was
genuine. If so, the reign of Manasseh is the most pro
bable date for its composition. It is by no means clear
precisely what it contained. It can hardly be questioned,
in view of the close parallelism between its injunctions

DEUTERONOMIC REFORMATION 85
and the reform carried through by Josiah, that it is to be
sought in the Book of Deuteronomy. Roughly speaking,
the original book may be taken to have embraced
Deut. v.-xxvi., xxviii., though here and there these
chapters contain subsequent expansions.
The destruction of the great sanctuaries in the
northern kingdom left the Temple at Jerusalem without
a rival. The fact that the capital alone had been spared
when the other cities of Judah had been destroyed, that
after taking these cities Sennacherib had been prevented
from capturing Jerusalem just when it seemed within his
grasp, vindicated the true inspiration of Isaiah, enhanced
the prestige of the city, and fixed the indestructibility of
Zion and its Temple as an axiom in the mind of the
people. And since the time of David, Jerusalem had
always had a pre-eminence in its possession of the ark.
The conditions were thus favourable for the abolition of
the high places or local sanctuaries, and the centralisation
of worship at the Temple, thus gaining for it an ex
clusive legitimacy. This was the leading reform con
templated by the unknown author to whom we owe the
book. He was the heir of the great prophets of the eighth
century, but he shows a concern for the externals of
religion in a degree quite foreign to them. In him the
priest and the prophet have met, and the author sets in
the forefront of his programme a reform of the cultus.

86 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
Yet it would dov him an injustice to miss the deeper
moral and spiritual elements in his work. Whole-hearted
love of God and devotion to Him is made the spring of
all action. This is to control the life of society and the
home, as well as the relation of man to God and the per
formance of the strictly religious duties. Love of others
is made secondary only to the love of God. A lofty
moral standard is throughout maintained, and the
humanitarian temper of the Law is one of its most
striking features. The author's theory of retribution, of
the invariable connection between righteousness and
temporal prosperity, had its value, but created serious
difficulties when events showed it to be inadequate to
explain the facts of life, and led to such a protest as we
find in the Book of Job. And even the reform of the
cultus was for the author but a means to an end. The
abolition of the local sanctuaries purified the worship of
Yahweh, for the high places were the seat of many
abuses. It strengthened monotheism, for one place of
worship involved as its correlate one God. It is true
that at the high places it was Yahweh who was
worshipped. But the inevitable result at that stage of
development was that the unity of Yahweh should be
dissolved by His differentiation into a large number of
local Yahwehs. The author emphatically asserts that
Yahweh is one. And he insists equally that Yahweh

DEUTERONOMIC REFORMATION 87
alone is to be worshipped; idolatry is repeatedly for
bidden, and the severest punishment for it is enjoined.
The injunctions of the Law were carried out in a
drastic Reformation (621 b.c). Josiah accepted them
as the command of God, and in a convocation convened
by him the nation assented to them. Idolatry was
suppressed with a ruthless hand, and the local sanctuaries
were abolished. It might seem, in view of the subse
quent return under Jehoiakim of the evils removed by
his father, that the Reformers had effected nothing. It
would not be easy, however, to over-estimate the im
portance, of their work for the later history of the religion.
They supplied the point of view from which later writers
judged the nation's past. The restriction of the cultus
to one sanctuary made possible the ritual programme of
Ezekiel and the Priestly Code. It also fostered the
more spiritual forms of rehgion, which at a later time
were characteristic of the synagogue. If sacrifice and
tithe and first-fruits could be offered only in Jerusalem,
then the religion in every-day life assumed a far less
materialistic character.
In another way the acceptance of the Deuteronomic
Law marked the beginning of a movement of quite
immeasurable importance. Here the origin of the
canonisation of the Hebrew sacred writings is to be
found. For the first time Judah became what it has

88 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
always been since — a people of a Book. A written code
was henceforth the law of the people's life and the
standard by which its conduct was judged. The com
pleted Law was at a later period the Canon of the
Jewish Church. Later still the prophetic writings were
admitted to stand by its side, though on a lower level.
And as a third stage other sacred writings were similarly
regarded as Scripture, and thus the Canon of the Old
Testament came into existence. Certain doubtful books
received canonical rank later than the time of Christ,
but in the main the Canon was fixed before His time.
For good, and, it must be added, also for evil, with the
acceptance of Deuteronomy Judah became a people of
the Law.

CHAPTER VII
JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE
Even before the discovery of Deuteronomy the voice of
prophecy, repressed so long by Manasseh, had again
been heard in Judah. The approaching overthrow of
Nineveh was heralded by Nahum in splendid, impas
sioned eloquence. As we read it we are tempted to
recoil from its burning words as if they were inspired
by no nobler feeling than the victim's bitter hatred of
the oppressor and exultation over his downfall. But
Nahum is not the mere mouthpiece of a vindictive
patriotism. He speaks rather in the name of outraged
humanity, cowed and tormented by the brutal cruelty
of Assyria. Of Judah's sin he says nothing, and this
distinguishes him from the great pre-exilic prophets.
But he is one with them in his assurance that sin must
bring its stern, though it may be slow, retribution, and
that God's hottest anger is poured forth on tyranny
and cruelty.
About twenty years before the destruction of Nineveh
vast hordes of Scythians poured from their home over

90 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
large parts of Western Asia. They inflicted terrible
damage wherever they went. As the news of their
approach reached Judah, two men saw in them the in
struments of Yahweh's judgment. Zephaniah depicts
the sin of Judah in familiar colours ; we read once more
of the flagrant idolatry, including star- worship, of child-
sacrifice, of scoffing denial of God's government, of the
infatuated obstinacy which blinded men to the warnings
of the past, of the scandalous miscarriage of justice, of
violence, deceit, and oppression. He also proclaims
the coming of the Day of Yahweh, though he describes
it with much more elaboration than his predecessors.
The Day of Wrath is set forth with poetical license and
in a highly effective way. From its devastation only a
remnant, the meek and righteous, will escape.
The other was Jeremiah, the greatest and the most
tragic figure among the prophets of the Old Testament.
He was called to the work of his life in the thirteenth
year of Josiah's reign (627 b.c), five years before the
discovery of the Deuteronomic Law-book. In that ex
perience he learnt that he was a child of destiny, chosen
even before his birth to be God's spokesman. The
mission was forced upon him against his own inclination.
For he was timid and self-distrustful, shrinking from
publicity, dreading the hatred that would be aroused by
his words, and dubious of his ability to deliver aright

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE 91
the prophetic message. But God would take no refusal,
nor suffer His long-cherished plan to be thwarted by
the scruples of His servant. Two visions accompanied
his call. By the rod of the almond tree, which is the
first to wake out of the sleep of winter, he learnt that the
apparent torpor did not imply that Yahweh's word would
fail of its fulfilment. It was a lesson for the present ;
the rigour of winter will soon give place to the spring.
But it was also designed to steady him for disappoint
ments in after days, when he had to see his predictions
again and again fail of their anticipated fulfilment.
Against the shock to his own faith and the incredulity of
the people he could brace himself anew by the memory
of this vision, and discipline his impatience with the
assurance that in spite of all inexplicable delay God was
still watching over His word to perform it. By the
second vision, that of the seething caldron, he learnt that
judgment was to come on Judah from the north. It
was natural that he should connect this with the Scythians.
The hordes of savage horsemen drew nearer and nearer,
a new, uncanny terror, filling the minds of men with
dread. They came down the coast of Palestine, and on
to the border of Egypt, leaving Judah almost untouched.
Then they returned, once more making no attack on
Judah. The sense of a great deliverance may have pre
disposed the people to accept the Reformation which

92 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
followed soon after. It may, however, have served also
to discredit Jeremiah, whose predictions of disaster now
seemed to be falsified. We do not know what attitude
Jeremiah adopted towards the Reformation. For the
king he had a warm regard, and the striking affinity
between Deuteronomy and his prophecies points to a
close relation between Jeremiah and the Law-book. It
has been supposed by many that he took part in a
mission to the cities of Judah in order to advocate the
principles of the Reformation (cf. Jer. xi. 1-8). He
may have hoped that it would avert the doom he had
been sent to announce. But the illusion, if it ever
possessed him, did not last. He saw the real rottenness
of society and its religion, and knew that the reform was
of the most superficial character. This became clear
when the untimely death of Josiah in 609 b.c. released
the forces of reaction. The time for Assyria's downfall
was now very near, and already the question had become
urgent to what power her empire should fall. Josiah,
unwilling to exchange for subjection to Egypt the prac
tical freedom he enjoyed through the weakness of the
dying empire, opposed the King of Egypt's march against
Assyria, and was slain at Megiddo. This seemed a direct
negation of the fundamental principle on which Deuter
onomy had based its appeal for obedience. Like the
earlier prophets, it had set before the people life and

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE 93
death, prosperity as the reward of righteousness, adversity
as the penalty of sin. Since through the acceptance of
the Law Judah had become a righteous people, her long
sorrow must be over, the era of blessedness at last begun.
The years which followed confirmed this hope. Then
suddenly the bright illusion was shattered. The champion
of the Reform died in battle before he reached his prime.
His son Jehoahaz, after a brief reign of three months,
was taken to die a captive in Egypt. His worthless
brother Jehoiakim was set on the throne. The miseries
into which the unhappy land was plunged more and
more deeply by Egypt and then by Babylon, were aggra
vated by the extravagance, the ostentation, and the
tyranny of the king. It is little wonder that a deep re
sentment was felt against the Reformers, whose promises
had been so belied by the event. Even in the reign of
Josiah it is probable that there was a strong under-current
of dissatisfaction with the suppression of the local
sanctuaries. Those who were bound to them by ties of
long familiarity, and whose forefathers had worshipped
at them through many generations, must in many in
stances have regarded as impiety their ruthless abolition.
With Jehoiakim on the throne the smouldering discontent
broke into a blaze. The old religious and moral abuses
came back, and the work of Josiah seemed to be undone.
Yet the Temple had in no waylost its unique pre-eminence.

94 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
The faith of Isaiah that Zion could not be overthrown
had been firmly wrought into the popular belief. The
Temple had become a national fetish : since Yahweh
dwelt in it, Judah's safety was assured.
Thus Jeremiah, with the plain facts before him, saw
that the Reformation had brought no radical change.
The people were utterly unconscious that their conduct
was out of harmony with God's requirements. Jeremiah
was thus confronted with the same situation as Amos.
He had to minister to a nation assured of its own good
standing with its God, and incredulous of any prediction
of judgment. His contradiction of this false confidence
was so sharp and uncompromising that it nearly cost
him his life. He bade the people not trust in lying
words that could not profit : " The Temple of Yahweh
are these." Let them go to Shiloh, where Yahweh
placed His name at the first, and as they pondered the
fate that befell it, remember that as Yahweh did to
Shiloh so also, unless they amended their ways, would
He do to Jerusalem. He did not expect, indeed, that
they would listen to his voice. For many years before
the blow actually fell, it was a prophetic certainty to him
that the extreme penalty would be inflicted. This
brought him into collision with the officialrepresentatives
of religion, both priests and prophets. Thus he says :
" A wonderful and horrible thing is come to pass in the

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE 95
land; the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests
bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it
so ; and what will ye do in the end thereof ? " (v. 30, 31).
He condemns the priests and prophets for healing
too lightly the hurt of the people, saying Peace, when
there was no peace. He charges the prophets with claim
ing falsely to speak in the name of Yahweh. They
prophesy lies in the name of God, the deceits of their
own hearts. Against the popular optimism of these
prophets Jeremiah set the fact that the older prophets
had spoken of war and calamity, and therefore he stood
in the accredited prophetic succession since he also
predicted disaster. A prophet who prophesied of peace
could be accepted as a true prophet only when his
predictions were verified. It was the prophets who in
the reign of Zedekiah incited the resistance to Babylon,
strong in the illusion that Zion could not be destroyed.
And earlier in his reign, after the best of the nation had
gone into exile with the king at their head, they were
not shaken in their beliefs, but confidently asserted that
the exiles would soon return. One prophet predicted
that the Temple vessels would be brought back to
Jerusalem within two years. Jeremiah remained firm to
his convictions. He was, in fact, so certain that the
capture of Jerusalem could not be averted that he said
even if the Chaldean army was so smitten that only

96 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
wounded men were left in it, they should rise up and
take the city. When the Egyptians compelled the
Babylonian army to raise the siege, and the Jews hailed
this as the final departure of the enemy and a vindication
of their belief that Zion could not be overthrown, he
warned them against their confidence, and counselled
them to yield. He was thus placed in the extremely
painful position of giving advice which, though it was
the wholesome truth, seemed unpatriotic and disloyal.
He was not merely looked upon as a traitor to his
country, but when attempting to retire from the city to
his native town he was arrested as a deserter and cast
into prison. Subsequently, on advising desertion to the
Chaldeans, he was thrown into a dungeon to perish, but
was rescued by friends.
It would not be wise in the space at our disposal to
set forth the teaching of Jeremiah in detail. It is not
in this, save in one important exception, that his signifi
cance resides. He was himself a greater contribution to
the religion of Israel. His personality counted for more
than his words. The exception to which reference has
been made was his doctrine of the New Covenant, and
this is to be explained out of his experience. Although
Jeremiah knew the evil heart of his people too well to
expect that they would obey his appeals for repentance,
and therefore did not waver in his conviction that judg-

97

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE
ment was inevitable, he did not think that punishment
was God's last word to Israel. The exiles will be re
stored — not Judah only, but Israel — and the two peoples
will again become one. The Old Covenant made with
the Hebrews at the Exodus will be replaced by a New
Covenant between Israel and God. He will put His law
in their inward parts and write it in their heart ; they
shall be His people and He will be their God. One
will no longer need to teach another the knowledge of
Yahweh, since all will know Him from the least to the
greatest. He will forgive their iniquity and remember
their sin no more (xxxi. 31-34).
This prophecy has been denied to Jeremiah by
several eminent scholars. The question is too complex
to be discussed in this place, and the present writer
must refer his readers, for a statement of the grounds on
which he attributes it to Jeremiah, to what he has written
elsewhere. It may at least be said that such a prophecy
is in harmony alike with the situation and with the
prophet's undoubted utterances. It is not even certain
that the Old Covenant had already been annulled by
the destruction of Jerusalem. That destruction had
been a certainty to Jeremiah many years before it
happened, and it is altogether probable that he had for
long reflected on the future relations between Yahweh
and Israel. The doctrine of the New Covenant is in
G

98 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
perfect harmony with Jeremiah's teaching, and, as will
appear later, can be explained from his own experience.
There is much besides in Jeremiah that points in the
same direction and that makes its individual character
probable. Especially is this true of his language about
the heart. He describes it as deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick ; he says of Yahweh that He tries
the reins and the heart, and in his own case says, " Thou
triest mine heart towards thee." In tacit contrast to
external circumcision (iv. 4, ix. 36) he places the cir
cumcision of the heart, which is significant when we
remember that the former was the mark of the Old
Covenant. The most important passage in this con
nection is xxiv. 7, " I will give them an heart to know me,
that I am Yahweh, and they shall be my people, and I
will be their God : for they shall return unto me with their
whole heart." This seems to express essentially what
the New Covenant passage expresses more definitely.
Thus, while he had much in common with his prede
cessors, and especially with Hosea, he made a decisive
advance beyond them. He effected a change of im
measurable importance in the very conception of religion
itself. The Old Covenant with Israel had been a matter
of external law, in which obedience on the part of the
nation was rewarded by certain promised blessings.
The New Covenant, it is true, is made with Israel, not

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE 99
with the individual. But the essential feature of it is
the law written on the heart of each individual. Re
ligion thus comes to consist, not in conformity to an
external Code, but in obedience to the God-given
promptings of the heart. It becomes personal and
individual, a matter between the soul and God. Thus,
ritual and ceremony are seen to be intrinsically unneces
sary. While religion remains a matter for the community,
it must find expression in external forms. But these do
not guarantee the genuinely religious character of the
community that practises them, since a national recog
nition and service of God is compatible with compara
tively widespread religious indifference or actual impiety.
When a nation is religious in the mass, the piety of
the units who compose it cannot be guaranteed. Where
the nation is all important, individuals may be safely
neglected. But when the individual gets full recogni
tion, the ideal is attained only when each single indi
vidual has become religious. Thus a national religion
can become national in the fullest sense only through
becoming individualist. This is what Jeremiah really
predicts ; for while the Covenant is made with Israel,
it is of such a nature that the individual Israelite knows
Yahweh for himself, through the revelation given in his
heart. The State is thus no longer necessary for the
preservation of the religion, so that its overthrow, and

ioo THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, did not
mean to Jeremiah, as to so many of his country
men, the death of the religion. By thus disengaging re
ligion from its hitherto inseparable connection with the
State, he provided a new basis for religion, and enabled
it, as personal, to attain a purity and worth formerly
unknown. And the principles he enunciated essentially
transformed religion into a universal and not a local or
national thing. A man needs only to be a man, in order
to have personal fellowship with God. Thus Jeremiah
transcended the religion of Israel, and rose into the
religion of humanity. And so Christianity found no
fitter expression for itself than that it was the religion of
the New Covenant. Jeremiah's doctrine was an anticipa
tion of the Gospel, which taught the supreme worth of
the individual, and the nature of religion as a cleansing
of the heart and the writing on it of an inward law.
It was through his own experience that he rose to this
great conception of the inwardness of religion. He was
a man of most sensitive and affectionate disposition and
deep emotional nature, which was moved to intense
sorrow at the sins and sufferings of his people. But he
rose above his weakness when this was demanded by
faithfulness to his office. His utterances are as pointed
and severe as those of his predecessors, and he so far
overcame his timidity as again and again to risk his life

JEREMIAH AND HIS AGE 101
in the fulfilment of his mission. He is of peculiar im
portance for the true appreciation of the Divine element
in prophecy. No other prophet depicts so vividly the
struggle between the weakness of human nature and the
overpowering consciousness of a Divine message. He
longs for peace, but is driven on against his will, and
forced by the irresistible compulsion of Yahweh's word
to utter it, at whatever cost to himself.
His vocation brought him into the sharpest conflict
with his people, who received his warnings of disaster
with derision, and denounced him as a traitor to his
country. To his sensitive nature such scorn and mis
understanding of his message were an intolerable
burden. For that message was dictated not by fanati
cal but by the purest and most clear-sighted devotion
to his country. Isolated and misunderstood, to whom
could he go but to God? To Him he unburdens his
soul, often in language of bitter reproach. His work
was not of his own choosing; it was God who had
doomed him to it, and would grant him no discharge.
Yet though the cry is wrung from him that God has
enticed him, and forced on him a task beneath which
he staggers, it is to God that he reveals his cause, to
God who is his strength and stronghold, his refuge in
the day of trouble. It is his great consolation that God
knows all that he suffers for His sake. And though he

102 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
speaks so passionately of the shame and scorn which
the delivery of God's message brings him, cursing the
day of his birth to a life of such sorrow, yet the message
itself inspires him with very different feelings. "Thy
words," he says, " were found, and I did eat them ; and
thy words were unto me a joy, and the rejoicing of mine
heart" (xv. 16). Thus his life came to be a long and
intimate intercourse with God. It touched all the levels
of emotion, from the gloomiest depression to exulting
joy. His whole heart, with its strength and weakness,
its love and its hate, the dark foreboding and the soar
ing aspiration, he lays bare to God. He would hide from
the great Searcher of hearts no secret winding of the
maze within his breast. And thus he came to under
stand the true nature of religion as no one before him
had understood it. Hitherto, the individual's relation
to God was mediated through the nation. But Jeremiah
came to understand that his own experience gave a
truer and deeper interpretation of religion. It was just
in this familiar fellowship with God that the essence of
religion was to be found. Thus he rose to the great
thought of the New Covenant, in which he enshrined
his religious ideal. It was the religion of the heart, the
personal knowledge of God by all, each for himself, and
the divinely implanted inward impulse as the spring of
all obedience to God's will.

CHAPTER VIII
THE EXILE
The failure of the Reformation demonstrated that a
sharper and deeper surgery was needed to cut the evil
from the vitals of the nation. A new and more tragic
ordeal awaited it. For fanatical attachment to the
Temple and scrupulous performance of its ritual was
not enough. Temple and ritual alike miist go ; captivity
alone could secure an effective breach with the guilty
past. And at last captivity had become possible without
the destruction of the religion. For the religion had
now become sufficiently spiritual to bear the terrible
shock of transplantation. And for its future develop
ment it was inevitable that it should be torn from its
native soil. While the nation remained in Palestine the
old local associations were so strong that abuse could
not be altogether cut away. And though at first
restriction to one land may be the strength of a religion,
since its very narrowness lends it power, and its energies
would be dissipated if the area of its influence were
extended, yet at length it changes to a weakness. The

104 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
religion becomes provincial and contracted, and univer
salism has no chance of asserting itself. The infatuated
opponents of Jeremiah could point to Isaiah's doctrine
of the inviolability of Zion and the overthrow of
Sennacherib's army as proof that Jerusalem was still
impregnable and that they were Isaiah's true successors.
But, obstinate in loyalty to the past, they had no discern
ment for the complete change of the conditions, and
could not read the signs of the times.
The blow was precipitated by their own reckless
turbulence and shameless violation of their solemn oath.
Already in 597 the flower of the people had gone into
captivity to Babylon with Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, his
successor, had sworn to be loyal to the Babylonians,
who set him on the throne. Rebellion brought on
the final catastrophe, and the illusions which the people
had so fondly entertained were shattered by the destruc
tion of Temple and city, and the captivity of the nation
in 586. Many reverted to idolatry (cf. Jer. xliv.), for, they
argued, our disaster proves that Yahweh cannot or will
not help us, so we are not bound to Him any more ; all
things were well with us while we worshipped other gods,
and to them we will once more give our allegiance.
But, others argued, punishment is for our sin in forsaking
Yahweh; it can be remitted only if we return to Him
with whole-hearted devotion. Whether few or many,

THEEXILE 105
these had the future in their hands. In them spiritual
religion had grown independent of time and place ; they
had risen above the local and provincial, and had attained
the universal.
The condition of the captives in Babylonia seems to
have been more prosperous than we might have antici
pated. They were not debarred from acquiring property,
and apparently they were allowed certain rights of self-
government, no doubt of a very limited character.
That they had achieved considerable worldly success is
clear from the fact that so few comparatively availed
themselves of the opportunity to return. Nevertheless
the passionate hatred of Babylon that animates many
utterances of prophet or poet, attests strongly how
galling was the yoke they were made to bear, and how
hard the service they were forced to render. And there
is clear evidence of the despondent and even hopeless
temper which had come upon them. Ezekiel's vision of
the dry bones is meant to rebut their despairing cry :
" Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost ; we are
clean cut off." And the Second Isaiah similarly
rebukes them : " Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest,
O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord and my judg
ment is passed away from my God?" Conscious of
their own innocence, they attributed their suffering to
the sins of earlier generations. "The fathers have

io6 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on
edge." But painful though their experience was, it brought
to the religion of Israel an immeasurable gain. The
Reformation of Josiah had soon proved a failure ; the
worship of the high places had been in many instances
restored. The old associations had proved too fasci
nating ; the people had succumbed to them and defied
the Law. Exile tore them away, and snapped the ties
that bound them to their ancient sanctuaries. When a
new generation returned, it was Zion alone that com
manded its allegiance. Moreover, their removal from
Palestine to Babylonia meant that the Jews now found
themselves in an unclean land. In such a land the
sacrificial system of Israel could not be practised.
Here again it was through exile that the purification of
the ritual became possible, since those who returned
from exile had no long familiarity with older practices
to hinder them from accepting the reformed ceremonial.
But the fact that sacrifice and first-fruits could no
longer be offered did not mean that the Jews abandoned
the service of Yahweh till they returned to His land.
That service was forced into other channels. If there
were no sacred places for them in Babylonia, sacred
times could be observed everywhere. The Sabbath thus
received an altogether new prominence. It became a

THEEXILE 107

distinctive feature of the religion in a way hitherto un
known, that prepared the way for the fanatical rigidity
with which the latter Jews observed it. And the more'
spiritual forms of religion could exist in every land-
prayer and praise and the utterance or exposition of the
Word. We are probably thus to account for the rise of
the synagogue worship on the Sabbath day, which filled
so large a place in and exercised so profound an influence
on the religious life of post-exilic Judaism throughout
the world. The voice of prophecy was not wholly dumb..
But the prophets as a class had been discredited by the
destruction of Jerusalem, which had branded them as
liars and proved their easy optimism a shallow delusion.
Prophets of Ezekiel's type were few. It was natural
that, in the Sabbath gatherings, the Jews should read
their own sacred writings, the prophets, historians, and
Codes of Law so far as they had been compiled. Thus
the ministry of the Word came to hold a very important
place in meetings for worship. The transition from a
ceremonial to a purely spiritual type of religion was
made easier by the fact that the captivity was not
accomplished at one stroke. Eleven years elapsed
between the captivity of Jehoiachin and the destruction
of Jerusalem. Those who went into exile first almost
all expected their absence from Jerusalem to be but
temporary : encouraged by their prophets, they refused to

io8 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
credit the predictions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This
had one advantage, that they were gradually trained
during those eleven years in the practice of a non-local
ised, non-ceremonial religion, so that when the final
blow fell, the situation that arose had lost its paralysing
novelty. Had there not been this interval, in which
they unconsciously became accustomed to a new order
of things, they might have found it difficult to retain
their faith in their ancestral religion. But since they
found it possible to do so, it was necessary to take pre
cautions to secure their racial identity frOm being
impaired. They no longer existed as a nation ; it was
all the more essential that they should remain Jews, and
not suffer the fate of others, who were quickly merged in
the population among which they were planted. Hence
came the striking development of those features which
marked the Jew off from other peoples, such as the
Sabbath, circumcision, and the laws of uncleanness.
Another result of the exile was that the attention of the
Jews was concentrated much more on their religious
customs and literature. The politics that had so long
absorbed their attention now lost all their meaning, and
patriotism was diverted in another direction. The
priests collected and committed to writing statements as
to the ritual usages to which they had been accustomed,
while others brought together and edited historical

THE EXILE 109

narratives or the oracles of older prophets. The
prophetic voice was not completely silent, though from
the time of Ezekiel till shortly before the destruction of
Babylon we know of very little if any activity of the
prophets. All the more zeal was shown in preserving
and meditating on the written Word.

CHAPTER IX
EZEKIEL
Ezekiel was carried into captivity with Jehoiachin in
597, and received his call to the prophetic ministry in
592. Several years had yet to run before Jerusalem was
destroyed, but he predicted her fate with unfaltering
•conviction. In this he followed Jeremiah, but the work
¦of the elder prophet was all but done when the blow
actually fell. It was therefore the lot of Ezekiel to
provide for the new conditions, and secure the continued
¦existence of the religion of Israel when the State with
which it had been indissolubly connected was no more.
Standing at the crisis of his nation's fortunes, he was
forced to read the lesson of the past and forecast the
future as well as fulfil a duty to the present. And his
attitude in each respect is controlled by his conception
of God. His whole teaching is dominated by his sense
of the holiness and glory of God, and it is from this stand
point that he interprets history and predicts the future.
He represents Yahweh as a self-regarding Deity, seek-
: ing His own glory in all His acts, rigorously just in all

EZEKIEL

His ways. It is in the light of this doctrine that he
draws his great indictment against Israel. It was this
which impelled him to give a reasoned justification of
God's government, that His glory might be seen in all
its untarnished brightness. His holy Name had been
compromised before the world by three things. First,
the sin of Israel cast its polluting shadow on the God
who dwelt in her midst. Yahweh vindicated His honour
by the punishment of exile. Secondly, the exile seemed
to the world to involve Yahweh in the dishonour of His
people, and prove that He could not save them. To
vindicate Himself from this the restoration of Israel was
necessary. Thirdly, the exultation of the nations at the
overthrow of Jerusalem seemed to strike at the glory of
the God who had dwelt there. To remove the stain
from His honour God would punish the nations that
had thus insulted His people and city.
At the very outset of his ministry he was warned again
and again that the Israelites were a rebellious house.
But this had been their character from the origin of the
nation. While other prophets spoke of the early right
eousness of Israel or of Jerusalem, Ezekiel emphatically
denied it. Even before they were rescued from Egypt
they were idolatrous, and after they had, in spite of this,
been delivered, they were guilty of repeated rebellion in
the wilderness. Still they were spared and brought into

112 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the fruitful land of Canaan ; but no sooner had they
entered it, than they adopted all the heathen sanctuaries
and idolatrous customs of the Canaanites. Their history
had been one unbroken series of acts of unfaithfulness.
Jerusalem, found by Yahweh deserted and uncared for,
moved Him to pity by her forlorn condition. He clothed
her magnificently, put His majesty upon her, and her
renown became great among the nations. But she
rewarded Him by forsaking Him for Egypt, Assyria, and
Chaldea, perverting to base uses the gifts He had lavished
upon her. She had been far worse than Sodom and
Samaria. Her father was an Amorite and her mother a
Hittite, and of her the proverb was true, " Like mother,
like daughter," for she had been a true daughter of the
Hittite. Idolatry and child-sacrifice, profanation of the
Temple and defilement of the holy things, perversion of
justice, oppression, murder and impurity, are among the
dark sins which characterise the people. They are worse
than the heathen, stubborn in their sin and unashamed.
And Yahweh has forborne to smite, lest His own honour
should be dimmed in the world's sight by the destruction
of His people. But now His wrath, long pent up, will
break loose, and He will neither spare nor pity. Thus
His glory will be satisfied and He will be comforted,
tormented no longer by the distraction between His
anger with Israel and His pity for His holy Name.

EZEKIEL 113

But just as zeal for His own glory leads Yahweh to
punish the nation which has intolerably darkened His
fair fame, so a similar concern will lead Him to restore
it from exile, lest He lie under the imputation of weak
ness. He meets the despair of the people with the
vision of the valley of dry bones. Just as these bones,
from which all the juice of life has been drained, yet
reunite into skeletons and are clothed with flesh, and
then as the wind breathes on them return to life, so
Yahweh will put His life-giving spirit into the dead
nation, and it shall live again and be restored to its own
land. Judah and Ephraim will be reunited and dwell
in the land for ever. Thus the nations will understand
that Israel's exile was due to her own sin, not to Yahweh's
inabihty to deliver her. Then when Israel is dwelling
in her land in peace and prosperity, with no visible
defence, Yahweh will wipe out the insults which the
heathen have heaped upon Him and His people, by
enticing Gog to attack the defenceless people. He
comes with an innumerable horde, but God utterly
destroys them with pestilence, fire, and tempest.
Israel's restoration and safety rest on her new relation
to God. Penitence on her part is met by grace and
forgiveness on His own. In almost New Testament
language the prophet describes how Yahweh will cleanse
His people from all their filthiness and idols. He will

ii4 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
give them a new heart and implant a new spirit within
them, taking away the stony heart and giving them a
heart of flesh. And for this regenerate community in
the New Jerusalem the prophet sketches an elaborate
organisation. Yet even this is for God's sake rather
than Israel's. He dwells in the midst of His people, and
the most rigorous precautions are taken to guard His
holiness from all that would profane it. He is most
elaborately insulated from contact with the heathen
world ; while the priests and Levites stand between Him
and the Jewish laity.
In yet another way Ezekiel's doctrine of God led to
important results. The people complained that they
suffered for the sins of their fathers, and that the ways of
Yahweh were therefore unfair. " The fathers have eaten
sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge."
This reflection on God's equity was a challenge which
Ezekiel could not ignore. He emphatically denied that
guilt or merit could be transferred from one to another.
His doctrine as he states and restates it is as follows.
In the first place, retribution and reward are given strictly
to the individual himself, and not in the least degree to
another. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die : the son
shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall
the father bear the iniquity of the son ; the righteous
ness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wicked-

EZEKIEL 115

ness of the wicked shall be upon him " (xviii. 20).
Secondly, at any moment the wicked may turn from his
wickedness or the righteous fall away from his righteous
ness. The human will is free. Thirdly, a man's fate is
determined not by his past but by his state at the
moment in which judgment finds him. If he has lived
in wickedness, but has turned from his sin, he shall live,
and his evil-doing shall not be remembered against him.
On the other hand, if a righteous man fall into sin, and
judgment overtakes him in it, none of his former good
deeds shall be remembered in his favour, but he shall
die in his iniquity. This is due to an intensification of
his individualism. Not only does he separate each
individual sharply from all others, and insist on his
suffering for his own sin or preservation by his own
righteousness, he sharply distinguishes the moments
of a man's life. He is judged not by his past, which is
left wholly out of account, but by his state at the
moment when the judgment comes. This judgment is
not to be identified with death. On the contrary, it is
the judgment which is coming on the nation, in which
the wicked will be slain, whereas the righteous will
survive to share in the time of blessedness. Life and
death are of course conceived as physical.
The denial of solidarity and assertion of individual
responsibility carried with it a new duty for the prophet.

n6 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL

He is not simply, like his predecessors, God's spokesman
to the nation. He has a message to the individual,
warning the righteous to remain in his righteousness lest
he be cut off in his sin, and warning the wicked to the
end that he may turn and live. Thus the prophet be
comes a pastor, with the salvation of individual souls
as his special concern ; and on his faithful fulfilment of
his task hangs the destiny of those entrusted to his care.
Thus with the break-up of the Jewish State, the individual,
who had been previously merged in the mass, receives a
recognition of his independent worth. Jeremiah finds
the essence of religion in personal fellowship with God,
while Ezekiel lays the stress rather on individual respon
sibility. But while Jeremiah's doctrine was too high for any
but a very few, and therefore found a home chiefly
among Psalmists before it was realised in Christianity,
Ezekiel powerfully influenced the immediate future, so
mnch so that he may be called the father of Judaism.
Its legalism, ceremonialism, and rigid dogmatism are all
in him. So, too, is the conception of God's remoteness,
which led in later Judaism to an elaborate doctrine of
angelic intermediaries between God and the world. His
sketch of the ritual service in the reformed and re
stored community constituted the bridge between
Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code. He combined

EZEKIEL 117

with his individualism a recognition of the fact that
religion is also a matter for the community. Thus the
religion of Israel was organised and preserved from
destruction ; and to Ezekiel more than to any man
was due the creation of the community which sheltered
spiritual religion till it was strong enough to stand alone,
and enabled it to survive the disintegrating influence of
Greek thought and life.

CHAPTER X
THE SECOND ISAIAH
The Book of Habakkuk presents a very difficult critical
problem. Usually it is supposed to belong for the most
part to the reign of Jehoiakim. The present writer,
however, prefers to regard the first two chapters (with
the exception of i. 5-1 1) as written in the exile. The
author's theme is the difficulty of reconciling the suffer
ing of righteous Israel and the triumph of the idolatrous
oppressor with the righteousness of God. That a nation
so cruel and haughty, so brutal and selfish, should be
permitted to glut its appetite for blood and treasure filled
him with amazement and indignation; and all the
more when its victim was the righteous people of God.
He gains no explanation of the moral mystery. But as
he waits on his prophetic watch-tower for the Divine
answer, he receives the assurance that sure though slow-
footed retribution will overtake the oppressor, while
righteous Judah will live through its loyal adhesion to
its God. It was a moral necessity, if He was righteous
who sat on the throne of the universe, that ruin should

THE SECOND ISAIAH 119
await the impious and treacherous tyrant. His pride
was the precursor of his fall ; his methods of conquest
bore within them the seeds of his destruction. There
fore let the afflicted people wait patiently, for in their
faith and patience they should win their lives. Faith
and patience might alike be sorely strained by delay,
but they must rise victorious over the temptation to
despair. Thus the prophet receives no answer to his
difficulty. But he attains peace, since he rises into the
atmosphere of unclouded trust, and leaves his unravelled
perplexities in the hands of a righteous God.
When Habakkuk proclaimed his confidence in the
overthrow of the Babylonian empire, it was not because,
as he scanned the heavens from his watch-tower,
he descried any cloud on the political horizon that
heralded the coming storm. But ere long the exiles
heard the tidings of the conquests achieved by Cyrus.
The news brought them no comfort in their despondency,
for how could they expect that he would destroy the
mighty dominion that had crushed all hope out of their
breast ? But some saw in him the predestined deliverer,
who would fulfil the earlier prophecies of retribution on
the oppressor and redemption of the oppressed. The
chief of these was the great prophet, who is usually known
as the Second Isaiah. It is probable that we should
attribute to him Isa. xl.-lv., including the four poems

120 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
commonly described as the Servant of Yahweh passages
(Isa. xiii. 1-4, xlix. 1-6, 1. 4-9, Iii. 13-liii. 12), though
many scholars prefer to regard these poems as the work
of another author.
It was his design to comfort and uplift his people, who
despaired of the future and were dismayed by the might
of Babylon and the magnificence of its gods. He does
so by his lofty declarations of Yahweh's omnipotence
and His government in nature and history, by his
scornful exposure of the senselessness of idolatry, by the
meaning he gives to Israel's suffering, and his description
of the part she is to play in God's great design. No
prophet has emphasised so strongly the greatness of
Yahweh. He is the everlasting God, the First and the
Last, and the Incomparable. He is the strong Creator
who called into being the starry heavens and the remotest
regions of earth, and rules them with unchallenged sway.
He is unsearchable in wisdom ; no one has been His
counsellor and instructor. The truth, thus vividly set
forth, that Yahweh is the only true God, and that the
heathen gods are nothing, finds its proof in history. He
is the ruler of the life of nature, who has ordained the
course of history and shapes all its forces to His own
ends. And this claim is proved by His power to
predict the future, exemplified in the prediction of
the rise of Cyrus, and in the new predictions which will

THE SECOND ISAIAH 121
soon be verified by their fulfilment. For only He who
rules the world can know what the world's future is
to be. And in the prophetic word which He inspires,
there works an inherent energy, so that it cannot return
to Him void, but must accomplish His will and prosper
in the task on which He sends it. So all the might
of Babylon and the splendour of its gods dwindle to
nothing compared with the strength and glory of Yahweh,
who counts the nations as the small dust of the balance,
as less than nothing and vanity.
The Yahweh of this prophet is a sweeter and more [
gracious Deity than the self-centred Yahweh of Ezekiel. .'
He is not, indeed, without stern elements in His character.
But what chiefly engages the prophet's thought is the
gentleness and graciousness of Yahweh. He has, it is
true, poured on Israel the fury of His anger. Indeed
Israel has received at His hands double punishment for
all her sin. But now He utters the word of comfort and
promises speedy deliverance. He will Himself bring
His people back from exile like a good shepherd, gently
leading the weak and carrying the lambs in His bosom.
Zion rises again from her humiliation and is clothed anew
with beauty. He will save His people with an everlast
ing salvation, and have mercy on them with everlasting
kindness. No weapon formed against them shall
prosper, and those who have afflicted Israel shall drink

122 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the cup of Yahweh's fury, while kings and queens shall
lick the dust of her feet.
The deepest element in the prophet's message is the
interpretation of Israel's suffering and the conception of
Israel's mission. He does not, it is true, deny that the
nation's sin is partly responsible for the death which has
overtaken it. But he feels that the penalty has been far
heavier than strict justice demanded. It is accordingly
a problem for him how he shall explain the excess of
punishment which Israel has received beyond its deserts.
He solves the problem by his presentation of Israel as
the Servant of Yahweh. God has chosen Israel in the
distant past for this high position. To the other nations
the elect people seemed but puny and contemptible,
as they scornfully watched its lowly origin and its
unattractive progress towards maturity. And when stripe
after stripe fell upon it, and it was made hideous by
disease, so that they shrank in disgust from it as from a
leper, they attributed to its sin the long calamities which
culminated in its death. But their judgment has gone
wholly astray. The death of the nation is to be
followed by its resurrection; Israel is to return from
exile and be exalted in glory. Struck with amazement
at so dramatic a change in its fortunes, the heathen will
penitently confess that they have wronged the Servant
by their misjudgment. His exaltation has proved that

THE SECOND ISAIAH 123
he was not marked out by his exceptional suffering
as an exceptional sinner. What meaning can they give
to that suffering which seemed to speak so loudly of his
sin ? As they meditate on it, the contrast between what
might have been expected and what has actually
happened brings them to see that Israel, which was
relatively innocent, has suffered, while they, who had
forsaken the true God for idols, had escaped. What can
be the meaning of this, save that Israel has borne
the penalty which should have been inflicted on thef
heathen ? The Servant of Yahweh is thus the vicarious;
sufferer for the sin of the nations. But this does not!
exhaust his significance. It is also his function to1
be Yahweh's missionary to the Gentiles, proclaiming to
them the knowledge of the true God. Trained by God's
own tuition, disciplined by pain and martyrdom loyally
endured in faithfulness to his mission, he will perform
his great task with the most tender respect for the
faintest gleam of light he may find in those to whom he
ministers. He will not speak to an audience wholly
unprepared. The far lands are already waiting for his
instruction. No nation could adequately fulfil so stupendous a task
as that which the prophet assigned to Israel. But
the author truly divined the essential meaning of Israel
in the world's history, disengaging it from the accidents

124 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
which were so inharmonious with it. It was only in
a single personality that the essential meaning could win
a clear and uncontaminated expression. And when
He came who gathered into Himself all the significance
of that people from which He sprang, He came as the
Supreme Revealer of God to man, and bore upon Him
fhe burden of the world's sin.

CHAPTER XI
THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM
In 536 Cyrus, into whose hands the Babylonian empire
had fallen, fulfilled the predictions of the Second Isaiah
and gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine.
But the response to this permission fell far short of
the prophet's glowing forecast. A fresh generation had
sprung up, which knew Jerusalem only by name, and
the power with which it appealed to their imagination,
however great it may have been, was too faint to spur
them to the worldly sacrifice involved in leaving Babylon,
or snap the ties which bound them to the land of their
birth. Yet those who remained behind exerted and
were destined to exert a powerful influence on the
Judaism of the future, for it was in Babylonia that the
final codification of the Law seems to have taken place.
On its return the feeble band that had come from
Babylon found itself thwarted by the hostility of " the
people of the land," whose offer to join in the rebuilding
of the Temple it had repulsed. But the delay in building
was not simply caused by external foes. The enthusiasm

126 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
which had brought them from Babylon was quickly
chilled by the disenchanting realities of drought and
wretched harvests aid failure to prosper in anything
to which they set their hand. They excused themselves
from rebuilding the Temple on the ground that the
effort was premature, and that all their energy was
needed to make their own position secure. At last
they were roused from their apathy by the reproach
and appeal of two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah.
The former prophet (520 B.C.) meets the excuse of the
people with the reply that it is their neglect to build
the Temple which has brought about their miserable
condition. They dwell in panelled houses, while
Yahweh's house lies waste. When they began to build,
and were despondent because the new Temple seemed
mean in comparison with the old, he encouraged them
by the assurance that Yahweh was with them and would
soon shake the heavens and the earth and all nations,
and then the desirable things of all nations would come,
and Yahweh would fill the house with His glory. For
the silver and the gold are His, and the latter glory of
the Temple shall be greater than the former. Then, after
this convulsion of kingdoms, Yahweh will take His
servant Zerubbabel and make him as a signet, for He
has chosen him. It is quite clear from these allusions
that the prophet knew of or expected great political

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM 127
disturbances, as a consequence of which he anticipated
a glorious future for Zerubbabel. These disturbances
had, in fact, begun the year before, when almost the
whole of the Persian empire, though not Syria or Asia
Minor, was in revolt. To Haggai this is the beginning
of the end. The Messianic kingdom will soon come
in, and apparently Zerubbabel is thought of as the
Messiah. The revolts were, however, suppressed, and
the subsequent history of Zerubbabel is unknown to
us. It has been conjectured that he was put to death
by the Persians for participation in a Messianic revolt,
and some have seen in him the martyred Servant of
Yahweh (Isa. Iii. 13-liii. 12).
Zechariah, who is the author of the first eight chapters
in the book which bears his name, shared the labours
and expectations of Haggai. He represents a further
stage in the movement of prophecy towards apocalyptic
which had been initiated by Zephaniah and Ezekiel.
His message is largely conveyed in visions, the symbolism
of which is often obscure ; angels receive a new promi
nence as intermediaries between God and the prophet,
a witness to the growing sense of the transcendence of
God; deliverance is expected to come not through a
normal development of the existing situation, but
through the sudden and decisive intervention of God.
In his first vision he learns that the earth is at rest.

128 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
The angel of Yahweh appeals to God for Jerusalem.
The connection between the report that all is at rest
and the angel's appeal lies in the thought that for the
Messianic time to come in, a great political upheaval
is necessary. When the angel learns that all is
peaceful, he urges his remonstrance against God's
delay. Zechariah's message is therefore similar to that
of Haggai. The stillness of the earth is but the calm
before the storm ; the tempest will soon burst, Yahweh
will shake heaven and earth, and in the crash of empires
Zion will come to its own. The second vision depicts
the^ destruction of the hostile heathen world. The
third vision answers the question, When will the walls
of Jerusalem be built? with the assurance that the
population will expand beyond the limits of a closely
built town into a cluster of villages, and Jerusalem will
need no walls, for Yahweh will be its protection. In
the fourth vision, which is very obscure, the prophet
addresses himself to the misgiving created by their
miseries in the mind of the people, that they were the
victims of God's settled hostility. The Satan, an angel
who contests before God men's claim to righteousness,
accuses Joshua the high-priest, in order to bring more
punishment on the people. Yahweh rebukes him on
the ground that He has Himself interposed to snatch
Jerusalem from punishment, plucking it as a brand

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM 129
from the burning, therefore the appeal for still further
punishment is contrary to His will. The sin of Joshua
is then removed, he is clad in robes of righteousness,
and access to Yahweh's presence is graciously promised
to him. The fifth vision seems to mean that the revela
tion of Himself which Yahweh makes in the Temple
is made possible through Zerubbabel and Joshua, the
prince and the high-priest, since it is they who rebuild
and maintain the sanctuary. Difficulties shall disappear
before Zerubbabel; as he has begun so he shall com*
plete the Temple. The sixth vision represents the curse
upon sin under the figure of a flying roll, which goes
over the land and entering the houses of sinners con
sumes them. The seventh vision describes the placing
of a woman in an ephah, which is fastened down and
carried to the land of Shinar. This woman is Wicked
ness; by her removal the land is freed from sin and
its allurements. The eighth vision apparently indicates
that Yahweh is about to execute judgment upon the
nations, and thus prepare the way for the Messianic
time. Following this we have a passage, which appears
to have been tampered with, but in its original form
represented Zerubbabel as crowned while Joshua was
set at his side. Zerubbabel is thus again described as
the Messianic king, and the counsel of peace between
him and Joshua means that king and priest are to act
1

i3o THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
harmoniously together. On the rest of the prophecy
it is not necessary to linger.
When the veil is again lifted we find that matters had
not improved. The date of the book which bears the
title Malachi is uncertain ; we may perhaps place it shortly
before Ezra's arrival in Jerusalem in 458. The sixty years
that separate the author from Haggai and Zechariah are
a blank to us. But the intervening period had apparently
been one of growing disillusion and cooling zeal. The
sins against which the older prophets had prophesied
still stain the nation's life — sorcery, adultery, perjury, op
pression of the poor and defenceless. The priests show
their contempt for Yahweh by the paltriness of their offer
ings ; their duties have become a tiresome routine. The
people rob God in the matter of tithes and offerings.
Divorce, and marriage with heathen women, were common.
The pious had grown discouraged, since the wicked
seemed to prosper and the righteous found it vain to
serve God.
The prophet rebukes the base ingratitude which Israel
displays towards Yahweh. He has loved Jacob and
hated Esau, so that while He has doomed Edom to per
petual desolation, He has brought Israel back from exile.
And a bright future lies before the righteous. For the
Day of Yahweh is at hand, when like a refiner's fire Yahweh
will purge away the dross. Then the difference will be

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM 131
clearly seen between the good and the wicked. The
prophet lays special stress on the priestly functions and
Temple service, contrasting a glowing and rather idealised
picture of Levi's past history with its present debasement.
His attitude to the ritual is very unlike that of the older
prophets, yet he has not lost the ethical note, even though
it sounds more faintly in his message.
Very striking is his attitude to the heathen. In his
language on Edom he echoes the hate expressed by
many exilic or post-exilic writers, who never forgave or
forgot the exultation of the Edomites over the destruction
of Jerusalem. And he strongly condemns marriage with
foreign wives. But on the other hand we owe to him
the remarkable words in i. n : " For from the rising of
the sun even unto the going down of the same my name
is great among the Gentiles ; and in every place incense
is offered unto my name and a pure offering: for my
name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of
hosts." The reference is not to the future but to the
present. The prophet can hardly mean that everywhere
in heathendom there are already proselytes to the religion
of Israel to be found. He means rather that the heathen
worship Yahweh, and that their sacrifices are really offered
to Him. So liberal an interpretation of heathenism is sur
prising, especially in a prophet of Malachi's predilections,
but such seems to be the true meaning of the passage.

132 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
It is probable that the greater part of Isa. lvi.-lxvi. be
longs to this period. It is on the whole unlikely that
these chapters are all from the same hand. They have
considerable affinity with Malachi, though they often
reach a higher spiritual standpoint. Religious, social,
and material conditions are alike unsatisfactory. The
desolate cities still remain to be restored, the walls of
Zion are still unbuilt.
The cause of their misery is not Yahweh's inability
to hear, but their flagrant sins, which have separated Him
from them, and which make their zealous religionism
hateful in His eyes. There are even sterner denuncia
tions of some who are addicted to certain forms of idolatry.
Probably the reference is to the half-heathen Samaritans.
They had met with refusal the gracious invitation of
Yahweh to abandon their practices and enter the Jewish
community. In no measured terms the prophet con
demns their necromancy, their human sacrifice, their
magical rites and gruesome sacrificial meals.
These chapters reveal a blend of the ethical and cere
monial such as we find in Ezekiel. The treatment of
fasting is worthy of the older prophets. The fast which
Yahweh approves is not mere abstinence from food, with
the external signs of mourning. It is the care for the
destitute and the breaking of fetters. And the prophet's
vocation is described in beautiful language, made the

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM 133
more sacred that Jesus chose the passage to describe
His own mission. The Spirit of Yahweh rests upon Him
because He has anointed Him to preach glad tidings
to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to an
nounce release to the captives, to comfort the mourners,
to proclaim the acceptable year of Yahweh and His Day
of vengeance. Yahweh is the high and lofty One, who
inhabits eternity, whose Name is Holy. Yet while He
dwells in the high and holy place He dwells also with
him who is of a humble and contrite spirit. He looks
to that man who is poor and of a contrite spirit and that
trembles at His word.
Yet side by side with this strong ethical and religious
interest there is a concern for the ceremonial side of the
religion which is specially characteristic of Ezekiel and
those who stood under his influence. Sabbath observ
ance is coupled with abstinence from moral evil. To
the Temple and its glory some of the loveliest sections
in the prophecy are devoted. It is, however, not merely
a place for sacrifice, but pre-eminently a house of prayer.
And to it all nations are welcomed, drawn to it by the
supernatural radiance which streams from it. Yet the
nations serve as a foil to Israel ; they adorn the Temple
with their wealth, and act as menials to the Jews. Edom
is the object of unrelenting hate. Yahweh tramples it in
His fury till its blood dyes all His raiment red, and

134 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
marvels that the nations have left Him to tread the wine
press alone.
According to the usual chronology Ezra the priest
and scribe came from Babylon to Jerusalem with a
company of exiles in 458 b.c. His main achievement
on this visit was to dissolve all marriages between Jews
and foreign women. This was carried thraugh with
what seems to us great harshness and rigour, and it ad
mirably expressed the spirit of Judaism. The land was
felt to be impure, and any connection with the people
of the land tainted the holy remnant. Some years later
we find Nehemiah the governor fiercely assaulting Jews
who had contracted mixed marriages. On his second
visit, which, according to the generally accepted but con
tested date, fell in the year 444 B.C., Ezra was able with
the help of Nehemiah to carry through one of the most
momentous revolutions which the religion of Israel ever
experienced. Deuteronomy had profoundly influenced
Ezekiel, and Ezekiel's sketch of religious institutions for
the restored community formed the basis of what is
commonly called the Priestly Document (P). This is
found in portions of Genesis, in large parts of Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua. It is marked by a
peculiar vocabulary and structure of sentences, by a love
for constant repetition and stereotyped formulse, which
betray the hand of the ecclesiastical lawyer. Such also

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM r35
are his standpoint and the interests which absorb him.
The matchless beauty of the older stories of the patriarchs
make no appeal to him ; he has no eye for the play of
emotion, and understands neither love nor hate. Dry,
precise, formal, he cares nothing for the romance which
fires the blood or the moving spectacle of man's warfare
with his fate. He begins with the story of creation, but
soon retreats from this universal point of view, and
narrows down the interest to the fortunes of the Hebrew
patriarchs and people. The author has a clearly defined
idea of progressive revelation, the stages of which are
marked by the names of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and
Moses. The chief interest is in the ceremonial side of
the religion, for the due performance of which minute
regulations are made. Anthropomorphism is carefully
avoided, and the feeling for Yahweh's holiness is very
pronounced. Much stress is laid on distinctively Jewish
observances, such as the Sabbath and circumcision.
The deepened sense of sin finds expression in the institu
tion of two new types of sacrifice, the sin-offering and
the guilt-offering. The peace-offering, which represented
the primitive idea of sacrifice, that of a meal in which
the Deity and his worshipper shared, sinks into compara
tive insignificance, while those sacrifices in which the
whole victim is retained by God or part eaten by the
priests, His representatives, become very important.

136 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL

This was aided by the centralisation of the worship,
which by detaching the sacrifices from their local associa
tions, destroyed their communal character, and obliter
ated the social while emphasising the religious element.
He has elaborate regulations as to uncleanness and
purification. Naturally he did not invent much of this
complex system. Large parts of it were of immemorial
antiquity ; indeed it is only in the light of savage parallels
that many elements in it can be understood. In many
respects the Priestly Law codified already existing custom.
To some extent it carried to a logical conclusion the
changes involved in the centralisation of the worship.
At some points innovations were introduced. The
combination of this document with the earlier sections
of sacred history and law down to the death of Moses
produced the Pentateuch, largely in its present form.
The chief work of Ezra was to introduce the com
pleted Law and secure its acceptance by the people.
Henceforth the Law becomes the dominant power in
Jewish life ; with its acceptance Judaism had its birth.
Although the Priestly Code exalted and enriched the
priesthood, and the central sanctuary now gained the
exclusive position which Josiah had only temporarily
won for it, yet the Law was greater than priesthood or
Temple. Thus the scribe became even more important
than the priest. The influence of the latter was concen-

THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM 137
trated in the Temple, while the former was supreme in
the synagogue, which could be planted wherever there
were Jews requiring a place of worship. And the
scribe's function was not simply that of copying, but
that of interpreting and making a hedge about the Law.
It would be unjust to represent this as a retrograde
movement. We cannot, of course, rate the intrinsic
religious value of the Law so high as that of the great
prophets. But we can recognise the guiding of Provi
dence in what seems at first the descent from the
prophetic religion to legalism. The latter stands to the
former somewhat as Ezekiel to Jeremiah. In both
cases chronological sequence is no indication of relative
worth. But apart from the firm structure erected by the
Law, the higher religion of the prophets might never
have maintained its existence in Israel ; it would have
perished for want of a shelter. "The Law came in
beside " that it might discipline the people and prepare
them for the final religion in which the prophetic re
ligion received its complete fulfilment.

CHAPTER XII
THE WANING OF PROPHECY
It was inevitable that prophecy should dwindle away in
the atmosphere of legalism, and in so far as it survived
should undergo transformation. The will of Yahweh
was made known in His Law; the water of life was
stored in a reservoir, and did not burst like a leaping
fountain from the inspired spirit. But even in this
decadent period there was one who ranks with the
greatest in the whole line of prophets.
This is the writer to whom we owe the Book of
Jonah. The author takes up the message of the Second
Isaiah, that Israel was called to be the revealer of the
true God to the heathen. Yet he seems to be free from
the narrowness which marred the otherwise noble and
generous position of the great prophet of the Exile.
He depicts the heathen in the most favourable light,
and reserves all his pitiless satire for the savage bigotry
of the Jews and their bitter hatred of the heathen. In
an allegory, constructed with the highest art, and set
"38

THE WANING OF PROPHECY 139

forth in the most concise and pregnant language, he
sketches the attitude of Israel to the heathen in the
guise of a story. Jonah the prophet is sent to Nineveh
to proclaim God's judgment upon it. He disobeys the
call and takes ship to Tarshish. He is a monotheist in
theology, yet seeks to flee from the presence of Yahweh,
localising his Deity and thus nullifying his monotheism.
But Yahweh follows him with a tempest, and the sailors,
who are most attractively represented, are at last com
pelled, in spite of their reluctance, to escape destruc
tion by casting the rebellious prophet overboard. He
is swallowed by a fish, and on his prayer is vomited on
dry land. He takes up the task he has found it useless
to evade, but long before he has proclaimed his message
through the whole of Nineveh, the city is moved to
contrition, and on its penitence is spared. Jonah is very
angry that his hate of Nineveh has not been glutted by its
destruction. It was his fear lest his lust for vengeance
should be disappointed that had made him in the first
instance unwilling to go to Nineveh. By creating and
then destroying a gourd, which during its brief existence
afforded the prophet a grateful shelter, God seeks to
lead him from his own tenderness for the gourd, and re
sentment at its destruction, to some sympathy with His
own tender care for Nineveh, with its teeming myriads

140 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
of souls, all dear to God. Jonah stands in this parable
for Israel, the episode of the fish for Israel's exile and
restoration. The final plea of Yahweh to Jonah corre
sponds to the Book of Jonah itself, hence the book
stops where it does, since it is quite uncertain how Israel
will respond to the appeal to rise above its exclusive-
ness, renounce its hate of the Gentiles, and carry the
knowledge of the true God to these souls that sit in
darkness but are longing for the light.
But this noble faith in the virtues of the heathen and
their readiness to welcome the truth did little to check
the growing alienation of the Jew from the Gentile, which
was fostered by the sense of spiritual superiority and the
resentment of a proud people against its political servi
tude. Edom was always the object of the deepest and
most intimate hate. But the Jews were only too ready
to turn for consolation from the wretchedness of their
lot to lurid dreams of a triumphant Messiah ruling the
nations with a rod of iron or shattering them like a
potter's vessel. It is one of the dark limitations of the
Old Testament that not a few of its later writers fed this
unhallowed fire. The experiences of the Maccabsean
struggle intensified the hatred of the Jews for the heathen,
while its victories enhanced their already exuberant self-
esteem. Both of these tendencies find expression in the

THE WANING OF PROPHECY 141
Book of Esther, a singularly unpleasing example of the
vindictive bigotry and megalomania of the baser Judaism,
though redeemed in some measure by the self-renouncing
patriotism of the heroine.
The most important feature in the history of the later
prophecy is its gradual transformation into apocalyptic.
This feature has been touched upon more than once,
and it is now necessary to refer to it rather more fully.
For the most part the Jewish apocalypses strictly so
called were not received into the Old Testament ; the
Book of Daniel is the only exception. But several of
the later prophecies are more or less deeply tinged with
an apocalyptic colouring. As prophecy became more
literary it rested more and more on the study of older
writings. The impulse to independent utterance was
weakened ; there was less original contribution, and more
combination of the very varied forecasts of the future
into a consistent eschatology. Not earlier prophecies
alone, but ancient traditional lore about the beginning
and the end of things, were embodied in these schemes.
The stimulus which gave them birth was the need of a
glorious future, to which faith might escape from the
despair of the present. And for the realisation of such
a future they had no hope but in God. He who had
entrusted the world's government to the angel-princes of

142 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the nations was tolerating their misrule and the oppres
sion of His people till their predestined time had run
out ; then He would Himself overwhelm the angelic host
of the high ones on high and the earthly kings whom
they had used as the tools of their malice against Israel.
Then, when their oppressors had been subdued and
punished, the kingdom of the saints would be established.
There is no hint in the politics of the time that any
change is impending, but the seer can read the hand
writing on the wall and proclaim that the hour of destiny
has struck. For nothing is to lead up to it. " When
they are saying, Peace and safety, then sudden destruc
tion cometh upon them." The future is cut loose from
the present ; not gradual development but sudden catas
trophe effects the transition from one to the other. The
literary form of apocalypse was singular. It was usual
to select some ancient seer, such as Enoch or Baruch, to
whom the vision of the future, often expressed in an
obscure and bizarre symbolism, was unfolded. The
history down to the writer's own time is given in the form
of detailed prediction. The vision passes into gene
ralities when it leaves the assumed for the actual future.
Several of the features which have been enumerated
are, of course, absent from the post-exilic prophets, so
that it would be a mistake to call them apocalyptists.

THE WANING OF PROPHECY 143
But the authors of Joel, Zech. ix.-xiv., Isaiah xxxiv.,
xxxv., and above all Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii. illustrate the drift
towards apocalyptic which had already been discernible
in Zephaniah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah i.-viii. It is not
possible to deal with these prophecies in detail ; such
points as demand attention are best reserved.
The Book of Daniel may be dated about the year
165 B.C. It was written to encourage the Jews of
Palestine in their resistance to the attempt of the
Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanes, to extirpate the Jewish
religion. The author enforces his lesson of unflinching
loyalty to God and unswerving obedience to His law by
the example of Daniel and his companions. Their
refusal to defile themselves with the ceremonially un
clean food of the heathen king was rewarded by promo
tion. Daniel's three friends refuse to worship the golden
image set up by Nebuchadnezzar, and walk free and un
harmed in the midst of the fiery furnace to which they
were doomed for their disobedience. Daniel himself
refuses to desist from prayer, and is untouched by the
lions into whose den he is cast. The pride of Nebu
chadnezzar is humbled by mania, the profanity of
Belshazzar is visited with defeat and death. Thus
history is shown to teach that God rewards the fidelity
of His servants, while disaster awaits the godless

144 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
oppressor. The visions are similarly intended to steady
the Jews under the terrible temptation to apostasy by
the assurance that dominion will soon pass from the
brutal powers of heathenism to the saints of the Most
High.

CHAPTER XIII
SAGES AND PSALMISTS
When we speak of Hebrew wisdom we must not think
of it as concerned with the problems of metaphysics
which absorb the attention of Western philosophers. It
was concrete not abstract, practical not speculative. Its
task was not to win an ordered and harmonious concep
tion of the universe, but to teach men how they might
direct their way aright. Even where it busied itself with
problems, it was a practical interest which supplied the
impulse. We have no reason to doubt that from the
earliest times there were those who reflected on life and
conduct, and embodied their observations in picturesque
parable or terse aphorism. Many of the maxims in the
Book of Proverbs may well be quite ancient, and not a
few may have come from Solomon himself. But for
reasons which must be sought rather in an introduction
to the Old Testament, we must regard the Book of
Proverbs, no less than those of Job and Ecclesiastes, as
products of the post-exilic period. Judaism forms its

146 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
background, the battle with idolatry has ended, the
burning questions of the prophetic period lie in the past.
Indeed the description of the Divine Wisdom in the
eighth chapter is of such a character that we can hardly
refuse to assign it to a comparatively late post-exilic date.
The main body of the book consists of maxims for the
right conduct of life, written from the standpoint of the
virtuous middle classes, and with a firm belief that
morality and prosperity went hand in hand. The
shrewd worldly wisdom, the prudential note, the value
placed on success, perhaps bulk too largely -in the
common estimate of the book, and do injustice to its
finer, nobler, and more generous qualities. And even
the lower element has its place in any sober judgment of
life. Society needs it for a stable basis, the commercial
world has much to learn from the insistence on integrity,
while many of the children of light would be all the
better for some of that wisdom in which they are
notoriously deficient.
The greatest example of Hebrew wisdom is the Book
of Job, the date of which is perhaps about 400 b.c. Its
theme is the suffering of the righteous, its problem the
harmony of such suffering with the righteousness of God.
Job suffers that the disinterested character of his virtue
may be vindicated against the cynicism of the Satan.

SAGES AND PSALMISTS 147
He triumphantly emerges from the ordeal, but now a
new question arises : How is Job, conscious of his
innocence and ignorant of the reason for his calamities,
to reconcile with the Divine righteousness the suffering
which stamped him in men's eyes as a sinner ? It seemed
as if God had borne false witness against him before the
world. And yet he had lived a long life, happy in the
consciousness of God's goodness. It is the collision
between the settled habit of piety based on the current
theology and supported by personal experience, and the
present evidence of God's implacable hostility, which
lends its intense dramatic interest to the book. As the
debate proceeds between him and the three friends who
represent the orthodoxy of their time, the hero, stung by
the calm insolence of their assumption that sin alone
can account for such misfortune, wounded still more
deeply by the arrows of the Almighty, feels his view of
God's goodness and righteousness shattered against the
invincible consciousness of his own innocence. His
own unmerited suffering has taken the scales from his
eyes, and everywhere he sees the evidence of an immoral
or non-moral government of the world. It is not the
world's agony, however, but his own which absorbs his
attention. And here his mind oscillates between the two
forces which are fighting for his soul. At times he sees

148 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
nothing but a calculated malevolence in God's earlier
favour, designed to make his present trial more bitter.
But gradually the memory of the past reasserts its
influence, and he recognises in it a true expression of
God's earlier attitude to him. But this in no way re
moves the conviction of God's present enmity. How,
then, is he to adjust the two contradictory attitudes?
His faith in God's essential friendliness triumphs. God's
present hostility does not represent His permanent
character. It is only a passing mood, from which God
will revert to His earlier, better self. But when His old
love for Job awakes again in His breast it will be too late.
Job will have left the warm life of earth for that gloomy
underworld whence none returned, and where man and
God could no longer have fellowship with each other.
But what if man might come back to earth ? then God's
regret for His passionate outburst might not be too late.
Job is fascinated by the thought, but he steadily sets
it aside. He has nothing to hope from God so far as
any renewal of the old happy fellowship is concerned.
God's repentance will come too late, and He will Him
self have to suffer the loss of the communion He
had prized in the past. But this matters less to Job
than we might have anticipated, deeply though the pathos
of the situation moves him. After all, life must end at

SAGES AND PSALMISTS 149
last ; the happiest day must merge in the everlasting night.
From such a fate even Job could in no case have escaped.
But there is another question, which troubles him still
more, and that is the question of his reputation. The
world, even his intimate friends, count him a grievous
sinner, and God has set His approval upon their verdict.
He knows that he is innocent, and the bitterest element
in his suffering is that the honour he prizes more than
life is so foully wronged. He can get no redress against
God, for men assume that Omnipotence and Moral
Perfection are convertible terms. His friends believe
him guilty ; posterity will not reverse his condemnation.
Who, then, is left to stand up for him against God ? Yet
the one thing he cannot bear is that the stain should for
ever remain on his reputation. So this intolerable craving
for his vindication combines with his memory of God's
goodness in the past. And thus he rises to his great
thought that the God of the future will right him against
the God of the present. His Vindicator lives though
Job himself will die, and He will stand on Job's grave to
proclaim his innocence. It will not mean for him a
return to earth or any renewal of his ancient fellowship
with God. But one supreme moment of happiness will
be vouchsafed to him. He will be permitted to see God
as He thus vindicates his honour.

150 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
Yet though Job almost swoons with emotion as this
conviction entrances him, it brings him no explanation of
his calamities, nor does it ease in the slightest the pressure
of the world's woe. Even after this splendid utterance
he criticises God's government with unexampled boldness.
He closes the debate with a pathetic description of his
former greatness and his present misery, and then in
one of the finest and loftiest chapters of the Old Testa
ment he solemnly clears himself of such sin as might
justify the change in his fortunes. Conscious of his
rectitude, he would fain have God's indictment against
him. Proudly he would wear it in God's very presence,
lifted above the shame of it by the approval of his
conscience. And now God speaks to him from the roaring of the
storm. He brings Job no word of comfort, nor does He
seek to alleviate even by a hint the mystery of his suffer
ing. He bruises him with scorn, brings home to him
his weakness and his ignorance. He unrolls before him
the vast panorama of nature, and presses on Job how
inexplicable its wonders are. And thus he bids him
look away from himself and consider the vast universe
which God must govern. Can he who is ignorant of its
simplest secrets be a competent critic of God's ways?
If he will only take time to ponder the world's marvels

SAGES AND PSALMISTS 151
he will learn that man is not all, and that God's tender
care is over all His creatures. Yet it is not this brilliant
demonstration which changes Job's attitude. It is the
vision of God Himself which leads him to loathe his
words and repent in dust and ashes. In other words,
Job finds rest in a mystical apprehension of God. He
undeistands God's action no better now than before, but
now he is sure of God Himself. It is imperative that
the reason for his trial should not be explained to him ;
he must stay his soul on the vision of God, which has
given him the certainty that all is well.
The same problem is the subject of three Psalms,
Pss. xxxvii., xlix., lxxiii. The first of these proceeds on
conventional lines, and need not detain us. The second
probably asserts that a different destiny is reserved in
the next world for the righteous and the wiciced. The
same conviction is expressed in Ps. lxxiii. But this
Psalm also closes on a mystical note. In one of the
most wonderful passages in Hebrew literature the
Psalmist depicts the blessed communion he has with
God : " Whom have I in heaven ? and possessing thee,
I delight in nought upon earth."
The writer of this Psalm tells us that his feet had
well-nigh swerved when he considered the prosperity of
the wicked. Another Jewish writer failed to keep his

152 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
footing. The author of Ecclesiastes, whose date we
may most plausibly fix as about 200 b.c, was forced by
his observation of life to pessimism. He remains, it is
true, a Theist, but his Theism is not of the kind which
fosters religion. God is the Almighty Ruler, in harmony
with whose predestination the whole course of rristory
moves in endless repetition. But deliberately he; has
humbled the pride of man by endowing him with the
instinct for action, but refusing the understanding Of the
laws which would make that action fruitful. Thijs, not
only is progress made impossible by the destiny which
condemns history for ever to repeat itself, but even a
knowledge of the principles on which history movesiis
withheld from men. So what God sees as a perfect
harmony appears to man as blind chance. Thus pil
effort is doomed to futility ; life is vanity, and striving
after wind. Wisdom and pleasure alike are vain, as may
be proved by experiment, while observation brings hoine
to us the universal reign of misery. Some slight alleva-
tion is possible, though within very narrow limits. Man
cannot escape from the disease which we call life except
by death, and which is preferable is a question he answers
in accordance with his mood. But while the pain and
unutterable weariness of existence cannot be avoided,
man may drug himself by a prudent enjoyment of such

SAGES AND PSALMISTS 153
pleasures as life has to offer. The grim skeleton, it is
true, will always be present at the feast. Yet let man
rejoice in his youth, remembering that his capacity for
pleasure will fail with old age, and that in the gloomy
underworld the days of darkness will be many. For the
author sets aside altogether the higher doctrine of the
future life.
The writer was better than he conceived his God to
be. He cannot bear the spectacle of the world's pain,
and he can find no remedy. It is almost strange that he
remained a Theist. Better no God at all than a God
who deliberately plans such an existence for man ! But
his Judaism so far triumphs as to preserve a bare Theism,
though his pessimism empties it of all religious signifi
cance. In its original form the book naturally seemed
too dangerous. Its ascription to Solomon guaranteed
its orthodoxy, but its apparent deviation from the con
ventional standard made it necessary to neutralise appear
ances by orthodox interpolations. Thus the book has
fortunately escaped the fate to which an understanding
of its real tendencies would naturally have consigned it.
One of the most noteworthy creations of Judaism still
remains to be mentioned. This is the Book of Psalms.
It would be obviously impossible to give even a brief
outline of the teaching enshrined in this book. Since,

154 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
however, it would largely cover the same ground as a
general sketch of Jewish theology, its necessary exclusion
is the less to be regretted. A short statement may there
fore suffice.
While it is by no means improbable that some portions
of the Psalter date from the pre-exilic period, the book
as a whole must be treated as post-exilic. It is a monu
ment of the piety of Judaism, of its hopes and its fears,
its conflicts with the world and the strife within its own
borders. More than anything else it disabuses us of the
mistake that Judaism was an unspiritual religion, a mere
routine of ritual observances mechanically performed.
There is no literature which so completely expresses the
whole range of religious emotion, and the fact that not
Jews only but Christians have turned to it as an unfailing
aid to devotion should have corrected a too ungenerous
estimate of Jewish piety. It is true that the use of it
has been too undiscriminating, since not a little expurga
tion is needed to fit it for Christian worship. The bitter
ness of language in which the writers permit themselves
to speak of their enemies may no doubt be palliated by
the provocation they received and the sense that the
cause they represented was the cause of God. Moreover,
in many cases the Psalmist speaks in the name of the
community rather than in his own. Yet while all these

SAGES AND PSALMISTS 155
considerations should be borne in mind, and while there
can be no healthy moral life without a capacity for
righteous indignation, the imprecations of the Psalmists
reveal a temper which no Christian can approve without
disloyalty to the Gospel, but which is only too character
istic of much in the Old Testament.
The theology of the Psalter is popular rather than
scholastic. The writers had been trained on the Law
and the prophets. They are fired with enthusiasm for the
Law, and count it the highest privilege to participate in
the Temple worship. They bring the great thoughts of
the prophets within reach of the humblest. They are
not for the most part original thinkers ; their theology is
secondary. But they had an original religious experience
of an intense kind, to which they gave a classical expres
sion. They are also at an advantage as compared with
the prophets in virtue of the timeless quality of their utter
ances. No doubt their language often becomes more
vivid as we apprehend their historical conditions. But,
broadly speaking, it depends but little for intelligibility
on anything outside itself. In the main, and in what is
most important, the Psalter has, while the prophets have
not, been understood by later generations. Naturally
where so many writers have been at work we find a rich
variety of view, but the similarity is even more striking

156 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
than the diversity. Since the Psalter was only gradually
compiled, and the three larger collections into which
it may be analysed contain smaller collections, we
cannot speak of any one motive as guiding the compilers
in their choice of Psalms. The Psalter is not infrequently
spoken of as the hymn-book of the Second Temple.
The term is somewhat misleading to modern ears, and
in the case of several Psalms it is questionable whether
this object was contemplated in their inclusion. In any
case the Psalter was a precious manual of religion for
the people, guiding their thought and quickening their
devotion. While for the most part warmly sympathetic
with the ritual system, it was even more a great book
of heart-religion. In its loftiest passages it transcends
the legal and ritual, and utters the deep penitence of
the soul for its sin, its thirst for the living God, the glad
sense of blissful fellowship, and the communion so com
plete that not death itself can sever it.

CHAPTER XIV
THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM
So far we have traced the development of the religion
from point to point, paying special attention to the con
tribution made by individual writers. It remains to
give a brief connected account of the leading doctrines
of Judaism. Where the material is so large and the
statement so many-sided it is obvious that within our
limits only a rough summary can be attempted, which
shall aim at substantial accuracy without undue concern
for qualifications.
In its doctrine of God, Judaism was strictly mono
theistic. This inheritance from the prophets and the
Law was held with passionate tenacity. It constituted
the fundamental distinction between Judaism and other
religions. Yet there were tendencies towards a recogni
tion that the unity of God was complex rather than
simple. The earlier conception of the Presence of
Yahweh or the Angel of His Presence pointed the way,
and later the doctrine of the Spirit and that of the

158 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
Wisdom of God moved in the same direction. It would,
of course, be a mistake to treat these terms as expressing
a distinction of Persons in the Godhead in the Christian
sense, but they indicated a tendency to conceive the
Unity as the home of distinction.
The conception of God was pure and lofty. Stress was
laid less on His metaphysical than on His moral attri
butes. The former are not ignored, but in harmony
with Hebrew genius they are expressed in a concrete
rather than an abstract form. What is said implies a
belief in the eternity, spirituality, omnipotence and
omniscience of God. His omnipresence was less easy
to grasp owing to the ingrained thought of God as
dwelling in a particular part of the universe. The
inevitable anthropomorphism of human thought made it
very difficult to escape from spatial conditions, though
formally the belief would have been accepted that God
was bound by the limitation neither of space nor time.
His moral character is summed up in the term holiness.
This, as applied to God, means His separation from all
the weakness and imperfections of His creatures, and
thus stands for His Divinity in contrast to humanity.
His absolute purity, inflexible justice, severity to sin,
His fiery wrath against wrong, His faithfulness and
truth, His righteousness, His loving-kindness and mercy,

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 159
His pity and his grace, are all recognised. Hints of His
Fatherhood are not absent, but this doctrine is not full)
formulated in the Old Testament.
Naturally God is identified with the Creator of the
universe. We have no evidence for the belief in a
creation out of nothing, though this may quite well have
been what was really intended. The representation is
coloured by the old Babylonian myth of the contest
between Marduk the god of light and Tiamat the chaos-
demon of darkness. From the priestly creation narrative
(Gen. i. i-ii. 4a) this has largely disappeared, but there
are numerous allusions in the Old Testament to God's
ancient victory over Rahab or Leviathan. In fact it is
necessary to supplement the story of creation in the
Priestly Document by other Old Testament references,
especially in Job and the Psalms. The Jews conceived
of the universe much as the Babylonians did. The
earth on which we live was regarded as a circular plane,
surrounded by an ocean. Beneath it lay the great deep,
or the abyss of waters. This is not to be identified
with the sea, but lies below sea and land alike. There
are, however, openings in the bed of the sea which con
nect with this submarine abyss, and through which the
sea is fed by a regulated supply. If these springs of the
sea or fountains of the great deep are broken up, as at

160 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the Deluge, then the water bursts up from the abyss and
devastates the world. The sky was a solid circular
vault, the rim of which rested on the ocean that flowed
round the earth. Within it was the realm of light, be
yond it there was the outer darkness. Across its earth
ward surface, so near to us that the birds brush by it in
their flight, the heavenly bodies move in their appointed
track. They are animate beings, each with its name,
each coming forth at God's summons from its resting-
place to its station in the sky. Above the firmament there
is a heavenly ocean, corresponding in the upper world
to the subterranean abyss in the lower. Originally they
were one, but when God subdued Chaos He divided the
waters into two portions, placing the solid dome of the
firmament between them. There are windows or sluices
in the sky, through which, when they are opened or
unsealed, the heavy tropical rain descends. At the
Deluge not only were the fountains of the abyss broken
up but the windows of heaven were opened, and thus
the waters, which had been separated at creation, were
partially reunited. The lighter rains do not come from
the heavenly ocean, but from the clouds,' which, though
they float in the air, are " the bottles of heaven," holding
much water in their filmy envelope.
Raised high above the heavenly ocean is the hill of

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 161
Yahweh, where He is throned in light and holds His
heavenly court. The angels are "the sons of God,"
by which is meant that they belong to the order of
Elohim or heavenly beings. Like God Himself, they
are composed of spirit. Yet they are susceptible to
the perils of sensual pleasure, as the story in Gen. vi. 1-4
shows. To "the angels God has entrusted the various
nations, reserving Israel for His own peculiar possession,
though in Daniel Israel also has its angel, Michael. At
appointed seasons they appear before God to give an
account of their administration. Of evil angels, in the
later sense of the term, we learn nothing in the Old
Testament. It is true that the angels of the nations
are regarded as responsible for the woes of Israel. And
thus God is in one place represented as pronouncing
on them the sentence of death, in spite of the fact that
as Elohim they would be naturally immortal. Usually,
however, the angels are regarded as strictly subordinate
to the will of God. This is true of the angel who bears
the title of the Satan, and who must not be identified
with the devil. It is his function to test the reality of
men's apparent goodness, to act as counsel for the
prosecution, and dispute their claim to righteousness
before God's bar. This exclusive preoccupation with
the evil side of human life has developed a cynical
L

162 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
disbelief in human goodness, and he stops at nothing
to prove his own estimate right. Yet this .is out of
no antagonism to God, but rather that no one shall
substantiate a false claim for lack of rigid scrutiny on
his part. It should be added that we read of demoniacal
creatures, such as the satyrs and other uncanny monsters,
of Azazel, a wilderness demon to whom the sins of
Israel are despatched on the Day of Atonement, and
of Lilith, a night demon akin to the vampire. These,
however, have their place rather in popular superstition
than in strict theology.
Man was created by God in His own image. Originally
this may have borne a literal anthropomorphic sense,
but in the more elevated thought of Judaism it expressed
rather man's spiritual and intellectual than his physical
resemblance to God. He is appointed ruler of all the
lower orders of creation. He is a little lower than the
Elohim. Yet between the two orders of being there
is a gulf fixed greater than the phrase would indicate.
For the Elohim are spirit and man is but flesh. The
term " flesh " is used not simply with reference to the
physical material, but to man's weak and perishable
nature. Strictly speaking the term is metaphysical
rather than ethical, but the contrast to the Divine
naturally gave it in some cases a moral colouring. The

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 163
supreme proof of man's fleshly nature lies in the fact
of death. He is a frail mortal. However long his life
may be, it comes to an end at last. The pale shade
leaves the body and descends into Sheol, the gloomy
underworld which lies in a cavernous region below
the earth's surface. There all the vast multitudes of
the dead are gathered, the small and great, the good
and the evil. Just dimly conscious of life, apathetic,
without the rich warmth and movement of the upper
world, they drag out their weary interminable exist
ence. Hence the supreme blessing earth had to give
was long life, for here man might be happy and enjoy
the beatitude of fellowship with God, but in Sheol no
communion with Him was any longer possible. The
later Judaism, however, advanced from this position
along two lines. In the apocalyptic section, Isa. xxiv.-
xxvii., which may be dated with most plausibility about
the time of Alexander the Great, we first meet with
a doctrine of individual resurrection. To re-people
the depleted land it is said that God's life-giving dew
shall descend from the realm of light and revive the
pious dead. In Daniel the thought is carried still
further, and a resurrection of faithful Israelites to
honour and of apostates to everlasting contempt is
predicted. But besides this return from Sheol to earth,

164 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
a few passages suggest another solution, that death
should not interrupt the communion between the saint
and his God. This view, however, it should be said,
is doubted by several scholars, who find a different
meaning in these passages. In Isa. xxv. 8 we have the
remarkable anticipation, " He hath swallowed up death
for ever."
The Old Testament recognises the universal sinfulness
of man. For the most part it is concerned only with the
practical aspects of the subject. Speculations as to the
origin of sin are foreign to its temper. It is very ques
tionable whether the doctrine of the Fall is to be found
in it. This depends on the view we take of the story
of the forbidden fruit in Gen. iii. Unhappily the
problems raised by the narrative are too complex to
admit of discussion in our space. Two things, however,
must be borne in mind. The story has left very little
mark on the Old Testament. Further, we must set
aside not simply our own theological preconceptions,
but also the interpretation placed on the narrative in the
non-canonical Jewish literature and by Paul, whose
own discussion is commonly misunderstood, and seek to
understand it in its own light. It is possible that the
strange story of the angel marriages, a fragment of which
is now preserved in Gen. vi., may have been originally

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 165
intended to account for the entrance of sin into the world,
but in its present connection it obviously has no such
significance. According to a very anthropomorphic
passage in the introduction to the story of the Flood,
Yahweh was Himself disappointed with the corruption
of the human heart, and repented that He had made
man. Elsewhere He excuses the inveterate tendency to
evil by the thought of man's frailty : " He remembered
that they were but flesh."
Naturally the Old Testament is but little concerned
with the sin of the heathen except where it affects Israel.
That the Gentiles, who do not know Yahweh, should be
sinners excites no surprise, save where they sink below
their own moral standard. But what moves the amaze
ment and indignation of the Hebrew writers is the sin of
Israel. It is continually brought out in the history, is
the constant theme of the great prophets and Psalmists,
while the Law and the warnings of the sages are largely
directed to its prevention. The nation's spiritual privi
leges, its intimate relation to God, only set in the darker
light its ingratitude and disobedience, and lead to a
stricter reckoning. Since Israel is the elect nation God
will visit upon it all its iniquities.
The election of Israel was the foundation on which its
religion rested. It was the rooted conviction of the

166 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
people, but its real significance was largely misappre
hended. It was regarded as an end in itself, and as a
token of Divine favouritism encouraging them to presume
on God's indulgence. Against this practical inference
the prophets vehemently protested. But some at least
failed to rise above the thought that Israel was God's
favourite people, to whose interests the course of history
was to be made subservient. This was not a purely self-
regarding attitude ; the egoistic motive is blended with
concern for Yahweh's interests, which were regarded as
bound up with Israel's continued existence. The actual
condition always presented a glaring contrast to what be
fitted the chosen people of God. Thus there arose the
confident anticipation of a glorious future. It was
natural that this should often be of a predominantly
political character. Israel's enemies were to be subdued
and the nation receive a world-wide dominion. From
these military and imperial aspirations many of the
prophets were not free, but they insisted that their
fulfilment implied the moral reformation of Israel, a
vital element which the mass of the people ignored.
The social conditions of the era of blessedness were
sketched in brilliant colours. All things that went to
make life happy — peace, prosperity, long life, a numerous
posterity, immunity from sickness and disaster, a Divine

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 167
protection which secured the people against all its ene
mies — were included in these dazzling pictures. There
would be a great transformation of nature, the land
would be marvellously fertile, and the beasts of prey
would lose their fierceness. The ancient schism between
Judah and Israel would be healed, and they would
return to Palestine from the Exile and the Dispersion,
and form again one nation under a Davidic king.
In many of these prophecies there is no explicit
mention of this monarch, but in others he plays a lead
ing part. For the sake of convenience we may adopt
the custom of referring to him as the Messiah, though
in the Old Testament the word does not occur in the
technical sense. He is to be a king of Davidic descent,
so signally endowed with the Divine Spirit that he shall
be an ideal ruler and judge, slaying the wicked and
exalting the righteous. The Messiah is designated the
Son of God, but this term was not employed in the
sense which it bears in Christian theology. Nor must
we be misled by the English rendering, " Mighty God "
in Isa. ix. 6, and find in the words an ascription
of Divinity to the Messiah. He is a godlike hero, who
must pass through battle to undisputed dominion, and
can become the Prince of Peace only through a conflict
in which he crushes the heathen nations which have not

168 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
been wise in time and submitted to him. Henceforth
he will rule in perpetual peace on the throne of David in
Zion, over a land no longer diminished or distressed by
the invader. With all the military zeal which animates
these Messianic aspirations, it must not be forgotten
that peace is their goal, when the weapons of war shall
be turned into the implements of agriculture, when the
men of Israel shall dwell each under his own vine and
fig-tree, when the nations shall learn war no more.
But while some consoled themselves for their miseries
by depicting the doom of their oppressors, it would be
unjust to forget those who struck a nobler note. They
looked at the Gentiles with no vindictive hate, nor were
they content with the spectacle of a heathen host swept
out of existence that Yahweh might get Himself glory.
The Second Isaiah, it is true, does not escape from a
contracted nationalism which saw in Israel the favourite
of God, though the author of the Book of Jonah rises
clear above it. But in the description of Israel as the
Servant of Yahweh, whose main significance in the
world's history was to carry to the Gentiles the know
ledge of the true God and to suffer for their sin, he rose
to a height far loftier than that reached in Messianic
prophecy. And others beside the author of the Book
of Jonah followed in his steps. In Isa. ii. 2-4 we read

THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM 169
that the nations will throng to Zion to learn the Law of
God, and submit to His arbitration. In Isa. xxv. 6, 7,
we read of the feast prepared for all peoples and the
removal of the veil which has hidden from them
the face of God. And in Isa. xix. 19-25, Egypt and
Assyria are represented as uniting with each other and
with Israel in the common worship of Yahweh.

SELECTED LITERATURE
No thoroughly satisfactory treatment of the subject on
an adequate scale exists in English. Much the best
is that given in the article "Religion of Israel" by
E. Kautzsch in the extra volume of Hastings' " Diction
ary of the Bible." This may be supplemented by many
articles in the course of the " Dictionary " itself. The
"Encyclopedia Biblica" does not deal explicitly with
Biblical Theology, and must on account of its radical
standpoint and extremely speculative textual criticism
be used with caution. But it contains many valuable
articles on religious institutions, which with the corre
sponding articles in Hastings' "Dictionary" largely
supply the lack of a Hebrew Archaeology. The chief
book on Old Testament Theology is by Schultz, but
this is now rather antiquated. A. B. Davidson's con
tribution to the " International Theological Library "
is rather a series of studies in individual doctrines
than a Theology of the Old Testament. The "Hib-
bert Lectures" by C. G. Montefiore, "Old Testament
Theology" by A. Duff, "Hebrew Religion" by W. E.

172 SELECTED LITERATURE
Addis, "The Religion of Israel" by Ottley, "The
Religion of Israel to the Exile " by Budde and " The
Religion of Israel after the Exile " by Cheyne, " The
Religion of Israel among the Religions of the Nearer
East " by Marti, all pursue the historical method followed
in the present work. The writer may refer to his own
" Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament " and his
"Commentary on Job" for a fuller treatment of the
later part of the period than the limits of space permitted
in the present volume. As a companion to this work
giving a topical discussion of individual doctrines he
would recommend the little " Old Testament Theology "
by C. F. Burney, or the rather larger " Theology of the
Old Testament " by W. H. Bennett. Of special value
is W. R. Smith's " Prophets of Israel."

INDEX

Aaron, 4, 17, 36
Abihu, 17
Abraham, 8, 135
Adam, 13s
Agag, 32
Agricultural feasts, 35
„ life, 30, 34 f., 67
Ahab, 45-49
Ahaz, 62, 75 f. , 80
Amaziah, 53
Amos, 33 f., 43, 45, 51-68, 70, 75,
79
Angels, 116, 127 f., 141 f. , 161,
164
Anthropomorphism, 17-19, 135,
158
Antiochus Epiphanes, 143
Apocalyptic, 127, 141-143
Ark, 19-22, 36, 41, 44, 85
Assyria, 6, 40, 49 f. , 58, 60, 71,
74, 75~78> So, 82, 89, 92, 112,
167
Assyriologists, 6
Athaliah, 69
Azazel, 162
Baal, 46, 67
Baalim, 30-33, 35, 67 f.
Babylon, 21, 76, 93, 104 f., 109,
120 f. , 125 f. , 133
Babylonia, 6, 46, 105 f., 119, 125
Bamoth, 36

Baruch, 142
Beersheba, 36
Belshazzar, 143
Bethel, 36, 52
Bethlehem, 37, 52
Beth-Shemesh, 16, 19
Black Stone of the Kaaba, 20
Book of the Covenant, 26
,, ,, Wars of Yahweh, 17
Budde, 13 ff., 38, 41
Canaan, 27 f. , 6j, 112
Canaanites, 18, 28, 30 ff. ,35 f. ,
42 f., 68, 112
Canon of the Old Testament, 87 f.
Caphtor, 57
Captivity of Judah, 80
Carmel, 42
Chaldea, 112
Chaldeans, 95 f
Chaos, 160
Chemosh, 14
Cheyne, 78
Child-sacrifice, 83, 90, 112
Circumcision, 2, 108, 135
Clan feast, 39
Cyrus, 119 f. , 125
Dan, 28, 37
Daniel, 141, 143, 161, 163
Danites, 37
David, 16, 20, 42, 44 f. , 59, 85

174

INDEX

Day of Atonement, 162
,, Wrath, 90
,, Yahweh, 58, 71, 90, 130,
133
Death, 163 f.
Deborah, Song of, 8, 28 f.
Decalogue, 22-25
Deluge, 160
Deuteronomic Law, 87, 88
Deuteronomic Reformation, 82-
88, 91-94
Deuteronomy, Book of, 85
Dispersion, 78, 167
Divine Wisdom, 146
Duhm, 78
E, 14, 23, 24
Ecclesiastes, 145, 152 f.
Edom, 6, 130 f. , 133, 140
„ King of, 55
Edomites, 131
Egypt, 2 f., 15, 57 74, 76 f., gi ff.,
ill f. , 169
Egyptians, 3, 17, 96
Egyptologists, 4
Election of Israel, 5, 57, 72, 165 f.
Elijah, 8, 42, 46 f. , 49, 55, 69
Elisha, 49, 69
Elohim, 15, 161 f.
Enoch, 142
Ephraim, 61, 65, 75, 80, 113
Esau, 130
Eschatological passages in Isaiah,
77
Esther, 140
Ethical elements, 12, 64
Exodus, 3, 12 f., 68, 134
Ezekiel, 87, 107 f. , 110-117, i"i,
127, 132
his doctrine of God, 114-
116
, , vision of, 105
Ezra, 130, 134, 136

Fall, the, 164
Feast of unleavened bread, 35
,, Tabernacles, 35
,, Yahweh, 36
First-fruits, 40, 106
Flood, 165
Future life, 148, 163 f.
Gad, 28
Genesis, 36, 134
Gentiles, 123, 131, 140, 165, 168
Gog, 113
Gomer, 61, 65
Gomorrah, 18
Greek influence, 117
Gunkel, 18
Habakkuk, 8, 118 f.
Hackmann, 78
Haggai, 126 ff. , 130
Hammurabi, Code of* 26
Heathen elements, 2, 67
Hebrew Canon, 87 f.
Hexateuch, 19
Hezekiah, 79, 81
Horeb, 8, 17
Hosea, 31, 35, 38, 51, 52-68, 69, 75
Idolatry, 55, 73, 90, 104, 112,
120, 132, 146
Immanuel, 75
Individualism, 98-102, 114-117
Isaac, 40"
Isaiah, 62, 69-81, 82, 182
,, disputed passages, 77 f.
,, foreign policy of, 75-77
vision of, 70 f., 94
Second, 105, 118-124, 125,
138, 168
J, 14, 23 f.
Jehoahaz, 93
Jehoiachin, 104, 107, no

INDEX

175

Jehoiakim, 87, 93
Jehoshaphat, 47
Jehu, 34, 49
Jephthah's daughter, 40
Jeremiah, 34, 43, 82-102, 104,
108, no, 116, 137
, , vision of, 91
Jeroboam, 45
Jeroboam II. , 49, 60, 61
Jerusalem, 44 f. , 73, 80, 82, 84 f. ,
87, 94, 97, 100, 104, 107, no ft,
125, 128, 130 f., 133
Jesse, 78
Jethro, 13
Joash, 49
Job, 8, 86, 145-149. J59
Jonadab, 34
Jonah, 138 ff., 168
Jordan, 28, 44
Joshua, 22
Joshua the high priest, 12S f.
Josiah, 84, 87, 92 f.
Judaism, 2, 107, 125-137, 153 f.
Judges, 28, 30, 37
Kenites, 6, 13-15
Kir, 57
Laish, 28, 37
Law, 86 ff., 93, 106, 136 f., 165, 167
, , codification of, 125
,, Priestly, 136
,, moral, 39
Law-book, 84, 90, 92
Levi, 36, 131
Leviathan, 159
Levites, 36 f. , 114
Leviticus, 134
Lilith, 161
Maccabean struggle, 140
Malachi, 38, 130 ff.
Man, Doctrine of, 162 f.

Manasseh, 80, 82, 89
Marduk, 159
Marriage, 61-66, 131, 134, 164
Marti, 78
Megiddo, 92
Melek, 83
Melkart, 46, 49, 69
Messiah, 78, 127, 140, 167
Messianic King, 129, 140, 167 f.
,, passages, 78
Micah, 37, 79
,, disputed passages , 79
Micaiah, 4, 17 f., 48
Michael, 162
Mcab, 6, 14, 55
Mohammed, 20
Moloch, 83
Monarchy, 43
Monotheism, 12, 39, 58, 86, 157
Moses, 1-7, 13 ff., 25 f. , 28, 36 f. ,
135. 136
Naboth, 47
Nadab, 17
Nahum, 89
Nathan, 54
National unity, 28
Nazirites, 32-34
Nebuchadnezzar, 21, 143
Nehemiah, 134
New Covenant, 96 ff., 100, 102
New Jerusalem, 114
Nineveh, 89, 139
Noah, 135
Nowack, 62
Numbers, 134
Old Covenant, 97 f.
Omri, 45
Oppression of the poor, 50, 53 f. ,
73. 130
Origin of the religion of Israel, 4

176

INDEX

p, 14, 19, 32, 87, 134, 136, 159
Palestine, 25L, 31, 76, 78, 91, 106,
125, 167
Patriarchs, 14, 36, 135
Patriotism, 5, 29, 41 f. , 42, 49, 89
Paul, 164
Pentateuch, 4, 136
Persian Empire, 127
Perversion of justice, 54, 90, 112
Philistines, 19, 41,44, 57
Phoenicians, 42 f.
Priests, 36 f., 114, 130
Primitive religion, 2
Prince of Peace, 167
Prophecy, 41-43, 45-49. 138-144
Prophets, rise of, 41
,, false and true, 48
Proverbs, 145 f.
Psalms, 151
Psalter, 153 ff.
Queen of Heaven, 83
Rahab, 159
Rainbow, 9
Rechabites, 34
Reformation of Josiah, 84, 87, 92,
94, 102, 106
Rehoboam, 45, 67
Religion, individual, 99
,, national, 5, 99
tribal, 38
,, universal, 5, 38, 105
Remnant, 59 f. , 77, 134
Restoration of Israel, in, 122
Resurrection, 163
Rites connected with agriculture,
30-32, 35
Robertson Smith, 9
Sabbath, jo6 f. , 133, 135
Sacrifice, 2, 39 f., 57, 73, 106,
131 ff. , 135

Samaria, 66, 69 f. , 80, 112
Samaritans, 132
Samson, 32-34
Samuel, 32
Sanctuaries, 36, 59
Sargon, 77
Savage elements, 2
Satan, the, 128, 146, 161 f.
Saul, 16, 41-44
Scythians, 89, 91
Semitic religion, 2, 9, 20, 25
Sennacherib, 80, 85, 102
Servant of Yahweh, 122 f. , 127, 167
,, ,, ,, passages, 120
Shear- Jashub, 72
Shechem, 36
Sheol, 163
Shewbread, 39
Shiloh, 94
Shinar, 129
Simeon, 28, 36
Sin, 164 f.
Sinai, 7 f., 13, 15 f., 18, 21, 31
Sisera, 18, 29
Sodom, 18, 112
Solomon, 44 f., 145, 153
Stade, 13
State, 99 f. , 116
Syria, 49 f. , 61, 75, 80, 127
Syrians, 57
Syrian wars, 49
Table of shewbread, 39
Tables of the Law, 21
Temple, 70, 85, 93, 100, 102, 104,
125 f., 129, 131, 133, 136
Temple, Second, 156
Temple vessels, 95
Tent of meeting, 22
Theism, 153
Tiamat, 159
Tiglath Pileser, 69
Tyre, 46

INDEX

177

Universalism, 38 f.
Uzzah, 16, 20
Uzziah, 69
Vindicator, 149
Volz, 78
Wellhausen, 59, 62
Worship of family deities, 46
,, ,, foreign deities, 46
Yahweh, angel of, 128
,, character of, 12, 55,
57 f; 84
,, the Creator, 10, 58,
120, 158

Yahweh, His glory, not, 113, 121
,, God of Israel, 4
,, God of Nature and
History, 58
„ holiness of, 16, 71, 73,
13S. i53> 158
,, judgment of, 90, 129
,, love of, 63-66
,, meaning of the name,
6-12
,, Presence of, 8, 20, 21,
129, 139, 157
Zechariah, 126-130
Zephaniah, 90
Zerubbabel, 126 f. , 129

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