By the rivers of Babel we sat and wept
When we thought on Zion.
We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.—Ps. cxxxvii.
“Here we ought to hang them upon the pyramids,” continued he. “The controversy which destroyed the harmony of our social meal this evening still jars upon my soul. Praised be God, that Jeremiah sojourned with my forefathers, that they like myself have continued Aramæan Jews, and have not gone over to the Hellenists.”
The Diaspora, or body of the Jews dispersed in foreign countries, was divided at this time into Hellenists and Aramæan Jews. The Hellenists had adopted the Greek, at that time the universal language of the civilized and literary world; the [Aramæan Jews] used, even in foreign lands, the Hebrew, or rather a dialect of that language, called the Aramæan. The latter attached themselves to the temple at Jerusalem, the former worshipped at Leontopolis in Egypt. A division once begun is easily extended to other points. With the Greek language the Hellenists had adopted Grecian culture, yet wished still to continue Jews, and hence arose the necessity for uniting philosophy with the law. The only way in which this could be accomplished, was that which they adopted, of attributing the doctrines of Grecian wisdom to the law, as its inward and spiritual meaning. In this undertaking the Egyptians had led the way for them. Egypt is the native country of [allegories]. For a long time past the popular religion had been very different from that of the sacerdotal caste, and they stood to each other in the relation of the letter to the spirit; of the image to the reality. The Hellenistic Jews had adopted this Egyptian mode, and three classes had been formed amongst them. One party openly renounced both law and allegory, living without the law, which indeed it was impossible to observe exactly any where but in Judea. Another outwardly conformed to the law, but did so for the sake of its hidden and spiritual meaning. A third set were contented with this spiritual meaning, which they arbitrarily annexed to it, and concerned themselves no further with the literal observance. No little confusion had arisen from this variety of opinions, and the incessant controversies to which they gave rise.
Helon had been hurried by the prevailing spirit of his age and country for some years into the vortex of allegory. A youth of such an ardent temperament and high intellectual endowments, connected with the most considerable families of the Alexandrian Jews, could scarcely escape this temptation. Had his father been alive, he would have been a constant monitor to him against the danger—but since his death on the journey to the Holy Land, Helon’s danger had increased, with the increase of his liberty. It seems too as if it were necessary that those master spirits, who are destined successfully to oppose the errors of their times, should themselves for a while be involved in them. The scattered intimations which the law itself affords opened to him a new and attractive field, which he was eager to explore completely. He was advised to make himself acquainted with the Grecian philosophy, as the source of the knowledge which he desired, and for this purpose he resorted to the Museum. His first instructor here was a Stoic, who demanded from him a greater rigour than even the law had required, but at the same time taught him, that the knowledge of God was not necessary. Helon forsook him, and applied himself to an acute Peripatetic; but his thoughts seemed more occupied with his pecuniary remuneration, than with the high rewards of wisdom and philosophy. Helon lost no time in seeking another teacher. A Pythagorean required, as a preliminary, a long study of music, astronomy and geometry, and Helon thought that the knowledge of the truth might surely be attained by a less circuitous process. At last a young and lively Greek of the name of Myron, whom he had known as a child, introduced him to a Platonic philosopher. In him he seemed to have found all of which he had been in search. He perused with Myron the dialogues of him whom his disciples called the divine. Those were hours never to be forgotten, in which his doctrine of [reminiscences], of virtue that is not to be taught or learnt, of That which is, first irradiated his mind. About this time he became acquainted with , who was also a Platonist, and profoundly skilled in the interpretation of the law. He could answer every question which Helon wished to ask respecting the sense of scripture. He explained to him the seven days of creation, and the ten commandments, in their spiritual import; and taught him much respecting the world of ideas, which he had not found even in Plato. His new teacher represented the divine intelligence, not as an attribute of God, but as a being having a distinct existence, and called it the image of God, his first born son, the highest of the angels and the primeval man.
For a long time his fancy rioted in these speculations, to which he was so entirely devoted, that if he continued to observe the law, it was owing to the pure and simple manners to which he was accustomed in his father’s family. But every thing which only gratifies the understanding loses its charm, especially with men of lively and ardent temperament, when it loses its novelty. When Helon’s first transport, at the enlargement of his views, had subsided, and cool reflection began to resume her sway; when he perceived that Myron could, with equal ease, explain and vindicate the worship of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Apollo—the Orphic and Dionysian mysteries—and all the idolatries of polytheism, by the aid of the same principles which his teacher had applied to the interpretation of scripture; suspicions were awakened in his mind that these principles could not be true. That which converts falsehood into truth, he thought, can never increase the force and evidence of truth. The promises which were given to Israel, the threatenings and warnings of Jehovah against participation in idolatry, recurred to his mind. The image of his deceased father was daily held up to him by his mother, as one who had abhorred the system of the Hellenists. A feeling of pride in his own nation, as the chosen people of Jehovah, was awakened in his bosom, and he could no longer take pleasure in the society of Myron.
He began now to remark the endless varieties and inconsistencies of these allegorical interpretations. Every one, full of the persuasion of his own wisdom, expounded the divine word according to his own fancy. Helon could not but perceive that all this wisdom was an arbitrary, self-invented, human system of doctrine respecting divine things, in opposition to which, not only Plato but the whole tenour of scripture taught him, that God only can be our [instructor] in things relating to himself, and that human reason must here rely upon revelation. This revelation he found in the law, delivered to his nation upon mount Sinai, under circumstances the most impressive and sublime. While this train of thought tended to alienate him from the Hellenists and their system, his mother one evening remarked to him with sorrow his slowness in fulfilling the divine precepts. At first he was so much offended by it, that he replied to her remonstrance only by a sarcastic look, and retired to his books. But conscience did not allow him to rest. Suddenly the divine denunciation occurred to him, “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”[[19]] He was deeply moved, and now saw with opened eyes the abyss of immorality, to the edge of which this new wisdom had conducted him. He had long desired to be free from the burthensome duties of the law, and he had now transgressed against the first commandment with promise. He felt to what this heathen philosophy, this partial culture of the mind, was bringing him; and in the lives of its professors he saw, in all their rank maturity, the vices, of which he discovered the seeds in his own heart. They lived without a law, sunk in heathen vice and immorality. He now perceived that nothing but the most faithful obedience to the law could make him truly happy, that in this way only he became a partaker in the promises of God to the upright, and that the passion for allegories had corrupted his mind instead of enlightening it. These reflections determined him to return to the faith of his fathers.
He now felt himself once more at home under his paternal roof; his former filial reverence for his mother returned; his father’s spirit seemed to smile on his conversion; and the experienced counsels of his uncle proved much more than an equivalent to him for all the wisdom of the Museum. All the joys and the longings of his childhood returned upon him; the feelings of the present moment seemed to be linked immediately to the remembrances of his boyish days, and all that had intervened appeared like a period of delusion. His desire to behold Jerusalem came over him again, in all its original vividness: it had been the strongest of his early feelings, and the very names of Canaan, Zion, and Jerusalem, had held a mysterious sway over his imagination. His mother, as he sat upon her knees, had told him of the place, towards which he was taught to lisp his prayer; of the thousands who went up to the feast; of Moses, David, and Solomon; and had represented Egypt as a land of exile, another Babel, in comparison with the land of his fathers. He often saw her weep when she spoke of Jericho and her native city, and related how she, when a maiden, had gone up in the choir of singers to the festival, but must now remain in a strange land. As the severest punishment for his childish offences, he used to be told, that it would be a long time before he would be fit to accompany his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the reward of his proficiency and his obedience was the promise of a sight of Jerusalem. When Jews from the holy city visited Alexandria, and, as their custom was, came to see his father, it was a festival for Helon; he regarded these strangers with scarcely less veneration than his fathers had done Jeremiah, and tried all the insinuating arts of which he was possessed, to induce the most courteous among them to tell him something about the land of his ancestors. It was the land of promise, the theme of sacred song, the theatre of sacred history. When his father was in a cheerful mood, he used to relate anecdotes of his pilgrimages, beginning and ending every narrative with the words of the children of Korah:
The Lord loveth the gates of Zion,