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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.
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