The Literary II. LEGALISM AND ITS AUSTERITIES It will be remembered that the Jewish people, with whose literary history our Book II is dealing, are called "The People of a Book,"1-the book in question being the Old Testament Scripture as a whole. Up to the time of the scribes the materials for that book had been accumulating, in the more or less occasional utterances of prophets, poets, and sages; but toward the organic fusion of these into the unity of a canon, or library, no definite steps had yet been taken. In the stage of Biblical development to which we have now reached the reason for this is apparent. Ezra's completed law of Moses, which both for its chronological significance and its paramount importance must needs stand at the head of such a canon, had just come to its own. Its speedy effect was, so to say, to precipitate and crystallize into form the Jewish religion and thought. Thenceforth its body of priestly and civic ordinances preëmpted the main regard of the cultured classes, so that its austere influence drew in the Jewish mind from its prophetic aspirations and destinies to a Puritanic régime of ecclesiastical law. It is to the somber dominance of this influence, prevailing through centuries of the scanty history from the times of Ezra and Nehemiah onward, that by modern scholars the name has been given, "the night of legalism." I The Jewish Mind and Mood. Note here that we are using the term "Jewish." We have reached the point where this distinctively applies. It is the Jew, the representative of the leading tribe, rather than the more liberal Israelite or the more primitive Hebrew that we have mainly in mind; for we have entered the atmosphere of matured and self-sufficient 2 As outlined above, pp. 12-20. 1 See above, pp. 251–253. Judaism, with its definitive qualities good and bad. Do not infer, however, that these qualities are engendered by the discipline of this imported law. A fair consideration of the noble Mosaic code with its attendant history disproves this. We must take into account the native Jewish mind and mood, as we have already noted its tendencies, and as events wrought to determine its attitude. As Shaped Some very concrete strokes of national experience, in fact, tended to set and harden the mood of the Jewish clergy in their zealous enforcement of scribal law. by Conflicts Chief among these, perhaps, the first at least, and Events was the conflict rising out of the marriage situation. Malachi, in prophetic vein, had scored the Jewish nobility for their treachery in deserting the wives of their youth for the sake of desirable foreign alliances (Mal. ii, 10-16).1 Ezra, coming with the stern ideas of racial purity engendered in an alien land, began his work by exacting an oath from priests and Levites to put away their foreign wives (Ezra x, 5-17). Nehemiah, coming back from Babylon for his second term as governor (cf. Neh. xiii, 6), added his civil power to clear the Temple courts of all foreign taint, an act at the bottom of which lay numerous cases of marriage with Gentiles, notably such an alliance with a member of the High Priestly family (Neh. xiii, 1–9; 23–31). A son of the High Priest, who was son-in-law to Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, he chased from his presence (Neh. xiii, 28). The sequel is not told in Scripture; but from Josephus 2 we learn that the degraded priest, with a considerable following of priests and Levites who had married Gentile women, escaped to Samaria, where his father-in-law enabled him to set up a rival Temple and worship on Mount Gerizim, the cultus to which the woman of Samaria 1 See above, p. 365. 2 Josephus, "Antiquities,” xi, 8, 2; Hunter, "After the Exile," Vol. II, chap. xv. belonged (John iv, 20-22) and the remnants of which exist to this day. This withdrawal of priests greatly confirmed the tendency of the Jews to racial exclusiveness and pride. All this reacted on the temper of leaders and people, enhancing their zealous regard for the law of Moses; it increased also a tendency, already native to the Jewish mind, to make their cultus too mechanical and meticulous, as we see by the way the law was handled by the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' time. A state of things this, very different from the friendliness to strangers and sojourners enjoined in this very law itself (cf. Lev. xix, 33; Num. xv, 14-16; Deut. x, 18, 19); different too from the ideal urged by the prophets that Israel should be a people hospitable, beloved, attractive. The larger Israel spoke in these; it is Judaism that speaks now in tones of a religion that is becoming congealed in rites and ceremonies and that is hardening into orthodoxy, exclusiveness, intolerance. As Creating an Atmosphere of Legalism Not only in the austere circles of the Temple clergy and the scribes but among the people at large this matured spirit of Judaism produced momentous effects both good and bad. To name this I have chosen .a modern term; the thing was just as real and pervasive in ancient times as it is to-day. It is what the novelists call atmosphere, that emotional and social fluid which holds the separate social atoms in solution."2 Not only in word and oath but in unforced opinion and sentiment the general response to Ezra's Mosaic law was hearty, eager, loyal. Further, this popular response seems to have been not to something entirely new, for the people recognized and reverenced it as the genuine law of Moses, but as something which, till then only vaguely apprehended, had now come to common appreciation and understanding. It is hard to see how this remarkable effect 1 Cf. above, pp. 329, 330. 2 Quoted from a recent literary review. could have been brought about unless we adopt some such explanation as that urged by Professor Édouard Naville,1 who holds that Ezra's work as "a ready scribe in the law of Moses" was to translate (or transcribe) the Mosaic statutes from the cuneiform in which they were originally written into the literary language of Palestine, which was Aramaic, and that the school of the scribes, his helpers, gave oral interpretations in the Judaic speech, the dialect of Jerusalem and its environs. This seems borne out by the manner in which the law was read and interpreted, Neh. viii, 4 to 8, where of the scribes who accompanied Ezra it is said, "They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly (literally, "with an interpretation"), and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading" (Neh. viii, 8). If his view is correct, we have here a striking parallel to what took place in Germany by Luther's translation of the Bible and in England by the translations culminating in the King James version. The Bible, by being translated into everyday language, was made a common people's book, and the popular response followed. So it seems to have been in the years following Ezra. The law was, as it were, released from its formal and academic prison and through the work of the scribes became a popular educative factor. It is no wonder then that it created an atmosphere of legalism which permeated to all classes. The people breathed and thought and felt in the idiom of torah, of instruction, of law. Do not imagine this atmosphere of legalism as a medium merely of pedantry and formal dignity and dreary scribal distinctions. There was plenty of this, to be sure, especially 1 Professor Naville's views, with the arguments by which they are set forth, are given in "The Text of the Old Testament," being the Schweich lectures for 1915. The part relating more especially to Ezra's services and influence begins at page 65, but as Professor Naville goes over the whole field from the beginning it is needless to say his book necessitates an entire revision of the current ideas of the Higher Criticism relating to the origin of the early Old Testament writings. in the academic and magisterial circles, and it produced both its dogmatisms and its reactions. But, as we have seen, the Enter, the word torah, which our word "law" only inadePedagogue quately renders, had a much more genial and liberal connotation; it meant a prime asset of the inner · life, round every aspect of which (as seen in its wealth of synonyms) the piety and affections of the people could cluster. "Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and mine ordinances; which if a man do, he shall live in them : I am Jehovah" (Lev. xviii, 5; cf. Ezek. xx, 11; Rom. x, 5; Gal. iii, 12), such was its essential sanction, felt by all. It was accepted not only as the law of the Temple but as the law of the heart. This we can see from the way it entered into the Hebrew sacred poetry into such Psalms as the first, which describes the blessedness of the godly observer; as the nineteenth, which sets its inwardness side by side with the energizing power of the sun and the heavens; as the one hundred and nineteenth, an elaborate acrostic poem one hundred and seventy-six verses long, every one of which contains, with devout ascriptions of praise, some synonym for the divinely given torah. Such was its good influence, far outweighing its austerities. We are not to judge its pervasive effects merely by the handled by the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' time. Its legalism was to a fundamental degree the legalism of something that was felt to be "holy and just and good" (cf. Rom. vii, 12). way it was NOTE. One can see how thoroughly the spirit of a devout legalism had permeated the finer mind of the people by noting the wealth of synonyms introduced into this Psalm cxix. The acrostic form of this Psalm, being apparently the form adopted by Hebrew writers for especially weighty and finished verse, is of course very characteristic; but even more intimately so is the continual recurrence of the words "law," testimonies." "precepts," "statutes," commandments," "word," "judgments," "ordinances," all these attributed directly to the mind of God. ११ |