THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT HEBREWS.* Ma. MONTEFIORE regards it
as certain that "we possess no unquestionably authentic and homogeneous contemporary writings older than the second half of the eighth century B.C." In history, as distinct from literature, he finds nothing authentic till he comes to Moses. Let us consider the second statement first. It is not a little surprising to find a Jew— and Mr. Mon tefiore is a Jew of the most patriotic type —resigning his belief in the hero whom generations beyond counting have regarded as the father of their race. "Children of Abraham" is the designation which the Hebrew people has for nearly three thousand years delighted to claim, and now we are told that Abraham is a myth ! Nor is this a mere sentimental objection. The personality of Abraham is of incalculable importance in the religious history of the world. It is not merely that he is a noble figure which it would be a loss to the sentiment of mankind to relegate to the region of fable; it is that his characteristic greatness—the quality of his belief in the unseen, which raised him above other nomad chiefs—is at the foundation of both Jewish and Christian religion. The very word " faith " calls up the image of the man who "went out not knowing whither he went." It is impossible to estimate the loss to belief which must follow when the whole story of the Call and the Promise is pronounced to be a romance. Mr. Montefiore expresses in eloquent language his admiration of the constancy with which his race has endured, and still endures, the cruellest persecution. Does he think that it would have been as steadfast and tenacious if its noblest traditions bad been resolved into fable and legend P And what is there, one asks, of a fabulous and legendary character in the story of Abraham and his descendants P There is very little of the miraculous in it. There are narratives, doubtless, of a com- munion between God and man, but the language in which they are expressed is very little different from that which is to be found in the description of religious experience even down to our own time. On the whole, the history of Abraham, as "he dwelt in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob," is a simple tale of pastoral life, such as might be easily paralleled by narratives unquestionably authentic. As for the element of marvel, it is far less prominent in the so.called patriarchal times than when we come to the epoch where Mr. Monte- fibre finds, for the first time, firm historical ground,—the time "when the Hebrew clans, under the guidance of a common leader, are about to leave their settlements upon the borders of Egypt and to seek a new home in Canaan." Then, again, historical criticism that seems certain to one genera- tion becomes unsettled in the next. Fifty years ago, the Regal period in Roman history was commonly pronounced to be a fable, the critics, among other objections, declaring that seven kings could not possibly have reigned 243 years. Opinion has now very much changed. As to the years, some one dis- covered that seven successive Kings of Ashanti actually reigned longer,—and Ashanti is scarcely a favourable place for regal longevity. Then, again, the British King Arthur has emerged into history from the region of myth, the place and date of his great victory over the West Saxons being pretty well agreed upon.
There are reasons no less cogent why we should hesitate in attributing certainty to the conclusions of literary criticism. There are not wanting instances in this province similar to those cited above in the region of history. Great changes have taken place, to quote one conspicuous example, in critical opinion on the date of the Homeric poems. The nucleus at least, whether we call it an Achilleid or anything else, has been put back by some most competent scholars by three centuries or more from the most ancient date accepted a quarter-of-a-century ago, or even less. Then, again, we have to consider whether the Hebrew books, as we have them now, do not conceal much more ancient forms ; a theory which may be fatal to the views of the extreme inspirationists, but is not inconsistent with the contention of reasonably conservative theologians.
But let us pass on to what Mr. Montefiore thinks to be firm ground, the age of Moses. Here we have the beginning of monotheism, or, as our author prefers to call it, monolatry. "There is no likelihood that monolatry preceded Moses." The
• Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Rebrevie. I" Hibbort Lectures, ma") By 0. G. btonteflore. London : Williams and Norgate. 1892.
Old Testament, "critically examined," does not lead us to think so, "and the analogy of other races contradicts it." We have italicised this passage because it indicates clearly enough the ruling thought in the writer's mind, a thought fatal to the idea which underlies the whole history of the Jewish people,— the idea of a Divine Choice, a Divine Mission. Their religion, on this theory, was a purely human growth. What cannot be traced in the history of other peoples, cannot be believed of this, The marvellous endurance of the race—an endurance to which no parallel can be found elsewhere—unless it can be ascribed to some physical excellence, is the result of a faith which turns out, according to Mr. Montefiore, to be an absolute delusion. But how did Moses come by his " monolatry" P To say, with some theorists, that be learnt it in Midian, is only to put the difficulty a step further back. It does not help us for ward to take the alternative view that the Sinairic peninsula was the home and origin of Yahveh. How did the conception get to the Sinaitie peninsula P Or was Yahveh the family god of Moses, whom his commanding personality was able to impose on his compatriots ? All that the writer seems certain of is that Moses was a very great man, "of high inspiration or exalted genius," who by his sublime conception of a pure and just God made a nation out of the tribe which he led.
Passing over the second chapter, which is devoted to a speculative account of the moral and religious development of Israel during the five centuries from 1250 to 750 B.C., we come to what is, on the whole, the most interesting portion of the volume, "The Prophets of the Eighth Century B.C." These prophets, in his view, are four in number, placed in the following order,—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah. (Joel is assigned to the latter part of the fourth century B.C.) Their great contribution to the development of religion was -" Universalism," the step from monolatry to monotheism, a teaching that begins with the belief that the God of Israel is greater than the gods of the nations, and ends with the sublime conception of him as the God of the whole earth :—
" Complete universalism is only then attained when the nations are conceived as converted to Israel's God for their own benefit and edification. The interval from the former stages to this further and fuller conception seems also, at least once, to have been traversed by Isaiah. At the close of his long ministry he .appears to have framed the idea of a true knowledge of Yahveh and his religion diffused permanently among Israel's two great enemies of the near and of the distant past, Assyria and Egypt. I do not venture to adduce here the celebrated fragment, found both in Isaiah and Micah, of the nations journeying to Jerusalem, to learn Yaliveh's ways and to walk in his paths. Its pre-exilic origin is, perhaps, not sufficiently assured. But we are still en- titled to assign the noble end of the nineteenth chapter to Isaiah himself; and if the two greatest nations within his geographical horizon are there pictured as glad converts to Yahveh, it would surely seem as if the idea of an ultimate abolition of all idolatry, and of the establishment of the world-wide empire of Yahveh, had shed at least a passing glory upon his visions of the coming age, If this be so, it is very striking that even after the deliverance from Assyria, when the Messianic age still delayed to dawn upon an unrepentant and unbelieving world, Isaiah did not lose his hope in a great spiritual future, and that he took leave of the world in a splendid prophecy of universalism, in which the two typical enemies of Isra I are to be united with him in common service of a common God, and recognised by that God as his worshippers and children."
The fourth lecture is given to " The Seventh Century : Deuteronomy and Jeremiah," Mr. Montefiore, following a wide consensus of criticism, believes that it was the " book of the law" which Hilkiah the priest found in the Temple in the reign of Josiah. He finds the closest parallel to its teaching in the utterances of Hosea. The date of its composition would be not far removed from that of its discovery (Professor Driver thinks that it must be put back into the reign of Manasseh). The efforts of some critics to find later addi- tions in chapters v.-xi. do not approve themselves to him ; the first four chapters and those that follow the twenty- eighth he considers to be a later accretion.
The sixth lecture (the fifth being devoted to "The Baby- lonian Exile" as illustrated by the utterances of Ezekiel and the Second Isaiah) deals with the " Restoration and the Priestly Law." We can but quote Mr. Montefiore's view, expressed with a somewhat startling air of certainty. He begins by quoting how Ezra read the book of the law of Moses to the people " in the broad space that was before the water-gate " :— " The greater portion of it is undoubtedly still preserved to us in large sections of the Pentateuch and Joshui, Speaking very roughly, and including additions made subsequently to the pro- clamation under Ezra in 414 it embraces some eleven chapters in Genesis, some nineteen in Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, and twenty-eight chapters of Numbers. If you were to print these eighty-five chapters together, they would not make a continuous whole, neither would they form a `book' in the ordinary accepta- tion of the word. The reasons are manifold. The Pentateuch, as we now possess it, is a fusion of these eighty-five chapters with the two far older narratives of the pro-prophetic or early prophetic period, and with the law of Deuteronomy. That fusion was effected in the generations succeeding Ezra. But when the eighty-five priestly chapters were dovetaile i with the other sixty- eight (omitting Deuteronomy), neither portion of the conglomerate was unimpaired by the process. But this is only one reason out of three for the fragmentary appearance of the eighty-five chapters if printed by themselves. Another is, that additions were made to the ' book' subsequently to Ezra. And the third and most im- portant is, that in the form in which Ezra read it aloud to that famous assembly at Jerusalem, it was already an interpolated book, without any claim to artistic unity."
The three concluding chapters are given to the period from " Nehemiah to the Maccabees," the third being the most striking in its dealing with the subject of "The Law and its
Influence." The whole is well worth the most careful atten- tion; one passage of surpassing interest we must quote :—
" It is only now that this amazing idealisation of the law is slowly breaking down, when the Pentateuch is being estimated at its actual historic worth, end subjected to the scalpel of a criticism which disintegrates its unity and bereaves it of its supernatural glamour, that Judaism will, I think, gradually begin to feel the want of a dominant and consistent doctrine, adequate and compre- hensive, soul-satisfying and rational, which can set forth and illu- mine in its entire compass the relation of the individual to society and to God. I am myself inclined to believe that, from the words attributed in the Gospels to Jesus, important elements towards the formation of such a congruous body of doctrine could well be chosen out., elements which would harmonise, develop and bring together the highest religious teaching in the Old Testament and the early Rabbinical literature, and which a prophetic, though not a legal, Judaism, with full consistency and much advantage, might adopt and cherish as its own. Doctrines and sayings, such as He who loses his life shall find it ; " Not that which goes into, hut, that which comes out of, the mouth defiles a man;' ' Not my will but thine ; " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,'—can only, I venture to think, be dis- regarded with some spiritual detriment to the religion which believes itself compelled to pass them by. Some of the sayings ascribed to Jesus have sunk too deep into the human heart, or, shall I say, into the spiritual consciousness of civilised mankind, to make it probable that any religion which ignores or omits them will exercise a considerable influence outside its own borders. If, then, Judaism be still destined to play a prominent and fruitful part in the religi •us history of the world, it may, perhaps, when it h , biethaast this new stage in its development will only ensue
harmoniously assimilated to itself such of the Gospel teachings as are not antagonistic, but complementary, to its own funda- mental dogmas, and has freely and frankly acknowledged the greatness, while maintaining the limitations, of the illustrious Jew from whose mouth they are reported to have come."
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