Topic: "Jewish" Bible as source for Christianity (and Islam) 1911 Eduorad DuJardin

[Prometheus]

The inconsistency that they allowed to pass is seen con-
tinually in the Bible as we have it.

We do not propose to give here a summary of the
Deuteronomic legislation. Its numerous enactments, apart
from a few precepts of common law, public hygiene, and
ritualism, which are required in a developed civilisation,
only develop the principles on which Judaism is formed.
Jahveh is the sole god; Jahveh must have no images;
there must be an ardent solidarity, a mutual love, among
the Jews, and their arms must be open to the foreigner
when he comes to prostrate himself at the feet of Jahveh
and of the Jewish fatherland, but anathema to the
foreigner who will not Judaise. Let us add a first
systematic organisation of the clergy: the question of
sacrifices, offerings, and tithes—that is to say, the fiscal
law* of Jerusalem, discussed in minute detail; finally,
recalled with the most precise rites, the three great
annual feasts of the Passover, Weeks, and Tabernacles—
that is to say, of the spring, the harvest, and the vintage,
since, in this east in which the priests command in the
name of the local god, the popular gatherings take the
form of religious festivals.

But it must not be supposed that the priests of Jeru-
salem could, like the Roman jurisconsults, promulgate
laws in the abstract. Calling themselves the heirs of
Moses, they simply taught the people the very ancient
law dictated to him by the national god, a thousand years
before, in the deserts of Horeb or on the banks of the
Jordan. No legislation could succeed at Jerusalem that
did not bear the name and authority of the unique legis-
lator Moses. Instead of saying to the people, “ Thou shalt
rest on the seventh day of the week,” they could not fail to
say: “In such and such circumstances, on such a day, at
such a place, Jahveh spoke unto Moses, and said to him :
Thou shalt rest.....”

Hence the Deuteronomic period marks the composition
of a new series of episodes (of a more particularly
 86

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

legislative character), which were added to the episodes
already composed. There was no break and no external
distinction between what we have called the Jehovist-
Elohist period and the Deuteronomic period. Fresh
narratives are added to the early narratives of the
creation, the patriarchal legends, and the Mosaic epic.
The new generations contribute their portion. But the
general spirit has changed somewhat; we have reached
the time when the rather vague teaching of the Jehovist
and the Elohist no longer suffices, and a more explicit
legislation is brought on the scene. The new priestly
writers do not profess to recommence the work of their
predecessors; they continue and complete it.

It is now related that at Horeb, just after the escape
from Egypt, when they were beginning to cross the
desert, Jahveh had spoken to Moses. After forty years
they reach the banks of the Jordan, in the plains of
Moab, and there:

Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, 0
Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your
ears this day...

Jahveh, our god, made a covenant with you in
Horeb.....

He talked with you face to face in the mount, out of
the midst of the fire.

I stood between Jahveh and you at that time, to show
you the word of Jahveh ; for ye were afraid by reason of
the fire, and went not up into the mountain.

And Jahveh said to you.....1

The celebrated decalogue follows.

Other scenes are composed to enframe other legislation.
Each new promulgation is presented as an account of a
conversation between Jahveh and Moses, from which
Moses brings fresh commands. In fine, we have the
famous episode of the benedictions and maledictions, a
magnificent development of the old theme:—

If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of Jahveh

1 Deuteronomy v. 1-5.
 THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD

87

thy god, Jahveh thy god will set thee on high above all
nations of the earth.

But if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jahveh
thy god, all these curses shall come upon thee, and over-
take thee...

All the blessings are enumerated, and they betray the
ideal of the Jerusalem aristocracy of the fourth century.
All the curses also are enumerated, with a concentration
of lyric atrocity that amazes us.1

The Deuteronomic writers added a large number of new
narratives to the older ones relating to the conquest of
Palestine by the Israelites under the command of Joshua.
These narratives form part of our actual book of Joshua.
The same need that had compelled the writers to enlarge
the Mosaic epic with so many episodes also forced them
to develop the epic of the conquest. Once more a fresh
situation created fresh needs.

We have already said that the writers who related the
episodes of ancient Israelitic history probably reached as
far as the end of the reign of David, when the Deutero-
nomic spirit gradually replaced the Jehovist spirit. The
story of Solomon, son of David, who, all-powerful master
of his neighbours, allowed their women to seduce him into
accepting their abominable deities, and of his successors,
the kings of Judah and Ephraim, with the constant
punishment by Jahveh of their lapses into idolatry and
the constant reward of their return, was written in a
Deuteronomic spirit. The great principle, laid down by
the Jehovist writers, that unfaithfulness is always punished
and faithfulness always rewarded, has not ceased to rule;
but the infidelities that are punished are now acts of
disobedience to the Deuteronomic codes.

The famous reform of Josias is the last creation of the
Deuteronomic dogmatism. No story was ever more
improbable, yet no story was ever taken more seriously

1 Deuteronomy xxviii.
 88

THE BOOKS OE MOSES

by the commentators; it was a colossal mistake, mis-
leading Biblical criticism for half a century. Possibly it
is an historical fact that King Josias, rebelling against
the king of Assyria, undertook to expel the Assyrian
deities which his servile predecessor Manasseh had intro-
duced into Jerusalem. As it is related in the Bible, the
alleged reform by Josias is an extreme episode invented
with a view to show that Jahveh had given a last counsel
to his people on the very eve of the Deportation. The
end of the Davidic dynasty, the ruin of the nation, and
the burning of the town, are, as usual, and more than
ever, a great chastisement inflicted by an angry god on
the people who have forsaken him for the Baals and
Astartes.

Because the king of Judah hath done these abomina-
tions, because he hath worshipped idols, and hath made
Judah also to sin with his idols,

Therefore thus saith Jahveh, the god of Israel, Behold,
I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah that,
whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle.

And I will stretch the plummet over Jerusalem ; and I
will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it,
and turning it upside down.

And I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance,
and deliver them into the hand of their enemies; and
they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies;

Because they have done that which was evil in my
sight, and have provoked me to anger.1

That point had been reached in the composition of the
Biblical narratives by the middle of the fourth century,
in the period of the last Persian emperors. Since the
Medic wars there is a continuous war between Persian
Asia and Hellenic Europe. Greek colonies develop in
Asia Minor, and the Greek civilisation gradually penetrates
the east. The empire of Artaxerxes spreads, as a con-
federation of provinces and States, as far as India, across
the whole of western Asia. Soon will open the great

1 2 Kings xxi. 11-15.
 THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD

89

epic of Alexander, conquering this vast universe for
Hellenism after a hundred and fifty years of struggle.

At this time Jerusalem may have had ten or fifteen
thousand inhabitants, counting its whole population.
The surrounding districts would hardly double the
number. We may conceive the Jewish State as a small
republic of thirty thousand souls, as little known to the
rest of the world, as lost in the universe, as the lowliest
of the principalities by the Jordan. It is elsewhere—at
Susa and Babylon, round the person of the king of kings,
in the heart of the great Persian feudalism; at Athens,
Sparta, Thebes, and presently in Macedonia; in Asia
Minor, where Hellenism and the East are face to face; in
the islands of the iEgaean Sea—that the destinies of the
universe seem to be arranged.

Yet the history of the world is being prepared just as
much in this obscure corner. The future presents itself
in the form of a few priests who are giving precepts and
dogmas to their little town.

The genius of Greece has left to posterity, in immortal
images, the memory of its ideas, its art, and its civilisa-
tion. In the narratives of its historians and the verses
of its poets we read, just as clearly as in the columns of
the Parthenon, the annals of the luminous ages which
represented the adolescence of the human mind. But
the annals of Judaism, which will later form a counter-
poise to the genius of Greece, are being written in a
country that was unknown to Socrates and Pericles. If
we would discover the origin of our Christianity, we must
study the humble composition of a series of fabulous and
dogmatic narratives, written in the shadow of a poor
temple in western Syria, by a few generations of fanatical
priests, for the instruction of the small people that the
disdainful Persian allowed them to govern.
 90

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

§ 4. The Levitical Period.

We have already said1 that the discovery of the papyri
of Elephantine strikingly confirmed the dating which we
have adopted for the books of the Bible. The witness of
the contemporary Greek writers has the same effect.

In the middle of the fifth century so inquisitive and
informed a writer as Herodotus is ignorant of the very
name of the Jews, much less the Israelites. If the
Mosaic legislation were then in existence, and if the
temple had been organised with its fully developed
services, it would be unintelligible that Herodotus should
know nothing of a work that would have so richly
rewarded his curiosity. We are, on the contrary, in the
age of Esdras (458, the arrival of Esdras at Jerusalem).
Jerusalem is hardly born yet.

Aristotle, in the middle of the fourth century, speaks
of a geographical feature of Palestine ; he knows nothing
of Jews or Israelites. The Jews are still, in spite of a
real development, only one of the many small peoples of
Palestine.

The word “ Jew ” enters Greek literature after the time
of Alexander, at the end of the fourth and the beginning
of the third century. The first interesting mention of it
is by Hecatseus of Abdera, at the beginning of the third
century. He is acquainted with various Mosaic narra-
tives and Deuteronomic laws, and a Levitical law, but
with sufficient errors and confusion to indicate that he
has merely heard them spoken of in Egypt, where he
lived, and some of the Jews had settled.

The Levitical or sacerdotal period, which succeeded
the Deuteronomic period, and was the period in which
the so-called Levitical or sacerdotal episodes of the Mosaic
books were written at Jerusalem, seems to have com-
menced about the middle of the fourth century, and to

1 See p. xv.
 THE LEVITICAL PERIOD

91

have developed during the Alexandrine conquest and the
wars of the successors of Alexander; it thus seems to
have coincided with the beginning of prophetism, and to
have continued until the first part of the third century,
at the time when peace was restored in Palestine, under
the vice-royalty of the high-priest Simeon I.

It is the period when the State of Jerusalem definitively
secures the hegemony over one half of Palestine; the
period when the aristocracy of the Jerusalem priests is
at its zenith.

In Palestine the State of Samaria alone resists the
State of Jerusalem; Judaea is about to form a great
province, of which Jerusalem will be the capital; the
little neighbouring States are subdued; the ardent
nationalism of the successors of Esdras has borne fruit;
Jerusalem reigns over the surrounding country.

In regard to its internal affairs, the clerical aristocracy
is fully organised ; the caste enjoys all its privileges; the
office of high-priest passes from father to son, and, first
under the suzerainty of the Persian emperors, then under
the suzerainty of the Macedonian kings of Syria and
Egypt, the high-priests govern the State ; below them
are a few families occupying the highest positions and
holding the wealth of the country, who will afterwards be
known as the princes of the priests. A body of sacrificial
priests continues the hierarchy; the army of levites obeys
them; while the Jewish people is disposed about them,
obedient and fanatical, in the fidelity of its heart to Jahveh.

At the same time the rites have become innumerable;
many of them come from Egypt. The priests have
gradually created a vast formulary in which their power
is revealed and exercised. Jerusalem is something like
a fraternity in which a mitred abbot rules, with his
college of vicars, amid an endless procession of ceremonies.
But let us note carefully; it is from this minute actual
organisation that the financial power of the Jerusalem
aristocracy has arisen.
 92

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

The Deuteronomic period had known nothing of these
complicated institutions, this powerful hierarchy. New
laws had to be issued gradually, to fix the new ritual
prescriptions; and new myths, to legitimise the new
institutions. The organisation of the Jewish State is
ever one of divine right, the right of Jahveh. The old
theory of Deuteronomy is applied to the new situation.
It is proved that Jahveh himself, in the remotest period
of history, said that things must be so. The authors of
the legislation of the fourth century had thought it
necessary to attribute the promulgation of it to Moses;
the priests who codified the new laws of the Jewish
State in the third century thought it no less indispensable
to make Moses their godfather. It was imperative that
the whole of the law should have been promulgated by
Moses, dictated to Moses by Jahveh; it was imperative
that the priesthood should be traced to a brother of
Moses, and that the temple should have existed in its
first form under Moses in the desert.

[Prometheus]

The work that had been done in the Jehov
The inconsistency that they allowed to pass is seen con-
tinually in the Bible as we have it.

We do not propose to give here a summary of the
Deuteronomic legislation. Its numerous enactments, apart
from a few precepts of common law, public hygiene, and
ritualism, which are required in a developed civilisation,
only develop the principles on which Judaism is formed.
Jahveh is the sole god; Jahveh must have no images;
there must be an ardent solidarity, a mutual love, among
the Jews, and their arms must be open to the foreigner
when he comes to prostrate himself at the feet of Jahveh
and of the Jewish fatherland, but anathema to the
foreigner who will not Judaise. Let us add a first
systematic organisation of the clergy: the question of
sacrifices, offerings, and tithes—that is to say, the fiscal
law* of Jerusalem, discussed in minute detail; finally,
recalled with the most precise rites, the three great
annual feasts of the Passover, Weeks, and Tabernacles—
that is to say, of the spring, the harvest, and the vintage,
since, in this east in which the priests command in the
name of the local god, the popular gatherings take the
form of religious festivals.

But it must not be supposed that the priests of Jeru-
salem could, like the Roman jurisconsults, promulgate
laws in the abstract. Calling themselves the heirs of
Moses, they simply taught the people the very ancient
law dictated to him by the national god, a thousand years
before, in the deserts of Horeb or on the banks of the
Jordan. No legislation could succeed at Jerusalem that
did not bear the name and authority of the unique legis-
lator Moses. Instead of saying to the people, “ Thou shalt
rest on the seventh day of the week,” they could not fail to
say: “In such and such circumstances, on such a day, at
such a place, Jahveh spoke unto Moses, and said to him :
Thou shalt rest.....”

Hence the Deuteronomic period marks the composition
of a new series of episodes (of a more particularly
 86

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

legislative character), which were added to the episodes
already composed. There was no break and no external
distinction between what we have called the Jehovist-
Elohist period and the Deuteronomic period. Fresh
narratives are added to the early narratives of the
creation, the patriarchal legends, and the Mosaic epic.
The new generations contribute their portion. But the
general spirit has changed somewhat; we have reached
the time when the rather vague teaching of the Jehovist
and the Elohist no longer suffices, and a more explicit
legislation is brought on the scene. The new priestly
writers do not profess to recommence the work of their
predecessors; they continue and complete it.

It is now related that at Horeb, just after the escape
from Egypt, when they were beginning to cross the
desert, Jahveh had spoken to Moses. After forty years
they reach the banks of the Jordan, in the plains of
Moab, and there:

Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, 0
Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your
ears this day...

Jahveh, our god, made a covenant with you in
Horeb.....

He talked with you face to face in the mount, out of
the midst of the fire.

I stood between Jahveh and you at that time, to show
you the word of Jahveh ; for ye were afraid by reason of
the fire, and went not up into the mountain.

And Jahveh said to you.....1

The celebrated decalogue follows.

Other scenes are composed to enframe other legislation.
Each new promulgation is presented as an account of a
conversation between Jahveh and Moses, from which
Moses brings fresh commands. In fine, we have the
famous episode of the benedictions and maledictions, a
magnificent development of the old theme:—

If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of Jahveh

1 Deuteronomy v. 1-5.
 THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD

87

thy god, Jahveh thy god will set thee on high above all
nations of the earth.

But if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jahveh
thy god, all these curses shall come upon thee, and over-
take thee...

All the blessings are enumerated, and they betray the
ideal of the Jerusalem aristocracy of the fourth century.
All the curses also are enumerated, with a concentration
of lyric atrocity that amazes us.1

The Deuteronomic writers added a large number of new
narratives to the older ones relating to the conquest of
Palestine by the Israelites under the command of Joshua.
These narratives form part of our actual book of Joshua.
The same need that had compelled the writers to enlarge
the Mosaic epic with so many episodes also forced them
to develop the epic of the conquest. Once more a fresh
situation created fresh needs.

We have already said that the writers who related the
episodes of ancient Israelitic history probably reached as
far as the end of the reign of David, when the Deutero-
nomic spirit gradually replaced the Jehovist spirit. The
story of Solomon, son of David, who, all-powerful master
of his neighbours, allowed their women to seduce him into
accepting their abominable deities, and of his successors,
the kings of Judah and Ephraim, with the constant
punishment by Jahveh of their lapses into idolatry and
the constant reward of their return, was written in a
Deuteronomic spirit. The great principle, laid down by
the Jehovist writers, that unfaithfulness is always punished
and faithfulness always rewarded, has not ceased to rule;
but the infidelities that are punished are now acts of
disobedience to the Deuteronomic codes.

The famous reform of Josias is the last creation of the
Deuteronomic dogmatism. No story was ever more
improbable, yet no story was ever taken more seriously

1 Deuteronomy xxviii.
 88

THE BOOKS OE MOSES

by the commentators; it was a colossal mistake, mis-
leading Biblical criticism for half a century. Possibly it
is an historical fact that King Josias, rebelling against
the king of Assyria, undertook to expel the Assyrian
deities which his servile predecessor Manasseh had intro-
duced into Jerusalem. As it is related in the Bible, the
alleged reform by Josias is an extreme episode invented
with a view to show that Jahveh had given a last counsel
to his people on the very eve of the Deportation. The
end of the Davidic dynasty, the ruin of the nation, and
the burning of the town, are, as usual, and more than
ever, a great chastisement inflicted by an angry god on
the people who have forsaken him for the Baals and
Astartes.

Because the king of Judah hath done these abomina-
tions, because he hath worshipped idols, and hath made
Judah also to sin with his idols,

Therefore thus saith Jahveh, the god of Israel, Behold,
I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah that,
whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle.

And I will stretch the plummet over Jerusalem ; and I
will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it,
and turning it upside down.

And I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance,
and deliver them into the hand of their enemies; and
they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies;

Because they have done that which was evil in my
sight, and have provoked me to anger.1

That point had been reached in the composition of the
Biblical narratives by the middle of the fourth century,
in the period of the last Persian emperors. Since the
Medic wars there is a continuous war between Persian
Asia and Hellenic Europe. Greek colonies develop in
Asia Minor, and the Greek civilisation gradually penetrates
the east. The empire of Artaxerxes spreads, as a con-
federation of provinces and States, as far as India, across
the whole of western Asia. Soon will open the great

1 2 Kings xxi. 11-15.
 THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD

89

epic of Alexander, conquering this vast universe for
Hellenism after a hundred and fifty years of struggle.

At this time Jerusalem may have had ten or fifteen
thousand inhabitants, counting its whole population.
The surrounding districts would hardly double the
number. We may conceive the Jewish State as a small
republic of thirty thousand souls, as little known to the
rest of the world, as lost in the universe, as the lowliest
of the principalities by the Jordan. It is elsewhere—at
Susa and Babylon, round the person of the king of kings,
in the heart of the great Persian feudalism; at Athens,
Sparta, Thebes, and presently in Macedonia; in Asia
Minor, where Hellenism and the East are face to face; in
the islands of the iEgaean Sea—that the destinies of the
universe seem to be arranged.

Yet the history of the world is being prepared just as
much in this obscure corner. The future presents itself
in the form of a few priests who are giving precepts and
dogmas to their little town.

The genius of Greece has left to posterity, in immortal
images, the memory of its ideas, its art, and its civilisa-
tion. In the narratives of its historians and the verses
of its poets we read, just as clearly as in the columns of
the Parthenon, the annals of the luminous ages which
represented the adolescence of the human mind. But
the annals of Judaism, which will later form a counter-
poise to the genius of Greece, are being written in a
country that was unknown to Socrates and Pericles. If
we would discover the origin of our Christianity, we must
study the humble composition of a series of fabulous and
dogmatic narratives, written in the shadow of a poor
temple in western Syria, by a few generations of fanatical
priests, for the instruction of the small people that the
disdainful Persian allowed them to govern.
 90

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

§ 4. The Levitical Period.

We have already said1 that the discovery of the papyri
of Elephantine strikingly confirmed the dating which we
have adopted for the books of the Bible. The witness of
the contemporary Greek writers has the same effect.

In the middle of the fifth century so inquisitive and
informed a writer as Herodotus is ignorant of the very
name of the Jews, much less the Israelites. If the
Mosaic legislation were then in existence, and if the
temple had been organised with its fully developed
services, it would be unintelligible that Herodotus should
know nothing of a work that would have so richly
rewarded his curiosity. We are, on the contrary, in the
age of Esdras (458, the arrival of Esdras at Jerusalem).
Jerusalem is hardly born yet.

Aristotle, in the middle of the fourth century, speaks
of a geographical feature of Palestine ; he knows nothing
of Jews or Israelites. The Jews are still, in spite of a
real development, only one of the many small peoples of
Palestine.

The word “ Jew ” enters Greek literature after the time
of Alexander, at the end of the fourth and the beginning
of the third century. The first interesting mention of it
is by Hecatseus of Abdera, at the beginning of the third
century. He is acquainted with various Mosaic narra-
tives and Deuteronomic laws, and a Levitical law, but
with sufficient errors and confusion to indicate that he
has merely heard them spoken of in Egypt, where he
lived, and some of the Jews had settled.

The Levitical or sacerdotal period, which succeeded
the Deuteronomic period, and was the period in which
the so-called Levitical or sacerdotal episodes of the Mosaic
books were written at Jerusalem, seems to have com-
menced about the middle of the fourth century, and to

1 See p. xv.
 THE LEVITICAL PERIOD

91

have developed during the Alexandrine conquest and the
wars of the successors of Alexander; it thus seems to
have coincided with the beginning of prophetism, and to
have continued until the first part of the third century,
at the time when peace was restored in Palestine, under
the vice-royalty of the high-priest Simeon I.

It is the period when the State of Jerusalem definitively
secures the hegemony over one half of Palestine; the
period when the aristocracy of the Jerusalem priests is
at its zenith.

In Palestine the State of Samaria alone resists the
State of Jerusalem; Judaea is about to form a great
province, of which Jerusalem will be the capital; the
little neighbouring States are subdued; the ardent
nationalism of the successors of Esdras has borne fruit;
Jerusalem reigns over the surrounding country.

In regard to its internal affairs, the clerical aristocracy
is fully organised ; the caste enjoys all its privileges; the
office of high-priest passes from father to son, and, first
under the suzerainty of the Persian emperors, then under
the suzerainty of the Macedonian kings of Syria and
Egypt, the high-priests govern the State ; below them
are a few families occupying the highest positions and
holding the wealth of the country, who will afterwards be
known as the princes of the priests. A body of sacrificial
priests continues the hierarchy; the army of levites obeys
them; while the Jewish people is disposed about them,
obedient and fanatical, in the fidelity of its heart to Jahveh.

At the same time the rites have become innumerable;
many of them come from Egypt. The priests have
gradually created a vast formulary in which their power
is revealed and exercised. Jerusalem is something like
a fraternity in which a mitred abbot rules, with his
college of vicars, amid an endless procession of ceremonies.
But let us note carefully; it is from this minute actual
organisation that the financial power of the Jerusalem
aristocracy has arisen.
 92

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

The Deuteronomic period had known nothing of these
complicated institutions, this powerful hierarchy. New
laws had to be issued gradually, to fix the new ritual
prescriptions; and new myths, to legitimise the new
institutions. The organisation of the Jewish State is
ever one of divine right, the right of Jahveh. The old
theory of Deuteronomy is applied to the new situation.
It is proved that Jahveh himself, in the remotest period
of history, said that things must be so. The authors of
the legislation of the fourth century had thought it
necessary to attribute the promulgation of it to Moses;
the priests who codified the new laws of the Jewish
State in the third century thought it no less indispensable
to make Moses their godfather. It was imperative that
the whole of the law should have been promulgated by
Moses, dictated to Moses by Jahveh; it was imperative
that the priesthood should be traced to a brother of
Moses, and that the temple should have existed in its
first form under Moses in the desert.
ist and
Deuteronomic periods was resumed in a new spirit, in
view of the necessary apology for the priesthood, but
equally in view of the development of the imperialist
policy. And it is possible to-day for commentators to
distinguish this new edition of the Mosaic books, which
the later compilers generally placed at the end of the
older one, in the books which compose our actual Bible.

[Prometheus]

The Deuteronomic writers had not resumed the
legendary history of origins; they had been content with
the Jehovistic narratives. The sacerdotal writers acted
differently; they took up again the whole legendary
history of origins, from the patriarchs and the creation
onward. There was a sacerdotal account of the creation,
just as there had been a Jehovistic account. The older
account is the one which begins at the fourth verse of
the second chapter of Genesis in our actual Bible : “ These
are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, in
 THE LEVITICAL PERIOD

93

the day that the god Jahveh made the earth and the
heavens.” It describes how Jahveh made woman from
one of the ribs of the first man, and ends at the twenty-
fourth verse of the same chapter. The sacerdotal account
is the famous beginning of Genesis with the creation in
six days: “In the beginning god created the heaven and

the earth.....and god said, Let there be light.” Here

god creates man to his own image; and he creates him
both male and female.

The patriarchal legends are resumed with an exaggera-
tion of the ritualist or hierarchical tendencies; in other
places genealogies abound, and take the place of the older
narratives; throughout, a new political situation gives
birth to new ethnographic myths.

The Deuteronomic writers, who had made no addition
to the Jehovistic episodes of the patriarchal legend, had
added much to the Jehovistic episodes of the exodus.
Nevertheless, this enlarged history of Moses and Joshua
seemed to the writers of the Levitic period to be inade-
quate. They took it up afresh.

I will quote only one instance, which has been very
profoundly studied by M. Maurice Vernes in his lectures
at the Ecole des Hautes-^ltudes.

The earlier writers had imagined that the Israelites
had, after leaving Egypt and taking possession of Pales-
tine, entered upon a solemn covenant with Jahveh and
sworn eternal fidelity. But where had the contract been
concluded ? The older narratives betray the hesitations,
alterations, and instability of their compilers in dealing
with the ancient traditions. It is at Cades, or Massa and
Meriba, in certain obscure oases, during the crossing of
the desert, that Jahveh has his obscure conversation with
Moses. Then one writer more luckily introduces the
mountain of Horeb; Moses descends from the company
of the god with the Decalogue written on tables of stone,
and, on the eve of entering the promised land, he
expounds to the people, amid the plains of Moab, the
 94

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

whole cycle of commandments which Jahveh has
revealed to him, and of which the Decalogue was the
preface. A different tradition is developed, however, in
another school. We know that one of the most ancient
sanctuaries of Jahveh, the memory of which still survives,
is that of Sichem, the old temple of Baal-Berit, of the
Lord-of-the-Alliance, or Jahveh-Lord-of-the-Alliance,
celebrated in the time of Gideon and his son Abimelech.
There, it is said, the alliance was promulgated, amid a
great gathering of the people, with the benedictions of
Mount Garizim on the one side and the maledictions of
Mount Ebal on the other. The Deuteronomic episodes
close with these contradictions.

The writers of the sacerdotal period desired more
majesty in the conclusion of the covenant; and, at the
same time, their imperialism required that the Jerusalem
temple should have the glory of it. There was among
them a writer of genius and an able casuist—a common
conjunction among the Biblical writers—who conceived
the epic of Sinai.

In the middle of the Arabian desert, during the terrible
forty years’ wandering, the people, led by Moses, halted
at the foot of Sinai. There, amid the chaos of rocks on
which no vegetation finds root, in the horror of the naked
gorges and the snowy peaks, across the storms which roll
from summit to summit and precipice to precipice, Jahveh
manifests himself to his prophet; while the people,
gaping with horror, gather in the valleys below. A thick
cloud had descended; smoke arose, as if from a furnace,
and the mountain trembled. Jahveh descended on the
summit of the mountain, and called Moses; and Moses
went up. Then the god spoke:—

I am Jahveh, thy god, which have brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou
shalt have no other gods before me.1

1 Exodus xx. 2-3.
 THE LEVITICAL PERIOD

95

The law follows. It is the work of a man of genius;
the work of a casuist.

The covenant has been concluded among the summits
of Sinai, in the middle of the desert, far from the land of
Israel, consequently far from the place where the single
temple of Jerusalem will be raised. But it has been
concluded above the ark, near the altar of brass, under
the tent of tapistry and animal-skins which is called the
Tabernacle. But where have the ark, the brass altar,
and the Tabernacle remained for time out of mind ? In
the Jerusalem temple. After wandering through the
desert and finding a temporary shelter at Sichem, at
Silo, at Bethsames, at Cariathiarim, and at Gabaon, the
divine “furniture” is brought to Jerusalem, and installed
for ever by Solomon in the temple. The Jerusalem
temple is therefore the legitimate heir or, rather, the
continuation of Sinai.

Though civilisation has advanced, the same spirit that
had inspired the ancient moshlim now inspires the
sacerdotal moshlim. We are still in the east, still at
Jerusalem; the aim is still to legitimise the actual laws
by attributing to them a divine origin, to consecrate the
institutions by deriving them from Jahveh. We have, as
before, doctrinal theses illustrated by legends; hopes and
ambitions that must be justified; genealogies created in
great numbers to explain the Jewish pretensions amid the
neighbouring peoples. The last Mosaic legislation is,
like the preceding, at once a theological legitimation of
existing institutions, a solemn promulgation of new laws,
and a presentment of ideal legislative views.

It is a theological legitimation of existing institutions.
That which exists is justified by the divine will from the
remotest antiquity; the temple is as it is, because Jahveh
has so commanded; the sacerdotal caste rules, because
the priests are the direct descendants of Aaron, brother
of Moses.

It is a solemn promulgation of new laws. The new
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES

laws are not new laws, but the laws which Jahveh himself
dictated to Moses long ago—though three-fourths of the
laws of the Levitic period settle questions of vestments or
of ritual butchery.

It is a presentment of ideal legislative views. Side by
side with the immediately useful enactment we have the
dream that it will be well to realise in a better, and
probably approaching, period. The ideal mingles through-
out with the real. Like that of Deuteronomy, the sacer-
dotal legislation is at one moment minute, at another
chimerical; it is always dogmatic and theocratic, always
imperialistic.

But there are other things in view than those of the
Deuteronomic period. The characteristic of the Levitical
period is the need, on the part of the clerical aristocracy
of Jerusalem, of a definitive organisation.

The legislation of the last great Mosaic code is really
that of a powerful church, which radiates over the
surrounding countries. It has all the greatness and all
the meanness of a constituted State which aims at ruling,
and is not content merely to live. An administration, of
complicated structure, is formed. One thinks of the
Catholic Church, so powerful, so administratively organised
for ruling.

There is no longer any question, for instance, in the
Levitical narratives of the massacres of the Canaanites,
The Jerusalemitic cult has definitively triumphed, round
about Jerusalem, over the earlier pagan resistance. The
horizon is broader; beyond the surrounding countries
they perceive more distant peoples whom it will be
possible to Judaise.

The ancient covenant concluded between Jahveh and
the Jewish people demanded that, as a reward for its
fidelity, Jahveh should secure for Israel the free and
peaceful possession of that part of Palestine to which the
priests of Jerusalem had given the mythic name of Israel,
the symbol of their ambitions. Now that the country is
 THE LEVITICAL PERIOD.

97

almost subdued, and, as Samaria alone resists, the ancient
Israel is almost restored, the dream of a more far-reaching
Judaisation, which we shall find developing in the soul of
the First Isaiah, is already dawning in the soul of the
priests of Jerusalem. Political independence, or the
rejection of the yoke of Persia or Macedonia, is always
included in these Mosaic epics, from the first Jehovistic
mashal to the last Levitic genealogies; but in the last
pages of the final Levitical narratives there appears, as in
the First Isaiah, the ambition to conquer the world, and
the covenant is enlarged until it promises the Jews, as a
reward of their traditional faithfulness, not merely the
enjoyment of a part of Palestine, but the conquest of the
universe. Extravagant dream for one of the smallest
peoples of the earth at the beginning of the third century !
Supremely fruitful dream, because it would one day lead
to its own realisation. And we read this dream, perhaps
for the first time, in the Jewish epics, in the famous
episode of the three sons of Noah :—

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted
a vineyard:

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he
was uncovered within his tent.

And Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told his
two brethren without.

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it
upon both their shoulders, and went backward and covered
the nakedness of their father; and their faces were back-
ward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what had
been done,

And he said: Cursed be Canaan [son of Ham] : a
servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

And he said: Blessed be Jahveh, god of Shem, and
Canaan shall be his servant.

God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the
tents of Shem.1

Shem, the narrative goes on to say, is the father of

Genesis ix. 20-27.

H
 98

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

Israel and the cognate peoples. Ham and Canaan are
the fathers of the Canaanites, who for the last time
symbolise the goim who are refractory to Judaism.
Japheth is the father of Javan, 'lcnrerog, the father of
the Greek peoples and all those whom the Jews of the
third century regarded as Greeks. In Japheth the Greek
world is, provided it submit to the law of Jahveh, invited
to take part in the blessings of the god.

We have reached the period of the high-priest Simeon I.,
who succeeded the high-priest Onias I. in the year 300.
Simeon I. is very probably the Simeon the Just of whom
Flavius Josephus and the Siracid speak, and the Shimeon
Hasadiq, of whom the Talmud speaks, the ideal high-
priest of the rabbinical tradition, he who is followed by
decadence.1

It seems that after this date the Mosaic legends ceased
to enrich themselves with new narratives and fresh
prescriptions. Modifications, corrections, interpolations,
and manipulations of the old narratives will continue to
be made; the largest additions will consist in the inser-
tion of entire psalms; but the general sum is fixed, and
presently the scribes will begin to arrange this infinite
number and variety of fragments, in order to make a
single book of them. Discordant narratives placed in
succession, the same things told several times with
variations that are often contradictory, the legislations
of several centuries simply put side by side, and hundreds
of myths that had their origin in the most diverse
circumstances, jostling each other with no unity save that
of the constant idea of the national work that is to be
accomplished—such will be the compilation of which the
scribes of the third and second centuries will make the
book of the Law, the masterpiece of oriental literatures.

[Prometheus]

1 See Appendix V.
 THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF JUDAISM 99

§5 .A First Glance at the Internationalisation of
Judaism.

Perhaps it is important to religions to maintain the
historical value of their sacrecl books ; so our conservative
theologians believe. Perhaps it is a matter of indifference
to religions whether or no their origin be illumined by the
light of history; so our liberal theologians, Catholic and
Protestant, believe. But the historian knows nothing of
these considerations. He neither attacks nor defends
religions; he studies how certain books, which have
become sacred books, offered to the veneration of all ages
throughout the whole earth, came into being among a
certain people, at a certain period, in certain circum-
stances, in order to meet certain needs.

Christianity has made the national and nationalist
books of the smallest people of ancient Western Asia
the sacred books of the modern world; in other words, it
has internationalised them. We shall follow this work, as
we gradually cover a fresh stage in Jewish history. With
the first group of the Jewish books, the books of Moses,
we catch our first glance of the internationalism of
Judaism.

The books of Moses were, as we recognised, born of the
imperious need, felt by the little people of Jerusalem, to
create a past for itself, to give itself a legislation of divine
origin, to legitimise its institutions, to consecrate its
ambitions, to sanctify its national hatreds. Inter-
nationalisation is the art of appropriating words that
have a concrete meaning in their age and their environ-
ment, and clothing these words with a general and purely
moral meaning; of ridding them of their literal meaning
in order to give them one that is ideal.

We will give several examples. This chapter, indeed,
might bear the title, “ On the Meaning of certain Hebrew
Words.”
 100

THE BOOKS OE MOSES

The Neighbour.—The neighbour, in Hebrew rea,
means compatriot in the Mosaic books. A Jew has no
other neighbour but his compatriot Jew. The Egyptian
is not a neighbour for the Jew. The famous verse,
“ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,”1 means,
“ Thou shalt love thy compatriot as thyself.” It is a
fresh affirmation of the ardent nationalism to which
Jerusalem owed its fortune.

The Stranger.—The stranger is protected by the
Mosaic law. But the English word “ stranger ” [in the
Biblical sense of “ foreigner ”] serves as a translation of
four different Hebrew words—ger, toshab, nocri, and
goim. The ger and the toshab are the strangers settled
in the territory of Jerusalem and obeying the Mosaic law;
the nocri is the non-Judaising stranger; the goim are the
enemy. Need we say that the Mosaic protection does not
extend beyond the ger and the toshab ?

Purity and Impurity.—The meaning is strictly
materialistic. At first an impure thing, tame in Hebrew,
may have been a thing taboo, but in the fourth and third
centuries it is merely an infectious or infected thing. A
pure thing comes to mean a clean or disinfected thing:
purification is a hygienic operation. In a country, how-
ever, where all the laws are clothed in a religious form,
the operation is conducted according to a special rite, and
gives a pretext for a tax which the rulers receive.

Woman is impure for several days every month; who-
ever has touched a corpse is impure; to eat certain for-
bidden animals makes a man impure.

Ye shall not make your souls abominable with any
creeping thing that creepeth, that ye should be defiled
thereby: I am Jahveh, your god.2

If a woman shall be cleansed of her issue, then she
shall number to herself seven days, and after that she
shall be clean.

1 Leviticus xix. 18.

2 Leviticus xi. 43.
 THE INTERNATIONALISATION OE JUDAISM 101

And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtles,
or two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to
the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.1

Holiness.—The root of the Hebrew word qadosh,
which is translated “ holy,” means “ to separate.” A holy
thing or a holy man is a thing or a man separated from
others, especially designed for a certain end ; it is to
prepare especially by setting apart. The people of Israel
is holy, because it has been set apart by Jahveh from the
other peoples of the earth. We are nearer than before to
the idea of taboo. Even when the word begins to have a
moral signification, it only means sacred in the sense of
consecrated. The feminine qedosJiah, holy, is a neological
and post-Biblical variant, invented by the modesty of the
rabbis to replace the real feminine qedeshah, a genuine
Biblical term, which means prostitute; a reminiscence of
the ancient times when prostitution was part of the cult
of Jahveh.

Jahveh.—The history of the divine name is a remark-
able example of internationalisation. We will presently
study the history of the word elohim, which likewise
means god in Hebrew—a god and the gods—and we shall
see how the enlargement of the meaning of the word has
corresponded to the development of Judaism. Let us
deal here with the special name of the special god of the
Jews, Jahveh.

The Jewish god is designated in the Bible by the
proper name Jahveh. Jahveh is his name, just as Camos
is the name of the Moabite god, and Dagon the name of
the Philistine god. Whence did the ancient Israelites
obtain the name ? It is believed that there was an exple-
tive form of the ancient word Jah, which closely resembles
a Babylonian Jah. Science is not yet agreed on the

1 Leviticus xv. 28-29.
 102

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

point.....In any case, Jahveh is the name of the god

worshipped at Jerusalem.

When the Jews, in the third and second centuries
before the present era, had promoted their little local god
to the dignity of supreme god, master and creator of the
universe, they had some scruple to permit their lips to
utter the name of so august a personage; and they
gradually substituted for it vague words like Adonai,
which means “ my lord.” A day came even when,
putting a false interpretation on a verse of the Law, they
no longer dared pronounce the sacred name; and as it
occurred on every page of their books, they decided to
read it Adonai}

The Greek translators of the Bible merely transcribed
the Hebrew proper names in Greek characters; but they
dared not preserve Jahveh, and they translated it into
the Greek equivalent of Adonai, 6 Kvpiog, the Lord. The
Catholics followed them in calling the ancient Jahveh
Dominus, then “the Lord.” The Protestants [apart
from the English Bible] translated it “the Eternal.”
To-day the learned students of the Hebrew texts, who
take credit for critical judgment, continue to say “ the
Lord,” if they are Catholics, and “ the Eternal,” if they
are Protestants or Israelites.

Now Jahveh is a name, like Milkom, or Camos, or
Jupiter, or Wotan. To say Jahveh is to indicate a certain
god, apart from other gods; possibly a greater, better,
and purer god than Milkom, or Camos, or Jupiter, or
Wotan, but a particular god in contrast to others. The
terms “Lord” and “Eternal” are, on the other hand,
just as acceptable to the Christians as to the Jews, to the
Europeans as to the Asiatics, to the philosophers as to the
metaphysicians, to Kant as to Esdras. But from Jahveh
to the Eternal or the Lord is as far a cry as from the

1 Hebrew grammarians still teach young Israelites to pronounce the

divine name Adonai.
 THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF JUDAISM 103

little State of Jerusalem to the Christian, Catholic, and
universal Church.

It suffices to restore “ Jahveh ” everywhere in the Bible
where we find “the Eternal” or “the Lord” to put
things right. If we keep “ the Eternal,” we are reading
a sacred book; if we restore Jahveh, we have an historical
document. The anger of the Eternal, the vengeance of
the Eternal, are phrases that, at the best, point to a
somewhat confused idea of a vague divinity. Vengeance
and anger have the sound of human expressions, applied,
for want of better, to divine things that are not our anger
and vengeance. Jahveh is, on the contrary, a clearly-
defined god: he is the god of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob,
and of Jerusalem, who will perhaps conquer the world,
but only in so far as Jerusalem will conquer the world.
Jahveh becoming the Eternal is a national and nationalist
god becoming international.
 \
 PART SECOND

THE PROPHETS

Chapter I.

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM
§ 1. Hellenism.

In the year 334 before the present era Alexander was
invading Asia Minor. The Persian army was beaten in
the first encounter, and Asia Minor conquered. In the
following year the victory of Issus delivered the whole
empire of Darius to the Greeks; and in 332 Alexander
took the town of Tyre, and subdued Palestine without
striking a blow. A tradition tells that he entered Jeru-
salem, and that the priests, going out to meet him, obtained
from him, at the threshold of the temple, his clemency
for their town. Whether or no Alexander entered Jeru-
salem, Palestine, together with the whole of western Asia,
passed from the domination of Persia to the domination
of Macedonia.

At this date the State of Jerusalem has reached the
zenith of its development. The work begun by Esdras
had had its effect. While the other small Palestinian
States that were subject to the Persian suzerainty lan-
guished in a state of inactive existence, the Jewish State
had, within the humble limits of its walls and its
immediate surroundings, entrenched itself in the intense
nationalism that found expression in the religion of
Jahveh; and, reacting on the country about it by the
very fact of its energy, the Jewish soul had gradually
permeated Palestine. The majority of the small States

105
 106

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

of ancient Israel accepted the religions and moral hege-
mony of Jerusalem; the neighbouring populations—
Moab, Ammon, and Edom—vegetated; even in the
towns of Syria the name of Jahveh was becoming great.
The State of Samaria alone remained antagonistic.
Everywhere else the number of Judaisers increased
constantly, and the priests of Jerusalem might entertain
the great hopes they had given themselves, and imagine
their people chosen among all peoples and the Jewish
soul imposing its primacy on surrounding nations.

But it is important to determine precisely what we
mean by these geographical expressions—Palestine, Judah,
Judaea, and the State of Jerusalem.

After taking Tyre and Gaza, Alexander, now master of
the Syrian region, set up a government which was bounded
by the Mediterranean, Lebanon, the Syrian and Arabian
deserts, and Egypt. That is Palestine; though historians
also add Ccele-Syria. Palestine, therefore, forms in the
age of Alexander a large province, embracing: in the
north, the small States which were later to be gathered
together under the name of Galilee; to the east of the
Jordan, Galaad (later Peraea) ; in the south-east, Ammon,
Moab, and Edom; on the shores of the Mediterranean,
the ancient Philistine towns; in the centre, lastly, the two
rival States, the two leading powers of the group, Samaria,
in which is included part of the ancient kingdom of
Ephraim, and Judah, which comprises the former kingdom
of Judah. Such is the advance made by the State of
Jerusalem since Esdras. If the Davidic kingdom is still
far from being restored, the kingdom of Judah at least is
gained. In the time of Esdras the State of Jerusalem
consisted of the town and the surrounding district; in the
time of Alexander this State has extended its domination
over the territories of which the kingdom of Judah had
once been composed. The land of Judah, however, is
now about to receive the name of Judaea. In creating a
province of Judaea, with Jerusalem as its capital and
 HELLENISM

107

[Prometheus]

metropolis, the Macedonian kings will merely consecrate
an accomplished fact. As to Canaan and Israel, these
ancient denominations, now mere expressions of a
theoretical nature, correspond geographically, sometimes
to the whole, sometimes to the greater part, of Palestine.

The Jerusalem aristocracy, mistress of Judaea, already
ruled over a half of Israel, of the land of Canaan promised
by Jahveh to the town of his temple, when the first of the
great crises which were to overthrow Judaism occurred.
A new danger, Hellenism, had appeared, a danger the
more formidable because it arose in the very bosom of the
aristocracy that had once created Judaism. And the
Jewish soul would, if it were to persevere, need to make
a greater effort than it had needed a hundred and fifty-
years earlier to create itself.

It must not be thought that Hellenism penetrated the
State of Jerusalem for the first time with the armies of
Alexander. We know that the battles of Marathon and
Salamina had had no echo in the Jerusalem of the
Restoration. Many years passed without the disciples
of Esdras suspecting anything of the Greek civilisation
which struggled against the Persian monarchy in Asia
Minor and on the islands. Gradually, however, as the
Persian hegemony gave security to the roads in western
Asia, while the Greek and Persian armies fought their
alternating conflict, the Hellenic infiltration reached
Palestine. Tyre, the great commercial town of the east,
was not far from the mountains of Jerusalem ; Palestine
was a stage on the road from Asia to Egypt; Palestine
could not escape the commercial invasion of the Greeks.
At what date did the priests of Jerusalem perceive the
novelty that was approaching their walls ? No document
informs us; but it is probable that by the middle of the
fourth century, many years before the arrival of Alexander,
words of the Greek tongue were heard at the foot of the
temple of Jahveh. The Macedonian conquest was not a
sudden invasion of unexpected conquerors, of a horde of
 108

THE BIRTH OE PROPHETISM

victors who at once take possession of a great land ; it
was the logical outcome of a century and a-half of effort,
the conclusion of a long and uninterrupted campaign.
Asia was conquered by the civilisation, as much as by the
armies, of Greece. But under the leadership of Alexander
Hellenism entered more imperiously, with the authority
of victory and conquest, the regions where it had hitherto
merely insinuated its influence.

The military success of Alexander mattered little to the
children of Jahveh. Israel had seen many such. The
triumph of the King of Macedonia might be ephemeral;
it crushed no hope. And, indeed, had not the sacred
dogmatics possible explanations of all the victories of the
goim ? Whether the master of the hour was called
Alexander or Darius, the stern perseverance of the Jew
would regard with disdain the soldier who won battles ;
the soul which had been born again, had lived and grown,
after Nabuchodonosor, would be able to resist the new
master. But those at Jerusalem who clung to the old
traditions of Esdras and Deuteronomy were alarmed, in
the year 332, to see Jews about them beginning to live
the Hellenic life.

Thus was opened a new epoch of Judaism. In future
the Jewish traditionalism will oppose itself implacably to
Hellenic ways. There begins, in the heart of Judaism,
that struggle of parties which is the key of Jewish history
—the struggle of nationalism and foreign influence.

At Jerusalem, however, nationalism was the party of
democracy, Hellenism the party of the ruling aristocracy.

The Jewish soul had been formed on the principle of a
complete isolation from other peoples. From that time
everything had been laid down in the Jewish law, in that
illustration of the Jewish law which the Jewish literature
is, with a view to keeping the men of Jerusalem together
among other men as a kind of church, a caste of saints,
the privileged children of the divinity, enjoying his
especial protection. If the Jews began to live the life
 HELLENISM

109

of other peoples, was it not all over with the Jewish soul ?

The men of Jerusalem in the time of Esdras had
perceived in a flash of genius the only conditions of
existence that were possible for them; the same flash of
genius came to some men of Jerusalem a century and
a-half later, in the time of Alexander. The Jewish soul
must resist Hellenism with all its strength, must remain
purely Jewish in face of Hellenism, or it must perish.
The task of the Jews was to extirpate from their midst
every tendency to Hellenisation, to set up among them an
Inquisition which should preserve the hopes of Judaism
from any alloy.

The historians of Judaism have not understood that the
tempests of Judaism took place between Jews from the
time that Hellenism invaded Asia. The task of Judaism
in the third and second centuries was to struggle, not
against the ways and ideas of other nations, but against
the introduction of these ways and ideas into Israel.

However sombre a fanaticism may have always ruled
in the little State of Jerusalem, it would be absurd to
suppose that there were not in it, as elsewhere, minds
that were inclined to more moderate ways, to some indul-
gence for foreign ideas, some tenderness for art and
elegance. Men of this character cannot have been
wanting in the most sombre surroundings, and the
Macedonian conquest discovered some within the walls
of Jerusalem, to the great scandal of the puritans. It
happened, however, as is quite natural, that the new
tendencies were especially found among the aristocracy.

The desire of luxury appears inevitably among a
prosperous aristocracy, even if it be a clerical aristocracy.
The clerical aristocracy held nearly the whole wealth of
the country, thanks to the numerous taxes which had
been instituted, in the form of tithes, offerings, and
propitiations, by the Deuteronomic law; its power, estab-
lished by divine right, was absolute. Among the priests
of Jerusalem there were wealthy men who longed for
 110

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

more spacious and better decorated houses. They modified
the old traditional garment; the fashion made its appear-
ance in the approach to the temple of Jahveh. They
affected to speak Greek; their wives wore eccentric
dresses; richer wines flowed ; possibly there were flowers
on the table. I do not exaggerate; these abominations
are described with indignation in the prophetic books.

Hellenisation took place in another way. People who
are little familiar with the biblical writings will be
astonished to learn that they not only anathematise
luxury, but they condemn commerce as a crime. Com-
merce became afterwards the great occupation of the
Jews, because new conditions of existence made new
souls. In developing commerce throughout Asia, the
Macedonian conquest introduced it into Jerusalem, and
some of the Jews became merchants. Naturally they
became rich; and, just as naturally, they sought luxury.
Once more the puritans raised the cry of scandal.

A century later the evil was at its height when,
probably for the first time in history, the Jews attacked
finance, and Joseph, son of Tobias, became farmer-
general of the Ptolemies for the government of Ccele-
Syria.

If Hellenisation had triumphed at Jerusalem, the world
would never have known either the Jewish conquest or
Christianity. But there was a formidable reaction of the
old nationalism, a prodigious outflame of the implacable
soul of Jerusalem ; and it was among the people, the
humble, that the movement arose, and grew, and
triumphed. Starting from the people, the nationalist
reaction assumed a democratic character, which would be
an essential part of Judaism.

Jewish patriotism understood and proved that the
correction of its leaders is a supreme law, that the leaders
must set an example of obedience to the traditions, that
it is useless to speak to the people of discipline when the
leaders have not first obeyed the most rigorous of disci-
 THE MEN OF GOD

111

plines, and that there is no real nationalism in a State, in
which guilty leaders are tolerated.

This appeal to the ancient traditions and the necessary
discipline, this return to an uncompromising nationalism,
this renascence of the imperialism of Jerusalem, was the
work of the prophets.

§ 2. The Men of God.

In the remotest periods of the history of peoples we
find sorcerers, mercenary diviners, strange healers, feared
and venerated, in the whole of the east, in the west and
Africa as well as Palestine, .among the nomad leaders of
flocks, in the first settlements of primitive husbandmen,
in the little cities surrounded with their walls of earth, in
the old towns where a formidable sultan rules with his
harem and janissaries, in the shade of the oldest
sanctuaries, and in the valleys where the caravans pass.

These men, with their disordered gestures, their
incoherent speech, and their wild eyes, are sometimes
mad, sometimes epileptic. They wander about in rags,
thin and famished and sordid. You meet them near the
villages, but they live in the desert places. The caverns
are their homes; they spend long hours in solitude.
They have no trade. When a beast or a man falls ill,
they know the remedy that will cure; when difficult
projects are in contemplation, they utter words in which
one divines the future. A few silver coins or measures of
corn are their salary.

These victims of hallucination are regarded as inspired
by the deity. Among primitive peoples the insane was
always considered a sacred being. It was the same in
Judaea as in the rest of the world; it is the same in the
east to-day. Madness is a sacred malady; epilepsy is a
divine phenomenon. The divine word can only be im-
parted^ to human ears by means of this delirium, in which
 112

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

a man loses his individuality and becomes a passive
instrument of inspiration. Saint Paul will explain it in
the most precise manner in a later age.1

On that account they are venerated and feared. These
haggard sorcerers and famished soothsayers see something
in the future, and control evil spirits. With all their
rags they bear on their brows the sign of Jahveh. They
are men of god.

The ancient tribes of Palestine, Israel as well as Moab,
Ammon, Edom, and Syria, swarmed with men of god.
The Bible has preserved the memory of these men of
god in pages to which we cannot grant an historical
value, but which undeniably afford a valuable picture of
customs.

There was once [eleven hundred years before the
present era] a man of Benjamin, whose name was Cis,
the son of Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bechorath,
the son of Aphiah, a Benjamite, a mighty man of power.

And he had a son whose name was Saul, a choice young
man and a goodly; and there was not among the children
of Israel a goodlier person than he ; from his shoulders
and upward he was higher than any of the people.

And the asses of Cis, Saul’s father, were lost. And Cis
said to Saul his son: Take now one of the servants with
thee, and arise, go seek the asses.

And he passed by mount Ephraim, and passed through
the land of Salisa, but they found them not; then they
passed through the land of Salim, and there they were
not; and he passed through the land of Jemini, but they
found them not.

And when they were come to the land of Suph, Saul
said to his servant that was with him: Come and let us
return; lest my father leave caring for the asses, and take
thought for us.

And the servant said unto him: Behold now, there is
in this city a man of God, and he is an honourable man.
All that he saith cometh surely to pass. Now let us go
thither. Peradventure he can show us our way that we
should go.

Then said Saul to his servant: Let us go, but, behold,

1 1 Corinthians xii, and xiv.
 THE MEN OF GOD

113

if we go, what shall we bring the man of God ? For the
• bread is spent in our vessels, and there is not a present to
bring to the man of God; what have we ?

And the servant answered Saul again, and said:
Behold, I have here at hand the fourth part of a shekel of
silver ; that will I give to the man of God, to tell us our
way......

Then said Saul to his servant: Well said, come, let us
go. So they went unto the city where the man of God was.

And as they went up the hill to the city, they found
young maidens going out to draw water, and said unto
them : Is the seer here ?

And they answered them and said : He is ; behold, he
is before thee; make haste.....

As soon as ye be come unto the city, ye shall straight-
way find him, before he go up to the high place to eat.
....Now therefore get you up.

[Prometheus]

And they went up into the city; and when they were
come into the city, behold, Samuel came out against them,
for to go up to the high place...

Then Saul drew near to Samuel in the gate of the city,
and said: Tell me, I pray thee, where the seer’s house is.

And Samuel answered Saul, and said: I am the seer :
go up before me unto the high place ; for ye shall eat with
me to-day, and to-morrow morning I will let thee go, and
will tell thee all that is in thine heart.

And as for thine asses that were lost three days ago,
set not thy mind on them, for they are found.1

The aged wizard Samuel, who was able to find the lost
asses for a fourth part of a shekel of silver, seems to have
delivered his consultation with a somewhat simple appa-
ratus on that day. It was not always so—with some of
his colleagues, if not with Samuel. And the Bible does
not fail to give us some information on the way in which,
at the remote epoch of the legend, the predictions and
conjurations took place.

The anecdote of Saul, the asses, and Samuel continues;
and, after the meal, Samuel says to Saul, among other
things, and in the midst of theologico-dogmatic discourses
after the manner of doctors of the Esdras school:—

1 1 Samuel ix. 1-20. Certain features of this translation are taken
from Lemaistre de Saci.

I
 114

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

When thou shalt have gone on forward from thence,
thou shalt come to the oak of Thabor, and there shall
meet thee three men going up to God to Bethel, one
carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of
bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine :

And they will salute thee, and give thee two loaves of
bread ; which thou shalt receive of their hands.

After that thou shalt come to Guibea-of-God, where is
the garrison of the Philistines; and it shall come to pass,
when thou art come thither to the city, that thou shalt
meet a company of prophets coming down from the high
place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp
before them ; and they shall prophesy:

And the spirit of Jahveh will come upon thee; and
thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into
another man.1

To prophesy means, in Hebrew, to utter cries and
dance to the sound of instruments.

Consider David, later, bringing back to Jerusalem the
ark of Jahveh:—

David, clothed with a linen tunic, danced before Jahveh
with all his might.

So David and all the house of Israel brought up the
ark of Jahveh with shouting, and with the sound of the
trumpet.

And as the ark of Jahveh came into the city of David,
Michol, Saul’s daughter (and David’s wife), looked through
a window and saw King David leaping and dancing before
the face of Jahveh ; and she despised him in her heart.

When David returned to bless his household, Michol
the daughter of Saul came out to meet him, and said:
How glorious was the king of Israel to-day, who un-
covered himself in the eyes of the handmaids of his
servants, and appeared half-naked like a buffoon.2

I do not regard the legends of David, Saul, and especially
Samuel, as having historical value; but they imply certain
ways. Israel could not be an exception amid the other
peoples of the East. The historical probability that
epileptic wizards, diviners, and healers, with the gestures
and speech of madmen, filled Palestine, both at the time

1 1 Samuel x. 3-6.

2 2 Samuel vi. 14-20.
 THE MEN OF GOD

115

of the ancient kingdoms and at that of the [Restoration, is
confirmed by the testimony of the Biblical hooks.

What name did these wizards hear in Palestine ? The
Bible uses several words of which the meaning is the
more vague because of the wilful confusion that its writers
have made between the real wizard of history and the
idealised seer of the legend. The three words most
frequently used are:—

Ish haelohim, the man of god;

Hozeh, or roeh, the seer;

Nabi, the speaker, more particularly the prophet.

It is impossible, in the actual condition of science, to
determine the chronological order of these three designa-
tions. The third has been accepted by usage to designate
the prophets in the highest sense of the word; the first,
probably earlier than the other two, expresses rather the
primitive idea of the healing diviner, an insane man—that
is to say, a man inspired by a god; the second, and vaguer,
term is less frequently used, and is hardly applicable to
any but Samuel or Gad. Hence, while warning the
reader that the choice is arbitrary, I beg to be allowed,
for the purpose of explaining more clearly, to neglect the
term “ seer ” (roeh or hozeh); to restrict the word
“prophet” (nabi) to the idealised prophetic type; and
to keep for the historical Israelitic wizard the name of
“ man of god ” (ish haelohim).

For the moment we have to see how the man of god
was made a prophet.

The men of god whom we find in the real history of
ancient Israel, just as in Moab, Ammon, Edom, Syria,
and in the whole of the East and among all primitive
peoples, did not play any particular part in ancient Israel.
They were, as everywhere else, tellers of good stories,
bonesetters to whom every one had recourse when neces-
sary, and who gave their advice in the form of chants, or
rather howls, and of dances, or rather stamping and
frenzied leaping.
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THE BIRTH OE PROPHETISM

At the time of the Restoration we find them once more,
eternal features of the East, always the same, miserable
and powerful wizards, whose ravings are inspired by
Jahveh; just as we shall see them again in the Jewish world
of St. Paul, and as we find them in our own time under
the name of howling and dancing dervishes. What part
did they play in the restored Jerusalem of the fifth and
the fourth centuries? No other than that which their
ancestors had played in the ancient kingdoms; no other
than that which their colleagues played in the surrounding
peoples—that is to say, none.

They would have passed away, forgotten and of no
account, had their names not served to shelter a literary
artifice of the Jewish writers of the fourth century: had
not the historical men of god suggested to the imagina-
tion of the writers of the Bible the ideal and purely literary
type of the prophets.

The priests of Jerusalem who had related, in the earliest
books of the Bible, how Jahveh punished national infidelity
and rewarded national fidelity, had imagined that Jahveh
had, in the course of these vicissitudes, often given direct
advice to his people. With the spirit of hostility to
abstractions which caused all their teachings to pass
through the living form of legends, they had thought it
necessary that, from time to time, sacred personages
should have, on the part of Jahveh, warned their ancestors,
whose history they were relating, of the chastisements
that awaited them and the promises that were held out
to them; they had pretended that Jahveh himself had,
all through this tragic and glorious history, raised up
inspired men to speak in his name, and to repeat in his
name, at every turn in Jewish history, from the settle-
ment in Palestine until Nabuchodonosor:—

Thus saith Jahveh: Because ye have forsaken Jahveh,
your god, and prostituted yourselves to the Baals and
Astartes, I will strike the fathers and the children, the
neighbour and his neighbour...Thus saith Jahveh: If
 THE MEN OF GOD

117

, ye return to Jahveh, your god, I will make your captives
return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and I will
break your chains, and I will take from your necks the
yoke of your enemies......

These inspired men are, therefore, above all, admonishers
invented by the Biblical writers in order to make more
precise the teaching that they wish to give to their readers.
Not only the warnings, but the warners themselves, might
be omitted from the historical books without the narrative
suffering in the least. The books of Samuel and Kings
are surcharged with these episodic personages; in every
page we find them playing the part of the moralists with
which Alexander Dumas filled his compositions, a sort of
Desgenais speaking in the name of public morality—that
is to say, to keep to the sentiment of the Bible, in the
name of Jahveh.

The Jewish spirit always disliked abstract instruction.
Instead of a simple statement that King David committed
a sin in taking the wife of his servant Uriah, and that
this sin deserved punishment, we read :—

The thing that David had done displeased Jahveh.

And Jahveh sent Nathan unto David. And he came
unto him, and said unto him :

....Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment

of Jahveh, to do evil in his sight ?

Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine
own house.1

It is an invention. Who were these admonishers who
were supposed to have the task of announcing the orders
of Jahveh to the people of Israel ? The Jerusalem writers
might have assigned the part to priests of the earlier
times; and some of them did so. But, as a rule, they
preferred to assign the part to special personages; and,
looking round them, they selected the men of god.

They supposed that in former times there were among
these demented wizards, these dreaded and venerated

1 2 Samuel xi. 27 ; xii. 1, 9, and 11.
 118

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

diviners, who were seen wandering near the towns and
whose ravings seemed to have a divine origin, some who
were especially inspired by Jahveh, and charged with the
mission of speaking to Israel in his name. The character
was thus created. It answered perfectly the needs of
the writers, and the fiction was gradually elaborated;
under the name of prophets, the men of god came and
went on behalf of Jahveh throughout Jewish history,
drawing from events the lesson that it suited the priest-
writers to give to their people.

The men of god were thus raised to the rank of
prophets. But it must be quite understood that in the
time of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms there had never
been, and there was not in the fifth and fourth centuries,
any man of god who professed to give warnings to the
Jewish people at the command of Jahveh. In accordance
with the conventional definitions which I proposed for
the words “ man of god ” and “ prophet,” we must say
that, in the Judaea of the fifth and fourth centuries, as in
all ancient kingdoms and in the Palestine of the third
and second centuries, there were, at all times and in all
places, humble men of god, but that, in point of fact,
there were no prophets.

Later, during the first century of the present era, when
the ancient books of Judaism had become sacred books,
when everybody in Judaea believed in the historical reality
of the Samuels, Elijahs, Jeremiahs, and Isaiahs, it is true
that some of these poor healers and fortune-tellers, who
always abounded in Palestine, tried to set up as new
Elijahs and Jeremiahs; this is the only period in which
there were, historically, prophets in Palestine—pale
imitators of fictitious heroes, such as John the Baptist,
Jesus of Nazareth, or Theudas.

We may therefore define the prophets as:—

Fictitious characters, invented by the Jewish writers of
the fourth and succeeding centuries, on an idealised model
of the men of god (that is to say, the wizards, soothsayers,
 THE MEN OE GOD

119

and healers) who were found throughout the east, and
interpolated by them in their national history to play the
part of admonishers enjoined by Jahveh to give a lesson
to his people.

To explain the presence of the prophets in the books
of the Bible, it is by no means necessary to suppose that
there had been prophets in the days of the ancient
kingdoms, or were in the fifth and fourth centuries; it
was enough that there had been, and were, men of god.
For the Middle Ages to create the epic character of
Merlin the Enchanter, it was not necessary that a Merlin
the Enchanter should have existed in the Middle Ages;
it was enough that there were wizards, and that some
writer sought to idealise them. The prophets of Israel
are the Merlins of Judaism.1

The fiction remained poor, however, in the earlier
books of the Bible. The characters of Samuel, Elijah,
and Elisha had not yet been created, or at least not yet
developed; the prophet-admonishers brought on to the
scene by the earlier writers were feeble expressions of a
mediocre literary device. Lifeless and uninteresting
phantoms, they would have been lost in oblivion if, some
day about the year 332 and the conquest of Jerusalem by
Alexander, the fiction had not been suddenly raised from
its lowly level and developed, and received at once an
unexampled range.

About the year 332, in fact, when it was necessary to
raise a cry of alarm on account of the new peril that
threatened Judaism, to discover a more impressive
formula, to arrest with inspired language the men who
were leading the country of the Jews to destruction, some
writer at Jerusalem imagined that, in the remote period
of kings Uzziah, Jotham, Achaz, and Jeroboam, there
was a man of god, a soothsayer—that is to say, a prophet
—of the name of Hosea, and that this Hosea had begun

1 See Appendix VI.
 120

[Prometheus]

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

to speak in the name of Jahveh and warn Israel, reproach
it with its faults, and foretell its punishment. Instead,
however, of telling the fact in a few dry lines, as the
writers of the books of Kings had done, when they
described the prophet Nathan accosting King David, the
new writer conceived the extraordinary idea of inventing
a series of long discourses and saying to his contem-
poraries :—

The word of Jahveh that came unto Hosea, the son of
Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Achaz, and
Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam,
king of Israel.1

The speeches of Hosea are admonitions, threats, and
promises. But the dry admonitions of the earlier Biblical
books are now changed into impassioned odes, in which
the oriental imagination displays itself in a thousand
picturesque and lyrical inventions. The cold moralists
of earlier times become great inspired figures who, in the
name of the national god, speak the language that befits
his terrible anger, or his terrible love. The earlier
Biblical writers had drawn from the events of their
national history, and from their ancient legends, some
teaching for the use of their contemporaries ; in order to
express this teaching better they had mingled with the
events and the legends, as spokesmen, certain men of god,
uttering a few words dictated to them by Jahveh and then
withdrawing into obscurity. Of these vague silhouettes
of men of god the present generation now made the
tribunes, the orators, and the national poets who were
about to become the prophets.

It was the great creation of Jewish literature. In this
way the men of the popular party took from the very
hands of the aristocratic writers the weapon they had
fashioned, the literary artifice they had suggested; but
they magnified it at once.

1 Hosea i. 1.
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121

The invention succeeded, as a matter of fact. Imme-
diately after Hosea, another writer invented Amos.

Amos is conceived to be a shepherd, a contemporary
of Hosea: “ an herdsman, son of an herdsman, and a
gatherer of wild figs; and Jahveh took him as he followed
the flock, and said unto him, Go, prophesy unto my people
Israel.”1

Once more we read: “ The words of Amos, who was
among the herdmen of Tekoa, and the visions which he
saw concerning Israel, in the days of Uzziah, king of
Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, king of Israel.” 2

The prophetic books are not problem-books. They do
not relate recent or contemporary events in the form of
ancient happenings. The authors of the prophecies, like
all the writers of the Bible, wish to give a lesson to their
contemporaries; and, like all the writers of the Bible, they
refuse to preach in the abstract. Bound the lesson that
they wish to give they create an impassioned scene with
the memories or the legends of their national past.

But if the writers place themselves in the time of an
Amos and an Hosea, if the facts in which they frame
their discourses are ancient facts, the ideas they express
are modern ideas. Their preoccupation is obvious ; and,
in spite of the lie about their false antiquity, they are so
candid and sincere that, in the language which they put
into the mouths of the idealised ancient men of god of
Ephraim and Judah, we hear the echo of the great events
of the Macedonian period.

Lastly, we must not forget that the prophetic books are
pseudonymous; that is to say that, though composed in
the fourth and third centuries, they pretend to be the
works of writers of the eighth, seventh, and sixth cen-
turies.

There is no room to doubt that the author of the
discourses of Hosea professed, about the year 332, to

1 Amos vii. 14-15.

2 Amos i. 1.
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THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

publish the authentic discourses which Hosea had pro-
nounced in the eighth century. The claim that these
lost and forgotten discourses were suddenly recovered
would hardly astonish an age that was incapable of
criticism, when there were at times only one or two
copies of a book in existence.

The Jewish writers always proceeded in this way. The
Bible is a collection of books which were not written by
the authors to whom they are ascribed. A new work
needed the authority of an older work; the work of a
contemporary had to borrow the authority of some
venerable name. The Mosaic moshlim had acted in this
way, and the psalmists and writers of apocalypses would
do the same. Was it not necessary to legitimise and
sanctify the lesson to be given to the people ?

The prophets are, as we said, fictitious characters
invented by the Jewish writers to figure in the history of
their country. The prophetic books are literary com-
positions which their authors put forward as the works of
these characters. They are imaginative works published
as works that have reality; books of sermons which are
presented as genuine.

At Athens, among peoples educated in the school of
the Hellenic intelligence, the creation of the beautiful is
a sufficient aim for the historian, the poet, and the
philosopher. The man of Jerusalem, on the contrary,
writes and speaks only with a strictly utilitarian object.
Glory, the supreme reward at Athens, is not found at
Jerusalem. The books of the Bible are anonymous, or,
rather, pseudonymous. In order to give greater authority
to their words, the authors of the prophecies sacrifice
their personality. They sign their works with some
ancient name, and say:—

Thus spake Hosea.......Thus spake Amos........Thus

spake Jeremiah....
 HOSEA AND AMOS

123

§ 3. Hosea and Amos.

After Alexander, as in the days of the Persian
emperors, the government of Jerusalem remained in the
hands of the leaders of the old clerical aristocracy. But
the heads of the old aristocracy which rules Judaea under
the Macedonian suzerainty are intoxicated with the
charm and joy of Hellenic ways; these grandchildren of
the sombre companions of Esdras, rich, obeyed, and
feared by the people, have become prosperous and
luxurious pachas. Hellenism, which triumphs with the
Macedonian armies, triumphs also in the hearts of the
Jewish aristocrats, and overthrows traditions no less
than territories. At this time Onias I. is high-priest at
Jerusalem ; in other words, he is viceroy of Judasa. As
powerless to resist the moral invasion of Hellenism as
the invasion of Egyptian or Syrian armies, he lets things
have their way. The work of the prophets begins.

We have already described how certain men arose
amid the Jerusalem democracy and the old nationalism
unaffected by the Hellenic contagion, to bring back to a
respect for tradition an aristocracy that was won by the
foreign novelties; and how the work of the prophetic
books—first Hosea and Amos, then Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Isaiah, and their disciples—was a nationalist and demo-
cratic reaction against the hellenisation of the sacerdotal
caste which ruled the State.

Alexander having entered Palestine in 332, one may
admit, in a general way, that Hellenism had begun to
penetrate Judaea about the year 350, and the year 332
probably indicates the period when the prophetic litera-
ture may have begun at Jerusalem. We must assign to
the last third of the fourth century, 332 to 300, and the
early years of the third century, the prophetic books of
Hosea and Amos, then of Jeremiah and his disciples.
Ezekiel follows; and the Isaiahs are still later.
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THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

The democratic nationalism, and especially the anti-
hellenic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-sacerdotal spirit of the
prophetic writers, localise them in the period of Alexander
and his immediate successors. The historical atmosphere
is none the less significant. Let us recall the chief
political events of this half-century, beginning a few
years before the coming of Alexander, say 350 to 300 ;
we shall see that no date suits the older prophets better.
To understand them, it is important to imagine oneself
at the close or in the midst of the circumstances of which
they speak.

The last years of the Persian monarchy had been
occupied in an expedition of Artaxerxes Ochus against
Egypt and Phoenicia. While Artaxerxes Ochus was
besieging Sidon, the Jews had rebelled; but the rising
had been suppressed, Jerusalem taken by the Persian
army, and a number of Jews deported to Egypt and
Hyrcania.

In 332 Alexander had taken Palestine, and placed
there a Macedonian governor. Soon afterwards he had
founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt, and some of the
Jews, taken forcibly or driven by misery, would settle
there later.

After the death of Alexander his generals had divided
his empire; but their ambition had drawn them into
endless wars. Palestine was for a quarter of a century
the object of a struggle between the Macedonian king of
Egypt and the Macedonian king of Syria.

Palestine had been given to the king of Syria. In 320
Ptolemy surprises and sacks Jerusalem, and a certain
number of Jews are deported to Egypt.

Antigonus soon retakes Palestine. Ptolemy re-enters
it in 312; he is again driven out. Jerusalem returns to
Syria; but its walls have been rased.

Finally, in 301, Palestine is restored to Egypt. The
city of Antioch is founded in Syria at this date, and is
partly peopled with Jews.
 HOSEA AND AMOS

125

Incessant crossings of armies on the march, Judsea a
battlefield, unending devastation, Jerusalem twice taken
by assault and sacked, the Jews twice deported, the
country in military occupation, a continuous emigration—
that is the picture of Palestine between the year 350 and
the year 301, as we find it in history.

In the heart of this stricken country the rivalry of
Jerusalem and Samaria has increased. The latter takes
the side of Egypt, the other of Syria; a little later,
Jerusalem sides with Egypt, Samaria with Syria.
Districts are taken from Samaria and given to Judsea;
they are again taken from Judsea and restored to Samaria.
When Jerusalem is in favour with the conqueror, it
demands the punishment of Samaria; Samaria is not
more generous when its protector has triumphed. Mean-
time the ancient Philistine and Edomite populations are
stirred, and armed bands spread on all sides, even as far
as the walls of Jerusalem.

An intestine war between Jerusalem and Samaria and
the hostility of surrounding peoples—that is the internal
history of Palestine.

Lastly, beyond the Palestinian region, deportation and
emigration have begun to fill Egypt, Syria, and Phoenicia
with Jewish colonies. Alexandria, Antioch, Damas, and
Tyre are about to experience the misery of the ghetto.
Not all the exiles are miserable, though the majority are;
and, all round Palestine, a vast field of exile, in which
the children of Israel weep for their absent country, is
about to be the horizon that will limit the gaze of the
men of Jerusalem.

That is the character of the second half of the fourth
century. This series of events will not be recalled, even
by way of allusion, in the prophetical books, because
their authors frame their discourses in an earlier period.
Some striking fact may, from time to time, be indicated
in the form of a prediction (for instance, the taking of
Tyre by Alexander, he being the only man who could
 126

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

[Prometheus]

take Tyre); some slight allusion may be made to some
great event (such as the disgrace of an unpopular
minister). But the misfortunes of this troubled period
will be the atmosphere in which the characters of the
monodramas play their part.

In every chapter of the prophetic books will be found
the sentiment of foreign invasion, the pillage of the
country by armies, the profanation of the holy city, and
deportation. Parochial quarrels between Jerusalem and
Samaria, ending in virtual or open, but always fierce,
warfare, will fill the old prophets. The terror of Edomite
invasions will hover above them, and maledictions will be
showered on Egypt and on Syria. They will return
incessantly to the question of “foreign alliances.” Must
they take the part of Syria against Egypt, of Egypt
against Syria, or remain simply the men of Jahveh?
And they will never forget their brothers in Egypt and
Syria, their exiled brothers, the unhappy victims of
deportation or emigration, of whose return they never
cease to dream.

Thus the historical world in which the authors of the
prophetic books lived breaks through the fiction in which
they enfold themselves. Their object is quite plain to us;
in the name of the old Jewish traditionalism they hurl
threats against Jerusalem for its infidelity to Jahveh—in
other words, to its national traditions. Whatever modifi-
cations or interpolations were made in the prophetic books
down to the time when they became sacred and canonical,
the critic cannot fail to penetrate their spirit, if he be free
from theological prepossessions.

The first, the author of the prophecies of Hosea, hurls
his anathema; and, from the first lines of his fierce
diatribe, the fiction of the poet clothes with the most
highly-coloured allegories the maledictions with which
the old traditionalism would terrify its compatriots.

When Jahveh began to speak by Hosea, Jahveh said to
Hosea: Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and
 HOSEA AND AMOS

127

children of whoredoms; for Israel hath committed great
whoredom, departing from Jahveh.

So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim:
which conceived, and bare him a son.

And Jahveh said unto Hosea, Call his name Jezreel;

for yet a little while and I....will break the bow of

Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

And Gomer conceived again, and bare a daughter. And
Jahveh said unto Hosea, Call her name Lo-ruhamah [that
is to say, Not-loved], for I will no more love the house of
Israel.

And Gomer weaned her daughter; and she conceived
and bare a son.

And Jahveh said unto Hosea, Call his name Lo-ammi
[that is to say, Not-my-people]; for ye are not my people,
and I will not be your god.1

The most terrible threats are then unfolded. In the
books of the Bible, however, the threat is always succeeded
by a promise. Israel the sinner will be punished ; Israel
faithful will receive an infinite reward.

And the number of the children of Israel shall be as
the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or
numbered: and it shall come to pass, that in the place
where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there
it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living
God!

Then shall the children of Judah and the children of
Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one
head, and they shall come up out of the land; for great
shall be the day of Jezreel.

And ye shall say unto your brethren, Ammi [My-people],
and to your sisters Ruhamah [Beloved] .a

And then the exhortation;—

Raise yourselves, raise yourselves against your mother ;
for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband! Let
her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight,
and her adulteries from between her breasts:

Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that
she was born, and set her like a dry land..

For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine,

1 Hosea i. 2-9.

2 Hosea i. 10-11, ii. 1.
 128

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they
prepared for Baal.

Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the
time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and
will recover my wool and my flax given to cover her
nakedness.....

I will cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her
new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.

And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees....and I

will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall
eat them.

And I shall punish her because of the incense which
she burned to the Baals, because of the earrings and
jewels, and because she hath forgotten me, saith Jahveh.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into
the wilderness, and speak to her heart.

And I will give her vineyards, and the valley of Achor
for a door of hope; and she shall sing there, as in the days
of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of
the land of Egypt.

And it shall be at that day, saith Jahveh, that thou
shalt call me, My husband; and I shall take from her
mouth the names of the Baals.......

And I will betroth thee unto me for ever.....1

The prophets know nothing but threats and promises.
But it is to the higher clergy of Jerusalem that the
threats are addressed.

Hear ye this, O priests: and hearken, ye house of
Israel; and give ye ear, 0 house of the king: for judg-
ment is toward you.2

Hostility to the priests who rule Jerusalem breaks out
in the famous and little-understood passage of the
prophecies of Hosea:—

I desire love ; that is to say, love of the god—that is to
say, patriotism ; I desire patriotism, and not sacrifices. I
desire respect for the god; that is to say, respect for the
national institutions, respect for the traditions; I desire
respect for the traditions rather than burnt offerings.3

The invectives grow, in strength and number, against

1 Hosea ii. 2-19.

2 Hosea v. 1.

3 Hosea vi. 6.
 HOSEA AND AMOS

129

the aristocracy of Jerusalem. Nothing of the kind had as
yet appeared in Jewish literature, neither in the Mosaic
books, nor in Judges, nor in Kings. A new soul has
arisen among the people. Henceforward, through the
whole of Jewish history, we shall follow this antagonism
between the popular party and the aristocracy. Its
appearance begins with the prophetic books; we are in
the period when Hellenism enters Jerusalem.

Amos, the successor of Hosea, enumerates in his turn
the crimes for which Jewish traditionalism demands
justice of Jahveh.

Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the
mountain of Samaria.....

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..

That drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with
the chief ointments, and are not grieved for the affliction
of Israel.

Therefore now shall they go captive with the first that
go captive, and their cries of joy shall cease.1

The author of the prophecies of Amos is not less
furious than the author of the prophecies of Hosea
against the powerful and wealthy—that is to say, against
the priests who govern Jerusalem:—

I hate, I despise your feast days, saith Jahveh, and I
will not smell your perfumes in your solemn assemblies.

Though ye offer me burnt offerings, I will not accept
them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your
fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, and
let me hear no more the melody of thy viols.2

Men had arisen among the people of Jerusalem who
understood the new danger, the great danger that
threatened the country. The sombre nationalism of
Esdras and his successors had concentrated all the
strength of the little State round the name of Jahveh,

1 Amos vi. 1 and 4-7.   2 Amos v. 21-23.

K
 130

THE BIRTH OF PROPHETISM

the national god; it had made foreign idolatry the
supreme danger. Now Hellenism was a new danger, as
the leaders were forgetting the old Judaic traditions, and
were turning to Hellenic novelties.

The pleasantness of the new ways, the easy life and
festivities, the beautifully decked women and spacious
houses, the wealth that affords luxury, and the luxury
that makes the soul soft—all this is called, in the fierce
language of the prophets, apostasy, fornication, adultery,
treason, the forsaking of Jahveh, the worship of strange
gods, the installation of the abominations of anti-national
cults at Jerusalem, the revival of ancient idols, the
stealing of the heart of Israel from Jahveh by Baal,
Astarte, Camos, and Milkom.

In resuming the war upon Baal, Astarte, Camos, and
Milkom the prophets will, in the ancient fashion of
Jewish literature, give their contemporaries a glowing
lesson for the present in the guise of an ancient history.

What had the Jews of the end of the fourth century
to fear from Baal, Astarte, Camos, and Milkom ? Baal
and Astarte now mean the Hellenic seduction. Apostasy
and treachery are forgetfulness of the ancient Deutero-
nomic discipline. Prostitution is the abandonment of
the old national traditions. Twenty-two centuries before
our time we find the men who are indulgent towards
foreign ideas and ways declared by their enemies to be
“ traitors ” and “ men of no country.” It is an exaggera-
tion, assuredly; but this corrupt aristocracy brought
Judaism into danger of death. The threats, the fury—
nowhere else can one find invective comparable to that
we shall presently meet in Jeremiah—the storms of the
Jewish democrats are intelligible, if we suppose that they
are denouncing the terrible danger of an aristocracy that
is forgetting its traditions, losing its discipline, and
denationalising itself. In face of this invading Hellenism
the Jewish soul found itself at the most formidable turn
in its history, and brought forth its decisive work.
 Chapter II.

JEEEMIAH

The history of Jewish literature is, as we said, the history
of Judaism itself. Having once formulated itself in the
Mosaic books, the vast movement of ideas, which Judaism
was, became fixed in the works of certain anonymous
writers—writers of genius—the authors of the prophecies
which hear the names of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
To analyse these works, to understand their object, to
penetrate their spirit, and to appreciate their effect, is to
write the history of Judaism from the end of the fourth,
and during the third, century before the present era.

In order to combat the Hellenic idolatry and ways, the
authors of the prophecies of Hosea and Amos had con-
ceived the characters of the prophets Hosea and Amos as
men who had lived in the remote period of the ancient
kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah, two hundred years
before Nabuchodonosor; and they had composed, and
put into circulation, certain great lyrical discourses which
the prophets were supposed to have pronounced, and
which were understood to have been preserved by some
extraordinary miracle. Apart, however, from the indica-
tion of the kings under whom the alleged prophets were
supposed to have lived, and a few other very general
indications, they had not made known any of the circum-
stances in which these discourses were said to have been
pronounced. The historical framework remained vague ;
clear enough in ideas, the discourses of the prophets
floated between heaven and earth, as far as the facts were
concerned. Were the authors of the prophecies of Hosea
and Amos ignorant of the details of the events that had
taken place in the ancient kingdoms of Ephraim and

131
 132

JEREMIAH

[Prometheus]

Judah, four centuries before their time ? They saw the
need only of one thing—the lesson that they wished to
convey to their contemporaries; and they omitted to
surround their declamations with an historical environ-
ment which did not interest them. The writer who
composed the chief prophecies of Jeremiah, like every
serious writer, at first followed his masters; like every
writer of genius, he then passed beyond them. It is
impossible to study the whole book of Jeremiah within
the limits of the present work. Criticism, indeed, now
shows that it is the work of several writers; we shall
concern ourselves preferably with the one who created
the figure of the terrible nabi. Whether or no a man of
the name of Jeremiah ever really existed mattered little;
just as it mattered little to the romances of the Round
Table whether or no there ever was a Merlin the
Enchanter. Whether he created or developed his
character, the writer, like his predecessors, went back to
an earlier period ; but, not going so far into the past, he
stopped at the period of Nabuchodonosor, and placed his
spokesman at that time; and, instead of being satisfied
with such vague surroundings as those in which the
prophecies of Hosea and Amos are placed, he showed his
originality by framing his discourses in the very definite
historical environment that was wanting in the earlier
works.

The period he had chosen evidently suited him. The
period chosen by his predecessors was half forgotten by
the Jews of the fourth century; but they had a vivid
memory of the last kings of Judah, the invasion of
Nabuchodonosor, the lingering and bloody agony of
ancient Jerusalem, the destruction of the city, and the
deportation to Babylon. They might be indifferent to
the remoter misfortunes of Israel; it was impossible to
be untouched by the catastrophe that had ruined the
earlier Jerusalem and given birth to the actual city.
Nabuchodonosor was still, in the imagination of the Jews
 JEREMIAH

133

of the third century, the scourge of god at whose recol-
lection they shuddered ; the exile beside the rivers of
Babylon was the symbol of the exiles and emigrations of
the end of the fourth century; the burning of the temple
was the supreme threat held over the head of Jewish
nationalism. The author of the prophecies of Jeremiah,
in going back to this fatal period, could not but revive its
episodes. The events amid which he placed the words
he wished to speak were well known. They were im-
pressed on every side, and the romance inevitably took
shape. Jeremiah was not merely an eloquence that
thunders, and a lyrism that enthuses, in the clouds; he
was a soul that mingles with the events; and the
character of the prophet assumed a glowing and terrible
life amid the misfortunes of his country. The author of
the prophecies of Jeremiah is, like the authors of the
prophecies of Amos and Hosea, a poet and an orator;
but he created a literary form that one may designate
the lyrical romance, if we regard its form, or the political
romance, if we regard its substance. And the romance
of Jeremiah was so powerfully conceived, and so
passionately lived, as to mislead posterity for ages into
seeing history in his vivid fancies.

The subject of the romance of Jeremiah is as follows :—

We are understood to be at the close of the seventh
century, at Jerusalem; the Jewish people has been
unfaithful to Jahveh, its national god; a prophet named
Jeremiah announces, in the course of many adventures,
that punishment is coming. Meantime Nabuchodonosor,
King of Babylon, approaches with his army; Jeremiah
recognises in him the instrument of Jahveh, and exhorts
the Jews to make no resistance, to accept their chastise-
ment ; when the trial is over, he promises that Jahveh
will restore his people. In fact, Nabuchodonosor takes
and destroys Jerusalem; but the appeased god will raise,
on the ruins of the guilty and justly-punished city, the
new Jerusalem that will never perish.
 134

JEREMIAH

The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the
priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, in
the days of Josias, king of Judah, and in the days of
Joachim, son of Josias, king of Judah, unto the end of the
eleventh year of Zedekiah, brother of Joachim, king of
Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive.1

Thus the book opens. Then follows the narrative of
the vocation of the prophet:—

The word of Jahveh came unto me, saying:

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and
before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified
thee; and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Then said I, Ah, Lord Jahveh, behold I cannot speak,
for I am a child.

And Jahveh said unto me, Say not, I am a child; for
thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever
I command thee thou shalt speak.

Do not be afraid of their faces ; for I am with thee to
deliver thee, saith Jahveh.

Then Jahveh put forth his hand, and touched my
mouth, and Jahveh said unto me, Behold, I have put my
words into thy mouth.

See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over
the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy,
and to throw down, to build, and to plant.2

The romancer imagines that the country has reached
the last stage of perversity. Idolatry reigns at Jerusalem ;
Jahveh is forsaken and betrayed; Jerusalem, the spouse
of Jahveh, stains herself with all the Baals; like a prostitute,
she has rejected her faith. Jeremiah then rises, with threats
on his lips. Many times before Israel has turned away
from its national god. Now the chastisement is at the
gate. Like Hosea and Amos, Jeremiah exhorts his
fellow-citizens in a series of great lyric discourses. The
anger of Jahveh is about to break out; if Israel return
not to Jahveh, Israel will be destroyed.

Jeremiah is not heard; Israel perseveres in its idolatry ;
the voice of Jeremiah grows harsher.

1 Jeremiah i. 1-3.

2 Jeremiah i. 1-10.
 JEREMIAH

135

And at that time, saith Jahveh, they shall bring out the
bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes,
and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets,
and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their
graves;

And they shall spread them before the sun, and the
moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved,
and whom they have served, and after whom they have
walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have
worshipped; they shall not be gathered, nor be buried;
they shall be for dung upon the face of the earth.

And death shall be chosen rather than life by all the
residue of them that remain of this evil family, which
remain in all the places whither I have driven them, saith
Jahveh of the Hosts.1

The threats increase.

I will appoint over ye four families, saith Jahveh, the
sword to slay, and the dogs to drag, and the fowls of the
heaven to tear, and the vermin of the earth to devour.2

Meantime, the symbolic apologues appear. Israel is a
linen girdle that Jeremiah is about to bury on the banks
of the Euphrates, and to find rotten, because Jahveh has
rejected it. Then there are the vessels full of wine, which
^Jahveh dashes the one against the other : the clay vessel
which Jeremiah is going to break, in the midst of the
elders of the people and the elders of the priests, in the

valley of Ben-Ennom.......Thus, saith Jahveh, will I break

this people and this city...Gradually Jeremiah becomes

a living person, the circumstances are detailed, the
surroundings are sketched, the romance unfolds.

Phassur, priest and overseer of the temple, hears
Jeremiah predict the destruction of Israel; he takes him
to prison. On the morrow Jeremiah says to him:—

“ Jahveh hath not called thy name Phassur, but Magor-
missabib [or Fear-on-all-sides].”

He renews his sinister predictions, adding that Phassur
himself and all his people will be taken captive.

In Phassur and Jeremiah, the priest and the prophet,

1 Jeremiah viii. 1-3.

2 Jeremiah xv. 3.
 136

JEREMIAH

the two parties face each other. And presently the author
of the book will reproach the rulers with not doing justice,
with oppressing the weak, with living in luxury. Woe,
he says, to those who do injustice! Woe also to those
who build themselves vast houses, with spacious chambers,
high windows, and cedar and vermilion ceilings.1

The romance continues. King Zedekiah sends two
priests to Jeremiah :—

“ Inquire of Jahveh for us; for Nabuchodonosor king
of Babylon maketh war against us.”

And Jeremiah says to them :—

“ Thus shall ye say to Zedekiah: Thus saith Jahveh,
god of Israel: I will smite the inhabitants of this city
with the pestilence, the sword, and the famine: I will
deliver Zedekiah.”2

The formidable Nabuchodonosor draws near. Can the
humble kingdom of Judah resist him ? But the writer
does not see in him the enemy who is about to destroy
his city and his country; he recognises and salutes the
minister of the judgments of Jahveh.

Behold, saith Jahveh, I send against them Nabuchodo-
nosor, king of Babylon, my servant...and will utterly

destroy them, and make them a desolation, and an hissing,
and perpetual solitudes.

I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice
of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of
the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the
camp.

And this whole land shall be a solitude and a desolation,
and this nation shall serve the king of Babylon seventy
years.3

At the end of seventy years Jahveh will turn against
Babylon, and will chastise it for its pride in thinking that
its strength came from itself, and not from the anger of
Jahveh. The anger of Jahveh is not a metaphorical
expression. Listen to this manifestation of the god who

1 Jeremiah xxii. 14.

2 Jeremiah xxi. 3-7.

8 Jeremiah xxv. 9-11.
 JEREMIAH

137

was afterwards to become the Unconditioned of the
philosophers:—

Jahveh roars from on high : he roars, he roars upon his
habitation: he gives a shout, as they that tread the
grapes, against the earth.

The cry of terror of the shepherds and the affrighted
howling of the flocks are heard, because Jahveh doth spoil
their pasture...

He forsaketh his covert, like a young lion; and the land
becomes a desolation.1

And what about those whom the god has struck ?

And the slain of Jahveh shall be from one end of the
oarth even unto the other; they shall not be lamented,
neither gathered, nor buried: they shall be dung upon the
ground.2

Meantime the romancer tells how Jeremiah is about to
take his stand in the court of the temple, and continues to
predict the ruin of the country; and the priests seize him,
saying

“Thou shalt die! Why dost thou prophesy against
the city ? ”

The people intervene :—

“ This man is not worthy to die; for he hath spoken
to us in the name of Jahveh, our god.”

Jeremiah recommences as soon as he is free. He
warns the neighbouring countries, Edom, Moab, Ammon,
Tyre, and Sidon, that they will be destroyed if they do
not submit to Nabuchodonosor. In order to express it,
he sends yokes and bonds to the kings of the five peoples.

And Jeremiah himself, the writer continues, came
before the people with a wooden yoke on his shoulders.
But there are those who contradict him. Hananiah,
another prophet, says :—

“ Thus speaketh Jahveh, god of Israel, I break the yoke
of the king of Babylon.”

1 Jeremiah xxv. 30-31 and 36-38.

2 Jeremiah xxv. 33.
 138

JEREMIAH

[Prometheus]

Taking the yoke from the neck of Jeremiah, Hananiah
breaks the bar of it, saying:—

“ Thus saith Jahveh: Even so will I break the yoke of
Nabuchodonosor, king of Babylon, from the neck of the
nations.”

Jeremiah is silent, and goes his way. But on the
morrow he comes again before the people with an iron
yoke on his neck.

“ Thus saith Jahveh : Thou hast broken a yoke of
wood, but thou hast made instead a yoke of iron. For
thus saith Jahveh, god of Israel: I put a yoke of iron on
the neck of the nations, that they may serve Nabuchodo-
nosor, king of Babylon, and they shall serve him; and I
give him the beasts of the field also.”

Then, turning to Hananiah :—

“ This year thou shalt die, because thou hast spoken
against Jahveh.”

Hananiah, the romancer adds, died in that year.

Jeremiah is the prophet of death. This people, which
has given itself to the Baals and Astartes, must be
destroyed. The sentence is irrevocable. And he writes
to those who have already been deported to Babylon that
they may not hope to see their country again.

No anarchist ever preached so violently the destruction
of the present social order, that he might build anew the
social order of the future. Jeremiah goes through the
town crying that it is useless to defend oneself, or to
struggle, for the city is forsaken. He summons Nabu-
chodonosor with the sword, the plague, and famine.
Implacably he hands over to him the race of David.

The romancer describes the indignation that breaks
out in Jerusalem. The city gathers in crowds. Jeremiah
is again put in prison. Meantime the army of the king
of Babylon besieges Jerusalem. King Zedekiah goes to
see the prophet in the yard of the prison:—

“ Wherefore dost thou prophesy the ruin of the land ? ”
he says to him.
 JEREMIAH

139

" This land will be restored some day. Once again its
people will buy bouses, fields, and vines.”

And Jeremiah, always joining example with precept, at
once buys a field at Anatbotb, his native village, with all
the ceremony of a burgher who wishes to be quite safe
about his investment. The prophecies of restoration and
glory now increase. When extermination has atoned for
the present crimes, the kingdom of Jerusalem will be able
to rise again, Jahveh will bring back the captives and
re-establish them, and the nations of the earth will be
astonished at the good he will do them.

Thus saith Jahveh: Again there shall be heard in this
place, which ye say shall be desolate, without man and

without beast.....the voice of joy and the voice of gladness,

the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the
voice of them that shall say, Praise Jahveh of the Hosts,

for Jahveh is good, for his mercy endureth for ever.....

For I will cause to return the captivity of the land, as at
the first, saith Jahveh.

Thus saith Jahveh of the Hosts: Again in this place
which is desolate, without man and without beast, and in
all the cities thereof, shall be an habitation of shepherds
causing their flocks to lie down.

In the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the vale,
and in the cities of the south, and in the land of Benjamin,
and in the places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of
Judah, shall the flocks pass again under the hands of him
that telleth them, saith Jahveh.

Behold, the days come, saith Jahveh, that I will perform
that good thing which I have promised unto the house of
Israel and to the house of Judah.

In those days, and at that time, shall I cause the branch
of righteousness to grow up unto David ; and he shall
execute judgment and righteousness in the land.

In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall
dwell safely ; and this is the name wherewith she shall be
called, Jah veh - our-Righteousness.

For thus saith Jahveh: David shall never want a
successor to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel;

Neither shall the priests and the Levites want a
successor before me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle
meat offerings, and to sacrifice continually.1

1 Jeremiah xxxiii. 10-18.
 140

JEREMIAH

But for the moment Jerusalem must be delivered into
the hands of Nabuchodonosor, and burned, and its people
must go into captivity. While the army of Nabuchodo-
nosor presses the siege of the city, Jeremiah begins afresh
his abominable imprecations.

In this romance Jeremiah plays a terrible, odious, and
sublime part. Imagine, says Renan, a Frenchman within
the walls of besieged Paris during the war of 1870 hailing
the minister of heaven in the Emperor William, applauding
his victories, and urging him to destroy Paris and France !
It is quite intelligible, we reply, if the imprecations are
written two hundred and fifty or three hundred years
after the events by a polemist who is illustrating his
political theories with ancient examples.

In another place he reproaches the aristocracy with
“loving strangers.”1 The charge is incomprehensible if
it was made in the days of Josiah and Zedekiah, at the
time when the army of Nabuchodonosor threatened the
city, when Jeremiah is the only friend of the enemies of
his country; it is justified if we put it at the end of the
fourth century, and if the foreigners loved by the aristo-
cracy are Greeks.

One day Jahveh ordered the prophet to write in a book
all the words with which he had inspired him. The
king orders the book to be seized, and has it read to him
by Judi, his secretary. He was sitting in his winter
residence; it was the ninth month; a brazier burned in
front of him. And, as Judi read, the king took the
leaves of the roll, and cast them in the fire.

It was useless, as Jahveh at once dictated to Jeremiah
a new book similar to the first! The orthodox fancy
that posterity thus came to possess the precious text of
the prophet.

Meantime the romance is full of adventures. The
prophet finds it useful to leave a city where he feels no

1 Jeremiah ii. 25.
 JEKEMIAH v

141

longer safe, but he is stopped at the gate of Benjamin by
the officer of the guard, Irijah, the son of Shelemiah.
He is brought before the chief officials, beaten, and put
in a subterraneous dungeon, where he remains several
days. As a special favour the king orders that he be
brought into the yard of the prison, giving him every
day a piece of bread out of the bakers’ street.

Jeremiah is inexorable :—

“Thus saith Jahveh: This city shall be given into
the hand of the king of Babylon, which shall destroy it.”
The chief officials become impatient:—

“Let this man be put to death! For thus he
weakeneth the hands of the men of war.”

“Behold,” says the king, “he is in your hands.”

They take Jeremiah, and cast him into a dungeon,
the cistern of Malchiah, son of Hammelech. There was
no water, but mud only, in the dungeon, in which they
placed him. Now this was noticed by an Ethiopian
eunuch, named Ebed-melech, who was of the king’s
house. The king was sitting before the gate of Benjamin.
Ebed-melech went to seek him, and said :—

“ My lord the king, these men have cast Jeremiah the
prophet into the dungeon, to die of hunger.”

And the king charged Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian, to
take thirty men and withdraw Jeremiah from the dungeon
before he should die. Ebed-melech provided himself
with cords and rags of torn stuff, and, letting them down
to Jeremiah, said to him :—

“Take these cords; put these rags of torn stuff under
thine armholes.”

The holy prophet was saved.

Meantime the siege goes on. Jerusalem is in a
desperate condition. Suddenly, on the ninth day of the
fourth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, a breach
is made in the walls of the city, and Jerusalem is taken
by assault. Nergal-sharezer, Samgar-nebo, and Sarse-
chim, the leaders of Nabuchodonosor’s army, camp in
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JEREMIAH

the ruins of the gates. The writer narrates the catas-
trophe, and tells how the Babylonian generals recognised
in Jeremiah the prophet of the god who had guided

them.....It is easy to see how much history there is in

that.....Speaking the language of Deuteronomy, Nebuzar-

adan, captain of the guards of king Nabuchodonosor, says
to Jeremiah:—

“ Jahveh had pronounced this evil upon this place.
Now Jahveh hath brought it, and done according as he
hath said, because ye have sinned against Jahveh.”1

The romance closes with the adventures of the Jews
who remain in Judaea, and of those who escaped into
Egypt. Jeremiah is one of the latter. In Egypt he
continues his sinister predictions in the shape of threats
and vociferations against the nations of Palestine, against
Babylon itself, and, more than ever, against his com-
patriots.

But at the moment when he relates the destruction of
the ancient land of the Jews, the author of the romance
of Jeremiah declares that Jahveh, god of the Jews, is
triumphant. The ardent nationalism which could not be
established while the nation was intact is glorified by the
sombre romancer amid the ruins and the dispersal. Like
some great fire that destroys the stubble and the wood,
but leaves unhurt the granite columns, the ruin of
Jerusalem has destroyed the lower elements in Israel,
without touching the incombustible and unalterable work
that was done by Jahveh. The temple built by Solomon
to the gods of Canaan, to Moloch, the Baals, and the
Astartes, is in flames; but the melting down of their
idols does but leave erect, in bronze, to stand for thousands
of years, the name of Jahveh, who alone is renovated.

Jeremiah has prophesied ruin....

I send upon ye, he said, the sword, the famine, and
the pestilence; I will treat ye as vile figs that cannot be

1 Jeremiah xl. 2-3.
 JEREMIAH

143

eaten, they are so evil; I will deliver ye to be molested
by the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, and a
desolation, and an hissing, and a reproach among the
nations whither I have driven ye; because ye have not
hearkened to my words, saith Jahveh, which I sent unto
ye by my servants the prophets.1

But he has also prophesied the restoration :—

I will bring again your captives; I will bring ye from
the nations whither I have driven ye, and I will cause ye
to return to the places whence I have driven ye......

The legend is born; it grows and spreads :—

Fear thou not, Jacob, my servant; for, behold, I am
thy saviour, and will bring thy seed from the land of
their captivity.

And I shall be with thee, to save thee, for I shall then
make a full end of the nations whither I have scattered
thee. And thou shalt be my people, and I will be
thy god.

The whirlwind goeth forth with fury, the fierce anger
of Jahveh shall not return, until he hath performed the
intents of his heart....

I love thee with an everlasting love. I will build thee
again, 0 virgin of Israel. Thou shalt again be adorned
with thy tabrets, and shalt dance. Thou shalt again
plant vines upon the mountains.

And there shall be a day that the peoples shall cry:
Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion, unto Jahveh, our god.

For thus saith Jahveh: Sing with gladness for Jacob.
Hear the word of Jahveh, O ye nations, and declare it in
the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will
gather him......Thus saith Jahveh, god of Israel.2

The old idolatrous people of Judah is destroyed; but
the Jewish people is about to arise, and Jahveh, after
dragging it through all the ignominy of the dispersal,
promises it a new Jerusalem.

Jewish history is, for the book of Jeremiah, merely an
illustration of a doctrine. There is need to exhort con-
temporaries to be faithful to the powerful nationalism
symbolised by the name of Jahveh. New gods, as

1 Jeremiah xxix. 17-19.

2 Jeremiah xxx., xxxi.
 144

JEKEMIAH

abominable as the Moloch, the Baals, and the Astartes
of former times, have appeared; they are called Greek
gods ; and the forsaking of Jahveh for Moloch, Baal, and
Astarte is only a myth representing the Hellenic apostasy.
The Jewish people is warned by the example of its
fathers, the fearful example of the ruin, and the mira-
culous example of the restoration. Like his predecessors
and followers, the sombre author of the prophecies of
Jeremiah gives a lesson for the present in the shape of a
history of the past. But the cold dogmatism of the
earlier historical books has been replaced by the impas-
sioned romance of a man of genius who, breathing life
into the dogma, dramatises the implacable action of the
national god, of whom he is the spokesman.

But we must not forget that, for the author of the
book of Jeremiah, just as for the authors of the books of
Hosea and Amos, the criminals who are forgetting the
old traditions and turning to foreign cults are the priest-
aristocrats who rule the State, the privileged leaders who
have been seduced by the pleasantness of Hellenism.
The democratic character of the prophetic writers is
clearly shown in the fact that the aristocracy is the
party of those who favour the novelties they attack with
their threats, and the democracy is the party of the pure
who have escaped the contagion ; it is seen just as clearly
in the fact that the prophetic writers were men of the
people rising in opposition to the men of the aristocracy.
But there was at the same time a profound necessity for
this, though it was an outcome of the circumstances.
On three counts the aristocracy had to be denounced by
the prophets; first because, about the year 332, it was
identifying itself with the anti-traditionalist party,
secondly because the prophets did not arise within its
ranks, and thirdly because democracy was a logical
outcome of the evolution of Judaism.

There was no democracy, in the modern sense of
the word, in Greece; there was none at Borne. The
 JEREMIAH

[Prometheus]

145

democracies of Greece and Rome are privileged classes
below which swarms the vast crowd of all who are not
citizens. Democracy was born at Jerusalem.

The terrible fierceness of the Jewish soul could not
indeed fail to see the conclusion of its premises.
Foreigners are enemies; in face of them the Jews are
united in struggle and hatred. A similar hostility, a
hatred common to a whole people, creates in that people
a bond of love like the savage and fanatical bond that
held the Jews together. Implacable enemies of other
peoples, they had to be themselves indissolubly united.
All were sons of Jahveh, and so all were brothers, and
all must be equal before Jahveh. When a glowing
patriotism centres about a military leader, a king, or a
dynasty, the State falls into a hierarchy below this
supreme head, and inspires in all its subjects a duty of
love of the master. But in a theocracy, when the name
which expresses the nationalism of a people is that of its
god, there is an inevitable implication of democratic
equality. Below the national god there must be leaders
to rule; as long as these rulers are faithful to their
duties, the ruled may accept them. But no fault will be
forgiven to this aristocracy; the moment it fails, its
subjects will remember their rights. Sooner or later it
is doomed to perish.

A hierarchic society admits, not indeed the oppression
of the weak by the strong, but the supremacy of the
strong. A few must be above, and the many must be
below; inequality of duties implies inequality of rights.
In a theocracy the god alone is master. There is an
unrestricted demand for equality. It seems intolerable
enough that some shall be feeble and others strong; but
the feeble, at least, will not suffer even the appearance of
oppression. Hence we get what has been called the
victory of Judaism; the orphan, the widow, and the
wage-earner will be infinitely protected. But let us not
be too sentimental about it; the orphan, the widow, and

L
 146

JEREMIAH

the wage-earner were not less protected in pagan Rome
than in Jerusalem. Let us have the courage to recognise
more nobleness in the strong man who gives than in the
weak who asks. It is noble in the strong to protect the
weak; but when the weak himself claims to be protected,
the claim is just, but has no title to our admiration. Let
us reserve our admiration for a Marcus Aurelius, master
of the world, who practises lofty virtues; and when we
see the ghetto stir itself and murmur against the
oppressor, let us grant these people the satisfaction that
we may owe them, and pass on.

In earlier days the Mosaic books, and the books of
Judges, Samuel, and Kings, had threatened with a divine
punishment the crime of idolatry—that is to say, the
abandonment of the national traditions. The prophetic
books threaten with divine punishment, first the crime
of idolatry, then the crime which they call injustice, and
which is the oppression of the people by its aristocracy.
This novelty should suffice to show commentators that
the prophetic books are later than the Mosaic books.
From the time of Hosea and Amos, especially from the
time of Jeremiah, Judaism, which has been a national
fact, becomes at the same time a democratic fact. By
the example of a past, which he dramatises, the author
of the romance of Jeremiah pursues a twofold aim; he
professes to restore the nationalism of the Jews, but he
wants to found the democracy of the Jews. Judaism
was destined to be the party of the lowly; a day was to
come when the Jewish aristocracy, almost entirely
Hellenistic, would be excluded from Judaism. The
author of the book of Jeremiah, following the authors
of the books of Hosea and Amos, brings under a common
anathema those who seemed to favour the Hellenic
idolatry and reject the cult of the national god, and those
who enriched themselves, gave themselves to luxury,
oppressed the people, and refused justice to the weak.

.1 will get me unto the great men, and will speak unto
 JEREMIAH

147

them; for they have known the way of Jahveh, and the
judgment of their god; but these have altogether broken
the yoke, and burst the bonds.

....Thy children have forsaken me, and swear by

gods that are no gods. They commit adultery, and
assemble themselves by troops in the harlot’s house.
They are well-fed horses; they run here and there, and
every one neighs after his neighbour’s wife.1

As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of
deceit; therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.

They are waxen fat, they shine; they judge not the"
cause of the fatherless; they prosper; the right of the
needy do they not judge.2

Here is the most characteristic speech of the anti-
sacerdotal tribune:—

Thus saith Jahveh of the Hosts, god of Israel: Put

your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices...I spake not

unto your fathers, nor commanded them, in the day that
I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning
burnt offerings or sacrifices.3

Here the prophet is actually declaring that Jahveh gave
Moses no laws concerning sacrifices and holocausts! Is
he referring to the ritual prescriptions of Deuteronomy ?
No, for Jeremiah is in his whole book faithful both to the
spirit and the letter of Deuteronomy. He is referring to
the new ritual laws which the priests were then promul-
gating in the Sacerdotal Code, the appearance of which
we may fix by the opposition of Jeremiah.

What does the old democrat demand in place of these
ritual laws which the aristocracy is multiplying about the
cult ?

This thing commanded I them, saying, Obey my voice,
and I will be your god, and ye shall be my people; and
walk ye in the way that I have commanded you, that it
may he well unto you.4

Jeremiah is faithful to Deuteronomy and Esdras; he is
faithful to the formula of Hosea :—

“ I desire love; that is to say, love of the god—that is

1 Jeremiah v. 5-8.

3 Jeremiah vii. 21-22.

2 Jeremiah v. 27-28.

4 Jeremiah vii. 23.
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JEREMIAH

to say, patriotism ; I desire patriotism, and not sacrifices.
I desire respect for the god; that is to say, respect for the
national institutions, respect for the traditions; I desire
respect for the traditions rather than burnt offerings.”1
In the book of Jeremiah the Jewish soul had found
expression. Just as violent, Deuteronomy had formerly
continued the work of the first Mosaic legislators; the
new work, outlined in the books of Hosea and Amos,
was now continued. In face of a decadent aristocracy,
denationalised by Hellenism, the rigorist party, at once
traditionalist and democratic, was taking over the
inheritance of Judaism. The book of Jeremiah was
born of it, and constituted it.

1 See above, p. 128.
 Chapter III.

EZEKIEL

§ 1. The First Book of Ezekiel.

Beside the writers of genius who imagined Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and Isaiah, Jewish history shows us, as disciples
repeating the lessons of the masters, the “ minor prophets ”
of Judaism—Michah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Joel, etc.
We will consider only the original works, and will now
deal with the strange and poignant romance entitled the
prophecy of Ezekiel.

In the days when this work was written Judaea was in
turn the prey of the Seleucids of Syria and the Ptolemies
of Egypt; but the second of the great prophetic writers
refuses, like the other Jewish writers, to speak in the
present, and seeks in the past the hero and the framework
of his romance. He chooses the same period as the
author of the romance of Jeremiah. While, however,
the latter had placed the action in Jerusalem, the author
of the romance of Ezekiel places it in Babylonia.

As we know, in 599, eleven years before he destroyed
Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah, Nabucliodonosor
had taken Jerusalem for the first time, but was content
to impose severe conditions on it and to deport some
thousands of its inhabitants to Babylonia. The romance
of Ezekiel opens near the river Chobar, not far from
Babylon, in the midst of these first victims of deportation.
The eleven years will soon be over; in Palestine the king
of Judah has sought to throw off the yoke of Nabuchodo-
nosor; the latter has returned with his formidable army;
Jerusalem is besieged; the day of its capture and
destruction is at hand.

Meantime the deported Israelites drag out their

149
 150

EZEKIEL

miserable lives in the land of exile, bemoaning their
country and questioning in their hearts the god who has
smitten them. Among them is a prophet, Ezekiel, son
of Buzi, priest of Jahveh. And suddenly, on the fifth
day of the fourth month, the hand of Jahveh is on him.

I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the
north, a great cloud and a fire intermingled, and a
brightness was about it; and out of the midst of the
fire came the likeness of glowing brass.

And out of the midst thereof appeared four animals.
And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of
a man.

And every one had four faces, and every one had four
wings.

And their feet were straight; and the sole of their feet
was like the sole of a calf’s foot, and they sparkled like
burnished brass.

And they had the hands of a man under their wings on
their four sides; and they four had their faces and their
wings.

Their wings were joined one to another; they turned
not when they went; they went every one straight
forward.

As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face
of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side; and
they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four
also had the face of an eagle.

Thus were their faces; and their wings were stretched
upward; two wings of every one were joined to those of
another, and two covered their bodies.

And they went every one straight forward ; whither the
spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when
they went.

As for the likeness of these animals, their appearance
was like coals of fire, burning like torches; and this fire
went up and down among the animals; it gave forth a
bright light, and out of it went forth lightning.

And the animals ran and returned, as the appearance
of a flash of lightning...

Above the heads of the animals there was, as it were, a
firmament of terrible crystals, stretched forth over their
heads above.

And under the firmament were their wings straight, the
one toward the other......

[Prometheus]

 ^HE ElRST BOOK OB EZEKIEL

15i

And I heard the noise of their wings, when they went,
like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty,
a noise of great tumult as the noise of a camp.

When they stood, they let down their wings; and there
was a voice from the firmament that was above their
heads, when they stood, and let down their wings.

And above the firmament that was above their heads
there was the likeness of a sapphire stone, in the form of
a throne; and upon the likeness of the throne appeared
the likeness of a man sitting on it, above.

And I saw as the appearance of glowing brass, as the
appearance of fire, round about, serving as his home, from
his loins upward, and from his loins downward ; I saw, as
it were, the appearance of fire with, all around, a bright
light.1

It is Jahveh himself, mounted on his chariot of
Kerubim. At a later date the Christian Church will, for
the men of the West reared in the Hellenic tradition,
turn these terrible Kerubim into our charming cherubs,
chubby and curly-haired, with pretty white wings. But
the Kerubim, offspring of Babylon, brought to Jerusalem
with the traditions of ancient Chaldaea, were monsters
with the heads of animals, the bodies of bulls, two pairs
of wings, spitting fire, as we see them in the Babylonian
ruins. Henceforward the Kerubim will play their part
in the manifestations of Jahveh.

Jahveh speaks to Ezekiel:—

“ Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to
these nations that have rebelled against me; they and
their fathers have rebelled against me, even unto this day.
I do send thee unto these impudent and stiff-hearted
children, and thou shalt say unto them : Thus saith the
lord Jahveh.”2

Ezekiel rises ; he takes a brick, and on it he represents
Jerusalem besieged, and, round about it, the trenches,
terraces, and camps, and the rams round the walls; and
he takes an iron stove, and puts it, like an iron wall,
between him and the city ; for at this moment, says the

1 Ezekiel i.

Ezekiel ii. 3-4.
 152

EZEKIEL

writer, Jerusalem is besieged by Nabuchodonosor. Then
he lies down on the left side, and remains lying for three
hundred and ninety days, bearing the iniquity of Ephraim.
Then he turns to the right side, and remains lying thus
for forty days, bearing the iniquity of Judah. With corn,
barley, beans, and lentils he has prepared as many loaves
as he must remain days lying down, and has had them
baked in dung. So will the children of Israel eat a defiled
bread. As a favour, Ezekiel obtains permission of his
god to bake his bread in cow’s dung instead of in human
excrements. And he prophesies against the guilty
city.

We are now in the temple of Jahveh, dishonoured by
all kinds of idolatries and prostitutions. Opposite the
holy of holies is the idol of jealousy; here are all sorts of
reptiles and abominable beasts, worshipped by seventy
sheiks, with censers in their hands; there are women
sitting and weeping over Adonis; there, again, are twenty-

five young men throwing kisses to the sun......Does that

not cry for vengeance ?

Meantime the Kerubim unfold their wings, and bear
the prophet from chapter to chapter.

Now the hero prepares his travelling garments, and in
the evening, in the midst of his silent compatriots, he
sets out as exiles do. He has not gone out of his house
by the door; he has, with his own hand, made a breach
in the wall. Under the eyes of his compatriots he places
on his shoulder the mantle of a traveller, and departs,
covering his face, so that it shall be a sign to the house
of Israel. And he says:—

I am your sign; like as I have done ye shall do. Ye
shall go into captivity.

Your princes, in the midst of you, shall put their
mantles on their shoulders, and shall go forth in the
twilight; the wall will be dug through to let them pass
out; they shall cover their faces, that they see not the
ground.1

1 Ezekiel xii. 11-12.
 THE FIRST BOOK OF EZEKIEL

153

Later the lord addresses the guilty spouse, her whom
he has distinguished and clothed and adorned, and who
has prostituted herself to strangers.

In another place there are two women, Aholah and
Aholibah—that is to say, Samaria and Jerusalem—whom
the master had chosen. Both have been unfaithful; they
have suffered their bosoms to be touched; they have
uncovered their bellies; they have called those who
passed by to their beds. Loaded with ornaments, their
eyes painted, sitting on magnificent beds, with bracelets on
their arms and crowns on their heads, near a table covered
with incense and oil, they have, with gesture and voice,
called upon the blue-cloaked Assyrians, the pachas and
young horsemen of Assyria, the red-robed Chaldseans,
with mitres of flowing colours. They have smiled when
the Egyptians have stroked their breasts in memory of
their virginity. But they will be despoiled of their
ornaments, they will have their bosoms torn, they will be
left naked on the ground, the nose and ears cut off.

Meantime the threats are carried out. One day a
fugitive comes, who has escaped from Jerusalem, and he
says:—

“ The city has been taken.”

Then Jahveh speaks to Ezekiel:—

O thou, son of man, prophesy unto the mountains of
Israel, and say: Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word
of Jahveh...

Because they have made you desolate, and swallowed
you up on every side, and ye became a prey among the
nations;

Thus saith the lord Jahveh to the mountains and to
the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys, to the desolate
ruins and to the cities that are forsaken, which became a
prey and a derision ;

Thus saith the lord Jahveh : I will speak, in the fire of
my jealousy, against the residue of the nations, which
have appointed my land into their possession, to cast it
out for a prey.

Thus saith the lord Jahveh: I lift up my hand; the
nations that are about you, they shall bear their shame.
 154

EZEKIEL

But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth
your branches, and yield your fruit to my people.

Eor, behold, I will turn unto you, and ye shall be
tilled and sown;

And I will multiply upon you man and beast; and
they shall increase and bring fruit; and I will do better
unto you than at your beginnings, and ye shall know that
I am Jahveh.1

Ezekiel is borne through space. He walks in the
midst of a valley, which is full of bones, numbers of
bones, very dry bones.

And Jahveh saith : Prophesy unto these bones, and
say unto them, 0 ye dry bones, hear the word of Jahveh.

Thus saith the lord Jahveh unto these bones: Behold,
I will cause spirit to enter into you, and ye shall live.

And I will lay sinews upon you, and bring up flesh
upon you, and cover you with skin, and put spirit in you,
and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am Jahveh.

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I
prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and
the bones came together, bone to his bone.

And when I beheld, lo, the sinews were on them, and
the flesh grew, and the skin covered them ; but there was
no spirit in them.

And he said unto me, Prophesy unto the spirit,
prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: Thus saith
the lord Jahveh : Come from the four winds, 0 spirit,
and breathe upon these slain that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the spirit
came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their
feet, an exceeding great army.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are
the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, Our bones
are dried ; our hope is lost; we are undone.

Therefore prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith
the lord Jahveh : Behold, I open your graves, and cause
you to come up out of } our graves, 0 my people, and
bring you into the land of Israel.

And ye shall know that I am Jahveh, when I have
opened your graves, and brought you up out of your
graves, O my people.

And I shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live;

1 Ezekiel xxxvi. 1-11.
 THE SECOND BOOK OE EZEKIEL

155

and I shall place you in your own land, and ye shall
know that it is I, Jahveh, who hath spoken it and
performed it, saith Jahveh.1

The earlier prophets promised Israel a happy future;
they said that Jahveh himself would accomplish the work
of liberation. Ezekiel announces that the day of Jahveh
will come only after frightful catastrophes, in the midst
of the direst anguish. The Jewish people must not hope
to enter peacefully, under a serene sky, into its era of
happiness. To fulfil the promise there must first be
frightful days ; no doubt in order that Israel may atone
for its former crimes, but also in order that it may the
better realise the price of the favours which Jahveh
reserves for it.

And in the depths of the north, among horsemen with
helmet and shield, all terribly clothed, all wielding the
sword, a multitude gathered to make plunder, to ruin the
nations and destroy the flocks, he evokes Gog, king of
Magog, prince of Rosch, Meshech, and Tubal.

Then, when the desolation is at its height, Jahveh
will manifest himself in an upheaval of the mountains, a
fall of the rocks, a rending of the walls, with pestilence
and blood, and a rain of fire and sulphur and stones
falling like hail; he will appear on his chariot drawn by
the four Kerubim ; he will see that he is recognised by
the nations; and they will know that it is Jahveh.

§ 2. The Second Book of Ezekiel: the Legends of Samuel,
Elijah, and Elisha.

Success and Check of the Prophetic Party.

Our Bibles do not distinguish the two books of
Ezekiel; but the testimony of the Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus shows2 that the two parts, so different
from each other, of the narrative of Ezekiel (chs. i.-xxxix.

1 Ezekiel xxxvii.

2 Jewish Antiquities, x. G.
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EZEKIEL

and chs. xl.-xlviii.) were originally separate. The second
book of Ezekiel is a piece of tentative legislation which
the prophetic party opposed to the Mosaic legislation.

About the same time certain writers of the same
group created or developed the legends of Samuel, Elijah,
and Elisha, which were afterwards incorporated in the
books of Samuel and Kings. Samuel was a character of
the older historical books; Elijah and Elisha seem, on
the contrary, to have been almost invented by the
prophetic school, and their adventures wholly fictitious.
The legends of Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha were put
forward by the prophetic party in opposition to the
Mosaic legends, just as the legislation of Ezekiel was in
opposition to the Mosaic legislation.

The prophetic movement had issued from the terrible
upheavals which preceded and followed the arrival of
Alexander the Great in 332. After the battle of Ipsus,
the successors of Alexander having definitively divided
his empire between them, an era of less frightful trouble,
if not an entirely peaceful era, had set in. This period
of semi-tranquillity corresponds, in Jewish history, to
the pontificate of Simeon I., called Simeon the Just,
probably 300-270. Ptolemy is king of Egypt; Seleucus
king of Syria. The wars between Egypt and Syria are
over for a time. Jerusalem is still subject, but there is
an end of the passing of armies, the battles, the taking
by storm, the massacres, and the deportations.

We must not, however, take literally the statements of
the Siracid and of the Talmud about the happiness of
Judsea under Simeon the Just. It was a comparative
happiness, in view of the frightful calamities of the
preceding and following periods. Let us conceive the
pontificate of Simeon the Just as a calm amid the storms
which laid Judaea desolate from the year 350 to the
Christian era; and let us understand that not one of the
causes of the misery and ignominy that beset the
unhappy country had been removed. Yet these years of
 THE SECOND BOOK OF EZEKIEL

157

calm enabled the sacerdotal aristocracy, on the one hand,
to complete the work of the Mosaic legislation,1 and the
prophetic party, on the other hand, to make its first
effort to seize the government.

The books of Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the
minor prophets had been very successful with the popula-
tion of Jerusalem. They had succeeded in every case in
preventing the Hellenisation of Judaea. The prophetic
writers had proved that to Hellenise Judaea would be
to denationalise it; they had convicted the Hellenising
priests, before the tribunal of public opinion, of forfeiture ;
they had restored the ancient traditions to honour.
Moreover, though Hellenism had made terrible inroads
into the nobility of Jerusalem for a third of a century, it
could not have absorbed it; though a large number of
these priest-levites, to whom had fallen all the power and
all the wealth of Jerusalem, had abandoned themselves to
the charm of Hellenic novelties, others must assuredly
have protested, in conjunction with the democrats, against
the forsaking of ancient customs. The latter could only
reproach an Amos, a Hosea, or a Jeremiah, with exaggera-
tion. Supported by the people of Jerusalem, badly fought
by the more Hellenising aristocrats, and hardly disapproved
by the others, the prophetic writers had, at least to some
extent, succeeded in imposing their ideas.

The prophetic writers and the crowd of common folk
who had followed them now formed an opposition party
against the ruling aristocracy. Would the ambition of
this turbulent minority be satisfied with a first victory ?
They professed to reform the government and the Church
of Jerusalem; but what is the reform of a government or
a Church if not the substitution of a better government
and a different Church ?

Bead over again the invectives of the prophetic writers
against the sacerdotal aristocracy, their threats and their

1 See above, p. 95.
 158

[Prometheus]

EZEKIEL

maledictions. What did they want ? The fall of the
priest-aristocrats. It is but a step from that to wish to
take their place or claim to succeed them, and this step
was taken with the second book of Ezekiel and the legends
of Samuel, Elijah, and Elislia.

There was, however, no open rupture.

It is clear that the prophetic party at Jerusalem was a
kind of Jewish protestantism. Religiously, they demanded
a return to the ancient traditions and ways, the purity of
the primitive dogmas, and the severity of the ancient
virtues. Politically, they wanted to replace an ancient
aristocratic government by a new democratic government.
In ancient Judcea, as in certain German towns in the
sixteenth century, to govern religiously was to govern
politically; and the struggle of Jewish prophetism with
the Mosaic Levitism, or of Protestantism with the Roman
Church, is the struggle of a democratic theocracy to take
the place of an aristocratic theocracy.

But, while the men for whom the second book of
Ezekiel and the legends of Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha
were composed are reformers, they were not rebels, at
least in the third century. Perhaps they had not among
them a man of decision who could, like Luther, break
openly with the established authority; perhaps they would
not consent to such a rupture. They merely betray at
times a significant violence against the hostile party.1
They flatter themselves that they rely on persuasion for
the acceptance of their novelties; they refuse to employ
insurrectionary means; they give a foretaste of the art of
despoiling with a blessing.

On the other hand, they do not reform for the pleasure
of reforming. All that, in the Mosaic legislation and
customs, seems to them to befit the new priesthood which
they desire to institute, is accepted by them. They
preserve as much, and alter as little, as possible of the

1 See, for instance, Ezekiel xliv. 10-15.
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159

Levitical prescriptions; their innovations are confined to
essential things. Hence there are many resemblances in
detail between the Mosaic legislation and that of Ezekiel,
the customs consecrated by the books of Moses and those
that the legends of Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha propose to
establish.

Avowing themselves to be above all traditionalists, the
men of the prophetic party were careful to avoid revolu-
tionary airs. They purported merely to establish new
institutions by the side of the old; and there again, as we
shall see, they went too far. In reality they tended
toward a change of personalities rather than a change of
institutions.

The sanctuary shall be for the priests, sons of Zadok,
which have kept my charge, which went not astray when
the children of Israel went astray, as the Levites went
astray.1

The procedure of the authors of Ezekiel, Elijah, and
Elisha is the unvarying procedure of Jewish literature.
They know that the priesthood which governs at Jerusalem
comes from Moses, and is of divine institution ; prophetism
is careful not to throw doubt on those truths. But they
teach and explain that, beside this government of Mosaic
origin and divine institution, there is another government,
another priesthood, likewise of divine institution, but of
prophetic origin, of which Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha
were the protagonists. Against Aaron, the first Mosaic
high-priest, they put Zadok, high-priest of King Solomon.
The priests of the levitic aristocracy were called Aaronids ;
an attempt will be made to give the name of Zadocids to
the priests of the prophetic party. The books of Moses
had been written to justify and legitimise the official
priesthood, among other institutions; in order to create
a new prophetic priesthood, they fabricate ancient books
from which it appears that Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha
were prophets invested with the high sacerdotal functions,

1 Ezekiel xlviii. 11.
 160

EZEKIEL

or that Jahveh himself dictated to his prophet Ezekiel,
three hundred years before, the legislation with which
they flatter themselves they will quietly overthrow the old
Levitic government. In order to attain its objects, the
prophetic party, faithful to the delinquencies of Judaism,
uses the customary stratagem of the pseudo-ancient books,
and appeals to the will of the national god, which is said
to have been made known some centuries before in
prophecies and legends which have been fortunately
recovered.

We will not linger over the legends of Samuel, Elijah,
and Elisha. They relate that Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha
were all three prophets, but that all three exercised the
priesthood—which is in contradiction to the Levitic
institution. What is worse, all three sacrificed outside
of Jerusalem, or of the sanctuary in which the ark of
Jahveh was kept—a thing illicit in Samuel’s case, but
criminal in the case of Elijah and Elisha, according to
the express terms of the Mosaic law, because both are
supposed to be later than Solomon and the building of
the temple. We may add that most of the adventures of
the three prophets are “ duplicates ” of the adventures of
Moses or Mosaic characters; for instance, Elijah going up
to Jahveh on Horeb.1 Finally, and decisively, Samuel is
represented as taking the place of the contemporary high-
priest, who has become unworthy; as to Elijah and Elisha,
they ignore the Levitic priesthood.

We will make a summary analysis of the legislation
proposed by the second book of Ezekiel.

The book opens with a plan of rebuilding the temple.
The question was then being discussed, and the plan of
Ezekiel agreed so well with the feeling of his contem-
poraries that the high-priest Simeon the Just caused the
temple to be restored at that time, from the foundations
to the sanctuary, including the enclosing walls.2

1 1 Kings xix. 6-18.

2 See Ecclesiasticus 1, 1-3,
 THE SECOND BOOK OE EZEKIEL

161

One day, it seems (the author of the second book of
Ezekiel says which day: the second of the first month
of the twenty-fifth year), the prophet is transported in
ecstasy, in the land of Israel, to the top of the holy moun-
tain. Here he sees a man whose appearance was like to
brass; it is not clear if this man is Jahveh himself or an
angel of Jahveh. Angel or god, this man held in his
hand a line of flax and a measuring reed. He says to
Ezekiel:—

Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with
thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall show
thee; and declare all that thou seest to the house of
Israel.1

Then the divine apparition takes, with its cord and
reed, all the measurements of a building, which is the

ideal temple.....And Ezekiel notes carefully:—

The threshold, one reed......

The first chamber, one reed.....

The vestibule, eight cubits.....

The posts of the vestibule, two cubits.....

There are six pages of it in our Hebrew Bible, for the
writer enters into the minutest details. The attempt has
been made to reconstruct the plan of this edifice with its
minute measurements. Unfortunately, certain essential
points are wanting ; there are evident errors in the text,
and some contradictions. The plan cannot be set up
without many hypotheses.

When scholars believed in the authenticity of the book
of Ezekiel, and placed it in the period of the Deportation,
the description was sometimes referred to the temple of
Solomon, which had just been destroyed, and sometimes
to the temple which Zorobabel was about to build. We
do not know anything of the temple of Solomon. We
suspect what the temple of Zorobabel was like: a humble
building, made of fragments, with no size or harmony—
something like Our Lady of Loretto in point of size,

1 Ezekiel xl. 4.

M
 162

EZEKIEL

Eenan says. The celebrated temple in which Jesus of
Nazareth preached was the third temple, the masterpiece
of Herod the Great. A simple plan of reconstruction, the
temple described by Ezekiel wras an idealisation of the
modest sanctuary of Zorobabel, which seemed inadequate
to all in the third century. Without departing from its
arrangement and general proportions, the writer pointed
out to his contemporaries what improvements were advis-
able, and what should be done to bring the building up to
the height of the required splendour. But, acting on the
old Judaic method, he thought it best to attribute his
plans and counsels to Jahveh himself, speaking through
the ancient prophet Ezekiel.

When the temple is described, with its sanctuary,
vestibules, courts, external galleries, and priests’ lodgings,
Ezekiel expounds the rites of the altar and the way of
offering holocausts and shedding blood on it. He then
describes the new organisation of the clergy, and he
suddenly launches anathema on the old Mosaic clergy:—

Let it suffice you of all your abominations, in that ye
have brought into my sanctuary strangers, uncircumcised
in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary,
to pollute it, when ye offer my bread, the fat and the
blood, and they have broken my covenant because of all
your abominations.1

The old Mosaic clergy, which has been led into foreign
abominations—that is to say, Hellenism—is condemned.
It has been faithless to Jahveh. It must be replaced by
a new clergy issuing from the prophetic party. So, in
the legends of Samuel, the prophet takes the place of the
Levitic high-priest. We have quoted the characteristic
phrase:—

The sanctuaries shall be for the priests, sons of Zadok,
who went not astray, as the Levites went astray.

For the priests who are sons of Aaron will be sub-
stituted the priests who are sons of Zadok. In reality,

1 Ezekiel xliv. 7.
 THE SECOND BOOK OF EZEKIEL

163

the Zadocids are the new sacerdotal corps which the
prophetic party wants to substitute for the old Levitic
corps in the administration of the temple and the govern-
ment of the State; or, rather, the parts are reversed.
The former aristocrats will become the servants of the
new masters. For the first time we find in Judaism the
revolutionary formula, “ The first shall be last.”1

There follows a complete legislation of the cult, a full
ritual, differing little from the Mosaic code. We know
that the Jews do not innovate without some use. Then
there is a political legislation, in which we find again the
determination to establish a government proceeding from
prophetism.

A prince is set at the head of the hierarchy. The
Hebrew text does not say either a high-priest or a king;
nasi means originally the head of a tribe. We must see
to what this title corresponds.

The nasi of Ezekiel could, without having the title,
exercise the functions of a king; democracies often lean
to Caesarism, out of fear of aristocracies; the Jewish
books are full of the expectation of a monarch descending
from David; in fine, some have thought of the Machabees,
and it has been suggested that the legislative part of the
book of Ezekiel might belong to the second century.
But the nasi of Ezekiel has none of the characters of a
king or a tyrant.

It has also been asked if the institution of the nasi did
not correspond to a movement of ideas that took place,
from the third century, in favour of a military theocracy,
with a kind of head of the executive power depending on
a legislative priesthood. The Persian peace had formerly
allowed them to form a sacerdotal government without
military organisation; but since the coming of Alexander
the state of war had been almost permanent round
Jerusalem. Below the priests who governed the State

1 See Ezekiel xliv. 10-15.
 164

EZEKIEL

there might, these writers conclude, have seemed to be
a need for an executive power, a minister of war, a
general commander of the troops which wTere charged to
guard the temple.

It is a gratuitous hypothesis, with nothing to confirm
it. Nothing in the text of Ezekiel allows us to liken the
nasi to an executive of any kind. Indeed, the military
spirit was never less in any people than it was among
the Jews; and if there was one party in which the
military spirit was wanting, it was the prophetic party.
The old aristocracy may have developed a military spirit
with its Hellenism ; the prophetic writers, on the
contrary, want no other guardian of the temple than
Jahveh. The psalms and apocalypses will push to
paroxysmal extremes this exclusive abandonment of
oneself in the hands of the deity. A military insti-
tution seems to be incompatible with the prophetic tradi-
tion.

The Biblical scholars who have studied the question of
the nasi of Ezekiel should have been edified by the
extraordinary absence of the high-priest, the cohen
hagadol, from this legislation. In reality, the prince, in
the second book of Ezekiel, is the new title proposed by
the prophetic party for the new high-priests. The former
high-priests, of the aristocratic and Hellenising party—
the Aaronid high-priests—were cohen hagadol; the new
high-priests, of the democratic party, the Zadocids, must
be nasi. A new dynasty must have a new name.
Though the cohen hagadol is not mentioned in the
legislation of Ezekiel, the functions attributed to the
nasi are his. At the head of the reformed sacerdotal
corps the author of the book of Ezekiel puts a reformed
high-priest, a religious as well as political character.

The remainder of the plan presents no difficulty. The
sacerdotal body will govern and render justice by the
side of the prince.

Below them Israel, its theoretical frontiers restored,

[Prometheus]

 THE SECOND BOOK OF EZEKIEL

165

mistress of Galilee and Samaria, will enjoy the old land
of Canaan promised formerly to the patriarchs.

And in the end we have the most chimerical utopia
that has ever been imagined. The land of Palestine is
divided among the twelve ideal tribes by means of straight
lines drawn from east to west, forming twelve geome-
trical and almost equal portions, with Jerusalem in the
centre, a sort of State of the church, the privileged
portion of the new priests. And the book Ezekiel closes
with these words :—

And the name of the city from that day shall be:—
Jahveh-Shamma, Jahveh-Is-Here.1

The enterprise of the prophetic party failed.

Practical impossibilities, such as that of realising the
extravagant division of the land of Canaan into
geometrical portions among tribes that existed only in
theory, would not have been an obstacle to the success
of the legislation of Ezekiel; the Jewish spirit always
liked to combine utopia with reality. The literary
poorness of Ezekiel’s project was a graver obstacle.

Becall the legendary fables, the profound and remote
atmosphere, of the Mosaic books. There is nothing of
the kind in the second book of Ezekiel. The first book
of Ezekiel, the lyric book, was full of sublimity and
beauty, but the second was too earthy, too devoid of
inspiration, too bare of fiction, to captivate oriental
souls. The Mosaic law had been the work of several
generations of national poets, who were at the same
time resolute politicians. The law of Ezekiel was the
work of a party-man, who lacked imagination.

Even the very traditionalism that had made the
fortune of the prophetic party was in the way of its
ambition. Its adherents were bound to present them-
selves as the authentic continuers of the ancient institu-
tions. How, then, could they impose new ones ? How

1 Ezekiel xlviii. 35.
 166

EZEKIEL

could they reconcile with the respect due to the Mosaic
legends some of the counter-legends of Samuel, Elijah,
and Elisha ?

The legislation of Ezekiel did not succeed. The
prescriptions and institutions imitated from the Mosaic
codes lived, and might give the democrats some illusion
of success; the innovations failed.

These intrinsic reasons for the failure of the prophetic
enterprise were supplemented by the historical circum-
stances in which it took place.

In a period of trouble, in opposition to a feeble or
unfortunate high-priest, prophetism might have suc-
ceeded ; in opposition to a comparatively fortunate and
strong high-priest like Simeon the Just, at the very time
when Judaea seemed to enjoy a little peace, it was bound to
fail. If, on the other hand, the priesthood had rejected
all reform, or abandoned itself to extreme Hellenisation,
the reformers would have found new weapons in the
excess of popular indignation; but we know that
prophetism itself had eradicated Hellenism from the
priesthood, and this first success prevented it from
winning again, or from dethroning its opponent.

We have compared Jewish prophetism to modern
Protestantism, and the analogy goes further. Luther
did not destroy the Homan Church ; in establishing a
rival Church beside it, he reformed it. It is too little
known that, on many points, the Homan Church satisfied
the demands of Protestants. It was the same at
Jerusalem in the third century. The prophetic party
constrained the clerical aristocracy to make certain
reforms, but did not overthrow it.

While the prophetic party attempted in vain to impose
its laws and seize the government, the old aristocracy
completed the work of the Mosaic legislation, and,
thanks, no doubt, to the action of Simeon the Just,
victoriously imposed it. The prophetic party was beaten,
but not destroyed, and had not ceased to produce great
 THE SECOND BOOK OF EZEKIEL

167

men. The causes that had given it birth remained, and
would be aggravated after the death of Simeon. It
would continue to agitate Judaea no less than before.
But it was all over with the legislative reforms of the
second book of Ezekiel, and the traditions which the
legends of Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha had endeavoured
to implant. AVhen, after a century of struggle with an
aristocracy that falls deeper and deeper into Hellenism,
it finally has its revenge, it will accept and appropriate
the old Mosaic law, the work of the aristocracy; and the
book of Ezekiel will, so the Talmud relates, run some
risk of being excluded from the canon of the sacred books.
 Chapter IV.

THE TWO ISAIAHS, AND THE IMPERIALIST
REVIVAL

§ 1. The Jeioish People in the Days of the Tivo Isaiahs.

From the third century onward the history of the Jewish
people is enacted, partly in Palestine, partly in the Jewish
colonies, which spread more and more around the
Mediterranean. The earliest prophetic writers had
arisen under the stress of the frightful calamities that
had fallen on Judaea during the second half of the fourth
century. To understand the last prophetic writers, it is
necessary to resume the history of the Jewish people,
during the following century, in the colonies as well as in
Palestine.

In Palestine.—The pontificate of Simeon the Just
was a calm after the storms at the end of the fourth
century. During the earlier years of his son, Onias II.,
this peace is still disturbed only at rare intervals in
Palestine. But from the year 247 the wars begin
between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of
Syria, and Palestine is once more plundered. Again we
find the long train of misfortunes which these wars drag
after them. In 240 peace is restored ; Palestine remains
in the possession of Egypt. Will the unhappy country
have at least time to dress its wounds ? At the end
of some years the war will be renewed between the
Syrians and the Egyptians (221-217). Palestine will
again witness the ceaseless crossing of armies, battles,
and towns from which the vanquished will burst forth
with fury and the conqueror enter with threats. In 201
the king of Syria again invades Palestine. The war lasts

168
 JEWISH PEOPLE IN DAYS OE TWO ISAIAHS 169

three years ; in the end the Egyptians are beaten, and
the king of Syria remains in possession of Palestine.
Judaea has changed its master.

The Jewish historian Josephus has told us1 how
severely the Palestinian States suffered from the wars
that took place between the kings of Egypt and Syria.
At Jerusalem the humiliation is all the greater from the
high hopes that had been entertained. Had not the
books of Moses promised to the imperialist ambition of
the successors of Esdras the free and peaceful possession
of the land of Palestine ? The chosen people of Jahveh
suffered, in subjection to the goim, in proportion to its
dreams.

When the war rages, plunder and devastation are
multiplied; when peace follows, exaction begins and
violence accompanies it. The powerful desire but to
enrich themselves; they refuse justice, and oppress the
weak ; on the pretext of gathering the tribute claimed by
the suzerain, they plunder the towns and the country ;
the tax-farmers are the leaders of bands who go from
country to country, extorting the debt with arms in
their hands. But the exactions and violence seem more
cruel to the people of Jerusalem when they are committed
by men of its own aristocracy, and when its leaders rely
on the foreign master in maltreating and despoiling it.

The Mosaic law rules at Jerusalem. Under the
shadow of its unchallenged authority, and under the
suzerainty of the Syrian or Egyptian kings, the high-
priest is a kind of viceroy who wields a supreme power.
The sacerdotal aristocracy surrounds him; the people
obey. The recently completed theocratic constitution
is in full vigour; but there is an irremediable division in
the depths of Jewish society.

The hatred of the rigorists for the Hellenists had
gradually risen. To the prophets the forsaking of the

1 Jewish Antiquities, xiii. 1, 3; 2, 28; 3, 129.
 170 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

national ways was an apostasy. The prophets had set up
anew the Jewish soul, by teaching that without Jahveh
and the law of Jahveh the Jewish people were doomed to
perish. The hatred of the rigorist Jews for the foreigner
was great, but their hatred of the renegade was bound to
be fiercer.

Day by day the abyss grew deeper. The Jews of the
people, in the midst of their misery, deluded themselves
with hopes that promised them revenge; and already
some of the aristocrats of the higher clergy assured them-
selves that these hopes were vain. In the humiliation of
the land, the sons of the clerical aristocracy of Jerusalem
were contented with a state of things that left them
masters of Judaea under an easily tolerable suzerainty,
wealthy, and independent enough to enjoy their wealth.

The anger of the traditionalist and nationalist Jew
against the renegade Jew, of the poor against the rich,
was inflamed by the innumerable exactions, the denials
of justice, the increasingly severe oppression, with
which the people reproached their aristocracy. It
seems, if we take the evidence of contemporary writers,
making allowance for rhetorical exaggeration, that this
oppression was extreme, and that the common folk,
exploited and flouted by their masters, reached a
state of the most violent resentment. The scandal
was at its height, among the pious and patriotic poor
of the lower classes at Jerusalem, when, towards the
middle of the third century, under the pontificate of
Onias II., a certain Joseph, son of Tobias, obtain from
Ptolemy Philopator the farming of the taxes in Palestine.
This Joseph, son of Tobias, was the nephew of the high-
priest Onias II.; he was thus one of the heads of the
Jerusalem aristocracy. In his Hellenism, his pomp, his
exactions, Joseph, son of Tobias, exhibits all the grievances
of the children of Jahveh against their aristocracy.

Here is the episode of Joseph, son of Tobias, according
to Flavius Josephus. In order to give an idea of Jewish
 JEWISH PEOPLE IN DAYS OF TWO ISAIAHS 171

society at the time, we cannot do better than quote at
length the picturesque account in his Jewish Antiquities,
which critics are disposed to place in the Days of Ptolemy
Philopator (222-205).

The high-priest Onias had a restricted intelligence, and
was dominated by the love of money; hence, as he had
not discharged the tax of twenty talents of silver, which
his fathers paid the kings, out of their own revenues, in
the name of the people, he caused King Ptolemy to be very
angry. Ptolemy sent a messenger to Jerusalem,reproaching
Onias for not having paid the tax, and threatening that, if
he did not receive the sum, he would divide the Jewish
territory into lots and settle soldiers on them as colonists.
The Jews were terrified on hearing the king’s threats; but
nothing could move Onias, blinded by his avarice.

There was at the time a certain Joseph, a young man,
but already enjoying the reputation of a grave, prudent,
and just man with the inhabitants of Jerusalem ; he was
the son of Tobias and of a sister of the high-priest Onias.
His mother having apprised him of the presence of the
envoy—for he was then on a journey at Phicola, the
village to which he belonged—he returned to the city, and
reproached Onias with not considering the safety of his
fellow-citizens and wishing to put the people in danger.

.....Onias persisting in his refusal, Joseph then asked his

permission to go on an embassy to Ptolemy in the name
of the nation ; and Onias granted it. Joseph went up to
the temple, therefore, summoned the people to assemble,
and begged the citizens to be neither disturbed nor
dismayed by the indifference of his uncle Onias in their
regard, but to keep their minds calm and banish their
gloomy presentiments. He promised, in fact, to go on an
embassy to the king and persuade him that they had done
no wrong. At these words the crowd thanked Joseph;
and he, going down from the temple, gave hospitality in
his own house to Ptolemy’s envoy, heaped rich presents
on him, and, after treating him generously for several
days, sent him back to the king, adding that he would
shortly follow himself.....

The envoy, on his return to Egypt, told the king of the
obstinacy of Onias, and spoke to him of the great merit
of Joseph, who was coming to clear the people of the
delinquencies charged against them. He praised the
young man so much that he made the king and his
wife Cleopatra well disposed towards Joseph before he
 172 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

arrived. Joseph sent to borrow money of some of his
friends in Samaria, and, after preparing all that was
necessary for the journey—clothes, utensils, and beasts
of burden, which cost him about twenty thousand
drachmas—he went to Alexandria. It happened that at
the same time all the chief citizens and magistrates of the
cities of Syria and Phoenicia were going there in connection
with the farming of the taxes, which the king sold every
year to the strongest men in each city. When these saw
Joseph on the road, they railed at his poverty and
simplicity. But Joseph, hearing on his arrival at
Alexandria that Ptolemy was at Memphis, went to
meet him. The king was seated in his chariot with
his wife and his friend Athenion, the very man who
had been sent to Jerusalem and entertained by Joseph.
When Athenion saw him, he at once made him known to
the king, saying that this was the young man whose
kindness and generosity he had praised to him on his
return from Jerusalem. Ptolemy then first embraced
him, made him enter the chariot, and, as soon as Joseph
was seated, began to complain of the procedure of Onias.

[Prometheus]

“Forgive him,” said Joseph, “on account of his age;
for thou knowest assuredly that old men have often but
the intelligence of children. But we, the young, will give
thee full satisfaction, and thou shalt have no fault to find
with us.”

The king, delighted with the charm and sprightliness
of the young man, conceived such an affection for him as
if he had long known him ; he invited him to stay in his
palace, and share his meals every day. When the king
had returned to Alexandria, the leading men of Syria,
seeing Joseph sitting beside him, were very envious.

When the day had come on which the taxes of the cities
were to be put up at auction, those whose dignity gave
them the first rank in their country came to buy them.
The offers rose to eight thousand talents for the taxes
of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia, Judaea, and Samaria. Then
Joseph approached, and accused the buyers of having
come to an arrangement to offer the king so poor a
price for the taxes. He declared that he was prepared
to give double, and deliver up to the king, in addition, the
goods of those who had failed in their duty to his house;
these goods were, in fact, assigned with the taxes. The
king heard him with pleasure, and said he was ready
to award him the farming of the taxes, because he
would thereby have an increased revenue; but ho asked
 JEWISH PEOPLE IN DAYS OF TWO ISAIAHS 173

if Joseph had security to offer. Joseph replied very
cleverly:—

“ I will find you excellent people whom you cannot
distrust.”

The king asking who they were:—

“ I give you as security, O king, thyself and thy wife,
each for the portion that is due to the other.”

Ptolemy laughed, and allowed him to have the taxes
without security. This favour greatly angered those who
had come from the cities of Egypt, as they felt themselves
relegated to the second rank. And each returned to his
country with his little disgrace.

Joseph obtained of the king two thousand foot-soldiers,
for he had asked troops in order to bring to reason those
who might despise his authority in the cities; and, after
borrowing five hundred talents from the friends of the
king in Alexandria, he set out for Syria. When he
reached Ascalon, he demanded that the inhabitants should
pay the tax. They refused to pay anything, and even
insulted him ; then he seized the chief among them, slew
a score of them, seized their goods—about a thousand
talents—and sent them to the king, informing him of
what had happened. Ptolemy admired his decision,
praised his conduct, and gave him a free hand. The
Syrians were terrified at this news, and, having under
their eyes, as an example well calculated to discourage
disobedience, the fate of the victims at Ascalon, they
opened their gates, received Joseph with every attention
and paid the tribute. The inhabitants of Scythopolis
however, attempted to insult him and refuse him the tax,
which they had hitherto paid without difficulty; there
also he had the chief men put to death, and sent their
goods to the king. When he had collected a great deal of
money, and made a large profit on the farming of the
taxes, he made use of it to strengthen the power he had,
thinking it wise to use the goods he had acquired in
preserving what had been the source of his present
fortune. He therefore sent many presents to the king,
to Cleopatra, to their friends, and to all who had power
at Court, thus purchasing their good will.

He enjoyed this prosperity for twenty-two years, and
became the father of seven sons by his first wife, and, by
the daughter of his brother Solymios, of a son named
Hyrcan.1

1 Jewish Antiquities, xii. 4, from the translation of Theodore Reinach.
 174 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPEKIALIST KEVIVAL

It is between this Hyrcan and his brothers that the
dissensions and intestine wars arose which were to
desolate Judoea at the beginning of the second century.

In the Colonies.—But in the third century the
Jewish people is not confined to Judsea; it is found
wherever Jewish colonies have been established; and in
the colonies the secular hopes of the Jews are no more
realised than in Judsea.

We shall close this volume with a comprehensive study
of the expansion of the Jews in the Mediterranean basin.1
We have already seen the Jews spread, first in Palestine,
then in Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt; soon we shall see
them penetrate into Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and
Greece itself.

Deportation and emigration have done their work.
Violence and misery alone have driven the Jews from
their country, and these colonists are, in the main, merely
exiles whose misfortunes are incessantly deplored by the
prophets, and whose triumphant return they are ever
predicting.

However widely they have spread, the Jewish colonies
are nevertheless, in the third century, lamentable settle-
ments in which misery reigns and men are but pariahs.
Already the Jewish quarter is a thing of contempt and
detestation among the nations. How could these folk,
who mingle not with the people among whom they live,
preserve their own clothing and usages, isolate themselves
in their sectarian pride, think themselves better than
others in spite of their sordid poverty, and cannot conceal
their envy, if not their hopes, expect from other men
anything but hatred in return for their hostility, and
disdain for their weakness ?

After so many promises of a glorious return to the
mother country, the Jews of the colonies will be still in

1 Part III., ch. iv.
 THE FIKST ISAIAH

175

the second century what they were in the third : unhappy
exiles, dying, one after another, in a surfeit of humilia-
tion, under the enmity of a foreign sky.

Thus did the reality belie the old Jewish hopes, from
the third century onward, in the colonies and in Judasa.
The situation was this: in Judsea were foreign domina-
tion, oppression, internal divisions, and exactions on the
part of the clerical aristocracy; beyond the Jewish
frontiers was the vast field of misery in which the exiles
shuddered, hated by, and hating, other men.

The most adventurous optimism could with difficulty
cast a few rays of light on this sombre picture. Jeru-
salem was still the most important town, its temple the
most celebrated sanctuary, and Judaea the leading State
of Palestine; beyond Palestine, the Jewish colonies
spread the name of Jahveh in the great cities of the
eastern Mediterranean. To maintain and renew this
confidence, to sustain their courage, to rekindle the fire
of the imperialism of Jerusalem, there was need of the
work of the men of genius who wrote under the name of
the prophet Isaiah.

§ 2. The First Isaiah.

The collection of prophecies which, in our Bible, bears
the name of Isaiah, is divided into two quite distinct
parts. Critics of the slightest shade of independence
have long since unanimously agreed in recognising them
as two different works, which it is customary to call the
First and the Second Isaiah. The one comprises chapters
i.-xxxix. of the collection, the other chapters xl.-lxvi. It
is further possible, and even probable, that the chapters
ascribed to each of the two Isaiahs come from a number
of different writers.

The author—let us say the principal author—of the
prophecies of the First Isaiah followed the tradition of
his forerunners. For his fabulous material he, like they,
 176 TWO ISAIAHS, AND IMPERIALIST REVIVAL

took a situation and the name of a prophet in the ancient
history of Judaea, and he represented as spoken to this
prophet, in the circumstances of the situation he had
chosen, the words which he himself, a man of the third
century, wanted to impress upon his contemporaries.
The authors of the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel had
chosen the last years of the former kingdom of Judah;
the author of the hook of Isaiah went farther back into
the past, and chose the period of Hezekiah and the last
kings of Ephraim. The book of Isaiah, however, is not
so much a political romance as a collection of anecdotes
and fine odes. The anecdotes are episodes of ancient
Jewish history, in which the author introduces his
prophet with an action or a discourse; the odes are
invectives against the Jewish aristocrats who indulge in
Hellenic ways, or oracular utterances on neighbouring
peoples, Tyre, Egypt, Syria, and Babylon.

On the doctrinal side the First Isaiah continues the
work of prophetism. He resumes the invective of
Jeremiah against the clergy and the Levitic legislation
in the famous apostrophe: “ To what purpose is the
multitude of your sacrifices unto me ? saith Jahveh: I
am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of
fed beasts.” 1 It is not a question, as so many writers
have said, of a profession of spiritual faith, but of attack-
ing the corruption of an aristocracy that lives on the
temple and oppresses the people. There is nothing new
in it. The originality of the First Isaiah consists in
responding to the misery and despair of his compatriots
with the imperialist dream of a conquest of the world.

Esdras and his successors had, after the Restoration,
created Jewish nationalism. In the midst of the small
States of Palestine they had, in concentrating the State
of Jerusalem round the name of Jahveh, created a Jewish
soul. Reduced to a few thousand men, vanquished,

1 Isaiah i. 11, and following.
 THE FIRST ISAIAH

177

oppressed, enslaved for a century, the little people had
not returned to life with the spirit of some great con-
quered nation that is suddenly saved by a brilliant victory.
Defeat, oppression, slavery, and weakness had taught it
patience. Stubborn, but humble, concealing behind
their half-closed eyes their unconquerable ambition, the
companions of Esdras had undertaken, noiselessly, with
bent backs, to build the house of Jahveh.

We have seen how they taught the men of Jerusalem
that the misfortunes of their fathers had been a punish-
ment for their unfaithfulness to Jahveh, and that Jahveh
had promised to reward them, if they were faithful to
him.

Then the famous theory of the Covenant had been
gradually shaped. The duty of the Jewish people is to
be faithful to Jahveh ; the duty of Jahveh is to reward
the Jewish people, if the Jewish people is faithful to
Jahveh. In the first Mosaic mashal, however, in
Deuteronomy, the reward promised to the Jewish people
consists of nothing but the free and peaceful possession
of a land flowing with milk and honey, the most beautiful
country in the world: thus do the Jews describe
Palestine.

The free and peaceful possession of Palestine is the
ideal of the early viosklim and of Deuteronomy.
“ Jahveh, thy god, will set thee on high among the

nations of the earth....all the peoples of the earth shall

be afraid of thee ” that is the maximum and exceptional
formula of the promises of Jahveh to the fourth century.
The ambition of the Jews of Deuteronomy had not gone
beyond that; their dream was to be happy on the soil
that Jahveh had sworn to their fathers he would give
them.2 The promise was restricted :—

From the wilderness to Lebanon, from the river
Euphrates to the western sea, shall your coast be.s 1

1 Deuteronomy xxviii. 1 and 10.   2 Deuteronomy xxx. 20.

8 Deuteronomy xi. 21.