\! * JUN 23 1902 A %*«SiTtt*^ Section.iM^fc A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE LITERATURE OF THE BIBLE BY RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A. (Camb.), Ph.D. (Penna.) Professor of Literature {in English) in the University of Chicago; Late Lecturer in Literature to Cambridge University {Extension) , and to the London and the American Societies for the Extension of University Teaching Author of "The Literary Study of the Bible" etc.; Editor of " The Modern Reader's Bible " BOSTON, U.S.A. D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 1901 Copyright, 1901, By RICHARD G. MOULTON. Entered at Stationers' Hall. Printed in the United States of America. PREFACE I wish to explain that this volume is not an abridge- ment of my other work on The Literary Study of the Bible. There is necessarily much in common between two treatments of the same topic : but the purposes of the two are distinct. The larger work is intended for formal students ; it is an illustration of literary mor- phology in the field of sacred Scripture. The present book is addressed to the general reader, whether more or less cultured ; it avoids technicalities, and treats the matter of the Bible, approaching this from the literary side. In what sense I understand the word ' literary ' — as distinguished from theological and critical — I have sufficiently explained in the opening section. Many things have convinced me that we are entering upon a new era of popular interest in the sacred Scrip- tures. My duties as a lecturer have brought me in con-, tact with many different types of audiences in different parts of England and America. No single thing has impressed me more than the commonness of the remark — coming usually from persons who were neither unedu- cated nor irreligious — that the Bible (except for a few passages) had long been a sealed book to them, but that they were taking to it again. We have done almost everything that is possible with these Hebrew and Greek writings. We have overlaid them, clause by clause, with exhaustive commentaries ; we have translated them, re- vised the translations, and quarrelled over the revisions ; iv PREFACE we have discussed authenticity and inspiration, and sug- gested textual history with coloured type ; we have mechanically divided the whole into chapters and verses, and sought texts to memorise and quote ; we have epito- mised into handbooks and extracted school lessons ; we have recast from the feminine point of view, and even from the standpoint of the next century. There is yet one thing left to do with the Bible : simply to read it. To give an impetus to this last is the main purpose of the present book. It may, however, be desired by some to use a work of this kind as an assistance in their studies. What help I have offered in this way has been reserved for an appendix. It is a sound principle that the sustained attention necessary for literary reading and appreciation should be kept distinct from the attitude of examination and reference which is implied in every kind of study. Possibly those who merely turn over the pages of this appendix may think the reading lists over-elaborate and detailed. I would point out that this is so only in appearance ; and the reason is that the numbering of chapters and verses in ordinary Bibles in no way agrees with the actual structure ; which necessitates a re-index- ing of the divisions proper for literary study. One who uses an edition in which the proper structure is pre- sented to the eye will hardly need the help of reading lists. In a second appendix I have endeavoured to meet the requests I am accustomed to receive for advice as to progressive study in biblical literature. RICHARD G. MOULTON. Chicago, December, 1900. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE The Literary Study of the Bible as Distinct from Theology and Criticism i PART FIRST BIBLICAL HISTORY AXD STORY CHAPTER I History and Story 15 CHAPTER II The History of the People of Israel as Pre- sented by Themselves 23 CHAPTER III The History of the New Testament Church as Presented by Itself 89 PART SECOND BIBLICAL POETRY AXD PROSE CHAPTER IV Poetry and Prose in the Bible . . . .121 vi O INTENTS CHAPTER V PAGE Old Testament Wisdom 130 CHAPTER VI New Testament Wisdom 187 CHAPTER VII Lyric Poetry of the Bible 219 CHAPTER VIII Prophecy as a Branch of Literature . . . 258 CHAPTER IX Old Testament Prophecy 285 CHAPTER X New Testament Prophecy 312 APPENDICES I. Bible Reading arranged to accompany the Present Volume 331 II. Progressive Study in Biblical Literature . 351 Index of Passages of Scripture .... 359 General Index 369 Introduction THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE AS DISTINCT FROM THEOLOGY AND CRITICISM INTRODUCTION THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE AS DISTINCT FROM THEOLOGY AND CRITICISM It is a purpose of this book to distinguish what will be here called the Literary Study of the Bible from other studies ; more particularly from theology, and from that historical treatment which chiefly at the present time is associated with biblical criticism. It may be convenient to approach this distinction from the side of illustration. I will take the fourth and fifth chapters of Judges, de- scribing the oppression of Israel under Jabin king of Canaan and their deliverance by Deborah and Barak, as a portion of Scripture in which the three treatments may well be compared. The first type of study accepts the canonical books of Scripture as a foundation for theology and a manual of devotion. To a student of this order it is a shock to find within the sacred volume an incident involving cold- blooded assassination with treacherous violation of hos- pitality, not brought forward to be denounced, or even palliated, but displayed with evident exultation. Such a circumstance is calculated to raise the reflection : Is the Bible to be understood as a theological system, in which every section is a fragment of complete truth ? or does the Bible comprise a theological evolution, bringing to view immature stragglings after right, as well as its complete revelation ? This is not the place to discuss i 2 INTRODUCTION such a question : that it is raised by a particular portion of Scripture is sufficient illustration of the first study. For a second department of Bible study matters of history are the chief concern. Who are the authors of the books of Scripture ? What periods produced them ? Have we the original form in which the books appeared, or have they been compiled out of earlier materials? What evidence do the different parts of the Bible thus carry as to the life of the far past? A student interested in questions like these will seize upon the differences between the fourth and fifth chapters of Judges, both treating the same incident : differences so great that the writer of the fifth chapter can hardly be supposed to have had the fourth chapter before him. The discus- sion will naturally arise as to whether The Book of Judges was the original composition of a single author, or whether it may not be made up of traditional poems, like the Song of Deborah in the fifth chapter, and later history, like that of the fourth, with or without an editor to bring the parts together. The third type I am calling literary study. No doubt the word ' literary ' is used in many different senses : what I have in mind is the study of the various forms of which a literature is made up. When we speak of 1 Greek literature ' or ' English literature ' every one thinks of certain dramas, epics, philosophical works, histories, poems, stories, and the like, produced by the Greek or English peoples. If then the Bible is to be called 'literature,' we ought to expect to find in it dramas, stories, philosophical works, histories, songs, and similar forms of literature. Where these are the chief interest of a student he will delight to distinguish, in the INTRODUCTION 3 fourth chapter of Judges plain history, in the fifth an outpouring of brilliant lyric poetry. Not only is this lyric poetry, but it can be referred to the particular species of lyric known as ' ballad ' — a technical term implying that musical accompaniment and dance move- ments are still in use. To such a literary student the mode of performance will not seem unimportant, and in the opening words, "Then sang Deborah and Barak," he will recognise interchange between a Chorus of Women led by Deborah and a Chorus of Men led by Barak. Fresh interest is added to every detail of the song when its antiphonal structure has thus been caught. The men are chanting dolefully — In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, In the days of Jael, The highways were unoccupied, And the travellers walked through byways; The rulers ceased in Israel, They ceased — The Chorus of Women break in — Until that I, Deborah, arose, That I arose a mother in Israel. The Chorus of Men call on all ranks of men to rejoice : — Tell of it, ye that ride on white asses, Ye that sit on rich carpets, And ye that walk by the way : — the Chorus of Women appeal similarly to all women : — Far from the noise of archers, In the places of drawing water : — There shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the Lord, Even the righteous acts of his rule in Israel. 4 INTRODUCTION The two Choruses break off to encourage one another : — Men. Awake, awake, Deborah, Awake, awake, utter a song : — Women. Arise, Barak, And lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam. The mustering of the tribes no longer reads as a mere catalogue, but is alive with snatches of spirited rivalry. Women. Out of Ephraim came down they whose root is in Amalek — Men. After thee, Benjamin, among thy peoples — Women. Out of Machir came down governors — Men. And out of Zebulun they that handle the marshal's staff — Women. And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah — Men. As was Issachar, so was Barak : All. Into the valley they rushed forth at his feet. It appears how one of the tribes changed its mind. The men are singing heroically, — By the watercourses of Reuben There were great RESOLVES of heart ! The women break in, with sarcastic interruption : — Why satest thou among the sheepfolds, To hear the pipings for the flocks? The men change their description by a single word : — At the watercourses of Reuben There were great searching* of heart ! As the song proceeds we have the Chorus of Men telling how kings came to fight, the Chorus of Women answering that the stars in their courses fought against them : the men's song gives to the ear the prancing of the horses in the flooded plain, the women burst out with the disap- pointment of spectators when one of the allies fails to INTRODUCTION 5 play its part. It is men and warriors who dilate upon the more than military hard-heartedness of Jael. Blessed above women shall Jael be, the wife of Heber the Kenite, Blessed shall she be above women in the tent ! He asked water, and she gave him milk; She brought him butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, • And her right hand to the workmen's hammer; And with the hammer she smote Sisera, She smote through his head, Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay : At her feet he bowed, he fell : ■Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. To the Chorus of Women is left the essentially feminine touch of fancying the mother of Sisera awaiting his return. Through the window she looked forth, and cried, The mother of Sisera, through the lattice, "Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariots? " Her wise ladies answered her, Yea, she returned answer to herself, " Have they not found, Have they not divided the spoil? A damsel, two damsels to every man; To Sisera a spoil of divers colours, A spoil of divers colours of embroidery, Of divers colours of embroidery on both sides, on the necks of the spoil? " Both Choruses unite in a final outburst of glory to God. So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord : But let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might ! 6* INTRODUCTION The literary study of the Bible thus seeks the new light which will come into any passage of Scripture when it is read in accordance with its exact literary form. So described, however, the study is apt to leave on some minds the impression that it is something superficial or technical, remote in its interest from those who are seek- ing the matter and spirit of Holy Scripture. It therefore becomes necessary to lay down this fundamental princi- ple : That a clear grasp of the outer literary form is an essential condition for understanding the matter and spirit of literature. There need be nothing to cause sur- prise in such a statement. In comparison with the pro- found questions of theology, or the far-reaching view of the historian, how superficial and trifling appear the nice- ties of grammar and syntax ! Yet every one understands that to read Scripture with faulty ideas of its grammar and syntax would be to run the risk of fundamental errors in theological or historical inferences. A similar risk is run by those who are seeking to draw theology or history out of a scripture of which they have ignored the literary structure. To take simple illustrations. A reader is using a chap- ter of the Bible as a devotional exercise, striving to bring home to his heart what he reads as a Divine message. He has omitted to note that the portion of Job from which he has selected his chapter opened with the words, " Then answered Bildad the Shuhite ; " and, in the final chapter of the book, God is represented as declaring that this Bildad and the other friends of Job "have not spoken of him the thing that is right." Thus this devo- tional exercise is seeking to realise as God's message the words of a speaker whom God himself expressly repudi- INTRODUCTION 7 ates. The mistake has arisen simply from overlooking the dramatic form of the book ; in other literature the details represent the author's sentiments, in drama they represent the sentiments which the author has put into the mouth of another, possibly of one who is the oppo- site of himself. The author of Job is no more responsi- ble for the sentiments of Bildad than Shakespeare is to be credited with the horrible thoughts of Iago. Or again, suppose The Book of the Prophet Micah is being read, and at a particular point (vii. 7) the reader is conscious of a total transformation in the spirit of the passage, from deep depression to confidence and exulta- tion. If the interpreter falls into the prevalent habit of looking only to history for explanation of such changes, he will probably cry out that the new passage is an * in- terpolation ' from some later age, different in its sur- roundings from the gloomier times of Micah ; he will follow Wellhausen in saying that between verses 6 and 7 " there yawns a century." To one who does not ignore literary structure it will be evident that what yawns between the verses is nothing more than a change in dramatic speakers. The prophecy has been introduced (vi. 9) by a title-verse : "The voice of the Lord crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom will see thy name." In other words, we are led to expect a dra- matic scene, in which one of the speakers will be the ' Man of Wisdom.' Immediately following the title we have (verses 10-16) the denunciation and woe with which God cries to the city ; next we have the despair (vii. 1-6) of the doomed city; at the critical verse the ' Man of Wisdom ' speaks — the righteous man on whose behalf God is interposing : — 8 I INTRODUCTION Tut as for me, I will look unto the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation. . . . Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy : when I fall, I shall arise. The dramatic scene continues, with natural connection of thought, to the end of the prophecy. Thus errors of history may be made, as well as mistakes in devotional exercises, through inattention to the literary structure of what is read. It might perhaps be objected that the distinction between dramatic and other literature is so broad a difference of form that mistakes like those cited would not often be made. But the smallest points of literary structure may serve as a key to interpretation. The ordinary reader would probably think it a finely drawn and purely technical question to dispute whether a par- ticular passage should be printed in 'asyndetic sentences' or in 'the envelope figure.' Yet the determination of this point will make a great difference even in a familiar passage of 'The Lord's Prayer.' The first part of this prayer is usually arranged in entirely independent sen- tences : — Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. The same words may be arranged in an ' envelope fig- ure,' in which the first and last lines are closely related, while what comes between is read in the light of both. Our Father which art in heaven : Hallowed be thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, In earth as it is in heaven. INTRODUCTION 9 According to the first arrangement the words, " in earth as it is in heaven," are connected only with the petition, "Thy will be done." According to the envelope arrange- ment the words must be associated with all three peti- tions ; the sense now becomes this: Hallowed be thy Name in earth as it is in heaven, Thy Kingdom come in earth as it is in heaven, Thy Will be done in earth as it is in heaven. So much of force can be brought out of so slight a variation of form even in what is so familiar. The fundamental connection between the outer struc- ture and the inner spirit, while it applies to all literature, yet stands in need of special assertion in regard to the Bible, owing to extraordinary circumstances connected with the transmission of the sacred word. The Bible has come down to us as the worst-printed book in the world. Not only modern literature, but even such as the literature of ancient Greece", if given out in modern times, will be printed in a manner which conveys the literary structure directly to the eye. If the work be a drama, the speeches are separated and the names of speakers inserted ; if it be a poem, verse and line divisions will be made ob- vious ; in essays or histories there will be at least titles and proper divisions into sections. But, though the Bible is proclaimed to be one of the world's great literatures, yet if we open our ordinary versions we find that the literary form is that of a scrap book : a succession of numbered sentences, with divisions into longer or shorter chapters, under which all trace of dramatic, lyric, story, essay, is hopelessly lost. Nor is it difficult to understand how this has come about. The Old Testament goes back to an antiquity in which the representation of structure to the eye had not been invented. The original authors 10 INTRODUCTION were succeeded by rabbinical, and later by monastic in- terpreters, to whom we are indebted for their reverent care in the preservation of the sacred word, but with whom there was no conception of Scripture as literature. It was an Age of Commentary, and to the rabbinical and mediaeval commentators each separate clause of Scripture was enough as a starting point for discussion. From their hands, then, the Bible emerged in the form of num- bered texts-for-comment ; and for most readers that is the form which the Bible still wears. Recovery from a tradition of twenty centuries is naturally slow. When King James's version of the Bible was made, the scholars of that age did not even know that parts of the Bible were in verse. The distinction between prose and verse in Hebrew was rediscovered a century later. The l Re- vised Lectionary ' of the Anglican Church, in our own day, took the step of presenting lessons unhampered by chapter divisions ; later still the ' Revised Version ' broke away from numbered texts, and printed parts of Scripture in the form of poetic verse. But it is still left for indi- vidual effort, in such works as The Modern Reader's Bible, to undertake the task of presenting Holy Scripture in the full'literary structure which for all other literature is a matter of course. It will be clear, then, that the Bible student, more than any other, needs the type of study which uses literary form as a key to interpretation. Three modes of treatment then — theological, his- torical, literary — are essential, if our study of the Bible is to be adequate. I go on to the observation that, in practice, the three studies must be kept distinct. The perspective of things in the three is so different, the objects sought and the methods followed are so unlike, INTRODUCTION 11 that no good can come of the attempt to carry them on together. The endless bickering and disputation, with its personal questions and heresy trials, which at the present time disturbs the peace of the biblical world, is mainly due to the fact that the two studies of history and of theology have been allowed to become entangled. Questions such as the authorship of Isaiah, or the struc- tural origin of the Pentateuch, are, it is admitted, issues of historical fact, and by historical methods alone can they be properly investigated. Yet in practice every stage of the investigation is scanned from varying theo- logical standpoints ; party spirit comes in, and one his- torical investigator turns into a champion for a creed, another has a mission to expose the hollowness of tradi- tion. Meanwhile, history has lost the ' dry light ' with- out which scientific inquiry is impossible, and theology itself suffers in its single-mindedness. It is equally im- practicable to mingle in the same treatment literary and historic study : the appreciation of what the Bible is, and the analytic examination of possible ways by which it has become what it is. Take for example The Book of Deuteronomy, and assume anyone of the competing theories as to its history : let it be supposed that the book is entirely the composition of the historic Moses, and that it represents exactly what took place in his day ; or let it be supposed that Deuteronomy is a pious fiction of a later age \ or again, that round a nucleus of tradition imaginative matter has gathered. How is it possible that any one of these theories can affect what is a matter of simple literary fact, that our Deuteronomy stands as a succession of orations and songs, presenting the Fare- well of Moses to the People of Israel ? Yet, in practice, 12 INTRODUCTION perplexing details in the Book of the Covenant — an appendix to the Deuteronomic orations — have been allowed to thrust out of view altogether the most magnificent oratory enshrining the most pathetic of all dramatic situations. Let the theologian, the historian, the literary interpreter, pursue undisturbed their inde- pendent paths of study. We shall know in the event how to harmonise ourselves with three aspects of truth. But to struggle along a course of three incompatible methods will bring us to no goal but that of confusion. The present work, then, is devoted to the literary study of the Bible in the distinct sense in which I have ex- plained the term. Literary classics carry on their surface enough of history and of theology for their interpretation ; further questions of historic origin, or bearing upon sys- tematic theology, belong to other branches of study. To read about literature is easy : it is much more difficult to read it. The ultimate aim of this book is to assist in reading the Bible, such reading being implied as seeks the full light that comes from clearly presented literary structure. One remark may be added. A man may be said to have read a history or a legal document when he understands it ; of literature his reading is not complete until he has come to love it. This book will have failed in its main purpose if it does not give assistance — to those who may need assistance — in perceiving that the Bible, as it is the most sacred, is also the most interest- ing of literatures. Part First BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY I. History and Story II. The History of the People of Israel as Pre- sented by Themselves III. The History of the New Testament Church as Presented by Itself CHAPTER I HISTORY AND STORY History and Story as Literary Terms At the threshold of our subject lies a literary extinc- tion of great importance : the distinction between his- tory and story. Both are narrative : history is narrative addressed to our sense of record and the explanation of things, story is narrative appealing directly to the imagi- nation and emotions. There is much misconception on this subject. It is usually supposed that story is imagi- nary incident : in reality, it is incident that is addressed to the imagination. Invented matter cannot be part of history; but the converse of this is not true, for matter of fact can perfectly well be worked up into the form of story. The question is not as to the nature of the mat- ter, but as to the mode in which it is narrated. The distinction can be well appreciated by one who reads continuously through The Book of Genesis. He feels the literature he is following shift its character backwards and forwards. At times he is occupied with strings of proper names, that carry him through succes- sive generations of men or mutual connections of races ; or in a few lines are narrated revolutions that may cover centuries. He comes upon the name of Joseph, and it is as if a curtain were suddenly lifted : the reader is in the midst of real life, warm with human interest and fluctuating passions. '5 16 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY A strong personality is apparent, making itself felt under the most varied circumstances. Joseph is at first the clever child of a large family, too untutored in life to veil his superiority. With boyish self-consciousness he must needs tell his dreams of his brethren's sheaves bow- ing down before his sheaf, or of the sun and moon and eleven stars doing obeisance ; his brothers envy and hate him, his doting father rebukes, but bears in mind and looks for further revelations. Opportunity betrays Joseph to his brethren away from all help, and they prepare to slay him ; opportunity is encountered by opportunity, and they are able to sell their brother to travellers, and make gain out of revenge. A slave in Egypt, Joseph none the less makes his personality felt : Potiphar puts his whole household under Joseph's man- agement, and knows not aught that is with him save the bread which he eats. But the same attractiveness which wins men wins women also ; Joseph finds himself entan- gled in a false charge and thrown into prison. Yet in prison, as everywhere else, Joseph soon rules : whatever is done there, he is the doer of it. And when he is by marvellous chance delivered and brought before Pharaoh, Joseph has not concluded his first speech at court before emperor and courtiers are saying, Can we find such a one as this, in whom the spirit of God is? To character interest other elements of story beauty are added in the narrative that centres around Joseph. Manners of the primitive home ; pastoral life, with long- continued wandering of herds and flocks from station to distant station ; mercantile caravans crossing deserts ; Egypt with its military organisation, its luxury and in- trigue, its underground prison life, its noble river fringed HISTORY AND STORY 17 with the reed-grass out of which monsters may be dreamed of as issuing ; court life with its pomp of gold chains and fine vesture, and runners crying, * Bow the knee ' : all these varied types of the picturesque are just sketched in to make a background for the movement of events. The realm of mystery encircling the real world is touched in dreams, the fanciful forms of which may be read as symbols only half veiling events which are on their way. Sudden mutations of fortune are dear to story ; and Joseph in a single day steps from the slaves' prison to the prime minister's throne, while it is given to him to be dispenser of food to a starving world. But when in the exercise of his office Joseph sees his own brethren stand before him, recognised but not recognising, then we get one of those double situations which are so fertile a source of beauty in story. And the situation is developed to the utmost. Joseph is torn opposite ways, by desire for righteous vengeance, and by reviving affection for kindred seen in the land of strangers. Now Joseph plays the foreigner with his brethren, speaking to them through an interpreter, while he can hear their naive conversation ; now he entangles them in cross-examination as to their home affairs ; now they find themselves overwhelmed with hospitality, mys- teriously arranged at table in the order of their age ; again their innocence is caught in strange situations of circumstantial guilt. Nor is this merely play. A moral effect is at work, as the brethren are given an opportu- nity of rising above themselves : from the first they have been led to think of their brother whose distress of soul they would not hear when he besought them ; they are as tender to their father in the temporary loss of Ben- 18 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY jamin as they were cruel in depriving him forever of his loved Joseph ; they had once united to slay or sell one brother, now two of their number offer, the one his liberty, the other his own children, to secure Benjamin for their father's old age. At last the tangle resolves as Joseph sobs out that he is the lost brother ; and plot rises into providence with the reassuring truth that not his brethren but God was the disposer of events, who permitted the slavery of one to save a world from famine. The excitement settles down into happy idyl pictures of the migration from Canaan to Egypt : the old father fainting at the news of Joseph's life, restored by the sight of real wagons sent to convey the family goods. The sons become chief herdsmen for the Egyptians. The father is presented at the court of Pharaoh, and the majesty of the crown bows down before the simpler majesty of patriarchal white hairs. The reader continues his perusal of Genesis; but the curtain has dropped. It is now the intellectual faculties to which appeal is made, with economic changes affecting the land tenure of Egypt, a few verses raising reflections as to consequences that would extend over centuries. The difference thus felt between the narrative of Joseph and what precedes and follows is just the difference between story and history. In other literatures story is quite a separate branch of literature, with matter of its own, and the verse style usually known as epic. In the literature of the Bible the stories are portions of the national history, attracted to the prose of historic narra- tive. The connection between the two is even closer still : story is used as a means of historic emphasis ; and the elaborate narrative of Joseph is justified by the posi- SCRIPTURE NARRATIVE 19 tion of the man who is the link between Israel and Egypt. It may be added that, besides this distinction of history and story, a properly printed Bible should keep separate to the reader's eye the history itself and the statistical or legal documents by which it is supported : just as in modern literature a volume of Hallam or Macaulay will print in separate type the text and the footnotes or appendices. When all proper distinctions have been observed, then the reader is in a position to appreciate the narrative literature of Scripture : the con- tinuous thread of history maintained through half the Bible, supported from time to time for those who desire it by documentary supplement, but with the spirit of the history made impressive for all with a wealth of epic stories. Scripture Narrative considered as History and as Literature The narrative portions of Scripture will hold a very different position in the study of history and in the study of literature. The first object of the historian is to ascertain the exact facts of the past. To him the his- torical books of the Bible are materials upon which he is to work. He will sift his materials : inquiring as to authorship, age, mode of composition ; discriminating different degrees of authority in different parts, according as they are the work of contemporary or other writers. With all this he will combine material drawn from other sources : modern discovery, or documentary matter out- side the Bible. In the nature of things his results must be ever under revision, as more and more of material is 20 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY given him to combine. But to the student of literature the historical books of the Bible, precisely as they stand, remain a literary product of permanent significance ; for they are nothing less than the History of the People of Israel as Presented by Themselves. The distinction for which I am contending can be illustrated in other fields. Shakespeare has given us plays which touch the history of England. In regard to these plays just the same questions arise as in regard to books of Scripture. One critic ascribes the plays to Shakespeare, others to another author, or to several authors in collaboration. One critic accepts the plays as history ; another thinks that Shakespeare, careless as to exact details of events, has used history as a form in which to embody general conceptions of life. It is obvi- ous that a number of critics, holding irreconcilable opin- ions on these points, might sit side by side in a theatre, and find themselves affected in exactly the same way by the play as presented on the stage ; it would never occur to them to interrupt the performance in order to settle whether a detail of the dramatic action was or was not in accordance with the latest historic opinion. There would be no need to discuss whether the historic study or the literary effect were the more important ; it is enough that the two are distinct. But perhaps an objection may be raised to this anal- ogy. In regard to the historic books of the Bible where, it may be asked, is the Shakespeare? The answer is that in this case we have, not the transcendent genius of an individual poet, but the national consciousness of a great people. For whatever may be the truth as to the process by which books of Scripture assumed the form in SCRIPTURK NARRATIVE 21 which we have them, it is not questioned that they rep- resent the history as it presented itself to the mind of the nation itself. The narrative of Scripture is philosophic history, of permanent importance in the world's literature. The national consciousness of Israel recognises the race as a chosen people, with a mission to be the witness of its invisible God to the nations of the earth. The first portion of the history, the biblical Genesis, gives us what that word implies — the Gradual Formation of the Chosen Nation. The next section is The Exodus (the biblical Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers}, the Emigration of the Chosen People to the Land of Promise ; with migra- tion goes the gradual evolution into an organised nation, and the massing at this point of legal documents makes the Constitutional History of Israel. Under the name of The Judges (the biblical Joshua, Judges, part of Sam- uel) we next distinguish the Grand Transition : a people starting with theocracy, the government of an invisible God, comes to accept the rule of visible kings copied from the nations around. But precisely at the time these kings begin there is established a regular order of 'prophets,' or interpreters for God, representing the old idea of theocracy : the fourth period of the history may be named as The Kings and The Prophets, a regular Government of Kings tempered by an Opposition of Prophets. Then comes The Exile : the witnessing of Israel for Jehovah has to be carried on in the land of strangers. There return from exile, not the whole people, but only those who are devoted to the service of God ; not the Hebrew Nation, but the Jewish Church : and the final section is thus the Ecclesiastical History of The Chronicles, The spirit of the history is throughout 22 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY made emphatic by story, or at times by fable or song. But in addition to the formal historic books we have to note two others. Deuteronomy gives us the Orations and Songs of Moses, emphasising the crisis of the leader's Farewell to Israel. And in Isaiah we find a certain dramatic work which, in connection with the deliverance from exile, reads a meaning into events such as strikes a unity through the whole career of the chosen people : it is an Epilogue to the History of Israel. What has been said as to the narrative of the Old Testament may, with the proper modifications, be laid down in regard to certain parts of the New Testament. Accordingly, the two chapters that follow will deal with The History of the People of Israel as Presented by Themselves, and again, with The History of the New Testament Church as Presented by Itself. CHAPTER II THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AS PRESENTED BY THEMSELVES Prologue to the Old Testament The relation between the people of Israel and their God is in the Bible expressed by the word ' covenant ' : God appears repeatedly as referring to his covenant with Abraham, and at successive stages in the history of Israel the covenant is renewed. The word ' testament,' which in later times has changed its meaning, was in earlier English exactly equivalent to ' covenant ' : hence it is nat- ural that the sacred literature of Israel should be called 'The Old Testament,' or covenant between God and his ancient people of Israel. It might have been expected that this literature should commence with the first of the fathers : as a fact, Genesis commences long before. But when the eleven chapters which precede Abraham are examined, the reason is plain. The call of Abraham is not the first example of covenantal relations between God and mankind. When the origin of all things has been noted in the creation of the world, Adam is granted dominion over all the earth ; the garden of Eden is given him for his abode, and for a sign of obedience is the command, to abstain from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the covenant between God and the common ancestor of men. Then is narrated the eating of the 23 24 BIBLICAL HISTORY AXD STORY forbidden fruit ; and Adam is driven out of Eden. With the slaying of Abel by Cain, the feud of the righteous and the wicked has appeared upon earth. Its continuance is suggested in the two genealogies that follow. The one traces the progeny of Cain to Lamech, the inventor of deadly weapons. In the other, Abel is replaced by Seth : " then began men to call upon the name of the Lord." Descendants of Seth — including Enoch, who "walked with God, and he was not, for God took him " — are traced to Noah. At that point corruption has reached its completeness ; and then, with vivid detail, is pictured the flood which sweeps a world away, the household of Xoah alone preserved in the floating ark. With Noah we have a fresh starting point for mankind, and a fresh covenant : The bow shall be in the cloud : and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. The foulness of Canaan's father recommences the history of sin, and the Curse of Noah prophesies the feud of righteous and wicked nations. Cursed be Canaan ; A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; And let Canaan be his servant. God enlarge Japheth, And let him dwell in the tents of Shem; And let Canaan be his servant. A genealogical table connects the sons of Noah with the nations of the world that were to be ; this is followed by the story of the Tower of Babel, in which diversity of speech enhances differences of nationality. Another THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 25 table traces the individual descendants of Noah to Abraham. Enough has been said to show how the early chapters of Genesis serve as prologue to the Old Testament. Twice has God entered into covenant with all mankind, as represented in a common ancestor; twice the cove- nant has been broken, and sin has triumphed. Hence- forward a particular people is to be called forth from among the nations, and through this chosen people all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. Genesis : or, The Formation of the Chosen Nation The first division of the history of Israel is occupied with the origin of the chosen nation. Abraham is called upon to give up his country and kindred, and to go out into a new land that is promised to his seed. The de- scendants of Abraham are followed through the stage in which they are a nomad people, wandering from station to station in the Canaan that is hereafter to be their own ; when they are a succession of families, living under simple patriarchal rule ; until at last they have grown into the twelve tribes which never ceased to be the basis of the future nation's organisation. The main note in the history is the gradual narrowing of the succession to the covenant. It was a family mi- gration which had started from Mesopotamia : Abraham and his kinsman Lot, with their households. When the land is no longer able to bear the increased flocks and herds, Lot makes his choice for the fertile plains with their cities of wickedness, Abraham remains in the country districts of Canaan. Lot is entangled in the 26 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY wars of the cities and taken prisoner ; Abraham comes to his deliverance. As the doom of the vile cities is approaching Abraham is admitted into the counsels of Deity ; in his intercessory prayer for the fifty, the forty and five, the forty, the thirty, the twenty, the ten right- eous men who may be found in Sodom, we find the first example of piety struggling with the mysteries of providential judgments. At last we have the exciting story of the destruction of the guilty cities : vice seeking to lay hands on the very angels themselves ; Lot and his household torn away by force before it is too late ; Lot's wife looking back and overtaken by the destruction ; Lot himself, with the spectacle of desolation before him, clinging to the chance of city life at the point where destruction may stop. 1 Thus one of the original emi- grants is unfaithful to the career of the chosen people. And, by incestuous wedlock, Lot becomes ancestor of the Moabites and Ammonites, chief neighbours and foes of the future Israel. There is a narrowing of the succession even among the descendants of Abraham. The long childlessness of Sarah brings into prominence the children of the bond- woman. There is a glimpse of household strife, persecut- ing mistress and mocking maid ; we have the affecting story of Hagar in the wilderness going a bowshot away that she may not see her child die, and coming upon the well ; Abraham is heard crying to God that Ishmael might live before him. But the children of the bond- woman are not to inherit with the children of the free. Ishmael stops short at the nomad type of life, ancestor of Bedouin Arabs ; his lot is compared to the wild ass,' 2 1 Genesis xix. 20. 2 Genesis xvi. 12. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 27 untameable, rejoicing in desert solitudes; his hand is against every man's and every man's against his, but he has no place in the advance of history. The long-promised seed appears when to Abraham and Sarah in their extreme old age Isaac is born, a son of promise, rather than a child according to the flesh. Im- mediately we have the strange incident of the offering of Isaac. Abraham obeys without question, and passes straight to the appointed spot, while the child wonders innocently at the absence of a lamb for sacrifice ; with wordless submission he is bound on the altar. The lifted knife is stayed, but the symbolic act has reached its com- pletion : in their ancestor Isaac the future people of Israel have been solemnly devoted to their mission. In the second generation there is a further falling out of the succession. Two children struggle in the womb of Rebekah : before they are born the oracular word declares that the elder shall serve the younger. The natural course of events is found to fulfil the prediction. From the first Esau is attracted to the hunter's ideal. Rough in person he is also rough in life; he is full of impulses, generous or revengeful, but without the tenacity of purpose that makes great nations. In a fit of appe- tite he sells his birthright to his younger brother for a mess of pottage. He takes a wife from the daughters of the land, and is thereby a grief to Isaac and Rebekah. At last we have the strange story of the stolen blessing. Diversities of the children have led to favouritism on the part of the parents : Isaac, on the verge of death, seeks to use his patriarchal authority to secure the succession for his favourite, Esau, to be proclaimed at a feast of the venison his soul loveth; the mother takes advantage of 28 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Isaac's blindness, and by a trick secures the blessing for her pet, Jacob. The father trembles when he discovers the fraud, and Esau piteously wails, " Hast thou but one blessing? " But the prophetic word cannot be recalled, and Isaac has unconsciously ratified the surrender which Esau himself had made. Jacob is the lord; for Esau nothing can be promised but the occasional rebellion: a foreshadowing of Edom, near and bitter neighbours to Israel, granted at times to work havoc, but forever outside the career of sustained progress. Other stories illustrate the providential care that pre- serves the pure descent of the coming race. Twice Abraham in his timidity disavows his wife, and twice miracle preserves Sarah from the princes of the land. It is the desire to find a wife for Isaac out of the origi- nal kin of Abraham, which gives us the beautiful idyl of the wooing of Rebekah: the faithful steward and his long 'journey to Mesopotamia; the prayer by the well; the maiden Rebekah unconsciously using the very words that are to be the sign of the Lord's choice; the profuse hospitality of Bethuel; the steward's refusal to eat until his errand has been done; the simple answer, "The thing proceedeth from the Lord, we cannot speak unto thee bad or good; " the family longing to delay separa- tion and the maiden deciding for the immediate jour- ney; Isaac receiving his new wife as he is meditating in the fields at eventide. Rebekah in her turn uses this same necessity of a wife from the homeland as an excuse for getting Jacob away from Esau's wrath. But in this case instead of idyl we have a prolonged story of adven- ture. The hospitable reception of Jacob by Laban is diversified with plenty of trickery on both sides: in full THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 29 detail we are able to watch the building up of a fortune and the formation of a large family. Jacob's first night of solitude after he had left home, with its dream and vow of Bethel, seems to open up to him for the first time a spiritual world outside the course of everyday life. And on his return journey we have the mystic story of struggle with supernatural power, winning Jacob the new name 'Israel,' from which the chosen people is to be called. The story works up to a breathless climax in the meeting with Esau, and the whole future of the nation to come trembles in the balance : but a wave of generous impulse sweeps suddenly over the warrior huntsman, and Israel is saved. Other stories, or brief historic notices, explain names of places in the promised land, or touch upon peoples who are to be neighbours to the future Israel. The most important of these stories is the Burial of Sarah. In substance, the incident is no more than the purchase of a piece of land; but it is told with all the conven- tionalities and elaborate courtesies with which the stately life of the East clothes even a commonplace transaction. And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, Hear us, my lord : thou art a mighty prince among us : in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead. And Abraham rose up, and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the children of Heth. And he communed with them, saying: If it be your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me, and intreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of his field; for the full price let him give it to me in the midst of you for a possession of a buryingplace. Now Ephron was sitting in the 30 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY midst of the children of Ileth : and Lphron the Ilittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Ileth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying, Nay, my lord, hear me : the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee : bury thy dead. And Abraham bowed himself down before the people of the land. And he spake unto Lphron in the audience of the people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt, I pray thee, hear me : I will give the price of the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there. And Lphron answered Abraham, saying unto him, My lord, hearken unto me : a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver, what is that be- twixt me and thee ? bury therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Lphron the silver which he had named in the audience of the children of Ileth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. But there is more in this story than may appear at first sight. For a people in the nomadic stage there can be no point of territorial fixity except the sepulchres of their dead. Thus in the incident of Abraham buying the cave of Machpelah we have the chosen nation taking formal possession of the promised land. The climax of Genesis is found in the story of Joseph, which with its elaborate literary beauties has already been fully treated. The chosen people pass into Egypt, and there continue their silent growth. And the blessing pronounced from the deathbed of Jacob stamps upon the tribes of Israel the varied characteristics which they are to retain to the end of their history. The Exodus : or, Migration to the Land of Promise The Exodus is a story of national emigration. But the forty years' passage through the desert appears in THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 31 the Scripture narrative as also the period in which, through the divine legislation of Moses, Israel gradually attains the national development which in other peoples is called constitutional history. Hence, in this second division of biblical literature, the form is a thin thread of historic narrative running through and binding together the whole constitutional lore of Israel. The light of story is focussed upon no more than tujo points of the narrative: it appears at the beginning to display the raw material of slaves in Egypt out of which a great people may be made; again, in the witness of Balaam to a completed process and a nation organised for victory. Bible story is nowhere more vivid than in its picture of the Plagues of Egypt. The curtain rises on the chil- dren of Israel as slaves in a land where once they had been received as guests; the Egyptians secretly dread their growing numbers, and seek to break their spirit by hard labour, and to exterminate the male children. But a single babe escapes, to become the deliverer Moses; the Egyptian court unconsciously educates its foe, and he receives his commission an exile in a desert beside the burning bush. The story maybe prolix in its earlier part, with reiterated shrinking of Moses, meek and slow of speech, from the bold work assigned him by God. But when Moses and Aaron have confronted Pharaoh, the march of events makes a moving panorama of miracle. Pharaoh is the incarnation of sullen force, yielding by inches, or for a single moment, only to harden his heart when the crisis is past. But it is human strength match- ing itself against the inexhaustible resources of nature, which Moses is permitted to wield. The river which is Egypt's pride runs with blood; from out its reed-grass 32 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY frogs invade the secret recesses of luxury; the dust of the ground takes life to become loathsome vermin; indoors and outside there is no escape from swarming flies and corruption. While all over the land of Egypt beasts are dying of murrain, in Israel's land of Goshen the cattle are intact. The royal magicians, seeking to compete with the wonders of Moses, become themselves victims to the plague of boils. Now the heavens begin to play their part, and rain down wasting hail, while, to enhance the wonder, fire winds about the hailstones and melts them not. The land of Egypt is one mass of desolation : but from outside the east wind blows steadily until the swarming locusts hide the ground; at a sign from the champion of Israel the western hurri- cane succeeds, and the locust hosts are swept into the Red Sea. Then the whole scene dissolves into darkness that might be felt: every man a solitary prisoner where he stands. At last, midnight reveals the slain firstborn, and Pharaoh and his people thrust Israel forth, bribing them with jewels to be gone without delay. Even then the struggle is not over: Pharaoh pursues, and comes upon the fugitive people entangled between the land of their foe and the seacoast. Now appears the climax toward which events have been trending. The mass of cloud which hides the people from their pursuers becomes luminous to the Israelites, and points a way opened through the midst of the sea itself; the chosen people pass forward on dry ground, with the waters towering above them on either hand. The veil of cloud lifting, the Egyptian hosts follow on the strange path; but the moistening sand makes their wheels heavy, and the returning waters whelm them in the depths. On the THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 33 other side rises the shout of freedom: women with tim- brels and dances reiterate the one thought of deliver- ance, while in the pauses of the dance the men sing the marvels by which the deliverance has come about. The floods stood upright as an heap ; The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil . . . Thou didst blow with thy wind; the sea covered them: They sank as lead in the mighty waters. Historic narrative follows to trace the earlier jour- neyings of Israel. The general spirit is a looking-back to the fleshly ease of Egypt; particular incidents bring out the miraculous provision of water in the desert, the feeding with bread from heaven. Contact with Amalek gives Israel its first war; a meeting with Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, leads to the first step in organisa- tion — the creation of subordinate officials to relieve the supreme lawgiver. Three months' journeying leads to the long halt in the desert of Sinai. At this point the other side of The Exodus becomes prominent, by which it is to be the constitutional his- tory of the people of Israel. We find, in succession, four Covenants 1 between God and his chosen people; that is to say, the perpetual covenant relation between God and Israel embodies itself successively in four sys- tems of legislative enactment. Each 'Book of the Covenant ' presents the circumstances under which it is promulgated, the code of laws itself, and, at the close, some verbal or ceremonial sanction for the law. First, there is the Law of the Ten Commandments: here, amid 1 For references see ' The Exodus ' in the Appendix. 34 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY thunder and mystic darkness, the voice of God is heard by the people. A Book of the Covenant immediately follows, of which Moses is the mediator. Whereas the decalogue had only given basic principles of a moral system, this fuller covenant contains a complete code of criminal law; with economic enactments, such as the regulation of slavery, or prohibition of usury, or estab- lishment of sabbatic rest for the land; it contains also enactments as to worship, and establishes the three annual feasts. Besides the promises and threats which make the conclusion, there is a ceremonial sanction with sacrifice, and the people are sprinkled with "the blood of the covenant." Again, when Israel, in the absence of Moses, has worshipped the golden calf, we have the Covenant of the Second Table. Moses first works ven- geance on the idolaters by the hands of the zealous Levites; then turns back to intercede passionately that the Lord shall not blot out his people. Accordingly, where before only an angel had been promised as leader to Israel, Jehovah is now brought to declare that his very presence shall go with his people, and be the sanc- tion of the new covenant. It is only necessary in this case to recapitulate leading enactments: and Moses thus bears a second table to the people, his face supernatu- rally radiant with the glory into which he has been admitted. There remains yet one more — the Covenant of Holiness. Modern associations with this word must not make us forget that here we are dealing with national, not personal, religion. The holiness is here the separate- ness of God's peculiar people: separation from the sins or evil customs of surrounding people; separation by national signs, such as the sabbath and the jubile; THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 35 separateness in laws or legal customs; holiness, finally, as opposed to uncleanness in the offerings to the Lord. A long-sustained denunciation of thrilling curses upon disobedience brings this fourth covenant to a close. When the march is resumed from Sinai — now with pomp of ark and tabernacle and ordered procession of the tribes — we find successive sections of the history relating little but outbreaks of the spirit of murmuring, which reaches its climax in the incident of the spies. This is the turning-point of The Exodus. At the very threshold of the promised land the report of the spies makes the heart of the people to fail with the thought of the giants and cities fenced up to heaven. Divine wrath dooms the murmuring generation to wander in the wilderness, while only the children, who have never known the enervating life of Egypt, shall go over to take possession of the land of Canaan. For thirty-eight more years the wilderness life is prolonged; the older generation dying out, the youth gaining hardihood from desert life. Little is told of the eight-and-thirty years, and that little belongs to the close. Only a later section displays Moses as himself involved in the doom of the people he has ruled; his successor, Joshua, is to lead the nation over Jordan. The whole forty years of The Exodus find their most important history, not in incidents of the journey, but in the constitutional documents which fill up this part of Scripture. The documents 1 fall into two classes. One class is purely statistical. We have a census of the children of Israel who came into Egypt; another of the tribes on the march; another of those who died 1 For references see ' The Exodus ' in the Appendix. 36 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY in the plague of Moab; another of the oblations at the dedication of the tabernacle. A detailed specification is given of the tabernacle and its service; again, in almost the same words, a specification of the carrying out of the same. A calendar of sacred feasts is natu- rally found. And there are geographical statistics: an itinerary of wilderness journeys; allotments of lands to the tribes; allotments of cities for Levites; and, espe- cially, of the cities of refuge, by aid of which voluntary exile was to discriminate between murder and homicide. Perhaps the most obvious literary impression left upon our minds by reading such documents is the immense difference made by the most elementary machinery of modern figures. One important census 1 in The Exodus would, in a modern book, be fully conveyed by this brief form : — Generations, by families, by fathers' houses, according to the number of the names, by their polls, every male from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war : Of the tribe of Reuben 46,500 Simeon 59>3°° Gad 45> 6 5° Judah 74,600 Issachar 544°° Zebulun 57>4°° Joseph [Ephraim] 40,500 Joseph [Manasseh] 32,200 Benjamin 35>4°° Dan 62,700 Asher 4I>5°° Naphtali 53«4°o Total 603,550 1 Numbers i. 20-44. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 37 In the Bible this has to be expressed with full verbiage : — Of the children of Simeon, their generations, by their fami- lies, by their fathers' houses, those that were numbered thereof, according to the number of the names, by their pulls, every male from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war ; those that were numbered of them, of the tribe of Simeon, were fifty and nine thousand and three hundred. Of the children of Gad, their generations, by their families, etc. and so on, in twelve paragraphs, identical save for the alteration of the numbers. Again, we have a long array of Laws and Ordinances. The deliverance from Egypt gives us the Ordinances ot the Passover and of the Firstborn. The incident of Nadab and Abihu connects itself with the Law of the Consecration of Priests; the more serious outbreak of Korah and his crew leads to a consolidation of the whole law in respect to priests and Levites. Our modern case-made law is exactly paralleled in the Judgment of the Sabbath-breaker; in the Law of the Inheritance of Daughters, and its sequel, On the Marriage of Heiresses; in the Law of Spoils: in each instance a general prin- ciple is brought into consideration by a particular case that raises it. The Law of Oblations has constitutional importance as providing for the support of the priest- hood. The Law of Purification and Atonement is in reality a system of diet and regimen; that of Vows and Tithes a settlement of voluntary and regular taxation; the Ritual of the Heifer of Purification treats of ceremonial cleanness, or, in other words, makes cleanliness a matter of religion. There is even a Law of Fringes, regulating 38 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY the item of dress that was to be a perpetual reminder to the Israelites not "to go about after their own heart and their own eyes," but to remember the commandments of the Lord. At its close, the history of The Exodus strikes the period covered by the lost book, The Wars of Jehovah, and snatches of heroic ballad light up bare narrative, painting a total discomfiture of Moab, or recalling the folk-song of the well : — Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it; The well, which the princes digged, Which the nobles of the people delved, With the sceptre, and with their staves. Israel is facing the last peoples that stand between them and the land of promise. Their kindred of Edom they respect; but Sihon of the Amorites and Og of Bashan are utterly exterminated, and their land settled by Israel's more pastoral tribes. It is here that we reach the second of the two epic stories of The Exodus: the Plagues of Egypt had presented Israel in their abase- ment, the Witness of Balaam enables us to see the same people as a unique nation, a terror to all around. Moab is one of the peoples that are trembling before the advance of Israel, and the Moabite king, Balak, sends to a distant land for Balaam to come and curse the foe. This Balaam is a sincere worshipper of Jeho- vah; he is a man endowed with the spirit of prophecy, and in his prophetic ecstasy has a supernatural insight which to the heathen around him seems enchantment. But when not in these moments of exaltation he is an ordinary, worldly man, adapting himself to those around THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 39 him and seeking his own material interests: he is a supreme example of an attempt to serve God and Mam- mon. On two occasions he goes as far as he can to meet the views of the Moabite king, and orders the prelimi- nary sacrifices. But in each case, as he seeks solitude for the prophetic exaltation, the spiritual side of Balaam prevails, and curse becomes blessing: by a rare literary effect the prose of the story becomes verse to clothe the outpouring of prophecy : — For from the top of the rocks I see him, And from the hills I behold him; Lo, it is a people that dwell alone, And shall not be reckoned among the nations. Balak in desperation chooses a third point of view, and Balaam listlessly attends him. Without seeking solitude this time, the prophet simply turns where he stands to gaze on Israel in the desert below. His eye is caught by the serried ranks of tents, the orderly array to which Israel has been disciplined, so different from the rude encampments of desert hordes : in a new outburst he compares this to spreading valleys, gardens by the river side, avenues of aloes of Jehovah's planting; and he yet again exalts the people's lion-like might. When Balak storms, Balaam pours forth prophecies more dis- tinct, and tells of Moab, Seir, Edom, Amalek, all over- thrown by the sceptre that shall rise out of Israel. Thus Balaam in his mood of inspiration has been compelled to witness to the finished work of The Exodus. But when story gives place to history we are able to see, not by direct statement, but by inference, how in some uninspired hour Balaam descended to the office of tempter, and suggested the seductive influences of 40 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Moab's daughters, 1 which drew Israel into lust, and the following plague, and, finally, to war. From the list of the slain 1 ' we find that Balaam the man died fighting against the people whom Balaam the prophet had blessed. Deuteronomy : or, The Farewell of Moses to Israel At the point we have now reached the succession of historic books is interrupted by a book which is not his- tory, but oratory. A full title for Deuia'onomy might be, The Orations and Songs of Moses, constituting his Farewell to the People of Israel. As oratory it is unsur- passed, in its rush of rhythmic sentences, its ebb and flow of exalted passion, its accents of appeal and denun- ciation. The matter is as striking as the form. Deu- teronomy has been called the most spiritual book in the Old Testament; its sudden discovery worked a religious revolution, and from the days of Josiah to the days of Jesus it was a text-book of Jewish devoutness. But the spiritually minded Moses has to encounter a people moved mainly by material promises and threats: through the entire book the two tides of feeling are in conflict. And beneath the whole lies a situation unique in its human pathos: all who listen will enter the land of promise, he who speaks is the only one excluded. Thus, through the succession of orations a dramatic situation is being developed; at length — with the elasticity that distinguishes Hebrew literature — oratory gives place to song, and a climax is reached in which pathos is only an undertone in glorious triumph. The very title page of the book lays stress upon the 1 Numbers xxxi. 16. 2 Numbers xxxi. 8. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 41 scene, some spot in the deep Arabah, where we can conceive of a vast multitude being brought picturesquely within the sight and hearing of a single speaker. In the first of the four orations Moses announces his Depo- sition from the Leadership of Israel. In the calm tone of historic survey is traced a succession of events, end- ing with that outburst of murmuring which drove Israel from the border of the promised land to eight-and-thirty years of wilderness wandering. The tone of the new generation, and the glorious conquests accorded them, had raised again the personal hopes of Moses; he had besought the Lord that he might see the good land beyond Jordan; he had received the final word, "Speak no more to me of this matter." Thus his work is done as mediator through whom the commandments of God are made known to Israel : the commandments remain for Israel to obey, and this obedience shall be their wis- dom among the nations. A peroration presents Israel, by their history and their legislation, gloriously separate among the peoples of the world. The second oration belongs to a ceremonial occasion: The Delivery of the Covenant to the Levites and Elders. The commandments of which Moses has been the speaker have now been put in written form; this 'Book of the Covenant ' — which, in fifteen chapters, follows the sec- ond oration — we must suppose handed to the Levites and elders grouped around Moses, and in their cus- tody it is henceforward to remain. In the oration itself Moses appeals to his hearers to write these command- ments upon their heart, talking of them when they sit in their house and when they walk by the way, when they lie down and when they rise up. The speech surveys 42 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY the forty years of providential mercies in the wilderness, and also the succession of murmurings and rebellions. Not for their own righteousness will the people of Israel conquer the nations; only as reward for their own obedi- ence will the land of promise enjoy the rain of heaven, and send forth its corn and wine and oil. In place of a peroration we find reference to a still more imposing function that is to follow. An ordinance makes provision for the Ceremonial of the Blessing and the Curse, as an institution for the other side of Jordan. But there is a rehearsal ! of this ceremonial in the pres- ence of Moses : priests standing round the ark in the valley chaunt the curses, and the whole multitude on the slopes shout their Amen. Being only a rehearsal, Moses interrupts this before it is concluded; and himself, in what constitutes the third oration, goes over the matter of blessing and curse. Nowhere in literature is there to be found so sustained an effort of terror-striking speech. Curses are to descend upon the guilty in city and field, when they come in or go out, in basket or kneading trough, in war or peace, in every element of life; curses from the heaven above or the earth under foot; curses on fruit of body, of cattle, of land; curses in the form of madness, or loathly sickness, of defeat and every form of adversity and helplessness. Instead of joyous service of Jehovah amid abundance of all things, they shall serve a bitter enemy in hunger and thirst and lack of all things; horrors of war and siege are painted, with 1 Chapter xxvii seems to combine an ordinance for the Ceremonial of the Blessing and the Curse on the other side of Jordan with a partial rehearsal on the spot, this latter interrupted by the Third Oration, Chapter xxviii. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 43 delicate women devouring their own children. The guilty shall be scattered as an abomination through the idol-worshipping nations. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot : but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and pining of soul: and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have none assur- ance of thy life : in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even ! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning ! for the fear of thine heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I said unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again : and there ye shall sell yourselves unto your enemies for bondmen and for bondwomen : and no man shall buy you. In the fourth oration we mark a transition from national to personal religion: if a man is cherishing evil in his secret heart, and thinking to escape in the general righteousness, he shall be separated from all Israel for the curse to descend upon him. Yet even when the curse has come down, from the most distant land of exile there is a way of escape by turning to God with full purpose of heart. Nor is this difficult: the word is not afar off, but in the very hearts of Israel. Moses calls heaven and earth to witness that he has set before his people life and death : "choose life, that thou mayest live." ^Yith a single reference to his extreme age and waning strength, Moses, with words of cheer on his lips, withdraws from the people he has led, and installs Joshua in his place. 41 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY A wave of poetic impulse comes over the retired leader, anxious for his people when he is gone. My doctrine shall drop as the rain, My speech shall distil as the dew; As the small rain upon the tender grass, And as the showers upon the herb. This Song of Moses celebrates Jehovah as the Rock of Israel, Jeshurun as the people of his inheritance, kept as the apple of his eye. When Jeshurun, fed with all the richness of nature, waxes fat and kicks, all nature is aflame with vengeance. Bitter suffering shows the dif- ference between the Rock of Israel and the loathly gods to whom Israel has revolted; commiseration changes in the heart of Deity to vengeance, and Jehovah again fights on behalf of his own people. We have reached the last stage of the action, and the Passing of Moses. The whole people wait to see their leader depart on his mystic journey: heads of the tribes line the route. Moses, with lingering steps, passes along, speaking to each leader words that thrill : old war cries of the tribes, or prophetic picturings, to be treas- ured up as blessings for the future. Reuben, strong in numbers; Judah, sufficient of his hands. Levi has been proved at the water of strife. On the shoulders of Ben- jamin Jehovah shall have his dwelling. Joseph is dow- ered with all gifts of sky and deep, of ancient mountains and everlasting hills. Zebulun the wanderer, Issachar with his tent life, Gad the lioness, Dan the lion's whelp, Naphtali rejoicing in his western sea and sunny south, Asher in wealth of oil and brass : each has received his word of farewell. For a last time Moses takes in at a single view the vast multitude, and lifts his hands in the final blessing: — THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 45 There is none like unto God, O Jeshurun, Who rideth upon the heaven for thy help, And in his excellency on the skies. The eternal God is thy dwelling place, And underneath are the everlasting arms. Then Moses turns to resume the journey on which none may accompany him. Like the hush that follows a pas- sionate climax comes a drop to the barest prose, telling of the ascent, the gaze from Pisgah's top over the prom- ised land, the solitary death, the sepulchre that no man knoweth. The mighty personality which has linked the bondmen of Egypt to the conquerors of the land of promise has passed out of the history of Israel. The Judges : or, Transition to a Secular Monarchy Heroes of the Transition : this might be a title for the portion of sacred history which is contained in the bib- lical Joshua, Judges, and part of Samuel. Hitherto Israel has had the distinction among the nations of a theocracy, the government of an invisible God, whose will is made known through his representative, Moses. In the future they will be found living under ordinary kings, who succeed by natural descent. In the inter- vening period we find, at intervals, and for portions of the nation, rulers of a special kind, who are called in the Bible 'judges.' But the associations of this English word are altogether misleading. The judges of Israel are nearer to the 'heroes ' of other peoples; and, like the heroes of chivalry, their glory is redressing human wrongs by the sword. They are, however, distinctly commis- sioned by God : as we find prophets and 'angels ' in this 46 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY history interpreting God's will, so the judge does God's work. Thus, the spirit of the history is here given in the heroic stories. But the stories are fitted into a framework of narrative, under which we can trace a gradual change of spirit, leading the people of Israel to assimilate themselves to the nations around with a secular kingship. To Joshua the term 'judge ' is hardly applicable : he is the successor of Moses, and carries the exodus to its natural conclusion in a conquest of Canaan. Yet here also the spirit of the period is conveyed in heroic story. Like the spies who brought the grapes of Eshcol to the wilderness, we have the exciting adventures of the spies sent to Jericho, received in the house over the wall, and let down by Rahab with the scarlet rope which was to save her in the destruction of the city. The miraculous crossing of the Jordan recalls the crossing of the Red Sea. The first city is conquered by no human force : a mystic captain of the Lord's host takes command, and the city walls fall before a shout. The war against Ai reminds us that we are in a remote age in which the feigned retreat and ambush are military novelties; but here — as so often under Moses the aim of the people interfered with the intentions of providence — the covetousness of Achan brings defeat, until it is purged by his stoning in the Valley of Trouble. Story interest is now varied : in place of war we have the wily embassy of the Gibeonites, who with their old shoes and clouted and musty bread deceive Israel into making an alliance with them as a distant people. This alliance brings against Joshua the League of the Five Kings. In the Battle of Beth-horon, that overthrows these kings, the THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 47 very heavens are on the side of Israel : the historic nar- rative speaks of hailstones destroying more than the swords of the people, while the ballad that is quoted makes mention of greater wonders: — Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon ! And the sun stood still, And the moon stayed, Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies. After these stories we have only brief summaries of con- quests in other parts of Canaan; an elaborate state-paper fixes the allotments of land among the tribes. Then, recalling the Farewell of Moses, we have the solemn scene in which Joshua renews the covenant between God and his people, and writes their vow in the book of the law of God. It is where the biblical title changes to The Book of Judges that the general character of the transition period becomes apparent. The Israelites have committed the fatal error of not entirely driving out the nations of the land : those nations that are left become so many " thorns in their sides." 1 The gods of these nations seduce Israel to idolatry, and the wrath of Jehovah falls upon them. It is to meet situations like this that judges are raised up. And when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge, and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for it repented the Lord because of their groaning by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back, and dealt more corruptly than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them. 2 1 Judges ii. 3. 2 Judges ii. 18-19. 48 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY The history follows the succession of these heroic saviours. Sometimes no more is given than the source of the oppression and the name of the judge. Or some single detail is added : the ox-goad of Shamgar, 1 Abdoir with his forty sons and thirty grandsons riding on their seventy ass colts. Or again, with all the vividness of an eye-witness, is related the assassination of the Moabite oppressor, and how Ehud was able to bury his sword in the body of "a very fat man." Of the greater crises the first is the "mighty oppres- sion" of Jabin and Sisera, when "the highways were unoccupied and the travellers walked through byways." The tyrants had nine hundred chariots of iron : against a force like this the half-armed infantry of Israel would be helpless, except by surprise. This seems to have been the plan of Barak, when, roused by a prophetess, Deborah, he leads the muster of Zebulun and Naphtali to the high ground of Kedesh, from which they can choose a moment for a sudden attack. But treachery is at work. The Kenites had united with Israel during the wilderness journeys, retaining in Canaan their tent life. Heber the Kenite, however, is described as mov- ing his tent away from his brethren until he is in touch with Kedesh; he is at peace with King Jabin: in fact, holds the peaceful relation of a spy. Accordingly the surprise is frustrated, and the army of Sisera fills the plain of Esdraelon. But " the stars in their courses fought against Sisera"; a sudden shower had converted the whole plain into a morass, and while the horses are madly prancing in the mud the Israelites are able to exterminate the enemy in a single day. Sisera fleeing 1 iii. 31. 2 xii. 14. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 49 from the battle seeks the friendly tent of Heber. But Heber's wife, Jael, had had no sympathy with her hus- band's baseness; she now sees her opportunity: with feigned hospitality luring Sisera to rest she drives the nail through his temples while he sleeps. The strange providence by which the treason of the husband was bal- anced by the treachery of the wife, this, as much as the victory itself, inspires the exultation of Deborah's Song. The scene changes to Gilead, and the oppressors are now Bedouin hordes of the desert — Midianites, Amale- kites, and children of the east, as locusts for multitude, and their camels as sand that is upon the seashore, with tawdry splendour of earrings and crescents and pendants and chains upon the camels' necks; before their devour- ing progress all sustenance of crops and flocks vanishes, and the men of Israel take refuge in caves and mountain dens. The spirit of the story is a sort of providential scorn for the vanity of mere numbers. The champion raised up is of a family the poorest in Manasseh, and he least in his father's house. Gideon hears with aston- ishment the angel's salutation to him as a mighty man of valour; before he can rise to the description he needs sign after sign to reassure him — the angel departing in the flame of sacrifice, the fleece moist when all around is dry, dry when all around is moist. With strenuous exertions Gideon has got an army together. They are pronounced too many : the proclamation for all the fear- ful and trembling to depart releases two out of every three. The ten thousand that remain are still too many : the chance token of lapping with the hands instead of kneeling down to drink selects a three hundred who are enough as the instrument with which Jehovah's work 50 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY will be done. As the crisis draws near there is the thrilling night adventure of Gideon and his servant descending into the midst of the sleeping hosts, and hearing one tell a fellow his dream. In the heart of the vast multitude, it appears, there is dread of the sword of Gideon. The hint is caught: Gideon's strategy is the manufacture of a panic. Torches are covered with pitchers: at the word of command the pitchers are shat- tered, the torches flare out, the trumpet rings, and with the shout "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon" the , three hundred charge down the three slopes, and drive the Midianite hosts down the valley in headlong haste, slaughter and rout, until the story slowly dies out in long strain of pursuit and plunder. Heroism melts into tragic pathos in the story of Jeph- thah, compelled by a rash vow to offer up in sacrifice the daughter who has come out leading the dance in honour of her father's victory. The opposite spirit underlies the stories of Samson. This Samson has the vast strength and physical robustness that overflows in humour and rough sport. And humour may do the work of providence: the Israelites are cowed before the Philistines, Samson delights to mock the foe and make them contemptible. He turns foxes with fire- brands on their tails into the standing corn; he slays a host with no weapon but an ass's jawbone; he loses a wager to Philistine guests, and pays it in raiment of other Philistines he slaughters for the purpose; he lets himself be confined in Gaza, and runs away with the city gates on his back; he pretends he will be helpless if bound with new cords, or if his locks be woven with the web, and at a word the cords snap like thread, and THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE < >i ISRAEL 51 his nod carries away web and pin and all. When, under Delilah's seductions, Samson has revealed the true secret, and been cast blind into prison, his nemesis takes the form of making sport for the triumphant Philistines. But at last he makes sport in grim earnest: with a jest on his lips — of taking vengeance for at least one of his two eyes — he bows the pillars in his mighty strain, and buries with him more foes than he had slain in his life. The succession of hero stories has been interrupted by a story of a different kind, yet most important for the history of the transition. It is nothing less than the appearance of a 'king ' in Israel. After his great deliv- erance Gideon was offered royalty for himself and his descendants; but he refused, true to the great principle that Jehovah was Israel's king. After his death his baseborn son, Abimelech, persuaded the men of Shechem to crown him : he slew the seventy sons of his father, except one who escaped; and then, with a rabble follow- ing, marched on in triumph. At an angle in the road the escaped Jotham confronted the procession, and from a safe height flung down at them this fable, in scorn of kingship : — The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them, and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to wave to and fro over the trees ? And the trees said to the fig tree, Come, thou, and reign over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I leave my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to wave to and fro over the trees ? And the trees said unto the vine, Come, thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to wave to and fro over the trees? 52 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come, thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon. The final word is fulfilled : an inglorious reign of three years ends in feuds, Abimelech burns the tower of Shechem over the heads of his rebel subjects, and him- self meets death at the hands of a woman. It is the darkest hour of disorder before the dawn of firmer rule which is revealed in the two stories of Micah and of the Benjamite War: four times here is repeated the formula, that there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. There seems to be a naive simplicity in the evil revealed by the first of these stories: the mother in devout thankful- ness that her son has restored the silver he had stolen from her makes it into graven images; Micah himself manages to secure a wandering Levite, and feels sure of the Lord's favour because he has a Levite as priest of his idols; the Danites wandering to a new settlement steal Micah' s images, and to the protesting Levite use the convincing argument that it will be better for him to be priest to a tribe than to a single man; finally, when Micah and his neighbours pursue, the Danites let their numbers be seen, and considerately advise Micah not to let his voice be heard, "lest angry fellows should fall upon him." The other is a story of unspeakable out- rage, bloody revenge, treacherous betrayal of women. Yet, if this suggests much as to the helplessness of woman in an age of lawlessness, it must be remembered that to about the same period, and to no very distant THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 53 locality, belongs the exquisite idyl of Ruth — the rustic peace of Bethlehem, the friendship of two women, and generous love of Boaz, which introduced a Moabitess into the ancestry of Israel's kings. The rise of order out of chaos associates itself with the name of Samuel. Every child knows the stories of Samuel's birth and boyhood: how the mother, long childless, vows her babe to the Lord's service, how she fulfils her vow, and watches over her child from a dis- tance, bringing every year the little robe; how while yet a youth Samuel hears the Divine call he does not under- stand, and unwillingly bears to the aged Eli the tidings of his doom. "The word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision." "The Lord appeared again in Shiloh . . . and the word of Samuel came to all Israel." This is nothing less than the rise of prophecy : single prophets have at times appeared, but from Samuel there is an unbroken order of prophets to the end of Israel's national existence. And Samuel's first act, when fully established, is to renew once more at Mizpah the covenant between God and Israel. But with the rise of prophecy we have the growing demand for kingship. All through the transition there have been Teachings after national unity: in the temporary sway of judges; in the abortive kingship of Abimelech; in the idea that the authority of a judge might be heredi- tary, frustrated by the wickedness of Eli's sons; in the attempt of Samuel himself to make his sons judges, failing likewise by their unworthiness; Shiloh also, with its ark, seems to be accepted as a symbol of national unity, and hence the importance attached to the circumstance of the ark falling into the hands of the 54 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Philistines, and the stories of the wonders that attend its presence until it is recovered. At last the people insist upon a king to lead them to battle like the nations around; however unwilling, Samuel is commanded to give way: "They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me." At first it is a kingship under prophetic control : Samuel anoints Saul, and writes in a book the manner of the kingdom. But between the kingship imitated from the nations and the prophetic order inspired directly by God there is irreconcilable antipa- thy. There is more than a momentary meaning in the proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" In realistic detail is described the anointing of Saul. Then more historic narrative follows the early part of the reign, and the success of the kingly office in organ- ising resistance to the Philistines. To this war belongs the story of the Raid on Michmash : Jonathan and his armour-bearer single-handed take a garrison, and them- selves barely escape execution in consequence of Saul's rash vow. Even here the hasty sacrifice of Saul pro- duces a breach between prophet and king. The breach becomes final in the Amalekite war, when Agag with the chief of the devoted spoil is spared; Samuel sternly slays Agag, and with the sign of the rent robe pronounces the kingdom rent from Saul. David is anointed : the presence side by side of the future dynasty and the dynasty already rejected affords the materials of a long feud, with which the history of the transition is brought to a conclusion. The spirit which has been prominent throughout this portion of the history of Israel culminates in the long- drawn story of adventures in the Feud of Saul and THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 55 David. Throughout the whole runs like a refrain the verse : — Saul has slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands. All else makes a background against which stand out three striking figures: Saul, of the mighty spear, proto- type of the men-at-arms and cavalry of the future; Jona- than the archer, patron of Israel's infantry; David, who works his feats with a sling from a distance, prototype of the artillery of the future : Saul, raised to an eminence by a power which has cast him off, seeing his servants and very children drawn away to his rival, falling under the domination of a spirit of evil, knowing his doom, yet a warrior to the last; David, type of the coming age, with winning grace and artistic genius, a hero in the field, yet with power to direct and govern; Jonathan, natural inheritor of his father's feud, yet knit to the man that must supplant him, until he loves him as his own soul, and the names of the two are forever linked in the most sacred of human friendships. It is a story of rapid movement. Now David is in the midst of palace scenes and bursts of royal frenzy; now he is secretly communing with Jonathan in the field; now he is captain of a band of the discontented in the wilder- ness; now he is a bulwark to flocks and herds of pas- toral Israel, and wins the beautiful and prudent wife of the churlish Nabal; now he is fleeing with his followers through caves and woods; twice he has his enemy in his grasp, and twice his reverence for the person of the Lord's Anointed shames Saul into softer feelings; he is found serving the king of Gath against Israel, until memory of his former prowess against them makes the 56 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY other lords of the Philistines demand his dismissal; again, he has a city of his own to govern and make prosperous, finds it looted in his absence and takes bitter revenge. For Saul the approaching climax is darkened by the visit to the witch of Endor; Samuel appears from the grave in visible form rehearsing the melancholy doom. All the threads of the story unite in the Battle of Gilboa, in which Saul and Jonathan fall, and the messenger of their death pays the penalty of boasting, slain by David as self-confessed slayer of the Lord's Anointed. Then David pours out his grief in his lament over Saul and Jonathan, lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death not divided. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan, Very pleasant hast thou been unto me; Thy love to me was wonderful, Passing the love of women ! With this touching elegy the heroic story of Scripture comes to a close : we pass into a different spirit of history. The Kings and Prophets It is hardly necessary to explain that I am not, in these few pages, attempting to write the history of Israel, but simply to treat the national history as part of the national literature; to indicate threads of connection, which may assist in keeping clear the philosophy of Israel's history as it presents itself to the sacred writers. From the point now reached that history becomes more complex, but does not alter its essential character. Three considerations should be borne in mind. Israel has become a monarchy, with principles of natural THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 57 descent and all the apparatus of secular kingship. But at the same time there never fails an order of prophets, whose divine commission manifests itself in their ap- peal to the consciences of their hearers: these prophets stand for the ideas of the old theocracy. Again, it must be remembered that the books now under consideration come from the side of this prophetic opposition. In form they follow the reigns of the kings ; when there are two kingdoms they endeavour, as far as chronology permits, to keep the reigns of Israel and Judah side by side; yet, in fact, the secular matter is despatched with the utmost brevity, or we are referred to other histories, but where the mission of prophecy is affected we get minute and vivid detail. Accordingly, in the third place, that which has distinguished the literary character of the history all through — the use of story to empha- sise history — adapts itself to the new conditions: we get annals of the kings combined with stories of the prophets. At the outset prophecy may well be in abeyance, for the kingly and prophetic spirit have united in the man after God's own heart. The account of David's reign falls into two very different parts. One deals, in more or less compressed narrative, with national events : the long-continued conflict between the house of Saul and the house of David, under their military champions Abner and Joab ; the wars by which David enlarged and con- solidated the kingdom ; the great feat of arms by which the impregnable Jerusalem was captured from the Jebu- sites, and solemnly inaugurated as a sacred metropolis ; the planning of a grand temple which David himself was never to see ; the mysterious sin of numbering the 58 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY people, and its strange expiation under the prophetic ministry of Gad. Even here the literary character of the history is made evident by the prominence it gives to poetical compositions of the royal psalmist. David idealises in a single magnificent Song of Victory the deliverances of a lifetime. The waves of death compassed me, The floods of ungodliness made me afraid. The cords of Sheol were round about me : The snares of death came upon me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, Yea, I called unto my God : And he heard my voice out of his temple, And my cry came into his ears. All nature is suddenly convulsed as Jehovah descends to the rescue, amid bowing heavens and shaking earth, shrouded in thickest darkness, while arrows of sharp lightnings prepare the way. And in the rescue of the righteous man the cause of right itself has triumphed : — With the merciful thou wilt show thyself merciful, With the perfect man thou wilt show thyself perfect, With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure, And with the perverse thou wilt show thyself froward. Once more, we have David's Last Words, breathing the spirit of rest after an accomplished ideal of the righteous ruler : — He shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, A morning without clouds; When the tender grass springeth out of the earth, Through the clear shining after rain. Very different is the other phase of David's reign : the great personal sin of the ruler after God's heart, and THE HISTORY < >F THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 59 its rebuke by Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb. The prophetic word is spoken : The sword shall not depart from thy house. Accordingly it is prophecy, not history, that we are reading, as we follow the expanded narrative of the Feud between David's Children : the banishment of Absalom, and the masterful conduct by which he pro- cures his return and fresh opportunities of mischief; the great revolt ; the long-drawn humiliation of the flight from Jerusalem ; the coarse triumph and divided counsels of the usurper ; the blunt statesmanship with which Joab brings the king back to power, all the while that David himself is prostrated by his recognition of the Divine hand in all that happens, and his ineradicable tenderness for the fairest as well as most wicked of his sons. Even when David is back at Jerusalem the domestic troubles do not end ; in his last moments the feud breaks out afresh in the disputed succession, and Nathan appears for the last time to use the prophetic influence on the side of Solomon. There is a return to plain history in the brief and com- pressed narrative in which is presented the political side of the reign of Solomon. The kingdom received from David is extended to what may well be called an empire, and Solomon reigns " over all the kingdoms from the River unto the land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt." Foreign alliances with Egypt and Tyre bring Israel into the circle of great states. Com- mercial wealth flows in, and brings splendour of external life ; Solomon makes silver to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars as lowland sycamore trees in abundance. At this one point in the sacred history it would appear as if the place of prophecy were taken by another form 60 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY of spiritual energy — wisdom. In his prayer at Gibeon Solomon makes wisdom the great desire of his life, and he is exalted to be to the philosophy of Israel what his father had been to its poetry. The gathering literature of proverbs centres around his name, exchange of wis- dom takes place between Solomon and Hiram of Tyre, and the Queen of distant Sheba makes a pilgrimage to admire the wisest of kings. It would seem from the tone of the narrative as if the conception of ' wisdom ' were here extended to take in the achievement of Solomon in the sacred arts : he erects the magnificent Temple, and in impressive dedicatory prayer makes it the centre of national religion, to which under all circumstances Israel might turn in penitence or supplication. At length, however, Solomon, like his father, yields to feminine influence ; his foreign wives corrupt the religion of Israel with heathen rites. At once prophecy comes to the front, and Ahijah throws his influence on the side of the Jeroboam who, amid numerous other adversaries, is the centre of revolt. Solomon himself dies in peace ; but when his son Rehoboam, with the reverse of his father's wisdom, takes the counsel of the younger men, and will make hi.; little finger thicker than his father's loins, the cry is heard, "To your tents, O Israel." Jeroboam, backed by the influence of the prophets, rends ten tribes from the house of David. The history which our literature is to present is increas- ing in its complexity : henceforward two distinct king- doms are to be balanced side by side in the sacred narrative. By an incident that shortly follows, the com- plexity becomes greater still. The first act of Jeroboam is to set up golden calves to represent the gods of Israel, THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 61 and Bethel and Dan as rivals to Jerusalem ; at once he becomes, for the whole course of prophetic history, the " Jeroboam who made Israel to sin." At this point is found a prophetic story, strange in its details, but most important for its bearing on the spirit of the historic books. A " man of God " out of Judah denounces the idolatrous rites of Jeroboam, and is confirmed by the rending of the altar and withering of the king's arm. Jeroboam makes submission and is restored ; when he offers hospitality the man of God refuses, being com- manded to return without eating or drinking. But an " old prophet " of Bethel pursues him, renews the hos- pitable offer, and is again refused. And he said unto him, I also am a prophet as thou art; and an angel spake unto me by the word of the Lord, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water. But he lied unto him. So he went back with him, and did eat bread in his house, and drank water. And it came to pass, as they sat at the table, that the word of the Lord came unto the prophet that brought him back : and he cried unto the man of God that came from Judah, saying, Thus saith the Lord, Forasmuch as thou hast been disobedient unto the mouth of the Lord, and hast not kept the commandment which the Lord thy God commanded thee, but earnest back, and hast eaten bread and drunk water in the place of the which he said to thee, Eat no bread, and chink no water; thy carcase shall not come unto the sepulchre of thy fathers. The prophecy is fulfilled, and on his way back into Judah the man of God is slain by a lion. The prophet of Bethel finds his dead body. And he laic] his carcase in his own grave; and they mourned over him, saying, Alas, my brother ! And it came to pass, after 62 HIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY he had buried him, that he spake to his suns, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. In this strange way is brought home to the reader the fact that, not only are the kingdoms divided, but there is a schism in prophecy itself; henceforward the false prophet in conflict with the true is an additional element of difficulty in the tangled politics of Israel. It is unnecessary to follow the bare records of reigns which succeed ; kings of Israel and Judah, with the exception of Asa, are alike pronounced evil. We soon reach, amongst kings of Israel, the name of Ahab, who takes for queen Jezebel of the Zidonians. Under her influence has been reached the nadir point of kingly revolt ; it is no longer imperfect service of Jehovah that appears, but Baal has been enthroned in Jehovah's place. At once prophecy springs to its full height to meet the crisis ; literary form catches the changed spirit, and story dominates history as we are abruptly introduced to the ministry of Elijah. With great insight into the spirit of the narrative Men- delssohn, in his musical setting of Elijah's career, has violated conventional order by commencing, even before his overture, with the few words of recitative which con- vey Elijah's prediction of the three years' famine : it is against the background of this famine that the details of the crisis are presented. While brooks and rivers are drying up, Elijah is miraculously fed by ravens beside the brook Cherith ; while all around hunger and death are doing their work, the good woman who shelters the prophet finds her barrel of meal and cruse of oil mys- teriously renewed, and her son restored to life. When THK HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 63 the drought is at its height, and the king with his minis- ters are searching the land for water, Elijah suddenly reappears, and the most dramatic of all Bible scenes is presented. Elijah demands to be confronted with the prophets of Baal ; Ahab, always a hesitator between Jehovah and idols, dares not refuse. There is an echo from the renewal of the covenant under Joshua when Elijah demands of the assembled people, How long halt ve between two opinions? But the people answer not a word. In strange opposition the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal prolong their ecstatic worship from morn- ing to noon, from noon to evening, amid the mockeries of Elijah. Then the prophet of the Lord, with his evening prayer, draws down the fire from heaven which consumes the sacrifice, and licks up the water in the trenches, while all the people shout, The Lord, he is God. The false prophets are slain by the brook Kishon, and at once there is a sound of abundance of rain ; Elijah seems to be forcing the clouds into the sky by the vehemence of his prayers on Carmel, and in the exultation of the sudden relief joins the runners before the chariot of Ahab. The prophet has triumphed : the man feels the re- action of physical and spiritual depression as he flees before the threats of Jezebel. His wanderings bring this chief of the prophets nearer and nearer to the scene of the original giving of the Law. Moses had fasted forty days and forty nights on the mount ; Elijah, in the strength of angels' food, goes forty days to the same mount, where once the theocracy had been pro- claimed amid thunder and the great fire and the sound of a more than human voice. And once more nature seems shaken with the approach of Deity. 64 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind : and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake : and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was nut in the fire : and after the fire a still small voice. Instinctively a modern reader listens for some deep spiritual truth, or some foundation principle of moral law, as the point to which all this succession of wonders has led up : what we actually hear is this : — Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus : and when thou comest thou shalt anoint Hazael to be king over Syria : and Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel : and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel- meholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay : and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. Yet will I leave me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. Nothing could more powerfully illustrate the true position of prophecy. The prophets are not, in the modern sense, spiritual pastors : they are the statesmen who make their stand for the theocracy in the political history of Israel. The joint ministry of Elijah and Elisha is to strike a unity through all that succeeds ; the history of Israel to the end of the northern kingdom is no more than the ex- pansion of the message of Horeb. In that message Syria has been indicated as the instru- ment of Divine vengeance against Israel. What imme- diately follows l — told with vivid detail because of the prophetic personages involved — displays the kingdom 1 / Kings xx, continued xxii. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 65 of Syria passing from friendship into hostility against the kingdom of Israel. Judah is joined with Israel, its supple king Jehoshaphat at once serving Jehovah and making alliance with idol-worshippers. Hence we get the strangest of all prophetic scenes : Micaiah facing the false prophets of Ahab, and springing upon the allied kings his vision of the lying spirit -put by God in the mouth of Ahab's prophets to lure him on to his doom. Under such gloomy auspices is fought the battle of Ramoth-gilead, in which Ahab, vainly disguised, falls by a bow drawn at a venture. It is other prophets who figure in these incidents, while Elijah has been continu- ing his first prophetic task of confronting Ahab with his crimes. 1 And he lives to speak a word of doom to Ahab's son and successor, a last prophecy drawn from Elijah amid scenes of lightning strokes and the destruc- tion of captains with their fifties. Three words of command made up the prophecy of Horeb : the first to reach fulfilment is the mysterious succession of Elisha to the work of Elijah. The event is told of Elijah's ascent to heaven : as the fiery chariots disappear the mantle of Elijah is taken by Elisha, sym- bol of the double portion of his spirit. A long series of wonder stories follow, the design of which is to vindicate Elisha as the successor of Elijah. The waters of Jordan divide at his word ; the foul spring is healed with salt ; the mocking children are overtaken by destruction. In the next wonder once more Jehoshaphat is seen in alliance with Israel and demanding a prophet of the Lord : he is told of Elisha, " who poured water on the hands of 1 I Kitigs xxi, continued II Kings i. 66 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Elijah," and Elisha foretells the miracle by which the water trenches, filled by no natural agency, glow blood red in the rising sun, and drive the Moabites to panic. The miracles of Elijah are repeated for his successor, as the poor woman's oil is multiplied, and the hospitable Shunammite receives her son back to life. Miraculously the poisoned mess is made harmless, the scanty bread multiplied. A little maiden, carried captive in the Syrian wars which are all this while raging, brings the captain of Syria's hosts to be healed of his leprosy by Elisha ; accord- ingly — after a parenthetic miracle of the axe-head that swam — we find Elisha's power recognised in Samaria itself, and an expedition is sent against him, only to reveal to timid doubters the mountain full of chariots and horsemen round about Elisha. At last, when the siege of Samaria has reached the horror of women de- vouring their own children, the king, who witnesses it, exclaims, " God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day : " to such a culmination has the prophetic power of Elisha attained that he is recognised as sole dispenser of doom to Israel. All this while Elisha has remained quiescent, the authority of his prophetic office none the less advanc- ing : he now moves forward in the other two mysteries revealed on Horeb. Visiting Damascus he is received as a prophet ; he looks into the face of the Syrian king's messenger Hazael, and weeps at the havoc he foresees Hazael will hereafter work upon Israel. The glimpse into the future has fanned a smouldering purpose : that very night Hazael assassinates his master and ascends the throne, divinely ordained instrument of woe to Israel THE HISTORY OF I I IF. PEOPLE OF [SRAEL 67 from without, as Jehu is to be the instrument of ven- geance in their midst. There remains the final and climax stage in the fulfil- ment of the commission to Elijah and Elisha : prophetic story and secular history become for the time inextri- cably interwoven. The scene changes to Jezreel and its pleasant palace ; Joram of Israel, wounded in the Syrian wars, is being nursed there, and thither comes Ahaziah of Judah — successor to the throne and alli- ance of Jehoshaphat — to visit his ally. Meanwhile among the captains of Israel facing the enemy at Ra- moth-gilead is Jehu the son of Nimshi. An envoy of Elisha suddenly proclaims Jehu king, and avenger of the prophets against the house of Ahab. The word is caught up by eager fellow-captains ; Jehu is hastily enthroned on heaped-up garments, and proclaimed king with the sound of trumpet. The "furious driving" of Jehu from Ramoth-gilead to Jezreel is a fitting symbol of the breath- less succession of events with which this climax works itself out. King Joram is smitten between the arms the instant he sees the treachery and turns to flee. Aha- ziah has a moment's warning, but escapes only to be slain in his flight. Jezebel is defiant to the last : she is hurled down from the window, and dogs devour her flesh. A mocking challenge is sent to the protectors of Ahab's sons in Samaria : bewildered and helpless they think it best to submit, and send the heads of Ahab's seventy- sons in baskets, thus enabling Jehu to point to the ghastly sight as a proof that providence, not himself, is working the doom of Ahab's house. Next, accident plays its part : the brethren of Ahaziah (descendants therefore of Ahab) are coming from Judah to salute 68 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY their kindred : they are taken alive and slain at the pit of the shearing house. With intrigue and feigned zeal for Baal Jehu draws the idolatrous priests into their tem- ple at Samaria, in order to slay all at a stroke and make the house of Baal a draught-house. In only one point has the work of vengeance remained imperfect : Atha- liah, daughter of Ahab and queen-mother in Judah, has set up Baal worship in Jerusalem itself; in a later sec- tion is narrated the revolution of Jehoiada, the priests crowning the youthful Joash, while Athaliah is slain, and the idolatrous worship purged from the land. The last stage has been reached in the career of the northern kingdom. Where the narrative turns to Judah we do hear of righteous rulers to balance the wicked and the wavering ; but for the kingdom of Israel history becomes a prophetic moralising upon a people's ruin. Jehu himself, his work of righteous vengeance accom- plished, returns to his native sinfulness. At once Hazael, king of Syria, begins to cut Israel short ; he and his suc- cessors fulfil all the prophecy of Horeb in afflicting Israel from the outside. There is indeed a partial recovery, and a second Jeroboam, under the prophetic ministry of Jonah, restores the border of Israel. But this is a last flicker of prosperity ; faction and feud with neighbour peoples prepare the northern kingdom for a mightier foe. At last the Assyrians appear upon the scene ; vainly met for a time by bribes, the tide of inva- sion returns resistless. The end is reached, and the ten tribes are carried into captivity ; while in their place are established the mixed peoples who seek to fear Jehovah and at the same time serve their graven images, and so grow into the hated Samaritans of a later age. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 69 The sacred history returns to simplicity where there is only the kingdom of Judah to be considered. Hezekiah brings back the zeal of David, and David's prosper- ity ; his are the glorious days of Isaiah's prophecy, and the ominous Assyrian invasion is met by the wonderful overthrow of the hosts of Sennacherib. But the son more than undoes the work of the father ; Manasseh seduces Judah to do evil more than the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel, and the voice of prophecy declares how God " will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab." For a brief space brightness reappears with Josiah. The sudden discovery in his reign of the " Book of the Law" causes a wave of religious revival to spread over the whole people ; idolatry is purged out of the land for a time,- and even the altar of Jeroboam at Bethel is overthrown. But the reformation of Josiah is to be considered, not an arrest in the downfall of the kings, but an anticipation of a future period ; here we have, not prophets standing for righteous statesman- ship in national politics, but the discovery, in the Law, of a rallying point for the pious when Israel shall have ceased to be a nation. Accordingly, from the days of Josiah there is but the brief history of Judah's fall. What the Assyrians were for the northern kingdom, Nebuchadnezzar and his Chaldeans are for the kingdom of the south. At last Jerusalem itself suffers the horrors of a siege ; it falls, and Judah follows Israel into captivity. The kingship has ceased to be ; and the ministry of prophets is no longer the instrument through which the chosen nation will express its adherence to its God. 70 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Stories of the Exile The history of Israel is in the position of a river which runs for a time underground before it returns to view. There is no Bible narrative of the exile : we know indi- rectly that the captivity continues for some seventy years without break ; also, that in the interval the Babylonian conquerors are themselves conquered, and their domin- ions pass into the hands of the Medes and Persians. But here again appears the importance of story as an adjunct to history : the seven stories of the exile cast their brilliant light upon successive points in the life of the captivity. Nowhere is the charm of story greater than in the books of Daniel and. of Esther ; and through these impressive narratives we are able to see how even in their exile the chosen people continue to witness for their God among the nations. The distinction of Babylon among the peoples is that it is the land of mystery ; the chief feature of its court is the band of astrologers, magicians, enchanters surround- ing the throne, and so supreme is the national interest in this mystic unveiling of the future that the name ' Chal- dean ' is synonymous with ' soothsayer.' The first of the stories presents four youthful captives of Judah — Daniel and his three companions — who are to undergo a three years' course of royal diet and training in the learning of the Chaldeans, until they are fit to join the band of the king's enchanters. But diet is a part of Israel's law ; and Daniel purposes in his heart that he will not defile himself with the king's meat. He challenges for himself and his companions the test of experience ; at the end of the period of training not only are the youths of Judah THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 71 the fairest to look upon, but the king when he makes his examination finds them " ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his realm." Thus the law of Israel has won a triumph over the regi- men of Babylon. While the period of training, apparently, is still in progress, a sudden outburst of royal panic dooms the whole body of wise men to destruction, because they fail, not to interpret a dream of the king's, but to tell the dream itself which has been forgotten. Daniel inter- poses to save them, believing that by prayer even this impossibility may be accomplished. He stands before the court of Babylon to testify that " there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets." Impressively he makes known the thoughts that have passed from the king's heart, and the far future which they portend : the image with head all of gold, suggesting the flawless glory of Nebuchadnezzar ; the inferior kingdoms that shall suc- ceed, symbolised by the silver, brass, iron, and clay ; above all, the stone cut out without hands smiting the image to pieces and becoming a mountain, by which is made known a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, but shall break in pieces and consume all other king- doms. Amid oblations and incense Daniel's God is acknowledged, and the Judean captive himself is made chief governor over all the wise men of Babylon. In the intoxication of that glory which this dream had symbolised Nebuchadnezzar erects an image of himself on the plain of Dura, and all rulers of all his provinces must at its dedication bow down and worship to the strains of harmonious instruments. The three companions of Daniel alone refuse : they stand firm before the king's 72 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY wrath, and his threat, " Who is that god that shall deliver you out of my hands?" They are cast bound into the burning fiery furnace, heated seven times beyond its wonted heat. The unique word ' astonied ' expresses the emotion of the tyrant as he beholds them walking free in the midst ©f the fire, and in their company a mystic fourth ; they come out from the furnace un- harmed, nor has the smell of fire passed on them. The omnipotent king makes a decree that every people, nation, and language which speak against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego shall be destroyed : " because there is no other god that is able to deliver after this sort." The fourth story is in form a royal decree ; in this solemn manner does Nebuchadnezzar relate, for the information of all the peoples, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth, the wonderful incident of a dream of his interpreted by Daniel, and the still more wonderful dispensation of heaven by which the dream has been fulfilled. It was a dream of a fair and towering tree cut down, and its stump left in the earth with a band of iron and brass, until a mystic period had passed over it. So, at the very moment when Nebuchadnezzar was contemplating Babylon as the city built by his might and for his glory, the word had gone forth ; and he had been driven from men, and his dwelling had been with the beasts of the field, he had eaten grass like oxen, and his body had been wet with the dew of heaven ; until as he lifted up his eyes unto heaven his understanding returned unto him, and his majesty and brightness was restored. He blessed therefore the Most High, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion ; all the inhabitants of earth are THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 73 reputed as nothing; none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou ? Nebuchadnezzar has been succeeded by his son Bel- shazzar, and Daniel has been almost forgotten. The dynasty has reached the last day of its allotted existence, and the last orgy of the king and his companions is running riot, with the sacred vessels of Jehovah among the drinking cups of the dissolute host. Suddenly a mystic hand is beheld writing upon the wall, and the trembling enchanters strive in vain to decipher the doom : only the queen remembers the wise counsellor of the late reign. Daniel stands once more before the court of Babylon, to recite the forgotten lesson of Nebuchadnez- zar's fall and restoration, and to read the mystic words numbered, weighed, divided. That very night the con- quering Medes burst in upon the Chaldeans ; and the one crisis of world history that happens during the cap- tivity is seen to be the work of Israel's God. Captive Israel in now under the strangest form of rule ever devised by man — absolutism limited only by its own absoluteness : a kingship that may decree what it will, yet is limited by its own decree, for " the law of the Medes and Persians altereth not." Under Darius Daniel is a prime favourite ; envy sees that he can be assailed only through his fidelity to his national faith. Accordingly a decree is procured from the unthinking despot, that for thirty days no prayer shall be offered to any god but himself. Daniel remains unchanged in his devotions and is denounced : the king labours all day to deliver him, but is confronted by the " law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not." In sore distress Darius must at last order that Daniel be cast into the den of lions, not with- 74 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY out hope that even here he may find protection. When the morrow reveals the wonder of the lions' mouths shut by angelic power, Darius breaks out with a decree to all peoples, nations, and languages, that all shall tremble and fear before the God of Israel ; his is the kingdom that shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even unto the end. There remains one more, the most elaborate of all scriptural stories. The hatred of neighbour peoples, which had troubled Israel through its whole career, pur- sues the exiles in captivity, and at one moment an Amalekite, Hainan, becomes the minister and favourite of King Ahasuerus. Out of all the hundred and twenty- seven provinces of the empire a single man refuses to bow the knee before the favourite. When Hainan learns that this Mordecai is a Jew, he prepares a mighty revenge. The lot is solemnly cast in his presence to select a day of doom, and then Hainan procures a decree from the king that on that day the Jews shall be extir- pated from all the provinces of the vast empire. He knows not how Providence has been working beforehand to prepare for this crisis, in elevating a Jewish maiden, Esther, to the throne ; she now stands forth to deliver her people. A girl in years, she works salvation in a girlish manner. Taking her life in her hand, she pre- sents herself unsummoned before the king. When he holds out the sceptre of mercy Esther, with youthful sim- plicity, petitions that the king and Hainan will come to a banquet which she will prepare. The flattery lulls all suspicions of Haman; and the king, accustomed only to the voluptuous orgies of a harem, tastes for a moment the sweets of domestic bliss. Twice in this way Esther THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 75 faces her king and her foe ; then, casting off the veil, she denounces the plot by which her own kindred are to be slain, and the king's empire deprived of a serviceable people. Hainan is hanged upon the gallows he had pre- pared for Mordecai ; yet there still remains the fatal decree, enrolled in the laws of Medes and Persians which alter not. But Mordecai succeeds to his rival's place, and devises the counter decree by which the Jews have leave to defend themselves. Hence when the allotted day arrives the blow intended for the chosen nation falls upon their foes. And from the midst of the captivity comes the Jewish feast " of Lots," in honour of a deliverance wrought for them by God amid their troubles, and brought about through the unbending fidelity of Mordecai and the youthful beauty of Esther. Chronicles of the Return and the Jewish Chu?'ch When the historical literature of Scripture is resumed after the exile a marked change is seen, both in its spirit and its form. It was a nation that had been carried into captivity ; it is no longer a nation that returns. To great part of the hosts of Israel, borne away from the northern and the southern kingdoms, no release from their captivity was ever granted ; they became merged in the national life of the east. When the proclamation of Cyrus granted permission to return, not all who heard availed themselves of the invitation ; it is said that there " rose up the heads of fathers' houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests, and the Levites, even all whose spirit God had stirred to go up to build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem." 1 It was a spiritual 1 Ezra i. 5. 76 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY purpose that brought the exiles back, and they proceeded to organise themselves as a spiritual community, around the two central ideas of a restored Temple service and a study of the Law under leadership of scribes. Thus, in place of the Hebrew People we have henceforward the Jewish Church. The literary product of the new community consists of the biblical books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah. The last two deal with the return j in the Chronicles all previous history is retold, in a spirit conformable to the new conception of the relation- ship between God and the remnant of his chosen people. Previous historians have been prophets, the statesmen of Israel who sought to translate religious ideas into political action ; their works combined annals of secular events with epic stories, of which patriarchs, judges, prophets, were the heroes. In the new history the prophets have their place, but not their former prominence. The dis- tinction between history and story can no longer be made ; the whole becomes uniform history, and, if one part be expanded in more vivid detail than another, it is because it bears upon the new religious ideals. In a word, we are entering upon the Ecclesiastical History of Israel. It is interesting to compare the two histories where they touch common ground. The most striking differ- ence is that the whole history of northern Israel, with its brilliant prophetic episodes of Elijah and Elisha, entirely disappears from The Chronicles; from the moment of the schism the ten tribes are regarded as outside the pale of the Jewish Church. The ecclesiastical history ignores the sin of David, and the long sequel of family feuds, including the rebellion of Absalom and the disputed THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 77 succession, all of which, in Samuel and in Kings, had covered half the ground of David's reign, being there regarded as fulfilment of Nathan's prophecy that the sword should not depart from David's house. The lyric compositions of David quoted in Samuel are omitted in Chronicles, though to balance these the latter work, char- acteristically, gives the sacred hymns of the ritual worship which David established ; it is equally characteristic that the elegy on Saul and Jonathan is in the chronicle his- tory replaced by a genealogy of Saul's house. 1 On the other hand, any point that may have a bearing on Temple service is sure to be expanded by the new historians into detail. In the incident of the bringing of the ark to Jerusalem, the prophetic history had merely mentioned the death of L^zzah and the terror it inspired, whereas the chronicle account brings out how this was a judgment on the neglect of levitical service for the carrying of the ark, and adds long lists of appointments made in this spirit by David for his second attempt to escort the ark. 2 Similarly, while the account of the building and dedica- tion of Solomon's Temple is much the same in both works, the chronicle history contains in addition, at great length, David's preparations for the work to be carried out by his son, and the regular courses of priestly service which he established. 3 In later history it is remarkable that Kings relates the reign of Manasseh without a hint of his repentance ; Chronicles adds the repentance and restora- tion of this ruler, in close connection no doubt with the 1 Compare // Samuel i with / Chronicles ix. 35. 2 Compare // Samuel vi. 6-12 with / Chronicles xiii. 1-14 and xv, xvi. 3 / Chronicles xvii, xxii-xxix. 78 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY good works he accomplished in strengthening the defen- sive power of the holy city. 1 The reigns of individual rulers come to have quite a different colour from the changed spirit of the history. In Kings the brief annals of Abijam's reign leave no impression but that of war and wickedness ; the ecclesi- astical historian relates at length this king's wars with Israel, and presents him as a hero of Judah, whose address to the enemy deserves lengthy citation, as em- bodying most powerfully the whole spirit of the books of Chronicles? Ye think to withstand the kingdom of the Lord in the hands of the sons of David; and ye be a great multitude, and there are with you the golden calves which Jeroboam made you for gods. Have ye not driven out the priests of the Lord, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites, and have made you priests after the manner of the peoples of other lands? So that who- soever cometh to consecrate himself with a young bullock and seven rams, the same may be a priest of them that are no gods? But as for us, the Lord is our God, and we have not forsaken him; and we have priests ministering unto the Lord, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites in their work : and they burn unto the Lord every morning and every evening burnt offerings and sweet incense; the shewbread also set they in order upon the pure table; and the candlestick of gold with the lamps thereof, to burn every evening : for we keep the charge of the Lord our God ; but ye have forsaken him. And, behold, God is with us at our head, and his priests with the trumpets of alarm to sound an alarm against you. O chil- dren of Israel, fight ye not against the Lord, the God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper. 1 Compare // Kings xxi and // Chronicles xxxiii. 2 Compare / Kings xv. 1-9 with // Chronicles xiii. The Chronicles name the king Abijah. THE HISTORY "I ["HE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 79 It is with the same zeal to find the new religious fer- vour in the ancient history that the chronicler delights to tell how, in the reign of Asa, the people entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, and " that whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.'' ] When we come to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which deal with the return, a further change is to be noted in literary form ; here we have not even history, but historical documents, the materials out of which his- tory may be constructed. One who reads in ordinary versions of the Bible is here in danger, unless he use great caution, of mistaking for continuous narrative what is really a series of disconnected chronicles ; between one sentence and the next there may be a gap in time and a change of subject. The first part of The Book of Ezra - relates the return under Zerubbabel. This has for its object the rebuilding of the Temple. In the seventh month the returned exiles come from their cities to the ruined Jerusalem, set the altar upon its base, and recommence the daily offerings and the periodical feasts. At length they lay the foun- dation of the new Temple, amid rejoicings of the younger men, while the older men weep at the thought of the more glorious Temple that has been destroyed. The peoples who have inhabited the neighbourhood during the captivity, mingling the service of Jehovah with idola- try, seek to unite with the men of the return and are coldly repulsed ; they then make interest with the Per- sian court, and succeed in restraining the work of re- 1 // Chronicles xv. 13-14. 2 For references see Chronicles in the Appendix. 80 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY building until the second year of Darius. Under appeals from the prophets Haggai and Zechariah the work is then resumed. A second attempt is made to oppose, but the ruling of Darius forces the governor and his companions to assist the Temple builders. The Temple is thus dedi- cated, and the courses of the Levites resumed. The lat- ter part of The Book of Ezra relates to another return, under the leadership of Ezra himself. It contains Ezra's memoirs of the journey, and shows the zeal with which he threw himself into the reform by which marriages between the restored exiles and the peoples of the land were put down. The personal narrative is prefaced with an introduction by some editor, who continues it where Ezra's own writing abruptly ceases. We reach a further stage of the return with The Book of Nehemiah ; it is not now the Temple, but the walls of the holy city that are to be restored. The strong per- sonality of this great leader gives a vivid interest to the successive parts of his narrative : the mournfulness which draws from his royal patrons permission to return ; the solitary night ride in which he views the ruined fortifi- cations ; the organisation of the builders in companies vying with one another in the good work ; the scornful opposition of powerful neighbours, and' the resource with which Nehemiah meets it, prepared at all moments alike for building and fighting ; the noble spirit with which the governor leads the way in foregoing taxes and exaction of debts, lest the poorer exiles suffer oppression ; the wariness with which every trap set to entice Nehemiah himself from the work is evaded. The rebuilding is carried to completion, and the defence of the city regularly organised. Later on in the same THE HISTORY OF THE TEOPLE OF ISRAEL 81 book 1 are more memoirs of Nehemiah, dealing with such incidents as the Dedication of the Walls, a Purification of the Temple, and Reforms of Sabbath Observance and of Marriage Customs. In the middle part of the book we have (besides certain Statistics of the Return) the important incident of the Renewal of the Covenant 2 under Ezra and Nehemiah. In this last-mentioned incident the return has attained full realisation, and the historical literature of the Old Testament may fitly conclude. The people gather themselves from their cities as one man to the broad place before the water gate of Jerusalem. Ezra the scribe stands " upon a pulpit of wood " : the first appear- ance of the pulpit in sacred history is a reminder how the nation has been replaced by the church. The read- ing of the Law day after day, the weeping of the people and the attempts to comfort them, make the whole a religious revival service ; the dwelling in booths suggests the modern camp meeting. Toward the close of the month comes the most solemn assembly of all. The people stand up and read in the book of the Law a fourth part of the day, and another fourth part they con- fess and worship the Lord. The Levites lead them in a long survey of their whole history : the covenant between God and Abraham to give his seed the land of promise ; the long series of providential mercies by which the promise was made good ; the persistent unfaithfulness of the people, punished by deliverance into the hands of enemies ; the mercies that have saved them again and again, and even now not made a full end of them : — 1 xii. 27; for references generally see Chronicles in the Appendix. 2 vii. 73-x. 82 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY Xow therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who keepest covenant and mercy, let not all the travail seem little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers, and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day. Howbeit thou art just in all that has c6"me upon us; for thou hast dealt truly, but we have done wickedly. . . . Behold, we are servants this day, and as for the land which thou gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold, we are servants in it. And it yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins : also they have power over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleas- ure, and we are in great distress. And yet fur all this we make a sure covenant, and write it; and our princes, our Levites, and our priests, seal unto it. The covenant so often renewed between God and the chosen nation is renewed yet once more : but those who now enter into it have forfeited their independent nation- ality, and are binding themselves into a new community, for the service of Jehovah's Temple, and the observance of his sacred Law. An Epilogue to Old Testame7it History The historical books of the Old Testament have been reviewed ; but there is outside these historical books a literary work which may in some sort stand as epilogue to the history of Israel. The last twenty-seven chapters of our Book of Isaiah make up the rhapsody, or spirit- ual drama, of " Zion Redeemed." It is a stupendous literary monument : the form is magnificent, though obscure to a modern reader ; the underlying thought is of such deep spiritual significance that this part of THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 83 the Bible is the chief foundation alike of Hebrew and of Christian theology. We are not concerned here with the work as a whole ; but a single one out of its many trains of interest may be followed, as one which brings the history of Israel into the unity of a single thought. A dramatic vision is opened 1 of the nations of the world summoned before the bar of God. In rapid sketch we have the idolatrous peoples, to the farthest islands of the west, assembling with panic : 2 the carpenter encour- ages the goldsmith, hammer-smoother and anvil-smiter look to the soldering of the graven images, that they may stand in the shock of confronting the true God. For Israel, as its exiles from the ends of the earth obey the summons, 3 there are tender words of protection, and the wilderness blossoms for them while they pass through. The scene is to be conceived as complete : 4 the nations on the one side, Israel on the other, before the judgment seat of heaven. Then Jehovah makes challenge to the idols of the nations. Declare ye the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or shew us things for to come. " Former things " and " things for to come " are brought together here : the gods of the nations are challenged to interpret the whole train of events from first to last, to put upon the course of history such meaning as will 1 Chapter xli. i. The islands [of Greece, etc.] are the usual western limit of the prophetic world: a summons to the 'islands' is equivalent to a summons of the whole earth. Compare verse 5 and xlix. 1. To appreciate fully the dramatic character of this portion of Isaiah it should be read in a properly printed text, e.g. the Isaiah volume of the Modern Reader's Bible. 2 xli. 5-7. a xli. S-20. 4 xli. 2i. 84 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY be seen when Jehovah unfolds his world plan. The chal- lenge is met with silence : l the idols are but vanity and nothingness. Then is unfolded the interpretation of Jehovah : and it is the proclamation of Israel as his servant. 2 Behold my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delighteth : I have put my spirit upon him; he shall bring forth judgement to the nations. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench : he shall bring forth judgement in truth. He shall not burn dimly nor be bruised, till he have set judgement in the earth; and the isles shall wait for his law. To most readers these words are familiar in their second- ary applications ; we must not forget that in the context where they originally occur their reference is to Israel, who is Jehovah's Servant to make him known to the nations. Not by violence and conquest (as Israel had once dreamed), but by agencies gentle as the light is he to win the peoples to Jehovah's law. But, the proclama- tion goes on to show, Israel has been blind to his sacred mission, and by his sins has fallen into the prison houses of the Gentiles. "Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I send? Who is blind as he that is at peace with me, and blind as the Lord's servant ? Thou seest many things, but thou observest not; his ears are open, but he heareth not. It pleased the Lord, for his righteousness' sake, to magnify the law, and make it honourable. But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid 1 xli. 24, 28-29. 2 Chapter xlii. 1-9 and xlii. 14-xliii. 8; the intervening passage (xlii. 10-13) ' s one °f m e numerous lyric interruptions of Jehovah's speech. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 85 in prison houses: they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore. . . . But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel : Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. Gracious promises of redemption flow forth, up to the climax — Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that have ears. Thus with Israel's deliverance from the prison houses of Babylon comes at the same time his enlightenment to his spiritual mission. The moment of time making the occasion to which all this proclamation is pointing is, of course, the deliverance from captivity under Cyrus. 1 God has called one from the north and from the rising of the sun, to tread the nations like clay, and set Jehovah's exiles free. Yet this salvation is not wrought for Israel's sake alone. -2 For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; he is God; that formed the earth and made it; he established it, he created it not a waste, he formed it to be inhabited. . . . Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. It is thus reiterated that in Israel's salvation a world is being saved. Babylon, in all its pride of conquest, had been but an unconscious instrument of God. 3 The victorious career of Cyrus was but a single detail in a Divine plan : the vanquished nations had been the price paid to Cyrus for the deliverance he was about to effect ; the peoples had crouched, not before Cyrus, but before the God that was hidden in him : 4 — 1 Chapter xli. 25 ; compare Chapter xlv. 2 Chapter xlv. 18-24. 3 Chapter xlvii, especially verse 6. 4 Chapter xlv. 14. 86 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY The labour of Egypt, and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine; they shall go after thee; in chains they shall come over: and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication unto thee : " Surely God is in thee : and there is none else, there is no God. Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour." As the drama progresses we find Israel speaking, awak- ened at length to his mission as Jehovah's Servant. 1 Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye peoples, from far; the Lord hath called me from the womb, . . . and he said unto me, Thou art my servant; Israel, in whom I will be glori- fied. But I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought and vanity: yet surely my judgement is with the Lord, and my recompence with my God. And now saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, and that Israel may be gathered unto him : . . . yea, he saith, It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel : I will also giv£ thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. Later on in the rhapsody, among the Songs of Zion Exalted, we find one which presents redeemed Zion in its mission of witnessing to the Gentiles. 2 Jehovah speaks : — Behold, I have given him for a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander to the peoples. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and a nation that knew not thee shall run unto thee, because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, for he hath glorified thee. 1 Chapter xlix. 2 Chapter lv : verses 4-5, 8-1 1, are the words of Jehovah ; the rest the words of Zion. See the Isaiah volume of the Modern Reader s Bible, pages 178-180, and 217. THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL 87 With this is heard the song of Zion addressing the na- tions, commissioned to admit them into the covenant of David. Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, And he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat; Yea, come, buy wine and milk, Without money and without price. . . . Incline your ear, and come unto me, Hear, and your soul shall live : And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, Even the sure mercies of David. . . . Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, Call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts: And let him return unto the Lord, And he will have mercy upon him; And to our God, For he will abundantly pardon. All nature exults in the climax of a world of nations thronging to Zion. For ye shall go out with joy, And be led forth with peace : The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Thus the whole of history, otherwise a chaos, becomes a clear unity in the light of the Divine plan. When the covenants made by God with all mankind had, again and again, broken down in a triumph of sin, one nation is chosen out of the world to be God's peculiar people ; not however for their own sakes only, but that in their seed ail peoples of the earth might be blessed. Israel, unfaith- 88 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND STORY ful to his God, sinks into the idolatry against which he was to have been a living protest ; the chosen people are for their sins scattered through the idolatrous nations, as through so many prison houses. Captivity recalls the Israelites to their sacred work ; it brings them also in touch with the peoples who through them are to be blessed. Then — like the completing of an electric cir- cuit that brings the flash of discovery — comes the con- quering career of Cyrus, and the deliverance that makes the Divine plan clear. Israel emerges from Babylon, no longer assimilated to the secular government of the nations, but a people organised for a spiritual work, waiting until the Church of Israel shall expand into the Church Universal. Such is the History of the People of Israel as Presented by Themselves. CHAPTER III THE HISTORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH AS PRESENTED BY ITSELF Between the point where the narrative of the Old Testament leaves off and that where the narrative of the New Testament begins there is an interval of some four centuries. During this period the Jews changed little, the rest of the world was wholly transformed. The seat of power had shifted from the far east to the far west ; the civilised world had become the Roman empire ; by permission of Rome Herod and other kings reigned in the holy land, and in time a Roman governor was found in Jerusalem. A new intellectual life had commenced for the world under the leadership of the Greeks ; though this affected the Jews of Palestine comparatively little, it had permeated other countries into which the Christian Church was destined to extend. In the midst of this changing world the Jews from the time of the return had never lost their distinctiveness as a spiritual people. The religion of the Law, under leadership of scribes and rabbis, had gradually stiffened into a system of fanaticism ; the ' Tradition of the Elders ' had covered over the Law itself with a host of unwritten precepts, themes of end- less disputations, and making life a burden of ceremonial usages and things to be avoided. Geographically, the holy land now appears in the form of three provinces : the southern province is Judcea, focus of the religious 89