“I hate, I contemn your festivals and in your feasts I delight not; for when you offer me your burnt-offerings and gifts, I do not regard them with favour and your fatted peace-offerings I will not look at. Take away from me the clamour of your songs; and the music of your viols I will not hear. But let judgment roll down like waters and justice like a perennial brook.”
In the younger contemporary prophet of Ephraim, Hosea, the stress is laid on the relation of love (ḥesēd) between Yahweh, the divine husband, and Israel, the faithless spouse. Israel’s faithlessness is shown in idolatry and the prevailing corruption of the high places in which the old Canaanite Baal was worshipped instead of Yahweh. It is shown, moreover, in foreign alliances. Compacts with a powerful foreign state, under whose aegis Israel was glad to shelter, involved covenants sealed by sacrificial rites in which the deity or deities of the foreign state were involved as well as Yahweh, the god of the weaker vassal-state. And so Yahweh’s honour was compromised. While these aspects of Israel’s relation to Yahweh are emphasized by the Ephraimite prophet, the larger conceptions of Yahweh’s character as universal Lord and the God of righteousness, whose government of the world is ethical, emphasized by the prophet of Tekoah, are scarcely presented.
In Isaiah both aspects—divine universal sovereignty and justice, taught by Amos, and divine loving-kindness to Israel and God’s claims on His people’s allegiance, taught by Hosea—are fully expressed. Yahweh’s relation of love to Israel is exhibited under the purer symbol of fatherhood (Isa. i. 2-4), a conception which was as ancient and familiar as that of husband, though perhaps the latter recurs more frequently in prophecy (Isa. i. 21; Ezek. xvi. &c.). Even more insistently does Isaiah present the great truth of God’s universal sovereignty. As with his elder contemporary, the foreign peoples—(but in Isaiah’s oracles Assyria and Egypt as well as the Palestinian races)—come within his survey. The “fullness of the earth” is Yahweh’s glory (vi. 3) and the nations of the earth are the instruments of His irresistible and righteous will. Assyria is the “bee” and Egypt the “fly” for which Yahweh hisses. Assyria is the “hired razor” (Isa. vii. 18, 19), or the “rod of His wrath,” for the chastisement of Israel (x. 5). But the instrument unduly exalts itself, and Assyria itself shall suffer humiliation at the hands of the world’s divine sovereign (x. 7-15).
And so the old limitations of Israel’s popular religion,—the same limitations that encumbered also the religions of all the neighbouring races that succumbed in turn to Assyria’s invincible progress,—now began to disappear. Therefore, while every other religion which was purely national was extinguished in the nation’s overthrow, the religion of Israel survived even amid exile and dispersion. For Amos and Isaiah were able to single out those loftier spiritual and ethical elements which lay implicit in Mosaism and to lift them into their due place of prominence. National sacra and the ceremonial requirements were made to assume a secondary rôle or were even ignored.[24] The centre of gravity in Hebrew religion was shifted from ceremonial observance and local sacra to righteous conduct. Religion and righteousness were henceforth welded into an indissoluble whole. The religion of Yahweh was no longer to rest upon the narrow perishable basis of locality and national sacra, but on the broad adamantine foundations of a universal divine sovereignty over all mankind and of righteousness as the essential element in the character of Yahweh and in his claims on man. This was the “corner-stone of precious solid foundation”: “I will make judgment the measuring-line and righteousness the plummet” (Isa. xxviii. 16, 17). The religion of the Hebrew race—properly the Jews—now enters on a new stage, for it should be observed that it was Amos, Isaiah and Micah—prophets of Judah—who laid the actual foundations. The latter half of the 8th century, which witnessed a rapid succession of reigns in the northern kingdom accompanied by dismemberment of its territory and final overthrow, witnessed also the humiliating vassalage and religious decline of the kingdom of Judah. Unlike Amos and Micah, Isaiah was not only the prophet of denunciation but also the prophet of hope. Though Yahweh’s chastisements on Ephraim and Judah would continue to fall till scarcely a remnant was left (Isa. vi. 13, LXX.), yet all was not to be lost. A remnant of the people was to return, i.e. be converted to Yahweh. The name given to an infant child—Immanuel—was to become the mystic symbol of a growing hope. God’s presence was to abide in Jerusalem, and, as the century drew near its close, “Immanuel” became the watchword and talisman of a strong faith that God would never permit Jerusalem to be captured by the Assyrians. In fact it is not improbable that the words of consolation uttered by the prophet (Isa. viii. 9-10) in the dark days of Ahaz (735-734 B.C.) were among the oracles which God commanded Isaiah “to seal up among his disciples” (verse 16), and that they were quoted once more with effect as the armies of Sennacherib closed around Jerusalem. The talismanic name Immanuel became the nucleus out of which the later Messianic prophecies of Isaiah grew. To this age alone can we probably assign Isa. ix. 1-7, xi. 1-9, xxxii. 1-3. The hopes expressed in the word Immanuel, “God with us,” were to become embodied in a personality of the royal seed of David, an ideal righteous ruler who was to bring peace to the war-distraught realm. Thus Isaiah became in that troubled age the true founder of Messianic prophecy. The strange contrast between the succession of dynasties and kings cut off by assassination in the northern kingdom, ending in the tragic overthrow of 721 B.C., and the persistent succession through three centuries of the seed of David on the throne of Jerusalem, as well as the marvellous escape of Jerusalem in 701 B.C. from the fate of Samaria, must have invested the seed of David in the eyes of all thoughtful observers with a mysterious and divine significance. The Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, the prophet of faith and deliverance, were destined to reverberate through all subsequent centuries. We hear the echoes in Jeremiah and Ezekiel and lastly in Haggai in ever feebler tones, and they were destined to reawaken in the Psalter (Pss. ii. and lxxii.), in the psalms of Solomon and in the days of Christ. See [Messiah] (and also the article “Messiah” in Hastings’s Dict. of Christ and the Gospels).
The next notable contribution to the permanent growth of Hebrew prophetic religion was made about a century after the lifetime of Isaiah by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The reaction into idolatry and Babylonian star worship in the long reign of Manasseh synchronized and was connected with vassalage to Assyria, while the reformation in the reign of Josiah (621 B.C.) is conversely associated with the decay of Assyrian power after the death of Assur-bani-pal. That reformation failed to effect its purifying mission. The hurt of the daughter of God’s people was but lightly healed (Jer. vi. 14, 15; cf. viii. 11, 12). No possibility of recovery now remained to the diseased Hebrew state. The outlook appeared indeed far darker to Jeremiah than it seemed more than a century before to Isaiah in the evil days of Jotham and Ahaz, “when the whole head was sick and the whole heart faint” (Isa. i. 5). Jeremiah foresaw that there was now no possibility of recovery. The Hebrew state was doomed and even its temple was to be destroyed. This involved an entire reconstruction of theological ideas which went beyond even the reconstructions of Amos and Isaiah. In the old religion the race or clan was the unit of religion as well as of social life. Properly speaking, the individual was related to God only through the externalities of the clan or tribal life, its common temple and its common sacra. But now that these external bases of the old religion were to be swept away, a reconstruction of religious ideas became necessary. For the external supports which had vanished Jeremiah substituted a basis which was internal, personal and spiritual (i.e. ethical). In place of the old covenant based on external observance, which had been violated, there was to be a new covenant which was to consist not in outward prescription, but in the law which God would place in the heart (Jer. xxxi. 30-33). This was to take place by an act of divine grace (Jer. xxiv. 5 foll.): “I will give them an heart to know me that I am the Lord” (verse 7). Ezekiel, who borrowed both Jeremiah’s language and ideas, expresses the same thought in the well-known words that Yahweh would give the people instead of a heart of stone a heart of flesh (Ezek. xi. 19, 20, xx. 40 foll., xxxvi. 25-27), and would shame them by his loving-kindness into repentance, and there “shall ye remember your ways and all your doings wherein ye have been defiled and ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight” (xx. 43).
Personal religion now became an important element in Hebrew piety and upon this there logically followed the idea of personal responsibility. The solidarity of race or family was expressed in the old tradition reflected in Deut. v. 9, 10, that God would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, and it lived on in later Judaism under exaggerated forms. The hopes of the individual Jew were based on the piety of holy ancestors. “We have Abraham as our father.” But Ezekiel expressed the strong reaction which had set in against this belief in its older forms. He denies that the individual ever dies for the sins of the father. “The soul that sinneth, it (the pronoun emphasized in the original) shall die” (Ezek. xviii. 4). Neither Noah, Daniel nor Job could have rescued by his righteousness any but his own soul (xiv. 14). And as a further consequence individual freedom is strongly asserted. It is possible for every sinner to turn to God and escape punishment, and conversely for a righteous man to backslide and fall. In the presence of these awful truths which Ezekiel preached of individual freedom and of impending judgment, the prophet is weighted with a heavy responsibility. It is his duty to warn every individual, for no sinner is to be punished without warning (Ezek. iii. 16 foll. xxxiii.).
The closing years of the Judaean kingdom and the final destruction of the temple (586 B.C.) shattered the Messianic ideals cherished in the evening of Isaiah’s lifetime and again in the opening years of the reign of Josiah. The untimely death of that monarch upon the battlefield of Megiddo (608 B.C.), followed by the inglorious reigns of the kings who succeeded him, who became puppets in turn of Egypt or of Babylonia, silenced for a while the Messianic hopes for a future king or line of kings of Davidic lineage who would rule a renovated kingdom in righteousness and peace. Even in the darkness of the exile period hopes did not die. Yet they no longer remained the same. In the Deutero-Isaiah (chaps. xl.-lv.) we have no longer a Jewish but a foreign messiah. The onward progress of the Persian Cyrus and his anticipated conquest of Babylonia marked him out as Yahweh’s anointed instrument for effecting the deliverance of exiled Israel and their restoration to their old home and city (Isa. xli. 2, xliv. 24, xlv.). This was, however, but a subsidiary issue and possesses no permanent spiritual significance. Of far more vital importance is the conception of Israel as God’s suffering servant. This is not the place to enter into the prolonged controversy as to the real significance of this term, whether it signifies the nation Israel or the righteous community only, or finally an idealized prophetic individual who, like the prophet Jeremiah, was destined to suffer for the well-being of his people. Duhm, in his epoch-making commentary, distinguishes on the grounds of metre and contents the four servant-passages, in the last of which (lii. 13-liii. 12) the ideal suffering servant of Yahweh is portrayed most definitely as an individual. In the “servant-passages” he is innocent, while in the rest of the Deutero-Isaiah he appears as by no means faultless, and the personal traits are not prominent. These views of Duhm, in which a severe distinction is thus drawn between the representation of Yahweh’s servant in the servant-passages, and that which meets us in the rest of the Deutero-Isaiah, have been challenged by a succession of critics.[25] It is only necessary for us to take note of the ideal in its general features. It probably arose from the fact that the calamities from which Israel had suffered both before and during the exile had drawn the reflective minds of the race to the contemplation of the problem of suffering. The “servant of Yahweh” presents one aspect of the problem and its attempted solution, the book of Job another, while in the Psalms, e.g. Pss. xxii., xlii.-xliii., lxxiii., lxxvii., other phases of the problem are presented. In the Deutero-Isaiah the meaning of Israel’s sufferings is exhibited as vicarious. Israel is suffering for a great end. He suffers, is despised, rejected, chastened and afflicted that others may be blessed and be at peace through his chastisement. This noble conception of Israel’s great destiny is conveyed in Isa. xlix. 6, in words which may be regarded as perhaps the noblest utterance in Hebrew prophecy: “To establish the tribes of Jacob and bring back the preserved of Israel is less important than being my servant. Yea, I will make you a light to the Gentiles that my salvation may be unto the end of the earth.”[26] This passage, which belongs to the second of the brief “servant-songs,” sets the mission of Israel in its true relation to the world. It is the necessary corollary to the teaching of Amos, that God is the righteous lord of all the world. If Jerusalem has been chosen as His sanctuary and Israel as His own people, it is only that Israel may diffuse God’s blessings in the world even at the cost of Israel’s own humiliation, exile and dispersion.
The Deutero-Isaiah closes a great prophetic succession, which begins with Amos, continues in Isaiah in even greater splendour with the added elements of hope and Messianic expectation, and receives further accession in Jeremiah with his special teaching on inward spiritual and personal religion which constituted the new covenant of divine grace. Finally the Deutero-Isaiah conveyed to captive Israel the message of Yahweh’s unceasing love and care, and the certainty of their return to Judaea and the restoration of the national prosperity which Ezekiel had already announced in the earlier period of the exile. To this is united the noble ideal of the suffering servant, which serves both as a contribution to the great problem of suffering as purifying and vicarious and as the interpretation to the mind of the nation itself of that nation’s true function in the future, a lesson which the actual future showed that Israel was slow to receive. Nowhere in the Old Testament does the doctrine taught by Amos of Yahweh’s universal power and sovereignty receive ampler and more splendid exposition than in the great lyrical passages of chap. xl. It marks the highest point to which the Hebrew race attained in its progress from henotheism to monotheism. Here again we see the wholesome influences of the exile. The Jew had passed from the narrow confines of his homeland into a wider world, and this larger vision of human life reacted on the prophet’s theology. This closes the evolution of Hebrew prophetism. What immediately follows is on a descending slope with some striking exceptions, e.g. the book of Job and the book of Jonah.
7. Deuteronomic Legalism.—The book of Deuteronomy was the product of prophetic teaching operating on traditional custom, which was represented in its essential features by the two codes of legislation contained in Ex. xx. 24-xxiii. 19 (E) and Ex. xxxiv. 10-26 (J), but had also become tainted and corrupted by centuries of Canaanite influence and practice which especially infected the cult of the high places. The existence of “high places” is pre-supposed in those two ancient codes and is also presumed in the narratives of the documents E and J which contain them. But the prevalence of the worship of “other gods” and of graven images in these “high places,” and the moral debasement of life which accompanied these cults, made it clear that the “high places” were sources of grave injury to Israel’s social life. In all probability the reformation instituted in the reign of Hezekiah, to which 2 Kings xviii. 4 (cf. verse 22) refers, was only partial. It is hardly possible that all the high places were suppressed. The idolatrous reaction in the reign of Manasseh appears to have restored all the evils of the past and added to them. Another and more drastic reform than that which had been previously initiated (probably at the instigation of Isaiah and Micah) now became necessary to save the state. It is universally held by critics that our present book of Deuteronomy (certainly chaps. xii.-xxvi.) is closely connected with the reformation in the reign of Josiah. It is quite clear that many provisions in the old codes of J and E expanded lie at the basis of the book of Deuteronomy. But new features were added. We note for the first time definite regulations respecting Passover and the close union of that celebration with Massōth or “unleavened bread.” We note the laws respecting the clean and unclean animals (certainly based on ancient custom). Moreover, the prohibitions are strengthened and multiplied. In addition to the bare interdict of the sorceress (Ex. xxii. 18), of stone pillars to the Canaanite Baal, of the Ashērah-pole, molten images and the worship of other gods than Yahweh (Ex. xxxiv. 13-17), we now have the strict prohibition of any employment whatever of the stone-symbol (Maṣṣēbhah), and of all forms of sorcery, soothsaying and necromancy (Deut. xviii. 10, 11. Respecting the stone-pillar see xvi. 22). But of much more far-reaching importance was the law of the central sanctuary which constantly meets us in Deuteronomy in the reference to “the place (i.e. Jerusalem) which Yahweh your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put His name there” (xii. 5, xvi. 5, 11, 16, xxvi. 2). There alone all offerings of any kind were to be presented (xii. 6, 7, xvi. 7). By this positive enactment all the high places outside the one sanctuary in Jerusalem became illegitimate. A further consequence directly followed from the limitation as to sanctuary, viz. limitation as to the officiating ministers of the sanctuary. In the “book of the covenant” (Ex. xx. 22-xxii. 19), as we have already seen, and in the general practice of the regal period, there was no limitation as to the priesthood, but a definite order of priesthood, viz. Levites, existed, to whom a higher professional prestige belonged. As it was impossible to find a place for the officiating priests of the high places, non-levitical as well as levitical, in the single sanctuary, it became necessary to restrict the functions of sacrifice to the Levites only as well as to the existing official priesthood of the Jerusalem temple (see PRIEST). Doubtless such a reform met with strong resistance from the disestablished and vested interests, but it was firmly supported by royal influence and by the Jerusalem priesthood as well as by the true prophets of Yahweh who had protested against the idolatrous usages and corruptions of the high places.
The strong impress of Hebrew prophecy is to be found in the deeply marked ethical spirit of the Deuteronomic legislation. Love to God and love to man is stamped on a large number of its provisions. Love to God is emphasized in Deut. vi. 5, while love to man meets us in the constant reference to the fatherless and the widow (cf. especially Deut. xvi.). This note of philanthropy is frequently found as a mitigating element (e.g. in the laws respecting slavery and war)[27] that subdues or even removes the harshness of earlier laws or usages. It should be noted, however, that the spirit of brotherly love was confined within national barriers. It did not operate as a rule beyond the limits of race.