The Evolution of Old Testament Religion

by W. E. Orchard

Among the writings of the Old Testament, the Prophetical Books, whether considered as literature or religion, are acknowledged to stand out as unsurpassed. If the Psalms claim to rival them it is to be remembered that the Psalms are probably to be traced to the Prophetic teaching. The Prophets themselves begin a new era; they are creative and owe but little to their past. That for so long a period, in unbroken continuity, there should emerge from a tiny nation a succession of men of differing temperament, training, and social position, who should with remarkable unity voice truths of religion not only hitherto unrecognised but rarely surpassed or apprehended in subsequent history, is in itself a unique phenomenon in comparative religion. Equally notable is the fact, that in the majority of the Prophets we have not only the gift of religious intuition, but that this is found in combination with great oratorical power, true poetic genius, and practical statesmanship. They remain for all time an indisputable witness to the Divine revelation in the development of Israel's religion.

Previous stages which we have been able to recognise in the development of Israel's religion do not carry us on to Amos by so inevitable a movement, that his message could be predicted as the next stage to be reached. When we come fresh from the investigation of the religion held by the leaders of the people in the times of David and Solomon, we recognise the immense strides made when we open the Book of Amos. We can trace a likeness between Elijah and Amos in their denunciation of wrong; but, in the sphere of religion, there is a great gulf between them which no records of the intervening period quite help us to bridge over. We cannot think of Amos taking part in the great vindication of Carmel; it is probable that he would have recognised it as useless. In Samuel, Elijah and Elisha we undoubtedly have the religious ancestors of the Literary Prophets, but while they stood at the head of popular movements which they led in triumph against the intrusion of alien faiths, the Prophets that we are now to study stand in decided antagonism to the popular faith, and the conceptions of Israel's religion which they reiterate with such passion and insistency were never acceptable to the people. Their religion has to make its way against the national religion.

The importance of the Prophets is the natural starting point for the modern study of the Old Testament, and it is from the earnest perusal of their writings that modern Biblical science has been forced to take up a rigorous criticism of the entire literature of the Old Testament. Under the old methods, the Prophets had only a secondary position in the history of the ancient revelation, since their message was conceived as rather concerned with an age yet to come than with their own times and needs. The Divine Law had already been given to the people, constituting a perfect norm of religion. When the people failed to obey the Law, then the Prophet appeared, enforced its principles, and condemned the people's apostasy. If that message was rejected, as it often was, then nothing was left for the Prophet but the proclamation of vengeance, or the prediction of a time when the Law should be ideally fulfilled by the revelation of the Gospel. Between the Law and the Gospel, therefore, stood the Prophets, but they acted only as a bridge from the one to the other. The natural method of studying their writings was to search for the fulfilment of their predictions in history. With these aims it was perhaps inevitable that their words should often be interpreted in a quite unwarrantable manner; events were read back into their prophecies, or the fulfilment was found in such ordinary coincidences that the dignity of prediction was itself lost, the study became puerile and morbid, while a fancied necessity as to what they must mean prevented any scholarly and unbiassed interpretation. Their works have consequently been largely used as mysterious oracles from which the future history of the world could be accurately predicted. To read the Prophets in order to obtain a picture of their own age was regarded as a secular occupation, while every attempt to recover the original application of their words was regarded as an endeavour to discountenance the proofs of Divine revelation. Many of their words bear remarkable likeness to the gracious invitations of the Gospel, so that they have been used equally with the New Testament for Gospel preaching, but it was never dreamed that they were real invitations to the people of their own times, founded on the eternal laws of God's forgiveness afterwards made clear in Christ; they were simply words spoken under mental effects which transferred the speakers to the time of the New Testament. Whatever the final results of the application of historical criticism may be, it has already laid religion under a permanent obligation in its discovery of the hitherto unrealised importance of the Prophets. At first attention was directed to their exalted ethical and religious standpoint, appearing as it did in an age that neither produced nor responded to it; minute study then showed that they gave first-hand and incidental accounts of their own times. Their messages bear witness to the contemporary state of the religion of Jehovah and the people's morals, and although it may be that they sometimes judged these from their own high standard, which caused them to paint them somewhat darker than an absolutely historical judgment would demand, yet on what the prevailing religious opinions of the day really were, they are the best evidence. The startling but unassailable deduction made from the Prophets' accounts of their own times is, that in matters religious they were proclaiming doctrines that seemed to their contemporaries entirely novel. The Prophets do not, however, acquiesce in the charge of novelty. They profess to go back to the original and inner meaning of Jehovah's choice of the nation. They refer to this choice, as a "covenant," and to the religion demanded by it, as the law of the Lord. The first inference is that they refer to that which we know as the Law, the Pentateuch, or Law of Moses. A comparison with the Prophetic teaching with the ordinances of, say, the Book of Leviticus, shows that this cannot be the case, for they do not correspond. Many things there commanded as essential are passed over in silence by the Prophets; but the force of the argument is not wholly drawn from that, although it has a weight here which the argument from silence cannot usually carry, because both Leviticus and the Prophets' teaching set forth the essentials of religion, and there can be no possibility of doubt that the conceptions of the essentials have an altogether different outlook. It is chiefly, though not by any means entirely, from the standpoint of the Prophetical writings that modern criticism is forced to revise the conception of the progress and decline of religion that Jewish tradition has embodied in the arrangement of its Scriptures, and especially in the ascription of the Pentateuch as a whole to the age and authorship of Moses. The verdict from this comparison between the Prophets and the Law is, that the five Books of Moses either did not exist in their present form at the time of the Prophets, or, if they did, remained entirely unknown to them.

The historical value of the Prophets is therefore to be rated very high, not only because of their transparent sincerity, but also because the historical data which can be secured from them are given indirectly, and are valuable for the same reason as the remarks of a contemporary diarist. They are unaware that they are writing history, and are consequently free from the almost unescapable tendency of the historian to make the facts fit into preconceived theories. Modern criticism, therefore, does rightly in making the Prophets of paramount importance for the understanding of the Old Testament, and when the Prophets are thus made the test, much in the history that was either completely hidden or difficult to understand, becomes visible and clear, and the progress of Israel's religion is displayed in all its grandeur and movement.

We can now turn to examine the extent of the sources from which we may draw, in order to estimate the religious opinions and influence of the Prophets, and to examine the peculiar character of the literature for which they are responsible.

First in importance stand the Books of the Prophets proper. In the ancient division of the Hebrew Bible into, (1) The Law, (2) The Prophets, (3) The Hagiographa, or the holy writings, "The Prophets" included, beside our Books of the Prophets, such historical Books as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Significantly enough, however, Daniel is not grouped with the Prophets, but with the Hagiographa, either because it was not classed as prophecy, or more probably because the Canon of "The Prophets" had been closed by the time it was written.

Therefore, in addition to the writings ascribed to the Prophets, there is a literature which has been influenced by their teaching, and this is found largely in those historical Books which have thus been rightly included in the Prophetical division of the Hebrew Bible. That is to say, however, that Books dealing with history prior to the rise of the Prophets, show traces of an influence that can only have emerged later. It is here that criticism seems to the ordinary reader to enter very debatable ground, although among critical students of the Bible the question is no longer an open one. They claim that the peculiar conditions under which Hebrew history was compiled allow us to discern, and to separate with ease, this later prophetical editing, whereas in other literatures such would be impossible. History was compiled among the Jews largely from pre-existing documents, much as it is everywhere, with the difference that in the Old Testament the records have been simply pieced together with whatever corrections and reductions were rendered necessary, while the conceptions of the later times, when this re-editing was accomplished, are often simply superimposed; this method has been ridiculed as an invention of the critical mind, but it is simply an indisputable if tiresome fact which has to be taken into account in any serious study of the literature. The narratives of the documents that have been named "J" and "E" bear the marks of having been combined under the influence of prophetical teaching, since this teaching, it is to be noted, is recognisably incompatible with other parts of the stories which have been left untouched.

It has been suggested that criticism seems to assume that religion progressed until it reached a certain height in the Eighth Century, and to enable this theory to stand all marks of this supposed later type appearing earlier are classed as interpolations. It is usual to trace this theory to "Evolution gone mad." Even on the critical theories this cannot however be legitimately shown to result, since critical reconstruction shows that the supreme height gained in the Prophets was never maintained, but suffered a perceptible decline. Whatever the guiding idea of criticism may be, it cannot be an endeavour to make the history of Israel's religion confirm some theory of the natural development and evolution of religion. The critical theories leave us with the problem of moral lapses to account for and with the failure of vision to explain, and demand still a moral insight to detect the cause. But it is clear to many that the moral causes do stand out more clearly discoverable by this method.

The critical theory of the priority of the Prophets is not based only upon the emergence under their teaching of certain theological ideas for the first time; but also on the difference of style and vocabulary which can be recognised after only a slight acquaintance with the language; and on the general outline of the history that the Bible itself forces upon us. It is a fact which the reader can soon discover for himself, that the historical Books are compilations from the records of various ages, and these various ages can be as easily discerned as the conflicting styles of an oft-restored church, or the disturbance of the normal geological strata that demands some upheaval for its explanation. It must be remembered that all this is made possible from the fact of the remarkable uniformity of ideas that characterises the various stages of Hebrew religion.

The Prophets' teaching can therefore be traced outside their own writings; mainly in fragmentary comments added to the narratives; or in a superimposed colouring, which easily falls off, leaving the original outlines in view; but it is supposed to be found grouped into one great mass in the Book of Deuteronomy. The critics' theory of this Book is that it is an endeavour to reduce the teaching of the Prophets, more especially that of Isaiah, to a code, and to secure reform by the centralisation of worship at Jerusalem. This idea of a central worship, which leaves no record of its actual observance until the time of Josiah, or perhaps an attempt in the reign of Hezekiah, is so unmistakable and is so uniformly expressed that the work of this author (perhaps we should say, this school) can be easily detected, and many of the Books, such as Judges and Kings, can be seen to have been subjected to a "Deuteronomist" redaction. In all these phenomena we have teaching that presupposes the Prophets, and that stands in contrast and often in conflict with the general tone of the original. It is remarkable that with such redactions of history any clue to the earlier conceptions should have been left to us, especially that there should have been left in the records anything that would be in disagreement with the editors' ideas, but the Jews, like the other nations of antiquity, did not possess modern notions of exactness, and their notions of history prevented them from understanding things that were removed only a short distance from their own times.