That the Pharisees commonly thought of God as a cold abstraction, a distant and inaccessible Power, is by Christian scholars frequently but quite erroneously asserted. Of course, it was never denied that God was the Almighty, the Lord of all worlds, supreme over everything. Indeed, that was affirmed over and over again, and is one of the axioms of Pharisaic belief. But, whatever other Jews may have done, under the influence of Hellenism, the Pharisees never doubted for a moment that God Himself, the one supreme God, was actually near to every one of His people; "near, in every kind of nearness," as it was said (j. Ber. 13ª). That is the really effective belief of the Pharisees, as can be seen on well-nigh every page of the Talmud and the Midrash. How it was to be reconciled, if it needed to be reconciled, with the belief in the abstract infinity of God, was a question which the Pharisees never troubled to answer, even if they were aware of it. There was no Jewish philosophy of religion till long after the closing of the Talmud. And the Pharisees most certainly did not logically develop their conception of God from their idea of the Torah. Whether, even if they had done so, they would have arrived at the barren abstraction, which Weber declares to have been the Pharisaic idea of God (Weber, System, etc., p. 149), is open to question. But they never allowed any theoretical reasoning which would prevent them from owning the love and goodness of God, or which would place an impassable gulf between Him and His creatures. The following piece of Haggadah illustrates this point: "It is said (Exod. xx. 1), 'And God spake all these words.' He doeth the whole at once (i.e. in one action). He kills and He makes alive, in one action. He wounds and He heals, in one action. The woman in travail, those that go down to the sea, travellers in deserts, captives in prison, east and west, north and south, He hears them all, in one act (of hearing)" (Shem. R. p. 50b). And a few lines further on it is stated that He spoke all the ten commandments in one act (of speaking). There is here no attempt to explain how God, being Almighty, can take particular notice of persons; there is the unquestioning belief that He does so. He may be high in Heaven, but no suffering creature of His suffers unseen or unheard. "A bird perishes not, without Heaven" (i.e. except by the will of God); so said a great Pharisee, in words that have a striking likeness to a saying of Jesus on the same subject (j. Sheb. 38d, and cp. Matt. x. 29). A story is told (Debar. R. 102ª) of a certain Jew who was on board a ship, where all the other passengers were Gentiles. The ship touched at an island, "and the sailors said to the Jew, 'Take money and go ashore, and buy something for us.' He said, 'I am not at home here; how shall I know where to go?' They said, 'A Jew is at home everywhere. For whithersoever thou goest, thy God goeth with thee.'" (The reference is to Deut. iv. 7, "What great nation hath a God who is so nigh to them.")
The nearness of God is especially emphasised in relation to prayer. He hears all who pray to Him, and it is He himself who hears and to whom prayer should alone be offered. "Every man," says the Talmud, "has a 'patronus' (a 'friend at court'). If there comes trouble upon him, he does not go direct to his patron, but goes and stands at his door, and calls to the servant or to a son of the house, and he tells the patron 'So and so is standing at the door of thy court.' Perhaps the patron has him admitted. Perhaps he leaves him alone. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is not so. If trouble comes on a man (God says), 'Let him pray, not to Michael and not to Gabriel, but to me, and I will answer him at once.' And this is that which is written (Joel ii. 32), 'Everyone that calleth on the name of the Lord shall be delivered'" (j. Ber. 13ª). Here we have not only the declaration of belief in direct access to God Himself through prayer, but also the repudiation of any mediator. Michael and Gabriel may be servants of God, but they do not come between God and man to keep them apart or to serve as the necessary medium of intercourse. They were never, in Pharisaic theology, allowed any place which might seem to impair the divine Unity. The idea of a second God was steadfastly resisted; and no personification of divine attributes, or exaltation of archangels, was ever carried so far as to imply a plurality of persons in the Deity. As against the doctrine of the Logos, and the Christian exaltation of Christ, the Pharisees maintained the strict unity of God. Neither the Memra of the Targums, nor the Shechinah of the Talmud and the Midrash, however personified for Haggadic purposes, was regarded as being in any sense a personality co-existent with God Himself. The Holy Spirit was either God, or the influence of God, but not a personality distinguishable from Him. Metatron comes the nearest to the conception of a second God; but, whatever the later Cabbalists may have made of Metatron, the Pharisees of the Talmud expressly rejected the notion that he was a second God. It is told (b. Ḥag. 15ª) that the famous Elisha b. Abujah, the nearest approach to a Jewish heretic, went up into Heaven (Paradise), and there saw "Metatron, to whom was given power to sit and write down the merits of Israel." (Elisha) said: "It is taught that on high there is no sitting, no strife, no parting, and no joining. Can there be, Heaven forbid, two powers? (i.e. two Gods). They brought out Metatron, and gave him sixty lashes of fire." The commentator on this passage explains that Metatron was treated in that manner in order to show that he was not superior to the other angels in kind, and that he was subservient to God, not on any sort of equality with Him. Metatron, as I have elsewhere maintained,[19] is the Rabbinical reply to the Gnostic and Christian doctrines which seemed to threaten the divine Unity. It was perhaps with reference to Christian doctrine that the Rabbis laid stress on the belief that God has no Son. Commenting on Exod. xx. 2: "R. Abahu said: 'A parable of a king of flesh and blood; he reigns and has a father or a brother. The Holy One, blessed be He, saith, "I am not so"; (but) (Isa. xliv. 6) "I am the first," I have no father; "and I am the last," I have no son; "and beside me there is no God," I have no brother'" (Shem. R. 51b). Abahu lived in the third century of our era; and most of the Haggadic expositions of the unity of God, on the lines indicated, are later than the New Testament period. But, as they were only developed in opposition to Christian teaching, it is not likely that in the time of Jesus or the Apostles the Pharisees were divided or uncertain upon a point which had scarcely as yet been challenged. Jesus himself never challenged it, so far as the Synoptic Gospels are evidence; and, upon a belief so fundamental in Pharisaic Judaism, it is not to be supposed that he was more consistent than the Pharisees themselves. The challenge came not from Jesus but from Paul, even though Paul may not have intended, or been conscious of, any infraction of the unity of God in his teaching about Christ. The Pharisees took the alarm from him; and, in opposition to his Christology, and the later Johannine doctrine, taught with especial emphasis the undivided sole supremacy of God. And they had no more difficulty than Jesus had in believing that the one God was both sovereign Lord and heavenly Father, as in fact they called Him.
So much for the Pharisaic conception of God. We will now consider another set of beliefs of theirs upon which a comparison with New Testament teaching is possible and instructive—the Pharisaic ideas about Retribution, reward and punishment, merit. There is no consistent Pharisaic doctrine upon the subject, but rather a comment upon the facts of human experience from different points of view. That man's will is free is one of the axioms of Pharisaism. It was stated by R. Akiba, "Everything is foreseen, and freedom is given, and the world is judged, and all is according to the amount of work" (M. Aboth. iii. 15). Man is therefore a moral agent, cognisant of the distinction between right and wrong, capable of acting upon that distinction, and liable to be judged accordingly. "All is in the hand of Heaven except the fear of Heaven," said another teacher (b. Ber. 33b). If, then, man serves God, he does so not on compulsion. He is therefore subject to the approval or disapproval of God for what he does. Experience, interpreting life, discerns evident tokens of such approval and disapproval; and Scripture clearly teaches that God distinguishes between the righteous and the sinner in His treatment of them. Whatever form His approval or disapproval may take, they are His certain judgment on human actions, to be looked for as the consequence of doing those actions.
The Pharisees, like other moralists, expressed this by saying that God rewarded the good and punished the bad. And they used that principle as a clue to the meaning of providence, as shown in human suffering and happiness. They pondered on the problem why suffering should be inflicted on the apparently innocent? and why the obviously sinful seemed often to prosper? And they suggested various partial solutions of the problem, but wisely left it an open question. It might be that there was no suffering without previous sin, or it might be that suffering was sometimes the chastisement imposed on the righteous through the love of God, as it is said: "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." It might be that material prosperity and adversity were the signs by which the divine approval and disapproval were shown, the reward or the punishment for human actions; or it might be that these were manifested only inwardly, in the soul and not in the outward lot. All these different views find varied expression in the utterance of Pharisaic teachers, and there is no attempt to set up one as true to the exclusion of the rest. And when the Pharisee spoke of reward and punishment, he meant to indicate his belief that in some way it went well with the man who did good, and ill with the man who did wrong, and both by the divine appointment.
In the Gospels, Jesus also speaks of reward, as every reader knows; and many readers have winced when they read:—"Pray to thy Father, ... and thy Father shall reward thee." "Great is your reward in Heaven." "If you do good to them that do good, what reward have ye?" Phrases like these have an unpleasant sound, wherever they occur, because of the notions commonly attached to the term reward. No one supposes that Jesus, in using that term, was appealing to low motives of self-interest; and I believe that he meant exactly what I have given as the Pharisaic meaning, namely, that there was a divinely appointed difference between the condition of the good and that of the bad, as a consequence of their actions. It is at least not justifiable to say that Jesus must have meant what he said, according to its best interpretation, and that the Pharisees must have meant what they said, according to its worst interpretation. Jesus was one, and the Pharisees were many; and while he remained ever on the highest plane of spiritual wisdom, the Pharisees represented different degrees of that wisdom. Some might, and occasionally did, interpret divine reward and punishment in terms of material welfare, while others saw more deeply into the spiritual meaning of those terms. But it is not true that the material interpretation represents the general belief of the Pharisees, while the spiritual interpretation is the exception. The truth is that they would not reject any interpretation which might throw some light upon the problem; and they cared nothing that different interpretations contradicted one another.
So far, there is no essential difference, that I can see, between the Pharisaic teaching and that of the Gospels, or the New Testament generally, about reward and punishment. The difference that does exist is due to the fact that Pharisaism was the religion of Torah. For here the divine approval or disapproval was necessarily associated in an especial degree with the "Mitzvōth," the precepts which expressed the will of God for the conduct of man. To say that there is a reward for doing a "Mitzvah" is no more out of keeping with true piety than to say there is a reward for praying to the Father which seeth in secret. In each case it only means that the act of devotion to God, whatever form it take, is acceptable to Him, and His blessing is given to the doer of it. Now, the Mitzvōth were clearly-defined, specific acts; and the Pharisee, as has been already pointed out in a previous chapter, regarded them not as irksome constraints, but as welcome opportunities for serving God. The more Mitzvōth he could meet with the better. If, by doing them, he could thereby please God, what more could he wish for? Certainly he looked for reward; but the joy of service and the blessing of God was the reward he looked for. That is the real mind of the Pharisee in regard to reward. And if some Pharisees interpreted the blessing of God in a material sense, to be shown in outward prosperity, while others interpreted it in a spiritual sense, that is only a difference of temperament as between particular Pharisees. What the reward should be, in what way God would show His approval and give His blessing, was as God should please. The Pharisee served Him with gladness and zeal; and only hoped (as Christians also have been invited to hope) that God might say to him: "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
It was a Pharisee who said, "The reward of one Mitzvah is the opportunity to fulfil another" (Aboth. iv. 5); and perhaps no words could better indicate the Pharisaic view of reward in the service of God. The service is everything; the reward is God's way of showing that the service is acceptable. Moreover, the reward, if it were expected to be anything more than the present consciousness of divine approval, was not looked for in this world, but would be part of the bliss of the world to come. "Thou wilt find," said a Rabbi, "no single Mitzvah in the Torah, to which a reward is attached, which does not depend on the raising of the dead. 'Honour thy father and mother, that thou mayest prolong thy days,' and 'that it may be well with thee.'... 'That thou mayest prolong thy days' in a world which is endless, and 'that it may be well with thee' in a world which is wholly good" (b. Ḥull. 142ª). And again it is taught, "What is that which is written (Deut. iv. 7) 'which I command thee to do them this day?'" To do them this day, and not to-morrow. To do them this day, and not to receive the reward this day" (b. Kidd. 39b); and on the same page is the express statement, "Reward for a Mitzvah in this world there is none." Of the nature of the reward this is said: "The world to come is neither eating nor drinking, nor increasing and multiplying, nor giving and receiving, nor jealousy, nor hatred, nor strife; but the righteous sit with crowns on their heads, and enjoy the light of the Shechinah" (b. Ber. 17ª).
Such ideas were in the minds of the Pharisees when they spoke of the reward for doing the will of God; ideas not hardened into a formal doctrine, and perhaps by some only dimly apprehended, but yet indicating a vision of divine things not very unlike what has floated before the gaze of Christian souls. But while the Pharisees thus delighted to muse on the reward, they were emphatic in teaching that the "Mitzvah" was not to be done for the sake of the reward, as if to obtain thereby some payment of what was due. The distinction is somewhat fine, especially as the reward hoped for was spiritual bliss and not material advantage. But the Pharisees drew the distinction, nevertheless. Thus it is said, in reference to Ps. i. 2, "His delight is in the law of the Lord." R. Eliezer says, "Who delighteth greatly in his commandments." "In his commandments (Mitzvōth), but not in the reward of the Mitzvōth" (b. A.Z. 19ª). The sole reason allowable for doing a Mitzvah is the hope of pleasing God thereby. And then follows the well-known saying of the ancient Antigonos of Socho: "Be not like servants who serve their master for a reward." These are only a few instances out of many to show that the Pharisee was not actuated by motives of the kind which are usually ascribed to him in his performance of the things commanded him. If to an ideal so lofty and so austere, the Pharisee sometimes failed to rise, and said what was not worthy of it, there is no cause for wonder, since the same may be observed amongst Christians, and is merely due to individual human nature. But the Pharisaic conception of religion in general, and of this phrase of it in particular, is entitled to be judged by the best to which it looked up, and not to be condemned for its occasional failure to apprehend that best.
Finally, what about merit? The Pharisees were never afraid to talk about merit; but what they said must be taken in the light of what has already been stated. They had no fixed doctrine of merit; and there certainly never was a general Pharisaic belief in a system of bargaining with God as between debtor and creditor on business lines. This or that teacher may have used the terms of such transactions by way of illustration; but they do not represent the general mind of the Pharisees upon the subject. The Pharisees certainly believed that to perform many Mitzvōth was better than to perform one; and they not unnaturally concluded that there could be no more reasonable criterion for a judgment of character than the use which a man had made of the opportunities afforded by the Mitzvōth for serving God. Mitzvōth, being specific commands, could be counted up; and the degree of goodness shown in doing them, or of badness in not doing them, could be thought of quantitatively, instead of qualitatively. This is not, for obvious reasons, the best way of treating the matter; and the Pharisees have, in consequence, come in for a great deal of rebuke and contempt for having degraded the relation of man to God, when all that they did was to use an unfortunate metaphor in order to express a real distinction. It was perhaps mainly through the use of this metaphor, this quantitative description of goodness, that they laid themselves open to the charge of boastful self-righteousness; and no doubt they were occasionally to blame in that respect. Because a Pharisee was able to observe, in a quite dispassionate way, the fact that he had performed so many "Mitzvōth." It would have been better for him not to have learned that method of self-examination. But, nevertheless, it is true, though only those who know the Pharisees can be expected to believe it, that genuine humility could and often did go along with that candid estimate of good performed.
This accumulation of goodness, through the performance of "Mitzvōth," is what the Pharisees meant by merit, "Zachuth." And though they were not in the least ashamed of it, nor saw why they should be, they were careful to keep the idea of merit within limits. Like the reward hoped for, the merit acquired was not a motive, but an accessory. They believed, certainly, that merit counted for much with God. As has been said, they believed that He judged men according to whether the goodness of their deeds or the badness was the greater; in other words, by the amount of merit which they possessed. But they did not presume to set up a claim against Him; and while they pleaded merit before Him, they were taught that it was not their own merit they should plead, but that of others. "He who pleads the merit of others is answered for his own; and he who pleads the merit of himself is answered for that of others" (b. Ber. 10b). Very often it was the merit of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whose influence with God great effect was ascribed. Yet what is all this but the idea of intercession, of the good on behalf of the less good? And as between Pharisaic and Christian ideas on the subject, the difference is more in the form than the substance. Even the appeal to the merits of the Fathers was discouraged by many Pharisees, on the ground that it tended to shift responsibility for a man's own conduct on to someone else. They never for long forgot that, nor wavered in their trust that God was a just and loving God, into whose hands they need not fear to commit themselves. With simplicity of heart, rather than with profound philosophical acumen, they mused on their experience of life in the light of Scripture and in the thought of service of God; and if they did not get much further than the conviction that it is well with the righteous and not well with the sinner, that God knows all and will deal justly with all, that some of His ways are plain to be seen, and others past finding out, and that the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep His commandments; and that the highest joy is to serve Him with gladness, and in doing justly, and loving mercy to walk humbly with Him,—who will say that they are very far wrong?