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Reprinted from The Biblical World, Vol. XXXVI, No. 5, November, 1910 
 
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 THE HEBREW AND THE GREEK 
 
 IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN 
 
 PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO I’RESS 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN, PH.D. 
 Urbana, Ill. 
 
 Matthew Arnold’s famous distinction between “Hebraism and 
 Hellenism” is misleading, and rests upon a fundamental miscon¬ 
 ception of the spirit of the ancient Hebrews. In Culture and 
 Anarchy he discusses what he calls the “two points of influence” 
 between which “moves our world.” These he calls the forces of 
 Hebraism and Hedenism, the one representing the effort to win 
 peace by self-conquest, a moral impulse; the other, the effort to 
 see things as they really are, an intellectual impulse. The essen¬ 
 tial difference between Elebraism and Hellenism, as Arnold dis¬ 
 tinguishes them, is that “Hebraism has always been severely pre¬ 
 occupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease 
 in Zion.” All through the essay he implies that the Hebrew spirit 
 was one of somber gloom, in contrast to the joyous spontaneity 
 that he attributes to the Greek. 
 
 Now such a distinction as this, in order to be valid, must be 
 based upon conclusions drawn from a comparative examination 
 of the literatures of the two peoples, for literature is the only 
 authentic record of the life of a race. Such a comparative exam¬ 
 ination of Hebrew literature with that of Hellas clearly demon¬ 
 strates that the spirit of Hebraism, at least before it narrowed 
 into Judaism, was in no sense the antithesis of that of Hellenism. 
 
 In the attempt to test the validity of Arnold’s distinction, it 
 was found advisable to iimit the investigation to a comparison of 
 the Greek and the Hebrew spirit as shown in the habitual attitude 
 of mind of the two peoples toward life, toward inanimate nature, 
 and toward the Supreme Being. Obviously it will hardly be 
 possible, within the limits of such an article as this, to do more 
 than state the results of the investigation without giving in detail 
 the process by which the conclusions were reached. 
 
HEBREW AND GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 335 
 
 Upon a comparison of the Greek with the Hebrew attitude 
 toward life, it was found that the Greeks, in contrast to the Hebrews, 
 were not a particularly hopeful people. This statement does not 
 refer to their belief in a future life, but merely to their attitude 
 toward what the future had in store for them here on the,earth. 
 Their sense of man’s helplessness in the hands of a mysterious 
 fate accounts in part for the peculiar way in which the Greek 
 authors speak of hope. They nearly always speak of it as a delu¬ 
 sive phantom—an illusion born of an uncertain future. Thus 
 Theognis (637-38) speaks of Hope and Peril as deities closely 
 associated, equally dangerous to men. To the Greek, hopes 
 were, as Pindar is said to have called them, “the dreams of wak¬ 
 ing men.” To the Greek, hope might be “the poor man’s wealth,” 
 but while it thus might become the consolation of the weak, it 
 could not be a source of additional strength to the strong. 
 
 Such a prevalent distrust of the future is clearly reflected in 
 Greek history. Among Greek historians of the classical age there 
 is absolutely no trace of the idea that the human race as a whole, 
 or any single nation, is progressing toward the fulfilment of a 
 divinely ordered destiny. Herodotus’ history, for example, seems 
 as if written to illustrate the insecurity of mortal happiness. 
 Throughout the history it is in the hour of men’s impious triumph, 
 when they seem most secure in the possession of life and happiness, 
 that Fate brings them to misery, or slits the thin-spun life. To 
 the Greek the future was full of dire possibilities—poverty, exile, 
 sickness, death. In the face of such uncertainties, the virtue 
 of the Greek was resignation rather than hope—a calm acceptance 
 of the will of the gods, without any joyful anticipations. Conse¬ 
 quently, though often, and perhaps usually, a man of cheerful 
 yesterdays, he was never a man of confident tomorrows. In the 
 absence of hope for the future the Greeks turned for inspiration 
 mainly to the past, to the mythical heroes of song and legend, 
 and to the deeds of their ancestors in the far-off Golden Age. 
 
 Like the Greeks, the Hebrews also looked backward to a Golden 
 Age when God had walked and talked with men, when men and 
 animals had lived at peace. So well had men understood their 
 poor relations, the animals, in that far-off time that they had 
 
336 
 
 THE BIBLICAL WORLD 
 
 \ 
 
 held converse with the beasts of the field, even with the serpent, 
 the lowest, albeit the subtlest of them all. But, unlike the Greeks, 
 the Hebrews looked not only backward but forward to a Golden 
 Age. They were the only people of antiquity who conceived of 
 a Golden Age as the beginning and end of human history. This 
 future Golden Age was to be no less ideal, though less primitive, 
 than the first had been. Apparently it was not thought of in a 
 uniform way in any age, nor always consistently by the same 
 writers, yet they all agree in describing its beginning. It was to 
 be introduced by the advent of Jehovah himself (Isa. 40:9-12; 
 52:7-12) or of the Messiah (Isa. 9:9-10). The conditions of the 
 new era are variously described, sometimes in language that 
 implies no more than the establishment of redeemed Israel in the 
 first place among the nations (Jer. 33:17-22; Ezek. 37:25); at 
 other times in words that suggest that they looked forward to a 
 change in Nature itself, and the creation of a new earth (Dan. 
 2:44; 7:14 and 27). Often they spoke of it as a time when 
 the happiness of Eden would be restored. Men will be exempt 
 from the ills that flesh is heir to, “the inhabitant shall not say I 
 am sick.” The harmony between men and their surroundings 
 will be of a kind to reproduce the conditions suitable to long life 
 such as the patriarchs enjoyed. So much will longevity be the 
 rule that one dying a hundred years old will be thought to have 
 met an untimely end (Isa. 65:20). Once more in that future 
 time will there be a truce of God, when the wolf and the lamb 
 shall feed together, and the lion eat straw like the bullock, when 
 they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s holy mountain. 
 
 The degree to which this hope affected the Hebrews’ political 
 outlook is hard to overestimate. It sustained them even during 
 the long exile, when the scepter seemed forever to have departed 
 from Judah. It comforted them while they groaned under the 
 oppression of the Greek, and the yet more galling yoke of Roman 
 domination, for to them, they believed, Jehovah had pledged his 
 word that a blessed future was in store for the nation, and had 
 added, “I the Lord will hasten it in his time.” Nothing can be 
 more striking than the contrast between the political pessimism 
 of Plato, for example, and the exultant optimism of some of the 
 
HEBREW AND GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 337 
 
 prophets. Such a difference is not to be accounted for by any 
 superiority over the Greeks in point of continued-national pros¬ 
 perity. Indeed, what difference there was in this respect was 
 all in favor of the Greeks. No people ancient or modern ever 
 had more to dishearten them in their thought of their national 
 future than had the Hebrews; and yet no people looked forward 
 so exultantly. 
 
 The exultation with which the Hebrews thought of their polit¬ 
 ical future was the logical result of their conception of God’s rela¬ 
 tion with them. The nation had been rebellious and had sinned; 
 therefore God as a God of righteousness must punish them. 
 Hence arose the idea first expressed by the prophets of the eighth 
 century, that the fall of the nation Israel was to be the triumph 
 of their God—the victory of righteousness over sin. When the 
 Hebrews in the course of their spiritual development finally attained 
 to this conception of their political history, their religion broke 
 for the first time through the bonds of nationality and became 
 a universal religion, instead of the religion of a single people. In the 
 second chapter of Isaiah and in Jeremiah this conception of Israel’s 
 as a world-religion found complete expression. In their thought 
 the kingdoms of the world are destined to become the kingdom of 
 Jehovah; and in this destiny they saw the final aim as well as the 
 crowning glory of Israel’s mission. That Jehovah’s house should 
 be called “the house of prayer unto all nations” was to be the con¬ 
 summation of God’s purpose toward which he was directing human 
 history. This purpose was to be attained by Israel’s becoming 
 perfect through suffering, and hence fit to be the evangelist of the 
 world. 
 
 Nor does the political hopefulness of the Hebrew in contrast to 
 the lack of it in the Greek, appear alone in his vision of a future 
 glory for the nation at large. It is evidenced also in the difference 
 between the Greek and the Hebrew ideal of citizenship. The 
 Greek ideal of the rcaXos rca^aOos was an aristocratic one. It 
 could be approached only by the favored few, by the wise, the noble, 
 and the strong. It was wholly unattainable by the ignorant, the 
 fallen, the feeble of the earth. Such an ideal tended persistently 
 toward the intensification of existing inequalities. The Hebrew 
 
33§ 
 
 THE BIBLICAL WORLD 
 
 prophets, on the other hand, filled with the hope of seeing estab¬ 
 lished in the world a reign of universal justice, were impatient of 
 social inequalities. Their ideal of citizenship was one that could 
 be attained by the poor and the oppressed, for it required only to 
 do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. 
 
 So far as the attitude of the Greek and the Hebrew toward life 
 present and future here on the earth can be determined, it would 
 appear that the latter was “more at ease in Zion,” to employ 
 Arnold’s phrase, than was the former; and that he was so because 
 his political outlook for the nation and for the individual was a 
 more hopeful one. 
 
 The Greek was not only less hopeful, but less appreciative of 
 natural beauty than the Hebrew. At least his appreciation of 
 natural beauty was less catholic. Within certain well-defined 
 limits, the Greek enjoyment of Nature was intense; outside those 
 limits, Nature was to him an object of distrust. She then became 
 Calypso the concealer, and Circe the sorceress. Nature to the 
 Greek, as Mr. Mabie has pointed out in speaking of Nature in 
 Greek and mediaeval thought, emphasized her beauty, and kept 
 her terrors in the background. But the fact that the vast and 
 awful forces of Nature were kept in the background, while the 
 emphasis was put persistently upon the benignant aspects of Nature 
 resulted in a limitation of the range of the Greek’s appreciation. 
 As a result, only the cultivated landscape appealed to him as beauti¬ 
 ful. Only once in all classical Greek literature (in the Critias of 
 Plato) are mountains spoken of explicitly as possessing beauty. 
 Ruskin in Modern Painters has noted the fact that every Homeric 
 landscape intended to be beautiful is composed of a fountain, a 
 meadow, and a grove. Rivers are sometimes in Greek literature 
 spoken of as beautiful; but the adjective was applied only to gently 
 flowing streams, which were looked upon as distributers of fertility. 
 Turbulent rivers had for the Greek no beauty; to him they sug¬ 
 gested only anger and strength. Thus we find Homer using the 
 ravages of a swollen river as a simile for destructive force. Some¬ 
 what so it was with the Greek feeling for the sea. The majesty 
 and loveliness of the sea, the Greek delighted to portray; but its 
 somber moods frightened him. It was his fear that caused him 
 
HEBREW AND GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 339 
 
 to adopt the principle of euphemism. The Black Sea, for instance, 
 the Greeks had called 6 i roWo? afe^o? (the inhospitable sea) from 
 the supposed terrors of its navigation, but later they altered the 
 name to o ttovtos evi^eivos (the hospitable sea), not because they 
 feared it less than formerly, but because they wished to avoid using 
 words of evil omen. 
 
 Of all natural objects, it was with trees alone that the Greeks 
 felt a sympathy that was almost human, and that knew no limita¬ 
 tions. They shared with other primitive peoples—the Egyptians, 
 the Hindus, the Persians, the Scandinavians—the belief that in 
 trees there existed a mysterious life. All the ancient peoples 
 about whose mythology we know anything believed in a tree of 
 life, that is in a plant or tree whose fruit partaken of in a purely 
 physical way was able to bestow immortality. Such in Greek 
 mythology were the apples of the Hesperides. They grew on an 
 island of the ocean whither no ship could penetrate, in the orchards 
 of the Hesperian Fields. Earth gave them to Juno upon her mar¬ 
 riage to Jove; and whoever ate of them attained eternal youth. 
 
 The Hebrew feeling for Nature was as intense as that of the 
 Greek, and was far more inclusive. Not limited to an enjoyment 
 of the mild aspects of Nature, it included such scenes as in the Greek 
 inspired only fear. The greater catholicity of the Hebrew appre¬ 
 ciation of Nature was due to a fundamental difference in the way 
 the two peoples thought of Nature in relation to God. To both the 
 Greek and the Hebrew Nature was divine. They differed only in 
 their understanding of the relation between the material and the 
 spiritual. The Greek, keenly susceptible to natural beauty within 
 limits already indicated, thought of Nature as the elemental reality, 
 the soul of whose beauty was embodied in the divinities who haunted 
 it. The thought of the gods was, then, the artistic completion of 
 his thought of Nature. 
 
 Quite different was the Hebrew view of the relation of Nature 
 to God. To the Hebrew God was the primary reality; Nature 
 was secondary. Not only was it true that without him was not 
 anything made that was made, but the continued existence of 
 Nature was dependent on his will. The Hebrew thought of Nature 
 as a mere shadow, finding the essence of its beauty as well as the 
 
340 
 
 THE BIBLICAL WORLD 
 
 
 sustaining power of its life in One whose providential care watched 
 over the great things and the small — who brought forth Mazzaroth 
 in his season and provided for the raven his food. 
 
 ^ It is characteristic of Hebrew poetry (Humboldt said in his Cosmos ) that 
 as a reflex of monotheism, it always embraces the whole world in its unity, 
 comprehending the life of the terrestrial globe as well as the shining regions 
 of space. It dwells less on details of phenomena, and loves to contemplate 
 great masses. Nature is portrayed, not as self-subsisting, or glorious in her 
 own beauty, but ever in relation to a higher, an over-ruling, a spiritual power. 
 The Hebrew bard ever sees in her the living expression of the omnipresence 
 of God in the works of the visible creation. 
 
 Because of this, we find in the Old Testament no landscape 
 descriptions as such. There is no description of the sunrise; no 
 picture of the sea. Only when we consider the wealth of poetic 
 material strewn among the pages of the Old Testament, and used 
 by the Hebrew poets simply in the way of allusion and incidental 
 illustration, can we realize how deep and inclusive their apprecia¬ 
 tion of natural beauty really was, considered as a revelation of the 
 divine. Though there is no description of the sunrise, can one 
 doubt the delight of the poet when he compares it to “a bridegroom 
 coming out of his chamber,” and to a strong man rejoicing to run 
 a race ? Nor can we question that of the author of the comparison 
 of the just ruler, who “shall be” he says, “as the light of the morn¬ 
 ing when the sun ariseth, even as a morning without clouds; as the 
 tender grass springing out of the earth in the clear shining after 
 rain.” And though there is no picture of the sea, the passing image: 
 “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose 
 waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, 
 to the wicked” is, as Carlyle would say, significant of much. The 
 sea had no terrors for the Hebrew, for he believed implicitly that 
 “the sea is his, and he made it” (Ps. 95:5), and that “the deep also 
 obeys God” (Ps. 94:7). Nay, even the roar of its voice was to the 
 Hebrew not the sound of anger, but of acclamation. There is in 
 Greek mythology no such sublime personification of the sea as that 
 in the third chapter of Habakkuk, where describing the accom¬ 
 paniments of the theophany, the prophet describes the sea as utter¬ 
 ing his voice and lifting up his hands on high. In that single state¬ 
 ment we have a wealth of poetic suggestion that makes the Greek 
 
HEBREW AND GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 341 
 
 mythology seem by comparison petty. Aphrodite “born in the 
 foam of the sea,” and Thetis with her “ tinsel-slippered feet” can¬ 
 not for a moment compare in sublimity with this image of the sea, 
 greeting with an inarticulate Te Deum the Creator coming to judge 
 the earth; and lifting before Him in adoration the white hands of 
 its foam-capped waves. Nor were the Hebrews less susceptible than 
 the Greeks to the beauty of the trees. The cedars that waved on 
 Lebanon were not less but more beautiful in their eyes for being 
 “the cedars which he hath planted” (Ps. 104:16). The growth of 
 the tree became to them the symbol of spiritual growth: “The 
 righteous shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon” (Ps. 92:12) and 
 “shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of waters” (Ps. 1 :i). So 
 great was their regard for trees that by the provisions of the Deuter- 
 onomic code they were forbidden to cut them down even in an 
 enemy’s country, “for the tree of the field is man’s life” (Deut. 
 20:19). 
 
 The Hebrew never considered natural objects as beautiful in 
 and for themselves, but as beautiful or majestic symbols of God. 
 Though this way of looking at them may seem to imply a limitation 
 of his appreciation of natural beauty, it really increased it by render¬ 
 ing visible the spiritual significance of things which to the Greek 
 had excited fear, or at most had aroused but a languid interest. 
 Thus the mountains round about Jerusalem came to symbolize 
 God’s protecting care for his people; and the fact of their being 
 such a symbol emphasized their beauty. The rushing river, which 
 to the Greek suggested only destructive force, became to the Hebrew 
 a symbol of the coming of Jehovah to punish the wicked and to 
 save his people. “He shall come as a rushing stream which the 
 breath of Jehovah driveth” (Isa. 59:19). 
 
 More inclusive and more spiritual than the feeling of the Greek 
 for Nature was that of the Hebrew. To him all nature was, as it 
 were, the garment of God, hiding and yet revealing his personal 
 presence. Or it was a symphony of praise filling the earth, as on 
 solemn feast-days the music of Israel’s Te Deums filled the Temple 
 courts. With such a conception of Nature, the Hebrew felt a secur¬ 
 ity in her more awful manifestations which the Greek could not 
 have known. 
 
342 
 
 THE BIBLICAL WORLD 
 
 The Greek and the Hebrew thought of God was closely allied 
 to their thought of Nature. Indeed, their thought of Nature was 
 part of their thought of God. We have just seen that the Hebrew 
 looked upon the earth as a temple filled with the harmony of a 
 mighty orchestra whose music was the gladness of the world. “In 
 his temple every thing saith glory,” sang the Hebrew poet (Ps. 
 29:9). The Greek conception of Nature was also closely connected 
 with his worship. But, unlike that of the Hebrew, his worship 
 was tinged with distrust. For his lack of confidence in the deity 
 there was abundant justification. The most reliable authority 
 from which to ascertain the nature of Greek theological beliefs is 
 Homer. He, with Hesiod, was regarded by the Greeks themselves 
 as the founder of the national religion. It is to Homer, then, that 
 we must turn for authentic information about early Greek theologi¬ 
 cal beliefs. Here we find that the nature of the gods was far from 
 being such as to inspire implicit confidence. Though immortal, 
 they are not omnipotent. There was a point beyond which they 
 could not give to man the help he needed. For every man’s destiny 
 was controlled by a fate to which even the gods were subject, and 
 which neither men nor gods could alter. Moreover, the gods were 
 thought to be to a certain extent capricious. To secure and retain 
 their favor men could not afford to neglect them, but must observe 
 the omens by which they were thought to make known their wishes. 
 Above all, man should be reverent, and religiously practice moder¬ 
 ation in his conduct and in his thoughts. Otherwise the gods might 
 easily become offended or jealous, and withdraw their favor. Nor 
 were the gods indissolubly connected with the moral order of the 
 world. This is shown by the fact that the punishment of crime, 
 both in this world and the next, was committed to the Furies, or 
 Erinnyes. Such gods with their limitations, their caprices, and 
 their deviations from moral rectitude, could never have fully satis¬ 
 fied the deeper needs of the human spirit, nor ever have exercised 
 any strong moral influence. That they were found inadequate is 
 proved by the changes that Greek theology underwent in the sixth 
 century B.C. when Greek religion became more monotheistic, and 
 when Aeschylus and Sophocles by their criticism of existing beliefs 
 
HEBREW AND GREEK IDEAS OF LIFE 
 
 343 
 
 voiced the new spirit of rationalism. Yet, in spite of the rise in 
 Greece of the rationalistic, and even of the philosophic spirit, the 
 Greeks never attained to a complete realization of a god who 
 “ ruleth by his power forever; his eyes behold the nations’! (Ps. 66 7); 
 whose “faithfulness is unto all generations” (Ps. 119:90); who, as 
 the Judge of all. the earth, cannot but do right (Gen. 18:25). 
 
 In the universal presence of the deity both the Greek and the 
 Hebrew implicitly believed. The conception of an absentee God, 
 ruling the world by a cunningly devised system of interferences it 
 was left for later theologians to formulate. Both peoples believed 
 heartily in what has since been called the immanence of God, but 
 the accompaniments of this belief were in the case of the two peo¬ 
 ples somewhat different. Plutarch in the Morals wrote: 
 
 Polycrates was formidable at Samos, and so was Periander at Corinth; 
 but no man ever feared either of them that had escaped to an equal and free 
 government. But he that dreads the divine government .... Whither 
 can he remove ? Whither can he fly ? What land, what sea can he find where 
 God is not ? 
 
 Similarly, and yet in how different a spirit, the Hebrew poet 
 sings: 
 
 Whither shall I go from thy spirit, 
 
 Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 
 
 If I take the wings of the morning, 
 
 And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
 
 Even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 
 And thy right hand shall hold me. 
 
 Ps. 139:7-9. 
 
 The difference is due to the greater confidence the Hebrew poet felt 
 in the presence of the deity, a confidence due to his exultant belief 
 that he could not escape Jehovah’s loving care. 
 
 Certain correspondences and differences have been pointed out 
 between the Greek and the Hebrew attitude toward life, and toward 
 Nature; and an explanation for these differences has been sought 
 in the fundamental theological conceptions of the two peoples. In 
 conclusion it may be said in justice to Arnold that though his dis¬ 
 tinction between Hebraism and Hellenism is totally misleading, 
 
V 
 
 344 THE BIBLICAL WORLD 
 
 it would have been entirely valid had he used the term Judaism 
 instead of Hebraism. Yet though the confusion on the part of the 
 author may have been one of terms rather than of ideas, we are 
 still justified in reminding ourselves that Arnold’s distinction by 
 its terminology attributes to Hebraism an austerity and somber 
 gloom which really did not characterize it. 
 
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