Section I. Grounds of Hebrew Philosophy
1. The historian of philosophy usually passes over the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet the book of Job describes philosophy in exact language. “Where is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?” is said to be the inquiry that matters more to man than finding veins of silver or bringing gold out of the earth. The book of Proverbs makes the search for wisdom its subject and purpose, and says man must dig for it as for hidden treasure. This language hardly fits an opinion that people of the most opposite views have eagerly held: that these books assume all knowledge to be handed down from above, so that man has nothing to search out. The opinion could not be so general unless there were facts or reasons behind it. The writers of Job and Proverbs do presume a revelation, and they ground both the possibility and the duty of searching for wisdom upon it. So revelation must mean something different to them than it does to many moderns. To learn what it means, we must go to the books that profess to record how God made himself known to man. There we will find not Hebrew philosophy itself, but its grounds and elements.
2. Genesis opens with the creation of the World, or Order, in which we live. Modern geological discoveries and speculations have done much to lift a veil from this record, and to bring out the all-important principle that the sacred historian speaks of the world in its relation to Man. If we forget this, the whole later history becomes incoherent and unintelligible. We must take the words “God made Man in his own likeness” as the key to it, and see the course of the visible world as secondary to the relation between God and our race.
3. Once these data are assumed, it is no strange exception that the unseen Being should unveil himself to man; it is the law and condition of man’s being. The contradiction would be that He after whose image man is made should not give him the capacity to behold his own archetype, and should refuse him the power to be what he was made to be. These Scriptures treat it throughout as a contradiction. God is everywhere speaking to man, and man is meant to hear. God places the first man in a garden, calls forth in him the power to name the creatures, gives him a helpmate, and creates the marriage bond. Man submits to a lower creature, denies the authority of the invisible Lord, and tries to hide from His presence. He is awakened to own that presence and to feel he has transgressed. He is driven from the garden and must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but this labour is to teach him that he depends not on the earth he tills but on an invisible Ruler. The first murder is committed, and God asks Cain for his brother. Cain’s great punishment is to go out from God’s presence. His descendants build cities and invent mechanical arts. Another race, headed by Seth, is said to be called by the name of the Lord. The first is irregular and disorderly; the second confesses itself under 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 that stage of his growth. Violence and confusion later overspread the earth, and a flood punishes the wickedness of its inhabitants; the race is preserved in one of the Seth family. A covenant of God with man is the foundation of the restored world. Noah’s sons are meant to people the earth according to their tongues, nations and families. Some of them seek to defy this purpose by building a tower on the plain of Shinar so as not to be scattered. God confounds the scheme, and they leave off building. But a mighty hunter establishes the kingdoms of Babel and Nineveh, and Scripture throughout treats the Babel kingdom as the form of godless society.
4. A Divine education, then, is assumed as the regular basis of human life and fellowship. God teaches man what he is, and man knows what he is and fulfils his task just so far as he receives this instruction. It comes from an invisible Being and is addressed to something in man other than what connects him with the visible world. Man is always ready to forget God and bow down to visible things. To that extent he becomes a slave and an animal, and the society he lives in becomes corrupt and untenable.
5. Abram is called by God out of his father’s house to go into a strange land, and this calling is the foundation of his life. The Lord of all speaks to him; he heeds and obeys. God makes him know that He is one he may trust, and he believes in Him as righteous. His faith is counted to him for righteousness; he acknowledges the Being in whose likeness he is made, and becomes like Him. His outward life is very commonplace: a shepherd with many flocks and herds, dwelling in tents among city-dwellers with whom he does not mix but has frequent dealings. Once he leads his servants to rescue a kinsman living in Sodom. Returning, he meets a priest of the most high God in Salem and gives him a tenth of the spoil. He goes into Egypt, already an organized nation with a Pharaoh; there he loses his faith in God and tells a lie to save himself, which nearly costs him his wife. All his discipline is of this practical kind. He finds that God overthrows cities that have become hateful and given over to beastly crimes, and he is taught to intercede for the righteous in them. He is sure the Judge of all the earth will not slay them with the wicked: God must do right. Abraham lives under the promise that in him and his seed all families of the earth will be blessed, yet he has no seed. A child is born to him by a bondwoman in his house, and he hopes the promise is fulfilled; but he is told that his own wife’s child must be heir. She is barren, yet he believes, and waits long. When the child is born and growing up, Abraham is called to sacrifice him. He gives himself to God, ready to do what is commanded. Another offering is provided, and Abraham is blessed for his trust. So the whole history, as far as he himself is concerned, is that of a man taught to know himself by knowing in whom he must believe. Nothing distinguishes him from his kind: he learns what he has in common with all human beings, the relations in which they stand to the world around them and to their Creator.
6. But such a history cannot be merely individual. To know what he is, Abraham is taught what it is to be a master, a husband, a father. The discipline that most concerns himself concerns him in these roles; God speaks to him as head of a family and founder of a race. So he is educated to feel his connection with past and future. Hebrew history rests on the belief that God made a covenant with the patriarchs and their seed. They are circumcised and 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, in turn, are treated as subjects of Divine teaching as much as the chosen race: God speaks to Abimelech and to Pharaoh, and the sign of the covenant is shared by Ishmael’s descendants. The patriarchs are shown to have all their neighbours’ evils, and some peculiar to themselves from their sense of special privilege. Jacob is more deceitful and treacherous than Esau, and the man who prizes his birthright more than the one who despises it. The one tries to get an heir’s rights by trick; the other thinks nothing of the inheritance but much of the loss of corn and wine he believes goes with it. Both are disappointed. The deceiver becomes a wanderer, yet 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, and it does not leave him till it has punished his falsehood. The frank, open-hearted hunter has his reward: he does not lose what he feared to lose; he misses only what he never cared for.
7. The rest of Genesis is in harmony with this. The heads of the Jewish nation, the circumcised sons of Jacob, commit the crimes one might expect of wild shepherds and settlers, and 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 and giving him wisdom. He believes that God cares for Pharaoh and Egypt, and is their Ruler and Teacher as well as his. He becomes an instructor to a king. Yet the historian is still chiefly occupied with family relations; he cares more to tell how Joseph behaved to his brothers and was made known to them than how he bought up the lands of Egypt. The consciences and hearts of human beings have testified that he is right: such records concern us more and are really more wonderful. They belong to humanity and morality, and set forth family relations as the first stage of spiritual history, the stage out of which all others must gradually develop.
8. Exodus shows the Jewish people still as a collection of families. They have multiplied in Egypt, are regarded as a dangerous body of aliens, and are reduced to slavery. The book gives the history of their deliverance. God sees their affliction and hears their cry; He remembers his covenant and calls a man out of one of their tribes to deliver them. Egypt is presented as a nation abounding in wise men, who practise magic and soothsaying and advise the king. Moses is brought up in the king’s court and learned in this wisdom. While still young he feels for his countrymen, tries to deliver them, and smites an Egyptian. He becomes an exile in Midian. There, keeping his father-in-law’s flock at the back of the desert, he hears the Lord God tell him that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But God also makes known to Moses another name: “Say to the Israelites that the I Am hath sent thee to them.” In this name Moses speaks to his countrymen and commands Pharaoh to let the people go. “The Lord God of the Hebrews” had sent him. Pharaoh asks “Who is the Lord God?” and increases the people’s burdens. The river is smitten; flies, lice and 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 and the slaves go out with a high hand. A memorial feast is appointed, to be kept from generation to generation, as a witness that the Lord protected their households and brought them out of the house of bondage.
9. At this stage the principles are plainly the same as in the first. The invisible Lord is still the great speaker and actor, men are in their right state when they hear His voice and confess His acting, and it is still the rule, not the exception, that He reveals himself. But this new revelation is of a deeper kind. The Egyptian priests and magicians had all sorts of thoughts and speculations about God, and plans for representing and propitiating Him. Hence came superstitions, tricks, the exaltation of men for their skill in the tricks, and worship of visible things in which they had found tokens of power, tools of usefulness, or causes of fear. The Lord of all comes forth declaring himself the true Being, himself the teacher of wisdom to man and the ruler of the things man is worshipping. He makes felt the power He is continually exercising. The plagues were startling specimens of judgments He had shown before and would show again in that land. They are remarkable chiefly because their reason is explained: natural agents are shown to obey a moral law. A righteous Being sends them, to punish the oppressor and deliver the oppressed.
10. On this foundation the polity of the Israelites stands. The name of God is its ground. He is the people’s deliverer; He calls out the leader who guides them through the wilderness; He gives them bread each morning and makes water flow from the rock. He goes before them by night and day and casts horse and rider into the deep. He is judge between man and man and teacher of their judges. He gives the law, appoints the priest and the sacrifice, orders the host and goes with it to battle. He is head of the tribes and fixes the bounds of their habitation. The commonest arrangements have their sanction from His name. He inspires the artificer with skill for cunning works, and himself dwells in the tabernacle and meets the worshipper at the mercy-seat.
11. God’s covenant is at the root of the national society as it was of the family society. For the most part the Jewish institutions were not new. Egypt already had a law, a priesthood, sacrifices and temples. The Jew did not bring these forms with him; he found them established in the land he entered as a band of shepherds. They might have been cast aside as parts of an idolatrous system. In that case the Israelites, having grown into a people, would have kept only family or pastoral institutions; they would have become an Arab horde. This would have been their fate if Moses had stolen the tenet of God’s unity from the Egyptian sages and published it to his countrymen, as a witness that they were no longer a degraded caste and could worship the one God of nature instead of their oppressors’ many gods. And if he had then, to suit their prejudices, pretended to a mission from an actual, living Being who authorized a system essentially Egyptian with a hard, lazy tenet of Divine unity tacked on, he would have framed the most incongruous scheme of falsehood ever palmed on the world, and his name should be held accursed as the wickedest of liars and blasphemers. Before we pronounce that sentence we should hear his own account. He does not boast of proclaiming any tenet about God’s unity. He says the I Am, the living God, sent him to guide and deliver his countrymen. The Egyptians believed in a hidden god; he said that hidden God had come forth to declare himself. The Egyptians thought he had delegated to priests the power to interpret His mind; Moses said God was ever living and acting, and the priest was the witness of His presence and of His relation to men. The Egyptian held that sacrifices were the means of bending the Divine will to man’s; Moses 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 amount. The Egyptian spoke of laws either irreversible or changeable at the monarch’s will. Moses spoke of laws as the utterance of an unseen, eternal King, which no man could set aside, which ever proceeded from God’s own mouth, enforced by thunders and lightnings, telling each Israelite he stood in God’s presence and warning him of tendencies hateful to God that would destroy him. The Egyptian had statutes for the particular emergencies of the land, to 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 suited to an agricultural people on the Mediterranean shore. The Egyptians had temples where they worshipped beings conceived from the natural phenomena of each place. Moses affirmed that God does not float in the air or dwell in the hills or clouds; where it pleased Him to dwell, there His glory might be felt and the worshipper converse with Him.
Whether or not this description of the polity is true, it is at least consistent. It does not set aside Egyptian institutions or faith; it justifies them by inverting them. The Egyptian rested on man’s conceptions of God; the Israelite on God’s declaration of Himself to man. The one assumes the nation to be a society that must be upheld, and can only be upheld, by Divine sanction, and so must forge those sanctions. The other assumes the nation to be established by the living and true God himself, to witness His truth and permanence, and to be bound to a perpetual protest and war against every attempt to confound Him with visible objects.
12. According to the Hebrew economy, this is the nation’s one great characteristic function. The nation grows out of the family and is grounded on the family covenant. It must preserve family distinctions; its lands are apportioned to the tribes; its memorial feasts are tied to household life; in battle each man encamps by the standard of his father’s house. But the nation is not a mere collection of families. It witnesses to a perpetual battle between order and disorder, right and wrong, the invisible God who is Lord of man and the visible things claiming lordship over him. The Israelite, God’s covenant servant, is to take part in this fight and go forth as God’s instrument in putting down corruption and oppression. When commissioned to destroy, he must destroy. He is to hold individual life cheap for the sake of asserting the right and truth men have violated. He sees idolatry as the cause of all strife and degradation, and is to hate it with a perfect hatred.
13. This new stage in Israel’s life is the beginning of Song and of Written Law. The first expresses thanksgiving for deliverance from the visible oppressor. It proclaims the Lord as deliverer and man of war. It is poured out by an individual who feels he is a member of a nation and becomes its spokesman. Though he speaks God’s praises, he feels he is inspired by God. The flame of the song, like that of the sacrifice, was first kindled by Him to whom it ascends.
The Code is precisely the opposite of the Song. It comes from the Lord’s lips and is simply His utterance; it carries no inspiration with it. It takes each man apart and makes him feel that he alone is spoken to, though a crowd surrounds him. Yet it too comes from a Deliverer, and 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. Written letter has replaced memorial stones and pillars; the finger of God has permanently set down the decrees His people must keep.
They are decrees. The whole force of the code, as a code, lies in its coming from Him who has the right to command, who has given the sea its bounds and determined what man is to be. The Lawgiver’s right to say “So it shall be” is the foundation of every precept. But we must remember that He who claims this right first revealed Himself to the Israelite as his Deliverer and Friend, the enemy of oppression and wrong, one who does not act from self-will. The Hebrew Scriptures teach us to call a law lacking either condition a contradiction. If law is the creature of self-will, its meaning and sanction perish in the very attempt to enforce it. For law to proceed from those it addresses is equally at odds with these books. They assume that there is a righteous Will in the universe, and that this Will can utter itself, and has done so.
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 modern European tribes, which differ from the Jewish in all outward respects? Anticipating a later part of this sketch, I say that this has happened only so far as the peoples of modern Europe have felt themselves to belong to distinct nations, and have recognised the essential grounds of the Jewish polity (the covenant, the calling, the actual government of an unseen Lord) as applying to themselves in their national character. They have felt the obligation and virtue of this code not as members of a larger society but precisely as united in particular local societies. Whatever has weakened or absorbed their national feeling has weakened the authority of the Ten Commandments. Hence the conscience of these nations has strongly commended the distinction between these Commandments and the mere statutes of the Jewish people. They have not denied a Divine origin to the statutes; they have felt that the same Wisdom which adapted one class of commands to one place and age must intend something different for another. The Ten Commandments they have recognised as having no such limitation.
The distinction some have tried to introduce here, between positive and essentially moral commands, does not seem to concern us. We may notice it later, but it cannot enter into the question of a code. Every part of a Law must, by the force of the term, be positive; that is, it must be laid down. But what is laid down may concern the inhabitants of a district as such, or as human beings. The subjects of the Jewish economy were especially awakened to this distinction. No more commandments were added to those spoken on Sinai; all later legislation, though referred to the same Authority, is kept separate from them. All later history witnessed to the Jew that the sources of political disunion and crime, and of the loss of all personal dignity and manliness, lay in setting up any god besides the Unseen Deliverer; in imagining any likeness of Him in heaven, earth or waters; in losing awe for His Name; in losing the distinction between Work and Rest, which grounds man’s life, has its archetype in God, and is worked by Him into the fabric of His own people’s existence; in losing reverence for parents, life, marriage, property and character; and in the covetous feeling at the root of these evils.
Property, it will be seen, was carefully guarded by this code, though only one provision refers to it. It cannot be pretended that the law exists to protect individual possession, though reverence for property was a sign of this second stage of Jewish education. It had comparatively little to do with the patriarchs’ tent life. We see its beginning in the quarrels of Lot’s and Abraham’s herdsmen, in arrangements about wells, and in the purchase of burying-grounds. It appears clearly in the assignment of portions to the sons of Jacob. But within the chosen people there were as yet no distinct rules to protect it. It is connected with the nation’s protesting character and with the sense of individuality awakened in its members.
But mixed with the family and national institutions was a hint of something larger than either. The Levite tribe was exempt from the ordinary regulations of property. It represented the whole people and each family, and bore witness that Israel’s relation to the I Am could not be satisfactorily expressed without breaking through the forms and limits of a local commonwealth. In fact, all these institutions taught Israelites to prize boundaries and landmarks and strengthened their attachment to place; yet they kept reminding every devout person who submitted to them and meditated on them that he had in him something that did not belong to space or time, that only a Being above such restraints could speak to, and that only knowledge of such a Being could satisfy.
14. Whatever else this history has or lacks, no one will deny that it is a moral and metaphysical history, by the definition already given of those terms. It is moral because from first to last it refers directly to man, to the habits, ways and constitution of the human race as distinct from every other. It is metaphysical because it asserts that man is distinct from physical things: though he has in him what is under the law of growth and decay, he also has what connects him with what is fixed, constant and permanent, with a living personal Being who is above the laws of nature and himself imposed them.
15. Though a moral and metaphysical history, it is, as already admitted, no history of a philosophy, of thoughts about wisdom or a search after it. I must add that it is also no history of a Religion in the common sense of the word. It is not a history of men’s thoughts about God, or desires after Him, 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 a history of one tribe’s speculations about God, we must deny the very root of any speculations that tribe ever had, which is the belief that they could not think of God unless He had first thought of them, nor speak of Him unless He were speaking to them. A class of modern teachers assume that God is made in man’s image and formed after his conceptions, and then insist that a nation which lived and acted on the opposite conviction must have shared this one. Let every people speak its own word and tell us what it means. We who think the Hebrews spoke a true word and meant the true thing claim for them only what we would claim for all: the right to interpret themselves.
16. I have denied that Hebrew history is the history of a religion or a philosophy. But I fully admit that there are Hebrew books which in the ordinary sense are to be called religious, just as I contend that some are to be called philosophical. When the Jewish Rabbinical schools gave the name “holy writings” to one part of these books and “histories” to another, they expressed their feeling that some especially embody the human spirit’s aspirations after a Divine person, just as others set forth that person’s acts towards men. The book of Psalms is chief of the holy writings. In later times there has been a tendency to give it this character too strictly and exclusively. People overlook the historical and political features that are so plain to ordinary readers, and regard the Psalms simply as utterances of individual sorrow, trust, thankfulness or rapture. This destroys the writer’s meaning, for it does not separate his religious feelings from their surroundings but gives them a new character altogether. The Psalmist is not a recluse brooding over his own feelings. He is a man learning under the pressure of life (on the battlefield, on the judgment-seat, through persecutors’ cruelty, the fellowship of outlaws, sons’ rebellion, his own transgressions) his own feebleness, his need of Divine help, and the mysterious relations in which he stands to the Lord and to his fellow-men. The Lord of all had revealed himself to Israel as a king reigning from generation to generation, in whose government alone lay his subjects’ freedom, safety and hope. Great changes had since come in Israel’s outward condition: they were no longer merely under the invisible Lord who spoke His laws on Sinai. A king went forth in sight of the Host as its leader and was confessed to be the chief of the people’s strength. The difficulty was to connect these two truths: to keep the visible king from interfering with the homage due to the Invisible, and to make him God’s witness instead of a rival and rebel. Saul had been made king because the people disbelieved that God was an actual king. The whole of David’s strange history (shepherd-boy, hero, exile, king ruling, king deposed, reigning righteously and falling into rebellion and injustice) testified that the temporal sovereign was only the representative, an imperfect type, of One whose throne is for ever and ever. A twofold conviction is implied in all the utterances of the Psalms: that the unseen kingdom is the ground of every other and the true substantial kingdom, and that man is meant to be the image of God in his royalty. It gives the Psalms their strength, unity and variety, and makes them as human as they are national.
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, will show the Jewish calling not to be vain, will fully manifest Himself to men as their Ruler, and will prove false every attempt to make Him in men’s likeness and true His assertion that He made men in His. It is a long fight between the true God and false gods, the true image and the false; the struggle is desperate in that land, in every land, in each man’s heart. At times all hope of success seems gone; “the faithful fail from among the children of men,” and false gods and false men have their way. God seems to have left the world to lies, misery and 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 poor and fatherless and see that those in need have right. Let the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing, He will set His king on His holy hill of Zion, a king who shall reign as long as sun and moon endure and set peace and righteousness on the earth. Throughout the Psalms, all the elements of Hebrew life and revelation I have mentioned (the feast, the law, the tribe, the tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices, above all the battlefield against idolatry) appear in connection with the writers’ inmost thoughts and longings. But the ingenuity of modern criticism has decided that some Psalms must be by men more cultivated than was compatible with reverence for the Mosaic institutions or the surrounding religious system. Someone who could have the Lord say, “Thinkest thou that I will eat bull’s flesh, or drink the blood of goats,” or, lamenting his crime, say, “Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it Thee, but thou delightest not in burnt offering,” must, we are told, have held convictions the old orthodox Hebrew would have regarded with horror. The end 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 accordingly written off as a priestly interpolation wholly at odds with the prayer. If my earlier remarks are true, these passages are the greatest proof of how earnestly the Psalmist had meditated on the Mosaic institution of sacrifice and on the difference between his country and all others. The very lesson that one who devoutly obeyed the Mosaic directions would have learnt from them was this: sacrifices were expressions of the heart’s surrender to Him from whom it had strayed, not gifts by which it might hope to make the Divine Lord tolerate its wrongdoing. Every humble and contrite man would have learnt that sacrifices are precious in God’s eyes as witnesses of a reconciled spirit and a restored nation. But I readily admit that there is a truth indicated in these rude attempts to break up the unity of compositions in which the consciences and hearts of all ages have recognized a match with their own deepest feelings. 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 with the longest experience of it see the furthest; the children who keep this Law are wiser than their forefathers.” I admit that the Psalms contain something that does not belong to the patriarchal or legal period of Jewish history. By claiming the privileges of Abraham’s children, meditating on the Law night and day, and undergoing the Divine discipline of toil, strife and sorrow that their fathers’ records explained to them, an insight and apprehension were cultivated in them that the earlier time could not have had. They saw more into the meaning and heart of institutions; they saw how the principle implied in them rose above accident and rule. They learnt to protest against those who sacrificed the spirit to preserve the letter and so lost both. They saw how what is essentially and eternally human was drawn out by what is formally and exclusively national. They found an absolute, unchangeable morality beneath the relative morality of the patriarchal family and the positive morality of decrees and statutes.
Section II. Hebrew Philosophy
1. No one will deny that the book of Proverbs is quite different in character from the book of Psalms. Everyone feels the difference, and the books’ own opening statements recognize it. When we call Proverbs a philosophical book, we are following the writer’s own definition: “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 does not prepare us for a book of passionate devotion, of groans from a man in deep trouble, or of his confident flight to a refuge. It prepares us for what we find: observation, reflection, experiment. Yet it has much in common with the Psalms. Unlike the histories, both set forth the seeking and striving of man’s spirit. Both assume that this striving has been awakened in the man and that its direction has been given him. He seeks righteousness because the righteous Being first sought him, and he seeks wisdom because the wise Being first sought him. He is to know wisdom and equity, as he is to be righteous, because God made him in His image.
2. The first statement of the Divine revelation already implies that it was meant to awaken this craving for wisdom as much as the other. The Jewish history is not merely a display of a gracious and kindly character, though it is that in the highest sense. When the Lord God reveals Himself as merciful, gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, He leads men to feel that their own lack of mercy, quickness to anger and unwillingness to forgive are wrong, a departure from the standard they are meant to match. As these qualities are shown in action, their nature becomes clearer and the sense of rebellion against them more vivid. But such a display presumes a method of government, a fitting of means to ends, which we call judgment. The unseen King must govern the world on a plan; there must be in Him something that arranges, devises and orders. What is in Him is in His creature too, who can perceive and trace it because he has something corresponding to it: an eye that meets the light, takes it in, and sees objects by it.
3. Solomon felt that the king has a calling which demands this wisdom. He asked for it and it was granted, and his life became the type of wisdom to the Hebrews and the key to his words, as it has been felt to be in every age. In him were the strongest tendencies to sensuality, the fullest sympathy with outward things and their attraction, and the assurance that the world is meant to be ruled and examined by man. All the motives to the visible worship or idolatry that the law condemned were in him at their liveliest. But he also had a sense of relation to the invisible Being of whom the law and covenant testified, the absolute and perfect King to whom every king, by his own authority and the permanence of his dynasty, bore witness. Only such a Being could protect him against the powers conspiring to rob him of his strength and enslave him. Only He could teach him how to judge and govern, how to know the boundaries of order and disorder, justice and iniquity, and how to make the things about him his instruments and distinguish their uses and properties. The Temple he built expressed his belief that the buildings and treasures of the world, the objects and instruments of idolatry, were to be consecrated to the unseen Being and to witness to Him. The book of Proverbs expresses his feeling of the relation in which man stands to the world and to his Maker.
4. Solomon is said to have known all plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar of Lebanon; he studied natural things. But Proverbs contains none of this lore. It assumes that Wisdom is not to be found there, however earnestly the wise man contemplates nature and however much he delights in it. Wisdom has to do first with man. He is to seek it so that he can rule others and himself, so that it may deliver him from the strange woman, the harlot Sense who is always dragging him down into death, and so that he may know the path of life.
5. If he seeks, he must find. As surely as the tempting voice is always beckoning him to follow its ways, another voice is crying aloud in the places of concourse and speaking to the heart within, promising him riches and honour, durable riches and righteousness. Wisdom seeks to enter the heart and draw the soul after it. Once fully welcomed, it becomes sweet and pleasant, but first it applies sharp corrections and bitter medicines. The man who follows this guide must not grow weary of discipline.
6. The Divine covenant and law evidently implied this distinction between two powers drawing men in opposite directions. 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 the most external-seeming Mosaic arrangements, such as the permission of some meats, the denunciation of others, and the apparently arbitrary division of clean and unclean beasts, had been cultivating in the Israelite the feeling that there was an upward and a downward path: he was naturally inclined to one, and a Divine hand was leading him into the other. The author of Proverbs only draws out the sense and purpose of these ordinances and recognizes an essential, eternal law beneath them. He represents the whole of man’s life as an expression of this conflict. Every act is done in obedience to one or the other of the influences acting on him at every moment, and every act confirms him in obedience to one or the other.
7. But are the words “influences,” “principles,” “powers” adequate? We have spoken of the “harlot Sense,” but Solomon, with far more practical truth and poetic power, calls her “the strange woman.” He can tolerate no abstraction. It is an actual enchantress who speaks to each unhappy youth. The best individual language is also the best general language; the only way to describe the temptations of the race is to describe those of the particular heart. He does not arrive at a notion of what is human by heaping up experiences; in each one he finds what belongs to all.
8. If what seduces a man from his proper state must be described personally, how is it with Wisdom? Is that merely an abstraction, when it is something to be embraced, possessed and loved? Is it not a reality, a person? If not, how could its attractions be measured against those of the other? Can we follow a dream or shadow as we follow what we know to be substantial? If Sense comes before us as a woman, Solomon takes for granted that Wisdom can be nothing less fair or attractive. To use the feminine in one case and not the other would make the meaning false in both. Wisdom must have an intense loveliness and captivating power for those who have come within its circle. It would contradict the whole doctrine of the book to fancy that this loveliness is the creature of the one who beholds and loves it. Wisdom offers itself to him, overcomes his reluctance and draws him after it. Far from making his understanding a creator, he is told above all not to lean on it or trust it; if he does, Wisdom disowns him and he is a fool.
9. But what is this Wisdom? At each step the question becomes more awful. Solomon had declared at the outset that whoever does not begin with the fear of the Lord has no hope of attaining it. That fear must have been strong in the writer, mixed with a strange boldness, when he gradually comes 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.” Wisdom speaks: “When there were no depths 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 had been unfolding gradually out of the earlier revelations, and here it finds full expression. Here is one who shares God’s mind and was before the universe, in whom the whole order of creation originated, yet who regards man as above all creation and has been his guide and teacher from the first. In Wisdom man attains the satisfaction of his highest desires and is delivered from subjection to the world around him. In this assertion lies the foundation of all the minute practical teaching about the duties of the king and of the shopkeeper. The Divine order of the world is also the true human order. The king is set on his throne to exhibit it in acts of protection and punishment; the just balances exhibit it too. All confusion comes from men forgetting their places in this order, ceasing to acknowledge the power that guides and keeps them in it, and yielding to the power that seeks to put out the inward eye that alone can discern it.
10. The antithetical form of Proverbs evidently belongs to its essence; its main idea, running through every part, could not have been brought out otherwise. It also matters that the book is addressed by a father to his child. It is didactic and affectionate, and gives the results of experience, not the processes. In both respects it differs from the other great book of Hebrew Philosophy, Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher.
11. Ecclesiastes records personal experiences, struggles, disappointments and partial conclusions. It is the story of a man in a labyrinth, trying one passage after another, always baffled and forced into a new path that ends as hopelessly. But the labyrinth is not chiefly one of speculation. It is the actual maze of human life, and the actual contradictions that a man meets if he does not shut his eyes. And though each conclusion seems to conclude nothing, something is ascertained by each experiment. Riches, all earthly enjoyments, all works, toils and vocations are found to have a positive good in them. The wise man whose eyes are in his head is found better than all others. Though there is an excuse for thinking the old days better than our own, it proves unwise to inquire about this. There is comfort under the oppressions of cities and provinces. And yet vanity and vexation of spirit is written on everything, and this is a fact that must not be disguised. Wisdom itself seems under the same curse, and the experiences of the wise seeker are sadder and more oppressive than other men’s. But his sadness, disappointments and falls are chief parts of his schooling. He is learning to accept the fact, painful at first to discover, that what is crooked cannot be made straight and what is wanting cannot be numbered. He had been trying to make an order, and has gradually learnt to perceive one. He had looked on himself as the centre of the universe, and despite all his skill, wisdom and piety, that false conception brought him weariness everywhere. When he confesses God as the centre, 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. After all its speculations and trials it returns to Him who made it, and learns to see itself in Him and Him in all things.
12. It is a hard question whether the book of Job should be counted among these philosophical books, and if so, to what time it belongs. On the date, critics have always fluctuated and seem no nearer agreement now. The weight of modern opinion perhaps favours a comparatively late period, but to many the arguments for extreme antiquity still seem decisive. It would be absurd to go into the reasons here, though the result matters to the student of philosophy. If the book belongs to the age of Abraham or Moses, it would prove that the deepest and most conscious agonies of the human spirit were experienced and expressed at a time when, judging from Genesis especially, we expect faith to show itself chiefly in practical life and the divinest utterances to take the form of simple history. It is certainly not impossible that such thoughts were working in men’s minds in the first ages. To be assured of it would be like discovering a wonderful new country where we least expected one, a discovery reasonable people would gladly make at the cost of any theory. If instead it must be assigned to Solomon’s age or even the Chaldaic period, it still cannot lose its profound reality as the history of an actual human struggle, or be twisted by criticism into a mere book of speculation. Whenever, wherever and by whomever written, it must remain for all human beings what the peasants of every land feel it to be: the divine record of what one felt who shared their flesh and blood, who was plunged in the deepest sorrows they can suffer, and had to work his way into health and peace, not unhelped or unguided, though all human friends and counsellors strove against him.
In attributing this kind of interest to the book, we may seem to have settled whether it belongs to the strictly religious or the strictly philosophical writings of the Hebrews. That would be rash. We have tried to show that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are in the truest sense human books, essentially practical and concerning everyone’s life. Job’s intense suffering makes it his first concern to find out whether a gracious and loving Being rules the world, whether his misery comes from such a source or from somewhere else. In his agony he pours out words like the east wind; at times he seems to deny his Maker’s goodness, and he continually contradicts himself. His pious, well-instructed friends confute him with authorized, beautiful, eloquent phrases. They appeal to the judgment of their elders, to whom they are mere children, they are shocked at his irreverence, and they wonder he is not afraid of affronting the Being who has laid him low and might raise him again. Job tells them he has heard a thousand such things and knows them all by heart. But God is actually smiting him, and fine speeches are no use then. He must know what his anguish means. Belief in a righteous God is everything to him, and without that hope he has nothing; so he cannot be content until he sees how God is righteous, and how He can be so while afflicting him, a man who knows inwardly that he has tried to be and do right and still clings to Him whose rod lies so heavily upon him.
So far this wonderful history seems fitter to be classed with the Psalms than with Proverbs. But when God answers Job out of the whirlwind, it is especially with a view of His wisdom that He lays him prostrate. Job had asserted in his inmost heart, and generally with his lips, the righteousness of God, and had justified Him as his three friends had not, however they seemed to. But he had taken no measure of the wisdom of Him who made Orion and the Pleiades, the horse that paws the valley, the ostrich that lays her eggs and forgets her young, and the leviathan that takes his pastime in the great waters. He had thought he could judge 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. A revelation not of God’s power or sovereignty but of His infinite wisdom was Job’s humiliation, and it was his cure. In dust and ashes he sees, actually exercising His gracious and mysterious dominion, the Being of whom he had heard by the hearing of the ear. He abhors himself, and then is raised to a new and nobler life. At this point the book of Job surely asserts its right to a place with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, among the books that set forth the search after wisdom, the methods by which God guides a man in that search, and its reward.
Section III. The Prophets
1. The book of Job has sometimes been read as the history of the Jewish nation rather than of one individual. I am not surprised that intelligent readers proposed this, or that it met vehement resistance. A nation’s prosperity, misery, and restoration can surely be read in that book. Yet anyone who has suffered will never be persuaded that he is not reading of his own struggles, struggles that went on in the heart of a real 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 show us that the experiences of the single man and of the body politic are not different but essentially the same. The Jew has to fight his country’s battles in his own soul. His study of its present condition, its past, and its coming fortunes is not separate from his own life. He understands what he sees outside him by what is passing within, and he does not know himself except as an Israelite.
2. The writings of the prophets cannot strictly be counted among the philosophical writings of the Hebrews. The prophet is not primarily a seeker but a preacher. He comes as one who has received light and can impart it, to denounce existing evils and foretell approaching ones. Still, any view of Hebrew philosophy is imperfect without him. Mixed with his announcements and denunciations are continual displays of his own difficulties and confusions. If he has been brought into the sunshine, he had a long preparation of darkness and twilight. His public teaching can never be separated from the school that raised him, or from the Temple where he saw his most glorious visions.
3. Every Hebrew teacher was a prophet. Moses, the guide and lawgiver, claims the title, and a Jew could hardly have refused it to Abraham. The prophet did not need to leave written records; he might, like the father of the nation, bear his witness by acts rather than words. Still, there was a time when the prophet became a more distinct part of Hebrew society, and the name became that of a class or Order. The Sacred Record places this at the transition from the age of the Judges to the age of the Kings, and connects it with a general shaking of the most sacred Mosaic institutions. Scripture never hints that the priest, with “holiness to the Lord” 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. 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 dedicated to the Temple’s service, sleeping in a chamber near it, heard a voice calling him. He thought it was the priest’s; it was the Lord’s. He was appointed to tell the priest of his sins and of the coming fall of his house. The Word of God had spoken to Samuel, and let none of his words fall. It was known that there was a prophet in Israel.
The elders believed there was a charm in the tabernacle to save them from their enemies; they took it into battle, and it fell into the hands of the Philistines. Samuel became a judge and a deliverer. He restored law and order, defined boundaries, and executed justice between man and man. His sons did not walk in his ways. The people craved a leader of their armies, and Samuel told them of the Invisible King in their midst. He anointed the visible king, warned him of his self-will, and foretold his ruin. He anointed the man after God’s own heart.
4. Here the essential qualities of the prophetic office are clearly shown, and we can understand what a school of the prophets was. The ground of its members’ mission was the same as Samuel’s: they were taught that the Word of God was speaking to them, and that they were to heed this voice and follow it wherever it led. In the school they were trained to study and meditate on God’s law, and to consider their people’s past: how God had dealt with their fathers, and what their calling as Israelites meant. But this was only so that they might know how He was dealing with them then. They were no less under His government and guidance than their fathers. They were reading not 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 or think of Him. Their countrymen forgot Him and thought He lived only in the past. Priesthood, sacrifices, and tabernacle had become dead machinery, instead of the assurance of His permanent presence. The prophet was to be trained in the belief of that presence, to act and live upon it, and to tell priests, kings, and people that their acts and their whole lives were lies unless they recognised this as their ground.
5. This was the true Jewish education. We have no reason to suppose that only prophets were trained in these schools; they might train their countrymen there, and could train them only in the same lore. They could only tell them, as they do in all their written discourses, that even without a special call to be teachers or prophets, the Word of God was speaking to them, warning them against their evil tendencies and guiding them to be right and true, and that they could lead safe and honest lives only by following that guidance.
6. Often those who claimed the special office of prophet heeded this teaching least, and for this very reason: they did not see it as the teaching of a righteous, wise Being to the whole nation. They prized their special gifts and thought it wonderful to speak words in God’s name. They would not submit to be schooled before pouring out their utterances. They never learned to distinguish the whispers of the harlot Sense, the vain, self-exalting spirit, from the lesson of Him who came to humble, sift, and purify. So they became traders in prophecy. They spoke a lie out of their own hearts and said “The Lord hath said,” now saddening the righteous, now speaking peace where there was no peace. They were base flatterers of kings, inventors of tricks, patrons of idolatry, and cunning or impudent deceivers of a people that loved to be deceived. They turned prophecy into divination, guessing at coming events from what they saw, or catching up the utterances of departed seers at second hand. Speaking of God’s judgments was nothing terrible to them, because they did not believe in the judgments or in Him. These were words to toy with, to frighten enemies or please disciples. They came from hollow, hypocritical, atheistical hearts, and did more than any others to make the people hollow, hypocritical, and atheistical.
7. Against these false brethren of their own order, even more than against the heartless priest and the godless king, the true prophet testified by words and acts. It was no part of his vocation to pass himself off as something else, or to hide from himself or others his conflicts with the evil in him, his difficulty in separating the precious from the vile, or the reluctance with which he often obeyed the Divine voice. He did not claim inspiration out of pride. His temptation was to deny it, to boast that he had something of his own, and to pretend he could be or do anything except as he submitted to One higher than himself. He does not seek credit by declaring what is to come; he is mainly busy with the present. He brings God as a present God, by signs, discourses, and songs, before the consciences of the presumptuous or cowardly king or prophet. He witnesses to the same present God to the heart of the crushed and oppressed Israelite. The future is all contained in the past and present. God is, and therefore He will manifest Himself. He reigns, and unrighteous rulers, Jews or heathens, shall know it. Their want of faith shall not hinder His purposes, and tyranny and disorder shall not always keep men from knowing what His gracious dominion is. Kings set up to testify of His rule may misunderstand their vocation, priests may forget Him and turn idolaters, prophets may utter lies in His name, and the whole people may misunderstand why it was called out; but a perfect King shall reign in righteousness, and 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 and become the lowest of nations, and heathens may be God’s ministers to punish it; but the promise will still prove true: in Abraham and his seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
8. An historian of Hebrew philosophy ought to notice these records, if only to show how entirely the popular teaching of the Hebrews corresponds with that of the specially philosophical books. It is entirely esoterical in the best sense, if by that we mean what concerns the inner man and his highest, most mysterious relations. It is entirely exoterical, if by that we mean what is proclaimed to all men and concerns states, governments, and the most outward circumstances of life. But it is especially necessary to point out how this popular teaching, tied as it was to the deepest personal meditation and experience, fills a gap in the merely philosophical teaching and removes a difficulty that might otherwise confuse us. We have seen that Wisdom in Proverbs is spoken of as a person, but a female. Everyone must feel that the passages quoted from that book would have been artistically less beautiful without this form of language. But artistic beauty always rests on some substantial ground of truth. We could not feel the propriety of such expressions if they did not answer to something in our hearts that required them and would suffer if others replaced them. Wisdom, regarded primarily as the object of our search and love, even though we are told that we were first sought 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 he is under the same teaching as Solomon. 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 this is no female voice. It is He who speaks, who commands and judges men, the Ruler and King of their inmost hearts and spirits. The prophets testify of such an One in every speech. They could not believe in a human king, priest, or prophet, or that man was made in God’s image, if they did not acknowledge Him. Because they believe in Him, they are confident that God will be completely declared to men and His image seen in a man. That prospect carries us beyond Hebrew philosophy as we find it in Proverbs, but it supplies the complement to it. By reflecting on it we may perhaps better understand what that philosophy is, and what all philosophy is: where its deep, essential truth lies, and its necessary limitation.
9. From the last remark our readers may gather that I have noticed these prophets, and especially this leading characteristic of them, for more than the sake of Hebrew philosophy. No one can read them simply without feeling that they saw the Being who spoke in their hearts as the real Lord of all men. In their comments on the state of the world in their day, they go far beyond Palestine. The more they find all heathen evils in their own countrymen, the more they discover, and rejoice to discover, a bond of spiritual connection between themselves and all peoples. They could not believe that any government, order, or desire of light or wisdom in any human creatures could come from anywhere but the Source of order, government, light, and wisdom. They saw resistance to the Divine teaching as the sin of their own land and of all lands. Their hopes of future blessing for their own people and for all people rested on the assurance that He who was then speaking secretly would be proclaimed openly.
10. In entering on the philosophy of the other nations of the earth, we have a choice of four methods. It is more honest to say at the outset which I shall adopt, so that readers may be on guard against any effort of mine to strain facts to fit it.
i. First, we may assume that the Hebrews, like all other peoples, were merely following their own instincts and impulses in the search for wisdom, and were not guided, as they pretended, by a Divine Teacher.
ii. Second, we may resolve to make out a connection between the Scriptures, or their writers, and the philosophers of Hindostan, Persia, or Greece, believing it impossible that those philosophers could have obtained light any other way.
iii. Third, we may resolve that these philosophers never had any light, and merely followed delusions and spread them.
iv. Fourth, we may assume the doctrine which seems to me to be asserted throughout the Scriptures, and especially elucidated and enforced by the prophets: that all men really have had a Divine Teacher, whether or not they have followed His guiding.
I believe this doctrine to be true. It adds unspeakably to the interest and wonder of the records we have been considering, and it makes me deeply anxious not to misrepresent those I am about to describe.