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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

THE LAYMAN'S LIBRARY

Edited by F. 0. BURKITT, M.A., P.B.A.,
Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the
University of Cambridge,
and the Rev. G. E. NEWSOM, M.A.,
Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's
College, London.

THE FAITH OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT

THE LAYMAN'S LIBRARY
Edited by F. C. Burkitt, M.A., F.B.A., Norrisian Professor
of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, and the Rev. G. E.
Newsom, M.A., Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's
College, London.
Crown Zvo. ss. 6d. net each Volume.
THE FAITH OF TH E OLD TESTAMENT. By the Rev. Alexander
Nairne, D.D., Professor of Hebrew and Exegesis of the Old
Testament at King's College, London. With a Preface by F. C.
Burkitt, M.A., F.B.A., Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the
University of Cambridge.
WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? or REDEMPTION. A Study in the
Doctrine of Atonement. By the Rev. J. G. Simpson, D.D., Canon
and Precentor of St. Paul's.
SOME ALTERNATIVES TO JESUS CHRIST. A Comparative Study
of Faiths in Divine Incarnation. By John Leslie Johnston, M.A.,
Fellow and Dean of Arts, Magdalen College, late Lecturer in Theology
at New College, Oxford.
THE TEACHING OF CHRIST. An Attempt to Appreciate the Main
Lineaments of the Teaching of Christ in their Historical Proportion.
By the Rev. Edward Gordon Selwyn, M.A., Warden of Radley,
formerly Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Examining
Chaplain to the Bishop of London.
DISCOVERY AND REVELATION. By the Rev. HAROLD FRANCIS
Hamilton, D.D., Professor of Pastoral Theology, Bishop's College,
Lennoxville, Canada, 1907-10.
PRINCIPLES OF CHURCHMANSHIP. By the Rev. G. E. Newsom,
M.A., Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's College, London,
Reader at the Temple Church.
CHURCH AND STATE. An Historical Sketch of the Church of
England in its Relations with the State. By Douglas Eyre, B.A.,
Barrister-at-Law.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. By the Rev. Peter Green, M.A,
Canon of Manchester.
THE CHURCH IN HISTORY. A Study of its Continuity, Develop
ment, and Influence. By the Rev. Eric Milner-White, M.A.,
Chaplain of King's College, Cambridge, Exa'miping Chaplain to the
Bishop of London.
THE HOLY SPIRIT. By the Rev. A. E. J. Rawlinson, M.A.,
Lecturer in Theology and Classics at Christ Church, Oxford,
Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Lichfield ; formerly Tutor of
Keble College.
Other Volumes are in Preparation and in Contemplation.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS

THE FAITH OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT
BY THE REV.
ALEXANDER NAIRNE, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND EXEGESIS OF THE OLD
TESTAMENT AT KINO'S COLLEOE, LONDON

WITH A PREFACE BY
F. C. BURKITT, M.A., F.B.A.

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND'tkl
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY. CALCUTTA. AND MADRAS
1914
AU rights reserved

PREFACE
The Layman's Library is a series of which the present
work is the First Volume, and it has been thought
appropriate that one of the two Editors should
commend it to the world with a Preface. My
friend Mr. Nairne himself needs no commendation
from me : it is rather the series that needs to be
introduced. Citrus Anglicanus stupor mundi. This familiar
phrase was first used of the dispossessed clergy of
the Church of England during the Protectorate.
It was the day of Walton and Edmund Castell, of
John Spencer, of Cosin, of Thorndike. The Church
of England had seemed to be a mere historical
accident, a creature of the State, and now historical
accident and the State had swept it away. But
the event proved that some of the Anglican clergy
were more than State-paid officials. Whatever the
origin of the Reformed English Church might have
been, it had struck such deep roots in the soil of
English life that silencing and proscription left
these men still Anglican. The Caroline Divines
were ready to give a reason for the faith that was
in them, whether on the controversial points that
«2 v

vi THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
separated Anglican faith and practice from that of
other Christians, or on matters that pertained to
religious thought generally. Men realised that a
religion which could breed such champions was a
distinct and living faith : a teaching Church is
never a dying Church.
During the last two and a half centuries great
changes have come to the Church of England in
particular, as well as to the world in general. More
over we are not at an acute crisis such as befell the
English Church during the fifteen years from 1645
to 1660 : we should not be at such an acute crisis
as that, even if a Disestablishment Bill for the whole
of England were before Parliament. Nevertheless
there is a sense in which it may be said that Anglican
ism is really on its trial, that it has to prove its right
to exist.
A teaching Church is never a dying Church. But
how far is the modern Anglican Ecclesia a teaching
Church ? Does it teach anything distinctive except
its own legitimacy ? Is there an ' Anglican touch '
that can be felt and recognised, even when the
matter in hand has nothing directly to do with
the validity of Anglican Orders or the essential
requisites for interdenominational communion ? Or
is an Anglican merely a person who thinks with
Roman Catholics on some questions and with
Protestants on others ? And — most important of
all — what has he to say on the vast and complex

PREFACE vii
array of questions that have arisen since the age of
the Caroline Divines \
The question is worth asking, for if the Anglican,
qua Anglican, has nothing to say, it means that
after all he is only an antiquarian survival. During
the last fifty years the Church of England, as still
by law established, has abandoned many points
of vantage from which it was wont in former days
to teach. For good and for evil the Anglican clergy
have become a class of parish priests. They have
abandoned the career of the schoolmaster and the
University don to laymen, who have to make no
profession of communion with the Church of England.
A change of similar import and equal significance
is that the investigation of large tracts of inquiry,
even on subjects that directly concern the intelligent
Christian, have been given over to the specialist.
Natural Science, Archaeology and ancient History
generally, Biblical Criticism, Philosophy, Psycho
logy (or the study of man's mind), all these touch
the Christian at vital points. The men who know
in these subjects all claim autonomy in their own
province, and if their province be found to overlap
the Church's preserves, so much the worse for the
preserves. It is not that these specialists are hostile to Chris
tianity in general or Anglicanism in particular. Some
of them are, in fact, pious and loyal sons of the
Church. But the ' authorities ' which as specialists

viii THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
they recognise are not the authorities set up by
the Church. The specialists hold the keys of king
doms of this world which Christians have to enter
like little children who are taught, who receive
instruction, who cannot carry their a priori likes
and dislikes into school.
As matters stand, it is no wonder that the plain
man sometimes wonders what real authority the
Church of his fathers still wields, outside the narrow
limits of the arrangements of ' services ' in Church
for such as like to go to them. And to this half-
expressed question no direct answer can be given,
for our conception of authority in these matters
has widely changed in the course of ages. It is no
longer found in the compulsion of ecclesiastical
regulation, still less in the likes and dislikes of non-
specialist Churchmen. I suppose that the modern
man only ascribes authority to that which has
irresistible power, or to which he gives his willing
assent. In proportion as a belief is not inevitable
it must be made attractive ; in proportion as a
belief is not attractive it must be shown to be
inevitable. For either of these alternatives the first necessity
is clearness and comprehension, a sound knowledge
of the points at issue and lucidity in presenting them,
appropriate to the audience addressed. This is
what we aim at in the Layman's Library. We use
the word in the old English sense, as doctors and

PREFACE be
lawyers use it. By a layman we understand a non-
specialist rather than an ecclesiastically minded
person not in Holy Orders. But we are thinking
in the first place of the laymen of the Church of
England, who are puzzled by the inroads of modern
learning upon the Church's ground and wish to know
what counsel and advice specialists who are also
Churchmen can give them on the several subjects.
For this reason the writers in this series are all
Churchmen. They do not belong to any particular
party or school within the Anglican Church, but
it is our hope and intention that they will one and
all be distinguished by a sound knowledge of the
subject they treat of.
A sound knowledge — nowadays such a descrip
tion looks perhaps rather uninviting, a quality to
which the layman would perhaps prefer to give
his approval rather than his attention. But to
most men there comes a day when paradox, even
brilliant paradox, falls fiat. Sound learning is
not necessarily either dull or spiritless. And it is
our hope that the learning of the writers in the
Layman's Library may be so leavened by their
reasoned loyalty as Churchmen, that the Spirit
which we believe still to inform our Church may
render our work attractive.
F. C. BURKITT.
Cambridge, 22 December 1913.

CONTENTS
OHAP. PAOII
I. INTRODUCTION  1
II. THE EARLY PROPHETS  36
III. EZEKIEL AND THE LAW  72
IV. THE WISDOM BOOKS  100
V. THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL . . . .132
VI. THE PSALTER  174
INDEX I.: BIBLICAL  209
INDEX II.: GENERAL  220

INTRODUCTION
The Old Testament to be enjoyed — Little criticism
required — Hebrew Bible — Broad distinction of styles —
Freedom regained by the critical movement — Religious
value of the completed Old Testament — Its history
varies in scientific accuracy — Semitic origins — Samuel
and the historians' methods of composition — The pro
phets and the growth of Israel's creed — Post-exilio
period of fuller faith; its variety and richness; its
influence on the religious charaoter of the Old Testament
as a whole.
The Old Testament is a collection of noble literature.
Nothing really like it has come to us from the ancient
world. Its authors used indeed the common inherit
ance of the old Semitic peoples, but literary creation
springs out of spiritual action on given material and
has nothing to do with the novelty of the material.
Our modern comparative method is apt to obscure the
supreme qualities of literature, and this tendency has
nowhere done more mischief than in the Old Testament.
A generation has passed away to whom the Old Testa
ment had become a dull book because it had been too
long used as a corpus of theology or devotion. A brief
period succeeded in which criticism at first shocked
then captivated the imagination, and the heroes of the
Old Testament were seen anew as men of our own flesh
and mind. Now criticism, progressing with more and
more minuteness, has discovered fresh difficulties which
shock no longer, but weary people. The Old Testament
A

2 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
has become (it almost seems) a matter of neither theology,
devotion, nor enjoyment, but merely a text to be analysed.
Dr. Johnson's advice on Shakespeare might well be
applied to it : ' Notes are often necessary, but they are
necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted
with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel
the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read
every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter
negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is
once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or ex
planation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let
it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald
and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and
obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him
preserve his comprehension of the dialogue, and his
interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty
have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the
commentators.' Thus read, Isaiah or Kings would
afford intellectual interest at least as great as the
Agamemnon or the history of the Byzantine empire.
Not but what some honey of the critics might be wisely
stolen to flavour this enjoyment. Criticism is largely the
attempt to arrange the documents in chronological order.
Its battle is aheady half won when the reader turns from
the English to the Hebrew Bible. The order there is
more nearly chronological than ours, which we borrowed
from the Latin Vulgate. The Hebrew Bible contains
three collections of books, which became canonical one
after the other, and of these three the later never at
tained quite the same sanctity or authority as the earlier.
These collections are : the Law, or as we commonly
style it, the Pentateuch ; the Prophets, i.e. Joshua,
Judges, Samuel, Kings, and all those books — with the
notable exception of Daniel — which we ourselves call
' prophets ' ; the Writings, which include all our other
books except the Apocrypha. This arrangement shows
or suggests that Kings is more ancient and more his-

fNTRODUCTION 3
torical than Chronicles ; that Daniel is later than the
Prophets and should be read in connexion with the
revolt of the Maccabees ; and that the Psalter belongs
to the post-exilic period and should be read as a monu
ment of Israel's completed rather than primitive faith,
and that therefore most psalms may be interpreted as
having had an almost Christian sense ever since they
have been used in worship.
The Hebrew Bible throws even more light than this
upon the canonical origins. It has none of those
elaborate titles which in our version make such definite
statements about authorship. ' The first book of Moses
commonly called Genesis ' is simply ' In the beginning.'
That quotation of the opening words is indeed the re
gular way of describing all the books in the manuscripts,
though to some of them the printers have commonly
affixed personal names (without further addition) for the
Bake of convenience.
Criticism however carries us a little farther. It has
proved that the several books of the Old Testament are
not simple units, but contain ancient and modern
elements brought together in various manners. Thus
Samuel is the work of a historian who has used older
materials but has impressed the unity of his own judge
ment on the whole story as he retold it. The five books
of the Law on the other hand, are a collection of laws
and documents, ranging through Israel's fife from the
earliest times to the post-exihc period, and still preserved
(at least in extracts) with slight change from their earher
forms. The book of Isaiah is a kind of ' gospel ' of
Isaiah, a record of the prophet's life and teaching com
bined with a good deal of later theology that sprang
out of his teaching directly or indirectly, all composed
into a book by the post-exilic scholars. This continuous
literary activity should be recognised in reading an Old
Testament book, just as a visitor to a cathedral or even
to a village church recognises the continuous archi-

4 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
tectural activity of Enghsh churchmen. And as his
enjoyment of the building is increased by his unpro
fessional knowledge of the styles and periods of archi
tecture, so the reader's enjoyment is increased by learn
ing from the critics, though not as a critic, to recognise
the four styles in Hebrew literature which correspond
to four well-marked stages in Israel's fife ; the early
and poetical JE, the reformation age's D, the later and
priestly P, and the eclectic renaissance scholarship of
post-exilic days.
Let us make this a little clearer. When we read the
narrative of the patriarchs we are conscious of a sim
plicity, vigour, directness and picturesqueness in the
style which makes the story pecuharly interesting and
enjoyable. As in the Old Testament throughout, we
of course move continually in the divine presence, and
deep truths of theology are therefore continually ex
pressed. But these are expressed in a manner which
we hardly know whether to call childhke or daring. It
is in fact highly sacramental or poetical. The whole
narrative indeed exalts our mind and feeling just as great
poetry does. This is the JE style. Those symbols
stand for ' Judean ' and ' Ephraimite,' and mean that
these narratives come from two early schools of hterature
in south and north Israel respectively, early schools
which show perhaps their noblest character in the first
great succession of prophets, Amos, Hosea, Micah,
Isaiah. But these interesting narratives are interrupted now
and then by passages which, to confess the truth, do
not interest us much. Such is the notice of Abraham's
marrying a second wife, Keturah, and of the descendants
who thus sprang from him, descendants who seem more
like shadowy personifications of tribes than friends
whom we know and love like Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. Then
there are antiquarian notes on the names of places, or
on the origin of institutions, all in a dry precise style

INTRODUCTION 5
which (as indeed the subjects themselves) reminds us
of the laws in Leviticus. This all means that to the
narrative of JE notes have been added from P, or the
priestly school of writers who come into prominence at
the end of the exile, and from whom Leviticus no doubt
did receive its final shape. Yet there is something more
in Leviticus than legal rubrics, and in Genesis, Exodus
and Numbers, we also find something more than anti
quarian matter in the priestly style, sublime touches
which remind us of that supreme example of the priestly
theology, the Hymn of Creation in the first chapter of
Genesis, where God transcendent, hidden, is confessed
with awful reverence.
Turn now to the beginning or end of Joshua. Read
the full, rolling sentences. If you read them aloud you
will feel, even in the physical effort of the voice, how
different they are from the patriarchal narratives, or
from such a passage in Joshua itself as that in which the
captain of the host of the Lobd appears with drawn
sword in his hand (Joshua v. 13-15). This is the
rhetorical, sermonising style of D or Deuteronomy, and
wherever it is found some touch is also found of that
deep heart-religion of the Lord's love which is the main
characteristic of that evangelical book. The history
as told in Kings, and the progress of the prophets'
teaching, seem to show that Deuteronomy (whatever the
date and origin of its laws) first entered effectively into
Israel's hfe in the reign of Josiah and the prophetic
period of Jeremiah ; Jeremiah is certainly the ' deuter-
onomic ' prophet. That was the period of ' refor
mation ' (as we read in 2 Kings xxii., xxiii.), when sacri
fice was restrained to Jerusalem alone, and the romantic,
but corrupt, worship of Israel's ' medieval ' age was
changed by command of the king Josiah.
This last paragraph might be challenged on some
X>oints by the exacter critics as well as by the conser
vatives. But the plain man needs not to trouble much

6 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
about those points. They are like the troublesome
points of dating to which the professional architect must
faithfully apply his best energies. What all can learn
to do with a little practice is to recognise these three
broad styles, to appreciate through them the variety of
the documents, and (however roughly) the development
of Israel's mind and conscience as expressed through
them. There remains the fourth style and period to consider.
There are no easy, superficial signs for discerning it.
Indeed it is only when we have pondered for some con
siderable time on the Old Testament as a progressive
witness to the life of faith that we recognise the need
for making room for this fourth style in our scheme.
But by degrees we do recognise it as in no small measure
the most important of all. Its importance is not ar
tistic or even historical so much as moral. It means
that the whole of the Old Testament comes to us from
the Jewish Church. It is more than a collection of
fragments from those earlier times when ancient Israel
was in strife with its own paganism, painfully and
vigorously forging a purer faith in the furnace which the
divine Spirit made white-hot. It is not a book of
fragments but an inspired collection. It is not a mere
tradition but an interpretation. Our fourth style is the
mechanism of that interpretation. It runs in and out of,
and over, all the rest. It is in itself from a literary
point of view, duller than the rest. Its presence often
mars the freshness of the rest, and obscures the vestiges
of history. But it gives the tone of instructed faith to
the whole, and we must never forget that this ' in
struction' came by way of martyrdom more than by
way of erudition.
Of course this simplifying of critical results does
mean that we recognise criticism as having really settled
something. The disagreements and uncertainties of the
critics do not prove that they have been guessing and

tNTRODUCTfON 7
beating the air, but that Biblical like all other criticism
is a progressive science. It tells us something already
and it will tell us more. The great thing it has achieved
is its recovery of a freedom never wholly lost, but cer
tainly long obscured in the general mind. It is the
freedom which is claimed in the Articles of the Church
of England, to find, not all things necessary to know
ledge, but all things necessary to salvation in holy
Scripture, and to refuse to accept anything as an article
of the faith which cannot be proved from holy Scrip
ture ; e.g. the Mosaic authorship of the five books of
the Law, or the historical accuracy of the book of Kings,
not to speak of Chronicles. This freedom has been
popularly though hardly ecclesiastically encroached
upon since the Reformation. It seemed to have been
aheady lost in the Middle Ages, but the allegorical
interpretation of those times counteracted their pro
fessed literalism. And when we get behind the domina
tion of the rabbinic school of Judaism in the second
century a.d. we find a variety of interpretation and a
theology so far from uniform that we may fairly suppose
that modern criticism would not have been shocking
(though doubtless it would have seemed strange and
unprofitable) to the Jewish Church taken as a whole
in the time of our Lord. With that recovered freedom
we now read the Old Testament, distinguishing its
poetry from its prose, correcting its history when it is
contradictory of itself or of any indisputable evidence
that we discover elsewhere, and recognising — what is
so natural — even in the ' things necessary to salvation '
a record of progressive morality and progressive faith.
The Old Testament is great literature. It is also the
record of a nation's life. It would be a mistake to
separate these qualities from its rehgious value, for they
are in fact part of its religious value. The rehgious
mind of Israel was partly shaped by her national and

8 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
international struggles, partly by her genius for the art
of speech and her dullness for almost all other art.
Still it remains true that Israel's faith was her great
achievement, and the chief interest of the Old Testa
ment is in its rehgious character and influence. First-
century Judaism was not entirely the ' religion of a
book,' but it was largely such. Our Lord used the Old
Testament; — or at least the core of it — as a book of
sacred authority. His teaching and His action were
regulated by it. And His criticism of it showed His
disciples how to trust its inspiration better than their
fathers had done. The New Testament grew out of a
Christian Church which was nourished and controlled
by the Old Testament, and it is impossible to give any
satisfactory account of the Christian faith without a
knowledge of the Old Testament. It has other uses
also for these days. Genesis is nearly as beautiful a
presentation of the one faith as the synoptic Gospels.
The early prophets speak directly to the conscience of
an age in which riches are multiphed and ideahsm in
politics ' is not so much as a subject of inquiry.' Still
for a Christian the great thing remains this : it is im
possible to learn the mind of Christ as we know Him
in the synoptic Gospels, or to enter into His apostles'
interpretation of Him, without study of the Old Testa
ment. But with that object in view the main direction of
our study will be to the Old Testament as a completed
whole ; the Old Testament read as He read it. The
Law, the Prophets and Psalms (S. Luke xxiv. 44) were
what He chiefly considered ; to the history, which is
such a critical problem to us, He paid but little atten
tion. His Old Testament was the Old Testament as it
had taken form in the post-exihc Church of Judaism ;
the Old Testament for which the Maccabees laid down
their lives. And it is upon that stage in the development
of the Book that attention is being concentrated in the

INTRODUCTION 9
latest school of criticism. The underlying documents,
the origins of Israel's life and religion, the obstinate
struggle of Israel's paganism, these remain legitimate
subjects for a more or less antiquarian curiosity. But
the living interest tends more and more to be in the
question : what did the Old Testament say to the Jews
in ' the fulness of time,' when the Lord Christ was born,
and the Kingdom of God which it promised was at hand ?
If it be found that the earhest history can but faintly
be discerned, and that firm ground for tracing develop
ment is not touched before the appearance of the pro
phets, and that even Moses becomes a shadowy figure
better known in what he effected than in the manner of
his effecting it, the loss is after all not very serious.
When we recognise our imperfect knowledge we do but
begin to read the Old Testament again as our Lord
read it, and to concentrate our energy upon the Christian
problems and the Christian doctrine which it enshrines.
Yet all things have a beginning, and the end is in
some sort dependent on the beginning, and ancestry
counts for something, and even the errors of youth go
to make up the purified character of maturity. So that
it is worth while to trace, as far as it is possible, even the
earliest history of this people.
Their first father according to Scripture was Abraham
who came to Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees. If we
attempt to be wise beyond what is written, to identify
Amraphel with Hammurabi, and to fix thereby Abra
ham's date, and to fill up the background of his life from
the material of Babylonian documents, difficulties soon
crowd upon us. Presently we get the Tel-el-Amarna
letters and find in them a different Canaan from what is
depicted in Genesis ; a province of Egypt with an elabor
ately organised official administration, paying taxes to
Egypt, and in a ferment of revolutionary excitement as
the strong hand of the Egyptian government already

to THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
began to relax its control. It might be said that this
relaxation came between the death of Joseph and the
beginning of Exodus. But even so, much difficulty
would remain, and this precision and co-ordinating is
not at all what the earher authors of these narratives
aimed at. They had no reason to square their chronology
with Babylonian inscriptions or with the later system of
the priestly writers. In fact they give no chronology
and httle detail. They tell with naivete the tradition
of their nation's childhood, and they spend their genius
upon portraying character and expressing (what was
no doubt part of the tradition of their time) the religious
dignity and simplicity of their nomad ancestors. Genesis
breathes poetry rather than history, and when we
tediously discuss how far it is or is not historical we lose
our pains and confuse our rehgious instinct, besides
doing injustice to the great rehgious artists who created
this glorious tale.
Then comes the sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus.
We trace in Egyptian history a dim coincidence in the
rise and fall of the Hyksos dynasty. Certain calculations
make it possible that Rameses n. was the Pharaoh of
the oppression. But it is not possible to discover definite
references to Israel's sojourn or Israel's escape in the
Egyptian records known to us. But again all this is
little to the point. There is no real improbability in
such a sojourn or such an Exodus until we begin to insist
upon the historical character of the sacred writer's secu
lar details and to square them with Egyptian chrono
logy. His story has come down to us with prosaic
additions from the late priestly school. The earher
writer, we may be sure, wrote as the patriarchal narra
tives were written, in a poetical and rehgious spirit, not
professing scientific history. He too recounted with
naivete the ancient tradition of his people, and the main
point of that tradition was that at some indefinite, far-
off time Jahweh, whom Israel worshipped, chose for

INTRODUCTION it
Himself a feeble tribe to be His people, redeemed them
with His outstretched arm, inaugurated ' true religion,'
and brought them into the land where in historic days
they actually lived. Two men were His instruments in
this divine act, Moses the judge or law-giver and Joshua
the soldier. Tales had been told of Moses such as had
been told before of Babylonian heroes ; our author did
not disdain their beauty, and, we may be sure, cared not
to investigate cold evidence for them. What he could
do he did. The outhne of the tale he tells we shall be
wise to accept as an outhne of facts. Yet surely he reads
most truly who drinks in the colours instead of measuring
the outhne. This is not history though it be fact. It is
rehgious idealism, a profession of the Hebrews' faith
in God's holy purpose being the beginning, as it would
be some day realised in the end, of their nation's destiny.
How strange that destiny was ! A spiritual impulse
working itself indefatigably out through the inimical
mass of the nations in their seemingly blind jostling ;
the divine mind animating brute force, or rather the
divine heart transmuting empires into the several souls
of the sons of God, through a tiny point of contact ; the
deepest creed the world has known springing out of the
feeble movements of a petty clan of highlanders as it
was pushed to and fro by the two contending dynasts
of the ancient world and at last crushed between them.
Look at the map of the ancient East. See Babylon
and Egypt already long established before history begins
in their river-countries. The desert stretches between
them. There is a thin connecting road of mountains
and inhabited countries. Canaan is a dot on that road.
Its position is such that sooner or later it must be affected
by the advance of the great armies. It is so small that
it might seem madness for it to choose any course but
submission. Yet its hill country and the almost impreg
nable site of Jerusalem give it surprising chances even

14 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
against immense odds, and its distance from the imperial
centres, the interplay of home-pohtics among other
states larger or smaller round about it, and the overtures
and promises of the great empires themselves which work
against one another by intrigue as well as by arms, do
induce Israel (who holds Canaan herself by virtue of
more than one or two bold military enterprises) to take
the risk of resistance and then of rebelhon. Her kings
were not afraid to fight and they had a passion for
political intrigue. Politics, ancient and Eastern, were
intrigues, and their ways were dark, dangerous and
bloody — witness the engrossing history in Kings. It is
that which explains to a large extent the seemingly
unpatriotic attitude of some of the prophets ; the
' evidence ' of their faith in the invisible Protector was
their simplicity in holding to the plain course of
honesty. It would be httle use for one who has no first-hand
knowledge of Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian docu
ments to discuss the early history of those nations at
any length. No romance of scholarship is more capti
vating than the story of the discovery of these monu
ments in all their variety, the prodigious antiquity of so
many, the vast quantity which are now available to
illustrate certain periods. It seems almost incredible
that we should possess now so much of the library of
an Assyrian king of the seventh century B.C., that Dr.
Johns should be able to describe it thus particularly :
' There were tens of thousands of clay tablets arranged
on shelves for easy consultation, and furnished with
lists of titles or catalogues. Apart from the master
pieces of all ages in both Sumerian and Semitic Baby
lonian, the collections of omens, astronomical portents,
the mathematical, grammatical, hnguistic tablets of all
sorts, forming dictionaries, lists of synonyms, comments
or scholia, are still invaluable for the understanding of
other texts. The library served also as a registry of

INTRODUCTION 13
contracts, deeds and other documents relating to the
transfer of property. There were stored hundreds of
letters to and from the king, despatches from the
governors of different provinces reporting public affairs,
copies or fragments of ancient inscriptions, lists of
eponyms. Long hsts of countries, towns, rivers, moun
tains, with notes of their position, products and char
acteristics, formed a sort of geographical section '
(Ancient Assyria, pp. 149, 150, Cambridge Manuals of
Science and Literature). What a difference between
the literary habits suggested by this account of Ashur-
banipal, and by that story in Jeremiah of the reading
before king Jehoiakim of the roll which the prophet
had dictated and which the king cut to pieces with his
knife and burned in the fire upon the hearth. It was
not in mihtary resources only that Jerusalem must have
appeared far inferior to Babylon or Nineveh. And yet,
when all possible appreciation has been rendered to the
hterature of the great empires, it is still safe to say that
the book of Jeremiah (as we read it) is infinitely finer
than their best.
It will be noticed that Ashur-banipal's library was rich
in documents which had been rescued even then from an
aheady distant past. Most remarkable is the knowledge
which these ancient peoples seem to have gained of their
own remote history, and astonishing again is the extreme
antiquity of some of the monuments which we have
ourselves recovered ; for Babylon they go back to 3000
B.C., for Egypt even farther. And finally, besides these
primeval relics and these royal collections, we have in
formal, once worthless scraps from daily hfe which show
a use of writing as common as our own to-day ; if a man
sent his servant to buy something in the town, he would
put it down for him on a piece of clay.
And yet with all this mass of salvage from the past,
it is after all only for a few periods that we have anything
like adequate illustration. The larger part of Egyptian,

14 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
but more especially of Babylonian and Assyrian history
remains obscure.
This however we do know. Before anything that can
be called history begins, these two empires of Babylon
and Egypt are aheady there, powerful and civilised.
The Sumerians, who first held the country of the
Euphrates, are more than a name, for they left a tradi
tion of art and a language which to a certain extent was
always preserved for hieratic pomp. But they them
selves disappeared and their place was taken by a Semitic
race whose mythology Israel shared and whose laws
were not unlike her own. In earlier times different cities
one after another or side by side had pre-eminence in
the country. At last Babylon became representative
and so remained. Babylon was hke Rome in this Eastern
world. Tradition and prestige were hers, but her masters
were a succession of neighbour peoples more vigorous
and military than herself. Yet these barbarians, though
they spoiled and even destroyed the venerable city,
bowed before her name. An Assyrian or Chaldean king
made himself King of Babylon but never substituted his
empire for the ancient one, and when Nineveh disappeared
Babylon under a new dynasty persisted. Egypt was per
haps even more ancient than Babylon but her influence
over the Eastern peoples was not so wide or lasting.
If Semitic blood had mingled there, it at any rate flowed
less pure and strong. Egypt was the Hellas rather than
the Rome of those days. Enthusiasts for Babylonian
culture make much of her art. But the plain man who
visits the British Museum feels that, fine though the
realism of the Assyrian military sculpture may be, it is
very different from the beauty which Egypt created.
The brutal realism of Ashur-banipal's lion-hunt would
have displeased the Egyptian painters. The cuneiform
script cannot be compared in grace with the hieroglyph
of Ani's Book of the Dead. As we look at the Assyrian
sculpture and script we understand why they won the

INTRODUCTION 15
battles and administered the provinces. As we look at
the Egyptian writing, carving, and painting, we seem to
discern a subtle difference of moral temperament which
accounts for the dislike of the puritan prophets; that
plastic art and the solemn calm, as of acquiescence in
fate (which again we feel to-day when we enter a gallery
of Egyptian antiquities), were suspect to them. ' Reli
gion and pohtics are a troubled element for art.' Assyria
was idolatrous and cruel, yet akin to Israel in blood and
even in rehgion. Neither of them cared for indoor
things too much. Neither of them allowed that ' in
active contemplation ' which later ages have associated
with Oriental races in the lump. Egypt was just ' giant
sit-still ' ; Assyria was ' the staff in the hand of the
Lob.d.' Some might judge this too subtle, content to point
to the one broad tie of racial kinship. It is certainly
obvious that Israel's connexion with the Babylonian
kingdoms was early, close and far-reaching. Whether
we assign most to early or late pohtical influence, direct
or indirect, it is equally clear that Israel was deeply
imbued with Babylonian ideas of law and religion. We
know the points of contact between the Mosaic codes
and Hammurabi's, between the flood-legend of Babylon
and of Genesis. But it is almost certain that Babylonian
thought is far more subtly interfused than such isolated
examples prove. In one sense the unique originality
of the Old Testament vanishes. In a truer sense it
becomes more valuable. But that does not so much
mean that the sacred writers took this or that Baby
lonian legend and rewrote it with improvements from
the ' true religion ' ; it rather means that both in hfe
and in literature Israel used her ancient Semitic heritage
of idea and phrase as the instrument of mind and con
science. On the one hand are the mass of the people
shaping baser superstitions out of the comparatively
harmless poetry of their ancestral myths. On the other

16 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
hand are the prophets, inimical to even the tainted
phraseology, yet compelled in large measure to employ
it themselves, and therefore filling old forms with con
tinually truer meaning, and preparing from ' Baby
lonian ' terminology the Christian faith in ' redemption,'
or ' the coming of the Lord.' The primeval ideas of the
Semites gave the language. In Israel where the lan
guage was used for more heart-searching debate and
dispute than elsewhere, that language renewed a more
wonderful life. For when sympathy or prejudice have
urged all that can be urged, the difference between
Israel and Babylon is the impressive fact. Dr. Johns,
if any one, has good right to say : ' The people that
achieved the maxim " To him that doeth thee an ill
deed requite a gracious favour " scarcely lacked ethical
perception to evolve a conception of God equal to any '
(Cambridge Biblical Essays, p. 52). Yet no one can
read any considerable collection of Babylonian writings
without feeling the impossibility of the Psalter or Job
or the prophetic books rising from among that people.
' It is the difference which polytheism and monotheism
work out in their results.'
In the foregoing remarks we slipped from Babylon
proper to Assyria in a scarcely logical manner. But this
was perhaps less illogical than it might seem. It is in
the ninth century, when Assyria comes into prominence,
that the history of the Eastern empire really begins
to be full and clear. And it is from that point, but more
especially in the next century, that Israel enters into
that history. The annals of Tiglath-Pileser, Shal-
manezer, Sargon and Sennacherib, throw much light
upon the Biblical narrative. That is the period of the
great prophets. From their prophecy we get our first
contemporary information on events. The rise of
Assyria coincides with the opening of the really his
torical period of Israel's life.

INTRODUCTION 17
That period begins with the prophets, but it may be
taken somewhat farther back into the times of Samuel,
whence (though the source is not too clear) the stream
of regular prophecy was considered to take its rise.
Israel in Samuel's day was under the power of the Philis
tines, and the book of Samuel tells a story not unlike that
of the Itahan Risorgimento. Hannah's song, ending
on the anticipatory note of the Lord's Anointed or
Messiah, at once suggests ' young Israel's ' enthusiasm
for a monarchy under which they might be a nation.
The historian who wrote the book seems to have had
two earher writings before him which had already told
the story of the time from the opposed points of view.
One was a history of Saul, the hero of the 'young Israel'
party ; the other a history of Samuel and David in
which the regrets and prejudices and more dogmatically
rehgious ideas of the conservative party were expressed.
Few tasks are more apt to cheat the labourer than the
attempt to reconstruct documents from books in which
parts of them have been embedded. And in Samuel
this is a particularly hazardous enterprise, since it is
pretty evident that the author only copied from his
documents word for word when it suited him, and in the
freedom of his method was really more like a modern
historian than a ' redactor.' Yet the earher documents
may be discerned beneath the surface without much
difficulty when we have learned to look for them. It
may or may not be a matter rather of memory than of
copying. The sutures may be hidden. Yet the differ
ence between e.g. 1 Sam. viii. and ix. is very plain. The
rhetorical style of ch. viii. is in marked contrast to the
plain but vivid narrative of ch. ix. — some beginners
in Hebrew who had doubted this were once convinced
by finding their task of translation so much easier in
ch. ix. ; and the position of Samuel as judge of the
whole nation in ch. viii. is very different from his posi
tion as the ' seer ' of a country town in ch. ix. These
B

i8 THE FAITH OE THE OLD TESTAMENT
variations recur more or less distinctly in other places.
In the later part of his bock (2 Sam. ix.-xx.) the author
seems to have used yet another document, a history of
David's reign. And here it looks as though he had
copied or extracted from his original with httle altera
tion ; but we cannot really tell. It may be noticed that
at the end of 1 Sam. xiv., 2 Sam. viii., and 2 Sam. xx.,
summaries occur which might well be taken from the
conclusions of the three books we have conjectured ; we
seem to be getting a real glimpse of the little library of
this Hebrew student. At the end of his whole work an
appendix is added which contains miscellaneous matter,
among the rest a statement that the man who slew
Goliath was not David but one of his captains. This
might be — so many other explanations have been
offered that we hesitate to say roundly, no doubt this
was — the tradition of a particular family in Benjamin,
which the author rejected from his history, yet con
sidered it fair to record. This historian must have
written before the reformation of Josiah. His point of
view is ' pre-reformation,' * medieval.' He records prac
tices of rehgion without blame which the post-reforma
tion author of Kings records with blame, and which the
priestly author of Chronicles often ignores as his high-
church tradition obliged. No doubt there are vestiges
of later writing in Samuel but hardly of later authorship.
Good histories are edited and re-edited, with notes and
additions, in our own days, and such re-editing was part
of the scholarly labour of post-exilic Judaism. No
doubt too the rhetorical style we noticed above as char
acteristic of some passages might be classed as ' deuter-
onomic,' but we have no right to be sure that there were
no beginnings of that style before Jeremiah, any more
than we can pretend to know that Samuel could not
have spoken, as the record makes him speak, of obedience
and sacrifice before that simple theme had been elabor
ated by the prophets of the eighth century. Whatever

INTRODUCTION 19
modifications were made for later readers, the book of
Samuel itself remains a monument of the earlier time.
And as such the method of the author has a particular
interest. The mere analysis of the text, the attempt to
refer each division to its ' source,' was a necessary pre
liminary to further study. Now that it has been done
we may (as usual) profit by the critics' labour by passing
lightly over the details of it, and by deducing from the
general result the author's principles not of composition,
but of history. He had accounts of action and judge
ments of character before him which contradicted one
another. He conceived it his duty to decide what was
the real course of events ; and this he did on the whole
with fair mastery, but he has been honest enough to
leave certain discrepancies. We ask, for instance, when
and how David first entered Saul's service, and we get
no clear answer from the historian's double account.
This is his confession that he cannot clear everything
up. In a modern book such confession would be plainly
declared in preface, footnotes, etc. He used none of
these printer's conveniences and left us to read between
the lines. More important is the other duty he recog
nised of passing judgement on the characters of his
heroes. This judgement is not read between the fines
but in the whole development of his narrative. That
Samuel was truly the prophet of the Lord, that Saul
for all his great qualities was a failure as king, that David
for all his evil deeds was a good king after the Lord's
own heart ; this has always been clear to the un
sophisticated reader. That is to say, the unsophisticated
reader has been impressed by the dehberate judgement
of the author, marshalled and declared in his narrative ;
it is only the modern critic, who has sometimes passed
a new judgement for himself, that has led us to forget
how decided the author is.
A conscientious judgement ; that is something in the
plan of a historian. But in a great, an ' inspired ' his-

20 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
torian more may be required ; his judgement should
also be reasonable. And the author of Samuel is
exceedingly reasonable. He recognises the two views
of Samuel's dignity — judge of all Israel or priest of a
country town. He shows both views in what should
be divided into separate chapters of his book, leaving
us to read between the fines such notes as, ' Thus I find
him represented by one authority ; thus by another,'
' It is impossible to clear up the question of his official
authority,' ' It is impossible even to be sure of his precise
attitude towards the Risorgimento, whether a frank en
thusiast or a cautious and half unwilling instrument in
creating the monarchy.' But he meets all these diffi
culties by describing in his history an ideal of the pro
phet's vocation which we may suppose was higher than
the popular one of his day, and which made the question
of rank a very small matter, while it also accounted for
seeming inconsistencies in political enthusiasm. His
idea of a prophet is not that he is a dervish, a soothsayer
or an intriguer, but ' one whose ear the Lord has un
covered,' whose dignity is wholly in his communion
with God, and whose action is not privately willed or
calculated but ordered step by step by divine revelation.
Such a prophet was Samuel.
In like manner he simplifies the problem of Saul's
nobility and failure, of David's degradation and favour.
In the message of Nathan (2 Sam. vii.) the King of Israel
is entitled ' son of God ' ; a general and ancient title
among Semitic peoples, but invested by Nathan's sermon
with new and deeper spiritual reality. Kingship is re
ligious. The divine right of Israel's kings was in their
character of sons to Israel's Lord. And in Saul's
nobility, as this author not without sincere admiration
depicts it, there was none of that mystical dependence,
though there had been a promise of it in the very ' his
torical' but rather conventional manner in which the
Spirit of the Lord fell on him after his anointing. But

INTRODUCTION 21
in David that is just what is evident, not only in his
repentance in the matter of Bathsheba — which seems to
those who come to it with Ps. li. in their mind too Chris
tian a repentance to be ancient, but which is in fact so
much simpler than the psalm and full of early veri
similitude — not only in that but quite as clearly in his
cheerful trust when flying before Absalom, though that
is narrated in a section of the history which is by no
means marked by rehgious phraseology.
Samuel is ' prophetic history ' of an early type. The
larger and most readable part of Genesis and Exodus
is of the same type ; the later, priestly parts are less
interesting and in fact make less impression on most
readers, unless they set store on the miraculous and ex
traordinary. But there is this difference. In Genesis
and Exodus the writers are deahng with a shadowy past
and are rather story-tellers than historians. There is
a certain progress in this respect even within Samuel.
Samuel, Saul and the early hfe of David do not stand out
so firmly as does David the king. As he brings us
nearer to his own day the author writes with more detail
and assurance. Still, allowing for this, we perceive a
more marked difference as to the whole ; Samuel is
really history. The book of Kings is prophetic history
also, and helps to make a background for the propheta
of the eighth and seventh centuries. But it is prophetio
history of a later type, and we do not understand the
book aright till we have also traced the progress of the
prophetic doctrine and work.
These prophets were reformers who, like all reformers,
appealed to the past but in reahty went forward. Their
task was to purge the true rehgion from pagan — largely
Canaanitish — elements, which in the eyes of the people
generally were the essence of rehgion. They were aided
by the kings in two ways. Some roused sympathy for
them and indignation against themselves by bringing

22 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
in foreign customs and ruling in a more high-handed
manner than suited the clan spirit of the nation. Others
were, hke the prophets, really anxious to regulate worship
which, left to the whims of country priests and squires,
ran into excesses and was injurious to united national
hfe. The prophets dealt in principles, the kings with
institutions. Hence we find a more or less continuous
attempt to organise the priesthood and to centrahse
worship, drawing it away, so to speak, from parish
churches to the cathedral. And the rehgious instinct
of the historians is right in recognising that success in
this attempt was possible in the petty kingdom of David,
not possible in the larger kingdom of the north with
its wider and more varied interests. The historians
express this instinct in a dehghtful fashion, investing
the family of David with the same kind of romance as
the Church of England has attached to the Stuarts.
But there is a deeper faith in them than that. Con
sciously or unconsciously they side with the prophets
in upholding the puritan ideal which runs through
Israelite and Jewish rehgion and has been inherited from
it by the Christian Church. Not the prosperity of the
north but the narrower interests of the city of David ;
not success in pohtics but the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness is the great thing. And, it should be
added, both prophet and historian treat history as an
exposition of that truth, not as a complete statement
of scrupulously certified facts.
In their appeal to an ancient faith which they insist
upon, bring out anew and interpret, the prophets built
up a creed for Israel . Each contributed an article or two.
Not till prophecy had ended, or at least changed its
character, in post-exilic days was this creed completed.
Amos or Isaiah must not be read as though they thought
of God or salvation in the same fashion as Jeremiah
or Malachi or the psalmists. And it must be remem
bered that when (following the Septuagint and Vulgato)

INTRODUCTION 23
our English version gives ' the Lord ' in capital letters,
the Hebrew has the very personal, or as we might
almost say, the family name of Israel's own God,
' Jahweh ' ; that name itself carries us back to a world
of thought very different from our modern world.
Thus Elijah, in opposition to the priests of Baal and
then to Ahab, the murderer of Naboth, estabhshed these
two truths : that Jahweh alone is God in Israel, and that
Jahweh is righteous and demands righteousness.
Amos proclaimed that Jahweh, the creator of all the
world, is also judge and will judge His own people most
strictly. Hosea, that Jahweh loves His people with a love like
a husband's or father's, invincible.
Isaiah's article was that Jahweh is holy, or as we might
say, divine. But with the fall of Samaria and the
imminent peril from the Assyrian, prophecy became in
Isaiah far deeper and more complex. His conception
of Jahweh was less naive than his predecessors', more
hke the idea of ' God ' in a mind which is modern yet
scarce touched by philosophy, e.g. Ruskin's. Rehgion,
pohtics, social problems were one complex whole in his
mind. Thus he worked out a far-reaching doctrine of
faith. Also of judgement ; with perhaps new and
more spiritual development of the ancient, popular
ideas about ' the day of the Lord.' Yet perhaps not.
Here a critical problem must be admitted. It is a ques
tion how far those passages in which such popular ideas
are recognised may be attributed to Isaiah himself.
On the whole these earlier prophets appear to stand
against the people and against the professional order of
prophets in solitary championship of the ' true rehgion.'
The whole system and phraseology of the popular
rehgion is suspect to them. Sheol, sacrifice and divina
tion are nought or worse than nought to them. Their
rehgion is a ' reasonable service,' and as being almost
exclusively that, it has proved but one element in the

24 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
less simple but more pregnant faith of later Judaism,
out of which sprang the Gospel.
Micah lived at the same time as Isaiah and faced the
same problems, but from another point of view. The
comparison of the two is instructive, for it shows how
prophets may be at one in ' things necessary to salva
tion,' yet rather wide apart in their immediately practical
application of faith. Isaiah was of Jerusalem and knew
the difficulties of government. Micah was a country
man, and saw its corruptions from outside. Hence he
appears more hke a sociahst as compared with Isaiah,
the broader-minded statesman. Both looked to Jahweh
as God of a new age that was coming. But Micah
pictured the new age in a few simple hnes ; Isaiah saw
deeper into its continuity with the present, and the
paradox of God's unique act working itself out by natural
means. With Jeremiah, if not philosophy, at least mysticism
comes in. For mysticism is philosophy felt but not
thought out. He saw a reformation of rehgion but it
did not satisfy him. Josiah, his reforming master,
fell at Megiddo, and after that Jeremiah stood almost
alone. Isaiah's doctrine had been hardened into a dogma
of patriotism, and Jeremiah's faith in a communion with
God which transcends nationahty was condemned as
treason and atheism. But he made new life possible
for Israel when city and temple had gone, and he was
reverenced as a martyr saint in those later days when
sainthness and martyrdom were valued. Heart-religion
is Jeremiah's article of faith.
Jeremiah saw Jerusalem taken and Ezekiel heard of
it in Chaldea. Here were two men, each of priestly
descent, yet so different. Ezekiel brought to the front
what the earher prophets had ignored or opposed, the
priestly rehgion of Israel. Yet he did this in prophetic
manner. He too was a reformer. He took that ancient
ritual and idea, purified it and showed its truly spiritual

INTRODUCTION 25
oapacity as the rehgion not of simple repentance but of
the cleansing of conscience. The Johannine doctrine
of propitiation, as well as the high-church Judaism of the
chronicler, springs from Ezekiel.
One other great prophet must be named ; he who
at the approach of Cyrus encouraged the exiles with the
promise of speedy return, and who began his message
with ' Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.' His prophecy
has been preserved to us as part of that large collection
of theology which was gathered together in course of
time round the name of Isaiah. With him we reach
what seems the highest spiritual faith in Israel. His
doctrine of God is indeed the same as is presented in the
first division of the Nicene Creed.
Nor is it the first division only of that creed which
we may discover in the prophets. Aheady in Israel's
conscience, as they educate it, a doctrine of the Holy
Spirit appears which is far nearer the doctrine of the
Christian Church than is sometimes remembered. There
is a sense in which it might be said that even an early
Israelite was fitter to receive that doctrine than a modern
Christian. For ' spirit ' is a word which has degener
ated in course of time. To us it commonly suggests
' character,' ' intangible influence,' often something
' less than reahty.' Throughout the Old Testament
the Spirit of the Lord is a very real and definite power.
See in Samuel how the Spirit falls upon anointed kings,
and fahs with visible, marked effect. The description
explains the like descriptions in Acts. What the
Church means by calling the Holy Spirit ' person ' is
hard for modern minds to grasp ; the instinct of ancient
Israel would scarcely have been at fault had the dogma
been presented to it.
Yet there would have been difficulty on another side.
For in the rehgion or statesmanship of the earlier prophets,
such as Amos or Isaiah, there was so little care for ' per
sons.' They dealt with nations. And if their concep-

26 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
tion of Jahweh as the national God of His own pecuhar
people made their apprehension of His ' person ' intense,
it also made it difficult for them to advance to that
larger view of the idea which promises to transcend cold
limitations by a fuller recognition of particular affec
tions. It may be remarked in passing that this habit
of the times has a bearing on critical questions of author
ship. There were prophets and there was the Lord's
message by the prophets, but there was httle care to
claim even a written word for' a particular person. Even
in much later times the effect of this habit lasted, and
when a book was called Isaiah, or a set of psalms were
entitled ' to David,' this was in a more symbolic and lesB
personal sense than ours when we put an author's name
on the title-page of a book. Much of the bitterness of
bygone critical disputes was due to people's unwilling
ness to imagine the intellectual machinery of past ages.
However with Jeremiah and Ezekiel the idea of persons,
or the value of each separate soul before God, did rapidly
develop ; and one of the most beautiful quahties of the
Levitical legislation is its pastoral exactness, its care
for each several soul among the people.
With the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus we begin to
enter upon a period which is in so many respects the
most interesting of all. Of course all gain has its corre
sponding loss. We cannot have the best without
letting go the second best, and the progress to the
Gospel of Christ — that might be taken as a fair sub
title to the collection of Old Testament Scriptures — is
a continuous process of letting go the second bests. The
old, romantic, out-door hfe, when religion and politics
were one; when prophets thundered in a large, free,
poetic speech ; when writers were few in number and
markedly accomphshed in their naive, direct art ; when
the vast empires of a world long passed away which move
like shadowy giants across the stage of history for us,,

INTRODUCTION V)
were very near and real and terrible to Israel — fearful
ministers of Jahweh for the stern discipline of His people,
while He compelled them to fight against their inherited
cruelty and lust and superstition and to reahse that
other-worldly knowledge of Himself which He had im
planted in their hearts from the beginning in pecuhar
intensity — all that has gone by now ; we have reached
what seems at first sight a more commonplace age. But
other things have gone by also ; the grosser forms of
superstition, the harems of the kings, the coarse worldli-
ness which made the rulers of the nation mere politicians
and provoked the prophets to assert a faith which, in
their own days, no one would accept. The faith those
prophets thus built up becomes now the recognised
faith of the nation. The nation is a church, and its
kingdom, as it becomes the centre of a hope instead of
an intrigue, becomes in the same measure a mystery of
rehgion. The misery of poverty no doubt still exists,
and it is not hkely that social injustice is all at once
removed. But the Law has made mercy and charity
the every-day ideal, and it has fixed the ethereal dreams
of the prophets' high morahty in effective forms. The
glories of the age of oratory have ceased, but the habit
of prayer has risen in their place ; reading and writing
show the ameliorating influence on people at large which
general education, though it may dull genius, always
does introduce. And there is a ' new learning ' as well
as a diffused education. It produces new sacred htera
ture of a more thoughtful, if perhaps less tremendously
inspired, type ; and it preserves the record of those very
glories of the past ; sometimes perhaps it weakens their
vigour by editing and adding, sometimes perhaps it
deepens their sanctity by daring selection and experi
enced reflection. We have begun to pass from the
period of making history to the period of making the
Old Testament; from the life of Israel to the times
of Judaism,

28 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
We have begun to pass. The days of Cyrus were of
course but the prelude to this new period. There has
been much foreshortening in the last paragraph. And
it is exceedingly difficult to get that prelude clear.
When once a series of events has been set before us by
a strong mind in a fairly orderly fashion we receive an
impression which is not easily disturbed. That has
been done by the author of Ezra and Nehemiah, and from
those two books our notions of the return from the
captivity and the thoroughly legal character of Judaism
have been commonly derived. But when we compare
Ezra and Nehemiah with Haggai and Zechariah, or
again with 1 Esdras in the Apocrypha, or when we set
the numbers given in Ezra and Nehemiah of the return
ing people with the numbers given in Jeremiah of the
departing exiles, we begin to see how obscure the history
really is, how many problems are suggested. And when
we glance at the contents of the third and latest
division of the Hebrew Bible and recognise the variety
of theology which is represented by Job, Ecclesiastes,
the Psalms, Canticles, Daniel, and when from the
Apocrypha we add to these Wisdom and Maccabees, we
cannot but suppose that there was a good deal beside
dry legahsm in the post-exilic Jewish church. What
did Cyrus and his successors effect for Israel ? Who came
home from Babylon and who had never been there T
Who built the second temple ? Who and what were
Ezra and Nehemiah and the historian who made the
book about them ? How did Deuteronomy and Levi
ticus come into being, and how were they combined ?
How is it that Jews had a temple in Egypt in the sixth
century, and at the same time took oaths in the name
of foreign gods ? These are questions which it is easier
to ask than to answer. Something at least may be said
for Dr Kennett's account of the exihc and early post-
exilic time. He thinks that the country was never
by any means depopulated ; that an ' Aaronic ' priest-

INTRODUCTION 29
hood was transferred from Bethel to Jerusalem to serve
those who remained in Judean territory ; that Samaria
and Judah thus drew together in the home country ;
that Deuteronomy (not completed till long after Josiah's
day) became the law-book of this amalgamated home
population ; that the missioners from Babylon brought
(though not till a far later time than Cyrus) a select
company of Babylonian Jews to Jerusalem as represen
tatives of what they considered the true Church ; that
with their support they intended to stem the tide of
new-fangled laxity ; that they held by the Zadokite
priesthood, and Leviticus the law-book of Babylonian
Judaism ; that the people at home looked upon all this
as the real innovation ; that a contest thus arose which
ended in a good working compromise, an Aaronic priest
hood and a law-book in which Deuteronomy and Leviticus
were combined ; but that this was not achieved with
out some tragedy, part of which was the inauguration
of the Samaritan schism. This is elaborate. It tempts
a comparison with Newman's letter to F. Capes : ' I
don't think I could do it from history. I despair of
finding facts enough — as if an imaginary tale could
alone embody the conclusions to which existing facts
lead.' Yet it is an honest attempt to take all the docu
mentary facts into consideration, and the exclusive
following of Ezra-Nehemiah is not. Another highly
imaginative sketch is given by Professor C. Torrey in
his Ezra Studies. And he says one thing at any rate
which seems true and safe and important : that the
exile was but one act, as it were, in a larger drama, the
' dispersion ' ; that there is no trench cut at any one
time across the area of history ; and that Israel's faith,
so far from drying up, was developing, broadening,
deepening, right on to Gospel times. That is indeed
what S. Paul seemed to hold when he wrote to the
Galatians about ' the fulness ' of the time in which God
sent His Son.

36 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
It may be worth while before concluding this intro
duction to set down briefly the main elements of this
complex Jewish churchmanship, which no doubt
gathered unprofitable accretions as it progressed, but
which did progress toward that ' fulness of time.'
There was the high-church party of the Law. They
have been severely judged yet highly estimated. They
captivate our imagination by their late history book,
Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah, and they were in fact the
greatest party of their time in so far as they made the
Law the comprehensive symbol of faith for which
legahsts and mystics were ready to die together.
There were the scholars who collected and edited laws,
records, prophecies, poetry ; who made in fact our Old
Testament. There were the critical, even to some extent sceptical,
thinkers from whom such books as Job and Ecclesiastes
came. And in the Psalter we feel that spirit of devotion which
ran through the whole hfe of Israel in those days ; yet
is so various.
Finally there was prophecy, changing however in eo
marked a manner from its ancient and authoritative
form that some held true prophecy to have ceased.
That was probably not quite the opinion of the scholars
who were completing the books of the prophets. Yet
in the main prophecy did take a new form in this period
which might rather be considered a new thing. Pro
phecy gave place to apocalypse such as we read it in the
canonical Daniel or the book of Enoch outside the canon.
This apocalyptic inspiration draws from sources in the
past. It transforms old thought. It consoles in evil
times. It does not disdain to use the language of the
people. It is powerful and can rouse the enthusiasm
of soldiers and martyrs, as Daniel did in the revolt of the
Maccabees. It is sometimes pohtical. We may not
fairly say that it despairs of this present world. Yet

INTRODUCTION 31
its main business is elsewhere. It fashions 'saints.'
It tells of a world to come. It has thoughts, very strange
to common sense, of a heavenly Kingdom and a King
who shall be divine, in quite another degree from that in
which the family of David had been the Lord's Messiahs
and His Sons.
Here is indeed a remarkable preparation for the
Gospel, more ' synoptic ' less ' Johannine ' than the last
generation's criticism of the prophets might have led
us to expect. And most important is it to observe that
here we meet once more what again and again recurs
to the student of the Old Testament, that puritan,
mystical, other-worldly strain which runs all through
Israel's history, accumulates dominantly in Judaism,
and through post-exilic scholarship has left so deep a
character on the whole collection of Hebrew Scriptures.
It is plain that if this post-exilic scholarship be allowed
to have made the Old Testament what it is, and if the
post-exilio age was imbued with such subhme apocalyptic
aspirations, our criticism, our interpretation of many
passages in the Old Testament, once thought supreme
passages, will be substantially affected. Our grand
fathers applied these passages directly to our Lord Jesus
Christ. Fifty years or so ago criticism warned us of the
peril of such simphcity ; inspired men would not have
a less but more real message for their own contem
poraries by reason of their inspiration ; the words must
have had a meaning for their own times which they
would not have had if they were merely vaticinations
of the earthly hfe that was to be eight centuries later.
Hence a rather jejune style of interpretation came in.
Strong words like ' Thou art my son, this day have I
begotten thee,' and 'Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God,'
were referred to reigning kings. The interest of psalm
ists or prophets was held to be concentrated upon this
present life, and scarcely anything that could be cahed
a doctrine of immortality was recognised in the Old

32 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Testament at all. But there can be httle doubt that
such remarkable passages were understood in a far more
extraordinary sense when they were read in the syna
gogue. It is possible, or even often probable, that
something of their astonishing grandeur is due to the
post-exilic theologians. And though we may not pretend
to distinguish sharply what they have done by addition
or arrangement ; and though, again, there may have
been once an earher, simpler sense which we might
recover if we could trace the whole history of our docu
ments to their origins ; still we need not be too anxious
in all cases to do this. We are chiefly concerned with
the Old Testament, the completed sacred books of the
Jewish Church; and those books have breathed the
larger faith of Judaism ever since they became books.
The criticism of the seventeenth century broke up the
allegorical system of interpretation which had become
conventional. The criticism of the nineteenth century
disturbed what might be cahed the simple, evangehcal
method, for it too had become conventional ; those
who used it scarce troubled to ask themselves austerely,
In what way can this or that apphcation be true ? But
there was a good deal in what Newman said of ' a certain
law of Christian development, which is this, — a refer
ence to Scripture throughout, and especially in its
mystical sense.' And of the Articles of the Church of
England still more important to the student of the Old
Testament than the sixth (to which we referred above)
is the seventh, which declares that ' The Old Testament
is not contrary to the New : for both in the Old and New
Testament everlasting hfe is offered to mankind by
Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man,
being both God and Man.' This points to that ' mystical '
sense which is more elusive than either the ahegorical
or the simple, unanalysed evangehcal sense, but which
is therefore nobler, deeper, safer. For ' mystical ' in
the Prayer-Book means ' sacramental,' and sacrament,

INTRODUCTION 33
apphed to literature, leads to the eternal essence through
the actual and historical process of human expression,
upon which, as its outward and visible sign, it insists.
To such a renovated mystical interpretation of the Old
Testament the criticism of the twentieth century is
leading back.
In this introduction a general sketch has been at
tempted, not of history, chronology and criticism, but
of a view of the Old Testament such as might be taken
by an intelhgent and fairly weh read man who wished to
use it as a collection of sacred books, and to use it both
reverently and with natural enjoyment. In the chapters
which follow no complete guide to the Old Testament
will be found. They will but partly fill up some of the
outhnes aheady drawn. As far as possible repetition
of what may be gathered from the many good hand
books already pubhshed will be avoided. On the other
hand no striking originahty is to be expected. The aim
will be to extract from the critical studies which are
active on ah sides the essential principles which those
studies are continually throwing off and estabhshing.
Simplification of the truths that matter to a man who
fears God, is the purpose of this essay. An ambitious
purpose certainly, which allows no hope of anything
hke complete success and obliges the purposer to sincere
modesty. But no lesser purpose would justify the
undertaking to write such a book at all. It is not neces
sary to add one more to the short guides which have
been so well composed during the last ten years.
From time to time modern books will be mentioned in
which those who care to do so may pursue the subjects
further, but there will be no attempt to furnish a sys
tematic bibhography. It may however be as weh to
name at once a few books which will certainly be found
useful. Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the
Old Testament (T. & T. Clark) can hardly be dispensed
C

34 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
with as a foundation for serious study ; a ninth edition
has been lately pubhshed. England can never repay
her immense debt to Dr. Driver for all he has done
for her on the Old Testament. If in this essay we go
beyond his lines in following new guides, that following
would be itself impossible but for his preparation.
G. H. Box's Short Introduction to the Literature of the
Old Testament (Rivingtons) is a small and very good
book which will suit hght purses. The Religion and Wor
ship of the Synagogue, by Box and Oesterley (Pitman),
is valuable for post-exilic and later Judaism. Robertson
/Smith's Prophets of Israel (A. & C. Black) is still the best
introduction to the prophets ; its vivid picture of their
human hfe and faith has made the Old Testament real
history to hundreds who had lost all interest in it.
Robertson Smith felt the impulse of Wellhausen. To an
earlier generation Dean Stanley handed on the torch
of Ewald, that spiritual historian of ' the true religion '
in Israel ; his Lectures on the Jewish Church (Murray)
should still be read to rouse enthusiasm for the subject.
For the newer view of the prophetical books, as records
of, rather than written by, the prophets, Buchanan
Gray's hundred pages of introduction in his edition of
Isaiah (T. & T. Clark) may be read ; also Kennett's
Schweich Lectures on Isaiah (Frowde) . But Dr. Kennett's
book, hke so many of the most stimulating books, must
be used with neither caution nor creduhty, but with an
open mind which will pay its teachers the comphment
of criticising them. That is always necessary in reading
Dr. Cheyne, and those who do not read Dr. Cheyne will
lose one of the greatest pleasures that Bibhcal study
affords. His latest theories of textual criticism may
be let alone. Of his earher writings three must be
specially recommended : Job and Solomon (Kegan Paul,
& Trench), Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (Putnam) ;
and best of ah, his one- volume commentary, The Book of
Psalms (Kegan Paul, & Trench, 1888 — to be carefuhy

INTRODUCTION 35
distinguished from the later two- volume commentary).
Those who wish to learn more about the analysis of the
Pentateuch will find all they need in the simple but
scholarly Introduction to the Pentateuch, by A. T. Chap
man (Cambridge Bible for Schools Series). The Theology
of the Old Testament (T. & T. Clark) was the last work of
that great master, Dr. A. B. Davidson ; the more it is
used the deeper will its truth be found.
Reminiscences of all these books will be recognised
in the following pages. But particular mention should
be made of an essay in The Parting of the Roads (Arnold,
1912), by Dr. Foakes Jackson. Its theme is much the
same as that of our third and fourth chapters. Yet it is
not directly from that essay that their thoughts have
been drawn, but from the continual intercourse of a
long and happy friendship which has been the source of
far more than books can impart.

II
THE EARLY PROPHETS
Contemporary witness of the prophets — Yet they need
a background, which is given in Kings— Contents and
character of Kings as prophetio history; contrast
Chronicles — The prophets contend for true faith and
morals against superstition and materialism — Their
inspiration, absolute trust in the Loed, supra-natural
call which however works out by natural means — Isaiah,
Hosea, Jeremiah — The books of the prophets not com
posed by themselves; they are 'gospels' with some
later and more developed theology colouring them —
This deepens the significance of some great passages —
Yet the message of the prophets themselves is plain
enough — They were puritans and idealists — Their
puritanism needed its complement ; their idealism has
become the abiding characteristic of the Jews.
' And it came upon me " Come stella in ciel," when, in
the account of the taking of Amphipohs, Thucydides,
Ss Tavra £wiypai{>tv, comes with seven ships to the
rescue.' So Fitzgerald wrote to Cowell. The reader
of the Old Testament feels a hke thrill when he passes
from Samuel and Kings to Amos and Hosea. He had
been reading history weighed and arranged by men who
lived later than the events. Suddenly he hears the very
voice of actors in those events, of men who helped to
make the history. That is what makes the prophets so
valuable to us when we too go to the Old Testament as
historians — historians separated from the events by
many multiplied removes, and obhged to exercise the
coldest criticism in trying to recover the facts. The

THE EARLY PROPHETS 37
prophets, as contemporaries, are our most trustworthy
witnesses. And yet we begin of late to recognise that
contemporaries also had their point of view, that the
old historians were not always more careless or mis
leading than the moderns with their scrupulous re
investigation, that after all the Acts is a good introduc
tion to S. Paul's epistles, and Kings to the study of the
prophets. Apostles and prophets have always held
strong views ; they saw one opened way to change the
world and looked intently forward. S. Luke and the
deuteronomic historian each had their heroes, but they
were men of letters with the instinct of the scholar's
honour ; they did exercise and educate their faculty
for contemplating the whole stream of action from
without, and their comprehensive view has produced
books of history which sometimes disturb our late learned
prejudices, and which certainly tend to-day to grow in
reputation. And if we do not approach the Old Testament as
historians or critics, but in quest of a simpler pleasure
or in hope of disentangling the things necessary to
salvation from the mass of things disputed, Kings proves
a still more valuable introduction to the prophets.
The prophets are difficult. They are allusive. Their
style is grand but abrupt, hke choruses in Aeschylus.
Unless we know something of the history of their days
beforehand we shall often be at a loss to make out their
meaning. They rebuke with fearful energy something
that was wrong with the people of Israel. Can we say
definitely what that thing was ? They urge faith in
the Lord, the God of Israel. Do we understand at all
precisely what this faith was, what it would cost Israel
to venture upon it, what good it promised ? It is the
vagueness of the answers we give to such questions that
dilutes our interest in these heart-searching books. We
read them as if they were no more than imperfect echoes
of the teaching of our Lord or of the Christian Church,

38 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
and we naturally feel that to those who have the perfect
doctrine the imperfect is of minor importance. But to
one who knows their times their words are very different.
He sees how extremely real they were then, how bold,
how true, and how intensely it mattered whether they
persuaded their generation or not. He sees too that
those days were in some respects more like our own days
than the Gospel times were or the Apostohc times, and
that the prophets are not merely imperfect echoes of the
Gospel or merely a preparation for it. They rather give
a particular interpretation of it which had poignant
force for Israel and Judah in the eighth and seventh
centuries B.C., when social order was breaking down, and
ideahsm in pohtics was disappearing while pohtic rela
tionships were becoming every day more perilous ; when
worship was splendid but unconsciously insincere ; when
rehgion was reformed but the reformation had not
touched the springs of national hfe ; when the nation
thought itself acceptable in God's eyes, yet was partly
corrupted by gross vice, partly dulled to the sense of
things eternal ; when there was an estabhshed teaching
ministry, not mahgnant but commonplace, and tragically
opposed to the eccentricity of those solitary reformers
who made the disquieting claim that the Lord had
spoken to them and put His words into their mouth and
revealed to them His purposes of judgement. This is
an interpretation of the Gospel which had specially
appropriate force there and then ; and it is difficult to
deny that it has a rather specially appropriate force
here and now.
Is the description given in the last paragraph fair ?
It may be compared with what is written in many
modern histories of Israel or guides to the Old Testament.
But it can only be tested by reading the book of Kings
and the prophets themselves. The modern aids are real
aids. They make things easier. But they are not
authoritative. And the easiness is apt to cheat us of

THE EARLY PROPHETS 39
more real joy. No one knows how enthralhng the story
in Kings is till he reads it right through as a story. There
are some difficulties which may be cleared up in a com
mentary, if the reader hkes, when he has finished the
story. There are some dull passages which he may skip
or pass over with a glance. He will need to devote the
alert attention to the rest which he does to other great
hterature. But in return he will be uplifted as by great
hterature. And if, when he has read it through, he will
carry the story about in his mind for a day, and then sit
down and write out briefly his impression of it, he will
find himself prepared for study of the prophets as he
could have been in no other way.
The narrative begins in the last days of David. Adoni-
jah's conspiracy is crushed. Solomon enters upon his
magnificent reign. The fate of Joab, rudely faithful to
his master through so many dangers but caught on the
wrong side at last, is darkly tragic as real history so often
is. The temple is built and Solomon's beautiful prayer
is described in that deuteronomic or evangehc style
which the author loves. We feel how great, how neces
sary, yet how regrettable is this innovation on the old
prophetic ideal of Jahweh dwelling in the thick dark
ness, reveahng Himself in the storm, and unconfined in
temples made with hands. Yet the king's high-priestly
intercession declares a faith in something deeper still
which even this innovation may mediate.
Then comes the division of the kingdom, which in
this history is nothing less than a national revolt. ' To
your tents, Israel ' ; leave the son of David to be chief
to his own clan. And so at first our interest is with the
nation in the north. It is a tale of lust and luxury and
blood and crime, of the intrigues of oriental palaces
and the murdering of their masters by soldier adven
turers. Even the prophets Ehjah and Elisha are too
much involved in these violences. But the author
does not let us dwell on those imperfections in his

40 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
heroes. In a vivid narrative which he no doubt de
rived from hving tradition and perhaps contemporary
writings, he shows us Ehjah in close communion with
Jahweh, standing for His majesty and for His justice
against a hostile nation and a dangerous king. It was
for Jahweh he stood. Nowhere is it more necessary
than in the story of Ehjah to restore that ancient name.
His God was Jahweh, that mighty national Person,
dwelhng in the wilderness, manifested in the storm —
though part of Ehjah's prophetic education was the
deepening and refining of that last idea — to be worshipped
with a mystical faith, not reasoned about. And if we
use the term ' mystical ' here it is not in its quiet modern
association but rather to describe a direct inexphcable
communication which obliged life to be risked and deeds
of violence to be done and strange signs to be expected.
The victory on Carmel is ' miraculous,' and as such a
stumbling- block to us who have learned enough to
acknowledge that ' the spiritual is the natural and
what is most natural is most spiritual,' but are still too
ignorant to be able to fit all that we would into that
formula. However of Carmel this at least must be
allowed : that, given time and place and persons, no
other way of telling the story than that we have in
Kings would be credible ; any rationahsing would
destroy that essential meaning of the drama which
however obscurely, at any rate is actually impressed
upon us as the text stands.
The picture of Elisha is less vigorously drawn, but
Jehu and his fierce, reforming seizure of the throne is a
remarkable chapter in the story. The dynasty he founded
reached high prosperity in the reign of Jeroboam n.
But at the moment when all seemed so prosperous the
downfall was threatening. The Assyrian army was
moving westwards. The kingdom of North Israel
whose ' high places ' and the corrupt religion and morals,
of which he held these to be the symbol and the cause, the

THE EARLY PROPHETS 41
author of Kings had tersely but repeatedly condemned,
was about to be overthrown by that grim scourge of
God. And at this point Amos and Hosea come forward
to warn and to plead. But warning and pleading were
in vain. Submission and rebelhon, new kings set up
and again thrown down, intrigue, weakness and then
stubborn resistance and a long siege, bring on the inevit
able end. Samaria falls, and the northern kingdom
disappears. It had been a scene of splendour, progress
and full life. The author evidently felt the romance of
its history. But he records its brutality also in his
plain, objective manner. He writes with the impartial
candour of a historian, yet he is a staunch disciple of
the prophets — whose faith, we may suspect, was even
when he wrote still far from popular, and he deliberately
affirms his judgement that spiritual apostasy — we might
translate it ' materialism ' in our modern tongue — was
the cause of ruin. ' They would not hear, but hardened
their neck, hke to the neck of their fathers, who believed
not in the Lord their God. And they rejected his
statutes, and his covenant that he made with their
fathers, and his testimonies which he testified unto them ;
and they followed vanity, and became vain, and went
after the nations that were round about them, con
cerning whom the Lord had charged them that they
should not do hke them' (2 Kings xvii. 14f.).
And now that Samaria and all Samaria stood for have
been thus wiped out, Jerusalem and Judah come into
sole prominence. The northern kingdom had indeed
begun in a revolt that was no less than national. Yet
the author, mindful of the supreme interest of the
second part of his narrative, had by degrees brought the
house and people of David more and more into view. He
had shown the steadiness oi the southern monarchy, its
deep foundations in the real affection of the people and
in the divine care which supported it, and once, when by
Athahah's coup d'ltat all seemed lost, wonderfully pre-

42 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
served it. Now our eyes are fixed upon it, and with
remarkable skill he makes us feel that it too is on the
razor's edge and that more is at stake than Samaria
ever possessed. All through this part of the story we
move under the shadow of the consecrated temple which
is raised to pecuhar sanctity by Isaiah, and then, as the
sad finale draws on, becomes more and more evidently
an object of mere formal reverence in the time of Jere
miah. Those two great prophets dominate the course
of events, and wherever they appear their faith, so differ
ent in the tasks and methods assigned to each, rouses our
conscience to apprehend the presence and the ceaseless
working of the Lord. The kings are no longer shown
from without as in the former chapters, but we are made
to enter into their minds, sympathising, admiring, pitying,
understanding their difficulties, but understanding too
how much is demanded of a king of Judah who is really
the Lord's Christ, and why the author therefore is bound
to pass his stern sentence on their unroyal weakness.
There are two acts in this drama of Jerusalem. In the
first the protagonist is Isaiah ; the adversary who comes
at the Lord's bidding to put Hezekiah the king to the
test, is the Assyrian. The choice is : simple honesty
in pohtics, quiet necessary reform of social abuses at
home, and such faith as will accept prosperity or loss
at the hand of the Lord, secure of His protection from
all that can be really harmful ; or the man of the world's
rejection of such a merely rehgious dream, acceptance
of the practical necessity of crooked policies if the state
is to be saved, and meanwhile neglect of those measures
at home which would relieve the oppressed and reform
the vicious. Between these alternatives Hezekiah vacil
lates. All but irrevocably he takes the baser one. Then
humbled as by a conversion he throws himself uncon
ditionally upon the Lord. The prophet, in the face of
apparently imminent destruction, promises dehverance ;
and the dehverance comes.

THE EARLY PROPHETS 43
In the second act Jeremiah is protagonist. The
Chaldean Nebuchadnezzar is the adversary ; the prophets
Nahum, Zephaniah and Habakkuk come in here, as
obscurely showing the downfall of Assyria and the rise
of this new power. And Zedekiah, the last of the kings,
has to bear the weight of an almost similar choice, but
it is a weight which he is obviously too weak to bear.
In these last chapters there is the same oppressive sense
of certain ruin as in the tragedy of Samaria. But there
is this great difference. Here there is no hopelessness.
This division of the narrative opens with that refor
mation of Josiah's which corresponds so markedly
with the injunctions of Deuteronomy that from S.
Jerome's time Deuteronomy has always been supposed
(in some form or other) to be the ' book of the law '
which was discovered in the temple and read to the
king. That reformation did not merely restrain
sacrifice in future to Jerusalem alone. It must have
really gone far to break the power of superstition with
all the vice and cruelty that accompanied it. We may
perhaps conjecture from some words of Jeremiah's that
he was disappointed with the reformation ; it seemed
to him formally successful but ineffective in changing
the heart of the people. To some extent that must
iave been the result; else Jeremiah's task would not
have been so immediately hopeless as it seemed to be.
But to some extent there must have been a better
result ; else Jeremiah's novel and (to those patriots
who beheved they were faithfully upholding the manly
faith of Isaiah) offensive doctrine would not have
inaugurated a new age in Israel's spiritual growth, as
it presently proved to have done. Moreover the author
of Kings was a thorough ' deuteronomist.' He may
have learned his religion from Jeremiah, but he tells
the story of Josiah's reforming acts as though he thank
fully remembered them. In any case his reformed
faith upheld him as he penned the tragic story of the fall

44 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of Jerusalem. He knew what heart-rehgion was, and
he did not beheve that all was lost because the externals
of worship and nationahty had been removed. Nor did
he confuse the chastising wrath of the Lord with false
analogies from the vengeance of men. He wih not even
say, as centuries after the chronicler said when he re
told the story, that the evil grew ' until the wrath of the
Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy '
(2 Chron. xxxvi. 16). On the contrary he brings his sad
record to its end calmly and without comment, and on
his last page adds the cheerful note that in the seven
and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king
of Judah, Evil - merodach king of Babylon hfted up
his head out of prison and made provision for him as for
a brother king in Babylon (2 Kings xxv. 27-30). This
makes us think of S. Paul's imprisonment and the happy
conclusion of the Acts. We expect a sequel.
It is plain that Kings was finished after this kindness
had been shown to Jehoiachin ; at least as late as the
middle of the exihc period. Like Samuel, it may have
had additions and modifications in much later times.
And as in Samuel, the author no doubt used earlier
material. But here again we need not for our purposes
go painfully into those investigations. If the author
had not been very different from a mere redactor of older
books his history would not leave the strong impression
it does upon us of a consistent exposition of certain
theological truths by means of honest historical narrative.
Assyrian documents confirm this narrative, but some
times also correct it in part. Here and there our com
prehensive study of the Old Testament may lead us to
question the accuracy of particular statements. But
these inaccuracies, if such there be, do not affect the
result at which the author aimed, which was to give a
general sketch of Israel and Judah under the monarchy,
and to show the divine purpose working through a very
human story, the spiritual reahty which is partly hidden

THE EARLY PROPHETS 45
but more revealed in a natural and even shocking course
of historical events, the heart of a loving God striving
very personally with the weakness and perversity of His
people. His idea of God's present influence on men goes
indeed farther than that. He is too instinctively a his
torian and too much imbued with prophetic theology
to infringe upon the real free-will of men, yet it is in the
spirit of the prophets also that he drives home to us all
through his narrative the conviction that God is in
finitely stronger than men's wills, that this conducts
history to tragic issues, that it makes a stern view of hfe
inevitable but at the same time keeps hope alive. This
last point of hope is important. The author of Kings
is a prophetic historian. All goes to prove this, his style,
the effect of his work upon our conscience, the position
given to it in their canon by the Jews. We shall not
appreciate Kings unless we remember this. But we
shall not appreciate the prophets either unless we re
member that a hopefulness, stern but invincible — a
disillusioned hopefulness — was of the essence of their
faith. But this introduces a further consideration. If the
author of Kings was a prophetic historian he belonged
to the period of the prophets, and that was the period
of which he has written the history. He may have hved
at the end of that period. It opened long before he was
born. He had perhaps no means of obtaining precise
information about many of the events he records. His
brevity in some places, the broad general hnes which he
draws in some other places, prove that he would readily
admit such criticism. But his belonging to the period
is the great recommendation of his work as real history.
What he professes to do we may trust him to have done
in an honest, workmanlike fashion. When we turn to
the later book of Chronicles we see the difference.
That book has a value of its own. It illustrates by
means of a narrative the rehgious ideal of the priestly

46 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
school, an ideal which is well worth insisting upon. But
Chronicles repeats Kings for the most part word for word,
yet with conspicuous additions, omissions and alterations.
And these changes plainly show that the author wrote
at a time when the contemporary tradition had been
transformed ; its historical consistency had been lost ;
a new tradition had broken in upon it, changing the
whole perspective, making the distant past of the
prophets a confused continuation of the ritual habits and
the priestly ideas of the times of the second temple.
Chronicles may preserve some facts of history which
Kings had omitted, but Chronicles is not history.
Kings may be inaccurate in some respects. The account
of that miracle on Carmel of which we spoke above may
be, for instance, coloured by ' unnatural ' ideas which
were characteristic of the prophetic period. But the
point is that they were characteristic of that period,
whereas the chronicler's ideas of the Levitical organi
sation, the unreheved badness of the northern kingdom,
the orthodoxy of Judah, were not. Most critics of the
New Testament; — even though hke the prophets they
face what seem the sternest facts and build on a ' dis
illusioned ' certainty — are satisfied that S. Mark's Gospel
gives an historical account of the hfe of our Lord. Their
main reason is that this Gospel is so consistent in what
might be called the psychology of its history. Allow
that our Lord knew Himself to be the Messiah, whom at
that time and in a particular manner Jews looked for,
and that He knew Himself ordained by His Father to
save the world by dying ; then the course of events
might most properly be just as S. Mark describes them.
The book of Kings can claim the same kind of confir
mation from the psychology of its history.
Taking Kings then as a trustworthy background to
the prophets, what in broad outhne do we see ? We
see the struggle of two religions in Israel. The people

THE EARLY PROPHETS 47
on the whole were almost pagan. They acknowledged
Jahweh, but they also worshipped the Baals of Canaan.
At their high places all manner of abominations went
on. From time to time horrible fashions of cruelty
broke out, such as burning their children in sacrifice to
Moloch. Against all this the prophets set their faces.
They claimed to be appealing to a purer rehgion which
was Israel's ancestral rehgion and had been by these
days corrupted. They never appeal to the Levitical law
in proof of this, and we misunderstand the history even
more than the chronicler did if we make the infringement
of that law the sin of the people. We cannot really
condemn them for such an offence without some unreality.
Our own consciences, especially since they have been
instructed by S. Paul, do not allow us to recognise the
mere infringement of that law as a moral offence. It is
not the high places that shock us, but what went on at
them. It is not even idolatry in its formal sense that
we think so wrong, but the vice, cruelty and cowardly
materialism which idolatry involved. These natural
motions of our conscience are exactly satisfied by the
prophets. We never find them beating the air, but
always engaged in a hand to hand struggle with sins
that are horrid and ruinous. But on the other hand,
the more closely we inquire, the more reason we find
to believe that the prophets were right in their appeal to
the purer religion of the past. How is it that in Samuel
we hear nothing of abominations connected with the
high places ? An unprejudiced criticism of the Old
Testament does not support the formal rule that Israel
simply developed in religion. Not progress wrought
out by men's united effort, but strange acts of God
which often disturb the reasonable progress of the nation,
is the idea which rules through these Hebrew books.
The paganism of Israel on the one side. On the
other these few prophets who stand, each one by him
self, dehvering a message which they claim to have

48 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
received from the Lord Himseh ; each in his own day
an apparent failure, yet each in the end leaving a truth
behind him which does prevail. These prophets are
the mediators of that true rehgion which we commonly
call Israel's (though it never was actually so until the
Israehtes became the Jews), which is the rehgion of the
Old Testament, and which was accepted by our Lord.
That is the situation roughly described. When we
look closer we find that the opposition was not quite
so simply defined. Elijah and Ehsha were not quite
alone with none to welcome their constancy. The
revolution of Jehu showed how largely the army felt
with the prophets. Some of the kings were decidedly
on the side of reform. In Zedekiah as in Hezekiah we
recognise goodwill combined with weakness. And in
the prophets' days as in the Gospel days and in the
various seasons of reformation or transition in the
Christian Church, neither movement nor continuity can
be accounted for without taking into account the
' quiet in the land,' the real ' catholics,' who have always
known and always wih know God, however that know
ledge is denied, discussed, or newly expressed in the
controversial world outside. As we study the prophets
we find ourselves again and again compelled to recognise
their kinship with other people. But the most obvious
thing about them is their difference from other people,
and the truest way of understanding them is to pay
attention in the first place to that difference.
They were really — it might be almost safe to say, they
were uniquely inspired. They claimed this by their
formulae : ' The Lord hath said,' ' The word of the
Lord came,' ' The oracle of the Lord.' But this by
itself cannot be pressed. The ordinary prophets, who
were a recognised professional order, not altogether
unlike the priesthood in the Christian Church, made the
same claim ; Jeremiah once protested scornfully against

THE EARLY PROPHETS 49
their readiness to do so, coining perhaps a verb for the
purpose — ' they go oracling the oracle ' (Jer. xxiii. 31).
A safer test appears when we notice that the word which
came to the greater prophets was always an unpopular
word, as that of Micaiah when all the other prophets
promised success to the two kings (1 Kings xxii.), or that
of Jeremiah throughout his misunderstood ministry.
And this unpopularity was so intense that it called for
extraordinary courage, brought persecution, even martyr
dom. The description of the servant of the Lord in
Isa. liii. is the most typical description of a prophet. He
gladly perishes that salvation may come to his people
by his death. It might be said : ' Why ah this timid
searching ? We know the prophets were inspired because
they foretold Jesus Christ.' But that short cut is in
admissible. Before taking it many questions would
have to be faced as to the manner and intention of that
foretelling. And it would not explain all the inspiration
of the prophets or the inspiration of all prophets. There
was nothing about our Lord Jesus Christ in Micaiah's
prophecy just mentioned, nor was Amos foretehing Him
when he declared at Bethel the overthrow of the house
of Jeroboam. Yet this objection does give us a hint
which is valuable for our present purpose. Nothing in
the Gospels so much assures us of our Lord's real com
munion with His Father as the quiet determination with
which He fohowed the guiding, or rather the indisput
able command, that led Him step by step, taking no
thought for the morrow, doing or suffering when ' the
hour ' came just what was given Him to do or suffer.
He Himself points to this perfect trustfulness as the
evidence of His mission, and He sometimes describes it
in very intense words as ' losing hfe to find it,' and implies
that it is not a matter of external compulsion but
of self-transforming love. The Saviour's ' faith,' the
theologian's ' inspiration,' the philosopher's ' intuition,'
seem to be different names for one and the same power
D

SO THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
which is the deepest and most essential act of real hfe,
the act in which ordinary hfe reaches into real or eternal
life. Our Lord set this act before His disciples as one
which they should make their own. The Acts and
Epistles show how far the apostles did make it their
own. The Gospels describe (it seems unconsciously)
how our Lord enjoyed it perfectly, not as an act or series
of acts, but as a state in which He lived as in His natural
home. Perhaps we might hazard the expression that
we recognise in Him incarnation, and in the apostles in
spiration. We may assert without hesitation that this
condition of courageous trust is the conspicuous char
acteristic of the prophets. The records we have of their
hves display it in the same unconscious manner as do
the authors of the Gospels. In the prophets as in the
apostles the condition lacks the perfect steadiness of the
Lord. But in them as in the apostles it does appear
legitimate to point to it as a proof of true inspiration.
It is indeed in the prophets a very impressive proof, for
nothing is so obvious about them as this sense of theirs
of not being their own masters, as being beyond fear and
hope, as speaking and acting because they must.
When men have approached such a state as that, it
has generally been by the door of a marked conversion.
So with S. Paul ; so perhaps even in our Lord's earthly
life, through His temptation. So too it seems to have
been with these prophets. Isaiah has given us the
account of his conversion or ' call ' (Isa. vi.). Dr. H. F.
Hamilton, in his book The People of God (Frowde, 1912 ;
2 vols., vol. i., ' Israel '), writes of this account : ' What
causes Isaiah's apprehension is the very vividness of his
consciousness, the nakedness with which he sees his soul
contrasted against another Personality. If death is
sometimes apprehended because consciousness is felt to
be dying out, in this case death is apprehended because
consciousness is passing the bounds of hfe in the opposite
direction. It is becoming so acute and so intense, the

THE EARLY PROPHETS 51
sense of strain and inability to cope with the situation
is so severe, that the prophet feels that soul and body
are on the point of being torn asunder.' Thus Dr.
Hamilton brings out the intense, supra-rational char
acter of the prophet's conversion, as if a blow had been
struck in those deep springs of being of which we are all
but ignorant in ordinary affairs, as if he passed to new
hfe through death. And this of course was so supreme a
change because its interest hes, not in the machinery of
psychology, but in that moral sphere where the destinies
of mankind are worked out by mutual activity. ' Just
as Isaiah had experienced Yahweh's infinite power in his
inner soul, and therefore knew it to be universal and
irresistible, so also he had experienced Yahweh's hohness
and knew it to be the very essence of His being.'
This moral direction of the force which so astonishingly
worked upon the prophets is important. At first sight
all seems supernatural, and we might be prepared to
expect any inexphcable marvel in their acts and sayings.
Might not men thus supernaturally visited have spoken
in the language and thought of generations far removed
from them, even though scarcely a word of what they
said would have had a meaning for the people among
whom they hved ? Why should we doubt that Isaiah,
in the days of Hezekiah, delivered a prophecy of comfort
for the captives at Babylon in the time of Cyrus ? Why
should we seek for a contemporary application of the
poem of the Suffering Servant (Isa. liii.), instead of simply
believing that its author foretold the death of the Lord
Jesus Christ ?
Much might be said in answer to that. The greater
part of the prophecies do show an intense interest in the
fears, hopes, sins, temptations, pohtical circumstances of
the prophets' own generations. Isaiah, and still more
Jeremiah, appeal to the Lord's constancy in the unchang
ing laws by which He rules nature ; and an abrupt inter
ference with the regular laws of human life and reason

52 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
would stand in puzzhng contrast with this. The style
of these prophets is for the most part so admirable just
because it is the natural flower of the speech and thought
of their own times ; we are almost shocked to think of
this style being no part of the man himself, but merely
a robe to be put off and on as supernatural necessity
compels. And the more constantly we read these books
the more deeply the conviction holds us that the pro
phets' course was never supernaturally deflected, but
was always supra-naturally directed ; that reason was
carried in them to a higher plane, and was never atro
phied. The word we can hardly help applying to the
prophets is ' mystical.' Some years ago that would
have been inadmissible ; the word was so loosely used,
so often abused. It is still possible to misunderstand it.
Yet it does represent so much of that trend in modern
philosophy and religion towards life itself as the immedi
ate experience instead of the ultimate ground of truth,
that it may be adopted without much fear of misprision.
If explanation be demanded no better can be found than
Hooker's description of man's aspiration after good
' beyond the reach of sense ; yea somewhat above
capacity of reason which the mind with hidden exulta
tion rather surmiseth than conceiveth ' (cf . Dean Church
on Fenelon's Mysticism, in his Occasional Papers, i. xvi.).
The word so understood will be really useful here. The
mystical goes beyond what is superficially recognised
in nature. It is ' supra-natural,' if that rather arbi
trary distinction in phraseology may be repeated. It
belongs to nature when nature is contemplated as
denned and ordered, but, because ordered, therefore
divine. It never contradicts nature. To beheve in the
supernatural instead of in the mystical is the tendency
of all vulgar religion. We see traces of this in that
Canaanitish rehgion of Israel, which the prophets opposed.
We see traces of it again iii the traditions of the late,
priestly school of Jewish theologians. But though these

THE EARLY PROPHETS 53
traces are visible in the Old Testament, they are but
traces. The Spirit of the whole transcends them. They
are part of the daedal richness which makes the harmony
of its colour ; only when isolated do they cause difficulty,
and the ambition of the rising generation of critics is to
pass beyond the isolating of analysis to the interpre
tation which appreciates the harmony.
And for this purpose they still find their best allies
in the earher prophets. Those prophets were indeed
ideahsts who made no truce with superstition. But they
were ideahsts who strove at every step to apply their
ideal practically. If their supra-natural inspiration is
remarkable, so is the natural variety of its operation.
Isaiah has left us the account of his tremendous call in
ch. vi. It was as tremendous as S. Paul's ecstasy in which
he heard unspeakable words ; yet Isaiah has attempted
to describe what happened, and his attempt is marked
by consummate art. If we read the preceding chapters
we seem to hear him telhng us how, not unnaturally,
he was prepared for the decisive call. He sees the
magnificence of Jerusalem in the prosperous days of
Uzziah and dreams of her splendid future. That dream
is shattered by a closer view in which he perceives the
corruption of a society which has grown unconsciously,
but cruelly unjust ; external worship which but covers
pitiful materiahsm ; a dangerous political situation
and no rehgious or patriotic idea to meet it. And then
at last he foresees ruin, and a new life not of material
splendour but of hohness rising from the ruin (cf . Isaiah
ii.-iv.). He had indeed thought out in his own mind
the main hnes of the theology that was to be revealed to
him. What remained was the shock which should reach
to the very ground of the heart when he heard the
divine voice asking ' Whom shall we send ? ' and he
answered, 'Send me.' So to Amos a moral summons
transformed the shrewd observer of the nations round
him into the prophet sent to save his neighbour Israel.

54 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
So Hosea, heart-broken by his wife's unfaithfulness,
learned thereby to love her with a love divinely deepened
just because it was ' natural ' in a good husband. The
whole of his message to Israel turns upon the natural
ness of the analogy between his and the Lord's invin
cible love, invincible in each because it is the natural
love of a husband or a father. And in Hosea's supra-
natural call we hear less of the initial impulse, and are
chiefly struck with the persistency of his continued
ministry. He hoped against hope and declared that
the Lord did too. And all through we are at a loss
whether to call the motive power inspiration or affection.
But nowhere is this naturalness so marked as in
Jeremiah. Like Isaiah, he too had his premonitions.
And as to Isaiah, so to him there came a definite moment
when the divine prepotency mastered him and he was
constrained to act. But how different was the setting of
his revelation. No vision of celestial ritual, but the
flowering of an almond tree changed his whole hfe. The
natural sign of the beginning of spring compelled him to
delay no longer. The Lord was waking ; he too must
wake and no longer excuse himself as ' a mere child ' for
delaying to save his people (Jer. i. 6, 11, 12). That is the
astounding thing in all these prophets. They see their
world going to ruin and they determine to save the
world ; for it would be a rash criticism that even con
fined their burning love of men to their own nation ;
it means at least something, that nearly ah their books
contain prophecies for the nations, and in the pieces
which certainly belong to the old prophetic period the
nations, hke Israel, are rebuked with sympathy not hate.
But this runs into criticism which shall come later.
For the present let us notice a few more of these ' natural '
signs in Jeremiah. A pot boiling over on the fire rouses
his assurance of imminent judgement by invasion
(Jer. i. 13 ff.). The work of the potter, the craft of the
scribe — handicrafts are fuh of interest to this lover of his

THE EARLY PROPHETS 55
brother men — clear the theological truths which are
obscurely jostling in his mind. When he was in prison
and the Chaldean army was encamped upon his family
property, his cousin came to him to sign a deed of sale.
Jeremiah seized this curious preoccupation in the midst
of peril with the use and wont of business, as a divine
guidance for his own spiritual hope of Israel's future
(Jer. xxxii. 6 ff.). It is tempting to make a rearrange
ment of the chapters at this point and to see in the pro
phecy of the new covenant (xxxi. 31-34) the outcome of
this sign of Hanamel. Thus again a natural sign from
outside would have cleared the conflicting notions in
the prophet's mind, so that finally he sees neither blank
ruin, nor such material restoration as the vulgar prophets
round him insisted was certain, but a real restoration,
assured indeed yet spiritual. Or again notice the
exceedingly natural growth of Jeremiah's character
through discipline. One of the charms of his book is its
frequency in prayer. Here for the first time in the Old
Testament do we find frequent, intimate prayer. That
intimacy is the essence of Jeremiah's prayers. He pours
out his hopes and disappointments. He asks for hardly
any boon except— too often— something sadly hke
vengeance on his fellow-citizens who have returned him
evil for his good intentions. Yet he has a formula :
' 0 Lord, thou knowest.' And after one of these fierce
prayers the answer came : ' if thou take forth the
precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth '
(xv. 19) . And the whole career of Jeremiah is a continued
process of taking the precious from the vile, until he
attains that height of self-forgetting which he expressed
in an answer to Baruch, who, having just escaped with
his life from the reading of one bold roh of prophecy
before king Jehoiakim, rather excusably shrank from
doubhng the risk with another roll. But Jeremiah,
through misunderstanding, abuse, imprisonment, and
all but death at the hands of the people he serves, has

56 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
learned another view of life. ' Seekest thou great things
for thyself ? ' he said, ' seek them not : for, behold, I will
bring evil upon all flesh, saith the Lord ' (xiv. 5). Of all
the heroes of the Old Testament Jeremiah, made at last
perfect by suffering, is perhaps the most beautiful type
of our Lord Jesus Christ. This character of his is so
far above the common that direct and special inspiration
is the most reasonable way to account for it. But it is
also evident that inspiration worked in him by thoroughly
natural means, and that the work was not completed at
one blow, but by a gradual process. Indeed something
of the old man remained in him to the last, and in his
denunciation of the remnant who insisted on going to
Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah (xhv.) we cannot help
suspecting a touch of personal resentment. However
if it was so, we may be sure that his fierce words did not
interrupt his devoted service, and wherever his unhappy
countrymen were, there Jeremiah was still found —
saving them. The Jewish scholars who composed the
Hebrew book of Jeremiah showed fine insight in ap
pending the words to Baruch (xiv.) to this half-angry
speech, though they broke the chronological order to
do so.
But this operation of the Jewish ' composers ' brings
us face to face with a serious question. How were these
books of the prophets composed? How far can we trust
the order of events which they indicate, or trace from
their statements the development of the prophets*
minds ? How far indeed may we beheve that we have
the prophets' own words at all ? Who wrote these
books ? What material had the authors ? What purpose
guided them in the use of their material ?
It will at once occur to us that these are exactly the
kind of questions that a student of the Gospels is com
pelled to ask. Does not that parallel help us ? Sup
pose that these books are, as it were, Gospels of Isaiah,

THE EARLY PROPHETS 57
Jeremiah, etc. Suppose that we have the same difficulty
in deciding what they actuahy said and did, as we have
in the study of our Lord's hfe. If we have the same
difficulty we may also expect to have the same kind of
certainty in the end. And if so, modern criticism which
has conducted us to this extreme point of view, will
perhaps have done us no injury. It shows us how to
simphfy, to select essentials. And essentials are really
none the worse for being set ' in a large room ' of obscure
surroundings. Thus reahty is everywhere distinguished
from artificial system. If we can set out the broad
doctrine of Isaiah and show where it stands on the hne
of faith that runs through the Old Testament into the
New, we should gain httle more by determining precisely
how much of his book comes directly from him, the
chronological order of ah his extant prophecies, and the
connexion of all his political ahusions with the events
of his day.
Yet after all facta are facts. There can be no history
without setthng a good many. And the doubt wih
recur whether we know enough facts about these prophets
and their books for setting out even their broad doctrine.
A conspicuous point on which this doubt must be felt is
their Messianic doctrine, their hope for the good time
coming. Did Amos add to his prophecy of judgement
that picture of a joyous restoration with which his book
ends ? Can we trace a development in Isaiah from a
clear-cut view as in the near future of a divinely righteous
king in ch. ix., through the vaguer but more Spirit-filled
expectation of ch. xi., to the large but quite indefinite
prospect in ch. xxxiii., seen as from the summit of the
mountain he has been chmbing all his hfe — a prospect
with a ' far horizon ' which cannot in itself satisfy, but
promises a fulfilment in times still hid from the prophet's
vision ? That is a beautiful interpretation. It seemed
satisfactory when critics were treating this book as a
book written by Isaiah with additions from a later age.

58 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
But is it satisfactory now when it begins to be thought
that this book is a ' fife and theology of Isaiah ' ; con
taining records of things he said but perhaps never
wrote down himself ; these scanty records of the primi
tive era of prophecy being combined with other far
more extensive cohections of later prophecy which, in
one way or another, were considered by the late Jewish
scholars to be dependent on, or ihustrative of Isaianic
thought ?
It may be objected that this later criticism is extra
vagant. No doubt everyone now allows that Isa.xl.-lxvi.
comes from a prophet or prophets of the exile. Those
who take interest in such research are perhaps further
persuaded that some passages in Isa. i.-xxxix. do not suit
the times and circumstances of Isaiah. But why doubt
that Isa. i.-xxxix. is substantially from his pen, and that
with this book of Isaiah a later one (xl.-lxvi.) has been,
so to speak, bound ? So in libraries we still find manu
scripts from different authors bound in one volume and
the volume is named after the first writer. Why seek
a more comphcated explanation ? The answer is that
the book of Isaiah is far more comphcated than such a
volume. The very dissatisfaction of the plain reader
with the old and simpler criticism is a proof of this.
He had no quarrel with the critics. He was ready to
be instructed. But he knew the book himself, and he
knew that if difficulties were to be faced at all, there
were more of them than such clear-cut distinctions
accounted for. Of course if he turned to the larger works
of the original leaders of criticism he found them well
aware of this, and stih busy collecting facts and correcting
hypotheses. Much as we owe to those who have given
us ' results ' of criticism in an easy form, we must con
tinually remind ourselves that such ' results ' are from
the nature of the case few ; for the most part they only
estabhsh broad principles ; the science of criticism must
always be progressive ; and the worst compliment we

THE EARLY PROPHETS 59
can pay a critic is to accept him as a dogmatist whom we
may obey at our ease instead of criticising him in our
turn while we learn from him. All this applies also to
the latest critics, who hold that the prophetic books are
the product of late Judaism ; preserving an uncertain
amount of matter that comes from the prophets directly ;
but preserving this in a large setting of other matter
from very various ages and sources. So far as they
condescend to details of analysis, and undertake to prove
for instance that just these or those passages of Isaiah
belong to the time of the Maccabees, we shall be wise
to suspend judgement about their accuracy. So far as
they simply give us the broad principle that the book
of Isaiah was written (hke most of the prophetic books)
in the later age of Judaism, it is rather different. A
little consideration will probably persuade us that there
is a good deal in the idea. Then the best plan is to read
the books ourselves with this idea in our head, and see
whether it does not make them more intelligible.
In Isaiah, to keep to that book, we find that in the
latter hah of xl.-lxvi. we are no longer reading of the days
of Cyrus, of the high hopes, and free spiritual ideahsm
of the ' Comfort ye ' prophecy. There is a marked
change to disappointment, severity, and new stress on
institutional religion. Yet it is difficult to say exactly
where the change begins. The words just used do not
describe ah the shades of thought that run in and out in
these chapters. There is a comphcation of ideas in
them. In chapters i.-xxxix. there are certainly some
passages which refer to the Babylonian empire and to
its downfall. There is one long piece, xxiv.-xxvii., which
both in vocabulary and in thought is very different
indeed from those chapters which we are agreed to accept
as representing the mind of Isaiah. And there are some
chapters which are obviously not prophecies at all but
narratives ; and they are mainly taken out of the book
of Kings. These are but hints of what may be noticed

60 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
at every turn. Surely however it is aheady evident
that things begin to point to a book written by some
one else about Isaiah, rather than to a book written by
Isaiah to which some one else has made additions. And
presently we notice that nothing is ever said which
suggests that Isaiah left any written prophecies. The
only writing of his which is mentioned is the placarding
on a board of a few striking words which form the text
of spoken prophecies. So Jeremiah dictates to Baruch
and does not write himseh. So Habakkuk is bidden to
write his vision indeed, but in the same fashion as Isaiah's
placards. He is to ' make it plain upon tables that he
may run that readeth it' (Hab. ii. 2). We begin to
wonder whether these early prophets were writers at all.
Perhaps we think of LordRosebery'sZ»/e of Chatham, and
remember that the effect Chatham made upon his genera
tion was by his spoken words. Little or nothing remains
written of what he said. It is often difficult to decide
precisely what he did say. Yet, in spite of obscure
and contradictory reports, the effect of those vigorous
speeches does remain. We do know what principles
Chatham stood for, and how he defended them. His
speeches, though so impossible to reproduce, are still in
their way more to us than the volumes of Burke which
are printed from his manuscripts. There is httle doubt
that Ezekiel did write his book. That is a great book
too. To have just what he wrote is a valuable posses
sion. Yet does it help us far towards recovering what
he said, and is it not our impression that the pecuhar
glory of Isaiah's oratory compared with Ezekiel's comes
just from that difference ? Isaiah was a speaker, care
less of the preservation of his exact words, and his speech
was the great thing ; Ezekiel was a writer who put his
heart into his book.
But these dry arguments of criticism are not to be
pursued here. There is another direction in which this
question touches us more closely. Look at Isa. ix. 1-7.

THE EARLY PROPHETS 6t
and especially the last two verses (' for unto us a child
is born, unto us a son is given,' etc.), and ask yourself
what these magnificent words meant when they were
first written. Some have been content to say that they
are a prediction of our Lord Jesus Christ. But though
they are without doubt a prophecy which is fulfilled in
Him, it is not a real answer to say they were, to Isaiah's
contemporaries, a simple prediction of Him. Nor
indeed are they to us a simple prophecy of the birth at
Bethlehem. When we read them on Christmas Day
we bring to our interpretation of them a multitude of
memories and hopes that centre in the exalted Christ
who has taken up our manhood into God, and who is
fulfilling Himseh (as S. Paul and S. John have taught us
to beheve) in the still advancing history of the world.
But what did those think of them who first heard these
words ? A little while ago many would have answered
that Isaiah spoke them to the people of Jerusalem when
the Assyrian was threatening them, and that they must
have understood Isaiah to mean something like this :
judgement indeed is about to fall upon this wicked and
faithless city ; but the judgement will purge us ; and
after it has purged us a righteous king, the near descend
ant of our present king, will rule over us ; He will be
what Israel's kings ought to be, what Nathan told David
they should be, truly a Son of our Lord God, a sacrament
of God's presence with us. Such an explanation does
give a meaning to the passage ; not altogether an un
worthy one, for it expresses a very noble conception
of the divine right of Israel's kings ; and it is consistent
with much that we read in the Old Testament. But is
it consistent with all the facts we can observe ? Is it
quite easy to suppose Isaiah counteracting the force of
his denunciation by this bright picture ? ' Behold dis
tress and darkness, the gloom of anguish. . . . But there
shah be no gloom to her that was in anguish.' Would
that kind of contradiction be the wise, kind way of

62 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
deahng with a nation obstinately set upon its ruin, whom
the prophet is straining every nerve to convert ? And is
the explanation quite a worthy one even ? ' And his
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.' Do not such
astounding titles after all imply quite another kind of
king than Hezekiah or his son or grandson could possibly
be ? Suppose that this passage does not come from
Isaiah at all. Or suppose that the full form in which
we read it is due to a modification of some less daring
utterance of Isaiah. Look at Daniel vii., or the book of
Enoch, and see how in the late Jewish time some pious
hearts at any rate were expecting, however dimly or
strangely, a Messiah King from heaven who would bring
the end of all oppression and give rest or triumph to
the 'saints' after their 'anguish.' And then consider
whether this passage might not have a deeper and a more
natural sense, if it represents, not the precise words of
Isaiah, but Isaiah as read in the synagogue a few centuries
before the birth of Christ ?
A striking suggestion but pure conjecture, may be the
comment. But it is not quite pure conjecture. The
Septuagint gives the translation of Isaiah into Greek
which was made probably in Egypt and probably in
the third century B.C. The Septuagint has a different
ending to verse 6. Those who know the Introits of the
Roman Missal are famihar with it in its ' Old Latin '
form. It runs : ' His name shall be called messenger
(or angel) of great counsel. For I wih bring peace upon
the rulers and health to him.' This certainly shows that
there was a time when the Jewish text of this passage
was uncertain. It seems to imply that an older form of
the prophecy was modified for synagogue reading. And
such modification appears the more probable when we
take a comprehensive view of all the prophetic books.
So many passages in them look hke words of comfort
suitable to an oppressed, but repentant and faithful

THE EARLY PROPHETS 63
people, whereas the gist of the early prophecy is warn
ing and remonstrance addressed to a faithless and
obstinate people. When we think of our own church
services, and how we sing Te Deum at the end of some
severe reading from the Old Testament, or give a Christian
meaning to a fierce psalm by adding the Gloria, it does
not seem unreasonable to fancy something of the same
kind being practised in the synagogue.
That in some way or other these additions and modi
fications have been made is also shown to be probable
by examining the language of the passages in question.
Sometimes, as in Isa. xxiv.-xxvii., the difference of style
is quite plainly marked ; sometimes the characteristics
are minute and therefore more disputable. But we need
not go into such details. For our present object is simply
to show that it is worth while to read the prophets for
ourselves with this idea in mind and see whether it does
not enable us to read them with more uninterrupted
understanding, and especially whether we shall not find
that it allows us to give a deeper meaning to many great
passages than we should otherwise venture to do. The
primitive theology of the early prophets has its own
conspicuous merits. It is bold, simple, poetic ; above
all it goes direct to its moral purpose. But it has
its hmitations. Even the morality sounds strangely
hmited to a Christian ear. With Jeremiah and the
deuteronomic school an approach is made to the Chris
tian feehng for motive rather than for works. But
even in them there is httle of the Christian desire for
cleansing. And in Amos, Isaiah, Micah, little more is
demanded than to do justly ; if the sinner would be
right with God let him simply turn from his evil way.
The force of these prophets is not in the depth of their
sense of sin, but in their unflinching insistence on faith
fulness to a plain moral standard in spite of the apparent
and generally acknowledged necessity of making terms
with a baser fashion. Again there is the hmited, still

64 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
mainly national, conception of Jahweh, Israel's God.
This hmitation makes for intensity. There is something
in it which a later, wider -thinking age ought not of
course to lose but is too apt to lose. But at any rate
these hmitations, whatever their compensating possi
bilities, do make it difficult to credit those early prophets
with certain great and almost Christian thoughts which
seem to be expressed in some parts of their books,
yet are not expressed with such absolute clearness as
to forbid dilution of their significance. But those who
allow a post-exihc influence to be permeating these
books will never dilute such significant passages. Isaiah,
in all his subhmity, was separated from the Christian
Church by seven centuries and more. His early faith
and passion, when we succeed in isolating them, blow
hke a refreshing gale upon a more complex age. But
the book of Isaiah, though it confuses the primitive
directness of the prophet, is a sacred book aheady pre
pared for the Christian Church to use.
It seems then reasonable to admit the general prin
ciple that the prophetic books are Lives of the prophets,
composed in the Jewish Church. But it will be wise
of us to be cautious in setthng details, making sharp
analyses, assigning this or that event in history as the
source or impulse of particular passages. The principle
alone will help us to study the book in a fresh manner,
though we confess our ignorance about special appli
cations of it, or even our scepticism about the possibility
of discovering very much of the history of any ancient
book. But we shall be cautious too in the applications
we do make. Not one only, but several counterbalancing
considerations must often be admitted. This question
of Messianic prophecy opens a whole vista of possibihties.
The later expectation of the heavenly Messiah seems after
all to have been the revival on a higher plane of some
of the most ancient ideas of Israel, or of the Semitic
world. It is plain from Amos as weh as from Isaiah that

THE EARLY PROPHETS 65
the people in their time used the phrase ' the day of the
Lord ' as a favourite rehgious formula. Amos re
pudiated Israel's idea of this ' day ' (Amos v. 18 ff.).
But is it not possible that he, or at any rate Isaiah,
adopted the idea and played themselves no small part
in transforming it ? May not Isaiah ix., xi., xxxiii., be
successive transformations of this idea which later
generations received from Isaiah, and used to guide
them in their own fuller transformation ? May not
something of the same kind be said about those gorgeous
chapters in Jeremiah, in which he pictures a return from
captivity, and a splendid kingdom for the son of David ?
They seem at first sight impossible from the mouth of
Jeremiah. They seem in unexpected agreement with
those prophets, such as Hananiah, whose hopefulness
Jeremiah opposed. One or two of them perhaps cannot
on any terms be explained as expressing the mind of
Jeremiah. Yet figurative language has its place in him.
Some of these passages might be highly concrete methods
of recommending the spiritual hope of the new covenant
to duh people. The ' seventy years ' of xxix. 10 might
have meant in Jeremiah's prophecy a different thing
from the plain measurement of the duration of the cap
tivity which later readers understood them to mean.
That might be urged, and much more of hke character ;
and though it would probably not carry us far, still it
would suggest several points on which it would be
prudent to acknowledge our ignorance of what it is
possible or impossible for Jeremiah or other early pro
phets to have said. But yet another characteristic of
these prophets needs to be noticed which may tend to
excuse us from paying too much attention to their de
pendence on early Messianic influence. Amos mentions
the ' day of the Lord,' but he mentions it only to reject
the popular notion of that day. He treats the whole
idea nearly as he treats sacrifice. And of course the
treatment of sacrifice by these prophets is surprising.
E

66 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
If the book of Leviticus had been received in their days ;
if even it had been received yet generally neglected, their
treatment of sacrifice would be inexplicable. If Jeremiah
knew Leviticus as a sacred book, there is no means of
explaining his words in vii. 22, 23 : ' For I spake not unto
your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I
brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning
burnt offerings or sacrifices : but this thing I commanded
them, saying, Hearken unto my voice, and I will be your
God, and ye shall be my people.' There can be httle
doubt that Jeremiah did not read Leviticus. But it is
generally supposed that he knew some form of Deuter
onomy, and it is at least probable that the germ of
the Levitical ordinances was already conserved by the
priests. Yet Jeremiah and Amos, and indeed all the
great prophets of that period, are so suspicious of
sacrificial rehgion that it would not be wrong to call
them hostile to it. The fact is these prophets have one
strongly marked characteristic in common. They are
' puritans.' They set their faces so sternly against all
forms of popular superstition that they oppose ceremonial
which lends itself to superstitious abuse even though it
has its good side. And the sacrificial system did so lend
itself. The worship at the high places was sacrificial
and the worship at the high places was tainted with
many abominations. The worship of the temple too
was sacrificial and the worship of the temple tended to
be formal and insincere ; ' temple-treading ' Isaiah called
it in his trenchant way (Isa. i. 12). And so to these pro
phets, who are so extreme in their convictions, sacrifice
is not real religion at ah.
This puritanism shows itself in other parts of their
teaching. It has often been observed how little they say
about hfe beyond the grave. It would be absurd to infer
that they did not beheve in immortahty. It is putting
the truth perversely to say that they are so full of the
thought of God's presence on earth with men in this life

THE EARLY PROPHETS 67
that they do not care to think of a hfe to come. The
truth is rather this : Sheol was a prominent article of
the popular superstitious faith, and the prophets wished
to stamp out that superstition ; hence they avoided all
language which might suggest it. The popular idea of
Sheol was that after death men passed to a dim half-life
in that gloomy abode which lay outside the sphere of
Jahweh's dominion. But the prophets had a nobler con
ception of Jahweh, which we may imperfectly indicate
by using ' the Lord ' in capital letters for the Hebrew
name when we are quoting them ; that is the good device
of our English versions, an improved imitation of the
Septuagint and Vulgate. The prophets insisted that
there was no place where the Lord had not dominion ;
therefore there was no such place as Sheol at all. They
sometimes use the word, but rarely and always with a
touch of scorn or to give a kind of brutal edge to their
indignation. So Isaiah says (v. 14), ' therefore Sheol
hath enlarged her desire and opened her mouth without
measure.' So too with other words or ideas from the
popular, half-heathen mythology. The prophets eschew
it, yet to point his bitter irony Amos breaks through
decorum and says : ' though they hide themselves in the
top of Carmel, I wih search and take them out thence ;
and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of
the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall
bite them ' (Amos ix. 3). The serpent, Rahab, levia
than, etc., are fabulous monsters of the old Semitic
mythology, which these prophets will not so much as
name except in outbursts of passion where they choose
to make their language horrid. It is just possible that
Isa. xiv. may be explained in that way. But one reason
for doubting whether that passage comes from Isaiah is
the elaborate and sustained treatment of the imagery
of Sheol ; and when we notice that the king who is there
greeted by the other shadowy kings in Sheol is the king
of Babylon, our doubts are strengthened. Other pro-

68 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
phets might not be so scrupulous. At a later time when
the puritan victory had been won, and men no longer
beheved seriously in Sheol, the old language might be
repeated as metaphor. But as far as we know the mind
of Isaiah and his companions in prophecy, we are not
apt to think that they could have talked like that.
To them Sheol was false doctrine, cruel to men and
derogatory to the Lord. In order to clear it quite away
they were reticent about hfe beyond the grave altogether,
just as modern puritans deprived themselves of loving
mention of their dead in their prayers, that they might
not countenance superstitions about the state of those
who had fallen asleep in Christ. There is however not
a single word in the prophets which should lead us to
suppose that they did not hold with perfect happiness
the ancient and perpetual behef of true Israehtes : we
go to God and that is enough ; the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, is not the God of the dead but of the
hving. They were puritans, and perhaps puritanism even in
prophets has the defect of its quahties. This prophetic
rehgion did need something more to complete it. The
sermons of Deuteronomy are the ultimate expression of
their faith ; but those sermons are combined with a
formal law, and Ezekiel, himseh a prophet, carried out
their purposes by reviving a purified system of ritual
and law. But these early heroes of the faith had their
own supreme quahty — ideahsm, of which their personal
heroism was one manifestation. For they were heroes,
whose hkeness we do not quite find again in Israel's
history. Those who trusted or supported them during
their ministry were so few that we may justly describe
them as standing each one alone against a hostile world.
If the dehverance of Jerusalem brought Isaiah a brief
popularity, it was but brief. In the reigns of Hezekiah's
successors reaction against his doctrine set in triumph
antly. And the impression left upon us by Isaiah

THE EARLY PROPHETS 69
i.-xxxix. is that his career closed in disappointment. A
century later his teaching gave a watchword to a short
sighted patriotism. But the heart of his teaching was
lost ; and when Jeremiah renewed it and enlarged it
he was persecuted as a freethinker and a traitor. Their
courage was the fruit of an ideahsm just hke our Lord's
which made them ' seek first the Kingdom of God and
His righteousness.' There is the great, eternal message
of these prophets. They uphold to every timid age
ideahsm in pohtics. Foreign empires, overwhelmingly
powerful, threatened Israel. The nation fluctuated
between indolent bhndness to its peril and feverish
belhcose conceit. Kings and statesmen dared not beheve
in any safety but what might be secured by intrigue with
Egypt and the neighbouring states. The prophets
declared that the Lord was really hving and near and
able to save, and that all would be well if they simply
put themselves into His hands. But the prophetic faith
was shrewd and practical. By putting themselves into
the Lord's hands they did not mean inertness but an
active and difficult trust. Social relationships were at
an evil pass. The prophets said the injustice and im
morality of the times were horrible. Other people seem
to have thought things were not really so bad. We shah
probably understand the situation best if we use our
own social problems to explain it. Advancing civilisation
has smoothed the surface ; we are less inconsiderately
brutal than men were in Isaiah's days, or perhaps in the
Middle Ages ; it would show lack of faith to doubt that
there has been real improvement in the course of twenty-
seven centuries. But the essential hkeness probably
remains. Most men then, as most men now, were kind-
hearted and would have hked to make the poor less
wretched and to let justice rule in ah relationships of hfe.
The advance that Christianity has worked is to be recog
nised in this : Isaiah was content to think of justice ;
we know that moral sacrifice is also right. But the same

70 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
difficulty confronted him as confronts us : the compli
cations of life being what they are, how is the straight
way to be found through them ? And again : the
excuses of apparent necessity being what they are, how
can the fortunate people dare to be logical and admit
that their insensibihty is a crying sin? Isaiah and those
other prophets detached themselves from the web of
commonplace interests. They said that this insensi
bihty was unjust, cruel, shameful. They said that
things could be put right by drastic measures, and that
the trust in the Lord which would be real safety in the
perilous times meant absolute honesty in pohtics, what
ever the immediate consequences of such honesty might
be, and the employment of the leisure thus gained on
domestic reforms. They were shrewd and practical.
If one hke Micah seems too revolutionary to be reahy a
safe guide to the abiding welfare of a people, that part of
his teaching is corrected by the larger and more patient
labour of Isaiah. And the very limitation of their moral
ambitions within the bounds of plain justice saved them
from mischievous interference with the beneficent
commonplaces of civilisation. Perhaps they sometimes
indulged in poetic dreams of a Messianic future, but in
the path of duty they went wisely and warily enough.
Only they would not be content with anything un
worthy of the ideal, and they were wholly for generosity,
wholly against selfish caution.
That was the first chapter in their teaching. Be
honest in politics ; restore justice at home ; then trust
the Lord who will certainly keep His people safe. But
they were all compelled to open a second chapter. Kings,
statesmen, people, refused to be persuaded. Intrigue
still went on in pohtics, and injustice stih made misery
at home, and national ruin became more and more
imminent. Then the prophets said : prosperity, even
safety, is a little matter compared with hohness and the
peace of God's favour; trust the Lord even at the

THE EARLY PROPHETS 71
eleventh hour ; put all in His hands, but do His will,
do simply right ; He may cause us to stand or He may
cause us to f ah before our enemies ; let Him do as He
judges best ; be sure that what He does will be best for
us. That is a hard doctrine, not learned easily even by
prophets. It seems as though Isaiah preached it to
Hezekiah, and when at last Hezekiah accepted it, he
was dehvered from the necessity of testing its truth in
all its severity. Only with Jeremiah do we find it fuhy
and absolutely upheld. The people of his day would
not endure it from his hps, but he — perhaps gradually —
certainly by a real inspiration, received it from the Lord
who knew him better than he knew himseh. Timid
hngerer as he was by nature, he never faltered in pro
claiming it when it had entered his own heart. He did
prepare Israel also to accept it when stern experience
gave them another chance. In their apparent ruin
they learned the secret of this deeper salvation. And
though the nation in after centuries may not always have
been faithful to this glorious truth, it did become part
of their continuous hfe. It has never been so in any
thing hke the same degree with any other nation, until
the Lord Jesus Christ made the essential spirit of Judaism
a common inheritance for all mankind.

Ill
EZEKIEL AND THE LAW
Ezra's book of the law compared with Josiah's ; it is
priestly instead of prophetic — Priestly rehgion in
augurated by Ezekiel — The earher prophetic impulse
dies away at the fall of Jerusalem — Yet runs out into
the ' Comfort ye ' prophecy of Isa. xl. ff. — Character of
that prophecy, especially of the ' Servant ' passages —
Difference apparent in lv.-lxvi. which are touched by
the new priestly influence — Ezekiel and the law — He
revives ancient theology of sacrifice on a higher plane —
His plan for legal and effective reformation — Develop
ment of law and priesthood sketched ; Exodus, Deuter
onomy, Leviticus — At each stage the Old Testament
asserts religion against formalism.
In the eighth chapter of Nehemiah we are told that Ezra
the scribe and priest brought ' the book of the law of
Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel,' and
read it before the congregation of the children of Israel
in Jerusalem ' before the broad place that was before
the water-gate.' A book had once before been read to
the people in Jerusalem. In the reign of Josiah, when
the temple was repaired (2 Kings xxii.) Hilkiah the high
priest ' found the book of the law in the house of the
Lord.' Shaphan the scribe read it, first himself, then
to the king. The king rent his clothes in horror, as
we may infer from the sequel, at the idolatry of his land
and the denunciation of that idolatry which the book con
tained. The book was taken to Huldah the prophetess,
who confirmed its words. Then ' the king sent, and
they gathered unto him all the elders of Judah and
72

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 73
of Jerusalem. And the king went up to the house of
the Lord, and ah the men of Judah and all the inhabi
tants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the
prophets, and all the people, both small and great : and
he read in their ears all the words of the book of the
covenant which was found in the house of the Lord.
And the king stood by the pillar, and made a covenant
before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep
his commandments, and his testimonies, and his statutes,
with -ah his heart, and ah his soul, to confirm the words
of this covenant that were written in this book : and all
the people stood to the covenant' (2 Kings xxiii. 1-3).
And after that a reformation was carried through which
followed the ordinances of Deuteronomy so exactly that
it has always been supposed that this book which was
found was Deuteronomy. So S. Jerome said, f oho wing
Jewish tradition. In later times the further questions
have been asked : whether it was the whole of the
Deuteronomy we read, and when and by whom the book
had been written. Into those questions we will not go
now. What we have to notice is that this reading of
a book of law to the people may be compared with
Ezra's reading in post-exihc days, and that the contrast
between the two is very marked.
Ezra's book was evidently much larger than Josiah's.
That seems to have been read by Shaphan and the king
and Huldah in quick succession, and there is nothing to
suggest that the meeting in the temple lasted a very long
time. But Ezra read from early morning till midday,
continued his reading on a second day, and, still con
tinuing as we may suppose, ' day by day, from the first
day unto the last day, he read in the book of the law of
God.' This fits the new title which Ezra's book bears.
The other was described simply as ' the book of the
covenant ' ; this has a name which has dominated the
history of Israel ever since, ' the book of the law of
Moses.' If Josiah's book and its effect make us think

74 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of Deuteronomy, Ezra's book and its effect make us
think of the great first division of the Hebrew canon,
' the Law.'
We notice too how closely the earlier reading was
connected with prophecy. A priest found the book,
and a scribe read it, but priest, scribe, and king, seek
explanation and advice from a prophetess. The gravity
of its contents was felt because they coincided with what
the prophets had long been vainly urging, not stricter
attention to ritual or the observance of a completer civil
code, but the abohtion of heathen abominations. ' Thus
saith the Lord,' was Huldah's answer, ' Behold, I will
bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants
thereof, even ah the words of the book which the king of
Judah hath read : because they have forsaken me, and
have burned incense unto other gods, that they might
provoke me to anger with ah the work of their hands ;
therefore my wrath shah be kindled against this place,
and it shah not be quenched' (2 Kings xxii. 16, 17).
Huldah repeats the strain of ah the prophets and
evidently found the book in thorough harmony with
that strain ; the whole episode breathes the spirit of
early prophecy. But in the later reading no prophet
appears. Ezra, the scribe and priest, rules throughout.
A different spirit breathes through the whole of that
narrative. This is just what an attentive reader of Israel's history
might expect. With the fah of Jerusalem the older
prophecy reached its climax and began to cease. At the
same moment another religious impulse began to oper
ate. Jeremiah completes the one movement : Ezekiel
introduces the other. Jeremiah is almost the last of
the prophetical prophets. Ezekiel almost brings in the
Law. It is a transition, not an abrupt cleavage. There
had been a law before Ezekiel took it up and gave it
new vigour. There is prophecy after Jeremiah, and

EZEK f EL AND THE LA W 75
Ezekiel himself was a great prophet in whom the spirit
of the earher prophets was by no means quenched. He
changed men's thoughts. Circumstances — as we say,
though the writers we are studying would say more
philosophically, God — were also fashioning the change.
Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the prophets of the
second temple, are still prophets ; but we cannot read
them without feehng that they scarcely continue the old
tradition of their calling. The temple, the institutions
of rehgion, are more to them ; the soaring ideahsm of
Isaiah or Jeremiah is beyond their inspiration. We
can understand them more easily, in the same way
that we can understand other parts of the New Testa
ment more easily than the most Pauline epistles of
S. Paul.
Yet there is one prophet of this age who cannot be
thus classified. The unnamed author of those chapters
in Isaiah which begin ' Comfort ye, comfort ye my
people,' stands in the same hne as Isaiah and Jeremiah.
He came with a message of encouragement to the exiles.
About forty years had passed since the fah of Jerusalem.
Rumours — ' voices in the wilderness ' — of the victories
of Cyrus the Persian were heard. He bids the exiles
be of good courage. Their Lord has not forsaken them.
He is directing this new conqueror ; He will come and set
them free. They have received double for ah their sins.
They shah return to Jerusalem and begin a new hfe of
hohness. As the prophet works out this theme he seems to be
proclaiming that the victory of the earher prophets is
won at last. They strove against the idolatry of Israel
and strove in vain. But now there is no more need for
that. This prophet heaps contempt upon the idols
because his people are inchned to fear them as the gods
of their powerful oppressors ; they have no longer any
wish to use them as their own gods. The earher prophets
urged repentance and urged it in vain. But this prophet

76 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
cheers a repentant people with the assurance of forgive
ness. They tried to deepen Israel's faith in the Lord as
the one true righteous God, before whom the gods of the
nations were as nought. This prophet proclaims to a
sympathetic people that the gods of the nations are not
merely as nought but are absolutely nought — things of
nothingness, and that the Lord is the one and only God
— ' one God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth, and of ah things visible and invisible.' ' I am he ;
before me there was no God formed, neither shah there
be after me. I, even I, am the Lord ; and beside me
there is no saviour. ... I am the first, and I am the
last ; and beside me there is no God. ... Is there a
God beside me ? yea, there is no Rock ; I know not
any' (Isa. xhii. 10 f ., xhv. 6, 8). So the refrain goes sound
ing with varied repetition, as of music, through this
Te Deum. It is the Catholic faith established at last
for Judaism, Christianity, and the whole of the thought
ful world of the future : ' that we worship one God.'
And that allusion to the Athanasian Creed is even more
justified than might appear at first sight. Whether all
comes from one prophet, or whether the complex sub
tlety, which hes beneath the surface of this smoothly
running poem, be due to a final reunion of many minds
in one more than personal utterance, is another of those
critical problems that we may leave to minute scholars.
At any rate this prophecy, as we read it, is far more than
a hymn of bare monotheism. Its God is indeed tran
scendent ; the glory of Jewish theology is that it never
dilutes that difficult truth of the more far-reaching
philosophy. But He is immanent also ; He who (as
the repeated present participles indicate) is ' still
creating,' and who inspires all history and speaks to the
secret heart of Cyrus as well as of Israel, is certainly
immanent. But the immanence of God is one form
of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. And indeed that
doctrine is directly expressed in words which passed

EZEKIEL AND THE LA IV 77
quite easily into the gospel hfe : ' The spirit of the Lord
God is upon me ; because the Lord hath anointed me to
preach good tidings unto the meek. ... In ah their
affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence
saved them. . . . But they rebehed, and grieved his
holy spirit. ... As the cattle that go down into the
valley, the spirit of the Lord caused them to rest : so
didst thou lead thy people' (Isa. lxi. 1, lxiii. 9, 10, 14).
Stih more striking is the adumbration (to content our
selves with too cold a term) of the Mediator who takes
up manhood into God. In the first fifteen chapters of
this prophecy a title ' the servant of the Lord : is often
repeated. At first it seems a mere name for Israel.
Then its significance seems to deepen as it becomes
obscure and mysterious. This servant is to convert
Israel, and to give the gospel of the Lord even to the
heathen. He is to meet with discouragement and perse
cution which becomes fiercer and fiercer. At last, in
Iii. 13-liii., the servant finds life in losing it for the sake of
men. He bears their iniquities, he makes intercession
for the transgressors, and in their salvation he sees his
seed, he prolongs his days though he has died a martyr's
death. That is far more than the deepest possible
answer to the problem of pain. It is part — and the
essential part — of the one and only solution of the pro
blem of salvation. Some have supposed the prophet
of the exile was thinking of Jeremiah when he drew this
picture. Others, that a prophet of the Maceabean age
described the martyred ' saints ' who by their death
brought new hfe to Israel, and through Israel to the world
with which Israel was then coming into closer contact.
How can we tell ? The mechanism of the composition
has been worn away and lost in the long course of ages.
The prophecy itself remains, and the lyric passion of its
author has so concentrated his once perhaps vague
thought, that its essential meaning stands out clearer for
being stripped of all minor associations. As a rule we

78 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
rightly desire historical background for the understanding
of a written word. This is one of those rare and supreme
utterances which do not require it. Even to the first
hearers of these words their eternal, universal sense
must have been the thing that mattered. They met, for
them as weh as for us, the whole problem of God and
man, loss and gain, the one and the many, by the prin
ciple of sacrifice. The truth was made universal just
because it was gathered in from the indefinite sphere of
nations, saints etc., and made to hve in a particular
person — that is the genius of lyric poetry ; that person
willed to lose his hfe for his Master's sake and the Gospel,
and so found the real hfe in which he no longer lived
alone and separated. The problem is the problem of
' individuals,' the solution is the love of a ' person.' If
the words wpre spoken in the days of the exile it may well
be that many who heard them thought of Jeremiah. In
the time of the Maccabees, and in all times since, those
who hear them have thought of different friends and
' saviours.' It is no contradiction, but the confirmation
of such affectionate thoughts, if the Christian Church
feels that no better summary of critical opinions about
the passage can be given than the sentence : ' the testi
mony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.'
This servant poem (hi. 13— liii.) interrupts a strain of
joyous praise which is resumed in the next chapter.
Some pecuharities in its vocabulary and style may in
dicate that it has been inserted in a hymn of praise which
once proceeded continuously. If so the insertion has
but improved the art of the whole. It comes hke a more
serious movement in a piece of music which adds to the
complexity and interest of the composition. And this
latter hah of the book of Isaiah is a finished, almost
musical, composition. Its art is so unlike the ruder,
though even greater, style of the older Isaiah ; it is so
accomphshed, that it gives the reader a feehng of ease
and smoothness which tempts him to forget how

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 79
strenuous the thought is. But the thought is really
strenuous. Many of the difficulties of the earher
prophets were past and gone when this author wrote.
But he had new ones of his own. Men were beginning
to look back ; and history, in which God seemed so often
to have been absent, made a trial for faith. The exiles
had been transplanted into a richer civilisation than
their own. The science of the ancient world was not
contemptible, and Babylon knew the best of it. When
the nineteenth century began to awake to the claims of
science the first chapter of Genesis became a difficulty.
Then it was argued that this Hymn of Creation was not
intended to settle scientific questions but only to pro
claim the divine principles of creation. But as know
ledge became calmer, it was recognised that, after all,
this Hymn was more scientific than might have been
expected. If critics are right in holding that it was
written after the exile, this would not be astonish
ing. Babylon knew a good deal, and had taught
intelligent Judaism much. But science always has
brought, and always must bring some trial to faith.
And as we read Isaiah xl.-lxvi., and especiahy xl.-lv.,
we seem to hear a prophet, who is also a thinker,
meeting this intellectual trial with intellectual help.
Tennyson's In Memoriam belongs of course to a very
different order of inspiration. Yet it may illustrate
the position and character of this prophet if we say that
he stands to Jeremiah in somewhat the same relationship
as Tennyson stands in towards Browning. Jeremiah
is more of a mystic ; he is more of a philosopher. Jere
miah is rougher in language and has more appearance of
wrestling with thought, yet is in reahty an emotional
rather than a severe thinker ; he conceals his austere
thought by the smooth flow of his language ; he employs
passionate imagery quite often ; but he is really doing
his best to face the whole of the intellectual difficulty
of his generation. What could be better selected as a

80 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
modern type of the religious feehng of Jeremiah than
those lines of Browning ?
' The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, " 0 heart I made, a heart beats here ! " '
But there are some stanzas in In Memoriam in which
Tennyson speaks of the frailty of faith in the face of
nature ; appeals to feehng to beat down doubt ; then
answers 'No,' and once more sets himself to think out
the whole tangle of the new knowledge, only more
modestly, under guidance till the whole shah be dis
covered : ' If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,
I heard a voice " beheve no more "
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep ;
'A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd " I have felt."
' No, like a child in doubt and fear :
But that blind clamour made me wise ;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near ;
* And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands ;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro' nature, moulding men.'
This corresponds to the prophet of the exile who
wrote : ' I form the hght, and create darkness ; I make
peace, and create evil ; I am the Lord, that doeth all
these things. . . . Verily thou art a God that hidest
thyself, 0 God of Israel, the Saviour ' (Isa. xiv. 7, 15).

EZEK f EL AND THE LAW 81
The latter part of these -chapters, xl.-lxvi., differs in
some notable respects from the former. In some passages
the temple and its ordinances of worship seem pre
supposed. The stress laid upon keeping the Sabbath in
chapter lvi. shows another kind of rehgious interest from
the soaring ideas of the earher chapters which scarcely
condescend to rules of life. There is an air of disap
pointed hope in some places as though rules of hfe were
proving after all only too much needed. The last
chapter ends with such terrible severity that a direction
is added in many Hebrew Bibles tehing the reader to
repeat the words which precede these, and so to con
clude on a happier note. Yet much of the tender beauty
of the opening chapters does mingle with ah this, and
it is not easy to draw a hard and fast hne of division.
Still the change cannot but be felt and, whatever be the
historical secret of the composition of the whole set of
prophecies, the change means that the new influence of
law is operating. This influence may have entered in
force when Ezra read to the people, but the man who
prepared the way for it was Ezekiel.
Landor writes somewhere of Lucretius as ' the authori
tative and stately man who leads Memmius from the
camp to the garden of Epicurus,' a phrase which rises
appositely to the memory of the reader of Ezekiel. For
it was Ezekiel's mission to lead Israel from the camp of
war and politics to the hahowed and secluded hfe of
Judaism, and the vision with which his book closes is (as
in the vision of S. John the Divine) a vision of a garden-
city. Still more appropriate is the personal description,
' the authoritative and stately man,' as will readily be
felt when the majestic ardour of Isaiah, or the passionate
heart of Jeremiah, is compared with the restrained force
of Ezekiel's prophecy and its measured advance, as
though of impersonal law. Yet these qualities are not
merely Ezekiel's own. He, like all strong thinkers, is
the product of the class he moulds. What has just been
V

82 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
said amounts to this ; he belongs to the priestly type of
Israel's faith. We have already referred to those three
styles in Israel's earher hterature, which are so plainly
to be discerned by attentive readers of the Old Testa
ment. They seem, to speak roughly, to succeed one
another in order of time, and it may be said that the
three prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, are represen
tative of the three styles.
Isaiah represents JE — for the subdivision may be dis
regarded ; Isaiah gathers up in himself the bold vigour
of J with the reverence of E. Here is poetry, and the
top of pure art unspoiled by philosophy. The Lord of
hosts rules Israel as king, marches to battle at the head
of His nation, demands righteous deahng and chastises
iniquity ; and He translates for the ear of His prophets
the deepest truths of theology, ' unspeakable words which
it is not lawful for a man to utter,' into vivid and in
finitely sacramental images.
Jeremiah represents D. Philosophical reflection has
begun, but (as might be expected among the Hebrews)
it expresses itself in the mystical nehgion of the heart
rather than dialecticahy. The direct, terse poetry of
youth develops into a noble rhetoric, and sometimes
into a copious unadorned speech in which the writer
strives to utter his exact meaning. And often he does
succeed in being clearer than his predecessors, but he
misses their penetrating reach ; it is hke Plato's dialogue
compared with his myths. Yet always there is that
great gain, heart-religion, spiritual touch, as in the
' new covenant ' of Jeremiah.
Ezekiel represents P. Once more there is loss and
gain, but the development is rich. Here is authority.
No longer does the sohtary prophet fight splendidly
against his generation. The voice in Leviticus is the
voice of a dominant society, and Ezekiel in the latter
part of his book anticipates that secure judgement. But
the authority is God's, not man's. These priestly writers

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 83
concentrate ah that has been felt in earher times of the
Lord's nearness and of His spiritual communion, into
the one simple yet inexhaustible thought of His sub
limity ; thus perhaps we may understand the repeated
address to Ezekiel, ' thou son of man,' as though he were
meant to feel the utter weakness of mere manhood in
the presence of God. Here again is a precision of sym
bolic detail in language, different from the earher imagina
tive style, but combining its unconscious aim with the
mystical passion of D into a defined expression which
dehberately limits itself in order to effect just so much
as language might properly effect. It is almost a tran
sition from poetry to prose, yet not quite. There is
poetry in Ezekiel, and the first chapter of Genesis is
poetry of the deepest tone. Perhaps P, by economy in
poetry, manages at the appointed season to educe its
profoundest capabihties. Still more important is the
doctrine of hohness, with its complement of atonement
or cleansing, which runs through this hterature. ' When
the wicked man turneth,' etc., says Ezekiel, as Micah
or Isaiah might have said before him ; but that is not
his characteristic teaching. He, hke S. John, speaks
rather to those troubled souls who feel the stain more
than the chain of sin, and who pray : ' 0 Lamb of God,
that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy.'
This is the word of the Lord which Ezekiel brought :
' I wih sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shah be
clean : from ah your filthiness, and from all your idols,
wih I cleanse you.' And again, this is not a repealing
of the older message but a fulfilling, for he goes on with
the very faith of Jeremiah : ' A new heart also will I give
you, and a new spirit will I put within you : and I will
take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I wih
give you an heart of flesh. And I wih put my spirit within
you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall
keep my judgements, and do them. And ye shall dwell
in the land that I gave to your fathers ; and ye shah be

84 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
my people, and I will be your God ' (xxxvi. 25-28). The
other verse, ' When the wicked man,' etc. (xviii. 27), is
not by itself characteristic of Ezekiel, but the context is ;
and not only of him, but of all this priestly literature.
For it sets forth God's care for each several soul of men.
The priestly writers are in themselves authoritative,
stately, impersonal ; but for the people they are tenderly
pastoral. They deal with souls, not with nations ;
their mission is to reconcile men, not simply man, with
God. A characteristic phrase in Leviticus is 'ish 'ish,
' man by man,' ' each several one ' ; and Ezekiel (who
also uses that phrase) writes : ' Behold, all souls are
mine, saith the Lord God.' This pastoral care for every
member of the flock is then a mark of P, as well as those
others, authority, the divine subhmity, precise sym
bolism and economy in poetry, and the doctrine of
cleansing or atonement.
This priestly man, Ezekiel, was one of the exiles who
went to Chaldea with Jehoiachin in the first deportation.
After he had been in exile more than twenty-five years,
Jerusalem having again rebehed against her suzerain
Nebuchadnezzar, and having fallen at his hands, Ezekiel
wrote a book in which he recorded events and his own
prophecies as he dehvered them year by year to his
fellow-exiles. He gives dates as though he had kept a
diary. Yet his book is no diary. It is an ordered retro
spect. The reader does not gather together scattered
notes as from a newspaper, and form his judgement upon
them. Ezekiel has drawn his own picture and imposed
his own idea upon his recollections, and has moulded
the whole into the unity of an impressive piece of art.
Only a simple effort of mind is required to read his book,
but the effect of it is tremendous. This ' authoritative
aud stately man ' moves us as his determined will directs.
It is almost a drama that he has written. There are
four acts. The first, i.-xxiv., is 'the Lord's removal.'
Jerusalem is still standing. The prophet rebukes the

EZEK f EL AND THE LA W 85
abominations of her leading men, and pleads for sin
cerity and repentance with his fellow-exiles. And in
a vision he sees the cherubim hft up their wings in the
sanctuary when ' the glory of the Lord went up from
the midst of the city, and stood upon the mountain
which is on the east side of the city' (xi. 22, 23). The
second, xxv.-xxxii., is ' the passing of the nations.' The
curtain, as it were, has fallen upon the doomed city, and
while the horror of her ruin takes place unseen, the
empires that insulted or seduced her, notably Tyre and
Egypt, pass across the stage ; their pomp has the mark
of death upon it. The third, xxxiii.-xxxix., is 'the new
hope.' In xxxiii. 21 a Judean who has escaped from
Jerusalem brings news of its destruction. That is the
turning-point of this Divina Commedic. The hope of
the prophet rises invincible. He recognises the repent
ance of the nation, and sees the Lord God raising them
from the dead to a new, united, holy life (xxxvii.). And in
xl.-xlviii., ' the Lord's return,' he depicts this hfe in the
distinct lines of a vision of the native land, city, and
temple, in which the Lord who had removed His presence
returns gloriously to His house (xliii.). The hohness of
the nation is inaugurated by sacrifice, and the Golden
Age is confirmed for ever by the divine influence of law.
The vision in the fourth act is most important
for our present purpose. The first and obvious point
is that it is a vision of Jerusalem and Canaan, of the
exiles' native land. There are other visions of that
kind in the book, and they combine with a few words
dropped here and there in Ezekiel's reticent manner
(cf . e.g. the scenery of Canaan in vi. 3, xxxiv. 13, xxxvi. 4)
to show that he felt strongly that love of country which
is so marked in other parts of the Old Testament, not
ably in Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Canticles. This is
the more to be remembered because Ezekiel, hke Jere
miah, entertained no unfriendly feehngs toward Babylon;
in the ' passing of the nations ' Babylon has no place,

86 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
and her immunity increases the marvel of the prophet's
restoration-hope. He dwehs within the old horizon
upon which Cyrus has not yet risen. The outward sign
which encouraged the second Isaiah, and woke in him
that exultation over falling Babylon which was to be
come a fierce recollection in still later ages, had not been
vouchsafed to Ezekiel. For him, as for Jeremiah, the
hght shone out of darkness itself ; to Jeremiah it re
vealed mystical communion with God, to Ezekiel the
reign of divine law.
Then we notice that the vision is fuh of symbolism,
and conscious, hterary symbohsm. This partly explains
the difficulty most readers find in reahsing to their own
mind's eye the temple and city which Ezekiel discerned
so plainly ' framed ' upon the hih. No doubt he did
discern them plainly, but he has comphcated his render
ing of what he saw by adding symbohsm to material
fact. So Dante's scenery is the scenery of Italy, but is
obscured or illuminated, according to his reader's mood,
by the symbohc values which he gave to it. The im
pression Ezekiel leaves upon us is that he could have
construed his own symbohsm with as much precision
as Dante used in explaining his sonnets. None but the
symbolist himseh may do that. If others attempt it
they contract the symbol to allegory or to dogma ; they
must accept the indistinctness cheerfully as the neces
sary medium of unconfined truth. Yet Ezekiel's sym
bolism may be mischievously exaggerated. It is a real
restoration that he sets forth, not a fancy. And the
main object of his exact record of measurements is to
convince of reahty. He is not very lucid. He is
describing an architect's plan, and the Hebrew language,
so visual in narrative, is ill fitted for such description.
Those who had seen Solomon's temple could follow him
better than we can. Yet the main features of this
plan are not hard to catch : the sanctuary, the house,
the courts, the city, and the widening country round it ;

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 87
circle within circle of deepening sanctity. And ah is
firm and measured, a practical design ; there is to be no
more neglect, innovation, ruin, as there had been in the
reign of kings hke Manasseh and Amon.
Nor are there to be kings any more hke them. Under
the new rigime there will be a prince and nobles, but
they are to be restrained by law, receiving honour, and
bearing the proper burden of nobihty. Ah oppression
of poor and weak by strong and unscrupulous is to cease.
Trade is regulated, and weights and measures shah be
inspected. The abuse of landed property, which had
caused so much evil in the past, shah be checked by fair
distribution to the prince and the tribes ; and the Lord's
own hahowed ground, under the administration of His
priests, is to be the centre of a really national life. The
old prophets had denounced abuses and declared the
spiritual principle of reform. This legahst will take
practical measures to carry out effective and permanent
reform. The new hfe is to be inaugurated by cleansing sacrifice,
and since even regenerated nature is frail, a continual
renewal is also provided for by sacrifice. No one who
has approached these chapters by the legitimate road
of the earher sections of the book, can suppose that these
repeated sacrifices are to be mere formalities. Some
have supposed that they are only provided to meet
ritual or accidental error, and that no cure for moral
guilt is supphed because Ezekiel's ideal is that no Israel
ite wih fall back into such sin. But that is perhaps read
into the vision from Leviticus, and it would be fairer to
compare Ezekiel's New Testament counterpart, S. John,
who does hold up that ideal in his epistle, and yet does
also point to the means of forgiveness if any man should
fall away from the ideal of the community. At least
there is no vain formality here. Not only would that
be impossible from the prophet of the earher prophecies,
but the glorious entrance of the returning Lord, and the

88 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
word of His message which fohows it (xliii. 1-9) invest
the whole section with immense seriousness.
And lastly, the hving waters which proceed from the
holy house and carry heahng throughout the land testify
to the grandeur of the prophet's reforming hope. Once
more we are induced to ask how far the passage is sym
bolical, how far literal, and once more it will be wise to
attempt no answer to the question in that form. We
may however ask how far Ezekiel is literal in another
sense, i.e. how far he really expected his reform to work.
The Septuagint closes with a mistranslation : ' And the
name of the city — from the day in which it is reahsed
shall its name begin.' A mistranslation ; but it puts
into words the misgiving which some of the original
readers, and the regret which most of the later readers
of the vision must have felt : ' Is this a practical scheme,
or is it the dream of a Utopia ? ' The answer to that
will be : that Ezekiel was truly a prophet, and was there
fore not dreaming but speaking of reahties revealed to
him ; that the revelation ahowed the play of the prophet's
mind upon its impulse, and therefore Ezekiel may have
worked out his firm hope with some of the freedom with
which all designers of the true republic draw their pre
liminary plan ; but that if hohness be given the first
place in his mind, and only a second to material pro
sperity, then no abatement in his distinct foreknowledge
need be made. On the one hand, he looked for his ful
filment far beyond the next few years or centuries ; on
the other, he did not doubt that sooner or later God
would indeed 'take away the sin of the world,' and that
this salvation would spring from Jerusalem. In Juda
ism, as in Christianity, there are two strains of faith.
One looks for no general betterment of things in this
world, but for a peace of God in the midst of continual
tumult. The other — and this is Ezekiel's, and on the
whole the priestly expectation — looks for the winning
of the whole world to Christ. Neither hope is quite

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 89
intelligible, and they seem contradictory ; yet in holy
Scripture their substance is assured, and their recon
ciliation is anticipated.
For the accomplishment of his hope Ezekiel trusts in
law. H we would understand his idea of law, we shall
get more help from the first book of Hooker's Ecclesias
tical Polity than from criticisms passed upon rabbinic
legahsm. Law is for Ezekiel the Spirit of God continu
ally expressing God's loving purpose through man's
fidelity in details. And since in his day it was ' under
priesthood that peoples received law,' he trusted also
in priesthood. But Ezekiel's priesthood is essentially
mediatorial, under God not instead of God. His priests
would gladly have used the Mozarabic prayer : Da
humilitatem quam placatus inspicias et accipe confes-
sionem ut peccata dimittas, ' give humility on which
thou mayest look in mercy and receive confession that
thou mayest forgive sins.' And part of the charm of his
book is its sacerdotal mildness and sympathy. There is
so httle in it of the old ' hewing by the prophets,' so much
of the larger humanity of Genesis and the synoptic
Gospels. He set store too by ordinances of worship ; the earher
prophets were puritans, he is a rituahst. And those
ordinances being sacrifices (in the Old Testament sense)
are strange and even repugnant to our notions. But it
must be remembered that the space between rituahst
and puritan is not a gulf but a very httle rift. Ah who
are ' in the body ' approach God by some ritual, and
there is no ritual which has more than temporary value.
The real importance of Ezekiel's ritual hes in the deep
idea of propitiation that runs through it. His ritual
wore out as ours must, but his doctrine of sacrifice is the
Johannine element in the Old Testament.
This doctrine however was no new one. It was a very
old one lifted to a higher plane. Something of the same
kind took place in Greece at a somewhat later time,

90 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
when the ' reasonable ' cult of the Olympian divinities
was superseded in many serious minds by the more
' rehgious ' mystery-rites. For these ' mysteries ' were
but the re-emergence with deeper significance of the
crude propitiatory rites which had been the earher ex
pression of faith and had never lost their attraction for
the multitude. It is possible that something of the same
kind was going on in Egypt and in Babylon in Ezekiel's
own time, and there is a faint parallel in the reaction
against ' hberal Christianity ' in England to-day. The
idea of propitiation, much of Fzekiel's legal ordinance,
and his pecuharly priestly style of language, emerge
at this time in the Hebrew hterature that has descended
to us, but there is a probability that all this had run side
by side with the earlier prophetic teaching for a long
time. This earher ritual, and even law, seem to have
been so bound up with Canaanitish superstitions that
the earher prophets set themselves against the whole
system. Ezekiel recognised its divine worth, ' took the
precious from the vile,' and availed himseh of the or
ganisation which had gradually developed in priestly
functions, and filled it with a pure and far-reaching
theology. What he thus started grew into Leviticus
and the high-churchmanship of the chronicler, then into
the legalism which S. Paul opposed. But that was a
side-issue ; the true direction of Ezekiel and Leviticus
was the doctrine of the Cross. And still through the
midst of other modes of service the priestly faith of
Ezekiel flows on, continually accumulating worthless
matter, and as continually sifting it out — cleansing its
streams as it runs to the sea.
This priestly faith emerges in the times of Ezekiel.
We can however trace its earlier-progress to some extent
from the Old Testament. Ezra called his book ' the law
of Moses,' but Hilkiah and Josiah say nothing of their
law-book being connected with Moses ; it was simply

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 91
the book of the law, or of the covenant. But the narra
tive in Exodus shows that long before their time Moses
was looked upon as the author of the law. Author in a
broad sense, or mediator as S. Paul cahed him. God
imparted certain laws to him. Some of these he wrote
down. Some he did not, for God Himself ' wrote ' them
— we must remember the figurative, sacramental style
of the early Hebrew writers. What Moses wrote, ac
cording to this first account in Exodus xx.-xxiv., was a
short code or 'book of covenant.' It contains first, a
few simple rules for worship allowing freedom to meet
God at many altars and giving no directions as to who
shall perform the priestly service ; so in the service of
inauguration which follows (xxiv. 5-8), 'young men of
the children of Israel ' offered the burnt offerings and
sacrificed the peace offerings unto the Lord. Then
there are some civil laws for order and honesty. They
are remarkable for the spirit of kindliness which breathes
through them. This kindliness is expressed in a very
natural manner by a few words here and there which
form integral parts of the laws themselves.
When we turn to Deuteronomy we find these same
laws in the main repeated. There are additions and
there are alterations. The most striking of course is
the repeal of the permission (Ex. xx. 24) to meet God
at many altars, and the reiterated even passionate
restraining of sacrificial worship to the one place which
the Lord, shall choose (Deut. xii.) . It is its noble passion
which gives Deuteronomy its character and makes it
a new book. The actual law in Deuteronomy is the
old law, the covenant, of Exodus, modified indeed but
substantially the same. But it needs rather attentive
reading to disengage a code in Deuteronomy. The code
is embedded in, almost interwoven with, a sermon which
recommends it. And the sermon is almost altogether
directed to breaking down the cruel and impure customs
of idolatry which, as we learn from Kings, had grown

92 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
rampant during the monarchy. There should be no
prejudice against considering this sermon (which is far
the larger part of the book) a product of the late mon
archical period. Its language, so very hke Jeremiah's,
obhges us so to judge if there be any history of the
Hebrew language at all. To cah Deuteronomy as a
whole the work of Moses would be not less unreasonable
than to cah Coleridge's Aids to Reflection a work of the
seventeenth century because of the extracts from the old
Enghsh Divines which provide texts for it. The author
of Deuteronomy made no such claim. He introduced
Moses in the third person, and he put his own sermon
dramaticahy into Moses' mouth. If some moderns
have fancied he did this in order to cheat a simple king,
court, and people, into ahowing a false authority to his
words, that is but a fancy which certainly cannot.be
proved, and is surely quite unhkely. No doubt he con
sidered his doctrine to be Mosaic, the faith of the fathers,
and not new. And no one will be apt to dispute that
who is not obsessed by the idea that ah early rehgion
was superstitious ; and such a person will need to be
thoroughly sceptical about the history in Samuel as weh
as about the history of the patriarchs in Genesis. As to
the actual laws in Deuteronomy, the author represents
them as being what they evidently are, a revised edition
of the old code. He represents Moses as author of the
revision ; the Israehtes are on the point of entering
Canaan and these are the ordinances which shall rule
them when they are settled there. Perhaps in the
nature of things there is nothing against the hteral
accuracy of this account of the matter. To the diligent
reader of the Old Testament certain difficulties wih soon
occur in squaring it with the rest of the history he reads.
But wih he not also conclude that this hteral way of
taking things is unnatural ? Just as the narrative of
the patriarchs is a broad handling of tradition and not
exact history, so what is written about the law asserts its

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 93
derivation from the Lord, the God of Israel, through
Moses the founder of Israel as a nation. It does not
mean that people or historians undertook to say exactly
what Moses had written. They cared more, we must
again insist, for the colour of their picture than for a
sharp outhne. That this may not remain a mere vague
assertion, notice one indication as an example of many
that each reader may easily discover for himseh. The
ten 'words' of Exodus xx. are spoken, and (cf. Deut. iv.
13 with Ex. xxiv. 4, 12) are written upon tables of stone.
In Deut. v. the ten ' words ' are quoted^ but the fourth ends
with a different reason for obedience from the reason
given in Exodus. In Exodus xxiv. Moses is summoned
to the mountain to receive the tables of stone on which
' the law and the commandment ' are written. In
Exodus xxxii. Moses breaks those tables, and in xxxiv.
he receives other tables on which a different set of
' words ' are written ; and if the former tables had been
broken this second set of words ought in strictness to be
the ten commandments which Israel kept in later times.
Finally, we are told in Deut. v. 22 that the Lord spoke
the ten ' words,' and added no more, as though the earher
accounts were to be corrected, and it were to be under
stood that while the ten words are the direct revelation
of God, the rest of the law is not. It may be possible
to reconcile these various statements ; with a httle
ingenuity it might be even easy. But that kind of re
conciliation is not obvious or natural, whereas it is
natural to suppose that the writer or writers did not care
about such verbal precision. They referred the origin
of their law, whatever its later modifications, to Moses,
and they beheved his wisdom divinely inspired. They
possessed also ten ' words ' or ' commandments,' simpler,
deeper, more universal, more rehgious, than any code
of law. These they considered divine in a special sense.
There were vivid traditions about them ; we should say
'symbolic,' spoihng their rehgious charm. But that

94 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
charm or ' grace ' is at least as important in rehgion as
any ritual can be, and the Hebrew writers refused to
spoil it by either philosophical explanation or scholastic
scruples about consistent narrative.
Passing from Exodus xx.-xxiv. and Deuteronomy to
Leviticus, we find ourselves in another world. The
language is different, still more different is the minute
attention to the ritual of worship. But something
quite hke it is to be read in other parts of Exodus (xxv.-
xxxi. and xxxv.-xl.), in some parts of Numbers, and in
Ezekiel xl.-xlviii. There are notable differences in
Ezekiel. His priests are called ' sons of Zadok ' instead
of ' Aaron and his sons ' ; he says nothing of a high priest,
but he does give a prominent position to a ' prince '
who is a layman ; he orders atoning sacrifices, but his
day of atonement is not the Levitical. The most natural
way of describing the relationship of Ezekiel to Leviticus
would be to cah his chapters a first sketch of Leviticus.
This at least would seem natural to a reader who had
no prepossessions about the authorship or date of Levi
ticus. We may again content ourselves with one
example to illustrate the possible course of develop
ment. In Exodus xx.-xxiv. nothing is ordered about a
special priesthood. From the end of Judges it is plain
that ' Levites ' were in early times looked upon as
speciahy suitable for priestly functions. From Samuel
we learn that priests (not necessarily of the tribe of Levi)
served, hke Samuel, at country shrines or high places.
In the account of Josiah's reformation (2 Kings xxiii. 9)
we read this note : ' Nevertheless the priests of the high
places came not up to the altar of the Lord in Jeru
salem, but they did eat unleavened bread among their
brethren.' This is explained by Deut. xviii. 6 f . where it
is ordered that Levites (whose country shrines are all to
be abohshed) may come to ' the place which the Lord
shall choose,' and shah minister there with their brethren
' which stand there before the Lord. They shah have hke

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 95
portions to eat.' This shows that in Deuteronomy an
organisation of priesthood is contemplated which is
weh denned by the phrase (xviii. 1 etc.) ' the priests the
Levites, ah the tribe of Levi ' ; all ' Levites ' are to be
regular priests in Jerusalem. But Josiah, when he carried
out the rest of the ordinances of Deuteronomy, did not
carry out that. Whatever the difficulty was Ezekiel
faced it anew. But he met it by separating the ' Levites '
of the high places from ' the priests the Levites, the sons
of Zadok ' (Ez. xliv. 15). Those are to be regular priests
as they always have been ; the other Levites are to be
servants, 'Levites' in the later Levitical sense. This
rule holds in Leviticus, but the priests there are the
sons of Aaron. That is a larger term and — though here
of course we stray into conjecture — it seems as though
in the end Ezekiel's division were accepted, but not quite
so stringently drawn ; the Levitical priesthood admitted
more from the earher priesthoods than Ezekiel had
intended. Something has here been read between the hnes, yet
not much. If it be thought that even that httle is
irreverent, the question might — with no intended
irreverence — be asked, whether the words in which the
history of the priesthood has been written are more
sacred than the priesthood itself was. S. Paul in Romans
and Galatians sets the whole law aside, and in still more
peremptory fashion the author of the epistle to the
Hebrews abolishes this particular part of the law, the
Levitical priesthood; he does not ahow it to be even a
type of the true priesthood which our Lord fulfilled. If, as
he says, the thing itself be but a shadow, can it be wrong
to examine its stih more shadowy records, noting their
inconsistencies, and trying to reach a more historical
account of the facts ? Perhaps it is not the most profit
able task most of us could engage upon, and we may be
satisfied if the result of our short excursion into criticism
is to persuade us that the mere ritual of Canaan, Israel,

96 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
or Judaism, is as unimportant as its history is obscure.
The passage just referred to in Judges (xvii., xviii.) is
one of many which show what this ritual was apt to
become in the early popular rehgion ; the Gospels and
S. Paul at least give hints of its aptness to degenerate in
later Judaism. What we find in all the legal writers we
have been considering is the attempt to make the ritual
pure, and to distinguish its rehgious meaning from its
unimportant form. In Exodus xx.-xxiv. we have the
simplest regulations possible. The civil laws are above
ah kindly. The laws of worship are expressed in this
heart-touching formula : ' in every place where I record
my name I wih come unto thee, and I wih bless thee '
(Ex. xx. 24). The spirit of the whole is gathered up in
those ten ' words ' which sufficed our Lord for expansion
into His sermon on the mount. Deuteronomy lays down
rules for checking the serious abuses of worship which
were rife during the monarchy. That is the importance
of them. They may have been devised by some pro
phetically trained legahst during the monarchy, or such
a person may have reduced to form the experimental
regulations of reforming kings and the suggestions of
prophets and statesmen. Or we may prefer to think
that Moses with inspired prudence wrote these laws, and
that they were providentially lost tih the season arrived
in which they could at last be promulgated with effect.
Such differences of opinion are not unworthy of atten
tion. Real history is worth estabhshing whenever it is
possible, and those who investigate the critical problems
of the Old Testament do so with pains because the solu
tions seem to open larger views of divine truth and
righteousness than the rabbinic tradition allowed. But
for the immediate study of Deuteronomy these differ
ences of opinion do not very much matter. And they
matter even less when we perceive that the laws them
selves are but a minor element in that deep book. If,
as some suppose, Jeremiah refers to it in Jer. xi. 1-8, he

EZEK f EL AND THE LA W 97
seems to feel just as a sincere and simple reader might
feel to-day who heard of the critical disputes about it.
' The law of the one sanctuary,' such a reader might say,
' I have scarcely noticed it. I thought Deuteronomy
was ah about the love of God.' In Ezekiel and Leviticus
we do get elaborate rules of ritual. They fill but one
short section of Ezekiel's book ; indeed they do not fill
that section. It is evident that Ezekiel is restraining
the ritual he selects and orders, that he has practical
reforms of civil hfe in view, and that the great thing he is
doing in this revival of priestly religion is the proclaim
ing of the doctrine of cleansing or atonement as the
eternal element in that religion. Leviticus is at first
sight drier. It is a book of rubrics, a prayer-book with
the prayers left out. But it is after all a good deal more
than that. There is a core to it, chapters xvii. to xxvi. —
the Law of Hohness it has been entitled — which stands
with Ezekiel half-way, as it were, between the prophets
and the priests. This contains some very tender plead
ing, some fine things about God's presence with His
people, and much of that kindly generosity which had
aheady been expressed naively in Exodus, and repeated
in Deuteronomy. But it attains a fuller expression here,
and no doubt from here it passed into the Wisdom
books and Tobit and has indeed become characteristic
of true Judaism to the present day. Here are a few of
these flowers of ritualism : ' Thou shalt love thy neigh
bour as thyself ' (xix. 18) ; ' If a stranger sojourn with
thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The
stranger that sojourneth with you shah be unto you as
the homeborn among you, and thou shalt love him as
thyself ' (xix. 33, 34) ; ' If thy brother be waxen poor,
and his hand fail with thee ; then thou shalt uphold
him : as a stranger and a sojourner shah he live with
thee. Take thou no usury of him or increase ; but fear
thy God: that thy brother may live with thee' (xxv.
35, 36) ; ' And I wih walk among you, and wih be your
Q

98 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
God, and ye shah be my people. I am the Lord your
God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt,
that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have
broken the bars of your yoke, and made you go upright '
(xxvi. 12, 13) ; ' And ye shah be holy unto me : for I
the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the
peoples, that ye should be mine ' (xx. 26).
There are two places in Leviticus where we see the
crude or even superstitious ritual of early priestcraft,
taken up and transformed before our eyes. One is
chapter xvi., the service of the day of atonement. Every
one feels the beauty and solemnity of that service as it
is described in Leviticus. Holman Hunt's picture of
the scapegoat rather shocks our feehng for its beauty.
Every age has its own callousness to some of the things
which dumb animals suffer for men ; but this suffering,
as Holman Hunt imagined it, is appalling. But it
surprises us in another manner to find, when we turn to
the Hebrew or to the Revised Enghsh Version, that the
' scapegoat ' is really the goat ' for Azazel.' This goat
was sent out as a prey or offering to the demon of the
wilderness, in whom we may be sure no one disciplined
by the early prophets believed. Yet there stands the
old pagan name in this ritual of solemn penitence.
In chapter xvii. we find the ancient pagan idea of the
blood being the hfe, and the ancient taboo against eating
blood. This is repeated word for word as it might have
been handed down from prehistoric times among the
Semitic tribes. ' And whatsoever man there be of the
house of Israel or of the strangers that sojourn
among them, that eateth any manner of blood ; I
will set my face against that soul that eateth
blood, and wih cut him off from among his people.
For the hfe of the flesh is in the blood ' (xvii.
10, 11). So far the primitive taboo. Now hear the
Jewish theology that transforms it : ' And I have given
it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your

EZEKIEL AND THE LA W 99
souls : for it is the blood that maketh atonement by
reason of the life ' (xvii. 11). ' I have given it to you.'
There is the doctrine of atonement which runs through
out Old and New Testament ; which is laid down per
haps in no other sacred books, certainly in no other with
like clearness ; and which even in the Christian Church
men are always apt to pervert. The second of our
Articles of rehgion speaks of Christ's reconcihng His
Father to us, but holy Scripture never so speaks and
modern commentaries always have a note to prevent
misunderstanding of the words. Here in Leviticus the
scriptural thought is aheady enunciated : that God's
wih to man is always good, His wrath is love, His for
giveness is at work even before our penitence. The
verb ' atone ' or ' propitiate ' takes various accusatives
after it in the Old Testament, but it never takes
the accusative ' God.' He provides atonement for
men's souls ; they do not make atonement to His dis
pleasure. And a glance at the margin of the R.V. will show that
the Hebrew word for ' soul ' and ' hfe ' is the same. The
blood is hfe. God gives life to make atonement for hfe.
To the old pagan the hfe was no doubt thought of in a
somewhat vague fashion ; the visible blood was the
tangible thing to his mind as well as to his senses. But to
the Jewish theologian this is reversed. The blood, the
symbol, had to him the value of a symbol, no less and no
more. Atonement, forgiveness, salvation, were ideas
of hfe. So, and so only, could this ancient language be
transferred to the New Testament and become inter
pretative of the work of the Redeemer of the world.

IV
THE WISDOM BOOKS
The creed and ohurch of post-exihc Judaism — Its lines
laid down by Ezekiel and drawn out with much diver
sity in unity — ' Wisdom ' one element ; its connexion
with philosophy — In the Hebrew canon it remains
strongly Hebraic — Three divisions of the wisdom
literature; (1) Job and Ecclesiastes, intensely Hebrew,
(2) Moral theology of one part of Proverbs and its
continuation in Sirach, etc., (3) Approach to meta
physical theology in another part of Proverbs and its
continuation in Wisdom of Solomon, etc. — Job, the
problem of suffering and the vindication of mystical
communion with God — Ecclesiastes, a record of
scholastio discussion and the triumph of Jewish faith
over intellectual difficulty — Agur and the extrava
gances of 'wisdom.'
When Mattathias, ' zealous for the law,' slew at Modin
the Syrian king's officer and the apostate Jew, he cried,
' Whosoever is zealous for the law, and maintaineth the
covenant, let him come forth after me,' and so he and
his sons fled to the mountains forsaking ah that they had
in the city, and the Maceabean revolt began (1 Mace. ii.
27, 28) . What did Mattathias understand by ' the law ' ?
Was it the sacred book of Moses, or simply the estabhshed
rules of food, sacrifice and worship ; or was it the Jewish
faith, 'the covenant,' in a larger sense? It must have
been the faith and not merely the legal customs, but no
doubt he and his companions held the faith in a well-
defined, unyielding sense. He summoned them ' to
contend earnestly for the faith which was once for ah
100

THE WISDOM BOOKS 101
dehvered unto the saints.' Plain loyalty to a final
form of faith is the battle-cry for martyrs, and we
honour the Maceabean heroes and admire, though it
little becomes us to share, their indignation against the
cravens who refused to join their venture. And yet
perhaps some held aloof who were not altogether cravens.
By the second century B.C. there may have been Jews,
and good ones, who saw that ' the faith once dehvered '
was intended by God to enlarge its boundaries, who
wished to be more clear as to what the Maccabeans
were fighting for, who even entertained curious misgiv
ings as to whether it was right to use violence in defence
of religion, who thought of a church rather than of a
nation as the home of faith, who were more anxious about
venal high priests and the subtle infection of their own
souls by moral laxity than about the persecution of
Antiochus, and who dreamed — perhaps too vaguely — of
a ' blessed company of all faithful people ' throughout
all the world. And it is possible that among these
eccentric people there were some who, Erasmus-like,
beheved in the gradual effect of education, would gladly
learn and teach, were jealous of disturbances which in
terfered with ' wisdom,' and were not themselves the
stuff from which martyrs could be made.
Men hke these in all their variety were the spiritual
descendants of Ezekiel as much as were the Maccabees
with their simple zeal for the law. Ezekiel inaugurated
the post-exihc age of Judaism. He introduced the reign
of law, and the most obvious, perhaps the most important
feature of that reign was reverence for ' the Law,' ' the
law of Moses.' But law does mean something larger
than that ; it did to Ezekiel, and it did also to the
synagogues in which men sang, ' The heavens declare
the glory of God : and the firmament sheweth his handy-
work. . . . Before the mountains were brought forth, or
ever the earth and the world were made : thou art God
from everlasting, and world without end. . . . Yea, like

102 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
as a father pitieth his own children : even so is the Lord
merciful unto them that fear him. For he knoweth
whereof we are made : he remembereth that we are but
dust. . . . All nations whom thou hast made shall come
and worship thee, 0 Lord : and shall glorify thy name.
For thou art great, and doest wondrous things : thou art
God alone. . . . Let everything that hath breath : praise
the Lord ' (Ps.xix. 1, xc. 2, ciii. 13, 14, Ixxxvi. 9, 10, cl. 6).
One law throughout nature and history, and the law of
worship part of that unity, was an assurance which helped
the faith of post-exihc Judaism to grow broad and
healthy. Then there was the strain of scholarship. The post-
exihc time was a time of writing history, of collecting
psalms and prophecies, of editing venerable documents.
It has left the mark of its matured faith on almost all
the books of the Old Testament as they passed through
its hands, and the student of the Old Testament styles
finds his task comphcated by the addition of this later,
eclectic, imitative, in a word scholarly style of post-
exihc Judaism. Almost the only book it has left un
touched is Ezekiel's own ; his workmanship was too
complete for others to improve upon ; he has been
justly called the first of the scribes. Stih more worthy
of notice is that critical view of conventional theology
which appears in Job and Ecclesiastes — the books of
' Wisdom ' which we are to examine in this chapter.
This too springs from the solvent influence of scholar
ship, and this too was anticipated in Ezekiel, who in
novated on the traditional hnes of prophecy, and denied
the ancient dogma of the sins of the fathers being visited
on the children.
There is also the strain of apocalypse, so important
as a hnk between Judaism and the Gospel, and as an
explanation of so much in the Old Testament which
seems almost too Christian to be ancient, and of so much
that is startling in the Gospel. If apocalyptic doctrine

THE WISDOM BOOKS 103
meant despair of this world it would certainly be hard
to find anything hke it in Ezekiel. But the apocalyptic
spirit took many forms, and in the two great canonical
examples — Daniel and the Apocalypse of S. John — de
spair of this world is by no means a characteristic. In
Ezekiel the most remarkable apocalyptic passage is the
doom of Gog and Magog (xxxviii., xxxix.), but the con
clusion of the vision of the city, with its most beautiful
picture of the heahng of nature, has formed a model for
some of the best features in later apocalypses ; these
have in their turn been transmuted into purer gold by
S. Paul in Romans viii., and by our Lord in His parables
and the sermon on the mount.
This last point however will be taken up in the next
chapter. It is mentioned here in order to complete our
study of Ezekiel by gathering together all the lines of his
multiple influence. The reign of law, the worth of
scholarship, the redemption of nature — these are noble
ideas which the modern world may gratefully trace back
to him. But we trace them back through the theology
of the later Jewish Church. And another reason for
bringing them briefly together at once is that we may
the better realise, even at the cost of reiteration, the
breadth and variety of that theology. This is one of the
vitally rehgious ideas which may be cahed the true result
of a century of criticism. The Old Testament is the
Bible of the Jewish Church. It is not an annalistic record
of the nation of Israel, but the Church's interpretative
history of the nation. The Church was the outcome of
the nation's chequered past. Through long and varied
discipline the Church had attained to a pure faith, deep
but also broad. Nothing could be more mistaken than
to suppose that the whole of later Judaism was a petrify
ing legahsm. The Gospels and S. Paul, and we may add,
the book of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, show that
there was an element in it which tended to degenerate
in that direction. But the Gospels and S. Paul, and the

104 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
New Testament read as a whole, and the Old Testament
and Apocrypha read throughout, show that this element
was but one of many, and that this element itself had
its eternal value as well as liability to abuse.
The readiest way to test what has just been asserted
would be this. Consider what sources of information you
have for recovering the whole faith of the Jewish syna
gogue in the three centuries that led up to our Lord's
ministry ; two of such sources wih be what our Lord said
about the testimony of the Scriptures to the Son of man
and His resurrection, and what S. Paul said before Fehx
and Agrippa about the faith of the Pharisees. Then
repeat the Nicene Creed, and ask yourself at each clause
whether or no it could have been received by the syna
gogue. It wih appear that the synagogue would accept
every word of the first part concerning God the Father :
that in the second part everything must be omitted
which refers to the ' days of the flesh ' of the Lord Jesus :
that however the name ' Jesus,' i.e. ' Saviour,' would
have a most significant meaning to these Jews who knew
the Old Testament and were expecting ' the Christ ' :
that the titles ' Christ,' ' our Lord,' ' only Son of God
the Father ' would be well understood : that ' coming
down from heaven,' ' sitting on the right hand of God the
Father,' ' Coming again — or at least " in the last day " —
with glory to judge quick and dead, with a kingdom that
shall have no end,' would express the very faith of those
who were fuh of apocalyptic hope drawn from Daniel,
Enoch and the popular apocalypses. As to the third
part, we have aheady noticed how familiar even to early
Israel, much more therefore to the later Jews, was the
thought of the Spirit of God as ' holy ' and ' person,'
and the whole of their belief in the inspiration of Scrip
ture might be summed up in the phrase ' who spake by
the prophets.' We have plentiful evidence for the practice
of baptism among the Jews. The one master truth
which runs through the whole of the Old Testament is

THE WISDOM BOOKS 105
that God gives ' remission of sins.' S. Paul and Daniel
show that Jews beheved not only in ' the life of the world
to come,' but definitely in ' the resurrection of the dead.'
Few can read the later parts of the old Testament with
out feeling that an even passionate affection for the
' Church,' the ' Congregation,' the company of ' Saints,'
is characteristic of Judaism. And if in some places the
narrower national exclusiveness stih obtains, in others
(proof of true church ' unity in diversity ') there is a
missionary zeal and a bold sympathy with the nations
which would allow fuh weight to the epithet ' cathohck '
— ' from the rising of the sun even unto the going down
of the same my name is great among the Gentiles ; and
in every place incense is offered unto my name and a pure
offering : for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith
the Lord of hosts' (Malachi i. 11). To restrain those
brave words to dispersed Jews seems a jejune interpre
tation ; it certainly would not have satisfied all members
of a synagogue in which the Psalter was recited.
Yet some (who have good right to an opinion) have
taken the passage thus. It is but one more instance of
the frequent difficulty we meet in seeking the absolutely
original intention of the prophets. We do not even know
the name of this prophet. ' Malachi,' ' my angel,' is a
quotation from his book. It may have been his name,
but it may quite as probably have been the descriptive
title which the Jewish scholars who made the collection
of ' the Twelve Prophets ' prefixed to this section of what
they produced as one book. We can sometimes reach
beyond their work ; we have tried in an earher chapter
to do so. Stih, when all such effort has been made, we
are obliged to confess that these Jewish scholars have
left the impress of their own mind upon the whole of our
books of the prophets, and upon the other early books
of the Old Testament too. But the impress of their
mind is another way of saying the inspiration of the faith
of their age. And if that faith was so close a preparation

106 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
for the Christian faith we need not complain of that. On
the contrary we may read our Old Testament again as
the Jewish Old Testament, and not as a collection of
fragments from an imperfect faith, mingled with vestiges
of antique mythology which we can scarcely understand
or profit from. The synagogue looked back upon that
period of beginnings, selected from its remains, told its
history with the understanding of experienced believers,
interpreted ah by their own instructed faith, ' so that
what is seen hath not been made out of things which
do appear.' And it looked forward to the Gospel, and
being itself diverse in unity it looked forward to the
Gospel in ah its length and breadth. The old times have
their own supreme interest, their vigour and romance,
their outdoor epic hfe, their history-making and faith-
forming progression. The post-exihc age is far less ex
citing. It is an age of hterature and recollection and
thought and discussion, and being removed from pohtical
eddies, it exercised itself in a kind of other-worldly
asceticism, which nevertheless nourished the eternal sym
pathies, and fitted it for its quiet task of gathering up
the indissoluble life of the true rehgion in readiness for
bursting forth again to renew the whole world. The
Old Testament is after all not primarily an epic tale, or
a pohtical history, or a guide to Semitic origins. It is
great hterature soberly edited in a sober age of scholar
ship, and it is the voice of a great faith from an age
whose faith was ah but Christian.
But now to the proper subject of this chapter, the
Wisdom books. These are Proverbs, Job and Ecclesi
astes in the Hebrew canon. Some of the more philoso
phical Psalms may be associated with them. And in the
larger Alexandrian or Greek cohection of Scriptures,
from which we draw our Apocrypha, there are Ecclesi-
asticus or the Wisdom of Sirach, and the Wisdom of
Solomon. These ah represent that strain of scholarship

THE WfSDOM BOOKS 107
noticed above which induces criticism of thought or hfe.
They are philosophical books so far as it is just to apply
that Greek term to any product of the Hebrew mind.
To a hmited extent it is just to do so. In the com
parison just made between Jewish faith and the Nicene
Creed those clauses were left unnoticed which might be
described as metaphysical : ' Very God of very God . . .
of one substance with the Father.' The earlier phrase
' Light of light ' is more metaphorical than meta
physical, and the metaphor is one which the Jew would
not have thought strange. But these others are terms
of Greek philosophy, and it may weh be doubted whether
in any circumstances they would have had much meaning
for him. To the author of the Wisdom of Solomon they
might have been intelligible. But that is a Greek book,
written httle if at all before the Christian era and not on
Jewish soil. Its author and Philo the Alexandrian Jew,
who may have been contemporary both with him and
with S. Paul, had undoubtedly come under Greek in
fluence. Yet they remain astonishingly Jewish in spite
of it. So does S. Paul though he had probably been at a
Greek university, and so (at least in the eyes of some of
his readers) does the author of the epistle to the Hebrews.
Not tih we reach the Johannine writings do we find Greek
thought working at all freely in a Bibhcal writer, and
even there the Hellenism is by no means undiluted.
In the ' Wisdom ' of the Hebrew canon at any rate
there is nothing akin to the Greek mind. In Ecclesiastes
there are a few expressions which some readers have
considered Stoic or Epicurean, and ' Epicurean ' is a
general description of the book which any one would
think of after a first detached or languid reading. But
when we have read the book again and again, and let its
passionate gravity enter into us, we seek more careful
words with which to define the serious impression it
has made, and we begin to mistrust resemblances to
Greek systems which may perhaps be plainly enough

108 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
observed, as though these touched the inmost mind of
the author so shghtly that it is not worth while to find
out how he happened to fall into them.
The one obvious difference between the mechanism of
Hebrew Wisdom and Greek or any other genuine philo
sophy, is that the Hebrew starts from the behef in
God, while the philosopher starts by questioning every
thing. He may be — Plato was — a very rehgious man,
but qua philosopher he uses the open question as his
tool. But that is httle more than the formal difference,
So far as these Hebrew men of wisdom are great in their
own quality, they do far more than start from the behef
in God. They hold that behef with an energy as im
passioned as the prophets' energy. In the prophets it
is conspicuous to sight, in them it is restrained and
hidden. But it is there. They are not philosophers,
dialecticians, but men with hearts on fire. It may be
objected that the division breaks down, and that in Plato
and Hegel and ah the philosophers whose work — or rather
who — continue to move the worldthis fire has also burned.
It may be so ; and if so, we should draw the inference
that God has chosen the weak things of the world that
He might put to shame the things that are strong ; there
is no such thing on earth as pure reason, and what goes
by that name changes and passes ; but the Hebraic fire
is an abiding force wherever found. It may be so ; yet
that is probably not the whole truth. It is the fashion
of the decade through which we are now passing to see
this fire, elan, intuitive vigour, as the one medium of
real hfe or inspiration everywhere, and, as compared
with it, to rate mere logical reason low. All feel the
charm of this fashion, but perhaps we should be suspicious
of its exclusive claim. There is after ah a difference be
tween Plato and Job. Plato has more reason (which
need not be defined as merely logical), and Job more
fire. Some might say that Plato is dialectic while the
Scripture writers are one and all Gnostic. They do not

THE WISDOM BOOKS 109
argue ; they teach. At any rate we may worship the
Holy Spirit in each without confounding the different
modes of His operation.
In the Wisdom books this fire does burn, but in un
equal measure. They might be arranged in three classes.
First come those which are most characterised by that
strange, antique energy, Job and Ecclesiastes. Job
comes early and Ecclesiastes late, but they are in the
same hne of hfe. Then Proverbs offers itself as a collec
tion of early and late material. It is a collection, not
an original work, and it is in consequence tamer. But
being a cohection it contains various elements, and these
may be brought together and arranged on two hnes which
are afterwards continued. On the one hand (this gives
our second class) the mass of this book's aphorisms are
shrewd generahsations on conduct, picturesque, deeper
than they appear at first sight, e.g. ' Where no oxen are,
the orib is clean : but much increase is by the strength
of the ox ' (xiv. 4). This runs out into the homely
thoughts of Sirach on practical rehgion, to the didactic
psalms, to the precepts of the rabbis, and at last rises to
unexpected height in the sermon on the mount. On the
other hand (our third class) there are proverbs which
express in hvely images the indwelling of God, the
spiritual source of hfe, the mystery of personal function ;
as a type that text of the Cambridge Platonists might
be quoted : ' The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord '
(xx. 27). These run out into such a psalm as cxxxix.
(' O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me '),
to those sayings of the rabbis which Dr. Abelson has
lately collected in his book The Immanence of Cod in
Rabbinical Literature (Macmihan, 1912), to the Wisdom
of Solomon or the allegorising of Philo. Simplified again
and marvehously deepened by divine events, they be
come part of the impulse to the Johannine doctrine of
the Word. The allusion to the Cambridge Platonists is
worth returning to for a moment. They were church-

no THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
men with a broad outlook. Men of another school have
cahed them latitudinarian or rationahstic. They used
philosophy with a fine manly understanding, yet cared
not to be philosophers themselves ; another business
occupied them. They kept ways of tradition open which
some parties were for closing, and they refreshed the
faith by recognising the wide diffusion of the Holy Spirit.
Analogies must not be too much pressed, especiahy from
a brief and definite period hke that of the Cambridge
Platonists to a long and vague one hke that of the Wisdom
hterature ; but so far as it goes, this analogy does illus
trate the relation of the Hebrew wisdom to philosophy.
These then are our three classes. (1) An essentiahy
Hebraic wisdom however superficially disguised : Job
and Ecclesiastes. Then an eclectic wisdom branching
into (2) a theology of conduct turning back to Judaism :
Proverbs, Sirach, didactic psalms, rabbinic precepts ;
and (3) a theology of the schools, coming at least to
speaking terms with Hehenism, and producing the
Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, and a certain mystical strain
in rabbinic teaching. Both these theologies become
rather diluted as they flow on. Yet both burst with
new strength into the Gospels, the former in the sermon
on the mount, the latter in the prologue to S. John.
It would be almost as difficult to put a date to Job
as it would be to the tale of Pelops' hne. When Ezekiel
spoke of Noah, Daniel and Job (Ez. xiv. 14, 20), was he
thinking of any books or merely of typical heroes of old
time ? When S. James wrote of the patience of Job
(James v. 11) can he have been thinking of our book of
Job in which Job's impatience shocks his friends and
is so obvious a characteristic of his speeches ? We
cannot even say that our book stands in the same re
lation to the immemorial story as Aeschylus' Agamemnon
does to the Greek one. Doubtless there had been Jobs
before our Job and Agamemnons before Aeschylus'.

THE WISDOM BOOKS m
And both our Job and Aeschylus' Agamemnon are great
truth-searching dramas built upon the stories. Job ia
of course no strict drama ; it was not written to be acted.
Yet it is so dramatic in character that there is little im
propriety in applying that term to it. But the Agamem
non is one whole, planned and composed by Aeschylus
as it stands. In Job there seem to be unmistakable
signs of the piecing together of various earher material.
If at last one master mind has impressed unity upon it,
he has done this by a different process from Aeschylus.
And yet — perhaps by indulging fancy rather than by
sober reasoning — the two might be brought fairly close
together. After the main dialogue between Job and the
friends is ended in chapter xxvi. certain soliloquies of
Job ensue in xxvii. and xxix.-xxxi. In xxvii. Job seems
to turn round upon himseh and contradict all he had
said about the unjust prosperity of the wicked ; he says
in fact just what Zophar ought to have said if he had
spoken in the third round, which (as the text stands)
he does not do. Zophar is so unpleasant that all readers
rejoice to find him thus silenced before the end, and one
is tempted to conjecture that an editor has taken his
speech away on purpose. But it hardly mends matters
to give it to Job, and the easiest explanation is that one
of those dislocations has taken place which are so common
in the transmission of manuscripts, and that we need
not trouble any further about this addition (which
proves no addition) to the dialogue.
Chapter xxviii. is the famous praise of wisdom. It
does not fit closely with the context, but it does fit fairly
well with the idea of the whole book ; it is very beauti
ful, and few readers would not regret its omission. An
Aeschylean chorus does fit more closely to the context
and movement of the play. But a Greek dramatist
was more logical than a Hebrew poet, and the rough
comparison with the Greek chorus may help us. Be
tween the close of the dialogue in xxvi., and the answer

112 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of the Lord in xxxviii., a resting-point is interposed with
choric song and monologue, as between two acts.
But something else, and a very considerable something,
is also interposed. Chapters xxxii.-xxxvii. give the speech
of Ehhu, a young man who is mentioned nowhere else
in the book. He says he has been standing by during
the dialogue, but no one has noticed his presence. He
claims to have something to say which wih put both Job
and his friends in the wrong and show them the true
solution of their problem. But when the Lord gives
judgement at the end, He says the friends were wrong
and Job was right, and He pays no attention to Elihu
at ah. There can be no doubt that the Ehhu speech
is an insertion into a book that was once complete
without it. Yet we need not allow that even this
insertion quite breaks up the (so to speak) Aeschylean
unity of our Job. The Agamemnon is part of a trilogy.
In the other two plays of the trilogy the same story goes
on, but ideas just sketched in the first play are carried
further ; some ideas not heard of at first are introduced.
That is what the Elihu speech does in Job. The friends
had said suffering is punishment for sin. Job had pro
tested against so cruel and false a doctrine. Elihu said
that suffering is rather education than punishment —
the sort of commonplace that would always be popular.
There indeed is the weak point in our comparison.
There are many technical difficulties — of style and
vocabulary, of minor inconsistencies and so on — in the
way of making the Ehhu speech part, though a subse
quent part, of the one author's design. But the broad
objection is that the Ehhu speech is on an inferior
level of thought, faith, piety and revelation. It is
very different from the addition of the Choephori and
Eumenides to the Agamemnon.
The same objection does not apply to the descriptions
of behemoth and leviathan (xl. 15-xli.). These may
seem to us far inferior to the pictures of the wild ass,

THE WISDOM BOOKS 113
horse or hawk in xxxix., but this is a question of art,
almost of ornament, not of things necessary to salvation.
And though we may be surprised that the same author
should have written so gloriously of nature in other
places, and so mechanically here, we may be well con
tent to remember that more influences direct taste than
any one person understands, and that behemoth and
leviathan are so nearly mythological monsters that both
their introduction and the manner of describing them
may be in obedience to archaising motives which were
once an integral part of every treatment of the story of
Job. As to the prologue and epilogue, there is little reason
to separate them from the main poem. They are in
prose, but that is natural since they tell but the plain
story. There is a simphcity in their style, which how
ever is rather the conscious simphcity of a thinker than
the naive simplicity of one whose proper business was
story-tehing. We feel that Job's restoration to tem
poral prosperity is hardly consonant with the deep
secrets of spiritual pain and joy which have been probed.
But an answer to that objection might be drawn from
another analogy in the Greek dramatists. As Euripides
concluded the new theology he ventured upon in his
plays with a Deus ex machina to give the turn to events
which old-fashioned orthodoxy loved, so this bold ques
tioner of traditional dogma ended his drama with the
more commonplace justice that piety demanded. There
would be something in such an answer. Yet it would be a
better way to quote our Lord's ' Suffer the httle children
to come unto me, and forbid them not.' The ' httle
children ' of God's family stih care for the plain story
of patient Job, and this deep, baffling book is valued by
labouring men quite as much as by theologians. If the
author dared to improve something in the tradition of
faith, there was something also which he had no wish
to disturb. This charity, this wisdom without conde-
H

114 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
scension, this reverence for the child-hke mind, lives
throughout the Old Testament. The priestly scholars
cultivated it as much as did psalmists and wisdom-
writers ; we owe the garden of Eden to it, and the ten
plagues, and the burning bush, and the limpid freshness
of the hves of the patriarchs.
Our Job would indeed be the poorer for its banishment.
All the same our Job is in the main a book for grown
men who have felt the terrible reahties of this mortal
state, and the apparent meaninglessness, injustice and
cruelty of pain. For that problem of pain is the main
theme of the book in the complete, elaborated form in
which we read it now. Job, the good man, was dehvered
into the hands of the Satan or adversary. This was not
the Satan of the New Testament, the prince of evil, but
that one of the obedient angels of the Lord, whose
function was to try the children of men. Job's trial was
for good not evil. Nevertheless it was bitter and seemed
for evil. His three friends, who came to comfort him,
were agreed it was not for evil, but their solution was
the simple one that all suffering is the result of sin, and
Job therefore must have sinned, and should repent.
Job protests against that cruel suspicion. They, shocked
by his vehemence, credit him with worse and worse sin.
Three rounds of dialogue take place, Job answering each
friend in turn as they repeat their accusing consolations.
Out of this clash of mind with mind an amazingly deep
theology is drawn. The form of the dialogue is poetry,
which ahows far-reaching suggestion of truths that
cannot be precisely defined. It is dramatic too. The
characters of the interlocutors are distinct. Ehphaz
is the large-hearted man of the world (in the best sense
of that term) . He is really sympathetic, and one element
of pathos in the controversy is the pity we feel that so
kindly and right-minded a person should be confined
and at last perverted by his loyalty to an imperfect
form of orthodoxy. Bildad is the scholar. He appeals

THE WISDOM BOOKS 115
to the wisdom of the ancients. He has the scholar's
terse phrase, and nothing could be more impressive than
his last short speech (xxv.), ' Dominion and fear are with
him ; he maketh peace in his high places,' etc., unless
it be the almost savage parody of his words with which
Job answers them ; a parody which however passes
quickly (as is Job's way) into a subhme but troubled
meditation, in which Bildad is forgotten, and Job presses
inwards, alone with God. Zophar is the popular orator,
with a wind of words. In the gust of his onset fine things
are sometimes uttered, but he cares not to understand
Job and he disappoints us in a very different manner
from the wise and tender Eliphaz.
But Job is different from them all and far greater.
He indignantly rejects the old dogma that suffering
means sin, which, as apphed to him, must mean that his
particular suffering is the punishment of some particular
sin. But he does far more than that ; he is wrestling
with new ideas that have scarcely come within the ken
of his friends. Scarcely ; yet we dare not say they
have not come at all. The whole dialogue is subtle.
The breath of a new age infects all four men, only in
Job it is shaping itself into an articulate spirit. Ah the
speakers hft the fringe not of one but of many of the
mysteries of life. Job raises objections and aspirations
so modern and far-reaching that, in passing from the
friends to him, the reader seems to be transported from
one century to another — sometimes indeed from the
ancient world into the twentieth century. There is so
much passion too in the whole dialogue, alternating with
and transmuting the play of intellect ; so fresh a delight
in external nature relieves the gloom and charges the
darkest corners with sparks of momentary light. Job
himseh, defiant, ironical, bitter, vaster than other men
in mental power and capacity for suffering, yet not un
touched by the weakness of man's craving for sympathy
— who can forget his cry, ' Have pity upon me, have

n6 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
pity upon me, 0 my friends, for the hand of God hath
touched me ' ? — is rendered yet more wonderful to all
who try to read the riddle of his character by that re
ticent piety of his, that struggling sense of a more mys
terious intensity of sin and hohness which is at last
brought to expression, that invincible claim to communion
with God which is at last satisfied, though the secret of
how it is satisfied still remains hah told and half concealed.
Such as it is that satisfaction comes in the answer of
the Lord out of the whirlwind. The Lord bids Job
contemplate His inexphcable power as He works through
out the whole of His creation. Job bows before such
magnificence confessing, ' I had heard of thee by the
hearing of the ear ; but now mine eye seeth thee, where
fore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.' This
gives no clear cut explanation of the problem of suffer
ing. It is more hke the still baffling suggestion of larger
solutions with which Plato concludes his dialogues. And
it seems to belong to the nice art of the author that he
places the Elihu speeches, the sohloquies, and the praise
of wisdom, between the opening discussion with the
friends and this divine answer. The pause prepares us
for the further putting off of the plain declaration our
hasty intehect demands. Whatever may be the actual
history of the book's complex growth, this final form is
the artistic unity ; it seems waste of time to seek the
earher stages.
That must be a common opinion, at least among those
who are not professed critics. And yet if any who held
that opinion saw Miss Amherst's performance of ' the
drama of Job,' as it was given during the last twelve
months in Norwich, Stratford, or London, they perhaps
changed their mind. Miss Amherst, using the Revised
Version, adding not a single word to it, but making large
omissions and some rearrangement in order, so as to
produce what might be acted instead of read, made in
deed a most solemn and impressive piece. It had ah

THE WISDOM BOOKS 117
the seriousness of a medieval Morahty and was quite
free from that sense of artificial interest which such re
vivals of the old Morahties can hardly avoid. But one
remarkable thing about it was that Miss Amherst, no
doubt unconsciously, seemed to have recovered just
that earher stage in the progress of the poem which is
really worth recovering. The shortened dialogue re
stored the intensity of the action. Not what Job
thought, but what happened to him became the main
business. His noble bearing under the first trial of
bereavement provoked the watching Satan to exclaim —
not malignly, but with enthusiasm for the courage of a
saint and with daring for the increase, through tremend
ous risk, of the glory of God — ' I would that Job were
tried unto the end' (cf. xxxiv. 36). The trial pro
ceeds. The friends say their brief says. Job answers,
makes his appeal to immortal vindication, then calls on
his God to come and plead with him. And in the twink
ling of an eye the Lord speaks. Job fahs flat on the
ground. The thundering voice of the Lord rolls over
him. None cares to ask how he is satisfied. The act
of God has brought conviction, and though in the per
formance there was another scene, of restoration, the
true drama had ended with that climax. The rest
touched the sympathetic spectator no more than the
epilogue in the finished book touches the intellectual
reader. Of course Miss Amherst's ref ashioning was not 'critical.'
No one supposes that this acting edition gives the actual
words of an earher book of Job. But it does, by its
vivid propriety, make us beheve that there was some
earlier book which was less intellectual, more directly
rehgious, less philosophical and Hehenic, more emotional
and Hebraic. Its theme was not the problem of suffering
but the reality of communion with God.
' Ye have heard of the patience of Job,' said S. James,
referring perhaps to the primeval story, not to our book

118 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of Job. In our book there is more than the lesson of
patience. There is a discussion of the problem of suffer
ing. The friends took suffering to be chastisement.
Job rebehed against that view, which was perhaps the
orthodox view when the book was written. The pro
blem of suffering seems to be the theme of the book.
Elihu' s speeches, which seem an addition to the main
poem, ihustrate that judgement. For Ehhu plays upon
the same theme ; on the whole he elaborates the idea
of suffering as remedial.
But S. James also said, "And ye have seen the end of
the Lord.' The chmax of the drama is the answer of the
Lord out of the whirlwind, and that is not an answer to
the problem of suffering, but to Job's sense of desolation.
Job's suffering was not what his friends thought. It
was a prefiguring of cur Lord's cry on the cross, ' Eloi,
Eloi. lama sabachthani.' He was ready to endure all
loss and pain if only his communion with God which
seemed broken might be renewed. The book ends with
no solution of the problem, but it does end with satis
faction to Job's yearning for communion. That satis
faction came partly through his eyes being opened to
the largeness of God's presence. While God was caring
for all nature the obscuration of His presence in one man's
heart did not mean that He was reahy absent from that
man. Let him think largely, naturally, divinely of God,
and he would not be impatient. Job learned what Hort
learned from nature : ' As we can seldom bathe ourselves
in the freshness of hving things, without coming forth
with purified and brightened hearts, even such let us
beheve may be the effect of the truth of nature on our
thoughts of God Himseh ' (The Way, the Truth, and the
Life, p. 84). This is an aspect of the book of Job which
is of pecuhar interest in these days of ours. Our theo
logy has perhaps been too long confined to the isolated
aspirations of mankind. A while ago man was chiefly
contemplated as being very far gone from righteousness

THE WISDOM BOOKS 119
and in need of rescue. Of late his state is beginning to
be rather glorified than deplored, as though it were
aheady lifted high in Christ. A truth indeed, but a
perilous one ; and difficulties increase as schemes are
reformulated. And many of these difficulties arise from
the larger and exacter science of nature which is char
acteristic of the age. Yet that new science brings new
reverence, new possibilities of faith with it. The hour
is coming when we shah invigorate theology by recover
ing the Alexandrine doctrine of Christ as the Word of
God, as being not merely the Saviour of men but the
Redeemer of the whole creation which has been created
through Him. When that is done the mystery of the
person of Christ will become more intelligible again and
more dominant in the general mind, and salvation will
again be sought and accepted by ah men as it includes
men and nature in its vaster sweep (cf. Rom. viii.
18-25). And yet Job's satisfaction did not come wholly or
even chiefly in that way. Before his vision of the majesty
of nature he had aheady received the tremendous shock
of the Lord's first words and entry. It was an entry
not merely upon the scene but into Job. That was
itself the renewal of communion. Job was a mystic (as
nearly ah the Hebrew saints were) ; one that is who felt
God's presence within more than he heard His voice from
without. His bodily and mental sufferings had brought
upon him that far more awful suffering which the great
mystics have all known, when their consciousness of
God's indwelling was interrupted and turned to darkness.
Job's words, strange and shocking as they sounded to
Ehphaz and as they still appear to students of the poem,
wih be more fairly understood by one who comes to
them from reading the hfe of Wihiam Cowper. His
restoration will be better understood if we have read
the account of the call of Isaiah and have realised the
life and death intensity of what Isaiah suffered then.

120 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Job's darkness was dispersed and his former communion
was restored in profounder sort than before. But that
was not effected easily, by a calm process. It was hfe
out of death for him. To him the whirlwind was but
a smah whisper ; it was the thunder of God's secret
power that overwhelmed his inmost soul and left him
weak but new-born.
Job has a wider outlook than the old prophets. Scene,
characters, even language carry us beyond Palestine.
That is indeed a common thing in the wisdom hterature ;
to some extent it is a mark of most of the post-exihc
hterature. But here again (if the fancy may be indulged)
Miss Amherst's drama made one feel that it was no
modern enlargement that produced this effect, but rather
the persistent tradition of the people who had never
forgotten their nomad ancestry in the desert. We feel
something hke this as we read Genesis, and by a happy
coincidence Dr. G. A. Smith's Early Poetry of Israel
(Frowde, 1912) was published soon after the London
performance of the drama, and in that book the same
persistence of hke traditions was asserted. The antique
character of the earher Job was impressed upon the spec
tators by several httle touches. In one performance the
actor made a shp and recited those famous words accord
ing to the Authorised instead of the Revised Version :
' I know that my redeemer liveth, and in my flesh shah
I see God ' (xix. 25). The ' in ' struck a jarring note at
once ; not that dogmatic faith of Maceabean times but
the older undefined hope of Abraham was natural to
the Job who was speaking. Again an angel of heahng
was introduced. Certain words in Elihu's speech were
the justification for this (cf. xxxiii. 23, 24), but all must
have felt how modern it seemed, how incongruous. This
Job and his author knew ' the sons of God,' and among
them one who served as ' adversary,' but further dis
tinctions in the heavenly host had not yet been ventured
upon. Again it is in Daniel and Maceabean times that

THE WISDOM BOOKS 121
these appear ; the ' early ' Job belonged to a simpler
stage of piety.
When we take up Ecclesiastes we have travehed far
from that simple stage in point of time. There are a few
verses in this book which are spoken in the person of the
son of David, king in Jerusalem. But that hterary
fiction is not kept up in the book generally, and it is
difficult to suppose that it was ever understood as any
thing but a hterary fiction till long after the days when
it was first pubhshed. The language in which it is
written does not fix its precise date, but does show plainly
that it belongs to a late post-exihc period. As time went
on Hebrew, like all languages, underwent natural change.
By the time of our Lord it was no longer the spoken
language in Palestine. Aramaic, a kindred dialect, had
taken its place, almost as Italian took the place of Latin.
The words quoted above, ' Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,'
are the Aramaic form of the Hebrew psalm (xxii. 1) ' Eh,
Eli, lamah azabhthani.' In the book of Daniel and in
Ezra-Nehemiah, we find Hebrew and Aramaic used side
by side. But the Hebrew in those books is the old
classical Hebrew, awkwardly handled indeed, yet still
classical. In those books, and even more markedly
in the original Hebrew of Sirach, the authors write
with conscious attempt at correctness, somewhat as a
renaissance scholar wrote Ciceronian Latin. But no
such attempt is made in Ecclesiastes. Here we have
the natural language of a Jewish scholar who writes as
he spoke at a period when Hebrew was hah-way on its
journey from the old classical style to the later rabbinic.
He writes Hebrew as S. Augustine wrote Latin.
And this is just as it ought to be in such a book.
We cah it Ecclesiastes, continuing the Greek title from
the Septuagint, and we translate this in Enghsh by ' the
preacher.' But the Hebrew title is Koheleth, a feminine
participle with a quasi-abstract sense, meaning the

122 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
typical ' cohector of sentences.' The book is in fact
anything rather than a sermon addressed to the general
pubhc. It is the record of the conversational teaching
of some beloved master of the schools, edited by a friend
or pupil. He has incorporated in his volume the sayings
of other masters who perhaps used to discuss things with
his hero, and who sometimes took easier, more cheerful
views of the problems of faith which he faced with un
common audacity (see L'Ecclisiaste by E. Podechard,
Paris, 1912 ; an excehent commentary). Many critics
hold many opinions about the composition of Koheleth,
and hardly a word in this last short paragraph would
pass unchahenged if it were offered as a contribution to
exact criticism. Yet it agrees roughly with the general
trend of criticism, and for our present purpose it is pre
cise enough. Any one who looks at the last verses of
the last chapter will see that some other person has put
the utterances of the speaker together and written them
out. And it is difficult to account for the variety of
sentiment in the rest of the book without allowing that
more voices than one are heard there. What needs to
be insisted upon is the academic character of the whole.
This gives a tone to the doctrine which may be missed
if the book is thought of as a pubhc address. Newman
used to contend that the Church had suffered from the
silencing of the schools of theology, such as the famous
one in Paris. In those schools, he said, free discussion
went on, and so the way was prepared for authority to
speak, not at first but at last, when different views had re
ceived full and fair consideration. In our own day a work
hke Encyclopaedia Bibliea has been sometimes judged
prematurely, as though it offered erroneous dogma and
not (which was its intention) proposals and arguments
for scholars to discuss among themselves. Such dis
cussions did go on in those Jewish meetings of the ' wise '
which are mentioned in Sirach, and which in later days
developed into the rabbinical schools. In such a meet-

THE WISDOM BOOKS 123
ing-place as that we may imagine the ' author ' of the
wisdom of Koheleth talking with his peers while juniors
hstened. He was one who knew something of a modern
style of learning, felt the importance of the questions
which intercourse with foreign, perhaps Western thought
was rousing in the younger generation. Yet he hardly
needed that stimulus, for he himseh felt only too heavily
the apparent disappointment of hfe and the difficulty of
faith. What he might have said had he been a prophet
with a message to the nation, or a parish priest com
missioned to instruct, correct, and cheer simple folk, we
cannot tell (yet see xii. 9). As things were he did not
shrink from giving to his friends and pupils the whole
of his mind, his uncertainties as much as his certainties.
For he did feel huge uncertainties. He was a scholar
with the scholar's passion for truth. That pecuhar
passion is not perhaps the best means of getting near
to truth. The practical man puts truth into action, and
approaches truth in action, and gets on the whole a fair
approximation that way. He is not daunted, for in
stance, by the misery of the world. He sees that it is
widespread and no one person has to bear it all. He
knows too that it may be lessened by mutual effort, and
his philosophy bids him be up and doing, and he knows
the joy, a joy of battle, in such effort ; hence too he
beheves in the general joy as weh as the general sorrow
of the world. This is impossible for the Hamlets and
Koheleths. Life is no equal-tempered clavichord for
them. They concentrate upon one key and play in it
with abstract fidelity. Thus Koheleth sees to the full
the vanity of labour, pleasure, learning, government.
He looks the several facts as honestly as he can in the
face and finds them terrible. He forgets that in their
interaction there is a way of escape, and so God suffers
not any one to be tried above what he is able. He is
set on that absolute truth which is beyond man's reach,
and his melancholy comes from the misgiving which

124 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
grows upon him that it is beyond man's reach. No one
perceived the beauty of hfe more intensely than he.
Even when he says in his cynical way that man is no
better than the beasts, he betrays the undercurrent of
his sympathy with the beasts and all the divine and
marvellous creation. But it is in ch. iii. 11 that he
opens the secret of his heart, his aspiration and his dis
appointment. There is a difficulty in the language here ;
considering the depth of the thought we should expect
one. But those who credit Koheleth with strenuous and
thoughtful piety, wih be willing to accept the margin
of the Revised Version, and to make the sense sharper
by omitting a ' yet ' which the translators have inter
polated. Then the verse runs as fohows : ' He (i.e. God)
hath made every thing beautiful in its time : also he
hath set eternity in their heart (i.e. in the heart of things),
so that man cannot find out the work that God hath
done from the beginning even to the end.' It is that
something hidden in the very substance of ah creation
which causes Koheleth's bitter longing. From one point
of view that something is an endless monotony. Things
pass and repass, but they are not new ; ah you can do,
the best you can do is to take things as they come and
enjoy them. It seems as though the one impossibihty
is just that which the Christian faith insists upon as
possible and real — a new beginning. But there is
another point of view which Koheleth scarcely holds,
but which he does vaguely feel. That monotony may
be the hint of a very different quahty which we cah
' eternity.' Our translation reads into the Hebrew word
a httle more than is natural to a Semitic mind. Yet
Koheleth is feeling after that grander idea. He chafes
at his confinement within the flaming walls of space and
time wherein he sees ' all the oppressions that are done
under the sun : and behold, the tears of such as were
oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the
side of their oppressors there was power, but they had

THE WISDOM BOOKS 125
no comforter ' (iv. 1). Yet it was also his happiness, for
this quest of his, for all his cloistered languor, was in
domitable. We may call him an Epicurean, if by
Epicurean we mean a poet like Lucretius who filled the
creed of materialism with spiritual desiderium. But he
is more than Lucretius, more intense, more direct — he
could never have spent his energies in perfecting the
hexameter metre — and he had a creed to start from which
was neither materiahsm nor the religion of the Roman
state. His yearning to see a meaning in hfe is not quite the
essence of pure philosophy. But if he spoils the purity of
his philosophy in one sense, he heightens it immensely
in another sense, by his naive Jewish faith that after all
God is there, and what man knows not He knows, and
man's wisdom is to leave the issue in His hands. Other
voices besides Koheleth's speak in this complex record
of his wisdom. We may perceive that clearly enough
and yet shrink from drawing the hard line between his
words and the others. But in any case there seems no
good reason to doubt that Koheleth may well have given
the simple teaching of ch. v : ' Keep thy foot when
thou goest to the house of God,' etc. What could bo
more in harmony with his proud humility than ' God
is in heaven, and thou upon earth : therefore let thy
words be few.' There is a touch of his cynicism in vii. 2 :
' It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to
go to the house of feasting : for that is the end of ah
men ; and the hving will lay it to his heart.' But
throughout this book the cynicism is upon the surface,
faith — only it is a ' faith unfeigned ' — burns beneath.
The Jews of Venice understood their master better than
the austere critic does, when they made that adaptation
of his sentence for the gate of their cemetery : ' This
is the end of every man ; it shall give rest to his heart.'
' Faith unfeigned.' That was the faith of Timothy,
whom S. Paul loved and trusted though he prayed God

126 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
to give him mercy as well as grace and peace. It is
perhaps the faith of thousands to-day who are in exile
from the Church because the eternity of created hfe
seems too large for any creed, and the terrible facts of
life seem stronger than the promise of grace. Here is
Koheleth in the same line which undoubtedly runs from
and back to God. ' Old Testament piety,' says Carl
Cornill, ' has nowhere enjoyed a greater triumph than
in the book of Koheleth ' (Introduction to the Canonical
Books of the Old Testament, p. 451 ; Williams and Norgate).
That judgement is to-day unfashionable, but surely it is
just. For triumph means risk run, difficulty overcome.
And we notice that this bold and learned critic does
not say Koheleth himseh enjoyed the triumph, but that
Old Testament piety did so. Koheleth's trial and final
hope are witnesses to the church hfe of post-exihc Juda
ism ; to its breadth and toleration, to its united strength
— ' if a man prevail against him that is alone, two shah
withstand him ; and a threefold cord is not quickly
broken ' (iv. 12) . That final hope is supremely expressed
in the last sentences of the famous hymn in ch. xii.
Whether Koheleth was the sort of man to compose so
elaborate a piece of poetry is a legitimate question for
critical minds. But there can be httle doubt that these
last words are true to his teaching : ' or ever the silver
cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the . . .
wheel broken at the cistern ; and the dust return to the
earth as it was, and the spirit return unto God who gave it.'
How ' unfeigned ' ! He wih not go a step beyond what
the truth he knows ahows him to say. How scriptural !
As modern men, ashamed of the noise of controversy
about sacred and ineffable marvels, come to firm rest
on the few words of the creed ' And the third day He
rose again,' so Koheleth contents himseh with the phrases
of Genesis. Does ' spirit,' ' breath of hfe,' in Genesis
mean just ' breath,' ' wind,' or ' the personal Spirit of
God ' ? Does Koheleth mean here ' the breath,' ' the

THE WISDOM BOOKS 127
hfe,' or some spirit more divine in man ? Would a Jew
of his day have been careful to distinguish ? Did the
psalmist distinguish, or if distinguishing, did he separate
the twain which God in His ' wonderful fashioning ' of
man's being had made one ? Did our Lord Himself —
who spoke so simply elsewhere of flesh and spirit —
separate the two ideas of ' spirit ' when He used the
psalm as His last evening prayer (Ps. xxxi. 5 ; Luke xxiii.
46) ? ' Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.'
So Christ prayed, and who would ask more ? Which
approaches nearer to His prayer ; the half-hehenised
doctrine of immortahty in Wisdom, or the definite pro
phecy in Daniel xii. 2, or this imperfect but most reverent
faith of Koheleth ?
It is imperfect elsewhere. ' The dust return to earth
as it was ' is no merely convenient form of words for
him. He had a melancholy horror of death. Its
physical reahty was very real to him. Its ' vanity,'
the hindrance it is to the plans and labour of men, was
very evident. And sometimes he, as sometimes psalmists
also, spoke despondently of the mystery. ' Whatsoever
thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might ; for there
is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in
the grave, whither thou goest ' (ix. 10). This is perhaps
capable of quite a Christian interpretation. ' Devices,'
even ' wisdom,' might be considered as belonging to the
logical conditions of this bourne of space and time ;
when God shah be all in all what need for them ? But
if that be too subtle, at least we may say this. Koheleth's
friend or pupil has left us a record of his master in various
moods, and has preserved his tentative as well as his
completed utterances ; we who beheve in the resurrec
tion of the body and in hfe everlasting, say things in
stress of pain which are not worthy of our faith ; and
it is fair to seek Koheleth's mind in its noblest expression,
while we learn from these less happy phrases how hardly
his nobler faith was won.

128 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Some have fancied that there is no need to recognise
more than one voice throughout the book. They would
press stih further this variation in mood, as though we
had here the confessions of a troubled soul which was
tossed between two extremes, now sceptical, now pious.
It is the necessity of allowing that in some cases the moods
are not merely different, but extremely opposed, that
makes this explanation so difficult. And those who read
the book most often and most sympathetically will be
the least inchned to accept it. The Koheleth they know
is not tossed weakly from one opinion to the other. He
is hemmed in by uncertainties, but that makes him
reticent not loquacious. He is no waverer but an in
tense, cautious, reverent thinker. Others have gone in
another direction. They have in a manner exaggerated
his strength, and have argued that he has been edited
as the Port Royal editors treated Pascal. Ah his strong
sayings have been watered down. Only they would
imagine this as much more drastically done than the
Port Royal editors did it, and they would describe him
as a much more shocking person than Pascal. The
original Koheleth, according to them, was almost en
tirely sceptical and pessimistic. His audacity has been
transformed for general reading, partly by additions of
sentiments exactly opposite to what he felt, partly by
alteration of what he actually said or wrote.
This is too conjectural to be worth discussing here.
But its possibility is just confirmed by analogy from the
book of Job, where the same kind of assertion has been
made, and in that case with a certain amount of external
support. For we know that Origen read the Greek
translation of the Septuagint (which he himseh enlarged
in conformity with the current Hebrew text) in a much
shorter form than the book now has. That shorter form
did perhaps in some degree make Job's language, which
so shocked his friends, stih more abrupt and bold. It
would be a possible inference that the shorter Greek

THE WISDOM BOOKS 129
represented a shorter Hebrew ; that the shorter Hebrew
was more ancient than the accepted Hebrew text ; and
that this original Hebrew was toned down by enlarge
ment in order to avoid a titanio protestantism which
seemed improper in a collection of sacred books. This
goes a little beyond the Koheleth conjecture in prob
ability. Yet not much. We only guess what Origen's
short Greek book may have been from a Coptic ver
sion of it, which after all represents it but imperfectly,
and perhaps not even imperfectly ; Dr. Burkitt thinks
there is too much Elihu in the Septuagint Job for it
to represent a really earher Hebrew recension. And
even granting that it does, some imagination must be
brought to bear before we gain a distinct picture of this
very violent Job. Yet good scholars have taken up
these notions, and in all competent criticism — even in
its vagaries — there is generally something about which
it is worth while to keep an open mind. And if these
conjectures were to prove right, or partly right, would
they spoil the Old Testament or rather broaden its
interest ? There is a scepticism still which is too fierce,
too one-sided, yet is allied with courage, purity, charity
and honesty. The Old Testament, especiahy in its
wisdom books, does show sympathy with the better side
of this scepticism. But its devotees want more than
that. They are in the toils of suffering, and they de
mand of rehgion that it should share their rebelhon and
their indignation. True religion cannot do quite what
they demand, for the essence of true religion is love and
humility. It takes its part in rebelhon and indigna
tion only when it transforms those potent spirits by love
and humility. Thus Job and Koheleth work as we
now read them. Yet it might attract and cheer those
not ignoble recusants if they could suppose that gener
osity which, hke theirs, stopped short of sainthness had
at least gone to the making of the Old Testament. Not
Job or Koheleth, but some shadowy prototype of Job
1

130 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
and Koheleth, was really one of themselves, and with
out that fundamental discord the harmonies of the ancient
Scriptures could never have emerged.
And shadowy though this particular prototype may
be, the general development is a fact. In the Jewish,
as in the modern Church, wisdom, philosophy, criticism,
did sometimes go beyond the bounds of charity and
truth. And in the Jewish, as in the modern Church,
those extravagances did play a part in the achievement
of breadth and health and reahty. And no doubt then
as now some of the rash thinkers lost the f ehowship and
happiness of their rehgion while they served it in so
strange and dark a fashion ; ' the fire shah prove each
man's work of what sort it is ... if any man's work
shah be burned, he shah suffer loss : but he himseh shah
be saved ; yet so as through fire ' — how deep S. Paul
looked into the intricacies of divine growth. We have
a curious glimpse of one of these Jewish heretics in
Prov. xxx. 1-6. So at least Dr. Cheyne thinks. He
has a translation of his own in Jewish Religious Life
after the Exile, p. 174, but the margin of the Revised
Version gives much the same sense :
' The words of Agur the son of Jakeh, of Massa.
The man saith : I have wearied myself, O God,
I have wearied myself, O God, and am consumed :
For I am more brutish than any man,
And have not the understanding of a man :
And I have not learned wisdom,
That I should have the knowledge of the Holy One.
Who hath ascended up into heaven, and descended ?
Who hath gathered the wind in his fists 1
Who hath bound the waters in his garment ?
Who hath established all the ends of the earth ?
What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou
knowest 1 '
Those are the words of the sceptic Agur. He pro
fesses the sceptic's humility. He ironically disclaims

THE WISDOM BOOKS 131
the profound knowledge of the theologian. Wearied
with controversy he asserts that man can have no know
ledge of God at ah.
His impious words are quoted by an orthodox follower
of wisdom, who adds his comment :
' Every word of God is tried :
He is a shield unto them that trust in him.
Add thou not unto his words,
Lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.'

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL
Further widening was going on — Jews in Egypt;
Elephantine and Alexandria — Sirach — The Septuagint ;
its origin, language and value for correction of the text
of the Old Testament — Its connexion with the Apo
crypha — The vague canon of Alexandria and of the
early Christian Church — Strictness of rabbinic Judaism
introduced by S. Jerome — The rule and practice of
the Church in England about Apocrypha ; suggestion
for revising its contents — Comparison of unhistorical
stories in Apocrypha and in the Old Testament proper
— Strength and weakness of Wisdom of Solomon —
The importance of 1 Maccabees as history of a heroic
defence of faith connected with an outburst of apo-
calyptio hope — The character of apocalypses; their
connexion with the Gospels ; examples of apocalyptic
writing in prophetical books — Daniel.
The wisdom books which we have examined are an
argument for the catholic character of the later Jewish
Church. They look forth beyond the boundaries of
Canaan, beyond the law, beyond the ordinary limits of
Jewish thought. They are not cosmopohtan, forgetting
the distinction of nations in the unity of mankind. But
they go far to annul the separation of nations. They
use the faith of Israel as a promise of larger union. And
they do this differently from the way of the prophets.
Speaking roughly and anticipating more modern ex
pressions, we may say that the prophets looked for the
submission of the world to the Lord God of Israel, the
wisdom writers 'bow their knees unto the Father of
i»s

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 133
whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is aheady
named ' (Eph. iii. 14, 15). But this wide view was being
opened in various ways. We cannot read the prophets
without being struck by the manner in which they
promise the gathering of the dispersed portions of the
nation. Not from Assyria or Babylon alone, but from
ah parts of the world they are to come. That language
is not mere rhetoric, nor is it to be explained only by
later scatterings and emigrations. These had aheady
begun before the great captivity ; that was but part,
though of course a momentous part of a more continuous
dispersion. This is forcibly brought out in a book (men
tioned in our introductory chapter) by Professor Charles
Torrey of Yale University called Ezra Studies (Chicago
University Press, 1910). This is one of those fresh, bold
books which are learned, yet the very opposite of aca
demic ; an invigorating wind from out of doors seems
to blow through it. Such books are generally open to
much questioning and to some correction, and Professor
Torrey certainly says a good many startling things for
which he adduces no sufficient reasons. But few books
are more stimulating to readers who can appreciate yet
hold their own, and on the point before us he has some
remarks which are worth quoting.
' In modern Biblical science the Babylonian exile has been
given the central place, and made the dominating factor, in
both the religious and the literary history of the Hebrews. . . .
Straight across the face of Israelite history is drawn a heavy
line, the exile, which is supposed to mark a very abrupt and
complete change in almost every sphere of the people's life.
. . . This is a mistaken theory. . . . The wider influence of
Babylonian (or Assyrian) life and literature was potent in
Judea long before the sixth century, and the transition to the
Persian rule brought no marked change in this regard. The
development of life and letters and religion in Jerusalem
after the great calamity continued to be a genuinely native
development, in which foreign elements played — as they
always had — a relatively small part. The outlook of the

134 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
people was not growing narrower, it was becoming broader
all the time. The religion of Israel — meaning that of the
whole people — was more liberal and more spiritual in the
fourth century than it had been in the fifth, more so in the
fifth century than it had been in the seventh. The cere
monial law played no such part in the thought and activities
of the people in general as the modern theory has assumed.
The catastrophe which included the destruction of the temple
and the extinction of the monarchy was indeed a crushing
blow, which left its deep and permanent imprint on the
religious literature of the Jews. But the Dispersion was a
calamity which was far more significant, and whose mark
on the heart of Israel was much deeper. The dissolution of
the nation began even before the fall of the kingdom, and
continued at an ominously increasing rate, even after the
building of the second temple. It was the influence of this
fact, more than anything else, that revised the theology
received from the old prophets, and gave it a broader scope :
Israel, the savior of the world, even through its suffering.
The monarchy was not necessary (1 Sam. 8), and the
community could, and did, recover from the catastrophe of
586. But the scattering of Israel to the four corners of the
earth meant the death of the nation, and only the miracle of
a second "return from Egypt" (Is. 43 : 16 ff., 48 : 21, etc.)
could restore the dead to life. . . . The destruction of the
temple was a turning-point, partly for evil, but more for
good, seeing that the nation as a pohtical entity was doomed
in any case. At all events, it was this catastrophe not the
exile, which constituted the dividing-line between the two
eras' (pp. 287-289).
On the whole the Old Testament, when Chronicles,
Ezra and Nehemiah are not allowed disproportionate
authority, supports as much (at any rate) of the passage
as is here quoted. If not strict propriety, stih conveni
ence induces us to keep the terms ' exilic,' ' post-exihc,'
etc., to mark a certain step in Israel's progress. The
persistence of the native Hebraic genius in spite of in
creasing foreign influences becomes more and more
evident to all sympathetic readers of the documents.
Foreign elements from time to time come in, only to be

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 135
rejected again, hke the apse in Enghsh architecture ; and
they are never reahy assimilated. Yet they do come in,
and it is impossible to accept Professor Torrey's bare
dictum that ' every part of our Old Testament was
written in Palestine ; ; impossible, even if we confined
our attention to the Palestinian canon ; far more so,
when we take into consideration the Apocryphal books.
For they carry us to Egypt, a country which played
a notable part in the broadening of later Judaism, and
in preparing it to pass into Christian churchmanship.
The earher connexion of Egypt with Judaism has been
so tersely sketched by Dr. Swete that it would be affec
tation to attempt it again in other words. And no
apology for the quotation is needed : Professor Torrey's
breezy language is delightful, but the finished accuracy
of a classical master is better still.
' Long before the time of Alexander Egypt possessed the
nucleus of a Jewish colony. Shashanq, the Shishak of
1 K. xiv. 25 f., 2 Chr. xii. 2 f., who invaded Palestine in the
tenth century B.C., may have carried into Egypt captives or
hostages from the conquered cities whose names still appear
upon the walls of the temple at Karnak. Isaiah (xix. 19 f.)
foresaw that a time must come when the religious influence
of Israel would make itself felt on the banks of the Nile,
while he endeavoured to check the policy which led Judah
to seek refuge from Assyrian aggression in an Egyptian
alliance (xxx. 1 ff.). Jewish mercenaries are said to have
fought in the expedition of Psammetichus 1. against Ethiopia
c. B.c. 650. The panic which followed the murder of Geda-
liah drove a host of Jewish fugitives to Egypt, where they
settled at Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph, and Pathros, i.e.
throughout the Delta, and even in Upper Egypt ; and the
descendants of those who survived were replenished, if we
may beheve Pseudo-Aristeas, by others who entered Egypt
during the Persian period.'
Then Alexander's victory at Issos ended the centuries
of Persian domination in Jewish history and began the
Greek period.

136 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
' His genius discovered in the Jewish people an instru
ment well fitted to assist him in his purpose of drawing
East and West together. Jews served in his army; and
such was his sense of their loyalty and courage that when
Alexandria was founded (b.o. 332), although the design of
the conqueror was to erect a monument to himseh which
should be essentially Greek, he not only assigned a place in
his new city to Jewish colonists but admitted them to fuh
citizenship. . . . The premature death of Alexander (b.c
323) wrecked his larger scheme, but the Jewish colony at
Alexandria continued to flourish under the Ptolemies, who
succeeded to the government of Egypt ' (Introduction to the
Old Testament in Greek, pp. 3-5).
Dr. Swete adds notes on the one or two points where
his statements might be modified by some scholars, but
it is not worth our while to consider these. What is
of interest to ah is the discovery, since he wrote, of
Aramaic papyri at Assuan and Elephantin6 which witness
to a Jewish community dwelling in that district of upper
or Southern Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries b.o.
Indeed they do much more than that. They show
us a picture of the life of this community ; their business,
their private affairs, their religion, their relations with
the Egyptian government and with the Jews at Jeru
salem. In some points they illustiate and confirm the
narrative of Ezra and Nehemiah. In one important
point they surprise the readers of those books, of
Deuteronomy and of Kings. We should suppose from
all those books that after the time of Josiah and Jeremiah
no good Jew countenanced sacrifice in any place but
Jerusalem. Yet these papyri tell of a temple in Egypt
where Jews had offered sacrifice to the Lord from the
sixth century onwards, of its destruction by Egyptian
violence, of the Egyptian Jews' appeal to Jerusalem
for help to restore this worship. Yet this is hardly
evidence for the emigrants' orthodoxy or the Mother
Church's toleration. When the temple at Elephantin6
had been destroyed, the 'Jewish army' wrote to

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 137
Jehochanan the high priest, and also to the sons of
Sanabahat. No answer came. After some time a
favourable message came from Bagohi and Delaiah
(Sachau, Drei Aramaische Papyrusurkunden aus Ele-
phantini, Berhn, 1907, 1908). Bagohi was the Persian
governor, perhaps not a Jew at ah, and Delaiah was
the son of Sanabahat. True, he was nephew or great-
nephew of the high priest, but just about then came
the ' Samaritan ' schism, and it is by no means clear
that the high priest would approve of his kinsman's
message. However the episode is a symptom of the
general broadening of Judaism at a comparatively early
time, and as we study it we muse on that Isaianic
' altar and pihar to the Lord ' in Egypt.
Even more interesting is the ghmpse here given of an
Aramaic-speaking Judaism in Egypt. What Professor
Torrey said about the native character of the Old Testa
ment books was too absolute to be lightly extended
to the books of the Apocrypha, nearly all of which have
come to us in Greek. Yet even to the Apocrypha the
principle may be apphed more largely than seems likely
at first. For it is becoming more and more safe to say
that most of these books are translations or adaptations
of Semitic originals. Some, e.g. Sirach, were in Hebrew,
the classical language of the Church ; some, as S. Jerome
says of Judith and Tobit, were in Aramaic or the vulgar
tongue of the later Jews. Yet, true though that be, these
books have come to us in Greek form ; we Lake them from
the Greek Bible ; it is with Greek-speaking Judaism that
Alexandria is mainly associated.
The book we call Ecclesiasticus is a good illustration
of both points of view. Ecclesiasticus, i.e. the Church
book par excellence, is the Latin title used in the West
as early as Cyprian (cent. iii). Its real name is The
Wisdom of Sirach, or The Wisdom of Jesus the son
of Sirach. It was written in Hebrew by Jesus (Joshua)

138 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
the son of Eleazar the son of Sirach (1. 27), no doubt
a Jew of Palestine as the Greek version in that place
states. One of the most interesting events of late
years was the discovery of a large part of the long-lost
Hebrew original. The verse just referred to is one of
many places where the discovery enables us to correct
the Greek version, and our own Revised Version which
was made from the Greek. The Hebrew is the work of
a scholar who wrote easily in the classical style which
was no longer the language of conversation ; it is not
artificial, and the author was not concerned to avoid a
few expressions which reveal to our curious eyes the
period in which he hved. He was a rabbi whose ' house
of instruction ' (li. 23) is an early example of those schools
of ancient learning which received that technical name.
And he looked backward to the good old times of
' famous men,' and did what he could to check the Greek
notions which were gaining ground among the Jews of
his day.
Was it an irony of providence which made his grand
son translate his book into Greek and pubhsh it in
Greek-speaking Egypt ? In that Greek dress the book
has descended, through the primitive Greek-speaking
Church, to us. The grandson tells us in his prologue
that he came to Egypt in the eight-and-thirtieth year of
Euergetes the king, and there made his translation,
This is generally supposed to mean the eight-and-thirtieth
year of the only Euergetes who reigned so long. The
date of the translation would thus be about 130 B.C., and
the date of the Hebrew original about 180 B.C. ; and
these dates fit weh with the character of the work, and
its relation to other matters. For in his ' praise of the
fathers of old ' (xliv. ff.) the grandfather shows that he
had read not only the Law and the Prophets, but also
Chronicles, Nehemiah, and perhaps Ecclesiastes ; but
makes no allusion to Daniel. That is just what might
be expeoted at the beginning of the second century B.o,

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 139
And in his prologue the grandson speaks of ' the Law,
the Prophecies, and the rest of the books,' as aheady
translated into Greek. That implies an advanced stage
in the formation of the canon, though ' the rest of the
books ' is no doubt a loose expression, very different
from 'the Writings' with a capital letter. And, more
than that, it imphes an advanced stage in the making
of the Septuagint, that Alexandrian Bible which we must
presently consider.
First however a word must be said on another point
concerning Ecclesiasticus. Mr. J. H. A. Hart in his
edition (Ecclesiasticus, the Greek Text of Codex 248 with
Commentary and Prolegomena, Cambridge, 1909) argues
for 247 B.C., the thirty-eighth year of Ptolemy Phila-
delphus and the first of Euergetes 1., as the date of the
grandson's coming to Egypt. The peculiar turn of the
Greek ahows this ; it is the difficulty of harmonising
the consequences with what we think we know of the
growth of the canon and the Septuagint which chiefly
makes the suggestion unacceptable. This is not the place
to go into such details of criticism and we may, with
some possible reservation of judgement, content our
selves with the conventional explanation. But Mr.
Hart has something else in his prolegomena which affects
all readers of Ecclesiasticus and should be noticed and
accepted by them. Those who knew the book in the
Enghsh Authorised Version may have been surprised to
find quite a considerable part of what they were accus
tomed to read omitted in the Revised Version. Such
and such a verse, or line, ' is omitted by the best author
ities ' is a frequent note in the margin. This means
that the Authorised Version rests upon certain late
cursive manuscripts which contained these hnes and
verses ; the Revised Version on the uncials of the fourth
century which do not contain them. Yet these addi
tions were not made in the late Christian centuries.
' They are fragments of the Wisdom of a Scribe of the

140 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Pharisees and contain tentative Greek renderings of
many of the technical terms and watchwords of the
Sect. As Jesus ben Sira dealt with the earher Scriptures,
so some unknown disciple dealt with his master's com
position. He received the deposit and added to it.
His speech bewrays him.'
A notable instance is in ch. xix. After verse 17 the
longer text has two verses which are partly founded
upon Prov. xi. 30, but the adaptation distinctly expresses
faith in the life eternal : ' The knowledge of the com
mandments of the Lord is the doctrine of hfe : and they
that do the things that please him shall receive the fruit
of the tree of immortality.' This is good Pharisaic
doctrine, but quite different from the creed of the son
of Sirach. For him good men hve in virtue of their
children, and no doubt he. believed what perhaps pious
Israehtes at all periods behoved, that at death men go
to God and that is enough to know. His latest editors
(Box and Oesterley in Charles' Apocrypha and Pseud-
epigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols., Oxford, 1913) say
' In the main Ben-Sira's behef concerning the Hereafter
was that of the normal teaching of the Psalms ; such
passages for example as Ps. vi. 5 (" For in death there is
no remembrance of Thee : in Sheol who shah give Thee
thanks ? "), and cxx. 17, 18, cvi. 2, cp. Isa. xxxviii. 18, 19,
are clearly the pattern on which he bases his teaching
in xvii. 27, 28.' That is true in a manner and as far as it
goes, but it is too exclusive and hteral an interpretation
of both Psalter and Ben-Sira. Yet it is certain that
Ben-Sira would not have expressed himseh as his Phari
saic successor does in xix. 19. But S. Paul might have
done so before his conversion, and it is very remarkable to
recognise a large part of the Pauhne vocabulary in the
hst of Pharisaic words which Mr. Hart cohects from
these interpolations, each word standing for a great idea.
Such words are ' patience,' ' boldness,' ' righteousness,'
'tradition,' 'reception,' 'rejection,' 'repentance,' 'pro-

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 141
mise,' ' hope,' and the very term S. Paul used before
Agrippa : ' after the straitest sect of our rehgion I lived
a Pharisee' (Acts xxvi. 5, cf. xxii. 3-). 'The doctrines,'
Mr. Hart concludes, ' common to Philo of Alexandria
and Saul of Tarsus, disciple of Gamahel, apostle of the
High Priest and of the risen Jesus, demonstrate the
existence of a far-away ancestor, who taught as did this
masterful translator. His legacy is as far removed from
the hypocrites of the Gospels, who abused it, as from
the docile and dependent expositors of the Talmudic
era, who codified it. But within its limits it explains
all the evidence which can be accumulated from all these
sources : it makes it intelligible, and therefore true.
The degenerate and the casuist, the Hellenist and the
Christian conspire with [Josephus] thefriendof Vespasian,
who did not share the passionate yearning for Liberty
of his neighbours, to confess that they received from such
a Master.' A ' masterful translator ' was that Pharisee, but there
had been a stih bolder one before him. How delightful
it would be if we could recover the words and accent of
the first man who ever essayed to render the Hebrew
scriptures into the unsophisticated vernacular of Greek
Judaism. Such attempts were probably never written
down, and no version of Old or New Testament exists
which is absolutely in the vulgar tongue. All are more
or less like our Authorised Enghsh Version, or hke
Dante's Itahan, works of scholarly art in which the lan
guage of common hfe is reduced to order and ennobled
by its limitation. Nor should we complain of that, but
rather be glad. A readable book cannot be written in
the loose ungrammatical style of even educated conver
sation, and if the version were thus made it would be
quite unlike the sacred original. All the same the
version will be the more hke the original and altogether
the better, the nearer it can keep to the real vernacular

142 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
without losing thereby its simple dignity and lucidity.
Examples of such successful adaptation may perhaps
be found in parts of the old Latin of the New Testament,
which are unconsciously true to vernacular genius ; and
quite lately the Roman Church has produced a transla
tion of 1 and 2 Thessalonians in which conscious learning
has worked back to a parahel result. But nowhere
do we come so near the fresh and natural speech of the
people as in the earlier parts of that Alexandrian version
of the Old Testament which is commonly cahed the Sep
tuagint, or the book of the Seventy Jewish translators.
That title indeed implies something rather different.
The story went that Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.)
brought seventy Jewish rabbis from Jerusalem who
made a grand translation of the Law for his hbrary. It
is told in a letter which bears the name of Aristeas.
Dr. Swete (in the quotation made above) refers to it as
' Pseudo-Aristeas,' and no one doubts that the letter
is not quite wha,t it professes to be. It was not really
written in the reign of Philadelphus, and it mingles
fancy with true tradition. It may well be true that the
Law (the letter does not speak of the other books) was
translated in the time of Philadelphus, and in Alex
andria. But it is most unlikely that it was done by
elect doctors of Jerusalem for the king's hbrary. The
' pseudos ' or pretence of the letter on some obvious
points allows us to criticise its other statements, and the
character of the version (which is its glory) proclaims
the ' popularity ' of the work. It is the language of the
Alexandrian streets broken into a simple hterary pur
pose. The parish priests of Alexandria made it, and
their parishioners heard it in church and read it at home.
As in Palestine the Law was read to the people in the
synagogue in Aramaic, and at last these Aramaic
paraphrases or Targums were written down, so it
happened also in the Greek synagogues of Egypt.
At least that is a reasonable guess, if it be not pressed

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 143
beyond a guess. The precise course of this piece of hter
ary history we do not know. The letter of Aristeas
gives a likely place and date. The language and style
of the version makes it probable that the needs of the
synagogue in Egypt led to the same sort of thing being
done there as was done for the same reason in Palestine.
But there was also a notable difference. The Septua
gint sometimes adds to the text such stories as Susanna,
and Bel and the Dragon, but the Targums embroider
more freely. The Targums are paraphrases, the Septua
gint is a conscientious translation. The Targums (pace
Semitic enthusiasts) are hardly hterature, the Septua
gint is great hterature. In the days when it was made
Greek was dying pompously. It revived indeed with a
grand, classical, academic resurrection. But the Septua
gint inaugurated a better resurrection. It braced up
the languid hterary style with the vigour of everyday
speech. It followed naturally the short sentences of its
Hebrew original and carved a terse utterance which
could be easily read aloud and easily followed by the
simplest hearer. And at the same time it never lost the
decent state of a book language any more than Burns
did in his Scots poems. It was the rude beginning of a
new form of noble art. The writers of the New Testa
ment learned their craftmanship in this vigorous and
sincere school, and thus carried forward the tradition to
something hke perfection. They proved it capable of
very varied application, and the variety of New Testa
ment writing is no small part of the charm of that monu
ment, not only of rehgion but of art. But in the excel
lent musio of the synoptic Gospels what Aristotle said of
Greek tragedy was again proved true ; having changed
many ohanges it attained its proper form and then it
soon ceased. Some reminiscence of this manly new
Greek hngers in the Christian Fathers, and in the prayers
of the Greek liturgies. Then it whohy disappears.
The Septuagint led the way to all that missionary

144 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
scholarship of the Church out of which a thousand
versions have since sprung. It remains a model of
language for those whose business it is to rough-hew
versions in new dialects. But it has a further interest
to the student of the Old Testament. It witnesses to
ancient variations of text in the Hebrew scriptures.
Our Enghsh versions, R.V. and A.V., are made from the
text which is stih printed in Hebrew Bibles. This is
called the Massoretic text from the word Massora or
tradition. We can trace it to the second, or possibly
the first century a.d., and we have all but no manuscript
evidence for any other text. Thus the text of the Old
Testament is in a very different condition from that of
the New Testament where abundant and early manu
script authority has enabled U3 to get behind the medieval
text which our Authorised Version represents, to the text
which our Revised Version represents, the text, at least
approximately, of the apostohc age itself. Hence there
are places in the Old Testament where the Hebrew is cer
tainly corrupt ; e.g. in 1 Sam. xiii. 1 the Hebrew says that
Saul was one year old when he began to reign, and in
Ps. xxii. 16 the Hebrew has 'hke a lion' for 'they
pierced.' We cannot get any help from the Hebrew
manuscripts since they all give the same text. Some
resort to conjectural emendation, and sometimes very
starthng and even wild conjectures' have been made
which can never satisfy those who have been trained in
the exact methods of New Testament textual criticism.
But some approach to those exacter methods is afforded
by the Septuagint. It often differs from the Massoretic
Hebrew in such a way as to show that the translators
followed another Hebrew text ; it stands for an ancient
hne of Hebrew manuscripts now lost. There are com
plications in this use of it. Some variations may be
mere imperfections of rendering, some (as in 1 Sam.
xiii. 1) conjectural emendations made by the Greek
translators ; sometimes the true text of the Septuagint

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 145
itself has suffered alteration in course of its transmission.
But those niceties of criticism lie beyond our pur
pose. The broad result of all which has been said is that
the Septuagint shows a freedom in the choice of text
and of interpretation which was once allowed in the
Jewish Church but after the first century a.d. was no
longer allowed there.
It also witnesses to a freedom once allowed but after
wards restrained in drawing the limits of the canon.
To speak roughly, our Apocrypha represents the excess
of the Alexandrian over the Palestinian Bible. These
books or parts of books have come to us — an exception
wih be noticed presently — in Greek. They have come
to us through the primitive Church which was mainly
Greek-speaking. The primitive Church took over the
Greek Bible of the Jews, though by that time the Jewish
rabbis were drawing their hnes more strictly round
sacred things. They excluded from their authoritative
collection of writings both the Greek additions of the
Septuagint and the Aramaic embroideries of the Targumic
paraphrases. This is to speak roughly however. There
was no Greek canon in the sense that there was at last
a Hebrew canon. The margin of the Septuagint was
vague. Some copies would have this, some that book.
Not chance indeed, but rather hturgical fitness decided
which books should be privileged in the end. We only
keep two books of the Maccabees, but 3 and 4 Maccabees
are Septuagintal books, and Dr. Charles says that Enoch
was quite a canonical book to the early Church. On the
other hand The Prayer of Manasses was not in the
Septuagint at ah. It is an early Christian writing
which cannot be traced beyond the third or second
century a.d. ; and if canonicity is to be settled by
appeal to antiquity, it is less canonical than Enoch.
It might be objected that canonicity does not come
into the question. The Apocrypha are not canonical.
These ' other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth
K

146 THE FAfTH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
read for example of hfe and instruction of manners;
but yet doth it not apply them to estabhsh any doc
trine.' So runs the sixth of our Articles of Rehgion. But
it is not clear that the primitive Church would have
quite understood that article. Before Hierome's, or S.
Jerome's, day there was no widespread interest in exact
hsts of the sacred books. On the other hand S. Jerome,
who hved in Palestine, and learned somewhat more than
merely the Hebrew language from Jewish instructors,
did import into the Christian Church some of the strict
ness of rabbinic Judaism. Before his time there was
httle idea of a hard and fast division between the right
' Hebrew ' books and the ' others.' He fought hard for
the distinction and said stronger things about it than
the Article quotes. He would perhaps have preferred
something more than distinction ; he might have gone
so far as total exclusion. As things turned out, the
medieval Western Church paid httle attention to his
protest, but the reformed Enghsh Church has, until
lately, come near to fulfilling his austerest advices. We
have indeed continued to read a small part of the
Apocrypha in church, but in Bibles printed for home
use these books have generally found no place. Of
late however this has been altered, and Bibles are
now commonly pubhshed with the whole Apocrypha
included. This fashion, whether it be a new one or an old one
revived, cannot but rouse some misgiving. To cut out
the Apocrypha altogether is to separate ourselves from
the primitive Church on a most important part of the
rule of faith ; it would also deprive us of some books of
almost first-rate importance to religion, and of one (1
Maccabees) which is of quite first-rate importance to
rehgious history. But there are some parts of the
Apocrypha which scarcely do seem fit for a place in the
modern Church's collection of sacred books. Bel and
the Dragon is an obvious example. Part of the story of

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 147
Tobit is almost as embarrassing, though other parts of
that book are exceedingly beautiful and eminently fitted
' for example of hfe and instruction of manners.' It is
difficult to be whole-hearted for the inclusion of the fierce
story of Judith or even of Susanna. And yet these have
played so large a part in Christian thought and Christian
art that it would be intolerable to cast them aside. To
these tales of the Apocrypha most Englishmen would
be quite ready to apply the term ' legend ' ; hardly any
one takes them as matter-of-fact history. There are in
the Old Testament proper some stories which many,
though perhaps not most, would say were also of the
nature of legend. Yet there is a difference. In the Old
Testament these stories are interwoven in contexts which
lend them solemnity. It might be argued that we should
be more ready to interpret these aright if we were accus
tomed to see this apocryphal border-land shading off
into the common hght of outside literature. But in
reahty this argument is less convincing than that other
argument from contexts. The fact is, this is no mere
modern scruple. S. Jerome may have introduced a
certain prosaic stiffness into the interpretation of the
Scriptures. He probably did ; the Church of the Vul
gate did lose some of that instinct for poetry and variety
and the sweet mystery of language which the Church of
the Septuagint stih enjoyed. But such loss is the con
dition of gain, and what S. Jerome created for us was
that sense of the unique purity and grandeur of Scripture
which, with all our perverse literalism, we hold firm
to-day ; and which, once given, cannot be parted with
again, any more than a grown man can become a
child. Might not we, who stand in some sense ' at the end of
these days,' venture to adopt something from ah who
have gone before us ; from S. Jerome his jealousy for
purest Scripture, from the early Church their freedom
to give and take books in the margin of the canon, from

148 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
the Septuagint translators their boldness in selecting and
re-selecting the actual text of these pecuhar books ?
' New theologies ' are not safe in our handling ; this age
of ours is no creative age. But a rearrangement of the
Apocrypha might seem just the task we are fitted for.
We might pubhsh one edition of the apocryphal books
by themselves. This should be a fuh edition in which
nothing should be lost, and to which perhaps something
might be added, e.g. The Psalms of Solomon with the
' Odes,' and part at least of Enoch. Then in the smaher
edition which would be bound with the rest of the Bible,
everything should be included from the present collection
which is appointed, or might be appointed in a revised
lectionary, to be read in church, or might seem suitable
for reading in church on special occasions even though
no definite provision were made for such occasions in the
lectionary. This smaher Apocrypha should contain not
only certain books — Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus,
Baruch (with perhaps the epistle of Jeremiah), The Song
of the Three Holy Children, The Prayer of Manasses,
1 Maccabees, but also selections from other books ; parts
of Tobit would certainly be included, and some verses
from the prayers in ' the rest of Esther ' could hardly be
omitted. It is hard to leave out 2 Maccabees ; the famous
passages about Hehodorus and the martyrs are necessary
to those who would enjoy Christian art and the epistle
to the Hebrews. Yet they really are scarce suitable for
our devotions. That parallel yet astonishingly divergent
account of the return from the Captivity and its sequel
which we have in 1 Esdras was no doubt the account
which the early Church accepted in preference to Nehe
miah and Ezra. It is another recension of the narrative
which begins with Josiah's passover, 2 Chron. xxxv., and
extends through Ezra and Nehemiah. In the main it
seems to be a Greek translation from a parallel Hebrew
recension of Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah ; one recension
was preserved at Alexandria, the other by the Palestinian

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 149
rabbis. If this were made popular again it might help
us to remember the uncertainty which surrounds the
records we possess of this period of the return, but there
would not be much gain in that, especially as the better
known Ezra-Nehemiah really is the better history.
And perhaps the chief cause of the popularity which the
Greek book so long maintained was the story of the three
guardsmen who disputed about the strongest thing in the
world, and the victory of Zerubbabel — one of the three
and the hero of this recension — who stood for Truth ;
' and ah the people then shouted, and said, Great is truth,
and strong above ah things ' — ' magna est Veritas et prae-
valet ' as the famihar quotation from the Vulgate has it
(1 Esd. iv. 41). Perhaps one lection, selected with large
omissions from ch. iv., would be enough from this
book. For fine as the chmax of this story is, the rest is
hardly level with the dignity of the Bible. The story
seems to have an origin separate from the main body
of the book. It is translated from some popular tale in
Aramaic. It cannot pretend to be history. Yet in its
context it seems to make that claim ; and if read in full
without any context at ah it would have an awkward
ambiguity about it.
The point might be illustrated by contrast with a
story in the prophets where the context makes ah clear.
The book of Jonah seems rather out of place among
the prophets for it is throughout rather a story than a
prophecy. Like Habakkuk however it also contains
a very noble psalm, and that psalm indicates how one
incident in the story at any rate is to be understood.
The psalm is a thanksgiving of a servant of the Lord
who has learned to trust Him by terrible experience
which is pictured as being ' compassed about with
waters, even to the soul,' as ' going down to the bottoms
of the mountains,' and as being ' brought up again from
the pit.' The story tells of one who bears the name of
an early prophet mentioned in Kings ; who was entrusted
with a mission of mercy to the heathen oppressor of

150 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Israel, the Assyrian at Nineveh ; who mistrusted the
Lord and tried to escape his duty ; and who was con
verted to faithfulness by being thrown into the sea,
swallowed by a sea-monster, and at last saved by that
fearful means. The Hebrew of this story is quite
obviously far later than the time of Jonah of Amittai,
the prophet of the book of Kings. The psalm in fact
pictures a spiritual experience in the fashion of the
psalmists, the story pictures a hke spiritual experience
in the simple parabolic fashion of ma,ny of the later
Jewish teachers. Our Lord did not disdain to refer to it,
and it should be read by no one who has not the holy
childlike mind which He specially commended. Less
disciplined readers however may delight in the charitable
lesson of the concluding chapter: 'And the Lord said,
Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast
not laboured, neither madest it grow ; which came up
in a night, and perished in a night : and should not I
have pity on Nineveh, that great city ; wherein are more
than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern be
tween their right hand and their left hand ; and also much
cattle?' (Jon. iv. 10, 11). Here then is a story which
might seem, and indeed does to many readers seem quite
as hght and legendary as the story of the guardsmen.
Yet when taken as part of the whole to which it belongs,
it grows in beauty and meaning. It will stih remain an
example of that grave kindliness to the little children's
mind which is so frequent and so delightful in the Old
Testament. But rightly and wholly understood it loses
no depth thereby. We cannot say the same of the story
of the guardsmen, and though it would be rash to draw
a hne and put everything in the Apocrypha below it,
nevertheless the general distinction holds ; the Old Testa
ment proper shows this capacity for exalting the humble
and meek parts of its hterature, and the apocryphal
books do not. Even Esther, which academic piety
rates low, has a directness and a natural ring which is

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 151
unlike Apocrypha ; and the simple souls of schoolboys
find the story extremely interesting.
Indeed the Apocrypha sometimes betray even an oppo
site tendency. The finest of them all in many respects is
the Wisdom of Solomon. Its great hopeful doctrine of
immortahty, its poetic imagery, its almost philosophic
' idea ' of wisdom, its stih more beautiful mingling of
that idea with a religious consciousness of the universal
movement of the Spirit of God, its phrases so often
happy and sometimes so magnificent — how admirable
ah this is. Yet there are languors even in the best parts
of the book, and in the latter chapters the grand lan
guage becomes almost bombastic. It is the most am
bitiously Greek book of the Old Testament and some
times we cannot help feehng that the author's hterary
ambition spoils his reahy noble thoughts, and that by a
kind of reaction he becomes not only Jewish again at
the end, but narrowly, fiercely Jewish. Stih the book is
beautiful, often most beautiful. No Bible could be con
sidered complete without it. Yet the Western-minded
people who are most enthusiastic for it on a first reading,
do generally acquiesce at last in the judgement of the
Church, which puts Sirach higher, naming his 'the
church book ' — Ecclesiasticus.
A book which certainly must be included in this
smaller collection we are vaguely dreaming of, is 1 Macca
bees. Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria, 175-164 B.C.,
determined to make his whole empire thoroughly Hellenic.
The Jews of Palestine were his subjects. There was a
hehenising party among them who were not altogether
averse from his design, and a good deal of place-hunting
was going on which led to disturbances and at last to
insolent interference from Antiochus. A regular perse
cution set in. The whole observance of the Jewish law
was proscribed. An altar for pagan worship, ' the
abomination of desolation,' was set up in the temple

152 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
precincts. But Jewish obstinacy was too stiff, and
Jewish zeal too hot, for the fierceness of the oppressor
or the acquiescence of the worldly or timid majority to
overcome it. God raised up ' a little help,' and in three
short years what seemed impossible was accomplished.
The ' saints ' who ralhed round the Maceabean brothers
wore out the armies of the great king, and in 165 B.C.
the tenjple was purged and re-dedicated, and the true
rehgion was made firm for ever. When, two centuries
later, Titus destroyed the temple, or when, a century
later still, Barcochba's revolt brought absolute ruin to all
the external ambitions of Judaism, there was no question
of the survival of the rehgion. The party of the Law
only planted their hedge thicker and closer, and strict
rabbinic Judaism continued to guard the sacred deposit
— in readiness for the larger day of S. Paul's vision.
In 1 Maccabees we have a good history of those stirring
times. It is a Greek translation from a Hebrew original,
as S. Jerome tells us, and Dr. Oesterley (who has edited
the book in the Oxford corpus of Apocrypha aheady
referred to) says that ' one of the chief sources of infor
mation utihsed by the writer seems to have been the
accounts given him by eyewitnesses of many of the
events recorded.' This appears the more hkely when
we contrast the imperfect knowledge he shows of the
constitution of republican Rome. But that comes in the
latter part of the story, when the rehgious fervour of the
warrior ' saints ' is aheady beginning to mingle with
pohtics. If our select cohection is to be purely first-rate
in hterary and devotional interest, the first seven
chapters of the book are as much as we shah need. And
if the omission of the rest would make this brief extract
thoroughly well known, the omission would be almost
justified. As things are, this matchless piece of history
is embedded in a mass of writings which are httle read,
and in consequence, the character of the late Jewish
Church and of some other parts of the Old Testament

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 153
is hardly understood. Theodore of Mopsuestia at the
end of the fourth century a.d. showed how weh a number
of psalms fit the Maceabean period, and of late it has
been often argued that many psalms of persecuted (and
sometimes, too militant) ' saints ' were actually com
posed then. There are difficulties in the argument and
we need not press it. But we may reflect that these
' saints,' with their thorough-going unworldhness, show
a side of the Jewish Church which probably reaches
beyond Maceabean days both before and after. They
represent the heroism of faith, supra-rational aspira
tions, thirst for the Kingdom of Heaven and its right
eousness alone, an idealism more popular than that of
the early prophets, and more akin to that of the people
in our Lord's day when they were expecting and all were
reasoning in their hearts concerning John whether he
could possibly be the Messiah (Luke iii. 15). In a word
the Maceabean struggle witnesses to the strong apoca
lyptic spirit of the post-exihc Jewish Church, and it is
rather remarkable to find that spirit working there among
staunch defenders of the Law. We have heard much of
this spirit during the last few years, and we are inchned
to separate it from ' legahsm ' rather sharply. The
history of the Maccabees may teach us to enlarge our
idea, and to remember that the apocalyptic hope was,
and is, manifold and elusive.
We must think largely of it therefore; but we are
bound to think much of it ; for, as Dr. Headlam says in
his study of S. Paul, apocalyptic is rehgion. And the
significance of the latest criticism in both Old and New
Testament is reahy the significance of a ' revival ' ;
rationalising thought is being transformed into rehgious
thought, and the aims of progressive civihsation are
being invigorated by ideal morality ; and strange to say,
academic criticism has had much to do with this change.
What has happened about the New Testament is this.
S. Mark has been proved to be the earliest Gospel, and

iS4 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
to have been used in the composition of S. Matthew and
S. Luke. Moreover the consistency of the narrative in
S. Mark shows that it is an historical document which,
even on strictly critical grounds, may be trusted. But
this document shows that our Lord beheved Himself to
be, and acted as the Christ or Messiah whom the Jews
of His day were expecting ; this is the main theme and
interest of the narrative. So far there is nothing new
to plain readers, though critical readers have for many
years been apt to assume that our Lord's teaching about
the fatherhood of God, and His own example of love,
were the heart of the Gospel, while the more particularly
Jewish and Messianic parts, which are less intelligible to
the reasoning piety of these days, were the colour that
a later generation added to the pure simphcity of His
actual hfe and speech. The new critics refuse to allow
this arbitrary separation. They recognise the strange
ness of these Messianic ideas, but they point out that
these ideas are no added touches, but run through the
whole narrative, explain the willing death upon the
Cross, and explain too the apostohc doctrine of the God
head of the Lord ; a divine Christ who should in a
wonderful manner bring in the Kingdom of God, and
coming with that Kingdom judge the quick and dead,
was the Christ whom the Jews of that time expected ;
the death of our Lord was the predestined, world-
transforming act, which He performed in His conscious
Messiahship. The apostles' faith was the Jewish faith
completed by their conviction that their Master who
had died and risen again was the Messiah.
All this is a confirmation of the ordinary belief of the
Church, and the novelty is that criticism, instead of
altering, establishes it. Less welcome at first sight is
the complementary argument that our Lord seems, when
due weight is ahowed to the whole of the record, to
have taught and expected that the Kingdom of Heaven
would come at once, and that this did not happen. As

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 155
to this difficulty, it will be enough to say here that we
cannot teh the secret workings of His mind ; that if He
reahy did expect an immediate fulfilment of what proved
to be a long-continuing process of which the end is not
even now seen, this might be a condition of (that most
important part of the catholic faith) His real and
therefore limited manhood ; and that the rest of the
New Testament is an expression of the Church's gradually
expanding faith from the early expectation of His simple
'coming' to the more complex idea of His "manifestation.'
The force of this last sentence will be felt if Acts i. 6
be compared with 1 John iii. 2. No doubt the difficulty
of this hne of criticism is great, though tp reverent and
patient students, who will follow it out with the modesty
of churchmen, its promise is greater than its difficulty.
In a study of the Old Testament it is enough to say that
it points to an equal recognition of the true Godhead
and true manhood of our Lord, to the general integrity
of the New Testament writings, to behef in a new
beginning and a final act of God as the essence of the
Christian faith, and to the acceptance of the ideal
morality of the sermon on the mount as the essence of
Christian morality.
The bearing of the whole matter on our present sub
ject is this. The Messianic idea in the Gospel is not
simply the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy of Isaiah
and the earlier prophets ; it is the fulfilment of that
ancient prophecy as continued and in large measure
transformed by the apocalyptic prophecy of the late
centuries of Judaism. On the whole the ancient pro
phets dealt with their own times, proclaimed in the
pohtical troubles of their own times the Lord's judge
ment on His sinful people, and promised the establish
ment of righteousness and true happiness when the
purging of that judgement should be finished ; as Isaiah
said, ' a remnant should return.' On the whole the later
apocalyptic prophets encouraged a persecuted but faith-

156 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
ful company of saints by telhng them of the end of this
present world and the coming of ' new heavens and new
earth wherein dweheth righteousness ' (cf. 2 Pet. iii. 13).
It is a mistake to draw the line of distinction too sharply.
Both in time and in thought the two kinds of prophecy
shade into one another, but on the whole the distinction
is just. The terms themselves point to the distinction.
' Prophecy ' means ' proclaiming,' and the message of
the prophets was ' thus saith the Lord.' ' Apocalypse '
means ' revelation,' ' discovery,' and the theme of the
apocalypses is the showing of things that are about to
happen. The word is Greek and perhaps imphes the
discovery of that which is veiled though it is aheady
here. But such a conception was not very natural
to the Hebrew mind. There probably was no Hebrew
word to describe this kind of hterature, and the Jews
were content with the simple notion of an event which
should happen in the future ; as we say stih, ' at the end
of the world.' It is this Hebraic simphcity about the
time idea which causes the difficulty in the apocalyptic
reading of the Gospels ; S. John's term ' manifestation '
is a step towards the translation of the Hebraic pictur
esque thought into the Greek philosophical thought.
Of course both modes of thinking are but modes of
man's hmited intellect, and the reality they aim at still
lies out of reach.
But it is a reahty, and this later Jewish hterature is
in some important respects an advance on the older
prophecy. As art its language is inferior, and its appeal
to the heart is therefore less triumphant. It is more
dogmatic and has the advantages and disadvantages
of that quahty ; and it is saved from narrowness by its
variety, and by its faculty for continual renewal, as simple
piety again and again rescues its ideas from pohtical
ambition — the Gospel is the record of a supreme rescue
of that kind. But its chief distinction is what S.
Teresa cahed ' glorious folly,' ' heavenly madness,' an

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 157
enthusiasm which indeed is perilous, but without which
' the new hfe ' is never hved.
Prophecy shades into apocalyptic. Nevertheless the
difference can generahy be discerned. Isaiah may be
read many times without the reader noticing how
strongly marked a character of its own the section xxiv.-
xxvii. has. But that is hke the unbotanical countryman
never noticing the differences in brambles. As soon as
the distinct species have been pointed out to him, he
can never confuse them again. As clearly in these
chapters may the marks of apocalyptic be pointed out
and then be plain for ever. Zechariah, hke Haggai,
was a prophet of the ' Return.' Both warned and
encouraged the ' remnant ' in Judah at the time of the
building of the second temple. But the latter half of
the book of Zechariah is quite distinct from the first.
Here this apocalyptio expectation appears, of the ruin
of the world as it is and the creation of a new heaven
and new earth upon its ruin. Jerusalem shall indeed
be the name of the happy city of the new world (Zech.
xiv.), but it is a Jerusalem which has passed through an
unearthly change: 'And it shah come to pass in that
day, that the light shah not be with brightness and with
gloom : but it shall be one day which is known unto the
Lord ; not day, and not night : but it shall come to pass,
that at evening time there shall be light ' (xiv. 6, 7). That
is one of many magnificently consolatory phrases in
this second part of Zechariah. They cannot be fully
understood. They are the antithesis of rationalism.
Apocalyptic writings offer them freely to simple piety.
Haggai and Zechariah have their own strength, wisdom,
inspiration, but this ' unexpressive nuptial song ' of the
heart of the people was not theirs to sing. Even so
Milton knew something when he wrote Lycidas, which
he had forgotten when he oomposed Paradise Lost.
There are other things in these later chapters of
Zechariah which indicate their later date ; e.g. ix. 13,

158 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
' I will stir up thy sons, 0 Zion, against thy sons, O
Greece.' That could hardly have been written at the
beginning of the Persian period. This prophet knows
Greece and speaks apocalyptically. As usual with such
critical observations, one hint confirms another ; so
called ' subjective ' conjecture is reduced to a minimum
in the end.
Two other short prophetical books, Obadiah and Joel,
are suffused with this apocalyptic colour. But they
have other characteristics also. It is not surprising that
various opinions have been held about their date, and
we shall be well advised if we refuse to accept any de
finite statement. Obadiah refers to the fall of Jerusalem
and to Edom's cruel behaviour at that time. Judge
ment is prophesied upon Edom. This passes into a
larger view of almost world-judgement and of final
restoration for Zion and her scattered people. The last
verse shows the strange fashion in which national
fierceness is mingled with a great spiritual hope : ' And
saviours shah come up on Mount Zion to judge the
mount of Esau ; and the kingdom shall be the Lord's.'
The problem of date and composition is comphcated by
many close resemblances to the book of Jeremiah. It
is perhaps still more profitable to compare the way in
which Edom is denounced in Isa. lxiii. and Ps. cxxxvii.
A mere ahusion to these passages has of course the
appearance of arguing in a circle. But the allusion is
worth making as at least a hint to students who care to
pursue the subject. They may consider whether it be
not justifiable to say that most of the harsh references to
Edom (and to Babylon also) are a good deal later than
the fall of Jerusalem. At that terrible time prophets
were more occupied with penitence than with vengeance.
That first. But secondly it may be considered whether
these references, when they were made, were not more
rehgious than crudely national; whether Babylon and
Edom had not begun to be symbols of spiritual foes —

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 159
as Sodom, Egypt, Babylon are in the Apocalypse of
S. John, or as we sing in the hymn ' Zion in her anguish
with Babylon must cope.' If that should be so, this
prophecy of Obadiah gains in spiritual beauty. Joel
begins with the description of a plague of locusts. That
seems to pass into a description of an invading army,
so that in ch. ii. we can hardly teh whether locusts or
soldiers are meant. Then the vision takes a wider sweep
and culminates in the glorious promise of the outpouring
of the Lord's spirit upon ah flesh ' before the great and
terrible day of the Lord come ' with its portents of blood
and fire. From this point the apocalyptic colour
becomes strong, and in iii. 6 (as in the second part of
Zechariah) the mention of ' the Grecians ' makes a late
date probable. Yet the opening of the book is different,
and it almost seems as if a prophecy of the old style,
starting from a contemporary visitation, had been com
bined with a later apocalyptic vision. Such newer
applications of earher warning or consolation may
have been not unusual. Something of the same kind
may account for the difficulty which has been felt in
the New Testament about the date of its Apocalypse.
Was the war with Rome, which ended with the fah of
Jerusalem in 70 a.d., its occasion, or some later trial ?
It is possible that an earher book of divine encourage
ment was republished when a later trial called for
inspired words both old and new.
One book in our Apocrypha (not in the Septuagint
and only in an appendix to the Vulgate) is an apocalypse
which belongs to the trial of 70 a.d. This is 2 Esdras.
It is only known to us in versions and is translated in
our Bible from the Latin, but it was originally written
in Hebrew. It consoles the Jews after that fall of
Jerusalem. The use of an ancient name (here Esdras
or Ezra) is so common a feature in apocalypses that it
might be cahed the accepted literary device for them.
Sometimes this book promises the overthrow of the

i6o THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Roman conqueror, sometimes a spiritual joy at the end
of the world. This variety may indicate a variety of
material used by an author who composed his book in
the second century a.d. Chapters i. and ii., xv. and xvi.,
are only found in the Latin version. They are later
additions ; the two first chapters are Christian addi
tions. This apocalypse should be compared with the
Baruch in our Bible, and with an extra-canonical apoca
lypse of Baruch, both of which offer a like consolation
to Jews on the same occasion. This book must be read
in the Revised Version ; it contains a long passage in
ch. vii. which is wanting in the Authorised Version. This
passage was recovered to the Latin version by the late
Professor Bensly in 1875 from a manuscript at Amiens.
The earnest, thoughtful religion of 2 Esdras is very
noble. It helps to explain S. Paul, and shows that a
movement of faith, not unhke his, was at work within
the Jewish Church. 2 Esdras must certainly be included
in our select Apocrypha, and its readers should deepen
their appreciation of it by studying Mr. Box's intro
duction, either in the Oxford corpus or in his separate
edition of the book (The Ezra-Apocalypse, Pitman, 1912).
A great number of these apocalypses seem to have been
produced in the centuries immediately before and after
the ministry of our Lord. They were something hke
our hymns ; founded on Scripture but containing
elements of extra-scriptural tradition, and expressing
popular religion. The most famous of those outside
the canon was Enoch, or rather a whole series of Enochs
of various dates. But the greatest of ah was Daniel.
This was of a less frankly popular character, more purely
scriptural ; at least it was such in the form which gained
a late entrance into the writings of the Palestinian
canon. And after our long digression, Daniel brings us
back to the Maccabees in whose heroic resistance this
book seems to have played a notable part.

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 161
Few passages in the Old Testament leave so vivid a
picture in our mind as the stories in Daniel, yet when we
examine them we wonder perhaps why this should be.
They lack detail ; they have none of that fresh actuality
of hfe which we enjoy so much in 2 Samuel or in S. Mark's
Gospel. Further consideration however explains their
power. In the broad hnes there is skilful drawing of
character. Nebuchadnezzar appeals to our sympathy
in his lonely greatness ; his rage and fury are but the
waves which disturb the surface of a strangely deep
mind, apt for piety and yearning for faith. Again, we
are made to feel the contrast between the apparent
strength of these oriental monarchs and the real muta
bility of their fortunes ; of their short-sighted plans
and the steadfastness of Daniel whose eyes are fixed on
eternity ; and ah through we reahse the presence of the
omnipotent Ruler of the world. His arm is ever
stretched out and we expect His intervention ; His
voice is ever sounding above the royal decrees and the
courtiers' jealousies and the noise of heathen worshippers.
These are in fact no mere stories of strange events, they
are symbols through which a powerful mind compels us
to perceive the real meaning of history. Kings and
nations rise and fall and are scattered ' like the chaff of
the summer threshing floors.' Brave men endure and
are dehvered when things are at the worst. And all
through the course of ages the God of Heaven is estab
lishing ' a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor
shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people.'
Line after line is added to the picture, and not a line but
tells, until the reader suddenly takes the meaning and
knows ' that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of
men and giveth it to whomsoever He wih.' Then he
is fit to go on to those curious visions which do not at
first impress us nearly so forcibly as the stories. With
this clue however in our minds, we find that all through
their varied imagery the same principle is being brought
L

162 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
out. In one and all the same scene is unfolded. First
there is a confused jostling disorder of violent powers
in conflict, then the absolute unchanging authority
which works behind them comes into view, and the
earthly powers drop to pieces and fall into nothing
ness, while He that sits upon the throne of everlasting
dominion estabhshes in their place His kingdom upon
earth. But when we have gone so far we find ourselves led
farther. A principle is set forth in stories and visions
alike, but it is impossible to read the visions carefuhy
without perceiving that this principle is being applied
to certain particular circumstances. Again and again the
same succession of world powers is symbohsed. They
begin with the Babylonian empire and they end with a
particular king, who arises when the last empire has been
divided into parts, over one of which he reigns. He is
a tyrant, a fierce but subtle pohtician, a blasphemer
who lifts himself against all that is called divine, and
chiefly against the saints of the Most High; he lays
waste ' the glorious land,' interrupts the sacred worship,
and defiles the temple. It is evident that the whole
book is written on account of this king. The author's
purpose is to encourage his countrymen in the oppres
sion under which they suffer, to arouse in them both
penitence and hope, toassure them that God still protects
them, is raising up help for them, and will in a short time
overthrow the oppressor and establish on the ruins of his
pride the divine everlasting kingdom which shall be the
kingdom of His own saints.
Many explanations of these successive empires have
been proposed, but if we lay prepossessions aside, we can
hardly avoid the conclusion that the explanation which
the author himseh gives in ch. viii. of one vision is suitable
for them all. The last empire mentioned there is, he
says, that of Greece, i.e. oi Alexander the Great. It
will be broken up (as Alexander's was after his death)

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 163
into four kingdoms, ' and in the latter time of their
kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full,
a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark
sentences, shah stand up. And his power shah be mighty,
and he shall destroy wonderfuhy, and shah prosper and
do his pleasure : and he shah destroy the mighty ones
and the holy people. And through his policy he shah
cause craft to prosper in his hand ; and he shall magnify
himself in his heart, and in his security shah he destroy
many : he shah also stand up against the prince of
princes.' When we compare this with the details which
are given in other visions of this king's alliances, wars,
and action against the worship of the Jews, and when
on the other hand we read in the books of the Maccabees
the history of Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria, and
the struggle of the Jews against him, there can remain
no doubt in our minds that this Antiochus is the person
meant. He came to the throne of Syria 175 B.C., having
passed some time as a hostage at Rome, where he con
ceived the ambition of bringing all bis dominions to
uniformity of worship and manners under the pattern
of the West. Western ideas had aheady penetrated
into Palestine, and there were many Jews who were
willing to fall in with his plan. Not all however ; the
party of the ' saints ' or orthodox was bitterly opposed
to such innovation, and when in 168 B.C. stringent laws
were enforced against Jewish worship and observance
of the Law, a champion was found to lead the resistance.
This was Mattathias of Modin, the father of the Macca
bees, a priest who slew an apostate Jew when he was
about to offer pagan sacrifice in obedience to the king's
officer. The officer was also slain and the revolt began
(1 Mace. ii.). Further repetition of what has been
already told is unnecessary. It is enough to say once
more that in three years the Maceabean party gained all
but complete success. The war indeed continued, but
with pohtical rather than rehgious purposes thence-

164 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
forward. Rehgious hberty had been gained, the desolate
sanctuary restored. The heathen altar or abomination
had indeed been set up (Dan. xi. 31, 1 Mace. i. 54) ; there
had been in the course of those troubled times shocking
losses such as were never forgotten — one of them, the
murder of a certain high priest of blameless hfe and
steadfast faith, seems to be ahuded to in Dan. ix. 26, as
affording a date from which to count the periods of the
contest (cf. 2 Mace, iii., iv. and xv. 12), but the cleansing
of the temple and dedication of the restored altar in
165 B.C., ever afterwards commemorated in the yearly
feast of Dedication (1 Mace, iv.), was the dehver
ance promised by the author of this book, which
with truly prophetic boldness he had predicted would
come to pass in three years and a hah (Dan. vii. 25,
xii. 7).
A tradition of the Jews was that Daniel himseh wrote
the book during the Babylonian captivity, but this can
hardly have been their original tradition, or it would
surely have been placed in the prophetical division of
their Bible. No such date or authorship is claimed in
the book itself. The stories are narrated about Daniel
by some one else, who also introduces the visions in
which Daniel speaks in the first person. Of course
Daniel might have written about himseh in this manner,
but when either stories or visions are examined it
becomes impossible to suppose that he did. There are
perhaps touches which show knowledge of Babylonian
hfe, but not many, and some knowledge of the kind
would have been within reach of a later writer, especially
of one so interested in historical research as (on the
theory of later authorship) the writer of the visions was.
On the other hand some things are said which one who
lived in those times could hardly have said. What siege
of Jerusalem took place in the reign of Jehoiakim
(Dan. i. 1) ? Is not this a confusion between Jehoia
kim and Jehoiachin (cf. Susanna 1) ? Who was

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 165
Darius the Mede ? No such king is known in history.
The ' Chaldeans ' were in the time of the captivity
simply the ruhng people of Babylonia, but in these
stories they are a special caste of wise men. What the
author of the book seems indeed to claim is not that
he is Daniel, but that he is in possession of some records
of visions, seen and written out by Daniel, and sealed
up for the use of that future generation to which he
himseh belongs (Dan. viii. 26, x. 14, xii. 4, 9). But this
again is hardly possible. On any theory of prophecy it
is difficult to suppose that Daniel would have foretold the
course of several centuries of history as we find it un
folded in these visions. First comes a long period of
which the information is vague and inaccurate — the
kingdoms of Media and Persia are treated as separate and
successive ; the numbers which are so elaborately cal
culated can hardly be explained except on the sup
position that the early chronology is imperfectly under
stood. Then comes part of the reign of Antiochus
which is presented with remarkable detail and exactness,
i.e. down to the year 168, when his insult was offered to
the Jewish religion. Then there is a brief prediction,
more than once repeated, definite and almost but not
quite exactly correct, that in three years and a half the
trouble shah be overpast. Lastly, the death of Anti
ochus is foretold in a vague manner which does not
correspond with the facts. The analogy of prophecy
would not lead us to expect that Daniel should foretell
in full and accurate detail the events of a far distant
age, but much less should we expect this to be done for
one short period of a distant age, while the years which
precede and follow that period are treated inaccurately.
And the evidence of language seems decisive. The
book is written partly in Hebrew (i.-ii. 3, viii.-xii.), partly
in Aramaic (ii. 4-vii.). In the margin of the Authorised
Version the latter language is called Chaldee, which
suggests that it was the language spoken in Babylon

166 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
during the captivity. That however is not the case.
So much more is known now about these ancient oriental
languages than was known sixty years ago, that we can
decide with a certainty which was impossible even to a
scholar hke Dr. Pusey, that the Aramaic of Daniel is the
western Aramaic, used by the people of Palestine when,
a good while after ' the return,' Hebrew had begun to
die out as a spoken language. The Hebrew of Daniel
fits in with this. As Hebrew decayed it came to be
written by scholars in two forms. On the one hand
it degenerated into rabbinic Hebrew. The book of
Ecclesiastes is (as we have already seen) an example of
Hebrew undergoing that change. On the other hand
classicists, like the authors of Chronicles and the original
Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus, imitated the ancient style.
The Hebrew of Daniel is of this imitative, ' renaissance '
style. This may account for the book being written
by one author in two languages. Just at that time
such a combination of the vulgar tongue with the classical
would not be altogether unnatural. It is possible that
the Hebrew sections are translations. The original
Aramaic of these parts having been lost, the loss was
supplied from the version which had remained complete.
In either case Daniel, apart from its other great quahties,
is interesting as an early and successful experiment in
the use of the vulgar tongue for a dignified hterary pur
pose. For the Aramaic part is the best. Even the
Enghsh reader can perceive that. His classical fetters
cramp the writer's mind ; freed from them his thought
is richer and more active.
All this must be held to prove a comparatively late
date, at least for the present form of the book. And
when we find further that it contains Greek words —
' dulcimer ' (iii. 5) is in the original synvphonia written in
Semitic letters — we feel at once that this answers to the
other evidence which leads us to assign it to the time of
Antiochus.

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 167
But if so, the question will be asked, why did the
author choose this curious mode of uttering the message
God had given him ; why should he not have spoken in
his own person as the old prophets did ; why does he
represent Daniel as foretelling history instead of him
seh plainly interpreting history ? Why, again, is he
never plain in his utterance, but so bent upon wrapping
everything up in this remarkable disguise ? The answer
is that such was the fashion of the time. A psalmist
(whom some would put at about this time, Ps. lxxiv. 9),
and the historian of the Maccabees (1 Mace. iv. 46, ix. 27,
xiv. 41), confess regretfuhy that the period of prophecy
is finished. The message, if given at ah, must be given
now by way of teaching, not by authoritative enuncia
tion, ' Thus saith the Lord.' Hence this hterature of
apocalypses. Daniel is greater than most apocalypses.
But it is one. Its imagery, its interest in the closing of
the present age and the coming of the heavenly kingdom.
its supposed connexion with a hero of old time (cf . Ez.
xiv. 14, 20), all prove this. When we recognise that, we
are reheved from suspicion of dishonesty in the author.
No doubt since the time when ' grace and truth came by
Jesus Christ ' such a fictitious form as he has employed
might seem hardly fit for the solemnity of a message
from God. But if we could imagine the author among
us now, and hearing that objection raised, we might
suppose him to answer : Yes, I see what you mean, and
I partly agree with you, but I wrote then in the way
which seemed to me and my readers most reverent.
I did not mean to deceive them and they were not
deceived. The inspiration which I beheved myself to
have received was not of such a kind as to warrant
my speaking plainly and authoritatively hke one of the
old prophets.
We may consider then that he suggested rather than
proclaimed truth ; he was a poet of a temporary fashion
but great in that fashion, and we cannot doubt that

i6§ THE FAlTH OF ThM OLD TESTAMENT
his book, if it moves us now, moved those who first read
it far more. In that tumultuous time, when men's
hearts were failing, and it seemed as though God had
forsaken His people ; when on the other hand a new
spirit was beginning to stir among those patriots who
were about to rise in arms and defend their faith against
such odds ; what an impulse must have been given
by the appearance of this magnificent work, with its
examples of courage and fidelity drawn from the ancient
traditions of Israel, its keen discernment of the signifi
cance of past history, its dehberate and assured promise
of speedy deliverance now that the ' httle help ' (Dan.
xi. 34) was arising — 'And I heard the man clothed in
linen, which was above the waters of the river, when he
held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven,
and sware by him that liveth for ever that it shall be
for a time, times, and an hah' (Dan. xii. 7) ; three years
and a hah, no longer, shall the oppressor hold his power ;
then dehverance is determined. How hearts would thrill
as the refrain was repeated, ' the Most High ruleth in
the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He
will.' Above all, when they read the seventh chapter
and saw the brute beasts of worldly empire striving and
pushing and destroying, and then beheld the veil hfted
and the Ancient of days on His throne with His ten
thousand times ten thousand ministers about Him, the
judgement set and the books opened. And then once
more the mist gathers, and the blasphemous horn is
heard speaking, till the beast is slain ; and again the
heavenly scene shines out, and Israel approaches God,
not figured as a brute among the brutes, but as a
man coming with the clouds of heaven and receiv
ing an everlasting dominion which shah not pass
away. We know of course that the ' Son of Man ' here cele
brated, though in the following verses the author dis
tinctly tells us that he stands for ' the people of the

The apocrypha and daniel 169
saints of the Most High,' does also stand as a type of One
greater than Israel but into whom Israel grew. This is
perfectly natural and eminently scriptural. The true
connexion between Jesus Christ and the Christs of the
Old Testament is obscured in the Enghsh versions. The
Jewish, Greek or Roman churchman knows how liter
ally the Old Testament is fuh of Christ, for in their
Bibles the proper title is kept wherever a king, a priest,
or the whole people is termed ' the anointed.' In our
versions this is lost except in Dan. ix. 25, A.V. And
there the exception, being so absolutely an exception,
was misleading and has been rightly corrected in the
Revised Version. But though ' Christ ' thus stands in
the Old Testament for the imperfect national Christs,
the idea is one that needs its completion in the Christ
of Christs, the inheritor (as the epistle to the Hebrews
puts it) of all this ancient Christship and Sonship. And
still in the New Testament the large idea rules. ' Christ '
(in Ephesians especially) means, not Jesus our Lord by
Himseh, separate from men, but Jesus the Lord and
Saviour in growing union with the men whom He has
redeemed. This doctrine of the Christ ' who is being
ah in ah fulfilled ' is what the Dean of Wells brought out
so forcibly in his edition of Ephesians (Macmihan, 1903 ;
the ' exposition,' which sufficiently explains this doc
trine, can now be had separately). It was an apostohc
doctrine which had been generahy forgotten, but Tenny
son had used it in his In Memoriam — ' Ring in the Christ
that is to be.' And this apostohc doctrine was a direct
continuation of the Old Testament doctrine. The
expected Messiah and the Messiah-nation were to the
Jews one divine person not two. The godhead of Christ
was to the apostles a means of real union with men, not
a separation from men. In Enoch the Messianic King
is pictured more ' separately ' ; this is one of the points
in which Daniel appears more properly canonical than
Enoch. Those who would pursue this subject further

170 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
wih find much help in Dr. E. A. Abbott's The Message of
the Son of Man (A. and C. Black, 1909), a small and
dehghtful book which he wrote as preliminary to his
larger The Son of Man.
We certainly do feel throughout Daniel that Christ
is strangely near, as in the passage where the Baby
lonian king sees walking with the three men in the
furnace the fourth whose aspect was ' hke a son of the
gods.' Our Lord Himseh seems to have recognised this
quality in the book, for from it He took His language
when He wished to speak on those subjects which will
least bear to be described in precise terms, His own bond
of relationship with the whole of mankind, the mystery
of the invisible world and those who dweh therein, His
own second coming and the judgement. The large and
awful poetry of the vision in which He saw himseh so
grandly prefigured was fuh of suggestion to His quick
ear, and would suggest to others what could not be
defined more exactly in human speech. The book of
Daniel, when it first appeared, must have answered to,
and drawn out into clearer faith, much which was
vaguely stirring in men's minds about immortahty and
resurrection and things to come. Then after nearly
two centuries our Lord gave new hfe to its symbols, while
at the same time He availed himseh of them to ' hah
reveal and half conceal ' the answer to those dark ques
tionings which exercise every generation.
This then is what the book of Daniel appears to be ;
a message from God modestly yet boldly delivered by
some unknown author ; a book which served a definite
purpose when it was first read, and contributed not a
little to save the faith of Israel in the hving God at a
time when that faith was seriously endangered. Again
in our Lord's time it enabled Him to utter and men to
receive some of the deepest truths He came to reveal.
Perhaps we might venture to add that its faith is the
faith of martyrdom and it may have been one of the

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 171
means which His Father used to point the way to His
heroic sacrifice of love upon the Cross. And in our own
day it still stands as a monument of how God has dealt
with His people in the past, while hke the other prophetic
books of the Old Testament, it also speaks directly to us,
encouraging, warning, instructing, reaching the con
science. It does this because it is in fact God's voice,
living and answering all those appeals and questions
which it is right for us to put to God. We know that it
is God's voice by our own experience and by the experi
ence of our brethren. And criticism has confirmed the
voice of experience by showing how the writer reahy
did come forward with a message from God to men who
sorely needed just such a message.
That Daniel, in the proper sense of the word, prophesies
of our Lord is certain. But the prophecy is not different
in kind from that of the older prophets. It does not
foretell details of His work and sufferings and of the
events which have followed or are stih to fohow in their
train, nor does it afford the means of making exact
calculations of dates for such events. That is not the
way Isaiah or Ezekiel or our Lord Himseh predicted the
future. This prophet, like the other canonical prophets,
is the bearer of the idea of the Christ, and in his immediate
concern for the people of God in his own times he shadows
forth the great development that is to be. This book,
hke other books of prophecy, can be interpreted in its
deepest sense by Christ's incarnation and victory. It
does not contain a residuum of mystery which the
Gospel is not competent to clear up. The more we
study prophecy in general the more distinctly we per
ceive how closely its divine and human elements are
intermingled. Ah that is wisest, bravest and most
practical in the prophet is trained and used by God.
God's way is not to startle us by unintelligible inter
ruption of that course of events which He has chosen
shall be natural ; His rule is beyond, not contrary to

172 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
our intelhgence ; He elevates that which is natural by
means which our reason most admires. He adds a
remarkable, but not incredible, insight to the wisdom,
courage, piety, which the prophet has aheady received,
and which he uses with dihgence worthy (as far as may
be) of the gift. In such a scheme of man's obedience
answering to divine prompting the book of Daniel has
its proper place. It does not stand, hke some other
apocalypses never admitted into the canon, as an un
natural marvel, the contemplation of which might
tempt thoughtful readers to doubt of the ordered and
unchangeable wisdom of God — the very truth which
the book is chiefly designed to establish.
A word perhaps should be added about the stories.
These, we may be sure, rest upon tradition ; the author
did not invent them. Whether they give us plain facts
we cannot either assert or deny, except in so far as there
certainly are some details, already alluded to, about
which the author has made historical mistakes. That
these wonderful trials and dehverances did take place
there can be no definite reason to deny, except the
a priori reason that they seem to us unhkely. It is not
honest to pretend that this reason is a weak one. Only
it must be remembered that the ultimate difficulty
about miracles is not that they fie outside the path of
our experience, for our experience is continually expand
ing ; but that it is sometimes hard for us to be satisfied
that such or such a miracle is morally worth while. We
cannot say that the miracles in Daniel are so well
attested, or are so morally worth while, as the works of
power and the resurrection of our Lord. But the
questions which it is important that we should put to
ourselves about Daniel are these — Is there anything
mischievous in the idea that the Old Testament should
contain some examples of imaginative work ? Is it
necessary that in such a book as Daniel the narrative
should be composed with the same conscientious search

THE APOCRYPHA AND DANIEL 173
after accuracy of facts as we justly expect in a historian
hke the author of Samuel or of Kings ? If this author
made no such careful search, was the message which he
dehvered to his oppressed countrymen less truly on that
account a message from God ?

VI
THE PSALTER
The manifold faith of the Jewish Church was bound
into one by the Spirit of martyrdom and the Spirit of
worship — Of this latter the Psalter witnesses — Its com
position ; whatever the date of the several psalms the
completed Psalter is late and must be interpreted in
the light of mature faith — This principle applied to its
doctrine of eternal life; apparent inconsistencies do
not detract from its fulness of immortahty — And to its
doctrine of forgiveness, which is a doctrine of forgive
ness rather than of sin, and is nearer to the Gospel
than to the prophets — Apparent self-righteousness in
the Psalter is generally the expression of the martyr
spirit of loyalty — The psalms are poetry — Character of
Hebrew poetry — The Song of Songs ; its simple delight
in nature — Lamentations; the peculiar structure of
laments — Gladness of the Psalter, especially its joy in
nature — This joy less naive than in the Song; its
sacramental oharacter — Scenery of Canaan ; its influ
ence on Israel's theology; mythological tradition
purified by nature - poetry — The large Messianic
doctrine of the Psalter.
The last two chapters have shown how much variety
there was in the church hfe of later Judaism. If Judaism
became narrow and formal it was not in these centuries
but after the final breach between the synagogue and
the Christian Church which f ohowed the revolt of Bar-
cochba in the latter hah of the second century a.d. The
Gospels and S. Paul show such a tendency at work, but
the response of Galilee to our Lord's ministry shows that
other impulses were still felt in His day. And 2 Esdras
17*

THE PSALTER 175
shows how long the broader spirit, which the Gospel
received from Judaism and fostered, stih breathed in its
old home. The high churchmen of the Law ; the critics
of the Wisdom schools ; the disciples of the early prophets
who cohected their utterances and composed their
memorial books, who sometimes perhaps added to their
venerable teaohings pieces of prophetic writing of their
own which were not unworthy of a place near their
models ; those other successors of the prophets who
burst forth into the fiery strain of apocalypse ; all this
went to the formation of a great post-exilic hterature
which was the expression of a faith very nearly approach
ing the faith of the Christian churchman. What the
Christian added was : the Christ we expected has come ;
He has been among us as a man on earth ; He has died
for us and has risen ; it is He, this Jesus, who will come
— Christ evident — with the kingdom, in those last days
which have already begun.
As those ' last days ' lengthened out, and as the
Church expanded in the Gentile world, this faith unfolded
though it did not change. At last the various companies
of Christians were bound together by a creed in which
the substance of the common faith was briefly expressed.
Some historical facts were plainly stated. Some trans
cendent truths were figured in symbol or poetry. The
early name for the creed was ' symbolum ' ; the earhest
sketch of a creed (1 Tim. iii. 16) was in rhythmical,
poetic form ; this symbohc or sacramental method was
part of the tradition of the Church. But the Jewish
Church had never adopted a formal creed of even that
character. Her creed was the Shema, Deut. vi. 4. That
expresses two truths of the utmost simplicity : that
God is one, and that God is Jahweh the beni-Israel's
God. It is the primitive faith with no unfolding. And
more ; these words have no verb in the Hebrew. They
are a battle cry rather than a creed. ' Hear, O Israel.
Jahweh our God, Jahweh one ! ' Such a battle-cry

176 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
might weh have been heard when the Maceabean heroes
closed with the enemy.
It is weh worth while to study the literature of faith.
Yet the Spirit which makes the faithful one, and binds
them so close together that controversies and parties are
mere instruments of healthy growth, can never be con
fined within the limits of hterature nor fully illustrated
by the faculties of hterature. Beyond and above the
literature of the Jewish Church this bond of peace and
virtue was forged by the heroism and martyrdom of
struggles hke that of the Maccabees, and by prayerful
and praiseful devotion such as the Psalter witnesses to.
No doubt the Maceabean struggle was an appeal by
the sword. Our Lord has shown a more perfect way.
The sequel of Maceabean history may prove that violence
is inconsistent with religion. That is how Mr. E. R.
Bevan points the final moral in his book Jerusalem under
the High Priests (Arnold). He points it after telling the
story of the war with gusto. If any history book is ' as
good as a noVel ' this book — quite admirable in all ways
— is. His moral is perfectly true also. The apocalyptic
courage, which inspired the revolt, itself leads inevitably
to the high ideal of peace. But that admission may be
gladly made. The faith of Judaism approached as nearly
as possible to the faith of our Lord ; yet He remains
unapproached in personal majesty. The ideal morahty
of the sermon on the mount is far beyond the vision of
the Maccabees ; the mystery of the Cross is a fulfilment
of apocalyptic hope which none could have anticipated.
And we must remember that after all we can only get
beyond hterature by means of literature ; we only know
the Maceabean spirit by what remains written about it.
Soldiers hke Havelock and Outram were not men of
violence, modern statesmen have been idealists in the
midst of affairs. No doubt there were still simple
' saints ' even in the later days of Hasmonean intrigues,
and the ' quiet in the land ' among whom our Lord was

THE PSALTER 177
born were the descendants in unbroken hne from exalted
patriots who fought in faith yet without hate.
So when we turn to the other bond ofuewish church-
manship, the bond of devotion, we are again obhged to
seek it through hterature ; the Psalter is its monument.
And in the Psalter too we find fierce words sometimes.
It has its moral imperfections ; it stih leaves something
for the Gospel to correct and complete. These are
truths indeed ; yet more remarkable is the satisfying
character of the Psalter's witness, and its capacity for
deepened meaning. When we read the Psalter we can
hardly imagine that we should know more of how the
Jews prayed if we could ourselves attend a post-exilic
synagogue ; and there are hardly any Psalms which
wih not yield a quite happy sense to the Christian who
repeats the Christian ' Gloria ' at the end, and apphes
to harsh particulars the solvent of spiritual imagination.
Yet that is weak, if not dishonest, some would answer.
Is it ? Are we sure that a good deal of that kind of
interpretation was not apphed to the psalms in their
original using 1 For the psalms as we know them are
aheady set in the Psalter. And the Psalter was the
hymn-book of the late Jewish Church. And the late
Jewish Church was not far removed from primitive
Christian habits of devotion; a 'mystical' interpretation
of the psalms is almost certain to have been accepted
to some not inconsiderable degree in the synagogue.
Something not unlike this conclusion is pointed to by
Dr. W. E. Barnes in his studies of the Psalter, Lex in
Corde (Longmans, 1911). He would on the whole give
up the search for special historical backgrounds for the
psalms and would rather attend to their general rehgious
meaning. Dr. Cheyne in The Origin of the Psalter (Kegan
Paul, & Trench, 1891), and elsewhere in his earher writ
ings, reached the same end by another path. He argued
that ah the psalms, with one possible exception, are post-
exihc and many of them as late as the Maccabees ; hence
M

178 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
he was able to give the full significance of developed
faith to passages which other critics had interpreted
more austerely.
Dr. Cheyne laid much stress on the need of search for
historical backgrounds, and we must admit that they
are valuable. We may also hope that patient co
operative study, freely criticised and welcoming cor
rection, may discover more of these backgrounds than
are visible at present. At present we are bound to
confess that for the most part the primitive background
remains obscure. In 2 Sam. xxii. we find the eighteenth
psalm written out in fuh and assigned to David. It is
obvious that this might be a later addition to the
original book of Samuel, and if so, that the ascription
of the psalm to David as author might be due to a late
and mistaken tradition. The psalm is certainly very
different from the two laments of David, for Saul and
Jonathan and for Abner, which are preserved in this
same book of Samuel. That does not prove the psalm
not to be David's. The silence about life beyond the
grave in the laments is perhaps not inconsistent with the
temper of the Psalter, and Dr. G. Adam Smith in his
Early Poetry of Israel gives some reason for supposing
that such reticence was traditionally characteristic of
laments. We may be content to say that Ps. xviii.
may perhaps be David's, and may very probably be
early, but that it is the only psalm for the date of which
we have any good evidence at all. Our Lord's reference
to Ps. ex. was clearly not made for the purpose of settling
a point of hterary criticism, but with a deeper intention ;
He was neither confirming nor correcting popular lan
guage about date and authorship. If the titles prefixed
to many psalms be considered to have been intended to
indicate authorship, they must nevertheless be late,
and the variety which appears in the Septuagint suggests
that they represent critical inferences about which a
good deal of freedom was allowed. But the Hebrew

THE PSALTER 179
particle translated 'of is a vague one, and when we
find ' of Solomon ' prefixed to Ps. lxxii., and ' the prayers
of David the son of Jesse are ended ' at the end of the
same psalm, we cannot but wonder whether it was ever
meant to assert authorship, whether some looser con
nexion was not the original idea.
The subscription just quoted points indeed further in
this direction. These titles help us httle in deciding the
ultimate derivation of psalms, but they do help us to
discern some smaher psalters, out of which the complete
Psalter was composed. Five of these are easily dis
covered. There may be traces of more than five, but it
wih be enough for our purpose to look at these five, to
see the general principles on which the complete Psalter
was made, and so to pass to the inferences which more
closely concern us than these critical inquiries.
In Book I. of the Psalter, as now arranged (i.-xli.)
nearly all psalms are entitled ' of David.' In Books 11.
and m. (xhi. -lxxxix.) a group of such Davidic psalms
stands between two groups of Levitical psalms (' Of the
Sons of Korah,' ' of Asaph ' etc.) ; there has been a shght
rearrangement in combining these three groups, but
this wih do for a rough description. Ps. lxxii. has the
subscription noticed above, and we may at this point
begin to suspect that it does not belong to that psalm
alone but to a cohection of psalms, once a httle psalter
by themselves, called ' The Prayers of David the son of
Jesse.' The other groups we have noticed may also
have been separate psalters, called ' David's,' ' Asaph's,'
' Of the Sons of Korah.' ' Sons of ' is the Hebrew way
of expressing ' company,' ' guild ' etc. Thus ' Sons of
Korah ' would not signify any degree of nearness in time
to a particular person named Korah, but ' the choir of
Korahites ' ; these ' Levitical ' titles at any rate are
quite impersonal. To finish this brief analysis : Books
iv. and v. (Pss. xc.-cl.) are marked by the very large
number of anonymous psalms which they contain, by

i8o THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
the absence of all musical titles or prefaces, and by the
artificiality of the division between them. Books I., n.
and ni. end with doxologies which belong to their
psalms and seem to indicate in each case an original
conclusion to a real book. The doxology which divides
Book v. from Book rv., at the end of Ps. cvi. is different ;
it is a brief hymn by itself, and is emphasised by a rubric
at the close : ' let all the people say, Amen.' Thus it
appears that Pss. xc.-cl. make a cohection together.
They may once have been a separate psalter. They
may be simply the new psalms which were taken into
the great cohection, when it was formed on the basis of
the earher psalters. The completed Psalter is in fact
the Hymns Ancient and Modem of the Jewish synagogue.
As in Hymns Ancient and Modem, earher collections
have been drawn upon, and ' modern ' psalms have been
also included.
Can we say anything about the date at which these
earher collections were themselves made ? There are
certain tests which may be apphed. One is an easy test
that every reader is competent to appreciate. Ps. xiv.
ends thus :
' Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion !
When the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people,
Then shall Jacob rejoice, and Israel shah be glad.'
Here is a reference to the ' captivity.' If we agree with
what Professor Torrey says about the dispersion (cf.
supra p. 133 f .) we shah be cautious in assigning a precise
date to this ' captivity ' ; and indeed the more search-
ingly we read the Old Testament the more cautious we
shah become of our own accord in claiming precision
about dates, analysis etc. But we do at least recognise
a rough indication of date here. This psalm must be
(in the broad sense) ' post-exihc,' and therefore the col
lection in which it is included must have been formed
in post-exihc days. Ahusions of the same kind wih be

THE PSALTER 181
found in some psalms of each collection. Readers will
probably come to the conclusion that the first book
(the ' first Davidic psalter ') is the earliest of these
smaller prior cohections. The inference is that all
of them are of post-exihc formation, and that the
completed Psalter (which we now use, having received
it from the synagogue) is of late post-exihc formation. If
it contains, as many think, some psalms which were
originally composed in Maceabean days, it cannot have
taken final shape tih as late as 150 B.C.
But though this be allowed, nothing is thereby proved
about the date of the original composition of each
several psalm in these cohections. A post-exilic psalter
may contain psalms of any earher age. Ps. xxiv. for
instance comes to us through the first Davidic psalter
which is itseh post-exilic. But this particular psalm
may have been composed for the festival of the bringing
of the ark to David's newly won city of Jerusalem
(2 Sam. vi.). Yet if so, it is strange that the chronicler
(1 Chr. xvi.) does not quote it in his account, but gives
a hymn composed of selections from many psalms in
which there is but one slight and ambiguous reference
to this psalm. We must in fact be content with recog
nising the possibihty of one psalm or another having been
originally composed at this or that early date. We shall
say, as Origen said about the popular tradition in the
Alexandrian Church, that S. Paul wrote the epistle to
the Hebrews — if any people think they have good reason
for so dating a psalm, they are right to do so ; no one who
holds a different opinion should quarrel with them. On
the other hand they must not quarrel with those others.
The question does not concern ' things necessary to sal
vation,' nor can any answer to it be really proved by
holy Scripture. But the point on which we can all
come together is this. The completed Psalter, as we read
it, has the form which the later Jewish Church gave it,
and it has the sense which they read into it. Criticism

1 82 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
estabhshes that, and it is historical as well as reverent
to interpret it according to that fuh, deep sense.
We shall see presently how much this reasonable and
charitaible agreement helps us in theological exegesis.
Let us however notice in passing how it relieves us of
scruples about the ascription of so many psalms to David
in the titles. Hardly any one would contend that
David wrote Ps. cxxxvii., ' By the waters of Babylon.'
Many must feel it unlikely that David, who fought,
ruled, administered so well, would have also written so
very many psalms of such various character as are
assigned to him. The difficulties about Davidic author
ship multiply swiftly in the mind of every questioner
among the readers of the Old Testament. It may be
in one manner reverent to listen to God's words without
asking questions when they puzzle us, but it is not
filial. And when the words are no part of the sacred
text itseh, but only titles added to explain it, the human
medium becomes insistent and the reader's intelhgence
is all but bound to be exercised. ' The spirit of man is
the lamp of the Lord. . . . The thoughts of the diligent
tend only to plenteousness : But every one that is hasty
hasteth only to want ' (Prov. xx. 27, xxi. 5) ; the Wisdom
of Israel is certainly on the side of the questioner. Is it
not allowable to suppose that these titles express the
' mystical ' interpretation of the Jewish Church ? We
interpret * mystically,' and find the Psalter richly illus
trative of the hfe and work, the manhood and the
Godhead of our Lord Jesus Christ. We could not
possibly use the Psalter better. But our ' mystical '
use is no arbitrary invention of our own. It is the
natural continuation of the use of the Jewish Church
who found their Psalter richly illustrative of the life and
work of David. And David did not mean to them
simply the son of Jesse, once king of Israel. The name
was a sacrament. It gathered round itself a multitude
of associations and aspirations, The earthly king, the

THE PSALTER 183
series of ' Christs of the Lord,' led on to a larger hope of
' The Christ ' who was yet to come. The Psalter illus
trated the immense variety of David the ' type.' And
yet — this is the beauty of the idea, a beauty which we
can so weh understand — this type was impressed on the
actual hfe of David the man. The ihustrations are
truly ' sacramental.' What the Jewish Church saw was
what we see in the hght of new heavens and new earth
now that the Word has been made flesh — Godhead
through manhood, sacramentahy. Do the titles, thus
understood, lose or gain in sacredness ?
It might be asked ; is not the language of the psalms
an indication of their dates ? To some extent it is.
To the reader of Hebrew Ps. cxxxix., ' 0 Lord, thou hast
searched me and known me,' is recognised by its very
language as late. This psalm makes us think of Isa. liii.
In both places the language is degenerate, in the same
sense that the language of Tennyson or Coleridge is a
degeneration from Elizabethan Enghsh. And in each
piece there is a depth and complexity of thought such as
was weh-nigh impossible for the glorious tongue of early
Hebrew. And again, it is possible to distinguish in the
Psalter a certain parallel to the broad styles we noticed
in the Old Testament generally. There are ' early
prophetic,' ' deuteronomic,' and ' priestly ' psalms. Yet
a difference is also apparent. Take for instance Ps. cxix.
as a ' priestly ' psalm. How different after ah is its
praise of the Law from the chronicler's. Naturahy so
perhaps, since the psalmist is a poet at his prayers, and
the chronicler is a historian composing a view of history.
Yet there is more than this to distinguish them. In a
childlike yet profound story called The House of Prayer,
by Florence Converse (Dent, sixth edition, 1912) — a book
which ought to be in every liturgiologist's hbrary — a quite
boyish httle boy is described who learned a good many
things about prayer, partly from his grandfather, a
student of liturgies, partly from his guardian angel.

1 84 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Among other exercises of discipline the angel had to
check the boy's piecociously growing taste for ancient
liturgical language. It is a good fault even in a child.
In a psalmist it is perhaps not a fault at ah. At any
rate the student of the Psalter who is also a student of
the Old Testament wih before long begin to catch —
and to enjoy — something of this imitative accent in its
language, and he wih in hke measure learn that the test
of language in the Psalter is a very dehcate one. He wih
also notice another pecuharity. Though some differ
ences in language may be observed, the general similarity
of language, as well as of metrical craf tmanship, is much
more obvious. Indeed it might be added that in spite
of the continually satisfying response of the Psalter to
our manifold desires and moods, still it is marked by one
general tone of devotional thought. Hymns Ancient
and Modem recurs to our mind. In that book Latin,
Greek and German hymns, Wesley, Heber, Watts and
Faber, have all been tuned to the same key. The book
is popular not academic. Liberties have been boldly
taken with texts in order to make the whole serviceable
to the Church in England at a particular period. ' Hark !
how all the welkin rings,' and ' Where the young Prince
of glory died,' have taken another form ; and ' Art thou
weary, art thou languid ' has been so freely dealt with
by its translator that the original Greek cannot now be
identified. Something hke that has happened in the
Psalter, and even those psalms which have most claim
to an early date, appear in it harmoniously adapted to
their new home.
We cannot but observe also that there has been a good
deal of thoughtful arrangement. Pss. cxx.-cxxiii. show
an ascending scale of faith.
'In my distress I cried unto the Lord.'
'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence
cometh my help.'

THE PSALTER 185
'I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the
house of the Lord.'
1 Unto thee do I lift up mine eyes, 0 thou that sittest in
the heavens.'

The best comment on this is Bacon's confession :
' Thy creatures have been my books, but thy scriptures
much more. I have sought Thee in the courts, fields
and gardens, but I have found Thee in Thy Temples.'
Notice too the juxtaposition of Pss. lxxxviii. and
lxxxix. Ps. lxxxviii. has been called the saddest psalm
in the Psalter. It is indeed so sad that, if it were taken
by itseh, it might seem almost to deny hope. ' Shall
thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave ? Or thy
faithfulness in Abaddon ? Shall thy wonders be known
in the dark ? And thy righteousness in the land of
forgetfulness ? Thy fierce wrath is gone over me ;
Thy terrors have cut me off.' Such language, absolutely
taken, contradicts the hope of Christian, Jew, and all
good men. But the composers of the Psalter do not
ahow it to be taken absolutely. Directly after this
psalm they have placed the exultant ' I will sing of the
mercies of the Lord for ever : With my mouth will I
make known thy faithfulness to ah generations.' This
sequent psalm also ends with a certain sadness. But
every one who has recited the two psalms together
has thereby learned to beheve in spite of bitterness ;
and if that were not enough, the doxology at the end
sanctifies both psalms and the whole book in which
they come.
But Ps. lxxxviii. raises a larger question to which this
principle, of interpreting the Psalter according to its
hturgical background, may help us to give a satisfactory
and true answer. Does the Psalter teach faith in eternal
hfe ? Let us be sure of what that question means.
If it means, ' Does the Psalter teach faith in the resur-

186 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
rection, or in a hfe beyond the grave ? ' the answer will
be, No. It is not in a new hfe beyond the grave, but in
one unbroken life in God, that these psalmists beheve.
If the question means, ' Did ah the several psalms from
their first appearance teach this ? ' the answer wih be
that very likely they did not. But that the Psalter, as
used in the Jewish Church, is full of immortality, there
surely should be very little doubt. Ps. lxxxviii. seems
to contradict this. Its connexion with Ps. lxxxix.
corrects that seeming to some extent. The use of the
mythological pagan word ' Abaddon,' in verse 11,
carries the correction further. We have aheady seen
in our study of the early prophets that ' Abaddon,'
' Sheol,' and other hke words, represented pagan super
stition against which those prophets sternly set their
faces. There is no ' Hell ' outside the reach of God's
love, though Israehtes and Christians have patheticahy
feigned it. But, whatever remnant of gloomy mistrust
stih hngered in the later Jewish Church, such mistrust
ful superstition was not the Church's faith. And in
those later days the old picturesque words were freely
used in an innocent sense ; they meant no more than
'Titan,' 'Rhea,' 'Saturn,' meant to Milton. But
Milton used those names with emotional effect, and not
without rehgious sincerity. So in Job or in the Psalms
those old Semitic titles of gloom are abundantly employed
when a soul, overwhelmed with dread or sorrow, would
find expression. We may go further and say that such
souls do sometimes play, and even perilously play,
with the ideas themselves which such words had stood
for. Even the faithful worshipper in the synagogue,
even the faithful Christian, sometimes feel the shadow
and the doubt of death. True prayer conquers that
weakness by sharing it with God (who ordained Calvary
and the cry Eloi, Eloi), not by Stoical repression. It is
possible that Ps. lxxxviii. was once an antique lament
from the lips of an Israelite who knew not the peace of

THE PSALTER 187
the true religion. It is not improbable that it was the
hah- despairing cry of some Jewish churchman who, in
the moment of his bitter suffering, doubted of the
brethren's faith. It is certain that in its place in the
Psalter this psalm was intended to make one music with
the rest ; its discord was part of the completeness of
the whole, a discord to be soon resolved. If it be not im
pertinent to say it, the history of Israel's faith in immor
tahty stih remains to be written. Dr. Cheyne has
thrown out pregnant hints of how the task should be
undertaken. A clear distinction must be made between
vestiges in the Old Testament of pre-Jewish paganism
(the discovery of which is of great antiquarian but little
theological interest), and the repetition of antique
mythological phraseology as a means of expressing
strong emotion. And again, the distinction must be
observed between clear-cut definition of a restored hfe
after death such as we find in Dan. xii. 2, 3, and the less
definite conviction that life in God is not interrupted
by physical death ; and it must not be assumed that
this latter form of faith is less near to our Lord's faith
than the former. And yet again, it must not be taken
for granted that the development of men's several,
personal consciousness is uniformly late in time. Be
cause those pubhc speakers, the early prophets, con
cerned themselves with the sin, repentance and hope
of the nation as a whole, it does not inevitably follow
that no Israehte of their day had his own personal
consciousness of God, or even that no earher Israehte
would have been unable to respect our Lord's argument
for immortahty, namely that He who said, I am the God
of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
is not the God of the dead but of the living. Tried by
such principles as these the Psalter will yield a deep and
satisfying doctrine of immortality. Those who have
found signs of poetic faith in Jewish hterature, and are
willing to take the Psalter as they find it, i.e. as the

1 88 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
synagogue book, wih scarcely be afraid to hear a promise
far more than temporal in Ps. xvii. :
' As for me, I shah behold thy face in righteousness :
I shah be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.'
Another point on which the Psalter shows its deepened
Jewish church character is the doctrine of forgiveness.
The early prophets were instant to rouse the people to
consciousness of their sins. They dealt httle with sin
in the abstract, nor did they say much about forgiveness.
The people were faithless, unjust, luxurious. The
prophets denounced those sins, urged the people to trust
the Lord and to walk again in His ways. If they would
do so ah would be weh ; if not, the Lord would purge
them with fiery judgement. The standard of righteous
ness was simple. The ten commandments in their hteral
sense might suffice to express it. Jeremiah and the
deuteronomists, with their heart-religion, mark the
transition to the priestly idea which is introduced (in
the hterature) by Ezekiel. Here a people aheady peni
tent begins to be dealt with. Cleansing is provided for
the troubled conscience. Sin for a while comes into the
foreground. In the Psalter sin again as it were recedes.
With the prophets righteousness, with the psalmists
hohness is the great thought ; sin the disturbing shadow
is mainly shown that it may be lost in hght ; there is no
doctrine of sin, but a most consohng doctrine of hohness.
But this doctrine in the Psalter presupposes all that has
gone before. The prophets roused conscience ; the
exile ratified their effort. The Psalter, hke the Gospel,
is httle concerned to awake the sense of sin. It takes
conscience for granted in all who use it, and provides
prayers for the burdened sinner — ' Be merciful to my
sin, for it is great ' ; and assurances of forgiveness —
' For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is
his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east
is from the west, so far hath he removed our trans-

THE PSALTER 189
gressions from us ' (xxv. 11, ciii. 11, 12). Ezekiel and the
priestly writers had transformed the thought of righteous
ness to the thirst for holiness, and throughout the Psalter
that nobler aspiration rules. Perhaps it is one sign of the
comparative earhness of the first Davidic coheotion that
this is not always so clear in it. Yet even in its passages
of simplest morahty there is generally a warmth of
affection that carries us beyond the mere statement. In
the PsaJter generally we are far beyond even prophetic
morality. With this thirst for hohness the trouble of
conscience naturally becomes more comphcated, and in
some psalms this maturity of conscience is carried
further than it is in any other part of the Old Testament.
Some have argued for the Davidic authorship of Ps. h.
from its hkeness to the narrative of David's repentance in
2 Sam. xii. Others have used the converse argument,
that the narrative is so hke the psalm as to be thereby
proved unhistorical. But careful comparison shows
how precarious is either argument. The narrative is
an exquisitely simple account of the awakening of an
untrained conscience. Penitence, forgiveness, penalty,
ah belong to the earhest stage of rehgious discipline.
As far as that consideration goes, the narrative bears
the strongest mark of historical accuracy. But how
deep and passionate is the psalm. The terse, concrete
Hebrew bhnds us to the immensity of the thought and
emotion. So perhaps does the Gospel style in the
parable of the Prodigal Son. But psalm and parable are
close together, separated by centuries of the Holy
Spirit's influence from the narrative in Samuel.
In another respect too the Psalter is akin to the
Gospel. In both there is denunciation of just one kind
of sin — cruel, self-righteous pride. In the Gospel this
is attacked by that love burning its way against oppo
sition which the Apocalypse cahs ' the wrath of the
Lamb.' In the Psalter there is sometimes a fierceness
which is too near to hatred. But it will be found that

190 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
most of those difficult and painful psalms are directed
against that one form of sin — ' Because that he remem
bered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and
needy man, and the broken in heart, to slay them '
(cix. 16). Such proud souls are ' brutish ' — if we may
so press the rendering of the Hebrew in Ps. xhx. 10 ;
but the weak, animal nature of man is in all other con
nexions used by the psalmists as a ground of hope :
' But he, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity,
and destroyed them not :
Yea, many a time turned he his anger away,
And did not stir up ah his wrath.
And he remembered that they were but flesh ;
A wind that passeth away, and cometh not again '
(lxxviii. 38, 39).
This makes us think of our Lord's word, ' The spirit
is willing but the flesh weak.' We remember how in
S. Paul that becomes ' the flesh lusteth against the
Spirit,' and we feel the difference between the divine
trust of the Son of God and the necessary severity of even
the great apostle. As the Gospel is to the Epistles, so,
we might almost say, is the Psalter to the Prophets.
Yet if such a thing be said it must be said with careful
hmitation. The Gospels too are severe, but their
severity is gathered up in the Cross. The passage in the
Old Testament which most resembles the Psalter in its
doctrine of forgiveness is Exodus xxxiv. 6, 7 :
'And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed,
The Lord, the Lord, a God fuh of compassion and gracious,
slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth ; keeping
mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression
and sin : and that will by no means clear the guilty ; visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the
children's children, upon the third and upon the fourth
generation.'

THE PSALTER t$l
Like Sam. xii. this passage is separated by a great
tract of time from the Psalter. This accounts for the
mode of expression in the last lines . But though they are
not in psalmists' language, their severity is found in
many places of the Psalter. That severity seems almost
to spoil the graciousness of the passage in Exodus. It
takes a shape now and then in the Psalter which we
can hardly bring ourselves to approve. Yet we cannot
remove it without changing the character of both from
an honest treatment of the facts of hfe to a sentimental
rehgiosity. And the divine utterance is always honest
to the facts of life ; we know God in His visible working,
and it is not merely the interaction of man's perversity
that makes far-reaching consequences of sin inevitable.
Part at least of our repugnance to such utterances is due
to confusion between forgiveness and removal of conse
quences. The petition in the Lord's prayer, ' Forgive
us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,' does declare
that even a removal of consequences is possible within
the family where the children interact reciprocally with
the ' lovingkindness ' or ' pity ' of the Father. This is
already in Hosea a Hebrew idea, and it often appears
in the psalms. But so long as the proudly cruel, the
self-righteous, hnger outside the family, the stern law
of consequences (which is one aspect of the doctrine
of ' original sin ') still works, and the psalmists would
proclaim no real message of forgiveness if they shut their
eyes to that fact.
But such a phrase as ' original sin ' takes us far away
from the temper of the Psalter. ' Behold, I was shapen
in iniquity ; and in sin did my mother conceive me,'
is not the language of an Article of Rehgion but of
poetry. There is little of system in the Psalter, httle of
legalism. Ps. 1. is typical of the psalmists' attitude to
sacrifice and rehgious institutions. Angels of evil are
just mentioned, but there is no Satan in the Psalter.
The means of forgiveness is God's power and love. This

192 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
becomes effectual when man's humility responds
to it :
' Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty ;
Neither do I exercise myself in great matters,
Or in things too wonderful for me.
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul j
Like a weaned child with his mother,
My soul is with me like a weaned child.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
From this time forth and for evermore ' (cxxxi.).
Beautiful however as this httle poem is, it does just
remind us of some other psalms where humility is the
very excellence which seems lacking. These are not
psalms of cruel seh-righteousness, but they have the
self-righteous tinge. In some this defect must be simply
recognised, and corrected by the worshipper's personal
act of humihty. The Psalter, for all its glory, is not the
Gospel, and the recitation of the Psalter always de
mands a spiritual alertness. This defect is found as a
rule in the ' deuteronomic ' psalms, such as Ps. i. The
deuteronomists were preachers and noble ones. But
no preacher, no one who ventures to teach other people
morahty, is quite safe from this grave peril ; even in
spiration leaves him open to it. Yet there is no need to
exaggerate the matter. Ps. cxix. is typical. It is
didactic, yet how affectionate ; and with what true
humihty it concludes.
There is a much larger class of psalms where the lan
guage that offends us is not didactic. It is no quiet
feehng of superiority, but a passionate assertion of
innocence which can hardly be distinguished from a
passionate loyalty to the Lord. It is a clinging to com
munion with Him in the face of immense hindrance. It
often recalls Job. Moreover we must remember that
the psalms are lyrical. They concentrate and vivify
generalities in the single person of the speaker. And

THE PSALTER 193
often the psalmist, though he speaks vividly and lyrically
of himseh, has a band of brethren in his mind. Some
times he says so, and from what he sometimes says we
may infer what he often thinks. Here is the key to this
language of innocence. It is not so much the whole
nation that he stands for ; it is a little group of brothers,
a httle group who are persecuted and steadfast in perse
cution. This language is their mutual encouragement,
their quite sincere appeal to the Lord for whom they
are witnesses. Since early Christian days ' witnesses '
of this kind have been entitled ' martyrs.' In the
Psalter the corresponding title is ' saints ' ; it is im
possible to read the Psalter without noticing how often
that term ' saints ' occurs. And the Psalter would
gain intensity if we remembered what courage its
' sainthness ' implies, just as the New Testament does
when we remember that ' temptation ' means in its
pages resistance unto blood or even braver endurance
than that.
So we come back to what we considered in our last
chapter and at the beginning of this. ' Saints ' was
the title of the noble army who rahied round the Mac
cabees and fought for the true rehgion when all were
faihng. Critics are inchned to make an ever-growing
number of psalms Maceabean, mainly because they
cannot but recognise this spirit of martyrdom in so many
places. It is a spirit which binds the faithful few close
together. It is the prefiguring type of S. Paul's ' in
Christ.' It does actuahy set men free from common
sin ; those inspired by it, risking their hves daily for it,
may claim even an innocence which the rank and file of
Christian churchmen dare not claim. They dare not
claim it for themselves ; they wih not be offended at
it in their spiritual princes — ' As for the saints that are
in the earth, they are the excellent in whom is all my
delight ' (xvi. 3). ' Maceabean ' is quite a good name
for these psalms. Only it should be understood as a
N

194 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
description of character, not as defining a date. If we
knew more of the whole history of post-exihc Judaism
we might perhaps find that there were other, now un
recorded, resistances not unlike that of the Maccabees.
Brave deeds not Unlike theirs were done even in earlier
times — ' Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath
given me,' said Isaiah, and the writer to the Hebrews
saw something hke ' Maceabean ' significance in the
words (Isa. viii. 18 ; Heb. ii. 13). And martyrdom
shades off in the Psalter into the less conspicuous peace
of all those faithful whose treasure is in the kingdom —
' Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than they
have when their corn and their wine are increased,'
' Happy is the people, that is in such a case : yea, rather
happy is the people, whose God is the Lord ' (iv. 7,
cxhv. 15, cf. Septuagint). The ' quiet in the land ' and
the ' saints ' with ' the high praises of God in their
mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand ' make one
company in the Psalter ; the common badge of both is
that they are strangers on this earth with God, and
sojourners as all their fathers were (see xxxv. 20, Ixxvi. 9,
cxlix. 6, xxxix. 12).
We noticed just now that a certain verse in Ps. li.
must be read as poetry, not as a term in systematic
theology. That of course must be always remembered
in the Psalter. To some extent it must be remembered
throughout the Old Testament. Our Revised Version
has helped us much by printing Psalms, Proverbs, Job,
and some other books or parts of books, in hnes of poetry.
Those who read Hebrew and use Kittel's Hebrew Bible
(Biblia Hebraica . . . edidit Rud. Kittel, Lipsiae, 1905,
1906), know that he and his coadjutors have printed a
great deal more of the text in this fashion. In large
parts of the prophets this was certainly right ; the
prophets are often misunderstood because we forget
that their oracles are poetry, with all the craftsmanship

THE PSALTER 195
of poetical rhythm as weh as the largeness of poetical
idea ; they are anything rather than matter-of-fact
speakers. But sometimes perhaps Kittel has gone too
far. The Hebrew language is not only poetical in its
picturesque dramatic way of expressing thought. It is
that. The best Hebrew hardly uses abstract terms, nor
does it attempt to express such things as the working
of conscience in an abstract manner; it sets people
talking — limor, ' saying ' is the Hebrew equivalent to
inverted commas, and even indirect quotation is regu
larly avoided. How naturally and beautifully is the
dialogue of Balaam with his ass understood when this is
remembered. But Hebrew is not only poetical in this
way. Its brief sentences, especially when they give
a person's speech, fall almost inevitably into rhythmical
balance. This can often be perceived even in transla
tion, and in the Greek of the Gospels (which has a some
what obscure but certainly real Semitic pedigree) the
same peculiarity may be observed. Hence the hne
between prose and poetry in the Old Testament is not
always easy to draw, and even in its regular poems there
is often a freedom from mechanical rule which by no
means detracts from their excellence. Hebrew poetry
(of the Bibhcal periods) seldom smells of the lamp ; it is
out-of-door work. Yet there are regular poems. There
is a regular craftsmanship. Prose and poetry may touch
on their border-line, but most of the poetry of the Old
Testament belongs unmistakably to its own proper class.
Robert Lowth in his Oxford Lectures (De Sacra poesi
Hebraeorum, Oxonii, 17C3) pointed out in his quiet
manner, as little more than a passing remark, the prin
ciple of parallelism. He has laid the foundation for all
discussion of Hebrew poetry since then, and has increased
the enjoyment of all readers, even the most unlearned.
There is no one to-day who does not feel the waving
wings, the ebb and flow, the pulse of answering
thought, as they repeat the double or treble verses

196 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of the psalms in which the idea is developed by
varied repetition :
' 0 come let us sing unto the Lord :
Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation.'
What more there may be of regular rule in the making
of Hebrew verses is still discussed. Mr. W. H. Cobb's
book (A Criticism of Systems of Hebrew Metre, an
Elementary Treatise, Oxford, 1905) gives the history of
such discussion in a style which is as readable as it is
scholarly. A rather curious recurrence appears. In
quirer after inquirer approaches the problem with a
prejudice in favour of the large, untrammelled freedom
of Hebrew versifying. But each ends by changing his
mind and joining the ranks of those who try to discover
the stricter rules which they are convinced do govern
the poets. We must not wander into these discussions
here. Enough to say that this at least seems clear.
Hebrew poetry is (hke Enghsh, unhke ancient Greek)
accentual. The responding hnes have generally the same
number of accented syhables, and the number of un
accented syllables intervening does not matter. Three
is the commonest number. In fact the Prayer Book
version of the Psalter gives a rough, but by no means
bad idea of the Hebrew rhythm ; in Ps. lxxx., ' Hear,
0 thou Shepherd of Israel,' it is particularly weh marked.
And as in that version, so in Hebrew poetry throughout
the Old Testament, there is (at least to modern and
foreign ears) a difference between the smoothness, and
obviousness of the rhythm in different poems. One of
the reasons for saying that the Psalter, as we have it,
belongs throughout to one and the same period is the
equable character of its rhythm throughout ; where
exceptions occur there is nearly always a special reason
to account for them ; often there is justifiable uncer
tainty about the text.

THE PSALTER 197
Job, Psalms and Proverbs are commonly cahed the
'poetical' books. This term however refers mainly
to a peculiarity in the Hebrew pointing. In these books
the Hebrew accents are so ordered that verses may,
when so required, be divided into threes instead of twos.
As we have already seen, there are other books which
deserve to be cahed poetical. If such a group were
made according to the ordinary meaning of the term, it
would be certainly hard to exclude Canticles or The
Song of Songs from it. For pure beauty of poetry
nothing surpasses this httle book. It tells a story in
which Solomon is one of the actors ; it is mere confusion
of thought to refer the piece to him as author. Readers
differ in opinion as to what the story precisely is. On
the whole it seems possible to fohow the action con
sistently if we suppose the Shulammite maiden to have
been carried to Solomon's court where she is wooed by
the great King ; she remains faithful to her shepherd
lover, and is in the end restored to him. Some such
idylhc progress of the love of man and maid was no
doubt part of the meaning of the poem, nor should we
feel anything but gladness that such simphcity finds a
place in holy Scripture. Yet it must be confessed that
the story thus taken is obscure. What is at once plain
to every reader is the poet's delight in outdoor nature,
' a love of the country,' which as has been said of an
Enghsh writer, ' is neither the sportsman's love, nor the
naturalist's, nor the poet's (and we might add, nor the
psalmists'), but passion for the country as such.' The
Enghsh churchman, who reads this book in the Easter
days of awakening spring, will agree with that. When
we notice that the Jews too have long read it at Passover,
we cannot but wonder whether after ah the book did not
enter the canon on its primitive merits, not because of
its capaoity for ahegoric interpretation ; in hke manner
Ruth was and is read by the Jews as a harvest idyh,
at the harvest festival of Pentecost. But, it may be

198 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
added, if this pure sympathy with all created life be
indeed the main impulse of the poem, then interpreta
tion, not allegorical but mystical (or sacramental) in
the best sense of the term, becomes exceedingly natural
and fitting. Comparison with the Song does not help
us about the date of psalms. Its own date is so uncer
tain. There are pecuharities in its language which have
at first sight a late appearance. But they fah short of
proof, and the latest editor makes out at least a fair
case for its pre-exihc origin in the romantic country of
Northern Israel (The Song of Songs, edited as a Dramatic
Poem by W. W. Cannon, Cambridge, 1913).
One other poem outside the Psalter may be noticed
in passing, especially as it illustrates a particular form of
rhythm different from that of the psalms in general.
This poem is Lamentations. That is the title in the
Greek and Latin Bibles. The Greek adds an intro
ductory note : ' And it came to pass after Israel was
made captive and Jerusalem laid desolate, that Jeremiah
sat down weeping and lamented with this lamentation
over Jerusalem, and said  ' But that account of the
origin of the book was not admitted into their text by
the Jewish scholars, who placed it far away from Jere
miah in the Writings. The title there is simply ' How ! '
— the first word of the poem. There is nothing in the
poem itseh which would lead us to ascribe it to Jere
miah. There is perhaps nothing to forbid that ascrip
tion, but it seems to rest on a later tradition than that
which marked the poem as anonymous. The mechani
cal form is strict. Like some of the psalms, e.g. cxix.,
it is alphabetical ; the verses in each of the first four
chapters begin with successive letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. But the distinctive point is that a special
rhythm is employed. It is the rhythm which is called
Kinah, a ' keen' or 'dirge' (cf. 2 Sam. i. 17, Jer. ix. 10, 19,
Ez. xix. 1, 14). Its characteristic is a long hne with a
shorter cadence, and it commonly begins with ' How ! '

THE PSALTER 199
The pathos of this heart-breaking lament is known to
all. Its affinity should be noticed with other parts of
the Old Testament which treat of suffering, e.g. Ps.
lxxxviii., Job, Isa. liii. The personal note in i. 12 etc.,
and throughout ch. iii., is hke the lyric fashion of many
psalms, and fits it for the wider application which both
the Jewish and the Christian Church have practised.
The psalms are poetry, and poetry is a supreme form
of art. Art has been defined in various terms, but the
best description is his who said that the aim of art is joy.
The Psalter is always serious and sometimes sad ; yet
it is sad only to transform sadness into joy, and its main
characteristic is gladness. In no direction does this
appear more clearly than in its delight in nature. This
delight is not the simply, innocently sensuous dehght
of the Song of Songs. What the poet there did uncon
sciously is done consciously by the psalmists. They
glorify nature as the vision and language of God. Some
times they are content to give a picture in a few hnes,
hke that of the strong sun running his course in Ps. xix.
No apphcation is made ; the poet trusts the saoramental
power of the mere natural beauty of the thing. Ps. xix.
does indeed end with a moral reflection. It is a beautiful
one, but surely forms a separate piece from the first
hah of the poem. The juncture of the two is just what
would be approved in a popular hymn-book ; the artist
and the sacramentahst (if the twain be not one) might
wish the two psalms were stih given separately. Some
times there is a magnificent theophany — the Lord
manifesting Himseh in the thunderstorm, as in xviii.,
xxix., and the conclusion of lxxvii. Sometimes the
theophany is rather suggested than described, as in
xcvi. where the coming of spring is the advent of the
Lord to judge. There is a famous addition in some
copies of the Septuagint of this psalm ; ' Say among the
nations, The Lord reigneth from the tree.' This is

2CO THM FAITH OP THE OLD TESTAMENT
thought to have been added in Christian times, but as
far as the context comes into the argument, the words
may be taken in a sense which is quite in harmony with
the psalmist's sacramental vision of the awakening
forest. Sometimes, as in civ., we have an elaborate
description of all the daedal hfe of nature in which
ascription of praise to the Creator, Guider and Provider is
continually interwoven ; through and over ah runs the
melody of simple joy. Sometimes a more solemn psalm
declares how God who is in and through nature is never
theless transcendently eternal above it ; so xlvi., xc,
cii. And yet other psalms teh of man's own special
place in the harmony of nature ; so viii., xxxvi. 7,
xxxix. 12, cxv. 16, cf. civ. 14, 23. But nature is never
a mere background to man in the Psalter ; man and
nature serve together in the universal temple of the
Lord (cf. xxix. 9). And that last phrase 'universal
temple ' reminds us that it would be a jejune inter
pretation which made ' the house of the Lord ' merely
Solomon's temple in the Psalter. The psalmists are
nearly always in sympathy with that older feehng of
Israel, which Solomon had (as it were) to propitiate
when he built his temple : ' The Lord hath said that
he would dweh in the thick darkness. I have surely
built thee an house of habitation ' (1 Kings viii.
12, 13).
Of course some psalms do refer to the builded temple.
The ' Songs of Ascents,' cxx.-cxxxiv., do so. Perhaps
their temple is not Solomon's, but that temple which
' the remnant ' restored after the captivity. ' Jerusalem
that art builded,' cxxii. 3, perhaps means ' that art
rebuilded.' And Ps. cxxvi. speaks plainly of the cap
tivity and the return (verses 1-3). Still more interesting
is its continuation in which the psalmist prays for yet
another ' turning of captivity ' (verse 4). As so often
in the poetry of the Psalter the outward and visible
touches the inward and spiritual ; ' to turn ' becomes a

THE PSALTER 201
devotional phrase exactly hke our ' convert,' cf . xxiii. 3.
These festal ' ascents ' to Jerusalem (whatever be the
precise significance of that Hebrew word) were harvest
thanksgivings and anxious farmers' rogation litanies,
but they were besides the unlading of troubled con
sciences from the country side.
The country side and hills of Canaan — the Old Testa
ment is fuh of the Israehte's love for his ' glorious land.'
Think of Deuteronomy, and especially of that poem in
which ' Moses the man of God blessed the children of
Israel before his death ' (Deut. xxxiii.) :
' Blessed of the Lord be his land ;
For the precious things of heaven, for the dew,
And for the deep that coucheth beneath,
And for the precious things of the fruits of the sun,
And for the precious things of the growth of the moons,
And for the chief things of the ancient mountains,
And for the precious things of the everlasting hills,
And for the precious things of the earth and the fulness
thereof,
And the good will of him that dwelt in the bush :
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.'
The scenery of the Psalter is mainly Canaan. Ps. xhi.
has been thought the lament of a departing exile — ' 0
my God, my soul is cast down within me : Therefore do
I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and the
Hermons. . . . Deep caheth unto deep at the noise of thy
waterspouts : Ah thy waves and storms are gone over
me.' Notice once more the sacramental turn ; the
visible and audible torrents of the mountains are all
one with the divine torrents which overwhelm and yet
console the poet's soul. Some psalms express the

202 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
longing of absence, the home-sickness which no nation
ever felt hke Israel except the Itahans, both dwellers
in lands of promise and of foreign domination. But
for the most part the highlanders of Canaan are
singing of and in their native hills and vaheys and
farms and bare wildernesses. Notice how httle there
is about the sea ; how httle (and that in derogation)
about the horse, which these highlanders did not much
use. This prevailing sense of the mountains must be sym
pathetically felt by all who would enjoy the Psalter
intensely. If we cannot visit the Holy Land, the next
best preparation is to read Dr. Adam Smith's Historical
Geography of the Holy Land (Hodder & Stoughton, 1894 ;
eighth ed. 1901). The second chapter with its maps is
the indispensable one. The wise student wih make
a rough, swift map for himseh and so try to realise, as
though he were in the country himseh, the variety of its
scenery and climate, the mountain masses, the rare but
fertile plain, the austere desert of the south. Then he
will respond to ah that physical imagery with which the
psalmists so naturally and vividly express their emotions
and their theology. The Lord is a ' rock,' a ' fortress ' ;
a ' narrow place ' is pain, sorrow, temptation ; ' en
larged steps ' are freedom of heart, conscience, hfe ;
' a good wind in a plain land ' (cxliii. 10) is the Holy
Ghost the Comforter ; the issues of hfe and death are
recognised in mountain gorges where mountain foes he
in wait ; and who can teh which way the struggle will
go ? The soul flies for refuge from the world ' as a bird
to the hills,' and in the silence of the hihs (Ixii. 1, see
R.V. margin) is peace. As Joshua drove the enemy
down the pass of Beth Horon, when the day began to
dawn behind Gibeon, and he prayed for an hour more of
storm and darkness to complete the rout ; so Jahweh,
called upon by His servant hard pressed in spiritual
conflict, takes shield and spear, comes down, hurls His

THE PSALTER 203
spear, then stands between the failing soldier and the
foe, shouts His battle-cry, and drives the adversary
down the dark and slippery way hke chaff before the
wind (Joshua x. 12, 13, Ps. xxxv. 1-6).
Such illustrations might be multiphed indefinitely.
Every one wih think of that description of the barren
Negeb, or southern land, with its astonishing sacra
mental apphcation to worship made ah the deeper by the
failure of its outward ritual : ' 0 God, thou art my God ;
early wih I seek thee : My soul thirsteth for thee, my
flesh longeth for thee, In a dry and weary land where
no water is. So have I looked upon thee in the sanctuary,
To see thy power and thy glory ' (lxiii. 1,2). Compare
that cohect in the Mozarabic Psalter, a mystic's prayer
in bis dark hour : ' Though the gate of heaven open not
to prayer, or the hving bread denying Himseh afford
not hfe ; stih for the redemption of Thy heritage and for
the praise of Thy glory, what Thou didst grant to the
type Thou dost grant to the reality ' (Mozarabic Psalter,
Ps. lxxvii., oratio). Every one wih remember too the fre
quent imagery of hght and shadow and covering wings;
or how the mountain path with its hindrances and dangers,
its stumbhng-blocks, and the lantern to light the feet
that travel along it, is variously apphed to the course of
man's hfe and the right way marked out for him by
God. Dr. Hatch in his Essays in Biblical Greek (Oxford,
1889) pointed out how the Gahlean Gospels keep this
mode of speech, and how in S. Paul it changes to the
townsman's metaphor of ' conversation,' or ' going up
and down ' the streets. There are a few city psalms in
the Psalter — notably that lovely one in which ' there
is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of
God ' (xlvi. 4) — but hills, open country or desert make
the large scenery of the Psalter in general. Isaiah and
Jeremiah dwelt in Jerusalem, Micah and the psalmists
with the sons of Rechab in the open country dreaming
of their nomad ancestors.

2o4 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
These parables of nature affect or even direct the
theology of the Hebrews. The tempest is the mani
festation of God. Hence His angels are winds and fire
(cf. civ. 4, Heb. i. 7) ; the thunder is His voice, and the
Lord ' speaking ' had for them an intenser meaning than
we, with our machinery of abstract expression, can easily
understand. And the terror of the storm shaped their
idea of divine justice or vindication. The idea thus
shaped sometimes offends our feelings ; yet it may be
questioned whether our own tendency to think of the
divine in human imagery be not more mischievous ;
the fury of the mysterious storm is a fitter adumbration
of the burning love of God — qui salvandos salvos gratis —
than is the too intelligible anger of men. And this
natural imagery is an aid to the acceptance of some vast
truths, such as the height of God above the changing
things of man's experience. His seat is on high ; He
humbleth Himseh to behold the things that are in
heaven and earth ; so it is that He is such a friend to the
poor and lowly (cxiii. 5-9) — as Ehhu said, God is mighty,
and therefore despiseth not any (Job xxxvi. 5). And
it deepens our silent awe in the face of some divine
quahties ; when Lancelot Andrewes was asked to frame
articles of rehgion about predestination he refused,
appeahng to the psalmist who had said that God's judge
ments were a great abyss (xxxvi. 6). It throws some
light too on the Hebrew utterances about hfe, death and
immortahty. ' Breath,' ' gates of death,' ' pit,' ' de
struction,' are physical illustrations, not exact terms of
theology. Most of the language used of these immeasur
able reahties is language of metaphor ; it moves to and
fro among those ' intehectual perplexities which haunt
us in that dim region where mind and matter meet.'
Some of these metaphors remind us of what we have
already noticed ; in the Psalter there are a number
of nature pictures which reflect an ancient mythology ;
and that mythology was not always pure. Such are

THE PSALTER 205
the passages about the strange fairyland of the north
(xlviii. 2) ; Jahweh marching from Sinai, and shaking
earth and heaven with His horrific tread, as He came to
put Himseh at the head of the army of His people (Ixviii.
7, 8, cf . Judges v. 4, 5) ; and the ahusions to Rahab, the
sea-serpent etc. (lxxiv. 13, lxxxix. 10). Such revivals
are cleansed and elevated in the Old Testament when
ever they occur, but in the Psalter especiahy ; there the
fresh nature-poetry in which they are set is a solvent
of the associations of superstition ; love of nature makes
even the dark places of nature divine.
A few brief remarks ought perhaps to be added on the
Messianic character of the Psalter. This is but part of
the character of the whole Old Testament, and if this
httle treatise has not altogether failed in clearness, the
reader wih not wish for a longer discussion here. The
Messianic character of the Old Testament is not found
in special and direct predictions, but in the whole yearn
ing of its heart for perfect union between God and man.
The student of the New Testament may be inchned
on first thoughts to object that the apostohc writers did
use the Old Testament as a repertory of special and
direct prediction. It may be answered that at any
rate the Lord Himseh did not so use it ; and also
that the bare, hteral apphcation of texts in Acts and
Epistles is not so common as our uncorrected memory
sometimes makes us suppose. The quotations are not
so very numerous, and they are generahy made more
reasonably than a hasty glance shows. In Acts ii. 25-31,
for instance, the quotation from Ps. xvi. 8-11 was not
apphed with quite the same effect as the words produce
now among people who have meddled with controversy
about the miraculous nature of the resurrection. It was
not a strict settlement of one or two controverted points,
but a large vaticination of Messianic resurrection. Acts
ii. 17 ff. shows, in its apphcation of Joel ii. 28-32, the

206 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
general principle of the New Testament quotation more
simply. Details such as those in Ps. xxii. 16 are not the
points to be generally considered. The use of this psalm
by our Lord on the Cross, the remembrance of it in
S. John xix. 24, bind it by deeper ties with the Saviour's
victory, and are truer examples of Messianic interpre
tation. The psalms which are apparently most definite in
their Messianic significance are the psalms of the King,
ii., xx., xxi., xiv., ex. etc. Most of these would seem
however to be best explained as composed in honour of
some reigning king of Israel. But it is difficult to trace
them back to such a primitive intention, and we may
at least be sure that they were used in post-exihc times
in a grander sense. As with Isa. ix. 6, 7, so with these
psalms, and especiahy ii. and ex., we seem compelled to
recognise in them the mystical language of a synagogue
which was aheady looking for a divine King in the
coming Kingdom of Heaven. If so, a certain embarrass
ment is caused. How are we to understand those words
in the contexts which express fierce hope of the over
throw and bruising of enemies ? It is perhaps enough
to admit that this is part of the natural reahty of the
type ; remove ah such marks of human frailty and ' the
nature of a sacrament is overthrown.' But it is at least
as important to notice how such phrases are after all
subordinate to the more generous spirit of the whole
Psalter. In the broader sense of the term even a suffering
Messiah may be recognised in the Jewish faith. As time
went on and the nation was more and more broken and
humiliated, they set their hope more constantly on the
victory which should fohow suffering, and the suffering
was seldom dwelt on ; ' their passion was present but
they put it from them when they looked ahead.' But
when the Psalter was being composed this had not
become the rule. Hence Ps. lxxxix. 51 is truly Messianic ;

THE PSALTER 207
the persecuted people are the Christ-bearing people, cf.
Heb. xi. 26. And so again Ps. lxxxviii. is Messianic in
spite of its dreadful gloom ; it has the hope of longing —
tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
For we must always remember how unbroken is the
hne between the kings, priests and people, who are
cahed the Lord's Christs (or anointed ones) in the Old
Testament, ' the Christ ' whom a few late apocalyptists
proclaimed, and our Lord as inheritor and fulfiher of this
ancient manifold office. But we must also remember
that the Messianic hope was broadly and primarily the
hope of the Kingdom. Neither in Old Testament nor
in the extra-canonical apocalypses is the person of the
Messiah a constant feature in the picture. That,
rightly considered, may throw hght on some parts
of the New Testament which are not written quite as
we might have wished to write them ; on the elusive
language of our Lord's tremendous claims, on the
large interpretation of those claims in S. Paul — ' Then
cometh the end, when he shah dehver up the kingdom
to God, even the Father. . . . And when ah things
have been subjected unto him, then shah the Son also
himseh be subjected to him that did subject ah things
unto him, that God may be ah in ah ' (1 Cor. xv. 24, 28).
It certainly helps us to appreciate better the pervasive
Messianic colour of the Psalter. The direct language
about the Son, the King, the Christ, is not the most
important thing ; more still to be pondered is the whole
of its rehgious longing.
For that rehgious longing is extraordinarily wide.
Strictly national in form, it runs out beyond its native
time and place. As in the highly Jewish synoptic
Gospels, so in the Psalter there is an inexphcable instinct
for the universal. From the Jewish point of view the
salvation of the Cross is explained by the hope of the
Kingdom. From the Greek point of view the incarna
tion of the Word is explained by the hope that the

208 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
invisible God would perfectly manifest Himseh. The
Psalter with its Jewish intensity, its sympathy with
the whole natural creation, and its simple ah-embracing
' goodness ' (cf. cxix. 65-72), effects even in the Old
Testament a concihation between these movements.

And here this httle sketch must be broken off. The
reader wih discover its more serious faults. Of its
incompleteness no one can be more aware than the
writer. In particular he knows that he has been carried
far by the current of the day, and has laid perhaps dis
proportionate stress on the other-worldly, ' Maceabean '
character of the Old Testament. And yet, that does
but mean its ideahsm, its constancy to ideal morahty
and ideal hope. In spite of the imperfections of its child
hood the Old Testament is at one with the disciplined
youth of the New Testament. It is ah one record of men
who, in spite of their own failures and the apparent
impossibihty of hving on earth in perfect union with
the wih of God, did nevertheless refuse to recognise any
peace less absolute. At last in Jesus of Nazareth they
found a friend and master who held this ideal and never
feh short of it. Therefore they were convinced that
He was nothing less than the light of all their hghts,
and that in Him was the source and renewal of the true
hfe of ah the world.

INDEX I.: BIBLICAL
OLD TESTAMENT
Ordbb and titles of books in English Bible mainly derived through
Latin Vulgate from Septuagint, 2, 22 f., 67, 169, 198. Origin
of Septuagint, 142 ff. Character of its Greek, 141 ff. Its
importance for textual criticism, 128 f., 144 f., cf. 199 ; for
other criticism, 62, 178, 194. Additional books in Septuagint,
see Apocrypha.
Simpler titles and more primitive order in Hebrew Bible, 2 f.
Three stages of Hebrew canon, 2 f., 8, 138 f., 145. Criticism
oarries ohronological arrangement further, distinguishing four
styles, 3 ft, 82 ff., 102, 183. Attitude of the Church of
England to criticism, 7, 32 f.
Development of Hebrew language in Old Testament, 52, 92, 121,
138, 150, 165 f., 183. Aramaio in Old Testament, 121, 165 f. ;
in Targums, 142, 145.
Connexion of Old Testament with Egypt, 10 ff., 90, 135 ff. ; with
Assyria, 12 ff., 16, 23 f., 40, 42 ; with Babylon, 9, 11 f., 43, 84,
90, 133 f. ; with Persia, 26 ff., 75 l, 86, 133, 135, 165 ; with
Greece, 106 ff., 123, 135 f., 138, 142 f ., 151 f., 158 f., 163, 207 f. ;
with Rome, 152, 159 i., 163.
Beligious character impressed upon the whole Old Testament by
post-exilic faith, 6, 8, 27, 31 f., 102 ff. The ' two religions '
in early Israel, 21, 27, 46 ff.
THE LAW OR TORAH
Earliest completed division of Hebrew Bible, 2. Its peouliar
sanctity, 2. Variety of its contents ; narrative, 10, poetry,
10, 83, sermon, 91 f., antiquarian notes, 4, laws, 91 ff. Called
in Greek, Pentateuch, 2, and divided into books with definite
titles j Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 3.
Its connexion with Moses, 7, 11,73, 90 f., 92 f., 96. Its promulga
tion by Ezra, 72 ff.
The divine origin of its laws, 91 ; especially of the Ten Words,
93, 188. Its theology, 87 ff., 90, 98 ff., 190. Its pastoral
beneficence, 27, 84, 87, 91, 97. Its religious treatment of
ritual, 96. Its care for the children's mind, 113 I.
Its composition from material of various ages, 3 ff., 90, 98 1. The
development of its laws through tho three codes, in Exodus,

2io THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
91, Deuteronomy, 6, 29, 66, 72, 91 1, 136, Leviticus, 5, 29, 66.
94 : which correspond with three modes of language and
thought ; early prophetic, 4, 10 f., 18, 91 j deuteronomio, 5,
39, 43 f., 68, 85, 91 f., 96 f., 183, 188, 192 ; priestly, 4 f., 74 f.,
83 f., 97 f., 183. Connexion of Deuteronomy with Josiah's
reformation, 18, 43, 73 ; of Leviticus with Ezekiel, 94 ff. ;
the Law of Holiness in Leviticus (xvii.-xxvi.), 97.
The Law and tho Maocabees, 30, 100 ff., 153.
Criticism of the Law by S. Paul and in the epistle to the Hebrews,
47, 95 f.

Exodus xx. 24 . p. 91, 96

Leviticus xxvi. 12 f.

p. 98

xxiv. 5-8
xxxiv. 6 f.

91
190

Deuteronomy iv. 13
v. 22

. 93
. 93

Leviticus xvi. .

98

vi. 4

. 175

xvii. 10 f. .

98 f.

xii. .

. 91

xix. 18 . .

97

xviii. 1

. 95

xix. 33 f. .

97

xviii. 6f.

. 94

xx. 26 . .

98

xxxiii. 13

16,

xxv. 35 f. .

97

26 f. .

. 201

THE PROPHETS
This, the second division of the Hebrew Bible, 2, seema to have
been complete before Sirach wrote, 138. It contains both
history, 'the former prophets,' and prophecy, 'the latter
prophets,' 2, 59. The Hebrew idea of prophecy, 156, and of
prophetio history, 22, 37.

THE FORMER PROPHETS
Joshua, a military narrative of the conquest of Canaan, 202, in
prophetio style, 5, with passages in deuteronomic and later
styles, 5.
Judges, narratives of the days when ' there was no king in Israel,'
in later, especially deuteronomic, setting. Chapters xvii. , xviii.
witness to early connexion of priesthood with ' Levites,' and
to their degeneracy, 96.
Sarrmel, pre-deuteronomio book, though re-edited in post-exilio
period, 18. The author used early material as historian
rather than compiler, 3, 17 ff ., and interpreted the beginnings
of the monarchy by a lofty ideal of prophet, 20, and of king,
20, 61. The book is primitive in theology, 21, 189 ; yot in
style and thought it sometimes anticipates later develop
ments, 18.
Kings, like Judges, has later touches, but on the whole shows a
deuteronomic author drawing from earlier narratives, 21, 44 f.
This narrative of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah gives a
background to the utterances of the earlier prophets, 37 ff.,
46 ff. j is of engrossing interest, 2, 12, 39 ; instinot with

INDEX I. : BIBLICAL

211

prophetio hopefulness, 45 ; is trustworthy as prophetio history
of prophetio times (contrast Chronicles), 45 I.

Joshua v. 13-15
x. 12 . .
Judges v. 4f. .
1 Samuel viii. .
ix. .
xiii. 1
xiv. 49-52

. p. 5
. 203
. 205
17, 134
. 17
. 144
. 18

17

2 Samuel i.
vi.
vii.
viii. 15-18
xii. xx. 23-26
xxii.

p. 198
. 181
. 20
. 18
189,191 . 18
. 178

THE LATTER PROPHETS
A collection made in post-exilic times, 26, 30, 56, 59 f., 105 ;
originally in four books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The
Twelve, 105. The scholarship of those times has affected all
the books except perhaps Ezekiel, 31, 105 f. ; before whom
prophets were speakers rather than writers, 26, 60.
Hence most of these books are ' Gospels ' of the prophets rather
than books composed by them with later additions, 2, 56 ff.,
64, 175. This accounts for consolations which seem to contra
dict denunciations, 61 ; and gives deep significance to some
passages in the light of post-exilic matured faith, 31, 62.
Arguments for this judgement from Septuagint, 62 ; from lan
guage, 59, 63, 67 f.
The ' mystical ' inspiration of the prophets, 50 ff., 104, 167
working through natural means, 24, 53 ff., 171 f.
Their ideahsm, 38, 53, 59, 68 ff., 75, cf. 208 ; morality, 69 f.
puritanism, 22, 66, 68 ; unpopularity, 49. Their attitude
to the nations, 54, 85 f., 105, 150, 158 f. ; to sacrifice, 23, 66,
Their doctrine of immortality, 66 ff. ; of personality, 25 f., 78:
187 ; of the Christ, 171.
Change in prophecy under influence of the Law, 75, 81. The
early and later idea of God (Jahweh, the Lord), 22 f., 40,
64, 76.
The several contributionsof the prophets to Israel's creed, 23 ff., 48.
Amos bore a stern message to Israel in time of Jeroboam II., 41 ;
that the Lord is judge of all and especially of Israel, 23 ;
this judgement to come through the Assyrian army, 41, 53.
Amos' mythological, 67, and Messianic language, 57, 65. Hia
morality, 63.
Hosea, northern contemporary of Amos, 41, learned from his
own love to faithless wife the Lord's invincible love to
Israel, 23, 54. Persistence of his ministry of affection, 54.
Isaiah has magnificent style, vigorous and abrupt, of early pro
phetic type, 78, 82. His preparation, 53 ; call, 50 f., 53, 119 ;

212 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
message of judgement, 42 ; final assurance to Hezekiah,
42, 71 ; triumph, 68 ; yet disappointment at last, 68 f. ;
mistakenly revered in time of Jeremiah, 69. His attitude to
the temple, 42.
His doctrine of God as holy or divine, 23 ; of faith, 23 ; political and
social idealism, 42, 70 f . His Messianic dootrine perhaps height
ened by post-exilio faith, 23, 57 f., 61 f. ; when his teaching
was enlarged and developed in the collection of ' Isaianio
prophecy which forms the book of Isaiah, 3, 25, 58, 64.
Variety of matter in chapters i.-xxxix., 58 f. ; apocalyptio style
in xxiv.-xxvii., 63, 157 ; mythological language in xiv., 67 f.
Main division of the book at chapter xl., where consolation to
exiles at Babylon begins, 58, 75 ; in flowing rhetorical style,
76 ; with large ' Nicene ' doctrine of the Lord, 76 ; and of
Holy Spirit, 76 f. ; with advanced thought, 78 ff. ; and deep
doctrine of sacrifice in ' Servant ' passages, 49, 51, 77 ff.
To suppose Isaiah author of this part is contrary to the analogy
of propheoy, 51 f., 171 f.
Further division of this seotion perhaps necessary ; from lv.
influence of Law felt, 81. Severity of concluding verses, 81.
Micah contemporary with Isaiah, 24 ; countryman of Judah,
24, 203 ; holding rougher hope of reform, but at one with
Isaiah in principles, 24, 70.
Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah prophesied when the Assyrian
empire was falling, the Chaldean rising, 43. Habakkuk's
placard of faith, 60 ; psalm in his book, 149.
Jeremiah began to prophesy in same period, but continued till
after the fall of Jerusalem, 43 ff. ; learning and teaching
communion with God which transcends nationality, 24. The
naturalness of his call and continuous inspiration, 54 f. ; his
Christ-like character developed by discipline, 56.
Likeness of his thought and language to Deuteronomy, 82, 92.
His attitude to Josiah's deuteronomic reformation, 43, 96 f.
His prayers, 55, and heart-religion, 24, 63, 82, 188 ; com
pared with Isa. xl. ff., 79 f. His Messianic dootrine, 55, 65.
His relations with Josiah, 24, 43 ; Jehoiakim, 13, 65 j Zedekiah,
43 ; Gedaliah, 56 ; with Baruch, 55 f., 60 ; Hanamel, 55 ;
Hananiah, 65. The unpopularity, 24, 43, 55, 71, and after
effect of his ministry, 43, 65. His possible connexion with
the ' Servant ' passages in Isaiah, 77 f.
His witness to the comparatively small number of exiles who
went to Babylon, 28.
Ezekiel contemporary with Jeremiah, but exiled with Jehoiachin,
24, 84. Prophesied in exile, kept record of events, and com-

INDEX I. : BIBLICAL

213

posed his book, 84, 102 ; in which the various strains of later
Jewish faith may be discerned, 101 ff.
But his chief work was to make the old prophetio ideal effeotual
through priestly law, 74, 89 ; which he purified and lifted to
higher plane, 89 f., when his new hope was kindled after
Jerusalem had fallen, 85 f. His vision of restored city and
temple, 85 ff. ; the spiritual reality of that vision, 88.
His priestly style, 82 ff. ; conception of law, priesthood, and
ritual, 89 ; doctrine of cleansing saorifice (the Johannine
element in Old Testament), 83 f„ 87 ff., 188; pastoral
authority and gentleness, 81 f., 89 ; hope for the taking away
of the sin of the world, 88.
His love of native land, 85 ; attitude to Babylon and the other
nations, 85 f., cf. 158.
His relation to Leviticus, 94 f.
Haggai and Zechariah prophesied in connexion with the rebuild
ing of the temple, 75, 157. Their view of the ' return '
compared with Ezra-Nehemiah, 28, 149. Their later style
of prophecy, 76.
The book of Zechariah falls into two divisions, the second of
which (ix.-xiv.) belongs to Greek period, 157 f. Its apoca
lyptic style (cf . Daniel) ; vision of last days ; ' unexpressive '
oonsolatory phrases, 157 f.
Obadiah also apocalyptic, but of uncertain date. Resemblances
to Jeremiah ; and to Edom-passages in Isaiah and Psalms,
which may perhaps be late and metaphorical, 158 f., cf. 86.
Joel also apocalyptic ; and has reference to Greeks ; but some parts
in old prophetic style ; perhaps an early piece enlarged, 159.
Malachi=' my angel ' : is this » name or a quotation ? 105.
This prophecy is in the later style, 75 ; with large outlook
on the nations, 105.
Jonah a story about an ancient prophet rather than a prophecy ;
expressing spiritual experience by psalm and parable. Our
Lord's use of this book. Its large charity, 149 f.

Isaiah i. 12

.

. . p. 66

... 53

v. 14

,

... 67

VI.

. . 50, 53

viii. 18

. . . 194
ix. 1-7,
31,
60 ff., 65, 206
xix. 19 f.
,
. .135,137
xxxiii  57, 65
xxxviii. 181  140
Isaiah xliii.
10 f. .
. p. 76
xliii.
16 ff. .
. .134
xliv.
6, 8 .
. . 76
xiv.
7, 15 .
. . 80
xlviii.
21 . .
. . 134
Iii.
13-liii. 51,
77 f., 199
lvi.
. . 81
lxi.
1 . .
. . 77
lxiii.
. . 158
lxiii.
9 f., 14
. . 77
214 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Jeremiah i.
vii. ix.xi.
xv.
xxix.xxxi.
xxxii. xliv. xiv.
Ezekiel vi. xi.
xiv.
xviii. xix.
xxxiii.
xxxiv, xxxvi.

6, 11 f.

13 ff.

p. 54

22 f. . . ." 66

10, 19

198

1-8 .

96 f.

19

65
10
65
31-34
55
6ff.
5566
5 '.
66
3 .
85
22 f.
85
14, 20
11C
), 167
27
83 f.
1, H
198
21
85
13 .
85
4 .
85
Ezekiel xxxvi. 26-28
xliii. 1, 9
xliv. 15 .
xlviii. 35 .
. p. 831.
. 88
. 95
. 88
Joel ii. 28-32 . .
. 205
. 159
Obadiah 21 . . ,
. 158
Jonah iv. 10 f. .
. 150
Habakkuk ii. 2
. 60
Zechariah ix. 13 . .
xiv. 6 f. . .
157 f.
. 157
Malaohi i. 11 . . ,
. 105
THE WRITINGS
Third and latest division of Hebrew canon, 2 f. Part of it used
by Sirach and by our Lord, 8, 138 f. ; strict rabbinic canon
later still, 145 f., 152. Subdivisions made by Jewish scholars,
197.
Witnesses to depth and variety of later Jewish churohmanship,
28, 30, 101 f., 175.
Psalms express devotional mind of Judaism, 177. Their con
nexion with David, 178 f., 181 f., is largely ' mystical,' 26,182 f.
Psalter composed from earlier psalters, 179 ff. ; all of which
were of post-exilio formation, 181. Psalms may be earlier
than the collections in which they stand, 181 ; yet original
background of the several psalms hard to find, 181 ff. ; one
liturgical accent common to all, 183 f. The Psalter as a
whole reflects mature Jewish faith of synagogue, 181 ; its
thoughtful arrangement, 185.
Hence profound interpretation justified, 177, 185 ff. And Psalter
appears full of immortality, 178, 185 ff., 204; with evangelic
doctrine of forgiveness, 188 ff. Its severity to pride, 189 ff.
Its didactic psalms, 192. Its ' Maceabean ' temper, 153, 167,
177, 193 f., of. 208.
Poetic form and oharacter of Psalter, 191, 194 ff. Its revival of
mythological language, 186, 204 ; delight in nature as sacra
mental, 199 ff. ; in scenery of Canaan, 201 ff. ; in the old
' country ' feeling of the Hebrews, 203. Influence of nature-
poetry on theology, 204 f .
Broad Messianic spirit of Psalter, 205 ; quotations in New Testa
ment, 205 ; psalms of the King, 206 ; of suffering, 185, 203,
INDEX I.: BIBLICAL 215
208. The ' Christs ' of the Old Testament, 104, 169 f., 183,
207. Conciliation of twofold line of hope in Psalter, 207 f.
Proverbs a Wisdom book, composed of early and late material,
and branching into two far-reaching lines of Hebrew and
hellenised Hebrew wisdom, 109 f. Wisdom and philosophy,
107 ff. Vestiges of possibly sceptical theology in Proverbs,
130 f.
Job essentially Semitic, 108 ff. An ancient story, re-told in
dramatio form; comparison with Greek drama, 110 ff. All
might be from one author except Elihu speeoh with its more
commonplace thought, 112.
The dialogue, ooncerned with problem of suffering ; characters
of interlocutors, and depth of their discussion, 114 ff.
Miss Amherst's play suggests earlier form of book, in whieh
action was more than discussion, 116 ff. Mystical intensity of
that earlier form, 119 ff. Simplicity of its doctrine of angels,
Satan, and immortality, 120 f. Traditional features pre
served in language and scenery, 120.
Septuagint has been thought to indicate earlier form of different
kind, with more rebellious Job ; but improbably, 128 ff.
The Song of Songs a happy example of Hebrew poetry, 197 ;
from Northern Israel, 198 ; not written by, but partly about,
Solomon, 197.
Has been explained as dramatic idyll of human love, 197 ; but
its love of the country is more obviously evident, 85, 197, 199.
This lends itself to sacramental interpretation, 198 ; and har
monises with its festal use in Jewish as in Christian Church,
197.
Ruth, a harvest idyll, used at the harvest festival of Pentecost,
197.
Lamentations. — This title and its connexion with Jeremiah be
longs to Greek, not Hebrew Bible, 198. The poetic form of
a lament or Kinah, 198. Lyrio character of the poem lends
itself to typical application, 199.
Esther. — See Apocrypha, The rest of Esther.
Ecclesiastes like Job, essentially Semitic ; but later, 121. Its
rabbinising Hebrew witnesses to date, 121.
The Hebrew title Koheleth indicates academic character of the
book ; reference to Solomon a literary fiction which is not
observed throughout, 121 ff. Last verses show the book to
be a pupil's record of a master's sayings ; the voices of other
doctors being also heard, 122.
But the disillusioned, yet unoonquered faith of Koheleth is the

216 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

main theme, 123 ff. His thoughts on eternity in things, 124 f. ;
on the mystery of the brute creation, 124 ; on the suffering of
men, 124 f. ; on the return of the spirit to God, 126 f. The
difficulty, 123, imperfection, 127, and triumph of faith, 126.
Other views of the composition of the book ; comparison with
Pascal and his Port Royal editors, 128. Ecclesiastes perhaps
read by Sirach, 138.
Daniel interpreted history of Antiochus Epiphanes, 162, and
encouraged the Maccabees, 3, 163 f., 168 ; symbolic value of
its stories and visions, 161. Connexion of the book with
Daniel, 164 ff. ; evidence of language to late date, 165 f.,
cf. 121.
The book an apocalypse, 167. Character of apocalypses as
' discovery ' of ' new heavens and earth,' encouragement to
' saints,' 155 f., under disguised language and titles, 167 ;
their connexion with the Gospel, 153 ff., 170. ' Son of man,'
and ' Christ ' in Daniel, 168 ff., 171. Our Lord's usa of the
book, 170.
Stories and miracles in Daniel — history, tradition, or imagination !
172 f.
Ezra and Nehemiah. — One book, closely connected with Chron
icles and 1 Esdras, 30, 103, 134, 148 ; gives history of the
' return ' from another point of view than Haggai and
Zechariah, 28 ; strong impression thus made on later ages,
28, 133 f.
Chronicles a priestly narrative, 3, 18, 90, 103, repeating Samuel
and Kings with alterations which show how the older tradition
had, by the fourth century B.C., been confused through later
ecclesiastical habits of thought, 46. Its value as exposition
of the priestly ideal, 45 f., cf. 68, 82 ff. Its relationship to

192
206 31
194140
200 180 193
205 188199199
102
206
206 121

Psalms i.

. p.

u.

n.
7
. ,
IV.
7
. ,
VI.
5
• ,
.
vm.
XIV.
7
, .
,
xvi.
3
, .
.
xvi.
8-11
. .
XVII.
15
, ,
xvm.
.
• ,
178,
XIX.
XIX.
1
. .
XX.
xxn.
1
• *
.
Psalms xxii. 16
. p. 144, 206
xxiii. 3
. . .201
. . .181
xxv. 11
. . 188 f.
xxix. 9
. • .200
xxxi. 5
. . .127
xxxv. 1-6
. . .203
xxxv. 20
. . .194
xxxvi. 6
. . .204
xxxvi. 7
. . .200
xxxix. 12
. 194, 200
xlvi.
. 200, 203
xlviii. 2
. . .206
INDEX I.

Psalms xlix. 10

. . p. 190

1. .

li. .

21, 189, 194

Ixii. 1 .

lxiii. 1 f.

. . .203

Ixviii. 7 f.

. . .205

lxxii. 20

. . .179

lxxiv. 9 .

. . .167

lxxiv. 13

. . .205

lxxvii. 16-20
. . 199
lxxviii. 38 f.
. . .190
Ixxxvi. 9 f.
. . . 102
lxxxviii. . ]
85, 199, 207
lxxxviii. 11
. . . 186
lxxxix.
. . 185 f.
lxxxix. 10
. . .205
lxxxix. 51
. . 206 f.
xc. 2 .
. . .102
ciii. 11 f.
. 188 f.
ciii. 13 f.
. . 102
. . 200
. . 204
civ. 14, 2.-
. . 200
ex.
178, 206
cxiii. 5-9
. . 204
cxv. 16
. . 200
cxix. . 1
33, 192, 198
cxix. 65-72
. . 208
cxx. 17 f. .
. . 140
oxxvi. 1-4 .
. . 200
cxxxvii. . .
158, 182
oxxxix. . .
109, 183
cxliii. 10 .
. . 202
BIBLICAL
Psalms oxliv. 15
cxlix. 6
cl. 6
Proverbs xi. 30
xiv. 4 .
xx. 27
xxi. 5 .
xxx. 1-6
Job xix. 21
xix. 25 f. .
xxv. . .
xxviii.xxxiii. 23 f. .
xxxiv. 36
xxxvi. 5 .
xxxix. -xii.
Eoclesiastes iii. 11
iv. 1
iv. 12
v. 1
vii. 2
ix. 10
xii. 1-7
xii. 9 .
Lamentations i. 12
Daniel i. 1 .
iii. 5 .
iii. 25 .
iv. 25 .
iv. 32 .
v. 21 .
vii. 25 .
viii. 23-25
viii. 26
ix. 25 .
ix. 26
x. 14 .
xi. 31 .
xi. 34 .
xii. 2 f . .
xii. 4, 9 .
xii. 7
Nehemiah viii.
217
p. 194
. 194
. 102
. 140
. 109
109, 182
. 182
130 f.
115 f.
. 120
. 115
. Ill
. 120
. 117
. 204
112 f.
. 124
124 f.
. 126
. 125
. 126
. 127
. 126
. 123
. 199
. 199
. 164
. 166
. 170
. 168
. 168
. 168
. 164
162 f.
. 165
. 169
. 164
. 165
. 164
. 168
127, 187
. 165
164, 168
.72 i.
THE APOCRYPHA
The Apocrypha represent roughly excess of Alexandrian over
Palestinian Bible, 106, 145. Most of these books have come
to us in Greek, though many are translated or adapted from
Semitio originals, 137.
218 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
This Alexandrian Bible adopted by Christian Church, but with
vague margin, 145. English Church distinguishes the addi
tions like S. Jerome, but includes them like the Vulgate,
146 ; and liturgical fitness should regulate the use, 145, 147 ff.
They contain legends oonsecrated by long use and the service
of art, 147, but are generally inferior to the Hebrew books,
149 ff.
1 Esdras, another recension, now in Greek, of 2 Chron. xxxv.,
xxxvi., Ezra, Nehemiah. Zerubbabel is its hero, especially
celebrated in the (inserted) story of the guardsmen, 148 f.
Tobit, a popular story, famous for Tobit's journey with the angel
and the dog ; valuable for its piety and praise of almsgiving,
but hardly suitable as a whole for devotional reading, 97, 147.
Judith a fierce but famous story celebrating the heroine who
brought salvation to Israel by slaying the Assyrian Holofernes,
147.
The rest of the chapters of the Book of Esther. — The Hebrew Esther
is a finer story of a woman's heroism, but is devoid of the
language of piety, 150 f. Both Jewish Targums and Greek
Septuagint added to it, 145 ; the Greek additions contain some
beautiful prayers, 148.
The Song of the Three Holy Children, the history of Susanna, Bel
and the Dragon, are in like manner additions to Daniel, 146,
147. The Song, or Benedicite, very gloriously celebrates the
kinship of all creation in the praise of God, 148, cf. 118 f., 200.
The Wisdom of Solomon the most Greek book in the Old Testa
ment, admirable in its ideas of immortality and of the uni
versal, life-giving Spirit, and (in spite of obvious imperfeotions)
in its poetic language, 107, 148, 151.
The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus (i.e. the
Church Book), proverbial philosophy written in Hebrew about
180 b.o., and translated into Greek by the author's grandson,
109 f., 137 f. Additions from the wisdom of the Pharisees
appear in some MSS., which have been made to the original
author's old-fashioned Judaism, 139 ff. His use of the older
Scriptures witnesses to the growth of the canon, 139.
The more this book is read, the more it is loved, 151.
Baruch, a consolation meant for Jews after the fall of Jerusalem,
70 A.D., though its literary form connects it with the trial
in Jeremiah's day, 55, 60, 148.
The Epistle of Jeremy has a like fanciful form, but seems to have
been an encouragement in pre-Christian days, 148.
f Esdras, however, is the most important of these archaising

INDEX I.: BIBLICAL

219

oonsolations. It is connected with 70 a.d. ; is earnest,
thoughtful, almost Pauline in rehgion, 159 f., 174 f. It comes
to the English Bible from the Latin appendix of the Vulgate.
Christian additions have been made to it ; the R.V. contains
a passage which the A.V. translators did not possess, 159 f.
The Prayer of Manasses is a (late ? ) Greek piece founded on 2 Chron.
xxxiii. 11-13 ; of admirable piety, 145, 148.
1 Maccabees. — Greek from Semitic original ; records the Macea
bean resistance to Antiochus Epiphanes, 151 ff., 163 f., cf.
100 f., 175 f. The first seven ohapters are great history, 152,
and a necessary commentary on Daniel and perhaps other
parts of the Old Testament, 62, 77, 193 f., 208.
S Maccabees. — A rhetorical, later account connected with the same
period ; famous for Heliodorus, and for the Maceabean
martyrs, 148, cf. 193.
The Septuagint also contained 3 and 4 Maccabees, which are not
read in the English Bible, 145.
1 Esdras iv. 41

Ecclesiasticus xvii. 27 f.
xix. 18 f.
xliv. ff.
1. 27
li. 23

p. 149 140
140 138138138164

1 Maccabees i. 54 .

lUi
164

ii. 27 ff.

100

163

iv.

,

164

iv. 46 .

167

ix. 27 .

,

167

xiv. 41 .

167

2 Maccabees iii.

164
iv.
, ,
164
xv. 12
'
164
S. Luke iii. 15 .
xxiii. 46 .
xxiv. 44 ,
153127 8
S. John i. 17 . .
. p. 167
xix. 24 .
. . 206
Acts i. 6
. . 155
ii. 17 ff. . .
. . 205
ii. 25-31 . .
. . 205
xxii. 3
. . 141
xxvi. 5 . . .
. . 141
Romans viii. 18-25
103, 119
1 Corinthians iii. 13 ff. . 130
xv. 24
28 . 207
Ephesians iii. 14 f.
. . 133
1 Timothy iii. 16 .
. . 175
Hebrews i. 7 .
. . 204
ii. 13 . .
. . 194
vii. 11 . .
. . 89
xi. 3 . .
. . 106
xi. 26 . .
. . 207
James v. 11
110, 117 f.
1 John iii. 2
. . 155
Jude 3 ...
. 100 f.
Apocalypse xix. 10
. . 78
INDEX II.: GENERAL

The Roman numeral followed by a name or abbreviated title
refers to a book or section in Index I.

Aaeon, sons of, 28, 94 f.
Abaddon, 185 f.
Abbott, E. A., 170.
Abelson, J., 109.
Abner, 178.
Abraham, 4, 9, 120, 187.
Absalom, 21.
Accents, Hebrew, 197.
Adonijah, 39.
Aeschylus, 37, 110 ff.
Agamemnon, 110 f.
Agrippa, 104, 141.
Agur, 130.
Ahab, 23.
Alexander, 135 f., 162.
Alexandria, 136, 181, I Apocr.
Amherst, Hon. S., 116 ff., I Job.
Amiens, 160.
Amon, 87.
Amos, I Proph. lat.
Amraphel, 9.
Andrewes, Lancelot, 204.
Angels, 62, 77, 85, 105, 114,
120, 191, 204, I Malachi.
Ani (Book of the Dead), 14.
Antiochus Epiphanes, I Daniel,
Maccabees.
Apocalypse, 30, 102, 156, I
Isaiah, Zechariah, Daniel.
 of S. John, 81, 103, 159,
189.
Apocrypha, I Apocr.
Architecture, 3 i., 6, 86, 135.
Aristotle, 143,
Ark, 181.
Art, 199.
 Assyrian, 14.
820

Art, Babylonian, 14.
 Christian, 148.
 Egyptian, 14.
 Hebrew, 8, 78, 82, 84,
116, 156.
Articles of Religion, 7, 32, 99,
146, 191, 204.
Asaph, 179.
Ascents, Songs of, 200 f.
Ashur-banipal, 13 f.
Assuan papyri, 136.
Assyria, I O.T., Proph. lat.,
Judith.
Athaliah, 41.
Athanasian Creed, 76.
Atonement, 25, 84, 90, 94,
97 ff., 99, I Ezekiel.
 day of, 94.
Augustine, S., 121.
Authorised Version, 141, 144,
165 f., 169.
Azazel, 98.
Baax, 47.
Babylon, I O.T., Nahum, Hab
akkuk, Zephaniah, Jeremiah.
Bacon, Francis, 185.
Bagohi, 137.
Balaam, 195.
Balfour, A. J., 204.
Baptism, 104.
Barcochba, 152, 174.
Barnes, W. E., 177.
Baruch, 55, 1 Jeremiah, Apoor.
Bathsheba, 21.
Battle-cry, 101, 176 f., 203.
Behemoth, 112 f,

INDEX II. : GENERAL

Bel and the Dragon, I Apocr.
Benedioite, I Apoor.
Bensly, R. L., 160.
Beth Horon, 202.
Bethel, 29, 49.
Bethlehem, 61.
Bevan, E. R., 176.
Bildad, 114.
Blood, 98 f.
Box, G. H„ 34, 140, 160.
Browning, Robert, 79 f.
Burke, Edmund, 60.
Burkitt, F. C, 129.
Burns, Robert, 143.
Cambridge Platonists, 109 f.
Canaan, 85, 132, 201.
Cannon, W. W., 198.
Canon, 139, 1 O.T., Law, Proph.
Writings, Siraoh.
Captivity, 24 f., 43 f.. 65, 133 f.,
180, 198, 200, I Ezekiel.
 return from, 28 f., 200,
I Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra.
Carmel, 40, 46, 67.
Catholic faith, 48, 76, 105, 155.
Chaldeans, 165.
Chapman, A. T., 35.
Charles, R. H, 140, 145.
Chatham, Earl of, 60.
Cheyne, T. K., 34 f., 130, 177 f.,
187.
Children, Song of the Three
Holy, I Apocr.
Choephori, 112.
Christ, 104, 154, 169, 175,
I Psalms, Daniel.
— ; — exalted, 61.
Chronicles, I Writings.
Chronology, 10, 165.
Churoh, Christian, 8, 25, 37,
48, 64, 78, 99, 138, 145, 199.
 of England, 22, 146, 184.
 Jewish, 8, 28, 30, 32, 64,
103 ff., 126, 130, 132, 145,
153, 160, 177, 181, 199.
 of Rome, 142.
Church, R. W., 52.
Cicero, 121.
Cobb, W. H„ 196.
Coleridge, S. T., 92, 183.

221
Commandments, the Ten, I
Law.
Communion, 116 ff., 192.
Consoience, 6, 8, 15, 25, 171,
188 f.
Converse, Florence, 183.
Conversion, 50 f., 201.
Cooke, G. A., 16.
Cornill, Carl, 126.
Covenant, 73, 91, 100.
 new, 82.
Cowper, William, 119.
Creed, 126, 175, I Proph. lat.
 Athanasian, 76.
 Nicene, 104, 107, 1 Isaiah.
Criticism, 96, I O.T.
Cross, 90, 118, 154, 171. 176,
190, 206 f.
Cyprian, S„ 137.
Cyrus, 26, 28 f., 61, 59, 75 f.,
86.
Daniel, 110, I Writings.
Dante, 86, 141.
Darius the Mede, 165.
David, 17 ff., 21 f., 26, 39, 178,
I Psalms.
Davidson, A. B., 35.
Day of the Lord, 23, 65,
159.
Delaiah, 137.
Deuteronomy, I Law.
Dispersion, 105, 134.
Divine right of kings, 20, 61.
Dogma, 17, 25, 59, 86, 102, 113,
115, 122, 156.
Driver, S. R.( 33 f.
Easter, 197.
Ecclesiastes, I Writings.
Edom, 158, I Obadiah.
Eduoation, 27, 101, 112.
Egypt, I O.T.
 Jews in, 28, 135 f.
Elan, 108.
Elephantine, 136.
Elihu, 112, I Job.
Ehjah, 40.
Ehphaz, 114, 119.
Elisha, 40.
Encyclopcedia Bibliea, 122.

222 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Enooh, 30, 62, 104, 145, 148,
160, 169.
' Ephraimite,' 4.
Epicurus, 81, 107, 125.
Erasmus, 101.
Esau, 158.
1 Esdras, I Apocr.
2 Esdras, I Apocr.
Esther, I Writings.
Eternity, I Ecclesiastes.
Euergetes, 138 f.
Eumenicies, 112.
Euphrates, 14.
Euripides, 113.
Evil-merodach, 44.
Ewald, H., 34.
Exile. See Captivity.
Exodus, I Law.
Ezekiel, I Proph. lat.
Ezra, I Law, Writings.
Faber, F. W., 184.
Felix, 104.
Fenelon, 52.
Fitzgerald, Edward, 36.
Flood, 15.
Foakes Jackson, F. J., 35.
Forgiveness, 76, 105, 188,
I Psalms.
Free-will, 45.
Galilee, 203.
Gamaliel, 141.
Genesis, I Law.
Geography, 11, 202.
Gibeon, 202.
Gloria (after psalms), 63,
177.
Gnosticism, 108.
Gog and Magog, 103.
Golden Age, 85.
Goliath, 18.
Gospel, 26, 38, 46, 56, 102, 106,
156, 171, 174 ff., 189 f.
Gospels, 49 f., 56, 141, 156,
195.
 synoptic, 8, 31, 46, 89,
143, 153 f., 161, 203, 207.
Gray, Buohanan, 34.
Greece, I O.T., Apocr., Joel,
Zechariah.

Habakkuk, I Proph. lat.
Haggai, I Proph. lat.
Hamilton, H. F., 50.
Hamlet, 123.
Hammurabi, 9.
Hanamel, I Jeremiah.
Hananiah, I Jeremiah.
Hart, J. H. A., 139 ff., 206.
Hatch, E., 203.
Havelock, 176.
Headlam, A. C, 153.
Heart-religion, I Jeremiah.
Heber, R., 184.
Hehrews, epistle to, 95, 107,
181, 194.
Hegel, 108.
Heliodorus, I 2 Maccabees.
Hellas, 14.
Hezekiah, 42, 51, 62, 71, I
Isaiah.
High places, 40, 47, 66, 94.
 priest, 94, 101, 137.
Hilkiah, 72, 90.
Holiness, 23, 51, 70, 88,
188.
 Law of, I Law.
Hooker, Richard, 89.
Hort, F. J. A., 118.
Hosea, I Proph. lat.
Huldah, 72 ff.
Humility, 89, 129, 192.
Hunt, Holman, 98.
Hyksos, 10.
Hymn of Creation, 5, 79.
Hymns, 159 f., 184, 199.
 Ancient and Modern, 180,
184.
Idealism, 11, 20, 153, 208, I
Proph. lat.
Idols, 75, 83.
Immanence, 76, 109, 200.
Immortahty, 31 f., 66 ff., I
Proph. lat., Psalms, Wisdom
of Solomon.
Incarnation, 50, 171, 207.
Inspiration, 19, 50, 71, 104,
108, 167.
Intuition, 49, 108.
Isaao, 4, 187.
Isaiah, I Proph. lat.

INDEX II: GENERAL

223

Issos, 135.
Italy, 17, 202.

Jacob, 4, 187.
Jahweh (the Lord), 10, 23, 51,
64, 67, I Proph. lat.
James, S., 110, 117 f.
JE, D, P, 4 f., 82 ff., I O.T.
Jehochanan, 137.
Jehoiachin, 44, 84, 164, I
Ezekiel.
Jehoiakim, 13, 55, 164, I Jere
miah.
Jehu, 40, 48.
Jeremiah, I Proph. lat.
Jeroboam 11., 40, 49, I Amos.
Jerome, S., 43, 73, 137, 145 ff.,
152, I Apocr.
Jerusalem, 11, 41 ff., 53, 72, 74,
84 f., 157 ff., 181, 198, 203.
Jeshurun, 201.
Jesus ben Sira, 140, I Sirach.
Jews, later name than Israel,
48.
Joab, 39.
Job, I Writings.
Joel, I Proph. lat.
John, S., 61, 83, 87, 89, 109 f.,
156, I Ezekiel.
Johns, C. H. W., 12 f., 16.
Johnson, Samuel, 2.
Jonah, I Proph. lat.
Jonathan, 178.
Joseph, 4.
Josephus, 141.
Joshua, 11, 202, 1 Proph. form.
Josiah, 43, 72 f., 94, 136, 1 Jere
miah.
' Judean,' 4.
Judges, I Proph. form.
Judith, I Apocr.
Kaenak, 135.
Kennett, R. H., 28 f., 34.
Keturah, 4.
Kinah, 198, I Lamentations.
Kindliness, 89, 91, 97.
Kingdom of God, 9, 22, 27, 31,
69, 153 f., 206 f.
Kings, I Proph. form.
Kittel, Rudolf, 194 f.

Koheleth, I Ecclesiastes.
Korah, sons of, 179.

Lamentations, I Writings.
Landor, W. S., 81.
Latin, Old, 62, 142.
Law, I Law, Isaiah, Ezekiel.
Legend, I Apoor.
Leviathan, 67, 112 f.
Levites, 94 f., I Judges.
Leviticus, I Law.
Liberal Christianity, 90.
Liturgies, 143, 183 f.
Lowth, R., 195.
Lucretius, 81, 125.
Luke, S., 37.
Maccabees, I Law, Psalms,
Daniel, Apocr.
Malachi, I Proph. lat.
Manasseh, 87.
Manasses, Prayer of, I Apocr.
Manifestation, 155 f.
Martyrs, 6, 49, 77, 101, 176, 193.
Massora, 144.
Materialism, 41, 53, 125.
Mattathias, 100, 163.
Mediator, 32, 77, 89, 91.
Megiddo, 24.
Messiah, 17, 46, 62, 64, 153 f.,
169, 206 ff., I Proph. lat.,
Isaiah, Psalms.
Micah, I Proph. lat.
Micaiah, 49.
Milton, 157, 186.
Miracle, 40, 46, 172.
Missal, Roman, 62.
Modin, 100, 163.
Moloch, 47.
Mopsuestia, Theodore of, 153.
Moses, 11, 92 f., 96, 201, 1 Law.
Mozarabio Psalter, 89, 203.
Museum, British, 14 f.
Mystery-rites, 90.
Mysticism, 24, 30 ff., 52, 79,
82 f., 119 f., 182, 203, 206.
Mythology, I Amos, Isaiah,
Psalms.
Nahxjm, I Proph. lat.
Nathan, 20, 61.

224 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Nature, 80, 102 f., 113, 115,
118 f., I Psalms, Song.
Nebuchadnezzar, 43, 84, 161.
Negeb, 203.
Nehemiah, I Writings.
Newman, J. H., 29, 122.
Nicene Creed, 104, 107, I
Isaiah.
Nineveh, 13 f., 150.
Noah, 110.
Nomad tradition, 10, 120,
203.
Numbers, I Law.
Obadiah, I Proph. lat.
Odes of Solomon, 148.
Oesterley, W. O. E., 34, 140,
152.
Old Latin, 62, 142.
Olympian divinities, 90.
Origen, 128 f., 181.
Original sin, 191.
Origins of Israel's life and
religion, 9, 15, 64, 67, 98 f.,
106, 120, 186 f., 204 f.
Outram, 176.
Paganism in Israel, 21, 47,
187.
Pain, 77, 114 ff„ 117 f., 127,
187, 206 f.
Parallelism, 195 f.
Paris, schools of, 122.
Pascal, 128, I Ecclesiastes.
Passover, 197.
Paul, S., 29, 44, 47, 53, 61, 75,
90, 95 f., 103 f., 107, 125, 130,
140 f., 152, 160, 174, 181,
193, 203.
Pelops, 110.
Pentecost, 197.
Persia, 133, 135, 165, I O.T.
Personality, 4, 26, 78, 1 Proph.
lat.
Pharisees, 140.
Philistines, 17.
Philo, 107, 109 f., 141.
Philosophy, 23 f., 79, 82, 107 ff.,
I Proverbs.
Plato, 82, 108, 116,

Platonists, Cambridge, 109 f.
Podechard, E., 122.
Poetry, 4, 10, 82 1., 114, 147,
194 ff., I Psalms, Lamenta
tions, Song.
 alphabetical, 198.
 lyric, 77 f., 192 f., 199.
Politics, 8, 12, 20, 27, 38, 69 f.,
106, 155.
Prayer, 27, 65, I Jeremiah.
 the Lord's, 191.
Prayer Book Psalter, 196.
Priest, 94 f., I Ezekiel, Chron
icles.
Prophet, 20, I Prophets.
Propitiation, 25, 84, 90, 94,
97 ff., 99, 1 Ezekiel.
Proverbs, I Writings.
Psalms, I Writings.
 of Solomon, 148.
Psammetichus, 135.
Pseudo-Aristeas, 136, 142 f.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, 139,
142.
Puritanism, 22, 31, I Proph.
lat.
Pusey, E. B., 166.
Rabbis, 7, 96, 109, 122, 138,
145 ff., 149, 166.
Rahab, 67, 205.
Rameses, 10.
Rechab, sons of, 203.
Redemption, 16, 99, 119.
Reformation, 5, 7, 18, 38, 43,
73, 94, I Jeremiah.
Religion of a book, 8.
 of heart, I Jeremiah.
 the true, 11, 15, 23, 34,
106.
Renaissance, 121, 166.
Resurrection, 105, 127, 185 f.,
205.
Return. See Captivity.
Revised Version, 98 f., 116, 120,
124, 130, 138 f., 144, 160,
169, 202.
Risorgimento, 17, 20.
Ritual, 89, 95 f., I Ezekiel.
Rome, 14, 125, I O.T.
Rosebery, Earl of, 60.

INDEX II. : GENERAL

225

Ruskin, 23.
Ruth, I Writings.
Sabbath, 81.
Sachau, 137.
Sacrament, 4, 32 f., 61, 82, 183,
198 f„ 203, 206, I Psalms.
Saorifice, 23, 66, 78, 94,
I Isaiah, Ezekiel.
Saints, 62, 77, 117, 119, 152 f.,
163, 169, 176, 193 f„ I Daniel.
Salvation, 7, 24, 37, 71, 77, 88,
99, 113, 119, 181.
Samaria, 41.
Samaritan schism, 29, 137.
Samuel, 17 ff., I Proph. form.
Sanabahat, 137.
Sargon, 16.
Satan, 114, 117, 191.
Saul, 17, 19, 178.
Scapegoat, 98.
Scepticism, 30, 128 ff.
Soience, 7, 79, 119.
Scribes, 102.
Sennacherib, 16.
Septuagint, I O.T., Proph lat.,
Apoor., Job, Sirach.
Sermon on the mount, 109, 155,
176.
Servant of the Lord, I Isaiah.
Shakespeare, 2.
Shalmanezer, 16.
Shaphan, 72 f.
Shema, 175.
Sheol, 23, 67 f., 186.
Shishak, 135.
Sinai, 205.
Siraoh, I Apocr.
Smith, Robertson, 34.
 G. A., 66, 120, 178, 202.
Sooial reform, 42, 69 f.
Socialism, 24, 70.
Solomon, 39, 179, 200, I Song,
Eoolesiastes, Wisdom.
 Psalms and Odes of, 148.
Son of God, 20, 61.
 of Man, 169 f., cf. 83.
Song of Songs, I Writings.
Spirit (Holy), 6, 20, 25, 53, 76 1.,
89, 104, 109 f., 126 f., 151,
176, 202.

Stanley, A. P., 34.
Stoics, 107.
Stuarts, 22.
Suffering. See Pain.
Sumerians, 12, 14.
Susanna, I Apocr.
Swete, H. B., 135 f., 142.
Symbolism, 83 f., 86, 88, 93, 99,
158 f., 161 f., 170.
Symphonia, 166.
Synagogue, 62, 101, 104 ff., 142,
177, 206.
Synoptic Gospels. See Gospels.
Syria, 151, 163.
Talmud, 141.
Targum, 142 f., 145, 1 The rest
of Esther.
Te Deum, 63, 76.
Tel-el-Amarna, 9.
Temple, 24, 39, 42, 46, 66, 75,
81, 86, 134, 152, 162, 164,
200.
Temptation, 193.
Tennyson, 79 f., 169, 183.
Teresa, S., 166.
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 153.
Theophany, 199, 204.
Thuoydides, 36.
Tiglath-Pileser, 16.
Timothy, 125.
Titus, 162.
Tobit, I Apoor.
Torrey, C. C, 29, 133 ff., 180.
'True religion,' 11, 16, 23, 34,
106.
Truth, 123 f., 149.
Tyre, 85.
Ub, 9.
Utopia, 88.
Uzziah, 53.
Venice, 125.
Vespasian, 141.
Virgil, 207.
Vulgate, 22 f., 67, 149, 169,
I O.T., Apocr.
Watts, Isaac, 184.
Wellhausen, J., 34.

226 THE FAITH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Wells, Dean of, 169.
Wesley, C, 184.
Wisdom, 106 ff., Ill, I Pro
verbs, Job, Eoolesiastes,
Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon.
Word of God, 109, 119, 183,
207.
Words, the Ten. See Com
mandments.

Wrath of God, 44, 99, 204.
 of the Lamb, 189.
Writings, The, I Writings.
Zadok, sons of, 94 f.
Zechariah, I Proph. lat.
Zedekiah, 43, 48, I Jeremiah.
Zerubbabel, I 1 Esdras,
Zophar, 111, 116.

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