Some quotations will illustrate their teachings, and the prevalence of the heathen practices against which they protested. «Seest Thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven [Ishtar], and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.» * The Lord is angry about it. «And they
____________________
* Jeremiah VII, 17-18.
-310-
have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my
heart.» *
There is a very interesting passage in Jeremiah in which he denounces the Jews in Egypt for their idolatry. He himself had lived among them for a time. The prophet tells the Jewish refugees in Egypt that Yahweh will destroy them all because their wives have burnt incense to other gods. But they refuse to listen to him, saying: «We will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil.» But Jeremiah assures them that Yahweh noticed these idolatrous practices, and that misfortune has come because of them. «Behold, I have sworn by my great name, saith the Lord, that my name shall no more be named in the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt. . . . I will watch over them for evil, and not for good; and all the men of Judah that are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by the sword and by the famine, until
there be an end of them.» â€
Ezekiel is equally shocked by the idolatrous practices of the Jews. The Lord in a vision shows him women at the north gate of the temple weeping for Tammuz (a Babylonian deity); then He shows him «greater abominations,» five and twenty men at the door of the Temple worshipping the sun. The Lord declares: «Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them.»
‡
The idea that all religions but one are wicked, and that the Lord punishes idolatry, was apparently invented by these prophets. The prophets, on the whole, were fiercely nationalistic, and looked forward to the day when the Lord would utterly destroy the gentiles.
The captivity was taken to justify the denunciations of the prophets. If Yahweh was all-powerful, and the Jews were his Chosen People, their sufferings could only be explained by their wickedness. The psychology is that of paternal correction: the Jews are to be purified by punishment. Under the influence of this belief, they developed, in
____________________
* Ibid., VII, 31.
€ Jeremiah XLIV, 11-end.
â
€ Ezekiel VIII, 11-end. ¡
-311-
exile, an orthodoxy much more rigid and much more nationally exclusive than that which had prevailed while they were independent. The Jews who remained behind and were not transplanted to Babylon did not undergo this development to anything like the same extent. When Ezra and Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem after the captivity, they were shocked to find
that mixed marriages had been common, and they dissolved all such marriages. *
The Jews were distinguished from the other nations of antiquity by their stubborn national pride. All the others, when conquered, acquiesced inwardly as well as outwardly; the Jews alone retained the belief in their own pre-eminence, and the conviction that their misfortunes were due to God’s anger, because they had failed to preserve the purity of their faith and ritual. The historical books of the Old Testament, which were mostly compiled after the captivity, give a misleading impression, since they suggest that the idolatrous practices against which the prophets protested were a falling-off from earlier strictness, whereas in fact the earlier strictness had never existed. The prophets were innovators to a much greater extent than appears in the Bible when read unhistorically.
Some things which were afterwards characteristic of Jewish religion were developed, though in part from previously existing sources, during the captivity. Owing to the destruction of the Temple, where alone sacrifices could be offered, the Jewish ritual perforce became non-sacrificial. Synagogues began at this time, with readings from such portions of the Scriptures as already existed. The importance of the Sabbath was first emphasized at this time, and so was circumcision as the mark of the Jew. As we have already seen, it was only during the exile that marriage with gentiles came to be forbidden. There was a growth of every form of exclusiveness. «I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people.» †«Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.» ‡ The Law is a product of this period. It was one of the chief forces in preserving national unity.
What we have as the Book of Isaiah is the work of two different prophets, one before the exile and one after. The second of these, who is called by Biblical students Deutero-Isaiah, is the most remarkable of the prophets. He is the first who reports the Lord as saying «There is no god but I.» He believes in the resurrection of the body, perhaps
____________________
* Ezra IX-X, 5.
€ Leviticus XX, 24.
â
€ Ibid., XIX, 2. ¡
-312-
as a result of Persian influence. His prophecies of the Messiah were, later, the chief Old Testament texts used to show that the prophets foresaw the coming of Christ.
In Christian arguments with both pagans and Jews, these texts from Deutero-Isaiah played a very important part, and for this reason I shall quote the most important of them. All nations are to be converted in the end: «They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more» ( Is. II, 4). «Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.» * (As to this text, there was a controversy between Jews and Christians; the Jews said that the correct translation is «a young woman shall conceive,» but the Christians thought the Jews were lying.) «The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. . . . For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.» †The most apparently prophetic of these passages is the fifty-third chapter, which contains the familiar texts: «He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. . . . But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. . . . He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.» The inclusion of the gentiles in the ultimate salvation is explicit: «And the gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the
brightness of thy rising.» ‡
After Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews for a while disappear from history. The Jewish state survived as a theocracy, but its territory was very small—only the region of ten to fifteen miles around Jerusalem, according to E. Bevan. § After Alexander, it became a disputed territory between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. This, however, seldom
____________________
* Isaiah VII, 14.
§ Jerusalem under the High Priests, p. 12.
€ Ibid., LX, 3.
â
€ Ibid., IX, 2, 6. ¡
-313-
involved fighting in actual Jewish territory, and left the Jews, for a long time, to the free exercise of their religion.
Their moral maxims, at this time, are set forth in Ecclesiasticus, probably written about 200 B.C. Until recently, this book was only known in a Greek version; this is the reason for its being banished to the Apocrypha. But a Hebrew manuscript has lately been discovered,
