The Literature of the Old Testament Part 6

If the story of Esther is told with dramatic power, that of Ruth is told with idyllic grace. The pathos of the moment in which Naomi bids her daughters-in-law return to their mothers' homes and Ruth refuses to part from her is unforced. The picture of the gleaners in the fields; the delicacy with which the night at the threshing-floor is treated; the scene at the city gate, where the waiver and redemption are witnessed and the shoe given in attestation; the blessing of the townsmen on the union, all have the charm of simple and unaffected narrative.

The question what the book was written for has received diverse answers. It has been thought that the author meant to protest against the narrowness of those who condemned all marriages with foreigners and put the Moabites under a special ban, by showing that David himself had Moabite blood in his veins; others see the point of the book in the commendation of the marriage of childless widows, not by brothers-in-law only as the levirate law required, but by remoter kinsmen. Others have conjectured otherwise. In this state of the case it is safe to say that if the author had an ulterior motive, he concealed it more successfully than is common to story-tellers who write with a purpose.

There are no very definite signs in the book of the age in which it was written. The author is familiar with the Hebrew literature of the good period, and writes a better imitation of it than some. It is precisely this imitative character which stands in the way of putting the book in the days of the kingdom. But where, in the centuries of the Persian or Greek dominion it belongs, it is impossible to say.

JONAH.--The third of the short stories, Jonah, is not found, like Esther and Ruth, in the Jewish Bible in the miscellaneous collection of "Scriptures" and in the Christian Bible among the Historical Books, but in the prophetic canon, as one of the Minor Prophets. The reason, doubtless, is that it is not only a story about a prophet and his mission, but was thought to be written by himself.

The tale is too familiar to have to be retold at length. The Israelite prophet, Jonah the son of Amittai, is commissioned by G.o.d to go to Nineveh and announce its impending destruction; to escape this unwelcome errand he embarks on a Phoenician ship bound for Spain, at the other end of the world; a tempest threatens to engulf the ship; the seamen cast lots to discover against whom the G.o.ds are so angry; the lot falls on Jonah, and he is cast into the sea, which thereupon becomes calm; Jonah is swallowed by a monstrous fish, which after three days sets him ash.o.r.e safe and sound. He goes to Nineveh and delivers his message; the people repent of their sins, and G.o.d repents of his purpose to destroy them, whereat the prophet is very indignant and upbraids G.o.d with his soft-heartedness; he expected this from the beginning, and therefore tried to flee to Tarshish. By his own grief for the death of the plant "which sprang up in a night and perished in a night," the prophet is taught the lesson of the divine compa.s.sion: "How should I not have compa.s.sion on this great city, Nineveh, in which are more than a hundred and twenty thousand human beings which do not know their right hand from their left, not to speak of cattle?"

With this rebuke the book ends.

These closing words leave no room for question about the purpose of the book. In the person of Jonah, the rebuke is addressed to the Jews, to whom G.o.d's long-suffering with the heathen was a stumbling-block.

The greater prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all contain a long array of oracles against foreign nations, predicting their total and remediless destruction, some of them very precise as to time and agent (see, for example, Isa. 13 f., against Babylon). The fulfilment of these prophecies, the final breaking of the power of the heathen world, must come before the golden age of Israel could dawn. Yet the generations came and went, and the heathen still ruled the earth!

Then, too, the Jews doubtless felt that they, as the people of G.o.d, had an exclusive claim on his affections, as he a.s.serted exclusive claims to theirs. The author of Jonah not only extends to mankind G.o.d's word in Ezekiel, "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked? saith the Lord G.o.d, and not rather that he should return from his way and live?" but he a.s.serts the all-embracing compa.s.sion of G.o.d.

The one G.o.d is the creator of the heathen as well as of Israel, his merciful providence is over all his works.

The higher spirit of Judaism here reproves the lower, narrow, exclusive, and intolerant spirit, which could unfortunately allege so much warrant for itself from the law and the prophets. Therein the author had many and n.o.ble successors, not only among the sages, with their cosmopolitan wisdom, but in the circles of the law.

It is not the fault of the author that modern readers and interpreters have had their attention diverted from the moral of the book to the fable in which it is conveyed; he could not have imagined the pseudo-historical frame of mind to which the question whether it all happened thus and so was of such absorbing importance that it might almost be said that the sea-monster swallowed the commentators as well as the prophet. For one of the difficulties of the book he is not responsible, the psalm (Jonah ii. 2-9) which Jonah sings in the fish's belly was put in his mouth by a later editor; vs. 10 is the immediate sequel of vs. 1. The poem was evidently not composed for the place; it is a hymn of thanksgiving not a prayer for deliverance; but the (figurative) references to the depths of the abyss seemed appropriate to Jonah's situation.

The hero of the story is a historical character, of whom, to be sure, we know only that he came from a place named Gath-hepher, and predicted the reconquest of lost Israelite territories which Jeroboam II. achieved (2 Kings xiv. 25). It has been conjectured that the author of our book may have heard in some way that he went on a mission to Nineveh; but if he had, that would not make the book any more historical.

Jonah, like Ruth and Esther, belongs to the later period of Hebrew literature; it is more likely that it was written after the time of Alexander than before, but greater definiteness is not justified.

CHAPTER XV

THE PROPHETS

In the old story of Saul and Samuel (1 Sam. 9 f.) Samuel is named "the seer," that is, a man endowed with what we call second sight, and a note by an editor explains that what in his time was called a prophet used to be called a seer. Samuel was, indeed, in the apprehension of later times, a prophet, but the story itself makes a clear distinction between the two. The band of prophets whom Saul meets coming down from the high place, working up by music an enthusiasm, or possession, which makes them beside themselves, raving in the prophetic fury (raving and prophesying, in such connections, is the same word in Hebrew), an enthusiasm which Saul catches, to the surprise and scandal of his townsmen, are evidently something quite different from the village seer; they must have been outwardly very much like modern Moslem dervishes.

In the ninth century of the Syrian wars, these gregarious prophets appear in many places; especially in the stories of Elisha they are organized societies of devotees, living by themselves in colonies of huts or cells under a superior--again very much like a dervish order--and sometimes turning their religious zeal into political channels, as when they incite Jehu to the revolt which overthrew the house of Omri.

Beside them are others who also bear the name prophet, but stand apart from the order and often in opposition to it. Such a figure is Micaiah son of Imlah, confronting the four hundred prophets whom Ahab got together, and declaring their unanimity of inspiration to be the work of a lying spirit sent from G.o.d to lure the king to his doom (1 Kings 22). Such a figure, above all as we have already seen, is Elijah, who, solitary, champions Jehovah's right to the undivided allegiance of Israel, or thunders the doom of the dynasty at the authors of Naboth's judicial murder. It is in such men as these, rather than in the common herd of prophets by profession, that the ethical prophets of the eighth century have their forerunners.

The moral conception of G.o.d had its roots far down in the religion of Israel, as may be seen in the older (certainly preprophetic) strata in Samuel, and better still in the patriarchal legends, which received their present form in the same age; but after the establishment of the kingdom it was crossed by the national idea. It was not till the eighth century that the men came who thought through what the moral idea of G.o.d involves, and had the courage to proclaim its consequences, fatal though they might be to both state and church.

These prophets, beginning with Amos, not only preached a new doctrine, they employed a new method. The message which they spoke to the heedless, incredulous, or hostile ears of their contemporaries, they also recorded, whether in the hope to reach through the written page a larger audience, or to perpetuate their words to generations following. Thus there begins a prophetic literature which is one of the most characteristic features of the Old Testament. Four prophets of the second half of the eighth century have given their names to such prophetic books, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Then, in the latter part of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth, follow the little books of Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habbakuk, and the great one of Jeremiah, whose younger contemporary in Babylonia is Ezekiel. Haggai and Zechariah were instrumental in the rebuilding of the temple in the reign of Darius I. In the discussion of these books we shall not attempt a chronological disposition, but follow the order of the English Bible.

CHAPTER XVI

ISAIAH

The first of the prophetic books bears the name of Isaiah, a Judaean prophet, who dates his call "in the year that king Uzziah died," a year which cannot be fixed with certainty, but was at all events not very long before 734 B.C., and whose latest dated utterances are from the time of Sennacherib's invasion in the year 701. His prophecies thus range over a period of not far from forty years. He witnessed the humbling of Israel by Tiglath-Pileser in 734, the fall of Samaria in 721, the a.s.syrian campaigns in the west in 720 and 711, and the condign punishment Sennacherib inflicted on Judah in 701; and all these events (of which we have historical knowledge from both a.s.syrian and Jewish sources) are reflected in his prophecies.

The book contains, however, much besides the prophecies of Isaiah in the different periods of his long career. It has already been noted that Isa. 36-39 are found also, with some variations, in 2 Kings 18-20, where they are an integral part of the narrative. That this extract from Kings was copied into the Book of Isaiah is explained by the fact that the prophet is a prominent figure in the story. It does not stand in immediate connection with the prophecies of Isaiah during the campaign of Sennacherib in cc. 28-33, from which it is separated by several oracles of different character and date; and the natural presumption is that this historical appendix was added at the end of a roll, just as Jer. 52, also an extract from Kings (2 Kings xxiv. 18-xxv. 21), is appended at the end of the roll of Jeremiah.

In the present Book of Isaiah, cc. 36-39 are followed by another prophetic book of considerable length (Isa. 40-66), which has no t.i.tle, and in which, from first to last, no prophet's name appears.

The theme which is announced in the first verses of this book and runs through a large part of it is the approaching deliverance of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, their return to their own land, and the restoration of Zion.

In Isa. 1-35 certain larger divisions are at once apparent; cc. 1-12, a collection of prophecies, chiefly, as appears from dates and other indications, from the earlier years of Isaiah's ministry; cc. 13 to 23, a collection of oracles mainly against foreign nations; cc. 24-27, previsions of a great judgment, in a peculiarly mysterious tone; cc.

28-33, chiefly from the time of Sennacherib, followed by c. 34, in which G.o.d's fury is poured out on Edom, and c. 35, a prophecy of restoration akin to cc. 40 ff. It is thus evident that the present book is made up from several older collections of prophecies gathered by different hands; the peculiar t.i.tles in cc. 13-23, for instance, are most probably to be attributed to the editor of an independent book of prophecies against the heathen.

The same phenomenon appears on a smaller scale in Isa. 1-12. That these chapters, at one stage in the history of the collections, formed a roll by themselves is probable from the fact that they begin with a grand overture (c. 1), in which the leading motives of Isaiah's prophecy are heard, and close (c. 12) with a psalm of praise for the messianic deliverance which is the subject of c. 11. But the order of the prophecies is not chronological: the inaugural vision and Isaiah's call to be a prophet stands, not at the beginning, as in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but in c. 6 (dated in the year of King Uzziah's death), while the chapters that precede it (cc. 2 f.; 5), with what was once an initial t.i.tle (ii. 1), may confidently be a.s.signed, on internal grounds, to the reigns of Uzziah's successors. Chapters 7 and 8 (dated under Ahaz) seem to have originally followed close on c. 6, as they do now. Whatever may be the reason for this singular arrangement, it seems evident that the compiler had several smaller groups or loose leaves of oracles, which he put together for better preservation, rather, perhaps, by affinity of subject than in order of time.

This must have taken place at a comparatively late time, for not only does his roll begin with a prophecy (Isa. i. 2-9) which vividly depicts the devastation of Judah and the isolation of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 (perhaps the latest oracle of Isaiah preserved in the book), but it contains pa.s.sages (e.g. xi. 11-16) which bear all the marks of a time several centuries after Isaiah's death; the psalm in c. 12 is perhaps later still. Another indication that the collection was made at a date remote from the age of the prophet is the fragmentary character of several of the oracles in cc. 2-5. The refrain verses here afford a certain clue; they show that prophecies originally composed with much art in balanced strophes with closing refrains came into the compiler's hands mutilated and dislocated.

Thus, v. 25 has the refrain of ix. 8-21; x. 4, while x. 1-3 is a "woe"

which has strayed away from v. 18 ff., and the refrain ii. 9, 11, 17 recurs in v. 15.

Fragmentary as many of these prophecies are, enough remains to show that Isaiah had poetical genius as well as unequalled mastery of the peculiar literary form of the Hebrew oracle. The parable of the vineyard (Isa. v. 1-7), or the picture of the swift, resistless advance of the a.s.syrian (v. 26-30), or the description of devastated Judah (i. 2-8), or the oracle against Samaria (ix. 8-21), in the authorized English Version ill.u.s.trate in different ways the art with which Isaiah handles this traditional form.

The earlier prophecies of Isaiah, whether directed against Israel and its allies or against Judah, are unsparing in their condemnation of the political and social evils of the time, and predict the imminent and irremediable ruin of both nations. This is revealed to Isaiah in the vision which made him a prophet, in terms so drastic that the closing words were piously erased by some late editor (so in the Greek Bible), and a meaningless phrase put in their place in the curtailed sentence by a still later hand (our Hebrew text). With this the tenor of his utterances in cc. ii. 5-iii. 26; v. 1-30; ix. 8-x. 4, wholly agrees. These unrelieved forebodings of doom led in later times not only to excisions such as we have noted in vi. 13, but to interpolations; hopeful pendants were attached to the prophet's gloomy pictures, sometimes written for the purpose--a particularly instructive example is iv. 2-6, after iii. 16-iv. 1--sometimes borrowed from other prophetic contexts. To the latter cla.s.s belongs the famous messianic oracle, ix. 1-7, which is very imperfectly connected (by changes in viii. 22) with the preceding climactic denunciation of doom, the end of which is missing. If Isa. ix. 1-7 is a prophecy by Isaiah, it can only belong to his latest years.

One other feature of Isaiah's message must be signalized. His G.o.d indignantly rejects the sacrifices and all the pompous worship which are offered him in his temple in Jerusalem (Isa. i. 10-17). Men think they can thus gain the favour of G.o.d and persuade him to overlook or condone their sins against their fellows! Such worship is an insult to G.o.d. So Amos a few years before had condemned the worship at Bethel (Amos v. 21-25). So their successors repeat in no uncertain terms (see Mic. vi. 6-8; Jer. 7, especially vss. 21-23). It is the fundamental doctrine of prophecy: the will of G.o.d is wholly moral. For worship he cares nothing at all; for justice, fairness, and goodness between man and man he cares everything. Such a G.o.d is capable of destroying the nation for the wrongs men do their fellow men; he is not capable of being bribed by offerings, or flattered with psalms, or wheedled with prayers. He will listen to no intercession (Jer. xv. 1 ff., after c.

14); nothing but complete reformation and reparation will he call repentance--and there comes a pa.s.s where repentance is impossible.

The book of prophecies against the heathen (Isa. 13-23) begins with two remarkable chapters (xiii. 1-xiv. 23) declaring the imminent destruction of Babylon by the Medes, whom the prophet sees already in motion against the doomed city, and exulting over the descent of the king of Babylon to h.e.l.l, greeted by the taunts of the mighty of the earth who were before him there. The two prophecies are connected by a prediction of the deliverance of captive Israel, which will be restored to its own land and rule over its oppressors (xiv. 1-4^a).

The situation is not that of Isaiah's time, in which Babylon was a province of the a.s.syrian empire, and when, under Merodach Baladan, it for a while rea.s.serted its independence, seems to have sought an alliance with Hezekiah against their common oppressor, a.s.syria (Isa.

39 = 2 Kings xx. 12 ff.). The Medes had been in league with the Babylonians against a.s.syria until its fall in 606 B.C.; it was not until the time of Cyrus that the Medes became a menace to Babylonia, and only after Cyrus's conquest of Lydia (546 B.C.) that the turn of Babylon was visibly come. On the other hand, the sack and ruin of Babylon, pictured with vengeful satisfaction in Isa. 13, did not come to pa.s.s at that time. The Persian armies, after a decisive battle in northern Babylonia, entered the city in the autumn of 538 without resistance. Babylonian inscriptions acclaim Cyrus as a deliverer, and Babylon became one of the capitals of his great empire. On these grounds the prophecy is generally thought to fall between 546 and 538 B.C.

It is immediately followed by a short oracle (Isa. xiv. 24-27) against the a.s.syrians, quite in the tone of the prophecies of Isaiah in the time of Sennacherib (701 B.C.), and by an enigmatical warning to the inhabitants of the Philistine cities, said in the t.i.tle to have come "in the year that King Ahaz died." Another prophecy concerned with the inhabitants of these cities, bearing Isaiah's name and definitely dated (711 B.C.), is Isa. 20. Chapter 17, ent.i.tled "The Burden of Damascus," is in fact chiefly against the kingdom of Israel, and falls in line with prophecies of Isaiah in the time of the alliance of the two kingdoms against Judah (ca. 736 B.C.); compare Isa. 7. In Isa.

xxii. 15-25 is a prophecy of Isaiah singular in the fact that it is launched at an individual, the major domo of King Hezekiah.

Besides these, the collection contains oracles against Moab (Isa. 15 f.), Nubia (c. 18), Egypt (c. 19), another vision of the fall of Babylon before the armies of Elam and Media (xxi. 1-10), but in a different spirit from cc. 13-14, the Arabs (xxi. 11 f., 13-17), Tyre (c. 23), and one with the mysterious (editorial) t.i.tle "Burden of the Valley of Vision" (xxii. 1-14). The last-named, in the form of a vision, depicts a crisis in the history of Jerusalem, and condemns the frivolous behaviour of its inhabitants on the eve of a siege or, as some think, during the respite given by a temporary raising of a siege. It was probably uttered by Isaiah at an early stage in Hezekiah's revolt against Sennacherib (704 or 703 B.C.), before the actual appearance of the a.s.syrian army. The oracle against Tyre (Isa.

xxiii. 1-14--what follows is a later supplement) seems more appropriate to the thirteen years' siege by Nebuchadnezzar than to the operations of Shalmanezer or of Sennacherib in Isaiah's days.

Thus Isa. 13-23, like cc. 1-12, contains prophecies of Isaiah from both the earliest and the latest period of his activity, intermingled with others having a totally different historical horizon and dating from a much later time, and to both additions have been made by editors or scribes. A very interesting example of the latter phenomenon is Isa. xix. 18 ff. The pa.s.sage is, in all probability, from the time of the Greek kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, the name of the city in the Greek Bible, "City of Righteousness," referring to Leontopolis, where a Jewish temple was erected about 170 B.C., with high priests of the legitimate line exiled from Jerusalem. "City of Destruction" (_heres_) in the Hebrew text is a hostile perversion, possibly by way of another reading "City of the Sun" (_heres_).

Each of the three large prophetic books has such a group of oracles about gentile nations, Isa. 13-23; Jer. 46-51; Ezek. 25-32. They are in part levelled at the immediate neighbours of Judah, in part against the great powers, Babylon and Egypt. Many of them are in such general terms--or, if they refer to specific events and situations, our knowledge of the history is so incomplete--that it is peculiarly difficult to fix their age. It was also a kind of prophecy which peculiarly invited imitation. Under the foreign yoke the Jews wore for so many centuries, it must often have been a relief of soul to repeat what G.o.d was going to do to the heathen; the spirit of the author of Jonah was not for everybody. Moreover, if there is any place in the Old Testament where it would be easier than another for oracles of the "false prophets" to slip in and be preserved, it is in these collections; about the doom of the enemies of Israel they were as orthodox and as emphatic as the best. It is not strange, therefore, that there should be more than usual uncertainty about the origin of these anathemas on the gentiles.

Isaiah 24-27 contains a series of prophecies of judgment to come which differ from others in the book in having no particular address. The vision seems to widen to a judgment of the world, in which the earth itself reels and sinks under the weight of men's sin, and the celestial powers (the heavenly bodies, which are the tutelary deities of the heathen) and the kings of the earth are cast into the pit and shut up in prison, while the Lord of Hosts reigns gloriously in Zion.

In another pa.s.sage G.o.d, with his great sword, punishes the leviathan, the swift and winding serpent, and slays the great dragon in the sea.

The mythological eschatology of Judaism made much of such imagery, which is itself doubtless of mythical ancestry.

The diction and style of these chapters alone would suffice to acquit Isaiah of responsibility for them; anything more unlike his writing could not be imagined. The author, whosoever he was, riots in plays on words, many of them, as is the fate of laborious punsters, forced or far-fetched. As to the age of the chapters, apart from the language, prophecy is here plainly making the transition to apocalypse with those visionary revelations of the last judgment in which Jewish invention was so fertile. This of itself points to a late time in the post-exilic period. The historical allusions which have been scented out in the chapters are too uncertain to reckon with; only, as in c.

19, the way in which Egypt and a.s.syria (or Syria) are conjoined seems plainly to point to the divisions of Alexander's empire.

In chapters 28-33 are brought together a number of oracles of Isaiah from the years of Hezekiah's revolt and Sennacherib's punitive expedition. These oracles are generally brief and pointed; they agree in form and spirit with his prophecies in cc. 1-12 quite as closely as the writing of an aging man ordinarily resembles that of his youth. In xxviii. 1-4, indeed, an early prophecy against Samaria is made to serve as text for a counterpart addressed to Jerusalem.

Mingled with these is a series of pa.s.sages which foretell the destruction of the foe and the miraculous escape of Judah from imminent ruin, or, taking higher flight, picture the golden age to come. To the former cla.s.s belong, for example, x.x.x. 27-33; x.x.xi. 4-9; to the latter, xxix. 18-24; x.x.x. 18-26; x.x.xii. 1-8, 16-20; while c. 33 partakes of both characters. That Isaiah predicted the deliverance of Jerusalem in the last extremity is reported also in Kings, and need not be questioned (see also Isa. x. 5-14; xiv. 24-27). Most of the prophecies of the golden age are, however, alien to their context, and the unmediated transition from the unsparing predictions of judgment to these messianic idylls makes them suspicious. It is not to be believed that the prophet thus took the sting out of his most pungent oracles, but the position of the pa.s.sages in question can have no other intention. If, then, these are utterances of Isaiah at all, they cannot have been spoken in their present connection. Some of them, at least, are much more likely by other hands. This is true most evidently of c. 33, which was probably once the end of this little book of prophecies from the time of Sennacherib (Isa. 28-33).

Isaiah 34 is a prophecy against all the nations, which at once concentrates itself upon Edom, and is remarkable for its rancour, in which, as in other respects, it resembles cc. 13 f. The supernatural features of the judgment remind us also of Isa. 27: it is too little that the people are annihilated, its very land is turned into an uninhabitable waste, and, as by some prodigious volcanic convulsion, its dust becomes brimstone and its soil burning pitch. This is the Lord's vengeance for the wrong of Zion. The cause of this unusual pa.s.sion is known from other prophets (see Obad. vss. 10-12; Ezek. xxv.