Prolegomena to the History of Israel Part 32

In Isaiah liv. 11, read with the Septuagint NPK: instead of the meaningless PWK:, and )DNYK instead of )BNYK.

CHAPTER X. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN TORAH.

What importance the written letter, the book of the law, possessed for the Jews, we all know from the New Testament. Of ancient Israel, again, it is said in the introductory poem of Goethe's West-Oestlicher Divan, that the word was so important there, because it was a spoken word. The contrast which Goethe evidently perceived is really characteristic, and deserves some further attention.

X.I.

X.I.1. Even if it be the case that Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code were only reduced to writing at a late period, still there remains the Jehovistic legislation (Exodus xx.-xxiii. x.x.xiv.) which might be regarded as the doc.u.ment which formed the starting-point of the religious history of Israel. And this position is in fact generally claimed for it; yet not for the whole of it, since it is commonly recognised that the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant (Exodus xx.-xxiii. 19) was given to a people who were settled and thoroughly accustomed to agriculture, and who, moreover, had pa.s.sed somewhat beyond the earliest stage in the use of money. /1/

1. Exodus xxi. 35: compare xxi. 33 with Judges ix. 4 ****************************************

The Decalogue alone is commonly maintained to be in the strictest sense Mosaic. This is princ.i.p.ally on account of the statement that it was written down on the two stone tables of the sacred ark. Yet of Deuteronomy also we read, both that it was written on twelve stones and that it was deposited in the sacred ark (Deuteronomy x.x.xi. 26). We cannot therefore place implicit reliance on such statements. What is attested in this way of the Decalogue seems to find confirmation in 1Kings viii. 9. But the authority of this statement is greatly weakened by the fact that it occurs in a pa.s.sage which has undergone the Deuteronomistic revision, and has been, in addition to this, subjected to interpolation. The more weight must we therefore allow to the circ.u.mstance, which makes for a different conclusion, that the name "The Ark of the Covenant"

(i.e., the box of the law) /1/ is peculiar to the later writers,

1. Compare 1Kings viii. 21, "the ark wherein is the covenant of Jehovah," and viii 9, "there was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at h.o.r.eb, the tables of the covenant which Jehovah had made with the children of Israel." The Deuteronomistic expression "tables of the covenant", alternates in the Priestly Code with that of "tables of testimony"; i e., likewise of the law. For H(DWT, "the testimony," 2Kings xi. 12, read HC(DWT, "the bracelets," according to 2Samuel i. 10.

and, when it occurs in older narratives, is proved by its sporadic appearance, as well as by a comparison of the Septuagint with the Ma.s.soretic text, to be a correction. In early times the ark was not a mere casket for the law; the "the ark of Jehovah" was of itself important, as we see clearly enough from 1Samuel iv.-vi.

Like the twelve maccebas which surrounded the altar on the holy hill of Shechem, and which only later a.s.sumed the character of monuments of the law, so the ark of the covenant no doubt arose by a change of meaning out of the old idol. If there were stones in it at all, they probably served some other purpose than that of writing materials, otherwise they would not have been hidden as a mystery in the darkness of the sanctuary; they must have been exposed to public view. Add to this that the tradition is not agreed as to the tenor of the ten words said to have been inserted on the two tables; two decalogues being preserved to us, Exodus xx. and Exodus x.x.xiv., which are quite different from each other. It results from this that there was no real or certain knowledge as to what stood on the tables, and further that if there were such stones in the ark--and probably there were--there was nothing written on them. This is not the place to decide which of the two versions is prior to the other; the negative result we have obtained is sufficient for our present purpose.

X.I.2. Ancient Israel was certainly not without G.o.d-given bases for the ordering of human life; only they were not fixed in writing. Usage and tradition were looked on to a large extent as the inst.i.tution of the Deity. Thus, for example, the ways and rules of agriculture. Jehovah had instructed the husbandman and taught him the right way. He it was whose authority gave to the unwritten laws of custom their binding power. "It is never so done in Israel," "that is folly in Israel," and similar expressions of insulted public conscience are of frequent occurrence, and show the power of custom: the fear of G.o.d acts as a motive for respecting it. "Surely there is no fear of G.o.d in this place, and they will slay me for my wife's sake," so Abraham says to himself in Gerar. "How shall I do such great wrong and sin against G.o.d?" says Joseph to the woman in Egypt.

"The people of Sodom were wicked and sinned grievously against Jehovah," we read in Genesis xiii. 13. Similarly Deuteronomy xxv. 18: "The Amalekites attacked Israel on the march, and killed the stragglers, all that were feeble and fell behind, and feared not G.o.d." We see that the requirements of the Deity are known and of force, not to the Israelites only, but to all the world; and accordingly they are not to be identified with any positive commands. The patriarchs observed them long before Moses. "I know Abraham," Jehovah says, xviii. 19, "that he will command his children to keep the way of Jehovah, to do justice and judgment."

Much greater importance is attached to the special Torah of Jehovah, which not only sets up laws of action of universal validity, but shows man the way in special cases of difficulty, where he is at a loss. This Torah is one of the special gifts with which Israel is endowed (Deuteronomy x.x.xiii. 4); and it is intrusted to the priests, whose influence, during the period of the Hebrew kings, of which we are now speaking, rested much more on this possession than on the privilege of sacrifice. The verb from which Torah is derived signifies in its earliest usage to give direction, decision. The participle signifies _giver of oracles_ in the two, examples _gibeath moreh_ and _allon moreh_.

The latter expression is explained by another which alternates with it, "oak of the soothsayers." Now we know that the priests in the days of Saul and David gave divine oracles by the ephod and the lots connected with it, which answered one way or the other to a question put in an alternative form. Their Torah grew no doubt out of this practice. /1/ The Urim and Thummim are regarded,

1. 1Sam xiv. xxiii. x.x.x. In connection with 1Samuel x.x.xi. 3 I have conjectured that the verb of which Torah is the abstract means originally to throw the lot-arrows. The Thummim have been compared in the most felicitous way by Freytag, and by Lagarde independently of him (Proph. Chald. p. xlvii.) with the Arabian Tamaim, which not only signifies children's amulets but any means of "averruncatio". Urim is probably connected with )RR "to curse" (cf. Iliad i. 11 and Numbers xxiii. 23): the two words of the formula seem mutually to supplement each other.

according to Deuteronomy x.x.xiii. 8, as the true and universal insignia of the priesthood; the ephod is last mentioned in the historical books in 1Kings ii. 26, /1/

1 Bleek, Einleiung in das A. T., 1878, p. 642.

but appears to have remained in use down to the time of Isaiah (Hosea iii. 4; Isaiah x.x.x. 22). The Torah freed itself in the process of time, following the general mental movement, from such heathenish media and vehicles (Hab. ii. 19). But it continued to be an oral decision and direction. As a whole it is only a power and activity of G.o.d, or of the priests. Of this subject there can be no abstract; the TEACHING; is only thought of as the action of the TEACHER. There is no torah as a ready-made product, as a system existing independently of its originator and accessible to every one: it becomes actual only in the various utterances, which naturally form by degrees the basis of a fixed tradition. "They preserve Thy word, and keep Thy law; they teach Jacob Thy judgments and Israel Thy statutes " (Deuteronomy x.x.xiii.

9, 10).

The Torah of the priests appears to have had primarily a legal character. In cases which there was no regular authority to decide, or which were too difficult for human decision, the latter was brought in the last instance before G.o.d, i.e., before the sanctuary or the priests (Exodus xviii. 25 seq.). The priests thus formed a kind of supreme court, which, however, rested on a voluntary recognition of its moral authority, and could not support its decisions by force. "If a man sin against another, G.o.d shall judge him," 1Samuel ii. 25 says, very indefinitely.

Certain legal transactions of special solemnity are executed before G.o.d (Exodus xxi. 6). Now in proportion as the executive gained strength under the monarchy, _jus_--civil justice--necessarily grew up into a separate existence from the older sacred _fas_. The knowledge of G.o.d, which Hosea (chapter iv.) regards as the contents of the torah, has as yet a closer connection with jurisprudence than with theology; but as its practical issue is that G.o.d requires of man righteousness, and faithfulness, and good-will, it is fundamentally and essentially morality, though morality at that time addressed its demands less to the conscience than to society. A ritual tradition naturally developed itself even before the exile (2Kings xvii. 27, 28). But only those rites were included in the Torah which the priests had to teach others, not those which they discharged themselves; even in Leviticus this distinction may be traced; the instructions characterised as toroth being chiefly those as to animals which might or might not be eaten, as to clean and unclean states, as to leprosy and its marks (cf. Deuteronomy xxiv. 8).

So it was in Israel, to which the testimony applies which we have cited: and so it was in Judah also. There was a common proverb in the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, "The Torah shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the ancient, nor the word from the prophet:" but no doubt the saying was not new in their time, and at any rate it will apply to the earlier time as well. Not because they sacrifice but because they teach, do the priests here appear as pillars of the religious order of things; and their Torah is a living power, equal to the occasion and never-failing. Micah reproaches them with judging for reward (iii. 11), and this shows their wisdom to have been based on a tradition accessible to them alone; this is also shown by some expressions of Deuteronomy (xvii. 10 seq., xxiv. 8). We have the counterpart to the proverb above cited (Jeremiah xviii. 18; Ezekiel vii. 26) in the complaint in Lamentations (ii. 9): "Jerusalem is destroyed; her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the Torah is no more; the prophets obtain no vision from Jehovah;" after the ruin of the sanctuary and the priests there is no longer any Torah; and if that be so, the axe is laid to the root of the life of the people. In the post-exile prophets the torah, which even in Deuteronomy (xvii. 11) was mainly legal in its nature, acquires a strong savour of ritual which one did not notice before; yet even here it is still an oral teaching of the priests (Haggai ii. 11).

The priests derived their Torah from Moses: they claimed only to preserve and guard what Moses had left (Deuteronomy x.x.xiii 4, 9 seq.). He counted as their ancestor (x.x.xiii. 8; Judges xviii.

30); his father in-law is the PRIEST of Midian at Mount Sinai, as Jehovah also is derived in a certain sense from the older deity of Sinai. But at the same time Moses was reputed to be the incomparable originator and practicer of PROPHECY (Numbers xii. 6 seq.; Deuteronomy x.x.xiv. 10; Hos. xii. 14), as his brother Aaron also is not only a Levite (Exodus iv. 14), but also a prophet (iv. 15; Numbers xii. 2). There is thus a close relation between priests and prophets, i.e., seers; as with other peoples (1Samuel vi.,; 1Kings xviii. 19, compare with 2Kings x. 19), so also with the Hebrews. In the earliest time it was not knowing the technique of worship, which was still very simple and undeveloped, but being a man of G.o.d, standing on an intimate footing with G.o.d, that made a man a priest, that is one who keeps up the communication with heaven for others; and the seer is better qualified than others for the office (1Kings xviii. 30 seq.). There is no fixed distinction in early times between the two offices; Samuel is in 1Samuel i.-iii. an aspirant to the priesthood; in ix. x. he is regarded as a seer.

In later times also, when priests and prophets drew off and separated from each other, they yet remained connected, both in the kingdom of Israel (Host iv. 5) and in Judah. In the latter this was very markedly the case (2Kings xxiii. 2; Jeremiah xxvi.

7 seq., v. 31; Deuteronomy xviii. 1-8, 9-22; Zechariah vii. 3).

What connected them with each other was the revelation of Jehovah which went on and was kept alive in both of them. It is Jehovah from whom the torah of the priest and the word of the prophet proceeds: He is the true DIRECTOR, as Isaiah calls Him in the pa.s.sage x.x.x. 20 seq., where, speaking of the Messianic time, he says to the people, "Then thy director (MWRYK) is no more concealed, but thine eyes see thy director, and thine ears hear the words of One calling behind thee; this is the way, walk ye in it; when ye are turning to the right hand or to the left."

TORAH and WORD are cognate notions, and capable of being interchanged (Deuteronomy x.x.xiii. 9; Isaiah i. 10, ii. 3, v. 24, viii. 16, 20). This explains how both priests and prophets claimed Moses for their order: he was not regarded as the founder of the cultus.

The difference, in the period when it had fully developed itself, may be said to be this: the Torah of the priests was like a spring which runs always, that of the prophets like a spring which is intermittent, but when it does break forth, flows with all the greater force. The priests take precedence of the prophets when both are named together; they obviously consolidated themselves earlier and more strongly. The order, and the tradition which propagates itself within the order, are essential to them: they observe and keep the torah (Deuteronomy x.x.xiii. 9).

For this reason, that they take their stand so entirely on the tradition, and depend on it, their claim to have Moses for their father, the beginner and founder of their tradition, is in itself the better founded of the two. /l/

1 It is also more firmly rooted in history; for if Moses did anything at all, he certainly founded the sanctuary at Kadesh and the torah there, which the priests of the ark carried on after him, thus continuing the thread of the history of Israel, which was taken up again in power by the monarchy. The prophets only appeared among the Hebrews from the time of Samuel onwards, but the seers were older than Moses, and can scarcely have had such a close connection with his tradition as the priests at the sanctuary of the ark of Jehovah.

In the ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first, and chiefly the Priestly Torah. The prophets have notoriously no father (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on the individuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketches of their lives have reached us. They do indeed, following the tendency of the times, draw together in corporations; but in doing so they really renounce their own distinctive characteristics: the representative men are always single, resting on nothing outside themselves. We have thus on the one side the tradition of a cla.s.s, which suffices for the occasions of ordinary life, and on the other the inspiration of awakened individuals, stirred up by occasions which are more than ordinary.

After the spirit of the oldest men of G.o.d, Moses at the head of them, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in inst.i.tutions, it sought and found in the prophets a new opening; the old fire burst out like a volcano through the strata which once, too, rose fluid from the deep, but now were fixed and dead.

The element in which the prophets live is the storm of the world's history, which sweeps away human inst.i.tutions; in which the rubbish of past generations with the houses built on it begins to shake, and that foundation alone remains firm, which needs no support but itself. When the earth trembles and seems to be pa.s.sing away, then they triumph because Jehovah alone is exalted. They do not preach on set texts; they speak out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man. Where do they ever lean on any other authority than the truth of what they say; where do they rest on any other foundation than their own certainty? It belongs to the notion of prophecy of true revelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and inst.i.tutions, communicates Himself to the INDIVIDUAL, the called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy.

Apart from the prophet, _in abstracto_, there is no revelation; it lives in his divine-human ego. This gives rise to a synthesis of apparent contradictions: the subjective in the highest sense, which is exalted above all ordinances, is the truly objective, the divine. This it proves itself to be by the consent of the conscience of all, on which the prophets count, just as Jesus does in the Gospel of John, in spite of all their polemic against the traditional religion. They are not saying anything new: they are only proclaiming old truth. While acting in the most creative way they feel entirely pa.s.sive: the _h.o.m.o tantum et audacia_ which may with perfect justice be applied to such men as Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah, is with them equivalent to _deus tantum et servitus_. But their creed is not to be found in any book. It is barbarism, in dealing with such a phenomenon, to distort its physiognomy by introducing the law.

X.I.3. It is a vain imagination to suppose that the prophets expounded and applied the law. Malachi (circa 450 B.C.) says, it is true, iv. 4, "Remember ye the torah of Moses my servant;"

but where shall we look for any second expression of this nature?

Much more correctly than modern scholars did these men judge, who at the close of the preexilic history looked back on the forces which had moulded it, both the divine and those opposed to G.o.d.

In their eyes the prophets are not the expounders of Moses, but his continuators and equals; the word of G.o.d in their mouth is not less weighty than in the mouth of Moses; they, as well as he, are organs of the spirit of Jehovah by which He is present in Israel. The immediate revelation to the people, we read in Deuteronomy xviii., ceased with the ten commandments: from that point onwards Jehovah uses the prophets as His mouth: "A prophet like unto thee," He says to Moses, "will I raise up to them from among their brethren, and will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him; and whosoever shall not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him."

We find it the same in Jeremiah; the voice of the prophets, always sounding when there is need for it, occupies the place which, according to the prevailing view, should have been filled by the law: this living command of Jehovah is all he knows of, and not any testament given once for all.

"This only I commanded your fathers when I brought them up out of Egypt: Obey my voice, and walk ye in all the ways that I will command you. Since the day that your fathers came forth out of Egypt, I have sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them; but ye would not hear."

And even after the exile we meet in Zechariah (520 B.C.) the following view of the significance of the prophets: "Thus spake Jehovah of hosts [to the fathers before the exile], Speak true judgment, and show mercy and compa.s.sions every man to his brother, and oppress not the widow nor the fatherless, the stranger nor the poor: and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in his heart. But they refused to hearken, and shrugged the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as a flint, lest they should hear the Torah and the words which Jehovah Sebaoth hath sent by His Spirit through the old prophets: therefore came a great wrath from Jehovah Sebaoth.

And as He cried and they would not hear, so now shall they cry and I will not hear, and I will blow them away among the peoples.... Thus saith Jehovah Sebaoth [after the exile to the present generation], As I thought to punish you without pity because your fathers provoked me to anger, so again have I thought in these days to do well to the house of Judah: fear ye not. These are the things that ye shall do: Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates; and let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour, and love no false oath, for all these are things which I hate, saith Jehovah"

(Zechariah vii. 9-11, viii. 14-16).

The contents of the Torah, on obedience to which the theocracy is here based, are very suggestive, as also its derivation from the "old" prophets. Even Ezra can say (ix. 10, 11): "We have forsaken Thy commandments which Thou hast commanded by the servants the prophets, saying, The land unto which ye go to possess it is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the land, which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness."

He is thinking of Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, and Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.

Of those who at the end reflected on the meaning of the development which had run its course, the writer of Isaiah xl.-lxvi. occupies the first place. The Torah, which he also calls _mishpat_, right (i.e., truth), appears to him to be the divine and imperishable element in Israel. With him, however, it is inseparable from its mouthpiece, the servant of Jehovah, xlii. 1-4, xlix. 1-6, l. 4-9, lii. 13-liii. 12. The name would denote the prophet, but here it stands for the people, a prophet on a large scale. Israel's calling is not that of the world-monarchies, to make sensation and noise in the streets (xiii. 1-4), but the greater one of promulgating the Torah and getting it received. This is to be done both in Israel and among the heathen. What makes Israel a prophet is not his own inner qualities, but his relation to Jehovah, his calling as the depository of divine truth: hence it involves no contradiction that the servant should begin his work in Israel itself. /1/

1. This is as if one were to say that there is much to be done before we Evangelicals are truly evangelical. Yet the distinction as worked out in Isaiah xl. seq. is certainly very remarkable, and speaks for a surprising degree of profound meditation.

Till now he has spent his strength only in the bosom of his own people, which is always inclined to fall away from Jehovah and from itself: heedless of reproach and suffering he has laboured unweariedly in carrying out the behests of his Master and has declared His word. All in vain. He has not been able to avert the victory of heathenism in Israel, now followed by its victory over Israel. Now in the exile Jehovah has severed His relation with His people; the individual Hebrews survive, but the servant, the people of Jehovah, is dead. Then is the Torah to die with him, and truth itself to succ.u.mb to falsehood, to heathenism?

That cannot be; truth must prevail, must come to the light.

As to the Apostle Paul the Spirit is the earnest of the resurrection of those who are born again, so to our author the Torah is the pledge of the resurrection of Israel, the justification of the servant of Jehovah. The final triumph of the cause, which is G.o.d's, will surpa.s.s all expectations. Not only in Israel itself will the Torah, will the servant of Jehovah prevail and bring about a regeneration of the people: the truth will in the future shine forth from Israel into the whole world, and obtain the victory among all the Gentiles (xlix. 6). Then it will appear that the work of the servant, resultless as it seemed to be up to the exile, has yet not been in vain.

It is surely unnecessary for me to demonstrate how uncommonly vivid, I might say how uncommonly historical, the notion of the Torah is as here set forth, and how entirely incompatible that notion is with "the Torah of Moses." It might most fitly be compared with the Logos of the prologue of John, if the latter is understood in accordance with John x. 35, an utterance certainly authentic, and not according to Philo. As Jesus is the revelation of G.o.d made man, so the servant of Jehovah is the revelation of G.o.d made a people. The similarity of their nature and their significance involves the similarity of their work and of their sufferings, so that the Messianic interpretation of Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12 is in fact one which could not fail to suggest itself. /1/

1. The personification is carried further in this pa.s.sage than anywhere else, and it is possible that the colours of the sketch are borrowed from some actual instance of a prophet-martyr: yet the Ebed Jahve cannot have a different meaning here from that which it has everywhere else. It is to be noted that the sufferings and death of the servant are in the past, and his glorification in the future, a long pause lying between them in the present. A resurrection of the individual could not be in the mind of the writer of Isaiah xl seq., nor do the details of the description, lii. 12 seq., at all agree with such an idea.