Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

Although at present he has much to endure, yet there will be in the future a better time, when the Messiah shall come and set up the kingdom of God upon earth. Then Israel will be freed from the oppression of the Gentiles, and will enjoy peace and prosperity and the fulness of the blessing of God. When that shall be, no one knows. God will send the Messiah when it pleases Him to do so. But the sins of Israel hinder his coming.

When life on earth is over, there is a life beyond the grave. For the righteous there is Heaven, where they will be rewarded; and for the wicked there is Hell, where they will be punished. The righteous in Heaven will live for ever. The wicked in Hell will be destroyed and made an end of. There will be no chance to repent after death.

Man is under the protection of angels, and liable to temptation and harm from evil spirits. There are many such, and there is a prince over them. The angels are God's messengers. Each man has in himself two opposing impulses or tendencies; one towards good and the other towards evil. It is his duty to control the evil impulse and strengthen the good one. God will help him to obey the good, and will not prevent him from yielding to the bad. To keep his mind fixed on the Torah, and filled with its teaching, is his protection against sin and his incitement to right living. He is glad that the Torah gives him so many precepts to fulfil, because it thereby constantly reminds him of God, and provides opportunities for serving Him. The Torah is the centre and circumference of all his thoughts and beliefs about religion. In it God has revealed everything that He has revealed at all. It is the greatest gift He could make, and He has bestowed it all on Israel, and kept nothing back.

Such, in bare outline, and purposely stripped of all details, I believe to have been the contents of the religious consciousness of the Pharisees in general, the beliefs and ideas common to them all. In different periods, according to circumstances, there would be variety in the emphasis laid upon particular points.

For instance there might be, as there certainly was, more than one period when the group of beliefs centring on the Messiah rose into exceptional prominence, and were held with more than usual fervour. And, again, the destruction of the Temple in a.d. 70, and the final overthrow of the Jewish national polity in a.d. 135, had a profound influence upon Pharisaic belief, by laying additional stress on faithfulness to the divine will, and by causing deeper reflection upon the mystery of that will as shown in the suffering of Israel. The Pharisees deplored, with sincerest grief, the loss of the Temple and the cessation of its services. But they were well able to learn the lesson of a worship and a religious life, for which such external means were needless. And they did learn it with wonderful rapidity.

So, too, for individuals according to temperament, some elements of the general belief would have more importance than others; and there would be, further, a great variation in the strength of conviction with which the beliefs were held, as also in the character of those who held them. It is clear that such a general conception of religion could open a way for the faults of pride and hypocrisy, charged against the Pharisees, as it also could open the way for the virtues of humble piety and sincere devotion. It probably did the one. It certainly did the other. There were good, bad, and indifferent Pharisees, as there are good, bad, and indifferent Christians. And all that I am concerned with at present is the general Pharisaic consensus of belief, thought, and feeling upon divine things.

If I have described it correctly, then it represents the underlying meaning of the Haggadah; and whatever is contained in the Haggadah is intended to illustrate, or enforce, or make prominent, some aspect of those beliefs. It matters nothing that there is endless variety, and frequent contradiction, in what the Haggadists say, i.e. in the form in which they clothe their thoughts; nor that they make statements which are extravagant, or impossible, or absurd, or grotesque, or even occasionally, in appearance at least, irreverent. What really was in their mind was the underlying religious truth or ethical principle which they sought to illumine. That was their serious intention; and it is not a denial of this if it be admitted that, like all interpreters who use the method of allegory, they occasionally let their fancy run riot, and indulged in freaks of exposition whose connection with religion is not obvious.[18] Trivialities of that kind, however, may be left out of account.

It will be of more use to take some of the points of the foregoing sketch of Pharisaic belief, and examine them in greater detail. And the first shall be the doctrine of God, and more particularly certain aspects of the doctrine of God.

Between the Pharisees and the New Testament teachers there was no dispute as to the sole sovereignty of God, or that He was the Creator and upholder of all things. But it is well to lay stress upon the Pharisaic belief in the nearness of God and the directness of access to Him; also to make clear the fact that emphatic resistance was offered by the Pharisees to any idea of a plurality of divine persons. They would own no being who could be regarded either as in some sense a second God, or as a mediator between God and man.