i Jj i: J. J- i^ of IS rae W. .R O Vi EFTfS ON S M !TH tihxavy of Che 'theological ^emmar;^ PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY ^B5l50S 1 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY By the Same. Author THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE JEWISH CHURCH lii'm and Enlarged Edition. Demy Svo, 10s. 6d. THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES Second Edition. Demy Svo, 15s. oiet. ;dr> 1951 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY TO TEE CLOSE OF THE EIGETE CENTURY B.C. By the late W. EOBEETSON SMITH, M.A., LL.D. F£OF£SSO£ OF AKABIC IN THE UKIVEBSIIT OF CAUBBIDGE WITH INTRODUCTION AND ADDITIONAL NOTES BY The Eev. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A., D.D. OSIEL F£OFESSO£ Of THE INTEKPKETATIOK OF HOLT SCKIPIOEE AI OXTOBD, CANON OF ROOHESTKE LONDON ADAM & CHARLES BLACK 1897 Published April 1882. RejJrinted November 1SD5, iinth Introduction and Additional Notes by Prof. T. K. Chcyne, M.A., D.D. Reprinted May 1897. CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction ...... vii Author's Preface ..... xlix LECTURE I. Israel and Jehovah ..... 1 LECTUEE II. Jehovah and the Gods of the Nations . . 47 LECTURE IIL Amos and the House of Jehu ... 90 LECTUEE IV. Hosea and the Fall of Ephraim . . . 144 LECTUEE V. The Kingdom op Jddah and the Beginnings of Isaiah's Work ..... 191 CONTENTS. LECTUEE VI. FAOE The Earlier Prophecies of Isaiah . . . 235 LECTUEE VII. Isaiah and Micah in the Reign of Hezekiah . 279 LECTUEE VIIL The Deliverance from Assyria . ,317 Notes and Illustrations . , . > 375 Index . . . . r . . 443 INTKODUCTION. It is not too much to say that the present work, though it only now appears in a second edition, has achieved one of the greatest known literary successes in the department of theology. It was, on its first appearance, eagerly bought and as eagerly read, and, though it has long been out of print, the demand for it has never ceased. The beloved and admired author resisted the temptation of simply reprinting it, and hoped — but hoped in vain — for leisure and strength to revise it. It would, no doubt, have cost him more labour than the companion-volume of Lectures, which he issued in a conscientiously revised edition in 1893, for reasons which the reader who is unfamihar with the subject will see when he has finished this Intro- duction. And precisely for this reason I lament, as much as any young student, that it was not vouchsafed to the highly gifted author to revise his own work. And now that the publishers have determined on INTRODUCTION. re-issuing the book, and have requested me, as an old friend of the author, to undertake the editorship, I must ask the forbearance of the reader if the result should in any respect disappoint him. For it is no easy task to adapt a work first published in 1882 to the wants of the present generation of students.^ It was clearly out of my power to divine the changes which the author would have introduced into the text. In their original form, the Lectures are not only a monument of a stirring crisis in the Church to which he belonged, but a persuasive presentation of a view of the earlier prophets and their times, which may still be assimilated with great advantage by students. With a few trifling exceptions, there- fore, about which no well-informed editor could have the least doubt, the form of the Lectures remains unaltered. Nor have I either altered or added to the notes without some good reason. To a large extent the additions consist of references to recent works, including those masterly Burnett Lectures, the second edition of which, revised by the author, appeared in 1894. These additions are marked by square brackets. Lastly, as regards the present Introduction, two objects have been before me, — first, I have sought to give ' The reader may be glad to compare these Lectures with a vohime of excellent lectures (German) on the same subject, but more com- prehensive, by Prof. Comill (1894). INTRODUCTION. some idea of the present position of the criticism of the earlier prophets ; and, next, I have ventured to indi- cate some statements in these Lectures, which, thouo-h natural to the author in 1882, would scarcely have been re-published by him unaltered at the present time. I will now proceed at once to the former part of my duty. I would beg leave, at the outset, to caution the student against identifying the author too closely with the results which he sets forth. In reading these Lectures it is of great importance to remember the date at which they were composed, and the rest- lessly progressive inteUect of this brHliant and fearless scholar. It is surely most improbable that " one who was in the van of progress when Hexateuch criticism first began to be fully discussed in England would have been in the rear when the turn of the prophetic literature came."i In fact, these striking Lectures on the Prophets seem to me to bear somewhat the same relation to a potential but never written Intro- duction to the Study of the Prophets as that borne by the first edition of vol. l of Kuenen's Inquiry to the second. By the time that the name of Kuenen had become widely known in this country, that fair- ^ I venture to quote from my Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (p. xiii), because of the kindly and approving words which appeared in p. 412 (Notes to Lecture V.) of the first edition of this work, but which are in this edition not reproduced. INTRO D UCTION. minded scholar had abeady revised and largely re- constructed his criticism of the Hexateuch. In other words, from being a "moderate" he had become an " extreme " critic, according to what was the English theological standard during the seventies. Thanks, however, in no slight degree to Eobertson Smith, the position in Hexateuch criticism adopted by Kuenen (who, like Wellhausen, was one of his personal friends) came to be regarded by many Enghsh students first as possibly and then as probably right. In other words, in this particular case, "extreme" criticism became —I know not which term to prefer—" moderate " and " sound." If Eobertson Smith had Hved, and had possessed the requisite leisure for a thorough inquiry, I have no doubt that he would have as much surprised lay-readers by his revised views on the Prophets as Kuenen must have surprised them by his changed views on the Hexateuch. And yet it was impossible that either Kuenen or Eobertson Smith should really have changed. There is but one kind of criticism known to science— that which leaves no problem till it has been thoroughly examined, and which con- tinually advances to fresh tasks. There are some critics who have greater versatihty than others in adapting methods to problems ; some who have greater freedom from apologetic considerations than others; INTRODUCTION. some who have a keener sense of the development of language or of ideas, or a greater ability in forming a generally consistent historical picture than others ; that is all the difference between them. In other words, the antithesis between "moderate" and "ex- treme " criticism ought to give way to that between a more and a less complete and thorough criticism. Of a truly complete and thorough criticism, Kuenen, till his lamented death, was one of the leading representa- tives. And thoroughness is certainly the characteristic of Eobertson Smith's best critical work. But thoroughness is a relative term, and in 1882 it was not possible for any one to see as clearly as ten years later. The true pioneers of a corrected criti- cism of the Prophets are neither Kuenen nor Eobert- son Smith, but Wellhausen and Stade in their re- spective works on the history of the people of Israel, to which various valuable research-articles of Stade, and, since 1892, the Minor Prophets of Wellhausen have to be added. Of the latter work, it may safely be said that, with the exception of Duhm's Isaiah, and, some will add, Giesebrecht's Jeremiah} no book of equal importance for the critical study of the Prophets has been produced in Germany for many a ^ A book wMch, from its cautious application of the newer critical principles, will be specially useful in England. h INTRODUCTION. long year. Unfortunately, though the criticism shows increased thoroughness, the presentation of its grounds is not as complete as could be wished. The arguments are somewhat carelessly hinted, rather than set forth with the full cogency of which they are often capable. It is therefore highly desirable that earnest students should be pointed to such a careful work as Kuenen's Inquiry into the Origin and Collection of the Books of the Old Testament (1885-87). It cannot, of course, repre- sent the actual state of criticism in 1895, but there is no recent book which equally well initiates the reader into the processes of scientific criticism, the results which have been gained, and the problems which await a fuller solution. I speak of Kuenen's work as a whole, because, though it is the second volume which students of the Prophets primarily require, the remainder of the work will need to be from time to time consulted. WeU-considered and approximately final decisions on the non-prophetic writings cannot but have a certain weight in our discussion of prophetic problems. The charges of arbitrariness, and of treating as axiomatic conclusions, which are but rash forecasts, would not probably be hurled so often against the most progressive critics if the authors of these charges had passed through a more rigorous critical training themselves. INTRODUCTION. It is to Kuenen, then, that the student may reason- ably turn for preliminary critical hints ; and here is one hint which he gives on a subject of far-reaching importance. It is that we cannot presume that any pre-exilic prophetic writings have been handed down to us in their integrity. The exile was a literary as well as a political catastrophe, and the fragments of the early literature had to be pieced together or even re-cast by the literary skill of editors. Now, " between the exilic and the post-exHic period a deep cleft exists, and the study of the narrative books has shown us that, in spite of, or rather in consequence of, its respect for the past, Judaism devoted its attention to filling up this cleft by the editorial modification of the ancient records." i It stands to reason that the necessary supplementing of the ancient fragments must have been done in the spirit of the times of the editors, and we may therefore be sure that there will, in general, be sufficient evidence of the date of the inserted passages. Now and then, indeed, hesitation may be not unreasonable. The editors were earnest students of the fragmentary records of the past, and may be presumed to have possessed sometimes considerable literary and imitative talent. They may, to some extent, have caught an early * Kuenen, EinUitung, ii. 20 (§ 40). INTRODUCTION. style and manner, and the ideas which they express may be the legitimate developments of ideas of the original writers. Still, upon the fact of editorial manipulation there can be no doubt, and we ought to read the Prophets with this fact in full view.^ More especially should we be on our guard when we find warnings in an early Prophet which can only be understood as referring to the Babylonian exile, or ex- hortations which lose all their point unless explained from what we know of the spiritual history of the post-exilic community. It is upon this ground that I have ventured to say elsewhere that " we can no longer assume that a prophecy is Isaianic unless it contains something flagrantly opposed to this assumption (such as the mention of Cyrus or an Aramaic loan-word), but have simply to consider to what period the circumstances presupposed, the beliefs and ideas, and the literary phenomena (including rhythm) most naturally assign it." And I have urged that " this can be done much better now than at any previous time, owing to our fuller knowledge of the history of Old Testament literature and of Israelitish religion."^ We have, in fact, already re-constructed that history to such an ^ Cf. Cheyne, Prophecies of Isaiah,^ ■p'9- 228-231. ^ Introduction to tlie Book of Isaiah (1895), Prologue, p. xxi. INTRODUCTION, xv extent that when a passage of prophecy is before us we can, after a study of the three points referred to, by uniting in friendly conference, determine within certain limits the period to which the passage (if it be not altogther too short or too vague) belongs. IL It is now time to mention some of the results of this virtually new critical point of view which best deserve acceptance, and briefly to indicate their bearings. Those which relate to the Minor Prophets will almost all be found in the work of Wellhausen already referred to, which, in spite of its too great conciseness in argu- ment, is distinguished by caution and soundness of judgment (for other critics, see Kuenen, whose discus- sions are perfect models of fairness). In the Book of Amos the most important later insertions are («) the cognate doxologies in iv. 13 ; v. 8, 9 ; ix. 5 6 ; and (5) the appendix in ix. 11-15, to which ix. 8-10 must be added as the link between the threatenings pronounced upon Israel in ix. 1-4, 7, and the idealistic conclusion. Both on the ground of phraseology and on that of ideas these passages must be assigned to a late editor, who had the same conceptions of the divine nature, and the same notions of the age widely caUed Messianic, INTRODUCTION. as the later writers in general. His phraseological affinities are the closest to the Second Isaiah, to the Book of Job, and to the close of Joel. Among minor insertions may be mentioned (c) Am. i. 2, a most in- teresting passage, which, like ix. 13, has played a great part in the controversy as to the date of Joel ; ^ {d) ii. 4, 5, a cold, vague, and conventionally expressed passage which greatly weakens the effect of the splendid composition in which it is inserted, but is thoroughly intelligible as a post-exilic work ; (e) v. 26, of which no explanation can be given which suits the authorship of Amos (see p. 399 ff.) ; (/) viii. 11, 12, the language and ideas of which are alike unsuitable to the context (it is a gloss on "faint for thirst," ver. Vo)? Eobertson Smith's judgment upon some of these passages (ii. 4, 5, and the doxologies) was favourable to the authorship of Amos in 1882. But his argument (notes on Lecture III.) for retaining ii. 4, 5, seems to be beside the mark. No one supposes that Amos " excepted Judah from the universal ruin." Equally inconclusive is the same scholar's reasoning on the doxologies. Of ^ The case for the late date of this passage is so strong that one is surprised to find Wellhausen accepting it in 1892 without question. On some views which have been held as to the relation of Am. i. 2, to Joel iii. 16, see Kirkjiatrick, Doctrine of the Prophets (1892), and G. B. Gray's article in the Eximsitor, 1893, pp. 208-225. ^ With all his reluctance to admit later insertions, Konig frankly admits that there seems to be one here. INTRODUCTION. course, the ideas on Jehovah's lordship over nature, which we find in the Second Isaiah, are, in part, the development of germs in the earlier Prophets. And, though Kuenen also, in 1889, rejected (but not with absolute confidence) the insertion-theory in its earlier form, this only shows the characteristic cautiousness of this critic, and his as yet imperfect application of his new critical principles. In his section on the Book of Amos he speaks of the " possibility " of late insertions ; but, according to his principles, he should have said the "probability." Now, if there are late insertions any- where in Amos, the passages referred to must be among them. It remains for some later critic to work out the criticism of Amos and the other Minor Prophets in detail from this point of view, so far as it is applicable. Meantime, those who wish for a specimen of the highest prophetic idealism, and the most intense prophetic faith in divine righteousness, should read the Book of Amos, omitting these extremely doubtful passages. Amos will become one of the most wonder- ful figures in the Biblical portrait gallery. In the Book of Hosea we naturally expect to see numerous signs of later editing. The abruptness of style characteristic of chaps, iv.-xiv. made it easy for editors to work in fresh passages, and the imperfect and probably often scarcely legible state in which the INTRODUCTION. early records were transmitted may have made it sometimes necessary for them to piece together, and so inevitably to misrepresent, the scanty relics of Hosea. In the present work, the most probable late insertions can alone be referred to. The clearest of all are {a) i. 10-ii. 1 [ii. 1-3] ; {h) " and David their king," iii. 5 ; (c) viii. 14 ; and {d) xiv. 1-9 [2-10]. The first of these passages (a) interrupts the prophecy of judg- ment, which (apart from i. 7, on which see below) extends from i. 2 to ii. 15 (Heb. ii. 17). It implies that the Israelites are already in a foreign land, and gives an at any rate premature promise of an increase in their numbers and a restoration to Palestine. The mention of Judah is also very strange ; indeed, Judah is even placed before Israel. The phraseology, too, is peculiar, and the imagery in i. 10 [Heb. ii. 1] reminds us of two probably very late passages: Isa. x. 22; xlviii. 19. In the second (&), the combination of the worship of Jehovah, and of the ideal Davidic king, is not in the spirit of Hosea any more than the parallel statement in Jer. xxx. 9 is in that of Jeremiah.^ To believe that Hosea would refer to the ideal king at all is difficult, considering his attitude towards kingship ^ It is probable, however, that the insertion in Hos. iii. 5, though late, is of earlier date than Jer. xxx. 9 (see Giesebrecht on Jer.), just as Hos. i. 10 [ii- 1] is probably of earlier date than the two parallel passages in Isaiah (see my Introd. to Isaiah, p. 54). INTRODUCTION. altogether;! to believe that he would call this ideal king "David" is still more difficult (c/ Ezek. xxxiv. 23, 24; xxxvii. 24). The third passage (c) is not in the style of the preceding prophecy; indeed, it is identical with the second half of Am. ii. 5.2 The fourth id), which, from the tenderness of its spirit and the pictorial character of the style of vers. 5-8 is so de- servedly admired, is akin both in language and imagery and in ideas to writings of the age which begins with Jeremiah, and which, among later works, includes the Song of Songs. An allusion like that in ver. 3 a to Isa. XXX. 16 is quite compatible with this. A similar combination of promises on the part of Jehovah, and penitential prayers on that of " Ephraim," is given in Jer. xxxi. 10-20. The spirituality of the tone of vers. 1-3 is, indeed, surprising (contrast the picture in Hos, V. 6). The whole passage is certainly more attractive than the appendix to the Book of Amos. But, to understand Hosea aright, we must omit it. To have added anything to the stern warning in xiii. 16 would have robbed it of half its force. ^ It is noteworthy that Konig, who, in general, accepts any possible answer to critical objections, fully admits, even against Kuenen, that Hosea regarded the first establishment of regal government as "an aberration of Jehovah's people" {EinleitUTig, p. 310, § 61, 1). On Hosea's position, see Wellhausen's Prolegomena, E.T., p. 417 (with note). ^ Observe ia particular that ' ' his Maker " is a late phrase (see the evidence in my Inirod. to Isaiah, p. 93). On Am. ii. 5 see above. INTRODUCTION. Four other passages are hardly less clear, especially the first two, though the arguments are unavoidably less varied, and, in so far, to those who have not been prepared by a gradual initiation into the phenomena of the prophetic literature, less convincing. These are — {d) i. 7; {e) iv. 15 a\ (/) v. 15-vi. 4; {g) vi. 11-vii. 1 (parts). The first {a) is the only later insertion recognised by Kuenen in 1889. It appears to be an allusion to the tradition of the overthrow of Sennacherib given in Isa. xxxvii. 36, and celebrated in Psalms xlvi. and xlviii. The spirit is that of the Psalms (Ps. xx. 7 ; xxxiii. 7 ; xliv. 6 ; cxlvii. 10); see also the reference to horses as unsafe objects of trust, in the appendix to Hosea (xiv. 3 a), a parallelism already noticed in Lecture IV. The statement that Jehovah will have compassion on the house of Judah seems contradicted by v. 10, 12, 14 The second (c) is ascribed to the late editor of Hosea, on the ground of the weakness of the style ("let not Judah incur guilt"), and on that of the implied favourable opinion of Judah {cf. i. 7). The third (/) is certainly not without points of contact with the preceding and the following passages: — "I will tear and go away," says Jehovah in ver. 14 ; " I will go away " and " he hath torn " point back to this in v. 15 and vi. 1 respectively ; while, " after two days," in vi 2, may- possibly be an allusion to " shall abide many days " INTRODUCTION. in iii. 4. So, too, the writer prepares the way for the expressions " piety " (or '■'• kindness ") and " knowledge of God" in vi. 6 by introducing the same phrases in vi. 3 and vi. 4 respectively. But how imperfect is the connection produced! Looking first at the connection with the sequel, we notice that the perfects in vi. 5 are most naturally taken as historical. We have scarcely a right to translate with Guthe, " This being the case, I must hew them in pieces by the prophets;" the writer almost certainly means. Because of past acts of guilt (referred to in a lost passage) Jehovah, by prophets like Elijah and Elisha, announced his purpose of judgment. And turning next to the connection with the preceding paragraph, we are struck by its unnaturalness. In V. 14, we are told that Jehovah has torn Israel and Judah in pieces ; he is in terrible earnest. In v. 15, however, we hear that he still hopes that his people wiU acknowledge their guilt. This is in itself perhaps conceivable, but is it intelligible that such an earnest expression of faith and zeal as that in vi. 1-3 should have been introduced by Hosea only to be branded by him (in the name of Jehovah) as superficial ? To most open-minded readers there will appear to be something artificial in this; the writer fails to realise what was natural and possible in the times of Hosea. Taking INTRODUCTION. this passage in connection not only with xiv. 1-8 (9), but with vi. 11-vii. 1 {g), we cannot avoid pronouncing it a late insertion. The writer is really thinking, not of Hosea's times, but of his own. He intends a useful lesson to be drawn from it by his own generation — a lesson such as is suggested in a passage of one of the late didactic psalms (Ps. Ixxviii. 34-37). Perhaps, too, comparing xiv. 1-3, we may say that the writer attaches importance to the initiation of public acts of repentance by the religious authorities. In vi. 1-3, Israel takes the first step in its repentance, and is repelled. But in xiv. 1-3, the writer and teacher who (honestly) assumes the character of Hosea gives Israel notice when it is time to approach Jehovah with resolutions of amendment. ifj) The words, " When I turn back the captivity of my people, when I heal Israel," are evidently a comforting insertion, perhaps designed to define the sense of the "harvest" of Judah, which Hosea (if he wrote vi. 11 «) meant in an unfavourable sense. The phrase, " To tuin the captivity of . . ," is characteristically late. Hosea, like Amos, gains by this more thorough criticism. He becomes a stronger man than we fancied. He has, no doubt, hopes for Israel to which Amos was a stranger, but he is not quite so much a prey to moods as used to be thought ; he can acquiesce more readily in the acknowledged will of his God. INTROD UCTION. With regard to the Book of Micah, it is becoming more and more doubtful whether more than two or three fragments of the heterogeneous collection of fragments in chaps, iv.-vii, can have come from that prophet. In 1889 Kuenen, whose extreme caution in dealing with Amos and Hosea gives special weight to his decision, pronounced that vi.-vii. 6 was most probably written under Manasseh, and not by Micah, while vii. 7-20 (adopting Wellhausen's original view) belongs probably to the exile. As to chaps, iv. 6-v. 15, Kuenen maintained its composite origin, iv. 9-10 (except the words " and thou shalt go to Babylon " in iv. 10), V. 1-6, V. 7-9, and v. 10-15 (in its original form) being the work of Micah, the rest that of a later editor or editors. With regard to iv. 1-4, he considered vers. 1-4, and Isa. ii. 2-4, to be two independent copies of the same original, and that original to be the work of a prophet older than both Isaiah and Micah. Even in chaps. i.-iii., which he admitted to be, as a whole, Micah's work, he found one later insertion, viz., ii. 12, 13. With these conclusions Wellhausen in 1892 largely agrees. He thinks, however (following Giese- brecht), that the appendix is still more probably post- exilic ; the antithesis is not merely between Zion and Babylon, but between Zion and the entire heathen world, and it is not the exiles who are brought back INTRODUCTION. from Chaldsea in vii. 12, but the Jews of the Dispersion from the whole world. He declines to assign more than vi. 1-8 to the reign of Manasseh, and suspects that it may be rather older ; in either case, it may possibly, he thinks, be Micah's work. As to iv. 1-4 (5), he rejects the once favourite view that it is a very old prophecy, and agrees with Stade as to its late date. In iv. 6-v. 15 he is willing to ascribe iv. 9, 10 (except the reference to Babylon), iv. 14, and v. 10-14, to the time of Micah, but not with any dogmatic positiveness ; ^ indeed, iv. 9, 10, as a whole, may almost more pro- bably be later. Turning next with some curiosity to Konig (1893), one finds ^ that even this great church- critic admits that ii. 12, 13, is an editorial insertion. Characteristically enough, however, he pronounces an exilic or post-exilic date " unacceptable." It is certain, however, that, unless criticism is to take many retro- grade steps, the situation, the phraseology, and the ideas are not pre-exilic (c/. Stade in his Zeitschrift for 1881, p. 162 sec[.). Nor is Konig's reply to the criticisms of recent workers any more up to date. He thinks it enough to answer Stade's plausible observation that these chapters refer not to some definite nation or nations, but vaguely to " many peoples," by a reference (from Giesebrecht) to Isa. viii. 9; xxix. 7; Jer. iii. 17. > On Mic. iv. 10 see below, p. 430. ^ Einleihmg, p. 328 (§ 63, 1 j8). INTRODUCTION. But in iv. 10 he recognises a later insertion, only it is not to be exilic or post-exilic, but from the last years before the exile. On vi. 1-vii. 6 (7) he agrees with Kuenen and Ewald ; he also assigns, in agreement with Ewald, but not with Kuenen, vii. 8-20 to the same period of persecution, which so deeply needed a divine message of encouragement. To Professor Driver's remarks i on the analysis of Micah ii. iv.-v,, and vi.-vii., a detailed reply is unneces- sary. However fair from the point of view adopted in the Introduction, they will not satisfy students who have been trained in the not less cautious but (in the sense already defined) more thorough school of Kuenen, and who can therefore realise the broader point of view of Stade and Wellhausen. The remarks may, indeed, be chiefly intended to prevent students who are new to criticism from ascribing finality to any results as yet reached. The author is doubtless well aware of the provisionalness of recent criticism of the prophets, and may think that some of Stade's disciples are too loud in their praises of their master. For my own part, I only wish that I could hear these praises ; I can only hear from most English scholars what appears to me scarcely generous censure. ^ Introdtidion, pp. 307-313. INTRODUCTION. Professor Driver is, in fact, not very far from the point where our common friend Eobertson Smith was in 1882, The Micah-criticism of the latter scholar, though somewhat bolder than that of Driver, Konig, and Wildeboer to-day, is still strongly marked by pro- visionalness. Naturally enough ; for he wrote only one year after Stade's great pioneering article in his Zeitschrift} The next scholar who takes up Micah from Stade's point of view, and does not shrink from the labour of putting down all the data, will have a fine opportunity of distinguishing himself. Meantime, so far as I can see, Welihausen's con- clusions, though not in all points final, are better founded than the scantiness of his notes might some- times lead one to suppose. The bearings of these on the history of Israelitish religion are far from slight. The result of this recent criticism on Eobertson Smith's finely drawn sketch of the prophecy of Micah may, I fear, be disappointing. His own skilful pen could, no doubt, have mitigated this impression, for the later period of the history of Israel gains by ^ See also Robertson Smith's article ' ' Micah " in the Encyclopcedia Britannica (1883). My owti small book on Micah (1882) is open to the same objection ; the last edition (1895), however, is to some extent brought up to date. It is more surprising that Wildeboer, approaching the subject at a later stage of the critical movement, while accepting Stade's fundamental principle (the editorial activity of the Sopherim) should still have been so timid in applying this principle. See Die LUteratur des A.T., 1895, p. 154 seq. INTRODUCTION. Micah's apparent loss. The age of Hezekiah is de- prived of the two great Messianic prophecies in iv. 1-5 and v. 2-5,^ but these same prophecies help to give definiteness to the thoughts of a period which has been unduly depreciated. Eobertson Smith's capital argument against the view that Micah expected a total captivity of Judah needs but little modification, though we cannot now be sure that he, the peasant- prophet, gave as high a place to Zion in his pictures of the future as the author supposed. The fourth prophet, whose reputed works contribute material for these Lectures, is Isaiah — that is, the true Isaiah of Jerusalem, not the so-called " second," or, as Matthew Arnold called him, the Babylonian Isaiah. And here I would most sincerely urge the reader not to trouble himself with these pages till he has done justice to the views expressed by the author. For, though I will only lay stress on what appear to me to be the most probable of the results of recent criticism, yet the reader may at first be disappointed at their seemingly subversive character. Subversive, indeed, they are not, except in a good sense; but to readers who have not assimilated the virtually new ' On iv. 1-4 (5) see my Introduction to Isaiah, pp. 9-16; on v. 2-5 Micah (in Cambridge School and College Bible) ad loc. With Roorda I read Bcth-Ephratah (so independently Wellhauseu). In v. 2 there is an allusion to Isa. vii. 14. G INTRODUCTION. critical principles spoken of, and who are not quick at recombining fresh results into a new historical picture, they may for a time appear so. Moreover, I have myself a tender feeling towards old views which I held myself for so many years, and am not un- willing that young students should, at any rate for a time, hold them. If, however, the reader has something of the deep reverence for truth which the author himself possessed, then I earnestly advise him not to be deterred from passing beyond the Eobertson Smith of 1882. It is certain that such a student will gain more than he loses. The wisest scholars assure us that truth heals the wounds that she has herself caused ; and it appears to me at least that Isaiah becomes more intelligible and in some sense greater through the transference of some of his supposed utterances to unknown writers of a much later but not less important age. At this point the student may be advised to consult some conspectus of the passages most commonly re- ferred to in Isaiah ; he will find one ready to his hand in note 7 on the fifth of these Lectures. The use of this will be in summarising the critical tradition which has obtained some degree of fixity, but which now needs a careful testing. Through a long course of years 1 have myself endeavoured to pass this new INTRODUCTION. tradition through the crucible, with regard both to the true and to the " second " Isaiah. My intermediate results on the former were given in the Jewish Quar- terly Remcw for July 1892, and those on the latter in the same Keview for July and October 1891. These are superseded, however, by those given in an Introduc- tion to the Book of Isaiah (1895), an attempt at analytic criticism, to which is added an appendix containing the undoubted portions of the two chief prophetic writers in a translation. That this book, like that of Duhm, which appeared in 1892, will contribute to carry the criticism of Isaiah some steps further, the writer confidently hopes. It is at any rate thoroughgoing; and the writer's habit of constantly correcting his own results by those of fellow-workers (especially Duhm), will, he hopes, have preserved him from any flagrant blunder or gross improbability. It may be permissible to add here a sentence from the opening address to the reader : — " Alas that Eobertson Smith is not here to test, or assist the author in testing, the criticism of this volume ! He would not have done it hastily, for no one knew better than he the respect which is due to all patient and original work. . . . But he would certainly not have been more content with my work than with his own. tie would have given not merely INTRODUCTION. acute but fruitful suggestions, clearing up difficulties, and applying the comparative method in new direc- tions." Before proceeding further, it may be useful to in- dicate the passages which four able critics whose names sound well in England have felt obliged to withdraw from the traditional writings of Isaiah of Jerusalem. The critics selected are Ewald (1866), Kuenen (1889), Dillmann (1890), and Konig (1893). To have passed over Ewald would have been impos- sible, because, again and again, this great though not faultless scholar came to conclusions which were in advance of his times. Without him Stade, Well- hausen, and Duhm would not have reached their present positions ; and I, too, have towards him the loyalty of a disciple to a master. Kuenen, from his combined freedom and caution, and his liigh position as a critic even in England, could not be omitted. But he seems to have wanted more time to recast thoroughly his older views on Isaiah in the light of that newer criticism of which Stade has been the chief pioneer. His statement of principles is more satisfactory than his application of them. Dillmann, whose name is not less honoured than Kuenen's, is a critic of wide range, and his fairness in recognising elements of truth in the work of his INTRODUCTION. juniors deserves warm recognition. But, partly from the timidity of age, and partly perhaps from loyalty to Ewald, he could not as a rule see whither the data which he has amassed should lead him, and too rarely reached anything better than an unsatisfactory compromise. Konig is such a deep student of the facts of the Hebrew language that his critical conclusions possess a special interest, yet his criticism is disappointing even on the linguistic side. He attaches too much weight to certain grammatical phenomena which might con- ceivably be due to editors or scribes, and which first obtain a high degree of importance when confirmed by a large examination of words and phrases. Whenever critical grasp is required he fails us. How mechanical, for instance, is his treatment of Isaiah xxiii., the whole of which has to be late because the word Kasdim ("Chaldeans") occurs in ver. 13; whereas there are several indications in that verse that, at any rate as it now stands, it is not by the author of the preceding elegy. These are the questionable passages in the traditional writings of Isaiah of Jerusalem, with the names of the respective critics who deny them to that prophet : — (a)iv.5 &,6,Dillmann, (&)xi.lO-xii.6,Kuenen,Konig; xii., Ewald, Dillmann. (c) xix. 18, Konig ; xix. 18 h, DiUmann. {d) xxi. 11, 12, and 13, 14, Ewald, Dill- INTRODUCTION. mann (older prophecies adopted by Isaiah).^ (e) xxiii. 1-14, Ewald (the work of a younger contemporary and disciple of Isaiah),^ Konig; xxiii. 15-18, Ewald, Kuenen, Dillmann (a later appendix). (/) xxxii., xxxiii., Kuenen (probably pre-exilic), Konig (at any rate post-Isaianic), xxxiii., Ewald (the work of a disciple of Isaiah).^ Let us take these in order, (a) That vers. 5, 6 are post-exilic was shown long ago by Stade. The evidence for the late origin of ver. 5 a is as strong as that for the late date of ver. 6 ; ver. 5 h must be considered by itself and explained as a gloss.* But we cannot separate vers. 5 «^, 6 from vers. 2-4, even if, as a last resource, we rearrange vers. 2-4, as Stade has done with a boldness of which the author of these Lectures would hardly have approved. The ideas and ex- pressions of the whole passage are alike charac- teristically late, and suggest the only possible theory that Isaiah iv. 2-6, is a consolatory appendix such ' The new tradition accepts a similar view for ii. 2-4 and xv. 1-xvi. 12. " Dillmann prefers to suppose an Isaianic original, worked over by a later editor. ^ Dillmann admits only that the form belongs to a disciple ; the basis, however, is a prophecy of Isaiah. ■* The words explain the "creation" of the cloud over the temple. The "canopy" {huppah) is the bridal canopy; the worshipiiing com- munity is the bride, Jehovah is the bridegroom. Jehovah is also king, the temple-mount is his throne. The "glory" {cf. Isa. xxiv. 23, R.V., marg.) of the bridegi'oom and the bride needs this canopy of cloud. So Duhm. INTRODUCTION, xxxiii as the post-exilic editors loved to give^ to pre-exilic fragments, especially when these were of a threatening import. (6) Here, too, a post-exilic origin is certaia. The use of the phrase "the remnant of his people" for the exiles of Israel and Judah has been sufficiently shown by Giesebrecht^ to be a sure sign of lafce origin. Nor is it hard to recognise in vers. 10-16 the hopes and aspirations, and to some extent the phraseology, characteristic of post-exilic times. It is equally clear that the rhythmical poverty of xi. 9-16, and the weakness and conventionality of the bits of song in chapter xii. are inconsistent with the authorship of Isaiah. (c) Konig sees rightly that xix. 18 can only refer to Jewish colonies in Egypt, and refrains from the arbitrary supposition that Isaiah was supernaturally informed of the future establishment of such colonies. But he does not see how the late writer of ver. 18 can also have written vers. 19, 20. I trust that his difficulty has been removed in the recent Introduction to Isaiah, p. 106 seq. The objection that the passage must be early because of the mention of a sacred maggeba {i.e., pillar) is a familiar one {cf. note 5 on Lecture VIII.). If it could be sus- tained, it would only show that the passage was pre- ^ We have already found this in Amos, Hosea, and Micah, and again and again criticism finds parallels in Isaiah. ^ Beitrdge zur Jesaia-Kritik (1890), p. 38 seq. INTRODUCTION. Deuteronomic, not that it was Isaianic, But it cannot be said that the objection is a sound one. Our old mechanical division of the history of eultus into pre- and post-Deuteronomic has long since broken down. " The passage may be quite naturally referred to the period when there was a compromise between the prophets and the legalists; in short, it may quite well be post-Deuteronomic. For, though the letter of the law in Deuteronomy is violated, the spirit is not." ^ Nor must we confine our attention to the magqeba. An altar is also referred to, and one can hardly believe that Isaiah would have spoken of an altar thus respectfully 2 (see i. 11). It may have been possible in 1889 for Kuenen to accept vers. 16-25 as Isaianic,^ but the doubtfulness with which he speaks shows that the question has already passed into a new phase, and if the master had had time to apply his principles more consistently he would almost certainly have re-considered his older decision. The only field for debate, as it seems to me, is in xix. 1-14. That this passage is not earlier than the time of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal is now on historical grounds certain ; ^ Introduction to Isaiah, p. 101. 2 Note that Hosea couples "sacrifice and ma^^eba " with "ephod and teraphim" among the objects which the Israelites will have to dispense with in their exile (Hos. iii. 4). ^ Einleitung, ii. 68 f. INTRODUCTION. but the poverty and imitativeness of the style justify us in referring it to the post-exilic age, and by preference to the period between Cambyses and Xerxes. A still later period is excluded by the coldness of the tone.i (^) The view adopted from Ewald by Dillmann is historically untenable, nor does the language at all favour a period even as late as Isaiah. Historically, the earliest conceivable age is that of Assurbanipal, but the Aramaic colouring of the passages referred to points rather, at earliest, to the age of Nebuchadnezzar.^ (e) That chapter xxiii. as it now stands is post-exilic is beyond reasonable doubt. That vers. 1-14 and vers. IS- IS are from different hands is also at once clear. The only question is, whether there is sufficient reason to suppose an Isaianic basis. I have lately answered this in the affirmative.^ But it is rather against this view that it has the support of Dillmann, who seems to younger scholars to be too much inclined to pro- visional compromises. (/) That chapter xxxiii., in spite of some phraseological points of contact with Isaiah, is post-exilic, no longer admits of doubt.* Heartily as all reverent minds must desire to accept '^ Intr. Is., pp. 114-119. Winckler (1895} independently refers xix, 1-14 to the time of Esarliaddon {Gesch. Isr., i. 100), 2 Op. cit., p. 130 f. * Op. cit., pp. 139-144. * Op. cit., pp. 163-180. INTRODUCTION. the historical exposition of this chapter given in the eighth of these Lectures, the arguments against it seem overwhelmingly strong. The linguistic and phrase- ological evidence is here remarkably full. One indirect consequence of this is (as Dalman has not failed to notice) to cast great doubt on the pre-exilic origin of Psalms xlvi. and xlviii. With chapter xxxiii. we must couple xxxii. 9-20, which is also late both in language and in ideas. The only reasonable doubt is with regard to xxxii. 1-8, of which Duhm still claims the first five verses for Isaiah, without (as it seems to me) offering any valid reasons for his analysis. Of passages of Isaiah not questioned by the four critics mentioned above, but strongly doubted either by Duhm and by myself, or by one of us, I witl only mention (a) certain passages in x. 5-34, which appear to have been inserted by a late editor, partly to connect imperfect fragments of Isaiah, and partly to adapt the work as a whole to the eschatological requirements of post-exilic times ; ^ (6) xxix. 5, 7, 8, which appears to have been inserted late to mitigate the sternness of the woe pronounced on Jerusalem, which, the prophecies being regarded as having a post-exilic as well as a pre-exilic reference, depressed pious Jews in later ' Op. dt., pp. 48-67. INTRODUCTION. times ;i (c) xxix. 16-24, a passage apparently intended for quite a dijEferent class of persons from those ad- dressed in the preceding prophecy ;2 and {d) xxx. 18-26, a passage cognate with (&), on the happy consequences of Judah's regeneration.^ Except as to (&), Duhm and the present writer are agreed on these passages. A right decision on the matter is of the utmost importance for the due comprehension of Isaiah; but I must refer the reader to the detailed arguments in my Introduction. With regard to (b), I think myself, with Hackmann, that, on grounds both of style and of ideas, the passage is distinctly non- Isaianic. It seems most unlikely that the Prophet should have suggested two different interpretations of the name " Ariel," one of which would strongly tend to destroy the effect of the other. The doubted passage seems also inconsistent with the stern threats of judgment upon Jerusalem in chapters vi. and xxii. ; nor is it probable that Isaiah, like much later prophets, anticipated a day when a horde of nations should assemble to besiege Jerusalem. The question can only be argued profitably by those who have assimilated the principles of the school of Stade 1 Op. cit., pp. 188-190. ^ Robertson Smith's exposition of xxix. 16 (see p. 324) is hardly natural, but is unavoidable on the old view of the section. See Mr. Is., pp. 190-196. » Op. cit., pp. 197-199. INTRODUCTION. aud Wellhausen, and who, in considering the prophecies in the Book of Isaiah, ask themselves, not, Is there any reason why this or that prophecy should not be by Isaiah, but, What is the period in which, by historical or social situation, language, rhythm, and ideas, the com- position of the prophecy can most easily be understood ? The other critical questions which most call for discussion by scholars who are sound on first principles are those connected with ix. 2-7 (1-6) and xi. 1-9. Robertson Smith has already remarked that " the person of the Messiah has not that foremost place in Isaiah's theology which has often been supposed" (Lecture VII.) ; and the result of denying his author- ship, not only of xxxii. 1-8 (the poorest of the personal Messianic passages in Isaiah), but the justly admired prophecy of the " king with the four names " (G. A. Smith), and of the "shoot from the stock of Jesse," involves nothing less than the abandonment of Isaiah's claim to be a preacher of the Messiah, Human frailty would gladly clutch even at straws, and hope that this conclusion may be avoided. All the comfort that I can offer is that, though, so far as the contents are concerned, the composition of these two prophecies can most easily be understood in the post-exilic age, yet the phraseological data are not on the whole markedly inconsistent with the INTRODUCTION. xxxix authorship of Isaiah. Nor would I be understood to assert that Isaiah's imagination was at all times closed to idealistic pictures, but I think that he rigorously restrained his idealism ; and in the two most idealistic passages ^ which are certainly his (xiv. 32 ; xxviii. 16), it is not a future scion of the house of David, but Jehovah himself, upon whom his hopes for Jerusalem's future are based. Nor is there any mention of the ideal king in Isa. ii. 2-4, which Duhm (contrary to the general opinion of critics) claims for Isaiah, but which is, as Stade, Guthe, Hackmann, Winckler, Toy, and myself hold is, not only not Isaiah's, but undoubtedly post-exilic. Upon the late date of these fine passages, however, I lay no stress. Those who will may assign them (including ii. 2-4 and xxxii. 1-8) to Isaiah's old age, a period of which I cannot profess to know anything. But I do most earnestly protest against the gratuitous accusation that critics of the newer school under-rate the power of great creative personalities. I am sure that I, at least, have proved that I am well aware of the "Alpine peaks of personality" which "break the monotony of normal evolutional progress." ^ Such 1 Duhm, however, denies xiv. 28-32 to Isaiah. 2 Whitehouse, Review of Cheyue's Introduction to the Booh of Imiah in Critical Review, 1895 (July), p. 230. xl INTRODUCTION. charges ought not to be brought against men who have long since made the historical study of antiquity their life-work. The danger is, not that some theory of evolution should blind the eyes of mature his- torical students, but that the relics of a worn-out form of the belief in the supernatural should hinder even good scholars from assimilating and applying sound principles of criticism, and from forming a historically consistent picture of the development of religious thought and belief in Israel. To sum up. The present work is important, not so much as giving established facts, but as enabling us to see the classical prophetic age as it appeared to an eminent student and teacher in a somewhat earlier phase of study. Just as it is still useful to read vol. i. of Ewald's History, though, as a whole, it is now antiquated, so it is still abundantly worth while to read these Lectures, because of the truth which they so vividly present in the midst of in- evitable error, and because of the high moral earnest- ness and the educational talent of the author. The gulf between the ancients and ourselves will never be entirely filled up, and there is much which can be almost better learned from the books of an earlier generation. It is also undeniable that there are still respected scholars who occupy more or less INTRODUCTION. xU fully the same position as the author, though it may be questioned how long they will continue to do so. On these grounds, it is not unnatural that ordinary students should begin their critical course by adopting Eobertson Smith's position; and, provided that they keep their minds open, and try to realise (as I believe that our friend would have done) the newer point of view, I heartily commend this book to their use. In the preceding section, I have endeavoured, so far as space allowed, to show by examples the ad- vance which some of the hardest workers in this field believe themselves to have made since 1882, 111.1 It was one conspicuous excellence of Eobertson Smith that he was a " whole man," that there was no gulf between his critical and his theological views. In an age of transition, it is not surprising if students do not always see the theological modifications which necessarily follow from their critical theories on the Scriptures. This was not the case with the gifted scholar whom we have lost, and I venture to think that the theological reasoning on revelation in the present volume is both clearer and more effective ^ The student may here compare Nowack's little tract on the growth of Israelitish religion (1895). xlii INTRODUCTION. than most that has up to this time been offered by church-writers, both north and south of the Tweed. Hence, however, arises a new danger. The exposition of the author's theological views in these Lectures may possibly be regarded as a final utterance. Would Eobertson Smith in 1894 (the year of his lamented death) have desired this ? I greatly doubt it. In theology, as well as in criticism, he had great potentialities, and could as well have filled the office of a professor of theology as of the Semitic languages. That the fundamental ideas of his re- ligious thinking must have remained unaltered, I do not presume to doubt ; but in the working out of those ideas modifications may reasonably be antici- pated. Prof. Lindsay's sketch, so sympathetic and competent, of his friend's earlier teaching on the " doctrine of Scripture " ^ {Expositor, Nov. 1894) seems to me not to allow room enough for the process of theological expansion. The criticisms which these remarks introduce arc offered with the utmost diffidence. It is not perhaps very surprising if some expressions were used in 1882 which in 1895 may seem to require qualification, and if some inferential readings of history should ^ The present writer has offered a friendly criticism of some poiuLs in this article in the Expositor for Dcceiubcr ISOi. INTRODUCTION. xliii need modification in the light of recent criticism. liCt me say, at the outset, that Eobertson Smith's method of teaching, both critically and theologically, seems to me a sound one. " Instead of asking at the outset what the prophet has to teach us," he says, " I shall inquire what he desired to teach his own con- temporaries," and he adds that he hopes thus to " learn something of [the prophet's] place and function in the unity of the divine work of revelation " (p. 8). But a little further on we find expressions used here and there which might easily be taken to imply a view of religion inconsistent with that which the author so earnestly held, and the reader may be cautioned against such a misinterpretation. So keen a critic as Eobertson Smith would most likely have smoothed away these apparent inconsistencies. Passing on to the large Mosaic question, which Lectures like the present could not altogether pass over, it is surely more than probable that the author would have re-written the statements respect- ing Moses on pp. 32-36. Equally certain is it that he would have altered the passage on p. 40, which begins, " So in the Ten Words, the fundamental document of the religion of the Old Testament." It is a pity that we have no record of his later views of the Decalogue of Ex. XX. Its date, he told us in 1888, is " a matter d xliv INTRODUCTION. of minor importance for the historian." ^ The author's name, of course, does not matter ; indeed, was there an author? But surely the age matters. Kuenen and Wellhausen place the Decalogue of Ex. xx. in the time of Manasseh; it seems, at any rate, to be, in contra- distinction to the older Decalogue of Ex. xxxiv., a product of the prophetic school of thought. It is more than probable that Eobertson Smith would have materially altered this passage. All honour to him for the caution of his early statement ! What Church- man does not feel on this point the (in a certain sense) subversive character of later critical results ? But what careful student can fail, sooner or later, to pass to the side of the two critics mentioned? Here is, indeed, a test of critical consistency. Happily we are not asked to believe either in Moses or in the Decalogue. Truth in this case can have no great difficulty in healing the wounds she has inflicted ! It was, however, a boon to many of the hearers and readers of these Lectures to learn that " neither Moses nor Samuel gave Israel any new system of metaphysical theology." Before Eobertson Smith spoke out, liberal-minded students were still under the ^ English Historical Review, 1888, p. 352. That the writer's article "Decalogue," in the Encyclopcedia Britannica is relatively so very conservative is not surprising, considering its date (1877), and the cir- cumstances under wliich it was written. INTRODUCTION. xlv influence of Ewald, whose abstract reading of the " teaching " of Moses has been justly described by Dorner (an unprejudiced witness) as an unhistorical violation of the great principle of development. And whatever view be held as to questions of dogmatic theology, we still agree that " it was from the personal experience of Jehovah's character, read in the actual history of His dealings with His people, that the great teachers of Israel learned, but learned by slow degrees, to lay down general propositions about divine things " (p. 59). Unfortunately, the very next sentence suggests the misleading idea that those "general propositions" are what we are wont to call "doctrines," and the reference to Moses on p. 58 is very confusing. On p. 47 (Lect. II.) there is, doubtless by a mere slip, a relic of older critical views in the passage which begins, "The religion of Jehovah, which lost the best part of its original meaning . . . threatened to disappear . . . before it could succeed in adapting itself to the change from nomad to agricultural life." This part of the work may profitably be compared with the corresponding part of Wellhausen's History of Israel and Judah. There may be a doubt as to the right reconstruction of the period of Amos and Isaiah, There can at the present day be none among xlvi INTRODUCTION. competently taught students as to the outlines of the period covered in Lecture II. A few questionable statements, which would presumably have been reconsidered by the author, should not prevent us from recognising the progressive tone of the great teacher who addresses us. How suggestive are the pages on the prophet Elijah ! But would the author have retained, in a second edition, the statement (p. 83) that "the God whom he declared to Israel was the God of Moses " ? If the God of Moses was a national God (p. 37), the God of Elijah is supernational ; Elijah is the true predecessor of Amos, who can hold his head up even in the prospect of the ruin of his people. Israel may die, but Jehovah cannot. With Lecture III. we enter on a field largely affected by the criticism of the writings of the Prophets. As has been already remarked, the pictures here given of the life and work of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, will probably need considerable readjustment to later critical results. The result will, as I think, be a historical sketch in which progress or development is more clearly visible than in that which Robertson Smith tentatively gave in 1882, and such a sketch is one of the greatest desiderata of Biblical study. The modifica- tions will doubtless, if my forecast is correct, be the largest in the period dealt with in Lectures VII, INTRODUCTION. xlvii and VIII., because of the overwhelming importance of the criticism of Isaiah. I admit that Kobertson Smith's view in 1882 is what all lovers of the Old Testament would (if they could forget the claims of criticism) wish to be true, because it invests Isaiah and his ministry with a luminous splendour that warms the heart and lifts the imagination. But unless what seems altogether inconceivable should come to pass, and some great critic, with the help (as our conservative friends may suggest) of unexpected archaeological discoveries, should transform the whole aspect of the Isaianic question, proving that Ewald's and Eobertson Smith's partly intuitive reconstruc- tion of history is also in accordance with historical facts, I see no chance that the Ewaldian view of things will be maintained. I fear, too, that the history of Old Testament religious ideas will have to pass through far-reaching changes. I fear it, for I know that there is no pain equal to that of reconstructing even an outlying part of the theological fabric. Still we have no occasion to despond, much less to attempt to hinder critical progress. The author of these Lectures would earnestly assure us that candid and religious students will in course of time be thoroughly reconciled to such changes. It is for the republic of scholars, however, to decide these questions, in so far as they are concerned xlviii INTRODUCTION. with literary and historical criticism ; and I trust that these Lectures, so honestly thought out, and so admir- ably expressed, may induce many to qualify themselves to share, even if it be only on a humble scale, in the debates of this republic. T. K CHEYNE. Rochester, August 26, 1895. *^* The alterations that have been made in the Text of these Lectures occvir on pp. 121, 153, 179, 253, 254, 279, 280, 281, 317, 322. In the Notes some trifling deletions have been silently made ; additions and alterations have been indicated by square brackets. PREFACE. The Lectures contained in this volume were delivered last winter to large popular audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow, at the invitation of an influential com- mittee of gentlemen interested in the progress of Biblical study. The Lectures were to some extent planned as a sequel to a course delivered in the same cities in the previous winter, and published last year under the title of The Old Testament in the Jewish Church. The primary design of that course was to expound, in a manner intelligible to persons unacquainted with Hebrew, the problems and methods of modern criticism of the Old Testament, and so to enable the laymen of Scotland to follow with intelligence the controversy then occupying the Courts of the Free Church as to the right of criticism to assert itself within the Churches of the Westminster Confession. So far as the Church Courts are concerned, that controversy has for the present been abruptly terminated, by what may fairly be called an act of violence, and without a legal decision being obtained 1 PREFACE. from the General Assembly of the Church on questions which certainly cannot be permanently disposed of until they have been exhaustively considered in their relation to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches on the one hand, and to the laws of scientific inquiry and the evi- dence of historical fact upon the other. Ecclesiastical leaders have always been prone to flatter themselves that questions of truth and Christian liberty can be set at rest by an exertion of authority ; but those who love truth for its own sake caimot acquiesce in this easy method ; and not in Scotland alone, but in all Protestant Churches of English tongue, it is becoming yearly more manifest that thoughtful and earnest students of the Bible will continue to examine the history of revelation for themselves, and will not rest satisfied with conclu- sions that do not commend themselves to the scientific as well as to the religious consciousness. For the popularisation of science in all its branches, which is so characteristic of our age, has accustomed men to examine the foundations of current beliefs, and to acquiesce in no results that have been reached or are defended by methods which science condemns. Histori- cal science in particular has made vast strides ; in every part of history traditional ideas have been upset, and old facts have been set in a new light. Even schoolbooks are no longer content to transcribe ancient sources, but seek PREFACE. li to interpret them on scientific and critical principles. The records of our religion are historical documents, and they claim the same treatment which has been so fruitfully applied to the other sources of ancient history. They claim it all the more because th€ supreme religious significance of this history gives it an interest to which no other part of ancient history can pretend. In point of fact the Bible has not been neglected in the general progress of historical study. A vast amount of genuine work has been done in this field, and, though much still remains for future research, many new results of the highest importance have been reached on which scholars are practically agreed. But unhappily the fruits of modern Biblical study are still very little accessible to the general reader. Many of them are only to be found in learned books, encumbered with technicalities and written in foreign languages, or, if translated, translated into that peculiar jargon which only translators venture to call English. And in general the best results of modern research must be sought in so great a variety of books, and are often expressed in so controversial a form, that it is difficult for the ordinary reader to follow them and combine them into an intel- ligible whole. It is far easier for the English reader to gain a just view of the present state of inquiry in Greek or Eoman history and literature than to learn lii PREFACE. what modern scholarship has done for the history and literature of the Hebrews. And yet it is manifestly absurd to think that the very best use of the Bible can be made by those who read it for the nourishment of their religious life, so long as the history of the revela- tion which it contains is imperfectly understood. In the interests of religion, as well as of sound knowledge, it is of the highest importance that everything which scholarship has to tell about the Old and New Testa- ments should be plainly and fully set before the intel- ligent Bible reader. The timidity which shrinks from this frankness, lest the untrained student may make a wrong use of the knowledge put into his hands, is wholly out of place in Protestant Churches, and in modern society, which refuses to admit the legitimacy of esoteric teaching. The Lectures now laid before the public are designed as a contribution to the popularisation of modern Biblical science. They cover but a small part of the Old Testament field, and they purposely avoid the tone of theological controversy. There are, indeed, many questions relating to the prophets and their work on which controversial feeling is stUl keen ; but the most hotly discussed of these lie in great part outside the period, closing with the end of the eighth century B.C., which the present volume deals with ; and where this PREFACE. liii is not the case I have sought to keep my discussion as close as possible to the historical facts, without raising dogmatic issues, which for the most part have really very little to do with the proper function of the his- torical interpreter. It is impossible to deal frankly with any Biblical problem without saying many things which may challenge opposition ; but where the pur- pose is to give real help to Bible students, and not to advance the interests of a theological party, the contro- versial method should always be avoided, for the ques- tions of modern controversy are generally derived from mediaeval rather than Biblical thought. The period with which this volume deals is that of the earliest prophetic literature, and therefore presents the prophetic ideas in their least complex form. Some readers may be surprised at the very small amount of developed theology which these ideas contain; the elements of prophetic religion in the eighth century before Christ are marvellously simple in comparison with the range of conceptions with which the modern theologian is accustomed to operate, and which are often traced back to the earliest Old Testament times. It must, however, be remembered that the theological thought of the Hebrews underwent a great development after the time of Isaiah; the principles of the oldest prophecy are germinal principles, which unfolded them- liv PREFACE. selves gradually and led to results whicli, though now familiar to every one, were not contemplated by the earlier teachers of Israel. It would have been easy to pause from time to time and point out the line of development connecting the truths of the earliest pro- phetic reKgion with New Testament doctrine; but to do so within the space of a single volume would have unduly straitened the exposition of what the first prophets actually taught, and were understood to mean by their contemporaries. If occasion offers I hope to be able at a future time to continue the history through the subsequent stages of prophetic teaching ; but to mix all stages together and read later views of truth into the earlier teaching is not likely to produce anything but confusion. There is a religious as well as an his- torical gain in learning to read every part of the Bible in its original and natural sense. Much unneces- sary exacerbation of dogmatic controversy would be avoided if theologians were always alive to the fact ' that the supreme truths of religion were first promul- gated and first became a living power in forms that are far simpler than the simplest system of modern dogma. The habit of reading more into the utterances of the prophets than they actually contain is partly due to dogmatic prepossessions, but partly to a lack of historical criticism. The notion which has proved most ( PREFACE. Iv fatal even in modern times to a right understanding of the prophets is the notion of the later Jews that all the prophets are interpreters of the Pentateuch, which either as a whole or at least in its most essential parts is sup- posed to be older than the oldest prophetical books. This opinion has only of late years been radically sub- verted by the demonstration — for such I venture to call it — that the Priestly Legislation did not exist before the Exile. I know that this conclusion of criticism is not universally received among scholars, but it makes way daily, and at least it can no longer be disputed that the ideas of the prophets do not presuppose those of the priestly parts of the Pentateuch. So much will be ad- mitted even by scholars like Noldeke, who do not accept the whole results of that construction of the history of the Pentateuch which is generally associated with the name of Graf, and has been mainly worked out and established in detail by Kuenen in Holland and Well- hausen in Germany. That I accept the leading critical conclusions of the newer school of criticism will be evident to the reader of this volume; my reasons for doing so are already before the public. But I trust that it will be found that what I have to say with regard to the progress of the prophetic teaching is not dependent on any evidence or argument that lies outside of the prophetical books themselves, and the indisputable Ivi PREFACE. facts of contemporary history. It is indeed from the study of the prophets that some of the strongest argu- ments for the late date of the Priestly Legislation are derived ; and, though I deem it right to advertise the reader of the critical views which underlie my exposi- tion, I trust that it will not be found that these views have been allowed to give undue bias to my treatment of historical facts. At the same time it is to be observed that recent advances in Pentateuch criticism have thrown a vast amount of light on the development of prophetic thought, especially by clearing away false assumptions that hampered historical exposition. The foundation of a truly historical view of the prophets was laid by Ewald, and what has been effected since his time has mainly been due to the new historical matter derived from the Assyrian monuments, and to the influence of the school of Graf. The first to attempt a connected liistory of the religion of Israel on the premisses of the newer criticism was Professor Kuenen, the value of whose writings is admitted by candid inquirers of every school. His Godsdienst, however, does not go very fully into the main questions that occupy this volume, and his work on the Prophets is so essentially a con- troversial essay that I have seldom found occasion to use it for my present purpose. I have derived more PREFACE. Ivii assistance from Duhm's Theologie der Propheten — a work always stimulating and interesting if often too fine- drawn and doctrinaire — but especially from the writings of my friend Professor Wellhausen. The first volume of Wellhausen's Geschichte, and the very remarkable article IsKAEL in the new edition of the Encydopcedia Britannica, contain most important contributions to prophetic theology, my obligations to which I am the more anxious to acknowledge because other features in the writings of this scholar have received too exclusive attention from his critics. Taken as a whole, the writings of Wellhausen are the most notable contri- bution to the historical study of the Old Testament since the great works of Ewald, and almost every part of the present Lectures owes something to them. I shall not attempt to signalise in detail my obliga- tions to other scholars subsequent to Ewald; the material for this volume is largely derived from aca- demical lectures written during a long course of years, and a great amount of re-reading, which I did not care to undertake, would have been necessary in order to furnish the present Lectures with full references to all the authors to whom I am indebted. The references incorporated in the Notes have a more limited object, being mainly designed to guide students who may use my book as an introduction to the subiect to call Iviii PREFACE. attention to works that are indispensable or might easily be overlooked, and to indicate where full discussions may be found on questions that I am obliged to treat perfunctorily. Besides such references the notes con- tain a good deal of illustrative matter of a somewhat miscellaneous kind, including some things specially designed to make the book more useful to academical students and a few observations which may, I hope, be of interest to fellow- workers in Biblical science. I have only to add that the Lectures, as now printed, are considerably expanded from the form in which they were originally delivered. W. ROBERTSON SMITH. Edinburgh, 3(? A])ril 1882. LECTUEE T. ISKAEL AND JEHOVAH. The revelation recorded in the Bible is a jewel wliich God has given to us in a setting of human history. The love of God to His people now is the continuation of the love which He showed to our fathers; and Chris- tianity, like all else that is of value in the spiritual possessions of mankind, is an inheritance the worth and permanence of which have been tried by the experience of generations. Such treasures are not won without effort and battle. What is appropriated easily is as easily lost, and the abiding possessions of humanity consist of truths that have been learned by laborious experiences, relations that have been knit and strength- ened by long habit, and institutions that have been shaped and polished by the friction of practical use. A religion fit to be a part of actual life cannot be exempt from this law, and revelation itseK has become a force in human conduct only by first becoming a factor in human history. It was not enough that God should declare His will and love to man. The declaration required to be incorporated with the daily lessons of 2 THE LA WS OF NA TURE lect. i. ordinary life, to be woven into the personal experience of humanity, to become part of the atmosphere of moral and intellectual influences which surrounds every man's existence, of which he is often as little conscious as of the air he breathes, but without which spiritual life would be just as impossible as physical life is under an exhausted receiver. It is often remarked upon as a strange thing that Jesus was born so late into the world, that Christianity has been permitted to spread through slow and imper- fect agencies from so narrow a centre as Judoea, and that the divine wisdom deemed it fitting to prepare the way for the world-wide rehgion of Jesus by that long series of rudimentary revelations, addressed to a single nation, of which the Hebrew Scriptures form the record. The slowness of the moral process by which God's will for our salvation realises itself on earth, the incomplete establishment of the moral kingdom of God in the midst even of professing Christians, and the fact that for long ages the power of revealing love seemed to pass by the greater mass of mankind altogether, and to deal very tardily and partially even with the chosen nation of Israel, appear hard to reconcile with the sovereignty of the divine purpose and the omnipotence of the divine working. It would serve no good purpose to deny that there is a difficulty in understanding these things, but the difficulty lies less in the facts to be explained than in the limited point of view from which finite creatures contemplate the work of an infinite and eternal being. AND OF GRACE. That the eternal and infinite God has anything to do either in the way of nature or of grace with the finite world of time is a mystery which we cannot hope to comprehend ; but in itself it is not more surprising that revelation follows the laws of historical progress than that a law of continuity runs through the succession of physical phenomena. The difference between nature and grace is not that nature follows fixed laws and that grace breaks through them ; there are laws in the moral world as well as in the material cosmos, and the sove- reignty of revealing grace does not lie in the arbitrary quality of the acts in which it is manifested, but in its dominion over the moral order of things to which the physical order is subservient. In revelation God enters into personal relations with man; but these personal relations would not be spiritually valuable unless they were constituted, maintained, and perfected by the same methods as the personal relations of a man to his fellows. According to the doctrine of the Old Testament the whole work of revelation and salvation rests on the fact that man was created in the image of God, and so is capable of entering into intelligent moral relationship with his heavenly father. But even in the sphere of ordinary human life the filial relation is one that has a gradual growth. The mere physical fact of parentage is but a small element in the meaning of the words father and son ; the greater part of what these words involve, as used between a loving father and son, lies in the relation of affection and reverence, wiiich is not of VIE W OF THE mere physical origin, but grows up with the growth and training of the child. Thus the analogies which the Bible itself presents as our guides in understanding the work of divine grace lead us to expect that revelation must have a history, conformed to the laws of human nature, and limited by the universal rule that every permanent spiritual and moral relation must grow up by slow degrees, and obey a principle of internal development. The older theology was not sufficiently attentive to this truth. It had indeed learned from the parables of the Gospel that the growth of the kingdom of God is similar to the development of a great tree from a small seed ; but it did not fully realise that this analogy not only affirms the contrast between the small beginnings and ultimate world-wide scope of the kingdom of grace, but teaches us to look on the growth as subject to an organic law similar to the physical law of development in a living germ. The very idea of law as applied to the course of history has been clearly grasped and fruit- fully worked out only in recent times, and therefore it is not surprising that even those theological schools which made a serious effort to understand the suc- cessive stages of God's saving dealings with man did not get much beyond the notion of a mechanical series of covenants or dispensations.-^ And in parti- cular almost all speculation on this topic, down to quite a recent date, fell into the cardinal mistake of nver-cstimatiu'f the knowledge of divine thiiiijs OLDER THEOLOGY. given to the earliest recipients of revelation. The fact that the work of salvation is one from first to last, that Christ is the centre of all revelation and the head of all redeemed humanity, led to the idea that from the first the faith of the Old Testament behevers looked to a personal Messiah as distinctly if not as clearly as the faith of the New Testament Church. This assumption involved the study of the old dispensation in extraordinary diflSculties, The Old Testament contains no explicit declaration in plain words of the cardinal New Testament truths about Christ, and it was therefore necessary to suppose that the men of the Old Covenant possessed, in addition to the written Word, certain traditional conceptions about the coming Saviour, which gave them a key to the symbolism of the sacred ordinances, and enabled them to draw a meaning from the language of the Prophets and the Psalms which does not lie on the surface of the words of Scripture.^ This theory arose naturally enough in the ancient Church, which held that a similar state of things continued under the Christian dispensation, and that the help of ecclesiastical tradition was still necessary to understand the mysteries which formed tlie really valuable teaching of the New Testament as well as of the Old. But when the Protestant Church broke with the doctrine of ecclesiastical tradition, and sent every man to Scripture to edify himself by the plain sense of the holy oracles, it was a strange incon- sistency to continue the figment of a hidden sense and METHOD OF lect. i. a traditional interpretation as applied to tlie old dispen- sation. Far from reading in the words of the prophets a profounder sense that lay beneath the surface, the Hebrews, as their history abundantly proves, could hardly be taught to accept the simple and literal lessons inculcated upon them line by line, and enforced by providential discipline as well as by spoken words. It is plain that the very elements of spiritual faith were still but half learned by a nation that made continual relapses into crass and immoral polytheism, and the elementary character of much of the prophetic teaching is not to be explained as vailing a hidden sense, but simply by the fact that the most elementary teaching was still not superfluous in the spiritual childhood of the people of God. This is the true state of the case, and perhaps the chief reason why people are still unwilling to admit that it is so is a fear that, by stripping the prophecies of their supposed mysteriousness, we shall destroy their interest and value for the Christian dispensation. Such a fear is altogether groundless. It would be absurd to expect to find in the Old Testament truth that is not in the New. The real use of the record of the earliest stages of revelation is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and prac- tical worth of the perfect scheme of divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth. A mechan- ism is studied by taking it to pieces, an organism LECT. I. THESE LECTURES. 7 must be studied by watching its development from the simplicity of the germ to the final complexity of the finished structure. Or, to put the thing under a more familiar analogy, the best way to understand the full- grown man is to watch his growth from childhood up- wards, and the childhood of the Church shows us in simple and elementary expression the same principles which are still active in the full manhood of the Christian dispensation. It would be easy to illustrate this argument by additional analogies, but it will be more profitably elucidated in the actual study of the prophets and their work, to which we are to proceed during the hours we spend together. In these Lectures I propose to adopt the simplest and most straightforward historical treat- ment. I shall take up the prophetic writings in the order of their date, and look at them in connection with what is known of the prophet and his times, just as one does with any other ancient book. Instead of asking at the outset what the prophet has to teach us, I shall inquire what he desired to teach his own contem- poraries to whom his message was directly addressed. In this way we shall get at the plain meaning of his' words, and what is still more important, we shall learn something of his place and function in the unity of the divine work of revelation. We shaU see the principles of revealing and redeeming grace shaping themselves from age to age in living contact with the life and needs of successive generations, and thus I hope we shall OBJECTIONS OF attain a more reasoned assurance of the consistency and supernatural wisdom of God's saving dealings in all ages, while at the same time the study of each divine word as it first came home to the immediate necessities of the people of God will make it easier for us to apply the same word to the support of our own spiritual life. The details of this practical application of course belong to the preacher or to the devotional reader, and not to the expositor of the Old Testament history. On the province of the preacher I do not propose to trench, but I hope that we shall be able to reach the point of view, and appreciate the methods and principles, from which the study of the prophecies can be proiitably under- taken with the design of personal edification. There is, however, one question of a general nature to which it may be well to devote a few words before we enter on this course of historical inquiry. The justification of the general conception of the method of revelation which I have just indicated must ulti- mately lie in the proof that it is consistent with historical facts. The doctrine of an organic develop- ment in the plan of revelation and redemption, analogous to the gradual education of a son by his father, can be established or refuted only by inquiring whether the analogy is justified by the actual course of liistory in the pre-Christian childhood of the people of God. But the whole conception of a progressive reve- lation worked out in special dealings of God with the people of Israel is often represented by modern thinkers THE MODERN SCHOOL. as involving something inconsistent with the univer- sality of the divine purpose. There is a large and thoughtful school of modern theologians, fully possessed with the idea of a divine education of mankind, and ready to do sincere homage to the teaching of Christ, which yet refuses to believe that God's dealings with Israel in the times before Christ can be distinguished under the specific name of revelation from His provi- dential guidance of other nations. They contend, and so far they are undoubtedly right, that God prepared all nations, and not the Jews alone, for the reception of the truth as it is in Jesus ; but they also maintain that there was no specific difference between the growth of divine truth in Israel and the growth of truth among other nations. The prophets who were the organs of God's teaching in Israel appear to them to stand on the same liae with the other great teachers of mankind, who were also searchers after truth, and received it as a gift from God. In one point of view this departure from the usual doctrine of Christians is perhaps less fundamental than it seems at first sight to be. For, as a matter of fact, it is not and cannot be denied that the prophets found for themselves and their nation a knowledge of God, and not a mere speculative knowledge, but a practical fellow- ship of faith with Him, wliich the seekers after truth among the Gentiles never attained to. This, at least, is sufficiently proved by the fact that the light which went forth in Christ Jesus to lighten the Gentiles did proceed 10 MEANING OF lect. i. from the midst of the Old Testament people. But behind this there appears to lie a substantial and prac- tical difference of view between the common faith of the Churches and the views of the modern school of which I speak. The difference is generally expressed by saying that the modern theologians deny the super- natural ; but I do not think that this phrase expresses the real gist of the point at issue. The practical point in all controversy as to the distinctive character of the revelation of God to Israel regards the place of Scrip- ture as the permanent rule of faith and the sufficient and unfailing guide in all our religious life. When we say that God dealt with Israel in the way of special revelation, and crowned His dealings by personally manifesting all His grace and truth in Christ Jesus the incarnate Word, we mean that the Bible contains within itself a perfect picture of God's gracious relations with man, and that we have no need to go outside of the Bible history to learn anything of God and His saving will towards us, — that the whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness is set before us in the record of God's dealings with Israel culminating in the mani- festation of Jesus Christ. There can be no question that Jesus Himself held this view, and we cannot depart from it without making Him an imperfect teacher and an imperfect saviour. Yet history has not taught us that there is anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. We still stand in the nineteenth century where He stood in the first; or LECT. I. SPECIAL REVELATION. 11 rather He stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme Head of the fellowship of all true religion. It is a bold thing, therefore, to affirm that we have any need to seek a wider historical foundation for our faith than sufficed Him whose disciples we are. And I apprehend that the apparent difficulty of the supposition that the whole course of revelation transacted itself in the narrow circle of a single nation is not so great as it appears at first sight. For it is not necessary to suppose that God gave no true knowledge of Himself to seekers after truth among the Gentiles. The New Testament affirms, on the contrary, that the nations were never left without some manifestation of that which may be known of God (Eom. i. 19 ; Acts xvii. 27) ; and the thinkers of the early Church gave shape to this truth in the doctrine of the \6jo<; airepfjiaTLKO'; — the seed of the Divine Word scattered through all mankind. But, while all right thoughts of God in every nation come from God Himself, it is plain that a personal knowledge of God and His will — and without personal knowledge there can be no true religion — involves a personal dealing of God with men. Such personal dealing again necessarily implies a special dealing with chosen individuals. To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to mysticism. In point of fact, it is not true in the case of any man that what he beUeves and knows of God has 12 THE POSITIVE ELEMENT lect. t. come to him directly through the voice of nature and conscience. All true knowledge of God is verified by personal experience, but it is not exclusively derived from such experience. There is a positive element in all religion, an element which we have learned from those who w^ent before us. If what is so learned is true we must ultimately come back to a point in history when it was new truth, acquired as all new truth is by some particular man or circle of men, who, as they did not learn it from their predecessors, must have got it by personal revelation from God Himself. To deny that Christianity can ultimately be traced back to such acts of revelation, taking place at a definite time in a definite circle, involves in the last resort a denial that there is any true religion at all, or that religion is anything more than a vague subjective feeling. If religion is more than this, the true knowledge of God and His saving will must in the first instance have grown up in a definite part of the earth, and in connection with the history of a limited section of mankind. For if revelation were not to be altogether futile it was necessary that each new communication of God should build on those which had gone before, and therefore that it should be made within that society which had already appropriated the sum of previous revelations. Some true knowledge of God might exist outside of this society, but at all events there must have been a society of men possessed of the whole series of divine teachings in a consecutive and adequate form. And under the conditions of ancient IN RELIGION. 13 life this society could not be other than a nation, for there was then no free communication and interchange of ideas such as now exists between remote parts of the c^lobe. Until the Greek and Eoman empires broke up the old barriers of nationality, the intellectual and moral life of each ancient people moved in its own channel, receiving only slight contributions from those outside. There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in the idea that the true religion was originally developed in national form within the people of Israel ; nay, this limitation corresponds to the historical conditions of the problem. But at length a time came when the message of revela- tion was fully set forth in Christ. The coming of Christ coincided under divine providence with the breaking down of national barriers and the establish- ment of a cosmopolitan system of politics and culture under the first Eoman emperors, and so Christianity was able to leave the narrow field of Old Testament develop- ment and become a religion not for one nation but for all mankind.^ It would seem, then, that the distinctive character claimed by the Biblical revelation, and expressed in the creed of the Churches by the doctrine that the Bible is the supreme and sufficient rule of faith and life, ulti- mately resolves itself into something which is quite capable of verification. It wiE not be denied that the knowledge of God reached by Gentile nations was frag- mentary and imperfect, that there was no soEd and continuous progress in spiritual things under any heathen 14 QUESTION OF system, but that the noblest religions outside of Christi- anity gradually decayed and lost whatever moral powei they once possessed. If the religion of the Bible can be shown to have run a different course, — if it can be shown that in it truth once attained was never lost and never thrust aside so as to lose its influence, but that in spite of all impediments the knowledge of God given to Israel moved steadily forward till at last it emancipated itself from national restrictions, and, without chanoin" its consistency or denying its former liistory, merged in the perfect religion of Christ, which still satisfies the deepest spiritual needs of mankind, — then, I apprehend, the distinctive claims of the Bible and the religion of the Bible are set upon a broad and safe basis, and the reve- lation of the Old and New Testament may fairly claim to be the revelation of God to men in a special and absolute sense. It is not necessary to encumber the argument by comparing the way in which individual divine communications were given to Israel with the way in which the highest thinkers of other nations came to grasp something of spiritual truth. The mode of God's communication to man is a matter of detail ; the essential advantage claimed by the religion of the Bible does not lie in details, but in the consistent unity of scheme that runs through its whole historical develop- ment, and gives to each part of the development a share in the unique character that belongs to it as a whole. To thoughtful minds it has always been a matter of THE SUPERNATURAL. 15 supreme interest to realise what proof of the truth and sufficiency of the Christian religion can be adduced apart from the internal impress of genuineness which it produces on the believing mind. The external evidences of religion have been very variously set forth, and per- haps no one statement of them has ever been quite satisfactory. In recent times the whole question has assumed a new and startling aspect, through the attacks chat have been made on the old favourite evidence from miracle. Instead of accepting the miracles as a proof of Christianity, a large number of men, who are neither unthoughtful nor irreverent, have come to regard the miraculous narratives of the Bible record as a chief difficulty in the way of its acceptance. It is felt that the reality of these miracles is the very thing in the teaching of Scripture which it is most difficult to prove ; and, so long as no deeper evidence can be offered of the truth of the Christian rehgion than is given by the old argument that it is attested by miracle, the objection is ready that this, far from being a distinctive peculiarity of one religion, is a prerogative to which all religions lay claim. Indeed, most of the arguments which make men unwilling to allow to the Bible the character of the record of a special revelation resolve themselves into objections to the idea that the narratives of a supernatural character which the Bible contains are different from the miraculous narratives found in other ancient histories. And in like manner it is contended that it is impossible to prove that the truths preached 16 QUESTION OF by the prophets came to them in any other way than the truths proclaimed by Gentile teachers. I am not prepared to deny that these objections may be put in a form which has great force against many current apologetical arguments, but they do not go to the root of the matter. There is an external evi- dence of the truth of the Biblical revelation which lies behind the question of the supernatural as it is usually stated, an evidence which lies, not in the miraculous circumstances of this or that particular act of revelation, but in the intrinsic character of the scheme of revela- tion as a whole. It is a general law of human history that truth is consistent, progressive, and imperishable, while every falsehood is self - contradictory, and ulti- mately falls to pieces. A religion which has endured every possible trial, which has outlived every vicissitude of human fortunes, and has never failed to re-assert its power unbroken in the collapse of its old environments, which has pursued a consistent and victorious course through the lapse of eventful centuries, declares itself by irresistible evidence to be a thing of reality and power. If the religion of Israel and of Christ answers these tests, the miraculous circumstances of its pro- mulgation need not be used as the first proof of its truth, but must rather be regarded as the inseparable accompaniments of a revelation which bears the histori- cal stamp of reality. Occupying tliis vantage-ground, tlie defenders of revelation need no longer be afraid to allow free discussion of the details of its history. They LECT. I. THE SUPERNATURAL. 17 are not bound to start, as modern apologists too often do, with preconceived notions as to the kind of acts by which God made His presence and teaching known in Bible ages — they can afford to meet every candid inquirer on the fair field of history, and to form their judgment on the actual course of revelation by the ordinary methods of historical investigation. It is on these lines that I ask you to join me in the inquiry on which we are about to enter, — not in a spirit of controversy, or with preconceived notions as to what must be the course and manner of a true revelation, but with a candid resolution to examine the documents of the Old Testament religion, and see whether they actually possess that evidence of consistent, progressive, and indestructible truth which entitles them to be re- ceived as embodying a scheme of Divine teaching. In a brief course of lectures our attention must necessarily be confined to one corner of this great subject, to a brief period of the history of Revelation and a very small part of the Old Testament documents. But the period and the books with which we shall be occupied are, in many respects, the most important that the Old Testa- ment student has to deal with. They are very little understood by ordinary Bible readers, and yet they form the key to all the chief problems of Old Testament study, and without understanding them no one can hope to make real progress in the knowledge of the Old Testament as a whole. The work of the prophets of the Assyrian and Babylonian periods falls in the most critical stage of th« 18 THE PERIOD lect. r. history of the religion of Israel, — when, humanly speak- ing, it seemed far from improbable that that religion would sink to the level of common Semitic heathenism, and perish, like the religions of other Semitic peoples, with the political fall of the nation that professed it. It was the work of the prophets that averted such a catastrophe, drawing forth with ever- increasing clear- ness the elements of moral and spiritual truth which were well-nigh lost in the corruptions of the popular worship, holding up a conception of Jehovah's holy purpose and saving love to Israel in which even the utter ruin of the Hebrew state appeared as part of a gracious plan, and so maintaining the faith of Jehovah unbroken and victorious when every other part of the inheritance of Israel was swept away by the ruthless tide of Assyrian and Chaldi^ean conquest. Nowhere in the Old Testament history is the victory of true religion over the world, its power to rise superior to all human vicissitudes and bestow a hope and peace which the world cannot take away, so clearly manifested as in this great achievement of the prophetic word. In the long struggle with the empires of the East the Word of Jehovah was tried as gold in the furnace, and its be- haviour under this crucial test is the best demonstration of its incorruptible purity and enduring worth. But there is another reason which gives this part of the history of the Old Covenant a central importance to the Biblical student. The Assyrian and Babylonian period is the age of written prophecy, the only age in which LECT. I. OF THE PROPHETS. 19 the whole movements of Israel's spiritual life can be closely studied in the writings of the very men who directed them. The period between Amos and the return is the golden age of Old Testament literature, which stands before us in contemporary records more clearly and fully than any other considerable period of Hebrew history. And for this period, too, we now poss'ess in the Assyrian inscriptions a most valuable mass of contemporary illustration from the records of the foreign nation with which Israel's history was most closely involved, — a new source of light which, by a singular and admirable providence, has been put at our command at the very moment when the progress of Biblical study has concentrated the prime attention of all scholars on the prophets and their times.* And now I trust that enough has been said to justify the choice of our subject, to give at least an initial con- ception of its importance, and to define the point of view from which I design to consider it. Let us turn without further preface to the matter in hand, and begin by assuring ourselves in a rapid historical survey that we possess a sufficiently clear conception of the field in which the prophets laboured, and the political and religious condition of the people to whom they spoke. We have already had occasion to note that the con- ception of a personal revelation of God to man, which underlies the scheme of Biblical religion in both Testa- ments, implies that God approaches man in the first 20 JEHOVAH LECT. i. instance in the way of special dealing with chosen individuals. According to the Old Testament prophets, the circle chosen for this purpose is the nation of Israel, the only nation, as Amos expresses it, among all the families of the earth which Jehovah knows in a personal way (Amos iii. 2). To the prophets, then, the nation of Israel is the community of the true religion. But it is important to observe how this is put. Amos does not say that Israel knows Jehovah, but that Jehovah knows or personally recognises Israel, and no other nation. The same idea is expressed by Hosea in figures drawn from domestic life. Israel is Jehovah's spouse (chaps, i. to iii.), or His son (chap. xi. 1). Thus the basis of the prophetic religion is the conception of a unique relation between Jehovah and Israel, not, be it observed, indi- vidual Israelites, but Israel as a national unity. The whole Old Testament religion deals with the relations between two parties — Jehovah on the one hand, and the nation of Israel on the other. Simple as this con- ception is, it requires an effort of attention to fix it in our minds. We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in wliicli a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit, — in which we have to deal, not with the faith and obedience of individual persons, but with the faith and obedience of a nation as expressed in the func- tions of national life. We shall have frequent oppor- tunity as we proceed to familiarise ourselves with this LECT. I. AND ISRAEL. 21 fundamental Old Testament conception in its practical aspects. For the present it may suffice to illustrate it by a single example. In the New Testament dispensa- tion every believer is regarded as a son of God. Under the Old Covenant it is the nation of Israel that is Jehovah's son. There are two questions, then, which lie at the root of all study of the prophetic teaching — Who is Israel ? and who is Jehovah ? The history of the ancient world, so far as it exists for us, was transacted within a narrow strip of the earth's surface, running eastward from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so as to include the lands easily accessible from the Mediterranean waters and the countries of Southern Asia as far as India and China, but excluding the great mass of Africa and the northern parts of Europe and Asia. Even this small world was again cut in two by the great mountains and deserts that divide Eastern and Western Asia, and the far East which lay beyond these boundaries was practically an isolated part of the globe. The geography of the Bible, as contained in the tenth chapter of Genesis, extends from Tarshish in the West — the Spanish settlements of the Phoenicians in the region of Cadiz — to the Eastern lands of Persia and Media lying between the Caspian and the Persian Gulf. And here again we have a further limitation to make. The nations of Europe had not yet begun to play an inde- pendent part in the drama of universal history. To the Hebrews the lands that gird the Northern and Western Mediterranean were known as the Isles or rather Coasts 22 GEOGRAPHY OF lect. i. of the Sea — a vague designation, derived, no doubt, from the Phoenician mariners who skirted their shores without penetrating into the interior. Thus, at the epoch with which we are concerned, the main movements of Western civilisation lay between the mountains of Media and the Libyan desert, the shores of the Levant and the Persian Gulf. In the eastern and western quarters of the region so defined lie two great alluvial countries, fertilised by mighty rivers, and producing the means of life in such abundance that they not only sustained a teeming population, but suppKed their inhabitants with that superfluity of natural wealth which is the first condition for the growth of material civilisation. Egypt on the Nile, Babylonia and Assyria in the Euphrates and Tigris valleys, were marked out by nature as the seats of populous cities and great empires, strong enough to defy or subdue their neighbours, and rich enough to cultivate the arts of life. The bridge between these two great civihsations vv^as the land which we call Syria, extending from the Euphrates to the Egyptian frontier, from the Mediterranean to the deserts of Northern Arabia. Syria, as well as the huge peninsula of Arabia, which bounded it on the south-east, and which in its northern parts was habitable only by nomads, was occupied by branches of the great family which we call Semitic. In language, and presumably also in race, the Semites of Syria and Arabia were closely related to the main stem of the Assyrians and Babylonians. They had also many kinsmen in the THE OLD TESTAMENT. 23 Delta of Egypt, but the Egyptian civilisation acknow- ledged no brotherhood with them, and held itself aloof from its Eastern neighbours (Gen. xliii. 32). The natural features of Syria were not favourable to the growth of a great and united nation fit to meet on equal terms with the empires on each side of it. For a time, indeed, a powerful people, called Hittites in the Bible, but better known from the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, where they appear as Khita and Khatti, occupied the part of Syria between the Orontes and the Euphrates, and from their capital of Carchemish (Jirb^s on the Euphrates) seem to have extended their influence far into Asia Minor.^ But the prime of the Hittite monarchy was earlier than the period with which we are immediately concerned, perhaps indeed earlier than the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan. It is possible that they were not of Semitic stock, and they hardly come witliin the sphere of the Biblical history. Apart from this mysterious people, the inhabitants of Syria (I still use the word in the ordinary English sense, including Palestine) were broken up into a multitude of small nations, as was natural from the deserts and mountains that divided the land. By their language these nations can be arranged in two groups, according as they spoke Aramaic or dialects belonging to the Hebrew stock. In the English Bible Aramaic is called Syriac (2 Kings xviii. 26 ; Dan. ii. 4 ; Ezra iv. 7), and when Syria or Syrians are mentioned we are not to think of modern Syiia, but of the land and people of 24 THE ARAM^ANS. lect. i. Aramaic tongue. The Aramaeans of the Bible were partly settled in Mesopotamia, partly west of the Euphrates as far as Damascus and the borders of Canaan. They formed a number of small states, of which Damascus was from the time of Solomon the most im- portant, at least in relation to Israel, exercising the hegemony over a considerable district to the north-west of Canaan. Between the Aramaeans and Egypt, again, we find a number of small nations speaking a language distinct from Aramaic, in several dialects sufficiently close to one another to be mutually intelligible, — Canaanites, Philistines, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and finally Israelites, all gathered in the narrow isthmus of habit- able land between the Mediterranean and the Desert, which, from Damascus and Hermon southwards, forms the only passage between the two great seats of civilisa- tion and empire on the Euphrates and the Nile. The whole habitable area of this isthmus, which on the south is separated from Egypt by a tract of desert, is very small. It may be roughly compared in length and breadth with Northern England from the Humber to the Scottish border, but even this measurement includes great tracts either wholly desert, or, like the wilderness of Judsea, capable of supporting only a scanty popula- tion of herdsmen. Erom north to south it is split up the centre by the great natural depression of the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea, the surface of the latter lying a quarter of a mile below the Mediterranean. To the LECT. I. ■ PALESTINE. 25 east of this valley, or rather trough, lies a tableland gradually merging into wild desert ; to the west are the mountains of Palestine, intersected by fertile valleys, which in the north are wide and numerous, and slope westward in long glades towards the Mediterranean, while further south the maritime plain is wider, but the mountains are stony and sterile, and the valleys often narrow defiles, till at length the cultivable land passes into bare steppe, and finally into absolute desert. Even in its geographical features this narrow region has a singular interest. It is almost an epitome of the ancient world, where the ocean and the desert, the pas- tures of the wilderness and the terraced vineyards of sunny hills, the cedars, fir-trees, and rhododendrons of Lebanon, the cornfields of Jezreel and the oak-clad glades of Tabor, the shores of the Lake of Galilee bright with shrubbery of oleander, the hot cane brakes and palm groves of Jericho, represent in brief compass almost every variety of material condition which enters into the development of Eastern antiquity. But a more important influence on the history of Palestine lay in the fact that it was the bridge between the East and the West. Before the opening up of the Eed Sea and the Indian Ocean as a water-way, all the through traffic of the world necessarily crossed it, or passed along the edge of the adjoining deserts. And, in close connection with this, the cities of the Phoenician coast became the central emporia of the world. It was Phoenician sailors who opened up the Western waters, extending their 26 THE PHCENICIANS lect. i, voyages as far as the tin mines of Cornwall, and tapping the trade of inland Europe by their stations on the Gulf of Lyons, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Eussia. How Tyre was the very centre of the world's commerce, drawing riches on all sides from the furthest lands, we still read in Ezekiel xxvii. The Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, who held so important a place in the ancient world, were only one branch of the so-called Canaanites or Amorites (the two names are practically interchangeable),^ who at the earliest date for wliich we have precise information not only occupied Palestine west of the Jordan, but had extensive eastern settlements in Bashan and Gilead. Their language, which was nearly the same as the Hebrew of the Bible, marked them off alike from the Aramaeans who lay to the north and from the Arabs of the southern and eastern desert. They were an agri- cultural and trading people, with walled towns and considerable material civilisation, but politically weak from their division into a multitude of petty states, each with its own kinglet or aristocratic senate, and morally corrupted by a licentious religion, in which drunken carousals and the grossest sexual excesses were practised in honour of the gods. These gods, which were wor- shipped under a multitude of local forms, had a twofold type — male and female. The male god of any com- munity was its Ba'al (lord or owner) ; the correspond- ing female deity was 'Ashtoreth, The one was often identified with the sun, the other with the moon. In LECT. I. AND THEIR RELIGION. 27 general terms it may be said that the Canaanites looked on their deities as productive powers — givers of life, fertility, and increase. Just as physical life is divided into two sexes, they thought that the divine productive power was male and female ; and, assigning to this sexual analogy a great and literal prominence in all the observ- ances of worship, their religion easily ran into sensu- ality, and lent its countenance to every form of immo- rality, if only performed at the sanctuary and the sacred feasts. Instead of affording a sanction to sobriety and domestic purity, the exercises of Canaanite religion gave the rein to the animal nature, and so took the form of Dionysiac orgies of the grossest type. Through the Phcenicians the practices of Canaanite worship were carried across the sea and introduced to the Western nations, and wherever they came they formed an element of pollution, a blacker spot even in the darkness of heathenism. The situation of Palestine naturally exposed it to invasion from different sides. The early campaigns of the Egyptians in this quarter do not concern our pre- sent purpose, and the western movements of Babylonia and Assyria were later than the Canaanite period. But apart from these, the Aramaeans from the north, the Arabs from the south and east, were constantly pressing on the land. The relation of the Northern Arabs to Palestine has been much the same in all ages. Their hordes make periodical descents on the cultivated land, which are easily repelled by a good and strong govern- 28 THE HEBRE W NA TIONS. ment, but prove successful when the settl A inhabitants are weakened by division and misrule. So, in ancient times, the Midianites, Amalekites, and other tribes overran the land from time to time. The Amalekites seem at one time to have ranged freely as far as the mountains of Ephraim ; and the population of the east, but especially of the south, in the wilderness or steppe of Judsea, contained an important Arab element in Biblical times. Indeed the large population of Judah, which gave that tribe such a preponderance in the time of David, was due, as can still be proved from the Biblical genealogies, to a fusion between the pure Judseans and other families of nomad origin.''' More lasting in their results were the migrations of a group of small nations which came from the direction of Aram, and acknowledged kindred to one another. They were four in number — Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Israel. The Ammonites and Moabites settled to the east of the Dead Sea, on the verge of the great desert, taking the place of the aboriginal Zam- zummim and Emim (Deut. ii. 10, 20), but not iuterfer- ing with the Canaanites proper. The Edomites found a seat to the south of the Dead Sea, where they con- quered or absorbed the early troglodyte inhabitants (Horim). They were a wilder, less settled race than their northern cousins, and appear to have approached much more closely to the Arabic type. Their land, as it is described in Gen. xxvii. 39, was " far from the fat places of the earth and from the dew of heaven aJjove." LECT. I. ISRAEL. 29 They lived by their sword — that is, by robbery — and the importance of their position lay in the fact that the caravan routes from Arabia and the Eed Sea to Gaza and the other mercantile towns of the coast passed through their territory.^ The fourth nation, Israel, found no fixed abode, and, crossing the southern desert, dwelt for a time on the borders of Egypt, where they continued to live a pastoral nomadic life, and, though acknowledging a certain dependence on the Pharaohs, never came into close contact with Egyptian culture.^ Their most intimate relations at tliis time were with Arab tribes, and, when the Egyptians oppressed them and tried to break them to forced labour on public works, it was among the Arabian Kenites that Moses, the leader of Israel's flight, found help and counsel.^*^ Once more crossing the desert, the tribes of Israel appeared after long wanderings on the eastern frontier of Pales- tine. It was only by the sword that they could win a place of rest ; but, respecting their cousins in Edom, Moab, and Amnion, they fell on the Amorites, east of the Jordan, and, after occupying their seats, crossed the river and established themselves in Western Palestine, not by one sustained and united effort, but by a multi- tude of local campaigns, in which each tribe generally fought for its own hand.^^ A war of emigrants for the possession of territory is always bloody, and this war was no exception to the rule. Whole communities of Canaanites were exterminated in the long struggle, for the Israelites, as weU as their foes, were fighting for 30 THE AGE OF lect. i. existence, and the " ban " by which a hostile commu- nity was devoted to utter destruction was an institu- tion of Semitic warfare which the Israelites had in common with the kindred nations — for example, with Moab.^^ But the Canaanites were not exterminated. On the Phoenician coast their force was unbroken, and many strong places even in the centre of the land remained unsubdued till the time of the Davidic king- dom. Such were the mountain fastness of Jerusalem, long esteemed impregnable, and a whole series of walled cities on the edge of the fertile plain of Jezreel, where, in fact, after the first tide of victory was stayed, the tribe of Issachar sank into the condition of a tributary (Gen. xlix. 15). The struggle lasted for generations before all the Israelites found a fixed abode ; the Danites, for example, are still found ranging the land as an armed horde in the days of the grandson of Moses (Judges xviii.), when they at last found a settlement at the base of Mount Hermon. In tlie days of Deborah and Barak the Canaanites were near re-establishing their mastery at least over Northern Palestine, and the tribes of Israel were too little at one to make common front against them. But, on the whole, Israel maintained its superiority, and the large Canaanite population which stiU survived in all parts of the land was gradually re- duced to vassalship. To a certain extent the two nation- alities began to fuse and form intermarriages, as was not difficult, since both spoke one language. Once at least we find an attempt to form a mixed Hebrew and Canaanite LECT. I. THE JUDGES. 31 state, for Shechem, which was then a Canaanite city with a Canaanite aristocracy of the Bn§ Hamor family, was the centre of the short-lived kingdom of Abimelech, who himself apparently was a Canaanite on the mother's side. Though the adventurer Abimelech failed to esta- blish a dynasty, the temporary success of the experi- ment shows how far the original antagonism of race had been softened, and the condemnation pronounced by the moral sense of the Hebrews on the slaughter of the tributary Gibeonites by Saul proves that the Israelite aristocracy and their Canaanite subjects began to feel themselves united by the bonds of common humanity. And so, in the age of the Judges, it might readily appear that this mvasion was to run the same course as so many other incursions from the desert into a land of higher civilisation, and that the conquerors would gradually become assimilated to the conquered, from whom the Hebrew nomads on their first introduction to settled life and agricultural pursuits had everything to learn. At the close of the period of the Judges the greater part of the Israelites had quite lost their pastoral habits. They were an agricultural people living in cities and villages, and their oldest civil laws are framed for this kind of life. All the new arts which this com- plete change of habit implies they must have derived from the Canaanites, and as they learned the ways of agricultural life they could hardly fail to acquire many of the characteristics of their teachers. To make the transformation complete only one thing was lacking — 32 JEHOVAH, THE lect. i. that Israel should also accept the religion of the abori- gines. The history and the prophets alike testify that to a great extent they actually did this. Canaanite sanctuaries became Hebrew holy places, and the vile- ness of Canaanite nature-worship polluted the Hebrew festivals. For a time it seemed that Jehovah, the ancestral God of Israel, who brought their fathers up out of the house of bondage and gave them their goodly land, would be forgotten or transformed into a Canaanite Baal. If this change had been completed Israel would have left no name in the world's history; but Providence had other things in store for the people of Jehovah, Henceforth the real significance of Israel's fortunes lies in the preservation and development of the national faith, and the history of the tribes of Jacob is rightly set forth in the Bible as the history of that divine dis- cipline by which Jehovah maintained a people for Himself amidst the seductions ot Canaanite worship and the ever-new backslidings of Israel. To understand who Jehovah was, and what He was to Israel, we must return to the deliverance of the Hebrew tribes from Egyptian bondage, to which later ages looked back as the birth of the nation. In the land of Goshen the Hebrews had not even a vestige of national organisation. The tribes into which they were divided acknowledged a common ancestry, but had no institutions expressive of the unity of race ; and, when Moses called them to a united effort for liberty, the only practical starting-point for liis work was an appeal LECT. I. GOD OF ISRAEL. 33 to the name of Jehovah, the God of their fathers. It is not easy to say how far the remembrance of this God was a living power among the Hebrews. The Semitic nomads have many superstitions, but little religion. The sublime solitudes of the desert are well fitteji to nourish lofty thoughts about God, but the actual life of a wan- dering shepherd people is not favourable to the formation of such fixed habits of worship as are indispensable to make religion a prominent factor in everyday life. It would seem that the memory of the God of the Hebrew fathers was Kttle more than a dormant tradi- tion when Moses began his work; and among the Israelites, as among the Arabs of the desert, whatever there was of habitual rehgious practice was probably connected with tribal or family superstitions, such as the use of teraphim, a kind of household idols wJiich long continued to keep their place in Hebrew homes. The very name of Jehovah (or lahwfe, as the word should rather be pronounced) became known as a name of power only through Moses and the great deliverance. At any rate it would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the traditional faith in an ancestral God, round which Moses rallied his brethren, included any developed metaphysical conceptions such as we associate with the idea of a spiritual God. Not the nature of the Deity, but His power and will to help His people were the points practical to the oppressed Hebrews. A living God, according to a conception never fully superseded in the Old Testament, must 34 MOUNT SINAI. lect. l have a kingly seat on eartli where He showed Himself to men, and this seat, it would seem, an ancient tradi- tion placed on Mount Sinai, which still appears in the Song of Deborah as the place from which the divine majesty goes forth in thunderstorm and rain to bring victory to Israel. It would be a profitless task to attempt to analyse this conception, and seek a symbolic meaning in the poetic language in which it is clothed. The Israelites thought in poetic figures, and we must take their thoughts as they themselves present them. The storm that broke on the mountains of Sinai and rolled across the desert in fertilising showers made the godhead of Jehovah real to them; the thunder was His voice of majesty, the voice of the same God who wrought the great deliverance at the Eed Sea, and beyond this they did not care to go. The new message that Moses brought to his brethren was not an abstract revelation of Jehovah's spiritual attributes, but an assurance of His personal interest in Israel, and a pro- mise of effectual help. The promise was fulfilled in a marvellous display of Jehovah's saving strength ; and, when the proud waters rolled between the Hebrews and the shattered power of the Egyptians, Israel felt that it was a nation, the nation of Jehovah. I have explained in a former course of lectures ^^ that the ordinances of the Pentateuch, in which tradition has accustomed us to seek the forms under which the great idea of Israel, the people of Jehovah, was organised during the wilderness wanderings, are reaUy of very LECT. I. THE PENTATEUCH. 35 various dates, and that the law of Israel did not take final shape till after the Babylonian captivity. The Pen- tateuch as we now have it is not the immediate record of the institutions of Moses, but the last codification of the divine teaching begun by Moses, and carried on and perfected through many centuries by the discipline of history and the word of the prophets who took up Moses' work. The sacred writers of the Old Testament were so deeply convinced of the unity and consistency of all Jehovah's teaching that they did not attempt to leave an historical record of its several stages. In every age their one concern was to set forth a clear testimony to the whole truth of God as they themselves knew it. It did not seem important to them to dis- tinguish the very words of Moses from the equally authoritative additions of later organs of revelation. Thus it is difficult for us to determine with precision how far Moses in person carried the work of giving to Israel divine ordinances fitted to express the new- born consciousness that Israel was the nation of Jehovah. We may be sure, however, that his work was carried out on practical lines. The ordinary judges of the people were still the elders, or, as an Arab would call them, the sheikhs of the several tribes and sub-tribes ; and this fact implies that Moses did not cancel the old customary laws which already existed as the basis of tribal justice.^* But the new circumstances of Israel, and, above all, the new sense of national unity, which was no longer a mere sentiment of common ancestry, 36 lAHWE gEBAOTHj lect. i. created a multitude of new questions. On these Moses had to decide, and he sought the decision from Jehovah, whose ark now led the march of Israel. It is only on the march and in time of war that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organisation, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial, and means " God (El) fighteth," and Jehovah in the Old Testament is laliwt ^ebdoth, the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realised ; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace, and the sanctuary of Jehovah, where Moses and the priests, his successors, gave forth the sacred oracle, was the final seat of judgment in all cases too hard for the ordinary heads of the Hebrew clans. It must, however, be observed that the idea of executive government as we understand it is quite unknown to the inhabitants of the desert. The business of a judge, among the Hebrews as among the Arabs, was to declare the law when consulted, not to enforce it, or even to offer a decision that was not asked. This principle held good alike in criminal and civil cases, and the foundation of what we caU criminal law was the right of self-help on the principle of exact retalia- tion.^^ Thus Israel entered Canaan without any de- veloped system of national government. As the tribes LECT. I. JEHOVAH OF HOSTS. 37 moved off from the central camp where the ark stood, and won themselves dwelling-places in different quarters of the land, often separated by districts which the Canaanites still held, their feelings of national unity- ceased to find any regular expression, the Hebrew federation became weaker and weaker, and there was no central authority to enforce the duties of political and religious unity. Now, it followed from the circumstances of the Exodus that these two unities necessarily went together, Jehovah was essentially the God of the whole nation, not of individual families ; every act of worship to Jehovah, every approach to the sacred judgment-seat at the sanctuary, was an expression of national feeling, which lost the best part of its meaning when the Israelite forgot the bonds of national unity that had been knit at the Eed Sea and in the wilderness. But, in fact, the Mosaic sanctuary soon lost much of its central importance. It was fixed on the first entrance into Canaan at the headquarters of the armed force of Israel, originally at Gilgal, afterwards at Shiloh, in the land occupied by the strongest and most martial of the Hebrew clans, the great tribe of Ephraim. The disper- sion and isolation of the tribes, therefore, brought it about that Shiloh became the local sanctuary of Ephraim, and was not regularly visited by the more distant tribes. This, indeed, did not imply that the other tribes ceased to do sacrifice to Jehovah, whose altars of earth or un- hewn stone were seen in all corners of the land, while 38 JEHOVAH AND THE lect. i. in many places a priesthood claiming kinship with Moses administered the sacred oracle as his successors. But such local worship necessarily came into contact with the Canaanite service of Baal ; and, apart from the fact that the luxurious festivals of the latter had a natural attraction for the sensuous Semitic nature of the Hebrews, there was a more innocent motive which tended to assimilate the two worships. The offerings and festivals of Jehovah were acts of homage in which the people consecrated to Him the good things of His bestowing. These were no longer the scanty products of pastoral life, but the rich gifts of a land of corn and wine, which the Canaanites had taught the Hebrews to cultivate. Thus the religious feasts necessarily assumed a new and more luxurious character, and, rejoicing before Jehovah in the enjoyment of the good things of Canaan, the Israelites naturally imitated the agricultural feasts which the Canaanites celebrated before Baal. It is not, therefore surprising that we find many indications of a gradual fusion between the two worships ; that many of the great Hebrew sanctuaries are demonstrably identi- cal with Canaanite holy places ; that the autumn feast, usually known as the Feast of Tabernacles, has a close parallel in the Canaanite Vintage Feast ; that Canaanite immorality tainted the worship of Jehovah ; and that at length Jehovah Himself, who was addressed by His wor- shippers by the same general appellation of Baal or Lord which was the ordinary title of the Canaanite nature-god, was hardly distinguished by the masses who LECT. I. GODS OF CANAAN. 39 « worshipped at the local shrines from the local Baalim of their Canaanite neighbours.-^^ The growth of this religious syncretism not only threatened to sap the moral strength of the Hebrews, but boded entire extinction to the national feeling which had no other centre than the reKgion of Jehovah. And so in the providence of God it was by a series of im- perious calls to united national effort that Israel was prevented from wholly forgetting Jehovah. Every in- vasion which woke the dormant feehng of patriotism woke at the same time something of the old faith. There was no patriotic fire in the religion of the Baalim, which had not even stimulated the Canaanites to united struggle against their Hebrew conquerors. In battle and in victory Jehovah was still the ancestral God, shaking the earth and dissolving the mountains as He marched from the desert of Seir to deliver His people (Judges v.). Hence it is that in the time of the Judges every revival of the religion of Jehovah is connected with the wars in which the Hebrews succeeded in main- taining their ground against numerous invading foes. It is plain, however, that the religion of Jehovah could not always stand still at the point which it had reached in the wilderness. It was not enough to have one religion for times of patriotic exaltation, and another for daily life. A God who dwelt afar off in Sinai and only came down to Canaan in the day of battle was not sufficient for human needs. It was necessary that the old religion should become master of the new and altogether 40 JEHOVAH AND THE lect. i. changed life of the Hebrews in their new seats. Jehovah and the Baalim had to contend for sovereignty in the ordinary existence of the Hebrews, when the simplicity of the desert had inevitably given way to the progress of material civilisation in a rich and cultivated land. And here we must ask what was the essential dififer- ence between Jehovah and the Baalim, which had to be preserved amidst all changes of circumstances if Jehovah was still to maintain His individuality ? In the first place, as we have seen, Jehovah represented a principle of national unity, while the worship of the Baalim was split into a multitude of local cults without national significance. But this would have been an empty difference if there had been nothing behind. National unity is a meaningless thing unless the nation feels that it is united for some common task. Now Jehovah represented to Israel two of the greatest blessings that any people can enjoy, blessings for which it is well worth while to unite in sustained and strenuous effort. The first of these was liberty, for it was Jehovah that brought Israel forth from the house of bondage; the second was law, justice, and the moral order of society, for from the days of Moses the mouth of Jehovah was the one fountain of judgment. So in the Ten Words, the fundamental document of the religion of the Old Testament, the claim of Jehovah to the exclusive wor- ship of Israel is based on the deliverance that made Israel a free people, and issues in the great laws of social morality. The cause of Jehovah in Israel was LECT. I. GODS OF CANAAN. 41 the cause of national freedom and social righteous- ness, and the task of the religion of Jehovah was to set these fast in the land of Canaan in a society which ever looked to Jehovah as its living and present head. The idea of righteousness is of course familiar to every one as a cardinal Old Testament conception. The idea of liherty may sound less familiar, but only because it has two aspects, which are covered by the conceptions of deliverance and jpeace. Thus, when the Psalmist speaks of righteousness and peace kissing each other (Psalm Ixxxv. 10), he expresses precisely the ideal of the religion of Jehovah which we are now considering. At the very close of the Old Testament dispensation the same ideal meets us in the song of Zachariah, " That we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve Him in holiness and righteousness before Him all our days." Here indeed we have one more idea, that of holiness, which will come prominently before us as our argument advances, but which it would be premature to dwell on at present. The holiness of Israel is in fact a summary expression for the conception that the whole national vocation of Israel is a religious vocation dis- charged by a worshipping people, inasmuch as the Judge, Lawgiver, and King of Israel is none other than Israel's God. Every true thought contains a deeper meaning and involves more important consequences than can be seen at once. And this is especially the case with religious truth, which presents itself in the first instance in the 42 JEHOVAH THE CHAMPION lect. i. form not of general propositions but of direct personal experience. The early Hebrews did not think about Jehovah; they believed in Him, and experienced the reality of His sovereignty in the great things which He did for His people. Thus it was only by slow degrees and in connection with the historical experiences of the nation that the whole meaning of His religion, the full difference between Him and the gods of the nations, came to be realised, or that the Israelites learned all that was impKed in their vocation as the people of Jehovah. In the first generations after the conquest the great practical question, as we have already seen, was whether Israel would continue in any sense to retain that consciousness of national unity which, in the absence of all political centralisation, had no other raUying-point than the faith of Jehovah. We have seen, too, that the struggle for freedom against successive attacks of powerful enemies was the means used by Providence in the age of the Judges to preserve at once national feeling and national faith in Jehovah. Jehovah in this period appears pre-eminently as the champion of Israel's freedom, the divine King to whom Israel owes national allegiance, and whose majesty is dishonoured when His servants pay tribute and homage to other nations and their gods. The foreign invaders of Israel encroach on Jehovah's sovereignty, and thus are His enemies too. So He goes forth and rallies His armies, the armies of Israel, around Him, calling them to help Jehovah against the mighty (Judges v. 23). And when OF ISRAEL. 43 the victory remains with Israel the song of triumph ends with the prayer, " So let all thine enemies perish, 0 Jehovah ; but let them that love Thee be as the sud when he goeth forth in his might." At this stage of Israel's religion, pictured most clearly in the Song of Deborah, the presence of Jehovah with His people was quite fully realised only in the hour of battle and victory. The ark itself, the visible token of the angel, or rather embassy of Jehovah, sent by Him to direct the march of His people and subdue the Canaanite before them (Exod. xxiii. 20 mq_. ; Num. x. 33 ; Judges ii. 1), was rather the sanctuary of the host than of the settled nation, and after it was fixed at Shiloh became, as we have seen, little more than the local shrine of the tribe of Ephraim. In the Song of Deborah Jehovah has not yet a fixed seat in the land of Canaan, but goes forth from Sinai to help His people in their distress. Hence the establishment of local sanctuaries of Jehovah, at Dan, at Ophrah, and at other points throughout the land during the period of the Judges, must not be looked upon as essentially a retrograde movement. It is true that these local shrines exposed Jehovah -worship to the great danger of taking up Canaanite elements and assimilating itself to the worship of the Baalim, and thus it is easy to understand that from one point of view the age of the Judges may be represented as one of continual backsliding. But, on the other hand, these local shrines brought Jehovah nearer to the daily Hfe of the people. He came down, 44 THE AGE OF lect. i. as it were, from Sinai and took possession of Canaan as the suzerain to whom the people in every corner of the country did homage for the good things of Jehovah's land. At the close of the period of the Judges the religion of Jehovah is thoroughly identified with the possession of Palestine. " They have driven me out this day," says David, " from being attached to the inherit- ance of Jehovah, saying, Go serve other gods." In other words, banishment from Canaan is now conceived as banishment from the service of Jehovah, and the reK- gion of Jehovah has become part of daily national life. Thus we see that the long struggle that was inevitable when the religion of Jehovah went forth from the desert and came into contact with the life of the larger world was not in vain. The crisis was sharp, and Israel had not passed through it unscathed; but in the end Jehovah was still the God of Israel, and had become the God of Israel's land. Canaan was His heritage, not the heritage of the Baalim, and the Canaanite worship appears henceforth, not as a direct rival to the worship of Jehovah, but as a disturbing element corrupting the national faith, while unable to supplant it altogether. This, of course, in virtue of the close connection between religion and national feeling, means that Israel had now risen above the danger of absorption in the Canaanites, and felt itself to be a nation in the true sense of the word. We learn from the books of Samuel how this great advance was ultimately and permanently secured. The earlier wars recorded in the book of Judges had LECT. I. THE JUDGES. 45 brought about no complete or lasting unity among the Hebrew tribes. But at length a new enemy arose, more formidable than any whom they had previously en- countered. The Philistines from Caphtor, who, hke the Israelites, had entered Canaan as emigrants, but coming most probably by sea had displaced the aboriginal Avvim in the rich coastlands beneath the mountains of Judah (Deut. ii. 23 ; Amos ix. 7), pressed into the heart of the country, and broke the old strength of Ephraim in the battle of Ebenezer. This victory cut the Hebrew settlements in two, and threatened the independence of all the tribes. The common danger drew Israel together. They found a leader in the Benjamite Saul, whom Jehovah Himself designated as the king of Israel by the mouth of the prophet Samuel. The resistance which Saul first organised in the difficult hiU country of his native tribe was conducted with varying fortune, but not without success. Saul himself fell in battle, but his work was continued by Abner in the north, while in the south David consolidated his power as king of Judah without disturbance from the Philistines, whose suzerainty he was content to acknowledge till his plans were ripe. When David was accepted as king of all Israel, and by a bold stroke found a capital in the centre of , the land in the strong fortress of Jerusalem, till then deemed impregnable, Israel met the invader on more than equal terms, and the Hebrews became masters where a few years before they had been servants. It was Jehovah who had given them this victory, 46 BEGINNING OF and, what was more than any victory, had at length given permanent expression to the unity of the nation by placing at their head a king who reigned as the anointed of the Lord. The first crisis was past, ajid thenceforward Israel could never forget that it was one nation, with a national destiny and a national God. LECT. II. THE KINGSHIP. 47 LECTUEE 11. JEHOVAH AND THE GODS OF THE NATIONS. In last Lecture we followed the history of Israel and Israel's religion down to the consolidation of the state under Saul and David. Throughout the period of the Judges, neither the nationality of Israel nor the reli- gion of Jehovah stood on a sure footing. The tribes of Israel were broken up into isolated fractions, and often seemed on the point of absorption among the Canaan- ites ; and the religion of Jehovah in like manner, which lost the best part of its original meaning when divorced from the idea of national unity, threatened to disappear in the Canaanite Baal worship before it could succeed in adapting itself to the change from nomad to agricul- tural life. Both these dangers were at length sur- mounted, and, whatever physical and political circum- stances may have conspired towards the result,^ it was the faith of Jehovah that united the Hebrews to final victory, and Jehovah who crowned His gift of the goodly land of Canaan by bestowing on Israel a king to reign in His name, and make it at length a real nation instead of a loose federation of tribes.^ And so the reli- 48 RELIGIOUS UNITY lect. ii. gion of Jehovah was not only a necessary part of the state, but the chief cornerstone of the political edifice. To Jehovah Israel owed, not only the blessings of life, but national existence and all the principles of social order ; and through His priests, His prophets, but above all His anointed king, He was the source of all authority, and the fountain of all law and judgment in the land. In principle, this paramount position of Jehovah the God of Israel was never again disputed. The kingdom of David was torn asunder, and new dynasties reigned in Northern Israel. But the kings of Ephraim, not less than the house of David, reigned in Jehovah's name, and derived their authority from Him (1 Kings xi. 31 seg-. ; 2 Kings ix. 3). The sanctuaries founded by Jeroboam were sanctuaries of the God who brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt (1 Kings xii. 28) ; and even Ahab, who provoked so bitter a religious conflict by making room in Samaria for the Baal of his Tyrian queen, did not give up. the religion of his ances- tors ; for it was Jehovah's prophets whom he consulted in time of need, and Jehovah was the God whose sus- taining help and loftiness he acknowledged in giving names to his sons. In the north not less than in the south to forsake Jehovah was a crime against the state, and the technical expression for treason was to abjure God and the King (1 Kings xxi. 13). In virtue of their common religion the Israelites of the north and south retained a sense of essential unity in spite of political separation and repeated wars ; and OF ISRAEL. 49 it was felt that the division of the tribes was inconsistent with the true destiny of Jehovah's people. We shall have repeated opportunity to observe how this feeling asserts itself in the teaching of the prophets, but it was a feeling in which all Israelites participated, and whicli had at least as great strength in Ephraim as in Judah. The so-called Blessing of Moses (which does not itself claim this name, but on the contrary bears clear internal marks of having been written in the kingdom of Ephraim) remembers Judah with affection, and prays that he may be strengthened against his enemies, and again restored to union with his brethren (Deut. xxxiii. 7). But while the religion of Jehovah had thus acquired a fixed national character, it would be a great mistake to suppose that it already presented itself to the mass of the people, as it did to the later Jews, as something altogether dissimilar in principle and in details from the religions of the surrounding nations. The Jews after the exile not only had a separate religion, but a religion which made them a separate nation, distinct from the Gentiles in all their habits of life and thought. In old Israel it was not so. The possession of a national God, to whom the nation owed homage, and in whose name kings reigned and judges administered justice, was not in itself a thing peculiar to Israel. A national religion and sacred laws are part of the constitution of every ancient state, and among the nations most nearly akin to the Hebrews these ideas took a shape which, so far as mere externals were concerned, bore a close D 50 COMMON FEATURES lect. ii. family likeness to the religion of Jehovah. Among the Semitic peoples it is quite the rule that each tribe or nation should have its tribal or national God. This of course does not imply a monotheistic faith ; the Am- monite who worshipped Milcom, the Moabite who as- 3ribed his prosperity to Chemosh, did not deny the existence of other supernatural beings, who had power to help or hurt men, and were accessible to the prayers and offerings of their worshippers. But the national god in each case was regarded as the divine lord, and often as the divine father, of his nation, while other deities were either subordinate to him, or had the seat of their power in other lands, or, in the case of the gods of neighbouring nations, were his rivals and the enemies of his people. He was therefore the god to be looked to in all national concerns ; he had a right to national homage, and, as we learn expressly, in the case of Chemosh, from the stone erected by Mesha to com- memorate his victories over Israel, national misfortune was ascribed to his wrath, national success to his favour.^ It was he too that was the ultimate director of all national policy. Mesha tells us that it was Chemosh who commanded him to assault this or that city, and who drove out the king of Israel before him, giving him to see his desire on all his enemies. The parallel- ism with the Old Testament extends, you see, not only to the ideas but to the very words. But the parallelism is not confined to such near cousins of the Israelites as the Moabites. Equally striking analogies to Old LECT. II. OF SEMITIC RELIGION. 51 Testament thoughts and expressions are found on the PhcEnician monuments. As the kings of Israel ascribe their sovereignty to the grant of Jehovah, so the king of Gebal on the great monument of Byblus declares that it was the divine queen of Byblus who set him as king over the city. As the psalmist of Ps. cxvi. says, " I take up the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of Jehovah," so this heathen king is figured standing before the goddess with a cup in his hand, and exclaim- ing, "I call upon my lady the sovereign of Gebal, because she hath heard my voice, and dealt graciously with me." And just as the prayer for life and blessing to the king of Israel in Psalm Ixxii. is a prayer for a king judging in righteousness, the Phoenician goddess is invoked to bless lehawmelek, king of Gebal, and give him life and prolong his days in Gebal, because he is a just king, and to give him favour in the eyes of gods and men.^ It would not be difficult to add to these analogies even from the scanty materials at our command, con- sisting mainly of a few weather-worn inscriptions hewn by the command of ancient kings. But it is not necessary to do so ; I have quoted enough to show that the characteristic conception of Jehovah as the national God of Israel is reproduced with very similar features, expressed in very similar language, in the religions of the surrounding nations. The most important point to carry with us is the bearing of these observations on the current conception of the Hebrew theocracy. The 52 THE HEBREW lect. ii. word theocracy, which has had such vogue among Christian theologians, is the invention of Josephus, who observes in his second book against Apion (chap, xvi.) that, while other nations had a great variety of institu- tions and laws, some states being monarchies, others oligarchies, and others again republics, Moses gave to his nation the unique form of a theocracy, assigning all authority and power to God, teaching the Israelites to look to Him as the source of all blessings to the nation or to individuals, and their help in every distress, making all the virtues, as justice, self-command, temperance, and civil concord, parts of piety, and subjecting the whole order of society to a system of divine law. Nothing gives so much currency to an idea as a happy catch- word, and so people have gone on to this day using the word theocracy, or God-kingship, to express the differ- ence between the constitution of Israel and all other nations. But in reality, as we now see, the word theocracy expresses precisely that feature in the religion of Israel which it had in common with the faiths of the surrounding nations. They too had each a supreme god, whose favour or displeasure was viewed as the cause of all success or misfortune, and whose revela- tions were looked to as commands directing all national undertakings. This god was conceived as a divine king, and was often invoked by this name. Moloch, or Milcom, for example — the name of the god of the Ammonites — is simply the word king, and the Tyrian sun-god in like manner was called Melkarth, " king of THEOCRACY. 53 the city." The human king reigned by the favour and gift of his divine Lord, and, as we see from the stone of Gebal, the exercise of kingly justice was under the special protection of the godhead. Perhaps the most character- istic expression of the theocratic idea is the regular payment to the sanctuary of tithe, or tribute, such as human kings claimed from the produce of the soil (1 Sam. viii. 15, 17) ; for this was an act of homage acknowledging the god as the sovereign of the land. But the tithe is not confined to Israel. It is found among other nations, and in Tyre was paid to the divine king Melkarth.^ The religious constitution of Israel, then, as laid down by Moses and consolidated in the institution of the kingship, was not the entirely unique thing that it is frequently supposed to be. Indeed, if Moses had brought in a whole system of new and utterly revolu- tionary ideas he could not have carried the people with him to any practical effect. There was a great difference between the religion of Israel and other religions ; but that difference cannot be reduced to an abstract formula ; it lay in the personal difference, if I may so speak, between Jehovah and the gods of the nations, and all that lay in it only came out bit by bit in the course of a history which was ruled by Jehovah's providence, and shaped by Jehovah's love. From these considerations, we are able to understand what is often a great puzzle to Bible readers, the way, namely, in which the Old Testament, especially in its 54 JEHOVAH AND lect. ii. earlier parts, speaks of the gods of the nations. Jehovah is not generally spoken of in the older parts of the Hebrew literature as the absolutely one God, but only as the one God of Israel ; and it is taken to be quite natural and a matter of course that other nations have other gods. The prophets, indeed, teach with increasing clearness that these other gods are, in point of fact, no gods at aU, mere idols, dead things that cannot help their worshippers. But this point of view was not clearly before the mind of all Israelites at aU times. Another and no doubt an older habit of thought does not say that there is no god except Jehovah, but only that there is none among the gods like him (Exod. XV. 11), According to the words of Jephthah (Judgea xi. 24), the natural order of things is that Israel should inherit the land which Jehovah has enabled them to conquer, while the invader who attempts to encroach on this inheritance ought to be content with the lands which Chemosh his god has given him. And David takes it for granted that a man who is excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, "the inheritance of Jehovah," must go and serve other gods (1 Sam. xxvi. 19). In truth, the great deliverance which manifested Jehovah to the Hebrews as their king and Saviour did not necessarily and at once compel them to deny the existence of other superhuman beings capable ol influencing the affairs of mankind. A man might believe firmly in Jehovah, Israel's God, and feel secure in His strength and love, without being drawn iuto the OTHER GODS. 55 train of reflection necessary to carry the conviction that those who were not the people of Jehovah had no divine helper at all. It was not every one who could rise with the prophet Amos to the thought that it was Jehovah's supreme providence which had determined the migrations of all nations just as much as of Israel (Amos ix. 7). It is not therefore surprising that the mass of the people long after the time of David held the faith of Jehovah in a way that left it open to them to concede a certain reality to the gods of other nations. The ordinary unenlightened Israelite thought that Jehovah was stronger than Chemosh, while the Moabite, as we see from the stone of Mesha, thought that Che- Inosh was stronger than Jehovah ; but, apart from this difference, the two had a great many religious ideas in common, and, but for the continued word of revelation in the mouths of the prophets, Israel's religion might very weU have permanently remained on this level, and so have perished with the fall of the Hebrew state. "We see, then, that it was not the idea of the theocracy that gave to the religion of Israel its unique character. It is well to observe that the same thing may be said of the sacred ordinances which are so often thought of as having been from the first what they undoubtedly became after the time of Ezra, a permanent wall of separation between Israel and the Gentiles. To discuss this subject in detail it would be necessary to trace the history of the ritual laws of the Pentateuch. This I have done, to a certain extent, in a previous course of 56 THE ORDINANCES lect. ii. lectures, and I sliall not repeat what I then said. But in general it must be observed that to the ordinary Israelite the most prominent of the sacred observances previous to the exile must have seemed rather to con- nect his worship with that of the surrounding nations than to separate the two. Israel, like the other nations, worshipped Jehovah at certain fixed sanctuaries, where He was held to meet with His people face to face. The method of worship was by altar gifts, expressive of homage for the good things of His bestowal, and the chief occasions of such worship were the agricultural feasts, just as among the Canaanites.^ The details of the ceremonial observed were closely parallel to those still to be read on Phoenician monuments. Even the technical terms connected with sacrifice were in great part identical. The vow (n6der), the whole burnt- offer- ing (kdlU), the thank-offering (shdem), the meat-offering (minhath)J s.nd a variety of other details appear on the tablet of Marseilles and similar Phoenician documents under their familiar Old Testament names, showing that the Hebrew ritual was not a thing by itself, but had a common foundation with that observed by their neigh- bours.^ And no hesitation was felt in actually copy- ing foreign models. When Ahaz took the pattern of a new altar from Damascus, he simply followed the precedent set by Solomon in the building of the temple. The court with its brazen altar and lofty columns (Jachin and Boaz), the portico (2 Kings xxiii. 11 — not suburbs, as the Authorised Version has it), the orna- OF WORSHIP. tn ments, chased or embossed in gold, the symbolic palm- trees, and so forth, are all described or figured on Phoenician inscriptions and coins.^ Again the approach of the worshipper to his God in sacrifice and offering demands, as its necessary comple- ment, a means by which the response of the deity can be conveyed to His people. Among the Hebrews the answer of Jehovah to the people's supplications was given by the priestly lot and the prophetic word. But here again the vast difference between the revelation of Jehovah and the oracles of the nations lies in what Jehovah had to say, rather than in the external manner of saying it. The holy lot is of constant occurrence in ancient religions ;^'^ there were prophets of Baal as well as prophets of Jehovah ; and the official prophets, con- nected with the sanctuary, were, according to the testi- mony of Jeremiah and Micah, often not distinguishable from sorcerers — a fact quite inexplicable if there had been a broad acknowledged difference in externals between their functions and those of the prophets of the heathen. In point of fact, we find Saul and his servant going to Samuel with a trifling present, just as in other early nations. In every way, then, the attempt to reduce the difference between the early religion of the Hebrews and that of other nations to broad tangible peculiarities that can be grasped with the hand breaks down. It was Jehovah Himself who was different from Chemosh, Moloch, or Melkarth ; and to those who did not hnow 58 THE KNOWLEDGE lect. ii. Jehovah, to use the expressive prophetic phrase, there was no insurmountable barrier between His wor- ship and heathenism. Even the current ideas of the Hebrews about unseen things were mainly the common stock of the Semitic peoples, and nothing is more cer- tain than that neither Moses nor Samuel gave Israel any new system of metaphysical theology. In matters of thought as well as of practice, the new revelation of Jehovah's power and love, given through Moses, or rather given in actual saving deeds of Jehovah which Moses taught the people to understand, involved no sudden and absolute break with the past, or with the traditions of the past common to Israel with kindred nations. Its epoch-making importance lay in quite another direction — in the introduction into Israel's historical life of a new personal factor — of Jehovah Himself as the God of Israel's salvation. Jehovah, as the prophet Hosea puts it, taught Israel to walk, holding him by the arms as a parent holds a little child ; but the divine guidance fitly characterised in these words is something very different from such a course of lec- tures on dogmatics as is often thought of as the sub- stance of Old Testament revelation. Again to borrow the language of Hosea, Jehovah drew Israel to Him by human ties, by cords of love; the influence of His revelation in forming the religious character of the nation was a personal influence, the influence of His gracious and holy character. It was from this personal experience of Jehovah's character, read in the actual LECT. II. OF JEHOVAH. 59 history of His dealings with His people, that the great teachers of Israel learned, but learned by slow degrees, to lay down general propositions about divine things. To suppose that the Old Testament history began with a full scheme of doctrine, which the history only served to illustrate and enforce, is to invert the most general law of God's dealings with man, whether in the way of nature or of grace. Unless we keep this principle clearly before our minds, the whole history of the divine teaching contained in the Old Testament will be involved in hopeless con- fusion ; and therefore it will not be amiss to devote a few sentences to show in detail how impossible it is to place the original peculiarity of Israel's religion in any- thing of the nature of abstract theological doctrine. For this purpose I may select two principal points, which are always held to be cardinal features in a spiritual theology, the doctrine of the unity and absolute spiritual being of God, and the doctrine of the future state and retribution in the world to come. No question has been more discussed by writers on the Old Testament than the monotheism of the Hebrews. Was the doctrine of monotheism an inheritance from the patriarchs ? or was it introduced by Moses ? or did it come to the front for the first time in the days of Elijah ? or was it, in fact, not precisely formulated till the time of Jeremiah ? That these questions can be asked and seriously argued by scholarly inquirers is, at any rate, sufficient proof that the older parts of the Bible do not give to the abstract 60 HEBREW doctrine of monotheism the importance that it possesses to our minds. To the early Hebrews the question which we view as so fundamental, and which was, in fact, felt to be fundamental by the later prophets, seems hardly to have presented itself at all. For the practical pur- poses of religion, the thesis that there is no god who can compare with Jehovah appeared as sufficient as the more advanced doctrine that there is no god except Him. As long as the Israelites, with Jehovah at their head, were absorbed in the conflict for freedom against other nations and their gods, there was no practical interest in the question whether the foreign deities had or had not metaphysical existence. The practical point was that Jehovah proved Himself stronger than they by giving Israel victory over their worshippers. And, in fact, it required a process of abstract thought, not at all familiar to early times, to deny all reality to deities which in many cases were identified with actual con- crete things, with the sun, for example, or the planets. Even in the latest stages of Biblical thought the point of view which strictly identifies the heathen gods with the idols that represented them, and therefore denies to them all living reality, varies with another point of view which regards them as evil demons (1 Cor. viii. 4 seq^. ; x. 20 scg-.). Nor is it at all clear that in the earliest times the difference between Jehovah and other gods was placed in His spiritual nature. The Old Testament word which we translate by spuit {ruVi) is the common word for wind, including the "living breath" {ruVi of life, LECT. 11. MONOTHEISM. 61 Gen. vi. 17), and so used of the motions of life and the affections of the soul. Now, observation of human life taught the Hebrews to distinguish between man's flesh, or visible and tangible frame, and the subtile breath or spirit which animates this frame. It was in the fleshy body that they saw the difference between man and God. " Hast Thou eyes of flesh," says Job, " or seest Thou as man seeth " (Job x. 4). " The Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses flesh and not spirit " (Isa. xxxi. 3). These passages are the clearest expres- sions of the spirituality of the godhead which the Old Testament contains, and you observe that they are not directed to distinguish between the true God and false gods, but to characterise the godhead in its difference from human nature. It is, in fact, the divine working, rather than the divine nature, that the Hebrew Scrip- tures regard as spiritual — that is, as possessing a subtile and invisible character, comparable with the mysterious movements of the wind. The common doctrine of the Old Testament is not that God is spirit, but that the spirit of Jehovah, going forth from Him, works in the world and among men. And this is no metaphysical doctrine ; it simply expresses that difference between divine and human agency which must be recognised wherever there is any belief in God, or at least any belief rising above the grossest fetichism. That the early Israelites possessed no metaphysical doctrine of the spirituality of Jehovah, conceived as an existence out of aU relation to space and time, is plain from the fact 62 HEBREW lect. ii, that the Old Testament never quite stripped off the idea that Jehovah's contact with earth has a special relation to special places — that the operations of His sovereignty go forth from Sinai, or from Zion, or from some other earthly sanctuary, where He is nearer to man than on unconsecrated ground. It is true that this conception generally takes a poetical form, and did not to the prophets appear irreconcilable with the thought that it is impossible to escape from Jehovah's presence (Amos ix. 1 seq^. ; Ps. cxxxix. 7), that heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him (1 Kings viii. 27) ; that He sits on the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers (Isa. xl, 22). But the figures of early poetry express the actual thoughts of the people who use them ; and there can be no question that, by the ordinary Israelite, the local relation of Jehovah to the land and sanctuaries of Israel, the idea of His march from Sinai in the thunderstorm that announces His approach, were taken with a degree of literality that would have been impossible if Moses had already given to the people a metaphysical conception of the divine being. As for the common notion that the name Jehovah expresses the idea of absolute and unconditioned existence, that is a mere fiction of the Alexandrian philosophy, absurdly inconsistent with the whole lan- guage of the Old Testament, and refuted even by the one phrase Jehovah of hosts — the Jehovah of the armies of Israel.^^ Even the principle of the second command- ment, that Jehovah is not to be worshipped by images, MONOTHEISM. 63 which is often appealed to as containing the most char- acteristic peculiarity of Mosaism, cannot, in the light of history, be viewed as having had so fundamental a place in the religion of early Israel. The state worship of the golden calves led to no quarrel between Elisha and the dynasty of Jehu ; and this one fact is sufficient to show that, even in a time of notable revival, the living power of the religion was not felt to lie in the principle that Jehovah cannot be represented by images. It was as a living personal force, not as a meta- physical entity, that Jehovah was adored by Israel, and so a living faith was possible in spite of much vagueness and vacillation upon the very points in the conception of the Godhead which, to our habit of mind, seem most central. In truth, metaphysical specu- lation on the Godhead as eternal, infinite, and the like, is not peculiar to the religion of revelation, but was carried by the philosophers of the Gentiles much further than is ever attempted in the Old Testament. The other point to which I have referred, the views of the Hebrews as to the state after death and future retribution, may be disposed of more briefly. Apart from the doctrine of the resurrection, of which nothing is heard till the later books of the Old Testament, the religion of the Hebrews has to do with this Ufe, not with a life to come, as, indeed, was inevitable, seeing that the rehgious subject, the object of Jehovah's love, is, ia the first instance, the nation as a whole, individual Israelites coming into relation with their God as mem- 64 SHEOL. LECT. n. bers of the nation sharing in His dealings with Israel (luA nation. After death man enters the shadowy realm of Sheol, where the weak and pithless shades dwell together, where their love, their hatred, their envy are perished, where small and great are alike, and the ser- vant is free from his master (Eccles. ix. 4 seg'. ; Job. iii. 13 sf^.), where there is no more remembrance of God, and none can praise His name or hope for His truth (Ps. vi. 5 ; Isa. xxxviii. 18). There is nothing in these conceptions which partakes of the character of revela- tion ; they are just the same ideas as are found among the surrounding nations. The very name of shades (Eephaim) is common to the Old Testament with the Phcenicians ; and, when the Sidonian king Eshmunazar engraved on his sarcophagus the prayer that those who disturbed his tomb might " find no bed among the shades," he used the same imagery and even the same words as are employed in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel in describing the descent into Sheol of the kings of Babylon and Egypt (Isa. xiv. 9, 18 seq^. ; Ezek. xxxii. 25).^^ In accordance with this view of the state of the dead, the Hebrew doctrine of retribution is essentially a doctrine of retribution on earth. Death is itself a final judgment ; for it removes man from the sphere where Jehovah's grace and judgment are known. Here, then, even more clearly than in the other case, it is plain that the religion of the Hebrews does not rest on a philosophy of the unseen universe. The sphere of religion is the present life, and the truths of religion RETRIBUTION. 65 are the truths of an everyday experience in which to Hebrew faith Jehovah is as living and personal an actor as men are. His agency in Israel is too real to invite to abstract speculation ; all interest turns, not on what Jehovah is in HimseK, or what He does beyond the sphere of the present national life, but on His present doings in the midst of His people, and the personal character and dispositions which these doings reveal. Now, to all early nations religion is an intensely real thing. The primitive mind does not occupy itself with things of no practical importance, and it is only in the later stages of society that we meet with traditional beHefs nominally accepted by every one, but practically regarded by none, or with theological speculations which have an interest to the curious but are not felt to have a direct bearing on the concerns of life. In the earliest stages of the religion of any nation we may take it for granted that nothmg is believed or practised which is not felt to be of vital importance for the nation's wellbeing. There is no remissness, therefore, in religious duty, no slackness in the performance of sacred rites. This principle holds good for ancient Israel as well as for other ancient nations. The prophets them- selves, amidst aU their complaints against the people's backsliding, bear witness that their z;ountrymen were assiduous in their religious service, and neglected nothing which they deemed necessary to make sure of Jehovah's help in every need. The Israelites, in fact, had not reached the stage at which men begin to be indifferent E 66 JEHOVAH AND lect. n. about religion, and if Jehovah had been such a god as Baal or Chemosh, content with such service as they exacted from their worshippers, there would have been no ground to complain of their fidelity to His name or their zeal for His cause. But here we come back to the real difference between the religion of Jehovah and the religion of the nations, which, as we have just seen, cannot be sought in the external forms of the Old Testament worship, or in a system of abstract monotheistic theo- logy. That difference lies in the personal character of Jehovah, and in the relations corresponding to His character which He seeks to maintain with His people. Properly spealdng, the heathen deities have no personal character, and no personal relations to their wor- shippers. They were, indeed, conceived as a kind of persons, as capable of anger and of pleasure, as hunger- ing and fed by sacrifices, as showing affection to their worshippers, who were often looked on as their sons and daughters, and so forth. But character in the sense of a fixed and independent habit of will was not theirs. The attributes ascribed to them were a mere reflex of the attributes of their worshippers, and what character they had was nothing else than a personification of the character of the nation that acknowledged their lord- ship. Heathen religions were by no means without moral value in giving fixed expression to national cha- racter, and adding a sacred sanction to the highest national conception of right and wrong. But they OTHER GODS. 67 had no effect in developing character. The god always remained on the same ethical level with his people. His virtues were their virtues, and their imperfections were his also. The god and the people therefore never parted company. It was not difficult to worship and serve him aright, for he asked no more than popular sentiment approved. The heathen nations, says Jere- miah, never gave up their gods, which yet are no gods (Jer. ii. 11). In point of fact, there was no motive to give up a religion which had no higher moral standard and no higher aims than those of the worshippers them- selves. The god and the people kept together because they formed a natural unity, because the deity had no independent will, and at most was conceived as being sometimes temporarily estranged from his people for reasons not clearly distinguishable from the caprice of an Eastern despot. Not so Jehovah. He approved Himself a true God by showing throughout the history of Israel that He had a will and purpose of His own — a purpose rising above the current ideas of His worshippers, and a will directed with steady consistency to a moral aim. Jehovah was not content to receive such service as it was easy and natural for the people to perform, and to give them such felicity as they themselves desired. All His dealings with Israel were directed to lead the people on to higher things than their natural character inclined towards. To know Jehovah and to serve Him aright involved a moral effort — a frequent sacrifice of 68 JEHOVAH'S CONTROVERSY lect. it. natural inclination. It was an easy thing to acknow- ledge the Divine King of Israel in the day of battle when He led His armies on to victory ; and it is not difficult to understand that in the prosperous days of David the Hebrews could rejoice before Jehovah, and find nothing burdensome in His service. But very different experiences awaited the nation in the ages that followed — when Israel was divided against itself, when its rulers were drawn into the larger stream of politics by the forward movement of the great empire on the Tigris, and when the old social system, based on peasant proprietorship, began to break up and left a dangerous gulf between the rich nobles and the landless or im- poverished classes. Every change in the old national life, every dis- order in society or in the state, opened a new religious problem — a new question, that is, as to the reason why Jehovah suffered such evils to befall His people. To the unthinking masses these things were only a proof that Jehovah was temporarily estranged, and did not lead them to doubt that He could be won back to them by greater zeal in acts of external worship which might with advantage be made more effective and splendid by taking hints from their heathen neighbours. But though the sacrifices were redoubled and the feasts thronged with eager worshippers, all this brought no help to Israel. The nation sank continually lower, and Jehovah still stood afar off ; to the common judgment He seemed to have forsaken His land. LECT. II. WITH HIS PEOPLE. 69 Under such trials a heathen religion which was capable of no higher hopes than were actually enter- tained by the mass of the Hebrews would have declined and perished with the fall of the nation. But Jehovah proved Himself a true God by vindicating His sovereignty in the very events that proved fatal to the gods of the Gentiles, Amidst the sceptical politics of the nobles and the thoughtless superstition of the masses He was never without a remnant that read the facts of history in another light, and saw in them the proof, not that Jehovah was powerless or indifferent, but that He was engaged in a great controversy with His people, a controversy that had moral issues unseen to those who knew not Jehovah and neglected the only service in which He was well pleased. When Jehovah seemed furthest off He was in truth nearest to Israel, and the reverses that seemed to prove Him to have forsaken His land were really the strokes of His hand. He desired mercy and not sacrifice, obedience rather than the fat of lambs. While these things were wanting His very love to Israel could only show itself in ever- repeated chastisement, till the sinners were consumed out of His land and His holy will established itself in the hearts of a regenerate people. Jehovah's purpose was supreme over all, and it must prove itself supreme in Israel though the Hebrew state perished in hopeless conflict with it. He who redeemed His nation from Egypt could redeem it from a new captivity; and, if Israel would not learn to know Jehovah in the good 70 JEHOVAH THE GOD lect. n. land of Canaan, it must once more pass through the desert and enter the door of hope through the valley of tribulation. Such is the prophetic picture of the con- troversy of Jehovah with His people, the great issues of which are unfolded with increasing clearness in the successive prophetic books. I am afraid that this long discussion has proved a somewhat severe tax on your attention, but the results to which it has led us are of the first importance, and will help us through all our subsequent course. Let me repeat them very briefly. The primary difference between the religion of Israel and that of the surround- ing nations does not lie in the idea of a theocracy, or in a philosophy of the invisible world, or in the external forms of religious service, but in a personal difference between Jehovah and other gods. That difference, again, is not of a metaphysical but of a directly practical nature ; it was not defined once for all in a theological dogma, but made itseK felt in the attitude which Jehovah actually took up towards Israel in those his- torical dealings with His nation to which the word of the prophets supplied a commentary. Everything that befeU Israel was interpreted by the prophets as a work of Jehovah's hand, displaying His character and will — not an arbitrary character or a changeable will, but a fixed and consistent holy purpose, which has Israel for its object and seeks the true felicity of the nation, but at the same time is absolutely sovereign over Israel, and will not give way to Israel's desires or adapt itself LECT. II. OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 71 to Israel's convenience. No other religion can show anything parallel to this. The gods of the nations are always conceived either as arbitrary and changeful, or as themselves subordinate to blind fate, or as essenti- ally capable of being bent into sympathy with what- ever is for the time being the chief desire of their worshippers, or, in some more speculative forms of faith, introduced when these simpler conceptions broke down, as escaping these limitations only by being raised to entire unconcern in the petty affairs of man. In Israel alone does Jehovah appear as a God near to man, and yet maintaining an absolute sovereignty of will, a consistent independence of character. And the advance of the Old Testament religion is essentially identified with an increasing clearness of perception of the things which this character of the Deity involves. The name of Jehovah becomes more and more full of meaning as faith in His sovereignty and self-consistency is put to successive tests in the constantly changing problems presented by the events of history. ISTow, when we speak of Jehovah as displaying a consistent character in His sovereignty over Israel, we necessarily imply that Israel's religion is a moral religion, that Jehovah is a God of righteousness, whose dealings with His people follow an ethical standard. The ideas of right and wrong among the Hebrews are forensic ideas ; that is, the Hebrew always thinks of the right and the wrong as if they were to be settled before a judge. Righteousness is to the Hebrew not so much 72 RELIGION AND lect. ii. a moral quality as a legal status. The word " righteous " {gaddili) means simply " in the right," and the word " wicked " (rdsha^) means " in the wrong." " I have sinned this time," says Pharaoh, "Jehovah is in the right (A.V. righteous), and I and my people are in the wrong (A.V. wicked)/' Exod. ix. 27. Jehovah is always in the right, for He is not only sovereign but self-consistent. He is the fountain of righteousness, for from the days of Moses He is the judge as well as the captain of His people, giving forth law and sentence from His sanctu- ary. In primitive society the functions of judge and lawgiver are not separated, and reverence for law has its basis in personal respect for the judge. So the just consistent will of Jehovah is the law of Israel, and it is a law which as King of Israel He Himself is continu- ally administering.^^ Now, in every ancient nation, morality and law (including in this word traditional binding custom) are identical, and in every nation law and custom are a part of religion, and have a sacred authority. But in no other nation does this conception attain the precision and practical force which it has in the Old Testament, because the gods themselves, the guardians of law, do not possess a sharply-defined consistency of charac- ter such as Jehovah possesses. The heathen gods are guardians of law, but they are something else at the same time; they are not wholly intent on righteous- ness, and righteousness is not the only path to their favour, which sometimes depends on accidental partial- MORALITY. 73 ities, or may be conciliated by acts of worship that have nothing to do with morality. And here be it observed that the fundamental superiority of the Hebrew religion does not lie in the particular system of social morality that it enforces, but in the more absolute and self-con- sistent righteousness of the Divine Judge. The abstract principles of morality — that is, the acknowledged laws of social order — are pretty much the same in all parts of the world in corresponding stages of social develop- ment. Heathen nations at the same general stage of society with the Hebrews will be found to acknowledge all the duties of man to man laid down in the deca- logue ; and on the other hand there are many things in the social order of the Hebrews, such as polygamy, blood revenge, slavery, the treatment of enemies, which do not correspond with the highest ideal morality, but belong to an imperfect social state, or, as the gospel puts it, were tolerated for the hardness of the people's hearts. But, with all this, the religion of Jehovah put morality on a far sounder basis than any other religion did, because in it the righteousness of Jehovah as a God enforcing the known laws of morality was conceived as absolute, and as showing itself absolute, not in a future state, but upon earth. I do not, of course, mean that this high view of Jehovah's character was practically present to all His worshippers. On the contrary, a chief complaint of the prophets is that it was not so, or, in other words, that Israel did not know Jehovah. But the higher view is never put forth by the prophets as a 74 RELIGION OF novelty ; they regard it as the very foundation of the religion of Jehovah from the days of Moses downwards, and the people never venture to deny that they are right. In truth they could not deny it, for the history of the first creation of Israel, which was the funda- mental evidence as to the true character of Jehovah's relations to His people, gave no room for such mytho- logical conceptions as operate in the heathen religions to make a just conception of the Godhead impossible. Heathen religions can never conceive of their gods as perfectly righteous, because they have a natural as well as a moral side, a physical connection with their wor- shippers, physical instincts and passions, and so forth. The Old Testament brings out this point with great force of sarcasm when Elijah taunts the prophets of Baal, and suggests that their god may be asleep, or on a journey, or otherwise busied with some human avoca- tion. In fact, all this was perfectly consistent with the nature of Baal. But the Hebrews knew Jehovah solely as the King and Judge of Israel. He was this, and this alone ; and therefore there was no ground to ascribe to Him less than absolute sovereignty and absolute right- eousness. If the masses lost sight of those great qualities, and assimilated His nature to that of the Canaanite deities, the prophets were justified in remind- ing them that Jehovah was Israel's God before they knew the Baalim, and that He had then showed Him- self a God far different from these. But religion cannot live on the mere memory of the LECT. II. THE PROPHETS. 75 past, and the faith of Jehovah had to assert itself as the true faith of Israel by realising a present God who still worked in the midst of the nation as He had worked of old. No nation can long cleave to a God whose pre- sence and power are not actually with them in their daily life. If Jehovah was Israel's God, He must manifest Himself as still the King and the Judge of His people, and these names must acquire more and more full significance through the actual experience of deeds of sovereignty and righteousness. Without such deeds no memory of the days of Moses could long have saved the God of the Hebrews from sinking to the level of the gods of the nations, and we have now to see that such deeds were not wanting, and not without fruit for the progress of the Old Testament faith. Before the time of Amos, the father of written prophecy, the record of Israel's religious life is too fragmentary to allow us to follow it in detail. Of the history of religion between Solomon and Ahab we know next to nothing. In the greater Israel of the North, which in these ages was the chief seat of national life, a constant succession of revolutions and civil wars obscures all details of internal history. The accession of the powerful dynasty of Omri, which regained in successful war a good part of the conquests of David — it was Omri, as we know, that reduced Moab to the tributary condition spoken of in 2 Kings iii. 4^* — restored the northern kingdom to fresh vigour ; and it is character- istic of the close union between national life and the 76 THE HOUSE OF OMRI. religion of Jeliovah which was involved in the very principles of the Hebrew commonwealth that the political revival was the prelude to a great religious movement. We know from the stone of JNIesha that the war of Israel with Moab appeared to the combatants as a war of Jehovah with Chemosh. The victory, there- fore, could not fail to give a fresh impulse to the national faith of the Hebrews. Now Omri, who imitated the conquests of David, followed also the Davidic policy of close union with Tyre, so obviously advan- tageous to the material interests of a nation which was not itself commercial, and could find no market for its agricultural produce except in the Phoenician ports. The marriage of Ahab with a Tyrian princess was also a direct imitation of the policy of Solomon's marriages ; and in building and endowing a temple of Baal for his wife Ahab did no more than Solomon had done without exciting much opposition on the part of his people. But now there were men in Israel to whom every act of homage to Baal appeared an act of disloyalty to Jehovah, and Elijah openly raised the question whether Jehovah or Baal was God. There was no room for two gods in the land. As Ahab had no intention of giving up the worship of Jehovah when he gratified Jezebel by establishing a service of Baal, we may be sure that to him the conflict with Elijah did not present itself as a conflict between Jehovah and Baal. Hitherto the enemies of Jehovah had been the gods of hostile nations, while the Tyrian LECT. 11. AHAB AND ELIJAH. 11 Baal was the god of a friendly state. To the king, as to many other persecutors since his day, the whole opposition of Elijah seems to have taken a political aspect. The imprisonment of Micaiah shows that he was little inclined to brook any religious interference with the councils of state, and the prophetic opposition to Jezebel and her Baal worship was extremely em- barrassing to his political plans, in which the alliance with Tyre was obviously a very important factor. On his part, therefore, the severe measures taken against the prophets and their party simply expressed a determina- tion to be absolute master in his own land. The pre- vious history of the northern tribes proves that a strong central authority was not at all popular with the nation. Ancestral customs and privileges were obstinately main- tained against the royal will, as we see in the case of Naboth ; and the same case shows that the Tyrian in- fluence encouraged the king to deal with this obstinacy in a very high-handed way. Elijah did not at first find any sustained popular support, but no doubt as the struggle went on, and especially after the judicial murder of Naboth sent a thrill of horror through the land, it began to be felt that he was pleading the cause of the ancient freedoms of Israel against a personal despotism ; and so we can understand the ultimate success of the party of opposition in the revolution of Jehu, in spite of the fact that only a small fraction of the nation saw the religious issues at stake so clearly as Elijah did, From the point of view of national 78 ELIJAH AND politics the fall of the house of Ahab was a step in the downfall of Israel. The dynasty of Jehu was not nearly so strong as the house of Omri ; it had little fortune in the Syrian wars till Damascus was weakened by the progress of Assyria, and Hosea, writing in the last days of the dynasty, certainly did not judge amiss when he numbered the bloodshed of Jezreel among the fatal sins of the people, a factor in the progress of that anarchy which made a sound national life impossible (Hosea i. 4 ; vii. 7), In this respect the work of Elijah foreshadows that of the prophets of Judah, who in like manner had no small part in breaking up the political life of the kingdom. The prophets were never patriots of the common stamp, to whom national interests stand higher than the absolute claims of religion and morality. Had Elijah been merely a patriot, to whom the state stood above every other consideration, he would have condoned the faults of a king who did so much for the greatness of his nation ; but the things for which Elijah contended were of far more worth than the national existence of Israel, and it is a higher wisdom than that of patriotism which insists that divine truth and civil righteousness are more than all the counsels of state- craft. Judged from a mere political point of view Elijah's work had no other result than to open a way for the bloody and unscrupulous ambition of Jehu, and lay bare the frontiers of the land to the ravages of the ferocious Hazael ; but with him the religion of Jehovah had already reached a point where it could no longer be LECT. II. THE HOUSE OF AHAB. 79 judged by a merely national standard, and the truths of which he was the champion were not the less true be- cause the issue made it plain that the cause of Jehovah could not triumph without destroying the old Hebrew state. Nay, without the destruction of the state the religion of Israel could never have given birth to a religion for all mankind, and it was precisely the in- capacity of Israel to carry out the higher truths of rehgion in national forms which brought into clearer and clearer prominence those things in the faith of Jehovah which are independent of every national con- dition, and make Jehovah the God not of Israel alone but of all the earth. This, however, is to anticipate what will come out more clearly as we proceed. Let us for the present confine our attention to what Elijah liimself directly saw and taught.^'' The ruling principle in Elijah's life was his con- suming jealousy for Jehovah the God of hosts (1 Kings xix. 14) ; or, to put the idea in another and equally Biblical form, Jehovah was to him pre-eminently a jealous God, who could endure no rival in His land or in the affections of His people. There was nothing novel in this idea; the novelty lay in the practical application which gave to the idea a force and depth which it had never shown before. To us it seems obvious that Ahab had broken the first commandment in giving Baal a place in his laud, but to Ahab and the mass of his contemporaries the thing could hardly be so clear. There are controversies enough even among 80 THE WORK modern commentators as to the exact force of the " before me " of the first commandment ; and, even if we are to suppose that practical religious questions were expressly referred to the words of this precept, it would not have been difficult to interpret them in a sense that meant only that no other god should have the pre- eminence over Israel's King, But no doubt these things were judged of less by the letter of the decalogue than by habitual feeling and usage. Hitherto all Israel's interest in Jehovah had had practical reference to His contests with the gods of hostile nations, and it was one thing to worship deities who were felt to be Jehovah's rivals and foes, and quite another thing to allow some recognition to the deity of an allied race. But Elijah saw deeper into the true character of the God of Israel. Where He was worshipped no other god could be ac- knowledged in any sense. This was a proposition of tremendous practical issues. It really involved the political isolation of the nation, for as things then stood it was impossible to have friendship and alliance with other peoples if their gods were proscribed in Israel's land. It is not strange that Ahab as a politician fought with all his might against such a view ; for it contained more than the germ of that antagonism between Israel and all the rest of mankind which made the Jews appear to the Eoman historian as the enemies of the human race, and brought upon them an unbroken suc- cession of political misfortunes and the ultimate loss of all place among the nations. It is hard to say how far LECT. II. OF ELIJAH. 81 the followers of Elijah or indeed the prophet himself perceived the full consequences of the position which he took up. But the whole history of Elijah testifies to the profound impression which he made. The air of unique grandeur that surrounds the prophet of Gilead proves how high he stood above the common level of his time. It is Jehovah and Elijah not against Ahab alone, but against and above the world. The work of Elijah, in truth, was not so much that of a great teacher as of a great hero. He did not preach any new doctrine about Jehovah, but at a criti- cal moment he saw what loyalty to the cause of Jehovah demanded, and of that cause he became the champion, not by mere words, but by his life. The recorded words of Elijah are but few, and in many cases have probably been handed down with the freedom that ancient historians habitually use in such matters. His importance lies in his personality. He stands before us as the representative of Jehovah's personal claims on Israel. The word of Jehovah in his mouth is not a word of doctrine, but of kingly authority, and to him pre-eminently applies the saying of Hosea : " I have hewed them by the prophets ; I have slain them by the word of My mouth : and My judgments were as the light that goeth forth " (Hosea vi. 5).^^ This view of the career of Elijah, which is that naturally derived from the Biblical narrative, is pretty much an exact inversion of the common representation of the function of the prophets. The traditional view F 82 THE WORK lect. ii. which we have from the Eabbins makes the prophets mere interpreters of the Law, and places the originality of their work entirely in their predictions. In that case Elijah would be the least original of prophets, for he gave no Messianic prediction. But in reality Jehovah did not first give a complete theoretical know- ledge of Himself and then raise up prophets to enforce the application of the theoretical scheme in particular circumstances. That would not have required a pro- phet ; it would have been no more than is still done by uninspired preachers. The place of the prophet is in a religious crisis where the ordinary interpretation of acknowledged principles breaks down, where it is necessary to go back, not to received doctrine, but to Jehovah Himself. The word of Jehovah through the prophet is properly a declaration of what Jehovah as the personal King of Israel commands in this particular crisis, and it is spoken with authority, not as an in- ference from previous revelation, but as the direct expression of the character and will of a personal God, who has made Himself personally audible in the pro- phet's soul. General propositions about divine things are not the basis but the outcome of such personal knowledge of Jehovah, just as in ordinary human life a general view of a man's character must be formed by observation of his attitude and action in a variety of special circumstances. Elijah's whole career, and not his words merely, contained a revelation of Jehovah to Israel — that is, made them feel that through tliis man LECT. II. OF ELIJAH. 83 Jehovah asserted Himself as a living God in their midst. We had occasion to observe in the course of last Lecture that all genuine religious belief contains a positive element — an element learned from the ex- perience of former generations. And so it will be found that all great religious reformations have their roots in the past, that true reformers do not claim to be heard on the ground of the new things they proclaim, but rather because they alone give due weight to old truths which the mass of their contemporaries cannot formally deny, but practically ignore. And they do so with jus- tice, for all genuine religious truth is personal truth, and personal truth has always a range far transcending the circumstances in which it was originally promulgated and the application to which it was originally confined. So it was with Elijah. The God whom he declared to Israel was the God of Moses — the same God, declaring His character and will in application to new circum- stances. Elijah himself is a figure of antique simplicity. He was a man of Gilead, a native of that part of the land of Israel which had still most affinity with the old nomadic life of the age of Moses, and was furthest re- moved from the Tyrian influences to which Ahab had yielded. It is highly characteristic for his whole stand- point that in the greatest danger of his life, when the victory of Jehovah on Mount Carmel seemed to be all in vain, he retired to the desert of Sinai, to the ancient mountain of God. It was the God of the Exodus to 84 THE NAZARITES. lect. ii. whom he appealed, the ancient King of Israel in the journeyings through the wilderness. In this respect Elijah shows his kinship to the Nazarites, a very curious and interesting class of men, who first appear in the time of the Philistine oppression, and who, some generations later, are mentioned by Amos side by side with the prophets (Amos ii. 11, 12). The cultivation of the vine is one of the most marked distinctions between nomadic and sedentary life. Nomads and half-settled tribes have often a certain amount of agricultural know- ledge, raising occasional crops of corn, or at all events of edible herbs. But the cultivation of the vine de- mands fixed sedentary habits, and all Semitic nomads view wine-growing and wine-drinking as essentially foreign to their traditional mode of life.^^ Canaan, on the contrary, is pre-eminently a land of the grape, and the Canaanite worship was full of Dionysiac elements. Wine was the best gift of the Baalim, and \vine-drinking was prominent in their luxurious worship. The Nazarite vow to abstain from wine, which in the earliest case, that of Samson, appears as a life-long vow, was un- doubtedly a religious protest against Canaanite civilisa- tion in favour of the simple life of ancient times. This appears most clearly in the case of the Eechabites, who had received from their father Jonadab the double pre- cept never to drink wine, and never to give up their wandering pastoral life for a residence in cities (Jer. XXXV.). We have no evidence that Elijah had a personal coimection with the ricchabites ; but Jonadab was a LECT. 11. THE PROPHETIC GUILDS. 85 prominent partisan of Jehu, and went with him to see his zeal for Jehovah when he put an end to Baal and his worshippers (2 Kings x. 15 seg'.). We see, therefore, that one element, and not the least popular, in the move- ment against Baal was a reaction in favour of the primi- tive simplicity of Israel in the days before it came into con- tact with Canaanite civilisation and Canaanite religion. Another seat of the influence of the movement was the prophetic guilds. Elijah himself, so far as we can judge, had little to do with these guilds ; but his suc- cessor Elisha, who had the chief share in giving political effect to his ideas, found his closest followers among the "sons of the prophets." The idea of " schools of the prophets," which we generally connect with this Biblical phrase, is a pure invention of com- mentators. According to all the laws of Semitic speech the sons of the prophets were not disciples of a school, but members of a guild or corporation,^^ living together in the neighbourhood of ancient sanctuaries, such as Gilgal and Bethel, and in all likelihood closely connected with the priests, as was certainly the case in Judah down to the extinction of the state (Jer. xxix. 26, cf. XX. 1, 2; Lam. ii. 20, etc.). The prophets of Jehovah and the priests of Jehovah were presumably associated much as were the prophets and priests of Baal. It would be a great mistake to suppose that wherever we hear of prophets or sons of prophets — that is, members of prophetic guilds — we are to think of men raised as high above their contemporaries as Elijah, 86 PROPHETS {NEBIIM). lect. ii. Amos, or Isaiah. The later prophets, in our sense of the word, were in constant feud with the common prophets of their day, whose profession was a trade, and whose oracles they condemn as mere heathenish divination im- plying no true knowledge of Jehovah. The very name and idea of the prophet {nabi) are common to Israel with its heathen neighbours, as appears, not only from the existence of prophets of Baal in connection with Jezebel's sanctuary, but from the fact that the Assyrians had a god Nebo, whose name is essentially identical with the Hebrew nabi, and who figures as the spokes- man of the gods, the counterpart of the Greek Hermes.-'^ The first appearance of companies of prophets is in the history of Samuel and Saul (1 Sam. x. 3, 10 seq), where they are found engaged in the worship of Jehovah under circumstances of physical excitement closely parallel to what is still seen among the dervishes of the East, and occasionally among ourselves in times of strong religious feeling.^o Excitement of this sort is often associated with genuine religious movements, especially among primitive peoples. Like all physical accompaniments of religious conviction, it is liable to strange excesses, and may often go along with false beliefs and self- deluding practices; but religious earnestness is always nearer the truth than indiffer- ence, and the great movement of which Elijah was the head found large support among the prophets of Jehovah. Yet we must not forget that physical enthusiasm is a dangerous ally to spiritual faith. The LECT. II. NABOTH. 87 revolution of Jehu, which Elisha set on foot with the aid of the prophetic guilds, used means that were far removed from the loftiness of Elijah's teaching, and under the protection of Jehu's dynasty the prophetic guilds soon sank to depths of hypocrisy and formalism with which Amos disclaimed all fellowship (Amos vii. 14). One feature in the teaching of Elijah still remains, which was perhaps the most immediately important of all. The divine denunciation of the fall of Ahab's house had its basis, not in the worship of Baal, but in the judicial murder of Naboth (1 Kings xxi.); and Wellhausen has given deserved prominence to the observation of Ewald, that this act of injustice stirred the heart of the nation much more deeply than the religious policy of the house of Omri (2 Kings vi. 32 ; ix. 25 seg'). Naboth's offence was his obstinate adhesion to ancient custom and law, and the crime of Ahab was no common act of violence, but an insult to the moral sense of all Israel. In condemning it Elijah pleaded the cause of Jehovah as the cause of civil order and right- eousness ; the God as whose messenger he spoke was the God by whom kings reign and princes decree justice. The sovereignty of Jehovah was not an empty thought ; it was the refuge of the oppressed, the support of the weak against the mighty. Without this it would have been nothing to declare war against the Tyrian Baal ; if Jehovah claimed Israel as His dominion, in which no other god could find a place, He did so because His rule was the rule of absolute righteousness. 88 THE HOUSE lect. ii. It would have been well for the house of Jehu if in mounting the throne of Ahab it had learned this lesson. But the dynasty which began in treachery and bloodshed, which profaned the great work of Elijah by making it the instrument of a vulgar ambition, rooted Baal out of the land without learning to know the true character of Jehovah. The second crisis in the religion of Israel was not without its wholesome issues. The faith of Jehovah was never again assailed from without, but within it grew more and more corrupt. Priests and prophets were content to enjoy the royal favour without remembering that Jehovah's cause was not victorious in the mere extirpation of Baal, and the nation returned to the service of Jehovah without learning that that service was worthless when it produced no other fruits than a constant succession of feasts and offerings. And meanwhile the inner state of Israel became daily more desperate. The unhappy Syrian wars sapped the strength of the country, and gradually destroyed the old peasant proprietors who were the best hope of the nation. The gap between the many poor and the few rich became wider and wider. The landless classes were ground down by usury and oppression, for in that state of society the landless man had no career in trade, and was at the mercy of the land-holding capitalist. It was of no avail that the Damascene enemy, lying as he did between Israel and Assyria, was at length compelled to leave Samaria at peace, and defend his own borders against the forward march of the great Eastern power, LECT. II. OF JEHU. 89 or that the last kings of the house of Jehu availed themselves of this diversion to restore tlie external greatness of their empire, not only on the Syrian frontier, but by successful campaigns against the Moabites. Under Jeroboam II. the outward state of Israel appeared as brilliant as in the best days of old, and the wealth and splendour of the court seemed to the superficial observer to promise a long career of prosperity ;' but, with all these outward signs of fortune, which the official organs of religion interpreted as sure proofs of Jehovah's favour, the state of the nation was rotten at the core ; there was no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land. A closer view of the condition of Israel at this epoch must, however, be reserved for our study of the prophets who have left the record of it in their written books — Amos of Tekoah and Hosea ben Beeri. 90 AMOS AND THE LECTUEE III. AMOS AND THE HOUSE OF JEHU. The century during which the house of Jehu reigned over Israel is handled very briefly in the epitome of the history of Ephraim preserved to us in the book of Kings. It was in its first part a time of wars and troubles, in which the house of Joseph maintained itself with difficulty against the power of Damascus. The Aramaeans, supported by the Ammonites, devas- tated the lands east of the Jordan with circumstances of barbarity which were still fresh in the memory of the Hebrews when Amos wrote (Amos i. 3, 13 ; 2 Kings X. 32 seq^. The frontier land of Gilead, which appears in Genesis xxxi. as the sacred boundary between Jacob and the Aramaean, had most to suffer, but the whole kingdom was more than once in the sorest straits (2 Kings xiii. 3 seq.; Amos iv. 10). The Israelites played a manful part in the unequal struggle, and at length, as we read in 2 Kings xiii. 5, Jehovah " gave to them a deliverer, and they went forth from under the hand of Syiia, and the children of Israel dwelt in their tents as beforetime." The LECT. III. HOUSE OF JEHU. 91 " deliverer," as we now know, can be no other than the host of the Assyrians, who began to make expedi- tions in the direction of Damascus under Shalmaneser II,, and received tribute from Jehu in one of the first years of his reign (B.C. 842). To us it seems plain enough that the forward movement of a great empire boded inevitable destruction to all the minor states of Syria and Palestine, and that the advance of the Assyrians could not be checked till they came to measure them- selves with the other great power that was seated on the Nile. At first, however, the Hebrews had very little conception of the power and plans of so remote a nation. The earliest historical allusions to the enemy that held Damascus in check are so vague that we are led to suppose that the very name of Assyria was unknown to the mass of the Hebrews ; ^ and the tribute of Jehu seems to have been offered to the conqueror of Hazael without being extorted by armed force. Damascus barred the road from the Tigris to Palestine, and till Damascus fell the successes of Assyria served to give Israel a needful breathing time. We cannot follow in detail the wars between the Aramaeans and the Great King ; but it is plain that they ultimately broke the power of Damascus. The Israelites, so long put on their defence, were able to assume the aggres- sive, and under Jeroboam II. the old boundaries of the land were restored, and even Moab once more became tributary (2 Kings xiv. 25 ; Amos vi. 14).^ The defeat of Moab at this time appears to be the subject of the 92 THE PROPHECY OF lect. tit. ancient fragment, Isaiah xv., xvi,, now incorporated as a quotation in the book of Isaiah, which represents the fall of the proud and once prosperous nation as a proof of the helplessness of its gods, who can give no answer to their worshippers.^ To Israel, on the contrary, their victory was a new proof of Jehovah's might, and we learn from 2 Kings xiv. 25 that King Jeroboam was encouraged in his successful wars by the word of Jehovah, spoken through the prophet Jonah of Gath- hepher. It has been conjectured that part of the prophecy of Jonah is preserved in the passage quoted by Isaiah, who expressly tells us (xvi. 14) that it is a word spoken by Jehovah against Moab long ago (A.V. " from that time "). There is, however, nothing in the prophecy which implies that its author belonged to the invading nation. He seems rather to watch the fall of Moab from a neutral position, and the only verses which are not taken up with a description of the calamity suggest rather that the writer was a Judsean. The Moabites are described as fleeing southward and taking refuge in the Edomite capital of Sela, whence they are exhorted to send tokens of homage to the Davidic king in Jerusalem, Edom's overlord, entreat- ing his protection and mediation (xvi. 1, 3, 4), while this exercise of mercy towards the" fallen is recom- mended as a worthy deed, tending to confirm the just rule of the house of David. We must not, however, linger over this prophecy, which is too fragmentary to be interpreted with certainty when we have so little LECT. III. ISAIAH XV., XVI. 93 knowledge of its history. The glimpse which it gives us of one sitting in truth in the tent of David, searching out justice and prompt in righteousness, will prove valuable when we come to be more closely concerned with the Southern Kingdom ; but under the dynasty of Jehu our chief interest still lies in the North, whose monarchs overshadowed the Davidic kings as the cedar of Lebanon overshadows the thistle that grows at its foot (2 Kings xiv. 9). After the victories of Jeroboam the house of Ephraim enjoyed external prosperity for a whole generation ; wealth accumulated and luxury increased. It seems, however, that the advantages of this gleam of fortune were reaped almost exclusively by the aristocracy. The strength of old Israel had lain in the free agricultural class, who formed the national militia, and in peace and war gathered round the here- ditary heads of their clans as their natural leaders. We must suppose the life of Israel in its best times to have been very similar to what is still found in secluded and primitive Semitic communities, where habits of military organisation are combined with simplicity of manners and steady industry. The Israelites were an isolated people, and became so in an increasing degree as the doctrine of Jehovah's jealousy made it more diffi- cult for them to enter into alliance with other states (Deut. xxxiii. 28; Num. xxiii. 9). To maintain their position amidst hostile nations, their superiority over the subjugated Canaanites, it was necessary for them to observe a sort of standing military discipline. Among 94 THE DECLINE lect. hi. all Semitic tribes which have successfully asserted their independence in similar circumstances we find an almost ascetic frugality of life, such as becomes men who are half soldiers half farmers. Custom prescribes that the rich should live on ordinary days as simply as their poorer neighbours ; there is no humiliating interval between the several classes of society. The chiefs are the fathers of their clan, receiving a prompt and child-like obedience in time of war, administering justice with an authority that rests on custom rather than on force, and therefore obeyed and loved in pro- portion as they are themselves true to traditional usages. The power of custom is unbounded, and notwithstand- ing the strong sense of personal dignity common to all free men, which in the oldest Hebrew laws finds its expression in the entire absence of corporal punish- ments, individual liberty, as we understand it, is strictly confined by the undisputed authority of usage in every detail of life. A small nation so organised may do great things in the Semitic world, but is very liable to sudden collapse when the old forms of life break down under change of circumstances. Eastern history is full of examples of the rapidity, to us almost incredible, with which nations that have grown strong by temperance, discipline, and self-restraint pass from their highest glory into extreme corruption and social disintegration.^ Now, in Israel, under Saul and David, the kingship was only the natural development and crown of the old LECT. III. OF EPHRAIM. 95 tribal system. But with Solomon the transition to the vices of Oriental despotism began to be felt. In Northern Israel, though not in Judah, Solomon sub- stituted government by officials of the Court for the ancient aristocratic organisation, and his levies of forced labour and other innovations also tended directly to break down the old estate of Israel's freemen. The rebellion under Jeroboam was beyond question a con- servative revolution, but with the rise of the house of Omri the policy of Solomon reappears at the Northern Court, and we have seen what deep offence Ahab gave by his high-handed interference with ancient custom and privilege.^ Under the dynasty of Jehu the old order of things may have had a temporary victory, but certainly not a lasting one. A dynasty founded by bloodshed and perfidy was not likely to be more faithful to ancient law and custom, more jealous of the rights of subjects, than the house of Omri. But, above all, the long unhappy wars with Damascus, with tlie famines and plagues that were their natural accompaniments (Amos iv.), exhausted the strength and broke the inde- pendence of the poorer freemen. The Court became the centre of a luxurious and corrupt aristocracy, which seems gradually to have absorbed the land and wealth of the nation, while the rest of the people were hope- lessly impoverished. The old good understanding between classes disappeared, and the gulf between rich and poor became continually wider. The poor could find no law against the rich, who sucked their blood by 96 THE WORSHIP OF THE usury and every form of fraud (Amos ii. 6, 7; iv. 1 ; viii. 4, etc.) ; civil corruption and oppression became daily more rampant (Amos iii. 9 seq^., and passi'ni). The best help against such disorders ought to have been found in the religion of Jehovah, but the official organs of that religion shared in the general corruption. Into this point we must look with some fulness of detail, as it is of the first consequence for the understanding of many parts of Amos and Hosea. We have already seen that the revolution inaugur- ated by Elijah and Elisha appealed to the conservatism of the nation. It was followed therefore by no attempt to remodel the traditional forms of Jehovah worship, which continued essentially as they had been since the time of the Judges. The golden calves remained undis- turbed, though they were plainly out of place in the worship of a Deity who had so markedly separated himself from the gods of the nations ; and with them there remained also many other religious institutions and symbols — such as the Ashera or sacred pole at Samaria (A.V. "grove," 2 Kings xiii. 6) — which were common to Israel with the Canaanites, and in their influence on the popular imagination could only tend to efface true conceptions of the God of Elijah, and drag Him down again to the level of a heathen deity. Yet the sanctuaries which contained so many elements unfavourable to a spiritual faith were still tlie indispen- sable centres of national religion. True religion can never be the affair of the individual alone. A right LECT. III. NORTHERN SANCTUARIES. 97 religious relation to God must include a relation to our fellow-men in God, and solitary acts of devotion can never satisfy the wants of healthy spiritual life, which calls for a visible expression of the fact that we worship God together in the common faith which binds us into a religious community. The necessity for acts of public and united worship is instinctively felt wherever reli- gion has a social influence, and in Israel it was felt the more strongly bejause Jehovah was primarily the God and King of the nation, who had to do with the indivi- dual Israelite only in virtue of his place in the common- wealth. It was in the ordering of national affairs, the sanctioning of social duties, that Jehovah made Himself directly present to His people, and so their recognition of His Godhead necessarily took a public form, when they rejoiced before Him at. His sanctuary. The Israelite could not in general have the same personal sense of Jehovah's presence in his closet as when he " appeared before Him " or " saw His face " at the trysting-place where He met with His people as a king meets with his subjects, receiving from them the expression of their homage in the usual Oriental form of a gift (Exod. xxiii. 15, 17), and answering their devotion by words of blessing or judgment conveyed through the priest (Deut, x. 8 ; xxxiii. 8, 10). It was at the altar that Jehovah came to His people and blessed them (Exod, xx. 24), and acts of worship at a distance from the sanctuary assumed the exceptional character of vows, and were directed towards the 98 THE WORSHIP OF THE lect. hi. sanctuary (1 Kings viii.), where in due time they should be supplemented by the payment of thank-offerings. How absolutely access to the sanctuary was conceived as the indispensable basis of all religion appears from the conception that Jehovah cannot be worshipped in foreign lands (1 Sam. xxvi. 19) ; that these lands are themselves unclean (Amos vii. 17) ; and that the cap- tives in Assyria and Egypt, who cannot offer drink- offerings and sacrifices to Jehovah, are like men who eat the unclean bread of mourners " because their food for their life is not brought into the house of Jehovah " (Hosea ix. 4). So too when Hosea describes the coming days of exile, when the children of Israel shall remain for many days without king or captain, without sacrifice or mag^eba (the sacred stone which marked the ancient sanctuaries), without epTiod (plated image), or terapimn (household images), he represents this condition as a temporary separation of Jehovah's spouse from all the privileges of wedlock.^ While the sanctuaries and their service held this position, every corruption in the worship practised at them affected the religion of Israel at its very core. The worship at the sanctuaries was guided by the priests, whose business it was to place the savour of the sacrifice before Jehovah, and lay whole burnt-offerings on His altar (Deut. xxxiii. 10). The personal interests of the priests lay all in the encouragement of copious gifts and offerings ; and, as the people had the choice of various sanctuaries — Bethel, Gilgal, Dan, Mizpah, Tabor, LECT. III. NORTHERN SANCTUARIES. 99 Shechem, etc. (Amos v. 5 ; Hosea v. 1 ; vi. 9, where for hy consent read at Shechem) — and pilgrimages to distant shrines were a favourite religious exercise (Amos v. 5 ; viii. 14), the priesthoods of the several holy places were naturally led to vie with one another in making the services attractive to the masses. The sacred feasts were occasions of mirth and jollity (Hosea ii. 11), where men ate and drank, sang and danced, with unrestrained merriment. The poet of Lament, ii. 7 compares the din in the temple at Jerusalem on a great feast day to the clamour of an army storming the town. It is easy to judge what shape the rivalry of popular sanctuaries would take under these circumstances. The great ambition of each priesthood was to add every element of luxury and physical enjoyment to the holy fairs. The Canaanite ritual offered a model only too attractive to the Semitic nature, which knows no mean between almost ascetic frugality and unrestrained self-indulgence, and Amos and Hosea describe drunkenness and shock- ing licentiousness as undisguised accompaniments of the sacred services (Amos ii. 7, 8 ; Hosea iv. 14). The prosperous days of Jeroboam II. gave a new impulse to these excesses ; feasts and sacrifices were more frequent than ever, for was it not Jehovah, or rather the Baalim — that is, the local manifestations of Jehovah under the form of the golden calves — who had given Israel the good things of peace and plenty (Hosea ii. 5 seq) ? The whole nation seemed given up to mad riotousness under the prostituted name of religion : " whoredom and wine and must had turned their head " (Hosea iv. 11). 100 JUDICIAL FUNCTIONS lect. la In order, however, fully to appreciate the corrupting influence of these degraded holy places and their ministers, we must remember that in the ancient con- stitution of Israel the sanctuary and the priesthood had another function even more important than that con- nected with feasts and joyous sacrifices. Since the days of Moses it had been the law of Israel that causes too hard for the ordinary judges, who decided by custom and precedent, must be brought before God for decision (Exod. xviii. 19). In the oldest part of the Hebrew legislation the word which our version renders " judges " properly means " God " (Exod. xxi. 6 ; xxii. 8), and to bring a case before God means to bring it to the sanctuary. It was at the door-post of the sanctuary that the symbolic action was performed by which a Hebrew man might voluntarily accept a life-long service ; it was God speaking at the sanctuary who was appealed to in disputed questions of property. " If one man sin against another," says Eli, quoting it would seem, an old proverb, "God shall give judgment on him." This judgment was the affair of the priests, who sometimes administered the " oath of Jehovah," which was accepted as an oath of purgation (Exod. xxii. 11) ; in other cases the holy lot of the Urim and Thummim was appealed to ; but in general no doubt the priests acted mainly as the conservators of ancient sacred law ; it was their business to teach Jacob Jehovah's judgments and Israel His law (Deut. xxxiii. 10), and in better days it was their highest praise that they dis- LECT. III. OF THE PRIESTS. 101 charged this duty without fear or favour, that they observed Jehovah's word and kept His covenant without respect to father or mother, brethren or children {ihid. ver. 9). Those days, however, were past. Under the kingship the judicial functions of the priests were necessarily brought into connection with the office of the sovereign, who was Jehovah's representative in matters of judgment, as well as in other affairs of state (2 Sam. viii. 15 ; xiv. 17 ; 1 Kings iii. 28). The priests became, in a sense, officers of the Court, and the chief priest of a royal sanctuary, such as Amaziah at Bethel (Amos vii. 10, 13), was one of the great officials of state. (Compare 2 Sam. viii. 17 seg., where the king's priests already appear in the list of grandees.) Thus the priesthood were naturally associated in feelings and interests with the corrupt tyrannical aristocracy, and were as notorious as the lords temporal for neglect of law and justice. The strangest scenes of lawlessness were seen in the sanctuaries — revels where the fines paid to the priestly judges were spent in wine-drinking, ministers of the altars stretched for these carousals on garments taken in pledge in defiance of sacred law (Amos ii. 8 ; comp. Exod. xxii. 26 seg-.). Hosea accuses the priests of Shechem of highway robbery and murder (Hosea vi. 9, Heb') ; the sanctuary of Gilead was polluted with blood, and the prophet explains the general dissolution of moral order, the reign of lawless- ness in all parts of the land, by the fact that the priests, whose business it was to maintain the knowledge of 102 HEBREW CONCEPTION lect. iii. Jehovah and His laws, had forgotten this holy trust (Hosea iv.). The whole effect of the unfaithfulness of the priests upon national morality and the sense of right and wrong cannot be appreciated without some explanation of the point of view under which the early Hebrews looked upon sin. We have already had occasion to see that in early nations the idea of law, or binding custom, is co- extensive with morality, and that, among the Hebrews in particular, right and wrong are habitually viewed from a forensic point of view. This, of course, influences the notion of sin. The fundamental meaning of the Hebrew word lidtoj, to sin, is to be at fault, and in Hebrew, as in Arabic, the active (causative) form has the sense of miss- ing the mark (Judges xx. 16) or other object aimed at. The notion of sin, therefore, is that of blunder or derelic- tion, and the word is associated with others that indicate error, folly, or want of skill and insight (1 Sam. xxvi. 21). This idea has various applications, but, in par- ticular, a man is at fault when he fails to fulfil his engagements, or to obey a binding command ; and in Hebrew idiom the failure is a " sin," whether it be wil- ful failure, or be due to forgetfulness, or even be altogether involuntary. Jonathan's infringement of his father's prohibition and curse in 1 Sam. xiv. was not less a " sin " in this sense because he did not know what Saul had enjoined. In two respects, then, the Hebrew idea of sin, in its earlier stages, is quite distinct from that which we attach to the word. In the first place, it is LECT. III. OF SIN. 103 not necessarily thouglit of as offence against God, but includes any act that puts a man in the wrong with those who have power to make him rue it (2 Kings xviii. 14). " What is my sin before thy father," says David, " that he seeks my life ?" (1 Sam. xx. 1). " That which was torn of beasts," says Jacob to Laban, " I brought not to thee ; I bore the loss of it " — literally, I took it as my sin (Gen. xxxi. 39). If David dies, says Bathsheba, without providing against the succession of Adonijah, " I and my son Solomon shall be sinners " (1 Kings i. 21). In the second place, the notion of sin has no necessary reference to the conscience of the sinner, it does not necessarily involve moral guilt, but only, so to speak, forensic liability. In two ways, however, the Hebrew notion of sin comes into relation with religion. In the first place, the lively sense of Jehovah's presence in Israel as a King, who issues commands to His people and does not fail to enforce them, gives prominence to the conception of sins against Jehovah. In by far the greatest proportion of passages in the older parts of the Bible where such sins are spoken of, the reference is to religious offences, to the worship of false gods or of Jehovah Himself in ways not acceptable to Him, to disobedience to some particular injunction — as in the case of Saul's failure to fulfil his commission against Amalek — or neglect to discharge a vow (1 Sam. xiv. 38 ; Judges xxi. 22). Offences which we should call moral, such as polytheism, stand on the same level with dis- obedience to purely ritual customs, such as eating the 104 CORRUPTION OF lect. hi. flesh of animals whose blood has not been offered to Jehovah (1 Sam. xiv. 33 seq^, or with such an offence against popular feeling as David's numbering of the people (2 Sam. xxiv. 17). In cases like the last the sin is not clearly felt to be such until misfortune follows, and this habit of judging actions by subsequent events, which plainly might give rise to very distorted views of right and wrong if guided only by popular feeling, became, under the spiritual guidance of the prophets, a chief means to produce juster and deeper views of Jehovah's holy will. But, in the second place, offences of man against man came to be viewed as religious offences, inasmuch as Jehovah is the supreme judge before whom such cases come for decision (Judges xi. 27 ; 1 Sam. ii. 25). The whole sphere of law in Israel is Jehovah's province, and He is the vindicator, not only of His own direct commands, but of all points of social order regulated by traditional law and custom. Thus, in virtue of the coincidence of law and custom with moral obligation, Jehovah, in His quality of judge, has to do with every part of morals, and all kinds of sin in Israel come before His tribunal. Jehovah has many ways of vindicating the right and punishing sinners, for He commands the forces of nature as well as presides over the visible ordinances of judgment in Israel. But it was to the judgment-seat at the sanctuary that the man who felt himself wronged naturally turned for redress, and the man who knew he had done wrong turned for expiation, which was granted by means of LECT. III. THE PRIESTHOOD. 105 sacrifice (1 Sam. iii. 14 ; xxvi. 19), or on a money payment to the priests (2 Kings xii. 16), the latter being regarded in the light of a fine, which was naturally held to wipe out the offence in a state of society when all breaches of law, except wilful bloodshed, were cancelled by payment of a pecuniary equivalent. When the priests, therefore, began to view the sins of the people as a regular and desirable source of income, as we learn from Hosea iv. 8 that they actually did in the times of that prophet, the whole idea of right and wrong was reduced to a money standard, and the moral sense of the com- munity was proportionally debased in every relation of life. The shortcomings of the priesthood might, in some measure, have been supplied if the prophets, whose influence with the masses was doubtless still great, had retained aught of the spirit of Elijah. But prophecy had sunk to a mere trade (Amos vii. 12). Hosea brackets prophet and priest in a common condemnation. In the fall of the priesthood the prophet shall fall with him (Hosea iv. 5). Was everything then lost which Elijah had con- tended for ? Was there nothing in the nation of Jehovah to distinguish it from other peoples, except that pre-emi- nence in corruption against which Amos calls the heathen themselves as witnesses (Amos iii 9 se^'O • ^^ reading the prophetic denunciations of the kingdom of Jeroboam we might almost deem that it was so ; and there can be no question that the inner decay of the state had 106 ISRAEL NOT lect. hi. gone so far that it was impossible to restore new and healthy life to the existent body politic. But, on the one hand, it must be remembered that Amos and Hosea, in virtue of their function as preachers of reformation, and uncompromising exposers of every abuse, necessarily give exclusive prominence to the evils of the state, and, on the other hand, it is to be observed that Amos at least speaks almost solely of the corruption of the wealthy and ruling classes, whose vices in an Eastern kingdom are far from a true index to the moral condi- tion of the poorer orders. Amos by no means regards the sinners of Jehovah's people (chap. ix. 10) as co- extensive with Israel He likens the impending judg- ment to the sifting of corn in a sieve, in which no good grain falls to the ground. There was still a remnant in Ephraim that could be compared to sound corn ; and, though all the sinners must perish, Jehovah, he tells us, will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob (ver. 8). This, it may be at once observed, is a characteristic feature of all Old Testament prophecy. The prophets have much to say of the sins of Israel, sins so aggra- vated that Jehovah can no longer pass them by ; but they never despair of Jehovah's good cause in the midst of the nation, or hold that all His goodness and grace have been lavished on Israel to no purpose. Amidst the universal corruption there remains a seed of better hope, some tangible and visible basis for the assurance that Jehovah will yet shape from the remnant of the reprobate nation a people worthy of His love. This LECT. III. WHOLL V CORRUPT. 107 conviction is not expressed in the language of modern sentimental optimism, which will not give up all hope even of the most depraved men. The prophets were not primarily concerned with the amendment of individual sinners ; it was the nation that they desired to see fol- lowing righteousness and the knowledge of Jehovah, and they were too practical not to know that the path of national amendment is to get rid of evil-doers and put better men in their place (comp. Jer. xiii. 23, 24). But this they feel is not a thing impossible ; there is a true tradition of the knowledge and fear of Jehovah in the land, though it has no influence on the actual leaders of the state ; and in appealing to this higher conception of duty and faith they feel that their words are not spoken to the winds, but that they are advocating a cause which, sustained by Jehovah's own hand, must ultimately triumph in that very community which at present seems so wholly given up to evil. So, when Elijah complains that he is left alone in his jealousy for Jehovah God of hosts, the divine voice answers him that, in the sweeping judgment to be executed by the swords of Jehu and Hazael, he will spare seven thousand men, all the knees which have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. (In 1 Kiugs xix. 18, for "Yet I have left" read "And I will leave," comp. 2 Kings xiii. 7.) The clearest proof that Jehovah's work in time past had not been without fruit in Israel lies in the high and commanding tone that prophets like Amos assume. When they speak of the omnipotent Jehovah, the 108 RELIGIOUS STANDARD lect. hi. Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord of all nations, to whose supreme purpose of righteousness all nature and all history must bend, they confess themselves to be speaking truths that the mass of their countrymen ignore, but never claim to be preachers of a new or unheard-of religion. If it sometimes appears that they treat Israel as sunk below the level even of heathen nations, it is elsewhere plain that they measure the people of Jehovah by a standard which could not be applied to those who have never known the living God. The keynote of the prophecy of Amos lies in the words of chap. iii. 2, " You only have I known of all families of the earth ; there- fore I will punish you for all your iniquities." The guilt of Israel is its declension, not from the common standard of other nations, and not from a new standard now heard of for the first time, but from a standard already set before them by the unique Jehovah who had made this nation His own. For the right under- standing of the prophets, it is plainly of the highest importance to realise, with some precision, what this standard was. Up to quite a recent date it was commonly assumed that this question presented no difficulty ; the laws of the Pentateuch, fully written out by Moses and con- tinuously preserved from his days, were held to have been the unvarying rule of faith and obedience before as after the Exile. In the present day this easy solu- tion of the problem can no longer be accepted by his- torical students. The prophets before the Exile never LECT. III. OF THE PROPHETS, 109 appeal to the finished system of the Pentateuch. The older historical books do not appeal to it ; and in fact the several parts of these books can be classed in dis- tinct groups, each of which has its own standard of religious observance and duty according to the age at which it was composed. The latest history in the books of Chronicles presupposes the whole Pentateuch ; the main thread of the books of Kings accepts the standard of the book of Deuteronomy, but knows nothing of the Levitical legislation ; and older narratives now incorporated in the Kings — as, for example, the histories of Elijah and Elisha, which every one can see to be ancient and distinct documents — know nothing of the Deuteronomic law of the one altar, and, like Elijah himself, are indifferent even to the worship of the golden calves. These older narratives, with the greater part of the books of Samuel and Judges, accept as fitting and normal a stamp of worship closely modelled on the religion of the patriarchs as it is depicted in Genesis, or based on the ancient law of Exod. xx. 24, where Jehovah promises to meet with His people and bless them at the altars of earth or unhewn stone which stand in all corners of the land, on every spot where Jehovah has set a memorial of His name. And in like manner, as I have shown at length in a former course of Lectures, the sacred laws of Israel which the earlier history acknowledges are not the whole complicated Pentateuchal system, but essentially the contents of that fundamental code which is given in no RELIGIOUS STANDARD lect. in. Exod. xxi.-xxiii. under the title of the Book of the Covenant/ The limits of the present Lectures forbid us to enter on a detailed inquiry as to how much of the Penta- teuchal law was already known to Amos or Hosea, and it would be unreasonable to ask you to take on trust results of other men's researches which you have had no opportunity to test. We must rather ask whether there is not some broad practical method by which we can get as near the truth as is necessary for our pur- pose, without committing ourselves to details that must be settled by the minute inquiries of scholars specially equipped for the task. If I have succeeded in carrying you with me in the course which we have already traversed, I do not think that we shall find this to be impossible. We have not hitherto had the help of any detailed results of Pentateuch criticism, and yet by simply concentrating our attention on un- deniable historical facts, and giving them their due weight, we have been able to form a consistent account of the progress of the religion of Jehovah from Moses to Elijah. We have not found occasion to speak of Moses as the author of a written code, and to inquire how much his code contained, because the history itself makes it plain that his central importance for early Israel did not lie in his writings, but in his practical office as a judge who stood for the people before God and brought their hard cases before Him at the sanc- tuary (Exod. xviii. 19 ; xxxiii. 9 seq^. It is this func- LECT. III. OF THE PROPHETS. Ill tion of Moses, and not the custody of the written word, which appears in the oldest history as carried on by his successors, and Israel knew Jehovah as its Judge and Lawgiver, not because He had given it a written Torah, but because He was still present to give judgment in its midst. So again we have not found occasion to dwell on the legislation at Mount Sinai, as if the cove- nant ratified there were the proper beginning of Israel's life as the people of Jehovah ; for the early history and the prophets do not use the Sinaitic legislation as the basis of their conception of the relation of Jehovah to Israel, but habitually go back to the deliverance from Egypt, and from it pass directly to the wilderness wandering and the conquest of Canaan (Josh. xxiv. 5 s&q^., 17 seq^. ; Amos ii. 10 ; Hosea ii. 15 ; xi. 1 ; xii. 9, 13 ; Jer. xi. 4). We are thus dispensed from entering into knotty questions as to the date of the several parts of the Sinaitic legislation, simply because the events of the year spent at Sinai are not those which have practical prominence in the sequel. And so again, when we came to speak of Elijah, we found it unnecessary to ask what novelty his work exhibited in comparison with Pentateuchal laws that may be supposed to have existed in his time, because the practically epoch-making significance of his stand against Baal is rendered clear by the fact that in the time of Solomon the introduction of foreign worships under similar circumstances passed without popular challenge, and that in Judah Solomon's sane- 112 RELIGIOUS STANDARD lect. hi. tuaries dedicated to heathen gods were left untouched till long after the time of Elijah (2 Kings xxiii. 13), and must therefore have been tolerated even by Ahab's contemporary Jehoshaphat, who passed for a king of indubitable orthodoxy. Facts like these are landmarks in the history which we cannot afford to overlook, and which veracity forbids us to explain away, and such facts, rather than traditional or hypothetical assump- tions as to the date of the Pentateuch, are our best key to understand the actual condition of the people to whom the prophets spoke. In truth those who hold the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and yet desire to do justice to the history are compelled to admit that it was practically a buried book, many of its most central laws being quite ignored by the best kings and the most enlightened priests. They were equally ignored by the prophets, as we shall see more clearly in the sequel, and so for the historical study of the prophets and their work we must leave them on one side, and direct our attention to things that can be shown to have had practical place and recognition in Israel. In other words, the history and the prophets are not to be interpreted by the Penta- teuch, but they themselves must be our guides in determining what constituted the sum of the extant knowledge of Jehovah in the time to which they belong. In the first place, then, it is perfectly clear that the great mass of Levitical legislation, with its ritual LECT. Ill, OF THE PROPHETS. 113 entirely constructed for the sanctuary of the ark and the priests of the house of Aaron, cannot have had practical currency and recognition in the Northern King- dom. The priests could not have stultified themselves by accepting the authority of a code according to which their whole worship was schismatic ; nor can the code have been the basis of popular faith or prophetic doc- trine, since Elijah and Elisha had no quarrel with the sanctuaries of their nation. Hosea himself, in his bitter complaints against the priests, never upbraids them as schismatic usurpers of an illegitimate authority, but speaks of them as men who had proved untrue to a legitimate and lofty office. The same argument proves that the code of Deuteronomy was unknown, for it also treats all the northern sanctuaries as schismatic and heathenish, acknowledging but one place of lawful pilgrimage for all the seed of Jacob. It is safe, there- fore, to conclude that whatever ancient laws may have had currency in a written form must be sought in other parts of the Pentateuch, particularly in the Book of the Covenant, Exod. xxi.-xxiii., which the Pentateuch itself presents as an older code than those of Deutero- nomy and the Levitical Legislation. In fact, the ordinances of this code closely correspond with the indications as to the ancient laws of Israel supplied by the older history and the prophets. Quite similar, except in some minor details which need not now delay us, is another ancient table of laws preserved in Exod. xxxiv. These two documents may be taken as 114 THE OLDEST LA WS lect. hi. representing the general system of sacred law which had practical recognition in the Northern Kingdom, though the very fact that we have two such documents conspires with other indications to make it probable that the laws, which were certainly generally published by oral decisions of the priests, were better known by oral tradition than by written books. Neither Amos nor Hosea alludes to an extant written law (Hosea viii. 12 is mistranslated in A.V.), though this fact does not prove that wiitten laws did not exist, but only that they had not the same prominence as in later times. Jehovah, however, instructed His people and re- vealed His character to them quite as much by history as by precept, and the recollection of His great deeds in times gone by forms the most frequent text for pro- phetic admonition. I have already remarked that the extant historical narratives fall into several groups, each of which is closely akin to the Book of the Cove- nant, to the Deuteronomic code, or to the finished Pen- tateuch (or, if you please, the Levitical legislation) respectively. In the Northern Kingdom, where the Deuteronomic and Levitical legislations had no recog- nition, it may safely be assumed that the parts of the historical books which are akin to these, and judge the actions of Israel by the standard which they supply, were also unknown. This would exclude those sections of the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua which are plainly by the same hand as the Levitical laws, and a LECT. III. AND HISTORIES. 115 considerable number of passages in the Deuteronomic style, chiefly comments on the older narrative or speeches composed in the usual free manner of ancient historians, which are found here and there in the other historical books. The main thread of the books of Kings, as distinguished from the author's extracts from earlier sources, must of course be set aside, since the history of Kings goes down to the close of the Judsean Kingdom, and is written throughout from the standpoint of Josiah's reformation, which took place long after the fall of the kingdom of Ephraim. It is important to indicate these deductions in a general way, but for our present purpose it is unneces- sary to follow them out in detail, because, speaking broadly, they affect the interpretation rather than the substance of the history. In the time of Amos and Hosea the truest hearts and best thinkers of Israel did not yet interpret Jehovah's dealings with His people in the light of the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws ; they did not judge of Israel's obedience by the principle of the one sanctuary or the standard of the Aaronic ritual; but they had heard the story of Jehovah's dealings with their fathers, and many of them, perhaps, had read it in books, great part of which is actually incorporated in our present Bible. Take, for example, the history of the Northern Kingdom as it is given in the Kings, No attentive reader, even of the English Bible, can fail to see that the substance of the narrative, all that gives it vividness and colour, belongs to a quite different species 116 THE OLDEST of literature from the brief chronological epitomes and theological comments of the Judsean editor. The story of Elijah and Elisha clearly took shape in the Northern Kingdom ; it is told by a narrator who is full of per- sonal interest in the affairs of Ephraim, and has no idea of criticising Elijah's work, as the Judsean editor criticises the whole history of the North, by constant reference to the schismatic character of the northern sanctuaries. Moreover, the narrative has a distinctly popular character ; it reads like a story told by word of mouth, full of the dramatic touches and vivid presenta- tions of detail which characterise all Semitic history that closely follows oral narration. The king of Israel of whom we read in 2 Kings viii. 4 was, we may be sure, not the only man who talked with Gehazi, saying, " Tell ine, I pray thee, all the great things that Ehsha hath done." By many repetitions the history of the prophets took a fixed shape long before it was committed to writing, and the written record preserves all the essen- tial features of the narratives that passed from mouth to mouth, and were handed down orally from father to child. The same thing may be said of the earlier history, which in all its main parts is evidently the transcript of a vivid oral tradition. The story of the patriarchs, of Moses, of the Judges, of Saul, and of David is still recorded to us as it lived in the mouths of the people, and formed the most powerful agency of religious education. Even the English reader who is unable to follow the nicer operations of criticism may LECT. III. HISTORIES. 117 by attentive reading satisfy himself that all the Old Testament stories which have been our delight from childhood for their dramatic pictorial simplicity belong to a different stratum of thought and feeling from the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws. They were the spiritual food of a people for whom these laws did not yet exist, but who listened at every sanctuary to Jehovah's great and loving deeds, which had consecrated these holy places from the days of the patriarchs downwards. Beersheba, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, and the rest, had each its own chain of sacred story, and wherever the Israelites were gathered together men might be heard "rehearsing the righteous deeds of Jehovah, the righteous deeds of His rule in Israel " (Judges v. 11). A great part of the patriarchal history — almost all, indeed, that has not reference to Abraham and Hebron — is gathered in this way round northern sanctuaries or round Beer- sheba, which was a place of pilgrimage for Northern Israel (Amos v. 5 ; viii. 14); and the special interest which the narrative displays in Eachel and Joseph is an additional proof that we still read it very much as it was read or told in the house of Joseph in the days of Amos and Hosea. There are two chapters in the Bible which can be pointed to as specially instructive for the way in which the Israelites of the North thought of Jehovah and His reign in Israel, One of these is the so-called blessing of Moses in Deut. xxxiii., which plainly belongs to the Northern Kingdom, because it speaks of Joseph as the 118 THE BLESSIXG crowTied one of his brethren (ver. 16 ; A.Y. separated from his brethren), and prays for the reunion of Judah to the rest of Israel (ver. 7). The other is Josh, xxiv., a narratiye connected ■vrlth Shechem, which speaks without offence of the sacred tree and sacred stone that marked this great northern sanctuary, and is therefore quite ignorant of the Deuteronomic law. The chapter gives a resumA of the history of Israel and the patriarchs in the mouth of Joshua, which is in fact the closing summary of a great historical book, known as the Elohistic history, to which large parts of the Penta- teuchai narrative are referred by critics ; and taken with the Blessing of Moses it shows us better than any other part of Scripture how thoughtful and godly men of the Xorthem Kingdom understood the religion of Jehovah though they knew nothing of the greater Pentateuchal codes. In the Blessing of Moses the religion of Israel is described in a tone of joyous and hopeful trust — the glory of Jehovah when He shined forth from Paran and came to Kadesh full of love for His people, the gift of the law through Moses as a possession for the congrega- tion of Jacob, the final establishment of the state when there was a king in Jeshurun uniting the branches of the people, and knitting the tribes of Israel together (ver. 5). The priesthood is still revered as the arbiter of impartial divine justice. The tribes are not all prosperous alike ; Simeon has already disappeared from the roll, and Eeuben seems threatened with extinction ; but the princely house of Joseph is strong and victorious, OF MOSES. 119 and round the thousands of Manasseh and the myriads of Ephraim the other trihes still rally strong in Jehovah's favour. "There is none like unto the Godof Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens for thy help, and in His loftiness on the skies. The God of old is thy refuge and the outspreading of the everiasting arms ; He drives out the enemy before thee, and saith, Destroy. Then Israel dwells secure ; the fountain of Jacob flows unmixed in a land of corn and wine, where the heavens drop down dew. Happy art thou, 0 Israel ; who is like unto thee, a people victorious in Jehovah, whose help is the shield, whose pride is the sword, and thy foes feign before thee, and thou marchest over their high places." ^ This is still the old warlike Israel, secure iu the help of the God of heaven, whose presence is alike near in the day of battle and in the administration of a righteous law. In Josh. xxiv. the picture has another side. The God who has done these great things for Israel is a holy and a jealous God ; He will not forgive His people's sins. It is no easy thing to serve such a God, for He must be served with single heart. The danger of departing from Him lies in two directions. On one hand Israel is tempted to fall back into the ancient heathenism of its Aramaean ancestors (vers. 2, 15); on the other hand it is drawn away by the gods of the Amorites. Such were, in fact, the two gi^eat influences with which the religion of Jehovah had to contend through aU the history of Israel, and both had a strange attraction, for they made no such demands on 120 AMOS OF LECT. III. their worshippers as the holy and jealous Jehovah. " Ye cannot serve Jehovah, for He will not forgive your sins ; if ye forsake Him and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you hurt, and consume you after He hath done you good." These words might serve as the epitaph of the Hebrew state in the destruction towards which it was hastening in the last days of the house of Jehu, and with them the history of Israel might have closed, but for the work of a new series of prophets, which built up another Israel on the ruins of the old kingdom. The founder of this new type of prophecy is Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa.^ The first appearance of Amos as a prophet is one of the most striking scenes of Old Testament history His prophecy is almost wholly addressed to Northern Israel, and the scene of his public preaching was the great royal sanctuary of Bethel, the chief gathering- point of the worshippers of Ephraim. But he appeared in Bethel as a stranger, and had nothing in common with the prophetic guild which had long had its seat there. His home was in the kingdom of Judah, not in any of the great centres of life, but in the little town of Tekoa,^'' which lies some six miles south of Bethlehem on an elevated hill, from which the eye ranges north- ward to Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives, while eastward the prospect extends over rugged and desolate mountains, through the clefts of which the Dead Sea is visible, with the lofty tableland of Moab in the far distance. Though it stands on the very edge of the LECT. III. TEKOA. 121 great wilderness, the spot itself is fruitful, and pleasant to the eye. Its oil, according to the Mishna, was the hest in the land {Men. viii. 3), and in the middle ages its honey passed into a proverb (Yakut s.v.). But immediately beyond Tekoa all agriculture ceases, and the desert hills between it and the Dead Sea offer only a scanty subsistence to wandering flocks. Amos him- self was not a husbandman, but "a shepherd and a cultivator " of sycomore figs " (vii. 14 seq^), the coarsest and least desirable of the fruits of Canaan. He was nurtured in austere simplicity, and it was in the vast solitudes where he followed his flock that Jehovah said to him, "Go prophesy to my people Israel." It was a strange errand for the unknown shepherd to undertake ; for the prophet was not a preacher in the modern sense, whose words are addressed to the heart of the individual, and who can discharge his function wherever he can find an audience willing to hear a gospel that speaks to the poor as well as to the great. Jehovah's word was a message to the nation, and above all to the grandees and princes who were directly responsible for the welfare and good estate of Israel. But the summons of Jehovah left no room for hesita- tion. " The Lord roareth from Zion, and sendeth forth His voice from Jerusalem, and the pastures of the shepherds mourn, and the top of Carmel withereth. . . . Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in the city and Jehovah hath not done it? Surely the Lord Jehovah 122 AMOS AT lecf. hi. will not do anything, but He revealeth His secret to His servants the prophets. The lion hath roared, who will not fear ? the Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy ?" (i. 2 ; iii. 6-8). The call of Amos lay in the consciousness that he had heard the voice of Jehovah thundering forth judgment while all around were deaf to the sound. In this voice he had learned Jehovah's secret — not some abstract theological truth, but the secret of His dealings with Israel and the surrounding nations. Such a secret could not remain locked up within his breast — " the Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy ?" And so the shepherd left his flock in the wilderness, and, armed with no other cre- dentials than the word that burned within him, stood forth in the midst of the brilliant crowd that thronged the royal sanctuary of Bethel, to proclaim what Jehovah had spoken against the children of Israel (iii. 1). Before we examine more fully the contents of this word, it will be convenient to complete the brief record of the prophet's history as it is given in the seventh chapter of his book. Amos had many things to say to the nation and its rulers, but they all issued in the announcement of swift impending judgment. The sum of his prophecy was a death -wail over the house of Israel : — The virgin of Israel is fallen, sLe cannot rise again : She is cast down upon her land, there is none to raise her up. (v. 2.) This judgment is the work of Jehovah, and its cause is LECT. III. BETHEL. 123 Israel's sin. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth ; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities." In the characteristic manner of Eastern symbolism, Amos expressed these thoughts in a figure. He saw Jehovah standing over a wall with a plumb-line in His hand. Jehovah is a builder, the fate of nations is His work, and, like a good builder. He works by rule and measure. And now the great builder speak^ saying, " Behold I set the plumb-line — the rule of divine righteousness — in the midst of Israel ; I will not pass them by any more ; and the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword." However little the audience under- stood of the prophet's harangue, the last words were intelligible enough. It was not the first time that a prophet had foretold the fall of a northern dynasty ; the conspiracy that set Jeroboam's ancestor on the throne received its first impulse from Elijah's sentence on the murderer of Naboth (2 Kings ix. 25 seq). The priest Amaziah, who was responsible for the order of his sanctuary, at once took alarm, and sent to the king the report of what he concluded to be a new conspiracy. " Amos," he said, " hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel ; the land cannot bear all hia words." The audacious speaker must be silenced, but usage and the traditional privilege of the prophets made the priest reluctant to use force against one who spoke in the name of Jehovah. The great man seems, in fact, 124 AMOS AND to have looked on the Judsean intruder with something of the same contempt which the captains of the host at Ramoth Gilead felt for the "madman" that brought Elisha's message to Jehu (2 Kings ix. 11) ; the freedom allowed to the prophets was in good measure due to the conviction that they could do little harm unless they had stronger influences at their back. " Get thee hence, 0 seer," he says, "flee into the land of Judah, and there earn thy bread, and prophesy there.^^ But prophesy no more in Bethel, for it is a royal sanctuary and a royal residence." To Amaziah Amos seemed half an intriguer, half a fanatic — a man whose prophesying was a trade, and who had made a bold stroke for notoriety in the hope, perhaps, that the Court would buy him off. Nay, says Amos, " I am no prophet, nor a son of the prophets [that is, no prophet by trade like the Nehiim of Bethel] . . . Jehovah took me as I followed the flock, and Jehovah said to me. Go prophesy against my people Israel. Now, therefore, hear thou the word of Jehovah. Thou sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, and preach not against the house of Isaac. Therefore, thus saith Jehovah, thy wife shaU be prostituted in the city, and thy sons and thy daughters shall fall by the sword, and thy land shall be divided by the line ; and thou shalt die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land." The judgment denounced on Amaziah com- prehends only the usual incidents of the sack of a city in those barbarous times ; and Amos, it is plain, does not hurl a special threat against the priest, but merely AMAZIAH. 125 repeats his former prediction of the fall of the nation before the invader, with the assurance that Amaziah shall live to see it accomplished. To so precise an intimation there was nothing to add. Amos, no doubt, was compelled to yield at once to superior force ; and the fact that his book, as we possess it, is a carefully planned composition, in which this historical incident holds the central place, followed as well as preceded by prophecies, shows that he effected his escape, retiring no doubt to Judah, where he placed on permanent record the words of Jehovah which the house of Israel refused to heed. As his prophesying was not a pro- fession, he had not ceased to be a shepherd in fulfilling his divine mission ; and, though the mediaeval Jewish tradition which showed his grave at Tekoa was certainly apocryphal, it may be presumed that he returned to his old life, and died in his native place. The humble condition of a shepherd following his flock on the bare mountains of Tekoa has tempted many commentators, fi'om Jerome downwards, to think of Amos as an unlettered clown, and to trace his "rus- ticity " in the language of his book. To the unprejudiced judgment, however, the prophecy of Amos appears one of the best examples of pure Hebrew style. The lan- guage, the images, the grouping are alike admii-able ; and the simplicity of the diction, obscured only in one or two passages by the fault of transcribers (iv, 3 ; ix. 1), ^ is a token, not of rusticity, but of perfect mastery over a language which, though unfit for the expression 126 THE STYLE lect. hi. of abstract ideas, is unsurpassed as a vehicle for im- passioned speech. To associate inferior culture with the simplicity and poverty of pastoral life is totally to mistake the conditions of Eastern society. At the courts of the Caliphs and their Emirs the rude Arabs of the desert were wont to appear without any feeling of awkwardness, and to surprise the courtiers by the finish of their impromptu verses, the fluent eloquence of their oratory, and the range of subjects on which they could speak with knowledge and discrimination." Among the Hebrews, as in the Arabian desert, knowledge and oratory were not affairs of professional education, or dependent for their cultivation on wealth and social status. The sum of book learning was small ; men of all ranks mingled with that Oriental freedom which is so foreign to our habits ; shrewd observation, a memory retentive of traditional lore, and the faculty of original reflection took the place of laborious study as the ground of acknowledged intellectual pre-eminence. In Hebrew, as in Arabic, the best writing is an unaffected transcript of the best speaking ; the literary merit of the book of Genesis, or the history of Elijah, like that of the Kitdh el Aghdny, or of the Norse Sagas, is that they read as if they were told by word of mouth ; and, in like manner, the prophecies of Amos, though evidently re- arranged for publication, and probably shortened from their original spoken form, are excellent writing, because the prophet writes as he spoke, preserving all the effects of pointed and dramatic delivery, with that breath of LECT. III. OF AMOS. 127 lyrical fervour which lends a special charm to the highest Hebrew oratory. Semitic authorship never becomes self-conscious without losing its highest quali- ties, the old dramatic and lyric power gives way to artificial conceits and affected obscurities. Ezekiel is much more of a bookman than Amos, but his style is as much below that of the shepherd of Tekoa as the rhetorical prose of the later Arabs is below the simplicity of the ancient legends of the desert. The writings of Amos, however, are not more con- spicuous for literary merit than for width of human interest based on a range of historical observation very remarkable in the age and condition of the author. There is nothing provincial about our prophet ; his vision embraces all the nations with whom the Hebrews had any converse ; he knows their history and geograpliy with surprising exactness, and is, in fact, our only source for several particulars of great value to the his- torian of Semitic antiquity. The rapid survey of the nations immediately bordering on Israel — Aram - Da- mascus, Philistia,Edom,Ammon,Moab — is full of precise detail as to localities and events, with a keen appreci- ation of national character. He tells how the Philis- tines migrated from Caphtor, the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7). His eye ranges southward along the caravan route from Gaza through the Arabian wilderness (i. 6), to the tropical lands of the Cushites (ix. 7). In the west he is familiar with the marvels of the swelling of the Nile (viii. 8 ; ix. 5), and in the distant Babylonian east 128 WIDE KNOWLEDGE lect. in. he makes special mention of the city of Calneh (vi. 2, comp. Gen. x. 10). His acquaintance with the condition of Northern Israel is not that of a mere passing observer. He has followed with close and sympathetic attention the progress of the Syrian wars (i. 3, 13 ; iv. 10), and all the sufferings of the nation from pestilence, famine, and earthquake (chap. iv.). The luxury of the nobles of Samaria (vi. 3 seq), the cruel sensuality of their wives (iv. 1 scq), the miseries of the poor, and the rapacity of their tyrants (iii. 6 seq. ; viii. 4 seq), the pilgrimages to Gilgal and Beersheba (v. 5 ; viii. 14), are painted from the life, as well as the ritual splendour and moral abominations of the sanctuary of Bethel. It is obviously illegitimate to ascribe this fulness of knowledge to special revela- tion ; Amos, we may justly conclude, was an observer of social and political life before he was a prophet, and his prophetic calling gave scope and use to his natural acquirements. The source of Amos's knowledge of nations and their affairs is of secondary consequence, but the critic will observe that his geographical horizon corresponds with those parts of Genesis x. which may plausibly be assigned to that oldest stratum of the Pentateuchal narrative which we have already spoken of as substantially representing the historical traditions of Israel at the time when he lived. ^' The exact details which he possesses as to Israel and im- mediately surrounding districts point rather to personal observation ; but long journeys are easy to one bred in the frugality of the wilderness, and either on military LECT, III. OF AMOS. 129 duty, such as all Hebrews were Kable to, or in the service of trading caravans, the shepherd of Tekoa might naturally have found occasion to wander far from his home. The prophetic work of Amos, forming, as it does, a mere episode in an obscure life, is sharply distinguished, not only from the professional activity of the prophetic guilds which lived by their trade, but from the lifelong vocation of men like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who received the divine call in their youth, and continued their work for many years, receiving new revelations from time to time in connection with the changing events among which they lived. Amos is a man of one prophecy. Once for all he has heard the thunder of Jehovah's shout, and seen the fair land of Canaan wither before it. The roar of the lion, to which he compares the voice that compelled him to prophecy, is the roar with which the beast springs upon its prey (comp. iii. 8 with iii. 4) ; it is not Israel's sin that bungs him forward as a preacher of repentance ; but the sound of near destruc- tion encircling the land (iii. 11) constrains him to blow the alarm (iii. 6), and stir from their vain security the careless rioters who feel no concern for the ruin of Joseph (vi. 1 scq^. We have seen from the words he addressed to Amaziah that Amos looked for the fall of Israel before its enemies within his own generation ; in the figure of the roar of the lion, which is silent till it makes its spring, he seems to imply that the destroying power 130 PROPHECY OF lect. hi. was already in motion. What this power was Amos expresses with the precision of a man who is not dealing with vague threats of judgment, but has the destroyer clearly before his eyes. " Behold, I raise up against you a nation, 0 house of Israel, and they shall crush you from the frontier of Hamath " on the north " to the brook of the Arabah," or brook of willows, a stream flowing into the Dead Sea, which separated Jeroboam's tributary Moab from the Edomites (vi. 14 ; comp. Isa. XV. 7). The seat of the invader is beyond Damascus, and thither Israel shall be carried captive (v. 27). It is plain, therefore, that Amos has Assyria in his mind, though he never mentions the name. It is no unknown danger that he foresees ; Assyria was fully within the range of his political horizon ; it was the power that had shattered Damascus by successive campaigns fol- lowing at intervals since the days of Jehu, of which there is still some record on the monuments, one of them being dated B.C. 773, not long before the time when, so far as we can gather from the defective chron- ology of 2 Kings, Amos may be supposed to have preached at Bethel. "When the power of Damascus was broken, there was no barrier between Assyria and the nations of Palestine ; in fact, the breathing space that made it possible for Jeroboam II. to restore the old borders of his kingdom was only granted because the Assyrians were occupied for a time in other directions, and apparently passed through a period of intestine dis- turbance which terminated with the accession of Tiglath LECT. HI. THE ASSYRIANS. 131 Pileser III. (b.c. 745). The danger, therefore, was visible to the most ordinary political insight, and what requires explanation is not so much that Amos was aware of it as that the rulers and people of Israel were so utterly- blind to the impending doom. The explanation, how- ever, is very clearly given by Amos himself. The source of the judicial blindness of his nation was want of know- ledge of the true character of Jehovah, encouraging a false estimate of their own might. The old martial spirit of Israel had not died, and it had not lost its connection with religious faith and the inspiriting words of the prophets of the old school. Elisha was remem- bered as the best strength of the nation in the Syrian wars — " the chariots and horsemen of Israel " (2 Kings xiii. 14). The deliverance from Damascus was " Jeho- vah's victory" {ihid. ver. 17), and more recently the subjugation of Moab had been undertaken in accordance with the prophecy of Jonah. Never had Jehovah been more visibly on the side of His people. His worship was carried on with assiduous alacrity by a grateful nation. Sacrifices, tithes, thank-offerings, spontaneous oblations, streamed into the sanctuaries (Amos iv. 4 seq^. There was no question as to the stability of the newly- won prosperity, or the military power of the state (vi. 13). Israel was once more the nation victorious in Jehovah, whose help was the shield, whose pride was the sword (Deut. xxxiii. 29). Everything indeed was not yet accomplished, but the day of Jehovah's crown- ing victory was doubtless near at hand, and nothing 132 AMOS'S CONCEPTION lect. hi. remained but to pray for its speedy coming (Amos V. 18).^" We see, then, that it was not political blindness or religious indifference, but a profound and fanatical faith, that made Israel insensible to the danger so plainly looming on the horizon. Their trust in Jehovah's omnipotence was absolute, and absolute in a sense determined by the work of Elijah. There was no longer any disposition to dally with foreign gods. There was none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rode on the heavens for His people's help. That that help could be refused, that the day of Jehovah could be darkness and not light, as Amos preached, that the distant thunder-roll of the advance of Assyria was the voice of an angry God drawing nigh to judge His people, were to them impossibilities. Amos took a juster view of the political situation, because he had other thoughts of the purpose and character of Jehovah. In spite of their lofty concep- tions of the majesty and victorious sovereignty of Jehovah, the mass of the people still thought of Him as exclusively concerned with the affairs of Israel. Jehovah had no other business on earth than to watch over His own nation. In giving victory and prosperity to Israel He was upholding His own interests, which ultimately centred in the maintenance of His dignity as a potentate feared by foreigners and holding splendid court at the sanctuaries where He received Israel's homage. This seems to us an extraordinary limitation LECT. III. OF JEHOVAH. 133 of view on the part of men who recognised Jehovah as the Creator. But, in fact, heathen nations like the Assyrians and Phoenicians had also developed a doctrine of creation without ceasing to believe in strictly national deities. Jehovah, it must be remembered, was not first the Creator and then the God of Israel. His relation to Israel was the historical foundation of the religion of the Hebrews, and continued to be the central idea in all practical developments of their faith. To Amos, on the other hand, the doctrine of creation is full of practical meaning. " He that formed the mountains and created the wind, that declareth unto man what is His thought, that maketh the morning darkness and treadeth on the high places of the earth, Jehovah, the God of hosts is His name " (iv. 13). This supreme God cannot be thought of as having no interest or purpose beyond Israel. It was He that brought Israel out of Egypt, but it was He too who brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7). Every movement of history is Jehovah's work ; it is not Asshur but Jehovah who has created the Assyrian empire, and He has a purpose of His own in raising up its vast overwhelming strength and suspending it as a threat of imminent destruction over Israel and the sur- rounding nations. To Amos, therefore, the question is not what Jehovah as King of Israel will do for His people against the Assyrian, but what the Sovereign of the World designs to effect by the terrible instrument which He has created. The answer to this question is 134 THE SINS OF lect. hi. the "secret of Jehovah," known only to Himself and His prophet ; and the key to the secret is Jehovah's righteousness, and the sins, not of Israel alone, but of the whole circle of nations from Damascus to Philistia, which the advance of Assyria directly threatens. In the first section of his book Amos surveys each of these nations in succession, but in none does he find any ground to think that Jehovah will divert the near calamity. The doom is pronounced on each in the same solemn for- mula : " For three transgressions of Damascus and for four" — that is, according to Hebrew idiom, for the multi- plied transgressions of Damascus — " I will not turn it aside." The " it " is a transparent aposiopesis, for the picture of the terrible Assyrian is constantly before the prophet's eyes. Now, it is plain that the sins for which Damascus, Ammon, Moab, and the rest are judged cannot be offences against Jehovah as the national God of Israel. Amos teaches that heathen nations are to be judged, not because they do not worship Israel's God, but because they have broken the laws of universal morality. The crime of Damascus and Ammon is their inhuman treat- ment of the Gileadites ; the Phoenicians and Philistines are condemned for the barbarous slave-trade, fed by kidnapping expeditions, of which Tyre and Gaza were the emporia. In the case of Tyre this offence is aggra- vated by the fact that the captives were carried off in defiance of the ancient brotherly alliance between Israel and the Phoenician city ; and in like manner the sin of THE NATIONS. 135 Edom is the unrelenting blood- feud with which he follows his brother of Judah. These are the common barbarities and treacheries of Semitic warfare ; and it is as such that they are condemned, and not simply because in each case it is Israel that has suffered from them. Moab is equally condemned for a sin that has nothing to do with Israel, but was a breach of the most sacred feelings of ancient piety — the violation of the bones of the king of Edom.^'' As Amos teaches that Jehovah's wrath falls on the heathen nations, not because they are heathen and do not worship Him, but because they have broken the universal laws of fidelity, kinship, and humanity, so He teaches that Israel must be judged and condemned by the same laws in spite of its assiduous Jehovah worship. The sinners of Israel thought they had a special security in their national relation to Jehovah, in the fact that He was worshipped only in their sanctuaries. Nay, says Amos, He will make no difference between you and the children of the Cushites, the remotest denizens of the habitable world (ix. 7). Jehovah is the high judge of appeal against man's injustice, and He is a judge who cannot be bribed or swayed by personal influences (iii. 2). " I hate, I despise your feast days ; I take no pleasure in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me whole burnt-offerings with your gifts of homage I will take no pleasure in them, and I will not look upon your fatted thank-offerings.^^ Take away from Me the noise of thy songs ; I will not hear the melody of thy 136 THE SINS OF viols. But let justice flow like waters and righteous- ness as an unfailing stream" (v. 21 scq}j. Israel is impartially condemned by the same laws that condemn its neighbours, and for offences patent to the universal moral judgment, as appears particularly at iii. 9, where the grandees of Ashdod and Egypt are summoned to appear before Samaria and bear witness against the disorder and oppression that fill the city. We see, then, that to Amos the forward march of the Assyrian is a manifestation of Jehovah's universal justice on principles applicable to all nations, the fall of Israel is but part of the universal ruin of the guilty states of Palestine. But, though Jehovah in revealing Himself to Israel does not divest HimseK of His supreme character as the universal judge. He has rela- tions with Israel which are shared by no other nation, and these relations involve special responsibilities, and give a peculiar significance to the development of His purpose as it regards His chosen people. It is on this special aspect of the impending judgment that Amos concentrates his attention after the general introduction in chapters i, and ii. of his prophecy. As the faU of Israel is part of the common overthrow of the Pales- tinian states, Judah and Ephraim are alike involved, Jerusalem as well as Samaria must fall before the destroyer (ii. 4, 5).^" What Amos has to say to Israel is addressed to the whole family that Jehovah brought up out of Egypt (iii. 1), and they that are at ease in Zion are ranked with the self-confident princes of Samaria LECT. III. JUDAH AND EPHRAIM. 137 (vi. 1). But the sin and fate of Judah are very briefly- touched. The centre of national life was not in the petty state of Judah, but in the great Northern Kingdom. Though the restoration of the Davidic monarchy is the ideal of Amos (ix. 11), as in another sense it had been the ideal of the greatest monarchs of Ephraim {sujpra, p. 76), he does not treat the larger Israel of the north as a schismatic state. Eevolt from the house of David and the sanctuary of Jerusalem is no part of Ephraim's sin, and the prophet addresses himself more directly to the house of Joseph, not because the sins of Joseph and of Judah were essentially distinct, but because the house of Joseph was still the foremost representative of Israel. The fundamental law of Jehovah's special relations to Israel as they bear on the approach of the Assyrian is expressed in a verse which I have already cited. " You only have I known of all the families of the earth ; therefore I will punish you for all your iniqui- ties " (iii. 2). To know a man is to admit him to your acquaintance and converse. Jehovah has known Israel inasmuch as He has had personal dealings with it. The proof of this is not simply that Jehovah brought up His people from Egypt and gave them the land of Canaan (ii. 9, 10), for it was Jehovah who brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7) although they knew it not. But with Israel Jehovah held personal converse. " I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites " (ii. 11). " The Lord Jehovah will not do 138 HOW JEHOVAH IS lect. in. anything without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets " (iii. 7). This is the real distinction between Israel and the nations — that in all that Jehovah did for His people in time past, in all that He is purposing against them now, He has been to them not an unknown power working by hidden laws, but a God who declares Himself to them personally, as a man does to a friend. And so the sin of Israel is not merely that it has broken through laws of right and wrong patent to all mankind, but that it has refused to listen to these laws as they were personally ex- plained to it by the Judge Himself. They gave the Nazarites wine to drink, and commanded the prophets not to prophesy (ii. 12). And now every good gift of Jehovah to Israel is but a new reason for dreading His judgment, when Israel has refused to hear how He means them to use His gifts. The princes of Zion and Samaria are at ease and unconcerned. What ! says the prophet, is not Israel the chief of nations ? Is there from Calneh and Hamath to the Philistine border a single kingdom broader or better than your own ? " Therefore ye shall go into captivity with the first that go captive" (vi. 1 seg-.). As the privilege of Israel is that all Jehovah's favours are accompanied and interpreted by His per- sonal revelation, the special duty of Israel is to seek Jehovah. Thus saith Jehovah to the house of Israel, " Seek me and live " (v. 6). " To seek God " is the old Hebrew phrase for consulting His oracle, asking His help TO BE SOUGHT. 139 or decision in difficult affairs of conduct or law (Gen. XXV. 22; Exod. xviii. 15; 2 Kings iii. 11; viii. 8); and by ancient usage Jehovah was habitually sought at the sanctuary, though the phrase is equally applicable to consulting a prophet. In fact, the offerings of the sanctuary may be broadly divided into two classes, those which express homage and thanksgiving (minhah, sMUm), and those which were presented in connection with some request or inquiry. In the latter class the burnt-offering is most conspicuous. But Amos refuses to acknowledge this way of seeking God. " Seek ye not Bethel, and come not unto Gilgal, and pass not over the border to Beersheba ; for Gilgal shall go captive, and Bethel shall come to nought. Seek Jehovah, and live ; lest He break forth like fire in the house of Jacob, and it devour and there be none to quench it in Bethel " (v. 5, 6). The multiplication of gifts and offerings is but multiplication of sin ; the people love to do these things, but Jehovah answers them only by famine, blasting, and war (chap. iv.). He is not to be found by sacrifice, for in it He takes no pleasure ; what Jehovah requires of them that seek Him is the practice of civil righteousness. When Amos represents the national worship of Israel as positively sinful, he does so mainly because it was so conducted as to afford a positive encouragement to the injustice, the sensuality, the barbarous treatment of the poor, to which he recurs again and again as the cardinal sins of the nation. The religion of Israel had become a religion for the rich, the priests and the 140 THE SINS OF nobles were linked together in unrighteousness, and the most flagrant scenes of immorality and oppression were seen at the sacred courts (ii. 7, 8). Amos never speaks of the golden calves as the sin of the northern sanc- tuaries,^ and he has only one or two allusions to the worship of false gods or idolatrous symbols. The Guilt of Samaria, spoken of as a concrete object in viii. 14, is probably the Ashera of 2 Kings xiii. 6, which had a connection with the moral impurities of Canaanite religion ; and in Amos v. 26 there is a very obscure allusion to the worship of star-gods, which from the connection cannot have been a rival service to that of Jehovah, but probably attached itself in a subordinate way to the offices of His sanctuary.-^ Once, and only once, in speaking of leavened bread as burned on the altar, does the prophet appear to touch on a ritual departure, of Canaanite character and presumably Dionysiac significance, from the ancient ritual of Exod. xxiii. 18.^ But these points are merely touched in passing. The whole ritual service is to Amos a thing without importance in itself. The Israelites offered no sacrifice in the wilderness, and yet Jehovah was never nearer to them than then (v. 25 compared with ii. 10). The judgment of Jehovah begins at the sanctuary (ix. 1 ^eq^. ; iii. 14), because the sanctuaries are the centre of Israel's religious life and so also of its moral corruption. The palace and the temple stood side by side (vii. 13), and they fall together (iii. 14, 15 ; vii. 9) in the common overthrow of the state and its religion. LECT. in. ISRAEL'S RELIGION. 141 If we ask what Amos desired to set in the place of the system he so utterly condemns, the answer is apparently very meagre. He has no new scheme of church and state to propose — only this, that Jehovah desires righteousness and not sacrifice. Amos, in fact, is neither a statesman nor a religious legislator ; he has received a message from Jehovah, and his duty is exhausted in delivering it. Till this message is received and taken to heart no project of reformation can avail ; the first thing that Israel must learn is the plain con- nection between its present sin and the danger that looms on its horizon. If two men walk together, says Amos, you know that they have an understanding ; if the lion roars he has prey within his reach ; if the springe flies up from the ground, there is something in the noose ; if the springe catches the bird it must have been rightly set (iii. 3 seq^.). And so, let Israel be assured, the advance of Assyria and the sin of Israel hang to- gether in Jehovah's purpose, and the man who knows the secret of Jehovah's righteousness cannot doubt that the approaching destruction is a sentence on the nation's guilt. To produce conviction of sin by an ajDpeal to the universal conscience, to the known nature of Jehovah, above aU to the already visible shadow of coming events that prove the justice of the prophetic argument, is the great purpose of the prophet's preaching. That that judgment will be averted by the repent- ance of those who rule the affairs of the nation Amos has no hope. The doom of the kingdom is inevitable, 142 ESCHATOLOGY lect. iii. and the sword of Jehovali shall pursue the sinners even in flight and captivity till the last of them has perished. What Amos means by the total destruction of the sinners of Jehovah's people (ix. 1-10) is of course to be understood from his view of Israel's sin as con- sisting essentially in social offences inconsistent with national righteousness. He does not mean by the word " sinner " the same thing as modern theology does. The sinners of Israel are the corrupt rulers and their asso- ciates, the unjust and sensual oppressors, the men who have no regard to civil righteousness. The total destruc- tion of these is the first condition of Israel's restoration, for even in judgment Jehovah has not cast off His people, and, though He could easily destroy the land by natural agencies or burn up the guilty nation in a sea of flame (vii. 1 scg'.). He chooses another course, and carries His people into captivity, that He may sift them while they wander through the nations as corn is sifted in a sieve, without one sound grain falling to the ground. And so when all the sinners are consumed His hand will build up a new Israel as in the days of the first kingdom. The fallen tent of David shall be restored, and the Hebrews shall again rule over all those vassal nations that once were Jehovah's tributaries. Then the land inhabited by a nation purged of transgressors shaU flow with milk and wine. " And I will restore the prosperity of My people Israel, and they shall build waste cities and dwell therein, and plant vineyards and drink the wine thereof, and make gardens and eat the LECT. III. OF AMOS. 143 fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked out of their land which I give unto them, saith Jehovah thy God." These are the closing words of the prophecy of Amos, and here we must pause for the present, reserving the remarks which they suggest till we can compare them with the picture of the restoration of Israel set forth a little later by his immediate successor Hosea. 144 HOSEA AND THE lect. iv. LECTUEE IV. fiOSEA AND THE FALL OF EPHRAIM. The prophetic work of Amos, which we examined in last Lecture, falls entirely within the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II. Hosea began to prophesy in the same reign, as appears not only from the title of his book, but from the contents of the first two chapters. " Yet a little while," says Jehovah in Hosea i. 4, " and I will punish the house of Jehu for the bloodshed of Jezreel" — that is, for the slaying of the seed of Ahab — " and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel." But Hosea continued his ministry after the prediction of judgment on the descendants of Jehu had been ful- filled, and the latter part of his book contains unmis- takable references to the state of anarchy into which the Northern Kingdom fell on the extinction of the last great dynasty that occupied the throne of Samaria. Before we address ourselves, therefore, to the study of his life and prophecies it will be convenient to take a rapid survey of the history of Ephraim after the death of Jeroboam, and in order to gain a clear view of the sequence of events it is indispensable to say a few LECT. IV. FALL OF EPHRAIM. 145 words on the tangled chronology of the period, which is usually interpreted in a way that does no small violence to the Biblical narrative/ According to the chronology which has passed into general currency from the Annals of Archbishop Usslier, and is represented on the margins of most English Bibles, the death of Jeroboam was followed by an in- terregnum of eleven years, after which his son Zachariah reigned for six months, when he was slain by Shallum. The Bible knows nothing of this interregnum, but on the contrary informs us in the usual way that Zachariah reigned in his father's stead (2 Kings xiv. 29). The coronation of Zachariah must in fact have followed as a matter of course, since his father died in peaceable possession of the throne. Even if revolt broke out immediately on this event, the party which sided with the old dynasty would at once recognise the legal heir as king, and, as it is admitted that Zachariah did mount the throne, if only for six months, we cannot doubt that he would date his accession from the time when he became king d&jure. And apart from this it is quite inconceivable that an interregnum of eleven years, with the stirring incidents inseparable from a prolonged period of civil war, could be passed over in absolute silence by the Biblical narrative. Whence, then, do Archbishop TJssher and other chronologists derive their eleven years of interregnum ? From the death of Solomon to the fall of Samaria the history of the books of Kings forms a .double line. 146 CHRONOLOGY OF THE lect. iv, Dates are determined in the one line by years of the kings of Ephraim, in the other by years of the kings of Judah, and as the author of our present book of Kings used separate sources for the history of the two kingdoms we must assume, at all events provisionally, that the two lines of chronology were originally dis- tinct. In point of fact they are not merely distinct, but of unequal length, as may be shown by the following simple calculation. According to the Judsean line there are just 480 years from the founding of Solomon's temple to the return from Babylonian exile, B.C. 535. According to the Northern reckoning the fall of Samaria took place in the 241st year from the revolt against Jeroboam, or in the 278th year of the temple. Counting then up the Judsean line and down the other we get for the date of the fall of Samaria B.C. 737. On the other hand, if we start from the statement of 2 Kings xviii. 9, that Samaria fell in the sixth year of Hezekiah, remembering that he reigned twenty-nine years in all, and that his death feU 160 years before the restoration, we get for the date of Samaria's fall B.C. 719. In other words, the Judsean line is about twenty years longer than the Northern one. It is in order to get over this discrepancy without admitting any error in the two sets of numbers that chronologists assume the long interregnum after Jeroboam II.'s death, and another period of anarchy somewhat later.^ But in point of fact to invent an interregnum of which the history does not speak is quite as serious a liberty with the text as tECT. IV. NORTHERN KINGDOM. 147 to suppose that there is some error in the numbers. On the other hand, to suppose that the numbers have been corrupted in transmission, and to introduce arbi- trary corrections — as was done, for example, by the late George Smith, who gives Jeroboam II. fifty-one years instead of forty-one, and Pekah thirty instead of twenty — is thoroughly unsatisfactory. The facts justify us in saying that the chronology as we have it cannot be right ; but they do not justify us in amending it at our own hand and by purely conjectural methods. And when we look at the thing more closely we are led to ask, not whether this or that particular number is corrupt, but whether the early Hebrews had a precise chronology dating every event by the years of the reigning king. As the history now stands we have an exact date for the accession of each monarch, but events happening in the course of a reign are habitually undated. No date of the Northern history prior to the fall of Samaria is given by the year of the reigning king of Ephraim, and in the history of Judah, till the time of Jeremiah, almost all events, dated by years of the kings of Jerusalem, have reference to the affairs of the temple (1 Kings vi. 37, 38 ; xiv. 25, 26 ; 2 Kings xii. 6 ; xviii. 13 scq. ; xxii. 3 ; xxiii. 23). In the temple archives, therefore, a system- atic record of dates seems to have been kept, but the system did not extend to general affairs ; Amos, for example, does not date his prophecy by the year of King Uzziah, but says that it was " two years before the earthquake." Where there is no precise system by 148 CHRONOLOGY OF THE lect. iv. which events are regularly dated, a reckoning by round numbers can hardly be avoided ; and on such a system the most natural unit in estimating long periods is not the year but a round period of years taken to represent a generation. Traces of this way of counting are common enough in early history, and among the Hebrews the unit was taken at forty years — forty, in fact, being a common round number in antiquity.^ The whole early chron- ology of the Hebrews is measured by this unit. Forty, twenty, and eighty are constantly-recurring numbers ; the period from the Exodus to the founding of the temple is 480 years, or twelve forties, and an equal period extends from the latter event to the return from exile, while 240 years is the duration of the Northern Kingdom. But again, when we analyse the 480 of the Judsean genealogy and the 240 of the Northern Kingdom, we find that each is naturally divided into three equal parts, and in each case the commencement of the second third is given by a date which is not due to the redactor of the books of Kings, but stood in the original sources from which he worked. The second third of the Judsean line begins with the year of Joash's reforms in the temple, and ends with the death of Hezekiah. In the Northern line the second period of 80 years precisely corresponds with the duration of the Syrian wars, which began four years before the death of Ahab. These cannot be mere coincidences ; they are part of a system, and, when taken with other details which can- not be dwelt on here, tlicy seem to show that the LECT. IV. BOOKS OF KINGS. 149 chronology on eacli line was constructed on the method of genealogies, and reduced to years by what a mathe- matician might call a method of interpolation, — that is, by starting with certain fixed dates, which were taken as the great divisions of the scheme, and then filling up the intervals in an approximate way from a rough knowledge of the longer or shorter duration of the several reigns. The scheme as a whole, at least as regards Judah, appears to have been worked out after the Exile, since it reckons back from the date of the return. It has also been shown by a critical argument, supported by observation of the Septuagint text, that the 480 years from the Exodus to the temple were added to the text of 1 Kings vi. after the Exile. Of course a chronology framed in this way can make no claim to be absolutely exact, and it ceases to be surprising that the two lines for Ephraim and Judah are not precisely correspondent. The whole body of dates except the few that are derived from the original sources are to be regarded as nothing more than an approximate and partly conjectural reconstruction of the chronology, which we cannot hope to render more exact without the help of records lying outside of the Bible. Of late years, however, such external aid has turned up in the records of the Assyrian kings. Unlike the Hebrews, the Assyrians were exact chronologers. They had considerable astronomical knowledge, and thus had learned to keep a precise record of years. As Eoman chronology is based on the list of consuls, or as the 150 CHRONOLOGY OF THE lect. iv Athenians named each year after the so-called Archon Eponymus, so in Assyria there was a high official appointed annually who gave liis name to his year of office. The list of these eponyms or date-giving officials has fortunately been preserved in a number of copies, and, as a note of royal expeditions and the like stands opposite each name, it forms, in conjunction with other monuments, a complete key to Assyrian chronology, the accuracy of which has been verified by numerous tests, on which it is unnecessary to enlarge. The lower part of the Eponym Canon runs parallel with the Canon of Ptolemy, which is one of the chief bases of ancient chronology, and in this way it becomes possible to express the Assyrian dates with reference to the Christian era. Now the Assyrian annals mention Jehu as paying tribute to Shalmaneser B.C. 842, and Menahem is men- tioned B.C. 738, 104 years later. It can be shown that this tribute of Jehu must have fallen in one of the first years of his reign, and as the sum of the reigns from Jehu to Menahem inclusive is just 112 years, according to the Bible, the Assyrian records confirm the general accuracy of the Northern line of chronology for this period, and completely justify us in our refusal to allow the eleven years' interregnum of the Ussherian chron- ology. It ought, however, to be observed that these re- sults do not afford any guarantee that the details of the Bible chronology, even in Northern Israel, are more than approximate, or weaken the force of the argument that LECT. IV. BOOKS OF KINGS. 151 the original reckoning was in round numbers. For there is every reason to believe that the old history of the Northern prophets, from which the editor of the books of Kings worked, gave eighty years for the Syrian wars ; and, with this datum and a generation of prosperity under Jeroboam II., the editor could not fail to give a tolerably correct estimate of the length of the period in question. For the period between Menahem and the faU of Samaria the Biblical chronologer seems to have had less full guidance from ancient sources. For, accord- ing to the monuments, Samaria was besieged dr. B.C. 722, so that the reigns of the last three kings of Samaria, which the Bible estimates at thirty-one years, must be reduced by one half.* The practical result of this inquiry is that the decline of Israel, after the death of Jeroboam, was much more rapid than appears from the usual chron- ology, and instead of occupying sixty years to the fall of Samaria, was really complete in less than half that time. This rapid descent from the prosperity of the days of Jeroboam throws a fresh light on the predictions of speedy destruction given by Amos and Hosea. Let us now, with the aid of the amended chronology, take a rapid view of the successive steps in the fall of the kingdom of Samaria. On the death of Jeroboam II., his son Zachariah succeeded to the throne, but after six months lost his kingdom and his life in the conspiracy of Shallum. The assassin assumed the royal dignity, but was not able to maintain it, for he was immediately attacked by Menahem, and perished in turn. Menahem 152 THE LAST YEARS lect. iv. established himself on the throne after a ferocious struggle (2 Kings xv. 16). The success, however, was not due to his own prowess, but to the assistance of Pul, king of Assyria, to whom he gave a thousand talents, raised by a tax on the great men of the country, " that his hand might be with him to confirm the kingdom in his hand " (2 Kings xv. 19). Menahem reigned, there- fore, as an Assyrian vassal, and so within a few months after Jeroboam's death his dynasty was extinguished, and the foe, whose approach Amos foresaw, had laid his strong hand on Israel, never again to relax his grasp. On the death of Menahem, the flame of civil war broke out once more. His son Pekahiah was assassinated after a short reign, and the throne was occupied by a military adventurer named Pekah, supported by a band of Gileadites. Pekah allied himself with Eezin of Damascus, and formed the project of dethroning Ahaz, king of Judah. Ahaz appealed to Tiglath Pileser, who marched westward, led the Damascenes captive, as Amos had foretold, and also depopulated Gilead and Galilee. In this disastrous war Pekah had lost his prestige, and, though the Assyrians seem to have left him in power, he was presently attacked and slain by Hoshea, the son of Elah. He in turn had to reckon with the Assyrian, and had to pay a subsidy and yearly tribute as the price of his throne. But Hoshea was eager to cast off the yoke, and sought help from the king of Egypt, who had begun to bid against Assyria for the lordship of the mountains of Canaan, which LECT. IV. OF SAMARIA. 153 formed the natural barrier between the great powers of the Nile and the Tigris. This defection sealed the doom of Samaria. The Assyrians again invaded the land ; after a prolonged and desperate resistance, the capital was taken, and the Israelites were carried captive to the far East, new populations being brought from Babylon and other districts to take their* place.^ Sargon, it is true, only claims to have carried away 27,280 of the inhabitants of Samaria, but these, of course, belonged to the ruling class ; what remained was but like the bad figs of which Jeremiah speaks (Jer. xxv. 8)^ without savour or beauty. It is also true that Jehovah worship did not altogether cease in the land, and was even accepted in a corrupt form by the new colonists (2 Kings xvii. 24 seq_.\ 2 Kings xxiii. 15; Jer. xli. 5). But the distinctive character of the nation was lost; such Hebrews as remained in their old land became mixed with their heathen neighbours, and ceased to have any share in the further history of Israel and Israel's religion. When Josiah destroyed the ancient high places of the Northern Kingdom he slew their priests, whereas the priests of Judaean sanctuaries were provided for at Jerusalem. It is plain from this that he regarded the worship of the Northern sanctuaries as purely heathenish (comp. 2 Kings xxiii. 20 with ver. 5), and it was only in much later times that the mixed population of Samaria became possessed of the Pentateuch, and set up a worship on Mount Gerizim in imitation of the ritual of the second temple. We have no reason to * See page 439, 154 HO SEA, SON lect. iv. think that the captive Ephraimites were more able to retain their distinctive character than their brethren who remained in Palestine. The problem of the lost tribes, which has so much attraction for some speculators, is a purely fanciful one. The people whom Hosea and Amos describe were not fitted to maintain themselves apart from the heathen among whom they dwelt. Scattered among strange nations, they accepted the service of strange gods (Deut. xxviii. 64), and, losing their distinctive religion, lost also their distinctive ex- istence. The further history of the people of Jehovah is transferred to the house of Judah, and with the full of Samaria Northern Israel ceases to have any part in the progress of revelation. Hosea, or Hoshea, as the name should rather be written, is the last prophet of Ephraim.*' Unlike Amos, he was himself a subject of the Northern Kingdom, as appears from the whole tenor of his book, and especially from vii. 5, where the monarch of Samaria is called " our king." Like Amos, he is mainly concerned with the sins and calamities of the house of Joseph ; but, while Amos speaks from observation which, with all its closeness, is that of an outsider, whose personfil life lay far from the tumults and oppressions of the Northern capital, Hosea views the state of the kingdom from within, and his book is marked by a tone of deep pathos, akin to that of Jeremiah, and expressive of the tragic isolation of the prophet's position in a society corrupt to the very core and visibly hastening towards dissolution. OF BEERI. 155 Amos coTild deliver his divine message and withdraw from the turmoil of Samaria's guilty cities to the silent pastures of the wilderness ; but the whole life of Hosea was bound up with the nation whose sins he condemned and whose ruin he foresaw. For him there was no escape from the scenes of horror that defiled his native land, and the anguish that expresses itseK in every page of his prophecy is the distress of a pure and gentle soul, linked by the closest ties of family affection and national feeling to the sinners who were hurrying Israel onwards to the doom he saw so clearly, but of which they refused to hear. And so while the work of Amos was completed in a single brief mission, the prophecies of Hosea extend over a series of terrible years. The iirst two chapters of his book are dated from the reign of Jeroboam, the gala-days of the nation (ii. 13), when the feast-days, the new moons, and the Sabbaths still ran their joyous round, and the land was rich in corn and wine and oil, in store of silver and gold (ii. 8). But the later chapters of the prophecy speak of quite other times, of sickness in the state which its leaders vainly sought to heal by invoking the help of the "warlike king" [A.V. King Jareb] of Assyria (v. 13), of civil wars and conspiracies, of the assassination of monarchs, of new dynasties set up without Jehovah's counsel, and powerless to better the condition of the nation (vii. 7 ; viii. 4), of a universal reign of perjury and fraud, of violence and bloodshed (iv. 1, 2). These descriptions carry us into the evil times that opened 156 THE MINISTRY lect. iv. with the fall of the house of Jehu ; but the actual captivity of Israel is still in the future (xiii. 16) : even in the closing chapter of his book Hosea addresses a nation which has not come to open breach with the Assyrians, but cherishes the vain hope of deliver- ance through their help (xiv. 3). Gilead and Galilee, which were depopulated by Tiglath-Pileser in his ex- pedition against Pekah (e.g. 734), are repeatedly referred to as an integral part of the kingdom (v. 1 ; vi. 8 ; xii. 11), and it is therefore probable that the work of Hosea was ended before that event, and that the prophet was spared the crowning sorrow of seeing with his own eyes the fulfilment of the doom of his nation.^ There is no reason to believe that Hosea, any more than Amos, was connected with the recognised prophetic societies, or ever received such outward adoption to office as was given to Elisha. At chapter iv. 5 he comprises priest and prophet in one condemnation. Israel is undone for lack of knowledge, for the priests whose office it was to teach it have rejected the know- ledge of Jehovah, and He in turn will reject them from their priesthood. They shall fall, and the prophet shall fall with them in the night, their children shall be forgotten of Jehovah, and their whole stock shall perish.^ Thus Hosea, no less than Amos, places himself in direct opposition to all the leaders of the religious life of his nation, and like his Judsean compeer he had doubtless to reckon with their hostility, " As for the prophet," he complains, " a fowler's snare is in all his LECT. IV. OF HOSEA. 157 ways, and enmity in the house of his God" (ix. 8). To discharge his ministry year after year amidst such opposition was a far harder task than was appointed to Amos. Even Amos was constrained to exclaim that ni times so evil the part of a prudent man was to hold his peace (Amos v. 13). But Amos at least could shake the dust off his feet and return to his kindred and his home ; Hosea was a stranger among his own people, oppressed by continual contact with their sin, lacerated at heart by the bitterness of their enmity, tiU his reason seemed ready to give way under the trial. " The days of visitation are come, the days of recompense are come, Israel shall know it ; the prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad for the multitude of thine iniquity and the great hatred " (ix. 7). The passionate anguish that breathes in these words gives its colour to the whole book of Hosea's prophecies. His language and the movement of his thoughts are far removed from the simplicity and self-control which characterise the prophecy of Amos. Indignation and sorrow, tender- ness and severity, faith in the sovereignty of Jehovah's love, and a despairing sense of Israel's infidelity are woven together in a sequence which has no logical plan, but is determined by the battle and alternate victory of contending emotions ; and the swift transitions, the fragmentary unbalanced utterance, the half- developed allusions, that make his prophecy so difficult to the ' commentator, express the agony of this inward conflict. Hosea, above all other prophets, is a man of deep 158 CHARACTER lect. iv. affections, of a gentle poetic nature. His heart is too true and tender to snap the bonds of country and kindred, or mingle aught of personal bitterness with the severity of Jehovah's words. Alone in the midst of a nation that knows not Jehovah, without disciple or friend, without the solace of domestic affection — for even his home, as we shall presently see, was full of shame and sorrow — he yet clings to Israel with inextin- guishable love. The doom which he proclaims against his people is the doom of all that is dearest to him on earth ; his heart is ready to break with sorrow, his very reason totters under the awful vision of judgment, his whole prophecy is a long cry of anguish, as again and again he renews his appeal to the heedless nation that is running headlong to destruction. But it is all in vain. The weary years roll on, the signs of Israel's dissolution thicken, and still his words find no audience. Like a silly dove fluttering in the toils, Ephraim turns now to Assyria, now to Egypt, " but they return not to Jehovah their God, and seek not Him for all this." Still the prophet stands alone in his recognition of the true cause of the multiplied distresses of his nation, and still it is his task to preach repentance to deaf ears, to declare a judgment in which only himself believes. And now the Assyrian is at hand, sweep- ing over Canaan like a fatal sirocco. " An east wind shall come, the breath of Jehovah ascending from the wilderness, and his spring shall become dry and his fountain shall be dried up ; He sliall spoil the treasure LECT. IV. OF HO SEA. 159 of all precious jewels. Samaria shall be desolate, for she hath rebelled against her God : they shall fall by the sword : their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up " (xiii. 15). And yet, when all is lost, the prophet's love for guilty and fallen Israel forbids him to despair. For that love is no mere earthly affection. It is Jehovah's love for His erring people that speaks through Hosea's soul. The heart of the prophet beats responsive to the heart of Him who loved Israel when he was a child and called His son out of Egypt. " How can I give thee up, Ephraim ? How can I cast thee away, Israel ? My heart burns within Me, My compassion is all kindled. I will not execute the fierceness of My wrath ; I wiU not turn to destroy thee ; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee" (xi. 8). How this invincible love shall triumph even in the utter fall of the nation Hosea does not explain. But that it will triumph he cannot doubt. In the extremity of judg- ment Jehovah will yet work repentance and salvation, and from the death-knell of Samaria the accents of hope and promise swell forth in pure and strong cadence in the last chapter of the prophecy, out of a heart which has found its rest with God from all the troubles of a stormy life. "I will heal their back- sliding, I will love them freely : for Mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew to Israel : he shall bud forth as the lily and strike his roots as Lebanon. . . . Who is wise, and he shall understand 160 THE KNO WLEDGE lect. iv. these things ? prudent, and he shall know them ? For the ways of Jehovah are right, and the just shall walk in them ; but the transgressors shall fall therein." Hosea is a man of emotion rather than of logic, a poet rather than a preacher, and the unity of his book is maintauied through the sudden transitions and swift revulsions of feeling characteristic of his style, not by a well-planned symmetry of argument such as we find in Amos, but by a constant undercurrent of faith in the identity of Jehovah's love to Israel with that pure and unselfish affection which binds the prophet himself to his guilty and fallen nation, Jehovah is God and not man, the Holy One in the midst of Israel. But this does not mean that the heart of Jehovah has no like- ness to that of man. His righteousness is not an impersonal unlovable thing with which His reasonable creatures can have no fellowship, and which they can- not hope to comprehend. Where Amos says that Jehovah knows Israel, Hosea desires that Israel should hnow Jeliovali (ii. 20 ; iv. 1, 6 ; vi. 3 ; viii. 2 ; xiii. 4). And this knowledge is no mere act of the intellect ; to know Jehovah is to know Him as a tender Father, who taught Ephraim to walk, holding them by their arms, who drew them to Himself with human cords, with bands of love (xi. 1 seq^. In chap. vi. 6 the know- ledge of God is explained in a parallel clause, not by " mercy," as the Authorised Version renders it, but by a word (Msedy corresponding to the Latin pidas, or dutiful love, as it shows itself in acts of kindliness and LECT. IV. OF JEHOVAH. 161 loyal affection. It is quite characteristic of the differ- ence between the two prophets, that in Amos this word Mscd. or kindness never occurs, while in Hosea it not only expresses the right attitude of man to God, but kindness and truth, kindness and justice, are the sum of moral duty (iv. 1 ; x. 12 ; xii. 6). Amos in such a case would speak of justice alone ; his analysis of right and wrong pierces less deeply into the springs of human action. For the kindness of which Hosea speaks is no theological technicality; it is a word of common life used of all those acts, going beyond the mere norm of forensic righteousness, which acknowledge that those who are linked together by the bonds of per- sonal affection or of social unity owe to one another more than can be expressed in the forms of legal obligation. In primitive society, where every stranger is an enemy, the whole conception of duties of humanity is framed within the narrow circle of the family or the tribe ; relations of love are either identical with those of kinship or are conceived as resting on a covenant. " Thou shalt show kindness to thy servant," says David, " for thou hast brought thy servant into a covenant of Jehovah with thee." And so in Hosea the conception of a relation of love and kindness between man and God goes side by side with the conception of Jehovah's covenant with Israel (\d. 7 ; viii. 1). Jehovah and Israel are united by a bond of moral obligation, — not a mere compact on legal terms, a covenant of works, as dogmatic theology would express it, but a bond of 162 JEHOVAH'S COVENANT lect. iv. piety — of fatherly affection on the one hand, and loyal obedience on the other. Jehovah and Israel form as it were one community, and M&cdi is the bond by which the whole community is knit together. It is not neces- sary to distinguish Jehovah's Msed to Israel which we would term his grace, Israel's duty of liesed to Jehovah which we would call piety, and the relation of liese^d between man and man which embraces the duties of love and mutual consideration. To the Hebrew mind these three are essentially one, and all are comprised in the same covenant. Loyalty and kindness between man and man are not duties inferred from Israel's relation to Jehovah, they are parts of that relation ; love to Jehovah and love to one's brethren in Jehovah's house are identical (compare iv. 1 with vi. 4, 6). To Hosea, as to Amos, justice and the obligations of civil righteous- ness are still the chief sphere within which the right knowledge of Jehovah and due regard to His covenant are tested. Where religion has a national form, and especially in such a state of society as both prophets deal with, that is necessary ; but Hosea refers these obligations to a deeper source. Israel is not only the dominion but the family of Jehovah, and the father- hood of God takes the place of his kingly righteousness as the fundamental idea of Israel's religion. Jehovah is God and not man, but the meaning of this is that His love is sovereign, pure, unselfish, free from all im- patience and aU variableness as the love of an earthly father can never be. LECT, IV. OF LOVE. 163 This fundamental thought of Hosea, that the rela- tion between Jehovah and Israel is a relation of love and of such duties as flow from love, gives his whole teaching a very different colour from that of Amos. Amos, as we saw, begins by looking on Jehovah as the Creator and God of the universe, who dispenses the lot of all nations and vindicates the laws of universal righteousness over the whole earth ; and, when he pro- ceeds to concentrate attention on his own people, the prophet still keeps the larger point of view before the mind of his hearers, and treats the sin and judgment of Israel as a particular case under the general laws of Divine government, complicated by the circumstance that Jehovah knows Israel and has personal communications with it in which no other nation shares. Hosea has no such universal starting-point ; he deals with the sub- ject not from the outside inwards but from the heart outwards. Jehovah's love to His own is the deepest thing in religion, and every problem of faith centres in it. To both prophets the distinction which we are wont to draw between religious and moral duties is un- known ; yet it would not be unfair to say in modern language that Amos bases religion on morality, while Hosea deduces morality from religion. The two men are types of a contrast which runs through the whole history of religious thought and life down to our own days. The religious world has always been divided into men who look at the questions of faith from the standpoint of universal ethics, and men by whom moral 164 AMOS AND HOSE A lect. iv. truths are habitually approached from a personal sense of the grace of God. Too frequently this diversity of standpoint has led to an antagonism of parties in the Church. Men of the type of Amos are condemned as rationalists and cold moderates ; or, on the other hand, the school of Hosea are looked upon as enthusiasts and unpractical mystics. But Jehovah chose His prophets from men of both types, and preached the same lesson to Israel through both. To Amos and Hosea alike the true standard of re- ligious life is the standard of conduct. The state of the nation before its God is judged by its actions ; and the prevalence of immorality, oppression, and crime is the clearest proof that Israel has departed from Jehovah. The analysis of Amos stops at this point ; he does not seek into the hidden springs of Israel's sin, but simply says. Without a return to civil righteousness, which you are daily violating, you can find no acceptance before Jehovah. Hosea, on the contrary, with his guiding principle of a relation of love between Jehovah and Israel, pierces beneath the visible conduct of the nation to the disposition that underlies it. Amos had said, Cease your ritual service, and do judgment and justice (Amos v. 24) ; Hosea says, " I desire love and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings " (Hosea vi. 6). Amos judges the moral offences of Israel as breaches of universal law aggravated by the possession of special privileges ; Hosea judges them as proofs of a heart not true to Jehovah, out of sympathy LECT. IV. CONTRASTED. 165 with His character, and ungrateful to His love. Ac- cordingly, while Amos deals mainly with Israel as a state, Hosea habitually thinks of Ephraim as a moral individual, and goes back again and again to the history of the nation, treating it as the history of a person, and following its relations to Jehovah from the days of the patriarch Jacob (xii. 2, 3, 12), through the deliverance from Egypt onwards (xii. 13 ; xi. 1 se^'.). He dwells with special interest on the first love of Jehovah to His people when He found Israel like grapes in the wilder- ness (ix. 10), when He knew them in the thirsty desert (xiii. 5), before the innocence of the nation's childhood was stained with the guilt of Baal-peor, and its early love had vanished like the dew of dawn, or like the light clouds which hang on the mountains of Palestine in the early morning and dissolve as the sun gets high (vi. 4). Hosea's allusions to the past history of Israel are intro- duced in unexpected ways, and are often difficult to understand. Sometimes he seems to refer to narratives which we no longer possess in the same form (ix. 9 ; x. 9) ; but their general drift is always the same — to vindicate the patient consistent love of Jehovah to His nation, and to display Ephraim's sin as a lifelong course of spurned privileges and slighted love. It is this thought of the personal continuity of Israel's relations to Jehovah that leads the prophet to speak of God's dealings with Jacob ; for Jacob is, in fact, the nation summed up in the person of its ancestor (comp. Heb. vii. 10). And so the whole history, from Llie days of 166 THE LOVE lect. iv. the patriarchs downwards, is the history of a single unchanging affection, always acting on the same principles, so that each fact of the past is at the same time a symbol of the present (ix. 9), or a prophecy of the future (ii. 15 ; compare Josh. vii. 24). It is worth remembering, in connection with Hosea's frequent use of the early history, that in last Lecture we saw reason to believe that the sanctuaries of Northern Israel, to which he belonged, were the special home of the greater part of the patriarchal history, as it is still told in the book of Genesis ; and it is hardly disputable that some episodes in that history personify the stock of Israel or individual tribes, and so treat them as moral individuals, much in the same way in which Hosea treats Ephraim. The blessing of Jacob ascribes a personal character to Eeuben, Levi, and Simeon, which is the character of the tribes, not of individual sons of Jacob, and refers to narratives which there are the very strongest reasons for regarding as allegories of historical events subse- quent to the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan. This consideration enables us to see that the allegorical treatment of Jehovah's relations to Israel in the book of Hosea would appear much less strange and puzzling to his contemporaries than it does to a modern reader. Their current habits of thought and expression made this way of teaching easy and natural.^" Since Hosea everywhere concentrates his attention on the personal attitude and disposition of Ephraim towards Jehovah, as constituting the essence of the OF JEHOVAH. 167 national sin, he is led to look at the sins of the people's worship much more closely than Amos does. Amos contents himself with noting the acts of injustice and immorality that were done in the name of religion, and with urging that no ritual service can be accept- able to Jehovah where civil righteousness is forgotten. Beyond this he shows a degree of indifference to all practices of social worship which is not uncharacteristic of an inhabitant of the desert. But when Israel's relation to Jehovah is conceived as a personal relation, the intercourse of Jehovah with His people at the sanctuary naturally assumes a much larger significance. Acts of worship are the direct embodiment of the attitude and feelings of the worshipper towards his God, and in them Hosea finds the plainest exhibition of Ephraim's unfaithfulness. It is necessary to look somewhat closely at the way in which this point is developed. In speaking of Ephraim's connection with Jehovah in the language of human relationship, it was open to the prophet to make use of various analogies. Jehovah was Israel's King, but this image did not adapt itself to his idea.^^ He required a more personal relation, such as is supplied by the analogy of domestic life. The idea of a family relation between Jehovah and Israel appears in the book of Hosea in two forms. On the one hand Ephraim is Jehovah's son (xi, 1), and this is the predominant figure in the latter part of the book. But in the first three chapters, which present the prophet's allegory in its most complete and original form, the 168 PERSONIFICATION lect. iv. nation or land of Israel (i. 2 ; ii. 13) appears as Jehovah's spouse. The two figures are intimately connected, indeed in chapter i. they occur combined into a single parable. Eor, according to a common Hebrew figure, a land or city is the mother of its inhabitants, or, by a slight variation of the symbolism, the stock of a family or clan is personified as the mother of the mem- bers of the clan (2 Sam. xx. 19 ; Ezek. xix. 2 ; Hosea iv. 5). The mother is the ideal unity of land and nation, having for her children the actual members of the nation as they exist at any particular time. Jehovah, therefore, is at once the father of His people, and the husband of their ideal mother. We are not to suppose that Hosea invented either form of this image. That the deity is the father of his worshippers, that the tribe springs from the stock of the tribal god, who is wor- shipped as the progenitor of his people, is a common conception in heathenism (comp. Acts xvii. 28). In Num. xxi. 29 the Moabites are called the sons and daughters of Chemosh, and even Malachi calls a heathen woman "the daughter of a strange god" (Mai. ii. 11). Proper names expressive of this idea are common among the Semites, a familiar instance being Benhadad, " son of the god Hadad." But in heathenism it is to be observed that god-sonship has a physical sense ; the worshippers are of the stock of their god, who is simply their great ancestor, and so is naturally identified with their interests, and not with those of any other tribe. In Israel, however, the idea of Jehovah's OF ISRAEL. 169 fatherhood could not take this crass form in the mind of any one who remembered the history of Jehovah's relations to His people. The oldest forefathers of the Hebrews in their original seats beyond the Euphrates were not the people of Jehovah, but served other gods (Josh. xxiv. 2), and Jehovah's relation to Israel is not of nature but of grace, constituted by the divine act of deliverance from Egypt. And so, according to Hosea, Jehovah does not love Israel because he is His son, but took him as His son because He loved him (xi. 1). The same contrast between natural and positive religion is expressed in the conception of Jehovah's covenant with His people ; for a relation resting on a covenant is not natural but moral. There was no covenant between Moab and Chemosh, but only a natural kinship quite independent of Moab's conduct. But in Israel the re- jection of Jehovah's covenant suspends, and but for sovereign love would cancel, the privileges of sonship. The sonship of Israel, therefore, must find its expression in filial obedience, and from this point of view the sin of the people is that they have ceased to take heed to Jehovah (iv. 10) and hearken to Him (ix. 17). Ephraim is not a wise son (xiii. 13). Jehovah has spoken much to him by the ministry of His propheta (xii. 10), but though He should write for him a myriad of precepts, they would seem but a strange thing to this foolish child (viii. 12). But though Hosea dwells on the sonship of Ephraim with great tenderness, especially in speaking 170 ISRAEL AS lect. iv. of the childhood of the nation, the age of its divine education (xi. 1 seg'.), this analogy does not exhaust the whole depth of Israel's relation to Jehovah. In ancient society the attitude of the son to the father, especially that of the adult son employed in his father's business, has a certain element of servitude (Mai. iii. 17). The son honours his father as the servant does his master (Mai. i. 6. ; Exod. xx. 12). Even now among the Arabs the grown-up son and the slave of the house do much the same menial services, and feel much the same measure of constraint in the presence of the head of the house. It is only towards his little ones that the father shows that tenderness which Hosea speaks of in describing the childhood of Ephraim. And so the whole fulness of Jehovah's love to His people, and the way in which Israel has proved unfaithful to that love, can be fitly brought out only in the still more intimate relation of the husband to his spouse. In looking at the allegory of Jehovah's marriage with mother-Israel, or with the mother-land, we must again begin by considering the current ideas which ' served to suggest such a conception. Alike in Israel and among its heathen neighbours, the word Baal, that is " Lord " or " Owner," was a common appellative of the national Deity. Instead of the proper names com- pounded with Jehovah, which are common from the time of Elijah, we frequently find in old Israel forms compounded with Baal which are certainly not heathenish. When we meet with a son of Saul named LECT. IV. JEHOVAH'S SPOUSE. 171 Ish-Baal, a grandson Meri-Baal, both names meaning " Baal's man," while David in like manner gives to one of his sons the name of Beeliada, " Baal knoweth," we may be sure that Baal is here a title of the God of Israel.-^^ In Hosea's time the worshipping people still addressed Jehovah as Baali, "my Lord," and the Baalim of whom he often speaks (ii. 13 ; xiii 1, 2) are no other than the golden calves, the recognised symbols of Jehovah. Now, among the Semites the husband is regarded as the lord or owner of his wife (1 Pet. iii. 6), whom in fact, according to early law, he purchases from her father for a price (Exod. xxi. 8 ; xxii. 17).^^ The address Baali is used by the wife to her husband as well as by the nation to its God, and so in an early stage of thought, when similarities of expression con- stantly form the basis of identifications of idea, it lay very near to think of the God as the husband of the worshipping nationality, or of the mother-land.^* It is not at all likely that this conception was in form original to Hosea, or even peculiar to Israel ; such developed religious allegory as that which makes the national God, not only father of the people, but husband of the land their mother, has its familiar home in natural reKgions. In these religions we find similar conceptions, in which, however, as in the case of the fatherhood of the deity, the idea is taken in a crass physical sense. Marriage of female worshippers with the godhead was a common notion among the Phoenicians and Babylonians, and in the latter case was connected with immoral practices 172 ISRAEL AS lect. iv. akin to those that defiled the sanctuaries of Israel in Hosea's day.-^^ It even seems possible to find some trace in Semitic heathenism of the idea of marriage of the Baal with the land which he fertilises by sunshine and rain. Semitic deities, as we saw in Lect are I. (p. 26), are conceived as productive powers, and so form pairs of male and female principles. Heaven and Earth are such a pair, as is well known from Greek mythology; and, though Baal and 'Ashtoreth are more often represented as astral powers (Sun and Moon, Jupiter and Venus), it is certain that fertilising showers were one manifesta- tion of Baal's life-giving power. Even the Moham- medan Arabs retained the name of Baal (&a7) for land watered by the rains of heaven. The land that brings forth fruit under these influences could not fail to be thought of as his spouse; and, in fact, we have an Arabic word Qathary) which seems to show that the fertility produced by the rains of Baal was associated with the name of his wife 'Ashtoreth.^^ If this be so, it follows that in point of form the marriage of Jehovah with Israel corresponded to a common Semitic concep- tion, and we may well suppose that the corrupt mass of Israel interpreted it in reference to the fertility of the goodly land, watered by the dews of heaven (Deut. xi. 11), on principles that suggested no higher thoughts of God than were entertained by their heathen neighbours. This argument is not a mere speculation ; it gives us a key to understand what Hosea tells us of the actual religious ideas of his people. For we learn from him LECT. IV. JEHOVAH'S SPOUSE. 173 that the Israelites worshipped the Baalim or golden calves under just such a point of view as our discussion suggests. They were looked upon as the authors of the fertility of the land and nothing more (ii. 5) ; in other words, they were to Israel precisely what the heathen Baalim were to the Canaanites, natural productive powers. We have already seen that a tendency to degrade Jehovah to the level of a Canaanite Baal had always been the great danger of Israel's religion, when the moral fibre of the nation was not hardened by contest with foreign invaders, and that in early times the reaction against this way of thought had been mainly associated with a sense of national unity, and with the conception of Jehovah as the leader of the hosts of Israel. These patriotic and martial feelings were still strong during the Syrian wars ; and in the time of Amos, in spite of the many Canaanite corrup- tions of the sanctuaries, Jehovah was yet pre-eminently the God of battles, who led Israel to victory over its enemies. But a generation of peace and luxury had greatly sapped the warlike spirit of the nation, while the disorders of the state had loosened the bonds of national unity. The name of Jehovah was no longer the rally- ing cry of all who loved the freedom and integrity of Israel, and the help which Ephraim had been wont to seek from Jehovah was now sought from Egypt or Assyria. Jehovah was not formally abjured for Canaanite gods; but in the decay of all the nobler impulses of national Life He sank in popular conception 174 ISRAEL THE SPOUSE lect. iv to their level; in essential character as well as in name the calves of the local sanctuaries had become Canaanite Baalim, mere sources of the physical fertility of the land. And that this view of their power was embodied in sexual analogies of a crass and physical kind, such as we have found to exist among the heathen Semites, is proved by the prevalence of religious prostitution and widespread disregard of the laws of chastity, precisely identical with the abominations of 'Ashtoreth among the Phoenicians, and accompanied by the same symbol- ism of the sacred tree, which expressed the conception of the deity as a principle of physical fertility (Hosea iv. 13 se^.)- Thus, in looking at Hosea's doctrine of the marriage of Jehovah with Israel, we must remember that the prophet was not introducing an entirely new form of religious symbolism. The popular religion was full of externally similar ideas ; the true personality and moral attributes of Jehovah were lost in a maze of allegory derived from the sexual processes of physical life ; and the degrading effects of such a way of thought were visible in universal licentiousness and a disregard of the holiest obligations of domestic purity. In such cir- cumstances, we might expect to find the prophet casting aside the whole notion of a marriage of Jehovah, and falling back like Amos on the transcendency of the Creator and Euler of the moral universe. But he does not do so. Instead of rejecting the current symbolism he appropriates it ; but he does so in a way that lifts it LECT. IV. OF JEHOVAH. 176 wholly out of the sphere of nature religion and makes it the vehicle of the profoundest spiritual truths. Jehovah is the husband of His nation. But the essential basis of the marriage relation is not physical, but moral. It is a relation of inmost affection, and lays upon the spouse a duty of conjugal fidelity which the popular religion daily violated. The betrothal of Jehovah to Israel is but another aspect of the covenant already spoken of; it is a betrothal "in righteousness and in judg- ment, in kindness and in love," a betrothal that demands the true knowledge of Jehovah (ii. 19, 20). A union in which these conditions are absent is not marriage, but illicit love ; and so the Baalim or local symbols of Jehovah, with which the nation held no moral fellow- ship, worshipping them merely as sources of physical life and growth, are not the true spouse of Israel ; they are the nation's paramours, and their worship is infidelity to Jehovah. There is no feature in Hosea's prophecy which distinguishes him from earlier prophets so sharply as his attitude to the golden calves, the local symbols of Jehovah adored in the Northern sanctuaries. Elijah and Elisha had no quarrel with the traditional worship of their nation. Even Amos never speaks in condem- nation of the calves. But in Hosea's teaching they suddenly appear as the very root of Israel's sin and misery. It is perfectly clear that in the time of Hosea, as in that of Amos, the popular worship was nominally Jehovah worship. The oath of the worshippers at Gil- gal and Bethel was by the life of Jehovah (iv. 15) ; the 176 HOSEA AND feasts of the Baalim were Jehovah's feasts (ii. 11; 13, ix. 5) ; the sanctuary was Jehovah's house (ix. 4), the sacri- fices His offerings (viii. 13). But to Hosea's judgment this ostensible Jehovah worship is really the worship of other gods (iii. 1). With the calves Jehovah has nothing in common. He is the living God (i. 10), the calves are mere idols, the work of craftsmen (xiii. 2) ; and the nation which calls the work of its hands a god (xiv. 3) breaks its marriage vow with Jehovah and loves a stranger. If the prophecy of Hosea stood alone it would be reasonable to think that this attack on the images of the popular religion was simply based on the second commandment. But when we contrast it with the absolute silence of earlier prophets we can hardly accept this explanation as adequate. Amos is as zealous for Jehovah's commandments as Hosea ; and, if the one prophet condemns the worship of the calves as the fundamental evidence of Israel's infidelity, while the other, a few years before, passes it by in silence, it is fair to conclude that the matter appeared to Hosea in a much more practical light than it did to Amos. Our analysis of Hosea's line of thought enables us to imderstand how this was so. Amos judges of the reli- gious state of the nation by its influence on social rela- tions and the administration of public justice. But Hosea places the essence of religion in personal fidelity to Jehovah and a just conception of His covenant of love with Israel. The worship of the popular sanctuaries LECT. IV. THE CALF-WORSHIP. 177 ignored all this, setting in its place a conception of the Godhead which did not rise above the level of heathen- ism. The attachment of Israel to the golden calves was not the pure and elevated affection of a spouse for her husband. It was in its very nature a carnal love, and therefore its objects were false lovers, who had nothing in common with the true husband of the nation. Hosea does not condemn the worship of the calves because idols are forbidden by the law ; he excludes the calves from the sphere of true religion because the worship which they receive has no afl&nity to the true attitude of Israel to Jehovah. By this judgment he proves the depth of his religious insight ; for the whole history of religion shows that no truth is harder to realise than that a worship morally false is in no sense the worship of the true God (Matt. vi. 24 ; vii. 22). As we follow out the various aspects of Hosea's teaching we see with increasing clearness that in all its parts it can be traced back to a single fundamental idea. The argument of his prophecy is an argument of the heart, not of the head. His whole revelation of Jehovah is the revelation of a love which can be conceived under human analogies, and whose workings are to be under- stood not by abstract reasonings but by the sympathy of a heart which has sounded the depths of human affection, and knows in its own experience what love demands of its object. One of the first points that struck us in Hosea's impassioned delineation of Israel's infidelity, in the inward sjonpathy with which he mourns 178 PERSONAL HISTORY lect. iv. over his nation's fall, yet holding fast the assurance that even in that fall the love of Jehovah to His people shall find its highest vindication, was that Jehovah's affection to Israel is an affection that burns within the prophet's own soul, which he has not learned to speak of by rote but has comprehended through the experience of his own life. It is a special characteristic of the Hebrew prophets that they identify themselves with Jehovah's word and will so completely that their person- ality seems often to be lost in His. In no propjiet is this characteristic more notable than in Hosea, for in virtue of the peculiar inwardness of his whole argument his very heart seems to throb in unison with the heart of Jehovah. Amos became a prophet when he heard the thunder of Jehovah's voice of judgment; Hosea learned to speak of Jehovah's love, and of the workings of that love in chastisement and in grace towards Israel's infidelity, through sore experiences of his own life, through a human love spurned but not changed to bitterness, despised yet patient and unselfish to the end, which opened to him the secrets of that Heart whose tenderness is as infinite as its holiness. In the first chapters of the book of Hosea the faith- lessness of Israel to Jehovah, the long-sufiering of God, the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will yet bring back His erring people, and betroth it to Himself for ever in righteousness, truth, and love, are depicted under the figure of the relation of a husband to his erring spouse. This parable was not LECT. IV. OF HOSE A. 179 invented by Hosea; it is drawn, as we are expressly told, from his own life. The Diviae Word first became audible in the prophet's breast after he had been led by a mysterious providence to espouse Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, who proved an unfaithful wife and became the mother of children born in infidelity (i. 2, 3). The details of this painful story are very lightly touched ; they are never alluded to in that part of the book which has the character of public preaching — in chapter i. the prophet speaks of himself in the third person ; and as Hosea gave names to the children of Gomer, names of symbolic form, to each of which is attached a brief prophetic lesson (i. 4, 5; 6, 7; 8 seg-.), it is plain that he concealed the shame of their mother and acknow- ledged her children as his own, burying his bitter sorrow in his own heart. But this long-suffering tenderness was of no avail. In chapter iii. we learn that Gomer at length left her husband, and fell, under circumstances of which Hosea spares the recital, into a state of misery, from which the prophet, still following her with compassionate affection, had to buy her back at the price of a slave. He could not restore her to her old place in his house and to the rights of a faithful spouse ; but he brought her home and watched over her for many days, secluding her from temptation, with a loyalty which showed that his heart was still true to her.^'^ These scanty details embrace all that we know of the history of Hosea's life ; everything else in chapters i. and iii., together with the whole of chapter ii., is pure 180 PERSONAL HISTORY allegory, depicting the relations of Jehovah and Israel under the analogy suggested by the prophet's experience, but working out that analogy in a quite independent way. It is difficult to understand how any sound judg- ment can doubt that Hosea's account of his married life is literal history ; it is told with perfect simplicity, and yet with touching reserve. We feel that it would not have been told at all, but that it was necessary to explain how Hosea became a prophet, how he was led to that fundamental conception of Jehovah's love and Israel's infidelity which lies at the root of his whole prophetic argument. Those who shrink from accepting the narrative in its literal sense are obliged to assume that Hosea was first taught by revelation to think of Jehovah's relation to Israel as a marriage, and that then, the better to impress this thought on his auditors, he translated it into a fable, of which he made himself the chief actor, clothing himseK with an imaginary shame which could only breed derision. But in truth, as we have already seen, the history of Hosea's life is related mainly in the third person, and forms no part of his preaching to Israel. It is a history that lies behind his public ministry ; and we are told that it was through his marriage with Gomer-bath-Diblaim — whose very name shows her to be a real person, not a mere allegory that Hosea first realised the truths which he was commissioned to preach. The events recorded in chap. i. are not Hosea's first message to Israel, but Jehovah's LECT. IV. OF HOSEA. 181 first lesson to the prophet's souL God speaks in the events of history and the experiences of human life. He spoke to Amos in the thundering march of the Assyrian, and he spoke to Hosea in the shame that blighted his home.-^^ Apart from the still surviving influence of the old system of allegorical interpretation, which, though no longer recognised in principle, continues to linger in some corners of modern interpretation, the chief thing that has prevented a right understanding of the opening chapters of our book is a false interpretation of chap. i. 2, as if Hosea meant us to believe that under divine com- mand he married a woman whom he knew from the first to be of profligate character. But the point of the allegory is that Gomer's infidelity after marriage is a figure of Israel's departure from the covenant God, and the struggle of Hosea's affection with the burning sense of shame and grief when he found his wife unfaithful is altogether inconceivable unless his first love had been pure, and full of trust in the purity of its object. Hosea did not understand in advance the deep prophetic lesson which Jehovah desired to teach him by these sad experiences. It was in the struggle and bitterness of his spirit in the midst of his great unhappiness that he learned to comprehend the secret of Jehovah's heart in his dealings with faithless Israel, and recognised the unhappiness of his married life as no meaningless calamity, but the ordinance of Jehovah, which called him to the work of a prophet. This he expresses by 182 THE CALL lect. iv. saying tliat it was in directing him to marry Gomer that Jehovah first spoke to him (comp. Jer. xxxii. 8, where in like manner the prophet tells us that he recog- nised an incident in his life as embodying a divine word after the event). It was through the experience of his own life, which gave him so deep an insight into the spiritual aspect of the marriage tie, that Hosea was able to develop with inmost sympathy his doctrine of the moral union of Jehovah to Israel, and to transform a conception which in its current form seemed the very negation of spiritual faith, full of associations of the merest nature worship, into a doctrine of holy love, freed from all carnal alloy, and separating Jehovah for ever from the idols with which His name had till then been associated. The possession of a single true thought about Jeho- vah, not derived from current religious teaching, but springing up in the soul as a word from Jehovah Him- self, is enough to constitute a prophet, and lay on him the duty of speaking to Israel what he has learned of Israel's God. But the truth made known to Hosea could not be exhausted in a single message, like that delivered to Amos. As the prophet's own love to his wife shaped and coloured his whole life, so Jehovah's love to faithless Israel contained within itself the key to all Israel's history. The past, the present, and the future took a new aspect to the prophet in the light of his great spiritual discovery. Hosea had become a prophet, not for a moment, but for all his life. LECT. IV. OF HOSEA. 183 We have already seen that the greater part of the book of Hosea, from chap. iv. onwards — the only part that has the form of direct address to his people — appears to date from the period of increasing anarchy, while the briefer prophecies in chap, i., associated with the names of Gomer's three children, belong to the reign of Jeroboam II. It would seem, therefore, that Hosea was conscious of his prophetic calling for some years before he appeared as a public preacher ; and this fact we can well understand in a nature so poetically sensi- tive, and in connection with the personal circumstances that first made him a prophet. But it was impossible for him to be altogether silent. He felt that he and his family were living lessons of Jehovah to Israel, and in this feeling he gave to the three children symbolical names, to each of which a short prophetic lesson was attached. In this he was followed by Isaiah, whose sons, Mahar-shalal-hash-baz and Shear-jashub, also bore names expressive of fundamental points in the prophet's teaching. The eldest of Gomer's sons was named Jezreel. " For yet a little while," saith Jehovah, " and I will punish the house of Jehu for the sin of Jezreel, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. And in that day I wiU break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel" — the natural battlefield of the land. To Hosea, as to Amos, the fall of the house of Jehu and the fall of the nation appear as one thing ; both pro- phets, indeed, appear to have looked for the overthrow 184 HOSE A' S VIEW OF THE lect. iv. of the reigning dynasty, not by intestine conspiracy, as actually happened, but at the hand of the destroying invader. It was fitting, therefore, that the great sin of the reigning dynasty should hold the first place in the record of the nation's defection. To Hosea that sin begins with the bloodshed of Jezreel, the treacherous slaughter of the house of Ahab. The very existence of the ruling dynasty rests on a crime which cries for vengeance. That Hosea judges thus of a revolution accomplished with the active participation of older prophets is a fact well worthy of attention. It places in the strongest light the limitations that characterise aU Old Testament revelation. It shows us that we can look for no mechanical uniformity in the teaching of successive prophets. Elisha saw and approved one side of Jehu's revolution. He looked on it only as the death-blow to Baal worship ; but Hosea sees another side, and con- demns as emphatically as Elisha approved. In the forefront of his condemnation he places the bloodshed, still unatoned, which, according to the view that runs through all the Old Testament and was familiar to every Hebrew, continued to cry for vengeance from generation to generation. But we must not suppose that in Hosea's judgment all would have been well if the house of Omri had retained the throne. The Northern kingship in itself, and quite apart from the question of the parti- cular dynasty, is a defection from Jehovah — "They have made kings, but not by ]\Ie ; they have made princes, and I knew it not " (viii. 4) ; " Where now is thy king LECT. IV. NORTHERN KINGSHIP. 185 to save thee in all thy cities, and thy judges, of whom thou saidst. Give me a king and princes ? I gave thee a king in Mine anger, and take him away in My wrath " (xiii. 10, 11). The kingdom of Ephraim, in all its dynasties, rests on a principle of godless anarchy. What wonder, then, that the nation devours her judges like a fiery oven : ^^ all their kings are fallen (vii. 7), the monarchy of Samaria is swept away as foam upon the water (x. 7). The ideal which Hosea holds up in con- trast to the unhallowed dynasties of the North is the rule of the house of David. In the days of restoration the people shall inquire after Jehovah their God, and David their king (iii. 5). Now, it is not surprising that Amos, who was himself a man of Judah, should represent the re-establishment of the ancient kingdom of David as part of the final restoration ; but when Hosea, a Northern prophet, gives utterance to the same thought, he places himself in striking contrast to all his predecessors, who never dreamed of a return of Ephraim to the yoke cast off in the days of the first Jeroboam. No doubt there were many things which made such a thought natural, at least in the days of anarchy that followed the death of Jeroboam II. The stability of the Davidic throne stood in marked contrast to the civil discords and constant changes of dynasty to which the prophet so often alludes ; and, though he speaks of Judah as sharing Israel's sin and Israel's faU (v. 5, 10, 13, 14 ; viii. 14), Hosea regards the corruption of the Southern kingdom as less ancient (xi. 12 ; Heb., xii. 1) 186 THE RETURN TO tacT. iv. and deep-rooted (iv. 15), and, in his earlier prophecies at least, excludes Judah from the utter destruction of the North. Wlien Jehovah's mercy is withdrawn from Israel He will yet save Judah, though not by war and battle as in days gone by (i. 7). Hosea is so essentially a man of feeling, and not of strict logic, that it would be fruitless to attempt to form an exact picture of his attitude to Judah, expressed as it is in a series of brief allusions scattered over a number of years. In his last picture of Israel's restoration the house of David is not mentioned at all, and images of political glory have no place in his conception of the nation's true happiness. One part of the ideal of Amos is the resubjugation of the heathen once tributary to David ; he looks for a return of the ancient days of victorious warfare. But Hosea has altogether laid aside the old martial idea as we found it expressed in Deut. xxxiii. The fenced cities of Judah are a sin, and shall be destroyed by fire (viii. 14). The deliverance of Judah is not to be wrought by bow or sword (i. 7) ; repentant Ephraim says, " We will not ride upon horses " (xiv. 3). His picture of the future, therefore, lacks all the features that give strength to an earthly state ; it reads like a return to Paradise (ii. 21 seg. ; xiv.). In such a picture the kingship of David is little more than a figure. The return of David's kingdom, as it actually was, would by no means have corresponded with his ideal ; but the name of David is the historical symbol of a united Israel. To Hosea the unity of Israel is a thing of pro- LECT. IV '« DA VID THEIR KING." 187 found significance. His whole prophecy, as we know, is penetrated by the conception of the people of Jehovah as a moral person ; the unity of Israel and the unity of God are the basis of his whole doctrine of religion as a personal bond of love and fidelity. Thus the political divisions of Israel on the one hand, and on the other the idolatry which broke up the oneness of Israel's God, are set forth by Hosea as parallel breaches of covenant ; when he mentions the one he instinctively joins the other with it (viii. 4 ; x. 1 seq^.y In contrast to this twofold defection and division " Jehovah their God and David their king " appear in natural connection. One sees from all this that in Hosea's hands the old national theory of the religion of Jehovah is on the point of breaking up, and that new hopes take its place. This was indeed inevitable. The ideal of a victorious and happy nation, dwelling apart in a goodly land and secure from invasion in Jehovah's blessing on its war- like prowess, as we find it in the prophecies of Balaam or the Blessing of Moses, was hopelessly shattered by the first contact with a great conquering empire such as Assyria. Amos was the first to realise that the advance of Assyria meant the ruin of Israel as it actually was, but he did not see that the new move- ments of history meant more than speedy captivity, that Israel could never again be restored on its old footing. To him it still seems possible that the rem- nant of the nation, purified by sifting judgment, may return to Canaan and restore the ancient kinQ;dom of 188 HOSEA'S LECT. iv. David. His picture of the last days is no more than a glorified image of the best days of the past, when the flow of Jehovah's blessings, victory in war and pros- perous seasons in time of peace, is renewed in fuller measure to a nation purged of sinners. The realism of this picture has no counterpart in Hosea's eschatology. The total dissolution of national life which he foresees is not a mere sifting judgment, but the opening of an altogether new era. Hosea never draws a distinction between the sinners who must perish in captivity and the righteous remnant which shall return. To him Ephraim is not a mingled society of the righteous and the wicked, but a single moral person which has sinned and must repent as one man. Amos does not look for national repentance ; the wicked remain wicked, and perish in their sins, the righteous return in their old righteousness, and so the new Israel is just a continua- tion of the old. But to Hosea the repentance of the nation is a resurrection from the dead, " Come and let us return to Jehovah, for He hath torn and He will heal us ; He hath smitten and He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us, in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him" (vi. 1 seq. ; xiii. 14). Even Ephraim's hard heart cannot for ever resist Jehovah's love. " He will allure her and lead her into the wilderness " of exile " and speak to her heart " (ii. 14). The desolate valley of Achor shall be to her the gate of hope, and there " she shall answer as in the days of her youth and the day when she came up out LECT. IV. ESCHATOLOGY. 189 of the land of Egypt" (ii. 15). When His people are scattered in exile Jehovah shall roar like a lion, and the wanderers shall come iiuttering to His call like a bird from Egypt, like a dove from the land of Assyria (xi. 10, 11). The purpose of the judgment is not penal ; it is meant to teach them that Jehovah alone is the husband of Israel, and the giver of those good things which in their blindness she esteemed the gifts of the Baalim (ii. 5 scj-)- Taught by adversity, Ephraim shall acknowledge that neither the alliance of strange em- pires, nor his own prowess, nor his vain idols can give deliverance ; " Asshur shall not save us, we will not ride upon horses, neither will we say any more to the work of our hands. Ye are our gods ; for in Thee the fatherless findeth mercy." And so at length all Israel shall be saved ; but in this redemption every feature of the old nation has disappeared — its state, its religion, its warlike might, its foreign policy, king and prince, sacrifice and sanctuary, images (ephod) and teraphim. The very face of nature is changed ; the wild beasts of the field, the fowls of heaven, the creeping things of the earth are at peace with Jehovah's people ; sword and battle are broken out of the earth that they may lie down safely (ii. 18). Jehovah alone remains over- shadowing Israel and Israel's land with His infinite compassion (xiv. 7). And then the voice of Ephraim is heard, " What have I to do any more with idols ? I answer and look to Him ; I am as a green fir-tree, from me is Thy fruit found." ^° 190 HO SEA. LECT. nr. It is no mere accident that Hosea in this closing picture returns to the image of the evergreen tree which played so large a part in that nature-religion which it was his chief work to contend against. In translating religion into the language of the most spiritual human affections, Hosea fixed for ever the true image of reli- gious faith ; and we still find in his book a fit expres- sion of the profoundest feelings of repentant devotion — a delineation of Jehovah's forgiving love which touches the inmost chords of our being. But to Hosea the worshipping subject the object of God's redeeming grace is the nation in its corporate capacity, not a true person but a personified society. So long as the indi- vidual side of religion fails to receive that central place which it holds in the Gospel it is impossible to repre- sent the highest spiritual truth without some use of physical analogies ; and this shows itseK in the most characteristic way when the book of Hosea closes with an image derived from mere vegetative life. The true goal of Hosea's ideas lay beyond his own horizon, in a dispensation when the relation of the redeeming God to every believing soul should have all that tenderness and depth of personal affection with which he clothes the relation of Jehovah to Israel.^^ LBCT. V. ISAIAH. 191 LEOTUEE V. THE KINGDOM OF JTJDAH AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ISAIAH'S WORK.^ We have now reached the point in the Old Testament history at which the centre of interest is transferred from Ephraim to Judah. Under the dynasties of Omri and Jehu, the Northern Kingdom took the leading part in Israel; even to the Judsean Amos it was Israel par excdlmce. Judah was not only inferior in political power, but in the share it took in the active movements of national Ufe and thought. In tracing the history of religion and the work of the prophets, we have been almost exclusively occupied with the North ; Amos himself, when charged with a message to the whole family that Jehovah brought up out of Egypt, leaves his home to preach in a Northern sanctuary. During this whole period we have a much fuUer knowledge of the life of Ephraim than of Judah ; the Judsean history consists of meagre extracts from official records, except where it comes into contact with the North, through the alliance of Jehoshaphat with Ahab ; through the re- action of Jehu's revolution in the fall of Athaliah, the 192 EPHRAIKT LECT. V. last scion of the house of Ahab, and the accompanying abolition of Baal worship at Jerusalem, or, finally, through the presumptuous attempt of Amaziah to mea- sure his strength with the powerful monarch of Samaria. "While the house of Ephraim was engaged in the great war with Syria, Judah had seldom to deal with enemies more formidable than the Philistines or the Edomites ; and the contest with these foes, renewed with varying success generation after generation, resolved itself into a succession of forays and blood-feuds such as have always been common in the lands of the Semites (Amos i.), and never assumed the character of a struggle for national existence. It was the Northern Kingdom that had the task of upholding the standard of Israel : its whole history presents greater interest and more heroic elements ; its struggles, its calamities, and its glories were cast in a larger mould. It is a trite proverb that the nation which has no history is happy, and perhaps the course of Judah's existence ran more smootlily than that of its greater neighbour, in spite of the raids of the slave-dealers of the coast, and the lawless hordes of the desert. But no side of national existence is likely to find full development where there is little political activity ; if the life of the North was more troubled, it was also larger and more intense. Ephraim took the lead in literature and religion as well as in politics ; it was in Ephraim far more than in Judah that the tradi- tions of past history were cherished, and new problems of religion became practical and called for solution by LECT. V, AND JUDAH. 193 the word of the prophets. So long as the Northern Kingdom endured Judah was content to learn from it for evil or for good. It would be easy to show in detail that every great wave of life and thought in Ephraim was transmitted with diminished intensity to the Southern Kingdom. In many respects the influence of Ephraim upon Judah was similar to that of England upon Scotland before the union of the crowns, but with the important difference that after the accession of Omri the two Hebrew kingdoms were seldom involved in hostilities. At the first division of North and South, upon the death of Solomon, the house of David was disposed to treat the seceding tribes as rebels, and the accumulated wealth and organised resources of the capital enabled Reho- boam for a time to press hard upon his rival.^ The in- vasion of Shishak, in which Eehoboam was impoverished and severely chastised, restored the natural balance of things, and soon after we find Asa, king of Judah, reduced to the necessity of calling on the Syrians to help him against Baasha ; but the house of Omri culti- vated friendly relations with the Davidic kings. Jeho- shaphat was the ally of Ahab and his sons, and an ally on inferior terms, bringing a contingent to their aid in the Syrian and Moabite wars. From this time forward the North and the South seem to have felt that they had common interests and dangers ; indeed, when the power of Damascus was at its height Judah as well as Ephraim suffered from the inroads of Hazael (2 Kings 194 HISTORY lect. v, xii. 17 seg".)- The wan ton attempt of Amaziali to pro- voke a conflict with King Joash, about the close of the Syrian period, ended in humiliation ; but Joash made no attempt to incorporate Judah in his dominions, and the popular rising which cost Amaziah his life prob- ably expressed the dissatisfaction of his subjects with his presumptuous policy. Amaziah was succeeded by Uzziah, whose long and prosperous reign appears to have corresponded pretty exactly with that of Jeroboam II. The current chronology, which obscures this cor- respondence, is certainly corrupt, and we shall not be far wrong if we view Uzziah and Jotham as the con- temporaries of Jeroboam II. and Menahem, while Ahaz of Judah came to the throne soon after Menahem's death, and saw the greater part of the wars which began with the invasion of Tiglath Pileser and closed with the fall of Samaria.^ The date of Hezekiah's accession is much disputed by chronologers ; but he appears to have taken the sceptre before the fall of Samaria, while the greater part of his reign certainly falls after that event. Thus, speaking broadly, we may say that in the time of Hosea and Amos, under Kings Uzziah and Jotham, Judah was at peace with Israel, and still free from implication in the stream of larger politics. Ahaz, on the contrary, w^as attacked by Pekah and Eezin, and to escape this danger accepted the position of an Assyrian vassal ; but his land was not yet brought into direct contact with Assyria. Under Hezekiah the Assyrian armies were close to Judah, conducting operations, not only against LECT. V. OF JUDAH, 195 Samaria, but against other neighbouring states, so as to become a source of imminent danger to Judah itself, which could only hope for safety by patiently fulfilling the duties of a vassal state, and rejecting every tempta- tion to chafe under the Assyrian yoke ; but meantime it had become plain that Egypt was the ultimate goal of the Assyrian operations in Palestine. Egyptian diplomacy was busy in the Palestinian states, with tempting promises to encourage revolt against the em- pire of the Tigris. Judah had to choose between abso- lute political quietude, accepting the present situation as it stood and leaving the great struggle to be fought out by others, and the task of entering for the first time into the movements of an imperial policy, in which the principal actors were great empires altogether different from the petty states with which it had formerly had to do. The alternative was pregnant with important issues, not only for the political existence of the little nation, but for the religion of Jehovah, and to indicate the religious solution of the problems of this crisis was the work of the greatest of Judsean prophets, Isaiah the son of Amos. The famous expedition of Sennacherib, tvhich marks the culminating point of his prophetic life, fell in the year 701 B.C., twenty years after the capture of Samaria and thirty -three after the expedition of Tiglath Pileser against Pekah and Ptezin, which gave occasion to the first important series of Isaiah's pro- phecies. To the student of prophecy these years are the most important in the Old Testament history, and as 196 THE KINGDOM lect. v. such, they claim from us a very careful study ; but to understand them aright it will be necessary to go back to the epoch of prosperity running parallel to the reign of Jeroboam II., and consider the political and religious position of Judah in the reign of Uzziah. Amos, it will be remembered, flourished under this king, and the call of Isaiah, described in chapter vi. of his book, took place in the year of Uzziah's death. Our business, therefore, is to examine the state of things in the Southern Kingdom at the time when Amos and Hosea were prophesying in the North, and at the commencement of Isaiah's ministry. From the overthrow of Athaliah to the accession of Ahaz and the acceptance by him of the position of an Assyrian vassal is something more than a century. It was, on the whole, a century of material progress, of political stability, and of successful war. Two kings indeed, Joash and Amaziah, met a violent death ; but, while in the North the assassination of a monarch was always followed by a change of dynasty, the people of Judah remained constantly attached to the house of David, and the order of succession was never broken. The judgments passed upon the character of Juda^an sovereigns in the book of Kings have almost exclusive reference to their actions in regard to the affairs of public worship ; but the stability of the dynasty is the best proof that the generally favourable estimate of their conduct was borne out by the opinion of their contemporaries. Their religious policy, indeed, may be LECT. V. 01* JUJJAn. 197 fairly assumed to be typical of the general principles of their rule. These principles were conservative ; the son followed in the footsteps of his father (2 Kings xv. 3 ; xvi. 3) ; and so, if no high ideal was aimed at, there were at least no new and crying abuses to excite dis- content. The conservative character of the Judsean state is readily explained from the history of the house of David. The earliest political unity in Israel was not the nation, but the tribe or its subdivision the clan. The heads of clans and communities were the hereditary aristocracy, the natural leaders in peace and in war ; and we have already seen that this form of organisation is that which history proves to be most conducive to stability and good order among Semitic peoples {supra, p. 93 seq.). The natural aim of a strong monarchy, ruling over a confederation of tribes, is to break down the tribal system, and bring all parts of the kingdom more directly under the control of the capital ; while the natural conservatism of the individual provinces opposes this process, and seeks to limit the power of the king to the supreme command in war, and the office of deciding appeals laid before him in peace. In the Northern Kingdom, as we have further seen, the overthrow of the old tribal system was already part of Solomon's policy, and the more powerful of the kings of Ephraim appear, in like manner, to have laboured in the dii-ection of centralisation and political absolutism. Prolonged and exhausting wars naturally favoured this policy, but at the ruinous cost of breaking up old social bonds and 198 JUDAH UNDER lect. v. opening a fatal gulf between the aristocracy of the court and the mass of the people. In Judah the course of events was different. In his own tribe Solomon ap- pointed no such provincial governors or tax-gatherers as excited the discontent of Northern Israel with his rule, — moved perhaps by the example of his father David, who, after the revolt of Absalom, in which Judah was the first to rise and the last to return to obedience, appears to have deemed it necessary to treat his own tribe with special favour, and recognise its willing sup- port as the chief prop of his throne. The Judseans remained loyal to Eehoboam, because their prejudices and ancestral usages had not been violated like those of the North ; and when the kingdom was practically narrowed to a single tribe, and could no longer pretend to play the part of a great power, neither policy nor interest urged the Davidic kings to startling innovations in government. Thus the internal condition of the state was stable, though little progressive ; the kings were fairly successful in war, though not sufficiently strong to maintain unbroken authority over Edom, the only vassal state of the old Davidic realm over which they Btill claimed suzerainty, and their civil administration must have been generally satisfactory according to the not very high standard of the East ; for they retained the affections of their people, the justice and mercy of the throne of David are favourably spoken of in the old prophecy against Moab quoted in Isaiah xv. xvi., and Isaiah contrasts the disorders of his own time with the LECT. V. KING UZZIAH. 199 ancient reputation of Jerusalem for fidelity and justice (i. 21). This reputation hardly proves that any very ideal standard of government was reached or aimed at, but we may conclude that ancient law and usage were fairly maintained, and that administrative or judicial innovations, which irritate an Eastern people much more than individual miscarriages of justice, were seldom attempted. The religious conduct of the house of David followed the same general lines. Old abuses remained untouched, but the cultus remained much as David and Solomon had left it. Local high places were numerous, and no attempt was made to interfere with them ; but the great temple on Mount Zion, which formed part of the complex of royal buildings erected by Solomon, maintained its prestige, and appears to have been a special object of solicitude to the kings, who treated its service as part of their royal state. It is common to imagine that the religious condition of Judah was very much superior to that of the North, but there is absolutely no evidence to support this opinion. Throughout the Old Testament history the abuses of popular worship are brought into prominence mainly in connection with efforts after reform. In Judah there was no movement of reform to record be- tween the time of Joash, when the Tyrian Baal was aboHshed, and the time of Hezekiah, who acted under the influence of Isaiah. Thus, in the narrative of Kings, the history of religion remains an absolute blank during the century with which we are Darticularly concerned, 200 RELIGIOUS CONDITION lect. v. and it is only just before Hezekiah arose that the his- torian finds it necessary to call unfavourable attention to the fact that Ahaz sacrificed on the high places, on the hills, and under every green tree. His predecessors had undoubtedly done the same, for they accepted the high places as legitimate ; the guilt of Ahaz is not measured by his deflection from the standard of his ancestors, but by his refusal to rise to the higher stand- ard which prophets like Isaiah began to set forth. There can be no question that the worship of the Judsean sanctuaries was as little spiritual as that of the Northern shrines, Isaiah has as much to say against idols as Hosea. "Their land," he says, " is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands" (ii, 8). And these idols were not new things ; the brazen ser- pent, destroyed by Hezekiah, was worshipped as the work of Moses, which certainly implies a cultus of immemorial antiquity. In detail, no doubt, there was considerable difference between the idolatry of the North and the South. We read of a brazen serpent, but not of golden calves as symbols of Jehovah ; nor does the name of Baalim, by which the latter were known in Ephraim, appear in Isaiah or Micah. The association of the Godhead with symbols of natural growth and reproductive power, which proved so fatal to religion and morality in the North, was not lacking : in Judah as in Israel the people worshipped under ever- green trees — the Canaanite symbol of the female side of the divine power ; and the ashera, which has the LECT. V. OFJUDAH. 201 same meaning, was found in Judsean as in Northern sanctuaries (Isa. i. 29 ; xvii. 8 ; Micah v. 14, where for groves read asluras). Other Canaanite elements were not wanting ; the worship of Adonis or Tammuz, for which we have direct evidence in the last days of Jerusa- lem (Ezek. viii. 14), appears to be already alluded to by Isaiah. But on the whole it is probable that the popu- lar religion was not so largely leavened with Canaanite ideas and Canaanite immorality as in the North ; there is nothing in the prophecies of Isaiah and Micah corre- sponding to the picture of vile licentiousness under the cloak of religion drawn by Amos and Hosea. This, indeed, is what we should expect ; for in the popula- tion of Judsea the fusion of Canaanite and Hebrew elements was not so great as in Ephraim and Manasseh ; in Southern Judah the chief non-Hebrew element was of Arab stock ; and the great sanctuaries of the South do not appear to have been to the same extent as in the North identical with Canaanite holy places. Judah, more- over, was a much poorer country than Ephraim ; there was less natural wealth, and apparently the whole con- ditions of life were simpler and more primitive ; so that we should naturally expect to find less sympathy with the luxurious Canaanite worship, but at the same time more relics of the ancient superstitions of the Hebrews before Moses. These, again, can hardly have been without affinity to the original beliefs of the incorporated Arab elements, and a variety of circumstances make it prob- able that a species of fetichism or totemism was largely 202 RELIGIOUS CONDITION current in Judah as in the neighbouring desert. Such ancestral superstitions are probably alluded to in Amos ii. 4, and their nature is illustrated in the worship of family gods, in the form of unclean animals, described in Ezek. viii. 10 scg. One of the most characteristic proofs of the prevalence of the lowest superstitions is the frequent reference made by the Judsean prophets to various forms of magic and divination, such as the con- sultation of familiar spirits through " wizards that peep and mutter" — a kind of ventriloquists (Isa. viii. 19, comp. xxix. 4).* The practice of divination was not con- iined to the masses. Isaiah reckons " the cunning magician and the man skilled in enchantments " along- side of the captains and counsellors as recognised props of the state (iii. 3) ; while Micah characterises the ordinary prophets as diviners (iii. 7, 11, comp. v. 12). Isaiah represents these superstitious practices as of foreign, in part of Philistine, character (ii. 6) ; and, when we take along with this the undisturbed existence of the sanc- tuaries built by Solomon for his foreign wives, we must conclude that the opposition to distinctively foreign elements which characterises the worship of Ephraim from the time of Elijah was not so strongly marked in the religious practices of Judah. Under the dynasty of Jehu Jehovah had nominally undivided allegiance from the house of Ephraim ; foreign elements were eschewed, and the superstitions incorporated with the ritual of the sanctuaries, which led Hosea to declare that the popular religion was not Jehovah worship at aU, LECT. V. OF JUDAH. 203 were those indigenous to the land of Canaan. In Judah the influence of the work of Elijah had been only indirectly felt; the nation had passed through no such great crisis as the long battle of the Northern prophets with the house of Ahab ; and thus the preva- lent superstitions were partly of a different character from those we meet with in Ephraim, and partly indi- cated a less hopeless condition of religious life, because a higher ideal of Jehovah worship had never been so distinctly set before the mass of the people. All this, of course, must be understood as not excluding a great influence of the North on the minor kingdom. On the one hand it is clear that Amos had thoroughly assimi- lated the teaching of Elijah, while Isaiah and Micah appropriate the teaching of Hosea on the subject of idolatry. In truth, everything that we possess of the sacred literature and history of the North has been conveyed to us through Judsean channels. On the other hand, the growing corruption of Ephraim in religion and social order was full of peril to Judah. Hosea warns the Judseans against participation in the guilt of Israel (iv. 15), and Micah tells us that the transgressions of Israel were found in his own land (i. 13, comp. vi. 16). The material prosperity of Ephraim in the last gen- eration of the house of Jehu had its counterpart, as we have already seen, in the condition of Judah under Uzziah. Edom was again reduced to subjection, and thus the harbour of Elath on the Eed Sea came into 204 PROSPERITY OF lect. v. the possession of the house of David, which at the same time obtained the control of the important cara- van route from Sela to Southern Arabia (2 Kings xiv. 7, 22). These successes gave Judah an important com- mercial position, and led to the formation of a fleet (Isa. ii. 16) and a great development of wealth (Isa. ii. 7). The resources of the monarchy were enlarged, and its warlike strength was increased by the multiplication of chariots and horses (Isa. ii. 7 ; Micah i. 13 ; v. 10 ; comp. Hosea i. 7; viii. 14). But to a nation situated like the Hebrews the sudden expansion of commerce brought grave social dangers. Society was constructed on the basis of a purely agricultural life, the merchants of early times were not Hebrews, but Canaanites, who had a trading quarter of their own at Jerusalem (Zeph. i. 11, where for merchant read Canaanite). The newly-de- veloped trade could not but fall largely into the hands of the grandees and courtiers, and the wealth they accu- mulated changed their relations to the commonalty, and gave them opportunity for the exactions and injustice from which, in Eastern society, the wealthy seldom keep themselves pure. Hosea complains that in Eph- raim commerce, deceit, and oppression went hand in hand (xii. 7), and in Judah the case was not otherwise. The centralisation of large capital in a few hands led to the formation of huge estates, the poorer landowners being either bought out when they fell into the power of their creditors, or ejected by violence and false judg- ment (Isa. V. 8 ; Micah ii. 2, 9). Judicial corruption LECT. V. UZZIAH'S REIGN. 205 increased ; every man had his price (Micah iii. 11), and the poor in such a state of things could do nothing against the tyrants who, in the forcible phrase of Micah, " stripped the skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones " (iii. 2). These evils, no doubt, assumed an intenser form after the calamitous war with Pekah and Eezin had spread desolation in the land, and when the burden of taxation, which in the East always falls heaviest on the poor, was increased by the tribute to Assyria ; and it is to this later time that the most melancholy prophetic pictures of the state of Judah apply. But the fatal degeneracy of the higher classes, unequal distribution of wealth, oppression of the poor, corrupt luxury, and the like are dwelt on in the earliest utterances of Isaiah (chaps, ii.-v.), at a time when the external prosperity of the nation was still uninterrupted. Isaiah began his work in the year of Uzziah's death, and when he accepted the task of a prophet he already pictures his nation as so corrupt that it could be puri- fied only by a consuming judgment. The year of Uzziah's death cannot be determined with precision. The present chronology gives to his son Jotham a reign of sixteen years, which in all probability is a good deal too much. But at all events Isaiah began to prophesy some years before 734 B.C., and his influence was at its height during the expedition of Sennacherib in 701, so that his career covers a period of some forty years at the least. More happy in his work than Amos and Hosea, he succeeded during this 206 CAREER AND long period in acquiring a commanding position in the state. In the time of Hezekiah, plans which it was known he would condemn were carefully concealed from him by the politicians he opposed (Isa. xxix. 15) ; and in the day of Jerusalem's sorest trouble the king and his people sought from him the help which only the word of Jehovah could supply. Though we are not expressly told so in the narrative of Kings, there can be no doubt that it was he who inspired Hezekiah's plans of reformation in the national worship, and at his death he left behind him a prophetic party so strong that the counter-reformation of Manasseh was only carried out by the aid of bloody persecution. And, though his work thus seemed for a time to be undone, its influence was not extinguished. It is the teaching of Isaiah that forms the starting-point of the book of Deuteronomy, and of the reformation of Josiah, of which that book was the programme ; and thus the ideas of the great prophet continued to exercise a decisive influence on the affairs of Judah more than a century after they were first proclaimed. In truth, the whole subsequent history of the Hebrew people bears the impress of Isaiah's activity. It was through him that the word of prophecy, despised and rejected when it was spoken by Amos and Hosea, became a practical power not only in the state but in the whole life of the nation. We can readily understand that so great a work could not have been effected by an isolated mission like that of Amos, or by a man like Hosea, who stood apart from all the LECT. V. INFLUENCE OF ISAIAH. 207 leaders of Ms nation, and had neither friend nor disciple to espouse his cause. Isaiah won his commanding posi- tion, not by a single stroke, but by long-sustained and patient effort. His work must have commenced when he was still a young man, and it was continued into old age with the same unfailing courage which marks his first appearance as a prophet. The work of a pro- phet was the vocation of his life, to wliich every energy was devoted ; even his wife is called the prophetess (viii. 3) ; his sons bore prophetic names, not enigmatic like those given by Hosea to Gomer's children, but expressing in plain language two fundamental themes of his doctrine — the speedy approach of judgment by hostile invasion (Maher-shalal-hash-baz, viii. 3), and the hope of return to Jehovah and His grace by the remnant of the nation (Shear-jashub, vii. 3 ; the name is trans- lated in X. 21), The truths which he proclaimed he sought to make immediately practical in the circle of disciples whom he gathered round him (viii. 16), and through them to prepare the way for national reformation. And in this work he was aided by personal relations within the highest circles of the capital. Uriah, the chief priest of the temple, was his friend, and appears associated with him as witness to a solemn act by which he attested a weighty prophecy at a time when king and people had not yet learned to give credence to his words (viii. 2). His own life seems to have been constantly spent in the capital ; but he was not without support in the provinces. The countryman Micah, who prophesied 208 ISAIAH AND lect. v. in the low country on the Philistine border near the begin- ning of Hezekiah's reign, was unquestionably influenced by his great contemporary, and, though his conceptions are shaped with the individual freedom characteristic of the true prophet, and by no means fit mechanically into the details of Isaiah's picture of Jehovah's approach- ing dealings, the essence of his teaching went all to further Isaiah's aims. Thus Isaiah ultimately became the acknowledged head of a great religious movement. It is too little to say that in his later years he was the first man in Judah, practically guiding the helm of the state, and encouraging Jerusalem to hold out against the Assyrian when all besides had lost courage. Even to the political historian Isaiah is the most notable figure after David in the whole history of Israel. He was the man of a supreme crisis, and he proved himself worthy by guiding his nation through the crisis with no other strength than the prophetic word. His commanding influence on the history of his nation naturally suggests comparison with Elisha, the author of the revolution of Jehu, and the soul of the great struggle with Syria. The comparison illustrates the extraordinary change which little more than a century had wrought in the character and aims of prophecy. Elisha effected his first object — the downfall of the house of Ahab — by entering into the sphere of ordinary political intrigue ; Isaiah stood aloof from all political combinations, and his influence was simply that of his commanding cha- racter, and of the imperial word of Jehovah preached LECT. V. E LIS HA. 209 in season and out of season with unwavering constancy. Elislia in his later years was the inspiring spirit of a heroic conflict, encouraging his people to fight for free- dom, and resist the invader by armed force. Isaiah well knew that Judah had no martial strength that could avail for a moment against the power of Assyria. He did not aim at national independence ; and, rising above the dreams of vulgar patriotism, he was content to accept the inevitable, and mark out for Judah a course of patient submission to the foreign yoke, in order that the nation might concentrate itself on the task of inter- nal reformation till Jehovah Himself should remove the scourge appointed for His people's sin. In this concep- tion he seized and united in one practical aim ideas which had appeared separately in the teaching of his predecessors, Amos and Hosea. Amos had taught the salvation of a righteous remnant in a nation purified by judgment, Hosea had pointed out that warlike effort and political combinations could not help Israel, which must seek its deliverance in repentance and reliance on Jehovah's sovereignty. With Isaiah the doctrine of the remnant becomes a practical principle ; the true Israel within Israel, the holy seed in the fallen stock of the nation, is the object of all his solicitude. Living in the very midst of the winnowing judgment which Amos had seen approaching from afar, he sought to give the vital elements of the nation a centre round which they could rally, and a task of internal reformation conformed to the duty of national repentance. This alone was 0 210 THE WRITINGS lect. v. Israel's wisdom ; Jehovah's power and Jehovah's spirit must accomplish the rest without help from the arm of flesh. In the supreme crisis of the Assyrian wars Isaiah was not less truly the bulwark of his nation than Elisha had been during the Syrian wars. But his hero- ism was that of patience and faith, and the deliverance came as he had foretold, not by political wisdom or warlike prowess, but by the direct intervention of Jehovah. When we endeavour to trace the history of Isaiah's prophetic activity by the aid of his own writings, we are met by the difficulty that his book is not arranged in strict chronological order. Thus the in- augural vision in which he received his consecration as Jehovah's messenger to Judah is not the first but the sixth chapter of the book ; or again chap, xx., which is dated from the year of the capture of Ashdod by the general of Sargon, i.e. B.C. 711, would in chronological order stand after chap, xxviii., which speaks of the king- dom of Ephraim as still in existence. It is plain, then, that the book as it stands is in a somewhat disordered state. Presumably Isaiah himself issued no collected edition of all his prophecies, but only put forth from time to time individual oracles or minor collections, which were gathered together at a later date, and on no plan which we can follow. Some of the prophecies bear a date, or even have brief notes of historical ex- planation ; others begin without any such preface, and their date and occasion can only be inferred from the LECT. V. OF ISAIAH. 211 allTisions they contain. We cannot even tell when or by whom the collection was made. The collection of all remains of ancient prophecy, digested into the four books named from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, was not formed till after the time of Ezra, two hundred and fifty years at least after the death of Isaiah. In one of these four books every known fragment of ancient prophecy had to take its place, and no one who knows anything of the collection and transmission of ancient books will think it reason- able to expect that the writings of each separate prophet were carefully gathered out and arranged to- gether in such a way as to preclude all ambiguity as to their authorship.^ If every prophecy had had a title from the first the task of the editor would have been simple ; or if he did not aim at an exact arrangement we could easily have rearranged the series for ourselves. But there are some prophecies, such as those which occupy the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, which have no title at all, and in some other cases there is con- clusive evidence that the titles are not original, because, in point of fact, they are incorrect. In the absence of precise titles giving names and dates to each separate prophecy, an editor labouring after the time of Ezra would be quite as much at a loss as a modern critic, if he made it his task to give what is now called a critical edition of the remains that lay before him. But ancient editors did not feel the need of an edition digested according to the rules of modern literary 212 THE WRITINGS lect. v. workmanship. Their main object was to get together everything that they could find, and arrange their material in volumes convenient for private study or use in the synagogue. In those days one could not plan the number of volumes, the number of letters in a page, and the size and form of the pages, with the freedom to which the printing press has accustomed us ; the cumbrous and costly materials of ancient books limited all schemes of editorial disposition. In ancient books the most various treatises are often comprised in one volume ; the scribe had a certain number of skins, and he wished to fill them. Thus, even in the minor collections that fell into the hands of the editor of the prophets, a prophecy of Isaiah and one from another source might easily occupy the same roll ; copies were not so numerous that it was always possible to tell by comparison of many MSS. what pieces had always stood together, and what had only come together by accident ; and so, taking all in all, we need not be sur- prised that the arrangement is imperfect according to our literary lights, but will rather expect to find much more serious faults of order than the lack of a just chronological disposition. If the present book of Isaiah has itself been made up from several INISS., a conclusion which the lack of chronological order renders almost inevitable, we must deem it probable that at the end of some of these MSS. prophecies not by Isaiah at all may have been written in to save waste of the costly material \ and so, when the several small books came to LECT. V. OF ISAIAH. 213 be joined together, prophecies by other hands would get to be embedded in the text of Isaiah, no longer to be distinguished except by internal evidence. That what thus appears as possible or even probable actually took place is the common opinion of modern critics. We must not accept this opinion without examination, and we cannot now pause to go over every chapter of the book in detail ; but, on the other hand, we cannot hope to get a just picture of Isaiah's life and work without keeping our minds open to the possibilities now suggested. Instead of taking up his prophecies in the order in which they now stand, we must look for internal evidence to connect each oracle with one or other part of his career. Those sections of the book which cannot be read in clear connection with any part of the prophet's life and times must provision- ally be set on one side. Even if they are Isaiah's they can have but secondary importance for our present business, which is to study the prophetic word in the light of the history of the prophet's own times ; and in fact the more clearly we come to see that the rest of the book is full of references to present history the more shall we be disposed to ask whether these prophecies too have not an historical setting of their own, but one which belongs to a later stage of the Old Testament progress. It may be well to say at once that most parts of the book of Isaiah whose authorship is disputed have a plain connection with the Chaldsean period. Wliether this connection is of a kind which 214 PERIODS Oh LECT. v. justifies us in holding that they were written in that period is a question which almost every critic answers in the affirmative, but which cannot be profitably dis- cussed in these Lectures, because the discussion involves an historical study of the age of the Exile. The critical problems of Isaiah belong to the history of prophecy under the Chaldoean empire, and even those scholars who still believe that the whole book is from the pen of Isaiah ascribe the prophecies against Babylon to his old age, after his active life was over, so that it at least can be completely studied without them. And it is further agreed that these prophecies had no part in the great influence which Isaiah exerted on the im- mediately subsequent age, so that for the whole study of the Old Testament religion before the Exile we lose nothing by leaving them out of account. The period of Isaiah's ministry falls into three parts : — (1) The time previous to the Syro-Ephraitic war, when Judah enjoyed external peace and apparent prosperity ; (2) The troubles under the reign of Ahaz, when the land was invaded by Pekah and Eezin, and the Judsean monarch became a vassal of Assyria to obtain the help of Tiglath Pileser; (3) The time of Assyrian suzerainty, when Judah's growing impatience of the yoke at length led the nation to intrigue with Egypt, and exposed it to the vengeance of Sennacherib. The last section of the prophet's life culminates in the great invasion and marvellous deliverance of the year 701 B.C. We may not in every case be able to give a LECT. V. ISAIAH'S MINISTRY. 215 precise chronological view of the progress of the prophet's work, but at least we may hope to distribute his prophecies under these three periods, and to gain an approximate conception of the order of those which belong to the last and longest of the three, especially by comparing the many historical allusions with the Assyrian monuments. Without going into detail at the present stage of the discussion, it may be convenient to indicate broadly some conclusions to which we are led by this method. In the first place, then, it is plain that the general survey of the state of Judah given in chap. i. cannot belong to the first period of Isaiah's work, for it repre- sents the land as reduced to the utmost distress by foreign invasion. It must have been chosen to open the book on account of its general character, and so displaced from its proper chronological setting. On the other hand, the prophecy which begins, with a separate title, at chap. ii. 1 belongs to the earliest part of Isaiah's ministry. Here there is no allusion to present wars, and at ii. 16 the ships of Tarshish appear as one of the glories of the nation. But Elath, the only Judaean harbour, was taken in the war of Pekah and Eezin, and the Syrians (or Edomites) continued to hold the town long after (2 Kings xvi. 6). This prophecy, or at least a connected series of prophecies which pre- sumably were published by Isaiah in a single book, goes on to the end of chap, v., and there is great prob- ability that ix. 8 to X. 4 originally formed part of the 216 PERIODS OF close of this publication. So common an accident as the displacement of part of a manuscript would suffi- ciently account for the transposition of these verses to their present place. The account of the inaugural vision of the prophet in chap. vi. does not belong to Isaiah's first published work, but stands at the head of a new series of pro- phecies dating from the great trouble at the commence- ment of Ahaz's reign. There is no reason to doubt that this arrangement is due to Isaiah himself. He might have many reasons for not speaking of the vision at the time when it occurred, and its contents form a very appropriate introduction to the series of prophecies which it now precedes, extending from vii. 1 to ix. 7. The prophecy of the downfall of Damascus (xvii. 1-11) plainly belongs to the same period. All the remaining parts of the book appear to be subsequent to the Assyrian intervention (B.C. 734). Most of them refer more or less clearly to successive stages in the progress of the Assyrians, which in the present state of our knowledge must often remain obscure. They cannot have been all published at once, and probably Isaiah himself, in reducing selections of his prophecies to writing from time to time, united oracles of various date. Chap, xxviii., for example, must have been first spoken before the faU of Samaria, but as we now read it it is closely connected with several following chapters which seem to be of later composition. For our present purpose it is enough to regard all the LECT. V. ISAIAH'S MINISTRY. 217 prophecies of Isaiah's third period as one group, without attempting at this stage to arrange them more exactly. The parts of the book which do not fall under any one of the three groups now spoken of, and which, as already explained, I shall pass over altogether, are the prophecies against Babylon, xiii. 1 to xiv. 23 ; xxi. 1-10 ; ^ the very remarkable and difficult section, chaps, xxiv. to xxvii. ; the prophecy against Edom, chap, xxxiv ; and the great prophecy, chaps, xl. to Ixvi., which is separated from the rest of the book by an historical section, certainly not written by Isaiah himself There are also two lyrical chapters, xii. and xxxv., of which the latter seems to go with chap, xxxiv. Both are so unlike the style of Isaiah that it will be prudent to pass them over also.'^ Although Isaiah did not publish the account of the vision in which he received his prophetic consecration until the second period of his work (chap, vi.), it is reasonable that we should take it first. In the year of Uzziah's death, he tells us, he saw Jehovah seated on a lofty throne, while the skirts of His kingly robes filled the palace. Jehovah's palace is the common name of the great temple at Jerusalem, and the features of the temple are reproduced in the vision. There was an altar (ver. 6), a threshold (ver. 4, where for fosts of the, door read sockets of the thresholds), and a cloud of smoke filling the house during the adoration of the seraphim, like the smoke of incense or sacrifice during ordinary acts of worship. In the earlier history of the temple the Debir or Holy of Holies appears not to have been shut off by doors from 218 ISAIAH'S LBCT. V. the holy place (1 Kings vi. 21 as contrasted with ver. 31), and in like manner Isaiah's palace forms one great hall, so that the prophet standing at the door, where he felt the rocking of the thresholds at the thunder of the Trisagion, could see the seat of Divine majesty within. Yet the palace of Isaiah's conception is not the earthly temple but the heavenly seat of Jehovah's sovereignty. The lofty throne of Jehovah takes the place of the ark, and the ministers of the palace are not human priests but fiery beings, — the seraphim. It is plain that the very idea of the dwelling-place of Jehovah involves to human minds the aid of figure and symbol ; it cannot be realised at all except under images derived from visible things. The scenery of Isaiah's vision is of necessity purely symbolical, and the form of the symbol was naturally determined by the old Hebrew conception of the sanctuary as God's palace on earth, while the additional feature of the fiery, winged seraphim appears to have been suggested by a current conception analogous to that of the cherubim. The Old Testament contains more than one trace of weird personification of atmo- spheric or celestial phenomena. The cherubim are possibly a personification of the thunder cloud, and the seraphim of the lightning.^ But the origin of the scenery is immaterial for the ideal meaning of Isaiah's vision ; temple and seraphim are nothing more than the necessary pictorial clothing of the supreme truth that in this vision his soul met the Infinite and Eternal face to face, and heard the secrets of Jehovah's counsel LECT. V. VISION. 219 directly from His own mouth. Nor can it be of importance to us to determine how far the description is conscious poetry, and how far the pictures described passed without any effort of thought or volition before his inward eye. Even in the highest imaginings of poetical genius this question would be hard to answer ; much less can we expect to be able to analyse the workings of the prophet's soul in a supreme moment of converse with God. In some quarters a great deal too much stress has been laid upon the prophetic vision as a distinctive note of supernatural revelation. People speak as if the divine authority of the prophetic word were somehow dependent on, or confirmed by, the fact that the prophets enjoyed visions. That, however, is not the doctrine of the Bible. In the New Testament Paul lays down the principle that in true prophecy seK-consciousness and self-command are never lost — the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Cor. xiv. 32). In Kke man- ner the prophets of the Old Testament never appeared before their auditors in a state of ecstasy, being thus clearly marked off from heathen soothsayers, who were held to be under the influence of the godhead just in proportion as they lost intelligent self-control. And, as the true prophets never seek in heathen fasliion to authenticate their divine commission by showing them- selves in a state of visionary ecstasy, so also they do not record their visions as a proof that they are in- spired. They knew very weU that vision and ecstasy 220 THE NA TURE lect. v. were common in heathenism, and therefore could prove no commission from Jehovah (Jer. xxiii.) ; and so, as we have seen, Isaiah did not even publish his inaugural vision at the time, but reserved it till his ministry had been public for years. Moreover, the Hebrews were aware that the vision, in which spiritual truth is clothed in forms derived from the sphere of the outer senses, is not the highest method of revelation. In the twelfth chapter of Numbers, which belongs to the part of the Pentateuch composed before the rise of written prophecy, Moses, who received his revelation in plain words not involved in symbolic imagery, is placed above those prophets to whom Jehovah speaks in vision or in dream. This view is entirely conformed to the con- clusions of scientific psychology. Dream and vision are nothing more than a peculiar kind of thought, in which the senses of the thinker are more or less completely shut to the outer world, so that his imagination moves more freely than in ordinary waking moments among the pictures of sensible things stored up in the memory. Thus, on the one hand, the images of fancy seem to stand out more brightly, because they are not contrasted with the sharper pictures of sense-perception, while, on the other hand, the power of the will to conduct thought in a predetermined direction is suspended, or so far subdued that the play of sensuous fancy produces new combinations, which appear to rise up of themselves before the mind like the images of real things before the physical senses. The ultimate elements of such a LECT. V. OF VISIONS. 221 vision can include nothing absolutely new ; the concep- tions of which it is built up are exclusively such as are supplied by previous waking experience, the whole novelty lying in their combination. So far, therefore, as its structure is concerned, there is no essential differ- ence between a vision and a parable or other creation of poetic fancy ; and this is as strictly true for the visions of the prophets as for those of other men, so that it is often difficult to say whether any particular allegory set forth by a prophet is visionary or not — that is to say, we often cannot tell whether the prophet is devising an instructive figure by a deliberate act of thought, or whether the figure rose, as it were, of itself before his mind in a moment of deep abstraction, when his thoughts seemed to take their own course without a conscious effort of will. In the experience of the greatest prophets visions were of very rare occurrence. Isaiah records but one in the course of forty years' prophetic work. As a rule, the supreme religious thought which fills the prophet's soul, and which comes to him not as the result of argu- ment but as a direct intuition of divine truth, an imme- diate revelation of Jehovah, is developed by the ordinary processes of the intellect. There is nothing rhapsodical or unintelligible in the prophetic discourses ; they address themselves to the understanding and the heart of every man who feels the truth of the fundamental religious conceptions on which they rest. But all thought about transcendental and spiritual things must be partly 222 THE PROPHETIC lect. v. carried out by tlie help of analogies from human life and experience, and in the earlier stages of revelation, before the full declaration of God in His incarnate Son, the element of analogy and symbol was necessarily larger in proportion as the knowledge of God's plan was more imperfect. The prophets, as we are taught in the first verse of the Epistle to the Hebrews, saw only frag- mentary parts and individual aspects of divine truth. This is not a peculiarity of early revelation alone ; it applies equally to early thought about the things of nature, which in like manner reveal themselves only in isolated aspects to the primitive observer, so that all thought is in its beginnings fragmentary, and, being so, requires to bridge over gulfs by the aid of analogy and figure, in a way which in later ages is mainly confined to the poetic imagination. And for this reason early thought is less clearly self-conscious than the scientific reasonings of later time. The thinker loses himself in his thought, and seems to be swept on by his own ideas instead of ruling and guiding them. The further back we can go in the history of human ideas the more closely do we approach a stage in which all new intellectual combinations are expressed in symbol, and in which the symbol, instead of being used only for purposes of illus- tration, is the necessary vehicle of thought. At this stage new ideas appear, not as logical inferences, but as immediate intuitions, in wliich the volition of the thinker has little or no share ; and when such symbolic views of abstract or spiritual things rise before the mind in a LECT. V. VfSrON. 223 moment of deep abstraction, as they most naturally do, they may without impropriety be called visions, though they are not necessarily associated with the symptoms of ecstasy in the strict sense. It is thus easy to under- stand that vision, in the sense now defined, was a pre- dominant characteristic of the earliest stages of pro- phecy, as Num. xii. seems to imply, but that it fell more and more into the background with the great prophets of the eighth century, as their conceptions of spiritual truth became more articulate and wider in range. For purposes of exposition it was still necessary to make a large use of symbol and analogy, but vision begins to merge more and more into conscious parable, till at length in the teaching of Jesus we reach a stage where vision altogether disappears in direct communion with the Father, and parable is no longer a means of thinking out religious problems, but simply a method of bringing truth home to popular understanding. At every stage, however, in the history of prophecy the spiritual value of vision is precisely the same as that of parable, and is proportioned to the measure in which the symbolic picture presents spiritual tilings under a true analogy. Whether the prophet merely set forth in symbolic form truths which he had reached in another way, or whether he consciously devised a symbol, in order to have the aid of analogy to bridge over gaps in his view of divine things, or whether the symbol rose up before his mind without a conscious effort of the intellect, does not affect its value as a vehicle of spiritual 224 THE HOLINESS lect. v. truth. The value of the symbol or vision depends simply on the fact that in one or other way he was guided to the use of imagery fitted to give larger and deeper views of spiritual realities. Of the spiritual realities impressed on Isaiah's mind in his great vision, and which continued to exercise a profound influence on his whole career, the first is the holiness of Jehovah. The notion of holiness belongs to the ancient stock of common Semitic conceptions, being expressed in all the Semitic languages by the same root {^p). The etymological idea of the root is obscure. If the Arabic commentaries on the Koran may be beheved, it is that of distance or separation ; but the word was so early appropriated to a special religious sense that its primary notion can no longer be traced with certainty.^ The traditional etymology seems, how- ever, to be so far justified by usage. To the Semite everything divine is also holy, and in this connection the word does not in its earliest use seem to convey any positive conception, but rather to express the distance and awful contrast between the divine and the human. The supreme Godhead of Jehovah is expressed in 1 Sam. ii. 2 by saying, " There is no holy one like Jehovah ; yea, there is none beside Thee." " I am God, and not man," says Hosea ; " the Holy One in the midst of thee" (xi. 9). Holiness, in fact, is the most comprehensive predicate of the Godhead, equally familiar to the Hebrews and their heathen neighbours. The "holy gods" is a standing designation of the Phoenician deities, as we LECT. V. OF JEHOVAH. 225 learn from the monument of Eshmunazar ; and so tlie word in its original use cannot have conveyed any idea peculiar to the religion of Jehovah. Its force lay in its very vagueness, for it included every distinctive cha- racter of Godhead, and every advance in the true know- ledge of God made its significance more profound ; thus the doctrine of Jehovah's hoKness is simply the doctrine of His true Godhead. When the first sound that Isaiah hears in the heavenly temple is the Trisagion of the seraphim — " Holy, holy, holy is Jehovah of Hosts ; All that the earth contains is His wealth," we see that Isaiah does not find the starting-point of liis prophetic work in the contemplation of any one attribute of Jehovah — His universal justice, as it is set forth by Amos, or His love, as developed in the teaching of Hosea — but in the thought that all the predicates of true God- head are concentrated in Jehovah, and in Him alone. The prophets who preceded Isaiah did not preach a doctrine of abstract monotheism, they did not start from the idea that there can be only one God ; but, looking at Jehovah, Israel's God, as He was actually known to His people, they interpreted His being and character in a way that placed a great gulf between Him and the nature-gods of the heathen. Thus the Godhead of Jehovah as taught by the prophets meant something quite different from the godhead or holiness attributed to idols or to heathen deities. There was no longer any p 226 THE HOLY ONE lect. v. meaning in applying the same terms to both ; Jehovah alone was holy, or, what is practically the same thing, He alone was God in the true sense of these words. It is this truth which forms the foundation of Isaiah's teaching. The whole earth is full of the signs of Jeho- vah's sovereignty ; He dwells on high, exalted over all (xxxiii. 5) ; He reigns supreme alike in the realm of nature and the sphere of human history ; and the crash of kingdoms, the total dissolution of the old order of the Hebrew world, which accompanied the advance of Assyria, is to the prophet nothing else than the crowning proof of Jehovah's absolute dominion, asserting itself in the abasement of aU that disputes His supremacy. Tlie loftiness of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and Jehovah alone shall be exalted in that day (ii. 17). But with all this Isaiah does not cease to regard Jehovah's kingship as essentially a kingship over Israel. At first sight this may seem to us a strange limitation on the part of one who declares that all that the earth contains is Jehovah's wealth ; but in reality the limita- tion gives to his doctrine a concrete and practical force otherwise unattainable. The kingship of Jehovah is to our prophet not a mere figure but a literal truth, and so His kingdom can only consist of the nation whose affairs He administers in person, whose human rulers reign as His representatives, and which receives its law and polity from His mouth. To Isaiah, therefore, Jehovah is not simply the Holy One in an abstract sense ; He ia OF ISRAEL. 227 tlie Holy Being who reigns over Israel ; or, to use the prophet's favourite phrase, " The Holy One of Israel." When the idea of holiness is thus brought into connec- tion with Jehovah's relation to His people, it becomes at once a practical factor in religion ; for in the ordinary language of the Hebrews hoKness was not limited to the Deity, but could also be predicated of earthly things specially set apart for Him. The sanctuary was a holy place, the religious feasts were holy seasons, material things were consecrated or rendered holy by being appro- priated to use in the worship of the Deity, or presented to the sanctuary. And in like manner holiness could be predicated of persons ; the prophet who stood in a particular relation of nearness to the Godhead was " a holy man of God" (2 Kings iv. 9) ; the ordinary IsraeKte was not holy in this sense, but at least he was con- secrated, or made holy, by special ceremonies before engaging in an act of sacrificial worship (1 Sam. xvi. 5) ; and the same expression is used of the ceremonial puri- fication employed to purge away those impurities which excluded an Israelite from participation in holy func- tions (2 Sam. xi. 4). In all this, you observe, there is nothing proper to spiritual religion, nothing that goes beyond the sphere of the primitive conceptions common to the Israelites with their heathen neighbours. Holy places, things, or times are such as are withdrawn from common use and appropriated to a religious purpose, and in like manner holiness, as ascribed to persons, is no moral attribute ; 228 ISAIAH'S DOCTRINE lect. v. it refers only to the ritual separation from things com- mon and unclean, -^thout which the worshipper dare not approach the divine presence. Holiness and immo- rality might even go side by side ; the " holy women " Qcedeshot) of the Canaanite rehgion, found also in the popular Hebrew shrines, were Hierodouloi consecrated to immoral purposes. But when the teaching of the prophets brought Jehovah's holiness into sharp contrast with the pretended godhead of the Baalim, the holiness of Jehovah's people could not but in like manner take a sense different from that which prevailed in heathenism. So already in Amos the licentious practices of the Hierodouloi are said to profane Jehovah's holy name (Amos ii. 7). But with Isaiah this transformation of the notion of Israel's holiness has a wider scope. He does not develop the idea in special connection with distinctively religious acts. The hohness of Israel rather depends on the thought that Israel, in all its functions, civil as well as religious, is Jehovah's people, Jehovah's property (His vineyard, as he puts it in chap, v.), the immediate sphere of His personal interest and activity. Thus the whole land of Judah, but more especially Jerusalem, the centre of the state, is, as it were, a great sanctuary, the holy mountain of Jehovah (xi. 9), and within this holy mountain everything ought to be ordered in conformity with His sanctity. The requisites of ceremonial sanctity faU altogether into the background ; the task of Israel as a holy nation is to give practical recognition to Jehovah's holiness — that is, OF HOLINESS. 229 to acknowledge and reverence His Godhead, in those moral characters which distinguish Him from the idols and false gods (viii. 13; xxix. 23). According to Isaiah, " the knowledge and fear of Jehovah " (xi. 2) are the summary requisites for the right ordering of the state of Israel ; where these are supreme the conditions of Israel's holiness are satisfied. The ideal condition of Jehovah's holy mountain is one in which the earth is fuU of the knowledge of Jehovah as the waters cover the sea (xi. 9). And, conversely, where these things are lacking, where the homage due to Him is shared by idols, where heathen di\anations are looked to instead of " the reve- lation and the testimony " of Jehovah (viii. 20), where injustice and oppression flourish in defiance of the right- eous king of Israel, the holiness of His people is changed to uncleanness, and cannot be restored save by fiery judgment purging away the filth of the daughters of Zion and the bloodguiltiness of Jerusalem (iv. 3, 4). It is easy to see that in this view of the religious problem of his times, Isaiah builds on the foundations laid by his predecessors Amos and Hosea. But his treatment of the problem is more comprehensive and all-sided. The preaching of Amos was directed only to breaches of civil righteousness, and supplied no standard for the reformation of national worship — it left even the golden calves untouched. Hosea, on the other hand, has a clear insight into the right moral attitude of the religious subject to God ; but that sub- ject is to him the personified nation, sinning and repent- 230 THE TASK OF ing as one man, and therefore lie has no practical sug- gestions applicable to the actual mixed state of society; his prophecy leaves an unexplained hiatus between Israel's present sin and its future return to Jehovah. Isaiah, on the contrary, finds in Jehovah's holiness a principle equally applicable to the amendment of the state and the elevation of religious praxis, an ideal which supplies an immediate impulse to reformation, and which, though it cannot be fully attained without the intervention of purging judgments, may at least become the practical guide of those within Israel who are striving after better things. In every question of national conduct presented by the eventful times in which he lived Isaiah was ready with clear decisive counsel, for in every crisis Israel's one duty was to concentrate itself on the task of shaping the internal order of the state in conformity with the holy character of Jehovah, and to trust the issue to His sovereignty. In very truth the task of internal reform was more than sufficient for one generation. The whole order of the state was glaringly at variance with right concep- tions of Jehovah ; or, in the language now familiar to us, the actual life of the nation was not holy but unclean. A strong sense of this uncleanness was the feeling which sprang to the prophet's lips when he first saw the vision of Jehovah's holiness — " Woe is me ! for I am undone ; for I am a man of unclean li^^s, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of hosts." On the old ritual view of LECT. V. INTERNAL REFORM. 231 holiness there was fatal danger in contact with holy things to any one ceremonially unclean. But the impurity of which Isaiah speaks is impurity of lips — that is, of utterance. In Hebrew idiom, a man's words {debdrlm) include his purposes on the one hand, his actions on the other, and thus impurity of lips means inconsistency of purpose and action with the standard of divine holiness. The prophet himself supplies the translation of his metaphor at iii. 8 — "Jerusalem is ruined and Judah is fallen, for their tongue and their doings are against Jehovah of hosts, to provoke the eyes of His glory," and the expansion of this sen- tence forms the main burden of his first great dis- course to the house of Israel (chap. ii. seq). There is, however, a special reason why, in this vision, the uncleanness of the people is particularised as un- cleanness of Kp. The vision is Isaiah's consecration as Jehovah's messenger, and for the discharge of such a function " pure lips " (Zeph. iii. 9) are necessary. But Isaiah feels himself to be personally involved in the impurity or unholiness of his people ; his own lips are impure and unfit for personal converse with Jehovah. And so the act of consecration is symbolically repre- sented as the purging of his lips by contact with a glow- ing stone taken from Jehovah's sacred hearth. " Lo, this hath touched thy lips," says the ministering seraph, " and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The form of this visionary transaction is suggested by the old familiar symboHsm of ceremonial holiness. In 232 P URIFICA TION primitive religious thought, the idea of godhead is spe- cially connected with that of fresh unfading life, and the impurity or unholiness which must be kept aloof from the sanctuary is associated with physical corrup- tion and death. Fire and water, the pure and life-like elements, man's chief aids in combating physical corrup- tion, are the main agents in ceremonies of ritual sancti- fication (Num. xxxi. 23 ; this passage belongs to the later legislation, but the antiquity of the principle appears from Josh. vi. 19, 24). But fire is a more searching prin- ciple than water. Fiery brightness is of old the highest symbol of Jehovah's holiness, and purification by fire the most perfect image of the total destruction of im- purity. To Isaiah, of course, the fire of Jehovah's holiness is a mere symbol. That which cannot endure the fire, which is burned up and consumed before it, is moral impurity. " Who among us shall dwell with de- vouring fire, who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings ? He that walketh in righteousness and speaketh uprightly, that shaketh his hands from hold- ing of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood [consenting to bloodshed], and shutteth his eyes from beholding [delighting in] evil ; he shall dwell on high ; his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks, his bread shall be given him, his water shall be sure " (xxxiii. 14 se,g). That which can endure the fire is that which is fit to enter into communion with Jehovah's holiness, and nothing which cannot stand this test can abide in His sanctuary of Israel. Thus the fire LKCT. V. BV FIRE. 233 wMch touches Isaiah's lips and consecrates him to pro- phetic communion with God has its counterpart in the fiery judgment through which impure Israel must pass till only the holy seed, the vital and indestructible ele- ments of right national life, remain. As silver is purified by repeated smeltings, so the land of Judah must pass, not once, but again and again through the fire. " Though but a tenth remain in it, it must pass again through the fire" (vi. 13), till all that remain in Zion are holy, " even every one that is ordained to life in Jerusalem, when Jehovah shaU have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and purged the bloodshed of Jeru- salem by the blast of judgment, and the blast of burning" (iv. 4 seg-.). That this is the law of Jehovah's holiness towards Israel is revealed to the prophet as soon as his own lips are purged. For the prophetic insight into Jehovah's purpose is the insight of spiritual sympathy, and thus, as soon as his sin is taken away and his own life pene- trated by the power of the divine holiness, he who had before heard only the awful voice of the seraphim shak- ing the very threshold at which he stood, and filling his heart with terror at the unendurable majesty of the Most High, hears the voice of Jehovah Himself asking, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" and replies without fear, " Here am I; send me." But from the first he is made to know that his mission cannot bear sudden fruit, that no swift and superficial repentance can cor- respond to Jehovah's plan. He is sent to men who shall 234 EARLIER PROPHECIES lect. v. be ever hearing, but never understand ; ever seeing Jehovah's work, but never recognising its true import ; whose heart (or intelligence) becomes more gross, their ears more dull, their eyes veiled with thicker clouds of spiritual blindness under the prophetic teaching, who refuse to turn and receive healing from Jehovah till cities lie waste without inhabitants, and houses with- out inmates, and the land is changed to a desert by- invading foes. And yet Isaiah knows from the first that this consuming judgment at the hand of the Assyrians moves in the right line of Jehovah's purpose of holiness. The axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the present state, corrupt beyond the reach of partial remedies, must be hewn to the ground. But the true life of Israel cannot perish. " Like the terebinth and the oak, whose stock remains when they are hewn down," and sends forth new saplings, so " the holy seed " remains as a living stock, and a new and better Israel shall spring from the ruin of the ancient state. Such are the first principles of Isaiah's teaching as he presents them in describing his vision of consecra- tion. Their development and application in his public ministry must be reserved for another Lecture. OF ISAIAH. 235 LECTUEE Vr. THE EARLIER PROPHECIES OF ISAIAH. We found in last Lecture that the arrangement of the extant collection of Isaiah's prophecies points to the conclusion that the prophet, at different times in his life, put forth several distinct volumes embodying the sum of certain parts of his oral teaching. In the case of Amos and Hosea it is not clear that anything of this kind took place, and as regards Amos we may take it as certain that his book was not written till his whole message to Israel had been delivered and re- jected. Isaiah, on the other hand, used the publication of his past prophecies as an agency supplementing his continued oral work. He was not left to the same isolation as Amos and Hosea. At an early period of his ministry we find him surrounded by a circle of dis- ciples, to whom it would appear that his written pro- phecies were in the first instance committed (viii. 16) ; and in this way he was able to influence a wider circle than he could have reached by mere oral preach- ing. The adoption of this method of teaching by books, and even, it would seem, by placards fixed in some 236 ISAIAH'S PROPHETIC lect. vi. public place (viii. 1 ; xxx. 8)/ implies the existence of a considerable reading public ; and it may be noticed, as an interesting illustration of this fact, that the recently- discovered inscription in the rock-cut tunnel of Siloam, probably dating from the lifetime of Isaiah, is no offi- cial record, but seems to have been carved by the work- men on their own account. Eeading and writing must therefore have been pretty common accomplishments (comp. Isa. xxix. 11 sec[), and the well-timed publi- cation of connected selections of prophecy, disseminated by the friends of Isaiah, had no doubt much to do with the soUd and extensive influence which he gradually acquired. We must not suppose that Isaiah's publi- cations were mere fly-sheets containing single oracles. Each of them was manifestly a well-planned digest of the substance of teaching which, in its first delivery, may have occupied several years ; chaps, ii. - v., for example, with the connected passage ix. 8 to x. 4, cover all the prophet's teaching before the war of 734, and can hardly have been published till the outbreak of that war, to the first stage of whicli some of the allu- sions appear to point. The gravity of the crisis made it natural for Isaiah to make a special effort to lead his nation to form a just estimate of its religious significance, and this he could best do by recalling in summary form the substance of the lessons which year after year he had been laying before them. A book written in this way became something more than a series of skeleton sermons : it took the shape of a pro- PUBLICATIONS. phetic commentary on the political events, the social and religious phenomena, of a certain period of Judah's history, in which predictive announcements were mingled with historical retrospect. The peculiarities of Hebrew grammar and prophetic style often make it difficult to distinguish between narrative and predic- tion, and the difficulty is increased by the fact that pre- dictions referring to the near future were sometimes fulfilled before they were set forth in a book. If the highest object of the prophet had been to show that he could foresee future events, he would no doubt have been careful to draw a sharp line between the predic- tive and retrospective parts of his writings ; but in reality prediction was only one element in the work of explaining to the nation what Jehovah's present deal- ings meant, and how He desired them to be laid to heart. It would have been mere pedantry to sacrifice this object to that of recording each prediction exactly as it was first made. When historical events had thrown new light on any part of the prophet's argu- ment, he used that new light in its proper place, and thus, on the whole, though many parts of Isa. ii.-v. are no doubt in the main a good deal older than the com- mencement of Ahaz's reign, we must take this section of Isaiah's prophecies as practically representing the stage to which his prophetic argument had advanced, after a good many years of prophetic work, about the beginning of the war with Pekah and Eezin, or, which is the same thing, about the time of the accession of Ahaz. 238 BEGINNING OF lect. vi. The situation of tlie kingdom when this book ap- peared is clearly described by the prophet in his per- oration, but to the English reader the sense of this pas- sage is somewhat obscured not only by the transposition of ix. 8-x. 4 from its proper place, but by the inaccurate translation of many of the tenses as futures instead of perfects, so that the Authorised Version puts as predic- tion statements which are really descriptive of the pre- sent condition of affairs. To restore the order and the sense we must read ix. 8 seq^. immediately after v. 25, so as to form a series of four strophes, describing in as- cending series the evils that had already fallen on the Hebrews, and each closing with the words, " For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still." The final judgment therefore lies still in the future, the Assyrians are the instruments destined to accomplish it, and their approach is pictured in the pre- dictive passage, v. 26-30, with which the book closes. King Jotham, the last of a series of strong and generally successful princes, had died at a critical moment, when Pekah and Eezin were maturing their plans against his kingdom. The opposing parties in Northern Israel suspended their feuds to make common cause against Judah (ix. 21), and the proud inhabitants of Samaria hoped by this policy to more than restore the prestige forfeited in previous years of calamity (ix. 9, 10). At the same time the Syrians began to operate in the eastern dependencies of Judah, their aim being to possess themselves of the harbour of Elath on the LECT. VI. THE REIGN OF AHAZ. 239 Eed Sea, while the Philistines attacked the Judseans in the rear, and ravaged the fertile lowlands (ix. 12 ; 2 Kings xvi. 6). A heavy and sudden disaster had already fallen on the Judsean arms, a defeat in which head and tail, palm-branch and rush — that is, the highest officers and the common multitude of the host — had been mowed down in indiscriminate slaughter (ix. 14).^ Ahaz was no fit leader in so critical a time ; his character was petulant and childish, his policy was dictated in the harem (iii. 12). Nor was the internal order of the state calculated to inspire coniidence. Wealth, indeed, had greatly accumulated in the preceding time of prosperity, but its distribution, as we saw in last Lecture, had been such that it weakened rather than added strength to the nation. The rich nobles were steeped in sensual luxury (v. 11 scg), the Court was full of gallantry, and feminine extravagance and vanity gave the tone to aristocratic society (iii. 16 scq^. \ comp. iii. 12, iv. 4), which, like the noblesse of France on the eve of the Eevolution, was ab- sorbed in gaiety and pleasure, while the masses were ground down by oppression, and the cry of their dis- tress filled the land (iii. 15 ; v. 7). All social bonds were loosed in the universal reign of injustice, every man was for himself and no man for his brother (ix. 19 SC2'.). The subordination of classes was undermined (iii. 4, 5), things were tending to a pass when ere long none would be found willing to accept a post of autho- rity, or to risk his own substance for the good of the state (iii. 6 seq.). 240 BEGINNING OF We must not suppose that to ordinary political observers at the time these internal wounds of the state appeared so aggravated and so patent as Isaiah repre- sents them. The best Oriental administrations permit abuses which we would think intolerable, and in par- ticular the wrongs and sufferings of the poor make little noise, and find no ready access to the supreme seat of government. The attention of the rulers was doubtless directed almost exclusively to the dangers that menaced from without ; their schemes of deliverance took the shape of warlike preparations, or were already turned to the project of an alliance with Assyria. As yet they saw no cause for despondency ; the accumulated re- sources of the nation were not exhausted, and the cha- racteristic Hebrew obstinacy, which in later times more than once plunged the Jews into hopeless struggle with irresistible antagonists, was backed up by false religious confidence. The idols of which the land was full had not lost their reputation ; Isaiah alone foresaw the approach of the hour of despair when these vain de- liverers should be confronted with stern realities (x. 10, 11), when the nations and their gods, from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, should go down before the brute force of the Assyrian hosts, when men should cast their idols to the moles and to the bats, before the terror of Jehovah when He cometh to shake the earth (ii. 21). To the mass of Israel, the contrast which Isaiah draws between Jehovah and the idols did not exist ; the idols themselves were associated with the sanctuaries of the LECT. VI. THE REIGN OF AHAZ. 241 national Deity, and men fancied, as the house of Eph- raim fancied in the days of Amos, that Jehovah had no part in the calamities that befell His land ; that though He was inactive for the moment, He must soon interpose, and could only interpose on behalf of Judah. But to Isaiah, these supposed tokens of Jehovah's temporary inactivity had quite an opposite sense : they proved that the King of Israel had risen for judgment, and would no longer pass by the sins of the state. "Jehovah setteth Himself to plead, and standeth up to judge His people ; Jehovah will enter into judgment with the elders of His people, and the princes thereof, for ye have eaten up the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor ? saith the Lord Jehovah of hosts " (iii. 13 &cg). " The vineyard of Jehovah of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant planting : and He looked for judgment, but behold blood- shed ; for righteousness, but behold a cry " (v. 7). Once and again does Isaiah expose the strange delusion which could see no connection between the sins of the state and the threatening conjunction of foreign powers, the insensate conduct of the nobles who went on their course of lawlessness and riot without turning their eyes to the work of Jehovah or regarding the operation of His hands (v. 12). The whole perceptions of these men were radically perverted : they called evil good and good evil, they put darkness for light and light for darkness, bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (v. 20). Far from Q 242 JEHOVAH EXALTED lect. vi. reading the lesson of Jehovah's displeasure, written so plainly on the page of contemporary events, they longed for His interposition as the cure for all their troubles. " Let Him make speed," they said, " and hasten His work that we may see it, and let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh that we may know it." Thus, in their blindness to all moral distinctions and to all the signs of the times, they went on courting destruction, " drawing guilt upon themselves with the cords of their vain policy, and sin as it were with a cart rope." In their own conceit they were full of political wisdom (v. 21), but they had no eyes for the cardinal truth which Isaiah saw to outweigh every principle of earthly politics — that Jehovah was the one disjpenser of good and evil to Israel, and that the law of His rule was the law of holiness and righteousness ; " They had cast away the revelation of Jehovah of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel " (v. 24). And now this whole fabric of sin and self-delusion must perish in a moment utterly, like chaff and stubble at the touch of fire (v. 24). " Sheol [the under world] hath enlarged its maw and opened its mouth without measure, and her glory and her multitude and her pomp and the joyous ones of Zion shall descend into it. And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be hmnbled. And Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in righteousness " (v. 14 sc*/.). Jehovah shall be exalted, IN JUDGMENT. 243 for it is at His call that the messengers of destruction are hastening towards the doomed nation. Past and present warnings have been alike despised. What Israel has already suffered has brought no fruit of re- pentance, and Jehovah's wrath is still unappeased. And now " He lifts up a standard to far nations and hisses to them from the ends of the earth, and behold they come with speed swiftly. None is weary, and none stumbleth among them ; they slumber not nor sleep ; the girdle of their loins is not loosed, nor the latchet of their shoe broken. Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are like the flint, and their chariot wheels like the whirlwind. Their roar is like the lioness, they roar like young lions, moaning and seizing the prey and carrying it off safe, and none can deliver." The roar of the lion marks the moment of his spring, the sullen moaning that follows shows that the prey is secured. Judah lies prostrate in the grasp of the Assyrian, and over all the land no sound is heard but the deep growl of brutal ferocity as he crouches over the helpless victim. " In that day he shall moan over Judah like the moaning of the sea, when the mariner looks for land, but lo, darkness hems him in, and light is turned to darkness by the clouds" (v. 26-30). This picture of judgment, you observe, has all the precision due to the fact that Isaiah is not describing an unknown danger, but one very real and imminent — the ^me danger which Amos had seen so clearly a generation before. The intervention of Assyria in the 244 JEHOVAH EXALTED lect. vi. affairs of the Palestinian states could not in the nature of things involve anything less than a complete dissolu- tion of the old balance of power, and of the whole poli- tical system. There was nothing in the circle of the nations round about Judah which could offer successful resistance to the well-directed force of a great and disciplined martial power, and the smallest acquaint- ance with the politics of Assyria was sufficient to prove that the absorption of the Mediterranean seaboard by that empire was only a question of time, and could in no case be very remote. The politicians of Judah were blinded to this truth by their characteristic Semitic vanity, by the truly Oriental indolence which refuses to look beyond the moment, but above all by a false religious confidence. The kind of Jehovah worship which had not learned to separate the God of Israel from idols, which left men to seek help from the work of their own hands, was only possible to those who knew as little about the world as about God. A just estimate even of the natural factors of the world's history would have shown them that the Assyrian was stronger than the idols, though it needed a prophet's faith to perceive that there was a God in Israel to whose com- mands Assyria itself was constrained to yield uncon- scious obedience. But, in truth, the leaders of Judah dared not face the realities of a situation which broke through all their established ideas, which offered no prospect but despair. Isaiah had courage to see and proclaim the truth, because he was assured that amidst LECT. VI. IN JUDGMENT. 245 the crasli of nations Jehovah's throne stood unmoved, and He was exalted when all was abased. The whole meaning of the impending crisis is summed up by the prophet in a sentence already quoted : "Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in righteousness." But to understand the scope of the judgment, the plan of the righteousness here spoken of, we must be on our guard against taking these terms in such a technical sense as they bear in modern theology. When Isaiah speaks of Jehovah's righteousness, he does so because he thinks of Jehovah as the King of Israel, discharging for His people, either directly or through His human vicegerent, all the ordinary functions of civil govern- ment. Jehovah's righteousness is nothing else than kingly righteousness in the ordinary sense of the word, and its sphere is the sphere of His literal sovereignty — that is, the land of Israel. Jehovah's great work of judgment by the hand of the Assyrians has for its object precisely the same things as a good and strong human judge aims at — not the transformation of the hearts of men, but the removal of injustice in the state, the punishment of offenders, the re-establishment of law and order, and the ultimate felicity of an obedient nation. " I will again bring my hand upon thee," says Jehovah, " smelting out thy dross as with lye, and taking away all thine alloy ; and I will make thy judges to be again as aforetime, and thy counsellors as at the beginning ; thereafter thou shalt be called the 246 SIN AND lect. vi. city of righteousness, the faithful city" (i. 25, 26). No doubt when Isaiah limits the divine purpose to the restitution of Jerusalem as it had once been, we must remember that the days of David were ideaKsed in the nation's memory. It is the virtues of ancient Jerusalem that are to be reproduced without its long-forgotten faults ; but for all that it is plain that the ideal is simply a state perfectly weU ordered — not a heavenly state, in which every individual is free from aU sin in the New Testament sense of the word. It is such an ideal as would be actually realised if the judges and counsellors of the nation again were what they ought to be in a land whose king is the Holy One of Israel.^ The limitation of Isaiah's conception of the divine judgment leads us at once to observe the corresponding limitation in his use of the words sin, sinners, and the like. Sin, as we have seen in a former Lecture (p. 102 seq.), is to the Hebrew any action that puts a man in the wrong with one who has the power to make him rue it. Sin against Jehovah, therefore, is such conduct as He must take cognisance of in His quality of king and supreme judge in Israel, not sin in the New Testament sense, but on the one hand offences against social righteousness and equity, and on the other hand idol- atry, which is the denial of Jehovah's true kingship. Hence the prophet has no doctrine of universal sinful- ness. The Israelites are divided into two classes — the righteous, who have nothing to fear from Jehovah, and the wicked, whom His presence fills with terror (xxxiii. LECT. VI. JUDGMENT. 247 14). Weal to the righteous, who shall eat the fruit of their doings ; woe to the wicked, because the deserv- ing of his hands shall be rendered to him — is the law of Jehovah's justice (iii. 10, 11) ; and when it is executed in all its fulness the ideal of His sovereignty is fully realised. The redemption of Zion is conceived in the same plain sense : " Zion shall be redeemed by judg- ment, and those in her that return by righteousness " (i. 27). The redemption is not the spiritual deliver- ance of the individual but the deliverance of the state, which can only be accomplished by purging out the sinners and their sin, and bringing back the remnant of the nation to obedience and right worship. If more than this were meant there would be no truth in Isaiah's representation of the fall of the might and independence of the state before Assyria as the means of redemption. But when we take the prophet's doctrine as he sets it forth himself, without complicating it by importing ideas from a later stage of revelation, the force of his argument at once becomes plain. The first condition of social reformation was the downfall of the corrupt rulers. While they held the reins there could be no hope of amendment, and in the approach of the Assyrians Isaiah sees the appointed means to level their pride and tyranny with the dust. And in like manner the first condition of true worship and homage to Jehovah was that men should recognise the nothingness of the idols, which the Assyrians in all their campaigns broke down or carried away captive. 248 THE SPRING lect. vi. Thus Isaiali looks forward without fear to the day when all the might of Judah shall be brought low, when great and fair houses shall be without inhabitant (v. 9), when wandering shepherds shall range at will over the rich corn-land and fertile vineyards of Judah (v. 17). He does so because Jehovah rules as Israel's king in the midst of judgment, and rules in grace for the remnant of Israel (iv. 2). In the day of utmost distress, when the land is shorn of all the artificial glories of man's making, "the spring of Jehovah* shall be the beauty and the wealth, the fruit of the land shaU be the pride and the ornament of them that are escaped of Israel " (iv. 2). Once more, as in the old days, the Hebrews shall recognise the fruits of the land of Canaan, the simple blessings of agricultural life, as the best tokens of Jehovah's goodness, the best basis of a happy and God-fearing life, and shall cease to regret the lost splendours of the time when the land was full of silver and gold, of horses and chariots, and aU the apparatus of human luxury and grandeur. All that remain in Zion shall be holy, for the fdth of the daughters of Zion and the blood-guiltiness of Jerusalem have been purged away by the fiery blast of judgment. Jehovah Himself shall overshadow His people, protecting them from all iU. His glory, manifested in smoke and cloud by day, in flaming fire by night, shall rest like a canopy over Mount Zion. He shall be their shadow by daytime from the heat, their hiding-place and covert from storm and from rain (iv. 3 seg-.). LECT. VI. OF JEHOVAH, 249 The picture of Israel's restoration, we ol)serve, lias none of that full precision of detail with which the prophet describes the present, or delineates the approaching judgment. The method of Jehovah's ideal government is as yet all vague; the grand but undefined image of overshadowing glory expresses no more than the constant presence and all-sufficient help of the King of Israel. And this is the law of all prophecy. It is a great fallacy to suppose that the seers of Israel looked into the far future with the same clear perception of detail which belongs to their contemplation of present events. The substance of Messianic prophecy is ideal, not literal ; the business of the prophet is not to anticipate history, but to sig- nalise the principles of divine grace which rule the future, because they are eternal as Jehovah's purpose. True faith asks nothing more than this : it is only un- belief that inquires after times and seasons, that claims to know not only what Jehovah's purpose is as it bears on the practical questions of the present, but how it will shape itself to needs and circumstances stiU re- mote. The law of prophetic revelation is that already laid down by Amos ; the Lord Jehovah does nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets. He deals with them as a prudent king does with a trusty counsellor. He never leaves them in the dark as to the scope and meaning of His present action, and He opens the future as far as is requisite to this end, but not further. 250 THE WAR WITH i.ect. vi. The vain confidence of the rulers of Judah described by Isaiah in his first prophetic book, was rudely shaken by the progress of the war with Pekah and Eezin. " It was told the house of David, saying, Syria is con- federate ^ with Damascus. And the heart of the kinsr and the hearts of his people were moved as the trees of the wood are moved by the wind " (vii. 2). The plan of the confederates was directed to the entire destruc- tion of the Davidic dynasty, and a new king of Judah had already been selected in the person of a certain " son of Tabeel " (vii. 6). The allies obtained important successes, the Syrians in particular making themselves masters of the port of Elath. But an attempt to take Jerusalem failed, and though Ahaz was hard pressed on every side, his position could not be called desperate while he still held the strongest fortress of Palestine. On the part of the king and his princes, however, un- reasoning confidence had given place to equally unrea- soning panic. They saw only one way of escape, namely, to throw themselves on the protection of Assyria. They were well aware that the only conditions on which this protection would be vouchsafed were acceptance of the Assyrian suzerainty with the payment of a huge tribute, and an embassy was despatched laden with all the treasures of the palace and the temple, to announce that the king of Judah regarded himself as " the servant and the son " of Tiglath Pileser (2 Kings xvi. 7 scg'.). The ambassadors had no difficulty in attaining their object, which perfectly fell in with the schemes of the LECT. VI. PEKAH AND REZIN. 251 Great Km^ The invincible army was set in motion, Damascus was taken and its inhabitants led captive and Gilead and Galilee suffered the same fate. At Damascus Tiglath Pileser received the personal homage of Ahaz, whose frivolous character was so little capable of appreciating the dangers involved in his new obhga- tions that he returned to Jerusalem with his head full of the artistic and religious curiosities he had seen on his iourney In a national crisis of the first magnitude he found no more pressing concern than the erection of a new altar in the temple on a pattern brought rom Damascus (2 Kings xvi. 10 se^). The sundial of Ahaz (9 Kincrs XX. 11), and an erection on the roof ot the templefwith altars apparently designed for the worship of the host of heaven (2 Kings xxiii. 12),« were works equally characteristic of the trifling and superstitious virtuoso, who imagined that the introduction of a few foreion novelties gave lustre to a reign which had fooled away the independence of Judah, and sought a moment- ary deliverance by accepting a service the burden of which was fast becoming intolerable. The Assyrians had no regard to the welfare of their vassals. The prin- ciple of the monarchy was plunder ; and Ahaz, whose treasures had been exhausted by his first tribute, was soon driven by the repeated demands of his masters to strip the temple evenof its ancient bronze-work and other fixed ornaments (2 Kings xvi. 17 se