Our Oriental Heritage

  Slowly the conception of Yahveh as the one national god took form, and gave to Jewish faith a unity and simplicity lifted up above the chaotic multiplicity of the Mesopotamian pantheons. Apparently the conquering Jews took one of the gods of Canaan, Yahu,* and re-created him in their own image as a stern, warlike, “stiff-necked” deity, with almost lovable limitations. For this god makes no claim to omniscience: he asks the Jews to identify their homes by sprinkling them with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, lest he should destroy their children inadvertently along with the first-born of the Egyptians;61 he is not above making mistakes, of which man is his worst; he regrets, too late, that he created Adam, or allowed Saul to become king. He is, now and then, greedy, irascible, bloodthirtsy, capricious, petulant: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.”62 He approves Jacob’s use of deceit in revenging himself upon Laban;63 his conscience is as flexible as that of a bishop in politics. He is talkative, and likes to make long speeches; but he is shy, and will not allow men to see anything of him but his hind parts.64 Never was there so thoroughly human a god.

  Originally he seems to have been a god of thunder, dwelling in the hills,65 and worshiped for the same reason that the youthful Gorki was a believer when it thundered. The authors of the Pentateuch, to whom religion was an instrument of statesmanship, formed this Vulcan into Mars, so that in their energetic hands Yahveh became predominantly an imperialistic, expansionist God of Hosts, who fights for his people as fiercely as the gods of the Iliad. “The Lord is a man of war,” says “Moses”;66 and David echoes him: “He teacheth my hands to war.”67 Yahveh promises to “destroy all the people to whom” the Jews “shall come,” and to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite “by little and little”;68 and he claims as his own all the territory conquered by the Jews.69 He will have no pacifist nonsense; he knows that even a Promised Land can be won, and held, only by the sword; he is a god of war because he has to be; it will take centuries of military defeat, political subjugation, and moral development, to transform him into the gentle and loving Father of Hillel and Christ. He is as vain as a soldier; he drinks up praise with a bottomless appetite, and he is anxious to display his prowess by drowning the Egyptians: “They shall know that I am the Lord when I have gotten me honor upon Pharaoh.”70 To gain successes for his people he commits or commands brutalities as repugnant to our taste as they were acceptable to the morals of the age; he slaughters whole nations with the naive pleasure of a Gulliver fighting for Lilliput. Because the Jews “commit whoredom” with the daughters of Moab he bids Moses: “Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun”;71 it is the morality of Ashurbanipal and Ashur. He offers to show mercy to those who love him and keep his commandments, but, like some resolute germ, he will punish children for the sins of their fathers, their grandfathers, even their great-great-grandfathers.72 He is so ferocious that he thinks of destroying all the Jews for worshiping the Golden Calf; and Moses has to argue with him that he should control himself. “Turn from thy fierce wrath,” the man tells his god, “and repent of this evil against thy people”; and “the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”73 Again Yahveh proposes to exterminate the Jews root and branch for rebelling against Moses, but Moses appeals to his better nature, and bids him think what people will say when they hear of such a thing.74 He asks a cruel test—human sacrifice of the bitterest sort—from Abraham. Like Moses, Abraham teaches Yahveh the principles of morals, and persuades him not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there shall be found fifty—forty—thirty—twenty—ten good men in those cities;75 bit by bit he lures his god towards decency, and illustrates the manner in which the moral development of man compels the periodical re-creation of his deities. The curses with which Yahveh threatens his chosen people if they disobey him are models of vituperation, and inspired those who burned heretics in the Inquisition, or excommunicated Spinoza:

  Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. . . . Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land. . . . Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. . . . The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation. . . . The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods (tumors), and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. . . . Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the Book of this Law, them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.76

  Yahveh was not the only god whose existence was recognized by the Jews, or by himself; all that he asked, in the First Commandment, was that he should be placed above the rest. “I am a jealous god,” he confesses, and he bids his followers “utterly overthrow” his rivals, and “quite break down their images.”77 The Jews, before Isaiah, seldom thought of Yahveh as the god of all tribes, even of all Hebrews. The Moabites had their god Chemosh, to whom Naomi thought it right that Ruth should remain loyal;78 Baalzebub was the god of Ekron, Milcom was the god of Ammon: the economic and political separatism of these peoples naturally resulted in what we might call their theological independence. Moses sings, in his famous song, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?”79 and Solomon says, “Great is our god above all gods.”80 Not only was Tammuz accepted as a real god by all but the most educated Jews, but his cult was at one time so popular in Judea that Ezekiel complained that the ritual wailing for Tammuz’ death could be heard in the Temple.81 So distinct and autonomous were the Jewish tribes that even in the time of Jeremiah many of them had their own deities: “according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah”; and the gloomy prophet goes on to protest against the worship of Baal and Moloch by his people.82 With the growth of political unity under David and Solomon, and the centering of worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, theology reflected history and politics, and Yahveh became the sole god of the Jews. Beyond this “henotheism”* they made no further progress towards monotheism until the Prophets.† Even in the Yahvistic stage the Hebraic religion came closer to monotheism than any other pre-Prophetic faith except the ephemeral sun-worship of Ikhnaton. At least equal as sentiment and poetry to the polytheism of Babylonia and Greece, Judaism was immensely superior to the other religions of the time in majesty and power, in philosophic unity and grasp, in moral fervor and influence.

  This intense and sombre religion never took on any of the ornate ritual and joyous ceremonies that marked the worship of the Egyptian and Babylonian gods. A sense of human nothingness before an arbitrary deity darkened all ancient Jewish thought. Despite the efforts of Solomon to beautify the cult of Yahveh with color and sound, the worship of this awful divinity remained for many centuries a religion of fear rather than of love. One wonders, in looking back upon these faiths, whether they brought as much consolation as terror to humanity. Religions of hope and love are a luxury of security and order; the need for striking fear into a subject or rebellious people made most primitive religions cults of mystery and dread. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the sacred scrolls of the Law, symbolized by its untouchability the character of the Jewish creed. When the pious Uzzah, to prevent the Ark from falling into the dust, caught it for a moment in his hands, “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error; and there he died.”84

  The central idea in Judaic theology was that of sin. Never has another people been so fond of virtue—unless it was those Puritans who seemed to step out of the Old Testament with no interruption of Catholic centuries. Since the flesh was weak and the Law complex, sin was inevitable, and the Jewish spirit was often overcast with the thought of sin’s consequences, from the withholding of rain to the ruin of all Israel. There was no Hell in this faith as a distinctive place of punishment; but almost as bad was the Sheol, or “land of darkness” under the earth,
which received all the dead, good and wicked alike, except such divine favorites as Moses, Enoch and Elijah. The Jews, however, made little reference to a life beyond the grave; their creed said nothing of personal immortality, and confined its rewards and punishments to this mundane life. Not until the Jews had lost hope of earthly triumph did they take over, probably from Persia and perhaps also from Egypt, the notion of personal resurrection. It was out of this spiritual dénouement that Christianity was born.

  The threat and consequence of sin might be offset by prayer or sacrifice. Semitic, like “Aryan,” sacrifice began by offering human victims;85 then it offered animals—the “first fruits of the flocks”—and food from the fields; finally it compromised by offering praise. At first no animal might be eaten unless killed and blessed by the priest, and offered for a moment to the god.86 Circumcision partook of the nature of a sacrifice, and perhaps of a commutation: the god took a part for the whole. Menstruation and childbirth, like sin, made a person spiritually unclean, and necessitated ritual purification by priestly sacrifice and prayer. At every turn tabus hedged in the faithful; sin lay potential in almost every desire, and donations were required in atonement for almost every sin.

  Only the priests could offer sacrifice properly, or explain correctly the ritual and mysteries of the faith. The priests were a closed caste, to which none but the descendants of Levi* could belong. They could not inherit property,87 but they were exempt from all taxation, toll, or tribute;88 they levied a tithe upon the harvests of the flocks, and turned to their own use such offerings to the Temple as were left unused by the god.90 After the Exile, the wealth of the clergy grew with that of the renascent community; and since this sacerdotal wealth was well administered, augmented and preserved, it finally made the priests of the Second Temple, in Jerusalem as in Thebes and Babylon, more powerful than the king.

  Nevertheless the growth of clerical power and religious education never quite sufficed to win the Hebrews from superstition and idolatry. The hill-tops and groves continued to harbor alien gods and to witness secret rites; a substantial minority of the people prostrated themselves before sacred stones, or worshiped Baal or Astarte, or practised divination in the Babylonian manner, or set up images and burned incense to them, or knelt before the brazen serpent or the Golden Calf, or filled the Temple with the noise of heathen feasting,91 or made their children “pass through the fire” in sacrifice;92 even some of the kings, like Solomon and Ahab, went “a-whoring” after foreign gods. Holy men like Elijah and Elisha arose who, without necessarily becoming priests, preached against these practices, and tried by the example of their lives to lead their people into righteousness. Out of these conditions and beginnings, and out of the rise of poverty and exploitation in Israel, came the supreme figures in Jewish religion—those passionate Prophets who purified and elevated the creed of the Jews, and prepared it for its vicarious conquest of the western world.

  IV. THE FIRST RADICALS

  The class war—Origin of the Prophets—Amos at Jerusalem—Isaiah—His attacks upon the rich—His doctrine of a Messiah—The influence of the Prophets

  Since poverty is created by wealth, and never knows itself poor until riches stare it in the face, so it required the fabulous fortune of Solomon to mark the beginning of the class war in Israel. Solomon, like Peter and Lenin, tried to move too quickly from an agricultural to an industrial state. Not only did the toil and taxes involved in his enterprises impose great burdens upon his people, but when those undertakings were complete, after twenty years of industry, a proletariat had been created in Jerusalem which, lacking sufficient employment, became a source of political faction and corruption in Palestine, precisely as it was to become in Rome. Slums developed step by step with the rise of private wealth and the increasing luxury of the court. Exploitation and usury became recognized practises among the owners of great estates and the merchants and money-lenders who flocked about the Temple. The landlords of Ephraim, said Amos, “sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes.”93

  This growing gap between the needy and the affluent, and the sharpening of that conflict between the city and the country which always accompanies an industrial civilization, had something to do with the division of Palestine into two hostile kingdoms after the death of Solomon: a northern kingdom of Ephraim,* with its capital at Samaria, and a southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem. From that time on the Jews were weakened by fraternal hatred and strife, breaking out occasionally into bitter war. Shortly after the death of Solomon Jerusalem was captured by Sheshonk, Pharaoh of Egypt, and surrendered, to appease the conqueror, nearly all the gold that Solomon had gathered in his long career of taxation.

  It was in this atmosphere of political disruption, economic war, and religious degeneration that the Prophets appeared. The men to whom the word (in Hebrew, Nabi†) was first applied were not quite of the character that our reverence would associate with Amos and Isaiah. Some were diviners who could read the secrets of the heart and the past, and foretell the future, according to remuneration; some were fanatics who worked themselves into a frenzy by weird music, strong drink, or dervish-like dances, and spoke, in trances, words which their hearers considered inspired—i.e., breathed into them by some spirit other than their own.94 Jeremiah speaks with professional scorn of “every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet.”95 Some were gloomy recluses, like Elijah; many of them lived in schools or monasteries near the temples; but most of them had private property and wives.96 From this motley crowd of fakirs the Prophets developed into responsible and consistent critics of their age and their people, magnificent street-corner statesmen who were all “thorough-going anti-clericals,”97 and “the most uncompromising of anti-Semites,”98 a cross between soothsayers and socialists. We misunderstand them if we take them as prophets in the weather sense; their predictions were hopes or threats, or pious interpolations,99 or prognostications after the event;100 the Prophets themselves did not pretend to foretell, so much as to speak out; they were eloquent members of the Opposition. In one phase they were Tolstoians incensed at industrial exploitation and ecclesiastical chicanery; they came up from the simple countryside, and hurled damnation at the corrupt wealth of the towns.

  Amos described himself not as a prophet but as a simple village shepherd. Having left his herds to see Beth-El, he was horrified at the unnatural complexity of the life which he discovered there, the inequality of fortune, the bitterness of competition, the ruthlessness of exploitation. So he “stood in the gate,” and lashed the conscienceless rich and their luxuries:

  Forasmuch, therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat; ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. . . . Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, . . . that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that chant to the sound of the viol, and invent to themselves instruments of music, like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments. . . .

  I despise your feast-days (saith the Lord); . . . though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.101

  This is a new note in the world’s literature. It is true that Amos dulls the edge of his idealism by putting into the mouth of his god a Mississippi of threats whose severity and accumulation make the reader sympathize for a moment with the drinkers of wine and the listeners to music. But here, for the first time in the literature of Asia, the social conscience takes definite form, and pours into religion a content that lifts it from ceremony and flattery to a whip of morals and a call to nobility. With Amos begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.

  One of his bitterest predictions
seems to have been fulfilled while Amos was still alive. “Thus saith the Lord: As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear, so shall the children of Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria in the corner of a bed, and in Damascus in a couch. . . . And the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end.”102* About the same time another prophet threatened Samaria with destruction in one of those myriads of vivid phrases which King James’s translators minted for the currency of our speech out of the wealth of the Bible: “The calf of Samaria,” said Hosea, “shall be broken into pieces; for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”104 In 733 the young kingdom of Judah, threatened by Ephraim in alliance with Syria, appealed to Assyria for help. Assyria came, took Damascus, subjected Syria, Tyre and Palestine to tribute, made note of Jewish efforts to secure Egyptian aid, invaded again, captured Samaria, indulged in unprintable diplomatic exchanges with the King of Judah,105 failed to take Jerusalem, and retired to Nineveh laden with booty and 200,000 Jewish captives doomed to Assyrian slavery.106

  It was during this siege of Jerusalem that the prophet Isaiah became one of the great figures of Hebrew history,† Less provincial than Amos, he thought in terms of enduring statesmanship. Convinced that little Judah could not resist the imperial power of Assyria, even with the help of distant Egypt—that broken staff which would pierce the hand that should try to use it—he pled with King Ahaz, and then with King Hezekiah, to remain neutral in the war between Assyria and Ephraim, like Amos and Hosea he foresaw the fall of Samaria,108 and the end of the northern kingdom. When, however, the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem, Isaiah counseled Hezekiah not to yield. The sudden withdrawal of Sennacherib’s hosts seemed to justify him, and for a time his repute was high with the King and the people. Always his advice was to deal justly, and then leave the issue to Yahveh, who would use Assyria as his agent for a time, but in the end would destroy her, too. Indeed, all the nations known to Isaiah were, according to him, destined to be struck down by Yahveh; in a few chapters (xvi-xxiii) Moab, Syria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Babylon and Tyre are dedicated to destruction; “every one shall howl.”109 This ardor for ruination, this litany of curses, mars Isaiah’s book, as it mars all the prophetic literature of the Bible.