But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore—as completely as Jesus did—that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck over Belgium and not of a mediæval Jew over the desolated home of Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she would like to kill every German—man or woman—with her own hand!
And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James Hinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it." And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can give us the clue to the Bible. This is the only "Guide to the Perplexed," and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when by allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that distorted dialectic known as Pilpul. The only true "Conciliador" is history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere—or rather everywhere. The same method that softened the Oriental amorousness of "The Song of Solomon" into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in the hands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church. But if Reason cannot always—as Bachya imagined—confirm tradition, it can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands from the higher in that motley collection of national literature which, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with strayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes of even a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when put forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as uniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people that produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because occasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths there is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery.
III[ToC]
As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his "Biblical Archæology" and as Sir James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and gradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has replaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes the angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when My creatures are perishing?" The very miracles of the Old Testament were side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages, is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered with the voting on a legal point, en mashgîchin be-bathkol—"We cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not heaven"—was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking. Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the masses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new back again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, "a veritable museum of relics," or as whales have vestiges of hind legs with now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had begun to evolve "the service of the Synagogue," but it did not shed the animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago. The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for universal salvation, that the more material prophecies—evoked moreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to foretell restoration and glory—are practically swamped. At the worst, we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own individual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When he brought the Roman ensigns with Cæsar's effigies to Jerusalem, the Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling deification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers and menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and went home. "But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed." And Pilate, touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the Jews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.
"God's witnesses," "a light of the nations," "a suffering servant," "a kingdom of priests"—the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur are unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion with poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of the Bible we owe to America.)
Behold My servant whom I uphold;
Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth;
I have put My spirit upon him,
He shall make the right to go forth to the nations:
He shall not fail or be crushed
Till he have set the right on the earth,
And the isles shall wait for his teaching.
Thus saith God the LORD,
He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth,
He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it,
He that giveth bread unto the people upon it,
And spirit to them that walk therein:
I the LORD have called thee in righteousness,
And have taken hold of thy hand,
And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people,
For a light of the nations;
[41] To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.
Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all civilization. "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream." "Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more."