Hebrew life and thought; being interpretative studies in the literature of Israel

Front matter

THE GIFT OF

Alfred CL Barnes,

Date Due iNOV

Preface

It is only fair to both readers and writer of these studies to say that they were written, and had been given in the form of lectures, before any of the now large and daily increasing popular literature of this subject had come into being. In the nature of things, every repetition of these lectures — and some of them have been given more than thirty times — implied their careful revision in whatever new light had been shed upon the subject; and now, before receiving their final form, they have been subjected to a very thorough revision. But as they were first written, and as they now stand, they are far more the fruit of a lifetime of Bible study than of any recent reading. That study began at an age earlier than children of today are taught to read, and has continued for more than the average lifetime. Its results have passed into the fiber of my mind, so that it would be impossible now, if it were desirable, to give authorities for many of the statements here made, or for the positions here held ; or to say what, if anything, here is my own contribution to the subject. Probably very little, if anything, is original with me. The viii HEBREW LIFE AND THOUGHT

purpose of these papers was not, and is not, to give forth original ideas, but to bring the more or less cultured but unscientific Bible student into a hospitable attitude toward the new light that scholarship has shed upon the sacred page. It has long been my conviction that if scientific scholarship had more generally availed itself of the method of culture, it would not have aroused that alarm and antagonism with which it even yet has to reckon. These papers are my effort to allay both, so far as their influence may reach, by putting into the language of culture some of those conclusions which, when clothed only in the language of scholarship, have aroused hostility which appears to me as unnecessary as it is unfortunate. My contribution to this end, therefore, like that of most popular writers, is more in the attitude of the mind which receives and gives forth the thoughts of others, than in anything new or original. It is, indeed, quite possible that the few ideas which appear to me to be mine, and which constitute the illumination which it seems to me that I have shed upon the subject, may be found in the works of other writers, though I am not aware of having found them. To me they appear to be either sudden flashes of insight, or the gradual develops ment in my own mind of a seed-thought planted many years ago by parents of unusual culture

PREFACE ix

and breadth of vision, or casually dropped there by I know not what agency, but in any case equally the gift of God.

My warm thanks are due to Mr. John M. P. Smith, of the University of Chicago, for carefully reading the manuscript of this book and offering many valuable criticisms, which had much weight in the very thorough revision which the work received before going to the printer; and especially to Professor Julius A. Bewer, Ph.D., of Union Theological Seminary, for reading the book in proof, and making important suggestions, by which I have been very glad to profit.

L. S. H.

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

T. The Day-Book of the Most High . . i

II. Folklore in the Old Testament . . 26

Chapter I I

It was Heine who called the Old Testament " Jehovah's diary/' That sad, bewildered, dauntless spirit was not able to find in it the divine teaching which some of us discover ; he could not make that application of its utterances to his own needs which to some of us is so precious; but he did see in it that which many of us fail to see, that which is its most important characteristic, making it the unique book of all the world. He saw that the Old Testament was the record of God's dealing with the entire human race. Yet it is not a history nor a philosophy of history. Bit by bit, part by part, in divers portions and in divers manners, as one sets down the events of his life in his own diary, now with ample detail, again in mere suggestion which only he who has the clue can understand — thus has God given us in this volume the revelation of a gracious purpose, the " inner history of a converse of God with man." With deeper insight than we find in the sacred books of other peoples, the Old Testament pictures the world as ruled by the thought of God; with a certainty unknown to other ancient works, sacred or profane, it unlocks the riddles of history with God as the master-key; more completely than anything that has ever been written, in any time or tongue, it shows the entire story of the human race, past, present, and future, to be an organic unity, event growing out of event by a natural development, a process in which each step prophesies of the end — the " one far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves."

As the records of other ancient peoples are unearthed, it becomes the more impressive a fact that the Old Testament gives a more comprehensive view of history than any other work of ancient time. The first attempt to account for the various races actually present at the dawn of historic time, of which we have any record, is that found in some early chapters of Genesis; while large parts of Isaiah and some other prophets are given to a survey of the whole world as then known, showing one nation after another as it stood in relation to the divine thought for the human race, then being worked out in the history of the people Israel.

It is a mistake to think of the Jews as a separate people in a geographical sense, as if they were isolated from the world in their mountainand desert-girt land ; they were in constant communication with all the nations then existing. It was a true instinct which led them to mark in their temple inclosure the precise center of the world. That circle of marble pavement surrounding a low pillar 1 did mark it then. Palestine was the geographical center of the world in a perfectly true sense, and Israel is still its historic center. The old rabbi who said, " Israel is among the nations as the heart among the limbs," spoke true. Israel was the vital organ of the world. It is with the heart that one sees God, as our Lord taught us, 2 and this vision and faculty divine were the heritage of the sons of Israel.

Nothing can be of profounder significance than the fact that from the earliest times the Hebrew idea of God was a moral idea. Not that Israel was the only religious nation of antiquity; the most important interests of all ancient peoples were religious interests, and this was especially the case with the Semitic peoples, to which great family the Hebrews belonged. Nothing is more striking than the revelation of this fact by the lately discovered inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, Moab and Phoenicia. All their wars were religious wars; all good and evil came to

1 Christian zeal has removed it to the Greek chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where at the great feasts it is kissed by thousands of devout pilgrims.

a Matt. 5:8.

them from the hand of their god, Chemosh or Melkart or Bel; in these things they differed not at all from Israel. Did David long to build a house for the God who had " given him rest from all his enemies round about " ? 3 Mesha, king of Moab, the contemporary of Ahab, inscribes on his monument, discovered hardly forty years ago, 4 " I have made this high place to Chemosh .... for he saved me from all the kings." Did Samuel hew Agag in pieces before Jehovah ? 5 "I slew all the inhabitants of the city," says Mesha; "a delightful sight to Chemosh." Did Jehovah say to Saul, " Go and smite Amelek " ? 6 The Moabite Stone tells how " Chemosh said (to Mesha), ' Go and take Nebo from Israel/ " and again, " Go and make war on Horonaim," an Israelite city. It was not in being religious that Israel differed from other nations, but in the character of his God. Bel and Chemosh had no more moral character than Apollo and Aphrodite, and Thor and Freya. But Jehovah was good in the moral sense of the word; he was a righteous God. What made Israel different from other peoples was his profound belief that eternal righteousness ruled the world.

It was this, as Matthew Arnold says, that made

Abraham differ from the highly religious Chaldeans, from among whom he was called out : he dared to demand justice of his God. " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" 7 If, as Professor Toy says, " the religious system of a people expresses its attempt to construe the world in accordance with its highest instincts," what must it have been to the world to have had, through long ages, in the very center of its active life, a people who construed the world as related in all its functions to a God of ever deeper and more comprehensive moral character ! 8 The thought lends interest to every clue we have to Israel's relations with the nations. Great portions of the Bible, which had seemed obscure and unimportant, spring up at once into high relief, and take on living interest. The burden of Tyre, the burden of Nineveh, 10 the burden of the desert of the sea, 11 begin to mean something when we find that these peoples and places have their part, too, in the development of God's great thought for the salvation of man.

The volume which, by a central idea like this,

8 " That Jehovah's relation to Israel is not natural but ethical is the doctrine of the prophets, and is emphasized, in dependence on their teaching, in the book of Deuteronomy. But . . . the idea has its foundation in pre-prophetic times; and indeed the prophets, though they give it fresh and powerful application, plainly do not regard the conception as an innovation." — W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 319, note.

brings into unity the story of the whole world's life surely demands a larger study than the purely devotional reading which is all that most of those who read it at all give to it. For it is manifestly more than a revelation of God to the individual soul, more than a system of belief, more than a law of life. It gives the key to human history, showing its secret to be the converse of God with man. Without question, the book which shows this truth is a far larger book than most people who read it have realized. And yet to most of those who read the Bible daily it is gradually becoming a smaller and smaller book. Not less precious; far otherwise, no doubt. The light of day was not less precious to the man of whom we read in the tragic story of the " Iron Shroud," who day after day saw the walls of his prison closing in upon him, and shutting out one by one the windows that opened between him and the sun. At first he did not notice the narrowing area of his chamber; and perhaps my readers are now reflecting for the first time that, as the years go on, they read the same portions of the Bible more frequently, going over and over again their favorite psalms and chapters, making fewer excursions into the unfamiliar fields of history and prophecy and wisdom and law.

They are hardly better off who have learned to see spiritual lessons applicable to themselves in all parts of the Bible — in every record of God's dealings with men in history, and in every psalm, prophecy, and proverb. Reading the Bible in this subjective way, with self as the center of importance, they have so far gained as to have been able to find that the driest and least profitable passages may have their gleams of interest; as when the story of Jabez flashes out like a precious jewel from the midst of a dull genealogical record. 12 It is easy to make a personal application of this exquisite little story, with its half-revelation of pathos and patience; and where the reader finds no such helps over hard places, he manages to make his reading " profitable " by means of the double sense, the figurative or typical application of it to his own inner history.

But granting that this is a legitimate use of the Word of God, what a belittling of a volume which brings to light the most sublime of all truths, thus to whittle it down to fit individual needs! A somewhat over-brilliant essayist of recent years has said that, though we have accepted the Copernican system of astronomy, yet in our philosophy of life we are still Ptolemaic — ourselves the center of our universe. This is certainly the case with regard to the Bible study of most people; and they miss more than they are aware by thus making their own personality the center of the Bible, and listening merely for the voice of God to their own souls. We cannot learn to know God by discovering what he is to ourselves, alone; it is not until we learn something of what he is to the world that we begin to know him. To assume a double significance for every passage of which the obvious meaning has no application to oneself, seeking therein for the cipher that tells one's own inner history, is like the way certain people study Shakespeare, finding in it the cipher in which Bacon wrote his own story; only the loss of all that is large and central and universal is incomparably greater.

It is true that we have the authority of the church fathers for the allegorical interpretation. They laid down the principle that everything in Scripture which, taken in its natural sense, appears unedifying, must be made edifying by some method of typical or figurative application; and Origen carried this principle so far as to teach that the literal sense of Scripture is often designedly impossible, absurd, or immoral; lest, cleaving to the letter alone, men should remain at a distance from the dogmata, and learn nothing worthy of God. But the Fathers lived in a day when history had not become a science, when the Hebrew language had not been revived from the dead by comparative philology, and when the comparative study of religions had not yet begun to illumine the pages of the Bible. No Bible reader of today would accept Origen's view in this particular; but all do not perceive with equal clearness that, unless they accept some such principle as he lays down, they have only two alternatives: either to find the greater half of the Bible meaningless, or else to search for its meaning by the same methods by which men search for the meaning of other written things.

When we come to think carefully on the subject of biblical interpretation, we see that it is as dishonoring to God to put a meaning into his inspired Word which is not naturally there, as it is impertinent to do what some eminent theologians, and a great many less eminent people, are continually doing — attempt to " reconcile " statements that appear to be contradictory. It is not faith, but presumption, which impels us to explain away anything in the Bible, or try to fit it to a standard not its own ; even though that standard be what we deem truth. For we know only in part ; and yet even we know that truth is something other than verbal accuracy. What we need is the open mind, willing at whatever cost to know the truth. Our first question must indeed be simply: What does the Old Testament say? And to this question the answer must be found by the method by which we can ascertain what any book says. When we have seen what

IO HEBREW LIFE AND THOUGHT

it says, we are ready to ask: What does it mean? We usually go to work the other way. We think we know pretty well what it must mean, and so we devote our energies to making what it says correspond with that.

II

The explanation of this mistake, which still remains almost universal, notwithstanding many recent efforts to correct it, is to be found in the fact that people generally do not concern themselves with the literary character of the Old Testament. Not only at divers times but in divers manners, divers literary forms — narrative, proverb, prophecy, psalm, parable, epistle — has God spoken to the world. There is always a reason for the form of every work of literature worthy of the name. Thought creates its own form; the thought of God for man, that revelation of his gracious purpose, that inner history of his converse with mankind, which we have in the Old Testament, must, in the very nature of thought, have revealed its various phases in various forms. To discern the force and meaning of these forms, their relation to the idea, is a duty pressing upon all devout Bible readers.

A large portion of the perplexities awakened by reading the Old Testament, especially the supposed need of "reconciling" conflicting historic

THE DAY-BOOK OF THE MOST HIGH II

statements, vanish when one discovers the literary class to which these statements belong, and traces the relation of the form to the idea which made it so. Nothing is more evident to any student of the books of the Bible which are called historical than that fact as fact is everywhere of minor importance to the writers. Let anyone read straight through at a sitting the book of Judges, for example. It is full of stirring incidents, of marvelous deeds ; but it is not these that will stick in the memory as one closes the book, but rather the ever-recurring words, resounding in his ears like the ceaseless roll of the waves upon the seashore: "The children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord .... and the Lord delivered them into the hands of their enemies .... then they cried unto the Lord . . . . and he raised them up a Saviour." 13 That is, the purpose of this book appears to be what theologians call a pragmatic purpose — or what, from the present point of view, may be called an ideal purpose : to teach, not history, but the nature of the dealings of God with Israel ; to bring to light, that is, by means of a fragmentary record of events, such as one puts down in a diary, the method of God's inner converse with man.

If the books which we call historic are not that in the ordinary sense of the word, what then are they ? The Jews call them prophecy. They divide the Old Testament into the Law, the Prophets, and the Sacred Writings, and all that lies between the Pentateuch and Esther they include in prophecy. Yet nothing is more evident than the essential difference between the books generally classed as history and those which are known as prophecy. Precisely what is the difference between them is a literary question of intense interest, to which I can here give only a clue by pointing out that, however far-reaching might be the meaning of prophecy, its first purpose must have been, in the nature of things, to interpret passing events to the men who were experiencing them, so that they might see God in them, and discern in some degree his gracious purpose. With a self-consciousness which would be almost sublime, were it not so pitifully blinding, Christian readers of the Old Testament have long assumed that the prophecies were written for themselves, to furnish them a proof of the truth of revelation by the fact that the prophecies have been fulfilled. But it is evident that this could hardly have been the view of those to whom the prophecies were given. They, the Hebrew contemporaries of the prophets, must have supposed that these prophetic utterances concerned themselves, and were intended as a revelation to them of God's gracious purpose. The historic books have in general the same purpose, but they were written, not only or not always for the actors in the events, but also for a later generation, and with a view to historic record. Yet is their purpose none the less prophetic : to reveal God and show him active in history; although from their literary character prophetic significance is found not so much in the interpretation of events as in their general scope and trend. 14

Ill

If, then, the historical books of the Old Testament are not prophecy, and yet, strictly speaking, are not history in the ordinary acceptance of the word, what are they?

Thoughtful reading makes one fact increasingly evident, namely, that imagination had a part in the writing of these books. The more we study them, the more we feel that poetry is latent all through them. This is not to say that there is untruth in them. The proverbial antithesis between truth and poetry is a mischievous mistake. Imagination, poetry, is a necessary element of truth. The antithesis does not lie between truth

14 These remarks do not apply to the books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemmh. They are practically one work, written, not from the prophetic, but from the priestly standpoint, and cover the history of Judah from Adam (in whom, from this point of view, it potentially began) to the latest event recorded, 432 a. i^.

and poetry, but it often does lie between truth and scientific statement, which fails of accuracy precisely from lack of poetry. As Matthew Arnold pointed out, it is more accurate to describe God as " the High and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity " than to say that he is " the moral and intelligent governor of the universe/' though the latter is a scientific statement of fact, and the former is poetry. More than half the supposed oppositions between the Bible and science arise from the lack of poetic instinct in scientist and theologian alike. If the theologians of the Latin church had been aware of the fact that certain parts of the Old Testament were poetry, they would probably not have condemned Galileo for teaching that the world moves, in blasphemous contradiction, as they supposed, to the biblical statement that the Lord has set the world upon pillars, 15 and again that he has so established it that it cannot be moved. 16

When we look at the historical books of the Old Testament from the true — that is, the poetic — standpoint, we perceive in a moment that they are not history in our modern understanding of the word " history," but answer more nearly to our idea of epic — the great world-epic of the dealings of God with men. Let me define an epic as an imaginative and poetic narrative of memorable things, always with appeal to the religious instinct, and it becomes clear that this precisely describes the historical narratives of the Bible. We shall learn more later about this epic method; but here we may properly pause to observe that, just as the Iliad and the Odyssey give us that sense of familiarity with Greek civilization which makes the history of Greece potent as the interpreter of human institutions and human thought, so the Bible epic is of importance in giving a large setting, a human environment, to spiritual truth. We should take into consideration that our only knowledge of the conditions under which the divine revelation first came is from these socalled historic books. When we come to New Testament times, we have an immense background and environment of secular history and literature, and therefore the revelation of New Testament truth is given in most condensed and concrete form. It was not so in Old Testament times; and it is a very suggestive fact that the sacred history becomes less full, and finally ceases altogether at about the time when profane history and literature came in to supply its place as a background — the time of Cyrus and the beginning of Greek supremacy.

IV

Beginning, then, to study the Bible as literature, the first question must be as to the way in which it was written — the human element. We are not studying the question of inspiration; let me here assure my readers that no one can study the literature of the Bible without coming to the profound conviction that it is inspired. But we must remember that inspiration is not necessarily given by means of a book. God can speak to the human heart by any means. He spoke to men long before ever a book was made, and we have no means of knowing whether he spoke in words or not; but we know that he speaks to us, and that he does not speak in words. We may, if we like, say that God could have made a panorama of creation pass before Moses; though we have no reason to suppose that he did so. But, however Moses or anyone else received a divine revelation, he could pass the knowledge on only by means of words, and could make it permanently useful only by committing it to writing. Now, not to speak of the fact that language is continually growing and developing — is " fluid," as Matthew Arnold says — fitting itself into any mold, we must remember also that the art of literary composition, like the arts of painting and sculpture, has its mechanical side, and that its methods have greatly improved since the Old

Testament was written. Punctuation, for example, is a device far more modern than the latest Old Testament writer; so is the distinction between capitals and small letters, and even the device of spacing between words. Every great library contains old manuscripts in which the letters are solid, the words following close upon one another; and if our English Bible were thus printed, familiar as it is to most of us, we should probably find some difficulty in getting at its meaning. Practice enables scholars to read the old manuscripts, notwithstanding their lack of modern facilities, and there are very few errors in translation due to wrong divisions between words — though there are some due to wrong divisions between sentences.

The absence of quotation marks is a more serious difficulty, and it is certain that much of the obscurity of the prophets and psalms is due to the failure to perceive that certain passages are quoted, as uttered by God or by some person not the writer. In some cases this is evident, as in the magnificent psalm sung at the triumphal entry of the ark into the newly conquered city of Jerusalem. 17 Here the alternation of voices is plain — the priest approaching with the ark, crying:

Lift up your heads, O ye gates !

Be lift up, ye doors of old,

That the King of Glory may come in!

and the warden answering from within :

Who is He, the King of Glory?

But there are other places where the proper setting of quotation marks throws a flood of light upon the passage. This is very strikingly the case in the Song of Solomon, and is of especial importance in prophetic passages. One attempting to read a copy of Shakespeare which made no division between the speeches, gave no name of speaker, no list even of the persons taking part, would find himself in much the same predicament as when reading the dramatic passages of the Old Testament as they are generally printed.

The translators perceived this difficulty in the case of the recapitulation of the work of the Levites, in I Chron. 23 : 5, where " said David " is inserted by them; and still more interestingly in Ps. 27 : 8, where, in the midst of an importunate prayer to Jehovah, occur the words " Seek ye my face," evidently spoken by God. The translators have very properly prefaced them with the words (not in the Hebrew) "When thou saidst." But there are few such instances, 18 and opportunities for some such treatment occur on nearly every page.

Many of the perplexities of the Old Testament arise from the want of such mechanical devices as the parenthesis, the footnote, and the appendix, none of which was known when the Old Testament was written. In the story of the Shunamite, 19 Elisha and Gehazi appear to carry on in the woman's presence a conversation which would more courteously have been carried on in her absence, and in fact was so, although the preceding verse says the woman stood before Elisha. In the verse that follows the conversation, indeed, Gehazi is told to call her, which is absurd if she was already there. If the writer had been familiar with the use of the parenthesis, this awkwardness, which is purely in the form of the narrative, would have been avoided ; there is no real contradiction, but an interesting bit of evidence of the difficulty with which so simple a literary device as the parenthesis was wrought out. In 2 Kings 5 : 2 the explanation how the wife of Naaman, the Syrian, came to have a Hebrew maidservant would have been put in a footnote, if the methods of writing in that day had admitted of such a device.