they were all written at one time and by one author is scarcely credible. The standpoint of the writer of the Kings is considerably shifted from that occupied by the writer of Samuel; we find ourselves in a new circle of ideas when we pass from the one book to the other.
The Books of Samuel are generally ascribed to Samuel as their author. This is a fair sample of that lazy traditionalism which Christian opinion has been constrained to follow. There is not the slightest reason for believing that the Books of Samuel were written by Samuel any more than that the Odyssey was written by Ulysses, or the Ãneid by Ãneas, or Bruce’s Address by Bruce, or Paracelsus by Paracelsus, or St. Simeon Stylites by Simeon himself. Even in Bible books we do not hold that the Book of Esther was written by Esther, or the Book of Ruth by Ruth, or the Book of Job by Job, or the Books of Timothy by Timothy. The fact that Samuel’s name is given to the book proves nothing as to its authorship. It may have been called Samuel because it begins with the story of Samuel. The Hebrews were apt to name their books by some word or fact at the beginning of them, as we have seen in their naming of the books of the Pentateuch.
It is true that certain facts are mentioned in this book of which Samuel would have better knowledge than any one else; and he is said to have made a record of certain events, (I Sam. x. 25.) But his death is related in the first verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of First Samuel; and it is certain, therefore, that considerably more than half of the document ascribed to him must have been written by some one else.
As to the name of the writer we are wholly ignorant, and it is not easy to determine the date at which he wrote. If we regarded this as a continuous history from the hand of one writer, we should be compelled to ascribe it to a date somewhat later than the separation of the two kingdoms; for in I Sam. xxvii. 6, we read of the present made by the king of Gath to David of the city of Ziklag, at the time when David was hiding from Saul; “wherefore,” it is added, “Ziklag pertaineth unto the kings of Judah even unto this day.” Now there were no “kings of Judah” until after the ten tribes seceded; Rehoboam was the first of the kings of Judah, therefore this must have been written after the time of Rehoboam. Doubtless this sentence was written after that time; and in all probability the books of Samuel did not receive their present form until some time after the secession of the ten tribes. The materials from which the writer composed the book are hinted at here and there; it is almost certain that here, as in the other books, old documents are combined by the author, and not always with the best editorial care. Several old songs are quoted: the “Song of Hannah,” David’s exquisite lament over Saul and Jonathan, which is known as “The Bow;” David’s “Song of Deliverance,” after he had escaped from Saul, which we find in the Psalter as the Eighteenth Psalm, and “The Last Words of David.” The books contain a vivid narrative of the times of Eli and Samuel and Saul, and of the splendid reign of King David. No portion of the Old Testament has been more diligently studied, and the moral teaching of the books is clear and luminous. The ethical thoroughness of these writings when compared with almost any literature of equal antiquity is always remarkable. Take, as an example, the treatment which David receives at the hands of the writer. He is a great hero, the one grand figure of Hebrew history; but there is nothing of the demigod in this picture of him; his faults and crimes are exposed and denounced, and he gains our respect only by his hearty contrition and amendment. Verily the God of Israel whom this book reveals is a God who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity.
The Books of the Kings were originally one book, and ought to have remained one. The manuscript was torn in two by some scribe or copyist long ago, in the middle of the story of the reign of King Ahaziah; the first word of Second Kings goes on without so much as taking breath, from the last word of First Kings. There is no excuse for this bisection of the narrative; it must be due to some accident, or to the arbitrary and unintelligent act of some person who paid no attention to the meaning of the document. As the Books of Samuel carry the history from the birth of Samuel down to the end of David’s reign, so the Books of the Kings take up the story in the last days of David and carry it on to the time of the Exile, a period of four hundred and fifty years. The name of the author is concealed from us; there is a tradition, not altogether improbable, that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah. If you will compare the last chapter of Second Kings with the last chapter of Jeremiah, you will discover that they are almost verbally the same. Here, again, if Jeremiah was not the author, either writer may have copied the passage from the other, or both may have taken it from some older book. But this passage gives us a note of time. It tells us that Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon, in the first year of his reign, released the captive king of Judah, Jehoiachin, from his long confinement, and gave him a seat at his own table. The book must have been written, then, after the beginning of the reign of Evil-Merodach; and there is plenty of history to show that his reign began 561 B.C. And inasmuch as the book gives no hint of the return of the Jews from their captivity, which began in 538 B.C., we may fairly conclude that the book was written some time between those dates. Let us suppose that Jeremiah wrote it; even he, as prophet of the Lord, certainly used the materials of history which had accumulated in the archives of the two nations.
It is evident that, after the establishment of the kingdom, considerable attention was paid to the preservation of the records of important national events. The kings kept chroniclers who not only preserved and edited old documents, but who wrote the annals of their own times. In I Kings xi. 41, at the conclusion of the narrative of Solomon’s reign, we read, “Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?” For his history of Jeroboam the writer refers in the same way to “The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel,” and for his history of Rehoboam to “The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.” The same is true of the reigns of other kings. These were not, of course, our Books of Chronicles, for these were not written for two hundred years after the Book of Kings was finished. It is thus evident, as one modern writer has said, “that the author laboriously employed the materials within his reach, very much as a modern historian might do, and further that he was as much puzzled by chronological difficulties as a modern historian frequently is.” [Footnote: Horton’s _Inspiration and the Bible_, p. 182.] Prophet or not, he took the materials at his hands, and put them together in this history.
The splendid but corrupt reign of the son of David; the secession of the ten tribes under Jeroboam; the hostile relations of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah for two hundred and fifty years, by which both were weakened, and through unholy alliances corrupted, and the result of which was the final destruction of both, are described in this book in a spirited and evidently veracious manner. The two great prophets, Elijah and Elisha, are grand figures in this narrative; much of the story revolves around them. As witnesses for the righteous Jehovah they stand forth, warning, rebuking, counseling kings and people; the moral leadership by which Israel is chastened and corrected and led in the way of righteousness expresses itself largely through their ministry. The words of Lord Arthur Hervey, in Smith’s “Bible Dictionary,” none too strongly convey the historian’s sense of the value of this part of the Old Testament:–
“Considering the conciseness of the narrative and the simplicity of the style, the amount of the knowledge which these books convey of the characters, conduct, and manners of kings and people during so long a period is truly wonderful. The insight which they give us into the aspect of Judah and Jerusalem, both natural and artificial, with the religious, military, and civil institutions of the people, their arts and manufactures, the state of education and learning among them, their resources, commerce, exploits, alliances, the causes of their decadence, and finally of their ruin, is most clear, interesting, and instructive. In a few brief sentences we acquire more accurate knowledge of the affairs of Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and other neighboring nations than had been preserved to us in all the other remains of antiquity up to the recent discoveries in hieroglyphical and cuneiform monuments.” [Footnote: Vol. iii. p. 1561, American Edition.]
The substantial historical veracity of these books has been confirmed in many ways by these very monuments to which Lord Hervey refers. And yet this substantial historical accuracy is found, as in other histories of the olden time, in the midst of many minor errors and discrepancies. It would seem as if Providence had taken the utmost pains to show us that the essential truth and the moral and religious value of this history could not be identified with any theory of verbal or even plenary inspiration.
Take, for example, some of the chronological items of this record. Mr. Horton’s clear statement will bring a few of them before us:–
“The author seems to have been content, in dealing with an Israelite king, to give the date reckoned by the year of the reigning king in Judah just as he found it stated in the Israelite chronicles, and then to do the same in dealing with the dates of the reigning kings of Israel; but he did not consider whether the two chronicles harmonized. We may take some illustrations from the latter part of the work. Hoshea began to reign in Israel (2 Kings xv. 30) in the twentieth year of Jotham the king of Judah. So far writes our author, following the records of the Northern Kingdom. For his next paragraph he turns to his records of the Southern Kingdom, and naively tells us that Jotham never reached a twentieth year, but only reigned sixteen years (xv. 33); but even this is not the end of the difficulty; in chapter xvii. he goes back to the Northern Kingdom and tells us that Hoshea began to reign, not in Jotham’s reign at all, but in the reign of Ahaz, Jotham’s successor; and if now he had said, ‘in the fourth year of Ahaz,’ we might see our way through the perplexity, for the fourth year of Ahaz would, at any rate, be twenty years from the beginning of Jotham’s reign, though Jotham himself had died after reigning sixteen years; but he says, not in the fourth, but ‘in the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah.’ We may give it up, and exclaim with the Speaker’s commentator, ‘The chronological confusion of the history, as it stands, is striking,’ and then perhaps we may exclaim at the Speaker’s commentator, that he and the like of him have given us so little account of these unmistakable phenomena, and the cause of them, in the history.
“One other illustration may suffice. King Ahaz, according to one authority, lived twenty years and then came to the throne and reigned for sixteen years. (2 Kings xvi. 2.) At his death, therefore, Ahaz was thirty-six years of age. In that year he was succeeded by his son Hezekiah, who was twenty-five years of age. This would mean that King Ahaz was married at the age of ten, which, making all allowance for the earlier puberty of Eastern boys, does not seem probable; and the explanation is much more likely to be found in the chronological inaccuracies of our author, to which, if we have been observantly reading his book through, we shall by this time have become quite accustomed.” [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, pp. 189-191.]
Observe that we are not going to any hostile or foreign sources for these evidences of inaccuracy; we are simply letting the book tell its own story. Such phenomena as these appear throughout this history. They lie upon the very face of the narrative. Probably few of the readers of these pages have noted them. For myself, I must confess that I read the Bible through, from cover to cover, several times before I was thirty years old, but I had never observed these inaccuracies. The commentators, for the most part,–the orthodox commentators,–carefully keep these facts out of sight. Sometimes they attempt, indeed, to explain or reconcile them, but such explanations generally increase the incredibility of the narrative. The latest verdict of ultra-conservatism is that these dates and chronological notes are interpolated by some later hand; but this, too, is quite out of the question. The only true account of the matter is, that the author took these records from the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah and the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, and pieced them together without noticing or caring whether they agreed. His mind was not fixed upon scientific accuracy of dates. He was thinking only of the great ethical and spiritual problems working themselves out in this history,–of the question whether or not these kings “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord,” and of the effects of their right doing and their evil doing upon the lives of the people. What difference, indeed, does it make to you and me whether Jotham reigned sixteen years or twenty years? It seems to me that these inaccuracies are suffered to lie upon the face of the narrative that our thoughts may be turned away from these details of the record to the great principles of morality and religion whose development it reveals to us.
These errors which appear upon the surface are obvious enough to any careful reader. But other facts, most important and suggestive, are brought to light when we compare these narratives of Samuel and Kings as we find them in the Hebrew text with the same narrative in the Greek text, the Septuagint. The Old Testament, as we have seen, was translated into the Greek language, for the benefit of those Jews who spoke only Greek, early in the third century before Christ. Undoubtedly it was a pretty faithful translation at the time when it was made. But a careful comparison of the two texts as they exist at the present time shows that considerable additions have been made to both of them; and that some changes and misplacements have occurred in both of them. Sometimes it is evident that the Hebrew is the more correct, because the story is more orderly and consistent; and sometimes it is equally evident that the Greek version, which, as you remember, was commonly used by our Lord and his apostles, is the better. This comparison gives us a vivid and convincing illustration of the freedom with which the text was handled by scribes and copyists; how bits of narrative–most commonly legends and popular tales concerning the heroes of the nation–were thrust into the text, sometimes quite breaking its continuity; they make it plain that that preternatural supervision of it, for the prevention of error, which we have frequently heard about, is itself a myth. It is in these books of Samuel and the Kings that these variations of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text are most frequent and most instructive.
In the story of David’s introduction to Saul, for example, our version, following the Hebrew, tells us (I Sam. xvi. 14-23), that when David was first made known to Saul he was “a mighty man of valor, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person.” He comes into Saul’s household; Saul loves him greatly, and makes him his armor-bearer. In the next chapter David is represented as a mere lad, and it appears that Saul had never seen or heard of him. Indeed, he asks his general, Abner, who this stripling is. The contradiction in these narratives is palpable and irreconcilable. When we turn now to the Septuagint, we find that it omits from the seventeenth chapter verses 12-31 inclusive; also from the 55th verse to the end of the chapter and the first five verses of the next chapter. Taking out these passages, the main difficulties of the narrative are at once removed. It appears probable that these passages were not in the narrative when it was translated into Greek, but that they embodied a current and a very beautiful tradition about David which some later Hebrew transcriber ventured to incorporate into the text.
In the Books of the Kings the variations between these two versions are also extremely suggestive. You can see distinctly, as if it were done before your eyes, how supplementary matter has been inserted into the one text or the other, since the Greek translation was made. In the sixth chapter of First Kings, the Septuagint omits verses 11-14, which is an exhortation to Solomon, injected into the specifications respecting the temple building. Omit these verses, and the description goes on smoothly. Similarly in the ninth chapter of the same book the Septuagint omits verses 15-25. This passage breaks the connection; the narrative of Solomon’s dealings with Hiram is consecutively told in the Greek version; in the Hebrew it is interrupted by this extraneous matter. You can readily see which is the original form of the writing.
Now what does all this signify? Of course it signifies most distinctly that this history must not be judged by the canons of modern historical criticism. Mr. Horton quotes some strenuous advocate of the traditional theory of the Bible as maintaining that “when God writes history he will be at least as accurate as Bishop Stubbs or Mr. Gardiner; and if we are to admit errors in his historical work, then why not in his plan of salvation and doctrine of atonement?” It is this kind of reasoning that drives intelligent men into infidelity. For the errors are here; they speak for themselves; nothing but a mole-eyed dogmatism can evade them; and if we link the great doctrines of the Bible with this dogma of the historical inerrancy of the Scriptures, they will all go down together.
But what, after all, do these errors amount to? What is the meaning and purport of this history? What are these writers trying to do? “It seems,” says Mr. Horton, “as if their purpose was not so much to tell us what happened as to emphasize for us the lesson of what happened. It is _applied_ history, rather than history pure and simple; and on this ground we can understand the tendency to irritation which critical historians sometimes betray in approaching it…. The prophetic historian would never dream, like a modern historian, of writing interminable monographs about a disputed name or a doubtful date; he might even take a story which rested on very doubtful authority, finding in it more that would suit his purpose than the bare and accurate statement of the fact which could be authenticated. The standpoint of the prophetic historian and of the scientific historian are wholly different; they cannot be judged by the same canons of criticism. …To the prophetic eye the significance of all events seems to be in their relation to the will of God. The prophet may not always discern what the will of God is; he may interpret events in a quite inadequate manner. But his predominant thought makes itself felt; and consequently the study of these histories leaves us in a widely different frame of mind from that which Thucydides or Mr. Freeman would produce. We do not feel to know, perhaps, so accurately about the wars between Israel and Judah as we know about the wars between Athens and Sparta; we do not feel to know, perhaps, so much about the monarchy of Israel as we know about the Anglo-Norman monarchy; but, on the other hand, we seem to be more aware of God, we seem to recognize his hand controlling the wavering affairs of states, we seem to comprehend that obedience to his will is of more importance than any political consideration, and that in the long course of history disobedience to his will means national distress and national ruin. The study of scientific histories has its advantages; but it is not quite certain that these advantages are greater than those which the study of prophetic history yields. Perhaps, after all, the one fact of history is God’s work in it; in which case the scientific histories, with all their learning, with all their toil, will look rather small by the side of these imperfect compositions which at least saw vividly and recognized faithfully _the one fact_.”
CHAPTER V.
THE HEBREW PROPHECIES.
In the last chapter the opinion was expressed that the first books collected by Nehemiah, when he made up his “library,” a century after the Exile, were the writings of the prophets. We studied the historical books first, because they stand first in the Hebrew Bible, and are there named the “Earlier Prophets;” but the probabilities are that the prophetical writings proper, called by the Jews the “Later Prophets,” were first gathered.
When was this collection made? If it was made by Nehemiah (and there is nothing to discredit the statement of the author of 2 Maccabees that he was the collector), then it was not compiled until one hundred years after the Exile, or only about four hundred and twenty years before Christ. Most of the prophets had written before or during the Exile. Joel, Hosea, and Amos had flourished three or four hundred years before this collection was made; Isaiah, the greatest of them all, had been in his grave almost three centuries; Micah, nearly as long; Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah had been silent from one to two hundred years; Jeremiah, who was alive when the seventy years’ captivity began, and Ezekiel, who prophesied and perished among the captives on the banks of the Euphrates, were more remote from Nehemiah than Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards are from us; even Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returning exiles and helped to build the second temple, had passed away from fifty to one hundred years before the time of Nehemiah. Malachi alone,–“The Messenger,”–and the last of the prophets, may have been alive when the compilation of the prophetic writings was made.
It may be safely conjectured that the Jews, although they had never possessed any collection of the books of the prophets, had known something of their contents. Several of the prophets had foretold the desolation and the captivity, and there had been abundant time during the Exile to recall the words they had spoken and to wish that their fathers had heeded them. These remembered words of the prophets, passing from lip to lip, would thus have acquired peculiar sacredness. It seems clear, also, that copies of these books must have been kept,–perhaps in the schools of the prophets; for the later prophets quote, verbally, from the earlier ones. It may, therefore, have been in response to a popular wish that this collection of their writings was undertaken. Words so momentous as these ought to be sacredly treasured. Furthermore, there were reasons to apprehend that the holy flame of prophecy was dying out. Malachi may have been speaking still, but there was not much promise that he would have a successor, and the expectation of prophetic voices was growing dim among the people.
The Levitical ritual, now so elaborate and cumbersome, had supplanted the prophetic oracle. The ritualist is never a prophet; and out of such a formal cult no words of inspiration are apt to flow. With all the greater carefulness, therefore, would the people treasure the messages that had come to them from the past. Accordingly these prophetic writings, which had existed in a fragmentary and scattered form, were gathered into a collection by themselves.
It must be admitted that when we try to tell how these writings had been preserved and transmitted through all these centuries, we have but little solid ground of fact to go upon. The Scriptures themselves are entirely silent with respect to the manner of their preservation; the traditions of the Jews are wholly worthless. We must not imagine that these books of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea were written and published as our books are written and published; there was no book trade then through which literature could be marketed, and no subscription agencies hawking books from door to door. You must not imagine that every family in Judea had a copy of Isaiah’s Works,–nor even that a copy could be found in every village; it is possible that there were not, when the people were carried into captivity, more than a few dozen copies of these prophecies in existence, and these were in the hands of some of the prophets or literary dignitaries of the nation, or in the archives of some of the prophetical schools. The notion that these works were distributed among the people for study and devotional reading is not to be entertained. No such general use of the prophetical writings was ever conceived of by the Jews before the Captivity.
Indeed, many of these prophecies, as we call them, were not, primarily, literature at all. They were sermons or addresses, delivered orally to the individuals concerned, or to assemblies of the people. You can see the evidence, in many cases, that they must have been thus delivered.
We speak of the “prophecy” of Isaiah, or the “prophecy” of Jeremiah; but the books bearing their names are made up of a number of “prophecies,” uttered on various occasions. The division between these separate prophecies is generally indicated by the language; in all Paragraph Bibles it is marked by blank lines. In each of these earlier prophetical books we thus have, in all probability, a succession of deliverances, extending through long periods of time and prepared for various occasions.
After the oracle was spoken to those for whom it was designed, it was written down by the prophet or by his friends and disciples, and thus preserved. This supposition seems, at any rate, more plausible than any other that I have found. Manifestly many of these prophecies were originally sermons or public addresses; it is natural to suppose that they were first delivered, and then, for substance, reduced to writing, that a record might be made of the utterance.
It is sometimes alleged that these prophecies, as soon as they were produced, were at once added to a collection of sacred Scriptures which was preserved in the sanctuary. There was a “Book” or “Scripture,” it is said, “which from the time of Moses was kept open, and in which the writings of the prophets may have been recorded as they were produced.” [Footnote: Alexander on Isaiah, i. 7.]
The learned divine who ventures this conjecture admits that it would be as hard to prove it as to disprove it. My own opinion is that it would be much harder. If there had been any such official receptacle of sacred writings, the prophets were not generally in a position to secure the admission of their documents into it. They were often in open controversy with the people who kept the sanctuary; the political and the religious authorities of the nation were the objects of their severest denunciations; it is not likely that the priests would make haste to transcribe and preserve in the sanctuary the sermons and lectures of the men who were scourging them with censure. This national _bibliotheca sacra_ in which the writings of the prophets were deposited as soon as they were composed is the product of pure fiction. It was not thus that the prophetical utterances were preserved; rather is it to be supposed that the pupils and friends of the prophet faithfully kept his manuscripts after he was gone; that occasional copies were made of them by those who wished to study them, and that thus they were handed down from generation to generation.
When Nehemiah made his collection he found these manuscripts, in whose hands we know not, and brought them together in one place. We may presume that the writings of each prophet were copied upon a separate roll, and that the rolls were kept together in some receptacle in the temple. Most of these prophets had now been dead some hundreds of years; the truth of their messages was no longer disputed even by the priests and the scribes; their heresy was now the soundest orthodoxy; the custodians of orthodoxy would of course now make a place for their writings in the national archives. The priests have always been ready to build sepulchres for the prophets after they were dead, and to pay them plenty of _post mortem_ reverence.
The books of the prophets stand in the later Hebrew Bibles in the same order as that in which they are placed in our own; they occupy a different place in the whole collection: they are in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, and they are at the end of ours; but their relation to one another is the same in both Bibles. This order is not chronological; in part, at least, it seems to represent what was supposed to be the relative importance of the books. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are placed first, perhaps because they are longest, although several of the minor prophets are of earlier date than they. “Daniel” is not among the prophets in the Hebrew Bible; the book which bears this name is one of the books of the third collection,–the Hagiographa,–of which we shall speak at another time.
“When we follow further the same collection,” says Professor Murray, “we find Hosea immediately following Ezekiel [although Hosea lived more than two centuries before Ezekiel] and in turn followed by Joel and Amos, mainly on the principle of comparative bulk. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were placed at the end for reasons purely chronological, after the rest of the collection had been made up. We cannot see any clear or consistent reason for the position of Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, which stand together in the middle of the collection.”
An examination of the chronological notes on the margin of our English Bibles (which are not always correct though they are approximately so) will show that these prophetical books are not arranged in the order of time. It would be a great improvement to have them so arranged. Pupils in the Sunday-schools who attempted a few years ago to follow the “International” lessons through these prophecies, _seriatim_, found themselves skipping back and forward over the centuries in a history- defying dance which was quite bewildering to all but the clearest heads. We could understand these prophecies much better if they were arranged in the order of their dates. And as no one supposes that the present arrangement, made by Jewish scribes, is in any wise inspired, there seems to be no good reason why the late revisers might not have altered it, and set these books in a historical and intelligible order.
Who were these prophets and what was their function? To give any adequate answer to this inquiry would require a treatise; it is only in the most cursory manner that we can deal with it in this place.
The prophet is the man who speaks for God. He is the interpreter of the divine will. By some means he has come to understand God’s purpose, and his function is to declare it. Thus in Exodus iv. 16, Jehovah says to Moses, “Aaron thy brother … shall be thy spokesman unto the people, and it shall come to pass that he shall be to thee a mouth and thou shalt be to him as God.” And again (vii. i), “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.” These passages indicate the Biblical meaning of the word. The prophet is the spokesman or interpreter of some superior authority. In Classic Greek, also, Apollo is called the prophet of Jupiter, and the Pythia is the prophetess of Apollo. Almost universally, in the Old Testament, the word is used to signify an expounder or interpreter of the divine will.
“The English words ‘prophet, prophecy, prophesying,'” says Dean Stanley, “originally kept tolerably close to the Biblical use of the word. The celebrated dispute about ‘prophesyings’ in the sense of ‘preachings’ in the reign of Elizabeth, and the treatise of Jeremy Taylor on ‘The Liberty of Prophesying,’ _i.e._, the liberty of preaching, show that even down to the seventeenth century the word was still used as in the Bible, for preaching or speaking according to the will of God. In the seventeenth century, however, the limitation of the word to the sense of prediction had gradually begun to appear. This secondary meaning of the word had by the time of Dr. Johnson so entirely superseded the original Scriptural signification that he gives no other special definition of it than ‘to predict, to foretell, to prognosticate,’ ‘a predicter, a foreteller,’ ‘foreseeing or foretelling future events;’ and in this sense it has been used almost down to our own day, when the revival of Biblical criticism has resuscitated, in some measure, the Biblical use of the word.” [Footnote: _History of the Jewish Church_, i. 459, 460.] The predictive function of the prophet is not, then, the only, nor the prominent feature of his work. By far the larger portion of the prophetic utterances were concerned with the present, and made no reference to the future.
The prophet exercised his office in many ways. Moses was a prophet, the first and greatest of the prophets; but we have from him few predictions; he interpreted the will of God in the enactment of laws. Samuel was a great prophet; but Samuel was not employed in foretelling future events; he sought to know the will of God, that he might administer the affairs of the Jewish commonwealth in accordance with it. Elijah and Elisha were great prophets, but they were not prognosticators; they were preachers of righteousness to kings and people, and they delivered their message in a way to make the ears of those who heard them to tingle. And this, for all the prophets who succeeded them, was the one great business. The ethical function of these men of God came more and more distinctly into view.
When Paul admonished Timothy (2 Tim. iv. 2) to “preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long- suffering and teaching,” he was calling on him to be a follower of the prophets. When kings became profligate and faithless, when priests grew formal and greedy, when the rich waxed extortionate and tyrannical, these men of God arose to denounce the transgressors and threaten them with the divine vengeance. They might arise in any quarter, from any class. They were confined to no tribe, to no locality, to no calling. Neither sex monopolized this gift. Miriam, Deborah, Huldah were shining names upon their roll of honor. To no ecclesiasticism or officialism did they owe their authority; no man’s hands had been laid upon them in ordination; they were Jehovah’s messengers; from him alone they received their messages, to him alone they held themselves responsible.
No such preachers of politics ever existed as these Hebrew prophets; with all the affairs of state they constantly intermeddled; bad laws and unholy policies found in them sharp and unsparing critics; the entangling alliances of Israel with the surrounding nations were denounced by them in season and out of season. The people of their own time often stigmatized them as unpatriotic; because they would not approve popular iniquities, or refrain their lips from rebuking even “favorite sons,” or the idols of the populace, they often found themselves under the ban of public opinion; they lived lonely lives; not a few of them died violent deaths. “Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?” demanded Stephen, “and they killed them which showed before of the coming of the Righteous One; of whom ye have now become betrayers and murderers.” [Footnote: Acts vii. 52.]
The relation of the prophets to the political life of the Jewish people is brought out in a striking way by John Stuart Mill in his book on “Representative Government.” In that chapter in which he discusses the criterion of a good government, he shows how the Egyptian hierarchy and the Chinese paternal despotism destroyed those countries by stereotyping their institutions. Then he goes on:–
“In contrast with these nations let us consider the example of an opposite character, afforded by another and a comparatively insignificant Oriental people, the Jews. They, too, had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and their organized institutions were as obviously of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. These did for them what was done for other Oriental races by their institutions, subdued them to industry and order, and gave them a national life. But neither their kings nor their priests ever obtained, as in those other countries, the exclusive moulding of their character. Their religion, which enabled persons of genius and a high religious tone to be regarded and to regard themselves as inspired from heaven, gave existence to an inestimably precious unorganized institution,–the Order (if it may be so termed) of Prophets. Under the protection, generally though not always effectual, of their sacred character, the Prophets were a power in the nation, often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept up in that little corner of the earth the antagonism of influences which is the only real security for continued progress. Religion, consequently, was not then what it has been in so many other places, a consecration of all that was once established, and a barrier against further improvement. The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were in church and state the equivalent of the modern liberty of the press, gives a just but not an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in national and universal history by this great element of Jewish life; by means of which, the canon of inspiration never being complete, the persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling could not only denounce and reprobate, with the direct authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could give forth better and higher interpretations of the national religion, which thenceforth became part of the religion. Accordingly, whoever can divest himself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it was one book, which until lately was equally inveterate in Christians and unbelievers, sees with admiration the vast interval between the morality and religion of the Pentateuch, or even of the historical books (the unmistakable work of Hebrew Conservatives of the Sacerdotal order), and the morality and religion of the Prophecies. Conditions more favorable to progress could not easily exist; accordingly, the Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, joint with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern civilization.” [Footnote: _Considerations on Representative Government,_ pp. 51-53, American Edition.]
Not only in the sphere of politics, but in that of religion also, were they constantly appearing as critics and censors. The tendency of religion to become merely ritual, to divorce itself from righteousness, is inveterate. Against this tendency the prophets were the constant witnesses. The religious “machine” is always in the same danger of becoming corrupt and mischievous as is the political “machine;” the man with the sledge-hammer who will smash it and fling it into the junk-pile has a work to do in every generation. This was the work of the Hebrew prophets. “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice,” cries Hosea, speaking for Jehovah. “I hate, I despise your feast days,” says Amos, “and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies,…but let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” “Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth,” proclaims Isaiah; “they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. Wash ye, make you clean; cease to do evil; learn to do well. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burden, and to let the oppressed go free?”
This is, then, the chief function of the Hebrew prophet; he is the expounder of the righteous will of God, not mainly with respect to future events, but with respect to present transgressions and present obligations of kings and priests and people. And yet it would be an error to overlook or disparage his dealings with the future. As a teacher of righteousness he saw that present disobedience would bring future retribution, and he pointed it out with the utmost fidelity. Any man who carefully studies the laws of God can make some predictions with great confidence. He knows that certain courses of conduct will be followed by certain consequences. Some of the predictions of the Hebrew prophets were of this nature. Yet predictions of this nature were always conditional. The condition was not always expressed, but it was always understood. The threatening of destruction to the disobedient was withdrawn when the disobedient turned from their evil ways. The predictions of the prophets were not always fulfilled for this good reason. The rule is explicitly laid down by the Prophet Jeremiah: “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation…to destroy it; if that nation…turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation…to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them.” [Footnote: Jeremiah xviii. 7-9.]
And there is something more than this. Instances are here recorded of specific predictions of future events, which came to pass as they were predicted,–predictions which cannot be explained on naturalistic principles. “Of this sort,” says Bleek, “are the prophecies of Isaiah as to the closely impending destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Syria, which he predicted with great confidence at a time when the two kingdoms appeared particularly strong by their treaty with each other,…besides the repeated predictions as to the destruction of the mighty hosts of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, which besieged Jerusalem, and the deliverance of the state from the greatest distress. Among these predictions, those in Isaiah xxix. 1-8, appear to me particularly noteworthy, where he foretells that a long time hence Jerusalem should be besieged by a foreign host and pressed very hard, but that the latter, just as they believed they were getting possession of the city, should be scattered and annihilated; for this prediction, from its whole character, appears to have been uttered before any danger showed itself from this quarter.” [Footnote: _Introduction to the Old Testament_, ii. 27.]
Beyond and above all this is the gradual rise in Israel of that great Messianic hope, of which the prophets were the inspired and inspiring witnesses. We find, at a very early day, an expectation of a future revelation of the glory of God, dawning upon the consciousness of the nation, and expressing itself by the words of its most devout spirits. Even in prosperous days there was a dim outreaching after something better; in times of disaster and overthrow this hope was kindled to a passionate longing. Of this Messianic hope, its nature and its fulfillment, no words of mine can tell so eloquently as these words of Dean Stanley:–
“It was the distinguishing mark of the Jewish people that their golden age was not in the past, but in the future; that their greatest hero (as they deemed him to be) was not their Founder, but their Founder’s latest Descendant. Their traditions, their fancies, their glories, gathered round the head, not of a chief or warrior or sage that had been, but of a King, a Deliverer, a Prophet who was to come. Of this singular expectation the Prophets were, if not the chief authors, at least the chief exponents. Sometimes he is named, sometimes he is unnamed; sometimes he is almost identified with some actual Prince of the present or the coming generation, sometimes he recedes into the distant ages. But again and again, at least in the late prophetic writings, the vista is closed by this person, his character, his reign. And almost everywhere the Prophetic spirit in the delineation of his coming remains true to itself. He is to be a King, a Conqueror, yet not by the common weapons of earthly warfare, but by those only weapons which the Prophetic order recognized; by justice, mercy, truth, and goodness; by suffering, by endurance, by identification of himself with the joys, the sufferings of his nation; by opening a wider sympathy to the whole human race than had ever been offered before. That this expectation, however explained, existed in a greater or less degree amongst the Prophets is not doubted by any theologians of any school whatever. It is no matter of controversy. It is a simply and universally recognized fact that, filled with these Prophetic images, the whole Jewish nation–nay, at last, the whole Eastern world–did look forward with longing expectation to the coming of this future Conqueror. Was this unparalleled expectation realized? And here again I speak only of facts which are acknowledged by Germans and Frenchmen no less than by Englishmen, by critics and by skeptics even more than by theologians and ecclesiastics. There did arise out of this nation a Character as unparalleled as the expectation which had preceded him. Jesus of Nazareth was, on the most superficial no less than on the deepest view of his coming, the greatest name, the most extraordinary power that has ever crossed the stage of History. And this greatness consisted not in outward power, but precisely in those qualities in which from first to last the Prophetic order had laid the utmost stress,–justice and love, goodness and truth.” [Footnote: _History of the Jewish Church_, i. 519, 520.]
This is the great fact from which the student of the Old Testament must never remove his attention. That this wonderful hope and expectation did suffuse all the utterances of the prophets is not to be gainsaid by any candid man. That the expectation assumed, as the ages passed, a more and more definite and personal form is equally certain. Isaiah was perhaps the first to give distinct shape to this prophetic hope. Ewald thus summarizes the Messianic idea in the writings of Isaiah:–
“There must come some one who should perfectly satisfy all the demands of the true religion, so as to become the centre from which all its truth and force should operate. His soul must possess a marvelous and surpassing nobleness and divine power, because it is his function perfectly to realize in life the ancient religion, the requirements of which no one has yet satisfied, and that, too, with that spiritual glorification which the great prophets had announced. Unless there first comes some one who shall transfigure this religion into its purest form, it will never be perfected, and its kingdom will never come. But he will and must come, for otherwise the religion which demands him would be false; he is the first true King of the community of the true God, and as nothing can be conceived of as supplanting him, he will reign forever in irresistible power; he is the divine-human King, whose coming had been due ever since the true community had set up a human monarchy in its midst, but who had never come. He is to be looked for, to be longed for, to be prayed for; and how blessed it is simply to expect him devoutly, and to trace out every feature of his likeness. To sketch the nobleness of his soul is to pursue in detail the possibility of perfecting all religion; and to believe in the necessity of his coming is to believe in the perfecting of all divine agency on earth.” [Footnote: _The History of Israel_, iv. 203, 204.]
It is precisely here that we get at the heart of the Old Testament; this wonderful fore-looking toward the Messianic manifestations of God upon the earth, which kindled the hearts of the people and found clearest utterance by the lips of its most inspired men, which binds this literature all together, histories, songs, precepts, allegories. This it is which reveals the true inspiration of these old writings, and which makes them, to every Christian heart, precious beyond all price.
Such being the character of these prophetic books, let us glance for a moment at a few of them, merely for the purpose of locating the prophecy in the history, and of discerning, when it is possible, the providential causes which called it forth.
It is difficult to tell which of these fifteen prophets, whose utterances are treasured in this collection, first appeared upon the scene. The probability seems to be that the earliest of them was Joel. Opinions differ widely; I cannot discuss them nor even cite them; but the old theory that Joel lived and preached about eight hundred and seventy-five years before Christ does not seem to me to be invalidated by modern criticism. He was a native of the Southern Kingdom; and at the time we have named, the King of Judea was Joash, whose dramatic elevation to the throne in his seventh year, by Jehoiada the priest, is narrated in the Book of Kings. It was a time of disturbance and disaster in Judah and Jerusalem; the boy-king was but a nominal ruler; the regent was Jehoiada; and incursions of the surrounding tribes, who carried away the people and sold them as slaves, kept the land in a constant state of alarm. Worse than this was the visitation of locusts, continuing, as it would seem, for several years, by which the country was stripped and devastated. This visitation furnishes the theme of the short discourse which is here reported. The description of the march of the locusts over the land is full of poetic beauty; and the people are admonished to accept this as a divine chastisement for their sins, and to do the works meet for repentance. Then comes the promise of the divine forgiveness, and of that great gift of the Spirit, whose fulfillment Peter claimed on the day of Pentecost: “In the midst of the deepest woes which then afflicted the kingdom,” says Ewald, “his great soul grasped all the more powerfully the eternal hope of the true community, and impressed it all the more indelibly upon his people, alike by the fiery glow of his clear insight and the entrancing beauty of his passionate utterance.” [Footnote: _The History of Israel_, iv. 139.]
The next prophet in the order of time is undoubtedly Amos. He tells us that he lived in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, about seventy years after Joel. He was a herdsman of Tekoa, a small city of Judah, twelve miles south of Jerusalem. In these days the Northern Kingdom was far more prosperous and powerful than the Southern; under Jeroboam II. Israel had become rich and luxurious; and the prophet was summoned, as he declares, by the call of Jehovah himself to leave his herds upon the Judean hills, and betake himself to the Northern Kingdom, there to bear witness against the pride and oppression of its people. This messenger and interpreter of Jehovah to his people is a poor man, a laboring man; but he knows whose commission he bears, and he is not afraid. Stern and terrible are the woes that fall from his lips: the words vibrate yet with the energy of his righteous wrath.
“Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that sing idle songs to the sound of the viol; that devise for themselves instruments of music, like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.”
Such luxury always goes hand in hand with contempt of the lowly and oppression of the poor; it is so to-day; it was so in that far-off time; and this prophet pours upon it the vials of the wrath of God:–
“Forasmuch therefore as ye trample upon the poor, and take exactions from him of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink the wine thereof. For I know how manifold are your transgressions and how mighty are your sins; ye that afflict the just, that take a bribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right.”
It is no wonder that Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, writhed under the scourge of the herdsman prophet, and wanted to be rid of him: “O thou seer,” he cried, “go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: but prophesy not again any more in Bethel.” But the prophet stood his ground and delivered his message, and it still resounds as the very voice of God through every land where the greed of gold makes men unjust, and the love of pleasure banishes compassion from human hearts.
The nearest successor of Amos, in this collection, seems to have been Hosea, who tells us in the opening of his prophecy that the word of the Lord came unto him in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king of Israel. There is some doubt about the genuineness of this superscription; but it was about this time, undoubtedly, that Hosea flourished. To which kingdom he belonged it is not known; probably, however, to Israel, with whose affairs his teaching is chiefly concerned. He must have followed close upon the herdsman of Tekoa; possibly they were contemporaries. His prophecy, too, is a blast from the trumpet of the Lord our Righteousness. Such an indictment of a people has not often been heard.
“Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. There is nought but swearing and breaking faith, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery; they break out, and blood toucheth blood.”
Especially severe is the prophet in his denunciation of the priesthood.
“They feed on the sin of my people, and set their heart on their iniquity. And it shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish them for their ways, and will reward them their doings.”
These prophecies of Hosea are instinct with a severe morality; the ethical thoroughness with which he chastises the national sins is unflinching; but it is not all threatening; now and again we hear the word of tenderness, the promise of the divine forgiveness:–
“I will heal their backsliding. I will love them freely; for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel; he shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon.”
Micah follows Hosea, at an interval of perhaps fifty years. He lived in a little village of Judah, west of Jerusalem, and exercised his ministry in both kingdoms, testifying impartially against the wickedness of Jerusalem and Samaria, though the weight of his censure seems to rest upon the Judean capital. His strain is an echo of the outcry of Amos and Hosea; it is the same intense indignation against the violence and rapacity of the rich, against corrupt judges, false prophets, rascally traders, treacherous friends. For all these sins condign punishment is threatened; and yet, after these retributive woes are past, there is promise of a better day. The great Messianic hope here begins to find clear utterance; the former prophets have seen in their visions only the restoration of the people of Israel; to Micah there comes the anticipation of an individual Leader and Deliverer.
“But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth that is to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting…. And he shall stand and shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide; for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.”
Thus slowly broadens the dawn of the Messianic hope.
The first part of the fourth chapter of Micah, which is a prediction of the glory that shall come to Zion in the latter day, is verbally identical with the first part of the second chapter of Isaiah. One of the prophets must have quoted from the other or else, as Dr. Geikie suggests, both copied from some older prophet.
After Micah comes the greatest of the prophets, Isaiah. He appeared upon the scene in his native city of Jerusalem about the middle of the eighth century before Christ. His work was mainly done during the reigns of Ahaz, “the Grasper,” one of the vilest and most ungodly of the Judean monarchs, and of Hezekiah, the good king, about a century and a half before the destruction of Jerusalem.
About this time Judea was constantly exposed to the rapacity of the great Assyrian power before whose armies she finally fell; sometimes her rulers entered into coalitions with the surrounding nations to resist the Assyrian; sometimes they submitted and paid heavy tribute. Egypt, on the south, was also a mighty empire at this time, constantly at war with Assyria; and the kings of Judah sometimes sought alliances with one of these great powers, as a means of protection against the other. They proved to be the upper and nether millstones between which the Jewish nationality was ground to powder. It was in the midst of these alarming signs of national destruction that Isaiah arose. Of the prophetic discourses which he delivered in Jerusalem we have about thirty; his words are the words of a patriot, a statesman, a servant and messenger of Jehovah. He warned the kings against these entangling alliances with foreign powers; he admonished them to stand fast in their allegiance to Jehovah, and obey his laws; yet he saw that they would not heed his word, and that swift and sure destruction was coming upon the nation. And his expectation was not like that of the other prophets, that the nation as a whole would be saved out of these judgments; to him it was made plain that only a remnant would survive; but that from that remnant should spring a noble race, with a purer faith, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Of the Messianic hope as it finds expression in these words of Isaiah I have already spoken.
This Book of Isaiah contains thirty-one prophetic discourses, some of them mere fragments. There is reason for doubt as to whether they were all spoken by Isaiah; when they were gathered up, two hundred years later, some utterances of other prophets may have been mingled with them. Indeed it is now regarded as well-nigh certain that the last twenty-seven chapters are the work of a later prophet,–of one who wrote during the Captivity. Professor Delitzsch, in the last edition of his commentary on Isaiah, finally concedes that this is probable. The Book of Isaiah, he is reported as saying, “may have been an anthology of prophetic discourses by different authors; that is, it may have been composed partly and directly by Isaiah, and partly by other later prophets whose utterances constitute a really homogeneous and simultaneous continuation of Isaian prophecy. These later prophets so closely resemble Isaiah in prophetic vision that posterity might, on that account, well identify them with him,–his name being the correct common denominator for this collection of prophecies.”
These words of the most distinguished and devout of the Old Testament critics throw a flood of light on the structure not only of Isaiah, but of other Old Testament writings; they show how unlike our own were the primitive ideas of authorship; and how the Pentateuch, for example, drawn from many sources and revised by many editors, could be called the law of Moses; how _his_ name may have been the “common denominator” of all that collection of laws.
I have shown, perhaps, in these hasty notices, something of the nature and purpose of five of these prophetic books. Of the rest I must speak but a single word, for the time fails me to tell of Zephaniah, who in the time of good King Josiah, denounced the idolatry of the people, the injustice of its princes and judges, and the corruption of its prophets and priests, threatened the rebellious with extermination, and promised to the remnant an enduring peace; of Jeremiah, who about the same time first lifted up his voice, and continued speaking until after the destruction of Jerusalem,–from whose writings we may derive a more complete and intelligible account of the period preceding the Exile than from any other source; of Nahum, who, just before the fall of Jerusalem, uttered his oracle against Nineveh; of Obadiah, who, after the fall of the holy city, launched his thunderbolts against the perfidious Edomites because of their rejoicing over the fate of Jerusalem; of Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, who wrote among the captives by the rivers of Babylon; of Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returning exiles, and whose courageous voices cheered the laborers who wrought to restore the city and the temple; of Malachi, whose pungent reproofs of the people for their lack of consecration followed the erection of the second temple, and closed the collection of the Hebrew prophets.
The limits of this small volume forbid us to enter upon several interesting critical inquiries respecting the component parts of Isaiah and Zechariah, and especially the matter of the variations of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text in the Book of Jeremiah. In this last named book we find the same phenomena that we encountered in our study of Samuel and The Kings: the Greek version differs considerably from the Hebrew; a comparison of the two illustrates, as nothing else can do, the processes through which the text of these old documents has passed, and the freedom with which they have been handled by scribes and copyists. The Hebrew text, from which our English version was made, is generally better than the Greek; but there are several cases in which the Greek is manifestly more accurate.
There is one book, reckoned among these minor prophets, of which I have not spoken, and to which I ought to make some reference. That is the book of Jonah.
It is found among the minor prophets, but it is not in any sense prophetical; it is neither a sermon nor a prediction; it is a narrative. Probably it was placed by the Jews among these prophetical books because Jonah was a prophet. But this book was not written by Jonah; there is not a word in the book which warrants the belief that he was its author. It is a story about Jonah, told by somebody else long after Jonah’s day. Jonah, the son of Amittai, was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom in the days of Jeroboam II., far back in the ninth century. The only reference to him contained in the Old Testament is found in 2 Kings xiv. 25. But this book was almost certainly written long after the destruction of Nineveh, which took place two hundred years later. One reason for this belief is in the fact that the writer of the book feels it necessary to explain what kind of a city Nineveh was. He stops in the midst of his story to say: “Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey.” That explanation would have been superfluous anywhere in Israel in the days of Jeroboam II., and the past tense indicates that it was written by one who was looking back to a city no longer in existence. “Nineveh was.” The character of the Hebrew also favors the theory of a later date for the book. We have, therefore, a tale that was told about Jonah probably three or four hundred years after his day.
Is it a true tale, or is it a work of didactic fiction? I believe that it is the latter. It is a very suggestive apologue, full of moral beauty and spiritual power, designed to convey several important lessons to the minds of the Jewish people. I cannot regard it as the actual experience of a veritable prophet of God, because I can hardly imagine that such a prophet could have supposed, as the Jonah of this tale is said to have supposed, that by getting out of the bounds of the Kingdom of Israel, he would get out of the sight of Jehovah. This is precisely what this Jonah of the story undertook to do. When he was bidden to go to Nineveh and cry against it, “he rose up to flee unto Tarshish _from the presence of the Lord;_ and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish _from the presence of the Lord”_ (ch. i. 3). Is this actual history? Is this the belief of a genuine prophet of the Lord? What sort of a prophet is he who holds ideas as crude as this concerning the Being with whom he is in constant communication and from whom he receives his messages? If Jonah did entertain this belief, then it is not likely that he can teach us anything about God which it is important that we should know.
Thus, without touching the miraculous features of the story, we have sound reasons for believing that this cannot be the actual experience of any veritable prophet of God; that it is not history, but fiction. Why not? Can any one who has read the parable of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan doubt that fiction may be used in Sacred Scripture for the highest purpose?
But it is argued that the references to this story which are found in the words of Christ authenticate the story. Our Lord, in Matt. xii, 39-42, refers to this book. He speaks of the repentance of the Ninevites under the preaching of Jonah as a rebuke to the Jews who had heard the word of life from him and had not repented; and he uses these words: “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet: for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
This confirms, say the orthodox commentators, the historical accuracy of the story of Jonah. “If,” says Canon Liddon, “he would put his finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, would warrant belief in his own resurrection, he points to Jonah’s being three days and three nights in the belly of the whale.” This use of the incident by our Lord clearly authenticates the incident as an actual historical fact. So say the conservative theologians. And so say also the men who labor to destroy the authority of Christ. Mr. Huxley perfectly agrees with Canon Liddon. He praises the Canon’s penetration and consistency; he agrees that there can be no other possible interpretation of Christ’s words. The ultra-conservative and the anti- Christian critics are at one in insisting that Christ stands committed to the literal truth of the narrative in Jonah. The inference of the ultra-conservative is that the narrative is historically true; the inference of the anti-Christian critic is that Jesus is unworthy our confidence as a religious teacher; that one who fully indorsed such a preposterous tale cannot be divine. It is instructive to observe the ultra-conservative critics thus playing steadily into the hands of the anti-Christian critics, furnishing them with ammunition with which to assail the very citadel of the Christian faith. It is a kind of business in which, I am sorry to say, they have been diligently engaged for a good while.
Now I, for my part, utterly deny the proposition which these allied forces of skepticism and traditionalism are enlisted in supporting. I deny that Jesus Christ can be fairly quoted as authenticating this narrative. I maintain that he used it allegorically for purposes of illustration, without intending to express any opinion as to the historical verity of the narrative. It was used in a literary way, and not in a dogmatic way. Our Lord speaks always after the manner of men,– speaks the common speech of the people, takes up the phrases and even the fables that he finds upon their lips, and uses them for his own purposes. He does not stop to criticise all their stories, or to set them right in all their scientific errors; that would have been utterly aside from his main purpose, and would certainly have confused them and led them astray. He speaks always of the rising and the setting of the sun, using the phrases that were current at that time, and never hinting at the error underneath them. He knew what these people meant by these phrases. If he knew that these phrases conveyed an erroneous meaning, why did he not correct them? So, too, he quotes from the story of the Creation in Genesis, and never intimates that the six days there mentioned are not literal days of twenty-four hours each. He knew that those to whom he was speaking entertained this belief, and put this interpretation upon these words. Why does he not set it aside?
These questions may admit of more than one answer; but, taking the very highest view of Christ’s person, it is certainly enough to say that any such discussion of scientific questions would have been, as even we can see, palpably unwise. There was no preparation in the human mind at that day for the reception and verification of such a scientific revelation. It could not have been received. It would not have been preserved. It would only have confused and puzzled the minds of his hearers, and would have shut their minds at once against that moral and spiritual truth which he came to impart. And what we have said about scientific questions applies with equal force to questions of Old Testament criticism. To have entered upon the discussion of these questions with the Jews would have thwarted his highest purpose. In the largest sense of the word these Scriptures were true. Their substantial historical accuracy he wished to confirm. Their great converging lines of light united in him. He constantly claimed their fulfillment in his person and his kingdom. Why, then, should he enter upon a kind of discussion which would have tended to confuse and obscure the main truths which he came to teach? If, then, he refers to these Scriptures, he uses them for his own ethical and spiritual purposes,–not to indorse their scientific errors; not to confirm the methods of interpretation in use among the Jews.
But Mr. Huxley insists, and all the ultra-conservative commentators join him in insisting, that Christ could not, if he had been an honest man, have spoken thus of Jonah if the story of Jonah had not been historically accurate. This is the way he puts it: “If Jonah’s three days’ residence in the whale is not an ‘admitted fact,’ how could it ‘warrant belief’ in the ‘coming resurrection’?” [Footnote: _The Nineteenth Century_, July, 1890.] Mr. Huxley is using Canon Liddon’s phrases here; but he is using them to confute those for whom, as he knows very well, Canon Liddon does not speak. Those who say that the story of Jonah is an “admitted reality” may, perhaps, be able to see that it “warrants belief” in the “coming resurrection.” To my own mind, even this is by no means clear. I do not see how the one event, even if it were an “admitted reality,” could “warrant belief” in the other. No past event can warrant belief in any future event, unless the two events are substantially identical. The growth of an acorn into an oak in the last century “warrants the belief” that an acorn will grow into an oak in the present century; but it does not “warrant the belief” that a city planted on an eligible site will grow to be a great metropolis. The one event might illustrate the other, but no conclusions of logic can be carried from the one to the other. It is precisely so with these two events. There is a certain analogy between the experience of Jonah, as told in the book, and that of our Lord; but it is ridiculous to say that the one event, if an “admitted reality,” “warrants belief” in the other,–whether it is said by Mr. Huxley or Canon Liddon. Our Lord’s words convey no such meaning. In truth, if we are here dealing with scientific comparisons, the one event, if taken as an “admitted reality,” _warrants disbelief_ in the other. What are our Lord’s precise words? “_As_ Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, _so_ shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” We are told by Mr. Huxley and his orthodox allies that we must take this as a literal historical parallel, or not at all; that if we treat it in any other way, we accuse our Lord of dishonesty. What, then, was the condition of Jonah during these three days and nights? Was he dead or alive? He was certainly alive, if the tale is history–very thoroughly alive in all his faculties. He was praying part of the time, and part of the time he was writing poetry. We have a long and beautiful poem which he is said to have composed during that enforced retirement from active life. It would appear that his release took place immediately after the poem was finished. If, now, these events are bound together with the links of logic, if the one event is the historic counterpart of the other, the Son of man, during the three days of his sojourn in the heart of the earth, was not dead at all! He was only hidden for a little space from the sight of men. He was alive all the while, _and there was no resurrection!_ It is to this that you come when you begin to apply to these parables and allegories of the Bible the methods of scientific exposition. This may be satisfactory enough to Mr. Huxley. I should like to know how it suits his orthodox allies.
The fact is, that you are not dealing here with equivalents, but with analogies; not with laws of evidence, but with figures of rhetoric: and it is absurd to say that one member of an analogy “warrants belief” in the existence of the other. There is no such logical nexus. The leaven in the meal does not “warrant belief” in the spread of Christianity, but it serves to illustrate it. The story of the Prodigal Son does not “warrant belief” in the fatherly love of God, but it helps us to understand something of that love, and it helps us precisely as much as if it had been a veritable history, instead of being, as it is, a pure work of fiction.
“What sort of value,” asks Mr. Huxley, “as an illustration of God’s methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened?” Such an admonition, he says, is “morally about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away.” Let us apply this maxim to some of Mr. Huxley’s homilies:–
“Surely,” he says in one of his “Lay Sermons,” “our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them. We should fear being banished for our neglect _to that limbo where the great Florentine tells us are those who during this life wept when they might be joyful_.” [Footnote: _Lay Sermons and Addresses_, p. 92.] This limbo of Dante’s is not, I dare say, an “admitted reality” in Mr. Huxley’s physical geography. “What sort of value,” therefore, has his reference to it? Is he merely raising the cry of bogy? He certainly does intend what he says as a dissuasive from a certain course of erroneous conduct. I venture to insist that he has a real meaning, and that, although the limbo is a myth, the condition which he intends to illustrate by his allusion to it is a reality.
Once more: “I do not suppose that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature says,–
‘A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more,’
would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and a central placentation.” [Footnote: _Ibid_. p. 91.]
Does Mr. Huxley believe that Peter Bell was a historical person? If he was not, how, in the name of biological theology, could his dead soul have been roused by any information whatever? Yet these sentences of his have a real and valuable meaning. It is evident that Mr. Huxley does understand the uses of allegory and fable for purposes of illustration; that he can employ characters and situations which are not historical, but purely imaginary, to illustrate the realities which he is trying to present,–speaking of them all the while just as if they were historical persons or places, and trusting his readers to interpret him aright. Such a use of language is common in all literature. To affirm that our Lord could not resort to it without dishonesty is to deny to him the ordinary instruments of speech.
“We may conclude, then,” with Professor Ladd, “that the reference to Jonah does not cover the question whether the prophet’s alleged sojourn in the sea monster is an historical verity; and that it is no less uncritical than invidious to make the holding of any particular theory of the Book of Jonah a test of allegiance to the teachings of the Master.” [Footnote: _The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, i. 67. ]
It is evident enough, as Professor Cheyne has said, that the symbolic meaning of the book was the most important part of it in the New Testament times. But other and more obvious meanings are conveyed by the narrative. Indeed, there is scarcely another book in the Old Testament whose meaning is so clear, whose message is so divine. Apologue though it is, it is full of the very truth of God. There is not one of the minor prophecies that has more of the real gospel in it. To the people who first received it, how full of admonition and reproof it must have been! That great city Nineveh–a city which was, in its day, as Dr. Geikie says, “as intensely abhorred by the Jews as Carthage was by Rome, or France under the elder Napoleon was by Germany”–was a city dear to God! He had sent his own prophet to warn it of its danger; and his prophet, instead of being stoned or torn asunder, as the prophets of God had often been by their own people, had been heard and his message heeded. The Ninevites had turned to God, and God had forgiven them! God was no less ready to forgive and save Nineveh than Jerusalem. What a wonderful disclosure of the love of the universal Father! What a telling blow, even in those old days, at the “middle wall of partition” by which the Jew fenced out the Gentile from his sympathy!
And then the gentle rebuke of Jonah’s petulant narrowness! How true is the touch that describes Jonah as angry because God had forgiven the Ninevites! His credit as a prophet was gone. I suppose that he was afraid also, like many theologians of more modern times, that if threatened penalty were remitted solely on the ground of the repentance of the sinners, the foundations of the divine government would be undermined. How marvelously does the infinite pity and clemency of God shine out through all this story, as contrasted with the petty consistency and the grudging compassion of man; and how clearly do we hear in this beautiful narrative the very message of the gospel: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.”
May I say, in closing, that the treatment which the Book of Jonah has received, alike from skeptics and from defenders of the faith, illustrates, in a striking way, the kind of controversy which is raised by the attempt to maintain the infallibility of the Bible. The _crux_ of all the critics, orthodox and heterodox, is the story about the fish. The orthodox have assumed that the narrative without the miracle was meaningless, and the heterodox have taken them at their word. In their dispute over the question whether Jonah did really compose that psalm in the belly of the fish, with his head festooned with seaweed, they have almost wholly overlooked the great lessons of fidelity to duty, of the universal divine fatherhood, and the universal human brotherhood, which the story so beautifully enforces. How easy it is for saints as well as scoffers, in their dealing with the messages of God to men, to tithe the mint, anise, and cummin of the literal sense, and neglect the weightier matters of judgment, mercy, and truth which they are intended to convey!
CHAPTER VI.
THE LATER HEBREW HISTORIES.
After the Book of the Law had been revised by Ezra, and the Book of the Prophets had been compiled by Nehemiah, there still remained a body of sacred writings, not Mosaic in their origin and not from the hands of any recognized prophet, but still of value in the eyes of the Jews. We cannot tell the time at which the work of collecting these Scriptures was begun; possibly it was going on while the Books of the Prophets were being compiled. This third collection was called from the first by the Jews, “Ketubim,” meaning simply writings; the Greeks afterward called it by a name which has been anglicized, and which has become the common designation of these writings among us, “The Hagiographa,” or the Holy Writings. The adjective holy was not a part of the Jewish title; it would have overstated, somewhat, their first estimate of this part of their Bible. For while the degree of sacredness attached to these books gradually increased, they were always held as quite inferior to the other two groups of Scriptures. For convenience the list of books in this collection may be here repeated:–
The Psalms.
The Proverbs.
Job.
The Song of Solomon.
Ruth.
Lamentations.
Ecclesiastes.
Esther.
Daniel.
Ezra.
Nehemiah.
1 Chronicles.
2 Chronicles.
The arrangement is topical; first, three poetical books, The Psalms, The Proverbs, and Job; then five so-called Megilloth, or Rolls, read in the later synagogues on certain great feast days,–The Song of Songs at the Passover, Ruth at Pentecost, Lamentations on the anniversary of the burning of the temple, Ecclesiastes at the Feast of Tabernacles, and Esther at the Feast of Purim; lastly, the historical and quasi-historical books, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles.
Of Ruth I have already spoken in its proper historical connection, taking it with the Book of Judges.
In treating of the remaining books I shall not follow the order of the Hebrew Bible, which I have given above, but shall rather reverse it, treating first of the historical books, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles, also of Esther and Daniel; then, in a subsequent chapter, of the poetical books, the Lamentations, the books attributed to Solomon,– Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon’s Song,–and finally of Job and the Psalms.
The histories which, under the title of the “Earlier Prophets,” are contained in the middle group of the Hebrew Scriptures, have been studied in a former chapter. In this later group of writings we find certain other historical works which cover the same ground. In the words of Mr. Horton:–
“Taking historical excerpts from the first six books of the Bible, and then going on in a continuous narrative from the beginning of Judges to the end of the Second Book of Kings, we have a story–true, a story with many gaps in it, still a connected story–from the earliest times to the captivity of Judah. Then, starting from the First Book of Chronicles and reading on to the end of Nehemiah, we have, in a very compressed form, though enlarged in some parts, a complete record from Adam to the return from the Captivity; at the end of this long sweep of narrative comes the Book of Esther, which is a brief appendix containing a historical episode of the Captivity. Taking these two distinct histories, we have two lines of narrative, an older and a later, which run together up to the Captivity; the older, though covering a shorter time, is much the larger and fuller; the later, very thin in most parts, becomes very full in its account of the Temple-worship and Temple-kingship at Jerusalem, and then continues the story alone up to the end of the Captivity, and the reëstablishment of the Temple-worship after the return.” [Footnote: _Inspiration and the Bible_, pp. 159, 160.]
The older history, contained in Samuel and Kings, breaks off abruptly in the time of the Captivity; we know that it must have been written during the Exile, and could not have been written earlier than about 550 B.C. The later history, in Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, begins with Adam, and goes on, by one or two genealogical tables, for almost two centuries after the Captivity. In 1 Chronicles iii. 19, the genealogy of Zerubbabel, who came back with the captives, is carried on for at least six generations. Counting thirty years for a generation, the table extends the time of the writing of this record to at least one hundred and eighty years after the return of the exiles. This occurred in 538 B.C., and the book must therefore have been written as late as 350 B.C., or very nearly two centuries after the earlier history was finished.
There are conclusive reasons for believing that the four books now under consideration, the two books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, were originally but one book. In the Hebrew Canon the Chronicles is now but one book; and in the old Hebrew collections Ezra and Nehemiah were but one book. It was in the Septuagint that they were first separated. Thus we have the four certainly reduced to two. And it is not difficult, on an inspection of the documents, to reduce the two to one. If you will open your Bible at the last verses of Second Chronicles, beginning with the twenty-second verse of the last chapter, and, fixing your eyes on this passage, will ask some one to read to you the first three verses of the Book of Ezra, you will see how these two books were formerly one; and how the manuscript was torn in two in the wrong place; so that the Book of Chronicles actually ends in the middle of a sentence. The period at the end of this book ought to be expunged.
The explanatfon of this curious phenomenon is not difficult. The last group of sacred writings, what the Jews call the Ketubim, was kept open for additions to a very late day. After this history was written (Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah) the question arose whether it should be admitted into the canon. The first answer to this question evidently was: “We do not need the first part of the history,–the Book of Chronicles,–for we have the substance of it already in the Books of Samuel and Kings and in the earlier writings; but we do need the last part of it, ‘Ezra-Nehemiah,’ for this carries the history on beyond the Captivity, and gives the account of the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of the city and the temple.” So they tore the book in two, and put the last part of it into the growing collection of “Ketubim,” or “Writings.” The careless division of the manuscript, not at the beginning of a paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence, made it necessary, of course, for the scribe to copy at the beginning of the Ezra-roll the words belonging to it which had been torn off; but they were not erased from the first part, and have been left there, as the old historians say, “unto this day.”
By and by there were requests that this first part–the Chronicles–be admitted to the Ketubim. The priests and the Levites of the temple would be sure to urge this request, for the Chronicles is the one book of the Old Testament in which their order is glorified; and at length the request was granted; the Chronicles were added to the collection, and as they went in last they follow Ezra-Nehemiah, although they belong, chronologically, before it. They stand to-day at the end of the Hebrew Bible, and thus testify, by their position, respecting the lateness of the date at which they were admitted to the canon. Thus the Hebrew Bible ends with an incomplete sentence.
What this later history may have been called before it was torn in two we have no means of knowing; but the Jews called the last part of it (which stands first in their collection) by the name of Ezra, and the first part of it (which is last in their canon) they named, “Events of the Times,” or “Annals.” In the Septuagint this book of the Chronicles was called “Paraleipomena,” “Leavings,” “Things Left Over,” “Supplements.” Jerome first gave it the name of “Chronicles,” by which we know it.
The name of the author of this book is unknown. The strong probabilities are that he was a Levite, connected with the temple service in Jerusalem. The Levites had charge of the public religious services of the temple, especially of its music; and the fullness with which this writer expatiates upon all this part of the ritual shows that it was very dear to his heart. [Footnote: See 1 Chron. vi. 31-48; xv. 16-24; xvi 4-42; xxv.2 Chron. v. 12, 13; vii. 6; viii. 14; xx. 19-21; xxiii. 13; xxix. 25-30; xxxi 2; zxxiv. 12; xxxv. 15.] Everything relating to the Levitical priesthood and its services is dwelt upon in this book with emphasis and elaboration; as the histories of Samuel and the Kings are written from the prophetical standpoint, this is most evidently written from the priestly point of view.
In these books of the Chronicles the author constantly points out the sources of his information. He tells us that he quotes from the “Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel,” from the “Acts of the Kings of Israel,” and from “The Story of the Book of the Kings.” The identity of these books is a disputed question. It is supposed by some critics that he refers to the Books of Kings in our Bible; others maintain that he draws from another and much larger book of a similar name which has been lost. The latter theory is generally maintained by the more conservative critics; and it is easier to vindicate the author’s trustworthiness on this supposition; yet even so there are serious difficulties in the case; for it is hard to believe that he could have written these annals without having had before him the earlier record, and between the two are many discrepancies. The main facts of the history are substantially the same in the two narratives; but in minor matters the disagreements and contradictions are numerous. It is part of the purpose of this study to look difficulties of this kind fairly in the face; it is treason to the spirit of all truth to refuse to do so. Let us examine, then, a few of these discrepancies between the earlier and later history.
In 2 Samuel viii. 4, we are told that in David’s victory over Hadadezer king of Zobah, he took from the latter “a thousand and seven hundred horsemen.” In 1 Chronicles xviii. 4, he is said to have taken “a thousand chariots and seven thousand horsemen.” In 2 Samuel xxiv. 9, David’s census is said to have returned 800,000 warriors for Israel, and 500,000 for Judah. In 1 Chronicles xxi. 5, the number is stated as 1,100,000 for Israel, and 470,000 for Judah. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 24, David is said to have paid Araunah for his threshing-floor fifty shekels of silver, estimated at about thirty dollars of our money; in 1 Chronicles xxi. 25, he is said to have given him “six hundred shekels of gold by weight,” amounting to a little more than thirty-four hundred dollars. In 2 Chronicles xiv. i, we read that Asa reigned in the stead of his father Abijah, and that in his days the land was quiet ten years. Again in the 10th and the 19th verses of the following chapter we learn that from the fifteenth to the thirty-fifth year of Asa there was no war in the land. In 1 Kings xv. 32, we are explicitly told that “there was war between Asa and Baasha king of Israel all their days.” In 1 Chronicles xx. the story of the taking of Rabbah seems to be abridged from 2 Samuel xi., xii.; but the abridgment is curiously done, so that the part taken by David in the siege and capture of the city is not brought out; and the whole narrative of David’s relation to Uriah and Bathsheba, with the rebuke of Nathan and the death of David’s child, is not alluded to. The relation of the two narratives at this point is significant; it deserves careful study. One more curious difference is found in the two accounts of the numbering of Israel. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 1, we read, “And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah.” In 1 Chronicles xxi., we read, “And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel.” The numbering in both narratives is assumed to be a grievous sin; and the penalty of this sin, which was David’s, was visited upon the people in the form of a pestilence, which slew seventy thousand of them. I observe that the commentators try to reconcile these statements by saying that God _permitted_ Satan to tempt David. I wonder if that explanation affords to any mind a shade of relief. But the older record utterly forbids such a gloss. “The anger of the Lord against Israel” prompted the Lord to “move David against them,” and the Lord said, “Go, number Judah and Israel!” It was not a permission; it was a direct instigation. Then because David did what the Lord moved him to do, “the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel,” which destroyed seventy thousand men. We are not concerned to reconcile these two accounts, for neither of them can be true. Let us not suppose that we can be required, by any theory of inspiration, to blaspheme God by accusing him of any such monstrous iniquity. Let no man open his mouth in this day to declare that the Judge of all the earth instigated David to do a presumptuous deed, and then slew seventy thousand of David’s subjects for the sin of their ruler. Such a view of God might have been held without censure three thousand years ago; it cannot be held without sin by men who have the New Testament in their hands. This narrative belongs to that class of crude and defective teachings which Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, points out and sets aside. We may, nay we must apply to the morality of this transaction the principle of judgment which Jesus gives us in that discourse, and say: “Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time that God sometimes instigates a ruler to do wrong, and then punishes his people for the wrong done by the ruler which he himself has instigated; but I say unto you that ‘God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man;’ moreover the ruler shall not bear the sin of the subject, nor the subject the sin of the ruler; for every man shall give account of himself unto God.” It is by the higher standard that Christ has given us in the New Testament that we must judge all these narratives of the Old Testament, and when we find in these old writings statements which represent God as perfidious and unjust, we are not to try to “harmonize” them with other statements; we are simply to set them aside as the views of a dark age.
Such blurred and distorted ideas about God and his truth we do certainly find here and there in these old writings; the treasure which they have preserved for us is in earthen vessels; the human element, which is a necessary part of a written revelation, all the while displays itself. It is human to err; and the men who wrote the Bible were human. We may have a theory that God must have guarded them from every form of error, but the Bible itself has no such theory; and we must try to make our theories of inspiration fit the facts of the Bible as we find them lying upon its pages.
The second portion of this history, the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, presents fewer of these difficulties than the Book of Chronicles. It is a fragmentary, but to all appearance a veracious record of the events which took place after the first return of the exiles to Jerusalem. The first caravan returned in the first year of King Cyrus; and the history extends to the last part of the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus,– covering a period of more than a hundred years. The documents on which it is based were largely official; and there is no doubt that considerable portions of the first book came from the pen of Ezra himself, and that the second book was made up in part from writings left by Nehemiah. The language of the second book is Hebrew; that of the first is partly Hebrew and partly Chaldee or Aramaic. We read in the fourth chapter of Ezra that a certain letter was written to King Artaxerxes, and it is said that “the writing of the letter was written in the Syrian character.” The margin of the revised version says “Aramaic.” We find this letter in our Hebrew Bibles in the Aramaic language. And the writer, after copying the letter in Aramaic, goes right on with the history in Aramaic; from the twelfth verse of the fourth chapter to the eighteenth verse of the sixth chapter the language is all Aramaic; then the historian drops back into Hebrew again, and goes on to the twelfth verse of the seventh chapter, when he returns to Aramaic to record the letter of Artaxerxes, which extends to the twenty- seventh verse. The rest of the book is Hebrew. With the exception of some short sections of the Book of Daniel, this is the only portion of our Old Testament that was not written originally in the Hebrew tongue.
The contents of these two books may be briefly summarized. The first book tells us how the Persian king Cyrus, in the first year of his reign, issued a proclamation to the Jews dwelling in his kingdom, permitting and encouraging them to return to their own country and to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The conquest of the Babylonians by the Persians had placed the captive Jews in vastly improved circumstances. Between the faith of the Persians and that of the Jews there was close affinity. The Persians were monotheists; and “Cyrus,” as Rawlinson says, “evidently identified Jehovah with Ormazd, and, accepting as a divine command the prophecy of Isaiah, undertook to rebuild their temple for a people who, like his own, allowed no image of God to defile the sanctuary…. The foundation was then laid for that friendly intimacy between the two peoples of which we have abundant evidence in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.” The words of the decree of Cyrus, with which the Book of Ezra opens, show how he regarded the God of the Jews: “Whosoever there is among you of all his people, his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord, the God of Israel, (he is God,) which is in Jerusalem.” The parenthetical clause is a clear confession of the faith of Cyrus that Jehovah was only another name for Ormazd; that there is but one God.
In consequence of this decree, a caravan of nearly fifty thousand persons, led by Zerubbabel, carrying with them liberal free-will offerings of those who remained in Babylon for the building of the temple, went back to Jerusalem, and in the second year began the erection of the second temple. With this pious design certain Samaritans interfered, finally procuring an injunction from the successor of Cyrus by which the building of the temple was interrupted for several years. On the accession of Darius, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stirred up the people to resume the work, and at length succeeded in getting from the great king complete authority to proceed with it. In the sixth year of his reign the second temple was completed, and dedicated with great rejoicing. This closes the first section of the Book of Ezra. The rest of the book is occupied with the story of Ezra himself, who is said to have been “a ready scribe in the law of Moses,” and who, “in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, king of Persia,” led a second caravan of exiles home to Jerusalem, with great store of silver and gold and wheat and wine and oil for the resumption of the ritual worship of the Lord’s house. The story of this return of the exiles is minutely told; and the remainder of this book is devoted to a recital of the matter of the mixed marriages between the Jewish men and the women of the surrounding tribes, which caused Ezra great distress, and which he succeeded in annulling, so that these “strange women,” as they are called, were all put away. To our eyes this seems a piece of doubtful morality, but we must consider the changed standards of our time, and remember that these men might have done with the purest conscientiousness some things which we could not do at all.
The Book of Nehemiah is in part a recital by Nehemiah himself of the circumstances of his coming to Jerusalem, which seems to have taken place about thirteen years after the coming of Ezra. He was the cupbearer of Artaxerxes the king; he had heard of the distress and poverty of his people at Jerusalem, and in the fervid patriotism of his nature he begged the privilege of going up to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls. Permission was gained, and the first part of the book contains a stirring account of the experiences of Nehemiah in building the walls of Jerusalem. After this work was finished, Nehemiah undertook a census of the restored city, but he found, as he says, “the book of the genealogy of them that came up at the first,”–the list of families which appears in Ezra,–and this he copies. It may be instructive to take these two lists–the one in Ezra ii. and the one in Nehemiah vii.–and compare them. After this we have an account of a great congregation which assembled “in the broad place that was before the water gate,” when Ezra the scribe stood upon “a pulpit of wood” from early morning until midday, and read to the assembled multitude from the book of the law. “And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people (for he was above all the people); and when he opened it all the people stood up, and Ezra blessed Jehovah the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with the lifting up of their hands; and they bowed their heads, and worshiped Jehovah, with their faces to the ground.” Other scribes stood by, apparently to take turns in the reading; and it is said that “they read in the book, in the law of the Lord distinctly [or, ‘with an interpretation,’ Marg.], and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading.” From this it has been inferred that the people had already become, in their sojourn in the East, more familiar with Aramaic than with their own tongue, and that they were unable to understand the Hebrew without some words of interpretation. It is doubtful, however, whether all this meaning can be read into this passage. At any rate, we have here, undoubtedly, the history of the inauguration of the reading of the law as one of the regular acts of public worship. And this must have been about 440 B.C.
The narrative of the first complete and formal observance of the Feast of Tabernacles since the days of Joshua; the narrative of the solemn league and covenant by which the people bound themselves to keep the law; the narrative of the dedication of the wall of the city, and the account of various reforms which Nehemiah prosecuted, with certain lists of priests and Levites, fill up the remainder of the book.
Taking it all in all it is a very valuable record; no historical book of the Old Testament gives greater evidence of veracity; none excels it in human interest. The pathetic tale of the return of this people from their long exile, of the rebuilding of their city and their temple, and of the heroic and self-denying labors of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, the governors, and Haggai and Zechariah, the prophets, and Ezra the scribe, with all their coadjutors, is full of significance to all those who trace in the history of the people of Israel, more clearly than anywhere else, the increasing purpose of God which runs through all the ages.
That portions of the first book were written by Ezra, and of the second book by Nehemiah, is not doubted; but both books were revised somewhat by later hands; additions were undoubtedly made after the death of Nehemiah; for one, at least, of the genealogies shows us a certain Jaddua as high priest, and tells us that he was the great grandson of the man who was high priest when Nehemiah came to Jerusalem. It is not probable that Nehemiah lived to see this Jaddua in the high priest’s office. It is probable that the last revision of the Bible was made some time after 400 B.C.
I have now to speak, in the conclusion of this chapter, of two other books of this last group, concerning which there has always been much misconception, the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel. Esther stands in our Bibles immediately after Ezra-Nehemiah, while Daniel is included among the prophets. But in the Hebrew Bibles both books are found in the group which was last collected and least valued.
I have styled these historical books; are they truly historical? That they are founded upon fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps, safer to regard them both rather as historical fictions than as veritable histories. The reason for this judgment may appear as we go on with the study.
The Book of Esther may be briefly summarized. The scene is laid in Shushan the palace, better known as Susa, one of the royal residences of the kings of Persia. The story opens with a great feast, lasting one hundred and eighty days, given by the King Ahasuerus to all the nabobs of the realm. It is assumed that this king was Xerxes the Great, but the identification is by no means conclusive. At the close of this monumental debauch, the king, in his drunken pride, calls in his queen Vashti to show her beauty to the inebriated courtiers. She refuses, and the refusal ought to be remembered to her honor; but this book does not so regard it. The sympathy of the book is with the bibulous monarch, and not with his chaste and modest spouse. The king is very wroth, and after taking much learned advice from his counselors, puts away his queen for this act of insubordination, and proceeds to look for another. His choice falls upon a Jewish maiden, a daughter of the Exile, who has been brought up by her cousin Mordecai. Esther, at Mordecai’s command, at first conceals her Jewish descent from the king. An opportunity soon comes for Mordecai to reveal to Esther a plot against the king’s life; and the circumstance is recorded in the chronicles of the realm.
Soon after this a certain Haman is made Grand Vizier of the kingdom, and Mordecai the Jew refuses to do obeisance to him; in consequence of which Haman secures from the king an edict ordering the assassination of all the Jews in the kingdom. His wrath against Mordecai being still further inflamed, he erects a gallows fifty cubits high, with the purpose of hanging thereon the testy Israelite. The intervention of Esther puts an end to these malicious schemes. At the risk of her life she presents herself before the king, and gains his favor; then, while Haman’s purpose halts, the king is reminded, when the annals of his kingdom are read to him on a wakeful night, of the frustration of the plot against his person by Mordecai, and learning that no recompense has been made to him, suddenly determines to elevate and honor him; and the consequence is, that Haman himself, his purposes being disclosed by the queen, is hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai, and Mordecai is elevated to Hainan’s place. The decree of an Eastern king cannot be annulled, and the massacre of the Jews still remains a legal requirement; yet Esther and Mordecai are permitted to send royal orders to all parts of the realm authorizing the Jews upon the day of the appointed massacre to stand for their lives, and to kill as many as they can of their enemies. Thus encouraged, and supported also by the king’s officials in every province, who are now the creatures of Mordecai, the Jews turn upon their enemies, and slay in one day seventy-five thousand of them,–five hundred in the palace of Shushan,–among whom are the ten sons of Haman. On the evening of this bloody day, the king says to Esther the queen: “The Jews have slain five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what then have they done in the rest of the king’s provinces? [From this sample of their ferocity you can judge how much blood must have been shed throughout the kingdom.] Now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee; or what is thy request further? and it shall be done.” It might be supposed that this fair Jewish princess would be satisfied with this banquet of blood, but she is not; she wants more. “Then said Esther, if it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews which are in Shushan to do to-morrow also, according unto this day’s decree, and let Haman’s ten sons be hanged upon the gallows.” The request is granted; the next day three hundred more Persians are butchered in Shushan the palace; and the dead bodies of the ten sons of Haman, weltering in their gore, are lifted up and hanged upon the gallows, and all to please Queen Esther! If a single Jew loses his life in this outbreak, the writer forgets to mention it. It is idle to say that this is represented as a defensive act on the part of the Jews; the impression is given that the Persians, by the menacing action of their own officials under Mordecai’s authority, were completely cowed, and were simply slaughtered in their tracks by the infuriated Jews.
As a memorial of this feast of blood, the Jewish festival of Purim was instituted, which is kept to this day; and the Book of Esther is read at this feast, in dramatic fashion, with passionate responses by the congregation.
Is this history? There is every reason to hope that it is not. That some deliverance of the Jews from their enemies in Persia may be commemorated by the feast of Purim is possible; that precisely such a fiendish outbreak of fanatical cruelty as this ever occurred, we may safely and charitably doubt. The fact that the story was told, and that it gained great popularity among the Jews, and by some of those in later ages came to be regarded as one of the most sacred books of their canon is, however, a revelation to us of the extent to which the most baleful and horrible passions may be cherished in the name of religion. It is precisely for this purpose, perhaps, that the book has been preserved in our canon. If any one wishes to see the perfect antithesis of the precepts and the spirit of the gospel of Christ, let him read the Book of Esther. Frederick Bleek is entirely justified in his statement that “a spirit of revenge and persecution prevails in the book, and that no other book of the Old Testament is so far removed as this is from the spirit of the gospel.” [Footnote: Introduction to the Old Testament, i. 450.] For it is not merely true that these atrocities are here recited; they are clearly indorsed. There is not a word said in deprecation of the beastliness of the king or the vindictiveness of the hero and the heroine. It is clear, as Bleek says, “that the author finds a peculiar satisfaction in the characters and mode of acting of his Jewish compatriots, Esther and Mordecai; and that the disposition shown by them appears to him as the right one, and one worthy of their nation.” “Esther the beautiful queen,” whose praises have been sung by many of our poets, possesses, indeed, some admirable qualities; her courage is illustrious; her patriotism is beautiful; but her bloodthirstiness is terrible.
As to the time when this book was written, or who wrote it, I am not curious. Probably it was written long after the Exile, but by some one who was somewhat familiar with the manners of Oriental courts. The name of God is not once mentioned in the book; and it seems like blasphemy to intimate that the Spirit of God could have had anything to do with its composition. It is absolutely sickening to read the commentaries, which assume that it was dictated by the Holy Ghost, and which labor to justify and palliate its frightful narrative. One learns, with a sense of relief, that the Jews themselves long disputed its admission to their canon; that the school of Schammai would not accept it, and that several of the wisest and best of the early fathers of the Christian church, Athanasius and Melito of Sardis among the rest, denied it a place in sacred Scripture. Dr. Martin Luther is orthodox enough for me, and he, more than once, expressed the hearty wish that the book had perished. That, indeed, we need not desire; let it remain as a dark background on which the Christian morality may stand forth resplendent; as a striking example of the kind of ideas which Christians ought not to entertain, and of the kind of feelings which they ought not to cherish.
The Book of Daniel brings us into a very different atmosphere. Esther is absolutely barren of religious ideas or suggestions; Daniel is full of the spirit of faith and prayer. Whether the character of Daniel, as here presented, is a sketch from life or a work of the imagination, it is a noble personality. The self-control, the fidelity to conscience, the heroic purposes which are here attributed to him, make up a picture which has always attracted the admiration of generous hearts.
“As in the story of the Three Children,” says Dean Stanley, “so in that of the Den of Lions, the element which has lived on with immortal vigor is that which tells how, ‘when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks to God, as he did aforetime.’ How often have these words confirmed the solitary protest, not only in the Flavian amphitheatre, but in the ordinary yet not more easy task of maintaining the right of conscience against arbitrary power or invidious insult! How many an independent patriot or unpopular reformer has been nerved by them to resist the unreasonable commands of king or priest! How many a little boy at school has been strengthened by them for the effort, when he has knelt down by his bedside for the first time to say his prayers in the presence of indifferent or scoffing companions…. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the court of Darius, are the likenesses of ‘the small transfigured band whom the world cannot tame,’ who, by faith in the Unseen, have in every age ‘stopped the mouths of lions, and quenched the violence of fire.’ This was the example to those on whom, in all ages, in spirit if not in letter, ‘the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire passed upon them;’ but it was ‘as it were a moist, whistling wind, and the form of the fourth, who walked with them in the midst of the fire, was like a Son of God.'” [Footnote: _History of the Jewish Church_, pp. 41, 42.]
Was Daniel a historical person? The question has been much disputed, but I think that we may safely answer it in the affirmative. It is true that in all these writings of the later period of Israel Daniel is mentioned but twice, both times in the Book of Ezekiel (xiv. 14; xxviii. 3). The first of these allusions is a declaration that a few righteous men cannot save a wicked city, when the decree of destruction against it has been issued; “though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord God.” The other is in a prophecy against the King of Tyre, in which he is represented as saying to himself that he is wiser than Daniel; that there is no secret that can be hidden from him. Whether these casual uses of the name of Daniel for purposes of illustration can be regarded as establishing his historical character may be questioned. And it is a singular fact that we have not in Ezra, or Nehemiah, or Haggai, or Zechariah, or Malachi, any reference to the existence of Daniel. Nevertheless, it is hardly to be supposed that such a character was wholly fictitious; we may well suppose that he existed, and that the narratives of his great fidelity and piety are at any rate founded upon fact.
The first six chapters of the book are not ascribed to Daniel as their author; he is spoken of in the third person, and sometimes in a way that a good man would not be likely to speak about himself. The remainder of the book claims to be written by him. The question is whether this claim is to be taken as an assertion of historical fact, or as a device of literary workmanship. Ecclesiastes was undoubtedly written long after the Exile, yet it purports to have been composed by King Solomon. The author puts his words into the mouth of Solomon, to gain attention for them. It is not fair to call this a fraud; it was a perfectly legitimate literary device. It is entirely possible that this may be the case with the author of this book. Daniel was a person whose name was well-known among his contemporaries, and the author makes him his mouthpiece. There may have been a special reason why the author should have desired to send out these narratives and visions under the name of a hero of antiquity, a reason which we shall presently discover.
The Book of Daniel is not what is commonly called a prophecy; it is rather an apocalypse. It belongs to a class of literature which sprang up in the last days of the Jewish nationality, after the old prophets had disappeared; it is designed to comfort the people with hopes of future restoration of the national power; its method is that of vision and symbolic representation. Daniel is the only book of this kind in the Old Testament; the New Testament canon closes, as you know, with a similar book. I shall not undertake to interpret to you these visions of the Book of Daniel; they are confessedly obscure and mysterious. But there is one portion of the book, the eleventh chapter, which is admitted to be a minute and realistic description of the coalitions and the conflicts between the Græco-Syrian and the Græco-Egyptian kings, events which took place about the middle of the second century before Christ. These personages are not named, but they are vividly described, and the intrigues and vicissitudes of that portion of Jewish history in which they are the chief actors are fully told. Moreover the recital is put in the future tense; “There shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be richer than they all; and when he is waxed strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece.” If, now, the Book of Daniel was written in the early days of the Exile, this was a very circumstantial prediction of what happened in the second century,–a prediction uttered three hundred years before the event. And respecting these predictions, if such they are, we must say this, that we have no others like them. The other prophets never undertake to tell the particulars of what is coming to pass; they give out, in terms very large and general, the nature of the events which are to come. No such carefully elaborated programme as this is found in any other predictive utterance.
But there are those–and they include the vast majority of the leading Christian scholars of the present day–who say that these words were not written in the early days of the Exile; that they must have been written about the middle of the second century; that they were therefore an account of what was going on, by an onlooker, couched in these phrases of vision and prophecy. The people of Israel were passing through a terrible ordeal; they needed to be heartened and nerved for resistance and endurance. Their heroic leader, Judas Maccabeus, was urging them on to prodigies of valor in their conflict with the vile Antiochus; such a ringing manifesto as this, put forth in the progress of the conflict, might have a powerful influence in reinforcing their patriotism and confirming their faith. It might also have appeared at some stage of the conflict when it would have been imprudent and perhaps impossible to secure currency for the book if the reference to existing rulers had been explicit; such a device as the author adopted may have been perfectly understood by the readers; although slightly veiled in the form of its deliverance, it was, perhaps, for this very reason, all the better fitted for its purpose.
It might, then, have been written when the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ were wasting the fields of Palestine with their conflicts. But was it written then? How do we know that it was not a circumstantial prediction made three hundred years before? We do not know, with absolute certainty, when it was written; but there are strong reasons for believing that the later date is the true date.
1. The book is not in the Hebrew collection of the Prophets. That collection was made at least a hundred years after the time at which Daniel is here said to have lived; if so great a prophecy had been existing then, it is strange that it should not have been gathered with the other prophets into Nehemiah’s collection. It is found, instead, among the Ketubim,–the later and supplementary writings of the Hebrew Bible.
2. It is strange also, as I have intimated, that no mention of Daniel or of his book is found in the histories of the Exile and the return, or in any of the prophecies uttered in Israel after the return. That there should be no allusion in any of these books to so distinguished a personage can hardly be explained.
3. Jesus, the son of Sirach, one of the writers of the Apocrypha, who lived about 200 B.C., gives a full catalogue of all the great worthies of Israel; he has a list of the prophets; he names all the other prophets; he does not name Daniel.
4. The nature of this prediction, if it be a prediction, is unaccountable. Daniel is said to have lived in the Babylonian period, and looked forward from that day. His people were in exile, but there is not a vision of his that has any reference to their return from the captivity, to the rebuilding of the temple, or to any of the events of their history belonging to the two centuries following. It is strange that if, standing at that point of time, he was inspired to predict the future of the Jewish people, he should not have had some message respecting those great events in their history which were to happen within the next century. Instead of this, his visions, so far as his own people are concerned, overleap three centuries and land in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes. Here they begin at once to be very specific; they tell all the particulars of this period, but beyond this period they give no particulars at all; the vision of the Messianic triumph which follows is vague and general like the rest of the prophecies. These circumstances strongly support the theory of the later date.
5. Words appear in this writing which almost certainly fix it at a later date than the Babylonian period. There are certainly nine undoubted Persian words in this book; there are no Persian words in Ezekiel, who lived at the time when Daniel is placed at the Babylonian court, nor in Haggai, Zechariah, or Malachi. There are several Greek words, names of musical instruments, and it is almost certain that no Greek words were in use in Babylonia at that early day. This philological argument may seem very dubious and far-fetched, but it is really one of the most conclusive tests of the date of a document. There is no witness so competent as the written word. Let me give you a homely illustration. Suppose you find in some late history of the United States a quoted letter said to have been written by President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, respecting a certain political contest. The letter contains the following paragraph:–
“On receiving this intelligence, I called up the Secretary of State by telephone, and asked him how he explained the defeat. He told me that, in his opinion, boodle was at the bottom of it. I determined to make an investigation, and after wiring to the member of Congress in that district, I ordered my servant to engage me a section in a Pullman car, and started the same night for the scene of the contest.”
Now of course you know that this paragraph could not have been written by President Taylor, nor during the period of his administration. The telephone was not then in existence; there were no Pullman cars; the words “boodle” and “wire,” in the sense here used, had never been heard. In precisely the same way the trained philologist can often determine with great certainty the date of a writing. He knows the biography of words or word-forms; and he may know that some of the words or the word- forms contained in a certain writing were not yet in the language at the date when it is said to have been written. It is by evidence of this nature that the critics fix the date of the Book of Daniel at a period long after the close of the Babylonian empire.
This verdict reduces, somewhat, the element of the marvelous contained