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Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart: for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts. - JEREMIAH

We really learn only from those books which we cannot criticise. The author of a book which we could criticise would have to learn from us.-GOETHE

THE PEOPLE OF A BOOK

OY THIS historic phrase, applied by Mohammed to the

Christ, we may designate what the Hebrew people became as the result of the long educative experience which began with the Chaldean exile, 586 B.C., and extended to the coming and ministry of Jesus. They went into exile with a heroic history behind them, full of the tokens of Jehovah's special care and leading. They had already in possession a goodly fund of literature, historic, prophetic, poetic; and when the break-up of the Israelitish state came this literature was still in full creative tide, in what we have called the formative centuries. It already had in some form the prophecies of Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah of Jerusalem; the popularized book of law which we know as Deuteronomy; many psalms and proverbs compiled under King Hezekiah; and much of the early histories from Genesis to Kings. In close touch with the exile itself Jeremiah was giving his fervid and vigorous warnings in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel, beginning five years after the first deportation (Ezek. i, 2), was working among the exiles in Chaldea. But this varied literary utterance, scattered and hidden, was imperfectly coördinated and not yet adjusted to the newer times. It needed the touch of the editor and the scholar, the organizing sense of the man of letters, who could collect, revise, and proportion, according to a just appraisal of its import. The people must learn, as it were, to read the great stories, poems, and prophecies that had already been written, and to realize their undying value.

This was the more needed because, in spite of the promise and hope of which their literature was full, their national

and political existence had seemed to end in irretrievable disaster. From 586 B.C. onward the people, suddenly plunged into exile, had to submit to foreign domination, which after the return to their homeland continued with changes of rulers and empires, but with little hope of national independence. Prospects of success in a merely worldly and material career seemed to be closed. If then the prophetic purport of their history, and the high destiny foretold of them, was ever to be realized, it must come in a sense and with an application different from worldly, an outcome not yet clearly understood. In other words, a new depth and strain of meaning must be given to their literature, to make it timely for strange new conditions.

Accordingly, after prophecy has reached its culmination during the exile, in Ezekiel and Second Isaiah, the commanding figure of the prophet, with his impassioned and creative mission, gradually ceases to hold the central place in literature and public appreciation. He gives way to the scribe, or scholar, whose interests are largely centered in the past, and whose work is more critical and interpretative than creative. Under the care of the scribes the body of the nation's literature is first collected and edited, and so preserved for the uses of the restored nation. Important new works are added, as occasion calls, and the old works are revised and filled out with matter suited to the changed circumstances of the nation, but with reverent regard for the integrity of the old masterpieces of literary composition. Then in course of time, and by successive stages, this accumulated literature is classified and organized into a canon, or library; to the making of which are applied rigid principles of inclusion and exclusion. Later still this canon comes to be regarded as a bible, a holy book, with something of the structure and essential unity of a single literary work; which work becomes the main source of the Hebrew race's education in religion, morals, and law. Thus, to an extent

far surpassing any other race of antiquity, the Jews became a people grounded in the knowledge of their racial idea, and of the meaning of their history, the people of a book.

In the large sense, then, we may say, it is the business of this Jewish people, through the nearly six centuries that intervene from the exile to the coming of Christ, to put into form and order the book of their life, that is, to articulate the living idea for which as race and people they exist, and to get this ingrained in the mind of all classes of the people. For this great mission they have been gathering rich material, which in spite of their dispersion and subject political condition still has unabated power to inspire and encourage. As an independent state, maintaining a political autonomy among the empires of the earth, their career is closed; but as a community of individuals, with strong racial and religious solidarity, their new career is just opening. Their mission is to build up the ideal of life anew, hot from the corporate but from the personal and individual unit (cf. Jer. xxxi, 29-34; Ezek. xviii, 1-4). For this object their formative centuries have already developed the organic principles. It remains to make these a spiritual power in the individual heart, in order that the body of the nation may be cultured and sound through and through; and so, with the discipline of exile and return from it they enter upon a new era, which will date no more from Egypt but from Chaldea (see Jer. xvi, 14, 15; xxiii, 7, 8), and the lands whither their God, for their salvation, had driven them.

WHE

CHAPTER VI

LITERARY FRUITS OF THE EXILE

[From 586 to 516 B. C.]

THEN the Jewish people were exiled to Chaldea, the motive of the deportation was involved in a vast scheme on the part of the young king Nebuchadnezzar for Motive of the the upbuilding of a world empire and a capital Deportation which should be, and which accordingly became, one of the wonders of the world. In the words of a modern historian: "Nebuchadnezzar needed builders for his city, and he needed a population for it when built. He must have husbandmen for his fields, artificers and traders for his commerce, soldiers for his armies, sailors for his ships, slaves for his palaces. His foreign wars gave him what he sought. When a country was subdued or a city taken, the best of its inhabitants, the strongest and bravest and most capable, were conveyed forthwith to Babylon. Both Greeks and Jews describe this process under the same metaphor that of sweeping as with a dragnet (see Hab. i, 15). Other lands were emptied, that the great city might be filled. Sometimes almost the entire population of a conquered state was swept into its vast enceinte, or dispersed through the various towns and villages of Babylonia, the central province and nucleus of the Empire. From the ancient cities of Egypt, from the pasture-lands of Syria, from the great seaports of Phoenicia, the captive multitudes poured into Babylon. The Jews were just such subjects as a king like Nebuchadnezzar required; and so once and again his armies appeared in Palestine, and carried off, in relays, all save

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