Of all Asiatics the Hebrews are the most interesting to the modern world. These as Jehovah’s chosen people will hold the place of honor throughout all time. They are preëminently the educated people, because educated by Jehovah; and preëminently the educators, because it is through them that the world has been taught the personality of God.
Judea.—Out from among a Chaldean people, of Sabæan religion, worshipers of the heavenly bodies, went Abraham, and founded a people that should reveal the true God to all nations.
At first there was a nomadic or herdsman’s life of his people; then the Egyptian bondage, a training in the highest civilization of that time. The chosen people were to learn agriculture and the arts, and leave off the herdsman’s life. Then in the promised land comes the development of the city life under the kings. The patriarchal, the agricultural, and the urban phases of life make up the national forms. Then there is the captivity to Babylon in which takes place another phase of the education of this people. Finally, under the Roman dominion, there is born the Desire of all Nations in Bethlehem, and the career of the Hebrews as a chosen people is at an end.
The Jew educated his children with the utmost tenderness and care, for they were the gift of Jehovah, and should be consecrated to him by education in his law and in the teachings of the prophets.
It is impossible to conceive of any other education of so powerful a character or of so spiritual and ennobling a tendency as the education of the Jewish child in the history of the dealings of Jehovah with his forefathers. His national history revealed the direct relation of man to God.
God is a teacher. He reveals his will to men. The consciousness of being God’s people educated those colossal individualities the patriarchs, the great national leaders, and the prophets. Their biographies furnish types of character that have a pedagogical value for all time.
With his idea of God as a father, the Jew becomes the most humane of all peoples. His respect for bodily life, his humanity toward widows and orphans, his institution of the Jubilee year, the scape-goat, the laws against cruelty to animals, have been a great lesson to modern civilization.
The Psalms of David that celebrate God’s greatness, goodness, providence, patient kindness and forgiveness, present for all time the expression of what is most comforting and most purifying to the human soul.
The Egyptian and Phœnician spirit is limited by nature. The Jewish is elevated above it. He conceives God as pure causality;—the creator of the world;—the sun and stars are not his special revelation and in no respect to be reverenced by man.
Man is greater than nature because he is chosen by the Almighty as his friend, and unconscious nature is not worthy such a destiny. Righteousness is honor of God, and mere ceremony is not. Mere nature is not adequate to the revelation of the divine. It is not the hurricane nor the earthquake that reveals God, but the small voice that speaks to man’s spirit and reason. The human heart is the place for God, but the sun and moon are not his incarnations.