of history. Even the literature which has come down to us is only a fragment, and the Bible itself is a collection of such fragments. To understand them we must first get an idea of ancient literary methods. This means that we must rid ourself of the idea that authorship implies literary property. In our own time it is unwarrantable to take sections of a book and intersperse them with paragraphs from ano her source and thus make another book. But in ancient times there was no scruple in doing just this. When a man of Israel had in his possession a book that seemed to him defective in its point of view, he saw no reason why he should not correct it by insertion of what he thought more adequate. This process was almost inevitable in the case of a sacred book, for religious ideas change, and what is edifying to one generation may not be so to another. We have seen how the allegorical interpretation was made to give the old Bible new meanings. Before the text had become fixed the same end was attained by interpolation and redactional changes. If we are rightly to appreciate the historical process which has embodied itself in these documents we must first apply the critical process and separate earlier elements from those which are later. It would be a mistake to suppose that what, for want of a better name, we call interpolations are of less value to us than the older strata with which they are interspersed. These later additions reveal most clearly, and often most touchingly, the state of mind of religious men who felt the defects of the documents which had come down from antiquity. All that we need to guard against is the temptation to take the later portions as evidence of what went on at an earlier time. This temptation naturally beset the first generation of critics, and it took a long time to establish the real historical order of the documents. The difficulty was caused by the strength of the tradition embodied in the Hebrew documents themselves. This tradition made the Law of Moses the starting-point of Israel's history. At the present day it is generally conceded that this is a mis take. With such a presupposition the history of Israel is unintelligible, whereas on the modern theory we get a wellordered development culminating in the priestly legislation instead of starting from it. In saying that our method must be critical we mean that we assume the results of critical study as to the order of the documents. This implies, of course, that we base our sketch of the religion of Israel on the critical reconstruction of Israel's history. But, since this reconstruction is not yet 'universally accepted, it is necessary at this point to state in brief what it holds to be the actual process of Israel's development. The comparative study of religions shows with increasing clearness that the religion of a people bears an intimate relation to that people's political and social conditions. What these conditions were in Israel must be determined by the historian. As thus determined, Israel's development may be sketched as follows: About thirteen hundred years before Christ a group of : nomad clans was making its way into the cultivated country of Canaan, the district which lies between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. For some three hundred years the struggle went on between the older inhabitants and the newcomers. The result was the amalgamation of the two elements, with the desert blood predominant. David succeeded in uniting the heterogeneous sections into one people, though the unity was never very perfect, and the single kingdom was broken into two after less than a hundred years. The larger fraction maintained a semblance of independence for about two hundred years, succumbing at last to Assyria in 722. Judah, the smaller fraction, enjoyed the name of a kingdom for something over a hundred years longer. But it, too, fell before a greater power, becoming an insignificant province of the Babylonian Empire. Never again politically independent, the Jews yet learned to live among the gentiles without mixing with them, keeping their separate social and religious customs. This bare outline shows that we may distinguish four stages in the history of this people, and the presumption is that the religion will show four stages corresponding to these. First of all, the clans were nomads living on the milk of their flocks and the plunder taken from their neighbours. Their religious ideas must have been similar to what we find among the Arabs of the same region at the present day. Then came the stage of amalgamation with the Canaanites and the adoption of the agricultural life. The adoption of Canaanitish religion would naturally follow, and we have abundant evidence that it actually did follow. With the reign of Solomon the arts of life made an advance; commercial enterprises were undertaken; great buildings were erected; class divisions became more marked. The reaction did not come at once, but when, in the time of Ahab, foreign customs seemed about to prevail, a vigorous protest was made under the lead of Elijah. The succession of prophets thus introduced marks a new era for the religion of Israel. Their political revolution, which set Jehu on the throne, did not stop the march of events, but their influence lasted long after the fall of Samaria, which they so plainly foresaw. Their message was repeated with emphasis by Isaiah but was disregarded in the half-century that followed his death. The attempt of the prophetic party to effect a thorough reformation of religion under Josiah was of short duration, but, as was true in the case of the earlier prophets, the message had greater vitality than the men who formulated it. The remnant which survived the fall of Jerusalem felt the full force of the denunciations which the prophets had put on record, and their attempt to regulate their lives by the traditions which came from the fathers made the final period (that of legalism) the most strongly marked of all the stages of Israel's religion. What is now clear to us is that in our history of the religion we must begin with the nomadic stage and end with the highly developed legalism which is characteristic of the religious community which we know as the Jews. For the nomadic stage we have to depend on indirect evidence, for the nomad does not preserve records of his experiences. In the agricultural stage written documents begin to appear. But it is only under the monarchy that literature in any real sense of the word takes form. And religiously the most important literary monuments of this period are the remains of the written prophets. Of course here, as in other departments of human history, no clear and sharp lines of division can be drawn. This is most distinctly seen in the case of Deuteronomy. The writers of this book supposed themselves to be putting the ideas of the prophets into definite form; yet they were, in fact, introducing a new period-that of legalism. This instance is important as showing that the political development and the religious history do not exactly coincide. Politically, the fall of Jerusalem in 586 was the most important event in the history of Israel; religiously, the publication of Deuteronomy, nearly forty years earlier, was epoch-making. It may be well to note, however, that the legalism introduced by Deuteronomy would not have become effective had not Jerusalem fallen into the hands of Nebuchadrezzar. What stands out clearly is that our divisions of Israel's religion will be the following: 1. Nomadic religion. 2. Agricultural religion. 3. Prophetism. 4. Legalism. CHAPTER II NOMADIC RELIGION ACCORDING to the unanimous voice of tradition, the Hebrews were immigrants to Palestine, coming from the eastern desert or from the south. The tradition is confirmed by the monuments, according to which the Chabiri, a nomadic people, invaded Syria in the fourteenth century or earlier. We are entitled, therefore, at the outset to seek for religious phenomena akin to those presented by the desert-dwellers of the present day. Direct testimony, that is, accounts contemporary with the desert sojourn, we must not expect, for the literature in our hands dates from the time of the monarchy. But the conservatism of religion is such that we may expect survivals from the earlier stage of thought to show themselves in tradition. The tradition, as was just remarked, is to the effect that the fathers of the people were, if not nomads in the strict sense of the word, at least shepherds without fixed dwellings. This is the more striking because the ideal of the Hebrew writers for themselves was agricultural. What the Israelite of the ninth century desired for himself was to dwell in the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree, with none to molest or make him afraid. But when he pictured those ideal figures, the patriarchs, he represented them as shepherds wandering up and down the land accompanied by their flocks, living in tents, and not having title even to a burial-place until they had bought it from the earlier inhabitants. What, then, was the religion of these fathers of the nation? It is almost superfluous to remark that it was not monotheism. The theory of Renan, according to which early Semitic monotheism was suggested by the sterile uniformity |
