History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

In that part of the code which has to do with the ethics of ritualism the dominant motive of the editors or compilers springs from a dread and abhorrence of idolatry, like the dread and abhorrence of heresy in medieval Christendom. Yahweh will divide his worship with no other god. Israel had gone after other gods and Yahweh had given her into the hands of the Assyrians. A like fate awaited Judah if she served any other than him: “Ye shall not go after other gods, or the gods of the people which are round about you, lest the anger of the Lord be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth,”[369] is the first commandment with threatening.

Fear that Yahweh would do unto Judah as he had done unto Israel awakened the conscience of the nation. Idolatry was suppressed; the high places on which incense was burned unto the Baals were defiled, and the altars and the images of the strange gods were broken down and ground into dust.

This reform movement practically ended the long struggle which had gone on now for six hundred years and more between polytheism and the rising monotheism of the people of Israel. But unfortunately while the monotheistic element of the religion of Yahweh was brought out by the reform in sharper outline, the ethical element was obscured. The religion that was now made the exclusive worship was really little more than a pagan cult. It consisted in the careful keeping of feast days and the observance of the rites and sacrifices of the Temple—an inheritance largely from the heathen nations around about Israel. Nothing could have been more opposed to true prophetism. It was the triumph of reactionary ritualism.

This victory of ritualism has exerted an almost incalculable influence upon the development of morality from the time of King Josiah down to the present day. The immediate effect upon prophetism in Judah was most lamentable. “Deuteronomy simply confirmed the belief that religion was concerned with ritual rather than with morality.”[370] And so the outcome of the promulgation of a written revealed law was, in the words of Wellhausen, “the death of prophecy.”[371]

But this fatal effect was not felt at once. In the dark days of the Exile, now just at hand, there was a revival of true prophetism; but after the return from the Captivity, as we shall see, the prophetic spirit was almost stifled by the rigid legalism of the Temple cult. And it was this same Deuteronomic law which, in the hands of medieval inquisitors, stifled awakening prophetism in Europe and delayed for generations true moral reform after the stirring of the European mind by the Renaissance.[372]

The intolerant spirit of this narrow, rigid religion of ritualism found specially sinister expression in Israel’s war ethics. Instead of promoting international amity and good will, it deepened intertribal prejudices and hatreds and intensified the barbarities of war. “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth;”[373] “thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them,”[374] were the commands to Israel regarding the nations round about her who were the worshipers of other gods than Yahweh.

Thus religion was made an active principle of international savagery. It made it, in the words of Cheyne, “difficult, if not impossible, ... to love God fervently without hating a large section of God’s creatures.”[375] Under the influence of the fierce ordinances of the Deuteronomic code the war practices of the Israelites became more ferocious and savage than those of any other nation of antiquity, unless it be those of the Assyrian kings. Their enemies, who were also the enemies of Yahweh, they smote with the utmost fury, putting to the edge of the sword men, women, and the little ones, and taking as booty the cattle and the spoils.

The social ethics of the code

But, as we have said, there were two spirits striving together in this strange Deuteronomic code. In opposition to this spirit of stern fanatical intolerance there was a spirit of tender sympathy for the unfortunate, the poor, and the oppressed.[376] Along with this priestly morality, based on a certain conception of Yahweh and of his relations to Israel, there was another wholly different morality—a social morality whose chief sanctions were the natural impulses and sentiments of the human heart and conscience.

This code of social ethics bears witness to a progressive development of the moral consciousness in Israel. The ethical advance is unmistakably registered in various ameliorations effected in the crude customary law of earlier times. One of the most noteworthy of these mitigations concerned the primitive blood revenge. In common with other peoples in the kinship stage of culture, the early Hebrews in their pursuit of blood vengeance made no distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide. The regulations of the Deuteronomic code regarding the so-called cities of refuge[377] bear witness to a growing power of moral discrimination; for these cities are made inviolable sanctuaries whither might flee the manslayer who had slain his neighbor unawares and hated him not in time past.[378]