Prolegomena to the History of Israel

by Julius Wellhausen

The life surrendered is here found again in a higher life, without any expression of hope of a hereafter. In the Book of Job we do indeed find a trace of this hope, in the form that even after the death of the martyr, God may still find opportunity to justify him and pronounce him innocent; yet this idea is only touched on as a distant possibility, and is at once dropped. Certainly the position of that man is a grand one who can cast into the scale against death and devil his inner certainty of union with God— so grand indeed that we must in honesty be ashamed to repeat those words of the 73d Psalm. But the point of view is too high. The danger was imminent of falling from it down into the dust and seeking comfort and support in the first earthly experience that might offer, or, on the other hand, sinking into despair. Subjective feeling was not enough of itself to outbid the contradictions of nature; the feeling must take an objective form, a world other than this one, answering the demands of morality, must build itself up to form a contrast to the world actually existing. The merit of laying the foundations for this religious metaphysic which the time called for belongs, if not to the Pharisees themselves, at least to the circles from which they immediately proceeded. The main features of that metaphysic first appear in the Book of Daniel, where we find a doctrine of the last things. We have already spoken of the transition from the old prophecy to apocalypse. With the destruction of the nation and the cessation of historical life, hope was released from all obligation to conform to historical conditions; it no longer set up an aim to which even the present might aspire, but ran riot after an ideal, at the advent of which the historical development would be suddenly broken off. To be pious was all the Jews could do at the time; but it caused them bitter regret that they had no part in the government of the world, and in thought they anticipated the fulfilment of their wishes. These they raised to an ever-higher pitch in proportion as their antagonism to the heathen became more pronounced, and as the world became more hostile to them and they to the world. As the heathen empires stood in the way of the universal dominion of Israel, the whole of them together were regarded as one power, and this world-empire was then set over against the kingdom of God, i.e., of Israel. The kingdom of God was entirely future; the fulfilling of the law did not prepare the way for it, but was only a statutory condition for its coming, not related to it inwardly as cause to effect. History was suddenly to come to a stop and cease. The Jews counted the days to the judgment; the judgment was the act by which God would at once realise all their wishes. The view thus taken of the world's history was a very comprehensive one and well worked out from its principle, yet of an entirely negative character; the further the world's history went wilfully away from its goal, the nearer did it unintentionally approach its goal. In this view, moreover, the earth always continued to be the place of hope; the kingdom of God was brought by the judgment into earthly history; it was on earth that the ideal was to be realised. A step further, and the struggle of the dualism of the earth was preluded in the skies by the angels, as the representatives of the different powers and nations. In this struggle a place was assigned to Satan; at first he was merely the accuser whom God Himself had appointed, and in this character he drew attention to the sins of the Jews before God's judgment-seat, and thereby delayed the judicial sentence in their favour; but ultimately (though this took place late, and is not met with in the Book of Daniel) he came to be the independent leader of the power opposed to God, God's cause being identified with that of the Jews. But as this prelude of the struggle took place in heaven, its result was also anticipated. The kingdom of God is on earth a thing of the future, but even now it is preserved in heaven with all its treasures, one day to descend from there to the earth. Heaven is the place where the good things of the future are kept, which are not and yet must be; that is its original and true signification. But the most important question came at last to be, how individuals were to have part in the glory of the future? How was it with the martyrs who had died in the expectation of the kingdom of God, before it came? The doctrine of the zakuth was formed: if their merit was not of service to themselves, it was yet of service to others. But this was a solution with which individualism could not rest content. And what of the ungodly? Were they to escape from wrath because they died before the day of judgment? It was necessary that the departed also should be allowed to take some part in the coming retribution. Thus there arose—it is remarkable how late and how slowly—the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, that the kingdom of God might not be of service only to those who happened to be alive at the judgment. Yet at first this doctrine was only used to explain particularly striking cases. The Book of Daniel says nothing of a general resurrection, but speaks in fact only of a resurrection of the martyrs and a punishment of the wicked after death. With all this the resurrection is not the entrance to a life above the earth but to a second earthly life, to a world in which it is no longer the heathen but the Jews who bear rule and take the lead. Of a general judgment at the last day, or of heaven and hell in the Christian sense, the Jews know nothing, though these ideas might so easily have suggested themselves to them.

It is not easy to find points of view from which to pronounce on the character of Judaism. It is a system, but a practical system, which can scarcely be set forth in relation to one leading thought, as it is an irregular product of history. It lives on the stores of the past, but is not simply the total of what had been previously acquired; it is full of new impulses, and has an entirely different physiognomy from that of Hebrew antiquity, so much so that it is hard even to catch a likeness. Judaism is everywhere historically comprehensible, and yet it is a mass of antinomies. We are struck with the free flight of thought and the deep inwardness of feeling which are found in some passages in the Wisdom and in the Psalms; but, on the other hand, we meet with a pedantic asceticism which is far from lovely, and with pious wishes the greediness of which is ill-concealed; and these unedifying features are the dominant ones of the system. Monotheism is worked out to its furthest consequences, and at the same time is enlisted in the service of the narrowest selfishness; Israel participates in the sovereignty of the One God. The Creator of heaven and earth becomes the manager of a petty scheme of salvation; the living God descends from His throne to make way for the law. The law thrusts itself in everywhere; it commands and blocks up the access to heaven; it regulates and sets limits to the understanding of the divine working on earth. As far as it can, it takes the soul out of religion and spoils morality. It demands a service of God, which, though revealed, may yet with truth be called a self-chosen and unnatural one, the sense and use of which are apparent neither to the understanding nor the heart. The labour is done for the sake of the exercise; it does no one any good, and rejoices neither God nor man. It has no inner aim after which it spontaneously strives and which it hopes to attain by itself, but only an outward one, namely, the reward attached to it, which might as well be attached to other and possibly even more curious conditions. The ideal is a negative one, to keep one's self from sin, not a positive one, to do good upon the earth; the morality is one which scarcely requires for its exercise the existence of fellow-creatures. Now pious exercises can dam up life and hold it in bounds, they may conquer from it more and more ground, and at last turn it into one great Sabbath, but they cannot penetrate it at the root. The occupation of the hands and the desire of the heart fall asunder. What the hands are doing has nothing in common with the earth, and bears no reference to earthly objects; but with the Jews the result of this is that their hope assumes a more worldly complexion. There is no connection between the Good One and goodness. There are exceptions, but they disappear in the system.

The Gospel develops hidden impulses of the Old Testament, but it is a protest against the ruling tendency of Judaism. Jesus understands monotheism in a different way from his contemporaries. They think in connection with it of the folly of the heathen and their great happiness in calling the true God their own; He thinks of the claims, not to be disputed or avoided, which the Creator makes on the creature. He feels the reality of God dominating the whole of life, He breathes in the fear of the Judge who requires an account for every idle word, and has power to destroy body and soul in hell. "No man can serve two masters; ye cannot serve God and Mammon; where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." This monotheism is not to be satisfied with stipulated services, how many and great soever; it demands the whole man, it renders doubleness of heart and hypocrisy impossible. Jesus casts ridicule on the works of the law, the washing of hands and vessels, the tithing of mint and cummin, the abstinence even from doing good on the Sabbath. Against unfruitful self-sanctification He sets up another principle of morality, that of the service of one's neighbour. He rejects that lofty kind of goodness, which says to father and mother, If I dedicate what I might give to you, that will be best even for you yourselves; He contends for the weightier matters in the law, for the common morality which sees its aim in the furtherance of the well-being of others, and which commends itself at once to the heart of every one. Just this natural morality of self-surrender does He call the law of God; that supernatural morality which thinks to outbid this, He calls the commandment of men. Thus religion ceases to be an art which the Rabbis and Pharisees understand better than the unlearned people which know nothing of the law. The arrogance of the school fares ill at the hands of Jesus; He will know nothing of the partisanship of piety or of the separateness of the godly; He condemns the practice of judging a man's value before God. Holiness shrinks from contact with sinners, but He helps the world of misery and sin; and there is no commandment on which He insists more than that of forgiving others their debts as one hopes for forgiveness himself from heaven. He is most distinctly opposed to Judaism in His view of the kingdom of heaven, not as merely the future reward of the worker, but as the present goal of effort, it being the supreme duty of man to help it to realise itself on earth, from the individual outwards. Love is the means, and the community of love the end.

Self-denial is the chief demand of the Gospel; it means the same thing as that repentance which must precede entrance into the kingdom of God. The will thereby breaks away from the chain of its own acts, and makes an absolutely new beginning not conditioned by the past. The causal nexus which admits of being traced comes here to an end, and the mutual action, which cannot be analysed, between God and the soul begins. Miracle does not require to be understood, only to be believed, in order to take place. With men it is impossible, but with God it is possible. Jesus not only affirmed this, but proved it in His own person. The impression of His personality convinced the disciples of the fact of the forgiveness of their sins and of their second birth, and gave them courage to believe in a new divine life and to live it. He had in fact lost His life and saved it; He could do as he would. He had escaped the limits of the race and the pains of self-seeking nature; He had found freedom and personality in God, who alone is master of Himself, and lifts those up to Himself who seek after Him.

Jesus works in the world and for the world, but with His faith He stands above the world and outside it. He can sacrifice Himself for the world because He asks nothing from the world, but has attained in retirement with God to equanimity and peace of soul. And further, the entirely supra-mundane position, at which Jesus finds courage and love to take an interest in the world, does not lead Him to anything strained or unnatural. He trusts God's Providence, and resigns Himself to His will, He takes up the attitude of a child towards Him, and loves best to call Him the Heavenly Father. The expression is simple, but the thing signified is new. He first knows Himself, not in emotion but in sober quietness, to be God's child; before Him no one ever felt himself to be so, or called himself so. He is the first-born of the Father, yet, according to His own view, a first-born among many brethren. For He stands in this relation to God not because His nature is unique, but because He is man; He uses always and emphatically this general name of the race to designate His own person. In finding the way to God for Himself He has opened it to all; along with the nature of God He has at the same time discovered in Himself the nature of man.

Eternity extends into the present with Him, even on earth He lives in the midst of the kingdom of God; even the judgment He sees inwardly accomplished here below in the soul of man. Yet He is far from holding the opinion that he who loves God aright does not desire that God should love him in return. He teaches men to bear the cross, but he does not teach that the cross is sweet and that sickness is sound. A coming reconciliation between believing and seeing, between morality and nature, everywhere forms the background of His view of the world; even if He could have done without it for His own person, yet it is a thing He takes for granted, as it is an objective demand of righteousness. So much is certain; for the rest the eschatology of the New Testament is so thoroughly saturated with the Jewish ideas of the disciples, that it is difficult to know what of it is genuine.

Jesus was so full of new and positive ideas that He did not feel any need for breaking old idols, so free that no constraint could depress Him, so unconquerable that even under the load of the greatest accumulations of rubbish He could still breathe. This ought ye to do, He said, and not to leave the other undone; He did not seek to take away one iota, but only to fulfil. He never thought of leaving the Jewish community. The Church is not His work, but an inheritance from Judaism to Christianity. Under the Persian domination the Jews built up an unpolitical community on the basis of religion. The Christians found themselves in a position with regard to the Roman Empire precisely similar to that which the Jews had occupied with regard to the Persian; and so they also founded, after the Jewish pattern, in the midst of the state which was foreign and hostile to them, and in which they could not feel themselves at home, a religious community as their true fatherland. The state is always the presupposition of the Church; but it was at first, in the case both of the Jewish and of the Christian Church, a foreign state. The original meaning of the Church thus disappeared when it no longer stood over against the heathen world-power, it having become possible for the Christians also to possess a natural fatherland in the nation. In this way it became much more difficult to define accurately the spheres of the state and the Church respectively, regarding the Church as an organisation, not as an invisible community of the faithful. The distinction of religious and secular is a variable one; every formation of a religious community is a step towards the secularisation of religion; the religion of the heart alone remains an inward thing. The tasks of the two competing organisations are not radically different in their nature; on the one side it may be said that had not the Christian religion found civil order already in existence, had it come, like Islam, in contact with the anarchy of Arabia instead of the Empire of Rome it must have founded not the Church, but the state; on the other side it is well known that the state has everywhere entered into possession of fields first reclaimed to cultivation by the Church. Now we must acknowledge that the nation is more certainly created by God than the Church, and that God works more powerfully in the history of the nations than in Church history. The Church, at first a substitute for the nation which was wanting, is affected by the same evils incident to an artificial cultivation as meet us in Judaism. We cannot create for ourselves our sphere of life and action; better that it should be a natural one, given by God. And yet it would be unjust to deny the permanent advantages of the differentiation of the two. The Church will always be able to work in advance for the state of the future. The present state unfortunately is in many respects only nothing more than a barrier to chaos; if the Church has still a task, it is that of preparing an inner unity of practical conviction, and awakening a sentiment, first in small circles, that we belong to each other.

Whether she is to succeed in this task is certainly the question. The religious individualism of the Gospel is, and must remain for all time, the true salt of the earth. The certainty that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God drives out that fear which is opposed to love; an entirely supra-mundane faith lends courage for resultless self-sacrifice and resigned obedience on earth. We must succeed: sursum corda!

12. THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD.

Palestine fell into Alexander's possession in 332; after his death it had an ample share of the troubles arising out of the partition of his inheritance. In 320 it was seized by Ptolemy I., who on a Sabbath-day took Jerusalem; but in 3I5 he had to give way before Antigonus. Even before the battle of Ipsus, however, he recovered possession once more, and for a century thereafter Southern Syria continued to belong to the Egyptian crown, although the Seleucidae more than once sought to wrench it away.