Section I. Grounds of Hebrew Philosophy
1. Whether the Hebrew Scriptures recognise the idea of philosophy. The Hebrew Scriptures are commonly passed over by the historian of philosophy. Yet the book of Job describes philosophy in particularly exact language. “Where is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?” this is said to be the inquiry in which man is more interested than in finding the veins of silver or in bringing the gold out of the earth. The book of Proverbs sets forth the search for wisdom as its subject and purpose. Man is to dig for it as for hid treasure. Such language is scarcely consistent with an opinion which has been eagerly maintained by persons holding the most opposite views respecting these books; that they assume all knowledge to be communicated from above, and therefore not to be an object for the search or investigation of man. This opinion, however, could not have been entertained so generally if there had been no facts or reasons to justify it. The writers of the book of Job and of the book of Proverbs presume the existence of a revelation, nay, ground their feeling of the possibility and the duty of a search for wisdom upon it. Evidently, then, this revelation must have a different meaning in their minds from that which it bears in the minds of many moderns. To know what sense it does bear, we must refer to those books which profess to record how God made himself known to man. In these we shall find not Hebrew philosophy itself, but the grounds and elements of it.
2. Genesis. First principles. The book of Genesis opens with the creation of the World, or Order, in which we are dwelling. Modern geological discoveries and speculations have done much to remove a veil which had been thrown over the meaning of this record, and to bring forth the all-important principle, that the sacred historian is speaking of the world in its relation to Man. The whole after history is incoherent and unintelligible if this principle is forgotten; What they involve. if the words “God made Man in his own likeness,” are not taken as the key to it; if the course of the visible world is not contemplated as secondary and subordinate to the relation between God and our race.
3. The elements of human history. These data once assumed, it becomes not a strange exceptional fact that the unseen Being should reveal or unveil himself to Man, but the law and condition of man’s being. That He after whose image the creature is made should not have given him the capacity for beholding his own archetype, that He should refuse him the power of being what he was made to be, this would be the contradiction. Accordingly it is taken throughout these Scriptures as a contradiction. God is everywhere said to be speaking to man; man is intended to hear. God places the first man in a garden, calls forth in him the power by which he names the creatures, provides him with a helpmate, creates the marriage bond. He submits to a lower creature, denies the authority of the invisible Lord, wishes to hide himself from His presence. He is awakened to own that presence, and to feel that he has transgressed. He is driven from the garden: he is to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but this labour is to teach him that he is not dependent upon the earth which he is to till and subdue; that he is dependent upon an invisible Ruler. The first murder is committed in the world: God asks Cain for his brother. His great punishment is that he goes out from the presence of God. His descendants are described as building cities and inventing mechanical arts. Another race, of which Seth is the head, is said to be called by the name of the Lord. The first is an irregular, disorderly condition. The second confesses itself to be under the Divine government. Though nothing is recorded of it but the succession of its families, it is treated as being in the state intended for man at this stage of his growth. General violence and confusion afterwards overspread the earth. A flood is sent to punish the wickedness of those who dwell upon it: the race is preserved in one of the Seth family. A covenant of God with man is the foundation of the restored world. The sons of Noah are meant to people the earth according to their tongues, in their nations, in their families. A portion of them seeks to set at naught this purpose, and to build a tower on the plain of Shinar, that they may not be scattered abroad on the face of the earth. God, we are told, confounded the rebellious scheme. They left off to build that tower. But a mighty hunter established the kingdoms of Babel and of Nineveh. The Babel kingdom is throughout Scripture treated as the form of godless society.
4. The ground of human knowledge and life. A Divine education, then, is assumed as the regular basis of human life and human fellowship. God teaches man what he is. Man knows what he is; he fulfils his appointed task just so far as he receives this instruction. The instruction proceeds from an invisible Being, and is addressed to something else in man than that which connects him with the visible world. He is always ready to forget God, to bow down before visible things. So far as he does this, he becomes a slave and an animal. So far as he does this, the society in which he lives becomes corrupt and untenable.
5. The education of Abraham. Abram is called out by God from his father’s house to go into a strange land. This calling is the foundation of his life. The Lord of all is speaking to him; he heeds the voice and obeys it. That Lord makes him know that He is one in whom he may trust. He believes in Him as a righteous Being. His faith is counted to him for righteousness; he acknowledges the Being in whose likeness he is made; he becomes like Him. His outward life is of the most commonplace kind. He is simply a shepherd, with many flocks and herds, dwelling in tents, surrounded by people who dwell in cities with whom he does not mix but with whom he has frequent dealings. Once he goes forth at the head of his servants to rescue a kinsman who had taken up his abode in the city of Sodom. As he returns, he finds a priest of the most high God in Salem, to whom he gives a tenth of his spoil. He goes into Egypt: it is already an organized nation; a Pharaoh is reigning there. He loses his faith in God, and tells a lie to save himself: it almost costs him his wife. All his discipline is of the same practical kind. He finds that God overthrows cities which have become hateful and given up to beastly crimes: he is taught to intercede for the righteous in these cities. He is sure that the Judge of all the earth will not slay them with the wicked. He must do right. Abraham is living under the promise that in him and his seed all the families of the earth are to be blessed: but he has no seed. A child is born to him by a bondwoman living in his house. Thus he hopes the promise will be fulfilled: but he is told that the child of his own wife must be his heir. She is barren: yet he believes. He waits long. When the child has been born, and is growing up, he is called to sacrifice it. He gives himself to God; is ready to do what is commanded. Another offering is provided, and Abraham is blessed for his trust. Thus the whole history, so far as he individually is concerned, is the history of a man taught to know himself by knowing in whom he has to believe. He has nothing whatever to distinguish him from his kind: he learns that which he has in common with all human beings: he learns the relations in which human beings stand to the world about them and to their Creator.
6. The education of the chosen family. But such a history cannot be merely an individual one. That he may know what he is, Abraham is taught what it is to be a master, a husband, a father. The discipline which has most to do with himself has to do with him in these characters. It is in his position as the head of a family, the founder of a race, that God speaks to him. Thus he is educated to feel his connection with the past and the future. Hebrew history is grounded upon the belief that God made a covenant with the patriarchs and with their seed after them. They are circumcised: they are taught that they are separated and set apart by the Lord of all. The sign shows that what they are separated from is something in themselves. Their own flesh is cut off. The Hebrew has the same tendency to forget God as other men. Other men, again, are treated as subjects of Divine teaching as well as the chosen race. God speaks to Abimelech and to Pharaoh. The sign of the covenant itself is shared with the descendants of Ishmael. The patriarchs are shown to have all the evils of their neighbours, to have some which belong peculiarly to them from their sense of having peculiar privileges. Jacob is more deceitful and treacherous than Esau; he who prizes his birthright than he who despises it. The one tries to get the rights of an heir of the covenant by trick; the other thinks nothing of that inheritance, but much of the loss of corn and wine which he believes are entailed upon it. Both are disappointed: the deceiver becomes a wanderer; but in his wandering learns that God is with him, though he knew it not, and that there is a ladder between earth and heaven. He has put himself under a Divine education; it does not leave him till it has punished him for his falsehood. The more frank and open-hearted hunter has his reward: he does not lose what he feared to lose; he misses only that which he never cared for.
7. Joseph and his brethren The rest of the book of Genesis is in harmony with these portions of it. The heads of the Jewish nation, the circumcised sons of Jacob, commit the crimes which might be looked for in a set of wild shepherds and settlers. Their sins are especially family sins. The one who feels what it is to be in covenant with a righteous being is taught to understand his privilege by being an exile and a prisoner. He learns that God is with him, keeping him from evil, giving him wisdom. He believes that He cares for Pharaoh and Egypt, and is their Ruler and Teacher as well as his! He becomes an instructor to a king. But it is still with his family relations that the historian is chiefly occupied; he cares more to tell how he behaved to his brethren, and was made known to them, than how he bought up the lands of the people of Egypt. The consciences and hearts of human beings have testified that he is right; that such records do concern us more, and are really more wonderful than the other: they belong to humanity, to morality: they set forth the family relations of human beings as the first stage of their spiritual history; that out of which all the other stages must gradually develope themselves.
8. The family becoming a nation. The book of Exodus exhibits the Jewish people still as a collection of families: they have multiplied in Egypt, are regarded as a dangerous body of aliens, are reduced into slavery. The book gives the history of their deliverance from this condition. God sees the affliction of the people, and hears their cry; He remembers his covenant, and calls a man out of one of their tribes to be their deliverer. Egypt is presented to us as a nation abounding in wise men: they practise magic and soothsaying: they are the advisers of the king. Moses is brought up in the court of the king, and is learned in this wisdom. While he is still young, he feels for his countrymen, tries to deliver them, and smites an Egyptian. He becomes an exile in the land of Midian. There, as he is keeping his father-in-law’s flock at the back of the desert, the Lord God speaks to him, and tells him that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But He makes known to Moses another name—“Say to the Israelites that the I Am hath sent thee to them.” In this name he speaks to his countrymen; in this name he commands Pharaoh to let the people go. “The Lord God of the Hebrews” had sent him with that message. Pharaoh asks “Who is the Lord God?” and increases the people’s burdens. The river is smitten; flies, lice, locusts attack the Egyptians; the magicians mimic the plagues. At last they and the people confess that a real hand is stretched out upon them. The first-born are destroyed. The slaves go out with a high hand. A memorial feast is appointed them, which they are to keep from generation to generation; a witness that the Lord was the protector of their households, and that He brought them out of the house of bondage.
9. The new revelation: what it signified. In this stage of the history, the principles are evidently the same as in the first. The invisible Lord is still the great speaker and actor in it. Men are recognised as in their right state when they hear His voice and confess His acting. It is still the rule and not the exception that he should reveal himself. But the new revelation is evidently of a deeper kind than the former. The Egyptian priests and magicians had all kinds of thoughts and speculations about God; they had all plans of representing Him and propitiating Him. Hence superstitions, tricks, exaltation of men for their skill in these tricks, worship of the visible things in which they had discovered tokens of power, instruments of utility, causes of fear. The Lord of all comes forth declaring Himself as the true Being; Himself the teacher of wisdom to man, the ruler of the things to which he is doing homage. He makes the power felt which He is continually exercising. The plagues were signal startling specimens of judgments which He had exhibited before, and would exhibit again in that land. They are remarkable chiefly for this, that the reason of them is explained. Natural agents are shown to obey a moral law: a righteous Being sends them; they are to punish the oppressor, and deliver the oppressed.
10. Hebrew polity. On this foundation the polity of the Israelites stands. The name of God is the ground of it: He is the deliverer of the people; He calls out the leader who guides them through the wilderness; He gives them bread each morning, and causes the water to flow from the rock for them. He goes before them by night and by day; He casts the horse and the rider into the deep. He is the judge between man and man, the Teacher of their judges. He gives the law, He appoints the priest and the sacrifice; He orders the host, and goes with it to battle. He is the head of the tribes; He appoints the bounds of their habitation. The commonest arrangements have their sanction from His name. He inspires the artificer with his power of doing cunning works; He himself dwells in the tabernacle, and meets the worshipper at the mercy-seat.
11. How distinguished from the Egyptian. The covenant of God is at the root of the national as it was of the family society. There was for the most part no novelty in the mere Jewish institutions. A law, a priesthood, sacrifices, temples, existed in Egypt. The Jew did not bring these social forms with him, he found them established in the land to which he and his countrymen went as a band of shepherds. They might have been cast aside as mere portions of an idolatrous system. In that case, the Israelites would have retained a set of family or pastoral institutions after they had grown into the dimensions of a people; in other words, they would have become an Arab horde. Had Moses stolen the tenet of the unity of God from the Egyptian sages, and published it to his countrymen as a witness that they were no longer a degraded caste, and that they might worship the one God of nature instead of the multitudinous gods of their oppressors, this would have been their fate. If, after taking this course, he had, in accommodation to their prejudices, pretended that he had a mission from an actual, living Being, who had authorized him to establish a system in all its essentials like the Egyptian, with a hard, lazy tenet of the Divine unity appended to it, he would have framed the most incongruous scheme of falsehood ever palmed upon the world; his name ought to be held accursed as that of the wickedest of all liars and blasphemers. Before we pronounce that sentence upon him, we should hear his own account of the matter. He does not boast that he proclaimed any tenet about the unity of God at all. He says that the I Am, the living God, sent him to be the guide and deliverer of his countrymen. The Egyptians believed in a hidden god. He said that hidden God had come forth to declare himself. The Egyptians thought that he had delegated to a set of priests the power to interpret His mind. He said God was ever living and acting. The priest was the witness of his presence, and of His relation to men. The Egyptian held that sacrifices were the means of converting the Divine will to man’s will. He said they were confessions of man’s revolt from God’s will, and could never be bribes to the Divine Being, who had himself appointed their kind and their amount. The Egyptian spoke of laws which were either irreversible or to be changed at the will of the monarch. He spoke of laws as the utterance of an unseen and eternal King, which no man could set aside, which were ever proceeding from the mouth of God himself, enforced by thunders and lightnings, declaring to each Israelite that he was in the presence of God, warning him of tendencies which were hateful in God’s eyes, and would destroy him. The Egyptian had statutes provided for the particular emergencies of the land, which must be enforced by some religious machinery. The law of Moses assumes that the Lord of all, who does not think it beneath Him to care for the growth of trees and the fall of sparrows, directed the arrangements which were suitable to an agricultural people dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean. The Egyptians had temples where they worshipped beings whom they conceived of from the different phenomena of Nature in the places where these temples stood. Moses affirmed that God does not float in the air, or dwell in the hills, or in the clouds; but that there, where it pleased him to dwell, might His glory be felt, there might the worshipper converse with him.
Whether this description of the polity be true or not, it is at least consistent. It does not set aside Egyptian institutions or Egyptian faith; it justifies them by inverting them. They were grounded upon man’s conceptions of God; the Israelite’s upon God’s declaration of Himself to man. The one assumes the nation to be a society which must be upheld, which can only be upheld, by Divine sanction,—which must, therefore, forge these sanctions; the other assumes the nation to be established by the living and true God himself, to be the witness of His truth and permanence, to be bound to a perpetual protest and war against every attempt to confound Him with visible objects.
12. The office of the nation. This, according to the Hebrew economy, is the one great characteristic function of the nation. It grows out of the family; it is grounded on the family covenant; it must preserve the family distinctions; its lands must be apportioned to the different tribes; its memorial feasts must be connected with the life of the household; in battle every man must encamp by the standard of the house of his fathers. But the nation is not a mere collection of families. It is a witness of a perpetual battle that is going on between order and disorder, right and wrong, the invisible God who is the Lord of man, and the visible things which are claiming lordship over him. The Israelite, the covenant servant of God, is to take part in this fight; he is to go forth as God’s instrument in putting down corruption and oppression. When he has a commission to destroy, he is to destroy. He is to hold the sacrifice of individual life a cheap thing for the sake of asserting the right and the truth, which men have violated. Idolatry he looks upon as the cause of all strife and degradation. He is to hate it with a perfect hatred.
13. The signs of national life. This new stage in the life of the Israelites is the commencement of Song and of Written Law. Song. The first is the expression of thanksgiving for deliverance from the visible oppressor. It proclaims the Lord as a deliverer and a man of war. It is poured forth by an individual man who feels that he is the member of a nation, and who becomes its spokesman. Though he speaks the praises of God, he feels that he is inspired by God. The flame of the song, like that of the sacrifice, has been first kindled by Him to whom it ascends.
The Code. The Code is precisely the opposite of the Song. It comes from the lips of the Lord; it is simply His utterance. It carries with it no inspiration. It takes each man apart, and makes him feel that he alone is spoken to, though a crowd surrounds him. Yet it too comes forth from a Deliverer; it is the sign of a new and greatly-advanced stage of education. The discipline of experience has not passed away, but distinct formal precepts have been added to it. The memorial stones or pillars have given place to the written letter. The finger of God has permanently set down the decrees which his people are to keep.
Its authority. They are decrees. The whole force of the code, as a code, consists in its coming forth from Him who has a right to command, who has given the sea its bounds, and has determined what man is to be. The right of the Lawgiver to say—So it shall be—is the foundation of every precept. But then it must be remembered that He who claims this right first revealed Himself to the Israelite as his Deliverer and Friend, as the enemy of oppression and wrong, as One who does not act from self-will. A law wanting in either of these conditions the Hebrew Scriptures teach us to consider a contradiction. If law is the creature of self-will, its meaning and its sanction perish in the very attempt to enforce it. For law to proceed from those to whom it is addressed, is equally at variance with the idea of these books. They assume that there is a righteous Will in the universe, and that that Will can utter itself, and has uttered itself.
The Code national. But the code is addressed to the covenant people. It is strictly national. How, then, have the Ten Commandments been felt to be the moral institute of the tribes of modern Europe, differing as they do in all external respects from the Jewish? It is not too much anticipating a future part of this sketch, to say that this has only happened in so far as the inhabitants of modern Europe have felt themselves to belong to distinct nations, and have recognised the essential grounds of the Jewish polity, the covenant, calling, actual government of an unseen Lord, as applying to themselves in their national character. Not as members of a more extensive society, but precisely as united in particular local societies, have they felt the obligations and the virtue of this code. Anything which has weakened their national feeling, or absorbed it, has weakened the authority of the Ten Commandments. Hence the distinction between these Commandments and the mere statutes of the Jewish people has strongly commended itself to the conscience of these nations, not because they have denied the latter to have a Divine origin, but because they have felt that the same Wisdom which adapted a certain class of commands to the peculiarities of one locality and age, must intend a different one for another. The Ten Commandments they have recognised as possessing nothing of this limitation.
Distinction of moral and positive precepts. The distinction of positive and essentially moral commands, which some have sought to introduce into this subject, does not therefore seem to concern us here. We may have many occasions for noticing it hereafter, but into the question of a code it cannot enter. Every part of a Law must, ex vi termini, be positive; that is, it must be laid down. But what is laid down may concern the inhabitants of a particular district as such, or may concern them as human beings. This is a distinction to the perception of which the subjects of the Jewish economy were especially awakened. To the Commandments which were spoken on Sinai there were added no more. All the subsequent legislation, though referred to the same Authority, is separated from these. All the subsequent history was a witness to the Jew that in the setting up of any god besides the Unseen Deliverer, in the fancy that there could be any likeness of Him in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; in the loss of awe for His Name; in the loss of the distinction between Work and Rest as the ground of man’s life, and as having its archetype in the Divine Being, and as worked by Him into the tissue of the existence of His own people; in the loss of reverence for parents, for life, for marriage, for property, for character, and in the covetous feeling which is at the root of these evils—lay the sources of political disunion and crime, the loss of all personal dignity and manliness.
Property. Property, it will be seen, was carefully guarded by this code. One of its provisions refers to this subject. It cannot be pretended that this law exists for the sake of protecting individual possession, though it may truly be affirmed that the reverence for property was a sign of this second stage of Jewish education. With the earlier tent life of the patriarchs it had comparatively little to do. We see the commencement of it in the disputes between the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham in the arrangements about wells, in the purchase of burying-grounds. It comes out clearly in the assignment of portions to the sons of Jacob. But as yet there are within the limits of the chosen people no distinct rules to protect it. It is connected with the distinct protesting character of the nation itself, with the distinct sense of individuality which was awakened in its members.
The universal element in the nation. But mixed with the family and national institutions, was the hint of something more large than either family or nation. The Levite tribe was exempt from the ordinary regulations of property. It represented the whole people, and represented each family; while it bore witness that the relation in which the Israelites stood to the I Am, could not be satisfactorily expressed without breaking through the forms and limitations of a local commonwealth. In fact, all these institutions, while they taught Israelites to prize boundaries and land-marks,—while they strengthened their attachment to place and their reverence for it, were perpetually reminding every one who devoutly submitted to them, and meditated on them, that he had that in him which did not belong to space or to time, to which only a Being above all such restraints could speak, which only the knowledge of such a Being could satisfy.
14. The Jewish a moral and metaphysical history. Whatever other characteristics this history may have, or may want, no one will deny that it is a moral and metaphysical history, according to the definition which has already been given of those terms. It is moral, in that, from the first to last, it refers directly to man, to the habits, ways, constitution of the human race, as distinct from every other race. It is metaphysical, inasmuch as it asserts that man himself is distinct from physical things; that though he has that in him which is under the law of growth and decay, he has that also which connects him with what is fixed, constant, permanent, with a living personal Being, who is above the laws of nature, and who Himself imposed them.
15. Not the history of a philosophy or of a religion. But though a moral and metaphysical history, we have admitted already that it is no history of a philosophy, of thoughts about wisdom, or of a search after it. Another remark must be made here. If this is no history of a Philosophy, it is also no history of a Religion, in the sense which we commonly give to that word. It is not the history of men’s thoughts about God, or desires after God, or affections towards Him. It professes to be a history of God’s unveiling of Himself to man. If it is not that it is nothing, it is false from beginning to end.
To make it the history of the speculations of a certain tribe about God, we must deny the very root of any speculations which that tribe ever had, for this root is the belief that they could not think of Him, unless He had first thought of them; that they could not speak of Him, unless He were speaking to them. A class of modern teachers assume that God is made in the image of man, is formed after his conceptions; and then insist that a nation must have had this conviction, which acted and lived upon the opposite one. Let every people be allowed to speak its own word, to tell us what it means. We who think the Hebrews spoke a true word—meant the true thing, only claim for them what we would claim for all,—the right of interpreting themselves.
16. The religious books of the Hebrews. We have denied that the history of the Hebrews is the history of a religion or a philosophy. But we fully admit that there are Hebrew books which, in the ordinary sense of the word, are to be called religious, just as we contend that there are some which, in the ordinary sense of the word, are to be called philosophical. When the Jewish Rabbinical schools assigned the name of “holy writings” to one part of these books, and of “histories” to another, they expressed their feeling that there are some of them which especially embody the aspirations of the human spirit after a Divine person, just as there are those which set forth the acts of that Divine person towards men. The Psalms. The book of Psalms is the chief of the holy writings. The tendency in later times has been to give it this character too strictly and exclusively,—to overlook the historical and political features of the Psalms, which are so conspicuous to all plain readers, and to regard them simply as utterances of individual sorrow, or trust, or thankfulness, or rapture. By doing so, we destroy the meaning of the writer; we do not separate his religious feelings from their surrounding elements, but give them a new character altogether. The Psalmist is not a recluse brooding over his own feelings and experiences. He is a man learning, under the heavy pressure of life, in the battle field, on the judgment-seat, through the cruelty of persecutors, the fellowship of outlaws, the rebellion of sons, his personal transgressions, to know his own feebleness, the necessity of Divine succour, the mysterious relations in which he stands to the Lord and to his fellow-men. As a king, the Lord of all had revealed himself to the Israelites,—a king reigning from generation to generation, in whose government lay the only freedom, safety, hope of his subjects. Great changes had taken place in the outward condition of the Israelite; he was no more merely under the invisible Lord who had spoken His laws upon Sinai. The Unseen King and the visible king. A king went forth in the sight of the Host as its leader; was confessed to be the chief of the people’s strength. The difficulty was to connect these two truths together; to prevent the visible king from interfering with the homage which was due to the Invisible, to make him the witness of God, instead of a rival and a rebel. Saul had been made king, because the people disbelieved that God was an actual king. The whole of David’s strange history, as a shepherd-boy, a hero, an exile, a king ruling, and a king deposed, reigning righteously, and falling into acts of rebellion and injustice, testified that the temporal sovereign was nothing but the representative, an imperfect type of One whose throne was for ever and ever. The twofold conviction that the unseen kingdom is the ground of every other, that it is the true substantial kingdom, and that man is intended to be the image of God in his royalty, is implied in all the utterances of the book of Psalms, gives them their strength, their unity, their variety, makes them as human as they are national.
The inward and outward battle. Trust in God is the life-spring of every prayer and song, trust in Him as the Lord God of Israel, who will do what He has promised, who will show the Jewish calling not to be a vain calling, who will fully manifest Himself to men as their Ruler, and will prove the falsehood of all the attempts of men to make Him in their likeness, and the truth of His assertion, that He has made men in His likeness. It is a long fight between the true God and the false gods, the true image, and the false image; the struggle is desperate in that land, in every land, in each man’s heart. At times, all hopes of a successful issue seem over; “the faithful fail from among the children of men,” false gods and false men have their own way. God seems to have left the world to lies, to misery, to atheism. But out of the depth of despair comes hope. The Lord shall arise, and man shall not always have the upper hand; He will defend the cause of the poor and the fatherless, and see that those in necessity have right. Let the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing as they will, He will set His king upon His holy hill of Zion, a king who shall reign as long as the sun and moon endureth, and who shall set peace and righteousness on the earth. Throughout these Psalms, all those elements of Hebrew life and revelation to which we have referred, the feast, the law, the tribe, the tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices, above all, the battle-field against idolatry, present themselves to us in connection with all the inmost thoughts and longings of the writers. But the ingenuity of modern criticism has discovered that some of these Psalms must be the work of men who had attained a higher degree of cultivation than was compatible with the reverence for the Mosaic institutions, or with the religious system which surrounded them. The Psalms in conformity with the Mosaic Law. One who could introduce the Lord, saying, “Thinkest thou that I will eat bull’s flesh, or drink the blood of goats;” or when lamenting his crime, could say, “Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it Thee, but thou delightest not in burnt offering,” must, we are told, have been impressed with convictions which the old and orthodox Hebrew would have regarded with horror. The conclusion of the 51st Psalm, “Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem, then shalt Thou be pleased with burnt offering, and whole burnt offering, then shall they offer young bullocks upon Thy altar,” is consequently set down as a priestly interpolation wholly inconsistent with the tenor of the prayer. If our previous remarks are true, there is no greater proof of the earnestness with which the Psalmist had meditated on the Mosaic institution of sacrifice, and on the difference between his own country and all others, than these passages. The very lesson which one who devoutly obeyed the Mosaic directions about sacrifice would have learnt from them, was precisely this, that they were expressions of the surrender of the heart to Him, from whom it had gone astray; not gifts by which the heart might hope to bring the Divine Lord to tolerate its wrong doings. It was a lesson which every humble and contrite man would have learnt, that sacrifices would be precious in God’s eyes as witnesses of a reconciled spirit, of a restored nation. But we readily admit that there is a truth indicated in these rude attempts to destroy the unity of compositions in which the consciences and hearts of all ages have recognized a correspondence with their own deepest feelings and intuitions. If the Mosaic economy were really part of a Divine education, it should be able to show how it has done its work; it should be able to say, “the men who have been under this training are not what they would have been without it, those who have had the longest experience of it see the furthest, the children who keep this Law are wiser than their forefathers.” The book of Psalms, we readily admit, has that in it which does not belong to the patriarchal or legal period of Jewish history. By claiming the privileges of the children of Abraham, by meditating on the Law night and day, by the divine discipline of toil, and strife, and sorrow, which the records of their fathers explained to them, an insight and apprehension were cultivated in them, which could not have belonged to the earlier time. They draw out the sense and principle of it. They saw more into the meaning and heart of institutions; they saw how the principle implied in them rose above the accident and the rule: they learnt to protest against those who sacrificed their spirit for the sake of preserving their letter, and in doing so, lost both; they saw how what was essentially and eternally human was drawn out by that which was formally and exclusively national; they found how an absolute, unchangeable morality lay beneath the relative morality of the patriarchal family, the positive morality of decrees and statutes.
Section II. Hebrew Philosophy
1. The characteristics of the book of Proverbs. No one will say that the book of Proverbs is not characteristically different from the book of Psalms. All feel the distinction. The programmes of the books themselves recognize and express it. When we say that the Proverbs is a philosophical book, we do but follow the definition which the writer gives of it. “To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity, to give subtlety to the simple, to give the young man knowledge and discretion.”
This is not a preparation for a book of passionate devotion, for a book uttering the groans of a man in deep trouble, or the confidence with which he flies to a place of refuge. It leads us to expect just what we find, a book of observation, reflection, experiment. It has, however, much which is in common with the book, to which it is in form and purpose so unlike. Both, as distinguished from the histories, set forth the seekings and strivings of man’s spirit; both assume that this seeking or striving has been awakened in the man, and that the direction of his search has been given him. The man seeks righteousness because the righteous Being has first sought him. He seeks wisdom, because the wise Being has first sought him. He is to know wisdom and equity, just as he is to be righteous and know righteousness, because God has made him in His image.
2. Its connection with the history. That the Divine revelation was designed to awaken, and would awaken, this kind of craving as much as the other, is implied in the first statement of it. The Jewish history is no mere exhibition of a gracious and benignant character, though it is that in the highest sense. The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, by revealing Himself as such, leads men to feel their own want of mercy, quickness to anger, unwillingness to forgive, is a wrong, the departure from a standard to which they are meant to be conformed. As these qualities are brought out practically, their nature becomes gradually more intelligible, the sense of rebellion against them more vivid. But such an exhibition of them presumes a certain method of government, a fitting of means to ends; what we call judgment. The unseen King must administer the world upon a plan. There must be in Him that which arranges, devises, orders. And that which is in Him is in His creature. He is able to perceive it, to trace it out, because he has that which corresponds to it. There is an eye in him which meets the light, takes it in, sees objects by it.
3. Solomon, the wise king. The king, so Solomon felt, has that calling which demands this wisdom; he asked it, and it was granted. His life became the type of wisdom to the Hebrew, the great key to his words. Such it has been felt in all ages to be. Within him were the strongest tendencies to sensuality, the fullest sympathy with all outward things and feeling of their attraction, an assurance that the world is meant to be ruled and examined by man. All possible motives to that visible worship or idolatry which the law condemned were in him in their fullest, liveliest power. But within him, too, was the sense of a relation to Him of whom the law and the covenant testified, to the invisible Being, to the absolute and perfect King, to Him of whom every king, by his own personal authority, and by the permanence of his dynasty, gave testimony. Such a Being was the only Protector to whom he could look up against the powers that were conspiring to rob him of his strength, to make him a slave. Such a Being only could teach him how to judge and to govern, how to know the boundaries of order and disorder, of justice and iniquity; how to make the things about him his instruments, how to distinguish their uses and properties. The Temple which he built expressed his belief that the buildings and treasures of the world, which were the objects and instruments of idolatry, were to be consecrated to the unseen Being, and to be witnesses of Him. The book of Proverbs, which he wrote, expresses his feeling of the relation in which man stands to the world and to his Maker.
4. Wisdom human, not physical. Solomon, it is said, knew all plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar of Lebanon. He was a student of natural things. But the Proverbs contain none of this lore. They assume that Wisdom is not to be found in them, earnestly as the wise man may contemplate them, greatly as he may delight in them. Wisdom has to do first of all with man; he is to seek it that he may be able to rule others and rule himself. He is to seek it to deliver him from the strange woman, from the harlot Sense, which is always dragging him down into death. He is to seek it that he may know the path of life.
5. The two voices. And if he seeks he must find. For as sure as that tempting voice is ever beckoning him to follow it, and choose its ways, so surely is there another voice crying aloud in the places of concourse, speaking to the heart within, promising him riches and honour, durable riches and righteousness. Wisdom seeks to enter into the heart, to draw the soul after it. When it does enter in, when it is fully entertained, it becomes sweet and pleasant. But first it applies sharp corrections, bitter medicines. The man who will follow this guide must not be weary of discipline.
6. Not a new discovery. This distinction of two powers or principles, which are drawing men in two different directions, was evidently implied in the Divine covenant and the Divine law. Without it we could not interpret the calling of Abraham and his family; still less the national faith and the national protest against idolatry. Even some of the most apparently external arrangements of the Mosaic institutions, such as the permission of certain meats and the denunciation of certain others, the seemingly arbitrary division of clean and unclean beasts, had been cultivating in the mind of the Israelite the feeling that there was an upward and a downward path, to one of which he had a natural inclination, into the other of which a Divine hand was leading him. The author of the book of Proverbs does but draw out the sense and purpose of these ordinances, does but recognize an essential and eternal law as lying beneath them. The whole life of man he represents as being nothing else but an expression and exhibition of this conflict. Every act he commits is done in obedience to one or other of the influences which is every moment acting upon him. Every act confirms him in obedience to one or the other.
7. The seducer personal. But these words—influences, principles, powers, are they adequate for our purpose? We have spoken of the “harlot Sense.” Solomon, with far more practical truth as well as poetical power, speaks of her as “the strange woman.” He can tolerate no abstraction. It is an actual enchantress which speaks to each unhappy youth. That which is the best individual language is also the best general language; there is no way of describing the temptations of the race but by describing the temptations of the particular heart. He does not arrive at a notion of what is human by heaping together a number of experiences; in each one he finds that which belongs to all.
8. Wisdom personal. If that which seduces a man away from his proper state must be described personally, how is it with Wisdom? Is that merely an abstraction? Is that not something to be embraced, possessed, loved? Is that not a reality, not a person? If not, how can its attractions be measured against those of the other? Can we follow a dream, a shadow, as we do that which we feel and know to be substantial? If Sense comes before us as a woman, Wisdom, so Solomon takes for granted, can be nothing less fair, less attractive. To use the feminine pronoun in one case, and not in the other, would make the meaning false in both. Wisdom must have an intense loveliness, an intense captivating power, to those who have once come within the circle of its influence; and, of course, it would be contradicting the whole doctrine of the book to fancy that this loveliness was in any sense the creature of him who beholds it, and is enamoured of it. It offers itself to him, overcomes his reluctance, draws him after it. Instead of exalting his understanding into a creator, he is bidden above all things not to lean on it, not to trust to it. If he does, Wisdom disowns him; he is a fool.
9. Wisdom divine. But what is this Wisdom? The question has become a more and more awful one at each step. Solomon had declared at the outset that he who does not begin with the fear of the Lord has no hope of attaining it. That fear must have been strongly in the mind of the writer, mixed with a strange boldness, when he proceeds gradually to see Wisdom, the counsellor of man as the counsellor of God, “by whom,” here on earth, “kings reign and princes decree justice, but who was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” “When there were no depths,” thus Wisdom speaks, “I was brought forth, when there were no fountains, abounding with water, before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth; when as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above, when He strengthened the fountains of the deep, when He gave to the sea his decree that the waters should not pass His commandment, when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the habitable parts of His earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.” This is the very essence of Hebrew philosophy. It has been gradually unfolding itself out of the previous revelations; here it finds its full expression. In this grand assertion of one who is the sharer of God’s mind, of one who was before the universe, in whom the whole order of creation originated, but of one who regards man as above all this creation, who has been from the first his guide and teacher, in whom he attains the satisfaction of his highest desires, by whom he is delivered from subjection to the world around him, lies the foundation of all the most minute practical teaching respecting the duties of the king and of the shopkeeper. The Divine order of the world is at the same time the true human order. The king is set upon his throne to exhibit it in acts of protection and acts of punishment; the just balances exhibit it as well. All confusion comes from men forgetting their places in this order, ceasing to acknowledge the power which is guiding them and keeping them in it, yielding to the power which is seeking to put out the inward eye that alone can discern it.
10. The form of the Proverbs. The antithetical form in which the book of Proverbs is conceived evidently belongs to its essence. The main idea which goes through every part of it could not have been brought out in any other way. It is also a very important circumstance that the book is addressed by a father to his child. It is didactic and affectionate; it gives the results of experience, not the processes of it. In both these respects it is distinguished from the other great book of Hebrew Philosophy, Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher.
11. Ecclesiastes Wisdom sought through disappointments. This book is the record of personal experiences, of struggles, disappointments, partial conclusions. It is the story of a man walking in a labyrinth, trying one passage after another, and always baffled, always forced into some new path which ends as hopelessly. The labyrinth, however, is not one of speculation merely or chiefly. It is the actual maze and puzzle of human life which he is seeking to penetrate; the actual contradictions which a man must meet with who does not shut his eyes to them. And though each conclusion seems to be one in which nothing is concluded, it is not so in fact. Something is ascertained by each experiment. Riches, all earthly enjoyments, all works, toils, vocations, are found out to have a positive good in them. The wise man whose eyes are in his head is found to be better than all others. Though there is an excuse for thinking that the old days were better than our own, it turns out not to be wise to inquire about this. There is a comfort under the oppressions which take place in cities and provinces. And yet vanity and vexation of spirit is written upon all things. It is a fact, and must not be disguised. Wisdom itself seems to be under the same curse with other things; all the mere experiences of the seeker after it, of the wise man, are sadder, more oppressive, than those of other men. But his sadness and his oppression, his disappointments, his falls, are themselves chief parts of his schooling. He is learning to acquiesce in the fact, the discovery of which is at first so painful, that that which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that that which is wanting cannot be numbered. He has been trying to make an order, and has gradually learnt to perceive one. He has looked upon himself as the centre of the universe, and, in spite of all the skill and wisdom and piety which he combined with that false conception, it did cause him to find weariness everywhere. He confesses God to be the centre; and then, “though the silver cord be loosed, and the golden bowl be broken, though the pitcher be broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern,” the spirit can find rest; it returns after all its speculations and trials to Him who made it, it learns to behold itself in Him, and Him in all things.
12. The book of Job. It is a very difficult question whether the book of Job should be reckoned among these philosophical books, and if it should, to what time it belongs. On this last question critics have been always very fluctuating, and it seems to be not much nearer a settlement now than in former days. The weight of modern opinion is perhaps in favour of assigning it to a comparatively late period. But the arguments in support of its extreme antiquity still seem decisive to a great many. In a treatise like the present, it would be absurd to enter into the reasons for either opinion, though the result is by no means uninteresting to the student of philosophy. Age in which it was written. If it does belong to the age of Abraham or Moses, it would prove that the deepest and most conscious agonies of the human spirit were experienced, and might be set forth, at a time in which, judging from the book of Genesis, more than from any other document, we are wont to think that faith would be exhibited chiefly in practical life, and that the divinest utterances would take the form of simple history. Assuredly it is not impossible that there should have been such thoughts working in men’s minds in the first ages. If we could be assured that there were, it would be like the revelation of a new and wonderful country where we least expect to find it, a discovery which reasonable persons would gladly obtain at the sacrifice of any theory. On the other hand, if it must be referred to the age of Solomon, or even to the Chaldaic period, it cannot lose that profound reality which belongs to it as the history of an actual human struggle, or be tortured by any devices of criticism into a mere book of speculation. Let it have been written where, and when, and by whom it will, it must remain for all human beings what the peasants of our land and of every land feel it to be, the divine record of what one felt who was of the same flesh and blood with themselves, who was plunged in the deepest sorrows which they can suffer, and had to work his way, not unhelped or unguided, though with all human friends and counsellors striving against him, into health and peace. When we attribute this kind of interest to the book, and suppose that such minds are sharers in it, we may seem to have settled the question whether it belongs to the strictly religious or the strictly philosophical portion of the Hebrew writings. But this would be a rash conclusion. Its personal reality. We have tried to show that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are in the truest sense human books, that they are essentially practical, and concern the life of every one. The intense suffering of Job makes it no doubt his first concern to find out whether there is a gracious and loving Being ruling over the world or no, whether his misery is to be traced to such a source, or must come from somewhere else. In his agony he pours out words like the east wind; he seems at times to deny the goodness of his Maker, he continually contradicts himself. His pious, well-instructed friends have a set of authorized, beautiful, eloquent phrases to confute him with; they can appeal to the judgment of their elders, to whom they are mere children; they are shocked at his irreverent expressions; they wonder that he is not afraid of affronting the Being who has laid him low and might raise him again. Job tells them that he has heard a thousand such things, he has them all by heart. But God is actually smiting him. At such a time fine speeches are of no avail. He must know what his anguish means. It is everything to him to believe in a righteous God, he has nothing to hope in, if that hope be taken from him; therefore he cannot be content till he sees how He is righteous, how He can be so while he is afflicting him,—a man who feels and knows inwardly that he has tried to be right and to do right, and has clung and clings still to Him whose rod is laid so heavily upon him.
Its philosophy. So far this wonderful history would seem more fit to be classed with the Psalms than with the Proverbs. But when God answers Job out of the whirlwind, it is especially with a view of His wisdom that He lays him prostrate. He had asserted in his inmost heart, and generally with his lips, the righteousness of God, he had justified Him as his three friends had not done, however they seemed to do it; but he had taken no measure of the wisdom of Him who had made Orion and the Pleiades in the heavens, and the horse to paw the valley, and the ostrich to lay her eggs and forget her young ones, and the leviathan to take his pastime in the great waters. He had thought he could judge of the means by which the All-wise would accomplish His righteous ends, why he appointed suffering for man, how He maintains the conflict with evil, how He will bring it to an issue. End of the book. A revelation not of the power or sovereignty, but of the infinite wisdom of God, was his humiliation; this was his cure. In dust and ashes he sees the Being of whom he has heard by the hearing of the ear, actually exercising His gracious and mysterious dominion. He abhors himself; then he is raised to a new and nobler life. At this point surely the book of Job asserts its right to a place with the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, among these which set forth the search after wisdom; the methods by which it pleases God to guide a man in that search, and the reward of it.
Section III. The Prophets
1. The nation and the individual. The book of Job has sometimes been considered a history of the Jewish nation rather than of an individual. One cannot wonder that such an hypothesis should have been entertained by intelligent readers; or that it should have encountered a vehement resistance. The prosperity, misery, restoration of a nation, are surely to be read in that book. Yet one who has suffered will never be persuaded that he is not reading of his own struggles,—of struggles which have passed in the heart of an actual person.
The Jewish prophets teach us to reconcile the two opinions. They feel in their own hearts the miseries of their nation, and of every nation. They enable us to feel that the experiences of the particular man and of the body politic are not different, but essentially the same. The Jew has to fight the battles of his country in his soul; his study of its present condition, its past history, its coming fortunes, is not something distinct from the experiences of his own life. He understands what he sees without, by what is passing within. He does not know himself except as he is an Israelite.
2. The prophet and the philosopher. The writings of the prophets cannot be reckoned strictly among the philosophical writings of the Hebrews. The prophet is not primarily and characteristically a seeker, but a preacher. He comes to denounce existing evils, and foretell evils which are approaching, as one who has received light and can impart it. Nevertheless, any view of Hebrew philosophy must be imperfect which does not include him. Mixed with his announcements and denunciations, there are continual exhibitions of the speaker’s own difficulties and confusions. If he has been brought into the sunshine, he has had a long preparation of darkness and twilight. His public teaching can never be separated from the school in which he has been brought up, or from the Temple in which he has seen his most glorious visions.
3. The prophetical order. Every Hebrew teacher was a prophet. Moses, the guide and lawgiver, claims that character. A Jew would scarcely have been justified in refusing it to Abraham. For it was far from necessary that the prophet should leave written records of his thoughts. He might even bear his testimony as the father of the nation did, by acts rather than words. Still there was evidently a time when the prophet became a more distinct, substantial element of Hebrew society,—when the name began to be the designation of a class or Order. This time is fixed in the Sacred Record at the point of transition between the age of the Judges and the age of the Kings. It is connected with a general shaking in the most sacred of the Mosaic institutions. It is never hinted in the Scripture Books that the priest, because he had “holiness to the Lord” inscribed on his forehead, was less prone to evil than other men. The very first High-priest, the brother of Moses, was the leader and tool of the people in setting up an Egyptian idol. But now certain members of the priestly family became utter reprobates, and the High-priest did not restrain them. The people abhorred the offerings of the Lord. Then a boy, who was dedicated to the service of the Temple, as he slept in a chamber near it, heard a voice calling him. He thought it was the priest’s voice; he found it was the Lord’s. He was appointed to tell the priest of his sins, and of the approaching fall of his house. The Word of God had spoken to Samuel; he let none of his words fall. It was known that there was a prophet in Israel.
Samuel: his office. The elders of the people believed that there was a charm in the tabernacle to save them from their enemies; they took it with them to battle; it fell into the hands of the Philistines. Samuel became a judge and a deliverer. He restored law and order to the people, defined boundaries, executed justice between man and man. His sons did not walk in his ways. The people craved a leader of their hosts: Samuel told them of the Invisible King who was in the midst of them. He anointed the visible king; he testified to him of his self-will, and foretold his ruin.
He anointed the man after God’s own heart.
4. The prophetical school. Here we have clearly pointed out to us the essential qualities of the prophetical office. Hence we may understand what a school of the prophets was. The ground of their mission lay where Samuel’s lay; they were taught that the Word of God was speaking to them; to heed this voice, to follow it in whatever it enjoined. In the school they were trained to study the law of God, to meditate upon it, to consider the past history of their people, how God had dealt with their fathers, what the meaning of their calling as Israelites was. But this was just that they might know how He was dealing with them then. They were not less under His government and guidance than their fathers. They were not reading of the acts of One who had been, but of One who was then and would be evermore. The Living God was the only name by which they could speak of Him or think of Him. Their countrymen forgot Him; they thought that He lived only in the past, not in the present. The whole economy of priesthood, sacrifices, tabernacle, had become a dead machinery, instead of the assurance of His permanent and continual presence. The prophet was to be trained in the belief of that presence, to act upon it, to live upon it, to tell priests and kings and people that their acts were lies, their whole lives lies, except while they recognised this as the ground of them.
5. Jews generally partakers of this divine teaching. This was the true Jewish education. We have no reason to suppose that prophets only were trained in these schools; they might train their countrymen in them. And they could only train them in the same lore. They could but tell them, as they do tell them in all their written discourses, that though they may have no special call to be teachers or prophets, yet that the Word of God was speaking to them, was warning them against their evil tendencies, was guiding them to be right and true, and that they could only lead safe and honest lives by following this guidance.
6. The false prophet. Oftentimes those who claimed the special office of prophet were those who heeded this teaching least. And for this very reason: they did not look upon it as the teaching of a righteous, wise Being, to the whole nation. They valued themselves upon their special gifts; they thought it was a wonderful thing to be able to speak words in God’s name. They did not submit to be schooled before they poured forth their utterances; they never learnt to distinguish between the whispers and suggestions of the harlot Sense—of the vain, self-exalting spirit—and the lesson of Him who came to humble, and sift, and purify. Therefore these men became a set of traders in prophecy. They spoke a lie out of their own hearts, and said “The Lord hath said;” now making the heart of the righteous sad, now speaking peace when there was no peace; the base, selfish flatterers of kings, inventors of tricks, patrons of idolatry; the cunning or impudent deceivers of a people which loved to be deceived. These men converted prophecy into divination: they made guesses as to coming events from what they saw, or caught up at second-hand the utterances of departed seers. It was nothing terrible with them to speak of the judgments of God, because they really did not believe in them or in Him. They were words which might be sported with to frighten their enemies or please their disciples,—words which came out of hollow, hypocritical, atheistical hearts, and which tended more than all others to make the people hollow, hypocritical, and atheistical.
7. The true prophet. Against these false brethren of their own order, more than even against the heartless priest, the godless king, did the true prophet testify by his words and his acts. It was no part of his vocation to pass himself off for something else than he was,—to hide from himself, or even from others, the conflicts which he had with the evil in him, the difficulty which he had to separate the precious from the vile, the reluctance with which he often obeyed the Divine voice. It was not in pride of spirit that he claimed Divine inspiration. His temptation was to deny it; to boast that he had something of his own; to pretend that he could be anything, or do anything, except as he was submitting to the government of One higher than himself. He is not a person who seeks credit for himself by declaring what is to come. It is with the present he is mainly busy. It is God as a present God that he is bringing in all ways—by signs, by discourses, by songs—before the consciences of the presumptuous or cowardly king or prophet. It is God as a present God of whom he witnesses to the heart of the crushed and oppressed Israelite. The future is all contained in the past and the present. God is, and therefore He will manifest Himself. He reigns; and the unrighteous rulers, Jews or heathens, shall know that he reigns. Their want of faith shall not hinder the accomplishment of His purposes. Tyranny and disorder shall not always prevent men from knowing what His gracious dominion is. Kings who were set up to testify of His rule may utterly misunderstand their vocation, priests may forget Him and become idolaters, prophets may utter lies in His name, the whole people may misunderstand why it has been called out; but a perfect King shall reign in righteousness, the true Priest and Prophet of the World shall appear. There shall be mysterious sufferings mixed with mysterious exaltation. At last God will confound all the false images of Him, and manifest His true image to man. Israel may go into captivity—may become the lowest of the nations, heathens may be God’s ministers for punishing it; but the promise will still prove itself true,—in Abraham and in his seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
8. Relation of the Wisdom in the book of Proverbs to the Word in the Prophets. It would be the duty of an historian of Hebrew philosophy to notice these remarkable records, if it were only to show how entirely the popular teaching of the Hebrew corresponds with that which appears in the specially philosophical books; how entirely esoterical that teaching is in the highest and best sense of the word, when by esoterical we mean that which concerns the inner man,—his highest, most mysterious relations; how entirely exoterical, if by exoterical we mean that which is proclaimed to all men,—that which concerns states and governments, and the most outward circumstances of man’s life. But it is especially necessary to point out how this popular teaching, connected as it was with the deepest personal meditation and experience, fills up a gap in the merely philosophical teaching, and removes a difficulty which might otherwise cause us great confusion. We have seen that Wisdom, in the book of Proverbs, is spoken of as a person, but as a female. Everybody must feel that the passages which were quoted from that book would have been artistically less beautiful, less perfect, if this form of language had not been adopted. But artistical beauty in all cases rests upon some substantial ground of truth. We could not feel the propriety of such expressions if they did not correspond to something in our hearts which required them, and would suffer if others were substituted for them. Wisdom, when regarded primarily as an object of our search and love, even though it is intimated to us that we have been first sought for and loved, does come before us in this feminine shape. But the prophet who speaks in God’s name says at once “The Word of God came to me, saying.” We feel sure that he is under the same teaching with Solomon; that he means the same antagonist to the harlot Sense, the same Divine Counsellor, the same person who was with the Lord as one brought up with Him before the earth was formed, or the heavens brought forth, and whose delights were with the sons of men. Yet we are sure that this is no female voice; it is He who speaks, who commands men and judges men, the Ruler and King of their inmost hearts and spirits. Of such an One the prophets are testifying in every speech of theirs. They could not believe in a human king, or priest, or prophet; they could not believe that man was made in the image of God, if they did not acknowledge such an One. Because they do believe in Him they are confident that God will be completely declared to men, that His image will be seen in a man. That prospect carries us beyond the region of the Hebrew philosophy as we find it in the Proverbs; but it furnishes the complement to that philosophy. By reflecting upon it we shall perhaps understand better what that philosophy is, and what all philosophy is; wherein consists its deep, essential truth, and its necessary limitation.
9. Transition from the Hebrew to Gentile philosophy. From the last remark our readers may gather that it is not only for the sake of Hebrew philosophy that we have noticed these prophets, especially this leading characteristic of them. It is impossible to read them simply and not to feel that they looked upon that Being who was speaking to them in their hearts as the real Lord of all men. In their comments upon the state of the world at the time in which they were living, they go far beyond the limits of Palestine. In proportion as they discover all heathen evils in their own countrymen, they discover, and rejoice in the discovery, that there is a bond of spiritual connection between them and all people. It was impossible for them to believe that there could be any government, or order, or desire of light or wisdom, in any human creatures, which did not proceed from the Source of order, and government, and light, and wisdom. Resistance to the Divine teaching they looked upon as the sin of their own land, and of all lands. Their hopes of future blessings to their own people, and to all people, rested upon the assurance that He who was then speaking secretly would be proclaimed openly.
10. Different ways of considering their relation to each other. In entering upon the philosophy of the other nations of the earth, we have the choice of four methods. It is more honest to state at the outset which we shall adopt, that our readers may be upon their guard against any effort we may make to strain facts into accordance with it.
i. Either, first, we may assume that the Hebrews, like all other people, were merely following their own instincts and impulses in the search after wisdom, and were not guided to it, as they pretended to be, by a Divine Teacher;
ii. Or, secondly, we may determine that we will make out a connection between the Scriptures, or the writers of them, and the different philosophers of Hindostan, of Persia, or of Greece, believing it to be impossible that they could have obtained light in any other way;
iii. Or, thirdly, we may determine that these philosophers never had any light,—that they were merely following delusions, and propagating them;
iv. Or, fourthly, we may assume that doctrine which seems to us to be asserted throughout every part of the Scriptures, and to be especially elucidated and enforced by the prophets,—that all men really have had a Divine Teacher, whether they have followed His guiding or not.
This doctrine we believe to be true. It adds unspeakably to the interest and wonder of those records which we have been considering. It makes us deeply anxious that we may not misrepresent those of which we are about to give an account.