By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing. This sufferer has been interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly as Christ. Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage. "Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,"—and at last "he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied." Then the strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all the passion and all the peace of the heart. "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Fear not, for thou shalt not be ashamed. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. The mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children."
To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will cling. For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of the storm had found peace. He called it the voice of God. What better name can we give it?
In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of Israel's religion. For the requirements of daily life there needs a more prosaic, definite, and minute guidance. This the Jew found in the body of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the priesthood. The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the direct communication of the code from heaven. One such occasion was the finding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentation and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and xxiii. The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses, and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the most "advanced" ideas of the time. A similar occasion, at a later period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers—or rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old—was probably in substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries. The mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter for curious study. It would be crude to class them as the deliberate and inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day. The claim of a divine authority for human beliefs—the idea that what is morally beneficial may be asserted as historically true—has worked in many strange forms. We see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow discovery. The same instinct—to claim for what we wish to believe a sanction of infallible revelation—works in subtle forms to-day.
As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader. The earlier code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper. It is one of the most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures. Here is that which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." The teaching of the book is primarily the worship of Yahveh,—a holy, loving, and judging God,—who rewards his people with blessings or punishes them with disasters. Promises and threats are equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more emphatic. The morality enjoined is charitable and pure. With an equal insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, including sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection of all other gods.
When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details. There is endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical uncleanness, and the like. Interwoven with these, as if on an equal footing, are special applications of morality—inculcations of chastity, justice, and good neighborhood. The principles of the Ten Words—themselves an inheritance from a very early day—are applied in many particulars. Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance. Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors. It was, in a word, a Puritan reformation. There was just the same combination of heightened moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the Puritan. But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead of simplifying his ritual. It is this interblending of outward observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern reader at every page. It was a confusion which needed the spiritual genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitely renounce.
By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually an expansion of its moral precepts. The sacred books were expounded by the Scribes. The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloody sacrifices and his imposing liturgies. Spontaneity, inspiration, prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality. The moral value of labor and industry came into recognition. There were teachers like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went hand in hand. In the ethics of Judaism—under all these various forms of "the Law and the Prophets"—the distinctive note, compared with the ethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity. The ideal Greece represented wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to God by purity of life.
The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of chastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great hope. The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation for it comes now before us.
Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and practice of degenerate Greek culture,—pleasure-loving, nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and tyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and vices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution with the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce courage and religious fervor of his race. He won his last victory in the field of arms. Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more into invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in their hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was to change the aspect of human life.