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LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. TORONTO I THE PRESBYTERIAN NEWS CO.
Crtftament
THE RELIGION OF REVELATION
PRE-CHRISTIAN STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT.
DR. HERMANN SCHULTZ,
PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OOTTISOEX.
translated from the JFourtb (Berman (Ftiition
BY THK
REV. J. A. PATERSON, M.A. OXON.,
K OP HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE or THE
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN COLLEGE, EDINBURGH.
IX TWO VOLUMES. VOL. L
EDINBURGH:
T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. 1892.
[The Translation is Copyright by arrangement with the Author.}
U — '
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY 01- CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
THE work of Dr. Hermann Schultz on Old Testament Theology has long been a standard authority on the important subject of which it treats. The author is one of the most accomplished exponents of that school of theological thought which is at present dominant in Germany. He stands high in the esteem of all parties ; and it is thought by many that he has succeeded in discovering the via media between the positions of Biblical scholars like Delitzsch on the one hand and Stade on the other.
Biblical theology is a subject certain to receive in the immediate future from the Christian public, both of Great Britain and America, a steadily increasing share of attention. One of the characteristics of the age is the emphasis with •which the Christian Churches are declaring that it is their duty as well as their privilege to interpret Scripture in the full light of present-day research. Hence the growing anxiety to know what the books of the Bible actually teach. It is this question which Dr. Schultz has undertaken to answer, from the historical point of view, in so far as the Old Testament is concerned. He has discharged his task in an eminently fair and judicial spirit ; and he has written in so felicitous and lucid a style, and with such freedom from technical phraseology, that his work should be intelligible and instructive, not merely to clergymen, but to that rapidly growing class of educated laymen who, without being specialists
vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
in theology, are nevertheless profoundly interested in the greatest problems with which the human mind has to deal. In churches where the voice of the lay representatives has as much influence in determining the doctrinal standards as that of the clergy, it is pre-eminently desirable that laymen should have access to a work like this, which, while thoroughly scientific and scholarly, is also distinguished by a singularly popular method of exposition. For these reasons it seemed to me that English readers, unfamiliar with German, ought to have the opportunity of ascertaining for themselves the exact views of such a master in this department of theological study as Dr. Schultz is admitted to be.
As the Hebrew in the notes has, as a rule, not been pointed, I have thought it well to add to the usual indexes of subjects and of passages quoted, an index of Hebrew words with the Massoretic points inserted. I may also state that no attempt has been made to transliterate Hebrew names, except where the subject under discussion rendered trans- literation necessary.
For their kind assistance in correcting the proof-sheets, and for many valuable suggestions, I desire to tender to Dr. Schultz himself, and to the Rev. Wm. M'Gilchrist, B.D., Ardrossan, my most cordial thanks.
J. A. PATEESON.
EDINBURGH, November 1892.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
I TRUST that this book of mine, in its new form, may, in some measure however small, contribute to the increase among English readers of a really historical knowledge of that religion from which our own faith has sprung. I cannot, indeed, refrain from expressing the hope that in a land which possesses so many distinguished Old Testament scholars, the faults and shortcomings of this work may be leniently dealt with. I console myself at any rate with the thought that, in a field of study so extensive and so obscure as that of Old Testament theology, it will be long before it becomes possible for investigators to avoid making mistakes.
As the proof-sheets of the translation were passing through the press, I compared them with the original as carefully as my knowledge of English permitted. In a very few passages, where an exact translation seemed to me somewhat obscure, I have suggested a wider departure from the German than a translator would have felt himself entitled to make. I have also thought it right, in a few instances, to insert one or two new sentences — as for example, my references to the important work on the religion of the Semites, which Dr. Robertson
rii
viii AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
Smith has published since the last edition of my own book appeared.
Professor Paterson has executed the translation with as much skill as care; and while he has not followed the German, at the expense of the English idiom, readers may rely on his having given the meaning of the original with
the utmost accuracy.
HERMANN SCHULTZ.
GOTTINGEN, October 1882.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MEANING AND METHOD OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY : Name, Scope, Relation to other branches of Theology, Methods, Sources, .
II. FORMS OF LITERATURE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIP- TURES : Didactic Pieces, Poetic Form, Books of Narra- tive, Legend and Myth, .... 14-31
III. THE BELIOION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IN CONNECTION
WITH THE HISTORY OF RELIGION : Theological and Philosophical Estimates, Relation to Nature-Religions, Place among Prophetic Religions, . . . 31-51
IV. OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT : Nature of Connection,
Development and Completion, Limits, . . 51-60
V. PERIODS AND SOURCES OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY, . 60-79
VI. LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY, . . 79-85
FIRST MAIN DIVISION.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION AND MORALS IN ISRAEL DOWN TO THE FOUNDING OF TIIE ASUON&AX STATE.
VII. ISRAEL'S PRE-MOSAIC AGE: Picture in Genesis, Abraham, Hebrew and Semitic Religion, Traces of Semitic Heathenism, ...... 86-125
VIII. MOSES: Personality of Moses, the Principle of Mosuism, . 125-139 IX. THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ISRAEL DOWN TO
SAMUEL, ...... 139-151
X. FROM SAMUEL DOWN TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY, . . 151-160
XI. RELIGIOUS FIGURES CHARACTERISTIC OF THE AGE PRIOR TO
THE EIGHTH CENTURY : Nazirite, Theocratic King, . 161-174 be
X TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
XII. RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE AND MODES OF PUBLIC WORSHIP
DOWN TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY, AND MORE PAR- TICULARLY TILL THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE : Knowledge of God, Monotheism, Revelation, Worship and Sacrifice, Human Sacrifices, Vows, Circumcision, Passover, Priesthood, Feasts, Sabbath, Holy Places, Ark of the Covenant, Tabernacle, Moral Ideal, Decalogue, . 174-220
XIII. THE ASSYRIAN AGE : Historical Relations, Development of
Religion, Reform and Reaction, r . . 220-235
XIV. PERSONAGES OF INFLUENCE IN THE ASSYRIAN AGE — THE
PROPHET : History of Prophecy, Heathen and False Prophets, Prophetic Names and Calling, Speech and Writings, Prophecy and Soothsaying, Miracles and Signs, ....... 235-300
XV. THE BABYLONIAN AGE — JUDAH'S TRIAL AND EXECUTION :
Historical Relations, Development of Religion, . 300-310
XVI. THE SUFFERING SERVANT OF JEHOVAH, . . . 310-320
XVII. THE PERSIAN AGE — ISRAEL'S RESURRECTION : the Servant of Jehovah, the New Jerusalem, the Age of the Epigoni, the Temple, Holy Scripture, .... 320-336 XVIII. THE SACRED INSTITUTIONS OF ISRAEL ACCORDING TO " THE LAW": Sacred Persons, the Holy Place, Sacred Seasons, Sacred Ceremonies, ..... 337-406 XIX. THE CLOSING ERA IN THE HISTORY OF OLD TESTAMENT RELIGION : the Greek Age, the Maccabees, the Forming of Sects, the High Priest, Prophet and Scribe, Holy Scripture, Apocalypse and Prophecy, . . . 406-423
XX. SPECIAL PHENOMENA OF THE LATEST OLD TESTAMENT AGE WHICH POINT FORWARD : the Community of the Dis- persion, Proselytes, Temple and Synagogue, Feast-Days, Parties, Scepticism, Foreign Elements, . , . 423-438
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.
MEANING AND METHOD OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY.
1. THE name "Biblical Theology" has been applied at different times to very different sides of theological science. It has been used to denote a popular, as opposed to an eccle- siastical, scholastic presentation of Christianity. Storr takes the term in this sense, and so, too, does Bahrdt, although his general point of view is wholly different In Pietist circles this is still its usual meaning. Again, it has been used to denote more particularly the creed of the early Christians as distinguished from the later development of doctrine in the Church.1 Again, it has been employed for the purpose of emphasising the character of Christianity as a revelation in contrast to a rational theology, much in the same way as the expression " Bible-believer " has nowadays come to indicate one holding a particular view of revelation. Lastly, by Biblical theology has been understood a collection of proof-passages from the Bible for the more important divisions of ecclesiastical dogma. This is its meaning in the works of writers like Weissmann and Schmid.2 In opposi- tion to these uses of the word, we understand by Biblical
1 So Biisching, Cnisius, Gruner, Bohmc, etc.
1 In connection with the above, cf. Baumgarten-Crusius, Gntndziige dtr bibl. ThtoL etc., § 8.
VOL. I. A
2 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
theology that branch of theological science which gives a historical presentation of revealed religion during the period of its growth. We mean to describe how, during the forma- tion of our Biblical records, the religion which we ourselves profess, advanced towards its full development among the people of Israel. The subjects with which Biblical theology undertakes to deal are the moral and religious views which the sacred books contain, considered in their historical develop- ment and in their inner living connection.
The task of Biblical theology is thus purely historical, and the sources it uses are the books of the Bible. The question is not in what form does Christianity, as developed by the Church, present itself to the evangelical Christian as his religion, but simply what form did religion take during the various stages of religious life in Israel up to the close of the apostolic age. Hence we cannot, like the early Church, assume, without further inquiry, that the religious and moral material which we find there must be everywhere uniform in character, or even equally excellent. Whether that is the case, or how far it is so, cannot be determined till the close of our investigation, when, after a purely historical examination of the various stages of development, we have reached definite results regarding the moral and religious standpoint of each particular period.
But by speaking of a presentation of "revealed religion," we imply that the subject-matter to be dealt with has a homogeneous character of its own. We mean to describe, not various forms of religion which have merely an ex- ternal connection of place or time, but a single religion in the various stages of its development, which stages con- sequently have an organic inner connection. Hence in such a presentation each member must be properly linked to its fellow. A common ligament of living growth must bind all the parts together. The presentation must be, not merely historical, but " genetic."
RELATION TO EXEGESIS. 3
To the terra "Biblical theology" we do not attach any special importance. It has become current through the works of Gabler, Schmid, and Oehler, and it seems to us decidedly preferable to the other term, " Biblical dogmatic," which de Wette and Hagenbach defend. We do not, how- ever, prefer it because the name " Dogmatic " would denote, as Baumgarten-Crusius thinks, " the variable and changing, in a word, the human element," in the subject-matter of this science, for this objection is obviated by the more recent application of the word. We prefer it, in the first place, because dogmas, that is to say, hard and fast statements of doctrine, do not often occur in Scripture ; in the next place, because we mean to describe the religious and the moral life as a connected whole ; and lastly, because the notion of " dogmatic " would require us to combine all the religious views of the Bible into one harmonious scheme. Consequently, if this latter name were to find general acceptance, it would have to be restricted to such works as aim, like that of Lutz, at a " systematic presentation " of the religious ideas of the Bible. Lutz is therefore right in distinguishing (p. 6) between his own subject and Biblical theology " which has a thoroughly historical character." (Cf. v. Colin, L 6.)
2. Biblical theology is directly connected, first of all, with the exegesis of Scripture. The latter, being grammatical and historical, makes the student of the former acquainted with what each individual writer in the Bible wished to say to his own age regarding religious and moral subjects, and at what period in the history of Israel each delivered his message. Only in this way is a historical presentation possible. Hence, as a matter of course, tbe criticism of the Biblical books, both positive and negative, is, in a special sense, the foundation of our subject. This makes it impossible to solve the problems of Biblical theology in a way likely to win universal assent As long as the results of the science of Introduction are still being called in question, even as regards their foundation
4 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
principles, opinions must differ as to the development of the Biblical religion. Why, even where there is essential agree- ment as to the principles of criticism, there are still many details, especially in reference to the Pentateuch and the Psalms, that are extremely debatable. In fact, the very latest investigations, particularly as regards the prophetical books, are still extending the boundaries of this debatable ground. On the one hand, however, it is only a bird's-eye view of the religious and moral ideas of long stretches of time that is aimed at, so that many points, in themselves debatable, cease to be important. On the other hand, a careful unfolding of the history of religion may, in many individual instances, prove helpful in settling questions of Introduction.
As a necessary preliminary to Biblical theology, one must study the expository works which deal with the doctrinal ideas of specially important single books or groups of books. Taken along with the works which trace single doctrines through all the different Biblical books, such writings would, if complete, provide us with almost all the material we require. We should then have the warp and the woof, out of which we could without much trouble weave the web of Biblical theology. Nevertheless, in this department, despite the many valuable contributions by painstaking investigators of proved ability which recent years have brought us,1 Science has still plenty of work before her.
3. While unfolding the original elements of revealed re- ligion, and thereby exhibiting the permanent basis of every- thing Christian, as well as the standard by which to judge every development of doctrine and morals in the Church, Biblical theology has of necessity a close connection with systematic theology. It provides what Schleiermacher already felt to be a desideratum in the teaching of doctrine, "a form of Scripture proof on a larger scale than can be got
1 Especially Baiidissin, Kiehm, Kautzsch, Duhm, and the contributors to the Theologisch Tijdschrift and the Ztitschrift fur alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.
RELATION TO SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY. 5
from single texts." Hence the distinction between Biblical and Systematic theology must be all the more strongly insisted on ; and it is just in the evangelical Church that it is most necessary to emphasise this distinction, because here the risk of confusing the two is greatest. Undoubtedly it is one of the most important and difficult tasks of modern theology to put an end to this vague confusion between Biblical theology and systematised evangelical doctrine, — a natural confusion in earlier ages, and one of which theologians were then quite unconscious, but which in the present day shows itself in conscious opposition to a sound historical conception of Holy Scripture, and, with a haughty disregard of the intellectual work of the Church, reappears in the form of a science of Christian doctrine based on the Bible documents. In this relation the rise of an independent science of Biblical theology is certainly of fundamental importance. It involves an ac- knowledgment that the subject-matter of the Bible cannot be the immediate foundation of Christian belief, that scientific theology has become conscious that the old evangelical pre- supposition that the doctrine of the Bible and the Christianity of the Church are in perfect harmony, is no longer tenable.
The distinction between these two branches of study is, in the first place, one of form. Systematic theology has to present in one harmonious whole the moral and religious consciousness of an evangelical Christian of the present day, as based on the completed development of the Bible and on the ecclesiastical history of Christendom resulting therefrom. Biblical theology has to show, from a purely historical stand- point, what were the doctrinal views and moral ideas which animated the leading spirits of our religion during the Biblical period of its growth. In the next place, the distinction is one of contents. What Biblical theology shows to have been the religious and moral contents of any particular period of Biblical development, is by no means proved thereby to be a doctrine of Christian faith or morals. It is but a single step in the
6 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
process of that religious development which was leading on- wards to the perfecting of religion in Christianity. Now, the law of organic development is, that in every stage of healthy development all future developments are already lying hid, but hid only, — as germs are. Hence, in the product of each stage in the Biblical religion, the germ of the last and highest stage was present, but still only the germ. It is only the man of science, to whom the life-history of a plant is familiar, that can recognise in the germ its relation to the coming bloom and fruit, never the superficial observer.
In like manner, no result of Old Testament theology can become a constituent part of systematic theology till its further development in Christianity has been recognised, in other words, except through the medium of New Testament theology. True, there is not a single Christian conception but has its roots in the Old Testament. In so far, however, as it is still Old Testament, in other words, as it is presented in Old Testament theology, it has not yet developed into Christianity, and is therefore not yet Christian. There is not a single Old Testament conception which Christianity does not set in a new light, and not till then is it rendered perfect. It is sad to see how, for example, the representation of Old Testament morality in Genesis or in the war-psalms is falsified in order to juggle it into conformity with the morality of Him who did not bestow upon His disciples " the spirit of Elias," or how the highest phase of Christian morality is actually darkened in order not to contrast too strongly with the morality of an earlier age.1
Not of Biblical theology as such, therefore, but at most of New Testament theology, can it be said that it is co- extensive with systematic theology. But even the results of New Testament theology do not, without further explana-
2 The greatest feat of this sort which recent Protestant theology has achieved is, perhaps, the excursus on the deeds of Ehud and Jael in Bachmann's Com- menlar zum Buclie der liichter, 1868.
DELATION TO SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY. 7
tion, coincide with those of evangelical doctrine and ethics. For even in the New Testament, revealed religion finds ex- pression through a multiplicity of persons whose individual peculiarities cannot claim to be the standard for all time. Notwithstanding all the unity of faith in the New Testament, none but the wilfully blind can help seeing the great variety of religious thought which it contains. The religious and moral consciousness of the New Testament writers is always pervaded by the ideas of their time, and influenced by their education and by their own special cast of thought. Hence the work of the Christian spirit, that has translated the religious and moral ideas of the men of the Bible into the speech and thought of other times, must not be declared useless on the one-sided dictum of a " Bible-believer."
Biblical theology is thus distinct in form and contents from systematic theology. But the former remains the neces- sary preliminary and the indispensable standard of the latter. It alone can give a pledge that the conscious faith of the Church, as of the individual, is not overstepping the bounds of historical Christianity.
4. Thus Biblical theology lies wholly within the circle of historical theology. Inside this circle, however, it keeps itself quite distinct from the department of this science, which, on the basis of the already complet€d religion of revelation, has to show how the fundamental doctrines of Christianity gradually became ecclesiastical dogmas, and how the com- munities and nations influenced by Christianity fared as Christians in the general history of mankind. In other words, Biblical theology is distinct both from the history of dogma and from Church history.
For us, to be sure, Biblical theology would form only a single section in the history of dogma, did we not recognise Jesus as the Christ, and therefore see in His personal mani- festation, and in those developments of the religious life which are directly due to Him, the perfect manifestation
8 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
of moral and religious life. Could we see in the further development of the Christian Church a regular, uniformly growing continuation of what the Bible began, then Biblical theology would be merely the first section of the history of dogma, and the Bible merely the beginning of Christian litera- ture. Such a result might be reached by carrying to its logical conclusion the Catholic view, that the infallible spirit of the Church can actually impart new religious know- ledge as well as by believing in the immanence of the Divine Spirit in the human. But even one who, though not a Christian, takes an unprejudiced view of history, will hardly deny that, when contrasted with its ecclesiastical development, the Biblical stage of Christianity is " the classical." And for the evangelical Christian, as such, it is beyond question that all healthy ecclesiastical development in later times can only be the shaping and unfolding of what was revealed once for all in the Bible as something immediately living, as some- thing manifest. For such an one the Bible is not merely the beginning, but also the classical standard of all Christian literature, and Biblical theology the description of that perfect typical development by which all later ecclesiastical work must be measured.
Consequently, Biblical theology comes into closer connection with the branches of historical theology that deal with the development of the people, among whom the true religion flourished till it reached its perfect form in Christianity. This province Biblical theology shares, in the first place, with " the history of the people of Israel." To this it stands in the same relation as the history of doctrine and morals does to the history of the Christian peoples. Into a general history of Israel, planned on a large scale, there can be woven, it is true, a history of its religion. Indeed, so far as its main features are concerned, it can scarcely be left out.1 But just
1 The great historical work of H. Ewald, a monument of astonishing industry and insight, is on a large scale, embracing not only the religion, but all the
RELATION TO BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY. 9
as in a history of Greece and Rome a special place is due to the history of Greek art and of Roman law, because in these provinces of intellectual life those two nations have shown themselves ideal pioneers, so in the history of Israel the history of its religion demands special atten- tion, because for us Israel is the religious people. Between the two provinces it is easy to draw a clear line of de- marcation. Biblical theology has to set aside everything that bears merely on the history of Israel as a civil com- munity having political relations with other nations, and, further, everything in which its civil development does not differ from that of other peoples, and is not determined by the peculiarity of its religion. Wherever there is a question as to the links connecting religious and civil life, Biblical theology simply takes its statements from the history of Israel as accepted facts.
This specified province Biblical theology likewise shares with Biblical archaeology. The latter science undertakes to give a view of everything affecting Hebrew life, the con- formation of the land under the influence of which this people developed, its domestic and social conditions, its occupations in private and public life, its enjoyments and its needs, its legal institutions, the average standard of morals in each age, and the forms of private and public worship. What it specially shares with Biblical theology, is the field of morals and of public worship. But even here the line of demarcation between the two sciences is clear and distinct The subject-matter of Biblical theology is simply the current ideal of morality and the religious thoughts
surroundings of ancient Israel, and is therefore of much service for our purpose. Still, in consequence of the general object he has in view, even Ewald has no room for the more minute details of the history of religion. In the histories of Hitzig, Seineke, etc., all discussion of the finer questions of this sort is pur- posely avoided. In the work of Static there is an attempt to unfold the fundamental thoughts of the religion of the people of Israel, but, to my mind, in a one-sided way. The chief problems of our science are dealt with in the works of \Vellhausen, always in a most attractive and suggestive manner.
10 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
embodied in the public worship of God. On the other hand, the delineation of actually existing conditions and of ex- ternal acts of worship, as well as of the finer distinctions in regard to customs and institutions, rights and duties, is the business of archaeology. On such matters as these Biblical theology has simply to take from archaeology its results as accepted facts.
With these three sciences, the history of Israel, Hebrew archaeology, and Biblical theology, our historical knowledge of the development-period of revealed religion in Israel is complete. No other department of intellectual life ever reached among this people such a special or important develop- ment as to require separate scientific treatment. In the case of Israel, all questions of law, constitutional history, and art may be discussed without loss in connection with history and archaeology.
5. Biblical theology has thus a well-defined province of its own among the separate departments of theology. Indeed, it is one of the most indispensable branches of theological science. In it alone the labours of the expositor and the critic arrive at definite results, by which may be tested at once their soundness and their thoroughness. It clears the way for systematic theology, inasmuch as by defining the true character of primitive Christianity, it fixes the limits and guarantees the Christian standpoint of every system of faith and morals which aims at being Christian. As a historical presentation of the original and complete development of the true religion, it serves as an introduction to the history of the progress of Christianity, and gives us the true standard by which to estimate the value of every later ecclesiastical form. Biblical theology is thus, as it were, the heart of theological science, which, by working upon the original sources, gathers the life-blood into one great centre in order to pour it back again into the veins, so that the theological life of the existing Church may be kept strong and healthy.
METHOD OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY. 1 1
But it is only as a whole that Biblical theology has this commanding position, and it is only from belonging to such a whole that a single section of it, like Old Testament theology, obtains its importance. Apart from its complete development, apart, that is, from its final stage, Old Testament theology would be but a poor standard for Christian faith and Christian morals.
6. Accordingly we must, after a careful chronological sifting of the extant documents, determine by purely historical tests what were the moral and religious principles which at each separate period of Israel's history were either expressly asserted or else implied in its forms and ceremonies, taking into account only those circles which eventually proved themselves the successful exponents of a healthy development. And this historical result must not in any way be either judged or settled from the standpoint of Christianity as developed by the Church, or from that of any philosophical school or of one's own mode of thought.
It is self-evident that Biblical theology can be a profitable study only to one who is able to bring himself into living sympathy with the spirit of that religion. No spiritual movement can or will reveal itself in all its truth except to one who, having come under its charm, keenly appreciates its real meaning, and takes an interest in all its peculiar characteristics. Still it does not follow from this that one has a right to speak of a special theological method any more than an art-historian should speak of an aesthetic, or a historian of literature of a poetic, method.
7. The only writings which can be regarded as the special and direct sources of Biblical theology are those which form the canon of the Old and New Testament For, even if we lay no special stress on the name " Biblical," but look simply to the object we have in view, our task is to give a history of the development of revealed religion as consummated in Christianity, not a history of all the religious and moral
12 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
products of the Jewish national spirit. Hence we can employ as direct sources only those writings which are the outcome of that religious movement which culminated in Christianity ; in other words, as compared with the canonical Scriptures, the kindred writings of later Judaism and of early Christianity cannot be regarded as real sources, but only as explanatory and preparative.
8. But even the books of both Testaments would not be satisfactory authorities for an investigation into the historical development of revealed religion, were it true, as some scholars have surmised, that these give us in great part merely the outer shell of the popular religion, and that, since the time of the patriarchs, there existed among the higher classes an esoteric religion that was marked by a deeper grasp of religious thought.1 Whether this theory points to particular doctrines, such as the belief in immortality, which de Wette had in view, or regards Moses as having been initiated into the esoteric religion of the Egyptian priesthood, of which religion he promulgated only the outer form, or finally holds, with Autenrieth, that a primitive Canaanitish school of philosophy taught the doctrines of monotheism, love to one's neighbour, and immortality, and that through its oldest pre- Mosaic production, the book of Job, this philosophy was introduced into Israel by David, but not •wholly incorporated into the Hebrew national religion till the time of the Babylonian captivity, any such theory would make a real history of revealed religion for ever impossible. For us the Biblical religion which would then remain would no longer have any interest. But if we succeed in pointing out in the Biblical books a healthy inner de- velopment of religion, and find that men like Isaiah, the
1 Literature. — Reinhold, Die ebraeiscJien Mysterien, 1788. Autenrieth, Ueber das Buck Hiob, 1823. De Wette on Psalm xvii. 15 ; cf. BMische Dogmatik, § 113, 114. — Zachariae, "Von der Herablassung Gottes zu den Menschen" (Philosophisch-theologische Abhandlungen, ed. Perschke, 1776, p. 541).
ACCOMMODATION. 1 3
Deuteronomist, and others, who would surely have been among the initiated, preach the same religion as the rest, in all simplicity too, and in the unmistakable language of perfect sincerity and transparent candour, this idea of an esoteric religion becomes the veriest phantom of the imagination.
It is somewhat different, however, with the question whether the Biblical writers may not have accommodated themselves to popular views. Wherever there is no philoso- phical teaching, there must be some such " accommodation." Everywhere outside the language of science the inner is represented by the outer in symbol and parable (Matt. xiii. 13), the spiritual is expressed by that which can be seen and handled. In the Sacred Scriptures this is such an outstanding characteristic of the language that, as Kayser remarks, not without reason, " the old sensuous language even in the Old and New Testament is without any deep metaphysical ideas, and its meaning must be grasped, that is, conceived of, through the senses ; what is high and holy comes into touch with what is sensuous and low." In regard to words spoken and written for the people, we are entitled, nay, bound in duty, to make this supposition, and not to seek in the outer garment of the form for the true meaning of the speakers.
But we could be led astray only by accommodation as to contents, that is, if the Biblical writers had allowed their own religious thoughts to appear other than they were. But the spirit by which these religious teachers were animated, and their holy zeal regarding the religious attitude of the people, make us certain that they meant to express their own religious and moral convictions, that they did not keep the kernel for themselves and give their people the shell. Hence we may rest assured that even when they are dealing with un- developed ideas, we can ascertain from their own words clearly and beyond a doubt what the true conviction 13 towards which they are striving to guide the nation.
14 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
CHAPTER II.
FORMS OF LITERATURE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES.
For the meaning of myth and legend in general, cf. F. G. Welcker, Griechische Gotterlehre, 1857, Bd. i. 46-107. F. Ch. Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie oder die Naturreligion des Alterthums, 1824, Bd. i. 1-103. Otfried Miiller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, 1825. Schelling, Philo- sophic der Mythologie, 1856, Bd. i. 193 ff., and Ueber My then historische Sagen und Philosopheme der dltesten Welt, 1793 (Ges. W., Abth. i. Bd. i. 43-83). W. Wackernagel, " Die epische Poesie" (Schweizer Museum fur histor. Wissenschaft,i. 341 ff.). On the application of this to the books of the Bible, cf. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Bd. i Aufl. 3, pp. 20-69, esp. pp. 49, 418 ff. Tuch, Einleitung zum Commentar zur Genesis, 1838, pp. i— xix. F. L. George, Mythus und Sage, Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Entivicklung dieser Begriffe und ihres Ver- hdltnisses zum christlichen Glauben, Berlin 1837. Lutz, Biblische Dogmatik, pp. 51 f., 112 f. Bruno Bauer, Eeligion des Alten Testamentes, Bd. i. p. 17 ff. — For particular points in connection with the question before us, cf. Fr. W. Schultz, Die Schb'pfungsgeschichte nach Naturwissenschaft und Bibel, 1865, a book, the weakness and illogical character of which has been well pointed out by Ed. Eiehm (Studien und Kritiken, 1866, iii. p. 547 ff., cf. esp. p. 572). Herm. Hupfeld, Die heutige theosophische oder mythologische Theologie und Schrifterkldrung, 1861. Historical, cf. Diestel, "Bibel und Naturkunde in den Zeiten der Orthodoxie" (Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1866, ii. 223 ff., iii. 483 ff.; and his Geschichte des Alten Testamentes in der christlichen Kirche, 1869, p. 723 ff. On Genesis vi., cf. Schrader, Studien zur Kritik und Erklarung der liblischen Urgeschichte. • — The principal treatises against the view we are about to
LITERATURE. 1 5
advocate : Holeraann, Einheit der bciden Schdpfungsberichte ; Apologetische Bibclstudie mit einem Sendschrciben an Herrn Domherm Dr. JCahnis, 1862. Engelhardt, Zeitschrift fur lutherisclie Theologie und Kirche, 1856, 401 ff. Hofmann, Weissayung und Erfiillung, i. 86 ff. ; Schriftbeweis, i. 265 ff.t 408 ff. Kurtz, Die Ehen der Sohne Gottes mit den Tochtem der Hfenschen, 1857. Keil, " Die Ehen der Kinder Gottes mit den Tochtern der Menschen " (Zeitschrift fur lutJier. Theologie und Kirche, 1855, 220 ff.; 1856, 22 ft, der Fall der Engel).
1. The writings from which we have to ascertain the essence and trace the development of revealed religion, include every form of literary production found among the Hebrews. Purely dogmatic or philosophical teaching is, however, almost entirely wanting. The range of teaching is restricted in a most practical way to the needs, the questions, and the circumstances of the particular age. Even the moral sections of the law, and the sayings of the prophets and sages are couched in thoroughly popular language without any of the art of the schools. It is only towards the close of this whole epoch, e.g. in Ecclesiastes, that we find anything akin to a philosophical mode of treatment. Of course, the writings that give the simplest and fullest explanation of their religious standpoint, are such as were directly intended for religious and moral instruction. From these, with a knowledge of the circumstances in which they arose, one has no difficulty in finding the desired information.
The task is more difficult when the pieces to be dealt with are strictly poetical. For even when these are of a religious character, one has always to bear in mind the peculiarities of poetry, its instinctive appeal to the senses, and its love for hyperbola Still more is this the case when the pieces are secular, and do not betray their religious background, unless involuntarily. This is true of the secular folk-song and of the earliest form of epic poetry, with its instinctive tendency to a naively sensuous presentation of the spiritual, as
16 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
is the case in all the oldest traditions of the primitive age of Israel. It is equally true of the secular drama, as in Canticles, where the spirit of the Old Testament religion can be detected only by a spiritual insight more than usually keen. On the same level we have the " vision," so frequent in the prophetical books, in which the spiritual manifests itself to the senses, not as an object of thought, but of inner contempla- tion, framed in a setting of constantly recurring forms ; — next, the " symbol," which depicts a religious thought by an outward act ; and then the " parable," in which eternal truths are dressed in the garb of simple stories from nature and from the life of the people. Lastly, we must also, in a certain sense, include in this category prophecy proper, inasmuch as it, too, describes in a variety of ways the eternal truths of religion in relation to the development of the kingdom of God, clothing them in the language of poetry, and applying them in a concrete form to individual cases. In this whole province the problem is to distinguish between the real meaning and the mere form in which it is presented, to recognise as the essential feature of the highly - coloured picture, the religious, the moral, the eternal. In such cases, any one without an instinct for poetic expression will be sure to fall into innumerable misunderstandings.
2. To Biblical theology, the historical books present a problem of much greater difficulty. This is not due to their being of very varied literary value. That would not matter, since we only want to learn from them in what condition religion and morals were at the particular time. It is be- cause we really cannot be sure that they are of equal historical credibility. For even in the case of an author animated by the deepest religious spirit and by the most disinterested love of truth, historical credibility depends on the nature of the documents at his command, and on his own nearness in time and place to the events which he describes. No book can be a trustworthy authority as to events from
BOOKS OF NARRATIVE. 17
which, without any intervening records, it stands hundreds of years apart la the most favourable circumstances, it may, indeed, give an essentially accurate description of the general condition of such times. But what is for our object precisely the most important thing, it cannot do. It cannot give a trustworthy and detailed account of the reli- gious colouring of these distant ages. Consequently, the historical credibility of the Biblical writings must vary. From this standpoint we have two classes of writings between which to distinguish. Those books of narrative, the authors of which were qualified, by personal position, or from possessing original documents, to form a historically trust- worthy judgment regarding the things narrated by them, are for us authorities as to the religious development of the age which they describe. Such is the oldest form of Kings and Judges, and such, too, is the main document in Ezra and Xehemiah. But those books, in regard to which we have sufficient reason to doubt such qualification, are for us authorities as to the religious development of the age in which they arose, and the views of which they express. Thus the stories about pre-Mosaic times are authorities as to religion as it was in the age of their authors ; and the book of Chronicles, though without value for an inquiry into the religion of Hezekiah's time, not to speak of David's, is one of the most important original authorities for under- standing the state of religion at the close of the Persian period.
3. Consequently we shall not be surprised to find, in the Old Testament, books of narrative that are little to be trusted as historical authorities. But that will not make them less important in our eyes, for they still remain original authorities as much as before, although only for the age in which they were written. But here a more difficult question meets us, viz. whether, in view of the character which Christian faith, on the ground of its direct religious experience, assigns to
VOL. i. B
18 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
these Looks, there can be included in the Old Testament even books of narrative, the contents of which are not history at all, but wholly or partly legend and myth.
We here make the preliminary remark that, of course, the expressions myth and legend have not, in themselves, a fixed and rigid meaning. We certainly do not intend to homologate every meaning which has at one time or another been assigned to these words, or may on linguistic grounds be assigned to them. We shall therefore state, first, what we understand by legend, and then, what we understand by myth.
4. Wherever we see a nation stepping forth out of the darkness of the prehistoric age into the light of historical life, it invariably brings with it, as one of its most precious spiritual treasures, the national legend. How a nation originated ; what its ancestors were like ; how it first awoke and be- thought itself of national glory, — all this is not handed down by history pure and simple, for which such ages have neither opportunity nor motive, but is preserved in song, in proverb, and in story ; and being in this form handed on and enriched, this material is at last combined into a single whole by virtue of the poetic spirit in the nation, — that spirit in which resides the mysterious motive power that impels each people to undertake its own special task among the family of nations.
Wherever the memory of a period as yet without a litera- ture is transmitted orally, we always find legend. A nation wreathes around the figures of its ancestors and the places famous in its earliest days a many-coloured garland of spon- taneous poetry — not a garland of fiction or of falsehood. To the popular mind, the figures of primeval days become instinct with life, dowered with the vigour of imperishable youth. Hence in legend there is invariably a historical kernel. But while it is the task of criticism to extract the historical kernel from history which ignorance or falsehood has garbled or destroyed, legend confronts the investigator as a unity
MYTH AND LEGEND IN THE SACRED BOOKS. 19
which does not admit of his separating the kernel from its adornment — that is to say, as itself a historical fact, and that, too, one of the weightiest Still it readily reveals itself as legend. It longs to be loved and prized as such ; it does not wish to borrow the false adornment of historicity. In legend, persons and times assume a superhuman character. Heaven and earth do not keep apart as in a historical age. The laws of probability, chronology, and development retire into the background. But, above all, the chief figures become typical, the accepted models of the nation's character, and of its task in history. Consequently, legend lets us look into the innermost heart of a nation and watch the flow of those living springs from which its historical life wells up.1 Hence the perennial freshness of legend ; hence the feeling of having to do with figures of flesh and blood, more real than those of history. Indeed, one never feels so much at home in history as in legend. One sits by the hearth in a people's home and listens there to the very breathing of its inner life. That the people of Israel did preserve the memory of its earliest days, not in history, but in legend, must be regarded as self-evident, unless we are willing to think of that people as crippled in one of the noblest attributes of nationality. Whoever, for dogmatic reasons, questions the existence of such " legends " in the Old Testament, must assume that Israel's legendary history has been lost to us, and that, in the sacred writers, its place has been taken by a knowledge of history miraculously acquired. Certainly an idea as fanciful as it is devoid of religious support ! For how could the filling of the sacred writers with the spirit of true religion help them to a special know- ledge of historical facts ? Nowhere within the range of our experience does a growing fulness of this spirit tend to a
1 In the same way, the characteristic features of a Greek are much more distinctly seen in Odysseus and Achilles, and those of a German in Siegfried and Hagou, than in auy historical personages belonging to these nations.
20 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
growing certainty in the domain of experimental know- ledge. On such a theory, what would become of the value attached to original documents, and to the testimony of eye-witnesses ?
This fanciful idea depends entirely upon the groundless prejudice that legend is not a suitable medium for the spirit of revelation to employ. But a narrative does not become a specially suitable medium for revelation because it is in exact correspondence with fact. In this respect even the historical books in our Canon vary according to the talents and the position of the writer, and the authorities at his command. Indeed, they are all far inferior, so far as facts are concerned, to the histories which modern science com- piles from official documents. Neither does this fitness depend upon giving trustworthy information about the people of revelation. Josephus does not belong to the Canon, because he writes Jewish history ; and a history of Israel from the standpoint of Tacitus, in spite of its historical excellence, would not be in its proper place among the sacred books. History itself becomes sacred history, that is to say, a medium of revelation, simply and solely because it either places us, by means of original documents, in direct contact with the development of revealed religion, or, being handled in the spirit of that religion, shows us thereby a 'stage of it. And the Holy Spirit, of course, excludes deceit and lying. Still He does not render impossible forms of presentation which may not appear to us quite permis- sible, but which were, nevertheless, in perfect harmony with the view of the period in question, as, for example, history written with a purpose (Tendenzgcschiclite) and pseudonymity. For it is only the moral standard actually in force at the time that can be taken into consideration. Our method of writing history the ancient world did not know, and did not aim at. It was far less concerned about ascertaining the details of what had actually happened than about expounding or
MYTH AND LEGEND IN TUB SACKED BOOKS. 21
defending the great principles and truths exemplified in history. Still less does the Holy Spirit exclude error or ignorance regarding matters of fact. This same Spirit — and there is not a second — did not make Luther the equal of Humboldt or Laplace in scientific knowledge, or Augustine comparable as a linguist and historian to Sallust, Thucy- dides, or Grimm. All scientific knowledge depends upon the gift of keen observation and the power of skilfully combining and ingeniously testing the various facts obtained by means of such observation. The spirit of revelation, on the contrary, illumines the moral and religious life. It gives a conscious- ness of the divine will. Hence it places even the phenomena of nature in a new light, and specially fits a man to judge of nature and history from the standpoint of religion. The keenness of his historical instinct did not teach Tacitus the ways of God, or make him see in the divine kingdom founded by the Jesus whom he so despised, the centre of the world's history. The matchless breadth of his views regarding nature did not lead Aristotle to statements like " Let there be light," and " The heavens declare the glory of God." But on such matters the spirit of holiness can neither increase nor correct the inductions of science. Hence it cannot prevent a historian imagining that he is giving us history when there is only legend.
Now the characteristic spirit, to which the special achieve- ments of a people are due, finds expression in the legends of that people ; and these legends are themselves due to the influence and the critical powers of those men who have the creative instinct of that people most strongly developed within them. Hence the legends of Israel must have been shaped and fashioned by that Spirit which determined the special task assigned by God to that people, in other words, by the Holy Spirit of divine revelation as manifested in the true religion. These legends must therefore have been due to the men who were the religious leaders of Israel, and who guided
22 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
the development of that nation's religion. In fact, legend must be regarded as fitted in a higher degree than history to be the medium of the Holy Spirit. For in history every figure expresses only in an approximate and imperfect fashion what the Spirit at work in that particular people desires. In the legend, however, it is this very Spirit which moulds these figures and gives them flesh and blood. They become model- figures, ideal characters. They show in unfading clearness and beauty the natural Israel on which the spirit of revelation is at work. Hence the peculiar characteristics of Israel as the religious nation par excellence never find such accurate and vigorous expression in any historical personages as in those met with in the patriarchal legends. Abraham is for Old Testament revelation a more instructive figure than all the kings of Israel from Saul to Zedekiah. In Jacob-Israel the Israelite is more truly delineated than in any personage mentioned in Kings or Chronicles. Hence the matchless value of patriarchal legend for purposes of edification. Where we meet with legend, it cannot warrant any conclusion on our part as to the religious development of the age of which it treats ; but for giving us a knowledge of the religion of the age out of which it springs, it is the most valuable material we possess.
5. As history springs from legend, doctrine springs from myth ; that is to say, from thoughts, embodied in narrative form, concerning the essence of the phenomenal world. In myth, transcendental knowledge previously acquired is not, as in a parable, purposely veiled in a symbolic garb, but form and contents are born together, and that spontaneously. The whole presents itself ready-made as an actual fact. Myths are " discovered rather than invented." Being invariabjy simple and perfectly apposite, they have all the appearance of intrinsic necessity. Hence the inclination to regard them as sacred. In such symbols and myths, the sense appeals directly to the spectator or hearer through the external object
MYTH AND LEGEND IN THE SACRED BOOKS. 23
or history, just as it was first directly apprehended in them (Welckcr, i. 56, 75).
Beyond human history and legend begins the region accessible only to faith. Thus myth, as the quasi-historical delineation of what faith has grasped, introduces legend, giving us as a kind of legendary prelude an account of creation, of the ideal development of man, and the meaning of his material and spiritual nature. It next works its way deep into the structure of legend, mostly, it is true, toned down in a Euhemeristic fashion, so that the gods of antiquity and the phenomena of nature, taken in the sense of nature-religion, are reduced to the level of human heroes, with human joys, griefs, and struggles.
Finally, as the myth of human destiny, it carries up history to the eternal again, and completes the circle of vision. The formation of myth ceases with the times in which the nature-religions are shaped and modified by the peoples in naive freshness and vivacity. "Where a religion, regarded as fully matured, has become an occult doctrine in the hands of priests and scribes, there may very well be a further artificial development of myth, but there is no longer any genuine creation of it. The proper time for forming myths is, as Max Miiller has correctly maintained, the time when languages are growing. Myth and language arise together. Such myths, closely and in- separably connected in most cases with national legends, every people brings with it from remote antiquity. To some extent they are the common possession of entire stocks, that afterwards become divided. But they get a different stamp according to the national genius and religious development of each individual branch. For " a myth can be enlarged and adorned, and even united with another as if by a process of inoculation or amalgamation " ("Welcker, 75). Such myths are among the noblest possessions of early peoples. While bearing the imprint of the freshness of the
24 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
human spirit in its infancy, they also witness to the maturity of a time when but few great things were observed with unsophisticated eyes.
That in this respect also, Israel did not come poor and with empty hands out of the bosom of the larger family of nations to which it belonged, is as self-evident as that it did not, on beginning its separate existence, create a new language or new national habits and customs, but only developed in its own way those which it already possessed. It is equally clear that the later spiritual religion of Israel cannot of itself have produced such myths, but that they date from times in which the religion of the Hebrew race was still a nature-religion. Nor can there be any valid reason why such myths should not have found their way into the Bible. The mythical ideas about the origin of the world and of man, held in common by the primitive Semites, naturally took in each tribe a particular form, according to the cast of its spirit and religion. Thus in Israel, too, the spirit which sustained and developed Israel's religion could appropriate such myths as raw material, and saturate them with its true and enduring beliefs concerning God, the world, and man. As long as Israel's religion was in full vigour, it would be in a position to appropriate and incorporate such material as came to it from without. It was only when it had ceased to grow, and, having lost its vitality, had become conscious of its weakness, that it would hold shyly aloof from such influences.
When myths were thus adopted, their original form would necessarily remain and indicate their kinship with the stories of a wider circle of nations. But in this common form the religious peculiarity of Israel must have stood out in all the greater contrast to whatever was foreign. The spirit that was creating Israel's religion would have to remould the dis- tinctive contents of these stories, and, as a matter of course, despite the affinity of form, reproduce them from within and
MYTH AND LEGEND IN THE SACRED BOOKS. 25
purify them. Thus myth grows into revelation-myth. And, in fact, it is undeniable that the earlier myths of the Persians, Hindoos, Phoenicians, and, above all, of the Chaldeans, are closely akin in form to the Bible stories. But as regards their religious character, the difference is as great as the difference between the religions of these nations and the religion of revelation. In the Old Testament the myth " is born again by the creative power of the living self-revealing God " (Riehm).
This revelation-myth is the most appropriate of all dresses in which to present the true religion. In this form its content can be unfolded in the freest manner, because the form adapts itself readily and naturally to it. Hence it surpasses every other kind of narrative. With its marvel- lous childlike beauty, in which there lie the deepest truth and wisdom, it speaks straight to the heart. For the deepest intellect it is deep ; for the child it is winning and simple. It is the brightest gem in the Old Testament. The case is different, of course, where there lie scattered, here and there in the national legend, fragments of the mythical treasures of a nature-religion which the true religion has not properly assimilated. Having been toned down in Euhemeristic fashion, and having thus lost their vitality, sucli fragments have no religious value for Israel. But out of the myths appropriated by the religion of Israel, and independently worked up, we have to gather the religious purport, though, of course, only as proof of the religious development of the age which appropriated them.
6. Of the legendary character of the pre- Mosaic narra- tives, the time of which they treat is a sufficient proof. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing, a time separated by an interval of more than four hundred years, of which there is absolutely no history, from the nearest period of which Israel had some dim historical recollection, a time when in civilised countries writing was only beginning to be
26 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
used for the most important matters of State. Now wander- ing herdsmen have invariably an instinctive dislike to writing. In fact, at the present day, it is considered a disgrace among many Bedouin tribes in the peninsula of Sinai to be able to write. It is therefore impossible that such men could hand down their family histories, in themselves quite unimportant, in any other way than orally, to wit, in legends. And even when writing had come into use, in the time, that is, between Moses and David, it would be but sparingly used, and much that happened to the people must still have been handed down simply as legend. Besides, the legendary character of these stories is proved by the superhuman proportions assigned to time and power, while at the same time no emphasis is placed on the miraculous. Thus the patriarchs are described exactly after the fashion of ancient heroes.1 The length of their lives before and immediately after the Flood are whole epochs,2 and the periods of time are given in round numbers that are typical.3 In fact, this mode of representa- tion did not lose its influence during Israel's Palestinian history.4 That we are dealing with legend is indicated by the disregard of historical probability, and by the easy tolerance of contradictions in many passages of Genesis which, never- theless, retain to the full their evidential value in spite of the ridicule which infidelity has frequently cast upon them. When a Cain builds cities, and is afraid of the blood- avenger; when all kinds of animals enter a vessel like the ark ; when the waters rise fifteen feet above all the mountain tops, at a period when there were already civilised States in Egypt and in the Euphrates valley ; when Abraham, whose begetting of Isaac was a miracle, becomes afterwards the father of many sons ; when Sarah, who mocks at the promise
1 Gen. xiv., xxix. 9 ff., xxxi. 45 ff. (Gilead, Mizpah), xxxii. 23 ff., xxxiv. 25 ff.
2 Gen. v., ix. 29, xxv. 7, xxxv. 28 (on the other hand, vi. 3).
3 Gen. v. 23, vii. 4, viii. 6, 10, 12.
4 Jiulg. iii. 11, 30, v. 31, viii. 28, xv. 16 ; Josh. v. 6 ; Deut. xxix. 5, etc.
MYTH AND LEGEND IN THE SACRED BOOKS. 27
of a son, becomes the object of Abimelecli's intrigues, and so forth, — all this is perfectly natural and unobjectionable in a legend that has been composed out of a number of varying traditions. Were it history, this would be in the highest degree perplexing and inconceivable.1
In post - Mosaic times this manner of presentation is certainly no longer the predominant one ; but many traces of it can still be detected both in the history of the conquest and in the narrative of pre-Davidic times.2 The presence of legend is further shown in the naive way in which heaven and earth commingle and the spiritual becomes material, — a method of presentation wholly different from poetic descrip- tion by vision and dream. Whoever sees history in this must come to such conclusions as that God was actually nearer to a Jacob-Israel than to an Isaiah or a Jeremiah.3 This mode of narration is found all through Genesis, and less frequently till the time of David.4 Finally, Genesis betrays its legendary character in the following ways. It often gives us the same story in several forms ; 5 it delights to connect significant proper names or very ancient localities with stories which owe their origin solely to the sound of the name ; * and, as if the history of a people were like that of a family,7 it habitually makes the links of connection genea- logical tables. The name Benjamin seems to me a specially clear instance of this. In all the narratives of the older popular cast, the members of this tribe are called Bne(ha)- jemini, the very way the Bedouin tribes of the present day
1 Gen. iv. 14, 17, vi. 19, vii. 2, 20, xvii. 17, xviii. 12, xx. 2, xxv. 1 Ex. xii. 87 ; Josh, vi., viii., xvi. ; cf. Judg. L 7-36, xv. etc.
* Gen. iii. 21 f., vii. 16, xL 5, xviii. 8, 21, xxvi. 2, xxviii. 13, xxxii. 24 ff.
4 Ex. xix. 19 f., xxiv. 10, 12, xxxL 18; Josh. v. 13 tf.; Judg. vi. 11 ff., xiii. 3-25 ; 2 Kings ii. 11, etc.
* Gen. xii., xx., xxvi., xxi. 22, xxvi. 26. The two accounts of the Flood.
8 Gen. ii. 23, iii. 20, iv. 1, 16, 17, 25, v. 29, xi. 9, xvi. 11, 13, xviii. 12, 13, 15, xix. 22, xxi. 9, xxii. 14, xxviii. 19, etc. Bethel, Beersheba, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, etc.
7 Gen. x., xxv. 13 IF., xxxvi.; cf. also Gen. iv. 1 ff. with Num. xxiv. 21, 22.
28 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
usually describe themselves.1 It does not matter whether the word Jemini be taken in a purely geographical sense, when it would mean " Southern," 2 a Hebrew thinking of himself as facing the east, or whether it have some other meaning. As the tribe, moreover, is reckoned among the sons of Joseph,3 it is quite clear that Benjamin is simply the Hero Eponymus of a part of the tribe of Joseph, probably the southern part of it, and so he is represented as Joseph's younger brother.
If, for the reasons stated, the contents of the first eleven chapters of Genesis would at any rate be regarded as legendary, a more careful examination leads us to see that these stories are strictly mythical. Certainly it is only the first three chapters that have become revelation-myths, in this sense, that they present to us in the garb of a narrative the ideas of the true religion about conditions antecedent to experience. All the rest has been toned down to the character of legend after the Euhemeristic method which the Jewish Sibyl and the Church fathers 4 applied to the Greek legends about the gods. In these chapters, however, there are still dimly visible some very old recollections of four world-epochs, and of Titanic convulsions on the earth.
The stories about creation, the primeval condition of man, and the Fall, are myths. For whatever is external in the narrative eludes the grasp of the expositor; the religious ideas alone remain. This is best shown, in spite of them- selves, by those expositors who on principle accept these narratives as history, aud yet do not succeed in getting out of them any other meaning than the advocates of the mythical view. And certain as it is that the religious import of these stories is characteristic of revealed religion,
1 Judg. iii. 15, xix. 16 ; 1 Sam. ix. 1-4, 21, xxii. 7 ; 2 Sam. xvi. 11, xix. 17, xx. 1 ; Ps. vii. 1 ; 1 Kings ii. 8.
2 Ps. Ixxxix. 13. 3 2 Sam. xix. 21. 4 E.(j. Origen, De. Printipiis, cd. Lommatzsch, p. 438.
MYTH AND LEGEND IN THE SACRED BOOKS. 29
it is equally certain that their form is not unconnected with a wide circle of myths found among other peoples. This might be doubted formerly when it was possible to see in the accounts of Sanchuniathon, Berosus, and Dundehesch, later compilations formed under Old Testa- ment influences. But it has now been proved to the satisfaction even of one who is certainly not a credulous judge of the monumental writings discovered in Nineveh, that Berosus has, in his legends of the Creation and the Flood, faithfully used the original documents of his ancestral religion, a fact which tends to give credibility to those narratives of his that have not yet been confirmed. Besides, in these stories, speaking animals, miraculous trees, and such like are not introduced as anything astonishing, — like Balaam's speaking ass in the legend, — but as matters of course. This, however, can only happen where the writer has no intention of relating what has actually occurred, but knows that he is dealing with a higher sphere. In Genesis itself, indeed, the creation of the world is related twice, and in such a way that, while the religious ideas remain the same, the outward circumstances are widely different, which, of course, is possible only in religious myths, not in histories miraculously revealed. Nor is it a question of the same narrator having a different intention, but of two narrators taking different views of outward events. Thus the whole animal world is in i 24 created before man, but in ii. 19 ff. after man PVJ). In i. 9 herbs and trees are created long before man ; in ii. 5 there is no green thing before man, the reason, in fact, being that man has not yet appeared ('3), and it is for man that the trees are planted. In like manner the earth is in i. 9 created out of the watery element ; in it 5 ff. it requires first to be watered. Accord- ing to L 27, v. 2, man and woman are created together; according to ii. 21, woman is not created till after man. According to i. 29, trees and herbs are at once given to man
30 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
for food ; according to iii. 18, the eating of herbs is a punish- ment, only the fruit of trees being man's original food. Besides, the whole arrangement of the days of work in A is rendered impossible by the phrase in the second narrative, " in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth." On more minute discrepancies, like the view as to the classification of " creeping things," no stress need be laid (i. 24-30, cf. ii. 19f., iii. 1, 14).
The short story in Gen. vi. 1-3 is worthy of special note. Hupfeld has already pointed out how unjust to the honour of Holy Scripture those are who take it as history, whether they give the wrong explanation that "the sons of God" are pious men or Sethites, or whether they really think of angels marrying. The whole of this much disputed story is, in reality, a parallel to Gen. iii. 22, giving a solution of the question as to how death came into the world. It gives as the explanation of this event, that at the instigation of beings superior to themselves, men gave up the natural position which God had intended for the in. This whole story keeps more on the level of nature than Gen. iii. does. In other respects it might well be compared with the temptation by the serpent and the "being as God." The preface to this piece shows that it belongs, not to the passage in which it now occurs, but to the beginning of the history of man, and should, therefore, precede chaps, iv. and v.1 In this piece, as in an instructive torso, we see how the mythical world of the Hebrew nation appeared when not fully con- trolled by the purer ideas of the religion of Israel, — though at least traces of the latter are shown in the condemnatory judgment passed on what is monstrous.
1 According to Budde, the determining ver. 3 would have its original posi- tion just in chap, iii., and was pushed out of its proper place when the idea about the tree of life forced its way in. His conjecture is certainly clever and attractive, but it seems to me to rest on too insecure a basis (Die biblische Urgeschichte [Gen. i.-xii. 5], untersucht von Lie. Karl Budde, Giessen 1883, i. and ii.).
LITERATURE. 3 1
The result may be given in outline as follows : — Genesis is the book of sacred legend, with a mythical introduction. The first three chapters of it, in particular, present us with revela- tion-myths of the most important kind, and the following eight with mythical elements that have been recast more in the form of legend. From Abraham to Moses we have national legend pure and simple, mixed with a variety of mythical elements which have become almost unrecognisable. From Moses to David we have history still mixed with a great deal of the legendary, and even partly with mythical elements that are no longer distinguishable. From David onwards we have Jnstory, with no more legendary elements in it than are every- where present in history as written by the ancients.
CHAPTER III.
THE RELIGION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IN CONNECTION WITH THE HISTORY OF RELIGION.
LITERATURE. — For the theological treatment, Diestel, GescMchte des Alien Tcstamcntes in der christlichen Kirche, Jena 1869. Spencer, De legibus Hebraeorum ritnalibus et earum notionibus libri ires, ed. 3, Leipzig 1705 (dissert, i. lib. iii., De ritibus c gentium moribus in legem tramlatis, 759- 937). For the philosophical treatment, Hegel, Religions- philosophic, ed. Marheineke, Bd. ii. 46-184 (Aufl. 2); Philo- sophic der Geschichte, Aufl. 2, p. 238 ff. Ifosenkranz, Die Naturrelifjion ein philosophisch-historischer Vcrsuch, 1831, and Zeitschrift fur die speculative Theologie (ed. Bruno Bauer), 1837, Bd. ii. 1, p. 11 ff. [Against Hegel, Nitzsch (Thcol. Stud.u. Krit. 1836, iv. 1096-1107). Against Hegel and Itust, Steudul (Tubinger Zeitschrift fur Theologie, 1835, i. 112 ff., ii. 138 ff.).] — Vatke, Religion des Alien Tcstamcntes,
32 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
1835, Ed. i. 99-120. Bruno Bauer, Religion des Altin Testamentes in der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Principien dargeslcllt, Bd. i. 1838; cf. Zeitschrift fur speculative Thco- logic, Bd. i. 2, 247 ff. (1836), Das Antithcologische am Hegelschen Begriff der hebraischen Religion, and I.e. 1837, p. 329 f. — Rust, Philosophic und Chrislenthum oder Wissen und Glauben (I have seen only the first edition, 1825), p. 53 ff. F. Baur, Christliche Gnosis, 1835, p. 721 ff. (esp. p. 727 against Rust and Hegel). — Billroth, Vorlesungen uler Religionsphilosophie, ed. Erdmann, Aufl. 2, 1844, § 105-110. Braniss, Uebersicht des Enlwicldungsganges der Philosophic in der alien und mittleren Zeit, 1842, p. 24 ff. Stuhr, Allgemeine Geschichte der Religionsformen der heidnischcn Volker, Bd. i. ; Die Religionssysteme der heidnischcn Volker des Orients, Ein- leitung, pp. xviii, xx. F. Kb'ppen, Philosophic des Christcnthums, 1813, Th. i. p. 57ff. Lotze, Microcosmos, Bd. iii. 147. Schelling, Sammtliche Werke, Abth. ii. Bd. i. 118 ff., Bd. iv. 119 ff. Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grcnzen der blossen Vernunft, 1794, esp. pp. 47, 84, 109, 146 ff., 188, 224ff. Feuerbach, Das Wescn des Christcnthums, Aufl. 3, 1849, c. 12. Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube, Aufl. 3, 1872, p. 103 ff.
1. The Old Testament religion, as merely one stage of religion, and that not the highest, naturally falls to be com- pared with the other pre-Christian religions. Hence Old Testament theology must take account of the attempts that have been made to bring this religion into connection with the general religious development of mankind. For historical purposes, it must be admitted, every phenomenon is but a single link in the continuous chain of human affairs until it has shown itself to be something creative, something new, in other words, a starting-point for special developments. Now such a starting-point will certainly not lose its connection with the parent soil of human history. Still it receives its only adequate explanation when referred to the mystery of
FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THEOLOGY. 33
those creative and determining divine forces by which the world, both of sense and of spirit, is upheld. For our task of describing the Old Testament religion, we cannot be properly equipped till we have got a firm grasp of it in its natural limits and connections.
As long as the sacred documents were looked at from the standpoint of uncritical reverence, theology was naturally unable to attempt a judicial estimate of the Old Testament religion. Least of all could it compare or connect the Old Testament with heathen religions. Spencer was the first to venture something of the kind, but as yet from a thoroughly orthodox standpoint, for it was only in a number of external matters that he asserted there was a connection between the religion of Israel and that of Egypt. If one wished to make a theological comparison, all that one was really allowed to do was to compare the two Testaments. Thus, against the Judaeo-Christian amalgamation of both Testaments, as well as against the old Catholic assumption of their essential similarity, protests had been already raised by certain Gnostics, who, fol- lowing a one-sided interpretation of supposed Pauline hints, ascribed to the Old Testament a God different from the God of Christianity, that is, a different religious principle. Accord- ing to some, for example Basilides and Valentinus, this was a more secular, less truly spiritual principle ; according to others, for instance Marcion, it was a principle excluding love, and rooted entirely in law, that is, in righteousness ; in other cases, as among the Ophites, it was an absolutely immoral principle, a principle of persistent envy and selfishness, of antagonism to the better spirit in man. Comparisons of this kind could not but be made in later times also, as soon as a freer atti- tude towards the Biblical records was taken up. Two distinct tendencies then became apparent. Those who, like Semler and Schleiermacher, insist strongly on the perfect character of historical Christianity (cf. GlaulensleJire, § 12, 129), separate the Old Testament from the New with conscious or unconscious
VOL. L c
34 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
disparagement of the former, and recognise only an external historical connection between the two. But others, who, like Kaiser in his first period of development, seek to reach, some- thing higher than the Biblical religion as it is, have a direct interest in placing both Testaments as nearly as possible on the same level.
As soon as a judicial estimate of the Old Testament religion was ventured on, the question had to be faced as to what constituted its distinctive peculiarity, the fundamental prin- ciple which it embodied in contrast with other religions. Now, the feature that first attracts attention is its monotheism, the exclusion of all gods save one from being acknowledged and worshipped by the people of Israel. It is unquestion- ably the fact that in later times the faith of Israel centred with the utmost constancy on this point — on the Echad of Deuteronomy, which became the watchword of the martyrs.1 Accordingly the popular conception of the Old Testament has generally taken this to be its main characteristic.2 But the monotheism of the Old Testament is essentially practical. It does not at first lay stress on there being only one God, but on the duty of Israel to have only one God. Indeed, the more recent estimate of Israel's religion sees, not without good reason, in the conscious monotheism which distinguishes Israel from the kindred peoples, a tolerably late development of Old Testament religion. Besides, a monotheism is imagin- able, and in fact exists, which, as a nature-worship, is at least as far removed from the Old Testament idea of God, as for instance, the moral polytheism of the religion of Olympus.
1 From the Schema of Deut. vi. 4, cf. Griitz, Die Geschichte des Judenihums nach den Quetten, 1856, Th. iv. 193 f. on the death of Rabbi Aquiba.
2 This does not apply to de Wette's definition, "The practical idea of one God as a holy will, when cleared of myth and symbolised in the theocracy, is the foundation-principle of the Hebrew nation," or with the assertion of Baumgarten-Cmsius, "that the Mosaic religion was practical, and limited to the single idea of the true God as the faithful patron of the Israeli tish people." For in both the emphasis is laid on the relation of this God to His people.
FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PHILOSOPHY. 35
Consequently monotheism as such is not a suitable term by which to define the religion of the Old Testament.
But even when the religion of Israel was in its prime, and though one were to speak only of its moral and spiritual monotheism, the unity of God was not the real foundation- principle of this religion. As theoretical knowledge in the technical sense, this would be a principle sufficient only for a reformation. Consequently it is, in fact, the foundation- principle of Islam which, without any creative force of its own, puts itself forward in a merely human and negative way as a purification of existing religions. But the Old Testament religion is, as a religion, of a thoroughly creative character. Hence that by which it is admittedly marked off from surrounding heathenism cannot be its fundamental idea. It became so only when Judaism, robbed of its creative spirit, degenerated into a sect.
Just as little is the emphasising of the doctrine of a per- sonal God independent of the world to be regarded as the special characteristic of Israel's religion. For in this respect Israel scarcely felt that it had diverged from the religions of the other Semities.
2. Among the philosophical critics of religions we meet, first of all, with a number of men who, having a decided dis- like to the Old Testament religion, have seen in it a low type of religion, and one even that is hostile to the higher develop- ment of man's spiritual life. At the first glance one is astonished to find Immanuel Kant pronouncing a judgment of this kind. For the emphasis laid upon the Moral Law as absolutely binding, and the practical nature of Old Testament religion, free from all metaphysics, seem to agree admirably with his own system. Nevertheless, he is of opinion that Judaism is really not a religion at all, but a body of purely statutory laws upon which a civil constitution was based. His idea is that, since no religion can be conceived of without belief in a future life, Judaism, as such, had no religious
36 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
faith ; that, in fact, this fundamental religious conception was intentionally eliminated, because it was only something political that was aimed at, not something ethical. Indeed, he asserts (148) that polytheism would, if the gods were only thought of as requiring moral conduct, be even more suitable for a religion than the worship of a god who merely issues commands that do not call for an improvement in the moral disposition.
What first prejudiced Kant against the Old Testament was that its morality is thoroughly " heteronomous," and that it seems to favour Eudoemonism (147), and therefore to mar the purity of moral endeavour. But he overlooks the fact that this apparent Eudaemonism is connected solely with the transitional stage of history, to which, undoubtedly, a part of the Old Testament belongs, but which was already surmounted in the Old Testament itself, and that the most important parts of the Old Testament lay emphasis in the grandest way on the relation of the heart to God, and to what is morally good. He separates, in a manner that is quite unjustifiable, what he calls Judaism in its purity from the prophetic elements in the Old Testament. Judaism cannot but appear to him poor, after he has withdrawn from it its choicest treasures, as being " non-Jewish." It is only the Levitical corruption of Israel's religion that is, according to him, the real Old Testament religion. Besides, he is wrong as to the importance that attaches, in religion, to a belief in a personal existence after death, and he forgets that a religion cannot possibly present the postulates of morality save in the form of the revealed will of God. Finally, he cannot bring himself to understand that in the Old Testament, as is unquestionably the case, the moral and religious life of man is conceived of, in the first instance, as national life, and he judges of this fact as if the civil, as such, were, for the Old Testament, the ultimate aim. But in Israel the civil is of importance only in so far as it is religious.
FEUERBACH. 37
English Deism, as well as the German antichristian move- ment, e.g. in Feuerbach, showed itself directly hostile to the Old Testament. The Old Testament is represented as the stage of egoism. But whoever calls a yearning after per- sonal communion with God egoism, must give the same name to every development of healthy and vigorous religious life, as well as to all true love and friendship. On that sup- position he would have to see in Christianity the religion of egoism. This is even to outdo the Ophites. For it is really only in the Old Testament that the latter would make out that God is the principle of egoism, the principle of stolid resistance to change, without inner justification, in con- trast to the spirit of life and freedom. But on Feuerbach's view the self-same principle would be found in every religion which concedes personality to God. Besides, this estimate of the Old Testament is as superficial as it is unjust. The restric- tion of religion to national ends, and the bestowal of rewards upon virtue, are the necessary consequences of the historical conditions in which this religion arose. But, of itself, it carries one far beyond such thoughts. How can egoism be more utterly annihilated than when the law demands the absolute surrender of the ego to the idea of the people of God ? How can opposition to egoism be more strikingly manifested than when the prophet foretells the self-sacrificing love of the servant of Jehovah ? This modern Gnosis, with its estimate "of the Old Testament, will make no impression on any one who has read that book with pious care, and given it a thorough and unprejudiced examination. And just as little will any one who really understands Old Testament piety, be impressed when Renan and Strauss, misled by the spirit of Indo-Germanic pride of race, find in the religion of Semitic Israel the religion of a migratory horde, and the expression of a national spirit undeveloped and poor in thought, when con- trasted with the brilliant world of Indo-Germanic myth and philosophy. Were that the right view of the matter, Judaism,
38 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
Mohammedanism, and Christianity could never have laid hold of the civilised nations of the Aryan race, or per- meated their spiritual life.
3. A really complete and harmonious estimate of Old Testament religion, in relation to the general religious history of mankind, was first formed by Hegel, and discussed in the circle of philosophers and theologians who acknowledged him as leader. To this estimate no one will presume to deny originality, brilliancy, and depth. But in the present con- dition of the science of comparative religion it is practically useless, being based on a far too meagre and one - sided acquaintance with human religions. A view which regards the Greek and Roman religions as the only higher forms of piety among " heathen " religions, and which has nothing special to say of the religion of the Hindoo, or the Persian, or the Buddhist, can no longer be considered satisfactory. It is solely because of its historical interest that it deserves a brief notice.
According to Hegel's own view,1 the whole of heathenism proper, as " nature-religion," is at the lowest stage of religious development. The divine, not being yet distinguished from the natural, is conceived of as the fortuitous. Hence these religions are also the religions of magic. Christianity is the highest stage, the religion of spirit, where the absolute spirit is conceived of as indwelling in the finite as the One — that is to say, where the finite consciousness knows God only in so far as God knows Himself in it ; hence the religion of incar- nation and reconciliation. The necessary bridge between the religion of nature and the religion of spirit is formed by those three religions, in which the absolute is indeed dis- tinguished from the natural, though the higher unity of both is not yet attained, viz. the religions of spiritual individuality — the Greek, the Roman, and the Old Testament religion.
1 PeVgionsphilosophie, i. 263 ff., ii. 48, 49, 92, 95, 187, 188, 191, 222. Philosophic der Geschichte, 239, 240.
HEGEL AND HIS SCHOOL. 39
Of these, that of the Old Testament is, in itself, the least complete. For, while the Greek religion, as the religion of beauty, freedom, and humanity, strives after the higher unity, and the Eoman State-religion, as the religion of purpose, deals with the thought of the absolute in the conception of the State, and seeks to give it human expression, — in the Old Testament religion, as the religion of sublimity, the separation between God and man is made in the sharpest possible way, without the higher unity of the two being really attained. But it is just for this very reason that this religion, as being the most consistent carrying out of the separation of the human and natural from the divine, is the only satisfactory starting- point irom which to reach the highest stage. " It is the Jewish people which God has kept for Himself as the old pain of the world," since " the infinity of pain could only exist where God is known as one God, as a purely spiritual God."
It is certainly somewhat fairer to the Old Testament to acknowledge, as Vatke does (113, 114), that within the sphere of religion, the Greek conception of beauty affords only a superficial reconciliation, and that for our purpose the Roman State does not admit of any real comparison with the idea of " the kingdom of God." The same may be said of Bruno Bauer's position. He holds, with Hegel, that the Greek religion is superior to that of the Old Testament in the beauty and freedom of its morality; while the Eoman is superior in its practical zeal for the general good, and its insistence on the rights of the individual. At the same time he maintains with the utmost emphasis that both these religions are quite inferior to that of the Old Testament. In the case of the Greeks this is due to their want of a real consciousness of sin, and to the consequent view of morality as a purely natural growth ; and in the case of the Romans, to their subordination of the divine to a merely relative end, the power of the State. But neither of these scholars has
40 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
emancipated himself from the formulas of Hegel and his arbi- trariness in comparing only the Greek and Roman religions with that of the Old Testament. Indeed, both of them fail to see that the deepest characteristic of Old Testament piety lies, not in the opposition of God and man, but rather in their growing unity in the kingdom of God already beginning on earth.
And this last mistake occurs even where the Hegelian school avoids the first, where it represents the Old Testament alone as the intermediate stage between heathenism and Christi- anity. For both Rust (71, 72, 166) and Baur (166, 173, 722) regard Judaism, the stage of understanding, opinion, reflection, authority, and law, as standing contrasted, not only with heathenism, the stage of immediate feeling or intuition, but also with Christianity, the stage of reason. Thus a differ- ence of degree between the Old Testament and the New, viz. that full spiritual communion between God and man is in the Old still a growing process, is changed into a difference of kind, as if the essence of the old covenant consisted in its not being the new covenant, whereas what had to be emphasised above all else was that the old, like the new, was a covenant between God and man.
4. Much more correct is the judgment which Schelling pronounces on the position of the Old Testament in the classi- fication of religions. According to him, heathenism, the sphere of the general working of the Son of God, is to be distinguished from revelation proper, the sphere of His personal working, as historia prof ana from historia sacra. But within sacred history itself the Old Testament is dis- tinguished from the New by the fact that in the Old the worship of the true God is still influenced and determined by antagonism to the false god of heathenism.
According to Schelling's conception of the development of religions, people originally worshipped Elohim, that is, the Godhead, there being as yet no distinction between the
SCIIELLINQ. 41
true God and the false. In other words, the idea of mono- theism as distinguished from polytheism had not yet arisen. On the intrusion of the second false god (the female), poly- theism arose, but at the same time also monotheism as its opposite. For those who did not accept the new God, their " Godhead " now became the one true God (Jehovah) in contrast to the various false gods. In this way the true God reveals Himself to Abraham. But His revelation works through mythology, that is, can only be understood from the fact that in heathenism the consciousness of the true God is strained and obscured. The Old Testament exists just to contrast the true God with the false. It presupposes the existence of God (Elohim), who, however, has also become the starting-point of polytheism. Hence the monotheism of Abraham is not yet a non-mythological monotheism. A great many of the puzzling institutions in the Old Testament are only to be explained by the fact that revelation still clings to this heathen principle as its own presupposition, even when what is heathen in it has become mere material on which to work. Hence Christianity had to do away with the Old Testament as such in the same way as with heathenism. It frees revelation from whatever elements still cling to it through its having issued forth out of heathenism.1 If we overlook the peculiarity of Schelling's general system of constructing the history of religion, we must heartily approve of his estimate of the Old Testament Its religion is, like Christianity, the revealed religion of the moral and spiritual God, but still fettered and hampered by the nature of those national religions out of which it sprang and in opposition to which it grew up.
5. The opinions expressed by most modern philosophical writers on religion are based on a similar view. According to Billroth, the Old Testament is the preliminary stage of Chris- tianity. It is not yet the highest and final revelation, because
1 I. 145, 148, 160, 170, ir. 123, 124, 132 ff.
42 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
the immanence of God is not yet recognised, because the severance of the finite from the infinite is not yet abolished from within, because the goodness, grace, and mercy of God are still revealed through the medium of outward history, bound up with the history of a particular nation. Neverthe- less it is revelation. The immediate oneness of God and the world is abolished, and in the nation man has an actual and real union with God. Stuhr takes a similar view of the Old Testament, and so in all essential points does Koppen, notwithstanding his otherwise very one-sided estimate of it. And Braniss teaches (24) that " until the reconciliation of the natural and the divine is reached, all peoples must fall into two great categories, the one of which declares nature to be the ruling power, and the other God. In the former case, it is true, the divine is also acknowledged bat as a something determined by nature ; in the latter, the natural is present, but only as a something determined by God. The concrete historical expression of these two categories is heathenism and Judaism. Their original contrast is the key that explains the whole life of the pre-Christian world." And if this emphasises too strongly the contrast between the Old Testament and heathenism, we must at any rate fully assent to the beautiful saying of Lotze : " Among the theo- cratic nations of the East the Hebrews appear to us like sober men among drunkards. To the ancient world they doubtless seemed like dreamers among waking men " (iii 147).
6. If we examine the religion of the Old Testament from a purely historical point of view as one of the religions of mankind, and for the time overlook its relation to Chris- tianity, then at the first glance it takes its place in its perfect form among the prophetic or the ethico-historical religions in the stricter sense of the word, and is thus distinguished from the physical or the national religions. But at the same time this final form of it is seen to be the result of a still explic-
AS A HISTORICAL RELIGION. 43
able historical development which has a connection with physical and national religions.
In the earliest period of the history of nations, religion meets us as elemental Nature-worship. Man in his weakness and need feels himself subject to the mighty forces of nature as if these were personal powers confronting him. With these powers he strives to enter into personal rela- tions so as to make them serviceable to him, or at least favourably disposed. Like every active force, they present themselves to him as somehow akiu to his own spiritual life. But primarily it is not the moral life of his spirit which, he recognises in these absolute powers, but mere power, mere will. At this stage the question as to one God or many gods is still essentially a matter of indifference. It is in the last analysis the same power which man encounters everywhere, although it meets him in a thousand different and even conflicting forms and manifestations. Contrasted with the systematic development of polytheism in the religions of civilisation, this original heathenism may appear akin to monotheism because the individuality of the separate pheno- mena of nature is in itself a matter of religious indifference, and only their power and influence are of interest, because they can for that reason be combined, interchanged, or con- verted into one another. But in reality there is here not the slightest trace of the idea which actual monotheism postulates, viz. that God is one. For we must not allow ourselves to be misled by the fact that prayers and hymns often purposely extol the God who is praised in them, as the only God and Lord. These religions are invariably national religions, moulded by the national peculiarities, by the character of the country and the climate, by the occupations, the fears, and the aspirations that make up the national life. They are all, to a certain extent, the spontaneous expression of the popular heart The mode of worship employed in them is interwoven with the everyday life of the people. They know nothing
44 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
of a theoretical interest in the gods ; and the relations between religion and the morality that grows up out of the mutual relationships of men are still altogether obscure and unstable.
The lowest of these religions with which we have to deal is Animism. In it the separate phenomena of nature are regarded as living, acting forces, though without any higher unity or moral character. Men do not enter into rela- tions with this world of spirits from love or admiration, but from fear and selfishness. The strongest motive for worshipping them is anxiety to secure their services by means of magic. They are not classified, for the purposes of religion, into good and bad ; rather are they all of them incalculable, unearthly, spectral. Closely akin to these are the ghostly shades of the departed, primarily objects of terror, but yet furnishing the basis of a higher stage, viz. ancestor-worship. As the lowest form of this stage of religion, though probably a degenerate one, we have fetish-worship, where the nature-power is conceived of as connected with some arbitrarily chosen symbol. Such pure animism was the prevailing religion of the Turanian races of Asia. But among the peoples of Africa, Polynesia, and America, almost without an exception, religion rested on a similar basis. In Finland it became a civilised religion with mythical and ethical elements in it ; in the moral State-religion of China, it con- stitutes the popular background. If Lenormant's theories are well founded, fetish - worship made no inconsiderable contribution to the civilised religion of Babylon as well as to the religion of India and of Egypt. Since the ritual of this religion consists of magic, it has a natural tendency to create priestly families and castes, that become the repositories of the songs and the various other means which magicians habitually employ.
Among the Semitic pastoral tribes elemental nature- worship seems to have been cast in a higher mould. Even among them, indeed, there was no monotheism in the strict
AS A HISTORICAL RELIGION. 45
sense of the term. We find that plurality of gods and goddesses ia everywhere taken for granted. But it is not the personality or individuality of these that excites interest. The real devotion of the people, as is proved by the names for God, is called forth by the kind of power and authority ascribed to the gods as such. It is from such attributes that the Deity is named, not from the parts of nature in which His activity is presupposed. The root-feeling is fear of God, and that probably not in the highest sense of the word, since the Deity is not primarily ethical, but only holy and terrible. Still it is the fundamental feeling that affords the religious spirit a starting-point from which to take its highest flights. It is the natural basis of prophetic inspiration. The Deity is felt to be the sovereign Lord of the particular tribe and people, and is thus brought into relation with the national life. He is, of course, also brought into relation with the ancestors of the nation and " the shades " of the departed, but in a way that tends to the moral interests of the national life. Here, then, \vere the roots of monotheistic religion and of theocracy. And since the attribute of absolute power constitutes what is essential in the idea of God, we here come very near taking the step that places God the Creator altogether outside of nature. This, then, is the native soil of the higher forms of prophetic religion, but at the same time also of those wild orgies, of that religious fanaticism, of that terrible fear of God, which finds expression in hecatombs of human sacrifices. To this form of religion, originally peculiar to the pastoral tribes of Arabian origin, are due in the main the composite religions of Assyria and Babylon, as well as of Canaan, and it is the parent soil of the prophetic religions of the Hebrews and the Arabs.
It is beyond doubt that the highest and most attractive form of elemental nature-worship is that which lies at the foundation of the civilised religions of the Aryan races. The character of it can be inferred from these religions, as well
46 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
as from the Vedic hymns and the nature - myths common to the Aryan nations. No doubt, here also, the gods are primarily elemental spirits, akin to and intermingling with the souls of men. They are not primarily possessed of moral attributes, just as nature itself is indifferent to the distinction between good and bad. But the heaven of light is conceived of as the common source of the powers of nature, and this involuntarily carries with it the idea of the true and the good. And the religious feeling entertained towards such a god is not fear, but ecstatic love. It is a joyous, heroic religion. Through the genius of language, the unfolding life of nature becomes a rich spring of poetic myths full of meaning. And, since the phenomena of nature, even when they are grasped as a unity, are nevertheless only something relative, mere transient expressions, as it were, of an unknown higher power, the religious view of the world becomes, to a certain extent, a philosophical one. Behind the gods we have the order and power of nature itself. There is here a spring of the richest poetry, of heroic gladness and of culture ; and here also the strongest impulse to ethics and philosophy. But assuredly not a foundation for genuine prophecy and for true revelation. For where the divine is itself essentially relative, and man feels himself equal to the gods, his highest elevation is not that of the prophet, but of the philosopher and the poet, and religion loses itself in metaphysics and ethics. Should a prophetic genius spring up on such a religious soil, he will reach out beyond the relative gods to the one absolute Being whom he feels within himself in greater purity than in the life of nature. He will become a Pantheist, or like Buddha, an Atheist.
Each of these primitive religions developed into civilised religions, sometimes in a pure form and sometimes in combina- tion with others. Sometimes a pantheistic polytheism grew up under the influence of a philosophical priesthood, as among the Babylonians and the Phoenicians, the Hindoos and the
AS A HISTORICAL RELIGION. 47
Egyptians. Sometimes an ethical polytheism was developed by the poets on the basis of a free and joyous national growth, as among the Greeks or in the Edda. Sometimes, under the influence of civil morality, a political religion was formed in which the old powers of nature gave place to the powers of civil and social life, as in the religion of the Roman Empire and among the Chinese. But in none of these cases was there a real advance beyond the stage of the physical or national religions. We nowhere find that a special genius for religion was the origin of any of these religions, how- ever often we have to admire their philosophical depth or poetical vigour, or the moral earnestness of their political and social sentiment The gods remain within the limits of the empirical. That deity means that which is absolutely exalted above nature, viz. spirit, and that its contents must, at the same time, be the purest expression of that which, as the basis of ethics, seeks to obtain human form, — that the communion of man with God must be inward, and its expression the whole social life of mankind, — that religion has to do, not with the separate life of individual nations and their work as States, but with the life of man as man, — all this is nowhere fully acknowledged in any one of these religions. Whether as regards origin or final aim, none of the religions of this class admits of any comparison with the Biblical.
Besides Christianity, there are only three religions at all worthy of being compared with the religion of the Old Testament, because they have been produced on the basis of nature-religions by the creative strength of religious genius. These are on the one side the Persian and the Buddhist, on the other the Mohammedan.
In many respects the Old Testament reminds one of the religion of the Persians as it was before it gradually lost its purity and strength by adopting elements out of the religion of the Chaldeans, and above all, out of the Anahita-worship under
48 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
Artaxerxes Mnemon.1 Both religions are connected with a comparatively simple and undeveloped form of nature-worship that had not yet grown into a really systematic polytheism, this nature-worship being in the one case Semitic and in the other Aryan. Then, through the religious genius of their prophets they detach themselves on the one hand from their natural soil in their struggle after a spiritual conception of God, and on the other hand they carry on a long fight for existence with the higher forms of that nature-worship out of which they sprang. In both the swaddling-clothes of nature- worship are still visible in the commingling of the physically holy with the morally holy, in the high value attached to definite forms of outward life, and in the close relation of the religions to the distinctive life of the nation. Both religions still retain in legend and myth various elements of nature-worship though blurred or transformed, while it is chiefly through antagonism to this their parent-soil that the course of their development is determined. Hence, it is easily understood how these two religions were quite in sympathy with each other when they first came into contact (Deutero-Isaiah xliv., xlv.).
The difference between them comes out mainly in two points. Of these, the first is that in the period after Darius the Persians were not favoured with any men of prophetic spirit capable of developing their religion, and that the ceremonial precipitate of that religion had to take the place of a living spiritual development. The strength of the nation wras exhausted in military and political achievements. They did not hold aloof from the nations attached to nature-worship, but as the ruling race, gathered
1 Herod, i. 131, cf. Xenophon, Cyrop. vii. 5. 53 ; Oec. iv. 24, cf. the inscrip- tions of Behistun and the epitaph of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustam. On this •whole question, still obscure on many points, cf. James Darmesteter in Max Miiller's Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv., Introduction. From the Babylonian documents it seems that Cyrus himself was a devotee of the Semitic worship of nature (A. H. Sayce, Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments).
AS A HISTORICAL RELIGION. 49
these around themselves. Accordingly, when the force of the first purely religious revival was spent, the Persian nation was not strong enough to withstand the overwhelming pressure of the religion of civilised Asia.1 Israel, on the contrary, though only after a severe struggle, was preserved from the same fate by its prophets, till its religion had become sufficiently mature not to fear any longer the influ- ence of such elements.
The second main distinction lies in the difference of the soil on which the two religions grew. "When one bears in mind how closely the Indo-Germanic gods were allied with nature, it was certainly a great religious achievement to elevate the God of Light in the old religion into the one true God, — the fountain of all good, the one proper object of religious love and reverence. Nevertheless, he was still surrounded by a retinue of kindred spirits, to whom divine honours were paid, and thus the bridge to polytheism was built. The Elohim of the Old Testament, on the contrary, were not regarded as objects of national worship. One part of nature, moreover, was regarded by the Persians as beyond the juris- diction of this god, viz. the domain of what was thought essentially evil and bad. No doubt Ailgro-Mainyus, the spirit of destruction and negation, is not God in the religious sense ; that position is reserved for Ahura-mazdao alone. But he represents a side of existence that does not fit in with the conception of God. He is the sign of the unassimilated Aryan nature-religion, of the merely relative conception of God. But through the conception of God already described, their Semitic nature-religion in its original simplicity enabled
1 The restoration of religion for political purposes by the Sassnnidn?, and the growth of our present collection of the Avesta, remind us of the collecting of the sacred books, and of the Levitical restoration of religion by the scribes of the second temple. The fate of the Persian religion, from Artaxerxea onwards, shows what lines the religion of Israel might have followed, had the influence which Solomon was the first to give them as a world-power of the first rank continued to grow.
VOL. I. D
50 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
the Hebrew prophets in a religious way, by means of the fear of God, to raise God absolutely above the world without leaving any such residuum. Besides, in the emphasising of the national God lay the possibility of reaching pure mono- theism in a really practical way. Hence the soil for the true kingdom of God was not in Persia, but in Israel.
With Buddhism, the second Indo- Germanic religion of prophecy, the Old Testament religion has no sort of affinity, any more than with the developments which philosophy underwent on the soil of Greek religion. Buddhism is the prophetic reformation of the already highly -developed Pan- theism of the priestly religion of India, and in its relation to the latter has many analogies with Christianity in its opposi- tion to Pharisaism and to priestly aristocracy. It is the most logical development of nature-religion become Pantheistic. For if the gods are powers actively at work only within the sphere of the world's development, then higher than all of them is the spirit of man, inasmuch as it raises itself above nature in recognising its own supra-mundane character. To the human spirit that has emancipated itself, the host of gods does homage. Idealistic atheism, not naturalism, is the last word of nature-religion. And if the world of phenomena has not a divine origin, then the only proper verdict of the spirit regard- ing it is the verdict of pessimism. For, considered as a mere " world," it is not good, and to belong to it is not a blessing. Where the question is between the optimism of " the new faith " and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the answer of the deeper spirits cannot but be in favour of the latter. Only the man who believes in the providence of a God, who is spirit and who is love, has the right to look at the world with the eye of an optimist without being guilty of superficiality.
Thus for comparison with Christianity and the Old Testa- ment religion there now remains only the third Semitic religion of prophecy, viz. Mohammedanism. But this does not really admit of comparison, since the whole kernel of this religious
OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT. 51
system was taken from that of the Old Testament No doubt, in opposition to a Semitic nature-religion that had remained at a comparatively rudimentary stage, Mohammed preached, like the founders of the religion of Israel, with true religious ardour, faith in one Almighty Ruler of the world ; and his religion was strongly influenced by the con- ditions of life then existing among the Arabian people. But he knew the Old Testament religion, although in an impure and corrupted form, and, in fact, he had also seen one-sided forms of Christianity. What Mohammed himself added or omitted shows his ability as a national leader, and his healthy aversion to the petty Pharisaic view of life ; but, at the same time, it indicates a great lack of moral earnestness, and of a high ideal as to the chief end of human existence. However powerful Mohammedanism has been as a factor in the history of the world, in the history of religion it can be regarded merely as a degenerate form of the Old Testament religion, as a heresy, the vitality of which was due simply to its having to contend against the spiritual caricature of Talmudic scholasticism, and against the idolatry and heathenism of the Oriental Church.
CHAPTER IV.
OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT.
1. Christ and His apostles do not regard the Old Testament religion as a mere outward historical preparation for Christianity, but as a form of piety which could and would continue to be the foundation even of Christian piety.1
1 One must not be led a.stray as to this by the polemic of the Apostle Paul. Even he does not wish to renounce the Old Testament as such. He merely denies to the law, which he recognises oven in heathenism as a pre-Christian form of religion, the power to save and to generate true life. How far ho L> from treating the law and the Old Testament as synonymous is, in (act, most
52 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
This is of itself enough to show a Christian that the Old Testament religion can be understood only in connection with, and as -an essential part of, Christianity. An Old Testament saint did not require to change his religion in order to become a Christian. All that was needed was the decisive act of faith which the Old Testament itself, by its prophecy, as well as by the innermost kernel of its essence, made possible, and even easy. Nothing more was necessary than the moral earnestness of the true penitent, just what ought to have been the natural result of the moral preaching characteristic of the Old Testament religion. In order to become a Christian, every heathen must be, in the strict sense of the word, converted — that is, his attitude towards religion, and his whole way of looking at it, must undergo a radical change. A Jew could become a pious Christian, and still continue a pions Jew. Hence such men as James the Just, and, indeed, the twelve apostles themselves, are quite as much model representatives of Old Testament piety as of Chris- tianity in the fullest sense of the word. No Christian, however, could by any possibility continue a pious worshipper at a Greek or Roman temple.
But this closeness of connection is also clearly established by a thorough comparison of the two Testaments. There is positively not one New Testament idea that cannot be con- clusively shown to be a healthy and natural product of some Old Testament germ, nor any truly Old Testament idea which did not instinctively press towards its New Testament fulfil- ment. Of course, it is only New Testament theology that can adduce satisfactory proof of this.
clearly shown by the proofs which he himself takes from the Old Testament, that the law is not the highest and permanent form of the true religion, but must pass over into faith (Gen. xv. 6 ; Hab. ii. 4). While, from the stand- point of history, one may say that Levitism came in between the religion of the prophets and Christianity, Paul, from his point of view regarding the date of the Pentateuch, maintains that the law came in between the religion of Abraham and Christianity (Rom. v. 20).
REVELATION. 53
Hence, in the spirit of the Old Testament religion, the Christian will recognise the same spirit which he receives as the perfect spirit of the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ, the spirit presented to us in His personal life as man. The Old Testament will be to him a religion of revelation, and that, too, a revelation of the Divine Spirit which, purify- ing, enlightening, redeeming, reconciling, leads up to the divinely-human life as that found permanent expression in Jesus.
The Old Testament religion, like the Christian, did not come forth out of humanity, according to the mere law of natural spiritual development, but as a result of the working, upon Israel's spiritual life, of that divine, self- coramunicating spirit which aims at establishing the kingdom of God among men. This religion rightly regards itself as called into existence by God, as called into existence by the clear separation of this one people from the life of the other peoples of the world. Hence the whole story of Genesis consists of a series of separations. Hence the law cuts Israel off from the nature-worship that was developing all around. Hence even a Moses and an Isaiah draw a clear distinction between their own thoughts and the voice of God involuntarily revealed to their inner ear. Hence the people are not to believe even signs and wonders if displayed, not in the interests of divine truth already attested, but in the service of mere human wisdom. Indeed, the natural life of Israel, where it follows its own promptings, comes constantly into conflict with the religion of the Old Testament. And this peculiar value of the Old Testament is everywhere unreservedly recognised in the New.
The starting-point of Old Testament religion is neither the natural nor the human as the object of experience. It does not reach the divine by idealising the empirical, either on the aesthetic principle, or the teleological, or on any other. The divine life, as absolutely transcending the whole region of
54 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
experience, as free, independent, spiritual, is, in tin's religion, grasped with the certainty of direct inward experience that cannot be shaken. In it, religious truth shines out from the very first, not as a fact of philosophy or of science, but as the absolutely certain, that which demonstrates itself even to the inner life.
Hence in Israel the knowledge of God was attained exclusively in a religious way under the influence of the divine, and is therefore purely practical. In no sense was it reached along the line of philosophy or of poetry. But an original religious conviction of this kind is never to be under- stood as a result merely of previously existing conceptions or circumstances. As an experience of forces which lie outside the world of sense, it has its roots in the communication of the spirit, through the love and mercy of God, to such members of the human family as are privileged to become interpreters to their brethren of the heavenly life, that is to say, in a divine revelation. Israel's religious teachers are prophets, not philosophers, priests, or poets. Hence the Old Testament religion can be explained only by revelation, that is, by the fact that God raised up for this people men whose natural susceptibility to moral and religious truth, developed by the course of their inner and outer lives, enabled them to understand intuitively the will of the self-communicating, redeeming God regarding men, that is, to possess the religious truth which maketh free, not as a result of human wisdom and intellectual labour, but as a power pressing in upon the soul with irresistible might. Only those who frankly acknowledge this can be historically just to the Old Testa- ment.
But on the other hand, this religion, too, like everything that the world produces, stands in close relation to the laws of development. It is not to be explained, it is true, by historical relations alone, but it presupposes historical con- ditions, and is itself conformable to historical laws. The
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT. 55
Old Testament itself represents such historical conditions as given to Abraham in the religion of the Senates, and to Moses in the worship of the God of his fathers. And although, from the character of the sources, it is only an imperfect picture of these conditions that we can now obtain, that does not make the fact of their existence a whit less certain.
The religion of Israel itself shows its historical development quite plainly. It did not reject the spiritual inheritance of the Hebrew people ; it appropriated it, but not without leaving traces discernible to the trained eye, of what that inheritance would have been without it1 In the course of its development, it adopted as raw material, popular customs, festivals, legends, and even mythical presentations ; and, in fact, it may in this way have incorporated even what was non-Israelitish. It did not, as with the touch of a magician's wand, change into a perfect morality the moral views then characteristic of Eastern, and specially of Bedouin life, but it influenced and purified them from within. This it could not do without having to put up for a long time, " because of the people's hardness of heart," with many things which did not agree with its real character and principles, as, for example, the avenging of blood, slavery, polygamy, and the imperfect morality which consequently characterised married life. It gave further organic development to national figures; for example, it did not directly transform the soothsayer into a purely spiritual prophet of God, hut it gradually set prophecy free from its natural environ- ment of dream-interpretation and soothsaying, and led it onwards to its highest height. But while it thus advanced step by step according to historical laws, it was only in Christ that it rose to a perfect consciousness of its true essence.
2. In Biblical religion there is but one fundamental principle. 1 E.g. Gen. vi. 1-3, xxxii. 25 ff.
56 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
It is in every respect the same in the Old Testament as in the New. Nor can any unprejudiced observer have diffi- culty in finding it out, however certain it is that it took the people of Israel centuries to make up their minds about it. All the stories of this religion have reference to the fact that the perfect spiritual God wishes in love to realise His holy will in communion with man. These narratives, therefore, refer to a loving communion of the people with a God who is self-communicative, and whose object it is, through, and in spite of human sin, in other words, by redemption and recon- ciliation, to produce a divine life, to set up a kingdom of God. Hence the history of this religion is the history of the king- dom of God, of redemption and reconciliation. Even sacred legend has no other centre. In this religion, wisdom is know- ledge of the way of life, in which the divine life is found, in other words, knowledge of the laws of the kingdom of God. The institutions, statutes, and laws of this religion are intended to give expression to the divine life which in spite of sin has been restored to man. The poetry of the Old Testament is joy over a life of communion with God the Eedeemer, or sorrow for its loss, or a longing after it. Prophecy is the outlook for a perfect kingdom of God. Even doubts and struggles revolve around this centre. In short, the fundamental thought of Biblical religion is the kingdom of God, the realisation of the perfect divine life as a redeeming and reconciling factor in human life. And, in truth, this is no empty fantastic enthusiasm for an imaginary ideal of salvation, but the joyful certainty of a historical salvation actually present and accessible to experi- ence, in the definite and actual features of which the full contents of the ideal are at once directly and indirectly included.
3. It still remains for us to answer the question, What relation on this theory of their inner unity do the two Testa- ments bear to each other ? It would be a simple matter
OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT. 57
to put their two religions, according to the view of the early Church, on absolutely the same level, or, at least, to see in Christianity nothing more than an essentially natural completion of the Old Testament religion. But such pro- cedure would be contrary to fact Since the essence of this religion is not a theoretical knowledge of God and of divine things, but a salvation that moulds human life, and finds expression in it, then, as soon as this salvation is realised in a human personality, as soon as the kingdom of God is established in its true form, an entirely new stage of religious development must begin. In comparison with this stage of full and complete salvation, the previous stage must seem like a type or a passing shadow. Whoever really sees in Jesus the complete revelation of the Divine Spirit in human life, and in His followers the citizens of the kingdom of God, for him Jesus is also He who alone has seen God, and Christi- anity something absolutely new. Only where special import- ance was attached to a theoretical knowledge of supernatural things was it possible to imagine that the "secret" of Christianity, viz. that incarnation of the living God which is characteristic of the Christian stage of religion, would be found already revealed in the Old Testament1 In a really historical development, knowledge and life never stand unrelated. The absolutely unique character of the religious position of Jesus is not sufficiently recognised by those who regard Christianity as having simply developed out of the Old Testament in much the same sense as the prophetic view of religion grew up within the Old Testament itself out of the old Mosaic view.
1 That is the defect of thoroughgoing supernaturalism, which sees the doctrines of revelation everywhere, and of Socinianism as well, regarding which, in thin relation, cf. Diestel, Jahrbucher fur dtutuche Theoloyie, voL vii. 4, p. 709 II". In modern times Hengstenberg is its most prominent advocate. As against him, the arguments of v. Hofmann are generally marked by a sound regard for the essence of religion. The followers of Cocceius were prevented by their arbitrary exegesis and their unscientific typology from reaping the full advant- age of the true views of history which are implied in the federal theology.
58 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
The Old Testament religion is the religion of the kingdom of God in the process of growth, this kingdom being still confined within the bounds of a political community, that is, restricted to a single nation. In this religion the divine life is primarily expressed in form and type, in other words, in an external and therefore transitory fashion, and the divine will is still primarily presented to the human heart as a mere ideal, in other words, essentially as duty, as law. In this religion the true realisation among men of the divine will is only hoped for, and is therefore represented as essentially an object of prophecy, and the separation between the divine and the human, present in heathenism, but nob felt, is consciously experienced, but still continues as something to be done away with. It is the religion of the holy people, of holy forms, of law, of prophecy, and of the fear of God. Christianity is the religion of the perfected kingdom of God in which the divine life has been personally and spiritually, and therefore as regards all human development, permanently expressed in human life. Consequently it has become the moving spirit of a human development, and therefore works in the individual as an inward impulse, as a new vital force. Its perfect growth is no longer something merely hoped for, but is appre- hended as belonging as much to the present as to the future, and is therefore an object of faith, and heathenism and the Old Testament, with their separation of the divine and the human, are simultaneously done away with. It is the religion of incarnation, therefore of everlasting reconciliation and of humanity — the religion of the spirit and of love, and therefore of true redemption — of faith and sonship. The kingdom of God, which was first embodied in the Old Testament under the imperfect outward form of a State life, and was next, through deeper insight into its essence, transformed into an ideal hope, is in Christianity realised in the person of Jesus and the influences that radiate from Him, although as a spiritual force in the world of
OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT. 59
phenomena it is still continually engaged in seeking after its pure expression, and thus reaches out towards the eternal world.
Hence the old saying, " The Old Testament is patent in the New, the New is latent in the Old,"1 is false if taken to mean that the New Testament religion is already present in the Old Testament as esoteric teaching. But it is correct if it be understood as meaning that the germinal principles of the Christian salvation are present in the Old Testament in various forms as yet incomplete and undefined, and that only in the New Testament does the Old Testament salvation attain its eternal and truly saving significance. In both religions there is an inner unity of life, an unfolding of the same power. No New Testament form of salvation is intelligible without the Old Testament form. But no Old Testament form of salvation, as such, is already Christian, but every one of them becomes so when in the light of the new spirit it has a new illumination thrown upon it. It is therefore perfectly clear that no one can expound New Testament theology without a thorough knowledge of Old Testament theology. But it is no less true that one who does not thoroughly understand New Testament theology cannot have anything but a one-sided view of Old Testament theology. He who does not know the destination will fail to understand many a bend in the road. For him who has not seen the fruit, much, both in bud and blossom, will always remain a riddle.
4. The line of demarcation between Old Testament and New Testament theology is easily drawn. The sphere of the former is wherever there is manifested in the pre-Christian religion a creative spirit conscious of itself and showing a spirit of uniform advance. Its task is done as soon as this
1 Cf. Augri&tine, Dt catechiz. rudibus iv. 8 in velere (estamento tut occullatio now, in noro teetamento eat mani/mla'.io refcri*. Cf. Coittr. faust. xv. 2. Enarr. in Pa. Ix.xxiv. 4.
60 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
spirit ceases, as soon as foreign influences begin to predominate, or the scribes' method of treating the Old Testament religion as already complete gets the upper hand. Whatever from this point onwards is either new or peculiar belongs to the Introduction to New Testament theology, which has to describe the religious conditions in the midst of which Christianity appeared. Hence we may briefly describe as the boundary line of Old Testament theology the founding of the hierarchical State after the Maccabean struggles. Up to that time the spirit of the old religion was always giving signs of life, at least in individuals. Unity was, it is true, gradually crumbling away, but outwardly, at any rate, it was still preserved. But under the Asmonrean dynasty, Pharisee, Sadducee, and Essene stand side by side, exposed to Palestinian, Grecian, and Oriental influences. The scribes, now at the zenith of their power, are supreme. The Old Testament religion has become a sacred literature absolutely complete and inviolable. Any further development is merely a stage of Judaism based on the completed Old Testament religion. It is of use only in a very few points where some suggestive additions have been made ; but even these are to be regarded solely as appendices, and not as strictly belonging to our present task.
CHAPTER V.
PERIODS AND SOURCES OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
1. As periods in the pre-Christian development of the religion of Israel, the following would naturally commend themselves : —
I. From Adam to Moses, Patriarchal period. II. From Moses to Samuel-David, time of the first un- altered form of the Theocratic State, Mosaic period.
PERIODS OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY. 61
III. From Samuel-David to the decline of the divided
kingdoms, that is to say, till about B.C. 800,
Time of the religion of the monarchy, Theocratic
period.
IV. From B.C. 800 to the rebuilding of Jerusalem by
Ezra and Nehemiah, Prophetic period. V. From Ezra to the Asmonaean princes, Hierarchical
period of Priestly Legislation.
These periods, however, cannot hold their ground against a real attempt at historical presentation. To begin with, the first of them proves utterly useless for our purpose. Not that we doubt that the people of Israel had a real national life even before Moses, perhaps one not without recollections of national glory, or that when Moses appeared, the better among the people already had a religion which could serve as the basis of the Mosaic, and the main features of which were retained in Mosaism. Indeed we may confidently ttssume that this was the case. Otherwise Moses could never have gathered a whole down-trodden people around the standard of his newly - revealed religion, or have suc- ceeded, in spite of the Egyptians, in evoking such popular enthusiasm for it. How different it was with Mohammed, who had to fight a life-long battle with his own people and his own tribe before the Arabian nation was roused to enthusiasm for Mohammedanism. And yet his work also was rendered possible only by the fact that among wide circles of his own kindred similar aspirations after a purer religion had made their influence felt. In fact, within his own nation, besides himself and partly also in opposition to him, there arose quite a number of prophet-preachers.1 Pastoral peoples, with their strong attachment to what is inherited, never adopt a religion unanimously without demur, unless it is in all essential points in strict accordance with
1 Let the reader think of War&ka, Umaya from Taif, Abu Amir from Medina, and the Prophets Tulaiha, Musailima, Al-Aswud.
62 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
ancestral tradition, or at least in sympathy with long acknow- ledged aspirations.
But for giving any information about the religious character of that age beyond the merest generalities, our original sources are absolutely insufficient. It is only through popular legend that we can get an idea of the pre-Mosaic age ; and this, of course, so far as its religious contents are concerned, bears the stamp of the times in which it grew up. Stories, which were committed to writing at the earliest about the time of Samuel, can give us no real information about the religious circumstances of the times of Abraham and Jacob. They can only show us what ideas of these times were prevalent among the people of Moses' day. It cannot therefore be right to speak of a period of pre-Mosaic religion. We can only say in what light Israel was wont to look at the religious circumstances of its earliest age. No original authorities for the period before Moses have come down to us. We can do nothing more than draw inferences from the national legends we have, and from any fragments of myth and of ancient customs that remain.
2. Nor can it be said that there is a literature of Israel dating from the age of Moses and Joshua. The oldest pieces of literature in our possession are, no doubt, songs and popular stories which have been carefully woven into our present large histories. Whether many of these were already consecutive writings cannot be determined with certainty. Only the mention of the " book of the Wars of Jehovah " (Num. xxi. 14) and of the "book of the Upright" (Josh. x. 13 ; 2 Sam. i. 18), proves that there had once existed old collections of songs in which were celebrated the memorable epochs and the principal heroes of the nation's religious wars. But the last-named book could not have been compiled till after the time of David. On the other hand, the song of Deborah and the main document in Judg. vi.-xvi. point to the existence of trustworthy tradition among the people
AUTHORITIES FOR MOSAIC PERIOD. 63
from the time of the Judges onwards. Ex. xv. and Gen. xlix. also date from the beginning of the kingly period. The original sources of the Pentateuch as they have come down to us, especially B, suggest a tolerably long period of previous literary activity. But of really consecutive writings, we undoubtedly possess nothing that can be older than the time of David.
None of the more detailed works of history are earlier than the time of the Kings. And though they were certainly intended to reproduce the character of the olden time as faithfully as the ancient method of writing history admits of our supposing, they do not enable us to distinguish clearly in matters of details between the circumstances of that olden time and those of the historian's own day. Accordingly, if we take only what goes back with absolute certainty to the time of Moses, nothing remains but a very small fragment. On the other hand, were we without more ado to treat everything that might possibly belong to the Mosaic period as really belonging to it, our picture would lose all historical value. Hence our only task at this point is to determine what results of historical development down to the eighth century can be clearly established, without attempting a complete presentation of Old Testament religion for the " period before Samuel." It would be vain to attempt a continuous sketch of the development of religion between the time of Moses and the building of the temple. Speaking generally, therefore, we describe as the first period the whole time down to the decline of the divided kingdoms, that is, to about 800 B.C. This we call the Mosaic period or Mosaism, because we are convinced that its moral and religious foundations rest on the work accomplished by Moses in founding the nation. But in this we purposely include whatever was built upon these foundations during the time of the Judges, and specially since the time of David.
As authorities for the time of David, the " Davidic "
64 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
Psalms would naturally take the first rank. But the more closely they are examined, the stronger becomes the feeling that by far the largest number of the sacred songs which tradition has assigned to the great king date from, a very much later age, and that perhaps only Ps. xviii. can be ascribed to him with anything like absolute certainty. Next to it come such songs as 2 Sam. i. 19-27, iii. 33, xxiii. 1-8 (xii. 1-5). In the period from Solomon to the eighth century, original sources have reached us in greater numbers. Certainly it will continue a moot point whether the main section of Proverbs (x.-xxii. 16) goes back as far as Solomon's time, but it must have been in existence before the eighth century. Canticles was undoubtedly composed in the northern kingdom not very long after Solomon's day. The book of the twelve Judges in its old form, and several songs, point to this era, e.g. Ps. viii., xixa., xxix., and 1 Sam. ii. 1-10, which is, we may be sure, an old royalist song.
But the most important sources are the older books, which are worked up into our present Pentateuch. Not only must the collection of Laws in Ex. xxi.— xxiii. be older than the year 800 B.C., but a much larger part of the Pentateuch. Side by side with the priestly document A,1 of which we shall speak later on, there runs right through Genesis a narrative which uses the Divine name " Jehovah " even for patriarchal times, and which was therefore called the book of the Jehovist ; by Ewald, the Fourth Narrator of the Primitive History. We denote this writer by B. Like the prophets, he is fond of connecting even the beginnings of the human race with the mission of Israel. His style is richer than that of A, his aim much more definitely religious. He represents the patriarchal view of God as more akin to the later religion of Israel, because
1 The symbols A, B, C refer simply to the sequence in which the sources meet us in our present book, and do not imply any judgment as to the time at which they severally came into existence.
AUTHORITIES FOR MOSAIC PERIOD. 65
he does not of set purpose keep his eye on the gradual growth of Israel's legal and moral peculiarities. His work is pervaded by a much stronger and more direct religious spirit, and, at the same time, it takes advantage much more freely of the highly-coloured and wonderfully-varied store of legends current among the people.
Most critics nowadays would bring this book down to the eighth century, as well on account of its diction and its mode of looking at things, as because Assyria is mentioned in it in a way that is only to be explained by the circumstances of this era. I cannot adopt this opinion, and must acknow- ledge that I still agree with Tuch in his view of the book. For the religious horizon is not so wide, nor the religious diction by any means so full, as is the case even in Hosea, nor is the glance into the nearer future anything like so penetrating. Above all, there is nowhere to be found in the book any definite reference to the hopes of the Davidic dynasty, nor is any attention paid to Zion as the central sanctuary. The holy places of Israel, against the worship at which Amos and Hosea are already fighting with passionate zeal, are, to this historian, objects of perfectly unembarrassed joy and admiration. Neither is it quite certain that the mention of Assyria, in the very passage where it is most striking (Num. xxiv. 24 f.), belongs to B. It is more likely to have been inserted by the last editor. But even if it were B's, and Gen. ii. 14 as well, nevertheless the two together would not be conclusive proof against a very early origin of the book. For the idea that Assyria first became known in Western Asia through Tiglath-Pileser, is a false assumption. According to the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings, it is much more probable that Israel was already tributary to Assyria in Jehu's reign. At any rate, it would require no very intimate acquaintance with foreign lands to know the most warlike people in Asia, whose power dates back to the fourteenth century B.C., even though it had not yet invaded Palestine.
VOL. i. E
66 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
There is no allusion in B to the division of the kingdom after Solomon, or to the feud between Judah and Ephraim ; and even the reference in xxii. 2 to the temple hill, Moriah, is certainly foreign to the original narrative, and belongs to a later form of text. Indeed, it appears to me so certain that Micah vi. 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, vii. 17; Amos ii. 10, iii. 1, iv. 11, v. 25 ; Hos. xi. 8, xii. 4, 5 f. -,1 Isa. vii. 14, xxxii. 9 (cf. Gen. iv. 23), refer not merely to the subject-matter of B's legends, but to his very words, that the book must, on this account alone, be considered earlier than the eighth, century. Prov. iii. 18, xi. 30, xiii. 12, xv. 7, show acquaintance with the story of Gen. iii. ; and 1 Kings xix. with Ex. xxxiv. Hence I believe the book should be assigned to the time of Solomon, a period admirably in keeping with the brilliant colouring of its early legends, its wide knowledge both of history and geography, and its strong national feeling. That there existed from of old a definite " law of God," and a regular ritual in connection with the worship of Jehovah, is clearly proved from the way in which the oldest prophets of the pre-Assyrian time take these for granted as regards both Judah and Israel (Amos ii. 4; Hos. viii. 1, 12).
Side by side with A and B there is found, in the second part of Genesis and in the following books, a considerable number of stories which were formerly attributed to A, because they generally employ the divine name " Elohim," or else were regarded as extracts from A revised by B. On closer examina- tion it was seen that the linguistic character of these passages has no affinity at all with A, but a very close affinity indeed with B ; while, at the same time, it has peculiarities enough of its own, apart from the use of the divine name, to warrant our inferring the existence of a separate document. Its author is particularly fond of describing the place of Israel among the
1 Although Hosea still read these stories in a more sensuous and naive form, in other words, was probably acquainted with an earlier form of the book than ours (the angel of God " weeps ").
AUTHORITIES FOR MOSAIC PERIOD. 67
nations of the world, its treaties and commercial relations ; and in Genesis the dream is a specially prominent feature of his narrative. Those who acknowledge the peculiarities of this writer generally consider him somewhat earlier than B and independent of him. I myself, on the contrary, am convinced that this writer, whom I call C, is later than B. He specially enriched the records of Israel with additions from original sources belonging to the northern tribes. Even if one assumes, with Wellhausen, that this writer is to be considered as origin- ally independent of B, his book and B's were, at any rate, very closely connected long before A's was added to their combined work. It is C whom we have to thank for pre- serving the old material which now lies before us in a revised form as "The Book of the Covenant" (Ex. xix. ff). The document of C, I am inclined to assign to the end of the Mosaic period. It is certain that Ex. iL 21, 22 is already imitated in Judg. xvii. 7, 8, 11. In consequence of the peculiar interweaving with B, C's handiwork can seldom be found unaltered in Genesis, but is so oftener in Exodus. Still where the two are combined, especially in the stories about Israel and Joseph, that is, where the legends of the northern kingdom, to which he undoubtedly belonged, are being dealt with, C is the leading authority all through.
3. Against the fourth period mentioned above, no valid objection can be brought. Prophets of conspicuous ability were certainly at work in Israel long before the eighth century. But the collapse of the first glorious realisation of the theocratic State, and the visible proof of the world's superior strength, afforded by the ever-increasing pressure of the Asiatic empire on divided Israel, necessarily caused a great change in the religious situation. There could not but arise quite new fears, hopes, and aims. And the prophets, in their new rdle as teachers of religion and as writers, were, at this stage, unquestionably the guiding spirits that determined the new direction which religion took Con-
68 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
sequently we have a new era to deal with ; and a long and trustworthy series of authorities of the first rank gives us the certainty of being able to obtain an accurate picture of it. In fact, this period is, if we may so speak, the centre of gravity of our whole structure.
On one point only could there be any doubt, viz. as to whether, when determining the limits between this period and a later, one should not consider the Babylonian exile as its natural end. So thought de Wette, v. Colin, and Baumgarten- Crusius, the last cleverly applying the names, Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews, to those who lived respectively during the period of MosSism, the era of the prophets, and the post- exilic age. It had long been so much the custom to speak of the influences of the Exile upon the religion of Israel, that everything post-exilic was looked on as a whole, — a view of the history of Israel certainly in many respects correct, for Kuenen, Wellhausen, and others have rightly laid stress on the fact that after Ezekiel and the priestly legisla- tion a change begins to come over the whole view of the community regarding religion and morals. But it is just during the exile that not only the legislative activity directed to the sacred ritual, but also the development brought about by the great prophets, attains its most inward and characteristic form. Besides, the spiritualising of the ancestral religion was nowhere so thoroughly carried out in the prophetic spirit as in the literature at the close of the Exile. In like manner, although prophecy by this time was beginning to lose its true freedom and vigour, the community which commenced to rebuild the city was still strongly per- meated with the prophetic spirit (Zech. vii. 8 ff.), while visible proofs of foreign influence were as yet quite inconsiderable. But the situation became wholly changed when at the second immigration Ezra and Nehemiah succeeded, though not with- out violent opposition, in setting up a legally constitute;! hierarchical State. A very strong bent was then given
AUTHORITIES FOR PROPHETIC PERIOD. 69
to the religious spirit in Israel, which dominated its whole future. Accordingly, we reckon the second period as lasting to the re-establishment of the State under Ezra-Nehemiah. This we call the prophetic period. It is the most brilliant era in the religion of Israel.
The period from 800-459 B.C. falls according to its religious development into the following smaller divisions. First we have the time during which Assyria, showing itself at the outset in the far distance, comes always nearer and nearer, and at last forms the determining factor in Israel's destiny, till it is hurled from the summit of its power by the invading Medes and Chaldeans, and is in a short time utterly blotted out from the roll of nations. This division from 800 B.c. to about 630 B.C., when the decisive attack on Nineveh began, we call the Assyrian period. Then the Chaldean empire in Babylon steps into the foreground of history. Leagued with the Medes, it overthrows Nineveh, destroys the last remnants of independence in Israel, and carries the people off into captivity. The short time during which this empire flourished before harbingers of its speedy fall began to appear, that is, from 630 till about 560, forms the Chaldean period.
Finally, with the first dawning hope of rescue through the rise of the Medo-Persian empire a new life began in Israel. Ere long the tyrant's citadel is stormed ; permission to return is granted; a colony of godly men, with Zerubbabel a son of David, and Joshua the high priest, at their head, return home, rebuild the holy city, and commence, under Persian suzerainty, a new, distinctive social life, although with little prospect of real success, till with the arrival of Ezra and Nehemiah new forces come into play. This period, from the decline of the Babylonian power till Ezra (560—460 B.C.), forms the Persian period of the epoch under consideration. We have now to point out the various original authorities for each of these three periods.
70 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
(a) 800-630 B.C. The great prophets of the eighth century refer to an older literature, which, like Isa. xv. and xvi., probably belongs to the ninth century. But for the history of religion these sources are of little importance. The book of Joel would be of greater weight did it date, as I myself, like most theologians, formerly supposed, from the ninth century. But although I do not consider that the reasons in favour of this opinion have been conclusively refuted, I must, in deference to Hilgenfeld, Merx, Duhm, Stade, and Oort, confess that it would not be right to use this book for the earliest period, so long as there are such strong and unrefuted reasons fo.r regarding it as a prophetic work of art dating from the post-exilic age. Hence the earliest important source that we have is Amos, who dates from the reign of Jeroboam II. ; then Hosea, and the author of Zech. ix., x., xi., xiii. 7 if., who, it is plain, lived during the terrible time of anarchy after Jeroboam's death.1 During the middle part of this period Isaiah 2 was active as a prophet certainly from 740 B.C. to about 700 B.C. Next to him comes Micah,3 and towards the close of the same period
1 Certainly this is vigorously combated by more recent scholars (cf. especially Stade, Zeitschriftf. alttest. Wissenschaft, 1881, i. 96 ; 1882, ii. 151, 275). Zech. ix.-xiv. is held to be the work of an author who must be regarded as an imitative prophet belonging to the period subsequent to the death of Alexander. I frankly confess that the mention of Javan throws a very heavy weight into the scale in favour of this view. But till it can be explained how a Jew in the days of Alexander's successors, instead of prophesying the return of Ephraim could ex- press a hope that all the men of war in Ephraim might utterly perish, — and further, how he could picture his Messiah on an ass, like one of the ancient Judges and Kings, — and so long as recourse must be had to arbitrary exegesis, such as taking the three shepherds of chap. xi. to mean imperial powers (Assyria, Babylon, Persia), or explaining the house of David by communal officials after the Exile (Isa. vii.), or representing the Canaanites as shepherds who sell the people, — I for one shall hold by the old view. To arrange the chronology of the prophetical books according to a preconceived idea as to the development of the Messianic hope, reminds one of dubious examples of New Testament criticism.
2 i.-xii., xiv. 24 to end, xvi. 13 to xx., xxi. 11 to xxiii., xxviii. to xxxiii.
3 The reasons which have induced Stade to deny to the prophet everything except chaps, i.-iii., Ewald and others everything except i.-v., and to set aside ii. 12, 13 as a gloss, appear to me altogether insufficient.
AUTHORITIES FOR PROPHETIC PERIOD. 71
we must think of Nahum, who may have prophesied some- where about 640 B.C., and of Zephaniah, who already hints at the threatening danger of Chaldean tyranny — about 630 B.C.
Of historical pieces, we assign to this period the work which deals in a somewhat free style with the history of David, as well as the oldest account of the history of Elijah and Elisha, and, according to xviii. 30, also the story in Judg. xviL and xviii. As these books were re-edited at a later date, one can often come only to an approximate judgment as to how they should be used in regard to matters of detail. Deuteronomy we assign to the following period, because though it may have been written earlier, it certainly had no influence on the history of religion till after its pro- mulgation. It was during this period, and in northern Israel, that the song Deut. xxxii. was composed.
"Whether the successive collections of the book of Proverbs, and songs such as Ps. xlvt and xlviii., belong to this age, cannot be definitely settled. In like manner it cannot be denied that the book of Job, notwithstanding much that tells in favour of ascribing it to this age, may perhaps, in view of its relations to Jeremiah, and the whole position of the problem, belong to the later times of Israel's suffering.
(6) G 3 0—5 6 0 B.C. To the early part of this period we assign with confidence the introduction of Deuteronomy, that is, its taking effect as law, and its combination with the blessing of Moses, chap, xxxiii. Immediately thereafter Jeremiah com- mences his active career as prophet. His writings, from the thirteenth year of Josiah onwards, are the chief original sources for all the first part of this period.1 As his younger
1 Jer. xxv. 2 f. From the relation of Jer. xlix. 7 ff. to Obadiah, the latter would be an older contemporary of Jeremiah. Still, on the other hand, Obadiah, if he belongs at all to this age, must have written after the destruc- tion of Jerusalem. In that case Obadiah, like Jeremiah, quoted an older prophet. Of Jeremiah's writings the only parts of which the authorship can be reasonably called in question are xxxiii. 14-26, x. 1-16, and l.-liL
72 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
contemporaries, we have the author of Zech. xii., xiii. 1-7, xiv., and Habakkuk, who both prophesy immediately before the threatened capture of the city (600 B.C.). For the second half of this period the chief representative of prophecy is Ezekiel, who laboured from about 593 B.C. among the colony of captives on the Chebar. As to the historical books, the gradual formation of the books of Kings probably belongs to this period, although the last section of it will fall within the post-exilic period. Its moralising tone in dealing with ancient history, shown, for example, in 1 Kings viii. and in many other passages, points to the same conclusion ; the older records were more after the style of a chronicle. Pieces like Isa. xxxvi.-xxxix. and Jer. lii. cannot have received their present form till at least the second half of this period.
But of still greater importance are the parts of the Penta- teuch literature which point to this age. Certainly the fine code of laws (Lev. xvii. ff.) dates from the time of the Exile, and probably also, as a whole, the great work of A, into which that code has been incorporated. This book has been subjected to such careful investigation, and, notwithstanding the dispute as to its date, there is such general agreement as regards both its contents and its range, among commentators like Kayser, Noldeke, Dillmann, Graf, Schrader, Wellhausen, etc., that I shall content myself with a mere sketch of it, drawn chiefly from the work of the last-named scholar (Jahrb. /. d. Th. 1876, 3. 4). It is a thoroughly homogeneous work, constructed on a well-arranged plan, and for the most part preserved with such care by the editors of the Pentateuch, that, in combining it with the other books, it is only occa- sionally that even single words and sentences have had to be sacrificed. Its object was to bring vividly before the reader's mind the origin of the sacred customs and the religious possessions of the people. It therefore begins with the God Elohim, who becomes to the patriarchs, El Schaddai,
AUTHORITIES FOB PROPHETIC PERIOD. 73
and to Moses, Jehovah. In the first place, it represents the Sabbath and the command to abstain from blood as sacred customs originally binding upon all mankind, and circum- cision as a custom common to the descendants of Abraham. It next shows us in broad outline how the sacred institutions of Israel took their rise under Moses, especially the law of sacrifice 1 in its most artistic development, and a\<o the origin of the festal year as based on the Sabbath, and of the holy place, which is represented in most ideal completeness by the tabernacle. It next carries us past the death of Moses to the settlement of Israel in Canaan, which is in like manner repre- sented as ideally complete, the tribes portioning out the whole land among themselves in an equitable and peaceful manner. It comes to a close in the time of the Judges, although it may originally have gone farther, or at least have been intended to go farther. Written in a simple lucid style, without any special force or grandeur of diction, it invariably becomes diffuse when dealing with anything that is important from the standpoint of ritual or of law. It may therefore be con- sidered the work of a priest.
While it is certain that laws of ritual were in existence in Israel even earlier than this,2 it is equally certain that the arrangements here presupposed were not known in the time of the older prophets. Deuteronomy has as little knowledge of this book as B and C. The section, Lev. xvii. ff, which is incorporated with it, has an unmistakable similarity to Ezekiel's phraseology and mode of thought. The book is the work of a priest who, undeterred by the existence of sanctuaries in Israel,3 has presented us with his ideal of
1 Unless the special codes of laws in Lev. i. ff. were not incoqiorated with it till a later date. (Wurstcr, in Stade, iv. 112 if., maintains that Lev. i.-vii., xi.-xv., were already codiGed in the ninth or eighth century.)
8 Hos. iv. 7 ff., vii. 12 ; Amos iv. 5, v. 22 ; 1 Sam. ii. 12, 15, 16.
* That the book cannot have been written after the Exile in Jerusalem is acknowledged even by Kucnen and his followers. But even in Babylon, in view of the fact of a newly-restored ritual and temple, this document would be ccarcely intelligible.
74 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
sacred customs in the form of a history of the development of religious ritual in Israel.
Of poetical pieces, Prov. i.-ix. points rather to the second half of this period than to the time after the Exile. The speeches of Elihu in Job cannot well have been composed later than about 600 B.C. The book of Lamentations certainly points to the first half of the Babylonian exile. Of the Psalms, a large number refer to the times of Jeremiah, perhaps to himself, and testify to the impression produced by the destruction of the holy city — among these, such beautiful ones a* the 22nd, the 51st, etc. Having at our command so considerable a number of prophetical authorities of known date, it is possible for us to reach absolute certainty as to the position of Old Testament religion. Even what is doubtful, particularly in the domain of the Psalms, attains to something like certainty when fitted into the frame of ascertained facts regarding the pro- phetical writings.
(c) 560—460 B.C. Towards the end of the Babylonian exile there arose a series of prophets whose common object was to proclaim the restoration of Israel and the destruction of the Chaldeans, and to call upon the people to rally with eager joy round the standard of God. Their names are forgotten — were probably never known. For, under the suspicious eye of Babylonian tyrants, and in view of their harsh treatment of prophets who incited the captives to rebel,1 it was certainly impossible for a prophet to show himself openly. Only by writings circulated in secret, and perhaps by purposely hiding their identity under the mask of old and famous names, could these men, in many respects the greatest prophets whom Israel ever produced, attempt to fulfil the commission given them by God. And these we have probably to seek among the men whom the Chaldean power crushed even in its death- throes. Room was found for them, especially in the book of 1 As Jer. xxix. 22 takes for granted.
AUTHORITIES FOR PROPHETIC PERIOD. 75
Isaiah. It was not till after the Exile that its three collections of speeches were combined and enlarged into the book we now have. They are to be found in Isa. xiii. 1-xiv. 23, xxl 1-10, xxxiv., xxxv., xL-lxvi. \Ve indicate these pieces in our quotations as the book of Isaiah (B. J.). To these also belong chaps. 1., li. of Jeremiah, which unquestionably point, in spite of Graf's doubts, to the time of Babylon's destruc- tion.1 Among those who returned to Jerusalem were the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the author of Zech. L— viii. inclusive. Perhaps the difficult section, Isa. xxiv.— xxvii. inclusive, also belongs to the period after the return. There is no doubt, at any rate, that it cannot belong to the prophet Isaiah, though there is very great doubt indeed as to when and in what circumstances it actually originated.2
The historical books, so far as in our Canon these are still included in the law and the prophets, were then complete as regards their own special contents. Their final editing and arrangement, on the contrary, was, like the final arrangement of the Psalms and the fragments of the prophetical writings, the work of Ezra and his successors. The book of Euth, although it knows so well how to present in a form true to antiquity the circumstances of the age which it depicts, cannot in its present form be older than the year 500 B.C. And to the same period belongs the book of Jonah, as an answer to the sceptical question why the divine threats were not all carried out at once and in their full severity. To decide which
1 Not because the view of Babylon's destruction by the Medes and their allies lay beyond Jeremiah's horizon, but because the temple is represented as actually in ruins, 1. 28, li. 11, 51, because Babylon's position and future are spoken of quite differently from the way in which Jeremiah speaks elsewhere (xxv. 9, xxvii. 6, xxviii., xxix., xxxvii., xxxviii., xliii. 10; cf. 1. 11, 24, 31, li. 7, 34, 53), and because the language, although intentionally akin to his, and taken from him, nevertheless differs from the genuine writings of Jeremiah the prophet in a very marked way in its difTtiseness and want of independence. The piece may be from the pen of one of Jeremiah's disciples.
s According to Smend, the hostile capital, xxv. 10, would be a city of Moab, and the date would fall between Nehemiah and Hyrcanus. Euenen, ii. 2, thinks of a contemporary of Obadiah in Palestine under Nebuchadnezzar.
76 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
Psalms belong to this period, rather than to the following, is extremely difficult, and in many cases absolutely impossible.
4. The period from Ezra to the Asmonsean dynasty we term the Levitical period, in which religion, although it had not yet come to a complete standstill, had no longer, as a whole, any real vitality, but was gradually petrifying into a system of statutory ritual. None of the writings of this age have any special religious value. Not one of them can bear comparison with the nobler monuments of the prophetic age. It is impos- sible not to notice a decline of healthful creative energy, an exaltation of the letter of Scripture above the prophetic spirit, and a further development of the tendency already begun in Ezekiel, A, and Zechariah. The Psalms alone indicate an advance in the inward and personal character of religious life.
(a) 460-330 B.C. With the exception of the little book of Malachi, tradition ascribes none of the prophetical books to this period. But we must, at any rate, acknowledge the possibility that during this time a not inconsiderable number of writers, skilled in reproducing prophecy, were busily at work. Such perhaps was Joel, such possibly writers whose productions are screened behind the names of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Perhaps also in this period of Persian suzer- ainty, the great historical work arose which, founded on older sources, e.g. Ezra's and Nehemiah's own journals, now includes the books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, thus giving a history of the Jewish hierarchy from the beginning of the world to the restoration of Jerusalem. It is clear that this work was composed at least five generations after the return.1 Still it is quite probable that it belongs to a considerably later period.2 Scarcely in any other book does the Levitical spirit come out so strongly as in this. Even the older historical writings in the Old Testament do not seek to reach what we
1 Neh. xii. 13, cf. 10, 22 (26, 47).
2 Kuenen puts it about 250 B.C. "Wellhausen sees in Darius the Persian, Neb. xiL 22, CodomaDnus.
AUTHORITIES FOR LEV1TICAL PERIOD. 77
regard as the true goal of historical science. Their real aim is not the discovery and the accurate statement of facts. These are only the materials by means of which they bring into visi- bility the grand thoughts and principles of religion. But in the older historical writings of Israel this results from the author being directly filled with the spirit of religion. The intense interest which these writers have in religion causes them to put light and shade, as it were, spontaneously into their grand pictures of history, so that the national history of Israel becomes in itself an instructive proof of the fundamental truths of revealed religion. It is different in Chronicles. Here we find, not an involuntary working of the spirit, but a conscious intention to instruct. Happiness and Levitical piety, misery and irreligion, are made to correspond down to the most minute details. The purpose of the historian is everywhere manifest. And it is not a man's moral and religi- ous principle which determines his lot, but external con- formity to sacred forms. Where the chronicler differs from the earlier accounts, it is certainly possible that he may have had before him special documents. But the greatest caution must be used before accepting new facts solely on the authority of this book ; and even where the facts are undis- puted, one must often question their setting and explanation. A particularly well-known instance of this is the story of King Manasseh's captivity and conversion.1 From the whole history of that period, it is in itself very likely that, on the occasion of the destruction of Samuges, an Assyrian force under Assurbanipal in 647, punished the faithless vassal on the throne of Judah, and that he was kept for a time as a hostage in the hands of the Assyrian king, who was then himself residing in Babylon. For, from the new arrange-
1 Cf. K. H. Graf, " The Captivity and Conversion of Manasseh, 2 Chron. xxiii." (Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 18f>9, iii. 467 ff.). Against him, Oerlach, I.e. 1861, iii. 503 ff. Cf. esp. 2 Chron. viii. 2, xiii., iiv., xx. 20 ff., xxi 11 ff., xxv. 7 ff., xxviii. 9 ff., xxx. etc.
78 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
merits made by Esarhaddon with Samaria, and from the inscriptions bearing on the expedition of this king and his successor, we know that the successors of Sennacherib had once more advanced in strong force into Western Asia. But the course of events, at any rate, cannot have been as is related in Chronicles. For, had Manasseh really died penitent, and in the full enjoyment of God's favour, later generations could not have considered his guilt to be the reason why the punishment of his people could not be any longer delayed, as they actually did.1
The little puzzling book Qoheleth, which bears the name of Solomon, may also belong to this age. At least, had it been written later, it is not easy to understand how a book, characterised by such scepticism, could have found its way into the Canon.2 The number of Psalms which date from this period and the one immediately following, is very large. For, at all events, by the time Chronicles was composed, the Psalter as a whole must have been in existence. Hence the majority of the later Psalms must, at the latest, date from this period,3 although certainly the use of the doxology in the Psalm-mosaic of Chronicles does not prove that the whole of our Psalter was then in existence, and still less that it was kept strictly closed.
(b) 330-160 B.C. Esther, a book religiously of little im- portance, and also a series of Psalms in the latest books of the Psalter, appear to date from the time of the Ptolemaic suzer- ainty. The original of Jesus the son of Sirach, too, cannot be assigned to a later date than this.
Out of the Syrian period we have the book of Daniel (167 B.C.), and also Ps. xliv. and Ixxiv. Next to these
1 2 Kings xxiii. 26, xxiv. 3 ; Jer. xv. 4.
2 Yet cf. Kleinert, ' ' Sind im Buche Qoh. ausserhebraische Einfliisse anzuer- kennen?" (Stud. u. Krit. 1883, iv. 760 ff.), and on Ecclesiastes, the writings of Ch. H. H. Wright, 1883 ; Th. Tyler, 1874; E. H. Plumptre, 1882.
8 1 Chron. xvi. 36, with the doxology of Ps. cv., cvi. ; cf. also the way in which the grandson of Sirach speaks of the translation of the Hagiographa.
LITERATURE. 79
comes the oldest part of the book of Enoch, then the third book of the Sibyl and the first book of the Maccabees, perhaps also Tobias, Baruch, and the original text of Judith. All other apocryphal writings point at the earliest to the last century before Christ.
CHAPTER VI.
LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
A full description of the development of Biblical theology as a distinct branch of study we do not consider it necessary to give. That has already been done a good while ago with tolerable thoroughness by v. Colin, § 4 ; Baumgarten-Crusius, iii. la; and by Havernick, 2nd edition, pp. 5-12. Since then, Diestel, in his exhaustive work, entitled, Geschiclite des Altcn Testaments in der christlichen Kirche, 1869, has given us everything relating to this subject, in full detail and from the right standpoint Weiss, too, in his handbook on the Biblical theology of the New Testament, discusses with sufficient ful- ness everything relating to the progress of Biblical theology. In a description of this progress, the one really instructive fact is this, that it was only through the gradual giving up of the conviction as to the perfect harmony between the teaching of the Bible and the Church that this science of ours could obtain a start and acquire a position of growing import- ance,— that ere long it began to take up a hostile attitude to the doctrine of the Church, founding itself on the Bible, and at last to the doctrine of the Bible itself as being limited by the circumstances of its own age, until it gradually resumed the friendly attitude which it had formerly held towards dogmatics as its handmaid for discovering proof-passages, now, however, in the more honourable and scientific form of serving as the historical foundation of Christian dogmatics and ethics. That
80 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
both have in more recent days been subjected once more to an unnatural amalgamation, implying that dogmatics, by surrendering the form given to it by the Church, must again become identical with the doctrine of the Bible, is only one more sign of the retrograde tendency of the theological science of the present day, and will pass away along with that tendency. Consequently, we give only the literature itself arranged in groups, so as to bring out clearly the significance of the indi- vidual books for the general development of our subject. ^
1. Treatises by which the conception of Biblical theology has been more clearly developed.
Of fundamental importance for our branch of study was the attempt to make exposition entirely independent of dog- matics. Such were Semler's works, Vorbereitung zur theolo- gischen Hermeneutik, 1760, Bd. i. 2, 3a, 3&; Apparatus ad liberaliorem Novi Tcstamenti interpretationem, 1767, Veteris Testamenti, 1773; Neuer Versuch die gemeinniitzige Auslegung und Anwendung des N. T. zu befordern, 1786. On Semler, cf. Diestel (Jahrb.f. deutsche Theol. 1867). — Keil (De historica librorum Sacrorum interpretation ejusque necessitate, in den opusc. theol., €d. Goldhorn, Lips. 1821, i. 84 ff.).
The inaugural lecture of J. Ph. Gabler (De justo discrimine theologies biblicce et dogmiticce regundisque recte utriusque finibus, Alt. 1787; republished by his sons in his minor theological writings, Ulm, 1831, ii. p. I79ff.) applies these views to Biblical theology. He is the first to classifiy Biblical theology definitely as a historical science, but he nevertheless demands that the ideas should be stripped of their historical shell. Alongside of him we may place °J. G. Hoffmann, Oratio de theologian biblicce prcestantia, Alt. 1770; and °Eber- hard Schruid, Dissert. II. de theologia liblica, Jena 1788 (?).
In contrast with the philosophical explanation of Biblical theology, Herder (18, Brief uber das Studium der Theologie)
LITERATURE. 8 1
lays special stress on its historical character; and K. W. Stein ("Ueber den Begriff und dieBehandlungsart der biblischeu Theologie," in Keil and Tzschirner's Analecta, Bd. iii. H. 1, 151-204) maintains that the truth of reason ought to have no influence on the presentation of the Biblical system, which should be based solely on a historical principle. Similarly (?), °A. G. F. Schirmer, Die biblische Dogmatik in ihrer Darstcllung und in ihrem Verhalten zu dem Ganzen der Theologie, Breslau 1820.
A satisfactory glimpse into the essence of Biblical theology is given by Schmidt (" Ueber Interesse und Stand der biblischen Theologie des Xeuen Testamentes in unsrer Zeit," Tubinger theologische Zeitschrift, 1838, 4). The true principles are given for the Old Testament in a more important and com- plete form by G. F. Oehler (Prolegomena zur Theologie, des Allen Testamentes, Stuttg. 1845). Besides these, we may mention F. Fleck (" Ueber biblische Theologie als Wissenschaft unsrer Zeit," Iluhr's PredigerUU. Th. 86, 1834), C. J. Nitzsch (Herzog's Realcncyclopadie, iL 219ff., Aufl. 2, M. Kiihler), Schenkel (" Die Aufgabe der biblischen Theologie in dem gegenwa'rtigen Entwicklungsstadium der theologischen Wiss- enschaft," Theol. Stud, und Kritikcn, 1852, L 40 ff.), Weiss (" Das Verhaltniss der Exegese zur biblischen Theologie," in the Deutschen Zeitschr. fur christl. Wissenschaft und Leben, 1852, 38, 39 ; cf. also his Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testa- mentes, § 5).
2. Expositions of Old Testament Tlicology.
We may pass over altogether such books as are practically mere collections of proof passages for dogmatics, like those of Sebastian Schmid, 1671, 3rd ed. 1689 ; Joh. Guil. Baier, 1716; Hulsemann, 1679; Kbnig, 1651; Zickler, 1753-6; Haymann, 1768 ; C. E. Weissmann, 1739 ; and also Semler's own attempt in 1764. The subject-matter proper is ap-
VOL. i. F
82 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
preached from the standpoint of a free-thinking supranatural- isra in the following works, in themselves of little importance, Biisching (Dissertatio, 1756; Epitome theologice e solis libris sacris concinnatce Lemgo, 1757), and Storr (Doctr. christ. pars theor. e solis libris sacris repetita, 1793 ; German by Flatt, 1803), Buddeus (Historia Ecd. Vet. Test., 2 vols. 1726, 29, 3rd ed.), as well as in the far more important work of Gotthilf Traugott Zachariii (Biblische Tkeologie oder Untersuchuny des biUischen Cfrnndcs der wrnehmsten theologischen Lehren, 1772-86, 6 vols., the last by Vollborth). The book of C. A. Crusius (Vorstcllung von dem eigentlichen und schriftgemdssen Plane des Reiches Gottes, 1768), written also from a mildly supranaturalistic standpoint, is rather a brief compendium of Christian doctrine. For a criticism of him, cf. Delitzsch, Die biblisch-prophetische Theologie, Hire Foribildung durch C. A. Crusius und Hire neueste Entwicklung, 1845.
J. H. Majus takes up an intermediate position in his Theologia proplietica, 1 7 1 0, and Synopsis theologice cliristiance e solis Verbis Cliristi, 1708, 4. Abr. Teller is hostile to the doctrine of the Church (Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens, 1764; Topice sacrce scriptures, 1761), and C. F. Bahrdt to the doctrine both of the Church and the Bible (Versucli eincs biblischen Systems der Dogmatik, 1769—70, 1784).
With the intention of giving a really historical presenta- tion, but certainly without actually attaining his object, Ammon wrote his Biblische Theologie, in 3 vols., 2nd ed. 1801-2, etc.; with still less success, W. Fr. Hufnagel, Die Schrift des Alien Testamentes nach ihrem Inhalt und Zweck bcarbeitet, of which vols. i. and ii.o. appeared Erl. 1785-6. Bretschneider, too (Die Grundlagen des evangelischen Pietismus, Leipz. 1833), gives nothing else but observations on the chief dogmas taken separately. G. Lorenz Bauer wrote from a thoroughly historical standpoint, except that in so doing he was too little conscious of the uniqueness and the unity of the Biblical literature (in addition to minor writings, for
LITERA.TUnE. 83
which cf. v. Colin, 24 N. 24, Theologie des Alien Testamentes, Leipz. 1796; Mythologie des Alien und Neuen Testamentes, 2 vols. 1802). G. Ph. Chr. Kaiser is a brilliant though fur from accurate writer, and with a tendency to confuse even the most widely different things (Die biblische TJieologie oder Judaismus und Christianismus nach der grammatisch- historischen Interprclationsmcthode und nach einer freimuthigen Stellung in die kritisch vergleichendc Unhersalgcschichie der Religionen und die universale Religion, voL i. 1813, ii. 1814, iib 1821). The book is commended to readers " who are observant students of mankind, and who, refusing to believe that any one Church is in sole possession of salva- tion, are learning to find out and appreciate the honest worshipper of the Divine in every age and clime, whose religion is neither Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, nor Paganism, but religious Universalism, Catholicism, in the true sense of the word, what our theologians call per- fectible Christianity." Vol. ii.5, however, which treats of the Biblical doctrine of morals, is written in an entirely different spirit.
Among somewhat modern works that are still of value, we may mention, of those written from the Hegelian standpoint, Vatke (Die biblische Theologie wisscnschaftlich dargcstellt ; voL i., Die Religion des Alien Testamentes nach den canon- ischen Biichern entwickelt, Berlin 1835, not continued), Bruno Bauer (Die Religion des Alien Testamentes, vol. L 1838, ii. 1839). °L. Noack goes still further (Die biblische Theologie des Alien und Nencn Testamentes, 1853).
From the side of scientifically critical theology we have de Wette (Biblische Dogmatik Alien und Ncucn Testamentes, oder kritische Darstellung der Rcligionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und des Urchristenthums, 3rd ed. 1831), Daniel von Colin (Biblische Tlieologie, vol. i., ed. Dav. Schultz, Breslau 1836), Gramberg (Geschichte der Religionsideen des Alien Testamentes, 2 vols. 1829-30), Ciisar v. Lengerke
84 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
(Volks- und Rdigionsgescliichte Israels, Kenaan, Th. i. 1844). Important contributions are found in Ewald (Geschichte dcs VolJces Israel, vol. i. 3rd ed. 1864, ii. 1853, iii. 2nd ed. 1853, iv. 3rd ed. 1864; Alterthiimer, 3rd ed. 1866). From the school which is more inclined to defend the doctrine of the Church, we have L. F. O. Baumgarten-Crusius (Grundzilge der HUisclien Tlieologie, Jena 1828), S. Lutz (Bill. Dogmatik, ed. Euetschi Pforzh. 1847). From an apologetic standpoint we have Steudel (Vorlesungen uber die Theologie des Alten Testamentes, ed. Oehler, Berlin 1840) and Havernick (Vorle- sungen uber die Theologie des Alten Testamentes, ed. Hahn 1848 ; 2nd ed., Hermann Schultz, with notes and Appendices, 1863).
Many points of contact with our work may be found in v. Hofmann (Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed. vol. i., ii.a, ii.&, 1857-60) and J. T. Beck (Die christliclie Lehrwissensclwft nach den liblischen Urkunden, vol. i. 1841).
Since the first edition of this work appeared, Dr. A. Kuenen (in his book, De Godsdienst van Israel tot den onder- gang van den Joodschcn Staat, Haarlem 1869, and later in De Profeten en de Prof die ondcr Israel, HisloriscTi-dogmatische Studie, Leiden 1875) has discussed the contents of the Old Testament with great acuteness, though he often goes too far. Among German scholars, Prof. Lie. Bernh. Duhm comes nearest to him in his Theologie der Propheten als Grundlage fiir die innre Entwicklungsgeschichte der israelitischen Eeligion, Bonn 1875.1 H. Ewald devoted a great part of his work (Lehre der Bibel von Gott, 1871—75) to the doctrinal contents of the Old Testament. Still the
1 The assertions of Duhm are partly attacked or modified in the essay of K. Sin end, "Ueber die von den Propheten des achten Jahrhunderts voraus- gesetzte Entwicklungsstufe der israelitischen Religion " (Studien und Kritiken, 1876, 4) ; cf. the dissertation by the same author, Moses apud prophetas. As combating the views of Kuenen and his German disciples, it is worth while mentioning Fr. Ed. Konig's book, Die Hauptprobleme der altisraelilischen Jieligionsgeschichte gegeniiber den Entwicklungstheoretikern beleuchtet, Leipzig 1884.
LITER ATUUE. 85
peculiar combination of ethical dogmatics with Biblical theology, and the interweaving of the dogmatic materials in the Old and in the New Testaments, make this work of little service for our purpose. The lectures of Dr. Gust. Fried r. Oehler, whose contributions to this science were specially great, published in two volumes in 187o— 74, under the title, Die Thcologie dcs Allen Testaments, do not contain very much beyond what the author himself had previously given to the world in separate essays on the questions dealt with in this branch of study. A still smaller contribution to the real advance of this science was made by the publication of Hitzig's lectures (ed. Kneuker, 1880, Karlruhe), and of Kayser's (ed. Eeuss, 1886), after the death of these scholars. A very similar verdict must be passed on the Alttestament- liche Thcologic of the late Dr. Ed. Puehm (ed. Tahnke, 1889).
FIRST MAIN DIVISION.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF KELIGION AND MORALS IN ISRAEL TILL THE FOUNDING OF THE ASMONJSAN STATE.
CHAPTER VII.
ISRAEL'S PRE-MOSAIC AGE.
LITERATURE. — E. Eenan, " Nbuvelles considerations sur le car- actere general des peuples semitiques" (Journ. Asiat. 1859); cf. Histoire et systeme compart des langues semitiques, Paris, 2nd ed. 1858, 1, 2. Grau, Semiten und Indogermanen in ihren Bezie- Jmngen zu Beligion und Wissenschaft, 1864, 66. Steinthal, " Characteristik der semitischen Volker " (Zeitsclirift fur Volker- psyclwlogie und Spracliwissenscliaft, ed. Lazarus and Steinthal, 1850, vol. i. 328-345. Oehler, " Volk Gottes " (art. in Her- zog's Realencyclopadie, 1st ed.). Max Miiller's Essays on Semitic Monotheism. Job. Eontsch, ITeber Indogermanen und Semitcn- thum. Eine wlkerpsyclwlogische Studie, 1872. Ltidwig Krehl, Ueber die Religion der vorislamischen Amber, Leipzig 1863. Falgrave, A Year's Journey in Arabia, 1862-3. Osiander, Zeitsclirift der deutsch-morgenlandisclien Gcsellschaft, vii. 1853. Merx, " Abgotterei in Israel " (art. in Schenkel's Bibellexicori). Ben-David, Ueber die Religion der Hebrder vor Moses. Land, " Over den Godsnamen mnV etc. (Theologisch TijdscJirift, 1868, 156 jEf.). L. Seineke, Gcschichte des Volkes Israel, Gb'tt. 1876,
LITERATURE. 87
voL L Stade, Geschichte dcs Volkes Israel, p. 403 ff. Selden, " De Dis Syris " (in Ugolin, Thesaur. Ant. Sacr. xxiii.). Chwol- sohn, Die Ssdbicr und dcr Ssabismus, 1856 (voL i. 30 Iff., esp. 395 ff. ; voL ii. 153, 273 ff., 367, 380 ff.). Tuch, " Ueber die Eigennaraen der alten Araber in ihrer Zusammensetzung niit Gottesnamen " (Zcitschr. der deutsch-morgenldnd Gesellsch. Hi. 153). Munter, Die Religion der Carthager. Diestel, "Der Monotheismus des iilteren Heidenthums vorziiglich bei den Semiten " (Jahrb. fiir dcutsche Thcologie, 1860, 4, p. 669 ff., 2 art). Dillmann, " Ueber den Ursprung der alttestamentlichen Religion," an inaugural lecture delivered on May 3rd, 1865, at Giessen. Movers, Religion der Phoniken, i. 168 ff. (cf. the essays on the Meslia stone by Clerinont, Ganneau, Schlott- mann, and Noldeke, and the article by Schlottmann on the inscription of Eschmunazar, 1868). Ewald, "Neue Unter- buchungen iiber den Gott der Erzvater " (Jalir. f. bill. Wissen- scliaft, 1859-61, vol. x. 1 ff., cf. vol. vi. 1 ff. °Klose, De polytheismi vestigiis apud Hebracos ante Mosem, 4, Gott. 1830. Bruno Bauer (Zcitschrift fur specul. TlieoL i. 1, 140 ff.). " Der mosaische Ursprung der Gesetzgebung des Pentateuch." F. W. Ghillany, Die Menschenopfcr der alten Jfcbrder, Nlirnb. 1842, and Fr. Daumer, Dcr Feuer- und Moloclisdienst der alien Hebrdcr, 1842. Bernstein, Ursprung dcr Sagen von AbraJuim, Isaak und Jacob, 1871. JuL Grill, Die Erzvater der Menscli- hcit, ein JJcitray zur Grundlegung cincr hcbraisclien Alterthums- wissenschuft, erste Abtheilung, 1875. Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, 1876. Lenormant, Lea premieres civilisa- tions, 1874 ; Essai de commentaire des fragments cosmo- goniques de Bcrose d'apres les textes cun€iformcs, 1871 ; Lcs sciences occultes en Asie, 1874. Schrader, " Semitismus und Babylouismus " (Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1875, i. 117 ff); cf. Zcitschrift der dcutsch-morgcnl. Gesellsch. xxvii. 397 ff. ; TJicol. Stud. u. Krit. 1874, 2. Die Hollcnfahrt der Istar, ein altbabyl. Epos 1874.
1. In Genesis, as we now have it, we get a picture, as rich
88 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
as it is attractive, of the religious and moral condition of the primeval Hebrew world. The latest narrative by A certainly means to draw a clear distinction between that condition and the one created by Moses. But even it takes for granted, from the time of our first parents onwards, a special relation between God and man. That relation is renewed with Noah, and develops in the case of Abraham into a special covenant of friendship.1 Thus the external life of all mankind, as well as the special relation of Israel to redemption, rests upon a covenant of God with man.2 And in Noah's case, as after- wards pre-emininently in Abraham's, pious faith in the divine commands and promises, combined with a walking with God and obedience to His ordinances, is represented as the simple foundation of religion.3 To these times is traced back the origin of the sacred customs characteristic of Israel, especially circumcision and abstinence from blood,4 — while the principle on which the sacred times are arranged is loftily explained as based on the creative work of God Himself.5 Here, of course, there is no question of historical reminiscences.
The earlier narrative of B and C, which is based on actual popular tradition, shows still less hesitation in describ- ing the patriarchal age as essentially similar, so far as religion is concerned, to the later age of Mosaism. From the Fall onwards it takes the Mosaic form of sacrifice for granted.6 From the time of Enosh men call on the holy name of Jehovah (Jahveh).7 It knows even in patriarchal times of the distinction between clean and unclean beasts,8 and of Jehovah being inquired of by oracle.9 Even then it speaks of God's covenant relations with Israel, and refers quite definitely and clearly to the coming salvation.10 In those ages the theo-
1 Gen. i. 28-30, ix. 1 ff., xviL * Gen. ix. 11, 12, xvii. 7ff.
8 Gen. vi. 22, 9, xvii. 1, 3 (cf. ver. 22). * Gen. ix. 4, xvii. 10 ff. 0 Gen. ii. 3. 6 Gen. iv. 3, viii. 20 ff.
7 Gen. iv. 26. 8 Gen. vii. 2, 8, viii. 20.
9 Gen. xxv. 22.
10 Gen. xii. 2ff., xv. 5, 13 ff., xviii. 17 ff., xxii. 18, xxvi. 4, xxviii. 14.
PICTURE OF PATRIARCHAL AGE IN GENESIS. 89
plianies and the appearances of the angel of God occur in a tangible, almost mythological way.1
This narrative is particularly fond of describing the patriarchs as splendid examples of humble faith and devoted piety,2 as men who acted towards their kinsfolk and in all matters of right8 according to the highest principles of morality, who were strictly upright and honest to those within a clearly defined circle,4 and who were hospitable and open- handed,5 — all this, however, being consistent with a natural right to deceive those outside that circle,6 as well as with considerable moral laxity and even licence.7 This picture is essentially the same as that which the inhabitants of the North- Arabian desert still consider the beau-ideal of a pious and upright man. That such sketches cannot possess the value of historical accounts, is evident from the whole style of the narrative. It is a general picture of religion and morals in the light of a later period. Even in its freshest and most original form sacred legend is still only legend. But for giving a knowledge of these primitive days it is not by any mean?, on that account, wholly valueless.
2. It certainly appears to us a well-grounded conviction, that Moses must have found the Hebrew nation already in possession of views of religion and morals fitted to serve as the basis of his work. He must have found already pre- valent the belief in a God who was bound to this people by a special covenant. However dim this belief may have been, it must at least have implied a personal God who had absolute power over nature. The grand simple principles of morality and justice must have been already thought of as
Gen. xvi. 7 ff., xviii. 19, xxviii. 10 ff., xxxii. 25 ff. Gen. xii. 4, xv. 6f., xxii. 2ff. ; cf. also xviii. 23 ff. etc. Gen. xiii. 8ff.f xiv. 24, xxi. 22 ff., xxvL 16 ff., xxxix. 8ff. etc. Gen. xvi. 6f., xxxi. 36 ff., etc. Gen. xviii. 2ff., xix. 1 ff., xxiv. 31 ff., xiv. 22 ff. Gen. xii. 13ff., xxvl 7 f., xxvii. 11 ff. 1 Gen. xxxviii. 16 ff., xxxiv. 25 ff., ix. 21 ff., xliii. 34.
90 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
involved in relationship to this God, and there must have already existed among the people a number of outward rites and ceremonies. Only on such assumptions could Moses, as the messenger of the God of their fathers, claim and secure obedience to his commands as a political prophet, muster a down-trodden people in the name of its God, and lead it onwards to an uncertain future.1 But a higher spiritual stage can develop without resistance, repentance, and conversion only out of a less developed stage, never out of one quite antagonistic. The mass of the people in Egypt may, it is true, have been sunk deep enough in ignorance, immorality, and idolatry.2 Even in our own day the roving children of the desert look down with justifiable contempt on the kindred tribes settled in the Nile valley, for the latter generally combine Egyptian luxury with nomadic roughness as soon as they begin to till the ground and cultivate the gentler arts of civilised life. But those who kept alive the better traditions of the people, we must think of as worshipping a national God quite distinct from nature, although, of course, the question as to theoretical monotheism had not yet been raised. We cannot doubt that this God was conceived of as a personal and, in a certain
1 Ex. iii. 6, iv. 5, v. 9.
2 In addition to stones like Ex. xxxii., etc., such passages as Ezek. xx. 16 justify us in inferring that the common people whom Moses led were deeply degraded. Amos v. 26 cannot, in my opinion, be so used, since the verse must be taken as a threat to send into exile the idolatrous Israelites of Amos' own age. Schrader (Theol. Stud. u. Krit. 1874, ii. 32411'.) translates, by trans- posing the word DS'WS. "So ye will take Saccuth (Assyr. ni2E>), your king, and Chiun, your star-god, your images which ye have made for yourselves, and I will lead you into captivity. " Another interpretation is attempted by Hoff- mann (Stade Zeitschrijft, iii. 112), "Did ye then offer sacrifices to me in the wilderness while ye at the same time carried about (Jer. x. 5) Saccuth, your king, and Chiun, your idol, as your own god, made by yourselves ? " We should say, " When ye sacrificed to me, did ye carry about idols?" In other words : " In the wilderness ye sacrificed to me alone, now ye give me companions. That is the way of foreigners. Therefore, off with you to a foreign land ! " Even this explanation — which, besides, appears to me forced —would not alter the judgment given above.
PICTURE OF PATRIARCHAL AGE. 9 1
sense, a spiritual God, and that Israel was regarded as His chosen people. According to the sacred legend, He must have given a special revelation of Himself to the patriarchs. The people determine unanimously and at once to hold a feast in His honour beyond the bounds of the idolatrous land of the foreign oppressor ; l and even when they fall away from the higher revelation of God, it is still Sis image that they wish to honour and worship.2 Further, the religious memory of this people must have regarded Canaan as the land of their fathers, the land of promise, the laud destined to l>e their inheritance. It could not have been in the post- Mosaic age that ancient sanctuaries like Shechem, Hebron, Beersheba, and Bethel became places hallowed by patriarchal legend.
Besides, there can be no doubt that legend has given us a faithful account, at least, of the chief moral characteristics of the pre-Mosaic period. The unchanging form of Bedouin life enables us to-day to recognise these figures as true to life, nearly three thousand years after the earliest parts of Genesis were written down. How, then, could the picture of them, a few centuries after their own day, be anything but true. Indeed, Israel was always in a position where it could refresh its recollections of the life which the patriarchs had led, by taking a glance at similar modes of life. The tribes to the east of Jordan always continued to be mainly pastoral peoples.3 In the time of the Judges, friendly tribes, like the Kenites, lived in tents, as they still do, in the fertile plain of the Kishon ; * and in the Eechabites we see, at a much later date, the picture of people clinging to a pastoral life with all the fervour of a religious passion.6 Hence we may, without hesitation, believe in the chief moral features of the legend,
1 Ex. v. 1 ff. * Ex. xxxii. 4 ff.
* Num. xxxii. * Judg. iv. 11, 17 ff.
8 Jer. xxxv. This was not exactly a species of Nazirite vow, though it was certainly akin to it. It was simple antagonism to city-civilisation and its habits as being destructive of ancient simplicity. Such antagonism is nothing
92 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
not as if it gave us a historical account, but because its colours could scarcely but be true to nature. There must have been simple forms of worship and of sacrifice, feasts expressive of popular joy. In Mosaism sacrifice is every- where presupposed as a matter of course, and the Mosaic feasts are derived from older ones.1 If an inference from later times is allowable, joy in nature and holidaying of a somewhat sensuous character were probably the main features of these festivals.2 On the other hand, the redemption of the first-born and many of the Passover rites point to a passionate energy of repentance, and to atonement for sin by shedding of blood, these being the very traits which specially mark all Semitic religions. The chief sacred customs must have already existed in a simple form. These would probably embrace circumcision, abstinence from blood, and a horror of using certain animals as food. For many of the later regulations of this kind cannot be explained except by primitive popular customs. Faithful observance of acknow- ledged obligations and respect for property ranked as moral duties, especially in the marriage relation, which was looked at from the standpoint of property. With these exceptions, the natural right to have recourse to cunning, deceit, and violence was admitted, and also the right of the male to free sexual enjoyment. The rights of parents and of the head of the clan were absolute. These were the only recognised authorities. Shed blood demanded bloodshed. Later legislation found this avenging of blood an established and sacred national custom, and had to remain content with
uncommon among pastoral peoples. The disinclination to tise any other tent but the black tent of the desert, and the contempt with which the Arabs of the peninsula of Sinai regard the art of writing, are examples of the same thing. In fact, Mohammed's prohibition of wine is to no small extent an expression of the views held by these children of the desert.
1 Ex. v. 1, xxxii.
2 Judg. xxi. 20 f. ; Ex. xxxii. 6, 15 ff. Unless this side of the national life had a closer connection with what Israel found already prevalent in Canaan than with its own tribal reminiscences.
PICTURE OF PATRIARCHAL AGE. 93
legalising it in the least objectionable forms. Hospitality, cunning, courage, and careful provision for the family, were held in the highest esteem. There was neither priestly mediator nor fixed forms of worship. The head of the family and the national leader represented the people even before God. The simple and certainly somewhat arbitrary forms of worship were the expression of a wish to gratify the Deity with a gift, whether by way of thanks, or in the hope of furthering a petition, or with a view to appease the divine wrath ; but above and beyond all this, these sacrifices were due to the habit of celebrating in a religious way every joyous occasion in life. Various objects of superstition, such as the Teraphim, must have been in use, and there must have been a desire to possess some symbolical representa- tion of the national God. The former were still found in the time of David,1 and actually in the possession of pious servants of Jehovah. The ox-image of the national God in the wilderness, as well as Gideon's, Micah's, and Jeroboam's, warrants the inference that there was an ancient liking for such a representation.2 Probably, too, the serpent- form of Xehushtan is a remnant of ancient custom.3 The normal picture of that age must have been something like the above. The actual moral and religious condition of the mass of the people in Egypt must also, of course, have been comparatively low. Sacred tradition was not wrong in cherishing only the memory of the free pastoral life of the patriarchs, and in working up the incidents of these days into pictures of surpassing beauty. Immorality and degradation must have been the chief characteristics of
1 1 Sam. xix. 13.
1 Judg. viii. 27, xvii. 8ff., xviii. 31 ; 1 Kings xii. 28 ff. Certainly, in the cases of Micah and Gideon, the precise nature of the image is not mentioned ; but the connection of the worship kept up at Dan till the overthrow of the kingdom with the worship in Micah's house, leads to a more than probable conclusion regarding Judg. viii. and xvii.
* 2 Kings xviii. 4.
94 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
those half-settled nomads, just as they are at the present day characteristic of those tribes on the borders of the Nile valley which are in the process of becoming Fellahin. Hence the time when Israel lived in tents as a purely pastoral race might well appear ideal.
3. It is with the name of Abraham that all the early memories of Israel associate the origin of the characteristic features of pre-Mosaic religion and morals, that is, the peculiarities that distinguish the Hebrew race from its Semitic brethren. In the old national tradition, as we have it in* B and C, this man is a most imposing figure. He has become the beau-ideal of a saint. He separates himself from his family by an act of faith.1 His whole family relations are based on faith, in contradistinction to nature.2 He appears as the priestly servant of the God Jehovah.3 From the first, gracious promises are made to him, and these always become more and more splendid. As the favours increase, so does his faith.4 Even his son he would be ready to give to God.5 God appears to him as to a friend, and takes counsel with him as with a confederate. He intercedes for sinners.6 On his account his son is blessed.7 In a word, he appears as the great " friend of God " to a degree not attained even by Moses himself. He is the august model, on the one hand, of piety, faith, self-sacrifice, honesty, hospitality, fidelity ; and, on the other, of high position, wealth, power, honour, and wonderful prosperity.
Tradition of the Deuteronomic cast represents him as fleeing from his native place, in order to escape from its idolatry. He is thus made the type of the people of the true
1 Gen. xii. 1 ff.
2 According to B, Gen. xi. 30, xviii. 11 f. B, C, xv. 2, 3. In B the land of promise is not named as in A ; it is " the unknown."
3 Gen. xii. 8, xiii. 18.
4 Gen. xii. 2 ff., xiii. 16 ff., xviii. 10 ff., x\r. 1 ff. 6 Gen. xxii.
6 Gen. xviii., esp. 17 ff., 22 ff., xix. 7 Gen. xxvi. 5.
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God as it escapes from the idolatrous land of Egypt1 For his sake God loves Israel, the nation of his descendants.2 And the honour thus given to Abraham grows steadily greater. In the priestly narrative of A, the patriarch's figure is, it is true, rather indistinct. Indeed the whole patriarchal tradi- tion has for A quite a subordinate significance as compared with " the Law." Abraham's history is represented as con- nected rather with the political aims of his tribe.3 But even in A there remains quite enough to show the splendour of this picture. Abraham is the covenant friend of God. He is the first on whom circumcision was enjoined. To him the promise regarding the glory of his nation is communicated. For his sake his kindred are rescued.4 And the theology of later times is specially fond of Abraham's personality, so that he is not merely the chief subject of profound allegoris- ing on the part of Philo, but even in the New Testament he far surpasses in religious importance the great prophet Moses.6 Finally, through the Koran, he has attained, even in the opinion of the Arabs, the position of being the most honourable among the men of God, the oldest and greatest of Moslems.
4. These ideas regarding Abraham, developed as they were stage by stage, do not possess the value of historical data. Indeed, we must even leave it undetermined, in the present state of tradition, how far the name of Abraham, and the general sketch of his life, are to be regarded as historical. If Gen xiv. were a really primitive account, the political importance of Abraham would be very clearly established. Still, I cannot convince myself of the certainty of this assump-
1 Josh. xxiv. 2, 3, and carried further by Josephus, Antiq. Jud, i. 8. Compare also the further development of the legend, 1 Mace. xii. 21. 1 Deut iv. 37, vii. 8, ix. 5.
3 Gen. xi. 31 f.
4 Gen. xvii., xix. 29.
6 Rom. iv. ; GaL iiL ; Jas. ii. 21 ; Heb. xl. 8 ; Luke iii. 8 ; John viii. 33.
96 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
tion.1 The fact that Assyrian documents of the age to which Abraham must have belonged give us political circumstances and names which agree well enough with this narrative, cannot justify us in considering it an ancient non-Israelitish source. For the author of Gen. xiv. is, at all events, a believing Israelite, who surrounds the figure of Abraham with such a halo of glory as would be inconceivable in a non- Israelitish source. This figure, which is for him the main object of the story, he might quite easily have set in a frame of stories thoroughly in keeping with the general historical character of those times.2 The inferences which Josephus3 draws from a narrative of Berosus, and his statement taken from Nicolaus of Damascus, that Abraham was king of Damascus,4 are absolutely without historical value. But it may be regarded as certain that the foundation of Israel's moral and religious character was not laid in Egypt, where the nation came into contact with an utterly alien worship, half-naturalistic, half-philosophical. It was brought with them from their free nomad life in Canaan and the neighbour- ing countries, having been gradually formed there in the small pastoral clan which had migrated from Mesopotamia, and which, at one time mixing with kindred clans, and at another keeping itself distinct, had sojourned for several genera- tions in that country, which was then, probably, less thickly peopled.
How then had this moral and religious distinctiveness originated ?
1 What can be said on that side may be best seen in Ewald, i. 431 ff. ; cf. also Baur, i. 140 f., and Sayce, Fresh Light from Ancient Monuments. Cf. on the other side, Noldeke, Abh. iii.
2 On the other hand, a mere glance at this section is sufficient to show any unprejudiced reader that vers. 18-20 are a late insertion, made for the purpose of giving the holy city Jerusalem = Salem, from the earliest days, a sacred character which it has sorely missed. The verses were inserted here because the " king's valley " gave an opportunity for doing so.
3 Antiq. i. 7. 2.
4 Cf. also Justinus, Tr. Pomp. If. Ph. Ep. xxxvi. 2,
ABRAHAM. 97
According to the late representation in Josh. xxiv. 3, it took its rise in distinct and conscious antagonism to the superstition of his kinsfolk on the part of Abraham, the founder of the nation. According to the legend in Josephus, the life work of this man sprang out of a definite intention on his part to reform religion. The writers in Genesis know nothing of any such direct antagonism on Abraham's part to his religious surroundings. It is true that among Abraham's kindred it is not only superstition, such as was common even in Israel, that is taken as a matter of course, but the actual worship of " other gods." l But in all other respects A, B, and C agree in considering that a monotheistic and ethical religion, not essentially different from the religion of Abraham, was an ancient inheritance of the descendants of Seth and Shem, and nourished in Western Asia.2 The one thing represented as new in the case of Abraham is the covenant relationship with God, together with the promises founded upon it. And long after this, nothing is known in Israel of any direct religious antagonism to the petty tribes of kindred stock.
To get an answer to our question, we must study the history of religions by the aid of the historical method, and thus seek to obtain an estimate of the religion of the Semitic races, and of its relation to the religion of the Hebrews before the time of Moses.
5. Ever since Ernest Kenan, in his own clever and brilliant style, asserted that monotheism was a natural instinct of the Semitic peoples, not a superior instinct either which set these peoples above the rest, but one " sui generis " having both excellences and defects of its own, — an assertion which he explains by the further statement that monotheism is really due to a lack of imaginative power and richness of diction, of breadth of conception and freedom of spirit, in fact, to a
1 B, Gen. xxxv. ; C, xxxi. 19, 30, 84 (53 ?). 8 Gen. v., vi. 9ff., xiv. 19, xx. 6, xxiv. 31, 50, xxxi. 49. VOL. I. O
98 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
lack of religious needs, and is therefore, so to speak, "the minimum of religion, — a lively discussion has been going on as to how far the nationality of Israel can account for the origin of Old Testament religion.
Lassen agrees with Eenan's proposition. Grau, with the approval of Leo, has taken his assertions as being in the main well founded, and has used them not unskilfully to prove the unique function of the Semites as repositories of revelation ; Steinthal, Ewald, Diestel, and Max Mtiller have, on the other hand, called attention to what is unfounded, or, at any rate, exaggerated, in these views of Eenan.1 " Could the monotheistic instinct of the Semitic race, if it really is an instinct, have been so frequently and so entirely obscured by the polytheistic instinct of the Aryan race, if it, too, is an instinct, that the Jews could worship at the high places round about Jerusalem, and the Greeks and Eomans become zealous Christians ? " (Max Miiller). The mistake in Eenan's general verdict regarding the limited capabilities of the Semitic peoples, is due to the very common error of generalising judgments that apply only to particular cases that have come under consideration. The capacity of the so-called Semitic peoples for religion and culture, especially if, contrary to the statement in Gen. x., the Phoenicians are reckoned among them, and if the civilisation of the Euphrates valley is placed to their credit, can no more be estimated by one standard than that of the Aryan races of the same period. The children of the desert, who, since primeval days, have lived in tents from Haran to Hedjaz, bear in this respect no more resem- blance to the haughty cultured peoples of Babylon and Tyre, than the ancient Slavs and Germans in their woods and marshes to the Greeks of the age of Pericles or to the Eomans under Augustus. To pronounce a general judgment on questions of such extent, is what every prudent man would decline to do.
1 The book of Eontsch goes too far in denying that any national influence contributed to the rise of the Biblical religion.
HEBREW AND SEMITIC RELIGION. 99
Only on one supposition is it possible to concede to Kenan's assertions a somewhat greater measure of justification. The name "Semitic" would have to be strictly confined to the small group of nations which, according to Hebrew recollection (Gen. x.), belonged to Israel's kinsfolk in the narrower sense — to the group of warlike shepherd tribes which, issuing, as is clear, from the bosom of the great Arabian peninsula,1 over- ran Mesopotamia, Syria, and Canaan, and possessed themselves of part of Egypt. Some of these remained in their original condition as regards culture ; others founded military empires on the soil of an older civilisation, and then conformed to the culture of their vassals, in much the same way as the modern world has seen the rise of the Ottoman and Seljuk empire on the soil of Arabic and Persian civilisation. It is thus that we should picture to ourselves the rise of Semitic suzerainty in Chaldea and Nineveh, of Aramaic over- lordship in Syria, and the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt Such, too, was Israel's supremacy in Canaan ; and such the supremacy of the kindred peoples, Edom, Moab, and Ammon in the lands east of Jordan. The founders of the special civilisation of Canaan, Babylon, and Egypt would then be peoples of another stamp, called in the Bible Hamites, who, though akin in language and race to the Semites, had gone through quite a different course of life and development, and had got even their national instincts modified by intermixture with peoples of a different race.
Only within such limits is it possible to speak of that peculiarity of the Semitic spirit on which Renan lays so much stress. Better acquaintance with the civilised peoples of Nineveh and Babylon, as well as a proper estimate of the rdle
1 According to Hoininol, in a lecture, " Ucber die urspriingUchen Wohnsitre der Semiten," Florence, 13th Sept 1878 (Avjsb. Ally. Z. Bt\l No. 263, 264, 1878), we should think of their original homo as in Mesopotamia, about mid- way down the Euphrates and the Tigris (A. v. Kremer, Semitische Cultur- entlehnungen atut ihm Thier- uml PJtanzenreich, Ausland, Bd. xlriii., Jan. 1, 2 ; as a separate pamphlet, by Gotta, Stuttg. 1875).
100 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY.
which the Phoenicians played in the history of the world, would directly contradict his assertions. We know now that a great many of the Hellenic myths rest on the mythology of these civilised States, especially the whole series of myths connected with Hercules, the victorious Sun-God, with his arrows, his lion's hide, and his gleaming locks, — with the beneficent yet destructive Hero- God, who afterwards acts the part of a woman and a servant, and at last, in order to renew his youth, perishes in the flames. We know that almost all the goddesses of Greece owe their origin to the Asiatic Nature-mother, and that the peculiar religious excitement known as orgiastic frenzy, which has so often smitten European nations also, has its home in those lands where the great mother of the gods and the dying Sun-God were worshipped. We are acquainted with mythical and epic Chaldee songs, like the Flood and the journey of Istar to Hades. We are aware that we have to seek for the cradle of Greek art by the banks of the Euphrates, just as even in Homer " the men of