THE HEBREW HISTORICAL BOOKS. 11 count of the matter. He does not boast that he proclaimed any tenet about the unity of God at all. He says that the I AM, the living God, sent him to be the guide and deliverer of his countrymen. The Egyptians believed in a hidden god. He said that hidden God had come forth to declare himself. The Egyptians thought that he had delegated to a set of priests the power to interpret His mind. He said God was ever living and acting. The priest was the witness of his presence, and of His relation to men. The Egyptian held that sacrifices were the means of converting the Divine will to man's will. He said they were confessions of man's revolt from God's will, and could never be bribes to the Divine Being, who had himself appointed their kind and their amount. The Egyptian spoke of laws which were either irreversible or to be changed at the will of the monarch. He spoke of laws as the utterance of an unseen and eternal King, which no man could set aside, which were ever proceeding from the mouth of God himself, enforced by thunders and lightnings, declaring to each Israelite that he was in the presence of God, warning him of tendencies which were hateful in God's eyes, and would destroy him. The Egyptian had statutes provided for the particular emergencies of the land, which must be enforced by some religious machinery. The law of Moses assumes that the Lord of all, who does not think it beneath Him to care for the growth of trees and the fall of sparrows, directed the arrangements which were suitable to an agricultural people dwelling on the shores of the Mediterrancan. The Egyptians had temples where they worshipped beings whom they conceived of from the different phenomena of Nature in the places where these temples stood. Moses affirmed that God does not float in the air, or dwell in the hills, or in the clouds; but that there, where it pleased him to dwell, might His glory be felt, there might the worshipper converse with him. Whether this description of the polity be true or not, it is at least consistent. It does not set aside Egyptian institutions or Egyptian faith; it justifies them by inverting them. They were grounded upon man's conceptions of God; the Israelite's upon God's declaration of Himself to man. The one assumes the nation to be a society which must be upheld, which can only be upheld, by Divine sanction,-which must, therefore, forge these sanctions; the other assumes the nation to be established by the living and true God himself, to be the witness of His truth and permanence, to be bound to a perpetual protest and war against every attempt to confound Him with visible objects. 12. This, according to the Hebrew economy, is the one great The office of characteristic function of the nation. It grows out of the the nation. family; it is grounded on the family covenant; it must preserve the family distinctions; its lands must be apportioned to the different tribes; its memorial feasts must be connected with the life of the household; in battle every man must encamp by the standard of the house of his fathers. But the nation is not a mere collection of families. It is a witness of a perpetual battle that is going on between order and disorder, right and wrong, the invisible God who is the Lord of man, and the visible things which are claiming lordship over him. The Israelite, the covenant servant of God, is to take part in this fight; he is to go forth as God's instrument in putting down corruption and oppression. When he has a commission to destroy, he is to destroy. He is to hold the sacrifice of individual life a cheap thing for the sake of asserting the right and the truth, which men have violated. Idolatry he looks upon as the cause of all strife and degradation. He is to hate it with a perfect hatred. The signs of 13. This new stage in the life of the Israelites is the comnational life. mencement of Song and of Written Law. The first is the ex Song. The Code. Its authority. pression of thanksgiving for deliverance from the visible oppressor. It proclaims the Lord as a deliverer and a man of war. It is poured forth by an individual man who feels that he is the member of a nation, and who becomes its spokesman. Though he speaks the praises of God, he feels that he is inspired by God. The flame of the song, like that of the sacrifice, has been first kindled by Him to whom it ascends. It The Code is precisely the opposite of the Song. It comes from the lips of the Lord; it is simply His utterance. carries with it no inspiration. It takes each man apart, and makes him feel that he alone is spoken to, though a crowd surrounds him. Yet it too comes forth from a Deliverer; it is the sign of a new and greatly-advanced stage of education. The discipline of experience has not passed away, but distinct formal precepts have been added to it. The memorial stones or pillars have given place to the written letter. The finger of God has permanently set down the decrees which his people are to keep. They are decrees. The whole force of the code, as a code, consists in its coming forth from Him who has a right to command, who has given the sea its bounds, and has determined what man is to be. The right of the Lawgiver to say-So it shall be is the foundation of every precept. But then it must be remembered that He who claims this right first revealed Himself to the Israelite as his Deliverer and Friend, as the enemy of oppression and wrong, as One who does not act from self-will. A law wanting in either of these conditions the Hebrew Scriptures teach us to consider a contradiction. If law is the creature of self-will, its meaning and its sanction perish in the very attempt to enforce it. For law to proceed fromi those to whom it is addressed, is equally at variance with the idea of these books. They assume that there is a righteous Will in the universe, and that that Will can utter itself, and has uttered itself. But the code is addressed to the covenant people. It is The Code strictly national. How, then, have the Ten Commandments national. been felt to be the moral institute of the tribes of modern Europe, differing as they do in all external respects from the Jewish? It is not too much anticipating a future part of this sketch, to say that this has only happened in so far as the inhabitants of modern Europe have felt themselves to belong to distinct nations, and have recognised the essential grounds of the Jewish polity, the covenant, calling, actual government of an unseen Lord, as applying to themselves in their national character. Not as members of a more extensive society, but precisely as united in particular local societies, have they felt the obligations and the virtue of this code. Anything which has weakened their national feeling, or absorbed it, has weakened the authority of the Ten Commandments. Hence the distinction between these Commandments and the mere statutes of the Jewish people has strongly commended itself to the conscience of these nations, not because they have denied the latter to have a Divine origin, but because they have felt that the same Wisdom which adapted a certain class of commands to the peculiarities of one locality and age, must intend a different one for another. The Ten Commandments they have recognised, as possessing nothing of this limitation. of moral and positive pre The distinction of positive and essentially moral commands, Distinction which some have sought to introduce into this subject, does not therefore seem to concern us here. We may have many occa- cepts. sions for noticing it hereafter, but into the question of a code it cannot enter. Every part of a Law must, ex vi termini, be positive; that is, it must be laid down. But what is laid down may concern the inhabitants of a particular district as such, or may concern them as human beings. This is a distinction to the perception of which the subjects of the Jewish economy were especially awakened. To the Commandments which were spoken on Sinai there were added no more. All the subsequent legislation, though referred to the same Authority, is separated from these. All the subsequent history was a witness to the Jew that in the setting up of any god besides the Unseen Deliverer, in the fancy that there could be any likeness of Him in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; in the loss of awe for His Name; in the loss of the distinction between Work and Rest as the ground of man's life, and as having its archetype in the Divine Being, and as Property. The universal element in the nation. The Jewish a moral and metaphysi worked by Him into the tissue of the existence of His own people; in the loss of reverence for parents, for life, for marriage, for property, for character, and in the covetous feeling which is at the root of these evils-lay the sources of political disunion and crime, the loss of all personal dignity and manliness. Property, it will be seen, was carefully guarded by this code. One of its provisions refers to this subject. It cannot be pretended that this law exists for the sake of protecting individual possession, though it may truly be affirmed that the reverence for property was a sign of this second stage of Jewish education. With the earlier tent life of the patriarchs it had comparatively little to do. We see the commencement of it in the disputes between the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham in the arrangements about wells, in the purchase of burying-grounds. It comes out clearly in the assignment of portions to the sons of Jacob. But as yet there are within the limits of the chosen people no distinct rules to protect it. It is connected with the distinct protesting character of the nation itself, with the distinct sense of individuality which was awakened in its members. But mixed with the family and national institutions, was the hint of something more large than either family or nation. The Levite tribe was exempt from the ordinary regulations of property. It represented the whole people, and represented each family; while it bore witness that the relation in which the Israelites stood to the I AM, could not be satisfactorily expressed without breaking through the forms and limitations of a local commonwealth. In fact, all these institutions, while they taught Israelites to prize boundaries and land-marks, while they strengthened their attachment to place and their reverence for it, were perpetually reminding every one who devoutly submitted to them, and meditated on them, that he had that in him which did not belong to space or to time, to which only a Being above all such restraints could speak, which only the knowledge of such a Being could satisfy. 14. Whatever other characteristics this history may have, or may want, no one will deny that it is a moral and metaphysical cal history. history, according to the definition which has already been given of those terms. It is moral, in that, from the first to last, it refers directly to man, to the habits, ways, constitution of the human race, as distinct from every other race. It is metaphysical, inasmuch as it asserts that man himself is distinct from physical things; that though he has that in him which is under the law of growth and decay, he has that also which connects him with what is fixed, constant, permanent, with a living personal Being, who is above the laws of nature, and who Himself imposed them. THE HEBREW HISTORICAL BOOKS. 15 history of a 15. But though a moral and metaphysical history, we have Not the admitted already that it is no history of a philosophy, of thoughts philosophy about wisdom, or of a search after it. Another remark must be or of a religion. made here. If this is no history of a Philosophy, it is also no history of a Religion, in the sense which we commonly give to that word. It is not the history of men's thoughts about God, or desires after God, or affections towards Him. It professes to be a history of God's unveiling of Himself to man. If it is not that it is nothing, it is false from beginning to end. To make it the history of the speculations of a certain tribe about God, we must deny the very root of any speculations which that tribe ever had, for this root is the belief that they could not think of Him, unless He had first thought of them; that they could not speak of Him, unless He were speaking to them. A class of modern teachers assume that God is made in the image of man, is formed after his conceptions; and then insist that a nation must have had this conviction, which acted and lived upon the opposite one. Let every people be allowed to speak its own word, to tell us what it means. We who think the Hebrews spoke a true word-meant the true thing, only claim for them what we would claim for all,-the right of interpreting themselves. of the 16. We have denied that the history of the Hebrews is the The relihistory of a religion or a philosophy. But we fully admit that gious books there are Hebrew books which, in the ordinary sense of the Hebrews. word, are to be called religious, just as we contend that there are some which, in the ordinary sense of the word, are to be called philosophical. When the Jewish Rabbinical schools assigned the name of "holy writings" to one part of these books, and of "histories" to another, they expressed their feeling that there are some of them which especially embody the aspirations of the human spirit after a Divine person, just as there are those which set forth the acts of that Divine person towards men. The book of Psalms is the chief of the holy writings. The tendency in later times has been to give it this character too strictly and exclusively, to overlook the historical The Psalms. and political features of the Psalms, which are so conspicuous to all plain readers, and to regard them simply as utterances of individual sorrow, or trust, or thankfulness, or rapture. By doing so, we destroy the meaning of the writer; we do not separate his religious feelings from their surrounding elements, but give them a new character altogether. The Psalmist is not a recluse brooding over his own feelings and experiences. He is a man learning, under the heavy pressure of life, in the battlefield, on the judgment-seat, through the cruelty of persecutors, the fellowship of outlaws, the rebellion of sons, his personal |