It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all.
If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict had come. It felled them. Amon-Râ it tore from the celestial Nile, and Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Refaïm hid them in shadows as surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and Rome. These interments, completed by others, the prophets began. For it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant, creator of whatever is: the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts.
It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of this. But it lacked the authority of inspired text. The omission was one that only seers could remedy. It was presumably in these circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was further assumed to have been renewed to Moses. The resulting poetry was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a single tale.
"In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth." That abrupt declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. The Hebraic announcement alone prevailed. It emptied the firmament of its monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a deity at first multiple but subsequently unique. Afterward seraphs and saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan might create a world of his own and people it with the damned; theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of the Ideal.
At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that ideal. These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false, but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with Persia, more wise.
The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain. Since then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the natural propensities of beings that never were. That explanation these myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly, accepted, both provide and conceal. They date possibly from the Ormuzdian revelation: "In the beginning was the living Word."
John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding: "The word was made flesh." But, save for a mention of the glory which he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought of Ormuzd, who, in describing paradise to Zarathrustra, likened it, in every way, to heaven. There the first beings were, exempt from physical necessities, pure intelligences, naked as the compilers of Genesis translated, naked and unashamed, but naked and unashamed because incorporeal, unincarnate and clothed in light, a vestment which they exchanged for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it is in Genesis, when, descended on earth, their intelligence, previously luminous, swooned in the senses of man.
In Egypt, the harper going out from Amenti sang: "Life is death in a land of darkness, death is life in a land of light." There perhaps is the origin of evil. There too perhaps is its cure. But the view accepted there too is pre-existence and persistence, a doctrine blasphemous to the Jew as it was to the Assyrian, to whom the gods alone were immortal, and to whom, in consequence, immortal beings would be gods. In the creed of both, man was essentially evanescent. To the Hebrew, he lived a few, brief days and then went down into silence, where no remembrance is. There, gathered among the Refaïm to his fathers, he remained forever, unheeded by God.
The conception, passably rationalistic and not impossibly correct, veiled the beautiful allegory that was latent in the Eden myth. It had the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any theory of future punishment and reward. In lieu of anything of the kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically punished itself. The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, for corollary, went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward. Against that idea Job protested so energetically that mediæval monks were afraid to read what he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine—always an impiety to the orthodox—was insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled by the Christ.