The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Author: Andrew Harper
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: May 25, 2015 [eBook #49045]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY ***
Transcriber's note:
Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
* * * * *
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
_Editor of "The Expositor"_
THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY
BY
ANDREW HARPER, B.D.
NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
51 EAST TENTH STREET
1895
THE
BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY
BY THE REV.
ANDREW HARPER, B.D.
PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS, ORMOND COLLEGE
WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE
NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
51 EAST TENTH STREET
1895
Dedicated to
REV. A. B. DAVIDSON, D.D., LL.D.
NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH
IN VERY GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
OF
INSTRUCTION AND IMPULSE
IN OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES
PREFACE.
An adequate exposition of Deuteronomy requires the discussion of
many topics. The author has endeavoured to keep these various claims
in view: at the same time the limits of the volume have dictated
selection and compression. In particular, a chapter on miracle
in the Old Testament has been wholly omitted. That topic cannot
be said to have a peculiar or exclusive relation to Deuteronomy.
Yet the writer would have wished to include in the volume a
reasoned statement of the grounds on which he owns and asserts the
supernatural in Old Testament history; all the more because he
admits critical views which have sometimes been associated, and
still oftener supposed to be associated, with rationalistic views
generally. For the present this discussion is postponed. In some
instances, also, the writer has been obliged to content himself
with statements on critical questions more brief than he could have
desired; but it is hoped that enough has been said to explain the
position assumed, and to make clear the main lines of argument.
The task of adjusting the matter to the space would have been easier
if it had seemed legitimate to omit the critical and archæological
questions on the one hand, or, on the other, to leave untouched the
bearing of the thoughts and Laws of Deuteronomy on the religious
history of the race, and on the dangers and duties of our own
age. But an exposition of Deuteronomy must endeavour to open the
appropriate outlooks in all these directions.
Owing to the author's distance from London the work of passing the
book through the press has necessarily been left wholly to others.
It is hoped that oversights which may have arisen from this cause
will be pardoned.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE AUTHORSHIP AND AGE OF DEUTERONOMY 1
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORIC SETTING OF DEUTERONOMY 37
CHAPTER III
THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT 48
DEUT. i.-iii.
CHAPTER IV
THE DECALOGUE--ITS FORM 60
DEUT. v. 1-21.
CHAPTER V
THE DECALOGUE--ITS SUBSTANCE 73
CHAPTER VI
THE MEDIATORSHIP OF MOSES 106
DEUT. v. 22-33.
CHAPTER VII
LOVE TO GOD THE LAW OF LIFE 116
DEUT. vi. 4, 5.
CHAPTER VIII
EDUCATION--MOSAIC VIEW 146
DEUT. vi. 6-25.
CHAPTER IX
THE BAN 168
DEUT. vii.
CHAPTER X
THE BAN IN MODERN LIFE 184
CHAPTER XI
THE BREAD OF THE SOUL 202
DEUT. viii.
CHAPTER XII
ISRAEL'S ELECTION, AND MOTIVES FOR FAITHFULNESS 218
DEUT. ix.-xi.
CHAPTER XIII
LAW AND RELIGION 239
DEUT. xii.-xxvi.
CHAPTER XIV
LAWS OF SACRIFICE 253
DEUT. xii.
CHAPTER XV
THE RELATION OF OLD TESTAMENT SACRIFICE TO CHRISTIANITY 267
CHAPTER XVI
LAWS AGAINST IDOLATROUS ACTS AND CUSTOMS 277
DEUT. xiii., xiv.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SPEAKERS FOR GOD--I. THE KING 295
DEUT. xvii. 14-20
CHAPTER XVIII
SPEAKERS FOR GOD--II. THE PRIEST 308
DEUT. xviii. 1-8
CHAPTER XIX
SPEAKERS FOR GOD--III. THE PROPHET 334
DEUT. xviii. 9-22
CHAPTER XX
THE ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF ISRAELITE LIFE 355
CHAPTER XXI
JUSTICE IN ISRAEL 377
CHAPTER XXII
LAWS OF PURITY (CHASTITY AND MARRIAGE) 396
CHAPTER XXIII
LAWS OF KINDNESS 411
CHAPTER XXIV
MOSES' FAREWELL SPEECHES 433
DEUT. iv. 1-40, xxvii.-xxx.
CHAPTER XXV
THE SONG AND BLESSING OF MOSES 452
DEUT. xxxii., xxxiii.
CHAPTER XXVI
MOSES' CHARACTER AND DEATH 471
CHAPTER I
_THE AUTHORSHIP AND AGE OF DEUTERONOMY_
In approaching a book so spiritually great as Deuteronomy, it might
seem superfluous to allude to the critical questions which have
been raised concerning it. On any supposition as to origin and
authorship, its spiritual elevation and the moral impulse it gives
are always there; and it might consequently seem sufficient to
expound and illustrate the text as we have it. Minute and vexatious
inquiry into details, such as any adequate treatment of the critical
question demands, tends to draw away the mind, in a disastrous way,
from the spiritual and moral purpose of the book. That however is
precisely what the expositor has to elucidate and apply; and so it
might seem to be an error in method to enter upon extraneous matters
such as those with which criticism has mainly to do.
On the other hand, this has to be taken into account. The truth
about the composition of a book, about the authorities it is founded
on, about the times in which and the circumstances under which it
was composed, if it be attainable, often throws a very welcome
light upon the meaning. It clears up obscurities, removes chances
of error, and often, when two or three possible paths have opened
before us, it shuts us up to the right one. But if that is the case
when no special conflict of opinion has arisen, it is much more so
when a revolution of opinion concerning the whole religious life of
a nation has been caused by the critical view of a book adopted
by able men. Now that is plainly the case here. Deuteronomy has
been the key of the position, the centre of the conflict, in the
battle which has been waged so hotly as to the growth of religion in
Israel. The attack upon the views hitherto generally held within the
Church in regard to that matter has rested more upon the character
and date of Deuteronomy than upon anything else. Consequently every
part of the book has been the object of intense and microscopic
scrutiny, and there is scarcely a cardinal point in it which must
not be regarded differently, according as we accept or reject the
strictly Mosaic origin of the book as a whole, or even of the legal
portions. The difference is probably never absolutely fundamental.
On either supposition, as we have said, the spiritual and moral
teaching remains the same; but the mind is apt to be clouded with
harassing doubt as to many important points, until clear views on
the critical question have been attained. This is felt more or less
acutely by all readers of the Old Testament who are touched by
recent debates, and they expect that any new exposition shall help
them to a clearer view. Many will even demand that some effort in
that direction should be made; and, as we think, they rightly demand
it.
But there is still another reason for dealing with the questions
gathering round the authorship and age of our book, and it is
decisive. The debate concerning the critical views of the Old
Testament has reached a stage at which it is no longer confined to
the professed teachers and students of the Old Testament. It has
filtered down, through magazines first, and then through newspapers,
into the public mind, and opinions are becoming current concerning
the results of criticism which are so partial and ill-informed that
they cannot but produce evil results of a formidable kind in the
near future. By those who are sceptically inclined, as well as by
those who cling most closely to the teaching of the Churches, it
is loudly proclaimed that the acceptance of the critical view--viz.
that the Levitical law, as a written code, came into existence
after the Exile, and that Deuteronomy, written in the royal period
of Israelite history, occupies a middle position between the
first legislation (Exod. xx.-xxiii.) and this latest--destroys
the character of the Old Testament as a record of Revelation, and
undermines Christianity itself. The former class rejoice that this
should be so, and think their scepticism is thereby justified.
The latter, on the contrary, reject the critical conclusions with
vehemence. They have found God through the Scripture, and, resting
upon this experience, they turn away from theories which they
believe to be in direct conflict with it. To write an exposition
of Deuteronomy therefore, without correcting the false impression
that the critical view as to its age, etc., is incompatible with
faith in a Divine revelation, would be to miss one of the great
opportunities which fall to writers on the Old Testament in our day.
Questions regarding the age, authorship, and literary form of the
books of Scripture cannot ultimately be so decided as to nullify the
testimony borne to them by the experience of so many generations of
Christian men and women. Whatever makes itself ultimately credible
to the human mind in regard to such matters, will always be capable
of being held along with a belief in the manifestation of Himself
which God has given in the history and literature of Israel. But
nothing will make that fact so readily apprehensible, nothing will
make it stand out so clearly, as an exposition of a book like
Deuteronomy, which takes account of all that seems established in
the critical view. Even the most extreme critical positions, when
separated from the totally irrelevant assumption (which too often
accompanies them) that miracle is unhistorical, are compatible with
a real faith in Revelation and Inspiration. It is not the fact
of Revelation, but the common conception of its method, which is
challenged by the critical theories. We shall therefore only try
to meet a clamant need of our time, if we take with us into the
explanation of the Deuteronomic teaching a definite conclusion as to
the authorship, age, and literary character of the book.
As regards authorship, the ordinary opinion still is that
Deuteronomy was written by Moses. This was the view handed over to
Christianity in pre-critical ages by the Jews, and accepted as the
natural one. But if the Mosaic authorship of the whole contents of
the other books of the Pentateuch is now given up, much more should
it be given up in the case of Deuteronomy. For Deuteronomy does not
even claim to be written by Moses. It is not merely that in it Moses
is often spoken of in the third person; that, if it were carried
out consistently, as it is, for instance, in Cæsar's Commentaries,
would be compatible with Mosaic authorship. But what we find is
that the author, "whenever he speaks himself, purports to give a
description in the third person of what Moses did or said,"[1] while
Moses, when he speaks, always uses the first person. The book,
consequently, falls naturally into two portions: the subsidiary,
introductory framework of statement, in which Moses is always spoken
of in the third person, together with the historical portions; and
the utterances of Moses himself, which these introduce and hold
together, and in which Moses always uses the first person.[2] Again,
wherever the expression "beyond Jordan" is used in the portions
where the author speaks for himself, it signifies the land of
Moab.[3] Wherever, on the contrary, Moses is introduced speaking in
the first person, "beyond Jordan" denotes the land of Israel.[4]
The only exception is iii. 8, where at the beginning of a long
archæological note, which cannot have originally formed part of the
speech of Moses, and consequently must be a comment of the writer,
or of a later editor of Deuteronomy, "beyond Jordan" signifies the
land of Moab. If, consequently, the book be taken at its word, there
can be no doubt that it professes to be an account of what Moses did
and said on a certain day in the land of Moab, before his death,
written by another person, who lived to the west of the Jordan.
The author must consequently have lived after Moses' day; and he
has taken pains by his use of language to distinguish himself from
Moses in a most unmistakable way. It is no doubt possible, though
not probable, that Moses might have written of himself in the third
person in the connecting passages, and in the first person in the
remainder of his book: but that he should have made the anxious
distinction we have seen as to the phrase "beyond Jordan" does not
seem possible.
[1] Driver, _Introduction_, 5th Ed., p. 84.
[2] Cf. Deut. i. 1-5, iv. 41-43, iv. 44, v. 1, xxvii. 1, 9-11, xxix.
1, xxxi. 1-30.
[3] Cf. Deut. i. 1, 5, iv. 41, 46, 47, 49.
[4] iii. 20, 25, and xi. 30.
But if our book, as we have it, is not by Moses, but is an account
by another person of what Moses did and said on a certain occasion,
that fact has a very important bearing upon the speeches reported
as Mosaic. For the style of the whole book up to the end of the
twenty-eighth chapter is, for all practical purposes, one. The parts
where the author speaks, and the parts where Moses speaks, are all
alike in style, and that style is in all respects different from
the style of the speeches attributed to Moses in other parts of the
Pentateuch. Consequently we cannot accept the speeches and laws as
being in the very words of Moses. They may contain the exact ideas
of Moses, but these have manifestly passed through the mind and
clothed themselves in the vocabulary of the author of Deuteronomy.
Even Delitzsch is quite decisive on this point.[5] In the tenth
of his _Pentateuch Kritische Studien_, after distinguishing the
Deuteronomist from Moses, he continues thus: "The addresses are
freely reproduced, and he who reproduces them is the same who also
contributed the historical framework and the historical details
between the addresses. The same colouring, though in a less degree,
may also be remarked in the repetition of the law in chapters
xii.-xxvi. to which the book owes its name. All the component parts
of Deuteronomy, not excepting the legal prescriptions, are woven
through and through with the favourite phrases of the Deuteronomist."
[5] Cf. _Pentateuch Kritische Studien_ in Luthardt's _Zeitschrift_,
1880.
Under these circumstances, the question immediately suggests itself
to what degree this representation of Moses' legislation can be
regarded as purely and unmixedly Mosaic. Was this legislation
given in the main or entirely by Moses, and, if it was so given,
may there not be mingled with what he gave inferences drawn by the
author in whose style the book is written, and adaptations demanded
by the exigencies of his later times? A full discussion of this
point would, of course, be out of the question here, and it would,
moreover, be superfluous. In Dr. Driver's article on "Deuteronomy"
in Smith's _Dictionary of the Bible_, and in his _Introduction to
Hebrew Literature_, detailed discussions will be found. All that is
necessary here is that one or two large and salient aspects of the
question should be looked at.
In the first place, it is important to know whether the author of
Deuteronomy can have been a contemporary of Moses, or a younger
contemporary of his contemporaries. If he were, the relation between
the speeches and legislation in his book and that which Moses
actually uttered would be similar to that between the speeches of
Christ reported by St. John in his Gospel and the actual words
of our Lord. They might, in fact, be taken to be in all respects
a reliable, though not a verbal, representation of what Moses
actually said or commanded. If, on the contrary, it should be
proved, either from the character of the legislation itself, or from
the evidence we have as to the date of the authorities whom the
Deuteronomist quotes, and upon whom he relies, that he must have
lived centuries later, then any such confidence would be materially
weakened. Now there can be no doubt, to take the last point first,
that Deuteronomy, taken as a legal code, though not wanting in laws
which have been first formulated by its author, is mainly intended
to be a repetition and a reinforcement of what we find in the Book
of the Covenant (Exod. xx.-xxiii.). The result of Driver's careful
tabulation of the subjects dealt with in the two codes is "that the
laws in JE,[6] viz. Exod. xx.-xxiii. (repeated partially in xxxiv.
10-26) and the kindred section xiii. 3-16, _form the foundations
of the Deuteronomic legislation_. This is evident as well from
the numerous verbal coincidences as from the fact that nearly the
whole ground covered by Exod. xx.-xxiii. is included in it; almost
the only exception being the special compensations to be paid for
various injuries (Exod. xxi. 18, xxii. 15), which would be less
necessary in a manual intended for the people." This is also the
conclusion of other scholars, and indeed is plainly demanded by the
facts. It is, moreover, what may be called the Biblical hypothesis,
for Moses is supposed to have been renewing the covenant made at
Horeb, and repeating its conditions.
[6] It is scarcely necessary to remind readers that, from the point
of view of the critics, J signifies one of the constituent documents
of the Pentateuch which uses the name Yahweh for God. Its date
is about 850 B.C. E is that document which uses the name Elohim,
and may be dated about the same period as J. D is the author of
Deuteronomy, who wrote, it is supposed, in the reign of Manasseh,
perhaps about 670 B.C. P is the Priestly document, which Dillmann
dates before Deuteronomy, but which most critics think was brought
substantially into its present shape by Ezra. The portions of the
Pentateuch assigned to these various documents will be found in
Driver's _Introduction_.
But in the present condition of our knowledge, the fact of
Deuteronomy's dependence upon the Book of the Covenant brings into
view unexpected consequences. It is true, certainly, that the laws
of the latter code existed before they were incorporated in the
text where we now find them. Consequently no verbal coincidences
would give us the assurance that the Deuteronomist had before him
the actual book in which these laws have come down to us. But a
conclusion may be reached in another way. A comparison of the
historical portions of Deuteronomy with the corresponding narrative
in the previous four books of our Bible shows that for his history
also the author of Deuteronomy relies upon these earlier narratives,
and that he must have had portions at least of them before him in
the same text as we have now. The verbal coincidences tabulated in
Driver, pp. 75 f., as well as the general and exact agreement in the
events recorded in Deuteronomy with those recorded in the earlier
books, show that the author has not only drawn his information from
the same sources as those of the earlier books, but that he must
have had before him at least that section which contains the laws.
Now, as it happens, in the course of the analysis of the Pentateuch
it has come to be all but universally acknowledged that Exod.
xx.-xxiii. form part of a document which can be traced, dovetailed
into others, from Genesis to Joshua, and perhaps beyond it. This
document has been called by Wellhausen the Jehovist document, and
in all critical books it is referred to as JE, as being made up of
two sections, one of which uses Yahweh for the Divine name, and
the other Elohim. The only generally known scholar who denies
the existence of JE is Professor Green, of Princeton in America,
who, rightly enough, sees that the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch cannot be held, if these separate component documents are
acknowledged. But the separate existence and character of JE may be
regarded as demonstrated, and also that it has been interwoven with
another narrative, largely parallel, but which deals of preference
with priestly matters, and has consequently been called the Priest
codex, or P. Together these make up the first four books of the
Pentateuch; and the remarkable thing is that, both as regards law
and history, Deuteronomy is dependent upon JE. "Throughout the
parallels just tabulated," says Driver,[7] "(as well as in the
others occurring in the book), not the allusions only, but the
words cited, will be found, all but uniformly, to be in JE, not in
P. An important conclusion follows from this fact. Inasmuch as, in
our existing Pentateuch, JE and P repeatedly cross one another,
the constant absence of any reference to P can only be reasonably
explained by one supposition, viz. that when Deuteronomy was
composed JE and P were not yet united into a single work, and JE
alone formed the basis of Deuteronomy." And this is not Driver's
conclusion only. Dillmann, who argues with splendid ability against
Wellhausen for the dating of P in the ninth century B.C. instead
of after the Exile, and consequently considers that it was in
existence before Deuteronomy, still holds that in general JE is
the Deuteronomist's authority both for law and history, contenting
himself with affirming that D shows undoubted acquaintance with
laws, etc., known _to us_ only in P. Clearly, therefore, Deuteronomy
must have been written after JE had been made public, or at least
after J and E had been written.
[7] Driver, _Introduction_, p. 76.
The question therefore arises, what is their date? An answer can be
gradually approached in this way. As JE reappear as an element in
the Book of Joshua,[8] and contribute to it an account of Joshua's
death and burial, they cannot have been written by him, nor before
his death. That is the first fixed point. Then we may proceed a
step further. In various parts of JE there occur phrases which
cannot all be later glosses, and which imply that the land, when the
writer lived, had long ceased to be in possession of the Canaanites,
if some of them do not even presuppose a time when the original
inhabitants had been absorbed into Israel, as Solomon attempted to
absorb them by making them slaves of the State. Such passages are
Gen. xii. 6, "And the Canaanite was then in the land"; Gen. xiii.
7, "Moreover the Canaanites and the Perizzites dwelled then in the
land"; Gen. xl. 15, in which Joseph says of himself, "I was stolen
away out of the land of the Hebrews," a name which the country could
not have acquired till some little time at least after the conquest.
Further, in Numbers xxxii. 41, which belongs to J or E, probably
the latter, we have an account of the rise of the name Hawwoth
Jair. Now in Judges x. 3-5 we are informed that the Jair from whom
the Hawwoth Jair had their name was a judge in Israel after the
time of Abimelech, who made new conquests for his tribe east of the
Jordan. Unless, therefore, the unlikely hypothesis be accepted that
both the district bearing this name in Judges and its conqueror are
other than those mentioned in Numbers, the verse brings down JE at
least to the period of Abimelech, which Kautzsch in his _View of the
History of the Israelites_, appended to his translation of the Old
Testament, states as about 1120 B.C., _i.e._ two hundred years after
the Exodus.
[8] Josh. xxiv. 30.
The next step is suggested by Gen. xxxvi. 31-39, a passage from JE
in which a list of Edomite kings is given with this heading: "These
are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned
any king over the children of Israel." That sentence clearly cannot
have been written before kings arose in Israel; consequently JE must
be later than the days of Saul, and probably than David, since the
Israelite kingship appears to the author's mind here as a firmly
established institution. The author of Deuteronomy must have lived
and written at a still later date, and we are thus gradually brought
down to the time of Solomon, or perhaps even later.
And the literary indications of date confirm this conclusion. For
instance, two books are quoted occasionally in JE as authorities,
which must consequently have existed before that work--the Book
of the Wars of Yahweh (Numb. xxi. 14, 15), and the Book of Yashar
(Josh. x. 12 f.). The former has indeed been declared by Geiger
to be the product of false punctuation; but soberer critics have
accepted it and date it in Solomon's day. However that may be, there
can be no doubt that the latter actually existed, and was probably
a collection of songs, since from it the verses describing the
standing still of the sun and moon are quoted. But we learn from
2 Sam. i. 18 that David's beautiful lament for Saul and Jonathan
was contained in this book, and was quoted from it by the sacred
historian. The book must therefore have been compiled, or at least
completed, after David's lament. As it was manifestly a compilation,
and the poems it contained may have been of very various ages, much
stress in our search for dates cannot be laid upon it. It is still
of some weight, however, that this post-Davidic book is quoted by
JE; so far as it goes, that fact confirms the conclusion arrived at
from other indications.
In the same way, the linguistic indications, though not of
themselves conclusive, point towards the same period. It is,
of course, true that we are as yet far from having a general
agreement as to the history of the Hebrew language. That can only
be established along with the history of the Hebrew literature
and the Hebrew people; and perhaps we never shall be able to fix
any definite stages in the growth and decay of the language.
Nevertheless no careful reader of JE will deny what Professor Driver
says regarding them: "Both belong to the golden period of Hebrew
literature. They resemble the best parts of Judges and Samuel
(much of which cannot be greatly later than David's own time); but
whether they are actually earlier or later than these, the language
and style do not enable us to say. There is at least no _archaic_
flavour perceptible in the style of JE."[9] That is an admirably
balanced judgment, and we may rely upon the indication it gives
as an additional confirmation of what we have already seen to be
probable.
[9] _Introduction_, p. 117.
It is impossible that these various lines of inquiry should
converge, as they have done, towards the early centuries of the
kingship as the date of JE, if Moses had written Deuteronomy, in
which JE is drawn upon at every moment. We may consequently dismiss
that view finally, and admit that the author of Deuteronomy cannot
well have written before the middle of the kingly period. But we
have still to inquire what the character of the Mosaic speeches
and the Mosaic writings given in Deuteronomy is in that case. Had
the author lived and written near the time of Moses, we might, as
has been said, have accepted them as the Church generally accepts
the Johannine speeches of Christ. But if the Deuteronomist wrote
four, or five, or six centuries after Moses, what are we to say?
In one view it must be granted that his account may be as accurate
as if it had been written within fifty years of Moses' death. For
an author of our own day, by keeping close to original written
authorities, and strenuously endeavouring to keep out of his mind
any information he may have as to later times, may reproduce with
marvellous correctness the actual state of things, as regards law
and other departments of public life, which existed in England,
say, five hundred years ago. Similarly the author of Deuteronomy
_may_ have handed on to us, without flaw or defect, the information
as to Moses' sayings and doings in the plains of Moab which he had
received from the written accounts of Moses' contemporaries. He may
have done so; but when we consider that his authorities may have
been in part not much earlier than his own time, that the critical
sifting of history was then unknown, and finally and most important
of all, that the Deuteronomist has hortatory much more than purely
historical aims, we cannot evade the question whether a good deal
that is here set down to Moses may not turn out to be additions
to and deductions from the original Mosaic germs of law, made by
inspired law-givers and prophets who took up and carried on Moses'
work. Many assert that this is so, and we must face and try to
settle the question they raise.
The theory held by those who most strenuously deny this assertion is
that all the laws in the Pentateuch are Mosaic in the strict sense,
that the codes were given by Moses in the order in which they now
stand in the Pentateuch, and that they were enacted with all their
modifications in a period of not more than forty years, all of which
was spent in the desert. In order to ascertain whether this view is
tenable, we shall take one or two of the more important matters,
such as the place of worship, the agents of worship, and the support
of the cultus; and we shall compare the provisions of the various
codes in order to see whether they can be supposed to belong to so
short a period, or to have been all enacted by one man.
Let us take first the place of worship. The three codes--that called
the Book of the Covenant (Exod. xx.-xxiii.), that contained in
Leviticus and Numbers and called the Levitical code, and that in
Deuteronomy--all contain directions about this. In the first the
prescriptions are (Exod. xx. 24): "An altar of earth shalt thou make
to Me, and thou shalt sacrifice upon it thy burnt offerings and
thy peace offerings, thy sheep and thy oxen. In every place where
I cause My name to be remembered I will come unto and bless thee."
In the Levitical law "the altar" is to be of Shittim or acacia
wood overlaid with copper, and the place for it is to be in the
court of the Tabernacle. There all sacrifices are to be offered,
and thither every slaughtered animal is to be brought (Lev. xvii.
1 ff.), and this is to be a statute for ever unto them throughout
their generations. In Deuteronomy again (chap. xii.) it is enacted
that all sacrifices are to be brought "unto the place which Yahweh
your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put His name there,"
and ver. 21, "If the place which Yahweh thy God hath chosen to
put His name there be too far from thee, then thou shalt kill of
thy herd and of thy flock" and eat them as game was eaten without
bringing it to the Sanctuary. But Moses is not represented as
ordering this law to be introduced immediately. It is only when they
go over Jordan and dwell in the land which Yahweh their God giveth
them, and when He giveth them rest from all their enemies round
about so that they dwell in safety, that they are to do this. Nay,
according to ver. 20 the new order is to be fully introduced only
when Yahweh their God shall enlarge their border as He had promised,
_i.e._ when their boundaries should be (xi. 24) the wilderness on
the south and Lebanon on the north, the Euphrates on the east and
the Mediterranean on the west. Now these boundaries were attained
only in David's day, and the rest from all their enemies round
about was, as Dillmann says, given as a matter of fact only in the
times of David and Solomon (cf. 2 Sam. vii. 11 and 1 Kings v. 18),
notwithstanding Josh. xxi. 42. Consequently the Temple at Jerusalem
must have been the place referred to. This is distinctly the view
of 1 Kings iii. 3 and viii. 16. The latter passage is peculiarly
emphatic. Solomon says, at the dedication of the Temple, "Since the
day that I brought forth My people Israel out of Egypt, I chose no
city out of all the tribes of Israel to build an house that My name
might be therein." The Deuteronomic view consequently is that the
law requiring sacrifice at _one_ sole altar was intended by Moses to
be enforced only after the Temple at Jerusalem had been built.
These are the provisions of the three codes. Can they have been
the successive ordinances of a man legislating under the influence
of Divine inspiration within a period of less than forty years?
Let us see. The first legislation was given at Sinai, in the third
month after the Exodus: the Levitical legislation on the matter was
given about nine months later when the Tabernacle was finished, and
during that time they had not removed from Sinai: thirty-eight years
afterwards the Deuteronomic code was given in the plains of Moab.
Let us look at the character of the legislation given first of all
at Sinai. The meaning of the decisive phrase, "In every place where
I cause My name to be remembered I will come unto thee and bless
thee," has been much discussed; yet taken as it stands, without
reference to laws which on any supposition are later, it cannot
mean that sacrifices were to be offered only at one central shrine.
It specially provides for sacrifices being offered at different
places, but restricts them to places which Yahweh Himself has
chosen. At every such place He promises to come to them and bless
them. So much, men of all schools admit; difference of opinion
arises only as to whether these places are meant to be successive,
or whether they may be simultaneous. The view of those who accept
all the legislation of the Pentateuch as Mosaic in the strict sense
is that the places could only be successive, since otherwise the
words would imply that originally worship at one altar was not
prescribed. Delitzsch, for example, maintains that these words imply
necessarily only this, that the place of sacrifice would, in the
course of time, be altered by Divine appointment, and he declares
that to be their meaning. Others, again, suppose that the command
was meant only to justify worship at the various places where the
Tabernacle was called to halt on the people's journeyings, whether
in the wilderness or in Palestine. Now it cannot be denied that
only on some such interpretation can Exodus be brought into harmony
with Leviticus, and that undoubtedly has influenced, and rightly
so, the scholars who take this view. If it were tenable it would
be by far the most satisfactory interpretation. But it can hardly
be considered tenable if we look at the time at which this law was
given. There was as yet no other law, and this was given as soon as
the people came to Mount Sinai. The law in Leviticus was not on any
supposition given till nine months later. Now, if Exod. xx. 24 was
meant for immediate use only, and was superseded by the Levitical
law after so short a time, it is difficult to understand why it was
given, and still more difficult to conceive why it was preserved. In
any case it cannot have been understood to command worship at only
one place. It could have no other sense than that the people, so
long as they were at Sinai, were to sacrifice only at Sinai where
Yahweh had revealed Himself, or at other places in the neighbourhood
which He should sanctify, or had sanctified, by revealing His
presence at them. At any such place, if there He had once revealed
Himself, He would continue to meet them. Without the colour thrown
upon them by succeeding laws, that is surely the only meaning that
_could_ be put upon the words, and so understood they undoubtedly
authorise sacrifice at two or more places simultaneously. If, on
the other hand, this law was meant more for the future than the
present, as some of the laws in the Book of the Covenant undoubtedly
were, it must have been intended to be in force concurrently with
Lev. i. f. But if so, the "places" it refers to cannot be the mere
halting-places on the wilderness journey. No doubt these were
determined by Yahweh, and the tabernacle was set up at places He
may be said to have chosen, but the places themselves were of no
consequence at all. The Divine presence is declared to be always in
the Tabernacle. That was certainly a place where Yahweh caused His
name to be remembered, and without further inquiry about place, the
men of Israel knew that He would always meet them and bless them
in sacrifice there. The different character of the altar in the
Book of the Covenant too, a mere heap of earth or unhewn stone, and
that in the Tabernacle, made of acacia wood overlaid with copper,
corroborates the view that the altar aimed at in Exod. xxiv. is not
the Tabernacle altar. The only coherent view, on the supposition
of the concurrence of the two laws, is therefore that while, as a
rule, sacrifice was to be offered at the Tabernacle, yet if the
people came to any place where Yahweh had caused His name to be
remembered, sacrifice might be offered there on an altar of earth
or unhewn stone, as well as at the Tabernacle. Either way therefore
there is permission to worship at more than one place. But then the
difficulty is that Leviticus appears to denounce upon pain of being
"cut off from the people" absolutely every sacrifice not offered at
the Tabernacle.
Now if so far matters have been far from clear on the traditional
supposition of the date and order of these codes, a glance at
Deuteronomy will produce absolute confusion in every mind. As we
have seen, Deuteronomy represents Moses as restricting sacrifice
most rigorously to one altar after the building of the Temple at
Jerusalem, but virtually declaring that worship at various shrines
was to be blameless until that time. We have also seen that that is
the view taken by the author of the Book of Kings. Now this might
be regarded as a temporary relaxation of the law, intended to meet
the difficult circumstances of a period of war and conquest, were
it not for one thing. That is, that Moses in Deut. xii. 8, after
prescribing worship at one altar, adds, "Ye shall not do after all
that _we_ do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own
eyes," and as if to render mistake as to the meaning impossible, in
ver. 13 he explains ver. 8 thus: "Take heed to thyself that thou
offer not thy burnt offerings in every place that thou seest."
Notwithstanding the efforts of conservative scholars like Keil and
Bredenkamp to explain ver. 8 as a reference to the intermissions in,
_e.g._, the daily sacrifice, brought about by the desert wanderings,
or to the arbitrariness and illegality of the generation which
had brought judgment upon themselves by refusal to obey Yahweh in
attacking Canaan, it still seems impossible to accept that view. Of
course if we knew that Moses was the giver of all these laws, these
words would have to be explained away in some such fashion. But
if they are approached by an inquirer seeking to discover whether
they all are Mosaic, sound exegesis demands that they should be
taken as Dillmann and others take them. In the plain sense of words
Moses here admits that, up till the time at which he is speaking,
sacrifices were offered wherever men chose, and that he had
participated in the practice. And observe, he does not refer to the
Levitical law. He does not say this conduct of ours is a sin which
we must repent of and turn from at once. He calmly permits this
state of things to continue after Israel is in Canaan, and looks
forward with equanimity to its continuance till the Temple shall
be erected in Jerusalem. With this passage before us we ask, Can
this be the same inspired legislator who thirty-eight years before
compelled sacrifice at one central altar on pain of death?
The traditional hypothesis being thus encompassed with difficulties,
students of the Old Testament have sought another which would
correspond better with all the data. Relying upon the fact that the
author of Deuteronomy founds his book almost entirely on JE, and
that if he knows some of the laws and some of the facts mentioned
in P only, there are no proofs that he knew that book as we have
it, they put it aside in this matter also. Immediately, when that
is done, light breaks in upon our problem. If we take Exod. xxiv.
20 in the natural sense given to it above, sacrifice at various
altars was permitted from Sinai onwards, the only limitation
being that there should have been, at the place chosen, authentic
proof of a theophany or some other manifestation of the Divine
presence. That is the state of things out of which Moses speaks in
Deuteronomy. It will be noticed, however, that there is a slight
contradiction of Exod. xx. 24. The Moses of Deuteronomy speaks as
if every man's arbitrary choice had been his only guide. Probably,
however, with his mind full of the stringent unity he desires to
see, he speaks hyperbolically of the looseness of the former law,
and means nothing else than the practice prescribed by it. In all
ways this view is supported by the history. From the patriarchs
till the time of Samuel, the practice was to sacrifice at various
altars.[10] Consequently, according to both the Book of the
Covenant and Deuteronomy, and according to the history, the worship
of Yahweh at sacred places throughout the land was legal, until the
Temple was erected at Jerusalem. The centralisation of worship was,
consequently, a new thing when the division of the kingdoms took
place, and was not an express law till Deuteronomy. If that book
was not written till perhaps Hezekiah's day, the fact will account
as nothing else will do for Elijah's words (1 Kings xix. 10), "The
children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine
altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword." Even in the presence
of Yahweh he, without rebuke, calls the altars in the Northern
Kingdom His.
[10] Cf. for the passages on which this statement is founded
Driver's _Introduction_, p. 80, and note in small print.
The first attempt we know of to centralise worship was made by
Hezekiah; a second and more strenuous attempt was made under Josiah,
but the work was not actually accomplished till after the Return
from the Captivity. All the facts taken together suggest that the
movement towards centralisation was an age-long development. At
first all holy places might be sacrificed at, though a certain
primacy belonged to a central sanctuary, and this may have been
stamped by Moses with approval. When the Solomonic Temple was
built the primacy began to take the form of a claim for exclusive
validity. The experiences in both kingdoms strengthened that
claim, by showing that if Yahwism was to be kept pure the worship
at the High Places must be abolished. The inspired writer of
Deuteronomy then completed Moses' work by embodying that which had
been always a tendency of the Mosaic system, and had now become
a necessity, in his revisal of the Mosaic legislation. This was
adopted by the nation under Josiah, and the Priest Codex must in
that case represent a later stage of the development, when the
centralisation was neither a tendency nor a demand, but a realised
fact. Such a process accounts much better for the facts than the
traditional belief; and though it is not free from difficulties it
at least releases us from the confusion of mind which the ordinary
supposition forces upon us.
The inquiry as to the agents of the cultus need not detain us so
long. In the Book of the Covenant no priests are mentioned at
all. The person addressed, the "thou" of these chapters, which is
either the individual Israelite or the whole community, has been
held by some to indicate that the individual offerer was the only
agent in sacrifice. But that is to press the word too far. Even
in Leviticus, while the whole people are addressed, the actions
enjoined or prohibited are such as are done by "any man of them,"
and in Deut. xii. 13 we have precisely the same expression, "Take
heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every
place that thou seest," used at a time when there was undeniably a
priestly tribe and even the High Places had a regular priesthood.
But while in Exod. xx.-xxiii. there is no evidence to show whether
a priesthood existed, in the previous chapter (xix. 22, 24) priests
who "come near to Yahweh" are twice mentioned. This would be a
fact of the first importance were it not that the words occur in
a passage which is admitted to be in its present shape the work
of the later editor. Dillmann maintains, and with good reason,
that he has inserted and adapted here a fragment of J. If so then
J may have held the view that there were priests before Sinai was
reached, but under the circumstances we cannot be certain that the
mention of them may not be an anachronism introduced by the later
hand. In favour of the view that it is so is the fact that in the
account given by JE of the ratification of the Covenant between
Yahweh and the people (Exod. xxiv. 1 ff.), Moses erected an altar
and then "sent the young men of the children of Israel which
offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto
Yahweh." He himself however performed the specially priestly act
of sprinkling the blood upon the altar. Had there been priests or
Levites accustomed to perform priestly functions, we should have
expected them to act, instead of "the young men of the children
of Israel." But, on the other hand, we must not omit to notice
that the Levites occupy in all these transactions, as narrated
by JE, a very prominent position. Dillmann,[11] as we have seen,
separating J and E, considers that the passages in which priests
before the Sinaitic legislation are spoken of belong to J, and adds:
"Indeed, it appears from Exod. iv. 14, 'Is not Aaron the Levite thy
brother?' and xxiv. 1, 9, that for him even then the Levites were
the priestly persons." To these passages Driver adds Exod. xviii.
12: "And Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, took a burnt offering and
sacrifices for God; and Aaron came, and all the elders of Israel,
to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law before God." Further, Nadab
and Abihu are Levites, nay, sons of Aaron, and in Exod. xxiv. 1 and
9 they go with Moses, Aaron, and the seventy elders as the complete
representation of the people, and Moses, himself a Levite, performs
all the greater priestly acts.[12] Moreover JE knows of the ark, and
speaks frequently of the "tent of meeting" (Exod. xxxiii. 7 ff.;
Numb. xi. 24 f., xii. 4 ff. and Deut. xxxi. 14 ff.). But a very
notable thing in connection with the inquiry as to the performers of
priestly duties appears in Exod. xxxiii. 7 ff., where E's account
of the "tent of meeting" is given. When Moses turned again into the
camp "his minister (_mesharetho_) Joshua, the son of Nun, a young
man, departed not out of the tent," yet Joshua was an Ephraimite (1
Chron. vii. 22-27). In Exod. xxxii. 29, however, the same authority
describes the consecration of the Levites to the priesthood, after
the apostasy of the golden calf.
[11] Dillmann, _Exodus and Leviticus_, p. 199.
[12] Josh. iii. 14-17 and _passim_.
In Deuteronomy, on the contrary, the priests are very prominent;
they are called, however, the Levitical priests, or priests simply,
but never sons of Aaron. The whole tribe of Levi is regarded as
priestly in some sense. They constitute, in fact, a clerical order,
though there are clear indications of ranks, of men being assigned
to special duties. Curiously enough, the tribe thus highly honoured
is spoken of as being notoriously and all but universally poor. No
sacrifice can legitimately be offered without them; and, though the
question of the place of sacrifice has not yet been finally settled,
the position of the Levitical priests as sacrificers is so entirely
established that it is regarded as needing neither assertion nor
justification. Nay, in one passage, Deut. x. 6--which there is
no valid reason, except the wish to get rid of its contents, for
supposing to belong to another authority than D[13]--the hereditary
succession to the chief place among the priesthood is assigned to
the family of Aaron. In xviii. 5 also the hereditary character
of the priesthood is asserted in the words, "For Yahweh thy God
hath chosen him--_i.e._ the priest--out of all thy tribes, to
stand to minister in the name of Yahweh, _him and his sons for
ever_." As for the body of the Levites, their position is somewhat
ill-defined. On the authority of xviii. 6 ff. many claim that at
the date of Deuteronomy every Levite was, at least potentially, a
priest, that in fact Levite and priest were synonymous. But, as
will appear in the exposition of the verses referred to, that is a
very questionable proposition. Nevertheless it cannot be denied
that in Deuteronomy the line between priests and Levites is a very
indistinct one; there is _prima facie_ reason to believe that it
could be passed, and the gap between the two is certainly not nearly
so wide as it appears to be in the undeniably post-exilic literature.
[13] Driver, _Introduction_, p. 145; Oettli, _Deuteronomy_, p. 7;
Kuenen, _H.K.O._, p. 113.
In the Priest Codex again, the priesthood is confined exclusively
to the house of Aaron, with the high priest at their head. The
Levites have no possible way of entrance into the priesthood. They
are Yahweh's gift to the priests, and are confined most strictly to
the duty of waiting upon these in the ministration of the Sanctuary.
They have none but the most subordinate share in the sacrifices;
they are shut out from the holy places of the Tabernacle; and they
have assigned to them cities in which they may dwell together when
they are not on duty at the Sanctuary. There is no word there of
Levites being poor, and altogether the position of the tribe is,
through the priests, much more dignified and prosperous in a worldly
sense than we found it to be in Deuteronomy.
Now, taking all these data together, we find here, just as we did in
the previous section, that the Levitical law is a disturbing element
between Exodus and Deuteronomy. If we take it out of the way, J, E,
and D harmonise well enough. The main difference is that the latter
shows the same fundamental conditions as we find in the former,
only consolidated and developed by time, but by a longer time than
forty years. In fact D makes explicit that importance of the Levites
which is only hinted at and foreshadowed in JE. They have come to
be the only authorised agents of sacrifice; they have a hereditary
headship in the house of Aaron; various orders and degrees must be
held to exist (cf. Deut. xviii. 1 ff.). Compared with this state
of things, the Levitical arrangements of P, supposed to have been
given thirty-eight years before, are very different. In every
respect they are more definite, more detailed, and show a much more
differentiated organisation than those sketched in Deuteronomy.
These latter indicate a state of matters which would suit admirably
as an embryonic stage of the full-grown Levitical system, and which
can hardly be fitted into their place otherwise.
It is suggested, in reply, that allusions in Deuteronomy _imply_
the existence of a system of a much more elaborate kind than any
that we could construct from the explicit statements of the book,
and that is certainly true. But no reasonable interpretation of
these allusions can lead us to a system identical with that in P.
Nor can Deuteronomy's use of the name Levites (though undoubtedly
it has been pressed by some too far) be held to be consistent with
the public recognition of the "great gulf fixed" in P between the
Aaronic priests and the Levites as a body. Nor will the fact that
Deuteronomy is the people's book, and is consequently not called
upon to go into technical details, cover the difference. Indeed
nothing will, short of recognising the fact that, as publicly
acknowledged organisations, the tribe of Levi in P and the tribe of
Levi in D are different, and that the state of things in D's day
is earlier than that in P. If this is not so, then the Levitical
legislation, conceived as given by Moses, must be held to have
proved impracticable, and Deuteronomy must then be regarded as an
abrogation of it for the time.
And the same conclusions suggest themselves if we look more closely
into the curious fact that Deuteronomy always speaks of the Levites
as poor. Some have supposed that this poverty is the result of
the centralisation of the cultus which the author demands, and
that the constant insistence that the Levite shall be invited to
all sacrificial feasts, along with the widow and the orphan, and
other helpless classes, is a provision against the poverty to be
brought upon them by the abolition of the High Places. But that
is not so. We know the manner of the Deuteronomist when he is
providing for contingencies arising from the new state of things he
wishes to bring about, and it is quite different from his manner
here. Clearly, the Levites were poor before the suppression of the
High Places, and were so, as Deuteronomy tells us, from the fact
that they had no inheritance in the land. But that poverty is not
consistent with their whole position as sketched in the Levitical
legislation. There we have the Levites launched as a regularly
organised priestly corporation, endowed with ample revenues, and
ruled and represented by a high priest of the family of Aaron,
clothed with powers almost royal, surrounded by a priestly nobility
of his own family and by a bodyguard of tribesmen entirely at his
disposal. Such a body never has remained chronically and notoriously
poor. In the wilderness they would not be so in contrast with
others, for all were poor, and there was nothing to hinder the
Levites having cattle as the other tribes had, and being on the same
level as they. In the promised land, instead of becoming poor, they
would at once enter upon the enjoyment of their various tithes and
dues, and would moreover have such a share in the booty of Canaan
as would more than make up at first for their want of a heritage.
The priests were to receive one five-hundredth part of the army's
half, and the Levites the fiftieth share of the people's half (Numb.
xxxi. 28 ff.). Gradually, too, they would be put in possession of
the priestly cities. Evidently, therefore, if the Levites were ever
poor, it cannot have been till some time after Israel had been
settled in the land, and then only if P's laws and organisations of
the tribe were not enforced.
Deuteronomy supports the same argument. Since want of a heritage
was the cause of the Levites' poverty, they cannot have been
_exceptionally_ poor in the wilderness. Nor can they have been poor
during the time of the conquest; for even if the Levitical law was
in force and the tribe was then wholly organised for the priesthood,
they must have shared in the fighting and the spoil. But if the
order of legislation, as we maintain, was (1) Exodus xx.-xxiii., (2)
Deuteronomy, (3) the Priest Codex, then as the booty from war ceased
to be a source of income, the Levites as a body remaining nomads,
while the other tribes became agricultural, would necessarily become
poor in comparison with their fellow-countrymen. It is out of that
state of things the Deuteronomist speaks.[14]
[14] See further in exposition of chapter xvii; xviii.
The same conclusions follow when the regulations are examined
which bear upon the support of the priestly tribe. The outstanding
matters in this department are tithes and firstlings. Space will not
admit of a full discussion of these topics; but if the reader will
compare, in regard to tithes, Numb. xviii. 21-24 and Lev. xxvii. 30,
32, with Deut. xii. 17, and in regard to firstlings Numb. xviii.
18 with Deut. xii. 6, 17 f., and xv. 19 f., he will see that the
application of tithes and of firstlings according to Deuteronomy
is quite different from that in the Levitical legislation. The
difference is such as will not comport with the hypothesis of a
single legislator and a consistent legislation. Expedients with a
view to solve the difficulty have been suggested by Keil and others;
but each of those expedients is burdened with specific difficulties
of its own.
The inevitable conclusion from all this would seem to be that in the
Deuteronomic as in the Levitical laws we have not the legislation of
Moses or of his age alone. The roots of all the legislative codes
are Mosaic, but in all save perhaps the Book of the Covenant the
trunk and branches are of much later growth. The authors of them are
not careful to distinguish what came from Moses himself from that
which had been developed out of it under the influence of the same
inspiration. In both D and P there were Mosaic elements, and in both
there are laws not given by him. To disentangle these completely now
is impossible, and it is probably best for expository purposes to
take the codes as giving what the Mosaic legislation had become at
the time of the writer. What we have in Deuteronomy therefore cannot
be better described than in Driver's words (_Introduction_, p. 85),
as "the prophetic re-formulation and adaptation to new needs of an
older legislation." Its relations to the other codes are as the same
critic states (p. 71): "It is an _expansion_ of that in JE (Exod.
xx.-xxiii.); it is, in several features, _parallel_ to that in Lev.
xvii.-xxvi.; it contains _allusions_ to laws such as those codified
in some parts of P, while from those contained in other parts of P
it differs widely." And the state of things in which these various
codes originated is more and more coming to be conceived in the
manner stated by Dr. A. B. Davidson.[15] "It is evident," he says,
"that two streams of thought, both issuing from a fountain as high
up as the very origin of the nation, ran side by side down the whole
history of the people, the prophetic and the priestly. In the one
Jehovah is a moral ruler, a righteous king and judge, who punishes
iniquity judicially or forgives sins freely of His mercy. In the
other He is a Person dwelling among His people in a house, a Holy
Being or Nature, sensitive to every uncleanness in all that is near
Him, and requiring its removal by lustrations and atonement. Those
cherishing the latter circle of conceptions might be as zealous for
the Lord of Hosts as the prophets. And the developments of the
national history would extend their conceptions and lead to the
amplification of practices embodying them, just as they extended the
conceptions of the prophets. A growth of priestly ideas is quite
as probable as a growth of prophetic ideas. That the streams ran
apart is no evidence that they were not equally ancient and always
contemporaneous, for we see Jeremiah and Ezekiel both flourishing
in one age. At one point in the history the prophetic stream was
swelled by an inflow from the priestly, as is seen in Deuteronomy,
and from the Restoration downwards both streams appear to coalesce."
[15] _Ezekiel_, Introduction, p. liv. f.
The actual date of Deuteronomy still remains to be settled. Already
it has been brought down to post-Solomonic days. How much later
must it probably be put? The book must have been written before
the eighteenth year of Josiah, 621 B.C., for the Book of the Law
which was then found in the Temple was undoubtedly not the whole
Pentateuch, but approximately Deut. i.-xxvi. But it can hardly have
been produced in Josiah's reign, because it would never have been
permitted to drop out of sight had it been known to that pious king
and the reforming high priest Hilkiah. On the other hand, it can
hardly have been written or known before Hezekiah's reforms, for
otherwise it would have been made the basis of them, as it was made
the basis of Josiah's. Probably, therefore, we may date it between
Hezekiah and Josiah. Indeed we may with great likelihood affirm, as
Robertson Smith suggests, that it was the need of guidance caused by
Hezekiah's reforms which suggested and called out this book.[16]
[16] _Additional Answer to the Libel_, p. 80.
But, say some, if the body of the book is not Mosaic, then this
is nothing else but forgery, and no forged or even pseudonymous
book can be inspired! Others again, most gratuitously, suppose
that Hilkiah found the book only because he had forged it and put
it where it was found. But there is neither need nor room for such
suppositions; and our effort must be to conceive to ourselves the
means by which such a book could come into existence, and be found
as it was, without fraud on the part of any one.
To modern, and especially Western notions, it seems difficult to
conceive any legitimate process by which a book of comparatively
modern date could be attributed, so far as its main part is
concerned, to Moses, and published as Mosaic. But if we take
into account the character of Deuteronomy as only an extension
and adaptation of the Book of the Covenant set in a framework of
affectionate exhortation, and that all men then believed that
the Book of the Covenant was Mosaic, we can see better how such
action might be considered legitimate. Even on modern and Western
principles we can see that; but at that early time and in the East,
literary methods and literary ideas were so different from ours
that there may have been customs which made the publication of a
book in this way not only natural but right. An example from modern
India will make this clear. Among the sacred books of the Hindus
one of the most famous is the _Laws of Manu_. This is a collection
of religious, moral, and ceremonial laws much like the Book of
Leviticus. It is generally admitted that it was not the work of any
one man, but of a school of legal writers and lawgivers who lived
at very various times, each of whom, with a clear conscience and as
a matter of course, adapted the works of his predecessors to the
need of his own day. And this practice, together with the belief in
its legitimacy, survives to this day. In his _Early Law and Custom_
(p. 161) Sir Henry Maine tells us that "A gentleman in a high
official position in India has a native friend who has devoted his
life to preparing a new Book of Manu. He does not, however, expect
or care that it should be put in force by any agency so ignoble as
a British-Indian Legislature, deriving its powers from an Act of
Parliament not a century old. He waits till there arises a king
in India who will serve God and take the law from the new 'Manu'
when he sits in his Court of Justice." There is here no question of
fraud. This Indian gentleman considers that his book _is_ the Book
of Manu, and would be amazed if any one should question its identity
because he had edited it; and he supposes that the king he looks
for, if he should come in his day, would accept and act upon it as
a Divine authority. So strangely different are Eastern notions from
those of the West. It is legitimate to suppose that _this_ Eastern
book originated in something of the same fashion. In the evil days
of persecution, when all the prophetic spokesmen were cut off,
and when the priests were occupying the chief position among the
supporters of pure religion, some pious man, inspired, but not with
the prophetic inspiration, set himself, like this modern Hindu, to
re-write and adapt the legislation which he believed to be Mosaic
to the needs of his own day. Altering the fundamental points as
little as might be, he developed it to meet the evils which were
threatening the Mosaic religion; and he inspired it with the passion
for righteousness and the love of God which had already thrilled the
hearts of faithful men in Israel through the ministry of the great
prophets. Hoping for the coming of a king who should serve God and
judge Israel out of this new Book of Moses, but while the darkness
still clouded the future, he died, committing his book to some
temple chamber where he might hope that it would be discovered when
God's set time should come. In such a supposition there is perhaps
something to shock the conventional theories of our time. But, so
far as can be seen, there is nothing to shock any open-minded man
who knows how widely ancient and Eastern thought differs from modern
and Western thought. It is certain that at this day Eastern men of
the highest character and of the most burning zeal for religion
would act in this manner without a qualm of conscience. We may
well believe, therefore, that in ancient days it was the same. If
so, this was a literary method which inspiration might well use;
and the supposition that Deuteronomy was so produced is certainly
more consistent with its history and character than any other. It
explains how it so exactly met the needs of the time and summed up
all its aspirations; and it gives to its claim of inspiration a
new support by laying bare the circumstances of its birth and its
psychological presuppositions.
But it may still be asked, what are we to think of the Mosaic
speeches, which, as has been seen, contain, to say the least, much
non-Mosaic matter? The answer probably is that in these, as in the
laws, the author relies upon earlier documents. From the appearance
in the codes of laws which would have little or no meaning if
originated in the time of the Deuteronomist, it has rightly been
concluded that there are very ancient and Mosaic elements in them.
So, in the speeches there are references and allusions that suggest
an ancient tradition of a final address of Moses, and perhaps a
written account of its general purport, in which even a hope that
the worship might be centralised may have been contained.[17] This
the author has adapted to his purpose of inciting his contemporaries
to be faithful to the Mosaic teaching, and has woven into it
all that later experience could suggest as effective ground of
exhortation. So much as that all ancient historians would have
done, and some moderns would do, without the faintest intention to
deceive, or any feeling of guilt; and so much may probably have
been done here. Delitzsch,[18] Robertson Smith,[19] and Driver[20]
are all at one as to this, and in the proofs they produce of the
necessity of accepting this view. In the words of Driver, "It is
the uniform practice of the Biblical historians in both the Old and
New Testaments to represent their characters as speaking in words
and phrases which cannot have been those actually used, but which
they themselves select and frame for them." The speeches of David
in Samuel and Chronicles serve for examples. In Samuel he speaks in
the language of Samuel, in Chronicles in the language of Chronicles.
"In some of these cases," Driver continues, "the authors no doubt
had information as to what was actually said on the occasions in
question, which they recast in their own words, only preserving,
perhaps, a few characteristic expressions; in other cases, they
merely gave articulate expression to the thoughts and feelings which
it was presumed that the persons in question would have entertained.
In the Deuteronomic speeches both these characteristic methods have
probably been employed, and we must just accept the inspired record
for what it reveals itself to be, setting aside, with the inevitable
sighs, our own _à priori_ assumptions of what it ought to be."
[17] Cf. Driver, art. "Deuteronomy," Smith's _Dictionary_, p. 770.
[18] _Pentateuch Kritische Studien_, X.
[19] _Answer to the Form of Libel_, p. 34. Note: where Arnold and
Masson's _Life of Milton_ are referred to.
[20] Art. "Deuteronomy," Smith's _Bible Dict._, pp. 769 ff.
These then are the conclusions regarding Deuteronomy on which the
exposition offered here will rest. They have been reached after a
careful consideration of the evidence on both sides, and are stated
here not altogether without regret. For, as Robertson Smith has
well said,[21] "to the ordinary believer the Bible is precious as
the practical rule of faith and life in which God still speaks
directly to his heart. No criticism can be otherwise than hurtful to
faith if it shakes the confidence with which the simple Christian
turns to his Bible, assured that he can receive every message which
it brings to his soul as a message from God Himself." Now, though
it can be demonstrated that the view of Scripture which permits
of such conclusions as those stated above is quite compatible
with this believing confidence, there can be little doubt that
Christian people will for a time find great difficulty in accepting
this assurance. The transition from the old view of inspiration,
so complete, comprehensible, and effective as it is, to the newer
and less definite doctrine, cannot fail to be trying, and the
introduction of it here cannot but be a disturbing influence which
it would have been greatly preferable to avoid.
[21] _Answer_, pp. 41 f.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that to the minds of the
working ministry and of their earnest fellow-labourers, who come
into constant contact with the actual needs of men, the change
should be unwelcome. But it cannot now, in my judgment, be avoided.
Even the best and most scholarly work of those who still hold the
traditional view does not convince. Rather it is their writings,
more even than those on the modern side, which make it clear that
the traditional view can no longer be held. These writers admit
the facts upon which their opponents' case rests, and then explain
them all away, harmonising everything by a crowd of hypotheses,
often scholarly, generally acute, but almost always such as can
be accepted only if we know beforehand that the view they support
is true. But far too many hypotheses are needed. Each case has
to be set right by a special effort of the imagination; while
the new view has this great advantage, that it makes room for
all the facts, by a hypothesis, suggested not by one difficulty,
but by almost all the discrepancies and difficulties which are
encountered. And, after all, this view does not move men away from
the central truth of inspiration, even as it was conceived by the
last generation. Apart from any care for averting errors in detail
which can be ascribed to Divine wisdom according to the old view
or the new, the central thing in both surely is the revelation of
God Himself. It was always God that was held to be revealed, and
this the advocates of the newer view insist upon most strenuously.
They hold that chosen men, the wisest, best, most truthful of
their respective generations, those who travailed most in thought,
received exceptional impressions of the Divine nature. They saw
God, and their whole being bore the impress henceforth of this
illumination. In every word and act the light they had received
found expression for itself. They did not receive this revelation in
mere propositions about God, which had to be carefully repeated with
minute verbal accuracy. They saw, and their natures were in their
degree uplifted, changed, and harmonised with the Divine. They could
no more be false in speaking of what they had thus experienced, than
a sincere and tender nature can be false in speech or thought about
death, when it once has found its love frustrated and overborne by
that dread messenger of God. The impression in both cases is true as
it is final, and it will triumphantly convey itself to others with
substantial and effective truth, whatever the man's knowledge or
ignorance otherwise may be. When a man has received an impression,
or a sight of God which has shaken his very soul, will it be lost
in its essential parts because in the speech in which he utters
it he shows ignorance of science, or accepts as simply true the
historic knowledge of his day? The thing is impossible. The light
that is within him must shine out, even though the medium through
which it shines be here and there blackened by imperfection. In the
fundamental point, therefore, the old school of critics and the
new are entirely at one. On the basis of this essential harmony it
should be possible for each to speak to the other for edification.
This is what has been attempted here; and if those who hold by the
Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy will tolerate the opposite view,
they will find that in dealing with the Scriptures as a revelation
of God, and as an infallible guide in all that concerns religious
and moral truth, there is no difference. To make the sacred word
living and powerful as an instrument of spiritual regeneration is
our common effort; and our common hope must be that, if in anything
we have been led into error, the mistake may be discovered and
removed, before it has wrought evil in the Church of God.
CHAPTER II
_THE HISTORIC SETTING OF DEUTERONOMY_
Whatever may be the date of the first publication of Deuteronomy,
there can be no doubt that it was accepted by Josiah and the people
of his time with an energy and thoroughness of which we find
no previous example. Its main lessons were learnt and put into
practice by them, and from that period the religious conceptions
of Deuteronomy dominated and formed the Hebrew mind in a manner of
which we have no earlier trace. For practical purposes, therefore,
we may say that this was the Deuteronomic period. The book gathered
up and embodied the higher strivings of that time; and to understand
it thoroughly we need to know the history of which it was, in part
at least, the outcome. Indeed, on any supposition as to age and
authorship, a study of the history of Judah from the end of the
eighth century B.C. to the end of the seventh is indispensable if we
would adequately understand our book, for that was the time when the
book is seen entering as a living force into the history of Israel.
Unfortunately, however, there are few periods of Israelite history
as to which we have less of reliable information. During much of
the period the main currents of the national life ran contrary to
all better influences, and in such epochs the compilers of the Book
of Kings took no interest. For the most part they were content
to "look and pass," gathering up the results of such times of
declension in a few condemnatory words. It is only when the nation
is on the upward slope that they enter into details. They wrote at
a time when the purpose of God in their national life was becoming
clear, and the splendour of it possessed them so that nothing else
but the increase of this purpose seemed worthy of any intenser
contemplation. Victories and defeats, successes and failures, and
last of all the tremendous catastrophe of the Exile, had taught them
this discernment; and they pressed forward so eagerly to record
the deeds and thoughts of those who had learned the secret of
Yahweh that they had eyes for nothing else. Consequently the eighty
years after the fall of Samaria, which for our purpose would be so
extremely instructive, are passed over in all our sources, almost
without mention. But there are some facts and events of which we
can be entirely sure; and from these it is possible to conceive in
outline the way in which things must have shaped themselves in these
eventful years.
Brought about as it had been by the appeal of Ahaz to the king of
Assyria for help against the continual aggressions of Syria and
Israel, the fall of Samaria must have come to the king and people
of Judah as a relief. Their enemy had fallen, and they would
henceforth be free from the anxiety and harassment which Israel's
enmity had caused. But those must have been blind indeed with whom
this feeling was permanent. Very soon it must have become apparent
to all thoughtful men in Judah that, if they had been freed from
the worrying and exasperating enmity of their kindred, their very
success had brought them into the presence of a much more serious
foe. With Assyria on their immediate frontier, settled in the lands
both of Damascus and Samaria, they must have felt themselves exposed
to chances and dangers they had never hitherto had to face. Under
the old conditions, except during comparatively short periods when
there was actual war between the two kingdoms, Israel had stood
between Judah and any danger from the North. But now the people of
the Southern Kingdom were summoned from "the safe glad rear to the
dreadful van." Henceforth no patriot could fail to be haunted by
fear of that ambitious and conquering Assyrian nation. The whole of
Hezekiah's reign was filled with more or less convulsive efforts
to maintain the independence of Judah. These were giving but faint
promise of success, when the great deliverance of Jerusalem foretold
by Isaiah gave the king a breathing space, and raised the highest
hopes in the minds of his people. It seemed for a little quite
possible that the ancient independence of Israel might be restored.
To many it seemed that the Messianic times were at hand; faith in
Yahweh carried all before it. But Hezekiah died not long after; and
in the succeeding reigns of Manasseh and Amon the whole temper and
policy of Israel underwent a most serious and reactionary change.
The causes of this are not far to seek. During the greater part
of Hezekiah's reign Isaiah had received only moderate support.
According to his own vision of his future work, he was to preach
without success; he was to say, "Hear ye indeed, but understand
not; and see ye, but perceive not"; and, so far as the mass of
the people were concerned, that prevision was justified. Only the
astounding success with which his opposition to the Assyrians had
been crowned had turned the tide of popular opinion in his favour.
It was probably, therefore, only then that Hezekiah's reforms were
instituted. They had been too short a time in force at his death to
have sent out their roots into the national life. But that was not
all. One of the most characteristic points in all prophecy was that
the _time_ when the full Messianic Kingdom should appear was never
clearly defined. Neither the Prophet nor his hearers knew when it
would be. It loomed always as a bright but vague background to the
deliverance which lay immediately before them; and in almost every
case neither speaker nor hearers had any conception of the long and
weary way which divided those sunlit mountain peaks from the dark
and threatening pass which they were approaching. Now the literal
interpretation of Isaiah's prophecies with regard to the deliverance
from Assyria had inevitably led the mass of the people to believe
that the raising of the siege of Jerusalem would mean the immediate
destruction of Assyria, and the advent of the Messianic day of
peace and glory for Israel. But the facts completely falsified that
expectation. Instead of being destroyed Assyria only grew more
powerful, and instead of the Messianic time there was only the old
position of vassalage to Assyria. So men grew weary, and said then
as they have said so often since, "All things are as they have been
from the beginning, and where is the promise of His coming?" The
true-hearted said it with sadness; and the false-hearted, saying it
in mockery and unbelief, fell back upon the old heathenish test, and
said, "The gods of Assyria are stronger than Yahweh, and we must
give them a place in our adoration." With the bulk of the people
this required no really great change in their point of view. They
had believed in Yahweh and agreed to purify His worship, because He
had proved Himself stronger than Sennacherib and his gods; and now
when, in the long run, Assyria was triumphing, they must have seemed
to themselves only to be following the teachings of experience in
giving the host of heaven equal honour with their own ancestral
God. The reaction, therefore, was more in the outward expression
than in principle, and we can easily understand how it was so swift
and so universal. Manasseh, Hezekiah's son, had probably opposed
his father's policy, as the heir-apparent has so often opposed the
policy of the reigning monarch; and if, as many suppose, Hezekiah
lived for sixteen years after the destruction of Sennacherib's host,
Manasseh came to the throne just when men's minds were most weary
with hope deferred, and when the Assyrian success was about to reach
its highest point before its final fall.
Accordingly Manasseh would seem to have undone at once all that his
father and Isaiah had accomplished. Nay, he went further in the
introduction of idolatry than any even of the idolatrous kings who
had preceded him. In the Book of Kings the charges made against
him are three:--1st, that he introduced the worship of the host of
heaven according to the Assyrian ritual; 2nd, that he took part in
the Moloch-worship; and 3rd, that he restored the old semi-Canaanite
worship which it had been Isaiah's most strenuous effort to root
out. And this policy, evil as it was in the eyes of all who cared
for the higher destinies of Israel, had at once great and striking
external success. For it meant complete submission to Assyria, a
willing vassalage from which even the wish for independence had
disappeared. The heart of the old Israelite independence had been
faith in Yahweh and confidence in Israel's calling as His people.
Even so late as Isaiah's day it had been faith in Yahweh which had
kept Hezekiah steady in his opposition to apparently overwhelming
force. But now Manasseh and the people who supported him exalted
the gods of Assyria as an even surer refuge than Yahweh had been.
Having made that admission, there was nothing left for them but to
humble themselves under the mighty hand of the great king and his
great gods. And this Israel under Manasseh did most thoroughly. As
Stade has strikingly said, "The Temple of the one God of Israel
became a Pantheon." The feeble attempts which Ahaz had made in
the same direction were utterly swept out of men's memory by the
completeness of Manasseh's apostasy. With this degradation of
the religious faith there also came, naturally, an intellectual
degradation. Superstition, baser even than idolatry, seized upon
the minds of men, and illegitimate efforts to pry into the future
or to influence the destinies of men by magic and incantations
became part of the popular fashion of the day. The old religion of
Israel had sternly set itself against all such debasing practices.
Alone amid the religions of the ancient world, it had relentlessly
refused the help of necromancy and magic generally. But the barrier
the religion of Yahweh had erected fell at once when its purity
and uniqueness had been sacrificed, and Manasseh gave himself up
to "practise augury and to use enchantments, and to deal with them
that had familiar spirits and with wizards." And to superstition he
also added cruelty. Not content with his signal victory over all
the best impulses of the past, not content with the applause of the
multitude who gladly followed him to do evil, he endeavoured to
force those whose work he had destroyed to bow before the gods they
both hated and despised. We know too little of the circumstances of
the time to be sure of his motives, but his action may have been
founded upon a craven fear that if he did not suppress the voices of
those who spoke for freedom, he might be visited with the anger of
the Assyrian king. Or it may have been that feeling, so powerfully
expressed in Browning's poem "Instans Tyrannus," which makes a
tyrant feel that all his life is made bitter to him if there remain
within his power one free man whom he cannot bend to his will. In
any case it is certain that he attacked the prophetic party with
sanguinary fury. Though he had the gods of the great battalions on
his side, he was dimly afraid of the power of ideas; and, so far
as faithful men were concerned, he instituted a "reign of terror."
According to the graphic statement of the historian, "he filled
Jerusalem with innocent blood from lip to lip," and for the time at
least was able to silence righteousness so far as public utterance
was concerned. There is a tradition that even Isaiah fell a victim
to his fury, being sawn asunder between two planks at his command.
It is perhaps not likely that Isaiah had survived so long. But,
beyond all doubt, many suffered for their faithfulness to God;
and it seems probable that the wonderful picture of the Suffering
Servant in the Deutero-Isaiah owes much of its colour to the
pathetic and painful memories of this evil time.
All this apostasy brought with it worldly success. Manasseh reigned
long, and under him the land had peace. Assyria _could_ have no
quarrel with a people and a king who anticipated its very desire
by eager submission. Peace brought material prosperity. The land
was so naturally fertile that it always grew rich when war was
kept from its borders. We may surmise, too, that a kind of bastard
culture became popular when the Jewish mind had opened to it, for
good and evil, a world of myth and song and legend which, if known
before, had until now been barred from complete and triumphant
entrance by faith in a living God. Once only would Manasseh appear
to have asserted himself, and, according to the Book of Chronicles,
he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem by the master he had served so
well, and learned to know in the bitterness of a Babylonian prison
that sycophancy does not always lead to safety. And the wisdom he
learned went further even than that. At the end of his life he
appears to have wished to undo, at least in some measure, the evil
he had laboured throughout his reign to establish and make strong.
But he found that to be impossible; and if his repentance was deep
and sincere he must have learned how severely the heavenly powers
can punish, by opening a man's eyes to the evil he has done when
it cannot be undone. Nor did his late repentance affect his son,
for under Amon all things continued in their previous evil course.
Indeed the prevailing idolatry had rooted itself so firmly that
even in the early years of Josiah, when the prophetic influence was
beginning to reappear, it still retained its hold with unshaken
power.
But what of the prophetic party during those evil days? Precipitated
from power in an instant at Hezekiah's death, it had at once become
feeble and obscure. Its leading supporters, we may well believe,
had to seek safety in hiding or in flight; and after some of its
chief speakers had been cut off, the once dominant party had to
take the position of persecuted remnants for whom all public work
was impossible. Under such circumstances what could these faithful
men do? They could only wait and pray, and prepare for that better
day of whose return their faith in Yahweh would not suffer them to
despair.
From the position afterwards taken up by the high priest, it would
seem probable that the Temple clergy were in full sympathy with the
prophetic movement. We need not suppose that that sympathy arose
wholly from the tendency of prophetic thought and effort towards the
suppression of the High Places. We should probably do the better
spirits among the priesthood grievous wrong if we thought that
their personal interest was their main motive in supporting even
that reform. Notwithstanding the earlier prophets' denunciation of
the priests as a class, there can be little doubt that they had
advanced, with the better classes of their nation generally, in
their appreciation of spiritual religion. And we may well believe
that the sight of the havoc which the now degraded worship at the
High Places was working in the popular mind made them earnest in
their endeavours to restore the true faith. Privileged as they
were, they would naturally be sheltered from the full fury of the
persecution. Consequently, when the time came for the supporters
of true religion to take their place in public life again, it was
natural and inevitable that the priests should be at their head.
The fact, too, that Josiah at his accession was a child, for whose
guardian no fitter person could be found than the chief priest, gave
the future into their hands. But they did not move prematurely. So
long as Josiah was a minor they contented themselves with instilling
their principles into the mind of the king. In outward political
life, so far as we can ascertain, they did not interfere at all, and
the ground was moved away from beneath the feet of the idolatrous
party, while they thought themselves firmly established. In Josiah's
eighteenth year the results of this quiet preparation appeared. In
that year Hilkiah, the high priest, told Shaphan the scribe that
he had found "the Book of the Law" in the Temple. That this was
Deuteronomy, if not altogether, yet practically, as we have it
now, there can be but little doubt; and it immediately became the
text-book of religion for all that remained of Israel.
Now it is obvious that the whole hopes of the religious party would
naturally be fixed upon it. They would turn to it as eagerly as
the Reformers turned to the Bible, after it had been rediscovered
by Luther at Erfurt. For obviously, if the people could be got to
acknowledge the law, the axe would be laid at the root of every evil
which they deplored. The High Places would be destroyed; the primacy
of the Temple at Jerusalem would be secured; and the prophetic
teaching, with its insistence upon judgment and the love of God as
the essentials of true worship, would, for the first time, become
the dominant influence in civil and religious life. Never since
Israel was a nation had the condition of the people called so
loudly for the enforcement of such a law, and now for the first time
was there hope that it might be actually enforced. The character
of the evils that afflicted the nation, the history of the last
half-century, and the teachings of the great canonical prophets had
all converged, as it were, to this one point, and we can understand
how all who strove for the higher life of Israel would strive
that Deuteronomy, whether ancient or modern, should be neglected
no longer. The result was that the whole power of the State was
thrown into the struggle against idolatry and the half-heathen
Bamoth-worship. The prophets and the priests joined hands to spread
the principles of the true religion, as voiced by Deuteronomy.
Professor Cheyne, in his _Jeremiah_, conjectures, with considerable
likelihood, that the break in that prophet's activity which occurred
at this time is to be accounted for by the zeal with which he
devoted himself to Deuteronomic propaganda throughout the land. In
any case, for the moment the purer worship obtained a completer
victory than ever before. Unfortunately it came too late and proved
too evanescent. But in the inward sphere, the Deuteronomic view of
religion as having its centre in love to God, the tender, thoughtful
evangelical spirit which distinguishes the whole outlook of its
author, laid hold upon all the higher minds that came after it. To
Jeremiah and to St. Paul alike, it, _par excellence_, represented
the law of God. Produced, or at any rate first prized, at a time
when Israel had fallen very low, when evil was triumphant and good
persecuted, it recommended and exemplified a cheerful courage, born
of faith in the high destiny of Israel and the truth of God. That,
more than anything else, helped to bear the ark of the Church over
the tumultuous centuries which separated those two great servants of
God, and when Christ appeared it was seen that this book, more than
any in the Old Testament save perhaps the Psalms, had anticipated
His cardinal teachings regarding the attitude of man to God and
of man to man. The conflicts and needs of the seventh century
B.C., which are so clearly reflected in it, gave inspiration the
opportunity it needed to reveal that inner secret of God's Kingdom.
Out of defeat and disaster this revelation came, and through times
of defeat and backsliding it proved its Divine origin by keeping
steadfast and calm those who specially waited for the coming of the
Messiah.
CHAPTER III
_THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT_
DEUT. i.-iii.
After these preliminary discussions we now enter upon the
exposition. With the exception of the first two verses of chapter
i., concerning which there is a doubt whether they do not belong
to Numbers, these three chapters stand out as the first section of
our book. Examination shows that they form a separate and distinct
whole, not continued in chapter iv.; but there has been a great
diversity of opinion as to their authorship and the intention with
which they have been placed here. The vocabulary and the style so
resemble those of the main parts of the book, that they cannot
be entirely separated from them; yet, at the same time, it seems
unlikely that the original author of the main trunk of Deuteronomy
can have begun his book with this introductory speech from Moses,
followed it up with another Mosaic speech, still introductory, in
chapter iv., and in chapter v. begun yet another introductory speech
running through seven chapters, before he comes to the statutes
and judgments which are announced at the very beginning. The
current supposition about these chapters, therefore, is that they
are the work of a Deuteronomist, a man formed under the influence
of Deuteronomy and filled with its spirit, but not the author of
the book. This seems to account for the resemblances, and would
also explain to some extent the existence of such a superfluous
prologue. But the hypothesis is, nevertheless, not entirely
satisfactory. The resemblances are closer than we should expect
in the work of different authors; and one feels that the supposed
Deuteronomist must have been less sensitive in a literary sense than
we have any right to suppose him if he did not feel the incongruity
of such a speech in this place. Professor Dillmann has made a very
acute suggestion, which meets the whole difficulty in a more natural
way. Feeling that the style and language were in all essentials one
with those of the central Deuteronomy, he seeks for some explanation
which would permit him to assign this section to the author of the
book himself. He suggests that as originally written this was a
historical introduction leading up to the central code of laws;
a historical preface, in fact, which the author of Deuteronomy
naturally prefixed to his book. _Ex hypothesi_ he had not the
previous books, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, before him as we
have them. These now form a historical introduction to Deuteronomy
of a very minute and elaborate kind; but he had to embody in his
own book all of the past history of his people that he wished to
emphasise. But when the editor who arranged the Pentateuch as we now
have it inserted Deuteronomy in its present place, he found that he
had a double historical preface, that in the previous books and this
in Deuteronomy itself. As reverence forbade the rejection of these
chapters, he took refuge in the expedient of turning the originally
impersonal narrative into a speech of Moses; which he could all the
more blamelessly do as the probability is that the whole book was
regarded in his time as the work of Moses. This hypothesis, if it
can be accepted, certainly accounts for all the phenomena presented
by these chapters--the similarity of language, the archæological
notes in the speech, and the historic colour in the statements
regarding Edom, for example, which corresponds to early feeling,
not to post-exilic thought at all. It has besides the merit of
reducing the number of anonymous writers to be taken account of in
the Pentateuch, a most desirable thing in itself. Lastly, it gives
us in Deuteronomy a compact whole more complete in all its parts
than almost any other portion of the Old Testament, certainly more
so than any of the books containing legislation.
Moreover, that the Deuteronomic reinforcement and expansion of
the Mosaic legislation, as contained in the Book of the Covenant,
should begin with such a history of Yahweh's dealings with His
people, is entirely characteristic of Old Testament Revelation. In
the main and primarily, what the Old Testament writers give us is
a history of how God wrought, how He dealt with the people He had
chosen. In the view of the Hebrew writers, God's first and main
revelation of Himself is always in conduct. He showed Himself good
and merciful and gentle to His people, and then, having so shown
Himself, He has an acknowledged right to claim their obedience. As
St. Paul has so powerfully pointed out, the law was secondary, not
primary. Grace, the free love and choice of God, was always the
beginning of true relations with Him, and only after that had been
known and accepted does He look for the true life which His law is
to regulate. Naturally, therefore, when the author of Deuteronomy
is about to press upon Israel the law in its expanded form, to call
them back from many aberrations, to summon them to a reformation and
new establishment of the whole framework of their lives, he turns
back to remind them of what their past had been. Law, therefore,
is only a secondary deposit of Revelation. If we are true to the
Biblical point of view we shall not look for the Divine voice only,
or even chiefly, in the legal portions of the Scripture. God's
full revelation of Himself will be seen in the process and the
completion of that age-long movement, which was begun when Israel
first became a nation by receiving Yahweh as their God, and which
ended with the life and death of Him who summed up in Himself all
that Israel was called, but failed, to be.
That is the ruling thought in Scripture about Revelation. God
reveals Himself in history; and by the persistent thoroughness with
which the Scriptural writers grasp this thought, the unique and
effective character of the Biblical Revelation is largely accounted
for. Other nations, no doubt, looked back at times upon what their
gods had done for them, and those who spoke for these gods may often
have claimed obedience and service from their people on the ground
of past favour and under threats of its withdrawal. But earlier than
any other people which has affected the higher races of mankind,
Israel conceived of God as a moral power with a will and purpose
which embraced mankind. Further, in the belief which appears in
their earliest records, that through them the nations were to be
blessed, and that in the future One was coming who would in Himself
bring about the realisation of Israel's destiny, they were provided
with a philosophy of history, with a conception which was fitted to
draw into organic connection with itself all the various fortunes of
Israel and of the nations.
Of course, at first much that was involved in their view was
not present to any mind. It was the very merit of the germinal
revelation made through Moses that it had in it powers of growth and
expansion. In no other way could it be a true revelation of God, a
revelation which should have in it the fulness, the flexibility,
the aloofness from mere local and temporary peculiarities, which
would secure its fitness for universal mankind. Any revelation that
consists only of words, of ideas even, must, to be received, have
some kind of relation to the minds that are to receive it. If the
words and ideas are revealed, as they must be, at a given place and
a given time, they must be in such a relation to that place and
time that at some period of the world's history they will be found
inadequate, needing expansion, which does not come naturally, and
then they have to be laid aside as insufficient. But a revelation
which consists in acts, which reveals God in intimate, age-long,
constant dealings with mankind, is so many-sided, so varied, so
closely moulded to the actual and universal needs of man, that it
embraces all the fundamental exigencies of human life, and must
always continue to cover human experience. From it men may draw off
systems of doctrines, which may concentrate the revelation for a
particular generation, or for a series of generations, and make it
more potently active in these circumstances. But unless the system
be kept constantly in touch with the revelation as given in the
history, it must become inadequate, false in part, and must one day
vanish away.
The revelation then in life is the only possible form for a real
revelation of God; and that the writers of the Old Testament in
their circumstances and in their time felt and asserted this, is in
itself so very great a merit, that it is almost of itself sufficient
to justify any claims they may make to special inspiration. The
greatest of them saw God at work in the world, and had experience
of His influence in themselves, so that they had their eyes opened
to His actions as other men had not. The least of them, again, had
been placed at the true point of view for estimating aright the
significance of the ordinary action of the Divine Providence, and
for tracing the lines of Divine action where they were to other
men invisible, or at least obscure. And in the records they have
left us they have been entirely true to that supremely important
point of view. All they deal with in the history is the moral and
spiritual effects of God's dealing; and the great interests, as the
world reckons them, of war and conquest, of commerce and art, are
referred to only briefly and often only in the way of allusion.
To many moderns this is an offence, which they avenge by speaking
contemptuously of the mental endowment of the Biblical writers as
historians. On the contrary, that these should have kept their
eyes fixed only upon that which concerned the religious life of
their people, that they should have kept firm hold of the truth
that it was there the central importance of the people lay, and
that they have given us the material for the formation of that
great conception of supernatural revelation by history in which God
Himself moves as a factor, is a merit so great that even if it were
only a brilliant fancy they might surely be pardoned for ignoring
other things. But if, as is the truth, they were tracing the central
stream of God's redemptive action in the world, were laying open to
our view the steps by which the unapproachably lofty conception of
God was built up, which their nation alone has won for the human
race, then it can hardly seem a fault that nothing else appealed
to them. They have given God to those who were blindly groping for
Him, and they have established the standard by which all historic
estimates of even modern life are ultimately to be measured.
For though there were in the history of that particular nation,
and in the line of preparation for Christ, special miraculous
manifestations of God's power and love, which do not now occur,
yet no judgment of the course of history is worth anything, even
to-day, which does not occupy essentially the Biblical position.
Ultimately the thing to be considered is, what hath God wrought? If
that be ignored, then the stable and instructive element in history
has been kept out of sight, and the mind loses itself hopelessly
amid the weltering chaos of second causes. Froude, in his _History
of England_, has noted this, and declares that in the period he
deals with it was the religious men who alone had any true insight
into the tendency of things. They measured all things, almost too
crudely, by the Biblical standard; but so essentially true and
fundamental does that show itself to be, that their judgment so
formed has proved to be the only sound one. This is what we should
expect if God's power and righteousness are the great factors in
the drama which the history of man and of the world unfolds to us.
That being so, the suicidal folly of the policy of any Church or
party which shuts the Bible away from popular use is manifest. It is
nothing short of a blinding of the people's eyes, and a shutting of
their ears to warning voices which the providential government of
the world, when viewed on a large scale, never fails to utter. It
renders sound political judgment the prerogative only of the few,
and sets them among a people who will turn to any charlatans rather
than believe their voice.
It was natural and it was inevitable, therefore, that the author
of Deuteronomy, standing, as he did, on the threshold of a great
crisis in the history of Israel, should turn the thoughts of his
people back to the history of the past. To him the great figure in
the history of Israel in those trying and eventful years during
which they wandered between Horeb, Kadesh-Barnea, and the country of
the Arnon, is Yahweh their God. He is behind all their movements,
impelling and inciting them to go on and enjoy the good land He
had promised to their fathers. He went before them and fought for
them. He bare them in the wilderness, as a man doth bear his son. He
watched over them and guided their footsteps in cloud and fire by
day and night. Moreover all the nations by whom they passed had been
led by Him and assigned their places, and only those nations whom
Yahweh chose had been given into Israel's hand. In the internal
affairs of the community, too, He had asserted Himself. They were
Yahweh's people, and all their national action was to be according
to His righteous character. Especially was the administration of
justice to be pure and impartial, yielding to neither fear nor
favour because the "judgment is God's." And how had they responded
to all this loving favour on the part of God? At the first hint of
serious conflict they shrank back in fear. Notwithstanding that the
land which God had given them was a good and fruitful country, and
notwithstanding the promises of Divine help, they refused to incur
the necessary toils and risks of the conquest. Every difficulty they
might encounter was exaggerated by them; their very deliverance from
Egypt, which they had been wont to consider "their crowning mercy,"
became to their faithless cowardice an evidence of hatred for them
on the part of God.
To men in such a state of mind conquest was impossible; and though,
in a spasmodic revulsion from their abject cowardice, they made an
attack upon the people they were to dispossess, it ended, as it
could not but end, in their defeat and rout. They were condemned to
forty years of wandering, and it was only after all that generation
was dead that Israel was again permitted to approach the land of
promise. But Yahweh had been faithful to them, and when the time was
come He opened the way for their advance and gave them the victory
and the land. For His love was patient, and always made a way to
bless them, even through their sins.
That was the picture the Deuteronomist spread out before the eyes
of his countrymen, to the intent that they might know the love of
God, and might see that safety lay for them in a willing yielding
of themselves to that love. The disastrous results of their wayward
and faint-hearted shrinking from this Divine calling is the only
direct threat he uses but in the passage there is another warning,
all the more impressive that it is vague and shadowy. God is to the
Deuteronomist the universal ruler of the world. The nations are
raised up and cast down according to His will, and until He wills
it they cannot be dispossessed. But He had willed that fate for
many, and at every step of Israel's progress they come upon traces
of vanished peoples whom for their sins He had suffered others to
destroy. The Emim in Moab, the Zamzummim in Ammon, the Horites in
Seir, and the Avvims in Philistia, had all been destroyed before
the people who now occupied these lands, and the whole background
of the narrative is one of judgment, where mercy had been of no
avail. The sword of the Lord is dimly seen in the archæological
notes which are so frequent in this section of our book and thus
the final touch is given to the picture of the past which is here
drawn to be an impulse for the future. While all the foreground
represents only God's love and patience overcoming man's rebellion,
the background is, like the path of the great pilgrim caravans which
year by year make their slow and toilsome way to Mohammedan holy
places, strewn with the remains of predecessors in the same path.
With stern, menacing finger this great teacher of Israel points to
these evidences that the Divine love and patience may be, and have
been, outworn, and seems to re-echo in an even more impressive way
the language of Isaiah: "The anger of Yahweh was kindled (against
these peoples), and He stretched forth His hand (against them) and
smote (them); and the hills did tremble, and (their) carcases were
as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this His anger is
not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still." Without a
word of direct rebuke he opens his people's eyes to see that shadowy
outstretched hand. Behind all the turmoil of the world there is a
presence and a power which supports all who seek good, but which
is sternly set against all evil, ready, when the moment comes, "to
strike once and strike no more."
Yet another glimpse is given us in these chapters of God's manner of
dealing with men. We have seen how He guides and rules His chosen
ones. We have seen how He punishes those who have set themselves
against the Divine law. And in chapter ii. 30 we are told how
men become hardened in their sin, so as to render destruction
inevitable. Of Sihon, king of Heshbon, who would not let the
Israelites pass by him, the writer says: "Yahweh thy God hardened
his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that He might deliver him
into thy hand, as appeareth this day." But he does not mean by these
expressions to lay upon God the causation of Sihon's obstinacy,
so as to make the man a mere helpless victim. His thought rather
is, that as God rules all, so to Him must be ultimately traced
all that happens in the world. In some sense all acts, whether
good or bad, all agencies, whether beneficent or destructive, have
their source in and their power from Him. But nevertheless men
have moral responsibility for their acts, and are fully and justly
conscious of ill desert. Consequently that hardening of spirit or
of heart, which at one moment may be attributed solely to God,
may at another be ascribed solely to the evil determination of
man. The most instructive instance of this is to be found in the
history of Pharaoh, when he was commanded to let Israel go. In that
narrative, from Exodus iv. to xi., there is repeated interchange
of expression. Now it is Yahweh hardened Pharaoh's heart; now, as
in viii. 15 and 32, Pharaoh hardened his own heart; and, again,
Pharaoh's heart was hardened. In each case the same thing is meant,
and the varying expressions correspond only to a difference of
standpoint. When Yahweh foretells that the signs He authorises
Moses to show will fail of their effect, it is always "Yahweh will
harden Pharaoh's heart," since the main point in contemplation is
His government of the world. If, on the other hand, it is the sinful
obstinacy of Pharaoh which is prominent in the passage, we have the
self-determination of Pharaoh alone set before us. But it is to be
noted, and this is indeed the cardinal fact, that Yahweh never is
said to harden the heart of a good man, or a man set mainly upon
righteousness. It is always those who are guilty of palpable wrongs
and acts of evil-doing upon whom God thus works.
Now we know that the author of Deuteronomy had two at least of
the ancient historical narratives before him which are combined
in Exod. iv.-xi., and he takes up their thinking. Expressed in
modern language, the thought is this. When men are found following
their own will in defiance of all law and all the restraints of
righteousness, that is manifestly not the first stage in their moral
declension. This obstinacy in evil is the result and the wages of
former evil deeds, beginning perhaps only with careless laxity, but
gathering strength and virulence with every wilful sin. Until near
the end of a completed growth in wickedness no man deliberately
says, "Evil, be thou my good." Nevertheless each act of sin involves
a step towards that, and the sinner in this manner hardens himself
against all warning. Like the sins which work this obduracy, this
hardening is the sinner's own act. The ruin which falls upon his
moral nature is his own work. That is the inexorable result of the
moral order of the universe, and from it no exception is possible.
But if so, God too has been active in all such catastrophes. He
has so framed and ordered the world that indulgence in evil must
harden in evil. This it was which the Israelite religious mind saw
and dwelt upon, as well as upon man's share in the dread process
of moral decay. We also do well to take heed to this aspect of
the truth. When we do, we have solved the Scriptural difficulty
regarding the Divine hardening of man's heart. It is simply the
ancient formula for what every mind that is ethically trained
recognises in the world to-day. Those who recognise themselves as
children of God, and acknowledge the obligations of His law, are
dealt with in the way of discipline with infinite love and patience.
Those who definitely set themselves against the moral order of the
world which God has established are broken in pieces and destroyed.
Between these two classes there are the morally undetermined,
who ultimately turn either to the right hand or to the left. The
process by which these pass on to be numbered among the rebellious
is pictured in Scripture with extraordinary moral insight. The
only difference from a present-day description of it is, that here
God is kept constantly present to the mind as the chief factor in
the development of the soul. To-day, even those who believe in God
are apt to forget Him in tracing His laws of action. But that is
an error of the first magnitude. It darkens the hope of man; for
without a sure promise of Divine help there is no certainty of
moral victory either for the race or the individual. It narrows our
view of the awful sweep of sin; for unless we see that sin affects
even the Ruler of the universe, and defies His unchanging law, its
results are limited to the evil that we do our fellow-men, which,
as we see it, is of little importance. Further, it degrades moral
law to a mere arbitrary dictum of power, or to an opinion founded
upon man's purblind experience. The acknowledgment of God, on the
contrary, makes morality the very essence of the Divine nature, and
the unchangeable rule for the life of man.
CHAPTER IV
_THE DECALOGUE--ITS FORM_
DEUT. v. 1-21.
As the fourth chapter belongs to the speech which concludes the
legislative portion of Deuteronomy both in contents and language
(see Chapter XXIII.), we shall pass on now to the fifth chapter,
which begins with a recital of the Decalogue. As has already
been pointed out, the main trunk of the Book of Deuteronomy is a
repetition and expansion of the Law of the Covenant contained in
Exod. xx.-xxiii.[22] Now, both in Exodus and Deuteronomy, before
the more general and detailed legislation, we have the Decalogue,
or the Ten Words, as it is called, in substantially the same form;
and the question immediately arises as to the age at which this
beautifully systematised and organised code of fundamental laws
came into existence. Whatever its origin, it is an exceedingly
remarkable document. It touches the fundamental principles of
religious and moral life with so sure a hand that at this hour,
for even the most civilised nations, it sums up the moral code,
and that so effectively that no change or extension of it has ever
been proposed. That being its character, it becomes a question of
exceeding interest to decide whether it can justly be referred to
so early a time as the days of Moses. In both the passages where
it occurs it is represented as having been given to the people
at Horeb by Yahweh Himself, and it is made the earliest and most
fundamental part of the covenant between Him and Israel. It would
accordingly seem as if a claim were made for it as a specially
early and specially sacred law. Now, much as critics have denied,
there have been found very few who deny that in the main some such
law as this must have been given to Israel in Moses' day. Even
Kuenen admits as much as that in his _History of the Religion of
Israel_. The only commandment of the ten he has difficulty in
accepting is the second, which forbids the making of any graven
image for worship. That, he thinks, cannot have been in the original
Decalogue, not because of any peculiarity of language, or because
of any incoherency in composition, but simply because he cannot
believe that at that early day the religion of Yahweh could have
been so spiritual as to demand the prohibition of images. But his
reasons are extremely inadequate; more especially as he admits
that the Ark was the Mosaic Sanctuary, and that in it there was no
image, as there was none in the Temple at Jerusalem. That Yahweh
was worshipped under the form of a calf at Horeb, and afterwards
in Northern Israel at Bethel and elsewhere, proves nothing. A law
does not forthwith extinguish that against which it is directed,
for idolatry continued even after Deuteronomy was accepted as the
law. Moreover, if, as Kuenen thinks, calf-worship had existed in
Israel before Moses, it was not unnatural that it took centuries
before the higher view superseded the lower. Even by Christianity
the ancient superstitions and religious practices of heathenism
were not thoroughly overcome for centuries. Indeed in many places
they have not yet been entirely suppressed. Nor does Wellhausen[23]
make a better case for a late Decalogue. His hesitation about it
is most remarkable, and the reasons he gives for tending to think
it may be late are singularly unsatisfactory. His first reason is
that "according to Exodus xxxiv. the commandments which stood upon
the two tables were quite different." He relies on the words in
ver. 28 of that chapter--"And he (Moses) was there with the Lord
forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread nor drink
water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the
ten words"--taking them to imply that the immediately preceding
commandments, which are of the same ritual character with those
which follow the Decalogue in Exodus xx., are here called the ten
words. But it is not necessary to take the passage so. According to
ver. 1 it was Yahweh who was to write the words on the tables, and
we cannot suppose that so flagrant a contradiction should occur in
a single chapter as that here it should be said that Moses wrote
the tables. Yahweh, who is mentioned in the previous verse, must
therefore be the subject of _wayyikhtobh_ (ver. 28), and the ten
words consequently are different from the words (up to ver. 27)
which Yahweh commanded Moses to write, somewhere, but not on the
tables. Besides, every one who attempts to make ten words of the
commands before ver. 27 brings out a different result, and that of
itself, as Dillmann says, is sufficient to show that the second
Decalogue in chapter xxxiv. is entirely fanciful. Wellhausen's
second reason is this: "The prohibition of images was quite unknown
during the other period: Moses himself is said to have made a brazen
serpent, which down to Hezekiah's time continued to be worshipped
as an image of Jehovah." But the Decalogue does not prohibit the
making of every image; it prohibits the making of images for
worship. Therefore Moses might quite well have made a figure of a
serpent, even though he wrote the Decalogue, if it was not meant
for worship. But there is nothing said to lead us to believe that
the serpent was regarded as an image of Yahweh. Indeed the very
contrary is asserted; and if Israel in later times made a bad use
of this ancient relic of a great deliverance, Moses can hardly be
held responsible for that. In the third place, Wellhausen says:
"The essentially and necessarily national character of the older
phases of the religion of Yahweh completely disappears in the
quite universal code of morals which is given in the Decalogue as
the fundamental law of Israel; but the entire series of religious
personalities throughout the period of the Judges and Kings--from
Deborah, who praised Jael's treacherous act of murder, to David,
who treated his prisoners of war with the utmost cruelty--make it
very difficult to believe that the religion of Israel was from the
outset one of a specifically moral character." Surely this is very
feeble criticism. On the same grounds we might declare, because
of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or on account of Napoleon's
reported poisoning of his own wounded at Acre, that Christianity
was not a religion of a "specifically moral character" at this
present moment. Surely the facts that people never live at the
level of their ideals, and that the lifting of a nation's life is a
process which is as slow as the raising of the level of the delta
of the Nile, should be too familiar to permit any one to be misled
by difficulties of this kind. Nor is his last ground in any degree
more convincing. "It is extremely doubtful," he says, "whether the
actual monotheism which is undoubtedly presupposed in the universal
moral precepts of the Decalogue could have formed the foundation
of a national religion. It was first developed out of the national
religion at the downfall of the nation." The obvious reply is that
this is a _petitio principii_. The whole debate in regard to this
question is whether Moses was a monotheist, or at least the founder
of a religion which was implicitly monotheistic from the beginning;
and the date of the Decalogue is interesting mainly because of
the light it would throw upon that question. To decide this date
therefore by the assertion that, being monotheistic, the Decalogue
cannot be Mosaic, is to assume the very thing in dispute. Wellhausen
himself, elsewhere (p. 434), seems to favour the opposite view. In
speaking of what Moses did for Israel he says that through "the
Torah," in the sense of decisions given by lot from the Ark, "he
gave a definite positive expression to their sense of nationality
and their idea of God. Yahweh was not merely the God of Israel; as
such He was the God at once of Law and of Justice, the basis, the
informing principle, and the implied postulate of their national
consciousness"; and again (p. 438), "As God of the nation Yahweh
became the God of Justice and of Right; as God of Justice and
Right, He came to be thought of as the highest, and at last as the
only power in heaven and earth." In the Mosaic conception of God,
therefore, Wellhausen himself being witness, there lay implicitly,
perhaps even explicitly, the conception of Yahweh as "the only power
in heaven and earth." In that case, is it reasonable to put the
Decalogue late, because being moral it is universal, and so implies
monotheism?
[22] See this brought out in detail in Robertson Smith, _Old
Testament in Jewish Church_, p. 431.
[23] Wellhausen, _Prolegomena_, p. 439.
But there is still other, and perhaps stronger evidence, that the
universality of the Decalogue is no indication of a late date. On
the contrary it would seem, from Professor Muirhead's account of
the Roman _fas_, that universality in legal precept may be a mark
of very primitive laws. Speaking of Rome in its earliest stages
of growth, when the circumstances of the people in very many
respects resembled those of the Hebrews in Mosaic times,[24] he
says: "We look in vain for, and it would be absurd to expect, any
definite system of law in those early times. What passed for it
was a composite of _fas_, _jus_, and _boni mores_, whose several
limits and characteristics it is extremely difficult to define."
He then proceeds to describe _fas_: "By _fas_ was understood the
will of the gods, the laws given by Heaven for men on earth, much
of it regulative of ceremonial, but a by no means insignificant
part embodying rules of conduct. It appears to have had a wider
range than _jus_. There were few of its commands, prohibitions, or
precepts that were addressed to men as citizens of any particular
state; _all mankind came within its scope_. It forbade that a war
should be undertaken without the prescribed fetial ceremonial,
and required that faith should be kept with even an enemy--when a
promise had been made to him under sanction of an oath. It enjoined
hospitality to foreigners, because the stranger guest was presumed,
equally with his entertainer, to be an object of solicitude to
a higher power. It punished murder, for it was the taking of a
God-given life; the sale of a wife by her husband, for she had
become his partner in all things human and Divine; the lifting of
a hand against a parent, for it was subversive of the first bond
of society and religion, the reverence due by a child to those to
whom he owed his existence; incestuous connections, for they defiled
the altar; the false oath, and the broken vow, for they were an
insult to the divinities invoked," etc. In fact, the Roman _fas_
had much the same character as the Decalogue and the legislation
of the first code (Exod. xx.-xxiii.). Consequently those who have
thought that all early legislation must be concrete, narrow,
particularistic, bounded at widest by the direct needs of the men
making up the clan, tribe, or petty nationality, are wrong. The
early history of law shows that, along with that, there is also a
demand for some expression of the laws of life seen from the point
of view of man's relation to God. That fact greatly strengthens the
case for the early date of the Decalogue. For practically it is
the Hebrew _fas_. If it has a higher tone and a wider sweep, if it
provides a framework into which human duty can, even now, without
undue stretching of it, be securely fitted, that is only what we
should expect, if God was working in the history and development
of this nation as nowhere else in the world. In short, the history
of primitive Roman law shows that, without inspiration, a feeble
wavering step would have been taken to the development of a code of
moral duty, within the scope of which all mankind should come. With
inspiration, surely this effort would also be made, and made with a
success not elsewhere attained.
[24] _Ency. Brit._, vol. xx., p. 670.
In none of the reasons which have been advanced, therefore, is there
anything to set against the Biblical statement that the ten words
were older and more sacred than any other portion of the Israelite
legislation, and that they were Mosaic in origin. The universal
hesitation shown by the greater among the most advanced critics in
definitely removing the Decalogue from the foundations of Israel's
history, although its presence there is so great an embarrassment to
them, lets us see how strong the case for the Mosaic origin is, and
assures us that the evidence is all in favour of this view.
But if it be Mosaic, at first sight the conclusion would seem to
be that the form of the Decalogue given in Exodus is the more
ancient, and that the text in Deuteronomy is a later and somewhat
extended version of that. Closer examination, however, tends to
suggest that the original ten words, in their Mosaic form, differed
from any of the texts we have, and that of these the Exodus text
in its present form is later than that in Deuteronomy. The great
difference in length between the two halves of the Decalogue
suggests the probability that originally all the commandments were
short, and much the same in style and character as the last half,
"Thou shalt not steal," and so on. Further, when the reasons and
inducements given for the observance of the longer commands are set
aside, just such short commands are left to us as we find in the
second table. Lastly, differences between the versions in Exodus
and Deuteronomy occur in almost every case in those parts of the
text which may be regarded as appendices. In fact there are only
two variations in the proper text of the commands. In the fourth,
we have in Exodus "Remember the Sabbath day," while in Deuteronomy
we have "Observe the Sabbath day"; but the meaning is the same in
both cases. In the tenth, in Exodus the command is "Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbour's house"; and the "house" is explained by the
succeeding clause, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor
his manservant," etc., to mean "household" in its widest sense.
In Deuteronomy the old meaning of "house" as household and goods
has fallen out of use, and the component parts of the neighbour's
household possessions are named, beginning with his wife. Then
follows the "house" in its narrow meaning, as the mere dwelling,
grouped along with the slaves and cattle, and with _tithawweh_
substituted in Hebrew for _tachmodh_. Fundamentally therefore the
two recensions are the same. Even in the reasons and explanations
there is only one really important variation. In Exod. xx. 11 the
reason for the observance of the fourth commandment is stated thus:
"For in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea and all that
in them is, and rested the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the
Sabbath day, and hallowed it." In Deuteronomy, on the other hand,
that reason is omitted, and in its place we find this: "And thou
shalt remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and
Yahweh thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand, and by a
stretched out arm; therefore Yahweh thy God commanded thee to keep
the Sabbath." Now if the reference to the creation had formed part
of the original text of the Decalogue in the days of the author
of Deuteronomy, if he had that before him as actually spoken by
Yahweh, it is difficult to believe that he would have left it out
and substituted another reason in its stead. He would have no object
in doing so, for he could have added his own reason after that given
in Exodus, had he so desired. It is likely, therefore, that in the
original text no reason appeared; that Deuteronomy first added a
reason; while ver. 11 in Exod. xx. was probably inserted there from
a combination of Exod. xxxi. 17 _b_ and Gen. ii. 2 _b_,--"For in
six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He
rested and was refreshed"; "and He rested on the seventh day from
all His work which He had made." Both these texts belong to P and
differ in style altogether from JE, with whose language all the rest
of the setting of the Decalogue corresponds. On these suppositions
Exod. xx. 11 would necessarily be the latest part of the two texts.
Originally, therefore, the Mosaic commands probably ran thus:--
"I am Yahweh thy God, which brought thee out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
"I. Thou shalt not have any other gods before Me.
"II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
"III. Thou shalt not take the name of Yahweh thy God in vain.
"IV. Remember (_or_ Keep) the day of rest to sanctify it.
"V. Honour thy father and thy mother.
"VI. Thou shalt not kill.
"VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
"VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
"IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
"X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house."
In that shape they contain everything that is fundamentally
important, and exhibit the foundations of the Mosaic religion and
polity in an entirely satisfactory and credible form.
But, before passing on to consider the substance of the Decalogue,
it will be worth our while to consider what the full significance
of these differing recensions of the Decalogue is. In both places
the words are quoted directly as having been spoken by Yahweh to
the people, and they are introduced by the quoting word "saying."
Now if we do not wish to square what we read with any theory, the
slight divergences between the two recensions need not trouble us,
for we have the substance of what was said, and in the main the
very words, and that is really all we need to be assured of. But
if, on the contrary, we are going to insist that, this being part
of an inspired book, every word must be pressed with the accuracy
of a masoretic scribe, then we are brought into inextricable
difficulties. It cannot be true that at Horeb Yahweh said two
different things on this special occasion. One or both of these
accounts must be inaccurate, in the pedantic sense of accuracy,
and yet both have the same claim to be inspired. In fact both
_are_ inspired; it is the theory of inspiration which demands for
revelation this kind of accuracy that must go to the wall.
It will be seen that this instance is very instructive as to the
method of the ancient Hebrews in dealing with legislation which
was firmly held to be Mosaic, or even directly Divine. If we are
right in holding that originally the ten words were, as we have
supposed, limited to definite short commands, this example teaches
us that where there could be no question of deceit, or even an
object for deceiving, additions calculated to meet the needs and
defects of the particular period at which the laws are written down,
are inserted without any hint that they did not form part of the
original document. If this has been done, even to the extent we have
seen reason to infer, in a small, carefully ordered, and specially
ancient and sacred code, how much more freely may we expect the same
thing to have been done in the looser and more fluid regulations of
the large political and ceremonial codes, which on any supposition
were posterior, and much less fundamental and sacred. That there is
for _us_ something disappointing, and even slightly questionable, in
such action is really nothing to the purpose. We have to learn from
the actual facts of revelation how revelation may be, or perhaps
even must be, conveyed; and we cannot too soon learn the lesson
that to a singular degree, and in many other directions than their
notions of accuracy, the ancient mind differs from the modern mind,
and that at any period there is a great gulf to be crossed before a
Western mind can get into any intimate and sure _rapport_ with an
Eastern mind.
One other thing is noteworthy. Wellhausen has already been quoted
as to the quite universal and moral character of the Decalogue;
and his view, that a code so free from merely local and ceremonial
provisions can hardly be Mosaic, has been discussed. But, while
rejecting his conclusion, we must adhere to his premisses. By
emphasising the universal nature of the ten commandments, and by
showing that they preceded the ceremonial law by many centuries,
the critical school have cut away the ground from under the
semi-antinomian views once so prevalent, and always so popular,
with those who call themselves advanced thinkers. It is now no
longer possible to maintain that the Decalogue was part of a purely
Jewish law, binding only upon Jews and passing away at the advent
of Christianity as the ceremonial law did. Of course this view was
never really taken seriously in reference to murder or theft; but
it has always been a strong point with those who have wished to
secularise the Sunday. Now if the advanced critical position be in
any degree true, then the ten commandments stand quite separate
from the ceremonial law, have nothing in common with it, and are
handed down to us in a document written before the conception even
of a binding ceremonial law had dawned upon the mind of any man in
Israel. Nor is there anything ceremonial or Jewish in the command,
Remember _or_ Observe the rest-day to keep it holy. In the reasons
given in Exodus and Deuteronomy we have the two principles which
make this a moral and universal command--the necessity for rest,
and the necessity of an opportunity to cultivate the spiritual
nature. Nothing indeed is said about worship; but it lies in the
nature of the case that if secular work was rigorously forbidden,
mere slothful abstinence from activity cannot have been all that
was meant. Worship, and instruction in the things of the higher
life, must certainly have been practised in such a nation as Israel
on such a day; and we may therefore say that they were intended by
this commandment. Understood in that way, the fourth commandment
shows a delicate perception of the conditions of the higher life,
which surpasses even the prohibition of covetousness in the tenth.
In the words of a working man who was advocating its observance,
"It gives God a chance"; that is, it gives man the leisure to
attend to God. But the moral point of view which it implies is so
high, and so difficult of attainment, that it is only now that the
nations of Europe are awaking to the inestimable moral benefits of
the Sabbath they have despised. Because of this difficulty too,
many who think themselves to be leaders in the path of improvement,
and are esteemed by others to be so, are never weary of trying to
weaken the moral consciousness of the people, until they can steal
this benefit away, on the ground that Sabbath-keeping is a mere
ceremonial observance. So far from being that, it is a moral duty
of the highest type; and the danger in which it seems at times to
stand is due mainly to the fact that to appreciate it needs a far
more trained and sincere conscience than most of us can bring to the
consideration of it.
CHAPTER V
_THE DECALOGUE--ITS SUBSTANCE_
That the Decalogue in any of its forms must have been the work of
one mind, and that a very great and powerful mind, will be evident
on the most cursory inspection. We have not here, as we have in
other parts of Scripture, fragments of legislation supplementary to
a large body of customary law, fragments which, because of their
intrinsic importance or the necessities of a particular time, have
been written down. We have here an extraordinarily successful
attempt to bring within a definite small compass the fundamental
laws of social and individual life. The wonder of it does not lie
in the individual precepts. All of them, or almost all of them, can
be paralleled in the legislation of other peoples, as indeed could
not fail to be the case if the _fundamental_ laws of society and
of individual conduct were aimed at. These must be obeyed, more or
less, in every society that survives. It is the wisdom with which
the selection has been made; it is the sureness of hand which has
picked out just those things which were central, and has laid aside
as irrelevant everything local, temporary, and purely ceremonial;
it is the relation in which the whole is placed to God,--these give
this small code its distinction. In these respects it is like the
Lord's Prayer. It is vain for men to point out this petition of that
unique prayer as occurring here, that other as occurring there,
and a third as found in yet another place. Even if every single
petition contained in it could be unearthed somewhere, it would
still remain as unique as ever; for where can you find a prayer
which, like it, groups the fundamental cries of humanity to God in
such short space and with so sure a touch, and brings them all into
such deep connection with the Fatherhood of God? In both cases, in
the prayer and in the Decalogue alike, we must recognise that the
grouping is the work of one mind; and in both we must recognise also
that, whatever were the natural and human powers of the mind that
wrought the code and prayer respectively, the main element in the
success that has attended their work is the extraordinary degree in
which they were illumined by the Divine Spirit. But where, between
the time of Moses and the time when Deuteronomy first laid hold
upon the life of the nation, are we to look for a legislator of
this pre-eminence? So far as we know the history, there is no name
that would occur to us. So far as can be seen, Moses alone has been
marked out for us in the history of his people as equal to, and
likely to undertake, such a task. Everything, therefore, concurs to
the conclusion that in the Decalogue we have the first, the most
sacred, and the fundamental law in Israel. Here Moses spoke for God;
and whatever additions to his original ten words later times may
have made, they have not obscured or overlaid what must be ascribed
to him. He may not have been the author of much that bears his name,
for unquestionably there were developments later than his time which
were called Mosaic because they were a continuation and adaptation
of his work; but we are justified in believing that here we have the
first law he gave to Israel; and in it we should be able to see the
really germinal principles of the religion he taught.
Now, manifestly, a religion which spoke its first word in the ten
commandments, even in their simplest form, must have been in
its very heart and core moral. It must always have been a heresy
therefore, a denial of the fundamental Mosaic conception, to place
ritual observance _per se_ above moral and religious conduct, as
a means of approach to Yahweh. On any reading of the commandments
only the third and fourth (two out of ten) refer to matters of
mere worship; and even these may more correctly be taken to refer
primarily to the moral aspects of the cultus. All the rest deal with
fundamental relations to God and man. Consequently the prophets
who, after the manner of Amos and Hosea, denounce the prevailing
belief that Yahweh's help could be secured for Israel, whatever
its moral state, by offerings and sacrifices, were not teaching
a new doctrine, first discovered by themselves. They were simply
reasserting the fundamental principles of the Mosaic religion.
Reverence and righteousness--these from the first were the twin
pillars upon which it rested. Before ever the ceremonial law, even
in its most rudimentary form, had been given, these were emphasised
in the strongest way as the requirements of Yahweh; and the people
whom the prophets reproved, instead of being the representatives of
the ancient Yahwistic faith, had rejected it. Whether the popular
view was a falling away from a truer view which had once been
popular, or whether it represented a heathen tendency which remained
in Israel from pre-Mosaic times and had not even in the days of Amos
been overcome, it seems undeniable that it was entirely contrary
to the fundamental principles of Yahwism as given by Moses. Even
by the latest narrators, those who brought our Pentateuch into its
present shape, and who were, it is supposed, completely under the
influence of ceremonial Judaism, the primarily moral character of
Yahweh's religion was acknowledged by the place they gave to the
ten commandments. They alone are handed down as spoken by Yahweh
Himself, and as having preceded all other commands; and the terrors
of Sinai, the thunder and the earthquake, are made more intimately
the accompaniments of this law than of any other. Unquestionably
the mind of Israel always was, that here, and not in the ceremonial
law, was the centre of gravity of Yahwism. In the view of that
fact it is somewhat hard to understand how so many writers of our
times, who admit the Decalogue to have been Mosaic, or at any rate
pre-prophetic, yet deny the prevailingly moral character of the
early religion of Israel. When this law was once promulgated, the
old naturalism in which Israel, like other ancient races, had been
entangled was repudiated, and the relation between Yahweh and His
people was declared to be one which rested upon moral conduct in the
widest sense of that term. And the ground of this fact is plainly
declared here to be the character of Yahweh: "I am the Lord thy God,
that brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage." He was their deliverer, He had a right to command them,
and His commands revealed His nature to His people.
The first four commandments show that Yahweh was already conceived
as a spiritual being, removed by a whole heaven from the gods of the
Canaanite nations by whom Israel was surrounded. These were mere
representatives of the powers of nature. As such they were regarded
as existing in pairs, each god having his female counterpart; and
their acts had all the indifference to moral considerations which
nature in its processes shows. They dwelt in mountain tops, in
trees, in rude stones, or in obelisks, and they were worshipped
by rites so sanguinary and licentious that Canaanite worship bore
everywhere a darker stain than even nature-worship elsewhere had
disclosed. In contrast to all this the Yahweh of the Decalogue
is "alone," in solitary and unapproachable separation. Amid all
the unbridled speculation that has been let loose on this subject,
no one, I think, has ever ventured to join with Him any name of
a goddess, and He sternly repudiates the worship of any other
god besides Him. Now, though there is nothing said of monotheism
here, _i.e._ of the doctrine that no god but one exists, yet, in
contrast to the hospitality which distinguished and distinguishes
nature-worship in all its forms, Yahweh here claims from His people
worship of the most exclusive kind. Besides Him they were to have no
object of worship. He, in His unapproachable separateness, had alone
a claim upon their reverence. Further, in contrast to the gods who
dwelt in trees and stones and pillars, and who could be represented
by symbols of that kind, Yahweh sternly forbade the making of any
image to represent Him. Thereby He declared Himself spiritual, in so
far as He claimed that no visible thing could adequately represent
Him. In contrast to the ethnic religions in general, even that of
Zarathushtra, the noblest of all, where only the natural element of
fire was taken to be the god or his symbol, this fundamental command
asserts the supersensuous nature of the Deity, thereby rising at one
step clear above all naturalism.
So great is the step indeed, that Kuenen and others, who cannot
escape the evidence for the antiquity of the other commandments,
insist that this at least cannot be pre-prophetic, since we have
such numerous proofs of the worship of Yahweh by images, down at
least to the time of Josiah's reform. But, by all but Stade, it is
admitted that there was at Shiloh under Eli, and at Jerusalem under
David and Solomon, no visible representation of Deity. Now the
same writers who tell us this everywhere represent the worship of
Yahweh by images as existing among the people. According to their
view, the nation had a continual and hereditary tendency to slip
into image-worship, or to maintain it as pre-Mosaic custom. And it
is quite certain that up even to the Captivity, and after, when,
according to even the very boldest negative view, this command had
been long known, image-worship, not only of Yahweh, but also of
false gods and of the host of heaven, was largely prevalent. Only
the Captivity, with its hardships and trials, brought Israel to
see that image-worship was incompatible with any true belief in
Yahweh. Undeniably, therefore, the existence of an authoritative
prohibition does not necessarily produce obedience; and the Biblical
view that the Decalogue is Israel's earliest law proves to be the
more reasonable, as well as the better authenticated of the two.
If, after the command beyond all doubt existed in Israel, it needed
the calamities of Israel's last days, and the hardships and griefs
of the Exile, to get it completely observed, and if in Jerusalem
and at Shiloh in the pre-prophetic time Yahweh was worshipped
without images, there can hardly be a doubt that this command must
have existed in the earliest period. For no religion is to be
judged by the actual practice of the multitude. The true criterion
is its highest point; and the imageless worship of Jerusalem is
much more difficult to understand if the second commandment was
not acknowledged previously in Israel, than it would be if the
Decalogue, essentially as we now have it, was acknowledged in the
days before the kingship at least.[25]
[25] Granting that the commandment did not exist, one asks, _What_
was it in Yahwism which determined the Jerusalem Sanctuary to be
imageless?
The arguments advanced by Kuenen and Wellhausen for a contrary
view, beyond those we have just been considering, rest on an undue
extension of the prohibition to make any likeness of anything.
They adduce the brazen serpent of Moses, and the Cherubim, and the
brazen bulls that bore the brazen laver in the court of the Temple
at Jerusalem, and the ornaments of that building, as a proof that
even in Jerusalem this commandment cannot have been known. But, as
we have seen, the original command prohibited only the making of a
_pesel_, _i.e._ of an image for worship. The making of likenesses
of men and animals for mere purposes of art and adornment was never
included; and the whole objection falls to the ground unless it be
asserted that the bulls under the basin were actually worshipped by
those who came into the Temple!
The supersensuous nature of Yahweh must, therefore, be taken to be a
fundamental part of the Mosaic religion. But besides being solitary
and supersensuous, Yahweh was declared by Moses, perhaps by His
very name, to be not only mighty, but helpful. The preface to the
whole series of commandments is, "I am Yahweh thy God, who brought
thee forth out of the land of Egypt." Now of all the derivations of
Yahweh, that which most nearly commands universal acceptance is its
derivation from _hayah_, to be. And the probabilities are all in
favour of the view that it does not imply mere timeless existence,
as the translation of the explanation in Exodus[26] has led many to
believe. That is a purely philosophical idea entirely outside of
morality, and it can hardly be that the introduction to this moral
code, which announces the author of it, should contain no moral
reference. If the name be from Qal, and be connected with _ehyeh_,
then it means, as Dillmann says (_Exodus and Leviticus_, p. 35),
that He will be what He has been, and the name involves a reference
to all that the God of Israel has been in the past. Such He will
be in the future, for He is what He is, without variableness or
shadow of turning. If, on the other hand, it be from Hiphil, it will
mean "He who causes to be," the creator. In either case there is a
clear rise above the ordinary Semitic names for God, Baal, Molech,
Milkom, which all express mere lordship. No doubt Yahweh was also
called Baal, or Lord, just as we find Him in the Psalms addressed as
"my King and my God"; but the specially Mosaic name, the personal
name of the God of Israel, does undoubtedly imply quite another
quality in God. It is the Helper who has revealed Himself to Israel
who here speaks. Hence the addition, "who brought thee out of the
land of Egypt." It is as a Saviour that Yahweh addresses His people.
By His very name He lifts all the commands He gives out of the
region of mere might, or the still lower region of gratification at
offerings and precious things bestowed, into the region of gratitude
and love.
[26] iii. 14.
Further, by issuing this code under the name of Yahweh Moses claimed
for Him a moral character. Whether the Hebrew word for holy,
_qādhōsh_, implied more in those days than mere separateness, may
be doubted; but it is impossible that the idea which we now connect
with the word "holy" should not have been held to be congruous
to, and expressive of, the nature of Yahweh. Here morality in its
initial and fundamental stages is set forth as an expression of His
will. And similarly, righteousness must also be an attribute of His,
for justice between man and man is made to be His demand upon men.
He Himself, therefore, must be faithful as well as holy, and His
emancipation from the clinging chain of mere naturalism was thereby
completed. The Yahweh of the Decalogue is therefore absolutely
alone. He is supersensuous. He is the Helper and Saviour, and He is
holy and true. These are His fundamental qualities. Such qualities
may be supposed to be present only in their elements, even to the
mind of Moses himself: yet the fundamental germinal point was there:
and all that has grown out of it may be justly put to the credit of
this first revelation.
A moment's thought will show how the teaching that Yahweh alone was
to be worshipped broke away from the main stream of Semitic belief,
and prepared the way for the ultimate prevalence of the belief that
God was one. That He was supersensuous, so that He could not rightly
or adequately be represented by any likeness of anything in heaven
or earth or sea, left no possible outlet for thought about Him,
save in the direction that He was a Spirit. In essence consequently
the spirituality of God was thereby secured. Still more important
perhaps was the conception of Yahweh as the Helper and Deliverer,
the Saviour of His people; for this at once suggested the thought
that the true bond between God and man was not mere necessity, nor
mere dependence upon resistless power, but love--love to a Divine
Helper who revealed Himself in gracious acts and providences,
and who longed after and cared for His people with a perfectly
undeserved affection. Lastly, His holiness and faithfulness, His
righteousness in fact, held implicit in it His supremacy and
universality. As Wellhausen has said, "As God of justice and right,
Yahweh came to be thought of as the highest, and at last as the only
power in heaven and earth." Whether that last stage was present to
the mind of Moses, or of any who received the commandments in the
first place, is of merely secondary importance. At the very least,
the way which must necessarily lead to that stage was opened here,
and the mind of man entered upon the path to a pure monotheism, a
monotheism which separated God from the world, and referred to His
will all that happened in the world of created things. God is One,
God is a Spirit, God is Love, and God rules over all--these are
the attributes of Yahweh as the Decalogue sets them forth; and in
principle the whole higher life of humanity was secured by the great
synthesis.
Like all beginnings, this was an achievement of the highest kind.
Nowhere but in the soul of one Divinely enlightened man could such
a revelation have made itself known; and the solitude of a lonely
shepherd's life, following upon the stir and training of a high
place in the cultured society of Egypt, gave precisely the kind
of environment which would prepare the soul to hear the voice by
which God spoke. For we are not to suppose that this revelation
came to Moses without any effort or preparation on his part. God
does not reveal His highest to the slothful or the debased. Even
when He speaks from Sinai in thunder and in flame, it is only the
man who has been exercising himself in these great matters who can
understand and remember. All the people had been terrified by the
Divine Presence, but they forgot the law immediately and fell back
into idolatry. It was Moses who retained it and brought it back to
them again. His personality was the organ of the Divine will; and
in this law which he promulgated Moses laid the foundation of all
that now forms the most cherished heritage of men. The central thing
in religion is the character of God. Contrary to the prevailing
feeling, which makes many say that they know nothing of God, but are
sure of their duty to man, history teaches that, in the end, man's
thought of God is the decisive thing. Everything else shapes itself
according to that; and by taking the first great steps, which broke
through the limits of mere naturalism, Moses laid the foundation of
all that was to come. There was here the promise and the potency
of all higher life: love and holiness had their way prepared, so
that they should one day become supreme in man's conception of the
highest life: the confused halting between the material and the
spiritual, which can be traced in the very highest conceptions of
merely natural religions, was in principle done away. And what was
here gained was never lost again. Even though the multitude never
really grasped all that Moses had proclaimed Yahweh to be; and
though it should be proved, which is as yet by no means the case,
that even David thought of Him as limited in power and claims by the
extent of the land which Israel inhabited; and though, as a matter
of fact, the full-orbed universality which the ten commandments
implicitly held in them was not attained under the old covenant at
all; yet these ten words remained always an incitement to higher
thoughts. No advance made in religion or morals by the chosen people
ever superseded them. Even when Christ came, He came not to destroy
but to fulfil. The highest reach of even His thoughts as regards
God could be brought easily and naturally under the terms of this
fundamental revelation to Israel.
The remaining commands, those which deal with the relations of men
to each other, are naturally introduced by the fifth commandment,
which, while it deals with human relations, deals with those which
most nearly resemble the relations between God and man. Reverence
for God, the deliverer and forgiver of men, is the sum of the
commandments which precede; and here we have inculcated reverence
for those who are, under God, the source of life, upon whose love
and care all, at their entrance into life, are so absolutely
dependent. Love is not commanded; because in such relations it is
natural, and moreover it cannot be produced at will. But reverence
is; and from the place of the command, manifestly what is required
is something of that same awful respect which is due to Yahweh
Himself. The power which parents had over their children in Israel
was extensive, though much less so than that possessed, for example,
by Roman parents. A father could sell his daughters to be espoused
as subordinate wives;[27] he could disallow any vows a daughter
might wish to take upon her;[28] and both parents could bring an
incorrigibly rebellious son to the elders of the city[29] and have
him stoned publicly to death. But, according to Moses, the main
restraining forces in the home should be love and reverence, guarded
only by the solemn sanction of death to the openly irreverent, just
as reverence for Yahweh was guarded.
[27] Exod. xxi. 7.
[28] Numb. xxx. 6.
[29] Deut. xxi. 8.
There was here nothing of the sordid view, repudiated so
energetically by Jewish scholars like Kalisch,[30] that we ought
"to weigh and measure filial affection after the degree of
enjoyed benefits." No; to this law "the relation between parents
and children is holy, religious, godly, not of a purely human
character"; and it is a mere profanation to regard it as we in
modern times too often do. In our mad pursuit after complete
individual liberty we have fallen back into a moral region which it
was the almost universal merit of the ancient civilisations to have
left behind them. It is true, certainly, that there were reasons for
this advance then which we could not now recognise without falling
back from our own attainments in other directions; but it was the
saving salt of the ancient civilisations that the parents in a
household were surrounded with an atmosphere of reverence, which
made transgressions against them as rare as they were considered
horrible. The modern freedom may in favourable circumstances
produce more intimate and sympathetic intercourse between parents
and children; but in the average household it has lowered the
whole tone of family life; and it threatens sooner or later, if
the ancient feeling cannot be restored, to destroy the family, the
very keystone of our religion and civilisation. This commandment
is not conditioned on the question whether parents have been more
or less successful in giving their children what they desire, or
whether they have been wise and unselfish in their dealing with
their children. As parents they have a claim upon their respect,
their tenderness, their observance, which can be neglected only at
the children's peril. Even the average parent gives quite endless
thought and care to his children, and almost unconsciously falls
into the habit of living for them. That brings with it for the
children an indelible obligation; and along with the new and wiser
freedom which is permitted in the modern home, this reverence should
grow, just as the love and reverence for God on the part of those
who have been made the free children of God through Christ ought far
to exceed that to which the best of the Old Testament saints could
attain.
[30] Kalisch, _Exodus_, p. 364:--yet taught in all Victorian State
schools under the vicious system at present admitted.
Want of reverence for parents is, in the Decalogue, made almost one
with want of reverence toward God, and, in the case of this human
duty alone, there is a promise annexed to its observance. The duty
runs so deep into the very core of human life, that its fulfilment
brings wholesomeness to the moral nature; this health spreads into
the merely physical constitution, and long life becomes the reward.
But apart from the quietude of heart and the power of self-restraint
which so great a duty rightly fulfilled brings with it, we must
also suppose that in a special manner the blessing of God does
rest upon dutiful children. Even in the modern world, amid all its
complexity, and though in numberless instances it may seem to have
been falsified, this promise verifies itself on the large scale.
In the less complex life of early Israel we may well believe that
its verification was even more strikingly seen. In both ancient
and modern times, moreover, the human conscience has leaped up
to justify the belief that of all the sins committed without the
body this is the most heinous, and that there does rest upon it
in a peculiar manner the wrath of Almighty God. It is a blasphemy
against love in its earliest manifestations to the soul, and only by
answering love with love and reverence can there be any fulfilling
of the law.
After the fifth, the commandments deal with the purely human
relations; but in coming down from the duties which men owe to God,
this law escapes the sordidness which seems to creep over the laws
of other nations, when they have to deal with the rights and duties
of men. The human rights are taken up rather into their relation
to God, and cease to be mere matters of bargain and arrangement.
They are viewed entirely from the religious and moral standpoint.
For example, the destruction of human life, which in most cases
was in ancient times dealt with by private law, and was punished
by fines or money payments, is here regarded solely as a sin, an
act forbidden by God. The will of a holy God is the source of these
prohibitions, however much the idea of property may extend in them
beyond the limits which to us now seem fitting. They begin with the
protection of a man's life, the highest of his possessions. Next,
they prohibit any injury to him through his wife, who next to his
life is most dear to him. Then property in our modern sense is
protected; and lastly, rising out of the merely physical region, the
ninth commandment prohibits any attack upon a man's civil standing
or honour by false witness concerning him in the courts of justice.
To that crime Easterns are prone to a degree which Westerns, whom
Rome has trained to reverence for law, can hardly realise. In India,
at this hour, false witnesses can be purchased in the open market
at a trifling price; and under native government the whole forces
of civil justice become instruments of the most remediless and
exasperating tyranny. So long as the law has not spoken its last
word _against_ the innocent, there is hope of remedy; justice may
at last assert itself. But when, either by corrupt witnesses or by
a corrupt judge, the law itself inflicts the wrong, then redress
is impossible, and we have the oppression which drives a wise man
mad. Both murder and robbery, moreover, may be perpetrated by false
swearing; and the trust, the confidence that social life demands, is
utterly destroyed by it.
But it is in the tenth commandment especially that this code soars
most completely away beyond others. In four short words the whole
region of neighbourly duty, so far as acts are concerned, has been
covered, and with that other codes have been content. But the laws
of Yahweh must cover more than that. Out of the heart proceed all
these acts which have been forbidden, and Yahweh takes knowledge
of its thoughts and intents. The covetous desire, the grasping
after that which we cannot lawfully have, that, too, is absolutely
forbidden. It has been pointed out that the first commandment also
deals with the thoughts. "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,"
separated from the prohibition of idol-worship, can refer only to
the inward adoration or submission of the heart. And in this last
commandment also it is the evil desire, the lust which "bringeth
forth sin," which is condemned. In its beginning and ending,
therefore, this code transcends the limits ordinarily fixed for
law; it leads the mind to a view of the depth and breadth of the
evil that has to be coped with, which the other precepts, taken
by themselves and understood in their merely literal sense, would
scarcely suggest.
This fact should guard us against the common fallacy that Moses and
the people of his day could not have understood these commandments
in any sense except the barely literal one. In the first and tenth
commandments there is involved the whole teaching of our Lord that
he that hateth his brother is a murderer. The evil thought that
first stirs the evil desire is here placed on the same interdicted
level as the evil deed; and though until our Lord had spoken none
had seen all that was implied, yet here too He was only fulfilling,
bringing to perfection, that which the law as given by Moses had
first outlined. With this in view, it seems difficult to justify
that interpretation of the commandments which refuses all depth
of meaning to them. The initial and final references to the inner
thoughts of men, the delicate moral perception which puts so
unerring a finger on the sources of sin, show that such literalism
is out of place. No interpretation can do this law justice which
treats it superficially; and instead of feeling safest when we find
least in these commandments, we should welcome from them all the
correction and reproof which a reasonable exegesis will sustain.
Some of those who adopt the other view do so in the interests of
the authenticity of the commandments. They say, We must be careful
not to put into them any idea which transcends what was possible
in the days of Moses; otherwise we must agree with those who bring
down the date of these marvellous ten words to the middle of the
seventh century B.C. But there is much ground for distrusting modern
judgments as to what men can have thought and felt in earlier and
ruder stages of society. So long as the _naïve_ interpretation
of the state of man before the fall prevailed, which Milton has
made so widely popular, the tendency was to exaggerate the early
man's moral and spiritual attainments. Now, when the most degraded
savages are taken as the truest representatives of primitive man,
the temptation is to minimise both unduly. How often have we been
told, for example, that the Australian is the lowest of mankind,
and that he has no other idea of a spiritual world than that when
he dies he will "jump up" a white man! Yet Mr. A. W. Howitt,[31]
an unexceptionable authority, as having himself been "initiated"
among the Australian blacks, tells us that they give religious and
moral instruction to their boys when they receive the privileges
of manhood. His words are: "The teachings of the initiation are in
a series of 'moral lessons,' pantomimically displayed in a manner
intended to be so impressive as to be indelible. There is clearly a
belief in a Great Spirit, or rather an anthropomorphic Supernatural
Being, the 'Master of all,' whose abode is above the sky, and to
whom are attributed powers of omnipotence and omnipresence, or,
at any rate, the power 'to do anything and to go anywhere.' The
exhibition of his image to the novices, and the magic dances round
it, approach very near to idol-worship. The wizards who profess to
communicate with him, and to be the mediums of communication between
him and his tribe, are not far removed from an organised priesthood.
To his direct ordinance are attributed the spiritual and moral laws
of the community. Although there is no worship of Daramülun, as, for
instance, by prayer, yet there is clearly an invocation of him by
name, and a belief that certain acts please while others displease
him." To most it would have seemed absurd to attribute religious
ideas of such a kind to a people in the social and moral condition
of the Australian aborigines. Yet here we have the testimony of a
perfectly competent and reliable witness, who, moreover, has no
personal bias in favour of theologic notions, to prove that even in
their present state their theology is of this comparatively advanced
kind.
[31] _Journal Anthropological Institute_, May 1884, p. 28.
Many critics like Stade, and even Kuenen, would deny to Israel in
the days of Moses any conception of Yahweh which would equal the
Australian conception of Daramülun! Not to speak of the "regrettable
vivacities" of Renan in regard to Yahweh, Kuenen would deny to the
Mosaic Yahweh the title of Lord of all; he would deny to Him the
power "to go anywhere and to do anything," binding Him strictly to
His tribe and His land; he would make His priests little more than
the Australian wizards; and purely moral laws like the Decalogue
Wellhausen would remove to a late date mainly because such laws
transcend the limits of the thought and knowledge of the Mosaic
time. But can any one believe that Israel in the Mosaic time had
lower beliefs than those of the Australian aborigines? In every
other respect they had left far behind them the social state and the
merely embryonic culture of the Australian tribes. Moses himself is
an irrefragable proof of that. No such man as he could have arisen
among a people in the state of the Australians. Even the fact that
the Hebrews had lived in Egypt, and had been compelled to do forced
labour for a long series of years, would of itself have raised them
to a higher stage of culture. Moreover they built houses, and owned
sheep and cattle, and must have known at least the rudiments of
agriculture. Indeed Deut. xi. 10 asserts this, and the testimony of
travellers as to the habits of the tribes in the wilderness of the
wanderings now confirms it. Further, they had been in contact with
Egyptian religion, and they had been surrounded by cults having more
or less relation to the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia. Under
such circumstances, even apart from all revelation, it could not be
assumed that their religious ideas must needs correspond to modern
notions of the low type of primitive religions. On the contrary,
nothing but the clearest proof that their religious conceptions
were so surprisingly low should induce us to believe it. On any
supposition, they had in the Mosaic time the first germs of what
is now universally admitted to be the highest form of religion. Can
we believe that only 1300 years B.C., in the full light of history,
coming out of a land where the religion of the people had been
systematised and elaborated, not for centuries, but for millenniums,
and only 600 years before the monotheistic prophets, a people at
such a stage of civilisation as the Hebrews can have had cruder
notions of Deity than the Wiraijuri and Wolgal tribes of New South
Wales![32] It may have been so; but before we take it to have been
so, we have a right to demand evidence of a stringent kind, evidence
which leaves us no way of escape from a conclusion so improbable.
[32] See Page Renouf, _Hibbert Lectures_.
Moreover the acceptance of the view now opposed does not get rid
of the necessity for supernatural enlightenment in Israel. It only
transfers it from an earlier to a later time. For if the knowledge
of Israel in Moses' day was below the Wolgal standard, then it
would seem inexplicable that the ethical monotheism of the prophets
should have grown out of it by any merely natural process. If there
were no inspiration before the prophets, though they believed and
asserted there was, then their own inspiration only becomes the
more marvellous. It is not needful to deny that the Hebrew tribes
may at some time have passed through the low stage of religious
belief of which these writers speak. But they err conspicuously in
regarding every trace of animistic and fetichistic worship which can
be unearthed in the language, the ceremonies, and the habits of the
Hebrews at the Exodus, as evidence of the highest beliefs of the
people at that time. As a matter of fact, these were probably mere
survivals of a state of thought and feeling then either superseded
or in the process of being so. Besides, the mass of any people
always lag far behind the thoughts and aspirations of the highest
thinkers of their nation; and if we admit inspiration at all as a
factor in the religious development of Israel, the distance between
what Moses taught and believed himself, and what he could get the
mass of the people to believe and practise, must have been still
greater. If he gave the people the ten commandments, he must have
been far above them, and dogmatic assertions as to what he can have
thought and believed ought to be abandoned.
Granting, however, that all we have found in the Decalogue's
conception of Yahweh was present to the mind of Moses, and granting
that the commands which deal with the relations of men to each
other are not mere isolated prohibitions, but are founded upon
moral principles which were understood even then to have much
wider implications, there still remains a gap between the widest
meaning that early time could put into them, and that which Luther's
Catechism, or the Catechism of the Westminster Divines, for example,
asserts. The question therefore arises whether these wider and more
detailed explanations, which make the Decalogue cover the whole
field of the moral and religious life, are legitimate, and if so,
on what principle can they be justified? The reply would seem to
be that they are legitimate, and that the ten words did contain
much more than Moses or any of his nation for many centuries after
him understood. For any fruitful thought, any thought which really
penetrates the heart of things, must have in it wider implications
than the first thinker of it can have conceived. If by any means a
man has had insight to see the central fact of any domain of thought
and life, its applications will not be limited to the comparatively
few cases to which he may apply it. He will generally be content
to deduce from his discovery just those conclusions which in
his circumstances and in his day are practically useful and are
most clamorously demanded. But those who come after, pressed by
new needs, challenged by new experiences, and enlightened by new
thoughts in related regions, will assuredly find that more was
involved in that first step than any one had seen. The scope of the
fruitful principle will thus inevitably widen with the course of
things, and inferences undreamed of by those who first enunciated
the principle will be securely drawn from it by later generations.
Now if that be true in regard to truths discovered by the unassisted
intellect of man, how much more true will it be of thoughts which
have first been revealed to man under the influence of inspiration?
Behind the human mind which received them and applied them to the
circumstances which then had to be dealt with, there is always the
infinite mind which sees that
"Far-off Divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
The Divine purpose of the revelation must be the true measure of the
thoughts revealed, and the Divine purpose can best be learned by
studying the results as they have actually evolved themselves in the
course of ages. Consequently, while the fundamental point in sound
interpretation of a book such as the Bible is to ascertain _first_
what the statements made therein signified to those who heard them
first, the second point is not to shut the mind to the wider and
more extensive applications of them which the thought and experience
of men, taught by the course of history, have been induced, or even
compelled, to make. Both the narrower and the wider meanings are
there, and were meant to be found there. No exposition which ignores
either can be adequate.
That all works of God are to be dealt with in this way is
beautifully demonstrated by Ruskin (_Fors Clavigera_, Vol. I.,
Letter V.). In criticising the statement of a botanist that "there
is no such thing as a flower," after admitting that in a certain
sense the lecturer was right, he goes on to say: "But in the deepest
sense of all, he was to the extremity of wrongness wrong; for
leaf and root and fruit exist, all of them, only--that there may
be flowers. He disregarded the life and passion of the creature,
which were its essence. Had he looked for these, he would have
recognised that in the thought of nature herself, there is, in a
plant, nothing else but flowers." That means, of course, that the
final perfection of a development is the real and final meaning of
it all. Now any thought given by God in this special manner which we
call "inspiration" has in it a manifold and varied life, and an end
in view, which God alone foresees. It works like leaven, it grows
like a seed. It is supremely living and powerful; and though it may
have begun its life, like the mustard seed, in a small and lowly
sphere, it casts out branches on all sides till its entire allotted
space is filled. So in the Decalogue; the central chord in all the
matters dealt with has been touched with Divine skill, and all that
has further to be revealed or learned on that matter must lie in the
line of the first announcement.
It is not, therefore, an illegitimate extension of the meaning
of the first commandment to say that it teaches monotheism, nor
of the second that it teaches the spirituality of God, nor of
the seventh that it forbids all sensuality in thought or word or
deed. It is true that probably only the separateness of God was
originally seen to be asserted in the first, and the words may
possibly have been understood to mean that the "other gods" referred
to had some kind of actual life. The second, too, may have seemed
to be fulfilled when no earthly thing that was made by man was
taken to represent Yahweh. Lastly, those who say that nothing is
forbidden in the seventh commandment but literal adultery have much
to say for themselves. In a polygamous society concubinage always
exists. The absence of the more flagrant of what in monogamous
societies are called social evils does not in the least imply the
superior morality, such as many who wish to disparage our Christian
civilisation have ascribed, for instance, to Mohammedans. The
degraded class of women who are the reproach and the despair of our
large towns are not so frequent in those societies, because all
women are degraded to nearer their level than in monogamous lands.
Both lust and vice are more prevalent: and they are so because the
whole level of thought and feeling in regard to such matters is much
lower than with us.
Now, undoubtedly, ancient Israel was no exception to this rule.
In it, as a polygamous nation, there was a licence in regard to
sexual relations with women who were neither married nor betrothed
which would be impossible now in any Christian community. It may
be, therefore, that only the married woman was specially protected
by this law. But in none of these cases did the more rudimentary
conception of the scope of the commandments last. By imperceptible
steps the sweep of them widened, until finally the last consequences
were deduced from them, and they were seen to cover the whole sphere
of human duty. It may have been a long step from the prohibition
to put other gods along with Yahweh to St. Paul's decisive word
"An idol is nothing in the world," but the one was from the first
involved in the other. Between "Thou shalt not make unto thee a
graven image" and our Lord's declaration "God is a Spirit, and
must be worshipped in spirit and in truth," there lies a long and
toilsome upward movement; but the first was the gate into the path
which must end in the second. Similarly, the commandment which
affirmed so strongly the sacredness of the family, by hedging round
the house-mother with this special defence held implicit in it all
that rare and lovely purity which the best type of Christian women
exhibit. The principles upon which the initial prohibitions were
founded were true to fact and to the nature both of God and man.
They were, therefore, never found at fault in the advancing stages
of human experience; and the meaning which a modern congregation
of Christians finds in these solemn "words," when they are read
before them, is as truly and justly their meaning as the more meagre
interpretation which alone ancient Israel could put upon them.
How gradually, and how naturally, the advancing thoughts and changed
circumstances of Israel affected the Decalogue may be seen most
clearly in the differences between its form as originally given, and
as it is set forth in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. If the original
form of these commandments was what we have indicated (p. 69),
they corresponded entirely to the circumstances of the wilderness.
There is no reference in them which presupposes any other social
background than that of a people dwelling together according to
families, possessing property, and worshipping Yahweh. None of the
commandments involves a social state different from that. But when
Israel had entered upon its heritage, and had become possessed of
the oxen and asses which were needed in agricultural labour and in
settled life, this stage of their progress was reflected in the
reasons and inducements which were added to the original commands.
In the fourth and tenth commandments of Exodus we have consequently
the essential commandments of the earlier day adapted to a new
state of things, _i.e._ to a settled agricultural life. Then,
even as between the Exodus and Deuteronomic texts, a progress is
perceptible. The reasons for keeping the Sabbath which these two
recensions give are different, as we have seen, and it is probable
that the reason given in Deuteronomy was first. To the people in the
wilderness came the bare Divine command that this one day was to be
sacred to Yahweh. In both Exodus and Deuteronomy we have additions,
going into details which show that when these versions were prepared
Israel had ceased to be nomadic and had become agricultural. In
Deuteronomy we find that the importance and usefulness of this
command from a humane point of view had been recognised, and one
at least of the grounds upon which it should be held a point of
morality to keep it is set forth in the words "that thy manservant
and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou." Finally, if the
critical views be correct, in Exodus we have the motive for the
observance of the Sabbath raised to the universal and eternal, by
being brought into connection with the creative activity of God.
If the progression now traced out be real, then we have in it a
classical instance of the manner in which Divine commands were
given and dealt with in Israel. Given in the most general form at
first, they inevitably open the way for progress, and as thought
and experience grow in volume and rise in quality, so does the
understanding of the law as given expand. Under the influence of
this expansion addition after addition is made, till the final form
is reached; and the whole is then set forth as having been spoken by
Yahweh and given by Moses when the command was first promulgated.
In such cases literary proprietorship was never in question. Each
addition was sanctioned by revelation, and those by whom it came
were never thought of. It would seem, indeed, that nothing but
modern sceptical views as to the reality of revelation, the feeling
that all this movement to a higher faith was merely natural, and
that the hand of God was not in it, could have suggested to the
ancient Hebrew writers the wish to hand on the names of those by
whom such changes were made. Yahweh spoke at the beginning, Moses
mediated between the people and Yahweh, and the law thus mediated
was in all forms equally Mosaic, and in all forms equally Divine.
One other thing remains to be noticed, and that is the prevailingly
negative form of the commandments. Of the ten only the fourth and
fifth are in the affirmative. All the others are prohibitions, and
we who have been taught by Christianity to put emphasis upon the
positive aspects of duty as the really important aspects of it,
may not improbably feel chilled and repelled by a moral code which
so definitely and prevailingly forbids. But the cause of this is
plain. A code like that of the Twelve Tables published in early Rome
is only occasionally negative, because it rises to no great height
in its demands, and is intent only upon ordering the life of the
citizens in their outward conduct. But this code, which seeks to
raise the whole of life into the sacredness of a continual service
of God and man, must forbid, because the first condition of such a
life is the renunciation and the restriction of self. Benevolent
dreamers and theorists of all ages, and men of the world whose
moral standard is merely the attainment of the average man, have
denied the evil tendency in man's nature. They have asserted that
man is born good; but the facts of experience are entirely against
them. Whenever a serious effort has been made to raise man to any
conspicuous height of moral goodness, it has been found necessary
to forbid him to follow the bent of his nature. "Thou shalt not"
has been the prevailing formula; and in this sense original sin has
always been witnessed to in the world. Hence the Old Testament, in
which the most strenuous conflict for goodness which the world in
those ages knew was being carried on, could not fail, in every part
of it, to proclaim that man is not born good. However late we may be
compelled to put the writing of the story of the fall as it stands
in Genesis, there can be no question that it represents the view of
the Old Testament at all times. Man is fallen; he is not what he
ought to be, and the evil taint is handed on from one generation
to another. Every generation, therefore, is called, by prophet and
priest and lawgiver alike, to the conflict against the natural man.
The truth is that all along the leaders of Israel had a quite
overawing sense of the moral greatness of Yahweh and of the
stringency of His demands upon them. "Be ye holy, for I am holy,"
was His demand; and so among this people, as among no other, the
sense of sin was heightened, till it embittered life to all who
seriously took to heart the religion they professed. This feeling
sought relief in expiatory sacrifices, like the sin offering and
the guilt offering; but in vain. It then led to Pharisaic hedging
of the law, to seeking a positive precept for every moment of time,
to binding upon men's consciences the most minute and burdensome
prescriptions, as a means of making them what they must be if they
were to meet the Divine requirements. But that too failed. It became
a slavery so intolerable that, when St. Paul received the power of
a new life, his predominant feeling was that for the first time he
knew what liberty meant. He was set free from both the bondage of
sin and the bondage of ritual.
To the religious man of the Old Testament life was a conflict
against evil tendencies, a conflict in which defeat was only too
frequent, but from which there was no discharge. It was fitting,
therefore, that at the very beginning of Israel's history, as the
people of God, this stern prohibition of the rougher manifestations
of the natural man should stand.
But it is characteristic of the Old Testament that it states
the fundamental fact, without any of the over-refinements and
exaggerations by which later doctrinal developments have discredited
it. There is no appearance here, or anywhere in the Old Testament,
of the Lutheran exaggeration that man is by nature impotent to all
good, as a stock or a stone is. Keeping close to the testimony of
the universal conscience, the Decalogue, and the Old Testament
generally, speaks to men as those who can be otherwise if they
will. There is, further, a robust assertion of righteous intention
and righteous act on the part of those whose minds are set to be
faithful to God. This may have been partly due to a blunter feeling
in regard to sin, and a less highly developed conscience, but it
was mainly a healthy assertion of facts which ought not to be
ignored. Yet, with all that, original sin was too plain a fact ever
to be denied by the healthy-minded saints of the Old Testament.
Fundamentally, they held that human nature needed to be restrained,
its innate lawlessness needed to be curbed, before it could be made
acceptable to God.
Among the heathen nations that was not so. Take the Greeks, for
instance, as the highest among them. Their watchword in morals was
not repression, but harmonious development. Every impulse of human
nature was right, and had the protection of a deity peculiarly its
own. Restraint, such as the Israelite felt to be his first need,
would have been regarded as mutilation by the Greek, for he was
dominated by no higher ideal than that of a fully developed man.
There was no vision of unattainable holiness hovering always before
his mind, as there was before the mind of the Israelite. God had
not revealed Himself to him in power and unalloyed purity, with a
background of infinite wisdom and omnipotence, so that unearthly
love and goodness were seen to be guiding and ruling the world. As
a consequence, the calling and destiny of man were conceived by the
Greeks in a far less soaring fashion than by Israel. To put the
difference in a few words, man, harmoniously developed in all his
powers and passions and faculties, with nothing excessive about him,
was made God by the Greeks; whereas in Israel God was brought down
into human life to bear man's burden and to supply the strength
needed that man might become like God in truth and mercy and
purity. It is of course true that both conceived of God under human
categories. They could not conceive God save by attributing to Him
that which they looked upon as highest in man. It is also true that
the higher natures in both nations, starting thus differently, did
in much approach each other. Still, the immense difference remains,
that the impulse in the one case was given from the earth by dreams
of human perfection, in the other it came from above through men who
had seen God. The Greeks had seen only the glory of man; Israel had
seen the glory of God.
The result was that human nature as it is seemed to the one much
more worthy of respect and much less seriously compromised than it
did to the other. Comparing man as he is, only with man as he easily
might be, the Greeks took a much less serious view of his state than
the Hebrews, who compared him with God as He had revealed Himself.
The former never attained any clear conception of sin, and regarded
it as a passing weakness which could without much trouble be
overcome. The latter saw that it was a radical and now innate want
of harmony with God, which could only be cured by a new life being
breathed into man from above. And when Europe became Christian,
this difference made itself felt in very widespread religious and
theological divergences. In the South and among the Latin races the
less strenuous view of human disabilities--the view which naturally
grew out of the heathen conception of man as, on the whole, born
good, with no very arduous moral heights to scale--has prevailed,
and in those regions the Pelagian form of doctrine has mastered the
Christian Church. But the Teutonic races have, in this matter, shown
a remarkable affinity with the Hebrew mind and teaching. The deeper
and more tragic view of the state of man has commended itself to
the Teutonic mind, and the depth of the moral taint in the natural
man has been estimated according to the Biblical standard. It is
not only theologians among the Northern races who have been thus
affected. The higher imaginative literature of England gives the
same impression; and in our own day Browning, our greatest poet, has
emphasised his acceptance of the Augustinian view of human nature
by making its teaching as to original sin a proof of the truth of
Christianity.[33] At the end of his poem "Gold Hair: a Story of
Pornic," in which he tells how a girl of angelic beauty, and of
angelic purity of nature as was supposed, is found after her death
to have sold her soul to the most gruesome avarice, he says:--
"The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays and Reviews' debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight:
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin:
'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie--taught original sin,
The corruption of man's heart."
[33] Browning's _Poetical Works_, vol. vi., p. 69.
But the Pagan view always reasserts itself; and modern Hellenists
especially, in their admiration of the grace which does undoubtedly
go with such conceptions of goodness as the Greeks could attain, are
apt to look askance at the harshness and strenuousness which they
find in the Old Testament. For the most pathetic and pure of the
Greek conceptions of the gods are those which, like Demeter, embody
mother's love or some other natural glory of humanity. Being thus
natural, they are set before us by the Greek imagination with an
unconstrained and graceful beauty which makes goodness appeal to the
æsthetic sense. To do this seems to many the supreme achievement.
Without this they hold that Christianity would fail to meet the
requirements of the modern heart and mind, for to interest "taste"
on the side of goodness is, apparently, better than to let men feel
the compulsion of duty. Reasoning on such premisses, they claim
that Greek religion gave to Christianity its completion and its
crown. This is the claim advanced by Dyer in his _Gods of Greece_
(p. 19). "The Greek poets and philosophers," he says, "are among
our intellectual progenitors, and therefore the religion of to-day
has requirements which include all that the noblest Greeks could
dream of, requirements which the aspirations of Israel alone could
not satisfy. Our complex life had need, not only of a supreme God
of power, universal and irresistible, of a jealous God beside whom
there was no other God, but also of a God of love and grace and
purity. To these ideal qualities, present in the Diviner godhead
of the Gospels, the evolution of Greek mythology brought much
that satisfies our hearts." The best answer to that is to read
Deuteronomy. The Hebrews had no need to borrow "a God of love and
grace and purity" from Greek mythology. Centuries before they came
in contact with Greeks, their inspired men had painted the love
and grace and purity of God in the most attractive colours. Nor
did they ever need to unlearn the belief that Yahweh was merely
a supreme God of power. In the course of our exposition we shall
have occasion to see that the worship of mere power was superseded
by the religion of Yahweh from the first, and that the author of
Deuteronomy gives his whole strength to demonstrate that the God of
Israel is a "God of love and grace and purity." But perhaps "grace"
means to Mr. Dyer "gracefulness." In that case we would deny that
"the Diviner godhead of the Gospels," as revealed in Jesus Christ,
had that æsthetic quality either. There is no word of an appeal
to the sense of the artistically beautiful in anything recorded
of Him; but neither in the Old Testament nor the New is there any
want of moral beauty in the representation given of God. Moral
beauty alone has a central place in religion; and when beauty that
appeals to the senses intrudes into religion, it becomes a source of
weakness rather than of strength. There may be a few people who can
trust to their taste to keep them firm in the pursuit of goodness,
but the bulk of men have always needed, and will always need, the
severer compulsion of duty. They need an objective standard; they
need a God, the embodiment and enforcer of all that duty demands of
them; and when they bend themselves to the yoke of obligation thus
imposed, they enter into a world of heavenly beauty which seizes and
enraptures the soul. The mere æsthetic beauty of Greek mythology
pales, for the more earnest races of mankind at least, before this
Diviner loveliness, and it is the special gift of the Hebrew as well
as of the Teutonic races to be sensitive to it, just as they fall
behind others in æsthetic sensitiveness. Wordsworth felt this, and
has expressed it inimitably in his "Ode to Duty"--
"Stern Lawgiver! yet Thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon Thy face."
That expresses the Hebrew feeling also. Drawn upwards by the
infinite and unchangeable love and goodness of Yahweh, the Hebrews
felt the clog of their innate sinfulness as no other race has done.
The stern "thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue consequently found an
echo in their hearts. Won by the beauty of holiness, they gladly
welcomed the discipline of the Divine law, and by doing so they
established human goodness on a foundation immeasurably more stable
than any the gracefulness of Greek imaginations could hope to lay.
CHAPTER VI
_THE MEDIATORSHIP OF MOSES_
DEUT. v. 22-33
After the ten commandments, Deuteronomy, like Exodus, next indicates
that for all of legislation, exhortation, and advice that follows,
Moses was to be the mediator between God and the people. He is
represented as Yahweh's prophet or speaker in all that succeeds; the
Decalogue alone is set forth as the direct Divine command. Evidently
a great distinction is here notified, and what it exactly was may
be best explained by reference to the history of Roman law. In the
earliest times that consisted of _Fas_, _Jus_, and _Jus moribus
constitutum_. In Chapter IV. Professor Muirhead's description of fas
has been given at length, so that we need not repeat it here. The
point to remember is that it consisted of universal precepts such
as the Decalogue contains, given direct by God. _Jus_ again was,
according to Breal, the Divine will declared by human agency, and it
occupied much the position which law does in civilised states now.
Finally, _jus moribus constitutum_, or _boni more
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