Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness,
Fearful in praises, doing wonders!”[462]
Thus sang Israel at the Red Sea in words which are constantly reëchoed in our liturgy. Nothing impresses the religious sense of man so much as unusual phenomena in nature, which seem to interrupt the wonted course of events and thus to reveal the workings of a higher Power. A miracle—that is, a thing “wondered” at, because not understood—is always regarded by Scripture as a “sign”[463] or “proof”[464] of the power of God, to whom nothing is impossible. The child-like mind of the past knew nothing of fixed or immutable laws of nature. Therefore the question is put in all simplicity: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”[465] “Is the Lord's hand waxed short?”[466] “Or should He who created heaven and earth not be able to create something which never was before?”[467] Should “He who maketh a man's mouth, or makes him deaf, dumb, seeing or blind,”[468] not be able also to open the mouth of the dumb beast or the eyes of the blind? Should not He who killeth and giveth life have the power also to call the dead back to life, if He sees fit? Should not He who openeth the womb for every birth, be able to open it for her who is ninety years old? Or when a [pg 161] whole land is wicked, to shut the wombs of all its inhabitants that they may remain barren? Again, should not He who makes the sun come forth every morning from the gates of the East and enter each night the portals of the West, not be able to change this order once, and cause it to stand still in the midst of its course?[469]
So long as natural phenomena are considered to be separate acts of the divine will, an unusual event is merely an extraordinary manifestation of this same power, “the finger of God.” The people of Biblical times never questioned whether a miracle happened or could happen. Their concern was to see it as the work of the arm of God either for His faithful ones or against His adversaries.
2. With the advance of thought, miracles began to be regarded as interruptions of an established order of creation. The question then arose, why the all-knowing Creator should allow deviations from His own laws. As the future was present to Him at the outset, why did He not make provision in advance for such special cases as He foresaw? This was exactly the remedy which the rabbis furnished. They declared that at Creation God provided for certain extraordinary events, so that a latent force, established for the purpose at the beginning of the world, is responsible for incidents which appeared at the time to be true interferences with the world order. Thus God had made a special covenant, as it were, with the work of creation that at the appointed time the Red Sea should divide before Israel; that sun and moon should stand still at the bidding of Joshua; that fire should not consume the three youths, Hananel, Mishael, and Azariah; that the sea-monster should spit forth Jonah alive; together with other so-called miracles.[470] The same idea [pg 162] occasioned the other Haggadic saying that shortly before the completion of the creation on the evening of the sixth day God placed certain miraculous forces in nature. Through them the earth opened to swallow Korah and his band, the rock in the wilderness gave water for the thirsty multitude, and Balaam's ass spoke like a human being; through them also the rainbow appeared after the flood, the manna rained from heaven, Aaron's rod burst forth with almond blossoms and fruit, and other wondrous events happened in their proper time.[471]
3. Neither the rabbis nor the medieval Jewish thinkers expressed any doubt of the credibility of the Biblical miracles. The latter, indeed, rationalized miracles as well as other things, and considered some of them imaginary. Saadia accepts all the Biblical miracles except the speaking serpent in Paradise and the speaking ass of Balaam, considering these to be parables rather than actual occurrences.[472] In general, both Jewish and Mohammedan theologians assumed that special forces hidden in nature were utilized by the prophets and saints to testify to their divine mission. These powers were attained by their lofty intellects, which lifted them up to the sphere of the Supreme Intellect. All medieval attempts to solve the problem of miracles were based upon this curious combination of Aristotelian cosmology and Mohammedan or Jewish theology.[473] True, Maimonides rejects a number of miracles as contrary to natural law, and refers to the rabbinical saying that some of the miraculous events narrated in Scripture were so only in appearance. Still he claims for [pg 163] Moses, as the Mohammedans did for Mohammed, miraculous powers derived from the sphere of the Supreme Intellect. In a lengthy chapter on miracles Albo follows Maimonides,[474] while his teacher Crescas considers the Biblical miracles to be direct manifestations of the creative activity of God.[475] Gersonides has really two opinions; in his commentary he reduces all miracles to natural processes, but in his philosophical work he adopts the view of Maimonides.[476] Jehuda ha Levi alone insisted on the miracles of the Bible as historic evidence of the divine calling of the prophets.[477] To all the rest, the miracle is not performed by God but by the divinely endowed man. God himself is no longer conceived of as changing the cosmic order. Both He and the world created by His will remain ever the same. Still, according to this theory, certain privileged men are endowed with special powers by the Supreme Intellect, and by these they can perform miracles.
4. It is evident that in all this the problem of miracles is not solved, nor even correctly stated. Both rabbinical literature and the Bible abound with miracles about certain holy places and holy persons, which they never venture to doubt. But the rabbis were not miracle-workers like the Essenes and their Christian successors.[478] On the contrary, they sought to repress the popular credulity and hunger for the miraculous, saying: “The present generation is not worthy to have miracles [pg 164] performed for them, like the former ones;”[479] or “The providing of each living soul with its daily food, or the recovery of men from a severe disease is as great a miracle as any of those told in Scripture;”[480] or again, “Of how small account is a person for whom the cosmic order must be disturbed!”[481] Thus when the wise men of Rome asked the Jewish sages: “If your God is omnipotent, as you claim, why does He not banish from the world the idols, which are so loathsome to Him?” they replied: “Do you really desire God to destroy the sun, moon, and stars, because fools worship them? The world continues its regular course, and idolaters will not go unpunished.”[482]
5. In Judaism neither Biblical nor rabbinical miracles are to be accepted as proof of a doctrinal or practical teaching.[483] The Deuteronomic law expressly states that false prophets can perform miracles by which they mislead the multitude.[484] We can therefore ascribe no intrinsic religious importance to miracles. The fact is that miracles occur only among people who are ignorant of natural law and thus predisposed to accept marvels. They are the products of human imagination and credulity. They have only a subjective, not an objective value. They are psychological, not physical facts.
The attitude of Maimonides and Albo toward Biblical miracles is especially significant. The former declares in his great Code:[485] “Israel's belief in Moses and his law did not rest on miracles, for miracles rather create doubt in the mind of the believer. Faith must rest on its intrinsic truth, and this can never be subverted by miracles, which may be of a deceitful nature.” Albo devotes a lengthy chapter to developing this idea still further, undoubtedly referring to the Church; he speaks of miracles wrought by both Biblical [pg 165] and Talmudic heroes, such as Onias the rain-maker, Nicodemus ben Gorion, Hanina ben Dosa, and Phinehas ben Jair, the popular saints.[486] In modern times Mendelssohn, when challenged by the Lutheran pastor Lavater either to accept the Christian faith or refute it, attacked especially the basic Christian faith in miracles. He stated boldly that “miracles prove nothing, since every religion bases its claims on them and consequently the truth of one would disprove the convincing proof of the other.”[487]
6. Our entire modern mode of thinking demands the complete recognition of the empire of law throughout the universe, manifesting the all-permeating will of God. The whole cosmic order is one miracle. No room is left for single or exceptional miracles. Only a primitive age could think of God as altering the order of nature which He had fixed, so as to let iron float on water like wood to please one person here,[488] or to stop sun, star, or sea in their courses in order to help or harm mankind there.[489] It is more important for us to inquire into the law of the mind by which the fact itself may differ from the peculiar form given it by a narrator. With our historical methods unknown to former ages, we cannot accept any story of a miracle without seeking its intrinsic historical accuracy. After all, the miracle as narrated is but a human conception of what, under God's guidance, really happened.