of Shakespeare?
It is not our purpose to show that the Old Testament knows nothing of "mercy" in the modern sense of the word, but that the word hesed in the bible text, which figures in the English translation of this text as "mercy," means something quite different. Following the lead of the great Hebrew scholar, Gesenius, Chilperic makes the word hesed in this text from Micah, synonymous with our word "piety." What Jehovah desires of his people, then, is not clemency, but piety; not the love of man, but the love of God. It is the duty of man to God, not the duty of man to his fellows, the world over, that the Jewish prophet has in mind. The first-born of Egypt and all the other foes of Israel were destroyed as a reward for the piety of the chosen people. It is for this David praises the hesed of the Lord. In the same way, the "do justly" in the text has also a purely ceremonial meaning. The word "justly" in the translation is not the English of the Hebrew word in the text, which is mishpat. The Jews used the word in the sense of the law, or the judgments and ordinances, of Jehovah. What the Lord requires, then, in this text from Micah, which the commentators make so much of, is "to perform the law, to love piety, and to submit to Jehovah." And when the prophet quotes the Semitic God as saying: "I desired hesed (mercy), and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings," * he means just what the modern revivalist means when he says: "All your morality can not save you. What God insists upon is piety." If further evidence be required to know that what we understand by justice, love, charity, had no place in the vocabulary of the bible writers, there is the story narrated in I Samuel, xv. This "moral" teacher, Samuel, orders King Saul, in the name of Jehovah, to slaughter the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The king, in carrying out this program, manages to spare the lives of the best of the cattle; he also allows the Amalekite king to escape alive. Whereupon, Jehovah is so provoked that, "it repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king," he says. Then Samuel goes to see the king, who relates to him how he had consumed the Amalekites by putting everything to the sword. "And Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" The king replied that the best of the sheep and of the oxen were reserved "to sacrifice unto the Lord." Observe now the answer which the prophet of God gave to the king:
* Hosea vi, 6.
Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
Now we understand what it is that the Lord demands; so did Saul, after Samuel had explained it to him, for "Samuel hewed Agag (the king whose life had been spared) in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal." From a human point of view, it would have been more moral to sacrifice to God the cattle Saul had saved than to "hew in pieces" a human being, but that is the morality of man; to be moral in the bible sense is to do as God commands, whether what he commands you to kill be a sheep or a human being. Morality, according to the bible, means unquestioning obedience. Addressing a monster revival meeting, the Christian preacher declared that: "Violation of the sixth commandment, cursing, theft, drunkenness, and even murder, are pardonable sins, but refusal to accept the Son of God is an eternal barrier to the heavenly kingdom." *
* The Toledo News-Bee, May 17, 1911.
That is our definition of immorality.