Somewhat more than a century after Jesus Ben Sira’s work, came an answer to his prayer, not from above but from beneath, in the so-called “Psalter of Solomon.” This is no wisdom book, and need not detain us. It is mainly a hash—one may say a mess—made up out of the Psalms; and though some of the allusions, apparently to Pompey and others, may possess value in other connexions, the work need only be mentioned here as an indication of the fate which Solomon met at the hands of Jahvism. The name of the Wisest of his race on this vulgar production is like the doggerel on Shakespeare’s tomb, and the fling at England’s greatest poet written on the tomb of his daughter,—“Wise to salvation was good Mistriss Hall,” etc.

Before passing, it may be remarked that the obvious allusions to Christ in this Psalter seem clearly spurious, and for one I cannot regard as other than a late interpolation verse 24 of Psalter-Psalm xvii.: “Behold, O God, and raise up unto them their king, the Son of David, in the time which thou, O God, knowest, that he may reign over Israel thy servant.” There is nothing in the literature of the time before or after that would warrant the concession to this ranting Salvationist (B. C. 70–60) of an idea which would then have been original. The verse has the accent of a Second Adventist a century later. The title “Son of David” occurs even in the New Testament but sixteen times.

The Psalter is in spirit thoroughly Jahvist, narrow, hard, without one ray of Solomonic wisdom or wit. It may fairly be regarded as the sepulchre of the wise man whose name it bears (though not in its text). Jahvism has here triumphed over the whole cult of Wisdom.

But Solomon is not to rest there. He is again evoked, though not yet in his ancient secular greatness, by the next work that claims our attention.

This last of the Wisdom Books bears the heading “Wisdom of Solomon” (Sophia Solomontos) and gives unmistakable identifications of the King, though herein also the name “Solomon” appears only in the title. Perhaps the writer may have wished to avoid exciting the ridicule or resentment of the Solomonists by plainly connecting the name of their founder with a retractation of all the secularism and the heresies anciently associated with him. The aristocratic Sadducees, who believed not in immortality, derived their name from Solomon’s famous chaplain, Zadok.

This “Wisdom of Solomon” probably appeared not far from the first year of our era. It is written in almost classical Greek, is full of striking and poetic interpretations and spiritualisations of Jewish legends, and transfused with a piety at once warm and mystical. Solomon is summoned much in the way that the “Wandering Jew,” Ahasuerus, is called up in Shelley’s “Prometheus,” yet not quite allegorically, to testify concerning the Past, and concerning the mysteries of the invisible world. He has left behind his secularist Proverbs and his worldly wisdom; but though he now rises as a prophet of otherworldliness, not a word is uttered inconsistent with his having been a saint from the beginning, albeit “chastised” and “proved.” In fact he gives his spiritual autobiography, which is that of a Son of God wise and “undefiled” from childhood. His burden is to warn the kings and judges of the world of the blessedness that awaits the righteous,—the misery that awaits the unrighteous,—beyond the grave.

The work impresses me as having been written by one who had long been an enthusiastic Solomonist, but who had been spiritually revolutionised by attaining the new belief of immortality. It does not appear as if the apparition of Solomon was to this writer a simple imagination. Solomon seems to be alive, or rather as if never dead. “For thou (God) hast power of life and death: thou leadest to the gates of Hades, and bringest up again.” “The giving heed unto her (Wisdom’s) laws is the assurance of incorruption; and incorruption maketh us near unto God: therefore the desire of Wisdom bringeth to a Kingdom.”

The Jewish people idealised Solomon’s reign long before they idealised the man himself; and indeed he had to reach his halo under personified epithets derived from his fame,—as “Melchizedek,” and “Prince of Peace.” The nation sighed for the restoration of his splendid empire, but could not describe their Coming Man as a returning Solomon, because the priests and prophets,—a gentry little respected by the Wise Man,—steadily ascribed all the national misfortunes to the shrines built to other deities than Jahveh by the royal Citizen of the World. Thus grew such prophetic indirections as “the House of David,” “Jesse’s branch,” and finally “Son of David.”

But this idea of the returning hero does not appear to have been original with any Semitic people; it is first found among them in the Oriental book of Job, who longs to sleep in some cavern for ages, then reappear, and, even if his flesh were shrivelled, find that his good name was vindicated (xiv.). This idea of the Sleeping Hero (which is traced in many examples in my work on The Wandering Jew) appears to have gained its earliest expression in the legend of King Yima, in Persia,—the original of such sleepers as Barbarossa and King Arthur, as well as of the legendary Enoch, Moses, and Elias, who were to precede or attend the revived Son of David. Solomon, whose name probably gave Jerusalem the peaceful half of its name (Salem) would no doubt have been central among the “Undying Ones” had it not been for the Parliament of Religions he set up in that city. But he had to wait a thousand years for his honorable fame to awaken.

In the “Wisdom of Solomon” the Queen of Sheba is also recalled into life. She is, as Renan pointed out, transfigured in the personified Wisdom, and her gifts become mystical. “All good things together came to me with her,” and “Wisdom goeth before them: and I knew not that she was the mother of them.” She is amiable, beautiful, and gave him his knowledge:

“All such things as are secret or manifest, them I knew. For Wisdom, which is the worker of all things, taught me: for in her is an understanding spirit, holy, one only, manifold; subtle, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good, quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good, kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and pervading all intellectual, pure, and most subtle spirits. For Wisdom is more moving than motion itself; she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness. For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no impure thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness. And alone, she can do all things; herself unchanged, she maketh all things new; and in all ages, entering into holy souls, she maketh them intimates of God, and prophets. For God loveth only him who dwelleth with Wisdom. She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars; compared with the light she is found before it,—for after light cometh night, but evil shall not prevail against Wisdom.” (vii. 21–30.)

In Sophia Solomontos Solomon relates his espousal of Wisdom, who sat beside the throne of God (ix. 4). But there remains with God a detective Wisdom called the Holy Spirit. Wisdom and the Holy Spirit have different functions. “Thy counsel who hath known except thou give Wisdom, and send thy Holy Spirit from above?” This verse (ix. 17) is followed by two chapters (x., xi.) relating the work of Wisdom through past ages as a Saviour. But then comes an account of the severe chastening functions of the Holy Spirit. “For thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things (i. e., nothing is concealed from her), therefore chastenest thou them by little and little that offend,” etc. (xii. 1, 2.)

There is here a slight variation in the historic development of the Spirit of God, and one so pregnant with results that it may be well to refer to some of the earlier Hebrew conceptions. The Spirit of God described in Genesis i. 2, as “brooding” over the waters was evidently meant to represent a detached agent of the deity. The legend is obviously related to that of the dove going forth over the waters of the deluge. The dove probably acquired its symbolical character as a messenger between earth and heaven from the marvellous powers of the carrier pigeon—powers well known in ancient Egypt—it also appears that its cooing was believed to be an echo on earth of the voice of God.1 We have already seen (viii.) that Wisdom, when first personified, was identified with this “brooding” spirit over the surface of the waters, and also that in a second (Jahvist) personification she is a severe and reproving agent. But in the second verse of Genesis there is a darkness on the abyss, and both darkness and abyss were personified. In the rigid development of monotheism all of these beings were necessarily regarded as agents of Jahveh—monopolist of all powers. We thus find such accounts as that in 1 Samuel 16, where the Spirit of Jahveh departed from Saul and an evil Spirit from Jahveh troubled him.

Although the Spirit of God was generally supposed to convey miraculous knowledge, especially of future events, and superior skill, it is not, I believe, in any book earlier than Sophia Solomontos definitely ascribed the function of a detective. There is in Ecclesiastes (x. 20) a passage which suggests the carrier: “Curse not the King, no, not in thy thought; and curse not the rich even in thy bedchamber; for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.”2 This was evidently in the mind of the writer of Sophia Solomontos in the following verses:

Wisdom is a loving Spirit, and will not (cannot?) acquit a blasphemer of his words: for God is a witness of his reins, and a true beholder of his heart, and a hearer of his tongue; for the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world, and that which containeth all things hath knowledge of the voice; therefore he that speaketh unrighteous things cannot be hid, neither shall vengeance when it punisheth, pass by him. For inquisition shall be made into the counsels of the ungodly; the sound of his words shall come unto the Lord for the disclosure of his wickedness, the ear of jealousy heareth all things, and the sound even of murmurings is not secret.”

Here we have the origin of the “unpardonable sin.” The Holy Spirit detects and informs, Jahveh avenges, and if the offence is blasphemy, Wisdom, the Saviour, cannot acquit (as the “Loving Spirit” of God it is for her ultra vires). This detective Holy Spirit appears to be an evolution from both Wisdom and Satan the Accuser, in Job a Son of God. By associating with Solomon on earth, Wisdom was without the severe holiness essential to Jahvist conceptions of divine government; in other words, personified Wisdom, whose “delight was with the sons of men” (Prov. viii. 31) was too humanized to fulfil the conditions necessary for upholding the temple at a time when penal sanctions were withdrawn from the priesthood. A celestial spy was needed, and also an uncomfortable Sheol, if the ancient ordinances and sacrifices were to be preserved at all under the rule of Roman liberty, and amid the cosmopolitan conditions prevailing at Jerusalem, and still more at Alexandria.3

With regard to Wisdom herself, there is a sentence which requires notice, especially as no unweighed word is written in the work under notice. It is said, “In that she is conversant with God, she magnifieth her nobility; yea, the Lord of all things himself loved her.” (viii. 3).4 This seems to be the germ of Philo’s idea of Wisdom as the Mother: “And she, receiving the seed of God, with beautiful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible Son, only and well-beloved.” The writer of Sophia Solomontos is very careful to be vague in speculations of this kind, while suggesting inferences with regard to them. Thus, alluding to Moses before Pharaoh, he says, “She (Wisdom) entered into the servant of the Lord, and withstood dreadful kings in wonders and signs” (x. 16), but leaves us to mere conjecture as to whether he (the writer) still had Wisdom in mind when writing (xvii. 13) of the failure of these enchantments and the descent of the Almighty Word, for the destruction of the first-born:

“For while all things are quiet silence, and that night was in the midst of her swift course, thine Almighty Word leaped down from Heaven out of thy Royal throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction; and brought thine unfeigned commandment as a sharp sword, and standing up filled all things with death; and it touched the heaven, but it stood upon the earth.”5

The Word in this place (ὁ παντοδύναμός σου λόγος) is clearly reproduced in the Epistle to the Hebrews (iv. 12). “The Word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword;” and the same military metaphor accompanies this “Word” into Revelation xix. 13. This continuity of metaphor has apparently been overlooked by Alford (Greek Testament, vol. iv., p. 226) who regards the use of the phrase “Word of God” (ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ) as linking Revelation to the author of the fourth Gospel, whereas in this Gospel Logos is never followed by “of God,” while it is so followed in Hebrews iv. 12.

This evolution of the “Word” is clear. In the “Wisdom of Solomon” Wisdom is the creative Word and the Saviour. The Word leaping down from the divine throne and bearing the sword of vengeance is more like the son of the celestial counterpart of Wisdom, namely, the detective Holy Spirit (called in i. 5 “the Holy Spirit of Discipline”). But in the era we are studying, all words by able writers were living things, and were two-edged swords, and long after they who wrote them were dead went on with active and sundering work undreamed of by those who first uttered them.

The Zoroastrian elements which we remarked in Jesus Ben Sira’s “Wisdom” are even more pronounced in the “Wisdom of Solomon.” The Persian worshippers are so mildly rebuked (xiii.) for not passing beyond fire and star to the “origin of beauty,” that one may suppose the author, probably an Alexandrian, must have had friends among them. At any rate his conception of a resplendent God is Mazdean, his all-seeing Holy Spirit is the Parsî “Anahita,” and his Wisdom is Armaîti, the “loving spirit” on earth, the saviour of men.6 The opposing kingdoms of Ahuramazda and Angromainyu, and especially Zoroaster’s original division of the universe into “the living and the not-living,” are reflected in the “Wisdom of Solomon,” i. 13–16:

“God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. He created all things that they might have their being; and the generations of the world were healthful; and there (was) no poison of destruction in them, nor (any) kingdom of death on the earth: (for righteousness is immortal): but ungodly men with their deeds and words evoked Death to them: when they thought to have it their friend they consumed to naught, and made a covenant with Death, being fit to take sides with it.”

In the moral and religious evolution which we have been tracing it has been seen that the utter indifference of the Cosmos to human good and evil, right and wrong, was the theme of Job; that in Ecclesiastes the same was again declared, and the suggestion made that if God helped or afflicted men it must depend on some point of etiquette or observance unconnected with moral considerations, so that man need not omit pleasure but only be punctilious when in the temple; that in Jesus Ben Sira’s contribution to his fathers’ “Wisdom,” the moral character of God was maintained, moral evil regarded as hostile to God, and imaginary sanctions invented, accompanied by pleadings with God to indorse them by new signs and wonders. Such signs not appearing, and no rewards and punishments being manifested in human life, the next step was to assign them to a future existence, and this step was taken in “Wisdom of Solomon.” There remained but one more necessity, namely, that there should be some actual evidence of that future existence. Agur’s question had remained unanswered—

To this the reply was to be the resurrection from death claimed for the greatest of the spiritual race of Solomon.

In a Theocracy the birth of a new God was not the mere new generalization that it might be in our secularized century,—a deification of the Unknowable, for instance,—of not the slightest practical or moral interest to any human being. Judea was the bodily incarnation, even more than Islam is now, of a deity who said, “I am the Lord and there is none else; I form the light and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” The denial of such a deity, the substitution of one who required neither prayers, sacrifices, nor intercessions, could not be merely theoretical. It must involve the overthrow of a nationality which had no bond of unity except a book, and the institutions founded on that book.

Nor did the theocratic principle admit of a mere philosophical opposition to its institutions. He who touched that system was dealing with people who, in the language of “Sophia Solomontos” were “shut up in a prison without iron bars.” The natural advent of the anti-Jahvist was in the Temple and with the words—

These miseries had no real relation to the social or political conditions amid which their phrases and hymns were born, but to a burden of debts to a jealous and vindictive omnipotence; a burden not of actions really wrong, but of mysterious offences, related to incomprehensible ordinances and heavenly etiquette. No human vices are so malignant as inhuman virtues.

Bunyan, in depicting Christian’s burden, has, with a felicity perhaps unconscious, made it a pack strapped on. It is not a hunch, not any part of the pilgrim, and had he possessed the courage to examine it there must have been found many spiritual nightmares of the race, and many robust English virtues turned to sins when the merry and honest tinker turned retrospective Rip Van Winkle, and dreamed himself back into the year One. The burden of sins on the poor Israelites had been gradually getting lighter under the scepticism of the Wisdom school, in view of the failure of Jahveh to fulfil the menaces and sentences of the priesthood. Conformity was secured mainly for actual advantages bestowed by the synagogue, or its terrors. But the discovery of the doctrine of a future life and a day of judgment, when all the mysterious “sins” were to be settled for, while smiled at by the Saducees, made the burden of the ignorant poor intolerable. Life was passed under suspended swords. The priesthood had a cowering vassal in every ignorant human being. The time, the labour, the flocks of the peasantry were devoted, but it was all a “sweating” process,—the debts were never paid, and there was always that “certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.” No doubt even the learned supposed these superstitions useful to keep the “masses” in order.

But one day a scholarly gentleman, a man of genius, was moved with compassion for these poor lost and priest-harried sheep: he turned aside from his college and his rank, and became their shepherd; he declared they owed no duties to any deity, and that the heavenly despot they so dreaded had no existence.

A modern gentleman in a fine mansion and estate may be amused at Bunyan’s quaint pilgrim, reading in a book and discovering that he was in a City of Destruction, fleeing with a burden on his back, and rejoicing when it rolls off at the cross. But if this gentleman should suddenly receive from some distant personage papers showing that his estate had been entirely mortgaged by his father, that it would soon be claimed and his family reduced to beggary, he might understand the City of Destruction. And if, soon after, some visitor arrived to state that the holder of the mortgages was dead; that those claims had all legally fallen into his own hands, and that he had burnt them, the rolling off of Christian’s burden might be appreciated,—also the enthusiasm of the personal followers of Jesus.

But one might further imagine a host of hungry lawyers, living on large retainers, not being quite happy at such easy settlements, especially if the generous visitor were found wealthy enough to go about buying up and burning claims, and ending litigation. This, to us hardly imaginable, was, however, actually the condition of things reflected in parts of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Therein the bond under which man suffers is clearly to him who hath the Power of Death, the Devil: Jesus ransomed man from the Devil.

The anonymous tractate superscribed solely “To the Hebrews,” though the last admitted into the New Testament, is probably the earliest document it contains. It has no doubt been tampered with, but the evidences of the early date of its conception of Christ remain. Not only was it evidently written before the destruction of the temple (anno 70), but before there was any thought of a mission to the Gentiles, who, with Paul their apostle, are ignored. Some of its phrases and illustrations are found in epistles of Paul, but, as Dr. Davidson pointed out in his Introduction to the New Testament, the general doctrine of this treatise is far from Pauline, and it is difficult to find any reason for supposing that the few borrowings were not by Paul, other than a preference for Paul, and disinclination to admit that there is any anonymous work in the New Testament. The treatise is without Paul’s egotism, or his fatalism, and its conception of the new movement seems decidedly more primitive than that in the recognised Pauline epistles. The sagacious Eusebius, “father of church history,” connects the Epistle “To the Hebrews” with the “Wisdom of Solomon,” and it seems clear that we have here the bridge between the last abutment of philosophic or “broad” Jahvism, and its “new departure” as Christism.

It is not of especial importance to the present inquiry to determine that Paul might not at some youthful period have written this work, though I cannot see how any critical reader can so imagine; but it will bear indirectly on that point if we read successively the following corresponding passages:

It appears to me that the evolution is represented in the order given. Paul’s phrase, “first-born of all creation,” is an amplification of the word “first-born” used in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but there used in another connection,—and not solely, as we shall see, relating to Christ. Paul’s phrase corresponds with “the only-begotten,” etc., of John, and with the “son constituted heir” of the Epistle to the Hebrews, though the latter is a different Christological conception. When this writer’s doctrinal statement is finished, and after his argument is begun, he says (i. 6), “But when of old bringing the first-born into the inhabited earth, he saith, And pay homage to him all angels of God.” The word “first-born” here is probably the seed from which Paul develops his full flower of doctrine, given above. Paul’s conception of a creative Christ seems later than the “guiding” Christ (Heb. i. 3), which recalls the function of Wisdom as “director” at the creation (Prov. viii. 30); and the idea in this epistle to the Hebrews of a previous and historical Christophany, while harmonious with that of the “Wisdom of Solomon” (vii. 27),—that she (Wisdom) “in all ages enters into holy souls,”—is so primitive, unique, and so foreign to Paul, that the writer may have been one of those accused by him of preaching “another Jesus” (2 Cor. ii. 4).1

Although this Epistle contains the principle ascribed to Jesus, “charity and not sacrifice” (xiii. 9) and substitutes for beasts the “sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips harmonious with his good name” (verse 15), the letter that killeth brought forth from the same chapter the fatal doctrine that the body of Jesus was a sacrifice to be eaten. And although this emphasizes the completeness of his humanity to an extent inconsistent with his deity, it is on the letter of this Epistle that the deification of Christ is founded.

He is represented as “made perfect through sufferings,” as “tempted in all points like (?others) without sin,” and as having without assistance of temple or sacrifices, “obtained eternal redemption” (ix. 12). Thus he also needed redemption.

The new covenant of which Jesus was the founder is described in the words of Jeremiah (xxxi.):

In quoting this the writer to the Hebrews adds: “In that he saith, ‘A new (covenant) he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is near unto vanishing entirely.’” Here is a primitive Quakerism, but more conservative; not like George Fox at once sweeping away priesthood sacraments and ecclesiastical laws before the Inner Light, but pointing to their near vanishing.

The writer of this Epistle is a philosophical conservative; he shudders at the idea of a swift and complete overthrow of the traditional system, and even borrows its old thunders against levitical sin to menace offences against the new moral God. “Our God [also] is a consuming fire.” It is evident by his very warnings that a great anti-sacerdotal and anti-levitical revolution had taken place, and that the free spirit was burgeoning out in excesses. But such is his culture that one may suspect his thunders of being theatrical, and that he thinks some superstition necessary for the masses.

The fatal and subtle character of the detective Holy Spirit is imported into this Epistle from the “Wisdom of Solomon” (i. 6), though not so distinctly personified. The sin afterwards called “unpardonable” is here a sin against Christ for which repentance, not pardon, is impossible. We may perhaps find in some of the expressions germs of the legend of Judas. “As touching those who were once enlightened, and tasted the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age that is come, and fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, seeing they individually impale the Son of God afresh and put him to open shame” (vi. 5, 6). The believers are “not of them that shrink back into perdition” (x. 39); and they are warned to look carefully “whether there be any man that falleth back from the grace of God,... like Esau, who for one mess of meat sold his own birthright” (xii. 15, 16). The words “tasted,” “perdition,” “sold,” might start a legend of the betrayal, first alluded to by Paul (if 1 Cor. xi. 23 be genuine, which is doubtful), though had the legend of Judas then existed this writer would naturally have alluded to him along with Esau.

This Epistle is the nursery of the titles of Christ; he is Apostle, Son of God, Son of Man, Great Shepherd, Captain of Salvation, Mediator, Great High Priest; and here alone is found the now familiar endearing phrase “Our Lord.” These titles represent the functions of different beings in the Avesta. The conception of the work of Jesus on earth is largely Zoroastrian. The Majesty on high has a colony and a people on earth, which otherwise is under the supremacy of the Evil One. As we have seen the Avestan definitions of Ahuramazda and Angra Mainyu, “the Living and the Not Living,” are reflected in the phrases of this Epistle,—the “Power of Imperishable Life” (vii. 16) and the “Power of Death” (ii. 14). Ahuramazda, when his “habitable earth” was prepared, brought into it his “first-born,” Yima, and wished him to propagate the divine law which should destroy the power of Angra Mainyu on earth and confine him in the underworld. Yima replied, “I was not born, I was not taught, to be the preacher and the bearer of thy law.” He engaged, however, to enlarge and nourish the garden of God on earth, of which he was king, and entitled “the good shepherd.” He obtained from the Holy Spirit, Anâhita, the powers thus enumerated in Abân Yast 26: “He begged of her a boon, saying, ‘Grant me this, O good, most beneficent Ardvi Sûra Anâhita, that I may become the sovereign lord of all countries, of the dævas [devils] and men, of the Yâtus [sorcerers] and Pairkas [seducing nymphs], of the oppressors [who afflict] the blind and the deaf; and that I may take from the dævas [devils] both riches and welfare, both fatness and flocks, both weal and glory” [hvarenô, “the glory from above which makes the king an earthly god”].3 This “firstborn” reigned a thousand years, but then, having ascribed his “glory” to the demons from whom he obtained wealth and material benefits, his “glory” was lost, and secured by the Devil, who reigned in his place a thousand years, blighting the world, when Zoroaster was born to undertake the establishment of the divine Law on earth. Yima was ultimately developed into the Jamshid of Persian mythology, whose power over demons, fabulous wealth, and ultimate fall (through declaring himself a god, according to Firdusi) invested the legend of Solomon.

From the legend of Solomon and the Solomonic Psalms the Epistle to the Hebrews brings its exaltation of Christ. From Ps. lxxxix. 26–7, as reproduced in 2 Sam. vii. 14, is quoted (i. 5) the divine promise, “I will be to him (Solomon) a Father and he shall be my Son,” along with the manifesto at Solomon’s enthronement (Ps. ii. 7), “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” Solomon is the “first-born” alluded to in Heb. i. 6: “When of old bringing the first-born into the inhabited earth (οἰκουμένην) he saith, And pay homage to him all angels of God?”

And here we have an interesting example of evolution in the Solomon legend. The term “first-born,” as indicating the relation of a human being to the deity, occurs but once in the Old Testament, namely, in Psalm lxxxix. 27. It occurs in a strange passage that must be quoted:

Although in all of these verses the Davidic royalty is exalted, the reference to David’s own reign passes at verse 24 into a celebration of Solomon. Here, as in Psalm cxxxii. 17, Solomon is the “horn” of David: he was distinctively the power on sea and river, phrases inapplicable to David, and there is a contrast between the anointed “servant” (verse 20) and the “first-born” (verse 27). The next title, “Elyon” (Most High), comes very near to that of the deity (El Elyon) of the mysterious priest-king of Salem, Melchizedek, whose mythical character and identity with the legendary Solomon will be hereafter considered.

Here we have no doubt the germs of the narrative in 2 Sam. vii. of the formal adoption of Solomon as Jahveh’s son, with the addition of a metaphysical connotation of the sonship not found in the Psalm. In the Psalm the fatherhood is that of support, the position of “first-born” is that of chieftainship among kings; and it is further said (31, 32) that if any of the sons of the Davidic line profane the divine statutes, “Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.” But in 2 Sam. vii. 14, Jahveh applies this warning to Solomon alone, and with a remarkable modification: “I will be his father and he shall be my son: if he commit iniquity I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the sons of men; but my mercy shall not depart from him.” That is, though a son of God he may be chastened like the sons of men,—an intimation of a difference between Solomon and ordinary human nature not intended in the words of the Psalm.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, finding in this Psalm an introduction of “first-born” into the world, for there is no article preceding the word, follows it so closely as to omit any article before “son” (i. 2). He finds this in an address of the deity to his angels (“holy ones” or saints), and understands verse 27 of the Psalm to mean that they, the angels, are to worship the “first-born” as the Elyon, or Most High on earth. From 2 Sam. vii. the Epistle gets sufficient authority for ascribing an eternal personality to the sonship, anciently represented by Solomon, and we may thus see that the gesture of Hebrew religion towards a doctrine of incarnation was much earlier than is generally supposed. And this, too, is the Hebrew contribution to a Psalm which, in the nine verses above quoted, imports ideas foreign to Judaism. The reciprocal help of the deity and the king (19–21) is Avestan, and inconsistent with monotheism. Elyon is the name of an ancient Phœnician god, slain by his son El, no doubt the “first-born of death” in Job xviii. 13, and the violent “son of evil,” in verse 22 of our Psalm. The exaltation of both David and Solomon in the Psalm is primarily in reference to service and deeds, not majesty, essence, or title; of these Avestan religion made little, but Hebraism made much, and the deification of Solomon, though warranted by other Psalms, is added to this eighty-ninth by Samuel and the Epistle to the Hebrews.

In Ecclesiasticus it is written: “In the division of the nations of the whole earth he set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord’s portion: whom, being his first-born, he nourisheth with discipline, and giving him the light of his love doth not forsake him.... For all things cannot be in men, because the son of man is not immortal. What is brighter than the sun? Yet the light thereof faileth; and flesh and blood will imagine evil” (xvii.). Now in the Zoroastrian theology there could be no direct contact of God with matter: the devil’s empire could be invaded and death conquered only by a perfectly “blameless” Man. (Cf. “Wisdom of Solomon,” xviii. 21, with the “sinless” of Heb. iv. 15, the “guileless” of vii. 26, and “without blemish,” ix. 14). The spotless one can use no carnal weapon. In the Zoroastrian theology the divine potency is that of the Word, and formulas exist to be wielded against every variety of demon. So in this Epistle the supremacy of the Son is by “the word of his power”, (i. 3), and “the Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword” (iv. 12).

The enterprise of the Son of God was to fulfil these conditions. He must become a complete man, share all the infirmities of man, all his liabilities to temptation, receive no assistance from his Father, no angelic help,—placed lower than the angels,—and confront the powers of Death and Hell without any material weapon. If he succeeded in remaining sinless, faithful to the divine law, even unto death, even while in hell, unshaken by threats, sufferings, or seductions, it must be a purely human achievement. There was no miracle; even the suspicion of using supernatural power would have tainted the whole work of Jesus as conceived in this Epistle.

This undertaking was not simply for the sake of mankind. All things are not yet subjected to the divine sway (Heb. ii. 8). Heaven itself was shaken, when the old covenant failed, and trembled for the result of the tremendous conflict of the Son of Man on earth with its Prince and his hosts (Heb. xii. 25–29). This was “the joy in front of him” (xii. 2), as well as the rescue of men.

Thus was the man left entirely to the devil, not even his life being reserved, as in the case of Job. He loudly cries for help, even with tears, at the sight of Death; he is heard, pitied, but no help comes. He must trust to his human merits, and not miracles, for his Sonship is of no value in this conflict. By his obedience learned in his sufferings, by his sinlessness under all trials and temptations, he fulfilled the conditions of deathlessness. By his own heart’s blood, not by offerings of bloody sacrifices, not by supernatural power, he reached the place of holiness, “having obtained eternal redemption.” From first to last there was no divine aid. His unanswered loud cries (Heb. v. 7) may be connected with the legend of his expiring cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

Much of the thought here is similar to the “Wisdom of Solomon” (ii. 22–4, iii. 1–9), where however the ideas are conflicting. It is said, “God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity: nevertheless, through the devil’s envy came death into the world, and they that hold of his side do find it.” But then Jahvism puts in with the declaration that the seeming destruction of the righteous is God’s chastisement and probation of them. The Epistle to the Hebrews does not regard the sufferings and death of Jesus as God’s work at all, but all from the devil. Though God spoke by him there is no suggestion that he sent Jesus, or that his coming was not voluntary.

With this reservation, and a large one it is, that Jesus was not delivered up to Satan by God, but left to confront his torments in an effort to subdue him, “bring him to nought,” the central idea of the Epistle is a doctrinal transfiguration of Job, who being delivered up to Satan, triumphs over the tempter and tormentor, and through all preserves his sinlessness and loyalty to God. The result being that those who had denied Job’s merits, his sinlessness, had to secure Job’s intercession in order to escape the penalty of having ascribed his sufferings to God (Job xlii. 8).4 This relationship of ideas is all the more interesting because apparently unconscious in the writer of the Epistle, and thus revealing the extent to which Oriental religion had remoulded Judaism among the educated Jews of his time. Monotheism is strictly inconsistent with the supremacy of “merits” which is the very soul of Oriental religion. The sacred books of India contain records of saints or Rishis who by extraordinary austerities, sacrifices, and virtues so piled up their “merits” that the gods were frightened, as they were at the tower of Babel; and sometimes the gods tempted these powerful saints to commit some sin that would reduce their “merits.” The Solomonic “Proverbs” are pervaded by the Oriental doctrine of “merits”: a man is proved by test of his merits, as gold passing through the furnace (xxvii. 21); the perfect inherit good (xxviii. 10); and perhaps that sublime pedlar of transcendent gems imported along with the gold of Ophir some version of the Puranic legend of Harischandra, “the Hindu Job.” All the Jahvist adulterations of the biblical version do not conceal the fact that when Jahveh, by delivering the meritorious man up to Satan, delivered himself also into the hands of Satan, he (Jahveh) was compelled to surrender before the merits on which the man had planted himself. Jahveh reclaimed his sovereignty, but agreed that Job, who had said “God hath wronged me,” had spoken of him “the thing that is right” (xlii. 8). In the same way the storm-god Indra (the Hindu Jahveh) accompanied by all the gods, headed by Dharma (Justice), appears to Harischandra after his trials, and tells him that he, his wife and son, had, by their merits, “conquered heaven” (Markandeya Purana). The completion of these merits was when Harischandra resolved with his wife to die on the funeral pyre of their son, who, as a result of their torments, had died by a serpent’s bite. It was then that the god Indra appeared to restore the son, and admit that the just and faithful king, his wife and son, had “conquered heaven.” We are thus carried to the Solomonic affirmations that “when the whirlwind passeth the just man is on an everlasting foundation” (Prov. x. 25), that “justice delivereth from death” (x. 2), that “the just man finds a refuge in death” (xiv. 32); and we are carried forward to the Epistle to the Hebrews, where, after the last ordeal, death, the son of the heavenly king is restored to life, and Satan, who had over him the power of death, “brought to nought” (ii. 14). But further, in the Puranic legend, which from time immemorial has been a passion-play in India, Harischandra, when told that he, his wife and son, had “conquered heaven,” refused to ascend to heaven without his “faithful subjects.” “This request was granted by Indra, and after Viswamitra had inaugurated Rohitaswa, the king’s son, to be his successor, Harischandra, his friends and followers, all ascended to heaven.” Thus, in our Epistle, the son, having “learned obedience by the things which he suffered, and having been made perfect, became unto all them that obeyed him the author of eternal salvation.” “For in that he hath himself suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” The subjects of King Harischandra who remained faithful to him after he was reduced to beggary, ascended with him. Faith is declared in our Epistle to be “the testing of things not seen” (xi. 1), and faithfulness is to “run with patience the course that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the captain and perfector of faithfulness, who for the joy set before him endured the stake (σταυρόν), despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (xi. 1, xii. 1, 2).

And there is also, I believe, in the scheme of redemption set forth in this Epistle, an influence from the story of King Usinára in the Mahábhárata, of which there were various versions which must have been familiar to the Buddhists in Alexandria. A dove pursued by a falcon takes refuge in the bosom of Usinára; the falcon demands its surrender. The King quotes the law of Manu that it is a great sin to abandon any being that has taken asylum with one. The falcon urges that it is the law of nature that falcons shall feed on doves, and that unless this dove is surrendered its little falcons must starve. The King offers other food, but the only substitute that is adapted to the falcon’s nature is a quantity of Usinára’s own flesh equal to the weight of the dove. To this the King agrees. Balances are produced, and the dove placed in one scale, in the other a piece of the King’s flesh, which seems large enough, but is insufficient. Though the King cuts off piece by piece all of his flesh, the dove outweighs it, until at length Usinára gets into the scale Himself. That outweighs the dove, which is really Agni, the falcon being Indra. The gods who had assumed these forms in order to test Usinára’s fidelity to the law of sanctuary, resume their shape, and the King ascends transfigured to paradise. In one version a King (Givi) sacrifices his son, Vrihad-Gasbha in obedience to sacred requirements, the story resembling that of Abraham and Isaac. Alford calls attention to the emphasis on the word “himself” in the Epistle of the Hebrews ix. 14: “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself, without blemish, unto God, cleanse our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”

Without blemish! That was the great point. The champion of the Good confronts the champion of Evil, his purpose being to conquer the last enemy, Death, by unarmed human virtue. This was the central idea in the Passion, a drama gone to pieces in the Gospels. Therefore, he did not summon legions of angels, and said to Peter, “Sheath thy sword.” Therefore, the mere lynching of Jesus, for such it was, is given the formalities of judicial procedure, in order to impress an official character on the testimonies to his innocence: Pilate, Caiaphas, Pilate’s wife, Judas, Herod, all bear witness that no evil is in him, and he challenges the High Priest’s court, “If I have uttered evil bear witness of the evil.”5 In this passion-drama Jesus Barabbas is set beside Jesus the Christ,—officially proclaimed guilt beside officially proclaimed innocence,—and Wrath selects guilt, condemns innocence. But it was thus the first-born of Life prevailed over the first-born of Death. In that crisis the blameless man swerving not from his rectitude, established the “assembly of the first-born,” who can dwell with the living God because they have learned from their Captain how to get rid of the defilement of mortality. There is nothing vicarious in his service. The Captain represented the human race in a single combat with Satan, and he discovered for all the vulnerable point of that Adversary,—that he could not hold in sheol a perfectly sinless human being. But it still remained that without holiness no man could see the Lord. Another advantage secured by Jesus for men was that after his victory was achieved the heroic man, on resuming his previous position as Son of God, was able to add thereto what he had won as Son of Man,—the office of high priest or intercessor, who could take good care that every man who fulfilled the condition of holiness got his reward. Satan should not cheat. Nevertheless Jesus had been his own saviour, and every man must be his own saviour.

Pulpit ignorance has wrested from the Epistle to the Hebrews fragments of texts, in support of a dogma of atonement which only a fortunate lack of logic prevents from amounting to a doctrine of human sacrifice. A favorite clause is, “Without the shedding of blood there in no remission,”—which is really this epistle’s stigma on the system it is abolishing! The sacredness of the blood of Jesus was that it was the price he had to pay to the devil in order to preserve his sinlessness, and so rise from death, and demonstrate to others that they also could rise by sinlessness to eternal life. It might cost their blood also, but would be lost if they “resisted unto blood.” Jesus thus brought life and incorruption, as distinguished from living-death in sheol, to light. And the devotion to Jesus for this was due to the belief that he had laid aside his heavenly glory and become a complete man, and had thus risked his all, his greatness, his very immortality, to make for both heaven and earth the tremendous venture; the slightest misstep, the least sin, or wrath, or impatience, and he would have had his abode in sheol, in bonds of Satan, through all eternity.

When this Epistle was written the believers already found immortality in such faith; with such hope and joy before them they were able to despise sensual joys, to conquer temptations, and to fulfill those duties and conditions of personal holiness which are described in this Epistle,—“Peace with all men, and holiness without which no man can see the Lord.” The ecstasy did not last long, but it was a marvellous phenomenon while it lasted, and the most complete reflection of it may be found in this Epistle to the Hebrews, especially if it be approached by its prologue,—the “Wisdom of Solomon,”—but it is subtle, and can only be comprehended by patient and comparative studies.

At the heart of this earliest and swiftly lost Christianity was a sublime effort to humanize God.