We have reached now a turning point in the moral history of Israel. Speaking of the effects of the Exile upon the inner life of Israel, Renan uses these words: “Twice it was the fate of Israel to owe its salvation to that which is the ruin of others, and to be recalled by the crushing of its earthly hopes to a sense of its great duties toward humanity.”
The mission of Israel, her duty toward humanity, was, as we have said, to interpret life in ethical terms. As the story of the exilic and the postexilic period unfolds, we shall see how the sad experiences of the Exile purified and deepened the moral consciousness of Israel, and prepared her for the great part she was destined to play in the moral education of mankind.
It was the great unknown prophet of the Exile, the so-called Second Isaiah, who wrote just after the capture of Babylon by the Persian king Cyrus (539 B.C.), who was the representative of the essentially new conceptions of Yahweh and of the requirements of the moral law which characterize this ethical development.391
Shut out from participation in political affairs, the best energies of the exiled community seem to have been turned to the things of the inner life, and consequently the development in the religious and moral spheres went on apace. The conception of God—of what is pleasing to him and what he requires of man—was elevated and purified.
We meet now for the first time monotheism pure and absolute. Yahweh is conceived as the only God; the gods of the other nations are no gods at all. Some of the earlier prophets had, it is true, caught sight of this lofty truth; but the multitude of the people certainly had no such idea of their patron god. The prophets of the Exile are the first to proclaim this doctrine with such emphasis as to cause it to become a part of the indestructible religious consciousness of Israel.392
One cannot read the declarations which the unknown prophet puts in the mouth of Yahweh—“Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me;”393 “I am the first and I am the last; and besides me there is no God;”394 “I am Yahweh who wrought everything, who stretched forth the heavens above, who spread forth the earth—who was with me;”395 “I am Yahweh and there is none beside me;”396 “I am God, and there is none else, I am God, and there is none like me”397—one cannot read these declarations without being convinced that they were not phrased by one to whom the idea of the unity of God had become a commonplace, but rather by one to whom the thought was something in the nature of a discovery.398
But it was not merely the idea of the oneness of deity, of Yahweh as the sole God, that was the element of supreme significance in this practically new thought of God. There is nothing unethical in the belief in many gods; nor, on the other hand, is there anything ethical in the belief that there is only one God. The historically important thing about the monotheism of Israel is that it was ethical monotheism. Up to the time of the Exile the multitude in Israel, notwithstanding the teachings of the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, had never thought of Yahweh as an absolutely just god, but rather as one who would favor his people under all circumstances. Put in the language of to-day, they conceived Yahweh as a partisan, who would be for his people right or wrong. But under the discipline of the Exile the more spiritual-minded of the nation came to accept the teaching that Yahweh’s favor “is conditioned by a law of absolute righteousness.”399
This conception of God marks a turning point in the moral evolution of humanity. It lifted a new ethical standard. It effected a union of religion and morality. This, it is true, was not a wholly new thing in history. In the worship of the good Osiris in Egypt these elements had been united; in the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda they had also been brought together; and at this very time in Greece there was an effort being made to unite them in the worship of the Delphian Apollo. But the union effected by the prophets of Israel was the only one destined to have large and permanent historical consequences. Because of the ethical content given the god idea by them, their conception of deity constituted the most precious part of the spiritual heritage bequeathed by Judaism to Christianity.
The progressive clarification of the moral consciousness in Israel disclosed by this truer conception of the divine character is further shown by the definite and emphatic repudiation by the prophets of the Exile of the doctrine of collective responsibility.400
There was an ironical proverb current in Israel, which, expressing bitter protest against the unequal ways of Yahweh in visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children,401 ran thus: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”402 The prophet Ezekiel says to the people that they shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb.403 With clear moral vision he sees how impossible it is that the moral government of Yahweh should rest upon the principle of collective responsibility, and that the innocent should be punished for the guilty. Declaring that the ways of God are just and equal, he annuls all earlier provisions of the law by boldly proclaiming that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.404
It marks a great moral advance when guilt comes thus to be viewed as a personal and not a communal thing. But unfortunately the ground here gained for morality was lost when the theologians of the early Christian Church, reviving the outgrown conception of collective responsibility, formulated the dogma that all the generations of men—such being the solidarity of the human race—are partakers in the sin of the first parents and under condemnation therefor.405
But the decisive rejection by the deepening moral consciousness in Israel of the doctrine that under the moral government of Yahweh the innocent are punished for the guilty left still unsolved the problem of the sufferings of the righteous—that problem which had at all times so troubled the pious Israelite, and for the solution of which so many different theories had been framed. The new teaching, or the implication of the new teaching, that such sufferings are not penal in character, that they are no sign of God’s displeasure with the sufferer, while a teaching of consolation, contributed nothing to the actual solution of the problem. But a new theory now offers a new interpretation. This theory assumes that all transgression must be atoned for by suffering, but teaches that this suffering may be borne vicariously by one not the transgressor, and the guilt thereby expiated.
This idea worked itself out in the sorrow-burdened souls of the pious exiles in Babylon. Never did acquaintance with bitter sorrow yield sweeter fruit. The thought finds expression in Chapters LII and LIII of Isaiah.406 The righteous Servant of Yahweh, who is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, is the personified community of the pious Israelites, who are wounded for the transgressions and bruised for the iniquities of the nation.407
Of all the ethical products of the troublous life of Israel, this idea that under the moral government of the world one may vicariously bear the burden of another’s fault and thus atone for it was the most important in its historical consequences. Six hundred years after the utterance of this message of consolation to the pious Israelite exiles, the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, thus held aloft by the Great Unknown, was incarnated, so it was believed, in Jesus of Nazareth. Clothed in actual flesh and blood, the sweet persuasiveness of the ideal—the nobility and divineness of suffering voluntarily borne in the stead of another—made unwonted appeal to the heart of humanity, and for eighteen hundred years and more, accepted as a true symbol and interpretation of the moral order, it has been a chief molding force in the moral life of the Western world.
The chief moral fact in the postexilic period408 was the putting into strict practice of the Levitical and Deuteronomic law, and the consequent triumph of ritual morality. From the establishment of this law till the rise of Christianity, orthodox morality in Judah consisted in the careful observance of the thousand and one minute rules and requirements of this Temple code. The good man was he who kept the law of the Lord.409 All duties were in a sense religious duties; they were acts performed simply because of the supposed divine command that they should be performed.410
Such dependence as this on rules and forms and rites is of course disastrous to all true morality. It fosters the idea that morality consists in the performance of certain outer acts, instead of being the attitude of the soul toward the good and the right inwardly discerned. It substitutes an outer standard for the individual conscience. Conscience disused loses its power of discrimination and becomes atrophied. The ethically indifferent is made the all-important, and thus all moral values are confused.
What confusion resulted in Israel is revealed in the denunciations of this rigid, mechanical legalism by the Prophet of Nazareth: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”411 “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth.... To eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.”412
The Sermon on the Mount announces the awakening of the true prophetic spirit in Israel after a sleep of five hundred years.
A sinister phase of the orthodox religious-ethical system of the postexilic age was its narrow, intolerant nationalism. To be an enemy of Israel was what was believed to constitute wickedness, and to excite the wrath of Yahweh, just as later in the ethics of certain systems of Christian theology the unbeliever or pagan, merely because of his unbelief or paganism, was regarded as wicked and as deserving of eternal punishment. In psalms which date from this period these enemies of Yahweh are cursed with a fierce hatred which spares not even the children, but pronounces happy him who shall take up and dash the little ones against the stones.413 Nowhere in history do we meet with a more fanatically intolerant nationalism.
It was only a comparatively small part of the Jewish nation whose home was the city of Jerusalem in the later postexilic period. The Israelite community was now widely scattered in the cities of the East and the West. One important outcome of this, in its bearings upon the moral life of Israel and of the nations that were to receive ethical instruction from her, was the establishment of the synagogue.414 For the Deuteronomic code had made religion to be something connected with the Temple, something separate and apart from true morality, whose root is in human relationships. Now the Dispersion, tearing the Israelites away from the Temple, tended to bring into prominence those religious exercises and those duties which had nothing to do with the Temple service. This was favorable to the religion and morality of the prophets, as opposed to the religion and morality of the priests. The services of the synagogue took the place of the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Temple.415 These services consisted in the reading and translation of a portion of the Scriptures with comments thereupon.416 This meant the incoming of a new and powerful agency in the promotion not only of the religious but also of the moral education of humanity, for this custom “was the origin of the homily and sermon.”417 The synagogue was the prototype and precursor of the Christian basilica and the Puritan meetinghouse.
The reëstablishment of the Law we have pronounced the chief ethical fact in the history of Judaism after the return from the Babylonian Captivity. And this is true if it is the history of the Jews alone that we have in mind; but regarding the moral evolution in the world at large there is another fact belonging to this period of even greater importance. This was the incoming of the doctrine of immortality.418
We have seen that from the first the Hebrews, like the Babylonians, held a belief in a sort of shadowy existence after death;419 but of a belief in personal immortality in our sense of the word, of a life of rewards and punishments beyond the grave, there is no certain trace in Hebrew literature until about the third or second century B.C.420
Different influences had concurred to create this new conception of the hereafter and to secure for it by the end of the Greek period a wide acceptance. First, there was what has been called the subjective sense of fellowship with God. During this period of Israelite history there was engendered in select souls a passionate outreaching after divine companionship. This feeling is revealed in many a postexilic psalm, as where the psalmist exclaims, “For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one [beloved] to see corruption.”421 This was the divination of love like that of the old mystic who exclaimed, “O God, if I should die, Thou couldst not live.”422 It was such filial love and trust as this, which found its divinest expression in the life of “the Sublime Mystic of Galilee,” that created in many a devout soul in Israel that larger hope which gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.
But while it was probably deep religious feeling, the soul’s recognition of its sonship to God, that called into existence the idea of personal immortality, it was the ethical necessity created by a profound faith in God’s absolute justice, an irrefragable conviction that under the moral government of the world well-doing will be rewarded and evildoing punished, that gained for the doctrine its wide acceptance. That good men should be afflicted and wicked men should enjoy prosperity, has in all ages of reflection caused questionings and murmurings. But this ethical problem filled with peculiar unrest the souls of the Israelites, first, because more than any other people they felt the need of a just God; and second, because of their lack of belief in a future life of rewards and punishments in which the wrongs and inequalities of this life might be righted. Hence the many different solutions of the problem which they thought out, and through which they sought to justify the ways of God to man. So long, however, as life practically ended at the grave, the problem remained insolvable. But the doctrine of another existence in which the righteous man should receive compensation for his sufferings here, and the evil man just retribution for his deeds, offered a reasonable solution of the problem that had so troubled the conscience of Israel. It was this undoubtedly that caused the teaching to gain popular currency.
The doctrine, however, was not wholly the product of the religious and ethical development within Israel. Its growth was fostered by various outside influences. Among these was the Persian doctrine of the resurrection and a future life of retributive justice, with which the Jews became familiar at the time of the Exile in Babylon or later in the Persian period. Then again the development of the idea was stimulated, after the third century B.C., by Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic.
But far more influential than either Zoroastrian teachings or Greek philosophy must have been the thought and conviction of ancient Egypt. After the founding of Alexandria, toward the end of the fourth century B.C., a vast number of Jews were settled in that capital; and though the positive evidence here is very meager, still we have a right to something more than a conjecture that in that city Judaism was deeply influenced by the ancient Egyptian doctrine of immortality.423
Under these various influences this doctrine rooted itself firmly among the Jews, and by the time of the appearance of Christ had become a distinctive tenet of a large and influential party among them.424
After the conception of a just God and the ideal of the suffering Servant of Yahweh, this doctrine of immortality, with its correlate teaching of future rewards and punishments, was perhaps the most important product, in its moral consequences, of the life and ethical experiences of ancient Israel. It exercised little or no influence, at least no decisive influence, upon the moral evolution in Judaism, but, adopted by Christianity, it was given new force and currency, and for eighteen hundred years and more has been one of the great bulwarks and sanctions of morality in the Western world.
We have spoken of the rigid legalism and the narrow nationalistic spirit of orthodox postexilic Judaism. But it must not be thought that in these last days the spirit of prophetism was dead. Hidden beneath this hard rind of legalism there pulsed a true moral life. This life found expression in a movement toward ethical universalism. To understand this movement we must recall the great political revolution of this epoch.
Almost exactly two centuries after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, all the political relations of the Semitic East were abruptly ended and new relations established by the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hellenism, the most powerful solvent of history, now came in contact with Hebrew life and thought both in Palestine and in Egypt. The effect upon the ethical development in Judaism was profound. With the expansion of the political and mental horizons the moral sympathies of men were widened. The wall of separation between Jew and Gentile was thrown down. In Alexandria and in the many new Hellenistic cities in Asia, the nobler spirits of dispersed Israel, casting aside their narrow racial prejudices, with enlarged mental vision and widened moral sympathies, came to read with new understanding their great prophets who had preached the universality of the moral law and the brotherhood of nations.425 Hebrew literature registers the change. This new spirit of internationalism, of kindness and justice even to enemies, breathes from many of the later psalms426 and speaks from many a passage of the so-called “wisdom books” of the period. The allegory of Jonah embodies the liberal spirit of this new Judaism. The great lawyers Hillel and Shammai,427 who laid emphasis upon social duties and human service, represented the humanitarian phase of the age movement. Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, represented its philosophical side. The way was being prepared for the incoming of the ethical universalism of Christianity.