3. THE RELIGION OF THE JEWS
Against all the hundred religions of antiquity the religion of the Jews stands out a thing unique. Alone of them all it has survived. Zeus and Minerva, Osiris, Astarte, gods of the East and of the West are long since merely names; but to this day the Jews survive and the God Whom they worshipped in the far off centuries when these other cults too had their millions of devotees is still their God, worshipped now not only by Jews but by hundreds of millions of every race and nation.
By its subsequent history, then, the religion of ancient Jewry is a thing apart. It is no less clearly distinguished from the rest by the doctrine which is its core, and by the historic character of its origin. Judaism was the revelation made by God to a particular people; the revelation of a doctrine concerning Himself, of a moral teaching, and of the fact of their own special relation to Him with the promise to them of a special role in all subsequent ages. The history of the Jewish people is the development of the tradition of this revelation. By that revelation, which from the beginning is consistently presented as the free act of the Divine goodwill, the race is constituted a sanctuary wherein lie safeguarded the true belief in the only God, the true principles of moral conduct and the tradition of God's promise. Within this sanctuary of the chosen race the divinely revealed religion lives, and develops as from an internal principle; its implications brought out, its detail defined, in later revelations through nearly two thousand years.
There is only one God, who is master of the world and the source of law, just, moral. He represents in Himself an ideal of moral perfection and insists on its reflection in the lives of all He associates with Himself. He is not, then, indifferent to the moral quality of men's actions, but from the beginning demands of them truth and obedience to His law. This "ethical monotheism" survived and developed in a world whose spirit and tendencies were so hostile to it that the mere survival is "a phenomenon unique of its kind. . . . It is a feat greater than the men who bring it about, and, contrasting as it does with the milieu wherein it is produced, puts the ordinary logic of history to flight." For this monotheism is, with the Jews, the popular belief. It is not a higher teaching in which only the elite of these people are initiated.
It was to Abraham -- the chief of a group of Hebrews living in Chaldea -- that, in a world rocking in political convulsion, the revelation was made. He obeyed the call, accepted the charge, believed the promise; and left, with his people, the moral decadence that lay around. To God he and they were now specially covenanted, and thereby separated from the rest of mankind. With this separation the history of Jewry begins. The development falls naturally into two uneven periods divided by the political destruction of the Jewish nation under the Babylonian kings (586 B.C.), and in the first and greater half of the development we may reckon roughly three principal stages. These are the primitive revelation to Abraham; the second revelation and re-organisation under Moses; and the work of preservation through the Prophets.
Moses, the leader personally called by God to whom first God makes known His nature in His name -- Yahweh (He Who Is) is the restorer of Abraham's tradition which, in the centuries of his descendants' slavery to Egypt, had almost perished. Moses it is who leads the people from Egypt and in the forty years of their wanderings makes a nation of this loose association of Abraham's children. Throughout, and consistently, he acts as the agent of Yahweh in obedience to frequent and explicit divine directions. But his influence in history is greater still as the divinely directed legislator. Here the traditional revelation is expressed once more, but with a new protective precision; and, with a wealth of detail, its moral principles are applied to the Hebrew's everyday life. Yahweh is God, and Yahweh alone is God. Israel is Yahweh’s people, His property; and if there is an alliance between Him and them, once more it is His good will and choice that is its foundation. He is the God of holiness of life, the enemy of violence and injustice. The sexual aberrations so closely and so universally interwoven with the contemporary idea of religious practice, are particularly obnoxious; and He exacts from all a purity of soul of which the carefully ordained bodily purity is but the sign. Throughout all the multitude of detailed observances there runs this idea of personal holiness as the end of life. The spirit of filial fear is to be the spirit of their observance and from the beginning the duty of charity and love of one's fellows is enforced. The law, its ideals and its motives, is for all; whence its power as the instrument of this people's moral and religious education. Its theocratic character, and the repeated insistence, whether in matters of ritual or of legal prescription as generally understood, on the supreme importance of the inner law of mind and conscience, safeguard it from the deadening effect that is the sure end of all mere codes of right behaviour. In this insistence Jewish law is unique, as it is unique in its aim of personal sanctification.
The cult remains, in principle, the same as that revealed to Abraham: prayer and sacrifice. Human sacrifices are from the beginning forbidden, and there is an emphatic prohibition of any attempt to represent in images Yahweh who is a spirit. The sacrifices are offered in one place only, before the Ark of the Alliance a chest of cedar wood that holds the sensible memorials of the divine dealings with Moses. There is an elaborate official ritual and a priestly caste. hereditary in one of the twelve tribes.
Moses is the man of his people's period of transition -- ruling and teaching for the forty years that lie between their leaving Egypt and their arrival in "the Promised Land," the Canaan to which Yahweh, centuries before, had directed Abraham. Their arrival and the death of Moses came together; and with their entry into this new country came a violent religious reaction. The temptation to abandon their austere religion, once escaped from the desert that was its natural setting, was strong. The Jews lived now in an easier, more generous land where everything called to the senses; and the native religions which, on every side, canonised moral corruption, afforded them an example which they imitated only too readily. Hence with their new political and social relations periods of apostasy, more or less open, from the worship of Yahweh; an ever-present danger of corruption of that worship and its teaching; and, in the new little kingdom, a more or less general moral decay.
So it was to be for some centuries: a never ending struggle between the traditional "ethical monotheism" and the inviting appeals of sense; but never does the tradition, doctrinal or moral, wholly disappear and unlike, for example, the Philistines, the Hebrews retain their individuality: they are never absorbed by the civilisations around them. This survival was due to the labours of the Prophets, spiritual free-lances whom from time to time Yahweh raised up to preserve the tradition and to develop it. At every critical moment of the kingdom's history they appeared, Yahweh’s messengers, speaking in His name, attesting the authenticity of their message by miracles and prophecies. Careless of the dignity or office of the guilty, they denounced unsparingly the moral corruption and the defections from Mosaic orthodoxy, recalling unceasingly the special vocation of the Jews and their special duties towards Yahweh who had called them. In times of political defeats they taught from contemporary events the lesson of Yahweh as God outraged by man's sin and punishing for man's correction. Salvation, reconciliation with God, Who was the nation's life, was possible through penance -- for along with the notion of divine justice the Prophets developed, too, the correlative idea of the divine pity for man and the idea of Yahweh’s special fatherly care for the Jews. More than ever is the holiness of God insisted on, of Yahweh, Who is the God not only of Israel but of all mankind, Master of the tyrants whom He suffered to oppress them as truly as He is Master of the defeated and broken nation. Wickedness will be punished, no matter what the race of the wrongdoer; and Israel is encouraged to submit with resignation to the divine justice, with an affectionate, filial piety that discerns the love behind a father's wrath. As the inevitable catastrophe draws on, the denunciation of wickedness in high places grows ever more severe, and the sternest critics of religious abuses are here no philosophers from outside but Yahweh’s own accredited ambassadors. And with the increasing vehemence of the reproach, the spirituality of the message grows ever deeper. More and more do the Prophets develop the notion that it is the piety and fidelity of the individual that is the one security for the present, the one hope for the future. Finally Nabuchodonosor captures the Holy City; the Temple that is the one centre of religious life is destroyed, and the last remnant of the people carried off into captivity; and in the midst of the lamentations and the cruelty of the oppressors, there comes from the broken heart of Israel the Prayer of Jeremias, the most sublime of testimonies to the ideal of the individual life with God, the highest moral achievement of all the earlier Old Testament writings.
The Prophets had yet another role. They kept ever before the mind of the Jew, and never more than in these hours of defeat, the promises made of old to Abraham that from his race there should one day come the glory of the world; and in their successive reminders the promises became ever more precise. For the faithlessness of His people had not alienated Yahweh for ever. Present disaster is but the means to their betterment and closer union with Him. Far from being unmindful of His ancient promises of a Saviour, He chooses the present time of catastrophe to renew them yet more splendidly, and thereby to heighten and spiritualise His chosen people's hope.
Against all the hundred religions of antiquity the religion of the Jews stands out a thing unique. Alone of them all it has survived. Zeus and Minerva, Osiris, Astarte, gods of the East and of the West are long since merely names; but to this day the Jews survive and the God Whom they worshipped in the far off centuries when these other cults too had their millions of devotees is still their God, worshipped now not only by Jews but by hundreds of millions of every race and nation.
By its subsequent history, then, the religion of ancient Jewry is a thing apart. It is no less clearly distinguished from the rest by the doctrine which is its core, and by the historic character of its origin. Judaism was the revelation made by God to a particular people; the revelation of a doctrine concerning Himself, of a moral teaching, and of the fact of their own special relation to Him with the promise to them of a special role in all subsequent ages. The history of the Jewish people is the development of the tradition of this revelation. By that revelation, which from the beginning is consistently presented as the free act of the Divine goodwill, the race is constituted a sanctuary wherein lie safeguarded the true belief in the only God, the true principles of moral conduct and the tradition of God's promise. Within this sanctuary of the chosen race the divinely revealed religion lives, and develops as from an internal principle; its implications brought out, its detail defined, in later revelations through nearly two thousand years.
There is only one God, who is master of the world and the source of law, just, moral. He represents in Himself an ideal of moral perfection and insists on its reflection in the lives of all He associates with Himself. He is not, then, indifferent to the moral quality of men's actions, but from the beginning demands of them truth and obedience to His law. This "ethical monotheism" survived and developed in a world whose spirit and tendencies were so hostile to it that the mere survival is "a phenomenon unique of its kind. . . . It is a feat greater than the men who bring it about, and, contrasting as it does with the milieu wherein it is produced, puts the ordinary logic of history to flight." For this monotheism is, with the Jews, the popular belief. It is not a higher teaching in which only the elite of these people are initiated.
It was to Abraham -- the chief of a group of Hebrews living in Chaldea -- that, in a world rocking in political convulsion, the revelation was made. He obeyed the call, accepted the charge, believed the promise; and left, with his people, the moral decadence that lay around. To God he and they were now specially covenanted, and thereby separated from the rest of mankind. With this separation the history of Jewry begins. The development falls naturally into two uneven periods divided by the political destruction of the Jewish nation under the Babylonian kings (586 B.C.), and in the first and greater half of the development we may reckon roughly three principal stages. These are the primitive revelation to Abraham; the second revelation and re-organisation under Moses; and the work of preservation through the Prophets.
Moses, the leader personally called by God to whom first God makes known His nature in His name -- Yahweh (He Who Is) is the restorer of Abraham's tradition which, in the centuries of his descendants' slavery to Egypt, had almost perished. Moses it is who leads the people from Egypt and in the forty years of their wanderings makes a nation of this loose association of Abraham's children. Throughout, and consistently, he acts as the agent of Yahweh in obedience to frequent and explicit divine directions. But his influence in history is greater still as the divinely directed legislator. Here the traditional revelation is expressed once more, but with a new protective precision; and, with a wealth of detail, its moral principles are applied to the Hebrew's everyday life. Yahweh is God, and Yahweh alone is God. Israel is Yahweh’s people, His property; and if there is an alliance between Him and them, once more it is His good will and choice that is its foundation. He is the God of holiness of life, the enemy of violence and injustice. The sexual aberrations so closely and so universally interwoven with the contemporary idea of religious practice, are particularly obnoxious; and He exacts from all a purity of soul of which the carefully ordained bodily purity is but the sign. Throughout all the multitude of detailed observances there runs this idea of personal holiness as the end of life. The spirit of filial fear is to be the spirit of their observance and from the beginning the duty of charity and love of one's fellows is enforced. The law, its ideals and its motives, is for all; whence its power as the instrument of this people's moral and religious education. Its theocratic character, and the repeated insistence, whether in matters of ritual or of legal prescription as generally understood, on the supreme importance of the inner law of mind and conscience, safeguard it from the deadening effect that is the sure end of all mere codes of right behaviour. In this insistence Jewish law is unique, as it is unique in its aim of personal sanctification.
The cult remains, in principle, the same as that revealed to Abraham: prayer and sacrifice. Human sacrifices are from the beginning forbidden, and there is an emphatic prohibition of any attempt to represent in images Yahweh who is a spirit. The sacrifices are offered in one place only, before the Ark of the Alliance a chest of cedar wood that holds the sensible memorials of the divine dealings with Moses. There is an elaborate official ritual and a priestly caste. hereditary in one of the twelve tribes.
Moses is the man of his people's period of transition -- ruling and teaching for the forty years that lie between their leaving Egypt and their arrival in "the Promised Land," the Canaan to which Yahweh, centuries before, had directed Abraham. Their arrival and the death of Moses came together; and with their entry into this new country came a violent religious reaction. The temptation to abandon their austere religion, once escaped from the desert that was its natural setting, was strong. The Jews lived now in an easier, more generous land where everything called to the senses; and the native religions which, on every side, canonised moral corruption, afforded them an example which they imitated only too readily. Hence with their new political and social relations periods of apostasy, more or less open, from the worship of Yahweh; an ever-present danger of corruption of that worship and its teaching; and, in the new little kingdom, a more or less general moral decay.
So it was to be for some centuries: a never ending struggle between the traditional "ethical monotheism" and the inviting appeals of sense; but never does the tradition, doctrinal or moral, wholly disappear and unlike, for example, the Philistines, the Hebrews retain their individuality: they are never absorbed by the civilisations around them. This survival was due to the labours of the Prophets, spiritual free-lances whom from time to time Yahweh raised up to preserve the tradition and to develop it. At every critical moment of the kingdom's history they appeared, Yahweh’s messengers, speaking in His name, attesting the authenticity of their message by miracles and prophecies. Careless of the dignity or office of the guilty, they denounced unsparingly the moral corruption and the defections from Mosaic orthodoxy, recalling unceasingly the special vocation of the Jews and their special duties towards Yahweh who had called them. In times of political defeats they taught from contemporary events the lesson of Yahweh as God outraged by man's sin and punishing for man's correction. Salvation, reconciliation with God, Who was the nation's life, was possible through penance -- for along with the notion of divine justice the Prophets developed, too, the correlative idea of the divine pity for man and the idea of Yahweh’s special fatherly care for the Jews. More than ever is the holiness of God insisted on, of Yahweh, Who is the God not only of Israel but of all mankind, Master of the tyrants whom He suffered to oppress them as truly as He is Master of the defeated and broken nation. Wickedness will be punished, no matter what the race of the wrongdoer; and Israel is encouraged to submit with resignation to the divine justice, with an affectionate, filial piety that discerns the love behind a father's wrath. As the inevitable catastrophe draws on, the denunciation of wickedness in high places grows ever more severe, and the sternest critics of religious abuses are here no philosophers from outside but Yahweh’s own accredited ambassadors. And with the increasing vehemence of the reproach, the spirituality of the message grows ever deeper. More and more do the Prophets develop the notion that it is the piety and fidelity of the individual that is the one security for the present, the one hope for the future. Finally Nabuchodonosor captures the Holy City; the Temple that is the one centre of religious life is destroyed, and the last remnant of the people carried off into captivity; and in the midst of the lamentations and the cruelty of the oppressors, there comes from the broken heart of Israel the Prayer of Jeremias, the most sublime of testimonies to the ideal of the individual life with God, the highest moral achievement of all the earlier Old Testament writings.
The Prophets had yet another role. They kept ever before the mind of the Jew, and never more than in these hours of defeat, the promises made of old to Abraham that from his race there should one day come the glory of the world; and in their successive reminders the promises became ever more precise. For the faithlessness of His people had not alienated Yahweh for ever. Present disaster is but the means to their betterment and closer union with Him. Far from being unmindful of His ancient promises of a Saviour, He chooses the present time of catastrophe to renew them yet more splendidly, and thereby to heighten and spiritualise His chosen people's hope.
