!■; i: !; I! hiiii i 5 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES <0*wnt THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN RESEARCH BY THE REV. J. R. COHU, RECTOR OK ASTON CLINTON, BUCKS ; SOMETIME FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD. fam^s ^ark^r anb (£a. OXFORD AND LONDON. 1908. 7/7/ DEDICATED, BY KIND PERMISSION, TO LADY DE ROTHSCHILD, OF ASTON CLINTON. :rprs'3rx3 c^"i27a>:2 n^bbrri T >V — ,- J' .T ; - T , ; r I" AUTHOR'S NOTE. An intended preface has grown into an in- troductory chapter, and leaves little to be added here. The author, troubled and perplexed, has had a flood of light poured upon the pages of his Old Testament by the Higher Criticism, and his one wish is to help others in their perplexities. He feels bound therefore to acknowledge that there is little in this work wJiicJi he can claim as his own, and this must be his apology where he may seem to dogmatize. He merely follows — afar off- — in the footsteps of such great masters as Wellhausen, Reuss, Kuenen, KautzscJi, Driver, Ryle, Robertson Smith, Davidson, Kirkpatrick, and Budde. These are only a selected few out of a large number of works consulted. He cannot pay all his debts, but he must at least do himself the pleasure of acknow- ledging his indebtedness to his publisher, whose keen reading of the proofs has led to many corrections and suggestions. vi Author's Note. It is not easy to convey a message in a borrowed tongne, and even forty years of silence cannot hush the voice of early childhood : but the author fondly hopes that the reader will not, in consequence of occasional awkward expressions, lose his interest in these pages. Friendly critics have saved the writer from many a Gallicism ; not a few, however, re- main. Now that he sees his thoughts in print he is appalled at his ozvn temerity ; but he would plead that his intejition is good although the achievement may be small. f. R. C. ERRATA. Paj^e 5 line Z2for ' Jael's wife,' read ' Jael, Heber's wife.' ,, 123. The note in reference to Giants in the Antediluvian World was taken from D. Wilson's " Prehistoric Man," vol. i. p. 114, who gave the reference to ' ' Philosophical Transactions," vol. xxiv. p. 85, but Daniel Wilson's reference is found to be erroneous. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. Modern research has vastly extended our knowledge. — Greater even than this gain is the new temper in which knowledge is approached. — The accuracy and thoroughness of the modern scientific method. — Universal application of this method, as a test of Truth, to Theology amongst the rest, and even to the Bible. — The moral spirit of the age is opposed to thinking of the Bible as literally as our fathers did. — Religious unrest is due to increase of God's light in men's hearts leading to a challenging of antiquated creeds. — Religion, as a living organism, must ever grow. — Faith is not impaired thereby; Truth and Faith can be trusted to hold their own. — In Israel, e.g., Mosaism, the re- ligion of the Prophets, and Christianity are illustrations of this religious evolution. — In all theology, in the Bible itself, there is an element which is ever dying, and there is one which never dies. — Christ's saying : " new wine must be put into new bottles that both may be preserved," explained. — Criticism only voices the needs of the age. — Thoroughness and conscientiousness of modern criticism. — Its conclusions have proved an immense gain to Faith, and opened our eyes to the intrinsic value of the Bible message. — Distinction between historical accuracy and spiritual truths. — Summary Pages 1 — 20 CHAPTER I. TJie Growth of Religions. Influence of Israel on the history and civilization of the world, — The three monotheistic religions of mankind all viii Conte7its. sprung from Judaism, which was itself of a very gradual growth. — Necessity of modern comparative study of re- ligions, for no creed can be really studied by itself. — Myths form the roots of all religions, and this human element survives to the last. — Several instances quoted of these myths, or " survivals " of older creeds, in religion of Israel. — We cannot strictly speak of religions as one true, all others false ; each, in its way, is a " seeking after God, if haply it may find Him." — Malachi and S. Paul endorse this view. — All religion is an evolution. — Why some re- ligions have remained stationary, some even retrograded, while others have advanced, and One has reached its goal. — God's election of Israel as His chosen people not an act of favouritism. — Israel's religion cannot be under- stood without a consideration of its three factors, the " human " element, the Semitic element, the purely He- brew element, for Hebrews are a branch of the Semitic group of the large family of mankind - Pages 21 — 35 * CHAPTER II. Primitive Mati's Religion. The origin of man, the Creation, and the Fall quoted as examples of "human" myths in Genesis. — These myths are to be found among all primitive peoples all the world over; examples given of primitive legends of origin of man, sin, death, and world-creation. — Early man lived in fellowship with nature, beUeving that all things which moved or changed had minds anil bodies exactly like his own : every brook and tree, the sun and wind were persons, not things. — In all religions there is a sensible and a senseless element. — Three stages in religious evolution: (i) animism, (2) anthropomorphism, (3) mono- theism : (i) is mainly magical and demonic; (2) pos- Contents. ix sesses man's virtues and vices ; (3) pre-eminently ethical and spiritual. Even in (3) traces of (i) and (2) sur- vive. — Every religion also has two sides, its religious ideas and its religious acts, its dogma and its ritual, and these are seldom well balanced. — Why Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity claim the title of '' world-religions." — How they have superseded their pre- decessors by assimilating their better and still living ele- ments. — Eden innocence and simplicity, a parable : primi- tive man far from moral : illustrations of this truth Pages 36—53 CHAPTER III. Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. Semitic origin of the Hebrews proved on Biblical and ethnological evidences. — The Semites originally an Arabian race of hardy nomadic shepherds, like the Bedouin Arabs. — Semitic character, the outcome of their prolonged desert-life under hard conditions.- — Their virtues and vices; their religion, a belief in spirits, oracles, and charms ; their sacrifices at sacred trees or stones ; but no developed priesthood. — In matters of thought they are practical rather than speculative : their literature is lyrical, the glowing utterance of emotional minds. — Brinton's sketch of their physique. — Babylonians : our knowledge of Babylon and its institutions vastly extended by modern excavations and research. — The Euphrates valley settlement. — Babylonian empire from 2250 b.c — 689 B.C. — Babylonian religion described and Babylonian and Hebrew religions com- pared : strong indications of Babylonian influence in Judaism : ten instances specially mentioned. — The more clearly we grasp this fact, the loftier will be our con- Contents, ception of God's guiding Hand and progressive revela- tion as witnessed in Israel's after-history.— Traces of Babylonian influence on the Mosaic code, and on the angelic and demonic hierarchy which we hnd in Israel's rehgion after the Exile; but the latter is mainly due to Persian influences.— Both Babylon and Persia suggested ideas to Israel, but, under God's guidance, the Hebrews turned this borrowed clay into pure gold Pages 54—76 CHAPTER IV. The Mosaic Books— A Composite Work. To Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy must be added Joshua, for they form one literary whole.— These six books (Hexateuch) naturally fall into three clearly-defined groups : Genesis and Joshua are purely historical, but history idealized ; religious prose poems : Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers are Law-books, with an arti- ficial framework of history to prop up their law : Deuter- onomy is also a law-book but of a sublimely spiritual and moral tone. — These three groups were composed at three different stages in Israel's history, widely apart in date (loth, 7th, 5th centuries b.c.).— Mosaic author- ship of parts of Pentateuch doubted even three hundred years ago.— First real clue supplied by Astruc (i753) by discovery of use made of different titles of God in Hexateuch.— Further important clues from internal evi- dence discovered by de Wette, and especially by Graf and Kuenen : these clues examined. — 2 Kings xxii. gives the key to the problem.— Genesis and Joshua com- posed when altars and shrines existed all over the land ; Deuteronomy when attempt was being made to abolish these local shrines and centralize worship in Jerusalem : Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers were written when this Contents. xi centralization of worship was an accomplished fact. Grafs solution now generally accepted. — Ascription of Mosaic Books to Moses, however, not a literary forgery Pages 77 — 90 CHAPTER V. TJie Mosaic Books {coittinued). Further application of Astruc's, de Wette's, and Graf's clues to the Hexateuch by recent scholars. — Critical con- siderations on internal evidence for a belief in the com- posite authorship of the Mosaic Books, viz. (i) Differences in style and language evident in the three groups ; (2) Differ- ent titles of God ; (3) Different and inconsistent religious views and conceptions of God to be found in the Hexateuch; (4) The moral and social conditions portrayed belong to at least three different periods ; (5) A lack of continuity in the Hexateuch ; frequent unnecessary repetitions ; many glaring inconsistencies and contradictions. — Modern con- clusions summarized, shewing that there are four main and easily distinguishable groups in the Hexateuch, and that the books are not contemporary records. — The historical value of these Books. — The probable dates of the composition of the four groups. — Subsequent revisions and alterations up to the third century i;.c. Pages 91 — 105 chaptp:r VI. Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. Genesis and Babylonian versions of the Flood compared. — Ten points of remarkable resemblance ; but striking points of dissimilarity where the Hebrew version is far xii Contents. superior and shows Divine inspiration. —Historicity of the Flood examined. — Creation story: primitive myths on this subject : Genesis and Babylonian versions of the Creation compared : here again there are clear parallels but equally striking points of contrast. — Prc-detuj^e giants : their evi- dent mythological origin, and how myths of the huge size of men in prehistoric days may be accounted for. — Patriarchal longevity : also a popular myth : Prof. Kyle's explanation of these pre-deluge patriarchs and their phe- nomenal ages. — Popular idea of date of Creation as 4004 B.C. accounted for - - Pages 106 — 126 chaptp:r VII. spiritual Teaching of Genesis. If the Holy Spirit inspires the writers of Genesis with a faculty of wise and judicious selection in unearthing the gems that lie hidden in the Babylonian legends of the Crea- tion and the Flood ; if the stories of the Fall and of Eden are only parables ; if God spoke in these narratives to early men in the only way they could understand : this does not rob Genesis of its immense value to the human heart and soul, or in the least impair its deep spiritual value. — Christ has shown us the intensely spiritual value of Parables. — Truth of idea is in every way as important as truth of fact. — Story of the Fall analysed ; a divinely inspired parable. — Genesis is written with a moral and religious, rather than historical aim - Pages 127 — 133 CHAPTER VIII. The Historical Value of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Are these patriarchs individuals or tribes ? — The narrative Contents. xiii stands on the border-line of history, being based on floating legends put into the form of a record 2,000 years after the events. — The value of the patriarchal biographies lies in their description of spiritually perfect types. — Ewald sees in Abram, Israel, Ishmael, Edom, Ammon, &c., and in their biographies, imaginary names and stories written with a purpose. — Instances, in Genesis, of the actual blending of tribal a.nd individual names. — Tendency, in ancient days, to invent myths to account for existing conditions, institutions, customs and names of places. — Examples of these picturesque legends. — Prof. Driver's view, however, is that these patriarchs are real personali- ties, but here worked up dramatically into ideal types Pages 134—144 CHxAPTER IX. Moses. The great national hero, Moses, a real personality of the first importance. — Condition of the Hebrews at the time of the Exodus ; Moses, a born leader of men, welds Israel into a compact nation, uniting a heterogeneous mass on the basis of a firm faith in a Jehovah Who is Israel's own God, and they Jehovah's own people. — The sojourn near Sinai an epoch-making crisis ; it was there that the foundation of all Israel's political, moral and religious after-development was laid. — Revelation of God to Moses at Sinai. — Ratification of solemn Covenant be- tween Jehovah and Israel ; meaning of the awe-inspiring rites and blood-sprinkling ceremony accompanying this covenant. — The Decalogue, Israel's Magna Charta : how far Moses' work - - - Pages \\s—^S\ xiv Contents. CHAPTER X. Religious and Moral State of Society at the time of the Hexatench. Genesis, and the Hexateuch generally, a good picture of the customs, ideas, &c., prevalent in the writers' own day, but an imperfect record of the period portrayed.— How far prehistoric Israel can be reconstructed from actual Bible data, supplemented by a comparison with Semitic and other primitive customs and institutions. — Merits of this comparative method, and its snares. — Do our available data justify the assumption that the primitive Hebrews were spirit- and ancestor-worshippers ? — Inferences drawn from sacred trees, stones, and springs in patriarchal days, and from funeral customs, in support of this view.— Fallacies involved in such reasoning. — Although arguments may be advanced from the Bible to prove that the early Hebrews were spirit-worshippers and addicted to magic, it must be remembered that in Christian England the popular belief in witchcraft and magic was common up to recent days, and is even now not extinct. — Explanation of the common practice of worshipping Jehovah in the shape of a bull Pages 155—168 CHAPTER XI. Religious and other Institutions of Israel at the time of the Hexateuch. In the Mosaic period, Israel's moral and religious ideas were very crude and materialistic, but the monotheistic idea was there. — Priesthood : very little is heard of priests then ; anyone could offer sacrifice ; tlie priest was not a sacrificer, but a custodian of sacred things, and an interpreter of oracles. — Sacrifices: The original idea of Contents. xv sacrifice is that man's offering is a " gift " to God ; a sacri- ficial meal was generally associated with the offering; its meaning. — Human sacrifices down to a late date in Israel. — The ban., a war custom of devoting an enemy to wholesale destruction ; a relic of primitive taboo. — Blood-revenge and retaliation, survivals of an age when there was no law or oider. — Efforts of Old Testament legislators to humanize these customs. — Leviraie, or law of marriage with a childless brother's widow ; its explana- tion. — Low moral and religious standard in Mosaic days. — Custom and "rights," ?iot morality or conscience, gov- erned conduct then. — The Ark was then identified with Jehovah Himself, and was not a mere symbol of Him, still less a chest containing the Book of the Law Pages 169 — 184 CHAPTER XIL Period of the Judges. Examination of the nature and value of the historical records dealing with this period, as given us in Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. — The editors of Judges and Samuel had at their disposal two very old and in- dependent documents of the highest rank and value. — The writer of Kings also gives us facts of great historical value, but he professedly writes from a pronounced re- ligious standpoint. — Chronicles is a later composition, with a decidedly ecclesiastical bias, but useful as a supplement to the other books. — The Hebrew mind strangely lack- ing in the sense of organic unity ; examples given. — The period of the Judges covers the time when Israel was settling in Canaan. — It is a period of disorder, anarchy and license. — Dangers accruing to Israel from the adop- tion of Canaanite civilization. — Tendency to split up xvi Contents. again into tribes, and also to join in Baal-worship. — Re- ligious and patriotic revival after Philistine defeat at Aphek.— Rise of prophets. — Samuel sees Israel's need of a king and discovers Saul - - /'a^^x 185—197 CHAPTER XIII. TJie Early Monarcliy. Inconsistent pictures of Samuel in the Bible sketch ; account of their origin, and how far they can be har- monized. — Advance in the spiritual conception of God : the idea of a Jehovah visible to men in bodily form is beginning to be repellent. — Jehovah is still, however, regarded as purely Israel's God and no other nation's. — Images of Jehovah are still quite common ; the ex- planation. — Altars and local shrines are found every- where. — Belief in Baal has greatly decreased but still exists. — Priesthood : expansion of their power but not yet a separate caste. — Prophets: great national teachers and religious reformers; their patriotic spirit. — Kiftgs : a national necessity ; they rule by divine right, and act as chief sacrificing priests. — Socially, the condition of Israel was one of comfort and prosperity and happy family life ; towns had multiplied, agriculture and trade prospered ; but wealth brought its usual train of evils, and there was great oppression of the weak and poor Pages 198 — 213 CHAPTER XIV. The Canonical PropJiets. The older prophetical schools had degenerated into a professional caste.— Sudden special " call " of the new prophets, direct from God ; for the strong hand of the Contents. xvii Lord was upon them, compelling them to denounce Israel's shortcomings. — Experience of Amos fully quoted as typical of the new prophetic school. — God had opened their eyes to see in the world's history His guiding Hand ; and in Assyria now knocking at Israel's gate they see the nation's impending doom. — But as patriots they fully trust in God's Covenant promises, and believe that He will again one day restore the kingdom to Israel here on earth. — Jehovah to them is no longer the God merely of Israel but the moral Governor of all the world, and the God of the heathen. — Their lofty conception of God and ideal moral and spiritual views. — Jeremiah the first to catch a glimpse of the individual personal side of religion. — Messianic prophecy : None strictly in these prophets, though their pictures of a golden year coming, with a perfect God - inspired Davidic King, clearly bear a Messianic interpretation. — Anthropomorphisvi : They knew well God was not like a man, but thus only could they convey to the human heart a portrait of our Heavenly Father. — Sheol : The cheerless phantom existence beyond the grave still remains. The prophets merged the individual in the family and nation. — Prof. Driver's list of canonical pro- phets, with dates - - - Pages 214 — 236 CHAPTER XV. PropJiets of the Period of the Captivity and after. The period of slavish adherence to minute rules ; good and bad points of the Priestly Code ; rules of holy living possibly a snare, but also a great boon. — Breaking down of the barriers of the old local and national religion, especially in the second Isaiah. — How Isaiah unwittingly paved the way for the later ecclesiastical community with its Priestly Code by encouraging Hezekiah's worship-reforms ; the b xviii Contents. subsequent prosperity was believed by the Jews to be due to these external reforms, and Jeremiah in vain tries to stem this impression. — External reforms continue, and Israel goes into Captivity in 586 B.C. — The lot of the Jews in their Captivity not so bad, for many prefer to stay there, even when allowed to return. — Return from Captivity under Ezra and Nehemiah. — Great solemn assembly in Jerusalem and the Priestly Code introduced into the Hexateuch. — This Code the outcome of deep religious zeal ; its purely ecclesiastical character ; pro- mulgated through the synagogues ; and the ideal princij^le underlying it. — The psalmists, living under its law, are a witness to the good influence of this Code. — Its ex- tremely high conception of God.— The nation was gone, and personal religion alone was now possible. — Expiry of prophecy. — Rise of Apocalyptic literature (e.g. Daniel) Pages 237 — 260 CHAPTER XVI. HagiograpJia or " Holy Writings^ List of " Holy Writings," wiih dates. — The 6th century B.C., a great crisis in Israel's history ; therefore produces an outburst of literary activity, e.g. prophets, psalmists, &c. - Reflective and meditative works of this period due to an intensity of personal religion. — Problems of suffering, and of the prosperity of the wicked and misery of the righteous, had to be dealt with. — Hebrews survey life from a practical point of view. — Explanation of tendency of Hebrews to ascribe anonymous writings to Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, &c. — Review of the Hagiographa : Fsahns (only about ten Davidic), Temple Hymn-Books echoing every experience of the human soul ; explanation of so- Contents. xix called imprecatory, Messianic and eschatological psalms. — Proverbs^ a collection of wise popular maxims of practical, moral and religious educational value. — Job, with problem of retribution reverently and philosophically treated ; es- chatology of Job examined. — Ecclesiastes^ the work of a pessimist. — Lainentations, five dirges, artistically perfect, possibly composed for a solemn act of mourning. — Ruth, a graceful prose idyll. — Esther, a patriotic historical ro- mance. — Canticles, an exquisite love-song, not allegorical Pages 261 — 284 CHAPTER XVII. Fignrativeness of Bible Language. The Semitic character is intensely sensuous and emo- tional, and Semitic literature is, therefore, full of word- pictures and imagery, delighting in play of fancy and emotion. — Semites naturally burst into impassioned lyric strains. — Hebrews see the world through a poet's eyes, therefore their word-pictures and imagery are a snare to a modern prosy matter-of-fact age. — Christ's word -pictures, or parables. — Many Bible books are poetry pure and simple and must be interpreted accordingly. — Illustrations of this Pages 285—295 CHAPTER XVIII. Old Testament View of Life after Death. No conception of an individual resurrection to be found in the Old Testament till its latest days. — Five stages in the evolution of the idea of personal immortality. — In early Hebrew days, up to early monarchy, the Jews merely believed in an underground Sheol, a magnified tomb, XX Co7itents. like Homer's Hades. — Dread of non-burial.— Occasional glimpses of higher aspirations, but really no idea of personal resurrection till two centuries n.c. — Till 600 b.c. the nation and family were regarded as the units, and the individual did not exist : a man's hope of continued existence lay in living on in his nation or family, not in his own person. — Annihilation of the nation gave this national view its death-blow in thinking minds ; but for very long after, in the people's hearts, the old patriotic national hope was fostered by the belief that God must restore the kingdom to Israel here on earth. — On the other hand the conception of personal religion since Jeremiah's day, and the dark mysteries of life, encouraged the idea of a real life after death as the only possible solution of God's Providence (cf. Eccl. xii.). — Still men even in 2nd and I St centuries b.c. clung to the old popular inter- pretation of prophecy and its earthly national idea (e.g. Daniel). — But as time went on, and no earthly saviour-king came, many began to look for a Divine Messiah and a hcaveti/y kingdom ; and, in the two cen- turies B.C., apocalyptic literature is full of this Divine Messiah with the advent of " The Day of the Lord," followed by a great Day of Judgment, the establishment of a glorious kingdom, antl a general resurrection of the dead. — Sheol is now transfigured, and is divided into com- partments of bliss and woe. — Then, too, we hear of Paradise, Gehenna, Abraham's bosom. — Paradise is a re- stored garden of Eden, a far-off place of perfect delight. — Gehenna is a place of punishment for the wicked in the presence of the righteous, while Abraham's bosom is the place of honour in Paradise. — Christ's eschatological language is expressed in popular, figurative word-pictures, and is mainly practical in its aim. — It does not sanction the literal meaning often pressed into it ; He teaches that Contents. xxi there is a real active life of close communion with God into which men pass after death, and there we reap as we have sown here. — Theologians often speak where Christ is dumb . . . . Pages 2 g6 — 325 CHAPTER XIX. Inspiration. Examination of the old idea of the Bible as verbally inspired, with every syllable dictated by God to the writers, who were, at the time, in a state of passive ecstatic un- consciousness. — Two modern extreme schools of thought on this subject. — General consensus of opinion nowadays opposed to verbal inspiration as irreconcilable with man's freedom of action. — How the idea of the prophet's passive unconsciousness under inspiration arose. — Pagan sooth- sayers were supposed to be god-possessed, and temporarily in a state of ecstasy, frenzy or mania, and this idea has been transferred to j ewish prophecy. — Some early Jewish " seers " were so intensely excited that they appeared to others to be similarly "God-possessed." — Not so, however, the canonical or Bible-writing prophets : with them there was still excitation, but self-consciousness was not lost. — Exceptional "visions" and "trances" explained. — The message came through men, (" we have this treasure in earthen vessels "), men tinged with the limited views of their day ; hence the weak human element so often peeping through the pages of Holy Scripture. — But the wondrous unity and sublimity of the Bible proves its undoubted Divine Inspiration - Pages 324—342. xxii Contents. CHAPTER XX. Revelation. Inspiration is the tlaslilight : Revelation is the picture unveiled by it : Scripture is the collection of these divine pictures. — Why Israel was chosen as the special medium of God's Revelation of Himself to mankind. — Homer and Shakespeare not inspired as Bible-writers are, because Inspiration, in the Bible sense, means a revelation straight from God and leading us straight to God ; while great works of human genius may be inspiring yet not lead us Godward. — Reason why this supernatural Inspiration ends with the New Testament. — The unfolding of Revealed Truth the work of the Holy Spirit since New Testament days ----- J\,ges 343—349 CHAPTER XXI. Canon of Holy Scripture. Foundation of the Canon of Holy Scripture laid by Ezra (440 B.C.). — The political annihilation of the nation, the dearth of prophecy, the existing misery of Israel, and its deification of the Law called into existence a new class of men, Scribes, who collected and studied the Sacred Books. — The Law of Moses (Pentateuch or Hexa- teuch) first canonized as the most Divine. — Next were included the canonical prophets and their historical works as well ; this division was highly esteemed, though it did not take equal rank with the Law. — Lastly the Hagiographa, though always regarded as inferior to the other two. — The expression " this book defiles the hand " explained. — No Contents. xxiii hard and fast line between canonical and apocryphal books among Jews, Christians, or apparently even in New Testa- ment writers. — The sanction for this Canon is human and not divine ; it was spiritually guided intelligence that formed it, and its value and finality must be judged at the same bar. — On the whole, the Canon is so well formed as to appear the outcome of a "providential inspiration," but the human formation of the Canon does not justify our forcing into it a supernatural guarantee of inspiration for the books included therein - - Pages 350 — 360 INTRODUCTION. TO write upon the Old Testament may seem to many a comparatively easy task, and there are others who may think that long since the last word has been said on the subject. There was a time when theologians alone were thought competent to study Holy Writ ; there was a time also, and this not long ago, when it was held that the Bible could be intelligibly understood without any aid from outside sources : a patient, earnest study of God's own Word was all that was needed, and all light from 'profane' learning was considered al- together superfluous and almost wrong. Thoueht has travelled far since then : the last sixty, or even forty years have brought many and important changes, and the age in which we live abounds in new needs. Our extension of knowledge in every direction, and of the methods of arriving at it, has been immense, and our intellectual horizon has greatly widened. Science has made many dis- coveries, if it has also manufactured a few theories ; it has proved to us that the universe is far larger and older than we had dreamed : everywhere it has found unbroken order, unchanging law, continuous development. We owe a heavy debt, too, to the new B hitrodnction historical method which has robbed history possibly of much of its artistic, romantic, reflective setting of classical days, but which has made of it something infinitely more exact, more intolerant of loose state- ment or careless conjecture. In every field of know- ledge we see clear tokens of the spirit of the age, a spirit characterized by sincerity and reality, a zeal for truth, a passion for accurate, methodical, pains- taking research. The spade of the excavator has unearthed monuments restoring to us the forgotten history of antiquity as far back as four thousand years before the Christian era. The ethnologist no longer regards myths, folk-lore, primitive customs, savage instincts, as so much useless lumber, as so many baneful weeds, but carefully collects, sorts, studies them historically and scientifically as pre- cious ' survivals ' of a remote age, the wreckage of ancient beliefs, giving us a key to the mysteries of the past, enabling us to reconstruct prehistoric days. Greater even than the gain in extension of know- ledge is the new temper in which knowledge itself is now approached. A marked change for the better is everywhere visible in the modern zeal for truth. In every department the spirit of the age is char- acterized by a fearless honesty and sincerity : it is impatient of superficial half-truths, preferring to suspend its judgment where no solid basis of evi- dence is to be found, to wait patiently till new light comes, rather than indulge in plausible guesses or Introduction. generalize without positive data. It is now felt that truthfulness of mind is of vital importance not only to knowledge but to character, that to fear investiga- tion even in matters of faith, to conceal difficulties, to slur over inconsistencies, or to overstate convic- tions, to become, in short, an advocate instead of a truth-seeker, are faults which darken and degrade the soul. In every other department the bases of our know- ledge have been tested and scientifically overhauled, scientific and historical methods have been severely applied, and have taught the world that guesswork will not do : that truth is not to be won by throttling liberty of thought, by authoritative dogmatizing, nor again by branding all who insist on rational proof as heretics, agnostics or worse. The very foundations of knowledge in its every branch have been laid bare and subjected to a fierce search-light so as to discover the real state of things, to test and examine the knowledge of facts each several department professes to give us so as to see if this profession is borne out and verified by the facts themselves. Naturally, then, when our knowledge in other spheres was so rigorously tested, theology could no longer reasonably be held exempt from the same rigorous course of analysis. Its historical basis must be tried by the same strict standards which were employed elsewhere. And it was not enough that theologians should overhaul their own fabric and reshape it in accord- Introduction. ance with their own preconceived ideas and pre- judices. The Bible itself must be put on its trial like any other book : its teachings on science, history, morals, religion must be cast into the crucible, and not till it established its claims, and was ready to court every kind of investigation, could the modern critical mind admit its obligation or its right to be accepted as of binding authority by rational men. Even orthodox Divines admit now the reasonableness of this plea. They neither ask nor wish that criticism should pause or stay its progress even before the shrine of the Christian Faith : they do not protest now as of old and bid investigators leave at least the Bible untouched. They know it is not only vain but unworthy to evade honest criticism, the confession of a weak and faltering faith, an altogether unworthy fear lest Christianity and the Bible should not be strong enough to stand the test of searching Truth. In i860, adherents of Darwinism in science, and advocates for the application of critical methods to the Bible were looked upon and denounced by large portions of the community as blasphemers ; in 1908 orthodox theologians regard evolution as an established principle, and are no longer alarmed by the critical results which seemed at first sight so destructive. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the year 4004 B.C. was accepted, in all sobriety, as the date of the creation of the world ; now we' measure the age of the world by hundreds Introduction. of millions of years ; and perhaps no statement can better illustrate the change which has come over the spirit of the age than the mention of this simple fact. But it is not only the intellectual horizon that has widened, the ethical spirit of the age is immeasurably broader than it was a generation ago. Even in re- ligious teaching, which invariably lags behind the spirit of its day, nothing is more marked than the modern change of emphasis from a Christianity of right belief to a Christianity of right character and conduct. Nowadays the moral ideal, in habit of thought if not yet in actual practice, is very high, and S. Paul's words : " Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, think on these things,'' appeal to the reason, the conscience, the hearts of men to-day as never before. Men therefore find it hard to think of the Bible as their fathers did when, in its records, deeds are reported and approved in the name of God which their con- science condemns, such as the murder of Sisera in his sleep by his hostess, Jael\ wife. In Holy Writ, again, there are views of God's relationship to man, such as His hardening Pharaoh's heart, which seem inexplicable if man is to be regarded, as his con- sciousness assures him, in the light of a free agent, with the liberty to act as he wills ; especially as it is on this assumption alone that he is responsible for his actions, and that his moral worth depends. Man also asks himself "can God approve injustice, Introduction. favoritism, treachery, cruelty, wholesale massacres ? " Can such a prayer as the Psalmist's, " Blessed shall he be who taketh thy children and dashcth them against the stones ? " or the order given as direct from God to destroy the Amalekites, man, woman, and child, be divinely inspired ? Yet these immoral acts, as we should call them, arc written large in the pages of the Old Testament. Once more, are human beings mere automatic puppets in God's almighty hands ? our moral sense rebels against the bare suggestion, yet Moses represents God as saying to Pharaoh : "In vciy deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to show in thee My power." Such questions are being commonly asked : the moral spirit of the age is repelled by such low moral views of God, and these ethical questionings cannot be answered without challenging the common traditional views of the Bible hitherto held. On these grounds, — by reason of the immense extension of our knowledge and the vast deepening of our moral sense, — it has long been felt that there must be a reconsideration of many of our current conceptions regarding the Bible and religion, for they failed to meet or satisfy the new moral and intellectual needs of the day : they were out of touch with, those higher aspirations which lay hid- den and unspoken, but actively alive, in many minds and hearts. True, many well-meaning but short- sighted religious souls have ever protested, with the very best of intentions, against any reforms, as Introduction. tampering with the faith of our fathers ; and to these the challenging of the old creeds was but one of the many signs of the time ; like the decay of church-going, the decrease of Bible-reading, the non- observance of Sunday, this new demand only proved that personal religion was at a low ebb, whereas in effect it proved just the reverse. God's light had grown so much clearer, man's moral and spiritual ideas and needs had so gained in height and depth and breadth that the old watchwords and formulas had lost their hold on people's minds and hearts ; their quickening influence, their inspiring motive power had evaporated. New moral and mental elements and forces, adapted to their present re- quirements, must filter into the antiquated theology of our fathers, or men now thoroughly in earnest would have none of it. It would be hard to imagine a change more far-reaching than that which has come over religion during the last fifty years. "In 1850 theology was the repetition of the formulas of the 4th and i6th centuries : every word of the Bible was divinely inspired and equally infallible : human reason was voted out of place in the sphere of religion, which consisted mainly in emotional preaching or ritual observances : art, science, politics, and social life were worldly things full of deadly snares" (Mayor). Here again thought has travelled far since then ; our ideas on evolution, inspiration, toleration, the religious character of art, science, social duties, 8 Introduction. amusements, have wondrously changed ; one thing after another long denounced as absolutely con- trary to the Christian faith has in course of time come to be a household word to us, and yet the faith is none the worse, but greatly the gainer by it. W^hen old doctrines vanish rapidly like this, as has happened in the last sixty years, and new truths, or rather restatements of the truth, no longer seem strange : when views once regarded as dangerous are universally accepted, even though at first it required a little straining of the conscience to make room for them, it clearly proves that these old doctrines were not adapted to the true needs of the time, and had already decayed at the roots. But in religion, above all else, reforms come slowly, for it is essentially conservative. The advocates and upholders of the older creed cling to it till the very ground is cut away from under their feet ; it has stood them in good stead and they love the old re- ligion, and loyally exalt it into a fetish ; they abhor those who clamour for reform, and their new fads, as dangerous enemies to the Faith, and resist the introduction of the new elements as long as they can. But they are unable to shut out the new ideas and needs ; they are obliged to let them in, were it only for self-preservation, otherwise they themse ves will lag behind and lose their hold on men's hearts and minds. A few of their number, the advanced thinkers of their generation, " scribes instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, bringing forth out of their Introduction. treasures things new and old " lead the way, and, as true representatives of the better insight and feeling of their time, voice the new needs of men's inmost hearts. Gradually, under pressure, the rank and file of the old school grudgingly fall into line, and once more men breathe freely in the new bracing religious atmosphere, only to find in time that the position must again be shifted, and that there is more change }'et beyond, for religion is an organism, and as such must ever be growing. For it to stand still is death. But, it may naturally be asked, " If we have constantly to reconsider and remodel our views and theology in this way ; if the religious ideas of sixty, nay, thirty years ago are now obsolete ; if old landmarks are thus rudely removed ; if everything is thus changing, and likely to go on changing, what then remains sure and certain ? Is there any- thing left in our Faith that cannot be shaken 1 " Yes, Truth and Faith can be trusted to hold their own : they cannot fail : it is only our partial views of these that can be shaken. What is Truth ? What is Faith ? Truth is perfect harmony between things as they are and our views of them, or in technical language *' Truth is the perfect correspondence be- tween thoughts and things : " Faith is the actual relationship between the soul of man and his God. Now God's attitude or relation.ship towards man is ever one and the same, it never changes or can change: it is only our human view or knowledge lO Introduction. of this eternal relationship that can alter, and it can and must grow and deepen as we grow. In the infancy of mankind God was pictured as a strong vindictive Being: a further step was taken in our knowledge of Him when He was seen to be not vindictive but righteous : the greatest ad- vance of all was when we learnt to know Him as our loving righteous Father, l^ut God was as much man's loving righteous Father when we were savages as He is now that we are civilized Christians, only we realized it not. So by Faith is meant the true expression of the relationship between the soul of man and his God : by Theology, or religious creeds, the attempt to frame this eternal Truth, this Faith- in the human words and ideas of the day. We can thus see how true it is that Faith never changes ; it is Theology that is ever changing, and must change if we are to grow in faith. Faith is the perfect living portrait, Theology is ever man's poor caricature of God, and the more our conceptions of God take clearer outline, the more God unveils or reveals Himself to our minds and hearts, the nearer we approach to the Truth and our picture of Him resembles God as He really is. To take a concrete instance : the religion of Moses was good and excellently adapted to satisfy the requirements of the Jews of his day; but it necessarily reflected the narrow limited atmosphere of his generation, and could not possibly meet the needs of an Isaiah, for example; so, later on, it Introduction. 1 1 was replaced by the higher and more spiritual re- ligion of the prophets, who taught that to obey is better than sacrifice, and that a lowly and contrite heart is the sacrifice truly acceptable unto God. Even this highly spiritual religion of the prophets did not quite meet the requirements of Christ's day, so it, too, in its turn had to be superseded by Christianity. Yet our Lord's Gospel was not a cancelling of all that went before it. Christ took up and assimilated all the better and still living elements of the old creeds : " I am come not to destroy but to fulfil the Law and the Prophets:" and our theologies ever since have been man's attempts to frame in the words and ideas of the day the perfect portrait of God our Father which Christ has given us in His teaching and in His own Person. We are very far from a true realiza- tion of it even now, but we are nearer to it than any who have gone before us. So it is that, to use Dr. Salmond's happy phrase, " Theology is the marriage of a mortal with an immortal, the union of the philosophy of the day with Faith : the Faith lives for ever, the philosophy grows old and dies; when the philosophic element of a religion becomes antiquated, its explanations which satisfied one age become unsatisfactory to the next," and must go overboard. It is simply one more illustration of the great law of evolution. Progress means growth, development : an acorn fulfils its mission not by remaining an acorn but 12 Iiitrodiictio)i. by becoming an oak : a child fulfils his not by- remaining a child but by growing into a man. Progress means the putting aside of the old bottles for new ; if the new wine were poured into the old wine-skins, the fermenting spirit would operate so powerfully as to burst the bottles and spill the wine. Hence, " new wine must be put into new bottles that both may be prfserved." At the birth of the Messiah the dispensation of Moses had done its work in the education of the world; it had served as a " pedagogue " to lead men by the hand to the school of Christ ; its types and ceremonies had waxed old, and were now obsolete by age and use and the accomplishment o{ their purpose. The requirements of the age had outgrown them. The bottles of Judaism would not hold the wine of Christianity. The new wine of baptism could not be poured into the old bottle of circumcision, or the new wine of the Eucharist into the old bottle of the blood-stained altar, or the new ministry of mercy into the old ministry of sacrifice, or the new gladness of the Gospel into the old discipline of the Baptist, or the new wine of holiness into the old bottles of a fleshly heart. Not only would the dregs of the old fermentation have acted injuriously upon the new wine, souring it, but the new spirit would have worked too powerfully in the old bottles, bursting them. So Christ came " not to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfil them;" not by mend- ing and repairing what was worn out in Judaism, Introduction. but by resetting the eternal Truth in a perfectly new frame. He did not destroy the old : true, He swept away with a ruthless hand the mushroom- growths, the excrescences that had gathered around it in course of ages, but He also retained the better and still living elements of the old creed, all that gave Judaism its value, the great underlying prin- ciples that formed its soul ; He corrected its partial statements of the Truth, reasserted all that was worth preserving, added much more of His own creation so as to bring it perfectly into line with the highest and deepest moral and intellectual needs and con- victions of the world. In a word Christ transfigured Judaism : it was still the same eternal Faith, only wondrously de- veloped and transformed : in it we have at last the perfect portrait and revelation of God Himself as He is, but so robed in the pure dazzling light of Divine thought that our blear dull eyes are not able to bear its splendour as of the Sun at noon- day, or gaze stedfastly upon God's Face, revealed there, as we might were our eyes not holden. All of us, ever since, from Apostles downward, have looked with dim eyes upon this perfect living por- trait, and one after another feebly tried to express in words our imperfect and blurred vision of the perfect portrait. — It is at best only a caricature. But as our eyes are growing day by day more used to the light, our vision of God is gradually taking clearer outline, gaining in health and colour. 14 Introduction. So it is that "the Faith never changes, Theology- is ever changing," the false in our picture is rubbed out and fades away, the true is daily more pro- nounced, and with each new revelation there must be a change of form, something taken out here, something added there. Most of us so love the old picture to which we have been so long accustomed that we resent any interference with it. Even when the new wine within ourselves is ready to burst its old bottle, we prefer the old and protest against the voice of warning telling us that it is high time to pour the new wine into new bottles that both may be pre- served. In a way the new preacher's voice finds a ready echo in our own hearts. Even while firmly- believing ourselves to be clinging to the old beliefs, the old watchwords of our fathers, under various dis- guises we are neutralizing our profession of the old creed by all manner of tacit reservations, attempts to justify it to ourselves though we feel that it is already sapped and decaying at the roots. There is in us a lurking sense of shame, a sneaking sus- picion that it is disloyal to desert the creed of our fathers. A little later, when our eyes are fully opened, and we have taken the inevitable step forward, the new belief seems so clear and simple that it surprises us we did not see it before. Which of us of the older generation does not understand and sympathize with the remark of a recent writer : "Now that I have left behind me the Calvinistic Introduction. 1 5 dogmatism in which I was born and bred, I feel like a man suddenly awaking from a nightmare and hideous dream." Most people would be amazed to find how much their belief depends upon their environment, and, exaggerated as it may sounds there is truth in the saying, " religion is very much a matter of geography." Of this we may be sure, that no resistance to the investigation of truth is so headstrong as that offered by mere prejudice and custom. " Truth can never fail : it is only our partial view of the truth that can be shaken." If we would but bear this in mind we should not be angry with those heralds of the Truth who are honestly and reverently seeking after it, nor so indifferent to the answers they give us after many years of patient toil. We can form little idea of the immense patience and labour, the lives of self-denying study and research, that these seekers after truth have had to face in their rigorous analysis of the Bible be- fore any positive, verified, tangible results could be obtained. Every branch of modern knowledge, physical science, archaeology, a comparative study of religions, textual criticism, ethnology, ancient history, primitive culture, had in turn to be thoroughly mastered before the expert student was in a posi- tion to decide upon actual facts. " Reality and sincerity" was the critic's motto, and, as may well be imagined, his work has been jealously and search- 1 6 In trodiiction . ingly scrutinized by friend and foe alike : and both have had to own that the methods adopted are true, exact, and scientific, while the results achieved are uniformly marked by soberness of judgment and scholarly completeness. It would be impossible to praise too highly the conscientiousness with which the minutest details have been carefully scanned, the honest suspension of judgment where there was any doubt, the candid acknowledgment wherever a surmise was hazarded, the loving enthusiasm of the student who believes that those only are ene- mies of the Bible who fail to investigate it, or who shrink from investigating it completely. We may therefore safely accept as established facts the conclusions at which these experts have arrived. And what are these conclusions, and what the outcome of them ? At the outset it seemed to us almost as though all we had been taught to look upon as sacred revelation were to be reduced to a chaos of literary fragments, for, indeed, the Hexateuch, the Psalter, and many of the historical books, together with the books of the Prophets, had apparently been torn into shreds. But we soon find that the critic's work is not merely negative and destructive. Critical experts have gathered up the scattered fragments, and reconstructed them into a connected and far more intelligible whole, so that as a matter of fact we now possess a clear, scientific, intelligent under- standing of our Bible, where before all was hap- Introdiictioji. 1 7 hazard and without method. The Divine character of the message in the Bible has been rendered far more inteHigible. We may have had to reconsider our traditional views as to the Bible's scientific and historic teaching, to recognize the distinctive human element in its composition, an element which goes far to explain the imperfect faith and morality, the many bewildering inconsistencies which we find in some of its early pages, — imperfections which our conscience had long since condemned, although perhaps we had not the courage nor the larger faith to admit this even to ourselves. True, but the ap- plication of critical methods to our reading of the Bible has vastly strengthened our Faith, — a faith that behind the veil of this visible world there lives a personal living God of infinite love, wisdom, power, and purpose. Who is guiding the world and man, and Whose Hand can be clearly seen in revela- tion and history. Our eyes have at last been opened to see in the Bible's pages God's moral government of the world in a uniformly consistent and systematic way right on from the very beginning. We see now that Creation is a gradual never-ending process, stretching indefi- nitely behind us and before, always increasing, changing, advancing. So also is knowledge, so also is God's revelation of Himself to man, so also is religion, so also is life. Of none of these dare we say that we see the beginning, neither can we discern the end. One and all they spring from one root, C 1 8 Introduction. and all our conceptions of a multiplicity of creations, of a series of abrupt beginnings and equally abrupt endings, have to be banished fronn our minds. Faith no longer compels us to believe that the forms in which Genesis writers expressed their ideas of the Creation are sacred and unalterable : that the primitive notions of a primitive age, an age of comparative ignorance, must be binding now on us dwellers upon earth in more enlightened days. Faith does not insist that our salvation in this life and the next depends on our accepting as eternal truths the literal facts of the biographies of the patriarchs, nor on our adopting their conceptions of God for our own. We have now a far higher understanding of the Bible and its message. Its value for us does not rest on its science, its history, or its dates, or the exact order of its books, nor on its verbal in- spiration : but we know that on its spiritual side, which alone matters, it is tenfold more than ever before God's own Book, showing us the steps by which God has unveiled Himself to man little by little as our eyes were able to bear the light : until at last He revealed Himself as He is in Christ Jesus. Here again criticism has proved to us the truth of what we have tried to express in this chapter. In the Bible, as in all theology, there is an element which is ever dying, and there is one which never dies : one mortal factor there is in Holy Scripture that changes as the world and experience change, Introduction. 19 and one again that is immortal and changeless : portions whose value is merely temporary and tran- sient, other portions which are for all times and for all people and for all eternity. It is this last and spiritual element which alone matters. Now as of old the simple unlettered peasant can make of the Bible a lamp unto his feet, and a light unto his path in all the changes and chances of this mortal life, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and fears, its graces and its sins. Criticism does emphatically not rob him of this deep and abiding comfort and help, for the spiritual message of the Bible remains untouched. All that criticism has done is to clear the ground and our minds as well of much misconception on matters of science, history, dates, and so forth, but these have an incidental connection only with spiritual revelation. It leaves the relationship between the soul and its God ever the same, a thing which cannot be shaken. So long as this remains it cannot, does not, greatly matter that we have to re-sort, set in order our ideas of the exactitude of this story or that, to admit this book or that as belonging to a later or an earlier date, to realize that the writers who edited the Bible made use of material varying con- siderably in historical worth. If, for example, the Psalter can no longer be regarded as the record of the spiritual experience of one individual, David, it becomes even more precious as voicing and embodying all the highest aspirations, the purest joys, the noblest sorrows of 20 Introihiction. many centuries of national life. In like manner if the laws given in the Hexateuch were not indeed, as was once fancied, the product of a few months or years of Moses' life, they surely gain in interest and instructiveness when known to be the slow growth of many generations in the most interesting crises of Israel's spiritual life. No, the Higher Critics have not, as once we feared, robbed us of our Bible. They took it away, yes, for a season, and we feared it had fallen into sacrilegious hands, but all the while they were honestly and reverently studying its pages by the light of a vast accumulated knowledge, and in a patient thoroughgoing manner. As seekers after Truth, and with eyes fixed upon their ultimate goal, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, lured by no will-o'-the-wisp of sentiment, tradi- tion, or authority, discouraged by no hostile voices, they set themselves to reach after Truth, if haply they might find her. Patiently, painfully, self- denyingly they pursued their way, and now it is we who reap the reward of their long years of struggle and of labour. They have given us back a Bible far more intelligible, far more helpful, far more spiritual than ever it was before : they have illuminated its pages with a flood of precious light. By that Hght we shall read into it a deeper meaning, a clearer, stronger, more perfect faith, and now, as never before, we "are always ready to give an answer to every man that asketh us a reason for the hope that is in us." CHAPTER I, The Growth of Religions. 'T^HE Old Testament has an interesting story to ■■• tell us of Israel's quest after the knowledge of the one true God, and also of many of the stages through which the Hebrews had to pass on the road to the goal : and as the story unfolds we see a steady progress onwards from small beginnings to a result of incalculable value to humanity, — a highly spiritual faith. Politically the place of Israel in history may be very small, but its influence on the history and civilization of the world has been enormous, for the Bible, which has revolutionized the world, was moulded in Hebrew minds, coloured by the genius of Hebrew speech, and its truths were put to the proof for the education of the world in Hebrew hearts and lives. The three religions which have taught men to worship one God, the Jewish, the Christian, and the Mahometan, are all due to Hebrew religious thought. Judged by its perfected result, its high-water mark, as seen in an Isaiah, for example, Israel's religion is an essentially enlightened, spiritual, inspiring faith — a faith in a living, loving Personal God, sole Creator of the universe ; above all, a faith in a moral 22 The Grow til of Religions. Governor of the world, "holy in all His ways, and righteous in all His works," all along guiding man- kind to a final goal worthy of His character, — a faith which finds its consummation and crown in Christianity, for our Lord Himself tells us that He came to put the coping-stone to it : "I am come not to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfil them." But we know that the Hebrew religion is a gradual growth and did not spring, like Minerva, into full- grown existence, ready-made, from the mind of God. This is not God's way of dealing with man ; and the purpose of this book is to show Israel's religion "in the making." It is true that the opening chapters of Genesis represent Adam and the early patriarchs as already possessing a clear knowledge of the one true God, but this was not really the case : it is a common misconception, an illusion due to an un- intelligent, uncritical, superficial reading of the Bible. The actual religion of those early days did not bear the faintest resemblance to the highly spiritual pic- ture of it given us by Genesis writers, and the Bible itself furnishes us the clue for a. right understanding of the matter. But we shall not really understand the evolution of Israel's religion at all until we have cleared and paved the way by examining certain points which may not seem to bear upon our subject at all, and yet are inseparable from it. To begin with, we cannot study the religion of TJie Groivth of Religions. 23 Israel, or any other creed, be it Christianity, Ma- hometanism, or Buddhism, by itself. We are obliged to study them thus separately in ordinary practice for convenience, but it is an artificial distinction. Nature recognizes no such distinctions of nations, languages, and peoples, but only mankind universally, individual man in the mass ; and precisely because human nature is at bottom one and the same always and everywhere, so we shall see that all religions the wide world over have a striking family likeness ; so much so that missionaries, struck by the wondrous similiarity of many of the beliefs of their heathen flock to what is to be found in Holy Scripture, have fancied that somehow the Bible stories must have already reached them in some mysterious way. In the presence of the unknown, man's curiosity has everywhere prompted him to ask such natural ques- tions as " How did the world come into being, and man, and disease, and death .? " Almost invariably the simple rough answers to these questions have been strangely alike, as we shall see in our next chapter. These myths form the roots, the common foundation of all religions ; this is the human element which they all have in common, and we shall see that it is a hardy plant, and survives even in Christi- anity, while Judaism is full of it. In our study of Israel's religion we cannot afford to disregard this human element, — it is so pro- nounced. We shall see that it is thus and thus alone that we can account for such extraordinary 24 TJie Groivth of Religions. Hebrew conceptions as the following-, and the list might be indefinitely lengthened : — The scene in the garden of Eden where Satan assumes the form of a serpent, as well as the worship of Jehovah in the shape of a bull, are palpably survivals of a day when primitive man commonly believed that gods and spirits could transform them- selves into any animal they chose. To the same primitive myths we owe the presence of trees of life and knowledge ; the formation of man from clay, and of woman from man's rib; the conversion of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt ; the phenomenal ages and gigantic size of mankind in the days before the Flood. We shall see that the account, as given in Genesis, of the introduction of disease and death, the creation of the world, and the Flood story find their parallels among uncivilized races in every latitude. Again, can we possibly assign a divine source to the procedure adopted by the Hebrews for the removal of uncleanncss arising from contact with a dead body (Numb. xix. i — ii) by means of the ashes of a red heifer which has to be brought to the priest, burnt, the ashes col- lected, then mixed with water, and everything done with a ceremonial that baffles description, and reminds one strongly of the formulas of the " medi- cine-man?" This is clearly a survival of the "taboo" arising from contact with a dead body and the procedure for its removal so commonly found even now among savages, and which was once universal. ///,■ Croi^'tli of l\il!_!^io)is. 25 Aiiollur u.iifaiul stray of olcli-n days is the strange ordeal of Ihe "water of l.ilteniess cr jealousy" (Nuinl). V.) whieh the jiriest is to i^ive to a woman supposed to be unlaithlid, .ind which would not haiin her if imioeent, hut, if .L;uilty, "would cause h(M- l)ody to swell and her thij^h to (all away." Si>ruuL; Iroin a ver)' primitive heliel, too, is im- doubtcdl)- the rite ol placing- tin; people's sins on a cfoal and sendinu it into the wilderness to Aza/cl (1,0V. wi.), an evil s|Mrit who was supposed to havt- his abode there; and the pi)pular belief in witchcraft, exorcism, neeiomaney, m.ii^ie anuilets, eastiuij^ lots, oracles, and si> forth, can have arisen h-oin no other source. What ctlu-r expl.nialioii can we lind, a_L;ain, lor the universal llebrcw btlief that the dead were relegated to an uiulerground |,)it (Sheol) where the)'- led an (.inpt)', joyli>ss, hopeless existence, good and b.ul all huddled ti)gellier ; just \\\c picture (^\ life after ilealh we ihid in (ireek and Roman myth, onl\' worse? The stories ol tlu- translation ol men to luMVt'U without seeing death, the universal belief in a golilen age ol" original innoceni\', the prevalence of stone and In e-w orsliip, ami (^{ human sacrifices, the vow ol Je[)hthah, and man)- mtn'c similar strange itlcas anil customs cm onl)- be satisfactorily accounted loi in the same wa)-. These instances must suffice, esjjcci.dly as our \er)- next chai)ler deals with this subject at some length, anil we have only relerred to these cases to m.ike oui point more clear. h'rom what we h.i\e ahead)' said it naturall)' lol- 26 TJie Groivth of Religions. lows as a corollary that, strictly speaking, we cannot speak of religions as one true, and all others false. One and all they have sprung from a common root ; each one in its way is " seeking after God, if haply it may find Him," but some have remained stationary,, some have even retrograded, while others have made immense strides forward, and one has reached its goal. The differences between religions are very- wide, but they are now admitted to be, like the differences between civilized men and savages, dif- ferences only in degree and not in kind. In our Introduction we stated that the modern intellectual horizon has everywhere widened, but nowhere has it so broadened as in its attitude to religion generally. Sixty, or even thirty, years ago all so-called religions outside the Bible were regarded as worthless superstitions : now the time has passed away when it is possible for the Bible student either to ignore every other religion but that of the He- brews, or to regard them merely as so many forms of error. The extension of knowledge has clearly taught him that Christianity is but one of many beliefs which have prevailed over vast areas and during indefinite periods, and the historical student of religion feels that he can no longer treat them as so many inventions of the devil, even thoueh he may be firmly persuaded that Christianity stands on a far higher plane than all the rest. Everywhere else we see clear evidences of one continuous process of development from the most slender beginnings, TJlb Gj'ozvtJi of Religions. 2/ the most elementary germs, up to life's present marvellously complex conditions : and these uni- versal laws of evolution must hold good in matters of religion just as in nature and civilization. Even as man himself has to take his place among other animals from which he has sprung, and whom he has outdistanced in the race, in the struggle for existence, by reason of certain superior qualities which he possessed and they lacked, so also religion has to be studied as an evolution of which Christi- anity is the perfect outcome and type amongst a host of imperfect types from which it in its turn has sprung. We cannot, therefore, say of creeds that one is true and all the others false : all alike have their roots in the primitive myths which are mankind's common heritage, man's early simple answers to the universal problems of the origin of the world, man, and death. Starting with these fundamental ideas as their common basis some " have built on this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, others mere wood, hay, stubble ; " some have remained all but stationary, others are still in a very low stage of development, while others have all but reached the goal. The more thoroughly and intelligently religion is studied, the clearer the conviction will be forced upon us that all religions of the world, be they crude and barbaric, be they spiritual and enlight- ened, are fundamentally one and the same. As Dr. Fairbairn well puts it : " The Son of God 28 TJie Groiutli of Religions. holds in His pierced hands the keys of all the religions, explains all the factors of their being, and all the persons through whom they have been realized." One and all these primitive creeds were but "the baby figures of the giant mass of things to come," and the end crowns all and explains all. This is not a discovery of to-day : S. Paul knew this truth, so did Malachi long before him. Not only does this Hebrew prophet say that God's Name is magnified among the heathen, but he distinctly speaks of their ofierings as having Jehovah for their object : " 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'* (Mai. i. ii R.V.). S. Paul also recognized the element of truth in heathen creeds, for in his address to the Athenians he says : " As I passed by, and beheld your devo- tions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly wor- ship, Him declare I unto you" (Acts xvii. 23 sqq.). Malachi and S. Paul grasped the truth which we are only just beginning to seize, — that during the ages of heathen darkness God " left not Himself with- out a witness" (cf. Acts x. 34, 35), but made even then certain revelations of Himself to men " in every nation " by the only means which they were then capable of understanding. To a Malachi and a S. Paul these so-called heathen superstitions, good, The GrowtJi of Religions. 29 bad, or indifferent, were so many blurred and cari- catured representations of the truth, witnesses every one of them for God, however faulty and unworthy. In modern times Cardinal Newman, amongst others, has said precisely the same thing : " There is something truly and divinely revealed in every religion all over the earth," and again : " Revelation, properly speaking, is an universal not a local gift." "What!" men exclaim, "is Christianity at the root one and the same with cannibalism ! " Yes, step by step we can trace the growth of the idea of God from the tin\' germ of immature childish superstitions to the full mature blossom of Christi- anity as Christ conceived it and we do not. At first sight the brutal rites of savages seem as far asunder as the poles from Christianity — those devil- born, this God-like : those black as the nethermost darkness of hell, this bright as heaven's noon-day sun : yet it is after all a difference of degree only. It was but a toddling step towards a higher Being which made the savage offer his demon-god human sacrifices so as to propitiate the thing he dreaded, his deity : it was another step when presently man, a savage still, but slightly more civilized, worshipped his " lords many and gods many," deities who were even such as men themselves, as vindictive, as cruel, as sensuous as they, but now human. A further advance was made when man's consciousness awoke to the sense that a nation's gods should be moral, of a character to inspire their worshippers 30 The Gruzuth of Religions. with a love of all that is noble and true and good and pure, and thus we get spiritual religions, like Judaism, with their root-idea of a righteous God ; the goal, however, was only reached when Christ proved in Himself that God is in man and man in God, a truth which even now, tv/o thousand years later, we are yet but blindly feeling after. So it is that every advance in religion dovetails into the faith that went before it, has its roots deeply imbedded in its predecessor, and cannot be maintained without taking up and assimilating the still living elements of the older creed: "I am come not to destroy but to fulfil." " These little systems which had their day and ceased to be " were one and all the imperfect but genuine efforts of their time and generation to comprehend the " Father of all, in every age, in every clime adored ' — links in the chain of the evolution of man's faith. It is only one more illustration of the great law of evolution which we see in operation everywhere and wondrously. In the commonest things it fulfils its daily miraculous task, converting the seed into the flower, the Qgg into the bird, the caterpillar into the moth, the child into the man. The egg sleeps in its nest, as motionless as a stone : how can it ever be so transformed as to run and fly } Look at the creeping caterpillar crawling tortuously along the earth, does it seem a likely creature to mount one day on wings and bathe in the sunbeam ? Or do those puny perish- The Growth of Religions. 31 able acorns on which the swine feed seem to hold in themselves the promise of mighty forest-oaks living over a thousand years ? How is it all done ? One and all they have a divine something within them, a soul, a vital spark, a germ-cell, a dynamic force, call it what you will, which has an innate capacity of infinite development, and under favourable circumstances will and must burst through its confining barriers, and will not rest till it has perfectly achieved the God-purposed end for which it was created. Every- where it is a law of development through a series of transformations. In technical language : " When the external conditions become favorable the seed germinates, the materials of active life within it undergo chemical changes of such a nature as to convert them into substances which can readily travel to the seed of s^rowth, and can be used as • . . . plastic material by the growing cells, and therefore as the embryo grows the original seed grows less, for its life-giving elements are being used up by the new offspring." The caterpillar must thus pass through its chrysalis stage before it can mount on the wings of the moth : yet through it all the "personality," be it in seed, ^^%, or child, is ever r the same in the perfect flower, bird, and man, only wondrously grown and developed — *' We all are changed by still degrees, All but the basis of the soul." — In a sense, all organisms are ever "rising on /7 32 The Gi'oivth of Religions. stepping - stones of their dead selves to higher things." So it is with reh'gion, for it also is a living organism, and its seed is that fc^Hng — call it in- stinct, aspiration, curiosity, as you will — which is in the mind and heart of every man born into the world in the presence of the unknown around him. This seed germinates first into nature-worship, then into polytheism, followed by a belief in a moral God, till we get the perfect flower in Christianity. " But," it may naturally be asked, " why then do not all religions arrive at the goal ? Why did other national seekers after God stop half-way while Judaism alone developed the seed into the perfect bloom ? " To this big question two answers may be given ; one a purely natural answer, the other the clue to the problem given us in the Bible. Man's solution goes a long way towards a helpful answer, but it does not explain everything. We have already seen that under the law of evolution the seed germinates and developes into the flower only wJieti all the conditions are favorable. Many acorns remain acorns and die because their surroundings are not of a nature to quicken the germ-cell into life, and unused functions die. More than this, even when the surrounding conditions are favorable to the maintenance of life they are often so very different in other respects that they abnormally develope some of the original life-cells and stunt TJie Growth of Religions. 33 others which cannot live in that environment. Thus do we account for the various species and kinds of vegetable and animal products, and understand why some living beings are fishes, or birds, or beasts, and others men. The same law holds good in the development of q human character. The environment of the Greeks abnormally developed their power of thought and their sense of beauty, so it has been their mission and function to refine and humanize mankind. Art, letters, philosophy, taste have been their con- tribution to the education of tlie world. Similarly, by reason of its environment, Rome's ] function and mission was to teach mankind law, *^ organization, government. The Teutonic nations' share in mankind's development has been the teach- ing of honour, truthfulness, respect for women. In like manner, because of the special environ- ment which was Israel's in the course of its national life, the spiritual or religious element has been pro- nouncedly developed in the Hebrews, and their mission has been to give the world its true re- ligion. But, all said and done, mere naturalism does not account for it all. The only answer which satis- factorily explains all the facts must ever be that Israel developed in a unique religious direction of its own " uader the constraint of a Divine training, and under the guiding light of a Divine revelation, and that its Prophets,— Moses, Isaiah, Christ,— D 34 The Growth of Religions. rightly claimed to be the spokesmen and represen- tatives of the one true God " (Kirkpatrick). If it be urged that this would imply an act of favoritism on God's part, unworthy of His character, our answer is that it is precisely because God is full of love and mercy that He thus chose Israel. He set apart the Jews as His chosen people, not out of partiality, but as the instrument in His hands for the purpose He has had in view all along from the beginning of the world, — the salvation of all men : " The fixed purpose that all men shall be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." God does not thus distribute His grace and gifts with a partial or niggard hand. He first selects the Jews to keep the conception of a living righteous Father alive in the midst of an evil world, so that through them He may reach and gather in the Gentiles. For their backsliding God has later on to reject the Jews, but through the Gentiles He means to save the Jews in their turn (Rom. xi.). But we shall speak of this more fully in our chapter on Inspiration. If therefore we would understand Israel's religion we must not study it by itself, for we cannot ignore other religions that preceded it and contributed largely to its making. We must go behind its earliest historical facts, look out for and expect to find in it many survivals of earlier faiths. The Hebrews are men of the Semitic group of the large family of mankind. As men they will retain a large TJie Groivth of Religions. 35 portion of the human element which forms the skeleton scaffolding of all religion. As Semites they must and do show forth in their religious rites and doctrine a striking family likeness with other Semitic races, the Arabs and especially the Babylonians, whose direct descendants they are. As Hebrews they have impressed upon this material a distinct stamp of their own in consequence of their special surroundings and the unique line of development which they followed under God's direct training and guidance. It is only by clearly keeping in view the connecting links between the human, the Semitic and the Hebrew elements, by showing how decidedly Israel's religion is rooted in the past, how it has been fostered by its predecessors, has assimilated what was still living in them, that we shall understand it as we should. In our next chapter, on primitive religion, we shall discuss the contribution made by the first of these factors, the human element, and endeavour to point out what an important part it has played in the religion of the Hebrews. CHAPTER II. Primitive Man's Religion. WE stated in our last chapter that all religions are at bottom one and the same. They one and all have their roots in the primitive myths which are mankind's common heritage, man's earliest answers to the world-wide problems : " How did the world, and man, and death come into beincr?" Let us take the Bible's own answers to these questions by way of illustration. Gen. ii. 7 tells us that God formed man (his human body) from clods (not " dust '') of the field, and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that man became a living being. In the story of the Fall (Gen. ii. 15 — 17; iii. i — 19) we read that death came into the world through man's eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Creation story says that when God created the world " the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face qf the deep (waters : the watery abyss : Tehom), and the breath of God was brooding over the waters," In other words, before the Creation all that existed was (i) dark- ness, (2) a vast watery abyss, (3) God's breath over it, or air. Now these passages — and we might quote many Primitive Man's Religion. 37 more — give a striking example of a most interesting phenomenon. The Bible explanations of the Crea- tion, the origin of man and death, are legends to be found amongst all primitive peoples all over the world, expressed also in almost identically the same terms, even when the homes of the races are as far apart as. Greece, Mexico, Australia, Egypt, South America, Iceland, and the South Sea Islands. Almost everywhere man is stated to have been formed by some supernatural being out of clay. In New Zealand the legend runs: "The god took red clay and kneaded it with his own blood." Greek myths relate that " men were baked in clay," and the Melanesian story is that " man was made of red clay." Some primitive peoples, however, such as the Australians and South Americans, as well as sundry Greek legends, speak of man as sprung from the lower animals. That death followed man's disobedience of some god's direct command is also a common primitive belief. With savage races there is a conviction that man was originally immortal, but he forfeited that immortality through breaking some law — some taboo — imposed by a deity, and death followed in conse- quence. In Australia a woman had been forbidden to approach a certain tree in which dwelt a bat: she went near it : the bat fluttered out and there- after men died. The Ningphoos were banished from paradise and became mortal, for the reason that one of them bathed in forbidden {tabooed) waters. 38 Primitive Man's Religion. In like manner the Greek myth tells us that man- kind was free from death-dealing disease till the woman Pandora lifted the lid of a forbidden box. The world, in primitive legend, or rather the earth is as a rule supposed to have grown out of something already existing, an animal, an egg, a fragment of soil fished up from the waters, or out of water itself. The Accadians and Japanese supposed the earth to have somehow grown out of water. The South Americans believed it was formed from earth thrown up from the bottom of the water. Most primitive nations incline to the idea of an egg or an animal as the source of all things ; or they even believe that a man was torn to pieces, and out of the fragments were made heaven and earth. Strange as it may sound, the Genesis account, as we show in the analysis of the Bible story in Chapter VI., repeats primitive man's creed of a world sprung from water as the primal element, and also embodies the idea of a heaven and earth formed from the mangled portions of an animal torn to pieces. These universal " common-stock " myths might be indefinitely multiplied, for ethnologists are carefully collecting and sorting them from! every quarter of the globe. Studying them, the question forces itself upon us : How is this universal prevalence of the same ideas to be accounted for? The favorite way of approaching this problem till quite recently has been to trace all these legendary traditions back to a common source — the Bible ; but this Primitive Mail's Religion. 39 orthodox method of harmonizing these world-wide myths has now been exploded, and a far more natural and rational explanation is now accepted. Thev are one and all a "survival" of a condition of thought or mind which was once common, if not actually universal, but is now only to be found among savages, and to a certain extent among children. Confronted by these primitive child-like legends and folk-lore stories scattered over the whole face of the earth, and bearing such a pronounced family likeness. Prof. Max Miiller many years ago asked : "Was there a period of temporary madness through which the early mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in India, Babylon, Iceland, America, and the South Sea Islands ? " To this we may answer that the human mind in its infancy must needs pass through this most curious, child-like, or savage state of thought. Curiosity and credulity seem to be the universal characteristics of the human mind in every stage ^m--^ of its development. We all want answers to the questions : — How came this or that to be what it is? What is the origin of the world, and of man, and of death .'' The only difference between our questioning and that of primitive man is that in these latter days we aim at being accurate and scientific in our search, whereas the savage is easily satisfied with any explanation that seems to square with the scanty facts at his disposal. Prof. Max 40 Primitive Maiis Religion. Miiller has well said, " Primitive man not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we think he ought to have thought." We must, there- fore, throw back our thoughts into this primitive age. From our knowledge of modern savage races, and by an intellectual tour de force we must face man's surroundings as savages face them. To primitive man all nature is alive and per- sonified. Every brook and well and tree : every rock and glade : heaven and earth : sun and moon : wind and thunder, are not things at all. Each is a living personality, and so the whole universe is peopled with an innumerable host of living spirits, good or bad. In poetry, by an effort of imagination, we personify sun and wind ; but even in our own days " A liushman once saw the personal Wind at Haarfontein, and meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill^" In the Iliad Homer recounts how the Wind, by certain mares, became the sire of special steeds. Missionaries, even now, often tell us that they cannot understand how savages can possibly believe that sun and moon are human beings. More than this, to uncivilized races, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind are not only persons but savage persons. They judge everything by their own standard, and believe each of these Beings to be even such an one as themselves. To the savasfe the only natural answer to the question : " Why do ?■ South African Folk-lore Journal. Primitive Alan's Religion. 41 trees grow, streams flow, sun and moon rise and set, light and darkness come and go?" is a quite simple one. " For the same reason," he says, "that I move and run and lie down : they are all living persons," It equally naturally follows that when a man, animal, or tree dies, its "spirit" does not die but hovers near the spot where it dwelt in life, and enters some other object, be it plant, or beast, or man, and goes on living again. More curious still, it is almost universally believed by savages that they have originally sprung from lower animals. In Australia men are supposed to have descended from kangaroos, emus, cockatoos. The same notions prevail among the Ashantees, Basutos, Peruvians, Bengalese, and the Jakuts in Siberia, &c. Stocks sprung from the same animal ancestor are " of one blood," and may not inter- marry. Equally hrmly-established and universal is the belief that men can at will assume the shape of beasts. We need scarcely seek authentic in- stances (as we may) of this superstition so far afield as India, Arabia, Greece, or Egypt, for we shall find it lingering at our own doors. There is a well-known Scotch legend that a ceitain old witch transformed herself into a hare ; on one occasion the hare was fired at, and it was dis- covered that where the hare was hit, there the witch had a wound also. Is it any wonder, then, that, near Loanda, Livingstone noted the common 42 Primitive Man's Rdigion. conviction that a chief may change himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and then resume his proper shape. Hindoo and Pythagorean ideas of transmigration are based on this belief. Absurd, laughable, fantastic as all these super- stitions may appear to us, it is important to bear them in mind, for they explain such Bible anoma- lies as the devil assuming the form of a serpent, and Jehovah worshipped in the shape of a bull. They also directly bear on much that we shall meet with when examining the religion of Israel, which is otherwise inexplicable and senseless. In every religion there is what we may call a sensible and a senseless, a rational and an ir- rational element. Even the ancient Greeks were perfectly conscious of this anomaly. The picture of the goddess Artemis " taking her pastime in the chase while her wood nymphs disport themselves with her, and high over them all she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where all are fair ; known by her quiver and her lofty mien, she walks majestic, and she looks their queen : " this to the Greeks was a perfectly rational picture of a goddess, queen, and huntress" chaste and fair. But that this sublime goddess should change her- self into a she-bear, as the Arcadians believed, the Greeks felt to be entirely irrational. In like manner Greek philosophers and poets were shocked at the senseless savage characteristics ascribed to their gods, at their infamous and absurd adven- Primitive Alaii s Religion. 43 tures. They marvelled that divine beings could be looked upon as incestuous, adulterous, mur- derous, and thievish, or as transforming themselves into swans, beasts, or stars. Yet this senseless element was but a survival in historic days of the child-like creeds of older times. Precisely the same phenomenon is to be seen abundantly illustrated, as we shall sec, in Israel's religion. In the religion of every age, of every clime, of every people, this same irrational and senseless element survives. In it we see the wreck- age of older beliefs, the waifs and strays of pre- historic religion, the fossilized remains of an older faith imbedded in the better and purer layers of latter-day creeds. We shall never intelligently grasp the innate Hebrew belief in magic, witchcraft, necromancy, demons : their worship of sacred stones and trees : their devils and gods assuming serpent and bull forms : their tendency to revert to " lords many and gods many : " their conceptions of what is unclean or " taboo " to God : their belief in Azazel and a hierarchy of angels and devils : their " red heifer" and "waters of jealousy," and many other quaint rites, till we bear in mind that with the Hebrews, as with us all, religion had passed through many phases. In process of evolution all religions go through various stages. We may instance three : — (A.) We have already seen that in the earliest 44 Primitive Man's Religion. phase of primitive man's beliefs all nature is alive. A world of spirits people the universe. These are mostly demons, powerful to do man grievous harm if not duly propitiated, and to their agency is ascribed every disease, accident, and death itself The only way of warding off their evil influence is by spells and formulas known only to their sorcerer-priests ; so in this stage magic is rife. Gradually these spirits, especially the most dreaded, are magnified into gods and worshipped at the sacred stones, trees and springs of water, which are themselves re- garded as persons and gods. As both they and we are sprung from animals, these spirits or gods can at will assume animal shapes, as bulls or serpents, bears or swans. (B.) A great step forward is taken when gods begin to be likened to men. Even then, however, the former stage still oft survives, and so we find the gods represented as half man and half beast, with the head of an animal and the body of a man, or with the body of an animal and the head of a man. Later still, we find these gods fashioned altogether in the likeness of men, and possessed both of man's moral and immoral attributes : they fight among themselves, are cruel, .sensuous, vin- dictive, with {q.\\ redeeming graces. Already, how- ever, some of these polytheistic religions are be- coming more moral and humane, though even then they lag behind the better thought of their day, and the more piou.s, philosophical and civilized Primitive Maiis Religion. 45 minds of the time express their dissatisfaction with their own creeds and try to mend or end them. In this second stage magic is still rife. The gods also continue to be worshipped under the guise of trees, stones, or animals, but these are now only their abodes or symbols, and not any longer regarded as identical with the gods themselves. (C.) The next stage is reached when these many gods are at last merged into some rude idea of one God. This is a long, process, and, as we shall see when examining Israel's religion, many of the con- ceptions of the two preceding stages, especially the second, long survive in it. Only one people, the Hebrews, advanced to this stage. In Assyria and Babylonia, with their head-gods Asshur and Marduk, the idea of one supreme god was almost reached, but the spiritual conception of their head-god as a moral, righteous Governor was lacking. Asshur re- mained a great war-god, and Marduk a mere local national deity who falls with his nation. In our study of religions we m.ust also clearly bear in mind that every religion has two sides. We must carefully distinguish between its religious ideas and its religious acts, the doctrine it teaches, and the rites or ceremonies it insists on, and these two factors arc seldom evenly balanced. Some re- ligions are essentially dogmatic, others pre-eminently ritualistic, and rites die hard. In nature-worship and polytheism, religion's two first stages, ritual is 46 Przinitive Alan's Religion. all-important ; they are obliged little by little to let in the moral or spiritual element, but it is for them the beginning of the end when they do. The old bottles cannot contain the new wa'ne and burst eventually. The new ideas are too full of life for the old rites ; so it is that in the struggle for existence only such spiritual creeds as Judaism, Mahometanism, Christianity, and Buddhism have been able to bear the strain, and claim the title ot " world religions." They overleap national barriers, and voice the aspirations of the human heart and mind. Judaism and Islam exalt the divine, Bud- dhism deifies man ; the former exalt man's depend- ence on God, Buddhism emphasizes man's liberty, and so each is one-sided. Christianity alone fuses the divine and the human, blends dependence and liberty into a harmonized whole, and stands far above its rivals. What has all this to do with the Old Testament } Much every way, for it is the key to its right under- standing. Even Christianity has its roots imbedded deeply in the past : it is the outcome of Judaism, which in its turn is sprung from Semitic polytheism, and this again has its foundations in primitive nature- worship. At each successive stage the religion of any given period has been fostered by one or more of its predecessors, and has only superseded the older faith by taking up and assimilating the better and still living elements it contained. With all reverence it may be said, for example, that the Primitive Mans Religion. 47 most sacred sacramental meal of the Lord's Supper, in memory of His Divine sacrifice on the Cross, focuses and fulfils the dumb and dim expectation of mankind's sacrifices through all the ages. Each stage satisfies and is suited to its own day, for God is speaking by its medium to man in the only language he can understand. It was one step god-ward when man learnt to reverence something outside himself, even a demon-spirit : another step higher when he awoke to a conception of " many gods," at least as human if as immoral as himself: a far higher step when these in turn gave way to one God infinitely better and higher than man. The bloody and ghastly ritual and accompani- ments of early sacrifices repel us. Repugnant to our minds is the original idea of sacrifice itself as a common family or tribal meal where a victim is killed and eaten and his own portion is allotted for food to the god. Yet the same thing meets us in the Bible. Not only are the blood and fat offered to God as His share of the food in every sacrifice, but Gen. xviii. i — 9 distinctly represents Jehovah and two angels as eating cakes, butter, milk and veal in Abraham's tent at Mamre. More than this, from the root-idea of all sacrifice, — the common meal wherein a family or a clan share the flesh and blood of a living victim after it has been slain, — springs the conception which underlies all true re- ligion, fellowship with God and fellowship with man. Thus was man unconsciously educated for thousands 48 Pi'iniitive MmCs Religion. of years not only for that Divine sacrifice of the Lamb without spot, which alone can perfectly unite us with God, but every act of sacrifice also expressed in its common meal the idea that man does not live for himself alone, but for his fellows. In very truth our beautiful faith in the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man is but the ripe fruit of that tiny seed which was sown in the childhood of the world and watered with the blood of innumerable brutal and degrading sacrifices. If the truths proclaimed by evolution are a fact — and who can doubt it ? — the passage from the brute to the civilized man must be gradual and marked by much that shocks a modern Christian. In all countries and in all times the gods are made by man in his own image, and reflect the minds of those who create them. To a savage might makes right and fear comes before love. Wicked gods obtain the largest offerings and the longest prayers, so demon worship is rife. Evil is the raw material of good, base and cruel superstition the seed of religion. But the path leads ever forward, and as God's light grow^ clearer, and man's moral and spiritual eyes grow stronger to bear that light, public opinion reacts on the religion of the day and humanizes it. The history of religions has shown clearly in Babylonia, Israel, every- where, even in the Christianity of the nineteenth century, that in the hands of its advocates and upholders religion is ever apt to lag behind the Primitive Man's Religion. 49 thought and spirit of its age, till more enlightened minds force theology to get abreast of the times and voice the truths which are already alive, though hidden and unspoken, in many minds and hearts. Therefore, as we look back upon the crude, fantastic, savage religion of primitive man, and trace it step by step on its evolution to our present Christian ideal, let us take heart of grace. The advance already made has been immense, and there is yet far more to come. The clearer our analysis, the more complete our grasp of the stages in religion's development, the more shall we understand, appre- ciate, love our faith : the more shall we realize what poor material God had to work upon at the outset, the trouble and patient pains He has taken with man's education ; the more shall we believe in man's and our own great possibilities in the loving hands of such a Father. Before closing this essay there remain, one or two points worth noting, for we shall find them useful later on. Perhaps we picture to ourselves our first parents and their children living a gladsome, innocent exis- tence as a happy, harmonious family, whilst around them frolic together the lion and the lamb in that charming far-off age of innocence. We imagine this life as a model of virtue worthy to be set up as an example and aim to a degenerate posterity. We must not dream such dreams. Modern research unfortunately gives the lie to this charming romance ; E 50 Primitive Mans Religion. — no, not unfortunately, it is more inspiring to know that our path ever points onward, and that history f) emphatically assures us that the golden age lies before us and not behind. We shall see later that the Creation, the Fall, and the story of Eden are in truth beautiful word-pictures in which God in- spires the Genesis writers to speak in parables, earthly stories full of a divine moral and spiritual meaning, gems of light and truth even as those we find in the parables of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan. But they are parables only, em- bodying primitive man's ideas of a happy golden age, in the childhood of the world, which never existed. Far from society having degenerated from an Eden-like simplicity of innocence we find that it is just the other way. "The world is very young, and has only just begun to cast off injustice," says a modern writer, and it is not true that man was moral and good and just in prehistoric days. There was an utter absence of justice and morality then, if we may follow Sir John Lubbock's lead, and judge prehistoric man by his modern equivalent and type, I uncivilized races. " Uncivilized countries are for us /^ a standing exhibition of prehistoric matters, museums where we find duplicates of objects which were thought to be lost or long since forgotten : each of them is a Pompeii, exhumed from beneath the rub- bish of ages." If so — and many ethnologists go even further and say that modern savages, abject as Primitive Alan's Religion. 51 is their condition, are yet vastly superior to primeval man, — then everything tends to prove that mankind, far from being born with a vivid sense of right and wrong, had to evolve a moral sense by a long and painful process. When a modern Bechwana was asked what it is " to be good " ; puzzled awhile, he finally answered : " To be good is to possess a wife and cows, and to steal one's neighbour's wife and cows." We have also the Pawnee's answer to the same question : " He is a good man who is a hunter, sly, crafty as a fox, daring and strong as a wolf." Might made right in those days. They were not a happy, innocent family then, these early peoples, for there was no family life in our sense at all. Men herded together and bred in those days much like a herd of cattle, and the love of the mother for her offspring was the only germ of any affection at all. The reason is not far to find. Man has passed through four stages : first, the hunting and fishing phase ; secondly, shepherd- ing and cattle-tending ; thirdly, agriculture ; lastly, industry and trade. In the two former stages men were nomads, and, certainly in the earlier hunting and fishing days, lived practically from hand to mouth, for their weapons and tackle were very in- adequate. None but men, hunters and fishers who could procure food and fight foes, were wanted, for each additional person meant an additional mouth to feed : therefore most girl-children were promptly destroyed, and the icw that were allowed to grow 52 Primitive Mans Religion. to womanhood became the common property of the tribe. Every woman had a score of husbands, and kinship was necessarily traced through the female. It was only when man advanced to the aefricultural or settled state that he wedded a wife as he wedded the soil, and family life first really came into existence. Thus the happy united family life of the golden age in far-off past days is a mere myth, and so is the idea of primitive innocence, morals, and a sense of justice. In those very early days right and wrong are meaningless terms. To Australian aborigines the words good and bad have only reference to taste or bodily comfort. The whole tendency is to give everything to the strong, to the prejudice of the young and weak, and especially to the detriment of women. "To believe," says Sir G. Grey, "that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom, either of thought or action, is utterly wrong : offences in their eyes are light or grave according to the rank of the offender." " Conscience," says Burton, " does not exist in Eastern Africa. Repentance expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime. Robbery constitutes an honorable man. Murder — the more atrocious the midnight crime the better — makes the hero." Self-interest and a desire for self-preservation, seldom if ever tempered by unselfish considerations, are the rule. If there is any law at all it is embodied in the "custom" of the tribe, just as even in the Primitive Maiis Religion. 53 Judges period of Israel's history "no such thing is wont to be done in Israel " was a final answer. Vendetta is universal, and Israel's history again, with its code "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," and its regulations for blood-revenge, shows how long this primitive institution survived. Within the tribe itself there may faintly show some glimpses of humanity, friendship, some symptoms of a rude honesty : but toward all outside it, cunning and violence, murder and ruthless brutality are the rule, — and here again the bitter attitude of Jews towards ^ strangers all through their history proves that in ' them this primitive trait died hard. When we remember that the Hebrews even in the days of Moses were little if at all better than Bedouin Arabs now, and that the people who left Egypt under Moses were a " half-brutalized horde ; '* " that there was no such thing as acting on principle, but custom, and not morality, ruled supreme ; a custom demanding, unconditionally, the execution of blood-revenge ; some honesty towards one fellow- tribesman, but allowing deceit and cheating to be practised without scruple on a stranger : a custom which made sin consist not in wrong-doing, but in breaking a taboo, and thereby incurring guilt and uncleanness " (Kautzsch), we may see the object of this chapter. No one can study the books of Judges without recognizing, with Dean Stanley, that the " human, let us even add savage, barbarian element " survived long in the Hebrew character. CHAPTER III. Semitic and Babylonian Influence ON Israel. ISRAEL is a Hebrew tribe of the Semitic group of the large family of mankind, and each of these three factors must be taken into account. As men, the Hebrews will reflect in their religion, as well as in their face and character, the common human element which is to be found everywhere among mankind. On this common fundamental material the genius of the Semitic race will impress a distinct stamp or type of its own. The local tribe will further develope characteristic individual features. We have roughly outlined the religion and culture of primitive man because it is the common mould in which the simple ideas of humanity were origin- ally cast, and we shall find abundant traces of it in Israel's religion. In this chapter we propose to show how the Semitic peoples took this common- stock knowledge of humanity, and impressed on it a Semitic type. The rest of the book will indicate how, under new conditions, the Hebrew tribe further developed this common Semitic religion, and gave it a distinct and unique individuality of its own. Semitic and Babylonian Injluence on Is)-ael. 55 A. Semitic peoples. In the opening chapters of Genesis we are told that the Euphrates valley is the cradle of the human race. This is not strictly true, but it is a fact that here, so far as history tells us. we have the cradle of a people whose mission it has been to revolu- tionize the world spiritually, — the Hebrews. We read in Gen, xi., xii. : " And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife ; and they went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan ; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. . . . Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, unto a land that I will show thee : And I will make of thee a great nation. . . . So Abram departed, and Lot went with him, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran ; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan ; and into the land of Canaan they came." On this passage Dr. Ryle says : " Here we have a historical tradition of a great nomadic movement of the Hebrews who migrated from Mesopotamia into Canaan." The very name Hebrew, " the people from beyond " the river, tells us the same story. So does Deut. xxvi. 5, where the Hebrews are 56 Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. made to refer to their ancestor as " a Syrian (Heb. 'Aramaean ') ready to perish was my father." Apart from the Bible, we know on the evidence of their language, customs, history, and ethnology, that the Hebrews are Semites. Who are these Semites ? They form a group of nations whose original home was probably the Arabian peninsula, and it is said that the Arabic language is upon the whole nearest the primitive Semitic speech. As a race they were originally nomadic, wanderers in the desert, hunters and shep- herds, more or less like their descendants, the Bedouin Arabs. They early divided into two main branches, the Southern and Northern Semites. The Southern, or Arabian branch, remained nomads and shepherds, like the Ishmaelites of Bible days. The Northern group became more easily civilized, and consisted of Semites who migrated from Arabia to the North-east and North-west. Thev became the races afterwards known as Babylonians (and Assyrians), Aramaeans, Canaanites, and Hebrews. Nomads by nature, ranging for countless genera- tions in small bands over a vast desert, shepherds and herdmen reduced to an out-of-door roving life, the whole character of the Semitic people ever after- ward was vitally affected by the hard conditions of their early life in remote ages. Prolonged droughts often compelled these nomad herdmen to migrate from one spot to another in search of Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. 57 herbage and water for their beasts. The same cause often involved them in quarrels and blood- shed with each other over the use of some yet undried well or exceptional oasis of green pasturage left fresh among the brown and withered herbage around. Each little Arab horde had constantly to fight for its own hand and its own herd, and they naturally became a bold, hardy, roving race : lovers of freedom and impatient of control. This Semitic love of independence constantly asserted itself even when they settled down as nations. There was always a strong clannish feeling, but it seldom extended beyond the clan or tribe to the nation. They lived, even as civilized nations, in independent city-states, only united in the face of common danger, or when forcibly welded together by a strong ruling hand. They instinctively split up again, and reverted to the independent tribe when- ever occasion offered. The history of Babylon, Canaan, and Israel fully bears this out. Their innate faculty of surviving and prospering amid strange surroundings and conditions, of arous- ing themselves from chronic inactivity to almost superhuman daring and enterprise, — seen in the Jew to this day, — seems to be the manifestation of a big reserve power acquired through ages of undaunted persistence under hard conditions in the infancy of the race. Probably no people had such a prolonged experience of wandering over a vast desert in small hordes as the Semites. 58 Semitic and Babylonian Inflnence on Israel. Renan gives us an able and brilliant sketch of the characteristics of the Semitic race, but it must be accepted with caution, for it is drawn from a one-sided and partial point of view. He is too apt to throw back into the remote prehistoric Semitic past the distinguishing traits of the Babylonians, Israelites, and Arabs of historic days ; but he speaks as an expert. As a race the Semites may be characterized as displaying the virtues and vices of a people who have long been dwellers in tents. They are patient, resolute, enduring, brave : faithful to friends, implac- able to foes : full of impulse, ardour, and passion : rather sensuous : prone to lying and exaggeration : superstitious : crafty, cunning, and rather treacher- ous : of great mercantile aptitude, but with a bias to fraud and cheating. Their morality depends more on local usage and custom than on law or trained conscience. In religion the Semites shared, with other prim- itive races, a belief in spirits pervading the universe, gradually resulting in stone and tree worship. There was no developed priesthood. The individual simply visited the tribal or other sacred spot with a gift of milk or first-fruits, or his animal-victim ; slew it with his own hand, and shared the flesh with the god, and with his own family, in a common meal. The share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon, or poured out beside, the stone, which was the deity, or, in later days, the " god's house." Trained in the Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. 59 desert to absolute self-reliance, the primitive Semite owned no master or intermediary between himself and god. In grave matters beyond his own or his tribesmen's ken, he consulted his god by oracle or omen, and only then did he refer to others. Here a mediator was necessary, for this " voice of god " was through omens which only the skilled could read, and in certain cases the god could only be appeased by charms and spells known to none but his sorcerer-priests. Casting lots also revealed the god's will, and this also required a skilled interpreter. In matters of thought, Renan maintains that the Semites were practical rather than speculative : full of common-sense and worldly wisdom, they confined themselves to questions and problems of actual life and cared little for abstract questions of philosophy. Their literature is, therefore, a mirror of themselves, full of sensuous, passionate imagery, taking a delight in the play of fancy and emotion, nature-loving, full of word-pictures. It is the literature of a people of an emotional temperament and imperious will, sub- ordinating everything to action and desire, seeing the whole universe through the medium of personal feeling. A creature of the emotions, swift to seize on anything that touches the feelings, intense in its love and hatred, full of ardour and passion, the Semitic character has produced some of the finest lyrical and emotional poetry the world has ever seen, but very little real philosophy. As a people, they are skilful interpreters of nature's language. 6o Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. and of the human heart : they compose beautiful poems : their reh'gion is simple, practical, and sub- lime : yet it all bears the stamp of sensuous, passive, oriental reverie. The sensuous trait is seen in the Semitic religion throughout. To take but one instance. The more refined and intellectual Greek aspired after a future life mainly because it carried with it release from the gross material flesh which blurred the pure soul's clearness of vision. The emotional, sensuous Semite felt nothing of this burden of the body, and required that, if life was to be restored hereafter, the body so dear to him was to be restored also. To complete our Semitic sketch, we may add that the physical features of the Semites are thus described by Brinton, the ethnologist : " Dolicho- cephalic (long) skull: curly and abundant hair: slightly wavy or straight strong beard, the colour predominantly black : prominent nose, straight or aquiline: oval face." Babylonians. In dealing with the Semites, our ground is more or less insecure. The period in which the Hebrews, Arabs, and other Semitic nations formed a single united people is far too remote and prehistoric for positive definite facts. It is not till we come to the Babylonian group of Semites, the immediate Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Isi'ael. 6i ancestors of the Hebrews, that we are on solid historic ground. Within the last thirty years Baby- lonian history has had to be rewritten. Before 1870 we were practically dependent on old historians, like Herodotus, for our knowledge of Babylon and its institutions. Since that date extensive excava- tions have brought to light contemporary documents which give us as accurate and exact a history of Babylonia as any we have of an ancient country. A whole library has been unearthed carrying back its authentic records to the remote past. A few years ago the year 4004 B.C. was soberly accepted as the date of the creation of the world ; to-day we have Babylonian written historical records far earlier than this date, and recent excavations have brought us evidence which leads to the clear in- ference that a high state of civilization had been attained in the Euphrates valley 9000 years ago. There are, no doubt, gaps in these historical docu- ments, but some of the tablets date between 4000 — 3000 B.C., some other records in the British Museum are labelled 4500 B.C., and there are others still earlier, representing even then an advanced stage of culture. The first great Semitic King of Mesopotamia of whom we hear is Sargon, who came into power in 3800 B.C. Many contemporary tablets of his reign have been discovered. He ruled all Babylonia, and his sway extended to the Mediterranean. A legend relates how ''he was born in concealment, and set 62 Semitic and Babylofiian Influence on Israel. adrift in an ark of bulrushes on the waters of the Euphrates," — the probable source of the Moses legend. We have seen both from the Bible, and on positive historical grounds, that the Hebrews are an offshoot of the Babylonians, and, without some clear know- ledge of their Babylonian ancestors, the religious and moral history of Israel will be unintelligible. It will be as impossible to unravel as would be our own English character and history if we deliberately ignored all consideration of the heavy debt we owe to our Saxon and Norman forefathers. The Babylonians settled early in the Euphrates valley. It attracted these Semitic nomads because it was already a rich, populous, cultured, and highly- civilized plain, where they could enter on other men's labours, and reap a rich harvest. " To spoil the Egyptians " is a peculiarly Semitic trait at all times. In the Euphrates valley agriculture was first practised by the Semites with large and rich results, and soon there followed trade by river, sea, and land, even at a time when Egypt was still undeveloped : probably as early as 6000 B.C. Prof. Sayce believes that the original inhabitants before these Semites came were the Sumerians, a highly- cultured race of non-Semitic stock, whose language was retained by their Semitic conquerors side by side with their own to the very last for official and legal purposes. The name Babylonia is now used throughout the Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. 63 history of these Semitic dwellers in Mesopotamia, but in early times there were many important and independent city-states, and it was not till 2300 B.C. that Babylon became the seat of government. In 2250 B.C. Khammurabi, or Hammurabi, made it the head of the Babylonian Empire, a supremacy it retained till 729 B.C., when Assyria wrested the power from it, and in 689 B.C. Babylon was de- stroyed. It was partially restored, but Cyrus, King of Persia, conquered it again in 528 B.C., and brought it under Persian rule. The Canaanites, an offshoot of these Babylonians, were the first to leave the Euphrates home and migrated Westward till they reached Palestine. Thither followed them, long after, the Hebrews. But long before Canaanites or Hebrews had mi- grated there, the Babylonians had already gained a foothold on it, led Westwards by their zeal for conquest, exploration, and self-enrichment. They held this land as part of their empire till 1600 B.C. Even when they relinquished their political hold on it, the Babylonian sphere of influence continued strong there. This we know from a famous recent *' find," the Tel-el-Amarna clay tablets, which show that in 1400 B.C. the Babylonian language was the recognized means of official diplomatic communi- cation in Palestine, Syria, and all over Western Asia. Naturally, therefore, seeing that Hebrews and Babylonians are both sprung from one common 64 Semitic and Babylonian bifliience on Israel. Semitic stock ; that for very many centuries they lived together in the cultured Euphrates valley ; that the Hebrews came to Palestine, impregnated with Babylonian ideas, direct from Babylon ; and that for centuries longer the two were in close relationship and constant intercommunication, it stands to reason that their religions, customs, laws, and habits of thought must have very much in common. What, then, was this Babylonian religion ? It was a religion of " gods many and lords many," polytheism with a strong colouring of primitive nature-worship. Out of the earlier beliefs in spirits or " zi " (Arab "jinn"), peopling the universe, had evolved a creed in superior " spirits " or gods, and each city had its patronal god. Eventually three gods superseded the rest, Ea, the god of the people of Eridu, a city on the Persian gulf: Bel, the great god of Nippur, in the North : and Anu. Anu was god of heaven ; Bel, of the earth and lower air ; Ea, of water. As we shall see in the Creation and Flood stories, Bel was not a kind god, Ea was very gracious to man. Each god had a wife, but Ishtar (the Bible " Ashtoreth"), the goddess of reproduc- tion in nature and mankind, was by far the most important and revered. She was generally wor- shipped with licentious rites. The supremacy of Babylon in 2250 B.C. naturally made its patron god Marduk, or Merodach, the chief god, for the conquest of the peoples of other gods Semitic and Babylonian Infltience on Israel. 65 meant in those days that the conqueror's god had beaten these other gods. As a new and younger god he is represented as the " son " of the older national gods, but he at once becomes lord of lords. In course of time a state-religion was established in Babylon, religion became early centralized, tem- ples were transferred to regular holy places, and in these places "houses of god" were built on a magnificent scale. The priests, who had only been caretakers or doorkeepers of local shrines, now rose to a dignity and importance which they had not when holy places were numerous and scattered. Services and rites became more ornate, and the Babylonians possess a rich stock of liturgical ser- vices, full of prayers, hymns and penitential psalms. Sacrifices, which the individual had originally offered himself, now devolved on the priests, and, at the central temples, became a daily practice. On great Festivals pilgrimages were made from all parts to these famous temples. The 7th day of Nisan and eleven days after were specially sacred, but the 7th, 14th, 2 1 St, and 28th days of the month were Sab- baths, rest and fast days, on which nothing whatever was to be done. Omens, oracles, casting lots, divination, were the regular methods of consulting the god's will ; and there is a rich Babylonian literature on the subject. Omens were obtained from sacrifices, oracles through the priests, divination by pouring oil in a cup, and as priests alone had the secret of interpreting these F 66 Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. things, they soon obtained a tremendous hold on a superstitious people. But side by side with this state religion there was a popular religion which had struck far deeper root into the hearts of the masses. It was the real religion of Babylon, as distinguished from the re- ligion of the learned priests. In countries where two distinct classes exist, the one intellectual and learned, the other illiterate and degraded, there will be in realit}^ two religions, as a rule, though nomin- ally there may be only one. Among the ancient Sabaeans the one class adored spirits who inhabited the stars, the other class adored the stars themselves. In Roman Catholic countries images are, to the learned class, aids to devotion, books for those who cannot read : the illiterate regards the image as itself a god. Similarly, in Babylon, though the learned class had outgrown this rude faith, the real popular faith was a survival of old primitive creeds ; a firm belief in spirits, magic, evil demons. These spirits, mostly harmful, lurked everywhere, were in- visible if they chose, and could pass through chinks, or hide themselves in open vessels or holes. They could enter animals, especially snakes, or any other object. All disease, accidents, even death, were attributed to their malign influence. They could only be averted, or expelled, by charms, spells, in- cantations, the exact formulas of which must be used, and these were known only to sorcerer-priests. Even the state religion abounds in incantation-hymns. Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. 6y The gods could be approached, consulted, pro- pitiated by sacrifices consisting of animal-victims, meat-offerings, drink-offerings, fruits of the earth. The sacrificial animal, generally a lamb, must be spotless. The sacrificer had to don a proper dress, guard himself against any personal impurity, assume the right position, and speak the proper words. Up to the last, among the people, all heights and mountain-tops, all sacred trees, stones, wells, specially associated with powerful "spirits," were ** houses of god," and shrines were often built there. Their conception of life after death is just what we find in all primitive religions. The souls of the departed were relegated to an under-world, some- where in the bowels of the earth. Thither a shadowy outline of man's body went after death : good and bad were all huddled together there. Life in this nether world was a mere shadowy existence, feature- less, lifeless, inane : with no joy, no activity, no excitement. The Babylonians called this place Shelu, and the idea and name (Sheol) are exactly reproduced in the Old Testament. Such was the religion in Babylon when the Hebrews left it to go to Canaan. Did they carry any of this religion away with them ? How could it be otherwise ? For countless centuries they had dwelt in Babylonia ; they were Babylonians pure and simple. Naturally, they brought away with them all the religious, moral, and mental equipment of Babylonia. They were steeped in its religion, or 68 Semitic and Babylonian Injiuence on Israel. superstition, call it which we will. On their arrival in Palestine they found there the Canaanites, another Babylonian tribe but belonging to an earlier stage of its civilization, still with traditions more or less like their own. For centuries after their arrival, as the Tel-el- Amarna tablets show, they were in constant touch with Babylon. In Israel's religion, therefore, we must expect to find a Babylonian basis. Judaism will only be the readjustment of old Semitic material to meet new conditions in faith and practice. We shall see in our next chapter that Genesis was written about looo B.C. ; yet even thus late there are strong indications of Babylonian influence in its pages. Eden is the Sumerian word for the garden or well-watered plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. A Sumerian hymn describes a magical tree, the tree of life, which grew in a garden in the centre of the earth, and speaks of the good god Ea walking in this garden. An ancient Babylonian gem also portrays a tree on either side of which are seated a man and a woman, with a serpent behind them, and their hands are stretched out towards the fruit hanging on the tree. In the Genesis account, the four rivers of Eden are Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. Two of these rivers are the Babylonian Euphrates and Tigris, for Hiddekel is the Sumerian name for the Tigris. Pishon is a Babylonian word for " canal " or " water-channel." Gihon is supposed to be Semitic mid Babylonian Influence on Israel. 69 Kerkhah or Gukkan, the stream on which Babylon was built. Adam is the Babylonian for " man." Babel, the tower where the confusion of tongues took place, is clearly Babylon, and the story is clearly the Babylonian story which tells us how " certain men turned against the father of all the gods, and built a huge mound or tower : but the Winds blew down their work, and Anu confounded great and small on the mound, and their speech, and made strange their counsel." We shall see later that the Creation and Flood stories of the Bible have a palpable Babylonian origin. But, over and above these loan-stories, there is much more. The original scaffolding, the skeleton- framework of the two religions is the same. Even from our hasty survey of Babylon's religion we can see how closely the Hebrew religion originally followed its Babylonian source. (i) The Genesis stories of Eden, the Creation, the Flood, and Babel are purely Babylonian. (2) The earlier Bible books show clear traces not only of polytheism in Israel, as in Baby- lon, but also of an earlier nature-worship. Up to the days of Moses, at any rate, the Hebrews firmly believed in " spirits," and re- garded many trees, stones, springs as sacred " houses of god." (3) Up to quite a late period, magic and witchcraft /O Semitic and Babylonian Ijijiuettce on Israel. i were practised commonly by the Hebrews. Saul's consulting the witch of Endor, and the constant injunctions and heavy penalties against the practice, show the prevalence of it. . (4) Omens at sacrifices (e.g. Cain and Abel's), cups of divination (e.g. Joseph's), oracles (e.g. Ephod, Urim and Thummim), casting of lots, were as common methods of consulting God's • ;.,. Will in Israel as in Babylon. . (5) Groves, heights, mountain-tops were associated with the licentious worship of gods in Israel up to the days of Hezekiah. (6) The Babylonian goddess Ashtoreth (Ishtar), with her impure worship, was as revered in Israel as in Babylon, in spite of prophetic denunciations. (7) The development of sacrifices and priests in both countries followed the same order. Noah's idea of sacrifice as a means of ap- peasing an angry god— "the Lord smelt a sweet savour, and said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more " — is exactly the Babylonian view of sacrifice. The priests in Israel, as in Babylon, start as mere caretakers and custodians of images or of local " houses of God," and only become a sacrificing caste very much later. (8) Even in David's day (i Sam. xxvi. 19) God, in Israel as in Babylon, is regarded as only a local god, powerful in his own land, power- Semitic and Babylonian I n flue f ice on Isj-ael. 71 less outside it. Just as Nippur, Eridu, Babylon each had their patron-god, so had Israel and other nations. Marduk only became chief god when Marduk's people conquered their neighbours ; so, in the con- quest of Canaan, even the Hebrews thought that Baal was the true god of the Promised Land till Jahweh, Israel's god, had beaten and conquered Baal's people and, therefore, their patron-god. (9) The Jewish Sabbath in name and idea is the Babylonian Sabbath, (10) The Hebrew Sheol in name and idea is the Babylonian Shelu. This list could be prolonged indefinitely, but this must suffice. It is only in proportion as we realize the heathen darkness of the Hebrews at the outset, wallowing in Babylonian superstition, that we shall appreciate the marvellous advance they made under ., God's guidance and discipline. The Bible's aim is to place clearly before us the various steps in the stupendous revolution accomplished by the Hebrews in their development from polytheism to mono- theism, from the recognition of many local gods to the worship of the one true living God Who is the moral Governor of the whole universe. The process was necessarily very slow and gradual, "by divers portions and in divers manners" (Heb. i. i), step by step, light following light as they were able to receive it. We shall see Israel struggling in the y2 Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. grasp of two contending forces : ancient customs and beliefs, aided by the influence of surrounding heathen peoples, pulling the Hebrews downward : prophets of the Lord urging them upward to purer conceptions and a more spiritual faith. There will be many relapses, followed by recovery, but the trend is ever a forward movement. Again, when we fully grasp the primitive, rough, crude material on which God had to work at the start, the low and unformed moral and spiritual conceptions of these early Hebrews, we shall under- stand much in our Bible which at present shocks us. We .shall judge these Hebrews with a larger and broader charity. A nation's moral ideas are not higher than the morality which they themselves attribute to their god. Christianity has planted deep in our hearts the conception of a God Who is a loving, righteous Father. Naturally, out of this have sprung humaner thoughts of what man owes to man, and a strong sense of sympathy and consideration for others has leavened and softened our character. Israel's idea of God, on the other hand, in the days before the prophets, was the conception of a Jehovah Who was strong but vindictive, a friend to His people's friends but a terrible foe to their enemies. They had little or no idea of a God, righteous, loving, and merciful. Is it any wonder that we read in their history tales of cruelty and treachery, of wicked craft and whole- sale massacres ? Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel, jt, The more clearly we grasp the gross, crude materialism of Hebrew religion at the outset, the more truly shall we see God's Hand in their history. We shall clearly realize the gradual revelation, the gleams of light with which He visited this people and gave light to them that sat in darkness. We shall also be more ready to judge the early Hebrews with a larger and more intelligent charity. Supplemental Note. Not only is there this close relationship between the Babylonian and Hebrew religion, but within the last five years another famous "find" has attracted the attention of Oriental scholars. In 1902, at Susa, was discovered the Code of Hammurabi (2250 B.C.) in its original autograph form, all but intact, containing 49 columns, 4000 lines, and about 8000 words, dealing in 282 sections with every possible case of law. In many respects it bears such a strong general resemblance to the so-called Mosaic code of a much later date that the likeness has led critical historians to this verdict : " The Babylonian and Mosaic codes are conceived in the same literary form : they contain a consider- able number of practically identical laws : they present not a few cases of actual verbal agreement, and both are designed for the regulation of a civi- lized community. The parallels are too close to 74 Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. be explained away. Israel learnt in Babylonia and Palestine ancient Babylonian folk-lore and myths, why not their laws as well ? We believe that the code of Hammurabi of 2250 B.C. passed more than a thousand years later into the Book of the Covenant^ and so became the heritage of Israel and of the world " (Prof. Johnston, Johns Hopkins University Circular, 1903). Be this as it may, the Mosaic code does show many traces of Babylonian influence, though the essential differences point to an independent hand. Our notes on the influence of Babylonian ideas upon Israel would be incomplete without some reference to one other matter, — the growth of a system or hierarchy of angels and demons in Jewish religion, — and though it belongs to the period after the Captivity, it naturally falls under the heading of this Chapter. In the Old Testament, before the exile, angels only appear occasionally, and in the Prophets they are hardly mentioned at all. So with devils: we see the serpent (a Babylonian survival) in Genesis, but, before the exile, the only other place where he is named is as " Azazel " (Levit. xvi.), an evil spirit supposed to dwell in the wilderness, to whom on the Day of Atonement is sent a scape-goat, laden with the sins of the people. This is also a survival of an older superstition. In Is. xxxiv. 14 mention is made of Lilith, a satyr, a bad female Semitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. 75 demon, or hag of the night, and very dangerous: but this is a post-exile myth of Babylonian origin. After the Exile we suddenly find in the Old Testament a whole system of angels and demons divided into regular orders from archangels and archdemons downwards, with God at the head of the one hierarchy, and Satan of the other. How are we to account for it? It must have arisen during the Captivity, when the Jews in the &ixth century B.C. came under the direct influence of the Persians. The Persian religion divides the universe between Ormuzd, a god of light and good, and Ahriman, a god of evil and darkness. Ahrimau is ever at war with his rival and adversary, the good god. Each god is represented at the head of his hosts of angels and demons who are respectively marshalled under their subordinate officers. ^ This dualism deeply affected Jewish thought, for it offered such a plausible solution to the problem of evil. Here was a key to the strange disorder of the world which had so long puzzled them ; it explained why " the wicked prosper, and the righteous go to the wall." This was a problem which all Jewish thinkers had faced, an anomaly which they could not understand or reconcile with the Providence of a righteous God. Therefore the Jews readily accepted this solution of the problem, and, after the Exile, we see it strongly colouring Job and Daniel ; we find it in Zechariah, and the late books of the Chronicles 76 Seiuitic and Babylonian Influence on Israel. (i Chron. xxi.), in the Apocryphal and Apocalyptic books, and all through the New Testament. In other ways, also, Persian religious ideas seem to have stimulated Jewish religious thought. In the Persian Avesta there is a picture of war in heaven, followed by the binding of the fiend, as in the Apocalypse. A new heaven and a new earth also follow the final judgment and destruction of the powers of evil. The idea of an individual resurrection and a millennial expectation likewise developed early in Parseeism. But as with Babylonian, so with Persian influences, all we can say is that they came as suggestions to the Hebrews and stimulated Jewish religious thought. Both in Babylonian and Persian theology there is a mass of undigested and indigestible rub- bish ; a crude, coarse, childish materialism which is altogether absent in the lofty, purified, spiritual Hebrew canonical Prophets. The points of resem- blance between the Hebrew religion and the others only bring out into clearer and stronger relief the immense gulf which separates them, the clear and decided independence of Jewish religious develop- ment under God's own guidance. Here again, even if the Jews are indebted to Persia for a small loan, they made excellent use of the borrowed material and turned Persian clay into Hebrew gold. CHAPTER IV. The Mosaic Books— A Composite Work. "XT 7E are now in a position to enter upon a critical ** examination of the Old Testament. It is now agreed on all hands that the Hexateuch, or so-called Books of Moses, in the shape in which we possess these writings, could not have been written by Moses. They are clearly a compilation of late date, the work of several writers living at dates very wide apart. Much of the contents of these earlier books is not history at all. These works are great religious prose poems mainly based on folk-lore, though in broad outline the historical tradition contained in them is trustworthy. In the following chapters we propose to discuss this question in detail. It may help to throw some light on what we have to say, and elucidate our arguments, if we pave the way by a very brief analysis of these books of Moses, then state the modern view of their origin and com- position, and finally give the reasons which have led critics unanimously to accept these results as true and assured. To proceed in this order is putting the cart before the horse, reversing the proper 78 The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. logical order of things, but it may make our meaning clearer. In much of what follows we are indebted to Prof. Wellhausen. The Mosaic books consist of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and to these we must add Joshua, for together these six books form one literary whole. As a law-book the first five are complete in themselves, but as a history the work is so planned that Joshua is its natural and necessary complement. It is not the death of Moses, but the conquest and possession of the Promised Land by Abraham's seed, which forms the true dramatic con- clusion of the history beginning with Abraham and the promise of this very land as his inheritance, followed by the bondage in Egypt, the escape from it, and the long sojourn in the wilderness. The natural ending of it all is the fulfilment of God's original promise by the triumphal entry of Abra- ham's seed into the Promised Land under Joshua. From its very idea, plan, matter and style Joshua must be included as the last act in the drama. These six books, therefore, are now always taken together under the name of the Hexateuch, and they naturally fall into three clearly-defined divisions, marked off by distinctive features giving each group an unmistakable individuality of its own. Genesis and Joshua are purely historical. They give us a strikingly fresh, natural, vivid, pleasingly dramatic picture of very early days. No later writer has drawn so many living portraits, such a graphic TJie Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. 79 sketch of any age. True, they are but portraits, portraits of men such as they seemed to the painter, not as they really were, and as such must we judge them. But, if we have not here the living men, we have in their place such absolutely inspired impressions, so full of life and movement, that we are carried away by the freshness and simplicity of the finished work. We find it difficult to conceive that the writers were not actual eye-witnesses, but had to draw on folk-lore and oral tradition for materials to portray for us such marvellously dramatic representations of character and action. Their creations are real living men in actual flesh and blood. So intent are the narrators on their subject, so heartily and sympathetically do they enter into the story they have to tell, they are in such living touch with their national heroes that they never stop to point a moral or introduce com- ments of their own ; though, as born Hebrews, they all unconsciously colour the narrative with the deep- seated Hebrew conviction that in all ways Jehovah guides the footsteps of His chosen people. In their enthusiasm for individuals the plan of their history hangs loosely. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua stand out in bold relief against a fragmentary background of history. Their bio- graphies form a series of living portraits without parallel in the Bible. Such in brief are the chief characteristics of their work, so bold in its impressiveness yet full of 8o TJie Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. romantic charm. " It breathes a sweet poetic fragrance, and in their writings heaven and earth are naturally blended into one." Exodus, Leviticus, Nuvihers. — The general tone of these books differs so widely from that of Genesis and Joshua that we seem to have been transported suddenly from the pages of Homer or Froissart to the uninteresting study of a dull history-book. No longer braced by the vigorous atmosphere of those "elder times when truth and worth were still revered on earth, and the tenants of the skies would oft descend to spotless heroes' homes," we breathe the lifeless air of dry lists and tedious genealogies. The light seems suddenly to have faded from scenes where angels and God walked and talked with men. Living figures animated by love and hate, and swayed by like passions as ourselves, vanish, and with them the miracles and all the play of light and fancy. All the local colouring, the vivid personal touches of Genesis and Joshua are gone,, and in their stead we have the stilted artificial mannerism of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. A barren genealogical scheme takes the place of stirring narrative, flashing and sparkling with life. Long dry lists of names, a marked predilection for exact numbers and measures face us at every turn. The language becomes poor and inflexible, the arrangement dull and formal, certain stereotyped expressions found nowhere else in the Hebrew writings occur with tedious repetition. Such legends The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. 8i as are given no longer recall the natural voice and language of living men steeped in folk-lore, but are obviously dry extracts from other writings. The fervour of enthusiasm is lacking in the authors and consequently lacking from their work. In order to impart a semblance of accuracy to the whole, precise and apparently authentic lists, details and numbers are introduced which upon closer inspection prove utterly untrustworthy. The historical con- struction of the books is artificial and fictitious. The authors write with an evident purpose, — that of introducing their new law, — and make use of the narrative quite obviously as a mere framework to the more important object of law-giving. In Genesis and Joshua the story is the end in itself into which the writers throw their heart and soul, carrying con- viction with every word. In Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers the historical element is introduced merely to give weight and credibility to all-important legal matter. Never once losing sight of this object they give to their theme an air of profound erudition, apparently so reliable and genuine with its long genealogies from Adam to Joshua without a break, till a closer analysis reveals that after all it is but spuriously precise and exact. The pearls of the old writers' stories are stripped off and all that remains is a thin thread. Genesis and Joshua, in a word, are living story-books pure and simple ; Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers are law-books and nothing else, with a loosely-constructed scaffolding of history put G 82 The Mosaic Books— A Composite Work. there merely to prop up their law, and give it a semblance of a connection with a period with which it stands in no form of relationship. Dejiterononiy has for centuries been felt to stand in a group all alone by itself. In one aspect it resembles Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, it is a law- book ; but in every other respect it rises to a far higher level. Deuteronomy deals mainly with laws concerning moral conduct in man's daily life, and with such religious observances only as affect the people generally. Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers lay their whole weight on public worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, assigning immense importance to its ceremonial and ritual ; attention is concen- trated on the purely technical points which specially touch the priests, as distinguished from the worship of the people. True to its name, which implies a second or later law, Deuteronomy addresses itself to a people already settled in the Promised Land, and bases its law entirely on this supposition ; whereas the authors of the other law-code, studiously avoiding any reference to so late a period, lead us to suppose that their law was written for and addressed to Israel while still wandering in the wilderness. This is part of their artificial scheme ; the intention was evidently to give their writings the value of ancient documents. Another striking feature of Deuteronomy, which places it in a class by itself, is its sublimely spiritual The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. 83 and moral tone. Throughout its pages a spirit breathes suggesting an almost Christian ideal. So impressive and exalted is its teaching that we find no parallel to it in the religious history of Israel until the time of the prophet Isaiah. This religious light and truth is so strikingly in advance of the age commonly ascribed to it that to attribute such writing to the time of Moses appears almost as incongruous as finding a modern treatise on the evolution theory interwoven with literature of the Elizabethan period. Thus we see that from internal evidence the Hexateuch naturally subdivides and splits up into three main groups : — (i) A purely historical section, Genesis and Joshua ; r Law-books, widely apart (2) Deuteronomy, (3) Exodus, Leviticus,^ Numbers. in character and style, each supplied with a his- torical thread connecting ^ it with its period. For reasons which will be mentioned later, modern students have unanimously arrived at the conclusion that Moses did not write a single one of the books called after his name. The dates now assigned to them are as follows: (1) Genesis and Joshua, loth or 9th century ]{.c. (2) Deuteronomy, 7th century. (3) Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 5tli century. It had been suspected for centuries that the Mosaic authorship of the Hexateuch was open to 84 The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. question, but such suggestions naturally ran far ahead of the laborious critical investigation of details necessary to solve such an important point. As early as the 17th century, attention was drawn to such, passages as : — Gen. xii. 6: "The Canaanite was tJien in the land." Gen. xxxvi. 31: "These arc the Kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel!' Deut. xxxiv. 5 : "So Moses, the servant of the Lord died there." Deut. xxxiv. 10 : " There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses." Numb. xii. 3: "Now the man Moses was very meek," &c. It was observed, even three hundred years ago, that it is at least unusual for an author to record his own virtues, or to describe minutely the cir- cumstances under which he departed from the earth : that the writer speaks to readers who had forgot- ten Canaanite days and were living under kings. *' Not a prophet since like unto Moses " necessarily compares Moses with many later prophets. Also it was pointed out that places such as Hebron and Dan are called by these names, whereas they were given to the localities long after Moses' day. But although the Mosaic authorship of the historical Tlie Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. 85 portion was questioned, the Law-books were be- lieved to be his work. At that time there was no really sound basis for criticism to work upon, and ingenious attempts were made to get over the difficulty raised by the passages just quoted : but the spirit of inquiry moved forward. The first great clue was found in 1753, when Jean Astruc made the great discovery that entire sections of the Mosaic books called God by the name of Jehovah, while equally large portions knew Him only by the title of Elohim. Here was laid a real solid foundation for sound criticism. We shall see in our next chapter how a critical study of the Hebrew text in these Jehovah and Elohim sections respectively soon revealed other important clues, and this discovery of Astruc has immensely helped for- ward the solution of the Hexateuch problem. In 1805 de Wette added another strong link to the chain of evidence. A minute study of the later books of Judges, Samuel and Kings revealed the marvellously strange fact that all through the period covered by these books the so-called laws of Moses were ignored and evidently unknown. For instance, if the clear instructions as to the election of a king given in Deut. xvii. 14 — 20 were known in Samuel's day, why does i Sam. viii. 7 make it such a heinous sin to ask for a king .'' (cf Judg. viii. 23). De Wette also pointed out that the Deuteronomic law abolish- ing altars in high places, and outside Jerusalem generalh% was not known or practised in Israel till 86 The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. Hezekiah's and Josiah's days. Other passages, as he showed, were equally incomprehensible if the writers of Judges, Samuel and Kings had any knowledge of the Mosaic books in our present form ; therefore he concluded and proved that Deuteronomy, at least, was a late work. He also indicated that several portions of the Hexateuch, in important points of law even, flatly contradicted each other ; that the history of the book of Genesis was untrustworthy ; and that the religious and moral tone of the whole series is centuries in advance of the Mosaic asre, and must be due to the fact that the writers lived very much later than was commonly supposed. But it was Graf, and his pupil Kuenen, who discovered the real clue. Working on the lines suggested by their predecessors, Astruc and de Wette, they showed in a way that carried conviction with it that the Hexateuch naturally subdivided into three distinct groups, and proved the truth of their hypothesis by further showing how exactly it corresponded with the actual facts of history. 2 Kings xxii. gave them the key to the whole problem. The most uncritical reader of Genesis, Joshua, and the so-called Book of the Covenant (Exod. xx. — xxiv. 26) can see, on the clear evidence of the books themselves, that they were written at a period when altars and sanctuaries were common all over the land. Jehovah comes to His worship- pers and blesses them, not in Jerusalem only, but TJie Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. ^j at every place where they erect Him an altar, and the patriarchs set up altars wherever they reside. The narrator speaks of them as existing and still hallowed in his day. The altar of Abraham at Shechem is the same on which sacrifices are still offered : Jacob's anointed stone at Bethel is still anointed. Deuteronomy shows a complete change. Jehovah is to be worshipped in Jerusalem and nowhere else. Deut. xii. 2 orders the destruction of these numerous local altars and sanctuaries on hills and heights and under green trees, and repeatedly comntands that Jerusalem shall be tJic one place of Jehovah's wor- ship. All this is clearly directed against current usage : " Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day " (xii. 8). The many altars and sacred places recognized and hallowed by Genesis, Joshua and Exod. xx. — xxiv. are now deemed offensive and heathenish. Deuteronomy orders and commands the abolition of these many local shrines which had led to license and irreligious practices ; its law is clearly aiming at a reformation of these abuses, but the reform has not yet been successful. Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, on the other hand, all along take it for granted that Jerusalem is the one sanctuary of Jehovah and there is no other. These books know of no other place where God dwells and can be approached by His worship- pers, no other spot where man can seek God's face SS TJlc Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. with sacrificial gifts. While Deuteronomy demands as a reform that should be accomplished the limi- tation of worship to the one sanctuary, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers tacitly assume it as a long accomplished fact. The reform of Deuteronomy has long since taken place and is no novelty now. As already hinted, Graf showed that 2 Kings xxii. supplies us with the key to the whole problem. This passage tells us that the turning-point in the history of Israel was the centralization of Israel's worship in Jerusalem under King Josiah (621). Till then there had been a multitude of local sanctuaries and altars all over the land, the lawfulness of which no one had ever dreamt of disputing before Hezekiah's day (720 — 680). Hezekiah first attempted to reform them, as the worship at these local shrines had grown licen- tious, but his reformation was only half-hearted and partial and produced no lasting effect. Josiaii's reform went much deeper. It was thorough- going, and made a permanent impression on Israel's religious history. In Josiah's own day the success was not pronounced ; but on their return from the Captivity the Jews were intent on a complete re- form and deeply imbued with the spirit of Josiah's ideas, which they carried out to the very letter. From that day there was no thought of worship- ping Jehovah except in the one place where He had caused His name to be celebrated, His Temple in Jerusalem. It was the one and only sanctuary. With these facts before us, there can be no shadow The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. 89 of a doubt that Graf's solution of the problem is cor- rect, and on this basis alone we can approximately fix the dates of the three Mosaic groups: — (r) Genesis, Joshua, and Exodus xx. — xxiv. must have been written during the period first mentioned, when many local shrines were recognized and hallowed as consecrated by patriarchal precedent ; that is to say, certainly before Hezekiah's day. (2) Deuteronomy exactly corresponds with Heze- kiah's programme of reform, and is of that date. {3) Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers belong to the period after the Captivity, when Jehovah's worship was definitely centralized in Jeru- salem. Graf and Kuenen's great discovery was made in 1870, and the last forty years have only confirmed still further the results achieved by these scholars. In our next chapter we shall give fuller proofs advanced by modern Bible students who have loyally, reverently and laboriously carried on Graf's work, and convincingly established the truth of his conclusions. It may be asked, " If the writers of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy composed their works at such a late date, close on a thou- sand years after Moses, why did they ascribe their laws and books to Moses .'' Is not tin's literary forgery .'' " For a full answer to this natural ques- 90 The Mosaic Books — A Composite Work. tion we must refer our readers to Chapter XVI., where the subject is treated in detail. Here we shall only mention that the Hebrews had no idea of literary property in our sense of the term. In their eyes Moses was the father of all laws, David of all psalms, Solomon of all wisdom and proverbs : therefore any legislation after Moses, any psalm- writer after David felt in honour and duty bound not to take to himself the credit of his own laws or religious hymns but to ascribe them to the source of his inspiration, Moses or David. This was done not, as we may fancy, to give the weight and authority of these great names to their new productions, — it might have this additional effect as well, — but simply to give each of these great Founders his due. Each of these giants of literature was regarded as fully entitled to receive all the credit for anything new discovered in his own particular line of thought : the new author was a mere pupil inspired by the master and counted for nothing. It may seem strange to us, but it is a high ideal, and to call this literary forgery would be a gross libel. CHAPTER V. The Mosaic Books {continved). IN the preceding chapter we have rapidly sketched chronologically the successive steps which have led modern students of the Bible to the unanimous conclusion that the so-called Mosaic Books are really, not the work of Moses but a mosaic composite compilation. We now propose to show how recent scholars have applied the important clues supplied by Astruc, de Wette, and especially Graf; what splen- did results they have achieved, results based on the soundest historical and textual criticism. The scholars of many nations have contributed their share ; their labours have been prolonged and arduous ; their analysis has been most searching, exact, and scientific, characterized throughout by soberness of judgment and scholarly completeness. We may therefore accept their conclusions as assured. Briefly stated, the main grounds on which these experts base their decision may be grouped as follows : — (i) Pronounced differences in style and language are apparent in the Hexateuch. 92 The Mosaic Books {continued). (2) Different titles are given to God in various portions of the Hexateuch. (3) The conceptions of God and the rehgious views in tlie Hexateuch represent at least three markedly different and inconsistent phases of thought. (4) The moral and social conditions also belong to at least three different periods. (5) There is a want of continuity in the narrative ; frequent unnecessary repetitions occur ; pas- sages often entirely inconsistent and contra- dictory stand side by side. We shall take these arguments in their order, examine them, and then give the conclusions arrived at by modern scholars. (i) Differences in style and phraseology. — A qualified literary critic, after his many years of patient study and practice, by merely glancing at a page of classical English literature, can at once fix its date and probable authorship from its style, phrasing and subject-matter. By a kind of instinct or second nature he can authoritatively state to what school and period of our literature the passage belongs. The reasonings by which these results are obtained are very delicate and complicated. Not only has every age, school and individual literary work a style of its own, a partiality for certain words and phrases, an essentially distinctive at- mosphere and habit of thought, a peculiar mould in which the very sentences are cast, but there are The Mosaic Books {continued ). 93 a thousand and one delicate touches of Hght and shade which none but an expert literary critic can appreciate. To quote the words of one of their number: " It should be realized that such differences of style as we can feel and weigh go far beyond what can be expressed in so many words ; just as we can recognize a friend's face, or even his step or handwriting, from a thousand, although we could but very imperfectly describe the manifold peculi- arities which make up its individuality of character." Literary Hebrew critics have subjected the Hcxa- teuch to the most searching test — not one or two critics only, but scores of them, past-masters in the sphere of textual criticism, both in England and ^\ abroad — and after a rigorous and scientific analysis of its style and conception, they have unanimously reached one conclusion. They assure us that the Hexateuch belongs not to one school or period of Hebrew literature but to four, at least, widely apart in date. More than this, not only does textual criticism clearly prove this fact, but there is un- deniable positive evidence that the Hexateuch was frequently re-edited and revised, and that, over and above the four main groups of which it is com- posed, the text was constantly added to, altered, re-touched from time to time down to the third century B.C. To fully appreciate the proofs adduced by these experts in support of their assertions, — the result of the critical investigations of three-quarters of a 94 The Mosaic Books {continued'). century, — would require a profound knowledge of the Hebrew text. We may give one instance which they quote, though it is a piece of evidence on which they themselves do not lay much stress. Such phrases as "cleave to Jehovah thy God," "prolong thy days in the land " ; " serve other gods which neither you nor your fathers have known " ; " that it may be well with thee " ; " that thou mayest possess the land," are phrases of constant occurrence in Deuteronomy and now Jure else in the Hexatench. So it is with individual words, and the same thing applies to each of the four groups which form the Hexateuch. To such a pitch of perfection has textual criticism attained nowadays that literary critics can decide not only what chapters or verses, but even what portion of a verse must be allotted to this group or that. (2) Titles given to God. — Jean Astruc in 1753 made the great discovery that in large portions of the Hexateuch God is only known by the name of Jehovah ; in others, again, He is consistently called Elohim ; while in a third group these two titles are blended. Even in Astruc's day this was regarded as a valuable clue; but literary criticism was not understood then as it is now, and it is only recently that scholars have been able to reap the full harvest of his great discovery. Following Astruc's clue, with their advanced knowledge of textual criticism still further guiding them, Bible scholars have already divided the Hexateuch into five main groups The Mosaic Books {continued). 95 on this basis alone of the titles given to God in its books. In what follows we must remember that, owing to frequent revisions, the Hexateuch is of an extremely- mosaic and composite character. Into each of the groups subsequent editors and revisers have intro- duced passages which belong to later periods, and there is not one book which does not bear clear traces of many groups. The Hexateuch has been quaintly but admirably likened to a " patchwork- quilt made up of four or five different bits of stuff differing in material, texture, pattern and colour, with smaller embellishments, borderings and the like added to improve the general effect of the whole." This exactly represents the facts. So when we speak, in what follows, of Genesis, Exodus, or any of the Books, our reference must be understood to apply to the book generally and not to all its parts. The five sections into which the Hexateuch naturally falls, on the basis of the evidence supplied by the titles of God, may be thus given : — {ci) The Jehovah section, the oldest of all ; prob- able date ninth century .B.C. This is called J for brevity. {U) The older Elohim section, slightly later in date ; some time between the ninth and eighth century B.C. This is called E for brevity. These two groups between them compose Genesis and Joshua. ic) Portions of the Hexateuch where J and E are 96 The Mosaic Books {conti?iued). blended together. They are scattered broad- cast, but are easily detected and catalogued by critics. This is called JE for brevity and belongs to the earlier prophetic period, about 750 B.C. {d) Deuteronomy, based mainly on the JE revision; called D shortly. Date 750 — 650 B.C. {e) Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, a very much later Elohim group with an artificial air of anti- quity, but unanimously referred to a late date, after the Exile. Its probable date is the fifth century B.C. It is called the Priestly Group, or P for brevity. The writers of this group, not content with their large contri- bution to the Hexateuch, " revised the whole Hexateuch, pieced together its various writings in such a way as almost everywhere to make their own line of thought the foundation of the whole, and wherever possible to adapt the other writings to their own pattern " (Kittel). The very first chapter of Genesis is their work. (3) Religious vietvs and conceptions of God in the Hexateuch. — In this and the following section we have merely an application of Grafs clue, which is the key to the whole problem. Modern critics have only elaborated and made more clear and convincing' what Graf detected forty years ago. In the Hexa- teuch there are clearly to be found side by side three layers of religious and moral thought which could The Mosaic Books {contijuied). 97 not possibly have been co-existent in the days of Moses ; neither can we for one moment suppose that all three narratives in which thev occur can be attri- buted to any one author Hving in those early days. Not only are these three layers of religious thought far in advance of anything in the religious views of Moses' day, but they exactly correspond with three well-known stages in the actual religious history of Israel. In Genesis and Joshua we find one conception of God which represents Him as talking, walking, eating with men. He is regarded as a war-god Who is strong but not humane, and whose sphere of influence is limited by local considerations. He is the God of Israel as He was known to His chosen people before the days of the canonical or writing prophets. In Deuteronomy we have a conception of God highly spiritual in its character. He is a God Who is loving, righteous and merciful, and we have to go down to the prophetic period between 700 — 600 B.C. before we can find a parallel to it. When we pass on to Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, the religious attitude has become hardened into an ecclesiastical creed. Religion and worship are clothed in a web of ceremonial formalitie.s. The conception of God is exactly the idea of a God Who is to be approached in the precise, formal way such as we find it in the period after the Exile. Deutero- nomy bears the strongest family likeness to the II 98 The Mosaic Books {contimied). religion of Hezekiah's day ; the Priestly Code exactly mirrors the views of Ezra's day and after. These three layers of religious thought would not be so strange or confusing if they followed each other consistently in a natural order. If, for instance, the whole of Genesis and Joshua gave us the original, primitive, elementary conception of a God Who is strong but not humane ; then came Deuteronomy with its spiritual idea of a God Who is loving, righteous, and merciful ; and lastly. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers with their formal, priestly, ecclesiastical creed, — we could easily thread our way through this labyrinth. But all three con- ceptions of God are so inextricably mixed up and intertwined in each book that we become confused and hopelessly lost in a maze. In the very first chapter of Genesis, and in many passages before the Flood, written after the Exile ; also in the whole of Deuteronomy, composed about the time of Hezekiah, the impression left on our minds by the Bible narrative is that the Hebrews of these very early days had already reached a remarkably high plane of religious and spiritual development. They almost seem to breathe the spirit of an Isaiah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel ; whereas we know that the social, moral and religious condition of Israel in the period covered by Genesis was essentially ele- mentary, primitive, crude. Even if it had only opened our eyes to this fact, we should feel deeply grateful to modern criticism, for it has rendered our The Mosaic Books {contimied). 99 reading of the Bible far more intelligent and made its message more intelligible. (4) Customs and iiistiUitions of Israel in the Hexateuch. — Here again we discover side by side three distinct strata of development, exactly corre- sponding with three stages in the actual historical evolution of the Jews. Let us take, by way of illustration, the treatment of slaves, and the accounts of Jewish Festivals, as given in the Hexateuch. Slaves. — In the older sections of the Hexateuch we read that if a man enters bond-service unmarried, and then marries a slave-girl in his master's house- hold, the wife and the children born to him by her shall not accompany the husband to his home in the year of his release from bondage. In Deut. xv., on the other hand, a far more humane view is adopted, for it is stipulated not only that the woman shall be freed as well (Driver), but that the master on re- leasing his slave shall provide him liberally from his flocks, his corn, and his wine. In Leviticus we find a new regulation. In the year of Jubilee (Jubilee is only mentioned in the Priestly Code), all Jew bondmen are to be set free in a body in that year, and return to their homes. Festivals.— Ox'vg\x\-d\\y iXi^xf^ were only three great festivals, all agricultural : the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of harvest, and the feast of in- gathering — with no fixed dates. People were guided as to date by considerations of weather and climate, as in Harvest Festivals. Hence the expression lOO TJic Mosaic Books {contijiiicd). \ ^ " Thou shalt proclaim a feast unto the Lord," that is, invite people duly to keep it by publicly intimating the date. In the Priestly Code, on the other hand, the agricultural character of the Festivals survives only in the Feast of Harvest (or Weeks), so their date is now definitely fixed. Not onl}' has the number of these feasts greatly increased, but they have now become strictly ecclesiastical or Church festivals. They now consist of (i) Passover, and unleavened bread, Abib 14th, (2) Pentecost (originally Feast of Weeks, or Harvest), Sivan 8th, (3) Tabernacles (originally Ingathering), Tisri 15th, (4) Day of Atonement, (5) New Moon, (6) Feast of Trumpets. It is only after the Exile that we find a parallel to this in Israel's history. (5) Repetitions, inconsistencies, contradictions in the Hexateiich. — Not only are there frequent unnecessary repetitions of the same facts, but very often these double accounts contradict each other. Look at the Creation story in the two first chapters of Genesis. In Gen. i. — ii. 4 man and woman are created together on the last day ; vegetation is created on the third day as soon as there is dry land ; and man receives the whole earth as his portion : "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." In Gen. ii. man is created first of all before any- thing else, and is at first alone, so Avoman has to be created out of him later on. As to vegetation, The Mosaic Books {contiimcd). loi instead of it springing up as soon as there is dry ground, Gen. ii. 5, 6 tells us that there was already dry ground, but vegetation could not spring up because God had not yet caused it to rain. Also, instead of receiving the whole earth as his portion, in Gen. ii. man is placed in a mysterious garden, with a very limited sphere. There is no division into days in Gen. ii., the older story. So it is, again, with the Flood stories. One Genesis account makes it last 54 days, the other, 150. Gen. vi. 19 bids Noah take into the Ark one pair of every kind of animal, Gen. vii. 2 seven of all clean beasts, and two of the unclean. In Gen. xvii. 17 and xviii. 11 Abraham and Sarah are so old that the birth of a son to them is regarded as an unheard of miracle ; yet in Gen. xx. 2 Abimelech is enamoured of Sarah and takes her to wife, as Abraham palmed her off as his sister ; while in Gen, xxv. i — 6 we read that after Sarah's death Abraham marries again and has several children. In one chapter of Joshua we read that the tribes were allotted their respective portions of the land of Canaan before crossing Jordan, and then had to go and conquer them for themselves ; in another passage of Joshua we are told that Joshua first conquered all Canaan, then allotted each tribe its portion. These inconsistent double accounts might be multiplied almost indefinitely. We are now in a position to summarize the main conclusions reached by critics after a very careful 102 TJie Mosaic Books [continued). reading of the Hexateuch with all these clues to guide them. There are at least four main and easily distin- guishable groups : — (i) Genesis and Jos/ma, dealing with the pre- historic history of Israel. (2) Exodus XX. 22 — xxiii. and xxiv. j — 8 is a group in itself It consists of a body of civil and religious laws of a simple and primitive character. They arc described as written in a book (xxiv. 4), and marking the establish- ment of a special covenant between Jehovah and the nation of Israel ; hence it is called the " Covenant Group " (C). (3) Deuteronomy differs as widely from the rest of the Hexateuch as the Gospel of S. John differs from the Synoptics, it is so highly spiritual in tone. The name Deuteronomy ("second law") is a mistranslation, but well represents the reformulated law as given in this book. (4) Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, a group of books marked by the ceremonial, legalistic, ritual, priestly spirit. Bible students have unanimously arrived at the conclusion that the old view that Moses wrote these books is wholly untenable. He may possibly have written passages of Jewish history and law here and there. These may have been preserved and em- bodied in the Hexateuch, but, if so, we have now 7 lie Mosaic Books [continued'). 103 no means of identifying them, and the hkelihood is strongly against any portion of the Hexateuch really being his handiwork. It is also clear that no portion of the history given in these books was written anywhere near the period which it professes to describe ; in Genesis, for in- stance, not till a thousand years, at least, after the latest events mentioned in it. We must, therefore, not expect Genesis to give us exact and accurate facts of history, as we now under- stand history ; it is rather what we should call idealized history. The Bishop of Ripon thus describes it : " It is not easy to discriminate be- tween parable and fact, between folk-lore and history, between tribe and individual ; these books may contain relics of early times, but they cannot be regarded as contemporary chronicles ; they represent the efforts of men of a later age to ex- plain the conditions of things around them. Not being men of any critical power the writers have gathered loosely certain traditions, old songs and stories, records of old laws and customs, tales of national heroes. The patriotic feeling of a later age carries back the ethical superiority of historical Israel to prehistoric times ; the writers breathe their own religious spirit over picturesque stories long current among the people." We find samples of these old songs and folk-lore in the Song of Deborah, the Song of Triumph at the Red Sea, the Prayer of Moses, the Blessing of Jacob, all of I04 The Mosaic Books {continued^. which Prof. Driver considers to be of great antiquity. Prof, Driver maintains that " Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are historical persons, and the accounts given of them in Genesis are true in outline, but their characters are idealized, and their biographies largely coloured by the feelings and associations of a later age." In Joshua the history is rather more true, for it is on the border-line of contemporary history, but it is still prehistoric. The first attempt to collect these old traditions, songs, folk-lore, so as to form a connected history, was probably made between the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. The Johovah and Elohim versions of it give us two independent accounts of the same facts, and the Jehovah account is rather the older of the two. About 700 B.C., a code of religious and civil laws and customs, Deuteronomy, commonly supposed to have been revealed to Moses by God, was embodied in the Hexateuch. It was this code which was read aloud in the hearing of all the people in the reign of Josiah (630 B.C.). This code was afterward provided with a historic setting, and we get Deuteronomy as we now have it. During the time of the Jewish Captivity a new body of ritual law, much more precise, minute, and detailed, was drawn up, probably by some disciple of Ezekiel, and also embodied in the Hexateuch as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers. To give this Priestly The Mosaic Books {continued). 105 Code a historic setting of its own a new version of the whole history of Israel was re-written. More than this, the other books of the Hexateuch were revised, touched up, altered, added to, and brought more into harmony with the spirit of this new code. After some further revising and re-editing the Hexateuch finally assumed its present form, probably about the third century before Christ. CHAPTER VI, Folk-lore and Legend ix Genesis. '\T7'E have said in former chapters that "the Genesis * • stories of the Creation and Flood were palp- ably derived from a Babylonian source," and that " it is not easy to discriminate between fact and -parable, folk-lore and tradition in these early books." Wc now propose to justify these statements by a critical examination of four incidents mentioned in Genesis : {a) The Flood ; (/;) Creation ; {c) patri- archal longevity ; (d) " There were giants in those days." ThejCrealio-n- and Flood stories clearly form part of those primitive legends, noticed in a previous chapter, which may be called " human " because they are practicaUy_lhe same among almost all races. They are to be found in every quarter of tlie globe. Now, we have seen that the Hebrews are of pure Babylonian origin, therefore the Hebrew versions of the Creation and Flood stories will mainly re^ produce Babylonian features, though they will also have much in common with other similar legends found all the world over. Here is the Babylonian account of the Flood, said Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 107 by experts to be at least 5,000 years old. It is con- tained in a cuneiform inscription on tablets preserved in the British Museum, and first deciphered by Prof. G. Smith in 1872. We quote Prof. Sayce's trans- lation, Sisuthros, the hero of the Flood, who had been taken up by God, like Enoch, without dying,^ is made to tell the story to Gisdubar. " Sisuthros speaks to him, even to Gisdubar: Let me reveal unto thee the story of my preservation, and the oracle of the gods let me tell to thee. The city of Surippak, on the Euphrates, was already old when the gods within it. Anu, Bel, Adar, set their hearts to bring on a flood, Ea, the god of wisdom, sat along with them, and repeated to me their decree and said : ' O man of Surippak, build the ship, save what thou canst of the germ of life. The gods will destroy tlie seed of life, but do thou live, and bid the seed of life of every kind mount into the midst of the ship. The ship which thou shalt build . . . cubits shall be its length , . . cubits its breadth and height.' I understood and spake to Ea, my lord : ' The ship if I shall build on dry land, the children of men and old men will alike laugh at me,' Ea opened his mouth and said : ' If they laugh at thee, thou shalt say unto them, every one who turns against me and disbelieves Ea's oracle that has been given me, I will judge. But, as for thee, enter the door of the ship, bring into the midst of it thy corn, thy goods, thy household, the sons of the io8 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. people, the cattle of the field. Shut not the door till the time conies of which I will send thee word. The beasts of the field I will send unto thee.' Fourteen measures high and broad I built the ship. Three sari of bitumen I poured over the outside ; three sa7-i of bitumen I poured over the inside ; I divided its interior seven times." Then follows a description of the building of the ship, and storing it with food ; then the sun-god fixes the time of the flood, saying : " In the night will I cause the heaven to rain destruction. Enter into the midst of the ship and close thy door." A vivid picture of a terrific storm is then given, a pitchy black cloud, great thunder, a fearful hurricane, rain literally in sheets, the wholesale destruction of " the wicked," mountains and plains wholly submerged, " The deluge reaches unto heaven, all that was light to darkness was turned. In heaven the gods feared the flood, and like a dog in his kennel, crouched down in a heap. Istar, the great goddess cries, and the gods wept with her," On the seventh day the storm subsides, and Sisuthros opens the windows and sees " corpses floating like reeds." The ship rests on mount Nizir. '' I sent forth a dove, it went and returned and found no resting place ; then a swallow, and it came back ; then a raven, it saw the carrion on the water, and it ate, and swam, and returned not. I sent forth the animals to the four winds, I sacrificed a sacrifice. The gods smelt the savour ; the gods smelt the good Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 109 savour ; the gods gathered like flies over the sacrifice. Thereupon the great goddess Hghted up the rainbow ; the crystal brilliance of the gods I may not forget. May the gods come to my altar ; but may Bel not come to my altar, since he did not consider but caused the flood, and my people he assigned to the abyss. When thereupon Bel saw the ship at his approach, Bel stopped ; he was filled with anger against the gods : ' Let none come forth alive,' he cried. Then Ea opened his mouth and spake to the warrior Bel, ' Thou O Bel, why didst not thou con- sider but causedst a flood ? Let the doer of sin bear his sin, let the doer of wickedness bear his wickedness. May the just not be cut off, may the faithful not be destroyed. Instead of causing a flood, let lions, hyaenas, famine, plague increase that men may be minished. I did not reveal the determination of the great gods. To Sisuthros alone a dream I sent, and he heard the determination of the great gods.' When Bel had again taken counsel with himself, he went up into the mid.st of the ship. He took my hand and bid me ascend ; he united my wife to my side ; he turned himself to us and joined himself to us in covenant ; he blesses us thus : ' Hitherto Sisuthros has been a mortal man, but now Sisuthros and his wife are united together in being raised to be like the gods.' " It is hardly necessary to indicate the points of agreement, in many cases the very wording and \ \ no Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. phrases of Genesis are found in the original. In both stories — (i) God reveals to the man the divine intention to bring a flood upon the earth, and commands him to build a ship, and save the germ of life, both of man and beast of every kind. (2) The ship's dimensions in cubits as to height, breadth and depth are given by God : "rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and pitch it within and without with pitch. The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits," &c. (3) God commands food for man and beast to be taken into the ship ; and shuts the door. {4) The picture of the storm is similar in both (cf. Gen. viii. 2, vii. 17 sqq.). (5) Both Noah and Sisuthros "open the windows" and look out, when the flood subsides. (6) Both send out a dove " which finds no resting place" and returns, and a raven, "which went forth to and fro '^ and did not return. (7) Both build an altar and offer a sacrifice imme- diately after leaving the ship, and in both cases " the Lord smelledasweet savour." (8) In each story the ship rests upon a mountain. (9) In both cases, the God who has caused the flood makes a covenant with the man, and gives him a blessing. (10) The rainbow is then first lighted up. Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 1 1 1 These points clearly show the Babylonian source of our Bible story, and we must remember that the old legend ha d be en^ ages upon ages inexisteac^ vvlien~Genesis vvas_vvriiten. Even in the original we already-see indications of a moral spirit which could not have existed in the primitive legend ; where Ea expostulates with Bel for destroying good and bad together. In the 2,000 years elapsing between the writing of this Accadian story and the Genesis written version the moral spirit would still further have developed, and it is striking that there is so very much of the original left after all that length of time. But if the points of agreement are striking, the ^Kiints of dissimilarity are equally great. In Genesis the childish puerilities of the original have mainly vanished. In the place of the gods of 4:he^^aby- lonian version, wrangling with each other in jeaious rivalry, crowded trembling " like a dog crouching in his kennel for fear," or " gathered like flies over "^the sacrifice," Noah's God is a righteous God Who hates His children's sins, but loves them still. He is not like Bel, a god who needs the intercession of Ea before he will consent not to destroy the faithful with the guilty, but One Who Himself says in His heart, " I will not again curse the ground any \more for man's sake." JEven though it is true that the Genesis writers found this old Flood story handed down from the religious mists of a far-away past, we still see the Holy Spirit's inspiration in the way in which they 112 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. ^ __ / were guided to select the wheat from the chafif. They Cgiye it a peculiar and original stamp of their own, both by their idea of One righteous God, and by the /moral significance so emphatically given to the catastrophe. Years ago, in a sermon preached at Oxford, Canon Liddon used words which may rightly apply both to the Flood and Creation stories : /^ The early history of Genesis may suggest traditions \ belonging to ancient pagan peoples living in Meso- potamia ; the original text of its genealogies may h'e buried in brick libraries as yet unearthed ; it may be proved that Jewish Revelation did not come y^to us from God in any but a natural sense, — yet all / this only shows that behind it all was a Holy Spirit f guiding and inspiring these Hebrew writers of old I to select from a large field those materials which y^ \ would best illustrate the great truths He had in view." w\ / So it is that in God's hands even pagan legends can > \ be purified and so used as to become the vehicle of ■gi^at religious truths and principles. There is no need nowadays of pointing out that the Bible story of a universal Flood is not a strictly exact historical fact. All the w^ter in the world would not nearly cover the mountains, and how could all kinds of animals have been got together from all over the world ? How could any Ark, however large, have held specimens of each kind, with all their food ? ^ How could eight people have looked after them ? The story is clearly one of a group of primitive pre- historic legends found all over the world. Whether Folk-lore and Lojend i)i Genesis. 1 1 i^ciiLV III vjt-ncoij. ^ ' J / it merely recalls the tradition of some great local flood is a moot question. The line of thought which suggested a world-wide deluge to Accadians, South Sea Islanders, Chinese, Eskimos, American Indians, Greeks, Mexicans, &c., is almost beyond our compre- hension, and one of the hardest problems in primitive folk-lore. No satisfactory answer has yet been given. ^ ' Creation. " What is the origin of the world ? " is a problem which has everywhere exercised man's thoughts, and primitive myths, in the shape of stories, are primitive man's reply to this question. These vary in quality with the civilization of the races in which they are current, but the same fundamental ideas pervade all the answers, savage or civilized. They all waver between two theories, creation out of nothing, which is rare, and evolution out of some elementary matter, and this is the much more common notion. The earth, as a rule, is supposed to have grown out of something already existing, an animal, an egg, a fragment of soil, water. Such ideas are not found in the lowest stages of man's culture ; it already implies some power of thought. As a rule, the lowest races hardly speak of the making of the world. Among people more advanced, the earth is supposed to have somehow grown out of the waters, either from the water itself as the material I / » 114 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. out of which it was made, or more commonly from earth fished up from the bottom of the water, as among the TacuUies of British Columbia. The New Zealand aborigines trace back the creation to nothing and darkness. Most primitive nations say the world sprang from an animal or man torn to pieces, and out of the fragments were made heaven and earth. Some cannot go back so far in thought, and fancy that in the beginning heaven and earth were united in loving embrace, but some dreadful tragedy occurred, and the earth and sky were torn asunder as we see them now, and the dewdrops every morning and evening are the tears of heaven and earth over the sad divorce. Strange as it may sound we shall see that the Genesis account repeats primitive man's creed of a world sprung from water as the primal element, and also embodies the idea of heaven and earth as formed from the mangled portions of an animal torn in pieces. The Old Testament contains three accounts of the origin of the world : Gen. i. — ii. 4, ii. 4 sqq. ; Prov. viii. 22, 31. The first is complete; the second is generally supposed to be fragmentary ; the third is highly thoughtful but poetical. To understand the Babylonian and Bible Creation- story we must picture to ourselves the ideas about the universe current in Babylonia and among all Semitic people. The following diagram, based on that given from Jensen in Hastings' Dictionary^ will greatly help us. Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 115 -w»t«- ^Mic^^g^^^^s We are told in Gen. i. 2, " And the earth was waste and void ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep ; and the spirit of God moved upon (or 'was brooding upon') the face of the waters." Another translation is, " Now the earth was chaos, and darkness was upon the face of the flood (Tehom), and the wind of Elohim was hovering over the face of the waters," So, before the days of Creation, all that existed was (i) darkness, (2) The chaos of waters, (3) the spirit, or wind, brooding over the abyss of waters. The great mass of waters was there already, and upon this the earth, when afterwards created, floated. We must remember that the three cKpressions " waste ii6 Folk-lore and Legend in Gejiesis. and void," "deep," "waters" in Gen. i. 2 are one and the same thing, and all express the original chaotic watery abyss called in Hebrew Tehom, in Babylonian, Tiamat. The first act of Creation was light, even before there was a sun. Similarly the Egyptian god Thoth " gave the world light when all was darkness, and there was no sun." This idea was once ridiculed, but science almost endorses it now. The second creation was the firmament, which all primitive people regarded as a solid vault or dome supported at its base by earth's mountains as its pillars. The firmament had windows. Above this firmament was all the mass of the " waters above the earth," which descended to earth as rain through these windows or openings of heaven ; e.g., in the Flood (Gen. viii. 2), The earth was conceived as floating upon the watery abyss, Tehom. In the great flood the waters not only poured upon the earth from the mass of waters above the firmament, but also ascended through clefts in the earth from the great nether abyss of waters. " The same day were all the foun- tains of the great deep broken 7ip, and the windows of heaven opened" (Gen. vii. 11). After the flood, "the fountains of the deep, and the windows of heaven were stopped " (Gen. viii. 2). Similarly, in the Malay peninsula, the aborigines hold that a thin crust covers the earth, and, in the flood, God broke the crust so that the waters below oozed through it Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 1 1 7 and covered the whole earth. So also thought the natives of British Guiana. More than this — and it is a strong point in the proof that the Hebrews copied the Babylonian Creation-story, — even in the Bible the great watery abyss under the earth, Tehom, was regarded as a dragon or sea-serpent, and images were made of it. Thus in the second Commandment : " Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of any thing in the water under the earth." Sometimes this dragon is called " Rahab," a dragon which fought with Jehovah, and was conquered by Him : "Art thou not He that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon .-'" (Is. li.9). So, again, " In that day the Lord with His sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, the crooked serpent, and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea" (Is. xxvii. i). We see the same conflict between the Creator and this dragon of the sea, Rahab, in Job ix. 13, R.V., xxvi. 12, R.V., and Ps. Ixxxix. 10, R.V., and elsev.^here. We shall see that this undoubtedly goes back to the conflict in the Babylonian Creation-story in which Marduk, the Creator of the world, vanquishes Tiamat (the watery abyss), the dragon, and her eleven helpers, by cut- ting her in two and forming heaven and earth out of the two halves. This is the Babylonian Creation-story : " When heaven above had not been named, and earth below yet bore no name, yea, the deep, the flood of the sea was she who bore and produced them all, their first 1 1 8 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. creator. Their waters were embosomed in one place. As yet there grew no plants at all. At that time the gods had not issued forth. Then were the gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu born. They grew up. . . . Next were made the host of heaven and earth. The time was long ; and then the gods Anu, Bel and Ea were born, and Marduk son of Ea, Marduk creator of the world." After these gods had sprung from chaos, or the flood, or Tiamat, a strife arose between Tiamat, — the dragon and her eleven helpers, — and the rest of the gods. At last Marduk fights in single combat with Tiamat, — the god of light with the goddess of darkness,— cleaves Tiamat in two with his sword, and with one half of Tiamat fashions the firmament of heaven, where he assigns their places to the gods Anu, Bel, Ea, and to the moon and the stars ; while out of the other half of Tiamat he fashions the earth. The eleven helpers of Tiamat he placed in the sky as signs of the zodiac, Marduk himself being the twelfth. The stars, moon and sun were ordered to rule over the night and day, and to determine the year, wJth its months and days. After this Marduk created the animals, and lastly man. "At that time the gods in their assembly created the living creatures. They made the living beings come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the field, and the creeping thing." The tablets are in parts terribly mutilated, too much so to yield a connected sense, but Prof. Sayce believes the last tablet probably contained Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 119 an account of the institution of the Sabbath (Sayce, " Fresh Light "). The parallels between the Babylonian original and the Hebrew copy of the Creation-story mainly lie in the fact that in both the world consists in the begin- ning of water and darkness. The Hebrew name for this watery abyss, Tehom, is the Babylonian Tiamat. The Babylonian story of the Creator cutting Tiamat in two is clearly seen in the Bible, not only in Gen. i. 7 : " God divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament " ; but still more clearly in the allusions to Rahab, already referred to in Isaiah, Job, and Psalms, where the dragon of the deep is vanquished and cut in pieces by Jehovah. As Prof. Sayce points out, " in botli stories the fourth day sees the creation of sun, moon, and stars ; even the very wording and phrases of Genesis occur in the Babylonian version ; and though no fragment is preserved which expressly tells us the Creation was accomplished in seven days, we may infer that such was the case, from the order of events as recorded in the tablets." An interesting fact has been noted in connec- tion with the word for "to create" in Gen. i. It originally meant " to carve " ; thus still further carrying out the idea of the Creator cutting Tiamat in two. But if the parallels arc clear, still more self-evident are the striking points of contrast. Most primitive peoples evolve the gods themselves from whatever I20 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. clement they select as the original source of all things. Thus Mr, Tylor quotes the Japanese origin of the world : " while the earth is still soft like mud, or like oil floating on the surface of water, there arises out of the soft mass the rush-plant, from which there springs the land-forming god." So the primitive originators of the Babylonian Creation- story taking water as the germ of all things, first make this watery abyss produce the gods, and these create everything else out of it. In Genesis, the my- thological taint and childish element vanish. God, the Creator, does not Himself originate from the " deep," but existed long before ; there is no longer a crowd of rival created gods, but a sublime con- ception of one God Who existed from all eternity. The Genesis writers set God above everything, and yet closely and lovingly linked with it all, " He sees everything that He has made, and, behold, it is very good." The Bible account also assigns a high dignity to man placed next to God ; created in His image and likeness to be, under God, the ruler of all created things. Already is laid ifl the first two chapters of the Bible the foundation on which Christ bases the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man. As elsewhere in the Bible, the Holy Spirit enables the inspired writers to take a pagan primitive legend, and so purify it as to become the vehicle of a great religious truth. He shows them clearly the Divine source from which all things have flowed ; man's dignity and close kinship with God, his Creator and Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. I2i Father. All else is of secondary import. God might easily have revealed the exact order and details of the Creation scientifically. He does not, and the Bible was never meant to be a science-primer. If God had given early men this scientific account, it would have been absolutely unintelligible to their primitive intelligence ; while this simple parable, or earthly story with its spiritual meaning, they could perfectly grasp, and so can we. It is for modern science to determine the details of the steps in the evolution of the world, and it is slowly doing this work. " There were giants in the earth in those days." The giants before the Flood are quite distinct from the later giants, such as the historical Goliath of David, who is real. These pre-deluge giants are mythological, as fnay be seen from the account given of their origin : "There were giants in the earth in those days ; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them ; the same became mighty men, which were of old, men of renown " (Gen. vi. 4). Here we certainly have an allusion to that region of mythology so abundantly illustrated in the sacred legends of other ancient peoples, the race of heroes or demi-gods ; like the Titans and the giants whose birth from heavenly and earthly parents is sung by Hesiod in the Theogony. In Talmudic writings we 122 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. also read that the first man reached from earth to heaven, but, after his sin, the Holy One laid His hands upon him and made him little. Till quite recently it was commonly supposed that pre-historic man was immensely huge. Ethnology and geology have exploded this fiction, a survival of early folk-lore to be found in all countries. Homer, for instance, is full of it, and tells us that men nowadays are dwarfs in size and strength compared with the heroes and mighty men of old. These old legends of immense giants may be accounted for in various ways. [a) Like the Anakim of Hebron, in the days of Jo.shua (cf. Numb. xiii. i}^ ; Dcut. ii. lo, iii. ii ; Josh. xi. 21, 22, xiv. 12, 15), they may be dim traditions, exaggerated through the mist of ages, of pre-Israelite barbarians, hurling huge stones in their rude warfare. Giant- legends of this class are common in Europe and Asia, recalling the big uncouth native barbarians, exaggerated into monsters by the later and more civilized, tribes who dis- possessed and slew them. {b) These giant stories may also be due to the common opinion that mankind has gone on degenerating, and that we are in every way worse and smaller than our forefathers ; whereas established facts point altogether in the other direction. Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. 12 {c) The probable real source of all these giant myths is the discovery of great fossil-bones, of saurians and mammoths, which have from early ages been supposed to be bones of giants. Even as late as 1712 a tooth weighing 4f lbs. and a thigh-bone 17 (??) feet long having been found, Dr. Increase Mather thereupon com- municated to the Royal Society of London the confirmation this discovery clearly afforded of the existence of men of prodigious stature in the world's infancy ! (v. Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 85.) ^^^ t ^,Vl Patriarchal longevity. It is exactly the same thing with the enormous ages of patriarchs before the flood. These pre-deluge patriarchs are given in two lists, one early (J) the other late (P). / Gen. iv. 17, 18. Adam, Cain. Enoch. Irad. Mehujael. Methusael. Lamech. P. Gen. v. 3 — 3 I. Adam, Seth. En OS. Cainan. Mahalaleel. Jarcd. Enoch. Methuselah. Lamech. It is strange that though one list traces through 124 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. Cain and the other through Seth yet they both come finally to Lainech. The similarity of names, often identical, sometimes thinly disguised, compels us to regard the two as recensions of one and the same original list. Prof. Ryle, Bishop of Winchester, says: " Perhaps we should not be far wrong in regarding them as constituting a group of demi-gods or heroes, whose names, in the earliest days of Hebrew tradition, filled up the blank between the creation of man and the period of Abraham. Such a group would be in accordance with the analogy of the primitive legends of other races. But, instead of presenting them as demi-gods, the narrator removes every taint of poly- theistic superstition, and just presents these names as the names of ordinarv human beinsfs." As with the enormous size and strength of the earliest inhabitants of the world, so it is with their phenomenal ages. It is still a common popular belief that men lived to a very great age then. Thus the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that in the silver age childhood lasted. 130 years. A Hebrew prophet (Is. Ixv. 20) sketching the Messianic picture in colours drawn from popular ideas respecting the far-distant past of the golden age, predicts that " the child shall die an hundred years old." In ancient history there are everywhere instances quoted of heroes who attained the age of several hundred years, but they are purely mythical. In actual history the following ages have been placed on record: 137; 145; 152; 154; 172; 185; but they are undoubtedly Folk-lore aad Legend in Genesis. 125 greatly exaggerated. The people mentioned all lived at a time when registers were not kept, and we have to depend entirely on popular memory, which is very fallacious and apt to exaggerate. Even were these ages correct, there is a huge gulf between i 50 and goo, the age often given to the patriarchs before the flood. These phenomenal ages are only quoted in the Priestly Code writings. A casual glance at Gen. iv. (J) and Gen. v. (P) will show that the Jehovah writer, if he gives anything beyond the patriarch's bare name, connects it with some curious and interesting fact. Thus he tells us that, of Lamech's sons, Jabal was the father of shepherds ; Jubal, of musicians ; and Tubal Cain, of smiths. Gen. v. (P), on the other hand, gives their ages pure and simple ; the age at which each patriarch begat his first-born, and the age at which he dies. P revels in exact numbers, names and precise details, which have all the air of authentic facts, and are utterly inconsistent, often, with the laws of possibility. Prof. Ryle's explanation is clearlj^right. The periods between the Creation and Flood, and between the Flood and Abraham, needed to be filled up. Sorely against the real character of this pre-historic age, the Priestly Code writer forces it into a regular historical and chronological system, and, with a spurious air of learned research in the most unsuitable places, carries the genealogy through without a break from Adam to Abraham. The names were supplied him, as the Bishop of 126 Folk-lore and Legend in Genesis. Winchester shows, by tradition, and he divided the traditional thousands of years between the creation and the flood among these patriarchs respectively. He has so dressed up these naive traditions into a learned history that Archbishop Usher and others, in an uncritical age, naturally regarded the precise detailed ages of these patriarchs as literally true, and on the strength of them drew up a scheme of Bible chronology tracing back the Creation to the exact year 4004 B.C. Usher's dates were inserted by some unknown authority in the margins of our Authorized Version, and there is the date 4004 B.C. printed to this day in the margin of the first chapter of Genesis. CHAPTER YII. /. Spiritual Teaching of Genesis. n^HE preceding chapter may seem to suggest the -■• inference that the early chapters of Genesis are a mere tissue of myths, legends and folk-lore, and therefore utterly untrustwortliy. No conclusion could possibly be further from the actual facts. It has been necessary to quote in all their bare naked- ness the results achieved and accepted by modem scholars : and the higher criticism may seem to shake the very foundations of our faith by its rude handling of Bible history ; but it does nothing of the kind. The real value of Genesis does not vanish hjsjcause it is shown that its Creation and Flood I stories have a common basis with Babylonian and other primitive kindred legends. The inspiration or worth of the Eden and Fall stories is not impaired by calling them parables. Historically and spiritually 'the early chapters of our Bible have a far deeper and stronger hold on us than this would imply. If there is any truth in the modern view, quoted in our first chapter, that religion itself is an evolution; that we cannot nowadays afford to ignore all religions outside the Bible as so many forms of error, but are bound to recognize even the rudest beliefs as 128 Spiritual TcacJiiiig of Genesis. stepping-stones to Christianity ; then, surely, here we have the key to the whole problem. Historically, these primitive Genesis legends are of the very first importance. They are connecting links between primitive religion and the more advanced Hebrew conception of the one true God. Israel's religion, like every other, has its roots in the remote past : has itself been fostered by earlier faiths ; has taken up and assimilated their better and still living elements, and we cannot possibly spare such records of older creeds as Genesis contains. ^^'These survivals, wrecks of older beliefs, are in- valuable to the student of religion as showing man's primitive way of seeking after God, and God's way of revealing Himself to man in those earlier stages of religious evolution. In these fossil creeds of a bygone age we see God speaking to man, as He always speaks to him, in the language of his day and generation, the only speech he can understand. /''We are too apt to forget that these earlier minds did not think as we think. Their stock of ideas is very scanty, their experience extremely limited, their power of weighing evidence nou-existent. Abstract thought and reasoning, historical accuracy to facts, are qualities altogether foreign to their elementary- stage of intelligence. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of things around them as they are eager to possess an explanation. Be their "question what it may,— the origin of man, disease, or death, — they have a reply ready to all these spiritual Teaching of Genesis. 129 questions, and tJiat reply is akvays found in the shape of a story. This instinct is not peculiar to primitive man ; the love of illustrative stories is alive in us now and appeals to all races, civilized and uncivilized, the whole world over, — especially do Hebrevv's and all Orientals revel in word-pictures, imagery, stories. So these early Bible narratives with their explana- tions of the origin of the world, and God as its one divine source ; death, as the wages of sin : the flood, /^ a proof of God's hatred of wickedness and sin as I unworthy of men made in His own likeness, — one I and all spoke very plainly to primitive man in the \ world's infancy, and speak equally clearly to us \_now. And herein lies the main value of these Genesis ^ stories. If it be true that much of Genesis is not historic fact, but mere parable, what does this matter ? If the story of the Fall be only a parable, es this rob it of its value to the human heart and soul ? To discuss its literal historic accuracy is as out of place as to seek to discover who was " the sower who went forth to sow"; or "the Prodigal Son"; or "the Samaritan who went down to Jericho." In our Lord's story, even if no member of the despised Samaritan race ever followed in the steps of a hypocritical priest or thoughtless Levite along the rocky road to Jericho, and succoured a needy fellow-man, the vital truth and teaching abides in the story all the same. So it is exactly with the story of the Fall. K arre 130 Spirihial Teaching of Genesis. What is this story of the Fall ? God places our first parents in a garden, and tells them : " Of the fruit of every tree in the garden ye may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ye shall not eat of it : for in the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die." For a time they obey, till one day a subtle serpent says to the woman : " Hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden ? " The woman replies that they may freely eat of all except one, of that one they may not eat, or they will surely die. The serpent answers : " Ye shall not surely die : for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened : and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." " And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit and did eat : and gave also to her husband, and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day : and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of God, amongst the trees of the garden," This is clearly a parable. No unprejudiced mind can pretend to doubt that if in any other book but the Bible he met with trees of life and knowledge, and talking serpents, and God walking in a garden in the cool of the day, he would want no other proofs that it was an allegory, a parable he was reading, spiritual Teaching of Getiesis. 1 3 1 /and intended to be understood as such. Is it any / the less God's own revelation because in it He is \ speaking to these early generations in the only Vlanguage which they can understand ? Is its palp- / able meaning any the less clear to us now ? Could ^^od have more vividly portrayed the way in which sin comes to the individual soul even now in the year 1908 A.D. ? First the faint suggestion to evil, as of some outer voice saying " eat, and ye shall be as gods," exaggerating the pleasure and gai'n to be won by yielding to the alluring temptation. Next, an uneasy feeling, again as of a voice, but a voice within us now, whispering " but God hath said, thou shalt not." Then we take the next step, fraught with danger ; we dally with the tempter, linger near the forbidden tree, weakly shut our eyes to the conse- quences, till slowly, unconsciously, the restraints of conscience vanish, the promptings of appetite increase, and in a hasty moment we snatch at the forbidden fruit, and eat thereof, and " our eyes are opened, and we know that we are naked," and we wish to hide ourselves from the presence of God. It is the most sublime picture of the origin of sin, the most masterly and clear analysis of its small beginning and rapid growth that ever was conceived : yet this story of the Fall is only a parable. We know it is not literally true : it is not a historical account of exact facts as they actually did happen. Again we ask: "What does this matter?" Not until we cease to focus our gaze on the letter, and 132 Spiritual Teaching of Genesis. fix it steadily on the spirit, shall we discern clearly the great spiritual messages of these early narratives. If the Holy Spirit of God inspires the writers of Genesis to unearth the gems that lie hidden in the Babylonian legends of the Creation and Flood, and guides them so to remould these stories as to make them true vehicles of great moral and spiritual truths, — what does it matter if these legends originally belonged to pagans living in Babylonia or anywhere else? When we speak lightly of the Babylonian or savage origin of this Bible story or that, we are not as wise as we wish to appear. A faculty of wise and judicious selection, such as is displayed in these Genesis stories when placed side by side with their Babylonian originals, manifests a high and rare gift, a spiritual genius of the first order, and nothing short of Divine inspiration can satisfactorily account for it. All said and done, questions of the relative date of Genesis and Deuteronomy, or the scientific value of the Creation account, or the historical accuracy of the Flood, or the Babylonian origin of the Sabbath or of Sheol, may be deeply interesting to the historian, but the real value of these Bible passages lies ever so much deeper than this. We shall miss the whole scope and purpose of the Old Testament early history, if we do not at the very outset grasp the great fact that it is written with a moral and religious rather than a historical aim. Its spiritual value alone matters, and this will ever remain the spiritual TcacJmig of Genesis. 1 33 same, it cannot be shaken. The knowledge our soul is athirst for is a knowledge of our own true and intimate relationship to God our loving Father, a knowledge of the duties and privileges involved in this relationship, a knowledge of our own ability to realize both the one and the other. This is the only x^^nowledge which gives to life all its dignity and y power for good ; and, so long as Genesis impresses Q upon our hearts these great spiritual truths as it / abundantly does, to guide us in our perplexity, comfort us in our sorrow, and lead us daily nearer to God, what matter questions of dates, authorship or scientific accuracy .-' Truth is independent of these minor details. Truth of idea has its place in education as well as truth of fact. God can teach and lead us just as well by parable as by history. rr^ -^.^ ) r CHAPTER VIII. The Historical Value of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. HOW far can we accept the portion of the Genesis narrative dealing with the biographies of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph as literal and accurate history? Arc they individuals or tribes? It may shock us to hear it thus bluntly sutreested that these hallowed names witli which we have so long been familiar may possibly belong to a world of shadows, but this is not what the critics mean. The denial of the existence of these old heroes and worthies no scientific student of the Bible would venture upon nowadays. The views of the modern critical school briefly amount to this : " We cannot possibly decide, now exactly how much of these early narratives is accurate history. The pro- phetic genius of the nation shaped popular traditions into vehicles of moral and spiritual truth. Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Joseph are life-like portraits. Does it make any real difference to us if some features in the portraiture are tribal or national, rather than strictly individual? If, in fact, there is some element of idealization in the narrative? Truth of idea has its_ place in education as well as truth of fact. Must The Historical Wilnc, &c. 135 ideal and historical truth always coincide ? Is ideal truth worthless if it is not historical?" (Dean of Ely, Church Congress, 1907). The narrative of these patriarchs stands midway between the Flood and Moses, and so comes nearer to the historical border-line, but it is pre-historic still and must, therefore, be read and interpreted with considerable caution. It has long been felt .that this portion of Genesis blends together tribal and personal stories : incidents which belong to the experience of the tribe are narrated as though they formed part of the life of an individual. The writers of Genesis found a number of traditions, legends and stories current in their day and intimately associated with the hallowed names of certain great national heroes. Some of these traditions were authentic and of very ancient date, others were floating stories handed down from mouth to mouth, and treasured by the Hebrew race. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were as real to Israel as William the Conqueror or Alfred to us, and it was felt that their biographies should be embodied in the national history which they themselves had been so instrumental in shaping. But this was not done till about the year 1000 B.C., at the earliest, that is to say, some two thousand years at least after the events recorded. Thus it comes about that the writers of the biographies of these patriarchs have idealized these old national heroes, the pivot characters of the Old Testament, and patriotically attributed to them a great deal 136 The Historical Value of more than was really theirs. Throwing back into this far-off age the moral and religious ideas of their own day, the writers have associated with the patri- archs thoughts and words, ideas and conceptions of God which these worthies never could have con- ceived ; making them think, talk and act as saintly Jews of the year 900 B.C. might have done, certainly not primitive men living two thou.sand years earlier. This does not rob these patriarchal biographies of their real value, and their real value is the spiritual one. As with the stories of the Creation and the Fall, so it is here. "The Creation of the world by God, and the creation of man in the image of God, form the charter of humanity, but the essential truth in the story of the Creation and the Fall is inde- pendent of the form of the narrative. The essence of the story is not in its draperv." So with the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, ''under the charm of these attractive personalities, and their stirring experiences and achievements, so dramati- cally presented that, they command breathless attention, these early biographies unconsciously, and, therefore, all the more effectively, instil into our minds the most essential truths concerning God, and life, and duty" (Dean of Ely, 7it supra). The great supporter of tlie view that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are only tribal names is Ewald. His idea is that just as Romulus in Roman mytho- logy is invented as the father of the Romans, and, in Greek legend, Hcllen, as the father of the AbraJuxiii , Isaac. Jacob. it,^ Hellenes or Greeks, — so Abram of Ur of the Chaldees, and Jacob, surnamed Israel, are mere fictitious persons to explain the tribe -names " Hebrews "' and " Israelites." He maintains that the personality of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is only dramatically conceived to represent three successive waves of migration of Semitic tribes into Canaan from their common home between the Tigris and Euphrates. Abram and Lot, according to Ewald, are represented as uncle and nephew to account for the patent fact that their descendants, — the Hebrews, Ammonites and Moabites, — arc kindred nations of the same common stock. In the writers' day, however, the Hebrews hated and despised the Ammonites and Moabites, their kindred and foes ; so the Genesis editors adopt a favourite Arab device of discrediting an opponent's ancestry, and make out that the fathers of these kindred races were begotten of incest by Lot with his two daughters (Gen. xi.x.). In I^sau, or Edom (Gen. XXV. 30), Ewald sees another imaginary name dramaticall}' coined to account for the Edomites ; and Jacob and Esau are both represented as sons of Isaac to indicate the close kinshiu between the Israelites 1. and the Edomites (" he is thy brother," Numb. xx. 14, Deut. xxiii. 7). The whole story of the quarrels between Jacob and Esau, Isaac's two sons, becomes a graphic picturesque representation of the way in which Israel (Jacob), the tent-dwelling tribe, already a cultured nomadic people, supplants Edom (Esau) 138 TJie Historical Value of the hunting tribe, or Arab proper, adroitly managing to oust these Bedouin hunters and drive them back almost to the desert. Up to the last, however, Israel recognized the close relationship existing between themselves and the Edomites : " An Ammonite or Moabite, bastards, shall not enter into the congre- gation of Israel. Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is thy brother " (Deut. xxiii.). Evvald here makes out a strong case, and even Prof. Driver, who rejects this view, has to own that there is much to be said in its favour, for in Genesis it is often extremely difficult to decide whether the name of an individual is not really the name of a tribe. Among many instances quoted by Prof Driver we may mention the following : {a) In Gen. X., in several cases, nations are clearly repre- sented as individuals. {b) In Gen. ix. Canaan^ Japheth, Shcni are manifestly three groups of nations and not individuals at all, while Esau and Ishmael later on are palpably patronymics. (c) Machir in Gen. i. 23 is put down as a person, but in Numb. xxvi. 29 Machir begets (the country) Gilead, while in Judges xi. i Gilead begets Jephthah ! There is, therefore, strong prima facie evidence for Ewald's theory, and his suggestion becomes all the more plausible when we look at this early Genesis history from the writers' standpoint. They found in their day, two thousand years or so later, a number AbraJiam, Isaac, Jacoh. 139 of existing kindred races with much in common, and speaking kindred dialects : they also found certain old customs and institutions in existence handed down from the remote past, and their record is an attempt at the solution of these problems. In course of time, various traditions and stories had sprung up which offered a partial explanation of this kinship and these old institutions, and the writers added not a few surmises of their own. It was asked, for example, "Why is it that the Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, our kindre speaking of the Semitic races, we said that they displayed the characteristics of a people who had long been dwellers in tents, living an open air life as nomads in the wilderness. A nation quick and versatile, patient and prac- tical, intense lovers of nature, full of impulse, ar- dour and passion, their literature is a mirror of themselves and abounds in sensuous, passionate imagery ; it delights in the play of fancy and emo- tion, is essentially nature-loving, and full of word- pictures. Bred for ages, in the childhood of the race, amid the endless excitement and the endless monotony of a roaming life in an extremely inhos- ^ This chapter, and another (chapter XIX.) on Inspiration, have ah-eady appeared (in substance) in the author's " Sermon on the Mount"; but they form an integral part of tliis Ijool-;, and are necessarily included in it. 'c<; 2 86 Figurativeness of Bible language. pitable region, wrestling with nature under adverse circumstances and fighting for his^ own hand, the Semite grew up patient, brave, self-reHant, and im- perious of will. He subordinated everything to the action and desire of the moment, seeing the whole universe through the medium of personal feeling. The Semitic mental horizon is comparatively narrow, practical rather than speculative, and intensely emotional. The love and hate, the pride and scorn, the fierce lust of revenge and the wailing grief, the braver}- and sensuousness of the Bedouin nomad run strong in the Semitic blood. Thus when their feel- ings are really stirred, when they are really moved by love or rage or grief (and with their intensely emotional natures this is almost their normal con- dition), Semites instinctively burst into the emo- tional l}'ric strain which is the natural vehicle of intense and passionate personal feeling. So strongly pronounced is the personal emotional element in Semitic character that all Semitic tongues reflect it vividly in their"' vocabulary. Almost every word expresses in its root something that can be grasped by the senses, and words are so formed from these roots as to express in word-pictures physical sensations in every possible colouring of light and shade. Even purely intellectual ideas are thus pre- sented in a way distinctly suggesting something that appeals to the eye, or touch, or taste, or to the senses generally. Such a language must therefore necessarily be essentiall}' picturesque and metaphorical. Figurativeiiess of Bible Uingiuige. 287 It has been said that the Hebrews are " even more emotional than their emotional Semitic brethren, they are so intensely subjective ; " and certainly their literature bears this out. It is the literature of a people of a passionately emotional temperament and an imperious will, full of the fire of passion, full, too, of keen insight into nature in her power to avv^ake or sustain human emotion. But they record this insight, not calmly and thoughtfully, but in swift, excited, sensuous, half-formed yet strong outlines, in metaphor piled on metaphor without regard to any other principle of proportion than the emotional harmony of each broken figure with the dominant feeling. To the Hebrew prophets and psalmists, religion was an excited and impassioned outpouring of the soul in ecstatic rapture and with rapid movement and a tendency to ring many variations on one tune. They were for the time being God-intoxicated,* rapt in Him, and though lacking in depth of speculative reflexion, these Hebrew singers have produced the finest lyrical poetry, " the most glowing utterances of emotional minds," the world has ever seen. In Hebrew patriotism, too, we see the same outbursts of love and rage and grief. We see it when personal or national vanity or emotion vents itself in ap- parently immoderate boasting, as in the song of Deborah, invective, as in the imprecatory psalms, or wailing, as in the Lamentations. There is an intensity of passion that touches the chords of our hearts and thrills our breasts. 288 Figurativeness of Bible language. Is it any wonder that we prosaic, matter-of-fact, cold-blooded Englishmen, dwellers under the sad and lowering skies of our northern climate, fail to appreciate the impassioned poetry and glowing imagination, the word-pictures and play of fancy of Eastern minds? In a scientific age which prides itself on its accuracy and exactness of expression, its unbiassed statement of fact so as to set forth things as they are, its clearing the mind of all glow of feeling or any sentiment or play of fancy that may colour its clearness of sight, — how can we hope to' grasp the ideas underlying the beautiful imagery and emotional word-pictures of Hebrew poetry? How can it seem anything but strange, far-fetched, hieh-flown to our minds to hear the Hebrew writer say " the hearts of the people melted within them and became as water " (Josh. vii. 5), or " the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another " (Dan. v. 6), merely to convey the simple idea which we express by the one word " fear " } Why, we ask, should the Hebrew Psalmist speak in such a round-about way as " The Lord shall light my candle, and the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness" (Ps. xviii. 28), when he might have equally well used some simple phrase to express the idea of "gladness" or "joy," and by a few plain words have made his meaning very much clearer ? Reading our Bible in this dull and literal spirit, turning all its poetry into bald prose, is it any wonder if its words oft lead us astray ? The language Figurativeness of Bible language. 289 of a people is made by them and for them ; it ex- presses what is common to them all, and has spruiifj up out of the universal wants of their hearts ; in it their thoughts and character arc crystallized. From the subjective, emotional, intense temperament of the Hebrews, therefore, we must expect a language and style revelling in poetry, word-pictures, metaphors, similes, hyperbole, figures of speech, imagery. To them it is not a fanciful exaggeration to say "the sun is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course," as it would be to us. They tho2ight in word-pictures ; just as in Homer's pages we can't help hearing the very snorting of the horses that are drawing on the car of Apollo, and see the sparks that flash up beneath their feet as they rush along the pavement of heaven. We have gained undoubtedly in clearness of brain and power of making expression correspond with actual facts, but we have also greatly stunted our imagination, and can no longer see the visions of grandeur and beauty which daily roll before our eyes in the commonest things of daily life ; and our language has become just like ourselves. This is why these Bible word-pictures so often mislead us and we read ideas into the Bible which are not there. We stupidly mistake the form for the substance, the frame for the picture, the garment in which spiritual truth is picturesquely dressed for the truth itself We are such slaves to logic and facts that we forget that the deepest spiritual lessons can U 290 Figurativencss of Bible language. be taught as truly in poem, parable and fable as in the exact phraseology, the close logical abstract reasoning of modern theological schools. We can learn more from the simple story of the Prodigal Son, mere parable as it is, than we could draw from a dozen modern treatises on the same subject : and if we would but understand the genius of the Hebrew people, their natural love of bold and striking imagery, the Bible's message would be far more intelligible to us than it is. We should not stumble then over the story of Balaam's ass speaking, or Satan's appearing in the form of a serpent in Eden, nor fail to seize the drift of those eloquent figures of speech which tell us that "the stars fought in their courses against Sisera," and that "the sun stood still upon Gibeon and the moon in the valley of Ajalon." Balaam's ass would speak to our dull ears, even as her stumbling and brushing against the wall opened Balaam's eyes and awoke his sleeping conscience to a sense of his own wrong-doing ; it was a little incident by the"^vvay, but it emphasized the misgivings of his heart, just as the ant speaks to the sluggard, the bee to Watts and Shakespeare, the patient spider to — was it Wallace or Bruce? — in his despondency. The Eden story with its alluring trees of know- ledge and of life, its forbidden fruits which seem so " good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, much to be desired to make one wise," and its tempting serpent, would vividly portray the first faint suggestion to Figurativeness of Bible language. 291 evil, as of some outer voice, the whisper of temptation we all know so well decoying us with its lures and snares to the sin that so easily and stealthily besets us. And what a graphic picture that grand passage " the stars in their courses fought against Sisera : the river Kishon swept them away" (Judg. v. 20), sketches for us of the pitiless rain-storm swelling this little stream into a roaring flood ; the blinding storm beating hard in the face of the foe ; the moistened soil turned into a bog ; the terrified plunging of the horses, as they sink in the deep mire, throwing Sisera's ranks into utter confusion, an easy prey to the onrush of the eager and agile highland Hebrew footmen. The poetical sense of Josh. x. 12, "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon ; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon," is too palpable to mislead any one. It is a popular extract from the very old "Book of Jashar," and Josh. x. 14 clearly shows that all it means is that the operations were carried out so rapidly, and Israel did such stalwart deeds, that as much was done as if the day had been twice as long '\ It is precisely because we thus fail to discriminate between poetry and prose, imagery and bald fact, truth and its picturesque expression, that we so often lose the spiritual lesson which becomes all the more forcible because embodied in some graphic, vivid, b The explanation that a lenglheninij of tlie (Uiy, and tlie continued mirage - appearance of the sun above the liorizon, was due to an increase of the refractive projicrties of the atmosphere, is (piite possible, and in harmony with the laws of lii^ht. 292 Figurativcncss of Bible language. living form which infuses life and action into the picture. It is just by this wondrous genius for word- painting, — the rare power of placing before us in real flesh and blood in a few clear bold strokes, yet with a touch so simple, so delicate and so sure, the sower scattering his seed, the housewife baking her cakes or sweeping the house to find a lost piece of money, the shepherd collecting his sheep, the fishermen drawing in their net, — that Christ lays bare the human heart, makes His parables the vehicles of the deepest spiritual truths, and uses these word-pictures as a barb to the arrow which drives truth home to our minds as nothing else could. We seem to have lost the power, which Christ and David possessed so richly, of looking through Nature up to Nature's God. We ask in wonder how the writer of the 148th Psalm can make beasts and fishes, winds and waves, sun and moon, fire and hail, snow and vapours, all the inanimate forces that beat round the lives of men, praise the Lord and magnify Him for ever ! Eyes have we, yet we see not. and it is only by a forced stretch of imagination that we can find "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." Is it any wonder that the bold imagery, the vivid word-pictures, the creative poetry of minds to whom sky and earth were the voices of God, " one day telleth another, and one night certifieth another," — is it strange that their style of language is the despair and the snare of our prosaic matter-of-fact natures } Figiiraiiveness of Bible laiif;;uage. 293 Consider the number of books in the Bible which are poetry pure and simple. Of course, we do not mean that it is all written in verse; but its prose has all the artistic form, deep emotional basis and true rhythm which constitute poetry. The Hebrew writers look at the world through the atmosphere that floats before the poet's eyes ; their soul for the time being has reached the stage of intense exaltation, of freedom from self-consciousness, so well depicted in the lines : — " 1 started once, or seemed to start, in pain, Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak. As when a great thought strikes along the brain And flushes all the cheek ; " and so their message " comes from the heart and goes to the heart." Not only are such divine artistic gems as the Psalms, — the world's " Great Lyric " — or tlie " Song of Songs " the purest of poems ; but Lamentations, like the dirge of David over Saul and Jonathan, is exquisite elegiac poetry. Job is a dramatic poem, so is Ecclesiastes. Ruth, Esther, Daniel and Jonah partake of poetical Jewish romance. Isaiah and many of the prophets have all the fire and passion, the artistic form and rhythmical language of the truest poetry. Genesis and many of the earlier his- torical books read like pages of Froissart or Homer. We have spoken of the Psalms as the Great Lyric, and it forms a class all by itself. There is nothing in Pindar, or indeed elsewhere in Greek or any otiier 294 Fignratirencss of Bible language. poetry, like its rapturous song, combining unconscious power with unconscious grace — it is purely Hebrew. It seems to belong as a birthright to those descen- dants of Shem who, yearning ahvays to look straight into the face of God and live, could see not much else. What poetry can excel in lofty imagination such passages as : "Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment, Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain." " He rode upon a cherub and did fly : yea, He did fly upon the wings of the wind." *' Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers like yellow gold." "In the hand of God there is a cup, and the wine foameth : it is full of mixture, and He poureth out of the same : surely the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall drain them out and drink them " ? To quote only one other example of Hebrew imagination and figurativeness, consider this picture of old age: "When the sun, and the light, and the moon are darkened, and the clouds return after the rain : in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened : and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low, even though he rise at the voice of the bird : and when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the Figurativeness of Bible lajiguage. 295 way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail : because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets : or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the dust as it was, and the breath shall return unto God Who gave it." Would any Western mind thus speak of old age with its tottering legs, it toothlessness, dim eyes, deaf ears, loss of taste and desire, its general break up, " the last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, The second childishness and mere oblivion Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything?" In reading our Hebrew Bible, well were it for us to remember Hobbes' phrase : " Words are the counters of wise men, but the money of fools." Most of us still treat the words of the Bible as money, forgetting our Lord's caution : " the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life." \ CHAPTER XVIII. Old Testament view of Life after Death. NOTHING in the Old Testament so astounds the Christian (for whom " the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come " is an essential article of his creed), as to be told that the Hebrews, down to the latest days of Israel's history, had no conception of an individual resurrection as we under- stand it, — and yet it is a fact. We do not mean to imply that Christ was the first to stamp ideas of immortality on the minds of men, under the forms ot heaven and hell, and a judgment to come ; this would be an untrue assumption. His gospel brought life and immortality to light ; but it was by illuminating obscure truths, by bringing to a focus all the partial, wandering and separate rays of light on this great subject which had dawned before His time, and pouring upon it a flood of light of His own whicli far excelled all that had gone before. Nowhere in the Old Testament is the great truth of the slow and gradual evolution of religious conceptions of the very first importance more clearh' shown than in the de- velopment of the idea of an individual resurrection to eternal life. It has its roots deep down in the soil Old Teslai/ient vieio of Life after Death. 297 of the crude instincts and supeistitions of primitive man in the infancy of the world. \A'e can trace its slow growth, " first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the car," in the course of thousands of years; each stage fostered by its predecessor. The connecting links and historical relations between the various phases in this gradual development must be carefully kept in view. We must grasp how the still living elements of the older ideas were taken up by each newer revelation and assimilated by it ; or we shall never thread our way intelligently through this intricate maze. Roughly speaking, there are five stages in the evolution of the conception of immortality; and they coincide exactly with the corresponding steps in the spiritual evolution of religion in Israel's actual historv. (i) A very primitive stage representing Israel's spiritual attitude down to the period of the Judges; a mere glimmer of liglu amid deep shadows. (2) The twilight phase from Samuel to about 800 B.C. (3) The age of the canonical prophets (760 — 450 B.C.) when the great truth of life and im- mortality begins to dawn on men's hearts. But it is still only a gleam, enjoyed but for a moment ; still it fills their heart with a bright hope ; they see dimly, but they be- lieve strcjiigly. 298 Old Testament vieiv of Life after Death. (4) 300 — I B.C. It is all but clear daylight; con- ceptions of individual immortality are taking a far clearer outline. They gain in health and colour, and are at last emerging robed in the pure, clear light of spiritual thought. (5) In Christ " The Sun of righteousness rises with healing in His wings;" "the day breaks in all its fulness and splendour, and the shadows flee away ; " Christ has brought life and immor- tality to light. The Bible gives us a history of these five stages. We must be prepared to see men, groping among low and unformed notions, visited with a gleam of light, taking in its significance slowly, and so for a long time dwelling still in a sort of twilight. Watch the process as light follows light. Realize the importance of each step : measure it not by the light which follows but by the darkness which is left behind, and we shall see how true are the words of the writer to the Hebrews that God spoke to men in olden days, made His revelation to them "by divers portions, and in divers manners," here a little, there a little. " The Old Testament makes its re- velations piecemeal : its writers are like subordinate workmen, each absorbed in his own particular task. It is only when the Master-builder appears, with the full idea of the house in His mind, that each of the separate parts prepared beforehand by the workmen takes its proper place in tlie building " (Davidson). Old Testament vieio of Life after Death. 299 During the first stage of evolution, down to the period of the Judges, the Hebrew idea of life after death is practically identical with the beliefs of primitive races everywhere on this subject. In the infancy of the race man found himself face to face with death. The chief difference between a living and a dead body is that, as soon as ever the breath leaves the body, warmth and motion cease, and the body at once begins to decay. Therefore, " breath is life " ; and almost every language expresses this idea in its word for "soul," But breath is air; and air is eternal, universal, imperishable ; therefore the " soul," or portion of air which gave life to the body, does not perish at the dissolution of the body, but returns to the Divine Air, — a living person in those olden days, — of which it is part, and out of which it came. A curious belief soon followed from this : since millions of souls had in course of time been released from their bodies and returned to air, the air must literally be full of them, swarm with souls, the "spirits" of the dead which the ancients so dreaded. The writer of Genesis ii. ~- who lived about loco B.C. — uses the language common to other primitive peoples, but accommodates it to his own higher type of religion. Just as in his story of the Creation of the world, he does not evolve God out of chaos, but places Him above and before all thines. 'so he here makes Him the source of life. It is His own Breath that He breathes into man's 300 Old Testament view of Life after Death. nostrils, so that man becomes a living soul. At death this breath returns not to the air, but to God's Breath from which it came. From the fact that men, animals and things generally, — it is unfortunate that we cannot here abolish the word things, for to primitive man ihcre were no " things," every object was fully alive, — are often seen to appear to others in dreams and visions, primitive man jumped at what seems to us a strange conclusion. He believed firmly that men. animals and things have a thin phantom likeness, a shadowy outline of themselves, separable from the real person or object, wiiich can leave the person, travel and appear to others however far away. When a man died, it was believed in these very early days that this thin, vaporous, material outline, phantom or shadow, was transported to some distant region, where it existed continuously, or rather vegetated. There was, however, no thought of rewards and punishmejits in this common home of the departed ; the moral question did not come in at all : it was simply an existence which was some- thing between being and not being. Intellectually and morally the man was as good as dead ; all the movement, freedom and joy of existence was at an end. The Babylonians from earliest times had this common primitive conception of an underworld to which the dead " phantom souls " were relegated ; a place inside the bowels of the earth which they Old Testament view of Life after Death. 301 called Shelu. The Hebrews inherited from the Babylonians both the conception of this underworld and their name for it, — Sheol, — and with them it was also located in the bowels of the earth. Thither a shadowy outline of man's body went after death : good and bad were all huddled together, living a shadowy, featureless, inane, lifeless existence. It was, if anything, worse than even Homer's vision of Hades : the Hebrew Sheol was a kind of vast subterranean tomb, with the barred and bolted gates common to Hebrew tombs, in which the ghosts did not even flit about, but lay like corpses in a sepulchre. It was a dreary place, where all were forgotten by man and God : a land of gloom and shadow, where intercourse with God was impossible; for in that realm man could neither pray nor praise : the life of this underworld was joyless and cheerless and no life at all. Even in the days of the early monarchy, the Jews had no other idea than this of life after death. Ver}- occasionally we catch a glimpse of a thin flicker of light, but it is the merest gleam. David's care in gathering the bones of Saul and Jonathan, and burying them with the bones of their father, was not merel}' a kindl)- act of respect. It breathes the very spirit of the belief current in those days that the spirit of the unburied dead would roam about without rest, and be unable to enter Sheol. This accounts for the dread of what was then considered the greatest misfortune that could happen to a man at death, 302 Old Testament vtezv of Life after Death. the denial of sepulture. Hence the frequent threat, so common in the Bible, to give bodies to be eaten by wild beasts and birds. How can we account for the long survival of this low, and to us unnatural view of life after death, even at a time when other religious conceptions had already advanced to a stage which seems to us utterly incompatible with such an idea? It is due to a cause which is harder still for us to realize. One of the very strangest things in the Old Testament is the fact that the individual as such does not exist till comparatively late times (600 B.C.). An Old Testa- ment Hebrew was absolutely merged, swallowed up in his family and his nation. In himself he had little or no place at all. The unit in Old Testament days was the family, the tribe, or the nation, and the individual completely effaced and lost himself in these larger wholes. In this way only can we under- stand that the sins of Achan, Korah, Dathan and Abiram involve not only the guilty individuals but their families as well, and all in any way associated with them ; in the case of Achan the whole nation suffers a disastrous defeat because of his sin. Natur- ally, therefore, if the man himself has no individuality of his own in this life, he has none, expects none in the world beyond the grave. On earth he lives in his family and nation ; on earth he receives in his family and nation all the blessings and prosperity Jehovah showers upon him. "That thy days may be prolonged in the land " was all he looked and Old Testament vieiv of Life after Death. 30 j'-'j hoped for. In Hebrew da\'.s and Hebrew eyes life on earth was the only real and solid thing. When in these early times the individual approached death, he felt he had received the blessing of life from God and had enjoyed it in His Presence and communion. His sojourn here had come to an end ; he was old and full of days, and he acquiesced in death, however strange his acquiescence may seem to us. He did not look forward as we do to a kingdom of heaven in the future ; Jehovah's kingdom was here on earth. To him the kingship of Jehovah, the conception that Jehovah was the actual King of Israel here and now, was not a mere ifieal, but an actual reality ; so he never dreamt of a future super- natural kingdom into which he should enter after death. Besides, if he gave himself a second thought at all, he consoled himself with the thought that he should not all die : he lived on really and actually in his faniil}', his tribe and his nation. He felt well rewarded if, after a good life spent here, he reaped the harvest of the good seeds he had sown in seeing his children blessed of God to the third and fourth generation. He saw in anticipation the good of his family, the good of his beloved nation, and in their blessing he felt abundantly blessed. He was more than content to have poured his little stream of life and service into the tide of family and national life, and in some degree to have swelled it. As to the possible annihilation of cither his family or nation, 304 Old Testament view of Life after Death. this was a catastrophe too awful even to contemplate, and such a possibility he did not so much as whisper to himself. Jehovah had established His Covenant with Israel, an inviolable and everlasting covenant, so the nation at any rate was safe ; and Jehovah had also promised to show mercy unto thousands of generations of them that love Him. Sa}- what we will, this idea of being directly qnder God's rule and in His Kingdom here on earth, and therefore abundantly blessed in the good of family and nation, is a high ideal, and an unselfish and noble one. We can well understand how it sufficed so long, at least, as Jehovah's actual kingship of Israel, His own chosen people, was a clear indisput- able reality to the Hebrews here and now on earth. This simple creed received its first rude shock when foreign enemies thundered at the gate. In them the canonical prophets recognized the rod and hammer of Jehovah, and opened the people's eyes to the terrible suggestion, though believe it the people would not, that degenerate Israel had ceased to be Jehovah's chosen people. To the prophets, as we have already seen, this much was clear, that Israel as a nation was rotten to the core, and Jehovah had rejected it. In spite of His long-suffering patience, it had shown no tokens of fitness to discharge the vocation of Jehovah's chosen people, and so become His kingdom on earth. But the canonical prophets do not yet anticipate a kingdom anywhere else but on earth. Though they are convinced that the Old Testament viezv of Life after Death. 305 present Israel must perish, they feel equally certain in their absolute faith in Jehovah's Covenant with His chosen people, that a new and better Israel will rise from its grave and become Jehovah's kingdom here on earth. The New Testament idea of a purely spiritual kingdom of God, in this world but not of it, is beyond the prophet's horizon ; though at times in Isaiah, and especially in the second Isaiah, it comes very close to it. In prophetic mouths "The Day of the Lord " was to be the day when Jehovah would judge His people; but behind His judgment there always rises clear the salvation and restoration of Israel as a new and purified nation. Even the second Isaiah looks at it in this light : his Servant of the Lord Who is to expiate not only Israel's guilt but also that of the heathen world, and be a light to the Gentiles, is only an idealized earthly Israel. So it is that with this fixed idea that the kingdom o of Jehovah is still on earth, it is still on earth that the prophets look for the realization of all their hopes of actual communion and fellowship with Jehovah the King. Their idea of life after death remains precisely the same as before. Even these highly-spiritual canonical prophets cannot shake off the nightmare of Sheol as a mere receptacle of phantom souls, an underworld outside Jehovah's ken. With the people the belief in the unaltered and unalterable old state of things is naturally still more pronounced. Let the prophets say what they will, the nation is convinced that it is Jehovah's own X 306 Cld Testament view of Life after Death. chosen nation, and will never be cast off. To the popular mind " the Day of the Lord " is not a day of judgment, as the prophets preach. It is a day when their Jehovah will interpose in their behalf and deliver them, especially from external foes, though internal miseries may also be included. " Ask of Me and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance : thou shalt break the nations with a rod of iron : thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." These words of Ps. ii., though written later, exactly voice the popular ideas on the Day of the Lord. As citizens of a kingdom of God here and now, the Hebrews of the prophetic period do not look for another beyond the grave. Of Sheol may still be written, " All hope abandon ye that enter here." Even righteous Hezekiah trembled lest when he closed his eyes on the earth, where he walked in close fellowship with God, " his eyes should no longer see the Lord in the land of the living." In Sheol there is no more giving of thanks or praise to God, " For the grave cannot praise Thee ; death cannot celebrate Thee : they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day " (Is. xxxviii. 1 8) (cf. Ps. vi. 5 ; xxx. 9 ; cxv. 17). God Himself does not remember the dead any more ; " Shall Thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave ? and Thy righteousness in .the land of forgetfulncss ? " (Ps. Ixxxviii. II, 12). "The fortunes of their children do not concern the dead" (Job xiv. and xxi.), "for Old Testament viezv of Life after Death. 307 there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol whither thou goest" (Eccles. ix. 10). The language of these passages from Psalms and Prophet is not the strain of a passing mood. Strong as is their faith in Jehovah, close as is their walk and communion with God here on earth, a blank is found in the creed of these holy men when life beyond the grave is in question. Their hope ended with this life. Yet, though he could give himself no reason for his pious aspiration, both psalmist and prophet at times could not believe that the pit, the shadowy half-existence of Sheol, was to be the end of all for the friend of God. One who had set Jehovah always before him, and desired none in heaven or earth in comparison with his God, could not thus be left in darkness and forgetfulness. It must be that he should awake and behold God's face in righteousness and be satisfied with His likeness (Ps. xvii. 15 ; xlix. 15). "God will not leave my soul in Hell : neither will He suffer His holy one to see corruption : He will shew me the path of life : in His presence is fulness of joy : at His right hand there are pleasures for evermore " (Ps. xvi. 9 — 11). Nevertheless, this aspiration was only a reach of faith. No revelation from God had yet been given, no clear teaching could be taught, no complete assurance could be enjoyed on this subject. There was still an impenetrable veil, but these occasional gleams are the first signs of the brighter light which is soon to dawn. We can but 3o8 Old Tesiavient viczv of Life after Death. admire and wonder at the vigour and tenacity of faith shown by these holy men at a time when there was absokitely none of the comfortable assurance, no revelation at all of a future life. In a way we can account for this new aspiration. It was the natural outcome of Jeremiah's great discovery that religion is a personal matter, a relationship between God and the individual soul : " They shall no more teach everyone his neighbour saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know Me from the least of them even to the greatest of them " (Jer. xxxi. 33). With this all - important discovery the whole aspect of religion changes. Hitherto it has been a purely national, henceforth it is going to be a personal question between God and the individual believer ; though in actual fact it is not till the days of the Gospel that the last shreds of the old national idea disappear. We soon see the results of this new idea of personal religion, for the great question now crying for an answer is, " How can we reconcile a belief in God's Moral Government of the World with actual experience } Why, then, do the righteous suffer and the wicked flourish ? How are we to justify the ways of God in His dealings with indi- vidual men .-* " It has already been seen that even following this line of thought alone there could finally be but one answer. The first solution suggested, " virtue leads always to prosperity and wickedness to failure even in this life," would not do ; actual facts told too heavily against it. Job's Old Testa7}ient view of Life after DeatJi. 309 solution, " sufifering is essential to beauty and strength of character," was better every way, but still in- adequate. These attempts at solving the problem all left the main question untouched. " How are we to account for the fact that in actual experience God does not fulfil His solemn promise to reward the righteous and punish the wicked (Deut. xxviii.), but so often does precisely the opposite .-* " It appeared as if God were asleep (Ps. xliv. 23). The prosperous transgressor asked mockingly, " Where is now thy God } " (Ps. xlii. 3 — 10). If men were to be rescued from the pessimism of an Ecclesiastes there could be but one answer ; a day was coming when God would call everything and every man into judgment, when each one should reap as he had sown. There must be a second hearing of the whole case by God Himself, when all men's wrongs should be set right. That this was the only possible solution is clear from the fact that it is actually the triumphant reply given by the late writer of Ecclesiastes xi., xii. So from the moment that religion became personal, a question between the individual believer and his God, a belief in an actual life of fellowship with God beyond the grave was bound to be the natural out- come of it all, sooner or later. But another and a quite different set of circum- stances led to exactly the same result. After the Captivity the nation had disappeared. The yoke of foreign oppressors rested continually on the land, and Israel found itself no longer a real living nation 3IO Old Testament viciu of Life after Death. under Jehovah as its King in any sense of the word. He was still the hope of Israel, but He was no longer visibly or actually present. The present was a blank, and the living realities of Jehovah's Kingship were but memories of a past, written in a book. As time passed, things only went from bad to worse. '• When would God again visit and redeem His chosen people ? " men were asking in their anguish. For a time it seemed as if a satisfactory answer had been found. Men began to look to the prophetic books in the hope and belief that tJiere might be found predictions which still awaited fulfilment ; clues that might be taken to refer to these latter days of Persian and Greek oppression. They found there a number of unfulfilled predictions which buoyed their hopes. What was spoken, they main- tained, must be literally accomplished. The pro- phets' predictions of judgment had been fulfilled by the Exile, but their prediction of the new and perfect Israel was still unrealized. In this spirit Daniel kept alive Israel's hopes by showing that the 70 years foretold by the prophet for the nation's restoration had been misunderstood ; that the real 70 years were 70 weeks of years, so that the longed-for time was only just now drawing near. But as time went on, and the day of Israel's restoration came and went and no lightening of the nation's burden of oppression accompanied it, the iron entered deep into Israel's soul. The nation seemed to be lying under God's interdict : depression Old Testament view of Life after Death. 311 and sadness was now its sole heritage. Their long oppression, the poh'tical bankruptcy of their nation, made the Jews give up all hope of any earthly king of David's line ever being able to thrust back the arms of the oppressing heathen. A better and a super- natural king must be looked for ; the true deliverance must come from God and not from man. Thus it was that the idea of a personal Messiah, triumphing over Israel's enemies, and establishing Jehovah's kingdom, became fully developed and pronounced in the century and a half before Christ. The ideal Davidic king of earthly origin so confidently pro- mised by prophets had lost his first attractiveness. These seers had so long sustained the nation's hopes, and reassured pious souls with the sure and cer- tain belief that the nation, after it had been purified by the punishment of sinners and the discipline of the godly, would be restored. They had assured Israel that they would obtain complete victory over their enemies and oppressors, and God would be- stow upon them such glory, peace and well-being as would surpass all the glories of their happiest days. This was clearly only an empty dream. They had waited for him so long, and he had not appeared, nor were there any signs of his coming. Some gave up all hope of this deliverer ; it would anyhow not be in thoir time. The glories of Israel were either confined to the remote past or the dim future. The promise was in books, and that was all. But even in the darkest days there yet remained 312 Old Testament view of Life after Death. some earnest souls who clung to the old faith and tried to revive it. Jehovah was ever faithful to His Covenant and promises. The golden year would assuredl}'- come ; though the conviction was daily growing^ stronger that the Davidic King would be no man but God Himself. A unique and ideal character was now attributed to this King. The very fact that he was separated by such a long in- terval of time from all his predecessors on the throne of Israel deepened people's sense of the magnitude of the events in connection with which he would appear, and of his immeasurable greatness. Here again it is in Daniel that we first see the picture of this great coming King, the first real pre- sentation of that Messiah-hope which looms so large in all Hebrew literature after his day ; and the Book of Daniel is the model on which all apocalyptic after- writers shape their predictions. Even before these hopes of a Messianic person had been thus definitely formed, the Book of Zephaniah, for example, had paved the way for it. In it we see a vision of the great day of the Lord's vengeance on the sinners in Israel, v/ith the destruction of the surrounding nations, and the subsequent glorious happiness of Zion. But in Daniel the whole picture is presented in clear and definite outline. His book deals with the actual restoration of Israel, and the victorious estab- lishment of the worship of Jehovah under a Davidic prince, with a wealth of detail that is quite new. The kingdom of God is at last established firmly I Old Testament view of Life after Death. 313 on earth. It is preceded by the Abomination of Desolation when sin, oppression and Hell do their worst for a season, only to be utterly crushed by the Most High. The glorious deliverance is ushered in by a partial resurrection of the dead, some of whom, or rather " many of whom now sleeping in the dust awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Dan. xii. 2). Thus is inaugurated Messiah's kingdom : " There is given Him dominion, and glor\-, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve Him : His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed " (Dan. vii. 14). Instead of vague pre- dictions there is now a definite date assigned to this deliverance and prosperous future. Even those who have fallen victims to persecution will not lose their reward ; they will be raised up from their graves and share in the triumph. On this model (180 — 160 B.C.) all following writers on the subject shaped their predictions, and in the main they all agree on certain important points : — (i) On a definite Day of the Lord, sometimes fixed by these writers, sometimes stated as " known only to God," Messiah will come. (2) Then will ensue a Great Day of Judgment. All judgment is committed to the Messiah, Who will sit on the throne of His glory judging the prince of this world and his angels, 314 Old Testament view of Life after Death. and all the hosts of evil demons and wicked men. (3) Heaven and earth will be transformed. The righteous will be glorified and reign with Messiah : the heathen nations converted and be subject to Israel, Himself without sin, there is no unrighteousness in Messiah's days, for all are saints. (4) The righteous dead are raised to share in this glory, as a reward for their past tribula- tion. A marked feature in the literature of the two centuries just before Christ is the prominence given to future rewards and punishments to quick and dead, according to their works. The Messianic kingdom is preceded by a Day of Judgment and just recom- pense for all the living and the dead. On fallen angels too is their verdict passed. It is an individual judgment for each man. A throne is set up ; the sealed books are opened ; to each man is meted out his due ; and the evil angels are cast into an abyss of fire. Sheol now naturally undergoes a radical change. In Daniel, it is still regarded as the final home of all mankind save the best and worst in Israel. The righteous rise to everlasting life, and the worst are cast into a place of shame and everlasting contempt. After Daniel's day all this is altered : instead of being as in former days a place where good and bad Old Testa)>icnt view of Life after Death. 315 are all huddled together, Sheol becomes a place of rew ards and punishments, where men are dealt with according to their deserts. All souls are still rele- gated to Sheol at death, awaiting the final judgment that shall usher in the reign of Messiah, but they have distinct habitations assigned them there. These are four in number: (i) for those who have died an undeserved death ; (2) for the rest of the righteous ; (3) for the wicked who have already suffered on earth for their sins ; (4) for the wicked who have sinned and escaped punishment in this life. More and more did Sheol come to be regarded as the intermediate abode of the dead, a place half-way between death and judgment, where the departed already have a foretaste of their final bliss or doom. In many apocalyptic writers it is a place of purification as well, where there is possibility of moral improvement. During the century immediately preceding the Christian era changes in Messianic hopes had ap- peared in two diametrically opposed directions. One set of opinions gave expression to the natural conviction that an eternal Messianic Kingdom cannot suitably be manifested on the present earth. Hence from this period the Final Judgment is seldom placed at the inauguration of the Messianic Kingdom on earth but at its close, and heaven becomes its true sphere. The other idea which seized the popular fancy just before Christ's Advent, — an idea wide apart as the poles from the other, — sprang from a renewal of 3i6 Old Testament viezv of Life after DeatJi. the political hopes of the Jews. The purely spiritual aspect of the Messianic hope faded away more and more. A Messiah of another sort was wanted, who should really and actually restore the Kingdom of David, with all its pomp, magnificence, and political power, to Israel. It was in truth this seculari- zation of the Messianic expectation that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. A suffering and meek Messiah was not at all in harmony with the views of the Jews of our Lord's day, or to their liking. His own dis- ciples even were totally unprepared for it. The mass of the nation wanted and fully expected a Messiah who should lead them to victory over their enemies and crush them, bringing in an era of great material prosperity. It only remains to explain some terms connected with the life beyond the grave, such as Paradise, Gehenna, Abraham's bosom, the origin of which we owe to this period. Paradise is a Persian word and idea. It is a park, enclosed against injury and intruders, a garden of exquisite natural beauty, with stately trees, and watered by clear streams. The hanging-gardens of Babylon suggest Mesopotamia as the original source of the idea. Also, to the Jewish mind, the associa- tion with the garden of Eden, man's home before he sinned, would at once present itself ; especially as the Septuagint had used the word Paradise to translate the " garden " of Gen. ii. So the apocalyptic writers Old Testament vieu' of Life afto' Death. 317 loved to imagine Paradise as a restored Eden, and filled it with all the delights of sense, — streams of milk and honey, trees laden with divers luscious fruits, hills whereon grew roses and lilies. Paradise thus became the bright sinless dwelling of the righteous. At one time it is the intermediate state between death and judgment, at other times their eternal abode. Sometimes it is conceived as an " earthlv paradise " somewhere in the far East ; more commonly it is represented in the new regenerated Sheol, or in heavenly places. The general idea was that Sheol was divided into two compartments : Gehenna on the one side, with its flames and torments : Paradise on the other, with its restored garden of Eden. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were there ready to receive their descendants into their bosom. Abraham's bosom was the place of highest honour. The Apocalypses also tell us that as the righteous enter Paradise angels strip them of their grave- *• clothes, array them in new robes of glory, and place on their heads diadems of gold and pearls. There is no night there, and the pavement of. Paradise is all of precious stones. To the ordinary Jew of Christ's day Paradise, as Josephus tell us, was a far off place of delight, where there was no rain or extreme cold or heat. It was perpetually refreshed by gentle zephyrs ; a place of sensuous bliss, of repose, shelter, joy and happiness ineffable. It is probably because of its connection with such associations of sensuous happiness that 3i8 Old Testament viezv of Life after Death. Christ only uses the word Paradise once, — to the dying thief; possibly as the word which would con- vey most meaning and comfort to him. He was a rough man, with only the most elementary and popular religious notions. To him the word Para- dise was specially fitting, assuring him, in the only way he could understand, of the immediate rest and peace that awaited him after all his sufferings on the cross. GeJwnna. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, in Josiah's day, had become the scene of idolatrous and human sacrifices to Moloch, and such a sink of ini- quity, that Josiah polluted it with human bones and other corruptions. It is generally accepted that it be- came the receptacle of all the city-refuse and the dead carcases of animals and criminals, and so perpetual fires were there kept up night and day to destroy this mass of corruption. It was naturally a nasty place and shunned; so much so that the Jews fancied that the gate of hell lay in this valley: "there are two palm trees in the valley of Hinnom between which a smoke ariseth, and this is the door of Gehenna (Hell)" (Talmud). In Is. 1. ii,andlxvi. 24% "They shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against Me : for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched : and ^ Both these passages are of very late date, — probably 3rd cen- tury B.C., but undoubtedly refer to Gehenna as a place of punish- ment for apostate Jews. The Heb. word for 'abhorrence,' here used, only occurs again in Dan. xii. 2, again in reference to Gehenna (Driver). Old Testament view of Life after Death. 319 they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." Gehenna represents the place of punishment for rebellious and sinful Jews in the presence of the righteous ; and the punishment is eternal. All through the Hebrew apocalypses it is always a place of punishment for the wicked in the presence of the righteous. For a long time, the righteous are supposed to be spectators of this punishment to all eternity. Gradually this idea became repellent, and they witness only the beginning of the torment of the wicked. Also at the outset body and soul were tormented ; later on it is only the soul that suffers. In some revelations Gehenna is altogether ignored, as it was felt that in the new transformed heaven and earth there could possibly be no place for Gehenna. Nevertheless, the common popular belief in our Lord's day was that Gehenna was a place of irreversible doom for the wholly wicked ; and, as usual, Christ speaking as a Jew to Jews uses it in its popular and prevalent sense. Even in Christ's day there were all the so-called modern ideas about it. Gehenna was regarded as a place of (i) everlasting punishment, (2) temporary punishment followed by annihilation, (3) as a purgatory, so that eventually all should be redeemed and blessed. Besides Gehenna there is mention made in the Book of Enoch of the " Lake of fire and brimstone " reserved for fallen angels and wicked men, and this is referred to in the Revelation of S. John. Enough has been said to show that when our 320 Old Testament view of Life after Death. Lord came He found all the teaching about the last day, Judgment, rewards and punishments after death, already definitely fixed and rooted in the Hebrew mind. It is usual to regard our Lord's use of the current terms Paradise, Final Judgment and Gehenna as a divine sanction of their literal meaning and truth. But is this so ? Jesus spoke as a Jew to Jews, and His ideas, naturally, were expressed in such words and terms as they could grasp and understand. A teacher has to be very patient, look at things from his pupils' standpoint, remember that they do not see as far as he does, and make truth easier for them by taking their lower view and gradually raising them up to a higher plane. This was God's way of educating the Jews in the Old Testament ; it is Christ's in the New. Again, we must not forget how constantly Christ uses a figurative style of speech, speaks in parables and word-pictures, such as all Orientals adopt in conversation. Similes, parables, metaphors were ever on His lips, and if we press Christ's words in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, for instance, and see a lesson in every detail, we shall certainly mis- interpret Christ altogether. Once more, Christ was a Jew, and, therefore, above all things, practical. As a nation the Jews take little or no interest in pure speculation, but sub- ordinate everything to the actual needs of daily life and conduct. Christ never indulged in speculative Old Testament view of Life after Death. 321 discussions if He could possibly help it : questions whose only object was to satisfy curiosity. When one asked Him, " Lord, are there few that be saved ? " His immediate reply was, " Strive to enter in at the strait gate " : and when S. Peter asked a question about S. John out of curiosity, Christ's only answer was " What is that to thee ? follow thou Me." We must, therefore, expect no information from Christ on points which only tend to satisfy curious inquiry. All along, Christ's invariable attitude towards the life to come was ever to impress on His hearers that the one important matter in connection with it was the moral and practical side of the question. He wanted, above all else, to dislodge His hearers' thoughts from the accidental details, the bliss or the terrors of the Last-Day, and focus them on its essential bearing and application to the present life. The whole intention of His picture of the Final Judgment in S. Matth. xxv. 35 sqq. is to make all who hear His words or read them see that the issue lies wholly in their own hands. Are they doing their Father's Will or leaving it undone } Are they feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, needy, or unfortunate ? Nothing can better prove Christ's main motive than His unmistakable words that, on this Great Day, He will test and judge us by our behaviour to "the least of these His brethren," We have no right whatever, therefore, to say that Christ's use of the current expressions of His day Y 322 Old Testament vieiv of Life after Death. about the life to come sanctions the hteral meaning and truth conveyed by these expressions. He treated popular religious terms as all true teachers must ever treat them : He rescued them for the service of the new and true ideas He came to reveal : He employed the old familiar symbols and imagery of heaven and hell to impress upon men's consciences the supreme bliss of righteousness, the awful misery of sin. The words He uses are often strong and full of large suggestion, remarkable for their variety as well as for their figurative force ; they are, in fact, striking word-pictures, but they do not necessarily take us beyond the broad fact that there is a real active life of close communion with God into which men pass at death ; that as we have sown here so shall we assuredly reap there. God is a righteous Judge, and His verdict on our life-work and char- acter will be right and just : there must be a re- hearing of all men's verdicts before His bar, and all human wrongs will be set right. Theologians have gone further than this, and ventured on many definitions of things left undefined in the Scriptures. They have developed precise and dogmatic teaching on the condition of men between death and the resurrection, on which the New Tes- tament says not a word. It is so easy to let imagination and speculation run riot, but it profits little. " In its ideas and definite teaching the New Testament turns for the most part on the present life, with its moral choices and spiritual responsi- f Old Testament view of Life after DeatJi. 323 bilitics, the untold moral issues that depend upon our character and conduct here ; the New Testament also speaks clearly on the state of being that follows the judgment, with its final decisions. It makes little of the mysterious space that comes between the two " (Salmond). Communion with God here, communion with God hereafter, this is the conclusion of the whole matter ; so said F. D. Maurice in a beautiful passage with which we shall close this chapter : " How I long to be telling myself, and telling everyone, that the Hell we have to fly is ignorance of the perfect goodness, and separation from it : and the Heaven we have to seek is the knowledge of it ; and partici- pation in it. Then I have no fear of the message of the gospel and the Church all manifesting itself to men in due time. Rut while that kind of notion of Christianity, which Christians seem to have taken up at one time, haunts the air, I do not see what we can expect but constant alternations of gloomy faith and gloomier unbelief. Punishment and reward to ourselves, instead of spiritual death from ignorance of God and sinking into self, and eternal life from knowing Him and deliverance from self." CHAPTER XIX. Inspiration. TN this book we have attempted to give the main A principles now accepted on all hands amongst scholars as the assured results of modern Old Testa- ment criticism. " It is agreed that the Prophets, not the Law, must be taken as the starting-point of all our study of the history of Israel : that the Hexateuch must be recognized as a compilation of late date ; that the early parts of Genesis are religious prose poems based upon folk-lore ; that the whole Levitical system was the result of late growth ; that much of the history of the Old Testament is not, in the ordinary sense of the term, historical, but idealized historv written with a moral and religious rather than historical aim ; that in almost every book there are clear evidences of interpplations b}' later hands : that whole books are not the work of their professed authors : that there is a pronounced human as well as a Divine element in the Old Testament " (Kirk- patrick). It may be asked, " How can one reconcile such views with Inspiration ? How is such an idea of the Old Testament consistent with the Bible's own words : The Word of God came not from matt, but Inspiration. 325 holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost ? How is it compatible, too, with the accepted Canon of Holy Scripture to discuss the authenticity of this or that book in Holy Writ ? " We acknowledge the fairness and justice of this criticism, and in this and the following chapter we propose to consider these two points. What is Inspiration ? There was a time when anyone who doubted the vei-bal inspiration of the Bible, its literal accuracy in every detail, — in historical and scientific as well as spiritual matters, — was re- garded as virtually a heretic. The Bible was looked upon as the very Word of God, absolutely true in every particular, every single statement correct ; not one jot or tittle of it could be called into question. The last verses of its last chapter : " If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book : and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life," — were taken to apply word for word to all Holy Scripture. It was considered nothins: short of a heinous sin asrainst God, a blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, Who was the real and only Author of the Bible, to question its veracity in any the smallest detail, a mortal sin which would involve awful consequences. This is not to be wondered at in days when the inspired writers were regarded as mere passive in- struments in the hands of God, bare mouthpieces, 326 Inspiration. through whom He delivered His message to man- kind. According to Philo, the " man of God " was in a state of entire unconsciousness while under the influence of Divine inspiration : " for the human understanding takes its departure on the arrival of the Divine Spirit, and, on its removal, again returns to its home ; for the mortal must not dwell with the immortal." In like manner Josephus makes Balaam excuse himself to Balak for his failure on the same principle : " When the Spirit of God seizes us, It utters whatever words and sounds It pleases, without any knowledge on our part ; for when It has come into us, there is nothing in us which remains our own." Under the influence of Divine inspiration, these inspired men were believed to be in such a state of passive ecstatic unconsciousness that their personality counted for nothing ; they could not even choose to alter one single letter in the Divine message, but simply poured forth mechanically the words which the Holy Spirit put into their mouth. The Jewish Rabbis were of opinion that there were degrees of inspiration ; Moses holding easily the first place in the scale. Every syllable of his Pentateuch was believed to have been dictated to him by God ; next in order they placed the pro- phetic writings, while the Hagiographa ranked last of all. The early Christian Church took over bodily the Jewish views respecting the inspiration of the Old Testament and treated a belief in verbal inspiration Inspiration. 327 as an article of faith, long holding the view that the inspired writers were mere passive instruments in God's hands. Thus S. Gregory describes them as " God's pens " ; Justin Martyr speaks of them as " lyres," while the Holy Spirit is the " quill " which strikes the chords and produces the music. On the other hand, even thus early, Chrysostom, Basil, Jerome and especially Origen already laid stress on the individuality of these inspired men as moulding their work. As a rule, however, the Church till comparatively recent days adopted the verbal in- spiration view so strongly that it was held to be useless or superfluous to ask who had written a particular passage so long as it was to be found in the Bible. The author's personality was of no moment at all, since the Holy Spirit alone was the real Author of the whole Bible, had formed the very words in the mouth of prophets and apostles, and, therefore, all Holy Scripture was of equal Divine value. Holding such uncompromising views, is it sur- prising that men forced themselves to accept every word of the Bible as God's own, and believed its every fact implicitly as God's truth ? They were not startled at anything, and, when confronted with serious difficulties or glaring inconsistencies in the Bible text, their one reply was : " It is written in God's Word, and therefore I believe it." In modern days there are two extreme schools of thought on this subject. The literalists still 328 Inspiration. insist on the old rigid view of verbal inspiration ; while others go so far as to deny that there is any difference between the inspiration of Holy Scripture and the inspiration of such great works of human genius as Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost. As usual in such cases, the truth probably lies half- way between these two extremes. The general consensus of opinion in the present day is overwhelmingly strong and decided in its opposition to verbal inspiration as utterly irreconcil- able with any view of man as a free agent : as quite contrary to anything we find elsewhere in God's methods of dealing with men! In actual human experience, both in Bible days and now, we in- variably see God deliberately treating men as free and conscious agents, willing fellow-workers together with Himself, never forcing them to any course of action against their will, not even to their own good. In the same manner, we shall see that, when God inspired the Bible writers. He did not make them mere passive channels of His revelation, mere lifeless instruments unconscious of the Divine mes- sage they were uttering or of its purpose, yet forced to deliver it whether they willed it or not : He used them as willing conscious agents. Under God's inspiration they become " seers," men whose intuition is so quickened, enlightened and prompted by the Holy Spirit that for the time being they are taken into the counsel of God ; they consciously both see and hear God's purpose and plan, and reveal it Inspiration. 329 to men. They fully grasp the message with which God fills their minds and hearts. They clearly and consciously see it as God wants them to see it, enlightens them to see it, intensifies their brain and heart power to see it. Dean Stanley defined inspiration as " a divine impulse given to the pro- phet's own thoughts," but it probably means more than this. It is rather a message from God flashed upon the inspired man as a kind of in- tuition. In the prophetic age, — the purest age of inspir- ation, to which WQ. owe three-fourths of the Old Testament, — these holy men of God themselves tell us, almost in so many words, that, while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, they felt as a man who is engaged in earnest devotion or absorbed in rapt communion with God. There can be no shadow of a doubt that God's revelations were made to the inspired writers in their ordinary conscious state. It is true that the man's mind was intensely spirit- ualised; but the important point to remember is that it remained fully awake and conscious during the inspiration. He not only received God's message, but himself thoroughly grasped the depth and purpose of it all. How, then, are wc to account for the almost universal belief in verbal inspiration so long pre- valent both with Jews and Christians, the belief that the inspired writers could not even choose to alter one single syllable in the Divine message for 3 3 o Inspiration. the simple reason that, while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, they were in an unconscious and ecstatic state, mere dummies in God's hands ? The reasons are not far to seek. i Sam. ix. 9 tells us that " Beforetime in Israel, when a man went to enquire of God, thus he spake, Come, and let us go to the seer : for he that is now called a Prophet was beforetime called a Seer," Now these seers or soothsayers are to be found among all primitive peoples ; and they were regarded with awe as men " possessed," under the influence of a spirit or demon who inspired them and spoke through them. Some- times these men gifted with the faculty of second- sight owned it at all times, like Samuel. They could be advantageously consulted even in private matters like the loss of the asses of Kish. But, as a rule, seers could onlv reveal what was hidden to others, gaze behind the veil, when possessed by the spirit or demon, which for the time being overpowered the soul of the medium, and took entire possession of him. The medium could not himself bring on a revelation. He was, at rare intervals, seized by the supernatural spirit, his consciousness ceased, and the god spoke through him words which he was himself unable to control or even at times to understand. Examples of this kind of revelation are common in the ancient world, in Arabia, Greece, everywhere. In the Bible, Balaam, and the "maiden possessed with a spirit of divination " (Acts xvi. 16, 19) are cases in point. These soothsayers, diviners, prognosticators Inspiration. 331 (Is. xlvii.)were the natural outcome of an age steeped in magic and sorcery. And this superstition struck deeper root in the hearts of the intensely credulous and emotional Semitic peoples than anywhere else. The religions of Arabia, Babylonia and Canaan fully prove it ; while the uncompromising and hostile attitude of the prophets (Micah v. 12, Jer. xxvii. 9 and Isaiah) towards soothsaying shows how strongly it appealed to the Jews at, all times. Now when we pass to the prophets of the days of Samuel, we come to an entirely different class of persons from these spirit-possessed " soothsayers " who worked themselves into a state of frenzy allied to madness and gave utterance to ecstatic cries, or exhibited other tokens of possession, under the compelling influence of their demon-spirit. The "schools of the prophets" were a new and unique phenomenon, nowhere mentioned before the time of Samuel. They were peculiar to Israel, a purely Hebrew growth on Hebrew soil. We have already seen (ch. xiii.) that they were the outcome of the intense wave of patriotic enthusiasm and religious revival which burst over Israel after their defeat by the Philistines at Aphek. These prophets appear not individually, like the old seers, but in bands. As in the Middle Ages the ravages of the plague gave rise to troops of flagellants, so Israel's subjection to a people hated and unclean worked these en- thusiasts into a state of holy frenzy, and produced, 332 Inspiration. as it always does in the East, a new religious order, like the howling dervishes of Islam. The prophesying of these prophets is marked by intensely excited preaching accompanied by music and ecstatic utterances and songs. They are bands of enthusiasts on whom the Spirit of God has laid hold with overpowering force, and, stimulated by loud music and their own ecstasy to still greater frenzy, their enthusiasm becomes highly contagious. It may be so powerful that he who is seized by it is unable to stand. Even Saul is so carried away by it that he strips off his clothes and lies naked for a day and a night in holy frenzy (i Sam. xix. 24). Now here we have in this genuine Hebrew re- ligious prophetism all the excitement and ecstatic frenzy which was the accompaniment of the older magical demon-possessed soothsaying. Under pro- phetic inspiration a man was beside himself, lost all his self-control, " the spirit of the Lord will come mightily upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man " (i Sam. X. 5, 6, cf. xix. 20). We can readily under- stand this strange phenomenon. The Hebrews of Samuel's day were a rude primitive people, deeply superstitious and intensely emotional. Now, just as a sudden shock, or fright, or prolonged excitement, or depression naturally produces catalepsy in a per- son of highly nervous temperament, so an intense wave of excitement working on these superlatively Inspiration. 333 emotional Hebrew enthusiasts operated in such a manner that they were beside themselves, hardly any longer masters of their own thoughts or wills. These early prophets of Samuel's day did, in their abnormally excited frenzy, see visions, and fall into trances, and dream dreams, and actually hear the voice of God, just as one hears words audibly and sees persons and things in a dream. When the Spirit of the Lord was upon him, the prophet literally saw visions and heard voices, and these terms truly describe the mental experience of these men, and are not mere figures of speech. But, when we come to the canonical prophets, the whole condition of things has changed. Even Elijah and Elisha, excitable as they are, become only pale reflexions of the frenzy of the earlier prophets of Samuel's day. And when we reach the period of Isaiah, Jeremiah and the canonical prophets gener- ally, the frenzy of ecstatic excitement has practically ceased, so far as it was possible for it to disappear in emotional Hebrew temperaments, and hardly any reference to it is made at all. The new prophet was conscious of being an individual independent person, and as such he entered into fellowship with God. He was no more, to the same extent, overpowered by an uncontrollable impulse from without which superseded his proper self. Excitation there still was, but self-consciousness was not lost ; and, in the very few instances where canonical prophets still "see" visions and "hear" words, a clear memory of 334 Inspiration. what has happened remains, and enables them to de- scribe the whole scene vividly in their own lucid words. But,— and this is the important point, — language is so conservative, so apt to retain expressions, ideas, habits of thought which have been emptied of all their meaning and are senseless by the light of actual experience, that even when the ecstatic excitation of prophecy had ceased, when prophets no longer normally saw visions, they still continued to use exactly the same form of words as in olden times. The primitive phrases are retained — the prophet " sees," " hears," " the hand of the Lord is upon him." But their original meaning is altogether gone out of these phrases. The words survive, but the feelings they once truly represented are no longer experi- enced, they are dead. We are well aware that distinct reference is made to a state of trance or visions in Is. vi. ; Ezek. i. ; Daniel vii., viii., x., xi., xii. ; Zech. i., iv., v., vi. We see precisely the same thing in Acts x. (S. Peter's vision) ; and 2 Cor. xii. (the vision of S. Paul), but S. Paul distinguishes between. " revelations " and "visions" (2 Cor. xii. i), just as in Numb. xii. 8 " speaking mouth to mouth " is contrasted with " visions and dreams." True, S. Paul had a " vision," but no one will dare to assert that he wrote his Epis- tles under the influence of a vision, and he only refers to it under a kind of semi-compulsion. In the same way there are undoubtedly instances recorded of communications made to the canonical prophets by Inspiration. 335 God in visions, but this does not alter the case at all. They are the exceptions which prove the rule, and their prophetic writings were no more written under the influence of these very rare and exceptional visions, than were S. Paul's Epistles due to his trance. The visionarv condition was an abnormal state with these prophets. It has even been plausibly sug- gested that "just as an artist, after dwelling long in thought on a work of art which he only has in his mind's eye, suddenly sees it flash before him in unthought-of finish and beauty so clearly that he can retain the vision and carry it into execution, so the truths so long dwelt on by the prophet have so taken possession of the prophet's sub-conscious mind and heart that when God's revelation flashes upon him the vision appears as a visible picture to his eye." We are told that Socrates, diving into the recesses of his soul, was sometimes so abstracted as to be utterly insensible to external impressions, and poured forth enigmatical expressions strange to him in his wakeful state ; so rapt in meditation, that he was absent and indifferent to all around him, once for twenty-four hours and remaining the whole time in one spot ; and at such times such deep revelations came to him that he was firmly convinced that they were supernatural suggestions from God. Had Socrates been, not a calm thoughtful Greek, but a warm-blooded, emotional, God-intoxicated Hebrew prophet, he would probably have seen visions. In both cases, the experiences were undoubtedly reve- 336 Inspiration. lations direct from God Himself, but they acted differently on the two different temperaments. That Isaiah, and S. Paul, and S. Peter saw a genuine vision, and this directly illumined by God's light, we do not for one moment doubt. It is inconceiv- able that they should have invented the incident. Everything shows that each, on this one occasion, beheld the supra-earthly pictures he describes, and heard the Divine commission ; but they were very exceptional instances, and the ordinary communica- tions made to them by God were in their conscious moments when they were their own proper selves. To bring these arguments to a focus. We have seen that in the ancient world there was a firm belief that certain human souls were "god-possessed," so overpowered for the time being by a spirit, that the man was in a state of holy frenzy, beside himself. While he was in this unconscious ecstatic state, the god spoke through him words which the seer could neither control nor often even understand. These seers or soothsayers ceased to be regarded as holy men after Samuel's day. But the popular superstitious mind clung to them at all times, as Isaiah and Jeremiah show ; and a firm belief in such demon-possession and divination was current in Christ's and S. Paul's day. Even the new schools of prophets of Samuel's day, which superseded these seers, only confirmed the old view of inspiration ; for these early prophets displayed identically the same symptoms of intense emotional and physical frenzy. Inspiration. i^^J They thus fostered the conviction that ecstatic holy frenzy was the natural state not only of demon- possessed soothsayers, but even of the "men of God " who were God's chosen mouthpieces. This holy frenzy and physical excitement con- tinued, but in an ever lessening degree, in Elijah, Elisha, and even in Amos and Hosea. In Isaiah it has practically ceased ; though emotional Oriental natures could never quite throw it off. Normally, however, the canonical prophets, while under the influence of God's Spirit, are their own ordinary conscious proper selves ; yet they still use the old set phrases common in the old days of holy frenzy, though the phrases are no longer strictly true as ap- plied to themselves. Thus the casual reader is led, by these set expressions, to believe that the canonical prophets are still mere tools in God's hands. Therefore the Jews, when the Scriptures began to be collected and the first Canon of Holy Scripture formed in Ezra's day (440 B.C.), (a Canon which was only completed in the first century A.D. long after the voice of prophecy had ceased), naturally fancied that all prophets were merely the unconscious mouth- pieces of God and could not choose to alter one syllable in their message. This view coincided with a reverent conception of the Word of God, and the early Christians when they took over the Canon of Holy Scripture bodily from the Jews, borrowed at the same time the Hebrew view of verbal inspiration, and clung to it firmly. 33^ Inspira tion. 7 It is only one more illustration of the universal law of evolution. In early days God was conceived as a physically strong almighty God; so His pro- phets, when under His influence, were seized and carried away by a sudden pJiysical impulse. Thus Samson, under God's Spirit, rends a lion, Elijah is by It carried away no one knows whither ; they all do things beyond man's normal power. Gradu- ally, as God is seen to be a moral righteous God and not merely physically strong, His methods of dealing with men are also seen to undergo a change in men's minds. He is now represented as using men as free moral agents, working upon them through their own wills. Even though the same words are used of God's action upon man in the two cases, yet " the hand of the Lord comes mightily upon me and overpowers me " means a totally different thing in the case of Elijah on the one hand, and Isaiah on the other. In Elijah's mind it is as if a real physical hand seized him and forced him along ; witii Isaiah it is a moral impulse within his own heart inspiring him to a certain course of action, just as it is with us now. To quote a precisely paiallel case, the writer of Genesis in looo B.C. can only conceive of temptation as due to an outward voice coming from a visible devil in the shape of a serpent. Three hundred years later, Isaiah would have expressed the same fact to his own mind, exactly as we do nowadays ; but as a Jew he would still have used something of Inspiration. 339 the old language, though to him, as to Christ, the words would have now become a mere figure of speech. So the ecstatic, unconscious, mechanical view of inspiration breaks down utterly. More than this, not only is Inspiration "a divine impulse given to the prophet's own thoughts" (Stanley), — or, still better, a message from God flashed upon the inspired man as a kind of intuition, — but we must ever bear in mind S. Paul's caution, " we have this treasure of God in eartJien vessels" (2 Cor. iv. 7), for it means much. It tells us something which is only plain common-sense, viz, that whether the " man of God " was Moses, David, Isaiah, S. Matthew or S. Paul, this holy man's character, his personal individuality, his mental views on things in general (outside his message as a spiritual revelation from God), were not altered by the fact of his inspiration. Moses and David, for example, had not our modern know- ledge of science, therefore we cannot expect in their writings a scientific account of the Creation. The inspired writers each shared the views, the knowledge or ignorance, the broad or narrow moral and religious opinions of his day and generation ; however perfect the writer may have been, he had a mental atmo- sphere of his own as we all have. He uttered God's message to mankind, but it comes to us in "an earthen vessel," tinged with his own limited views, coloured by the ideas and language of his day, the light and mental atmosphere of his generation. The 340 Inspiration. revelation comes to us through a man, not an angel ; and it is only in Christ and through Christ that we have the pure perfect message absolutely free from any taint or flaw : in every other inspired man of God the human element peeps through somewhere. It is precisely this weak human factor which alone explains much that otherwise puzzles us in the Bible. All through the Old Testament, side by side with its great spiritual truths which are its backbone, its real divine message, we find a number of inaccuracies in incidental details. The Flood is described as if it had covered the whole earth, and as if specimens of every animal in existence had entered the Ark in sevens and in pairs ; a geological and physical im- possibility. In Joshua, the sun stands still upon Gibeon, the moon upon the valley of Ajalon. In like manner, there are many incidents in the Old Testament, mentioned as if done in the name of God, which our conscience condemns. To name only a few : God's order to destroy Israel's enemies wholesale, man, woman, child and beast ; the bless- ing pronounced on Jael above all women for her cold-blooded murder of her guest Sisera in his sleep ; the Psalmist's " blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and dasheth them against the stones," — how are we to reconcile these immoral deeds with our idea of God ? We must ascribe them not to God's Inspiration, — they are altogether foreign to His true nature, — we must trace them to their real source, the human clement which so i Inspiration. 341 often peeps through the pages of the Old Testa- ment. This does not lower the Bible in a wise man's eyes. The Inspiration of the Bible no one doubts, the Higher Critics least of all : it is an undeniable glaring fact. There is a wonderful unity underlying all the Bible's variety which clearly proves that, behind the forty odd writers who composed it, there was all the while a Divine Master Mind guiding them one and all. From cover to cover there is a golden connecting thread running through the whole Bible, one goal in view to which everything else points, — Jesus and the Cross. Each portion of the Bible dovetails into the next ; its various books seem so many chapters written by one and the same author, at different stages of his life, as his experience and mental horizon broadened, instead of being the work of some forty independent writers living a thousand years apart. How are we to account for this wondrous unity, this perfect adap- tation of the various parts so that the independent works of these many authors form not a discon- nected library but one Book ? There is and can be but one answer : now as in S. Peter's day it is a fact that " The Word of God came not from man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." The Bible still is and ever will be God's guide to man enabling him to live a true life here, to walk with God and clasp the hand of his brother-man on 342 Inspii'ation. earth, to look forward to the attainment of the full stature of the perfect man hereafter. The spiritual portion of the Bible is and ever will be all God's own, full of comfort in our sorrow, our lamp and guide in the way of life, our one staff and support in the hour of death. Modern criticism cannot, does not wish or attempt to alter that, — it is a thing which cannot be shaken ; its one aim is to render the Bible more intelligible by opening our eyes to the human element in the minor details of Holy Scripture, a human element which alone ac- counts for much that is otherwise inexplicable in Bible pages. In the words of one of these Higher Critics, " It is God Who is the Moral Governor of the world, it is He Who has shaped its history, and it is His inspired Bible that enables us to understand it. The Bible remains, and will remain, the most precious heritage of mankind, — God's own Book." CHAPTER XX. Revelation. IN connection with the Bible the words Inspiration and Revelation are often confused and regarded as interchangeable : they do dovetail one into the other, but they are not the same thing. Inspiration is the divine flashlight which reveals the picture ; it is the cause, and Revelation is the result. In Inspiration God pours a flood of warm clear light upon some great truth, which has been there all the while, only it was hidden from our eyes. The Divine light dissipates the darkness that veiled it from us, and when God thus shows us things as they art\ and we grasp the reality for the first time, this new picture of an old truth is a revelation to us. The very word Revelation, or " unveiling anew," tells us that the truth now unveiled existed before our eyes saw it. At first it comes upon us as a discovery so strange and startling, but the burst of surprise once over, gradually the new truth takes its place among things which are quite natural : it seems so simple and clear we wonder we did not see it before, and we are then ready for another and further revelation going beyond it. Thus it is that in the Bible which describes for 344 Revelation. us the gradual training, enlightening, education of mankind by God, as their minds and hearts were ready to receive the new truths, revelations naturally came in bits and in various ways : " by divers portions and in divers manners." We have in the Bible pages many of the gradual steps by which God led man from the stage of savagery right up to the perfect revelation in Christ. At first man's e}es were only able to bear a mere tiny gleam of light, and God gave them that, and ever more and more as their eyes were able to receive it. There- fore, when He showed Himself at last to man as He is in Christ, " His own express image," this perfect revelation did not burst suddenly upon men unprepared for it, like a blinding lightning-flash on a dark night; it was rather like the rising of the sun after a long and gradually lightening twilight. Thus Inspiration is the flashlight : Revelation is the picture unveiled by it : Scripture is the collection of these divine pictures. A very interesting question suggests itself. Why did God confine His Inspiration and Revelation, in the sense in which we commonly understand these terms, to the Hebrews ? We have already hinted at the answer in a former chapter. We have said there that, following a natural law of evolution, just as from the same plants in course of ages, owing to individual peculiarities and different surroundings, are produced flowers differing in size, shape, colour, markings, perfume ; and precisely the same thing Revelation. 345 occurs in animals, so that some become fishes, birds or quadrupeds, others develope into apes ; in like inanner each group of mankind, and . each family within these groups, has in course of ages developed distinct functions. From some innate peculiarity in the ancestors of the Greeks, and owing to their peculiar surroundings, they have developed an ab- normal faculty of refinement and thought ; so philosophy and art ha\'e been their contribution to the common good of mankind. In the same way, Rome's function and mission has been to teach the human race law, organization and government ; while the Teutonic peoples have taught men the lesson of honour and truthfulness. For a similar reason we owe to the Jews our religion. Firmly believing as we do that the history of the world has a deep meaning, and that it is not a mere chance succession of events : that God is the moral Governor of the universe and has shaped the world's history, — we see in these various functions of the different nations clear evidences of God's Divine plan ; and there is no favoritism in it. In God's eyes all individuals and nations are alike, for He is no respecter of persons. They are all members of one body : none can dispense with the other : the health of the whole body depends on the health of each and every part of it. But though the whole body is one, each member has its special function for which it is naturally adapted. Some of these members may seem to be more honorable and to 34^ Revelation. have higher functions than others, but all are equally necessary to the body's well-being (i Cor. xii.). Greece's refinement and thought : Rome's law and organization : the Teutonic faculty of truthfulness and honour : Israel's religion : the African's capacity for hard menial work are all wanted. No one nation has a monopoly of all the virtues ; each race must fully develope its own special qualifications, con- tribute that as its share to the world's civilization, and, in due course, the ripe fruit of each nation's life-work becomes the common property of all man- kind. Each nation in turn is God's "steward," en- trusted by God with certain talents to be laid out not for its own selfish ends but for the common good of all. Thus it was that after Israel had learnt its lesson of religion, it handed it on to the world at large, and in this sense "salvation is of the Jews." " Heaven doth with us as we with torches do. Not light them for themselves." This will also explain why we restrict Inspiration to Jewish writers, and refuse it to the literary geniuses of Greece, Rome or other nations. In its Bible sense, Inspiration means a divine suggestion or revelation to man, coming direct from God, about God Himself in His relationship to man. This is just the distinguishing mark between the Inspiration of a Moses, Isaiah or S. Paul and the inspiration of a Homer or Shakespeare. True, every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of Revelation. 347 lights ; every gift of genius, every sacred or secular gift is God's and comes from God. Mankind at large feels that it is so, or they would not have applied one and the same word, inspiration, to Shakespeare and Psalmist alike. In both cases we are all conscious that our souls have been nobly spoken to by a noble spirit : drawn out in admiration and joy, in hope and despair, in aspiration, wonder, love : that the highest and best qualities in us have been forcibly appealed to by a spirit akin to, yet superior to our own. We feel this influence in the presence of a great writer or artist, just as we do in the presence of the writers of Holy Scripture, and we call it inspiration in either case, because we instinctively realise it comes from God. But we do not say of the inspiration of a Shakespeare that it is Revealed. Yes, their source is one and the same, but their aim \s not the same. All great works of genius fill us with awe, but not all lead us Godward : and it is precisely in this pronounced Godward aim that we realise the clear and distinct note of Inspiration in the Bible,— it comes straight from God and leads straight to God. Hence we say the Bible is Revealed. One word more : why does this supernatural In- spiration end with the New Testament writers ? The reason is self-evident : it is because with Christ —God made Man — the Revelation is complete. The Gospels are written merely to place clearly before our eyes the portrait of the Christ, a portrait of in- expressible moral beauty and sinless perfection. 348 RevtiMion. We cannot spare the Epistles either, nor the Acts, tor, to know Christ fully, we must not only know what He Himself said and did, we must see what He made of the men who surrendered themselves to His influence, how far they caught His Spirit and grasped His teaching. Christ copied, reflected, ex- hibited in a S. John or S. Paul, and in the early Christian Church, is as much part of the revelation of :he Christ as is the perfect Christ Who stands beiore us in the Gospels. Therefore we cannot spare S. John's philosophy, or S. Paul's theolog>% or the historical picture of the early Church as drawn in the Acts: they all form part of Christ's own witness to Himself by His Holy Spirit. With the new Testament, however, the last word has been said : all that is needed henceforth is the Holy Spirit's indwelling presence and guidance to bring home to men's hearts the length and breadth, the depth and height of this perfect Revelation of God in Christ. God's Holy Spirit has been doing this work ever since, and is abundantly doing it now. In many ways, after all these 1900 years, if we may say so without irreverence, we see further and deei>er into their own writings than the inspired writers themselves. This is only Christ's fulfilling of His own promise. Christ said He had sown the seed which would grow into a tree : that His disciples would "do greater works than He." He promised that when the Holy Spirit came : " He will guide you into all truth," "for there are many other things Revelation. 349 I have to tell you, but ye cannot bear them now." Ha.s the Holy Spirit been guiding men ever since into the truth as they were able to receive it ? Can there be any doubt about the answer if we believe in Christ and in the Holy Ghost at all ? God's eternal purpose for man's spiritual progress is ever marching on, never at a standstill ; His truths are daily sinking deeper and deeper into men's hearts, finding truer expression in individual lives and the tone of society at large. To urge no other! plea, the change of stress from the old Christianity . / of right belief to the modern Christianity of right character has brought us much nearer to Christ, has made us much more able and willing to learn of Him — and there is more beyond. Let us in our inmost hearts believe in the orolden vear. It will come. CHAPTER XXI, Canon of Holy Scripture. IT is desirable to say a few words about the Canon of Holy Scripture, for the question will naturally arise in many minds, " How is it compatible with the Canon of Holy Scripture to discuss, as has been done in this volume, the authenticity of this or that book of the Bible ? " But what is this Canon, and what its intrinsic value ? Has it a divine or a purely human sanction to back it ? If the Canon is of human origin, on what principle was it formed ? What were the considerations which determined the inclusion or exclusion of particular books or groups of books ? The word Canon means originally a " measuring rod, a standard rule": as applied to the Bible it defines "the list or catalogue of. books authoritatively received and declared to be Holy Scripture and recognized universally as the Church's rule of faith and practice, its final court of appeal.'' We shall see that Ezra, about 440 B.C., was the first to collect the sacred books of the Jews and thus lay the foundation of a Canon ; though the word itself does not occur in connection with Holy Scripture till Origen so applied it about 200 A.D. This does Canon of Holy Scripture. 351 not, of course, mean that the jews had no sacred books before Ezra's day : for Jiund reds of years ^ / / previously, they had fully recognized the Mosaic ' ' , books oT~the Law as peculiarly sacred and as having a special Divine authority. A brief historical account of the formation of the Old Testament Canon may make our meaning clearer. When the Jews returned from the Captivity the last shreds of their old national hopes had practically vanished, politically the Exile had broken and quashed Israel as a nation : to obey the Law of Jehovah and patiently await the coming Deliverer was the only vocation that remained for the little community gathered in Jerusalem. The voice of prophecy, long since lacking the old fire, expired with Malachi, and the age of religious literary activity was past. Thus, amid present misfortune (which the distant hope of a brighter future could not dispel), and weighted with regretful memories of a past tinged with ideal splendour, the whole concern of the nation from this time forward was simply to preserve the sacred inheritance of that past, and to lean more and more upon the sacred books which had been their sheet-anchor in the Exile, especially the Mosaic Law. In the eyes of Ezra and his contemporaries the Law was God's greatest gift to Israel, the complete revelation of Jehovah's Will, and the basis of His solemn inviolable Cove- nant with His chosen people. In His Law God had made known the perfect way of life, binding 352 Canon of Holy Scripture. Himself by its terms to reward both now and for ever the pious Jew who faithfully kept its precepts. All these circumstances, the political annihilation of the nation, the dearth of prophecy, the present misery, and this deification of the Law called into existence a new class of men, the scribes, who took the place of the old prophets. They were pure men of letters who entirely devoted themselves to the study of the law and copied, edited, interpreted it for the common good. Thus Ezra, the great type and model pattern of this new order, is described in Ezra vii. as " a ready scribe in the Law of Moses who had set his heart to seek the Law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel its statutes and judgments." The Law was made the one rule of faith and practice. Neh. viii. tells us that at a solemn public meeting, when " all the people gathered themselves together as one man," Ezra the scribe brought '■ the book of the Law of Moses," read it publicly to the people day by day right through, and the whole assembly bound and solemnly pledged themselves to keep this Law. Thus public sanction was given to the Penta- teuch, some say the Hexateuch, and there and then was laid the foundation of the Canon and the first step taken in its formation (444 B.C.). But the canonization of Scripture could not stop there. There were other great religious writings in existence : there were the great prophets whose ex- hortations and warnings, which at the time of their utterance had fallen on listless ears, had been verified Canon of Holy Scripture. 353 by experience. A number of historical books such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings were also held in the highest reverence. These prophetic and his- torical books were soon felt to be only second in importance to the law, and a second Canon was soon formed under the general title of The PropJiets. Under this term are included the Former PropJiets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and the Latter Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve minor prophets. This division receives its general name of TJie Prophets because the prophets were regarded as the authors of all these books. Chronicles was not at first included in this group because it is a very late book. On the authority of the book of the Maccabees (2 Mace, ii.), the formation of this Canon is generally ascribed to Nehemiah, but this is an open question. This second collection or Canon was highly esteemed, though it did not take equal rank with the first. As to the Hagiographa it is extremely difficult to say when its books were canonized. The Psalms, on their own intrinsic merits, and from their sacred use in Temple worship, were always recognized as inspired ; the Proverbs of Solomon early acquired canonical authority from their religious tone, edifying wisdom, and the authority of the name of their supposed author. Ruth and Lamentations were long regarded as forming a kind of appendix to Judges and Jeremiah respectively, and as unquestionably canonical : of Job's right to inclusion in the Canon there never was A a 354 Canon of Holy Scripture. a shadow of a doubt in the Jewish mind, and Daniel was also admitted. Over Ecclesiastes, however, because of its cynicism, Canticles owing to its sensual tone, and Esther for its want of spirituality, there were grave questionings of heart ; and the discussion waxed long and furious as to their inclusion in the Canon down to 90 A.D. and even after. The Jews took such a material view of the holiness of Holy Scripture that they jealously regarded the alteration of the smallest letter or particle in it, " one jot or one tittle," as a grievous sin. This is curiously seen in their expression for a canonical book as one which ^'defiles the hand ;" the idea being that a really canonical book is such a holy thing that merely to touch it is desecration, and requires an expiation for sin precisely as if a man had touched the sacred Ark. To avoid this defilement the sacred books read in the synagogue were covered, but for a long time it was stoutly maintained that Canticles, Ecclesiastes and Esther did not " defile the hand." It was only in 90 A.D., at the Council of Jamnia, that it was finally decided by a majority, but by no means unanimously, that these books do " defile the hand." Even then, for long after, there was a difference of opinion on the subject and some Rabbis excluded one or more of these books, while others included in the Canon the apocryphal books of Sirach and Baruch. If it be asked on what definite principle books were admitted into the Canon, it is not easv to Canon of Holy Scripture. 355 answer. Real or apparent importance — especially religious — determined their adoption. The Penta- teuch was admitted because of its Divine Covenant and Mosaic authority ; it is the Hebrew Magna Charta, the basis of Israel's religious and national life, and has always been regarded by the Jews as peculiarly Divine. The Prophets spoke as God's mouthpieces, and their historical books bore witness to God's hand in Israel's history. Liturgical use in Temple and synagogue worship was another factor which contributed to the inclusion of a book in the Canon (e.g.. Psalms, Lamentations), as also did authorship by some famous person, such as Solomon. Of the three portions the Law undoubtedly stood first in Hebrew estimation ; The Prophets occupied a somewhat lower place, but its books were regularly read in the public services side by side with the Law. The Hagiographa was regarded as distinctly inferior to the other two. The only portions of this third section publicly read are Canticles (at the Passover), Ruth (at the Feast of Weeks), Lamentations (at the anniversary of the Destruction of Jerusalem''^), Eccle- siastes (at the Feast of Tabernacles), Esther (at the Feast of Purim). But the Hagiographa never * Septuagiiit preface (not found in the Hebrew ; but cf. 2 Chron. XXXV. 25). Lamentations is now read on the 9th of Ab, the anni- versary of the burning of the Temple by tlie Chaldasans. Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther together form the five Megilloth ('rolls'), or small books written on separate rolls for liturgical use at the five Jewish festivals mentioned. 356 Canon of Holy Scripture. ranked on a par with the other two sections in Hebrew opinion, or anywhere near it, and was scarcely distinguishable, as we have seen, from those of the more spiritual books of the Apocrypha. This undefined boundary of tlie Canon will explain the many allusions to the Apocrypha in the New Testament, implying that the writers had no rigid notions about the hard and fast line dividing canon- ical from uncanonical books. Thus the authority of the writers of the New Testament which would have gone far towards settling the question of the Canon, does not materially help us, for many of them seem to include Apocryphal books in their Bible. Jude quotes Enoch, Hebrews, and Maccabees ; S. Paul and S. Peter are familiar with the Book of Wisdom ; S. James with Sirach ; while the very books about which both Jews and Christians have any serious doubts, Esther, Canticles and Ecclesiastes are not even referred to in any way. Indeed so little idea had the early Christian Church of what books were in the Canon or not that Melito, Bishop of Sardis (170 A.D.), made it his special business to travel to Palestine to enquire among the native Jews there the number and names of their canonical books. To this historical sketch we should add a word on the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the Bible, made about 200 B.C. This most important version of the Old Testament seems almost to have super- seded the original among Greek readers, since the Canon of Holy Scripture. 357 New Testament writers almost invariably quote from it ; and we would especially point out that it inserts a number of Apocryphal books in addition to the writings generally included in the Canon ; further that the early Christian Fathers, Irena;us, Clement, and Origen, followed its lead. Even the Reformers of the sixteenth century did not regard the authority of the Canon as binding, and felt justified in discussing it, though they did not alter it. Luther thinks i Maccabees not unworthy to be placed on a level with the other canonical books, and would like to exclude Esther from the Canon. The modern study of the subject similarly tends to obscure the line drawn between the Hagiographa and the Apocrypha. Indeed, relying on their in- ternal value, or the witness of the books themselves to their spiritual worth, there are many who feel that if Ecclesiastes, Esther and Canticles had never been included in the Canon, and Sirach and Wisdom had been admitted, it would have been as well. We have entered into this important question thus in detail to show that the formation of the Canon of Scripture has been a very slow and gradual process, and that it is based on human, not divine, judgment and sanction. The canonicity of the respective books was not established by any Council or definite official ecclesiastical authority at the time of the formation of the Canon : the present list of books found its way into the Canon simply because the hearts of men told them that these writings were 358 Canon of Holy Scripture. inspired. It was enlightened religious common- sense that formed the Canon, and it is enlightened religious common-sense which must judge its value and finality ; the spiritually-guided intelligence and verdict not of this or that individual or body of individuals, but of all spiritually-minded, right- thinking, honest and devout men throughout the world. The acclamation of souls, the ripe judgment and verdict of enlightened rehgious public opinion, must be the final court of appeal. It will never make much alteration in the present accepted list of holy books, for the only books of whose claim to canonicity there is any serious doubt are just those which, from a religious point of view, are least important. But the essential fact to remember is that the Canon was formed gradually, as the result of local usage : it was not the outcome of criticism or of any authoritative decision on the part of the whole 1 Church or General Councils, but the product of uni- \ versal Jewish reverence and esteem. The acclamation of souls established the canonical value of the books before any Church or General Council gave its official sanction to them. The Canon was 'not formed in one place or at one time : it varied in different places and at different times, and the value assigned to some books of the Hagiographa and Apocrypha respectively was not according to our estimate, but according to the estimate of men of bygone times. From 400 B.C. to 400 A.D. its boundaries were undefined, elastic, constantly changing. At the pre- Canon of Holy Scripture. 359 sent clay the Roman and Greek Churches have a much more extended Canon than our own, while Luther, and the Reformers, and modern Bible stu- dents alike have felt that the last word has not yet been said on the subject. The primitive Church may be quoted as a witness for the Canon ; that is all. Really and truly the canonicity of these books lies within themselves and nowhere else. The one question is, '"' Do they bear God's own stamp and mint-mark ? Do they, or do they not, bear clear witness to their own inspiration as containing a revelation and declaration of the Divine Will ? " In the words of the Westminster Confession " our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority of Holy Scripture is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness in our own hearts." This was the test originally applied to these books in the first instance when they were admitted into the Canon ; and the application of this same test may at some future time lead to some slight alteration in our present list of books. But we may be sure that it will not be done lightly or unadvisedly, for, in Westcott's phrase, the general consensus which fixed the Canon was almost " a divine instinct, a providential inspiration." All we imply is that the Canon was formed not by God, but man ; therefore, when the question arises, *' Should Leviticus or Numbers be included in the Mosaic Books ? Are Esther, Canticles and Ec- clesiastes worthy of a place in the Canon .-"' it is no 360 Canon of Holy Scripture. real answer to exclaim, "They are in the Canon, and therefore God's own Word." So long as inspiration cannot be claimed for the process by which the Canon was formed, the mere fact that a book is included in the Canon does not prove that the book is inspired ; neither does it prove that every really canonical book within it occupies its proper chrono- logical place, or is ascribed to its right author. We fully believe with Westcott that the Canon was formed with a kind of " divine instinct," that " history teaches by the plainest examples that no one part of the Bible can be set aside without great and permanent injury to the Church which refuses a portion of the apostolic heritage." But this can be pushed too far : his estimate of the loss to the Church from the exclusion of the epistles of S. James or the Hebrews, and the canonising of the whole Apocrypha, is undoubtedly correct and just ; but would the exclusion of Esther, Ecclesiastes and Canticles be a loss or a gain ? The Canon of Holy Scripture is an inestimable boon and an imperative necessity. It is, on the whole, so well formed as to be almost the outcome of a " providential in- spiration." But when we speak of the Canon, or apply the term to the Bible, its value depends upon our taking the word in its true sense and not forcing into it a supernatural guarantee of inspiration which the human origin of the Canon does not justify. ipvintcS bv| S^amcs Ip.irl5cv an^ Co., Ciown iJaili, ©rfoiJ'. JAMES PARKER AND CO. 31 BEDFORD-STREET, STRAND, LONDON; AND ON Sale at Messrs. PARKER AND SON, 27 BROAD-STREET, OXFORD. Critical and Historical Notes ON THE PASSAGES SELECTED FOR THE SUNDAY AND HOLY DAY LESSONS FROM THE PENTA- TEUCH AND THE BOOK OF JOSHUA. By the Rev. P. J. BoYER, iM.A., Yicar of Rotliersthorpe, Northants. Cr. 8vo., 4^. iiet. {.7"^^ ready- Eleven Addresses during a Retreat of the Companions of the Love of Jesus, engaged in perpetual Intercession for the Conversion of Sinners. By the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D. With a new Preface by Viscount Halifax. A new Edition. 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