CHAPTER V
INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWS DURING THE PERSIAN PERIOD
The Jews took to Babylon a highly complicated body of civil law and religious doctrine. The essence of the latter was an exclusive monotheism, and that belief was not the possession of a cultured few, but the accepted credo of the entire nation. No doubt, among the common people, practices still existed that implied the recognition of polytheism. No doubt, too, words and phrases occurred in common speech, in poetry, and in ritual, which had arisen in polytheistic times, and are fully intelligible only with a polytheistic background. But these phrases and practices do not imply the survival of polytheism, either as a whole or in rudimentary form, any more than using the names of the Teutonic gods for the days of the week commits us to the worship of those gods, or the various funeral superstitions still in vogue allow the inference that our present-day religion is a worship of the Di Manes.
Just as the Jewish religion was in a highly developed form at the time of the Exile, so the Law was very fully developed. That the entire Law, as embodied in the Pentateuch, was promulgated by Moses is not altogether likely, but that any considerable fraction of it is later than 586 B.C.E. is equally unlikely. Interpolations doubtless occurred often. To insert into an authoritative text an inference from the words which the interpolator honestly believed to be true, was not a generally reprehended practice. Perhaps some of the emphasis upon sacerdotal organization which parts of the Pentateuch show, may have so been imported into the constituent codes of the Torah. But on how slight a scale this was can be readily seen by comparing the Pentateuch with any of the apocryphal books consciously designed to magnify the priesthood.[[66]] The actual civil law bears every mark of high antiquity. The religious law is at least not inconsistent with such antiquity.
Now neither in civil law nor in religious thought did the community that slowly formed itself about the acropolis of Zion remain stationary. We must suppose that the energies of the returning exiles were pretty well concentrated upon the economic problems before them. But an actual community they were from the start, and although the communal life was far from attaining at once to the richness of former days, it contained all the elements necessary. Without a common law, i.e. a regulation of conflicting claims to property, and without a common cult, i.e. a regulation of the communication between the divine and the human members of a state, no state was conceivable to the ancient world. Changed conditions will infallibly modify both, and some of these modifications it will be necessary to understand.
We possess in the book known as Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus,[[67]] an invaluable and easily dated record of life as it appeared to a cultured and wealthy inhabitant of Jerusalem about the year 200 B.C.E. The incidental references to past time and, above all, the inferences which may legitimately be drawn about the origins of a society so completely organized as that of Judea at that time, render recourse to the book a necessity at many points of our investigation. While accordingly we find it a convenient terminus in both directions, we must make large individual qualifications. Ben Sira does not fully represent his time or his people. He belonged to a definite social stratum. His own studies and reflections had no doubt developed conclusions that were far from being generally shared. But he is an eloquent and unimpeachable witness that the Biblical books had already reached a high measure of sanctity, and the division later perpetuated in the tripartite canon of Law, Prophets, and Writings, already existed; and, if nothing else, the single reference to Isaiah as the prophet of consolation renders it probable that even so heterogeneous a corpus as the canonical Isaiah was already extant much as we have it now.[[68]]
Opinions may differ as to the length of time necessary to permit this development. But that a very few generations could have sufficed for it is scarcely credible. Since even the Secondary Canon, that of the prophets, had already become a rigid one, in which historical differences in parts of the same book were ignored, the Law must have been fixed for an even longer time, and the process of interpretation which every living code requires must have gone on apace for very many years indeed.
We know very little of the actual agencies by which this process was effected. The second great code of the Jews was not finally fixed till 200 C.E. We are, however, measurably familiar with the organization of the judiciary for some two centuries before, but even here there are distressing gaps, and for the time before Hillel the tradition is neither clear nor full. All, therefore, that concerns the organization of the judicial bodies that framed and applied the Law must be conjectured, and the earliest conjectures embodied in Talmudic tradition are perhaps as good as any. The development of “houses of prayer” was a necessity where so many Jewish communities were incapacitated from sharing in the great cult ceremonies at Jerusalem, and these houses became a convenience within Palestine and Jerusalem itself. But the creation of houses of prayer demanded local organization, and with that local organization gradations of members and the establishment of local magistrates. There can be little doubt that the organization of the Greek city-state, familiar to the East for many years, became a model for these corporately organized communities. Now the judicial function inherent in the character of ancient magistrates of all descriptions might easily have been the means of originating that long series of responsa from which the later Mishnah was finally winnowed. With every increase of population, power, and governmental machinery, the judicial system increased in complexity, and the intimate relation which the civil code bore to the ancient sacred code, as well as the close penetration of life by religion, tended to render the complexity still more intricate.
But if the origin of the oral law, in its application at least, can be made clear to ourselves only by means of such imaginative reconstruction, we are helped on the side of Jewish religious development by the possession of at least one fact of prime importance. The religious system of the Bible knows of a life after death, in Sheol, but does not know of a survival of personality. Warlock and witch, by such incantations as were used by Odysseus at the mouth of the dread cave, or by the wise woman at En-Dor, could give the shadowy ghost enough outline to be recognizable under his former name, but for the most part all these flitting spirits were equal and indistinguishable. But about 100 B.C.E. there was current generally, although not universally, a very different belief, to wit, that in Sheol, or the grave, personality was not extinguished, but at most suspended; and that under certain conditions it might, or certainly would, be permanently continued. In other words, between the deportation to Babylon and the culmination of the Hasmonean rule, the belief about life after death had very considerably changed for most people. And the change was of a nature that must inevitably have affected conduct, since the acceptability of man’s life could no longer be proved by the naïvely simple method of Eliphaz the Temanite,[[69]] nor yet by the austere consciousness of rectitude that was the ideal of the prophets. Transferred to a world beyond perception, reward and penalty gave the Torah a superhuman sanction, which must have been far more powerful than we can now readily imagine.
It is idle to look for the origin of this belief in any one series of influences. For many generations poets and philosophers had swung themselves in bolder and bolder imagery up to the Deity, which they, as Jews, conceived in so intense and personal a fashion. Very many passages in the Bible have seemed to imply a belief in personal immortality and resurrection, and perhaps do imply such a belief. Nor is it necessary to assume that these passages are of late origin. Some of them may be, but one would have to be very certain of the limitations of poetic exaltation to say just what definite background of belief metaphor and hyperbole demand. We shall not go far wrong if we assume that even before the Exile, individual thinkers had conceived, perhaps even preached, the dogma of personal immortality. Its general acceptance among the people occurred in the period previously mentioned. Its official authorization took place much later in the final triumph of Pharisaism.