History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

II. The Evolution of the Moral Ideal

1. The Development up to the Exile

The primitive moral code

The history of Hebrew morals is the record of a long and slow evolution. The primitive code with which the development began was the code of Semitic nomadism. It was essentially the same as that which to-day governs the conduct of the practically unchanged kinsmen of the Hebrews, the Bedouin of Arabia and neighboring lands. It was the morality of the kinship group.[343] The principle of communal responsibility, which affords the key to a large part of the moral history of Israel, had not yet been challenged as unethical, and blood revenge was a most sacred duty. The circle covered by the moral feelings was still narrow; there was practically no sentiment of duty or obligation toward tribes or nations outside the group of tribes constituting the people of Israel. The conception of Yahweh as a jealous national god prevented the growth of feelings which might have formed the basis of a true international morality. The wars which the Israelites waged against their enemies were wars of ruthless slaughter and rapine.

This rudimentary morality is summarized in the Decalogue,[344] for the Ten Commandments are indisputably of a high antiquity. One mark of the primitive character of this legislation is the negative form of the commandments.[345] Where there is need of the “thou shalt not,” the moral life is still on a low plane. The aim and purpose of the law thus worded are restraint and repression. There is a wide interval in moral chronology between the morality of the Ten Words and that of the Sermon on the Mount. In this earlier code there is only the slightest recognition of the truth that the truly moral life consists not in refraining from evil but in doing good. The nomads of the desert for whom these negative commands were framed, forbidding mostly crude, coarse crimes, were evidently a long way yet from that level of moral attainment where the only law is the law of love and liberty.

The moral anarchy of the age of the Judges

That period of transition which marks the passage of the Israelite tribes from the nomadic pastoral life of the desert to a settled agricultural life in Palestine may be instructively compared with that transition period in the history of Europe which followed the migration of the German tribes and their settlement in the provinces of the disrupted Roman Empire. It was an epoch characterized by the rapid decay of the clan and tribal organization, with an accompanying loss of the rude virtues of the nomadic and pastoral life, and the acquisition of the vices of the civilized or semicivilized communities among which they had thrust themselves and whose lands they had forcibly seized.

Especially upon the religious system, which in Israel was ever closely bound up with morality, was felt the reaction of the new environment. Many foreign elements adopted from the Canaanite peoples were incorporated with it, while the national god Yahweh, as conceived by the popular imagination, tended to become sanguinary, capricious, and unjust. He became eminently a god of war, and is for his people right or wrong. Thus a chief bulwark of morality was impaired. The result was a moral interregnum. The old standards and rules of conduct lost their sanction. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.[346]

Prophetism: its different elements

The necessities of the situation called into existence the monarchy (about 1050 B.C.). Then followed the disruption of the kingdom (about 953 B.C.). The significant matter in the moral domain during the period of the united and the divided kingdom[347] was the appearance of teachers called prophets or seers, men who were believed to speak the word given them by Yahweh. This emergence of prophetism in Israel is beyond controversy one of the most important phenomena in the moral history of the world.

There were in this prophetism various elements.[348] First, it contained a nomadic element; that is, some of the prophets were men who looked backward to the simple pastoral life of the desert as the ideal moral life. They regarded civilization as the sum of all evils. Their reading of history was, in the words of Wellhausen, that “as the human race goes forward in civilization, it goes backward in the fear of God.” Second, there was in it a socialistic element. These prophets were the first socialists. Theirs was the first passionate plea for the poor, the wretched, and the heavy-burdened. Third, it contained a predictive element. The prophets were regarded as seers, as foretellers of future events. Fourth, there was in this prophetism an element of pure intuitional morality which was in irreconcilable antagonism to all legal ritual morality. Fifth, it contained a monotheistic element. The later prophets were distinctively teachers of the doctrine that there is only one God, beside whom there is no other.

Of these several elements the predictive, or prophetic in the popular sense, has been given such undue prominence that Hebrew prophetism in the minds of many stands for little else than a supernatural forecasting of future events. But, in truth, this is the element of least importance. In the words of Kuenen, the business of the prophets was “not to communicate what shall happen, but to insist upon what ought to happen.”[349] They were preachers of individual and social righteousness. It is this ethical element, forming the very heart and core of their message, which makes the appearance of prophetism in Israel a matter of such transcendent importance for universal history. Our main task in the following pages of this chapter will be to point out this moral element in the message of the prophets, to show how the conception of Yahweh was by them moralized, and how the morality they inculcated became purer and more elevated as the centuries passed, till the evolution culminated in the lofty teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.

The beginnings of historical prophetism: Elijah and Elisha

The real history of Hebrew prophetism opens with the appearance in the northern kingdom, about the beginning of the ninth century B.C., of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. It was the moral degeneracy of the times of the monarchy, the inrush of the hateful vices of civilization,—the greed of land[350] and of wealth, the cruel inequalities of the new society, the selfish luxury of the rich, the harsh oppression of the poor, the forgetting of men’s kinship, the substitution of the worship of other gods for the sole worship of Yahweh,—it was all this which called out the vehement protest of these teachers of social justice and national righteousness.

It was, however, a very different prophetism from that of the later seers of Israel which was represented by these early teachers. There was in it a large nomadic element. Its representatives looked back to the times of the simple pastoral life of the fathers as the Golden Age of Israel. They hated civilization, that grossly material civilization which Israel, under the lead of an idolatrous and luxurious court, was now adopting from the surrounding nations, and looked upon it as “the sum of all evils.” They were, furthermore, monolatrists rather than monotheists. They believed in sacrifice; but sacrifices must not be offered to strange gods—only to Yahweh. They were fanatical in their zeal for the worship of Israel’s patron God; but even here there was an ethical element, for in their view the triumph of the worship of Yahweh over that of the Baals meant a triumph of the simple, severe, desert morality over the voluptuousness and the nameless vices of the Canaanite civilization.

This early prophetism, in a word, was a sort of Puritanism. Renan calls it “this terrible prophetism.” It was fierce, cruel, fanatical, intolerant, like English Puritanism. Indeed, it can best be studied in this modern seventeenth-century prophetism, which was essentially a revival of it. But notwithstanding the imperfect character of this early prophetism, because of the true ethical element it contained,[351] its appearance in Israel and its successful fight against a sensuous idolatry was a matter of vast moral import, for here in this narrow, intolerant monolatry is the real historical beginning of that long religious-ethical development which lends chief significance to the story of Israel, and constitutes a main interest of the history of European civilization. In the words of Renan, “The prophetism which struggled under Ahab and triumphed under Jehu is ... upon the whole the most decisive event in the history of Israel. It forms the commencement of the chain which, after nine hundred years, found the last link in Jesus.”[352]

The moral advance represented by Amos (760 B.C.) and Hosea (738–735 B.C.)

The second link in this chain was formed by the prophets Amos and Hosea, who delivered their message about the middle of the eighth century. Amos was the earlier. There is in his message the note of true prophetism. His thought of Yahweh is that he is a God who hates iniquity and loves righteousness. What angers him is not idolatry or the worship of other gods, but social wrongs and injustice—wickedness in every form. He is angry with Israel[353] because there has been stored up violence and robbery in the palace;[354] because of the luxury and self-indulgence of the rich; because of the treading upon the poor and the taking from him burdens of wheat; because of the taking of bribes and the turning aside of the poor in the gate from their right;[355] because of the falsifying of the balances by deceit that the poor may be bought for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes.[356] And what pleases Yahweh is not fast days and sacrifices, but justice and righteousness: “I hate, ... I despise your fast days,”[357] declares Yahweh. “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and meat offerings, I will not accept.”[358] “But let judgment run down as water and righteousness as a mighty stream.”[359]

A generation later the prophet Hosea repeats the same message; namely, that what angers Yahweh is moral evil—lying, swearing, stealing, and killing. He puts in the mouth of Yahweh these words: “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”[360]

There is here a notable ethical advance over the word to Israel of the prophets of the preceding century. The thought of Amos and Hosea that it is social wrongdoing that angers Yahweh is indeed no new thought, for we meet with this conception of the moral character of God in the teachings of the earlier prophets; what is new is the emphasis which is laid upon it. Here we reach ethical monolatry;[361] ethical monotheism lies not far in the future.

The ideal of the brotherhood of nations and universal peace

The morality of Amos and Hosea infolded the germ of ethical cosmopolitanism. The conviction that the government of Yahweh is founded on absolute justice and righteousness led to the conviction of its ultimate universality, “for right is everywhere right, and wrong is everywhere wrong.” The political situation in the Semitic world at this time fostered the thought thus awakened. The predominant fact in international relations in the latter half of the eighth century was the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In its expansion it had already engulfed many of the smaller states of western Asia, and Assyria had become a world power. Political unity suggested now, as it did when Rome had established a world empire, religious and ethical unity. Yahweh, Israel’s God of justice and right, is the suzerain of all other gods and peoples. He will establish a world-wide kingdom, and all nations shall acknowledge his righteous rule.

As representatives of this broadening vision we have the great prophets Isaiah and Micah, who, proclaiming the universal reach of the law of right and justice, held aloft a noble ethical ideal of the brotherhood of nations and universal peace. Seers by virtue of their conviction of the absoluteness, the oneness and sovereignty, of the moral law, they foretold the coming of a time in the last days when all the nations of the earth should form a federation under the suzerainty of Israel with Jerusalem as the world capital: “Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”[362]

This is the first distinct expression in Hebrew literature, or in that of any race, of the idea of the brotherhood of man and a federated world. The lofty ideal has never faded from the eyes of men. It has inspired all the noblest visions of world unity and peace through the war-troubled ages, and is in the world of to-day the source and spring of much of that ethical idealism which with prophetic faith and conviction proclaims a federated world, with the nations dwelling together in peace and amity, as the one divine event toward which all history moves.

With this lofty ethical universalism in the teachings of Isaiah and Micah was joined a simple personal and social morality of the human heart and reason. These prophets were at one with Amos and Hosea in proclaiming that what Yahweh delights in is not sacrifices and the observance of new moons and Sabbaths, but cleanliness of life and services of love. Hear Isaiah as he repeats the words of the Lord: “I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.... Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.... Cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”[363] And listen to Micah: “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams and with ten thousands of rivers of oil?... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[364]

The prophetic spirit creates a unique ethical literature

The prophets of the eighth century were the first of the literary prophets; that is, the first of those who employed literature as the vehicle of their message to Israel. Hence here our attention is called to a matter of supreme significance for universal morality—the ethicalizing of the mythology and traditional history of the Hebrew people.

It was during the age of the kings that the mass of cosmological myths and legends borrowed from Babylonia,—doubtless largely through contact with Assyria,—the traditions of the patriarchs, and the story of the sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus, all of which had been transmitted from the foretime orally or in writing, was worked over and edited afresh, in which process it received the indelible stamp of the deeper and truer moral consciousness of this later age. For though probably little of this work was done by the prophets themselves, it was done by men who wrote under the inspiration of the new thoughts of God and of his moral government which had been awakened in the souls of the great teachers of Israel. The polytheistic elements of these myths and traditions and their grosser and more archaic immoralities were pruned away, while at the same time they were given a monotheistic cast and a truer morality was breathed into them. In a word, all this literary material was censored by the growing moral consciousness of Israel. The outcome was the creation of a literature absolutely unique in its moral educative worth.

Thus the remolded and moralized Chaldean account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of human history came to form the basis of the opening chapters of Genesis, whose influence upon Hebrew morality, through molding Israel’s idea of the character of Yahweh and of his relations to man, it would hardly be possible to exaggerate. Also the tradition of the Exodus, given now its final form and received by the later generations of Israel as an historically true account of the experiences of their fathers, left an ineffaceable impress upon the mind and heart of the Hebrew nation, determining largely their ideas as to their chief moral obligations as the chosen and covenanted people of Yahweh. It was this tradition of their heroic past which was the inspiration of the moral strivings of the nation. Furthermore, all this literary material, thus reshaped and colored by the growing monotheistic ideas of the teachers of Israel and bearing the stamp of their gradually deepening moral consciousness, and in this form transmitted to the Aryan nations of the West, was destined to become one of the most important factors not merely in the religious but especially in the moral life of the European peoples.

The ethicalizing of pagan festivals and cults

Just as the myths and traditions, in part borrowed from neighboring peoples and in part transmitted from Israel’s own foretime, were transformed and moralized by the ethical genius of the Hebrew spirit, so were the institutions and festivals borrowed by the Israelites from kindred Semitic peoples, and particularly from the Canaanites, transmuted and moralized.[365] Permeated by the ethical spirit of Israel’s great teachers and transformed into moral symbols, these originally nonethical agricultural cults and festivals were given a distinct educative value.

Among these pagan institutions thus moralized was the festival or rest day of the Sabbath.[366] Filled with ethical meaning and consecrated to a religious-moral purpose, this originally pagan lunar festival was made a most important means of moral instruction and discipline.[367] This borrowing and moralizing by Israel of this festival has an almost exact parallel in the later borrowing and moralizing by the Christian Church of the pagan festival of the winter solstice, which has given Christendom one of its most beautiful anniversaries, one which takes precedence of all others in its power to evoke the tenderest altruistic sentiments.

As with the Sabbath, so was it with all the festivals which the Israelites, after their settlement in Palestine and during the period when they were passing from the nomadic to the agricultural life, adopted from the Canaanite peoples among whom they were dwelling. All of these in the course of time were turned from their original purpose, were cleansed of immoral and sensuous elements, and were thus made the means of awakening moral feelings and developing moral character.

This transforming power of the ethical genius of Israel finds a true historical parallel in the esthetic genius of ancient Hellas, which, receiving from every side elements of art and general culture, inspired them all with the beauty and energy of her own spirit.[368] “Israel,” as Cornill finely says, “resembles in spiritual things the fabulous King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold.”

The dual morality of the Deuteronomic code

The effect of the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and the carrying away into captivity of the flower of the Ten Tribes was to put an end to prophetism in the North and to make Judah in the South the center of the movement which had such significance for the moral life of the world.

During the century and a half that passed between the fall of the northern kingdom and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, only one great prophet appeared in Judah. This was Jeremiah, who prophesied in the reign of King Josiah, just a little time before the Captivity.

It was during the reign of this king that there appeared a book which, excepting the Gospels of the New Testament, has had a greater influence upon the general evolution of morality than any other book ever written. This was a work known as the Book of Deuteronomy, that is, the repetition of the law. Before the discovery of the Laws of Hammurabi this was the oldest known code of laws.

The book contains much archaic material—traditions, customs, judicial decisions, laws, and rituals—manifestly handed down from the earliest times in Israel, with additions made at the moment of its appearance, and all bearing plainly the stamp of the spirit and temper of these later times. Hence it comes that there are two moralities embodied in the work—an atavistic ritual morality and a progressive social morality.

The ritual ethics of the code

In that part of the code which has to do with the ethics of ritualism the dominant motive of the editors or compilers springs from a dread and abhorrence of idolatry, like the dread and abhorrence of heresy in medieval Christendom. Yahweh will divide his worship with no other god. Israel had gone after other gods and Yahweh had given her into the hands of the Assyrians. A like fate awaited Judah if she served any other than him: “Ye shall not go after other gods, or the gods of the people which are round about you, lest the anger of the Lord be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth,”[369] is the first commandment with threatening.

Fear that Yahweh would do unto Judah as he had done unto Israel awakened the conscience of the nation. Idolatry was suppressed; the high places on which incense was burned unto the Baals were defiled, and the altars and the images of the strange gods were broken down and ground into dust.

This reform movement practically ended the long struggle which had gone on now for six hundred years and more between polytheism and the rising monotheism of the people of Israel. But unfortunately while the monotheistic element of the religion of Yahweh was brought out by the reform in sharper outline, the ethical element was obscured. The religion that was now made the exclusive worship was really little more than a pagan cult. It consisted in the careful keeping of feast days and the observance of the rites and sacrifices of the Temple—an inheritance largely from the heathen nations around about Israel. Nothing could have been more opposed to true prophetism. It was the triumph of reactionary ritualism.

This victory of ritualism has exerted an almost incalculable influence upon the development of morality from the time of King Josiah down to the present day. The immediate effect upon prophetism in Judah was most lamentable. “Deuteronomy simply confirmed the belief that religion was concerned with ritual rather than with morality.”[370] And so the outcome of the promulgation of a written revealed law was, in the words of Wellhausen, “the death of prophecy.”[371]

But this fatal effect was not felt at once. In the dark days of the Exile, now just at hand, there was a revival of true prophetism; but after the return from the Captivity, as we shall see, the prophetic spirit was almost stifled by the rigid legalism of the Temple cult. And it was this same Deuteronomic law which, in the hands of medieval inquisitors, stifled awakening prophetism in Europe and delayed for generations true moral reform after the stirring of the European mind by the Renaissance.[372]

The intolerant spirit of this narrow, rigid religion of ritualism found specially sinister expression in Israel’s war ethics. Instead of promoting international amity and good will, it deepened intertribal prejudices and hatreds and intensified the barbarities of war. “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth;”[373] “thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them,”[374] were the commands to Israel regarding the nations round about her who were the worshipers of other gods than Yahweh.

Thus religion was made an active principle of international savagery. It made it, in the words of Cheyne, “difficult, if not impossible, ... to love God fervently without hating a large section of God’s creatures.”[375] Under the influence of the fierce ordinances of the Deuteronomic code the war practices of the Israelites became more ferocious and savage than those of any other nation of antiquity, unless it be those of the Assyrian kings. Their enemies, who were also the enemies of Yahweh, they smote with the utmost fury, putting to the edge of the sword men, women, and the little ones, and taking as booty the cattle and the spoils.

The social ethics of the code

But, as we have said, there were two spirits striving together in this strange Deuteronomic code. In opposition to this spirit of stern fanatical intolerance there was a spirit of tender sympathy for the unfortunate, the poor, and the oppressed.[376] Along with this priestly morality, based on a certain conception of Yahweh and of his relations to Israel, there was another wholly different morality—a social morality whose chief sanctions were the natural impulses and sentiments of the human heart and conscience.

This code of social ethics bears witness to a progressive development of the moral consciousness in Israel. The ethical advance is unmistakably registered in various ameliorations effected in the crude customary law of earlier times. One of the most noteworthy of these mitigations concerned the primitive blood revenge. In common with other peoples in the kinship stage of culture, the early Hebrews in their pursuit of blood vengeance made no distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide. The regulations of the Deuteronomic code regarding the so-called cities of refuge[377] bear witness to a growing power of moral discrimination; for these cities are made inviolable sanctuaries whither might flee the manslayer who had slain his neighbor unawares and hated him not in time past.[378]

Especially is the humanitarian advance shown in the provisions of the code which relate to the poor, the debtor, and the bondsman. We meet here some of the most humane regulations to be found in any of the codes of antiquity. Social morality is almost made to consist in consideration for the poor: “If there be among you a poor man ... thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him”—so the law enjoins—“and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need.”[379] Things that were necessities to the poor man were not to be taken as security for a loan: “No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge.”[380] If a garment be taken as security, this must be returned before night, in order that the man may sleep in his own raiment.[381] The widow’s raiment must not be taken in pledge at all.[382] The wages of the poor and needy must be promptly paid: “At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it.”[383]

The law goes even further in its humane endeavor to prevent the oppression of the needy. The loaning of money in ancient times was in general a very different thing from similar money transactions in this commercial and industrial age of ours. Those seeking loans were the very poor, who were forced to borrow to meet domestic necessities. Under such conditions the taking of interest would naturally be denounced, and those who did so would come to be regarded as extortioners, and robbers of the poor. Hence the prohibition, “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; ... unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.”[384]

This legislation, well adapted to the times and the conditions of the society for which it was enacted, became centuries later, through its adoption and attempted enforcement by the medieval Church, a source of grave mischief. It constituted a heavy drag for centuries upon the industrial development of European civilization.

The same spirit of tenderness toward the portionless and needy is shown in the provision concerning the ingathering of the harvest: “When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.”[385] This tender consideration for the poor speaks from one of the most beautiful of Bible pictures—that of the Moabitess Ruth gleaning in the fields after the reapers, who “let fall some of the handfuls of purpose for her.”[386]

The social conscience awakening in Israel, to which the above regulations and commandments bear witness, finds further expression in the provisions of the code effecting ameliorations in the lot of the unfortunate bondsman. The master is enjoined to see that the Sabbath is observed by his slave as well as by himself and his family, and the reason assigned is the humanitarian one—“that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.”[387] And a limitation was set to the time that a person could be held in bondage: “And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.”[388] Furthermore, the law is solicitous respecting the welfare of the bondsman even after emancipation: “And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty. Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy threshing floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.”[389]

To these ameliorative measures effect is sought to be given through a revival of memories of the past. The masters are enjoined to be compassionate to their bondsmen because they themselves had been worn and bruised in bondage: “Remember,” says the lawgiver, “that ye were bondsmen in the land of Egypt.”[390]

2. The Morality of the Prophets of the Exile

The effects of the Captivity upon the moral evolution in Israel

We have reached now a turning point in the moral history of Israel. Speaking of the effects of the Exile upon the inner life of Israel, Renan uses these words: “Twice it was the fate of Israel to owe its salvation to that which is the ruin of others, and to be recalled by the crushing of its earthly hopes to a sense of its great duties toward humanity.”

The mission of Israel, her duty toward humanity, was, as we have said, to interpret life in ethical terms. As the story of the exilic and the postexilic period unfolds, we shall see how the sad experiences of the Exile purified and deepened the moral consciousness of Israel, and prepared her for the great part she was destined to play in the moral education of mankind.

It was the great unknown prophet of the Exile, the so-called Second Isaiah, who wrote just after the capture of Babylon by the Persian king Cyrus (539 B.C.), who was the representative of the essentially new conceptions of Yahweh and of the requirements of the moral law which characterize this ethical development.[391]

Ethical monotheism at last; religion and morality at one

Shut out from participation in political affairs, the best energies of the exiled community seem to have been turned to the things of the inner life, and consequently the development in the religious and moral spheres went on apace. The conception of God—of what is pleasing to him and what he requires of man—was elevated and purified.

We meet now for the first time monotheism pure and absolute. Yahweh is conceived as the only God; the gods of the other nations are no gods at all. Some of the earlier prophets had, it is true, caught sight of this lofty truth; but the multitude of the people certainly had no such idea of their patron god. The prophets of the Exile are the first to proclaim this doctrine with such emphasis as to cause it to become a part of the indestructible religious consciousness of Israel.[392]

One cannot read the declarations which the unknown prophet puts in the mouth of Yahweh—“Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me;”[393] “I am the first and I am the last; and besides me there is no God;”[394] “I am Yahweh who wrought everything, who stretched forth the heavens above, who spread forth the earth—who was with me;”[395] “I am Yahweh and there is none beside me;”[396] “I am God, and there is none else, I am God, and there is none like me”[397]—one cannot read these declarations without being convinced that they were not phrased by one to whom the idea of the unity of God had become a commonplace, but rather by one to whom the thought was something in the nature of a discovery.[398]

But it was not merely the idea of the oneness of deity, of Yahweh as the sole God, that was the element of supreme significance in this practically new thought of God. There is nothing unethical in the belief in many gods; nor, on the other hand, is there anything ethical in the belief that there is only one God. The historically important thing about the monotheism of Israel is that it was ethical monotheism. Up to the time of the Exile the multitude in Israel, notwithstanding the teachings of the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, had never thought of Yahweh as an absolutely just god, but rather as one who would favor his people under all circumstances. Put in the language of to-day, they conceived Yahweh as a partisan, who would be for his people right or wrong. But under the discipline of the Exile the more spiritual-minded of the nation came to accept the teaching that Yahweh’s favor “is conditioned by a law of absolute righteousness.”[399]

This conception of God marks a turning point in the moral evolution of humanity. It lifted a new ethical standard. It effected a union of religion and morality. This, it is true, was not a wholly new thing in history. In the worship of the good Osiris in Egypt these elements had been united; in the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda they had also been brought together; and at this very time in Greece there was an effort being made to unite them in the worship of the Delphian Apollo. But the union effected by the prophets of Israel was the only one destined to have large and permanent historical consequences. Because of the ethical content given the god idea by them, their conception of deity constituted the most precious part of the spiritual heritage bequeathed by Judaism to Christianity.

Repudiation of the doctrine of collective responsibility

The progressive clarification of the moral consciousness in Israel disclosed by this truer conception of the divine character is further shown by the definite and emphatic repudiation by the prophets of the Exile of the doctrine of collective responsibility.[400]

There was an ironical proverb current in Israel, which, expressing bitter protest against the unequal ways of Yahweh in visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children,[401] ran thus: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”[402] The prophet Ezekiel says to the people that they shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb.[403] With clear moral vision he sees how impossible it is that the moral government of Yahweh should rest upon the principle of collective responsibility, and that the innocent should be punished for the guilty. Declaring that the ways of God are just and equal, he annuls all earlier provisions of the law by boldly proclaiming that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.[404]

It marks a great moral advance when guilt comes thus to be viewed as a personal and not a communal thing. But unfortunately the ground here gained for morality was lost when the theologians of the early Christian Church, reviving the outgrown conception of collective responsibility, formulated the dogma that all the generations of men—such being the solidarity of the human race—are partakers in the sin of the first parents and under condemnation therefor.[405]

The doctrine of the sufferings of the righteous as vicarious and expiatory

But the decisive rejection by the deepening moral consciousness in Israel of the doctrine that under the moral government of Yahweh the innocent are punished for the guilty left still unsolved the problem of the sufferings of the righteous—that problem which had at all times so troubled the pious Israelite, and for the solution of which so many different theories had been framed. The new teaching, or the implication of the new teaching, that such sufferings are not penal in character, that they are no sign of God’s displeasure with the sufferer, while a teaching of consolation, contributed nothing to the actual solution of the problem. But a new theory now offers a new interpretation. This theory assumes that all transgression must be atoned for by suffering, but teaches that this suffering may be borne vicariously by one not the transgressor, and the guilt thereby expiated.

This idea worked itself out in the sorrow-burdened souls of the pious exiles in Babylon. Never did acquaintance with bitter sorrow yield sweeter fruit. The thought finds expression in Chapters LII and LIII of Isaiah.[406] The righteous Servant of Yahweh, who is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, is the personified community of the pious Israelites, who are wounded for the transgressions and bruised for the iniquities of the nation.[407]

Of all the ethical products of the troublous life of Israel, this idea that under the moral government of the world one may vicariously bear the burden of another’s fault and thus atone for it was the most important in its historical consequences. Six hundred years after the utterance of this message of consolation to the pious Israelite exiles, the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, thus held aloft by the Great Unknown, was incarnated, so it was believed, in Jesus of Nazareth. Clothed in actual flesh and blood, the sweet persuasiveness of the ideal—the nobility and divineness of suffering voluntarily borne in the stead of another—made unwonted appeal to the heart of humanity, and for eighteen hundred years and more, accepted as a true symbol and interpretation of the moral order, it has been a chief molding force in the moral life of the Western world.

3. The Moral Life in the Postexilic Age

A ritual morality

The chief moral fact in the postexilic period[408] was the putting into strict practice of the Levitical and Deuteronomic law, and the consequent triumph of ritual morality. From the establishment of this law till the rise of Christianity, orthodox morality in Judah consisted in the careful observance of the thousand and one minute rules and requirements of this Temple code. The good man was he who kept the law of the Lord.[409] All duties were in a sense religious duties; they were acts performed simply because of the supposed divine command that they should be performed.[410]

Such dependence as this on rules and forms and rites is of course disastrous to all true morality. It fosters the idea that morality consists in the performance of certain outer acts, instead of being the attitude of the soul toward the good and the right inwardly discerned. It substitutes an outer standard for the individual conscience. Conscience disused loses its power of discrimination and becomes atrophied. The ethically indifferent is made the all-important, and thus all moral values are confused.

What confusion resulted in Israel is revealed in the denunciations of this rigid, mechanical legalism by the Prophet of Nazareth: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”[411] “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth.... To eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.”[412]

The Sermon on the Mount announces the awakening of the true prophetic spirit in Israel after a sleep of five hundred years.

An intolerant nationalism

A sinister phase of the orthodox religious-ethical system of the postexilic age was its narrow, intolerant nationalism. To be an enemy of Israel was what was believed to constitute wickedness, and to excite the wrath of Yahweh, just as later in the ethics of certain systems of Christian theology the unbeliever or pagan, merely because of his unbelief or paganism, was regarded as wicked and as deserving of eternal punishment. In psalms which date from this period these enemies of Yahweh are cursed with a fierce hatred which spares not even the children, but pronounces happy him who shall take up and dash the little ones against the stones.[413] Nowhere in history do we meet with a more fanatically intolerant nationalism.

The relation of the synagogue to the moral evolution

It was only a comparatively small part of the Jewish nation whose home was the city of Jerusalem in the later postexilic period. The Israelite community was now widely scattered in the cities of the East and the West. One important outcome of this, in its bearings upon the moral life of Israel and of the nations that were to receive ethical instruction from her, was the establishment of the synagogue.[414] For the Deuteronomic code had made religion to be something connected with the Temple, something separate and apart from true morality, whose root is in human relationships. Now the Dispersion, tearing the Israelites away from the Temple, tended to bring into prominence those religious exercises and those duties which had nothing to do with the Temple service. This was favorable to the religion and morality of the prophets, as opposed to the religion and morality of the priests. The services of the synagogue took the place of the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Temple.[415] These services consisted in the reading and translation of a portion of the Scriptures with comments thereupon.[416] This meant the incoming of a new and powerful agency in the promotion not only of the religious but also of the moral education of humanity, for this custom “was the origin of the homily and sermon.”[417] The synagogue was the prototype and precursor of the Christian basilica and the Puritan meetinghouse.

The new doctrine of immortality: its ethical import

The reëstablishment of the Law we have pronounced the chief ethical fact in the history of Judaism after the return from the Babylonian Captivity. And this is true if it is the history of the Jews alone that we have in mind; but regarding the moral evolution in the world at large there is another fact belonging to this period of even greater importance. This was the incoming of the doctrine of immortality.[418]

We have seen that from the first the Hebrews, like the Babylonians, held a belief in a sort of shadowy existence after death;[419] but of a belief in personal immortality in our sense of the word, of a life of rewards and punishments beyond the grave, there is no certain trace in Hebrew literature until about the third or second century B.C.[420]

Different influences had concurred to create this new conception of the hereafter and to secure for it by the end of the Greek period a wide acceptance. First, there was what has been called the subjective sense of fellowship with God. During this period of Israelite history there was engendered in select souls a passionate outreaching after divine companionship. This feeling is revealed in many a postexilic psalm, as where the psalmist exclaims, “For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one [beloved] to see corruption.”[421] This was the divination of love like that of the old mystic who exclaimed, “O God, if I should die, Thou couldst not live.”[422] It was such filial love and trust as this, which found its divinest expression in the life of “the Sublime Mystic of Galilee,” that created in many a devout soul in Israel that larger hope which gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.

But while it was probably deep religious feeling, the soul’s recognition of its sonship to God, that called into existence the idea of personal immortality, it was the ethical necessity created by a profound faith in God’s absolute justice, an irrefragable conviction that under the moral government of the world well-doing will be rewarded and evildoing punished, that gained for the doctrine its wide acceptance. That good men should be afflicted and wicked men should enjoy prosperity, has in all ages of reflection caused questionings and murmurings. But this ethical problem filled with peculiar unrest the souls of the Israelites, first, because more than any other people they felt the need of a just God; and second, because of their lack of belief in a future life of rewards and punishments in which the wrongs and inequalities of this life might be righted. Hence the many different solutions of the problem which they thought out, and through which they sought to justify the ways of God to man. So long, however, as life practically ended at the grave, the problem remained insolvable. But the doctrine of another existence in which the righteous man should receive compensation for his sufferings here, and the evil man just retribution for his deeds, offered a reasonable solution of the problem that had so troubled the conscience of Israel. It was this undoubtedly that caused the teaching to gain popular currency.

The doctrine, however, was not wholly the product of the religious and ethical development within Israel. Its growth was fostered by various outside influences. Among these was the Persian doctrine of the resurrection and a future life of retributive justice, with which the Jews became familiar at the time of the Exile in Babylon or later in the Persian period. Then again the development of the idea was stimulated, after the third century B.C., by Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic.

But far more influential than either Zoroastrian teachings or Greek philosophy must have been the thought and conviction of ancient Egypt. After the founding of Alexandria, toward the end of the fourth century B.C., a vast number of Jews were settled in that capital; and though the positive evidence here is very meager, still we have a right to something more than a conjecture that in that city Judaism was deeply influenced by the ancient Egyptian doctrine of immortality.[423]

Under these various influences this doctrine rooted itself firmly among the Jews, and by the time of the appearance of Christ had become a distinctive tenet of a large and influential party among them.[424]

After the conception of a just God and the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, this doctrine of immortality, with its correlate teaching of future rewards and punishments, was perhaps the most important product, in its moral consequences, of the life and ethical experiences of ancient Israel. It exercised little or no influence, at least no decisive influence, upon the moral evolution in Judaism, but, adopted by Christianity, it was given new force and currency, and for eighteen hundred years and more has been one of the great bulwarks and sanctions of morality in the Western world.

The expansion of the moral sympathies in the Hellenistic Age

We have spoken of the rigid legalism and the narrow nationalistic spirit of orthodox postexilic Judaism. But it must not be thought that in these last days the spirit of prophetism was dead. Hidden beneath this hard rind of legalism there pulsed a true moral life. This life found expression in a movement toward ethical universalism. To understand this movement we must recall the great political revolution of this epoch.

Almost exactly two centuries after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, all the political relations of the Semitic East were abruptly ended and new relations established by the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hellenism, the most powerful solvent of history, now came in contact with Hebrew life and thought both in Palestine and in Egypt. The effect upon the ethical development in Judaism was profound. With the expansion of the political and mental horizons the moral sympathies of men were widened. The wall of separation between Jew and Gentile was thrown down. In Alexandria and in the many new Hellenistic cities in Asia, the nobler spirits of dispersed Israel, casting aside their narrow racial prejudices, with enlarged mental vision and widened moral sympathies, came to read with new understanding their great prophets who had preached the universality of the moral law and the brotherhood of nations.[425] Hebrew literature registers the change. This new spirit of internationalism, of kindness and justice even to enemies, breathes from many of the later psalms[426] and speaks from many a passage of the so-called “wisdom books” of the period. The allegory of Jonah embodies the liberal spirit of this new Judaism. The great lawyers Hillel and Shammai,[427] who laid emphasis upon social duties and human service, represented the humanitarian phase of the age movement. Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, represented its philosophical side. The way was being prepared for the incoming of the ethical universalism of Christianity.

CHAPTER X
THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HELLAS: AN IDEAL OF SELF-REALIZATION

Introduction

The Greek ethical ideal, a creation of the natural feelings and impulses of the human mind and heart uninfluenced by theological doctrines, was one of the most imperishable products of Greek life and thought. This conception of what constitutes good life became a part of the Greek bequest to civilization. The modern world is thus indebted to Greece not only for priceless elements of its intellectual and art life, but for precious elements of its moral life as well. Throughout the medieval age, it is true, it was the ethical heritage from Judea that shaped and colored the moral ideal of the European peoples, but even during that period this Semitic ideal bore the deep impress of Greek ethics, while ever since the Renaissance it is the ethical bequest of Hellas which has steadily become an ever more and more dominant factor in the moral life of the Western nations. The conscience of the modern world of science is Hellenic rather than Hebraic.