The ideal of the brotherhood of nations and universal peace
The morality of Amos and Hosea infolded the germ of ethical cosmopolitanism. The conviction that the government of Yahweh is founded on absolute justice and righteousness led to the conviction of its ultimate universality, “for right is everywhere right, and wrong is everywhere wrong.” The political situation in the Semitic world at this time fostered the thought thus awakened. The predominant fact in international relations in the latter half of the eighth century was the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In its expansion it had already engulfed many of the smaller states of western Asia, and Assyria had become a world power. Political unity suggested now, as it did when Rome had established a world empire, religious and ethical unity. Yahweh, Israel’s God of justice and right, is the suzerain of all other gods and peoples. He will establish a world-wide kingdom, and all nations shall acknowledge his righteous rule.
As representatives of this broadening vision we have the great prophets Isaiah and Micah, who, proclaiming the universal reach of the law of right and justice, held aloft a noble ethical ideal of the brotherhood of nations and universal peace. Seers by virtue of their conviction of the absoluteness, the oneness and sovereignty, of the moral law, they foretold the coming of a time in the last days when all the nations of the earth should form a federation under the suzerainty of Israel with Jerusalem as the world capital: “Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”[362]
This is the first distinct expression in Hebrew literature, or in that of any race, of the idea of the brotherhood of man and a federated world. The lofty ideal has never faded from the eyes of men. It has inspired all the noblest visions of world unity and peace through the war-troubled ages, and is in the world of to-day the source and spring of much of that ethical idealism which with prophetic faith and conviction proclaims a federated world, with the nations dwelling together in peace and amity, as the one divine event toward which all history moves.
With this lofty ethical universalism in the teachings of Isaiah and Micah was joined a simple personal and social morality of the human heart and reason. These prophets were at one with Amos and Hosea in proclaiming that what Yahweh delights in is not sacrifices and the observance of new moons and Sabbaths, but cleanliness of life and services of love. Hear Isaiah as he repeats the words of the Lord: “I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.... Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.... Cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”[363] And listen to Micah: “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams and with ten thousands of rivers of oil?... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[364]
The prophetic spirit creates a unique ethical literature
The prophets of the eighth century were the first of the literary prophets; that is, the first of those who employed literature as the vehicle of their message to Israel. Hence here our attention is called to a matter of supreme significance for universal morality—the ethicalizing of the mythology and traditional history of the Hebrew people.
It was during the age of the kings that the mass of cosmological myths and legends borrowed from Babylonia,—doubtless largely through contact with Assyria,—the traditions of the patriarchs, and the story of the sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus, all of which had been transmitted from the foretime orally or in writing, was worked over and edited afresh, in which process it received the indelible stamp of the deeper and truer moral consciousness of this later age. For though probably little of this work was done by the prophets themselves, it was done by men who wrote under the inspiration of the new thoughts of God and of his moral government which had been awakened in the souls of the great teachers of Israel. The polytheistic elements of these myths and traditions and their grosser and more archaic immoralities were pruned away, while at the same time they were given a monotheistic cast and a truer morality was breathed into them. In a word, all this literary material was censored by the growing moral consciousness of Israel. The outcome was the creation of a literature absolutely unique in its moral educative worth.
Thus the remolded and moralized Chaldean account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of human history came to form the basis of the opening chapters of Genesis, whose influence upon Hebrew morality, through molding Israel’s idea of the character of Yahweh and of his relations to man, it would hardly be possible to exaggerate. Also the tradition of the Exodus, given now its final form and received by the later generations of Israel as an historically true account of the experiences of their fathers, left an ineffaceable impress upon the mind and heart of the Hebrew nation, determining largely their ideas as to their chief moral obligations as the chosen and covenanted people of Yahweh. It was this tradition of their heroic past which was the inspiration of the moral strivings of the nation. Furthermore, all this literary material, thus reshaped and colored by the growing monotheistic ideas of the teachers of Israel and bearing the stamp of their gradually deepening moral consciousness, and in this form transmitted to the Aryan nations of the West, was destined to become one of the most important factors not merely in the religious but especially in the moral life of the European peoples.
The ethicalizing of pagan festivals and cults