III.
Each great book should, as a whole, be read in its proper place in Hebrew and Christian history.
The historical method is the true clue to the interpretation of a book. To know it aright we must know the age in which it was produced. This is the method by which such surprising light has been shed on many great works. Who that has read Taine's graphic portraiture of the Elizabethan age can fail ever thereafter to see Shakespeare stand forth vividly? What can we make of Dante without some knowledge of Italy in the thirteenth century? What new life is given to Milton's Samson after we have seen the blind old poet of the fallen Protectorate in his dreary home! How can we rightly estimate Rousseau's writings unless we know somewhat of the artificial and luxurious age to which they came as a call back to nature? Taken out of their true surroundings these writings lose their force and meaning.
In the same way we need to find the historical place of a Biblical writing, and to read it in the light of its relation to the period.
The traditional view of Deuteronomy made it the last of the writings of Moses, a Farewell Address of the Father of his Country; reciting to the nation he had founded the story of its deliverance, repeating the laws established for its welfare, and warning it against the dangers awaiting it in the future. Such a view was attended with many difficulties, not insuperable, however, to the critical knowledge of earlier generations. Its real place in the history of Israel appears to have been found of late.
The Prophetic Reformation of Religion, begun in the eighth century before Christ, by the group of noble men of whom Isaiah was the most conspicuous had, by the latter part of the seventh century before Christ, become ripe for an organization of the institutions of religion. Jeremiah was the central figure in this second period of the prophetic movement. Upon the throne of Judah at that time was the good young king, Josiah—the Edward the Sixth of Israel—in whom the hopes of the reformers centred. About the year 625 B.C. occurred an event that decided the future of religion in Judah; described in the twenty-second chapter of the second book of Kings. The high-priest sent to the young king, saying:
I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.
This book of the law of Moses, according to tradition, had been lost; had been lost so long that its provisions had dropped into disuse, into oblivion; an oblivion so complete that the nation's religion ignored and violated the whole system of that law; had been lost so long and so thoroughly that the very existence of such a law had passed from the memory of man.
This was the book that Hilkiah claimed to have re-discovered in the temple archives. It was at once read to the excited king. It made a profound impression upon him by its revelation of the apostasy in which the nation was living, and by its solemn threatenings upon such apostasy.
It came to pass that when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.
For, said he:
Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us.
The devout young king threw himself into a thorough reformation of the prevailing religion. All local altars were swept away, all idolatries were cleared from the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood was centred in the capital and more thoroughly organized; in short, as our fathers read the story, Mosaism was re-established, after some seven centuries of partial or total disuse.
Through processes which we cannot now follow, our later critics have, I think, fairly established the proposition, that this book of The Law was none other than the substance of our book of Deuteronomy, then for the first time written. The plans of the prophetic reformers had contemplated the sweeping changes described above, in the interests of an ethical and spiritual religion. They felt that they were but carrying out the principles of the nation's great Founder. Of his original conception of religion, bodied in The Ten Words, their aspirations were the legitimate historical development; as the leaf and bud are the growth of the far back roots. This programme of the prophetic reformers, presented in its true light as a development of the ideas of Moses, was, by the priest Hilkiah, sent to the king as the law of the nation's Founder, with the results sketched above.
Read in this light, the book takes on a fresh and fascinating interest. It marks the organization of the movement toward a higher religion which had been started by the great prophets of the preceding century. It becomes the Augsburg Confession of the Jewish Reformation, from which dates the gradual possession of the institutions of the nation by ethical and spiritual religion.
The lofty character of this book, the "St. John of the Old Testament," as Ewald called it, is thus rendered intelligible; as it stands for the aspirations of the noblest movement in ancient Jewish history. It is the issue of a long travail of soul to whose words we hearken in such a truth as this:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Placed in this position, the book of Deuteronomy becomes the key to Israel's history, by which criticism is reconstructing that story, on the lines of the great laws of all life, with most significant consequences to the cause of religion. The ideas and institutions known to us as The Mosaic Law come forth now as the crown and culmination of a long historic development. Israel's story is that of a slow and gradual education under the divine hand; not a relapse, but a progress, not an apostasy but an evolution. Israel takes its place in the general order of humanity's movement. With it religion sweeps at once into the pathway of progress which science has shown to be the order of nature; and the historic revelation is seen to be, like the revelation in nature, a gradual, progressive manifestation of Him "whose goings forth are as the morning"—its orbit the sweep of the ascending sun.
With such mighty secrets does this little book grow luminous when placed in the light of its real belongings.
The Book of Ezekiel, whose historic position was never disputed, becomes of new value in the light of a fuller knowledge of its period. It presents to the science of Biblical criticism the missing link in its theory of Israel's development. It shows the process of transformation, out of which issued during the exile the elaborate, hierarchical system known to us as Mosaism. The new criticism seems to me to have reasonably established the theorem, that the priestly cultus embodied in the legislation of the Pentateuch was first systematized into the form it there presents during the exile, and was first set up as the national system on the return to Judea. It is not claimed that it was a new manufacture of that period. As such it would be inconceivable.[35] It is simply claimed that it was a thorough codification, for the first time, of the scattered and conflicting codes of conduct and systems of worship of the various local priesthoods of Israel, as handed down by tradition and in records from ancient times; a codification animated by the centralizing and hierarchical tendencies working in the nation; which tendencies were themselves the result largely of the prophetic spirit, and its aspirations for a nobler religion.[36] It is not difficult to account for this remarkable priestly movement.
The institutional organization of religion that began under Josiah had continued, with various fortunes, the aim of the higher spirits of the nation down to the exile. The movement of life was in the direction of uniformity and order. There was much in the circumstances of the exile to stimulate this movement. The priests were left without their temple worship, and, in the absence of outward interests, must have turned their thought in upon their system itself, studying it as they had not done in the midst of its actual operation. Like all wrongly lost possessions, it became doubly dear. The Jews were placed in the midst of an ancient and highly organized priestly system in Babylonia, whose benefits to culture and religion they must have noted and pondered. In the national humiliation and the personal sorrows of such a wholesale carrying away of a people from their native land, a wide-spread awakening of the inner life was experienced, a genuine revival of religion. A new wave of prophetic enthusiasm rose in the strange land, lifting the soul of the nation to heights of spiritual and ethical religion never reached before.
This revival was stamped with the impress of the intellectual influences which were working upon the Jews in Babylonia. Some of the extant writings of this period, alike in literary style, in moral tone and in religious thought, mark a new era. Israel's genius flowered in this dark night—true to the mystic character of the race. This highest effort of prophetic thought and feeling appears to have quickly exhausted itself. In reality, it followed the usual order of religious movements, and turned into a priestly organization. The group of prophets around the first Isaiah prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed a century later. The group of prophets around the second Isaiah prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed close in their steps. First comes always, in religion, an epoch of inspiration, and then comes a period of organization. The organization never bodies fully the spirit of the inspiration. The ideal is not realizable in institutions. Institutional religion is always a compromise, a mediation between the lofty conceptions and impatient aspirations of the few who inspire the new life, and the low notions and contented conventionalisms of the many whom they seek to inspire. The compromise is necessarily of the nature of a reaction; but the interplay of action and re-action is the law of ethical as of chemical forces.
Israel really needed the conserving work of a great organization. The prophetic religion was far in advance of the popular level. The high thoughts and lofty ideas of the prophets needed to be wrought into a cultus, which, while not breaking abruptly with the popular religion, should imbue the conventional forms with deeper ethical and spiritual meanings; should, through them, systematically train the people in ethical habits and spiritual conceptions; and should thus gradually educate men out of these forms themselves.
In the providence of God, and under the influences of His patient Spirit, this needful system was developed in the exile: a system whose symbolism was so charged with ethical and spiritual senses that it led on to Christ; as the Epistle to the Hebrews rightly shows and as Paul distinctly declares. As the first priestly period, following the first prophetic epoch, bodied that double movement in a book—Deuteronomy; so the second priestly period, following the second prophetic epoch, bodied this double movement in a book, or group of books—the present form of the Pentateuch. The traditions and histories and legislations of the past were worked over into a connected series of writings, through which was woven the new priestly system, in a historical form. On the restoration to Judea, this institutional reorganization was set up as the law of the land, and continued thenceforward in force—the providential instrumentality for the ad interim work of four centuries. Such a remarkable process of development, so deepening in us a sense of the guiding hand of God, ought to show some sign of its working, in the literature of the period. However clear, from our general knowledge, the tendencies which were at work in that period, we could not feel assured of our correct interpretation of this most important epoch, in the absence of some such sign, in a writing of that date.
The Book of Ezekiel supplies the missing link. The writer was a prophet-priest, who went into the exile, and wrote in Babylonia. In the earlier part of his life-work, recorded in the earlier portion of his book, he was thoroughly prophetic, intensely ethical and spiritual, breathing the very spirit of his great master, Jeremiah. In the latter part of his career he was visited with dreams, such as are plainly indicated to us in the remarkable vision occupying the concluding section of his book. The fortieth chapter opens thus:
In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain, upon which was as the frame of a city on the south.
Then follows, through eighteen chapters, a sketch of the temple system in the expected restoration. It is a thoroughly ideal sketch, a vision destined to take on much simpler and humbler proportions in its realization; a picture probably not intended for copying in actual construction, but, like all ideal work, a powerful stimulus to the aspirations it expressed.
It is a free sketch of the New Priestly System, on the easel, awaiting correction and completion at the hands of Ezra and others. It reveals to us the visions that were occupying the minds of the best men in the latter part of the exile, and the work they were essaying. Thus we are prepared for the final issue.
The Book of Daniel has been wrongly placed, traditionally, with most serious consequences to the character of the book, and, through this misconception to Christianity. Dated from the early part of the sixth century before Christ, its story of Daniel's experiences read as literal history, and its visions appear as actual predictions of long subsequent events.
A high authority has declared—
There can be no doubt that it exercised a greater influence upon the early Christian Church than any other writing of the Old Testament.[37]
That influence, owing to this misconception, is chiefly to be traced in the growth of an apocalyptic literature, and in the fantastical and material expectations of the Messianic Kingdom which they encouraged. It has continued down to our own day turning heads as wise as Sir Isaac Newton's, setting religion at conjuring with visions of monstrous beasts and juggling with mystic figures until the name of Prophecy has become a by-word.
This book appears to take its proper place, at least in its present form, about a century and a half before Christ. That was a period of deep depression for Israel. Under Antiochus Epiphanes the nation had been sorely oppressed, its temple denied, and its religion well nigh crushed out. Men's hearts were failing them for fear, and for looking for those things that were coming to pass upon the earth. Pious souls turned back to the ancient time of bitter humiliation, when Israel had been scattered in a strange land, and recalled the bold word of faith spoken by Jeremiah, which had stayed the spirits of their forefathers. The great prophet promised that after seventy years the nation should be restored to its native land, and should renew its prosperity gloriously. It had won back its home, but in the old homestead it had grown poorer and feebler, generation after generation. Had the ancient promise of prophecy failed? Good men could not think so. To some devout soul came the suggestion that the seventy years had meant seventy Sabbatical years, each of which consisted of seven years; that is, four hundred and ninety years. One can still feel the thrill that must have gone through him, as he saw that this computation would place the defiling of the temple—that sign of God's having forsaken his people—in the middle of the last week of years. It was then only about three years to the destined end of the weary period that Jeremiah had included in the term of Israel's humbling, after which would come Jehovah's help. Fired with this thought, he set himself to inspire his people with fresh hope and courage.
Around a traditional Daniel, famed for his wisdom and piety, and possibly upon an earlier document containing some tales of this sage and saint, he wove a story which should interpret Jeremiah's prophecy and Jehovah's purpose. With charming grace he tells the tale of Daniel's constancy and trust under the sorest trials, and of the divine deliverance that always came to him. Into his mouth he placed predictions of what had already come to pass in history, that thus his reputation as a prophet might be established. Then he caused him to present a striking series of symbolical visions, the clue to which was furnished for the writer's contemporaries by certain clear allusions. These visions foretold deliverance as about to come at the approaching end of the four hundred and ninety years of Jeremiah. Other visions sketched the ushering in of the Messiah-Kingdom, in glowing pictures of lofty religious tone.
In that dark night over Israel this book was as the morning star. It was truly, as Dean Stanley called it, "the Gospel of the age." Its story spread, and with it spread renewed patience and hope. It doubtless fed the forces of that glorious revolt that shortly thereafter burst forth under the heroic Maccabees. Thus it kept alive the vital spark in the nation, through a crucial hour, that else might have gone out before it had given birth to Christianity. Noble as the book of Daniel is in many ways, especially as the real father of "the philosophy of history," it has a still deeper interest to us Christians for its timely service to the sinking nation through which came at last our Blessed Master.
The Acts of the Apostles, when studied in the light of the tendencies known to have been working in the apostolic church, becomes of similar importance in New Testament history to Deuteronomy in Old Testament history.
The primitive Church was, as we well know, agitated by contending factions. Two leading parties dominated all minor schools of thought; the Jewish Christians, who naturally wanted to keep within the old religion, and who would have made a reformed Judaism, and the Gentile Christians who as naturally objected to being herded within Judaism, and who wanted to make a new and universal society. The first party rallied under the name of Peter, and the second used the name of Paul. There was imminent danger that the new society would break apart, with fatal consequences to posterity. Real and deep as were the differences between Peter and Paul, they did not, in all probability, sunder these great natures as widely as their followers imagined. There must have been meeting points between such souls, in love with the one Master. To find these convergences and construct out of them a peace-platform on which both wings of the new society might stand, was the aim of The Acts. It embodied genuine journals of a traveling companion of St. Paul, notes of his addresses in various cities, traditions lost to us outside of this book, of Peter's conciliatory attitude and utterances; and groups these historic fragments into a sketch, in which the two apostles are shown as dividing equally the labors of founding the Christian Church, as preaching the same views, and acting in cordial harmony. This book is a sign of the disposition to draw together which was gaining ground among the primitive churches, a disposition fostered largely by this writing; out of which process of comprehension and conciliation arose the Catholic Church, naming its great cathedrals after St. Peter and St. Paul.