He that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes,
That stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking upon evil;
He shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks;
His bread shall be given, his water shall be sure.
Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold a land stretching afar.”[282]
Here we behold the fiery element of the divine holiness partly depicted as a reality and partly spiritualized. The last of the prophets compares the divine wrath to a melting furnace, which on the Day of Judgment is to consume evildoers as stubble, while to those who fear the Lord He [pg 110] shall appear as the sun of righteousness with healing on its wings.[283]
5. The idea as expressed by the prophets, then, was that God's anger will visit the wicked, and particularly the ungodly nations of heathendom, and that He shall judge all creatures in fire.[284] This was significantly altered under Persian influence, when the Jew began to regard the world to come as promising to the righteous greater bliss than the present one. Then the day of divine wrath meant doom eternal for evil-doers, who were to fall into the fiery depths of Gehenna, “their worm is never to die and their fire never to be quenched.”[285] This became the prevailing view of the rabbis, of the Apocalyptics and also of the New Testament and the Church literature.[286] The Jewish propaganda in the Hellenistic literature, however, combined the fire of Gehenna with the Stoic, or pagan, view of a general world-conflagration, and announced a general doomsday for the heathen world, unless they be converted to the belief in Israel's one and holy God, and ceased violating the fundamental (Noachian) laws of humanity.[287]
6. A higher view of the punitive anger of God is taken by Beruriah, the noble wife of R. Meir,[288]—if, indeed, the wife of the saintly Abba Helkiah did not precede her[289]—in suggesting a different reading of the Biblical text, as to make it offer the lesson: “not the sinners shall perish from the earth, but the sins.” From a more philosophical viewpoint both Juda ha Levi and Maimonides hold that the anger which we ascribe to [pg 111] God is only the transference of the anger which we actually feel at the sight of evildoing. Similarly, when we speak of the consuming fire of hell, we depict the effect which the fear of God must have on our inner life, until the time shall come when we shun evil as ungodly and love the good because it is both good and God-like.[290]