National ideals in the Old Testament

Preface

Different theories have held the field with regard to the controlling factor in the destiny of nations. In the older study of history, especially of the sacred history contained in the Bible, God was regarded as the supernatural cause of every national disaster or development. Secular history has long been studied as the history of governments, with emphasis upon the military relations between states. Battles were the decisive events and "big battalions" were the accompaniments or the expressions of Providence. More recently the economic interpretation of history has come to the foreground, and the fate of nations has been said to depend on natural resources, commerce, and the appetitive and competitive motives which material needs stimulate.

Against these extreme views, whether superhuman or purely material, the influence of national ideals deserves emphasis. There is a collective human idealism of which neither economic determinism nor supernatural Providence is wholly independent. The folk songs, the war cries, the moral standards, and all the influences of civilization and religion have often determined a nation's history quite apart from the working of military

VI PREFACE

and economic factors. Ideals as well as expectation of profit have guided the course of events and animated national conduct. Providence has found expression through patriot and prophet, and through the developing experience of nations, no less than by miracle and military intervention. History must be interpreted spiritually as well as materially, naturally as well as supernaturally.

The correct interpretation of history is more than an academic question. It affects directly the conduct of individuals and society. The forces which seem to men effective in the past are the very forces on which they will pin their faith for the future. If we accept the apocalyptic interpretation of history as the inexorable working of a Divine plan, we shall merely await in passive reliance the unaided intervention of God to create the consummation of his will. All human endeavor will seem useless to hasten or to hinder his purpose. If on the other hand we accept the economic, the military, or the political interpretation of the past, we shall use our effort to secure economic, military, or political readjustment in the future. These are indeed the varied hopes of many men to-day — premillenarianism, socialism, militarism, democracy are some of the names for them. But if we believe spiritual forces and ideals are the real determinants of human life and progress, then our interest and our effort will be directed toward the creation of

PREFACE vii

a new public conscience, of a spirit of brotherhood, and of all the higher qualities of personal and social life. We shall interpret the movements of our time not as the unwinding of a divine machine nor as the conflict of states and systems, but as a conflict of ideals. "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," and we shall appreciate with Paul "that the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God." "The revealing of the sons of God" — this simple realization of Christian ideals in all the relations of men and nations is the

"One far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."

The purpose of the chapters that follow is to sketch in outline some of the striking and influential ideals which were held by the Hebrew nation or its leaders through the thousand years of its history covered by the canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament. This study has been the natural outgrowth of an impulse given by the Great War for the comparison of national standards and aspirations. But it may be predicted that a few years will not make obsolete the analysis of these questions nor make valueless the study of the idealism in great nations of the past. An ancient and remote nation like Israel provides vm PREFACE

a field where such study can be carried on without passion or prejudice.

It is a strange fact that so little investigation has been made of the subject. Even the study of political theory usually omits the ancient Orient altogether and begins in Greece only with Plato and Aristotle. Although the Bible has been studied from nearly every conceivable view-point, one cannot easily name any treatise that attempts to describe the development of its national ideals. This volume is not an effort to supply that lack so much as to call attention to it. A thorough and less popular study of the subject by a competent Old Testament scholar would be a useful contribution to modern political thought as well as to a knowledge of the Bible. As will be evident to the reader, the author has essayed no independent historical or critical investigations. He is indebted to the current English and American commentaries and general works about the Old Testament such as are mentioned in the footnotes. In the quotations from these books the spelling Jehovah has been substituted for Yahweh and other forms of the Divine name in order to be consistent with the usage of the Bible text adopted.

As a background for the study the author has adopted that reconstruction of the history of Israel which appears to be most generally accepted by historical criticism, although he is fully aware of the objections to which this reconstruction is

PREFACE IX

open from more than one direction. Perhaps two other criticisms will occur to the reader : the failure to emphasize in conventional fashion the development of Hebrew religion, and the omission of the New Testament. Both are due to the limited purpose of the book, in aiming to focus attention upon a single phase of a significant national history. The religious meaning of the Bible has so long overshadowed in our minds its social and political significance that it may be well here for the sake of clearness to leave theology in the background. It cannot be completely separated even from patriotism and politics. The implications of early Christianity for national ideals are also an essential supplement to the study of those ideals in Hebrew history.

To the editors of The Homiletic Review and of The World Tomorrow the writer expresses thanks for permission to reprint from their columns Chapter XX and Chapters XI, XII, XVII, and XXII, respectively.

Haveeford, Pennsylvania, April, 1919.

Contents

PAGE

I. Introductory: The Bible and National Ideals 1

II. The Political Inheritance of the

II The Political Inheritance Of The Hebrews

The founding of the Hebrew nation may be dated from the Exodus from Egypt, but the roots of the nation, of its physical and social history, of its economic and political institutions and ideals, lie far back of Moses and his generation in the desert life of Arabia. For the Hebrew stock was Semitic, and at some time it had been in the most primitive stage of culture — the culture of the nomad. Indeed, the Hebrews were but little removed from that stage when first they emerged from Egyptian slavery and pushed their way into Canaan, as some of their ancestors had pushed into the fertile lands of Egypt. Such migrations from the desert of Arabia into the richer lands about it have characterized the whole history of the barren peninsula, with its limited resources for the support of human life. Palestine itself seemed to the desert folk a land flowing with milk and honey, and was the lure of successive waves of nomad immigration long before and long after the famous venture of the Hebrew spies.

To these nomad ancestors, therefore, must we look to gain some idea of the Hebrew heritage

POLITICAL INHERITANCE 9

of political thought and customs. No records of these men have come down to us on paper or stone. They lived and died, as transient as the life of all their kind,

"Like snow upon the desert's dusty face."

Nor did their descendants soon enough commit to writing their memories of the past to preserve an accurate picture of the desert life. The Hebrew records, even in Genesis, all presuppose some stage of agricultural development. The first man, both in Eden and without it, was a tiller of the soil. It is true that many of the nomad habits and customs still survived in the age of Hebrew history that is known to us from contemporary records, and confirm our assumption of a nomadic origin and of powerful nomadic heredity. These clues, together with the similar survivals found in other developed peoples of^Semitic origin, form one source of knowledge about the Hebrew ancestors. But a far more complete and no less reliable picture is to be found in the modern life of the Arab bedouin. Scarcely scratched with the civilizations that have risen and fallen about them for thousands of years, these children of the desert have kept unchanged most of the characteristics of the remotest past. By studying these sources a clear impression can be formed of the life of the primitive Semites that was bequeathed to those hardy sons of the desert who were welded into a Hebrew nation. Their life was simple and natural. It had no artificial boundaries; but religion, social custom, and government were all bound into one, and these were largely determined by the economic conditions under which they lived. If, however, adopting the modern method of classification, we select those elements in nomad life that can be called political, we shall find the following outstanding factors:

The unit of nomad life is neither the individual nor the nation but the tribe or clan.^ The family, of course, exists, but the ties of kinship extend to more than the immediate family circle and include the larger circle of kindred by blood and marriage. The tribe is economically and religiously the unit, owning property in common — such property in cattle as the nomads possess — and worshipping the same totem or god. The tribe lives together at an oasis and travels together from place to place in the desert. But its unity is fortified not so much by the common ties of blood — which are often remote and even imaginary — nor by the bonds of mutual service, nor by the fellowship of common worship, but primarily by the need of mutual defense. Each tribe is hostile to its

1 Clan and tribe are often used interchangeably by writers on this subject, nor is any effort made here to describe the more elaborate organization — which is possibly quite primitive— by which a group of clans are loosely federated to form a tribe.

POLITICAL INHERITANCE 11

neighbor, and it is this fear that creates the tribal loyalty and finds its most characteristic expression in the law of blood-revenge.

The vendetta, or law of blood-revenge, belongs to many primitive cultures and survives even to the present day, not only in backward regions but (in modified form) even in the penal and military institutions of the "civilized" world. As expressed in Genesis 9:5, 6, it is an ordinance of God that "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." In the life of the bedouin this means that the tribe is bound to avenge the death of one of its members, by the death not necessarily of the murderer nor of merely one member of his tribe, but by manifold vengeance on himself and his kin. And this duty is established by all the sanctions of religion. In striking contrast to the Ishmaelite hostility between clans is the well-known bedouin law of hospitality. Parallel with the anarchy of the desert, where all tribes are rivals and each must fight for its existence, is the unalterable and sacred custom which welcomes the stranger without question and without selfish restraint.

Within the political unit a simple patriarchal form of government prevails in all matters directly affecting the interests of the whole. The sheik is leader in peace and war, in religion, and in quest for food for his clan. But the sheik is raised but slightly in dignity and power over the other free members of the clan, who stand to each other in the relation of brothers. The members accept his rule, and little individual initiative can arise where mutual dependence is the unconscious background, where custom is unquestioned law, and where personal ambition cannot disturb the simple equality within the tribe.

To any one familiar with the Old Testament the influence of these nomad standards and practices upon the Hebrew people is apparent. There is much of the nomadic not merely in the stories of Genesis, as we should expect, but also in the later narratives of the Judges and the Kings. As has been said: "In spite of the tradition of the national unity under Moses before Palestine was reached — the children of Israel are represented during the process of that invasion and after its achievement as still a number of loosely connected tribes. One of the strongest of these, Judah, was reinforced by, if indeed, it did not entirely consist of, clans which for centuries resided on the desert border. Another tribe, Simeon, never left the desert. The whole nation was reminded that it inherited a civilization which it did not create (Deut. 6:10, 11). Customs and institutions, tempers and attitudes toward civilization, religious conceptions and religious rites, long persisted in Israel, some of which were identical with those of the desert nomads and some were strongly reminiscent of them. *To your tents, 0 Israel,'

POLITICAL INHERITANCE 13

was still the national cry in the days of the kingdom. Long after the monarchy had created a central executive government among the people, with guards or police and prisons, the private vendetta, mitigated by a modified form of the right of asylum, was retained in the national law."i

And so the influence of the political heritage of the desert long continued with the settlers and residents of Canaan. There was much of the restless independence, the practical democracy, the love of generous liberty, which the desert had bred. There was still the divisive tendency which made the achievement of a larger nationalism so diflBcult. As in the larger units of the modern time, making society safe required not so much the increase of democracy within the units as a more extensive integration and organization between the units. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Arabia, the cradle of all Semitic races. As Professor Smith says: "The population is broken up into tribes, that are defined not by the more or less vague areas over which they roam in search of pasture, but by ties of blood and kinship, supplemented by fictions of a common descent or other artificial expedients. Famine and war are the annual curses of their life. The insufficiency of water and pasture; the strain of hunger and the jealousy of 1 George Adam Smith, The Early Poetry of Israel, p. 41.

blood, all the heat and recklessness which are bred of poverty and pride; the constant temptations to raid the camels and cattle of other tribes, with the sacred obligation which binds the whole tribe to avenge the slaughter of one of its members— all these create a climate of feud, while the necessity of living in shifting camps, and the absence (except for rare moments in the history) of economic or military interests common to the whole peninsula and of an authority effective over so vast and wild a surface, render impossible any policy save of the most loose and friable kind. Such incoherence, derived from residence in these deserts perhaps for millennia before the race broke into history, has cursed to the end even the most settled and progressive of Semitic peoples. Israel itself is an illustration."^

Perhaps to the same nomadic origin may be traced the deep-seated and spontaneous hostility to foreigners that has long been supposed to be instinctive to all humankind. The law and ethics of the desert, which differ little from the law of the jungle, were not completely discarded with the crossing of the Jordan. Perhaps not in excess of many other peoples in the same stage of culture, yet to a marked degree, the Hebrews who settled Canaan dealt ruthlessly with their neighbors and enemies, while in the later generations they developed a racial exclusiveness that

* George Adam Smith, The Early Poetry of Israel, pp. 27 /.

POLITICAL INHERITANCE 15

was only equalled by the hostile reaction of anti- Semitism which it met among all other peoples.

Yet in the historical period of Hebrew history, as in the life of the desert before it, there remained in striking contrast to the belligerent attitude to alien peoples the cordial hospitality to individual aliens. The Hebrew legislation throughout is tolerant and merciful toward the "stranger within the gates," and many narratives attest the strong public sentiment by which such laws were created and maintained. For inhospitality Sodom met a fate that made it a watchword, while Lot providentially escaped because he "entertained angels unawares."

Another noble heritage from desert life was the strong cohesive bond of loyalty that bound together the members of the tribe. To be sure, at iSrst the motives for loyalty were merely self-defense, the objects of loyalty were small and conflicting, and the expression of loyalty was in the form of fanatical revenge and destructive violence; nevertheless, in course of time, all these limitations could be transcended. Mutual service could replace mutual defense; loyalty to the tribe could become loyalty to a nation, and still retain the feeling of solidarity, the sense of social obligation, and the practice of self-forgetting sacrifice. Hebrew history illustrates all these forms of development. The absence of individual ambition in many chapters of Hebrew history is only the political counterpart of that sinking of the individual which is so marked a feature in Hebrew religion. Both are equally strange to more modern eyes, and both are doubtless due to the desert inheritance. The notable indifference to the physical life of the individual is like the notable indifference to the spiritual life of the individual. "The reason," says Professor Smith, "is in part the fact that the tribal interests, the security, and the survival of the tribe in this life, overwhelm the individual's interests, and the importance of what may happen to him hereafter."^ It is no accident of history that the world owes to the Jewish race so many expressions of the highest vicarious sacrifice — from the prophetic picture of Moses praying to be blotted from the book of life for his people's sins^ to the patriot martyr of Calvary.

Thus for good or for ill the ideals of a nation were founded on the habits of long-forgotten ancestors. So the nomad blood with all its contradictory passions and instincts flowed in the veins of the children of Israel to more than a third or fourth generation, and unconsciously affected the evolution of their political life and thought. New environment, a new civilization, new ideals modified the old heritage but never completely obliterated it.

in

THE BIRTH OF THE NATION

To few nations has Providence given so dramatic a beginning as the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. In most cases the origins of national life either are lost in obscurity or appear as the natural evolution of slow and insignificant factors. This is, no doubt, partly true of Israel as well. There is much in its early history that is now lost to view, and much of what we know indicates that the Hebrew nation only gradually developed from the nomads of the desert to the chosen people of God. Nevertheless, the Hebrew nation clearly dates its birth back to a distinct era, to a definite event. Whatever doubts may attach to other events in their early history, the story of their bondage and liberation can scarcely be an invention. This is the landmark that fixes their birth, and to this their historians forever turn back in grateful memory. Here was the founding of the Hebrew nation and the beginning of their distinctive national life.

The story of the Exodus is familiar to us from childhood. Historical study has only served to make its details more realistic and vivid. A company of nomad clans, children of the Arabian desert, find their way into Egypt in search of more abundant food. In course of time the ambitious rulers of the land impress them into the unwonted and restrictive labor of public works, and reduce them to the condition of virtual serfs. At length, galled by this yoke, guided by the inspired enthusiasm of Moses, and aided by a series of local calamities, they strike for freedom and make good their escape to the free, wild life of the desert. Such, in simplest terms, was the birth of the Hebrew nation.

The religious significance of this event has long been the subject of earnest discussion, but its political significance is clear beyond all argument. It was a great act of self-emancipation and the expression of the inherent love of human liberty. Just how long these revolutionists had eaten ''the bread of affliction in the house of bondage" our records do not tell, nor can we be sure that the earlier freedom of the desert was a living memory or a conscious lure to them. But they were not of the servile stock of Egypt, and when their lives were made bitter they felt that holy discontent which brooks no opposition.

That the Hebrews in Egypt had exercised no political control goes without saying. Local autonomy they doubtless did enjoy, but in the greater affairs of the empire of the Nile they shared with countless other fellahin complete sub-

BIRTH OF THE NATION 19

jection to the will of the king or the ruling priestly or princely caste. Probably they expected no voice in affairs of state: such a conception of citizenship was alien to all antiquity or at least could only be suggested when lack of representation was made acute by its non-political results. Indeed, the Scripture records declare that the oppression which inspired their unrest was not political but industrial. Their lives were made bitter, not by want of franchise, but "with hard service in mortar and in brick,'* by the exploitation of their labor. The primary political meaning of the Exodus was the liberation from industrial slavery, though with this liberation came political enfranchisement as well.

A second factor in the Exodus of Israel was the impulse for co-operation — an impulse which in this case, as in so many others, was born only out of the dire necessity of a common need. The lesson that in union is strength was learned once — if not once for all — in the first national emergency that made the beginnings of the real nation. The oppression of Ramses could continue as long as resistance was sporadic and unorganized. In a telling incident the biographer of Moses reveals the futility of individual effort (Ex. 2:11-15). Moses' first reaction to oppression was the angry killing of an Egyptian taskmaster. This deed of violence produced no real relief, but, rather, impaired and delayed the possible usefulness of the slayer for furthering his patriotic ideals. In the end the relief came through the more gradual method of patient insistence on rights and the education of the oppressed to work together for their common good. And, as repeatedly since throughout history, national liberty was found possible only through national unity. The two are forged together.

But the third factor of the Exodus was individual— the leadership of Moses. Through the accretions of legend that have gathered about his name can still be discerned the political significance of the great Hebrew leader. In him all the meaning and glory of the Exodus are summed up, and he is a convincing example of the power of personal initiative in the history of nations. Futile though individual effort often proves when isolated, it is most effective when associated with others in leadership. Without such leadership national progress seems well-nigh impossible. ''Israel," it has been said, "perhaps more than any other nation owes its distinction to a few individuals. Poorly endowed as a people with the qualities which lead to national success, being gifted with tenacity and retentiveness rather than power of initiation, it has been indebted for its position amongst mankind to a few commanding personalities. Among these Moses occupies a foremost place. "^

BIRTH OF THE NATION 21

It is needless to say that these political factors of the Exodus were indelibly stamped on the later life of the nation. The event itself was never forgotten. It was celebrated annually in a feast of rejoicing, in which the love of liberty was forever renewed under the sanctions of religion. The passover was more than an act of worship. It was the holiday of national independence. The love of liberty which had called the nation into being was repeatedly roused in memory amid its later vicissitudes. The very existence of the Hebrew people served not merely as a monument of protest against industrial slavery like that in Egypt; it was a charter of independence for political and for religious liberty as well. There is something intensely modern in this national aspiration for freedom, that anticipates by three thousand years the "spirit of 76" and the French tricolor cockade. Throughout his history for all these years the enslaved Jew has been able to trace back his rebel spirit to the shepherd by the burning bush, to the great cooperative venture of faith of his fellow rebels, and to the triumphant vindication of freedom and of faith that cried over the fallen oppressor:

"Sing ye to Jehovah, for he hath triumphed gloriously; The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea."

For the cause of freedom cannot and could not be regarded as merely a political issue. It was a religious and moral issue as well. It was Jehovah, as well as Moses, who had heard the cry of bondage, and it was by his guidance and power that liberation was achieved. By manifest signs God identified himself with the interests of the refugees — not merely because they were his people, but because their cause was just. No matter how partisan and unethical the ideas of God may have been in those or even later days, the Exodus proved that God was on the side of right and not of might. And no matter how blind to the claims of equality and fraternity were the worshippers of Jehovah, there was always at least a cogent humanitarian reminder in the lawgiver's refrain: "Remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and Jehovah thy God redeemed thee." Though the religious view-point of the historians of the Exodus doubtless obscures many political details, it has nevertheless surrounded this great struggle for freedom with an atmosphere of moral earnestness that is both appropriate and significant, purifying patriotic enthusiasm with the transcendent sacredness of a universal ideal. Into one event were crowded the motives of religious liberty, political independence, and industrial emancipation — motives that in other nations, like the American, have been successive legacies of different generations. And this event became, therefore, the corner-stone of

BIRTH OF THE NATION 23

that Hebrew love of liberty which, in its nobler moments, shared the altruism of the poet Lowell:

"Is true freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt ?

No ! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear. And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free I"

IV

In their sojourn in Egypt the Israelites appear to have been little affected by the superior culture of the land of the Nile. Though we are assured by a Christian writer that " Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," there is much more evidence that his religious and legal ideals were influenced by an obscure bedouin tribe near Sinai, with which he associated during his exile, than that they were aifected by the court of Pharaoh. '^He refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter," though he accepted apparently both the kinship and the religion of his Kenite father-in-law, and so remained essentially a child of the desert. So, also, his fellow refugees show no trace of the civilization of Egypt, except a passing memory of its fleshpots and succulent vegetables (Ex. 16:3; Num. 11:5). When they enter the land of promise they are typical nomads. Several reasons combine to explain this fact. Their contact with Egypt was, after all, superficial. They are represented as living apart in the land of Goshen and as still employed in tending their flocks. Even when they were made "to serve with rigor"

on public works they were not thereby exposed to the ancient culture of the land, for, as has been found by more modern nations, the industrial exploitation of backward peoples does not tend to civilize them. The duration of their sojourn in Egypt is a matter of doubt. Archaeological evidence suggests that only some of the tribes later affiliated were ever in Egypt at all, while the Bible insists that the whole generation of Moses died before the crossing of the Jordan.

The first real contact with civilization in Hebrew history must be dated, therefore, with the settlement of Canaan. Here was an experience that influenced deeply and permanently the whole nature of Hebrew national life. Between the nomads of the desert and the Canaanites, or Amorites, as the natives appear to be called indifferently, there existed a series of distinctions that affected their political, social, industrial, moral, and religious life. Probably both the immigrants and the natives of Canaan at this period belonged to the same (Semitic) race, and possibly they spoke the same language. But the standards of the settled Amorites differed in many points from the standards of the desert.^ In part this difference of the Canaanites was due to their contact with the older cultures of the Euphrates and the Nile. The Tel-el-Amarna tablets, written in cuneiform characters by the Egyptian governors 1 See Chapter II.