Creed and Deed: A Series of Discourses

In the foregoing sketch we have observed how deep a mist of uncertainty hangs over the earliest period, the golden age of the history of the Hebrews. All is in a state of flux, and what appeared compact and coherent at a distance yields to our touch upon closer contact. To gain terra firma let us turn to the period which immediately succeeded the settlement of the Israelites in Palestine; a period in which the outline of historical events begins to assume a more definite and tangible shape.

It was a dismal and sorrowful age. The bonds of social order were loosened; the current conceptions of the Deity and the rites of his worship were gross and often degrading. Mutual jealousies kindled the firebrand of war among the contending clans. Almost the whole tribe of Benjamin was extirpated. Abimelech slew seventy princes upon one stone. Lust and treachery ran riot. A wilder deed has never been chronicled in the annals of mankind than that related in chapter xix. of Judges, nor ever has a terrible deed been more terribly avenged. Now, looking backward, we ask, Is it to be believed that in the fourteenth century B. C. not only the leader of Israel, but also their elders, their priests, nay, large numbers of the very populace, shared in the most exalted, the most spiritual conceptions of God, and nourished the most refined sentiments in regard to human relationships, while immediately thereupon, and centuries thereafter, violence and bloodshed, and idolatry, do not cease from the records? It has been argued, indeed, that the worship of idols was but a relapse from the purity of a preceding age; and that, though the tradition of the Mosaic time may have been lost in the succeeding period among the people at large, it was still preserved in the circle of a select few, the judges, King David, and others. These, it is believed, continued to remain faithful disciples of the great lawgiver. But these very men, the judges – King David himself – all fall immeasurably below the standard that is set up in the Pentateuch. If they were esteemed the true representatives of the national religion in their day, if the very points in which they transgressed the provisions of the Mosaic code are distinguished by the approval of God and man, we are forced to conclude that that standard – by which they stand condemned – did not yet exist; that, in the days of David, the laws of Moses, as we now have them; were as yet unwritten and unknown. Let us illustrate this important point by a few examples taken from the records. Gideon no sooner returns from victory than he makes a golden idol and sets it up for worship. Jephthah slays his daughter as an offering of thanksgiving to Jehovah. In the Pentateuch the adoration of images is branded as the gravest of offences. David keeps household gods in his own home (Sam. xix). In the Pentateuch, on its opening page, God is proclaimed as a pure spirit, maker of heaven and earth. In the eyes of David (1 Sam, xxvi. 19), the sway of Jehovah does not extend beyond the borders of Palestine.* In the Pentateuch the ark of the covenant is described as the treasury of all that is brightest and best in the worship of the one God. None but the consecrated priest dare approach it, and even he only under circumstances calculated to inspire peculiar veneration and awe. In 2 Sam. vi., David abandons the ark to the keeping of a heathen Philistine. In an early age of culture, when fear and terror in the presence of superior force entered largely into the religious conceptions of the Hebrews, the taking of the census was deemed an act of grave transgression. It appeared a vaunting of one's strength; it seemed to indicate a defiant attitude toward the loftier power of the Deity, which he would certainly visit with condign punishment. At a later period the priesthood found it in their interest to override these scruples, and the taking of the census became an affair of habitual occurrence. In the last chapter of Samuel the more primitive view still predominated. Seventy thousand Israelites are miserably slain to atone for King David's presumption in commanding a census of the people. In the fourth book of Moses, on the other hand, the numbering of the people not only proceeds without the slightest evil resulting therefrom, but at the express command of God himself.

In the book of Deuteronomy the service of Jehovah is said to consist mainly in the practice of righteousness, in works of kindness toward our fellows, in sincere and holy love toward the Deity, who is represented as the merciful father of all his human children. Second Sam. xxi., a famine comes upon the land of Israel. The anger of Jehovah is kindled against the people. To appease him, David offers sacrifice – human sacrifice. The seven sons of Saul are slain, and their bodies kept exposed on the hill, "in sight of Jehovah," and the horrid offering is accepted, and the divine wrath is thereby pacified.** Truly, in the age of in the beginning of the barley-harvest. This circumstance seems to throw light on the primitive mode of celebrating the Passover. That the rite of human sacrifice was originally connected with this festival is generally acknowledged. Vide, e. g., Exod. xiii., 2. By such offerings it was intended, no doubt, to secure the favor of the god during the continuance of the harvest.

* Banishment being described as a transfer of allegiance to strange gods.

** It is important to note that the seven sons of Saul were sacrificed

David, the Hebrews were far, far removed from the high state of culture in which the ideal conception of religion that pervades Deuteronomy became possible. And long after, when centuries had gone by and the kingdom of Judah was already approaching its dissolution, the direful practices of David's reign still survived, and the root of idolatry had not been plucked from the heart of the people. Still do we hear of human sacrifice perpetrated in the midst of Jerusalem, and steeds and chariots dedicated to the sun-god, and images of the Phallus, and all the abominations of sensual worship, filled the very Temple of Jehovah.

But in the meantime a new force had entered the current of Hebrew history. The conviction that one God, and he an all-just, almighty being, ruled the destinies of Israel, began to take root. In the eighth century B. C. authentic records prove that monotheism, as a form of religious belief, obtained, at least among the more illustrious members of the prophetic order. We have elsewhere attempted to trace the causes which led to the rise of monotheism at this particular epoch, and can do no more than briefly allude to them here.

When the mountaineers of Southern Palestine, after centuries of protracted struggles, had secured the safe possession of individual homes, the endearments of domestic life were invested with a sanctity in their eyes never before known. The attachment of the Hebrew toward his offspring was intensified; his devotion to the wife of his bosom became purer and more enduring. Now, the prevailing forms of Semitic religion outraged these feelings at every point. The gods of the surrounding nations were gods of pleasure and of pain; and in their worship the stern practices of fanatic asceticism alternated with the wildest orgies of sensual enjoyment. The worship of Baal Moloch demanded the sacrifice of children; that of the lascivious Baaltis insulted the modesty of woman. The nobler spirits among the Hebrews rebelled against both these demands. And, as the latter were put forth in the name of the dominant religion, the inevitable conclusion followed that that religion itself must be radically wrong. The spirit of opposition thus awakened was aroused into powerful activity when, in the days of Ahab, the queen, supported by an influential priesthood, determined to introduce the forms of Phoenician religion in Israel by measures of force. The royal edicts were resisted, but for a while the rule of the stronger prevailed. The leaders of the opposition were compelled to flee, and, avoiding the habitations of men, to take refuge in wild and solitary places. Thus the rupture was widened into schism, and persecution inflamed the zeal and kindled the energies of that new order of men of whom Elijah is the well-known type.

Through their agency the emotional nature of the Semitic race now found expression in a form of religious worship loftier by far than any that had ever arisen among men. If Baal was the embodiment of Semitic asceticism and Baaltis the type of sensual orgiastic passion, the national God of Israel now became the type of a nobler emotion, the guardian of domestic purity, the source of sanctity, the ideal Father. It is indeed the image of a just patriarch that fills the mind and wings the fancy of the eldest prophets, when they describe the nature of Jehovah, their God. Jehovah is the husband of the people. Israel shall be his true and loyal spouse. The children of Israel are his children. Unchastity and irreligion are synonymous terms. And thus, if we err not, the peculiar feature of Hebrew character, their faithful attachment to kith and kin, the strength and purity of their domestic affections, serves to explain the peculiar character, the origin and development of the Hebrew religion. And because the essential elements of the new religion were moral elements it could not tolerate the Nature-worship of the heathens: and the way was prepared for the gradual ascendency of the purely spiritual in religion, which after ages of gradual progress constituted the last, the lasting triumph of prophecy.

After ages of development! For we are not to suppose that, in the centuries succeeding Hosea, the doctrines of the prophetic schools had become in any sense the property of the people at large. "The powers that be" were arrayed against them, and the annals of the kings are replete with evidence of their sufferings. It was in the late reign of Josiah that they at last received not only the countenance of the reigning monarch, but also a decisive influence upon the direction of affairs. In that reign a scroll was found in the temple imbued with the doctrine of the unity of God, and breathing the vigorous spirit of the prophets. In it was emphasized the heart's religion in preference to the empty ceremonial of priestly worship. The allegiance of the people was directed toward the God who had elected them from among the nations of the earth, and dire disaster was predicted in case of disobedience. When brought to the king and read in his presence, he was powerfully affected, and determined, if possible, to stem the tide of impending ruin by such salutary measures of reform as the injunctions of the newly-found Scripture seemed most urgently to call for. The concurrence of many critics has identified this scroll, written and published at or about the time when the youthful Josiah succeeded to the throne of his ancestors, with Deuteronomy, the fifth of the books of Moses. It differs materially from the more recent writings of the Pentateuch. The family of Aaron are not yet exclusively endowed with the priesthood. The priests are all Levites, the Levites all priests. There are, moreover, other vital differences, into which the limits of this article do not permit us to enter.* The date of the composition of Deuteronomy is thus referred to the closing decades of the seventh century B. C.**

* E. G., the rebellion of Korah is unknown to the author of Deuteronomy.

** The language of Deuteronomy attests its late origin. Sixty-six phrases of Deuteronomy recur in the writings of Jeremiah. Vide Zunz, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, xxviii., p. 670.

The princes who succeeded Josiah fell back into the old course, and quite undid the work which had begun with such fair promise. Indeed, little permanent good was to be hoped for in so disordered a condition of political affairs, and from the degenerate rulers who then swayed the helm of state. The fortunes of the kingdom of Judah were swiftly declining, and not fully a quarter of a century after the pious Josiah had breathed his last, Nebuchadnezzar burned the Temple of Jerusalem, and carried its inhabitants captive to Babylon.

Heretofore, with but a brief, brilliant interlude, idolatry had been the court religion of Judah. Early training, long usage, the example of revered ancestors, had endeared its forms and symbols to the affections of the people. Resistance to the innovating prophets was natural; men being then, as ever, loath to abandon the sacred usages which had come down to them from the distant generations of the past. But, in the long years of the captivity, a profound change came over the spirit of the Hebrew people; "by Babel's streams they sat and wept;" by Babel's streams they recalled the memories of their native land, that land which they had lost. It was then that the voices of Jehovah's messengers, which had so earnestly warned them of the approaching doom, recurred to their startled recollection. They remembered the message; they beheld its fulfillment; the testimony of the prophets had been confirmed by events; the one God to whom they testified had revealed his omnipotence in history; and with ready assent the exiles promised allegiance to his commandments in the future. The love of country, the dread of further chastisement, the dear hope of restoration, combined to win them to the purer worship of their God, and, in the crucible of Babylon, the national religion was purged of the last dregs of heathendom.

With the permission of Cyrus, the Jews returned to Palestine and the Temple at Jerusalem was rebuilt. The question now arose in what forms the ceremonial of the new sanctuary should be conducted. The time-honored festivals, the solemn and joyful convocations, the sacrifices and purifications of the olden time, were all more or less infected with the taint of paganism. Prophecy would have none of them – prophecy, free child of genius, contemned sacrifice, denounced the priesthood, even the temple and its ritual;* proclaimed humbleness and loving-kindness as the true service in which Jehovah takes delight. There was formalism on the one hand, idealism on the other. As is usual in such cases, when the time had arrived for turning theory into practice, it was found necessary to effect a compromise.

* Jeremiah vii. 4; Isaiah lxvi. 1; Micah vi. 6.

As Christianity in later days adopted the yule-tree into its system, and lit the lamps of the heathen festival of the 25th of December in honor of the nativity of its founder, so the leaders of the Jews, in the fifth century before our era, adopted the feasts and usages of an ancient Nature-worship, breathed into them a new spirit informed them with a loftier meaning, and made them tokens, symbols of the eternal God. The old foes were thus reconciled; priesthood and prophecy joined hands, and were thenceforth united. As an offspring of this union, we behold a new code of laws and prescriptions, whose marked and inharmonious features at once betray the dual nature of its progenitors. "A rough preliminary draft, as it were," of this code, is preserved in the book of Ezekiel, composed probably about the middle of the fifth century. In its finished and final shape, it forms the bulk of a still later work – of Leviticus, namely the third of the books of the Pentateuch: of all the discoveries of criticism none more noteworthy, none we are permitted to consider more assured. What lends additional certainty to the result is the circumstance that it was reached independently by two of the most esteemed scholars of our day, the one a Professor of Theology in the University of Leyden,* the other a veteran of thought, whose brow is wreathed by the ripe honors of more than fourscore years.** Let us briefly advert to the line of argument by which this astonishing conclusion was reached:

* Prof. A. Kuenen.

** The venerable Dr. Zunz, of Berlin.

The author of the book of Ezekiel was a priest, and one confessedly loyal to the sanctuary of Jerusalem. Now, had the laws of the Levitical code, which minutely describe the ritual of that sanctuary, existed, or been regarded as authoritative in his day, he could not, would not have disregarded, much less contradicted, their provisions. He does this, and, be it remarked, in points of capital importance. In chapter xlv. of Ezekiel are mentioned the great festivals, with the sacrifices appropriate to each; but the feast of Pentecost, commanded in Leviticus, is entirely omitted; also that of the eighth day of tabernacles. The second of the daily burnt-offerings, upon which the legislator of the fourth book of Moses dwells with such marked emphasis, is not commanded. The order of sacrifices appointed in Ezekiel is at variance with that in the more recent code. Ezekiel nowhere mentions the ark of the covenant. According to him, the new year begins on the tenth of the seventh month, while the festival of the trumpets, ordained in Leviticus for the first of that month (the present new year of the Jews), is nowhere referred to. We are not to suppose, however, that the festivals, the ark, etc., did not yet exist in the time of Ezekiel. They existed, no doubt, but were still too intimately associated with pagan customs and superstitions to receive or merit the countenance of a prophetic writer. In Leviticus the process of assimilation above described had reached its climax. The new meaning had been successfully engrafted upon the rites and symbols of the olden time; and they were thenceforth freely employed. The legislation of the Levitical code exhibits the familiar features which in every instance mark the ascendency or consolidation of the hierarchical order. The lines of gradation and distinction between the members of the order among themselves are precisely drawn and strictly adhered to. The prerogatives of the whole order as against the people are fenced about with stringent laws. The revenues of the order are largely increased. In the older code of Deuteronomy, the annual tithes were set apart for a festival occasion, and given over to the enjoyment of the people. In the new code, the hierarchy claims the tithes for its own use. New taxes are invented. The best portions of the sacrificial animal are reserved for the banquets of the Temple. The first-born of men and cattle belong to the priesthood, and must be ransomed by the payment of a sum of money. In no period prior to the fifth century B. C. was the hierarchy powerful enough to design such laws. At that time, however, when in the absence of a temporal sovereign they, with the high-priest at their head, were the acknowledged rulers of the state, they were both prepared to conceive and able to carry them into effect. The language of Leviticus contributes not a little to betray its late origin.* The period in the history of the Jews, when the fear of taking the name of the Lord in vain induced men to avoid, if possible, mentioning it at all. We find ha Shem in the above sense in Lev. xxiv. 11. authorship of Moses attributed to the Levitical code is symbolical. The name of Moses is utterly unknown to the elder prophets.

* To mention only a single instance, ha Shem (meaning the name, i. e. the ineffable name of God) was not employed until very late.

In all their manifold writings it does not occur a single time, though they make frequent reference to the past. There can now be little doubt that the composition of the bulk of Leviticus, and of considerable portions of the books of Numbers, Exodus, and even parts of Genesis, belongs to the epoch of the second Temple, and that the date of these writings may be approximately fixed at about one thousand years after the time of Moses. As to the story of Israel's desert wanderings, it rests upon ancient traditions whose character it is not our present business to investigate. It was successively worked up in various schools of priests and prophets, and this accounts for the host of discrepancies it contains, some of which have been noticed in the beginning of this essay. It was finally amplified by the inventive genius of the second-Temple priesthood, who succeeded in heightening the sanctity of their own institutions by tracing them back to a revered, heroic person, who had lived in the dim days of remote antiquity.

In the preceding pages we have indicated the more important phases of that conflict which ended in the establishment of monotheism, a conflict whose traces, though sometimes barely legible, are still preserved in our records. We saw in the first instance that the Mosaic age is shrouded in uncertainty. We pointed out that pure monotheism was unknown in the time of the early kings. We briefly referred to the rise of monotheism. Finally, we endeavored to show how the prophetic idea had been successively expressed in various codes, each corresponding to a certain stage in the great process of evolution. From what we have said, it follows that the prophetic ideal of religion is the root and core of all that is valuable in the Hebrew Bible. The laws, rites, and observances, in which it found a temporary and changeful expression, may lose their vitality; it will always continue to exert its high influence. It was not the work of one man, nor of a single age, but was reached in the long course of generations on generations, evolved amid error and vice, slowly, and against all the odds of time. It has been said that the Bible is opposed to the theory of evolution. The Bible itself is a prominent example of evolution in history. It is not homogeneous in all its parts. There are portions filled with tales of human error and fallibility. These are the incipient stages of an early age – the dark and dread beginnings. There are others thrilling with noblest emotion, freighted with eternal truths, breathing celestial music. These are the triumph and the fruition of a later day. It is thus by discriminating between what is essentially excellent and what is comparatively valueless that we shall best reconcile the discordant claims of reason and of faith. The Bible was never designed to convey scientific information, nor was it intended to serve as a text-book of history. In its ethical teachings lies its true significance. On them it may fairly rest its claims to the immortal reverence of mankind.

There was a time in the olden days of Greece when it was demanded that the poems of Homer should be removed from the schools, lest the minds of the young might be poisoned by the weeds of superstitious belief. Plato, the poet-philosopher, it was who urged this demand. That time is past. The tales of the gods and heroes have long since ceased to entice our credulity. The story of Achilles's wrath and the wanderings of the sage Ulysses are not believed as history, but the beauty and freshness and the golden poetry of the Homeric epic have a reality all their own, and are a delight and a glory now, as they have ever been before. The Bible also is a classical book. It is the classical book of noble ethical sentiment. In it the mortal fear, the overflowing hope, the quivering longings of the human soul toward the better and the best, have found their first, their freshest, their fittest utterance. In this respect it can never be superseded.

To Greek philosophy we owe the evolution of the logical categories; to Hebrew prophecy, the pure canon of moral principle and action. That this result was the outcome of a long process of suffering and struggle cannot diminish its value in our estimation. When we compare the degrading offices of the Hebrew religion in the days of the judges with the lofty aspirations of the second Isaiah, when we remember the utter abyss of moral abasement from which the nobler spirits of the Hebrews rose to the free heights of prophecy, our confidence in the divine possibilities of the human soul is reinvigorated, our emulation is kindled, and from the great things already accomplished we gather the cheering promise of the greater things that are yet to come. It is in this moral incentive that the practical value of the evolutionary theory chiefly lies.*

* Most aptly has this thought been expressed in the lines with which Goethe welcomed the appearance of F. A. Wolfs "Prolegomena."

"Erst die Gesundheit des Mannes, der, endhch vom Namen Homeros Kuhn uns befreiend, uns auch flihrt in die vollere Bahn. Denn wer wagte mit Gettern den Kampf? und wer mit dem Einen? – Doch Homeride zu seyn, auch nur als letzter, ist schon." The Elegy of Hermann und Dorothea