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« on: February 21, 2018, 04:46:19 PM »
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.
1112
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:45:34 PM »
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
1113
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:44:49 PM »
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
96
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.
1114
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:44:09 PM »
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.
1115
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:43:14 PM »
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.
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§ 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.
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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.
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The ordaining of the Jerusalem temple as the sole
temple of Jahveh, the monopolisation of the cult of Jahveh
in the single temple of Jerusalem, was at first a fact, then
a law. The fact arose from the natural circumstances in
which the little State of Jerusalem was placed by the end
of the sixth century; the law arose from the deliberate
ambition of the Jewish aristocracy. In order to impose
its hegemony on its neighbours, it had created the theory
of the ideal Israel. Now it proclaims, as a supreme law,
that Jerusalem is the centre from which Jahveh must
reign over the whole of Palestine.
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
79
Unto the place which Jahveh, your god, shall choose
out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto
his habitation shall ye seek.1
Is it possible to determine the date of this event ? The
task seemed difficult, until the papyri recently discovered
at Elephantine2 provided the means, apparently. Let us
give the facts which became known to us through the
discovery.
At some unknown period, perhaps at the beginning of
the sixth century—that is to say, at the period of the
destruction of Jerusalem by Nabuchodonosor—a Jewish
colony had settled in Egypt, on the island of Elephantine,
opposite Assouan, not far from the first cataract. They
built there a temple to their god, Jahveh. In the year
523 or 522, when Cambyses crossed Egypt, he sees and
respects this sanctuary, the papyri state. It is the time
when the Jews of Jerusalem are restoring their town.
A century passes. The Jews of Elephantine, never-
theless, have a social and economic life. They obey laws.
They would observe the Mosaic laws, the Jehovist and
Elohist and Deuteronomical laws, if they knew them.
But, in point of fact, they obey laws which at times
cruelly violate the Jehovist, Elohist, and Deuteronomic
codes. They are nevertheless in constant communication
with the metropolis, and, in the year 419-418, they
receive from it a regulation for the celebration of the
Passover. Hence the priests of Jerusalem do not regard
the priests of Elephantine as schismatics. Elephantine
is more than seven hundred miles from Jerusalem. The
monopolisation of the cult in the Jerusalem temple is a
fact in the State of Jerusalem; but the fact has not yet
been erected into a law, and it only holds of the State of
Jerusalem. The fundamental law of Deuteronomy is not
yet codified in the year 419-418.
Suddenly, during the month of Tammuz, in the four-
teenth year of Darius (that is to say, in the month of
1 Deuteronomy xii. 5.
2 See p. xv, note 3.
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July, 409), the Egyptian priests of Elephantine come to
terms with the local authorities.
“ The sanctuary of the god Jahveh must be removed
from the city of Elephantine,” they say.
And the temple of Elephantine is rased to the ground.
What do the priests of the ruined temple do ? They
petition the Persian governor; and at the same time they
appeal to the high-priest at Jerusalem for his intercession.
The priests of Elephantine do not regard themselves as
schismatics in 409. It is a fresh proof that the Deutero-
nomic law was not known to the Jews of Elephantine in
409.
We have just seen that in 419-418 the government
which ruled at Jerusalem had sent them a regulation for
the celebration of the Passover.
What reply does the high-priest of Jerusalem make
in 409 ? He does not reply at all. Is his silence due to
negligence or hostility ? We shall see.
Three years pass, and, in the month of Marchshvan, the
year 17 of King Darius (that is to say, in November, 406),
the Jews of Elephantine make a fresh appeal to the
Persian governor. To whom do they turn for help this
time ? To the sons of the pacha of Samaria, the rivals
and opponents of Jerusalem.
The silence of the high-priest of Jerusalem, therefore,
was a mark of hostility. The Jewish priests of Elephan-
tine must have seen that they had nothing to hope for
from him. They turn to the enemy.
The Jerusalem aristocracy admitted in 419-418, but
admits no longer in 409, the practice of the cult outside
the temple of Jerusalem. The Deuteronomic law,
which did not exist in 419-418, and was not yet known
at Elephantine in 409, is now promulgated. It is
taught to the Jews of Elephantine by the hostility
of the high-priest at Jerusalem. They become schis-
matics, and can only turn to Samaria. The year 409 is
the approximate date when the monopoly of the cult in
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
81
the single temple of Jerusalem changes from law by
custom into written law.
But, besides the regions in which Jahveh was wor-
shipped, there were parts of Palestine in which other
gods were worshipped. Such were the coveted plains of
Philistia, and the sister-countries of Ammon, Moab, and
Edom. There were also regions in which the cult of
Jahveh was accompanied with that of other deities; as
in certain parts of the State of Samaria. The priests of
Jerusalem, moreover, failed to distinguish properly
between the cult offered to images of Jahveh and the
worship of strange gods. We have, for instance, seen
them confusing the altars of Jahveh-Melek with the
altars of the Ammonite Moloch. Finally, on every side,
perhaps even in Judaea, local superstition raised numbers
of small sanctuaries to the most sanguinary demons; and
although these sanctuaries no longer threatened the
great official temples, they propagated idolatry. Of all
these cults, which Deuteronomy, as we shall see, collec-
tively denominates Canaanitic, some were Canaanitic in
the scientific sense of the word—that is to say, anterior to
the arrival of the Israelitic tribes in Palestine; others
might be the cults of sister-tribes such as Ammon, Edom,
and Moab; while others may have been introduced later
into the country. Whatever their origin and development
were, it is against these different forms of Palestinian
paganism that the Deuteronomic legislators found them-
selves compelled to act; just as they had been constrained
to act against the Jahvic temples which rivalled that of
Jerusalem.
In the Jehovist period the chief object of the successors
of Esdras had been the resolute maintenance of Jewish
nationalism about the name of Jahveh, the national god.
Jerusalem was then the most meagre of the Palestinian
States; it seemed to the priests of Jerusalem necessary
to create a focus of unquenchable patriotism in the temple
of Jahveh. Half a century afterwards, the little State
G
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having prospered, and beginning to extend its activity
into surrounding regions, there was a danger of the people
of Jerusalem allowing strange deities to penetrate into
their town and their hearts. Further, a new danger was
arising. Would not the people of Jerusalem take their
gods from these foreigners whom they were beginning to
subdue ? Would not the conquered impose their gods on
the conquerors ?
It was not enough to preserve the people of Jerusalem
from the contagion of foreign idolatry; this idolatry must
be exterminated in such of the neighbouring communities
as came under their influence and began to feel their
domination. It is, indeed, an invariable fact that, in the
history of religions, the people who have suffered a
religious defeat tend, in spite of their conversion, to
persevere in their former practices. It could not be
otherwise among the peoples who were gradually falling
under the hegemony of Jerusalem. These Judaisers were
not all good Judaisers; a large number, especially in the
country, were clearly very bad. The old idolatrous and
fetichistic practices, the worship of Jahveh in an animal
or inorganic form along with their insignificant and
domestic gods, sacrifices, and necromantic propitiations,
would not fail to persist. They must be eradicated at
any cost.
Thus it is that the State of Jerusalem, which is a
people, now assumes the features of a sect. The work of
Esdras, creating an ardent nationalism, but giving it the
form of a religion, has developed an extraordinary
fanaticism in the souls of the Jews. When Home con-
quered Italy, it imposed its laws strenuously; Jerusalem
imposed a faith, a cult, a ritual, on those about it. The
despotism would be terrible some day. Judaism, through
its priests at first, through its Pharisees afterwards,
always exacted of the Judaisers, not merely material
obedience, but the entire surrender of the moral per-
sonality. It has been said that the Inquisition is found
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
83
in Deuteronomy. The clerical aristocracy of Jerusalem
inaugurated the Inquisition in the fourth century before
the present era.1
In fine, not content with preserving the Jewish soul
from foreign idolatry, or with attacking this idolatry in
the heart of the Judaising peoples, the Jerusalem legis-
lators felt that the great programme of the reconstitution
of the kingdom of Israel implied, if the neighbouring
populations were to be conquered some day, the con-
demnation of whatever deities they had besides Jahveh
and the monopoly of the Jahvic cult at Jerusalem. Like
the monopoly of the Jahvic cult at Jerusalem, the con-
demnation of pagan cults in Palestine was a logical and
necessary consequence of the ambition of Jerusalem.
The leaders who ruled at Jerusalem took the offensive.
They turned again to the neighbouring populations, whom
they dreamed of conquering some day, and, in order to
impose on them the worship of the Jahveh who reigned
at Jerusalem, they cast anathema on their gods. The
centres of anti-Jahvic idolatry which continued to increase
in Palestine threatened—at first in Jerusalem itself, then
among the Judaisers, lastly among their idolatrous neigh-
bours—the authority which the Jerusalem clergy dreamed
of securing in the name of the people of Israel. It was
the exigencies of their imperialist policy that once more
guided the Deuteronomic legislators when, on the one
hand, they promulgated their fearful enactments against
idolatry, and when, on the other, they launched their
anathema against the Canaanites.
We know that the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorrhites,
Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and Gergezites are names
that the Jehovist writers used in order to explain how
Jahveh had benevolently bestowed their land on Israel.
In the Deuteronomic writers all these peoples are con-
founded under the generic name of Canaanites. But the
1 See ante, p. 33.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
Canaanites are no longer merely victims despoiled by
Jahveh in favour of Israel. They become the symbol of
idolatry, of paganism; they are, by the very definition,
the enemies of Jahveh. In accordance with the invariable
usage of Jewish literature, the moshlim of the fourth
century project on them, in the past, a contemporary
reality. The Canaanites of the Deuteronomic Bible are
the mythical image of those neighbours of Jerusalem who,
in the midst of and by the side of the hegemony of
Jerusalem, maintained in the fourth century the religious
practices condemned by the law of Jerusalem. Even
more than during the Jehovist period, Canaan is the
counterpart of Israel.
Thus the mashal of the Deuteronomic period are terrible
for the Canaanites. The Deuteronomic episodes of the con-
quest, in the book of Joshua, are pages of blood. There
is nothing but frightful massacres. Women are no more
spared than men ; children no more than the aged. The
flocks are exterminated, the soil is accursed. These pages
seem to be written in the fearful delirium of visionaries
sated with carnage. The command of Jahveh is explicit
—none must be spared. And when Joshua is laid in his
tomb after the conquest, not a single Canaanite remains
alive, say the ancient narratives. The priests who ruled
at Jerusalem in the fourth century were giving to the
world the dilemma that pervades the whole of Jewish
literature, including the prophets and the apocalypses—
submit or be exterminated.
The ancient Jehovist narratives of a period presumably
later than Joshua and the ancient episodes of the Judges
knew nothing of this extermination of the Canaanites;
they had frankly related the sequel of the conflicts
between the Israelites and the Canaanites. With that
indifference to contradictions that shocks us so much,
though it is general among the Orientals, and particularly
found in the Jews, the Deuteronomic writers did not
trouble to recast the legends of the Judges and Samuel.
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
85
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
Does anyone question the purely, absolutely dogmatic
intention of the moslilim ? Let us see how the book of
Judges will presently speak:—
The children of Israel went every man unto his inherit-
ance : and the people served Jahveh for many days.....
And there arose another generation after them which
knew not Jahveh, nor yet the works which he had done
for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the
sight of Jahveh, and served the Baals, and they forsook
Jahveh, and followed other gods of the gods of the people
that were round about them; and bowed themselves
unto them, and served Baal and the Astartes.
And the anger of Jahveh was hot against Israel, and he
delivered them into the hands of the spoilers that spoiled
them ; and he sold them into the hands of their enemies
round about, so that they could not any longer stand
before their enemies.
Whithersoever they went out, the hand of Jahveh was
against them for evil, as Jahveh had said, and as Jahveh
had sworn unto them; and they were greatly distressed.
Nevertheless Jahveh raised up Judges which delivered
them out of the hand of those that spoiled them.....
And when the Judge was dead, they returned and
corrupted themselves again, in following other gods to
serve them, and to bow down unto them........
And the anger of Jahveh was hot against Israel.....1
It is always the same story. The Israelites having
forsaken Jahveh, they are handed over by him to their
enemies. As soon as they repent, Jahveh raises up a
Judge to deliver them. Then the Israelites fall back
into their sin; they forget Jahveh, and serve the Baals
and Astartes. At once the anger of Jahveh flames out
against them, and again he delivers them to their enemies
until they repent, when he raises up another Judge to
save them.
The legends of the Judges are merely an illustration of
this doctrine: the forsaking of Jahveh is punished by
defeat, the return to Jahveh is rewarded with victory.
After the Judges, the writers of Jerusalem undertook
1 Judges ii. 6-20.
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
73
to narrate the history of Saul, the first Israelitic king,
and of David, the great founder of the dynasty. This
made up what are called the two books of Samuel. But
the story of Saul and of David has no other object than
to show how fidelity to Jahveh is [infallibly rewarded, and
disobedience is infallibly punished. The history of
Solomon and the kings who succeeded him, down to the
disappearance of the dynasty and the destruction of Jeru-
salem by Nabuchodonosor, was written later. The present
state of Biblical criticism does not enable us to determine
if the earliest Jerusalem writers went beyond the reign of
David; if they did, their narratives must have been lost.
Such, then, is the literature of Jerusalem at the begin-
ning of the fourth century. Some men of the sacerdotal
caste which ruled the little State of Jerusalem, and already
had some influence in neighbouring countries, have under-
taken to relate how their laws were given by Jahveh,
their god; how Jahveh, their god, chose them as his
people; and how their fortune has depended, and will
always depend, on their fidelity to him. Each narrated
these episodes that were used to illustrate the fundamental
dogmas according to the traditions he had collected,
according to his own imagination, according to the legends
that circulated about him or the knowledge brought from
Babylon. These early fragments, from which the Bible
would afterwards be formed, were a kind of rhapsodies,
but rhapsodies with a purpose ; fables, but in the sense of
the Greek 6 /xvOoq SrjXot on; moral tales, epics or idylls,
proverbs in the form of legends, a vast cycle of inde-
pendent narratives. And from this mass of different
episodes there emerges at once a sort of great national
history, which this people, boldly absorbing its neighbours,
gives itself in order to learn from the example of an
imaginary past. The creation of the world, the Deluge,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons; then the captivity
in Egypt, Moses raised up by Jahveh to deliver his people
and lead them to the gates of the promised land, the
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THE BOOKS OE MOSES
crossing of the desert, the giving of the law; after Moses,
Joshua and the conquest of Palestine; then, when Israel
is settled in its inheritance, the constant punishment of
secession, the invariable reward of a return to Jahveh,
the Judges, Saul, David founding the famous Israelitic
kingdom that they would restore—a complete past created
almost in its entirety by a small people that is hardly
born, with a view to opening out the future. Never was
there a vaster programme, or one that was more magni-
ficently realised.
But the years were passing, and fresh needs demanded
fresh activities.
§ 3. The Deuteronomic Period.
The few laws which the earlier moshlim had inserted
among the Mosaic episodes sufficed, as legislation, for the
period of the immediate successors of Esdras. Written
laws never precede the organisation of a people; they
do not appear until the people becomes self-conscious.
Societies which do not develop have no legislation.
Legislation is a sign that a society has entered upon
adolescence.
Half-a-century after Esdras the State of Jerusalem has
reached the period of development which is the adoles-
cence of a people. It has become stronger every day, in
proportion as it has deepened the ardent nationalism
which was symbolised in the name of the lord Jahveh.
The sacerdotal aristocracy is larger; the people obey
with more comprehensive soul; the temple casts a more
formidable shadow round the city. The time has come
for framing more precise laws. The Deuteronomic period
will be above all things legislative.
Of the two most important of the Deuteronomic laws,
one relates to the prohibition to worship Jahveh elsewhere
than in the temple at Jerusalem, which is thus raised to
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
75
the rank of the sole temple of the god; the other relates
to the extermination of the so-called Canaanitic cults.
Both of them—the one in looking to the Palestinian
worshippers of Jahveh, the other referring to the
Palestinian worshippers of other deities—seem to have
aimed chiefly at preparing the hegemony of Jerusalem
over the whole of Palestine.
The enacting that the temple of Jerusalem shall be the
sole temple of Jahveh is a fact turned into a law. We
must explain how the exigencies of their imperialism led
the successors of Esdras to codify a state of things which
already existed in point of fact.
The Jewish State of the fifth century comprised the
small town of Jerusalem and its outskirts. It is the same
situation as that of the Athenian Republic, of which
Athens was the only town; or of the Roman Republic,
which consisted of Rome alone. One cannot imagine two
Capitols at Rome, or more than one Acropolis at Athens;
and it is even more inconceivable that there should be
several temples at Jerusalem in the east, with its one god,
a god personifying the soul of the country. Our modem
Catholic churches, Protestant chapels, and Jewish syna-
gogues are houses of prayer. They convey no idea of the
temple at Jerusalem, which was the centre of the State.
We must regard it as, not merely the house in which
sacrifice is offered, but the throne on which is placed the
sovereignty of the national god. The Bible will teach
that Jahveh has two homes—one in heaven, the other in
the temple at Jerusalem.
If the State of Jerusalem had been larger, or had
comprised more than one town, it is possible that sheer
necessity would have brought about a decentralisation of
the cult. In point of fact, it consisted of one town only,
and its outskirts, including the desert regions, had an area
of only a few thousand acres—not twice the extent of the
Isle of Wight. In a few hours’ march the most distant
rustics could reach their capital, and all the Jews, without
76
THE BOOKS OE MOSES
exception, could bring their offerings in their hands to the
temple at each of the ceremonies on which this was
enjoined.
We said a moment ago that the Jerusalem temple had
not the same character as our Christian churches or our
synagogues; it was also quite different in arrangement.
When we regard the situation of the temple as it is
to-day, and try to imagine what the topography of these
places was formerly, we see plainly that there could not
be two such edifices in a State of a few thousand acres.
The temple of former days was, like the Haram of to-day,
an immense fortified esplanade, with the house of the god
in the centre. The house of the god was not larger than
one of our small churches; the esplanade could easily
contain the whole Jewish people on the days when they
were commanded to appear before their god.
Can it be supposed that there were rural sanctuaries in
the surrounding district ? It is not impossible, if we are
merely thinking of lowly survivals of the older Palestinian
cults. Instead of regarding them as temples, however, we
can at the most see in them certain obscure high-places
maintained by local superstition. A temple was at once
a fortress, a palace, and a court-house. What common
measure could there be between the seat of the govern-
ment at Jerusalem and miserable chapels lost on the
mountains ?
In the time of Esdras and his successors, then, the
Jerusalem temple is the sole temple of the State, and it
is difficult to see how any historian can doubt this. Why,
then, did the men of Jerusalem take the trouble to
formulate a solidly accomplished fact in the form of a
rigorous enactment ?
When they looked out beyond their walls, the men of
Jerusalem perceived Moab and Camos, the god of Moab,
in the east, across the Dead Sea; in the north-east they
saw Ammon, and its god Milkom; but what did they see
in the south, in the nearer west, and in the north, in
THE DEUTERONOMIC PERIOD
77
Samaria ? They saw hostile peoples worshipping Jahveh,
their own national god. The national god of the Jeru-
salem State had, in fact, once been the god of all the
Israelitic tribes. In the time of David and Solomon he
had had altars from one end of Palestine to the other.
Later, in the period of the two kingdoms, his cult had
been celebrated in Ephraim, as well as Judah. The
Assyrian and Chaldaean invasions had thrown everything
into confusion; but, as the times became more tranquil,
a certain number of these old sanctuaries were restored.
Some of the ancient towns of Palestine, notably Samaria,
had then, in the fifth century, preserved or rebuilt
temples in which holocausts sent up their smoke to
Jahveh no less than in the temple at Jerusalem.
The disciples of Esdras were bound to regard these
cults as sacrilegious. Their sanctuary was, in their eyes,
the sole orthodox sanctuary; the others were altars of
abomination, plainly repudiated by the god. They might
indeed have been content to declare that Jahveh was
rightly worshipped in Jerusalem, and not rightly in
Samaria and elsewhere; but with the magnificent decision,
of which we find so many examples in Jewish history,
and which made the Jewish people one of the great peoples
of the world, they took advantage of what might have
been an unfortunate circumstance.
They intended some day to rally or annex to the recon-
stituted kingdom of Israel, of which they would be the
chiefs, these Palestinian towns in which an illicit incense
was offered to their god. But how could they express in
the language of the fifth century the rallying, annexing,
or subduing of Samaria ? Solely by imposing the Jeru-
salem cult upon Samaria. Turning toward Samaria, and
toward the towns of Palestine in which Jahveh was wor-
shipped, the men of Jerusalem did not hesitate to proclaim
that it was only in their town and their temple that all
the children of Israel—that is to say, all the Palestinians
—should render to the god the cult that was due to him.
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We do not say that the Deuteronomic law of the
monopolisation of the cult in the single temple at Jeru-
salem was promulgated for the use of the neighbouring
populations, and especially the State of Samaria. We
say that this law, inspired by the imperialism of the
legislators, had in view, in their minds, the neighbouring
populations, and especially Samaria. It is laid down in
view of the time when the whole of Palestine will be
under their domination. It condemns the other sanctu-
aries in advance: it kills rivalry in the germ. Two
centuries in advance it formulates the principles on which
the Machabees will proceed. It is, in the minds of the
successors of Esdras, the complement of their theory of
Israel. They gave their mountain in advance as capital to
the people of Israel whom they proposed to create some day.
Jerusalem was to be the capital of the State of Jeru-
salem : that was the expression that Deuteronomy gave
to the ambition of the successors of Esdras. In putting
forward, at the close of the fifth century, the pretension
to appropriate the cult of Jahveh—that is to say, to appro-
priate Jahveh—they were putting forward the pretension
to make tributaries of their neighbours; they posed as
sovereigns. To rule religiously meant, as we know, to
rule as completely as it was possible under the suzerainty
of Persia, in expectation of the time when this yoke itself
would be cast off.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
profound charm has won the soul. Strange genius, in
which the narrowest dogmatism has clothed itself with so
delicious a mantle of idylls !
The great episode of Joseph closes the patriarchal
legend. With it, in our Bible, the book of Genesis
terminates. The following book, Exodus, is a collection
of narratives relating to the departure from Egypt and
the crossing of the desert; Moses is its hero.
Everyone will remember the scenario.
The people of Israel languishes in the service of Egypt.
Jahveh gives Moses the mission to deliver them. Episode
of the ten plagues of Egypt. Passage of the Bed Sea.
After that the people of Israel wander in the Sinaitic
peninsula, under the lead of Moses. But the writers of
the beginning of the fourth century, who were the first to
relate the vicissitudes of the exodus, knew nothing of the
revelation on Sinai. For them the sacred mountain on
which Jahveh appears to Moses is called Horeb. It is the
unanimous opinion of the critics that the mention of Sinai
suffices to discredit a later series of narratives—the series
which we shall call the levitical.
Here are expounded a certain number of laws which
the priests of Jerusalem wished to legitimise, and which
they describe as dictated by Jahveh himself to Moses.
Let us add that they occupy only a small part of our
actual Exodus.
Our whole Leviticus and part of the actual book of
Numbers belong to a later period. The sequel to the
preceding narratives is found in the second half of the
book of Numbers. Forty years have elapsed; the people
of Israel still wander in the desert; they reach Cades;
fights with the natives; arrival on the plains of Moab,
near the Jordan, opposite Jericho. There Moses dies,
after placing his hands on the head of Joshua. From
that time the children of Israel obey Joshua.
The book of Deuteronomy is altogether later, and
certain chapters of Joshua have preserved the narratives
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PEEIOD
67
of the earliest Biblical writers. Under the leadership of
Joshua the Israelites conquer the promised land. Jericho
is taken, its walls falling at the sound of the sacred
trumpets; the Israelites settle in the promised land, the
twelve tribes dividing it more or less between them.
Joshua dies, and is buried in Mount Ephraim.
Nothing is more familiar than this series of episodes of
which Moses and Joshua are the heroes. The group of
priestly writers who first offered them as a lesson to the
people of Jerusalem saw in them, especially, an illustration
of the famous compact between Jahveh and his people, the
same covenant which other priestly writers had traced to
the patriarchs. The Israelites, saved from Egypt, guided
in the desert, and endowed with the soil of Palestine,
exhibit the benevolent, but definitive, act by which
Jahveh consecrates to himself the people he has chosen.
Henceforth the Jewish literature will unceasingly remind
the Jews how they owe to Jahveh the land they occupy
and their very existence. Israel belongs to Jahveh as one
who is saved from death belongs to his saviour; so, at
least, the theology of Jerusalem will have it.
The earliest legislation of the priests of Jerusalem is
thus found to be inserted in the midst of the Mosaic
episodes. The priests, as we said, wanted to represent
as dictated formerly by Jahveh the laws which they
wished to impose on their contemporaries, and we are
not astonished at their procedure. There is no legislator
in ancient times who did not assign a divine origin to his
work. Why should the Jerusalemitic legislators of the
fourth century act otherwise ?
But it was equally important to make these laws the
very conditions of the compact between his people and
Jahveh.
And Jahveh said: Behold, I make a covenant; before
all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been
done in all the earth, nor in any nation : and all the people
shall see how terrible is the work of Jahveh.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
Thou shalt worship no other god: for Jahveh, whose
name is Jealous, is a jealous god.1
Thou shalt not make a covenant with the inhabitants
of the land, and thou shalt not take their daughters unto
thy sons......2
Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.8
The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep: seven
days thou shalt eat unleavened bread.........*
Every first-born of a mother is mine, and every firstling
among thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male...........
All the first-born of thy sons thou shalt redeem, and none
shall appear before me empty.5
Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou
shalt rest; in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.6
And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the first-
fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at
the year’s end.7
Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear
before your lord Jahveh, the god of Israel. For I will
cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders:
neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt
go up to appear before Jahveh, thy god, thrice in the
year.8
Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with
leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the
passover be left unto the morning.9
The first of the first-fruits of thy land thou shalt bring
unto the house of Jahveh thy god.10
Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.11
And Jahveh said unto Moses: Write thou these words:
for after the tenour of these words I have made a
covenant with thee and with Israel.12
All these are religious laws, it will be said. They are
not, because at Jerusalem religious institutions are but
the form of the civil institutions; because the rulers are
1 Primordial law nationalising the cult of Jahveh.
2 Prohibition of mixed marriages.
8 Prohibition of images. 4 Feast of the Passover.
8 Law of taxes. 6 Law of the Sabbath.
7 The three great feasts, that of Easter recalled.
8 The three pilgrimages. 9 A detail of the Passover.
10 Lax of taxes.
11 A law the meaning of which, Reuss says, was unknown even to the
ancient Jewish commentators. We believe that it refers to a proverb, of
which the meaning has been lost.
12 Exodus xxxiv. 10-27.
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
69
priests, and we know that to worship Jahveh means to
consecrate one’s soul to one’s country, Jerusalem. But,
from the first feeble utterance of the Jewish legisla-
tion, we see, among other laws, the utopian law: the
ideal law by the side of the practical law. In demanding
that the males shall come in pilgrimage thrice a year
from the country round Jerusalem to the one temple (for
it is a question of the one temple, whatever the commen-
tators may have thought of it), Jahveh promises them
that no enemy shall profit by their absence to sack their
houses and ravish their women.
Another small, but slightly longer, code1 deals with
certain questions of the civil order. It regulates the
position of servants; it punishes homicide, theft, blows
and wounds, seduction, sorcery, bestiality, and usury; it
resumes the prescriptions of the preceding code, and adds
the extraordinary utopianism of the sabbatic year. The
Jews are not only enjoined to dedicate to Jahveh the
seventh day of the week, but they are also commanded to
consecrate a whole year in every seven years:—
Six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in
the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it
rest and lie still.2
At a later date the legislators of Jerusalem will
guarantee their people that Jahveh will, in the sixth year,
give them a double harvest, sufficient to feed them during
the seventh.
Lastly, a number of enactments are devoted to protect-
ing the man whom our translations call “ the stranger,”
and who is really only the Judaising foreigner. For a
people who were ambitious and hopeful to annex the
surrounding peoples it was necessary to protect foreigners,
when they began to accept Jewish ways. Jerusalem is
still but a town with its immediate surroundings ; but it
dreams of becoming the capital of a great country, and
1 Exodus xxi. 1 to xxiii. 19.
2 Exodus xxiii. 10, 11.
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the mashal of Jerusalem always think of the people of
Israel which does not yet exist, except as an ideal.
Theoretically, the Mosaic laws are made for the whole of
the States of Palestine; in practice, they are only valid
for Jerusalem and its immediate district. Theoretically,
the Palestinian neighbours are brothers; in practice, they
are still foreigners. The protection of the Judaising
foreigner at Jerusalem is a transitory arrangement. It is
an accommodation of the utopia to realities.
The Pact, formerly concluded by the patriarchs, now
signed by Moses, is afterwards renewed by Joshua.
After delivering Israel from the bondage of Egypt,
Jahveh gives it the good and spacious land, the land
flowing with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanites,
Hethites, Amorrhites, Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and
Gergezites.
What historical value is there in this list ? Possibly
they have founded erudite discussions on narratives in
which dogmas are covered with a mantle of fable. If
peoples who attained to some idea of history, the Greeks
and the Latins, were unable to learn anything of their
past beyond a few centuries, how can we suppose that
Orientals, Jews entirely lacking the historical sense,
can, apart from a miraculous communication, and
apart from what was afforded by Chaldaea and Egypt,
have learned anything about a period that was contem-
porary with nomadism, a period one thousand years
before their time ?
Kenan, with his habit of ridiculing the improbabilities
of the exegetic theses which he adopted, was astonished
that there was no mention of a revolt of Canaan in the
history of Israel. The Canaanites, Hethites, Amorrhites,
Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and Gergezites are, in the
Mosaic epic, the characters which the imagination of the
Jerusalem moshlim of the fifth century has summoned to
play a part: to explain that Jahveh had, as an effect of
his favour, given to the Israelites a country to which they
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
71
had no other right than this favour of Jahveh. Later, in
the deuteronomic period, these supposed peoples, gathered
together under the generic name of Canaanites, will serve
to illustrate another dogma. At no time are they any-
thing hut puppets in the hands of the priests of Jerusalem.
We do not mean to say that there never were any
Canaanites, Hethites, or Amorrhites. The Hethites
formed a great empire in the north of Palestine at the
time of the Egyptian and Assyrian invasions. The
Canaanites seem to have come from Chaldaea, and are
related to the Hyksos who invaded Egypt. But the Bible
knows nothing of these historical Hethites and Canaanites.
It knows next to nothing of the Hethite empire; it is
unable to distinguish the Hethites from the most miserable
tribes of Palestine. The names only are real; the rest is
fiction, and fiction with a purpose. The fact is that they
needed an appendage to Israel. They had taken from
the past the old and disused name of Israelites, and the
Israelites had become the chosen people of Jahveh. In
the same way they take from the past the forgotten and
lost name of Canaanites. The Canaanites become objects
of disgrace to Jahveh; as a kind of theological helots,
they are the rejected of Judaism. Canaan is the counter-
part to Israel. Palestine will henceforward bear two
equally unreal and dogmatic names. Before Jahveh
makes a gift of it to his people, it will be called Canaan;
afterwards, it will be known as Israel.
After the narrative of the conquest of Canaan, the
history of Israelitic antiquities is continued in a new
cycle of epic episodes.
Judges was the name given to the legendary heroes of
Palestinian extraction who had lived in the land of Israel
before the establishment of royalty. Such were Gideon
and his son Abimelech, Deborah the prophetess, Jephtha,
who sacrificed his daughter to Jahveh, Samson, the lover
of Delilah the Philistine, Samuel, whose sombre figure
would afterwards grow to terrible proportions.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
of the world. The moshlim narrated with light heart the
marvellous adventures of primitive ages, which had for
the most part been taken from Babylon. But the main
object of the priests was, by means of complete genealo-
gies, to connect the patriarchs, the fathers of the people
of Israel, with the first man. No link in the chain must
be wanting; and, unfortunately, the different moshlim
invented different genealogies, which, in spite of their
disagreement, were equally preserved for our veneration.
From the time of Noah and the Deluge we find the
theory of the Pact making its appearance. The Deluge
is over, and Jahveh puts before the patriarch, for the
first time, the bases of the famous alliance.
Let us explain what we mean.
The history of the Jewish people from its constitution
as a people—that is to say, from Esdras—until the time of
its destruction, the history of the Jewish soul, such as it
was framed amid the civilisations of the east and as,
afterwards, in its Christian form, it was imposed on the
Graeco-Roman world, is the development of a leading
idea, which shows itself from the childish legends of
Judges to the death-rattle of the Judaeo-Christian
apocalypses. This is the Pact—the compact agreed upon
between Jahveh and the Israel which symbolised the
ideal of Jerusalem. Theologians speak of it as the
Covenant.
Jahveh will punish Israel, if Israel is unfaithful to
him; if Israel is faithful to Jahveh, he will reward Israel.
But it must be clearly understood that the Jews were not
thinking of vague promises made by the deity; there was
question of a real treaty, an act drawn up in good and
due form, a private deed, signed, read, and approved, the
considerations and clauses of which will fill the whole of
the Judaic literature. Only, in the fourth century,
Jahveh merely promises the Jewish people the free and
peaceful possession of Palestine.
With the legend of Abraham the theory of the Pact
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
61
reaches its full development, at the beginning of the
fourth century. Abraham is brought by Jahveh from
Ur in Chaldasa to take possession, for his descendants, of
the country that the god reserves for them. A score of
times the god gives his divine word to the patriarch:—
In the same day Jahveh made a covenant with
Abraham, saying: Unto thy seed do I give this land...
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee
and thy seed after thee in their generations for an ever-
lasting covenant, to be a god unto thee, and to thy seed
after thee.1
The choosing of Israel, the fundamental dogma of
Judaism, is the starting-point of the Pact. Jahveh has
chosen Israel among the peoples from the earliest time;
and now, if Israel observes the law of Jahveh, Jahveh
will secure its happiness in the land which he has given
to it. We know what is meant by Israel. At the time
when the mashal of Abraham were written Israel has no
real existence; it is the myth that symbolises the future
kingdom of which the aristocracy of Jerusalem dreams.
The choice of Israel has, therefore, two stages: in the
first stage it is the union of the populations of Palestine
in one single kingdom by the Jewish people, under its
hegemony; in the second stage it is the assurance of an
endless prosperity to this new kingdom amid the
kingdoms of the earth.
The writers who, in the fifth century, composed the
earliest Biblical narratives aimed at proving this choice of
their people, by putting it at the very source of history.
But they were not less concerned to specify the degrees
of subordination of the States which must make up the
kingdom of their dream, and the degree of vassalage of
the surrounding States. Bound about them are the little
peoples which they regard as brother-peoples, believe to
belong to the Israelitic stock, and propose to absorb in
their ideal Israel. A little farther off are their neigh-
1 Genesis xv. 18 ; xvii. 7, and passim.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
hours, the congenital peoples of Moab, Ammon, and
Edom. Legend says that David reigned over them;
why should they not some day be subject to the hegemony
of Jerusalem ? The moshlim of Jerusalem will tell how
Moab, Ammon, and Edom are cousins, or, rather, more
lowly brothers, younger sons who owe obedience to their
elders. Beyond them there is Syria, into which Jewish
action is already penetrating; for Syria also is a country
of the same family.
These relationships are symbolised in a series of myths.
Abraham, the mythic father of the people of Israel,
was not the only son of Thare (or, as is now more com-
monly said, Terah) when he left Ur in Chaldaea to come
to Palestine; he brought with him Lot, his brother’s son.
Now, Lot is the father of Ammon and Moab. But
Ammon and Moab are the sons of incest; the myth of
the daughters of Lot puts in their place, in this great
table of origins, the lower tribes of Moab and Ammon.
Abraham himself has two sons. One is Isaac, the
legitimate son, the heir of Abraham, the chosen of Jahveh;
the other is Ishmael, son of a slave, bastard, humbler
brother of Isaac—Ishmael, the father of many Arab
tribes.
Isaac, again, has two sons. Esau, deprived of his birth-
right, is the father of Edom; Jacob, the favourite of the
god, is destined to continue the family.
Jacob himself is the eponymic father of the privileged
people. He is Israel himself; for the name Israel, which
the priests of Jerusalem have revived in order to give it
to the former kingdom of David—that is to say, to the
collection of Palestinian States which they hope to unite
under their hegemony—is now projected upon the ancestor
Jacob. Israel becomes the second name, the surname
given by Jahveh himself to the patriarch Jacob.
And Jahveh said to Jacob : What is thy name ? And
he said, Jacob.
And he said : Thy name shall be called no more Jacob,
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
63
but Israel; that is to say, conqueror of God! Because
thou hast fought with God and with men, and hast
prevailed.1
On that day the definition is completed. Israel is the
solemn name of the eponymic patriarch in whom the
Jerusalemites of the fourth century symbolised the Pales-
tinian kingdom which they aspired to found on the model
of the ancient empire of David.
With Jacob-Israel we come to the very heart of the
family which the men of Jerusalem are ambitious to form.
The people of Israel is created. Jacob has twelve children,
and these twelve children are the fathers of the twelve
tribes of Israel, and give them their names—Ruben,
Simeon, Levi, Judah, Joseph, Benjamin, etc. From that
time, through the whole of Jewish history, the relations
between the different Israelitic groups will be reflected in
all the Biblical narratives. At one time Joseph will be
exalted, at another time he will be cast in the shade;
though he is the hero of a celebrated mashal, this eponymic
father of a northern tribe will never be raised to the rank
of ancestral patriarch, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Benjamin will be alternately praised and vilified. Simeon
will become the expression of the Jewish ambitions in the
southern territories. Judah himself will not always be
equally glorified, and he will experience the severity of
the depreciating myths, when the priest-writers are minded
to rebuke their people; but at the origin of the tribe will
be placed the myth of Thamar, with the purpose of cele-
brating, by a providential and almost miraculous inter-
vention, the birth of the ancestors of Jerusalem.
Nothing is more comical than the concern of com-
mentators to locate on the Palestinian territory these
twelve tribes, of which scarcely one half had a real
existence, and which, in the mind of the fourth-century
writers, are only the expression of political views. For-
merly—a long time ago—geological and astronomical
1 Genesis xxxii. 27-28.
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THE BOOKS OF MOSES
truths were sought in Genesis; later an effort was made
to reconcile the Bible and geology. To-day people seek
ethnographical and anthropological indications in Genesis,
as if the Biblical writers had been better at ethnography
than geology; as if the Bible were anything else but
dogmas illustrated by fables.
We have only quoted a few instances. The early
Biblical narratives are encumbered with genealogies which
are all dogmatic, and all aim at expressing the pretensions
of the aristocracy of Jerusalem. If there are many con-
tradictions between these genealogies, these ethnic myths,
it is because the Bible was not composed by one single
school, nor in one single day; it is because each genera-
tion, each school, inscribed its ambitions therein. Such
is the myth of the sons of Noah, one of the last born of
the Mosaic myths.
Everywhere, in the course of their wanderings over the
land of Palestine, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lay the first
stones, in some way, of the ancient sanctuaries of Jahveh
scattered over Palestine, for which it was necessary to
find a patriarchal origin.
Let us try to understand how the Jerusalemitic writers
of the fourth century could, and must, glorify the sanc-
tuaries of their neighbours. Commentators see in that
an irrefutable proof of the non-Judaic origin of a large
part of Genesis ; we see in it a proof of the contrary. In
the fourth century these famous sanctuaries had almost
all disappeared, or were in ruins. Most of them were
mere memories. Bersabee, Hebron, Bethel, Gabaon,
Mispha, Galaad, and Mahanaim no longer existed; vener-
able ruins, they could cause no apprehension to the clerical
aristocracy at Jerusalem. On the other hand, they are
careful not to seek a sacred origin for Samaria, the rival
city; and Sichem, a sub-prefecture of Samaria, too ancient
and celebrated to be omitted, is most frequently mentioned
unfavourably. For Jerusalem, on the contrary, they find, in
Melchisedech and the sacrifice of Moriah, especially sacred
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
65
antecedents. The old sanctuaries celebrated by the aris-
tocracy of Jerusalem are almost always vanished or fallen
rivals, whose extinct glory does but exalt the primacy of
Jerusalem, in preparing the way for it.
But in collecting the ancient legends of Palestine, and
appropriating the old memories of neighbouring cities, the
priests of Jerusalem are, as we know, pursuing their secret
aim. They, a people without a past, must enrich them-
selves with the legendary and national treasures of the
tribes that they dream of assimilating; they will gather
about themselves, and under their leadership, this land of
Palestine that they are ambitious to conquer; they are
more than ever determined, in incorporating in their work
the traditions and dreams of congenital and neighbouring
peoples, to realise at some near date their ideal of a people
of Israel.
We ought also to say a word of the etymologies that
abound in the Mosaic books—etymologies of which hardly
a single one has been admitted by philologists, plays upon
words such as primitive peoples love, puns with a purpose
of proving something. But it is enough to understand
that everything in this Bible, in which some have thought
to find history, is dogmatic, purely dogmatic.
The marvellous thing is that the patriarchal legends
have grown round these theses in a delicious flowering of
the oriental imagination. Doubtless, in this never-chang-
ing east, the Jews of the fourth century did not imagine,
in their more remote legends, caravans that differed from
those which they saw passing at the foot of the walls of
Jerusalem; and the gates of the town opened at evening
to the same nomad flock-drivers, seeking rest and refresh-
ment. Yet the theorists who related the vagabond origins,
in which they found it expedient to fix their dogmas, were
at the same time poets. Thus these flowers, the prettiest
that the east has produced, came into the light: Abraham
wandering in the valleys of Palestine, Eliasur and Rebecca,
Joseph and his brethren, etc.—those beautiful stories whose
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THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 55
may have been saved in the wreck of the ancient history
of Israel. It is possible that these nomads may have pre-
served, and transmitted to their descendants, the name of
some great chief who had directed their migrations in a
remote age. It is no less possible that the memory may
have survived of a period of slavery in the land of Egypt;
though nothing is less probable, since not a single Egyptian
monument mentions this Israelite episode. We may, if
we will, retain the name of Moses, but that is all.
Twelve centuries lie between the recorded facts and
the age in which they were recorded; the critics who put
back the composition of the Mosaic books to the eighth
century will say eight, instead of twelve, centuries. How
many generations in twelve, even eight, centuries! How
many generations lost in the vicissitudes of nomadic life,
of barbarism, or of a most rudimentary civilisation! Let
us understand that nothing crosses such steppes as those.
The priests of Jerusalem who, after Esdras, undertook
to relate the origin of their people, or, rather, of the so-
called people of Israel, would thus find themselves con-
fronted, in regard to the time before the Judges, with a
yawning abyss, in which nothing was offered to them but
a few remote traditions. But they are determined at all
costs to glorify this ancient Israel, and from that time,
with the aid of these vague traditions, they proceed to an
imaginative creation.
Does anyone hesitate to admit that the priests of Jeru-
salem would deliberately, shamelessly forge the Mosaic
history ? We must not forget that we are dealing with
orientals: that we are dealing with priests, with rulers
who have no idea of writing history in the modern fashion,
but write merely to establish dogmas, give a divine
character to laws, legitimise institutions, preach a national
faith to a people, and create for it a sublime past.
That the ancestors of the Jewish people, the people of
Israel, should have come from Egypt, guided across the
desert by the hand of Jahveh, to settle in Palestine, will
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THE BOOKS OE MOSES
hardly suffice as a picture of their origin for the men of
Jerusalem. Whence came the Israelites before they
settled in Egypt ? Had not Jahveh chosen the people,
which he was to cherish, in the remote ages ? Had he
not, since the first days of the world, promised to the
ancient Israelites the country which he would give to
their descendants? The writers of the Bible do not
doubt that they can put back to the very creation of the
universe the promises of Jahveh and the miraculous
choice of Israel. Thus will be composed the history of
the patriarchal times, the account of the first days of the
world.
Possibly the Palestinian traditions furnished one or two
other names; but, though the imagination of Jerusalem
continued to play the chief part, it was Babylon, possibly
Egypt, perhaps even Persia, that would now contribute
elements to the story.
Science is gradually making clear the share that the
sages of Babylon had in their conception of the origin of
humanity. The story of Moses may seem to imply no
foreign document, but the account of the origin of man
points to documents of Babylonian origin; witness the
Deluge.
The Babylonian civilisation, like that of Egypt, sinks
into the remotest depths of history. Countless centuries
old at the time when the writers of Jerusalem were but
beginning to think of writing a history of their ancestors,
Babylon had civilised the west of Asia all around it. The
kings of Persia, instead of destroying the vast city, had
often resided there. Alexander and his successors respected
its great antiquity, and it was still, in the fourth and the
third centuries, the centre of western Asia. Though it
had ceased to be its political capital, it had remained the
spiritual metropolis. From immemorial time science, art,
and a powerfully-organised religion lived under the shelter
of its walls. Heir of the ancient cities of Chaldasa, it has
been the religious, artistic, and scientific teacher of Asia.
THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 57
In the fourth century it is still ruled by its own laws; the
Persians, its masters, respect the legislation that had been
promulgated, fifteen hundred years before, by the Baby-
lonian king Hammurabi. The little States of western
Syria accept this influence, like the others, and the Jews
are affected by it even more than the others. A Jewish
colony lived at Babylon; they are the descendants of the
men of Judah deported in 588 by Nabuchodonosor. There
is unbroken intercourse between the Jews of Jerusalem
and the Jews of Babylon; the Jews of Babylon continue
to teach those of Jerusalem the legends, laws, and sciences
of Babylon.
The men of Jerusalem could therefore learn from Baby-
lon certain legends about the early ages of humanity, the
Deluge, and certain movements of peoples across Asia;
but could they learn from it anything concerning their
own ancestors ? Is it conceivable that the Babylonians
possessed information on the migrations of the Israelitic
nomads in the time of Hammurabi, or in the time of the
Kassite kings ? In point of fact, Assyriology is still
silent as to the adventures of the Bene-Israel before the
time of Solomon. The amount of information that the
writers of Jerusalem may have received from the Baby-
lonian civilisation is, therefore, easy to determine. Of the
ancestors of the great family of western Asia which is
called Semitic they might learn something; of the ances-
tors of the Israelitic tribes in particular they could learn
nothing.
As to the Medo-Persic science and religion, it is certain
that the priests of Jerusalem were acquainted with it, but
its influence seems to have been rather theological, and
came later.
Gathering, therefore, on the one hand, from the reminis-
cences of the cities of Palestine certain fragments of
legends, and possibly a few vague names, such as that of
Moses, and from the science of Babylon, and perhaps that
of Egypt, on the other hand, a few traditions which
58
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
Assyriology and Egyptology are gradually detaching from
the Biblical narratives, they proposed to make amends for
the lack of a national past of their own, and, in view of the
dogmas which they purported to illustrate, in the fashion
of their contemporaries, and the ambitions that they
resolved to justify, to erect in freedom the monument of
their pretended past.
Thus, although the historical, legendary, and mythical
framework of the Mosaic books is borrowed from the
legendary and fabulous histories of other peoples, they
are in substance profoundly national. These legends
have been borrowed from their Palestinian neighbours
only with a view to annexing them; from their Baby-
lonian ancestors only to enrich themselves with their
glory. All this legislation, theory of origins, legitimising
of institutions, lessons drawn from events, and justification
and glorification of the ambitions of Jerusalem, will be so
fiercely national that this epic, created afresh or borrowed
from foreigners by this people without a past, seems to us
as profoundly Jewish as if it had really been born of the
forty centuries’ past which the writers of Jerusalem
pleased to imagine. The books of the law are the
programme of the imperialism of the men of Jerusalem.
§ 2. The Jehovist-Elohist Period.l
If the date 458, which tradition assigns to the arrival
of Esdras, corresponds to the great nationalist movement
from which Judaism issued, it is to the generation that
lived about the middle of the fifth century that we must
grant the high honour of having written the first pages of
the Mosaic books. Above all things, the priests who then
governed wished to impose upon the people of Jerusalem,
not merely by force, but by persuasion—that is to say, by
1 See Appendix IV.
THE JEHOVIST-ELOHIST PERIOD
59
faith—that fidelity to the patron-god, Jahveh, the soul of
the Jewish State, in which they recognised the supreme
condition of the existence of their country; they must
perpetuate, as a living and eternal reality, the teaching
of Esdras. Jahveh punishing his people for their unfaith-
fulness to him, and restoring them for their fidelity to
him, was the great lesson with which they needed to
penetrate the Jewish people. And these terrible priests,
who enforced nationalism under pain of death, wished,
instead of legislating in the abstract, to give the precept
at once in the form of example.
Thus was the Bible begun.
The priests of Jerusalem wished to enact: “ Jahveh is
the national god of Jerusalem; Jerusalem can have no
other god but Jahveh.”
What they said was : “ Your fathers were taken away
by the rivers of Babylon, because they had forsaken
Jahveh.”
They wished to enact: “You shall not have foreign
wives....You shall make no image of your god.......You
shall not offer the holocaust to your god save in his house
of Jerusalem.”
What they said was : “ Your town was burned down,
your fathers were slaughtered, your nation was destroyed,
because you had taken foreign wives, because you had
worshipped images, because you had burned the fat of
your flocks under every high tree and on every green
hill.”
Thus did they undertake to relate to the people the
story of its past, in order to give it an example and a
lesson. In following the development of the many
narratives, the combination of which afterwards formed
the earliest books of the Bible, we shall see the unfolding
of the series of dogmatic theses of the aristocracy of
Jerusalem in the fifth and fourth centuries.
After the manner of the sages of Babylon, the priests
of Jerusalem made their history go back to the creation
60
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THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 49
has always an immediate object. It is utilitarian and
political; it is dogmatic; it justifies, enforces, or recom-
mends something.
Most frequently it provides a frame for legislation.
The laws must come direct from heaven, and the writers
are engaged to describe how.
Everything contributes to the same object—fabulous
traditions, national legends, and the history of their
ancestors, are turned into illustrations of the religious,
political, or social theses that it is sought to impose.
To show the legitimacy of the actual institutions seems
to be no less needed. It must be explained how they
were established, and they must be consecrated by having
a venerable origin assigned to them.
The relation to neighbouring peoples is another point
that the moshlim will never forget; they have to show
that, if their own people have such and such a descent,
the neighbouring people has a different origin, so that the
recriminations, ambitions, and hatreds between them will
thus be more or less sanctified.
These special characters of the early literatures of
ancient western Asia may be resumed in a general law,
which has persisted so steadily as the dominant law of
the Hebrew literature that it seems to us to-day to be
peculiar to it; it is the constant practice of projecting
into the past, in the form of myths and legends, the
institutions, laws, and theories of the present time.
Encyclopaedias of the religion, law, organisation, and
ambitions of an epoch, these epic growths are born and
develop as soon as the national soil is sufficiently fertile,
and they increase, in infinite variety and often in contra-
diction with each other, until the time when the reflective
work of an established school undertakes to gather them
together in great epics. Such were the earliest literatures
of western Asia; such was bound to be, and such was, at
Jerusalem, the Mosaic literature, or, to speak more
correctly, the great cycle of epic narratives of which the
E
50
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
five books of Moses, and the books of Joshua, Judges,
Samuel, and Kings, were afterwards formed.
But, while this national epic was bound to have, and
actually had, the general characters of the earliest writings
produced in any civilisation, and especially those of the
civilisations of western Asia, it was further bound to have
the absolutely special character, which distinguishes it
from all others, of being the expression of an imperial-
ism.
Born in the age of Cyrus, the Jewish people had hardly
known more than a century of real existence when the
first mashal was written; nevertheless, the five centuries
of the Davidic dynasty formed a prologue, a necessary
pre-historic phase, to it. The succinct narratives of the
ancient historiographers of the kings of Judah, which
survived in part at least, provided a chronological frame
for Jewish history from David to the Deportation; though
they may have been no more than a few great deeds, a
few anecdotes. The priests of Jerusalem had only to
resume this history to adapt it to the lessons which they
desired to give. But what could they discover before
David ? Until the day when David made Jerusalem his
citadel it had been but a poor little town without history
or legends. Babylon and Memphis had countless ages of
ancestors; Sichem, Bethel, and Hebron, in Palestine, had
certain vague memories. Jerusalem had nothing.
How could the priests who governed the little State of
Jerusalem make their past begin with David ? Primitive
peoples have always hung upon the most remote antiquity
the national epics with which they illustrated their legis-
lation. The priests of Jerusalem, who began, at the end
of the fifth century, for the purpose of political education,
to write the ancient history of their town, could not
escape this psychological necessity. Their ambition
suggested to them a way to create the ancestors that they
had not.
We saw how, from the close of the fifth century, the
THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 51
priests of Jerusalem had entertained the hope of re-estab-
lishing, with profit to themselves, the ancient empire of
David and Solomon, and formed the project of subduing
the populations of the same tongue and similar manners
who, in the north and on the west, surrounded their
barren mountains. The history of Jerusalem in Palestine
is the same as that of Home in Italy, if we take account
of the difference that separates the Jewish from the
Roman soul. Apart from the difference in the means
that are at the command of a sacerdotal aristocracy and a
military, positivist, and juridical aristocracy, we find, on
both sides, a long-matured resolution, carried out with
patience, to annex the surrounding peoples. But while
Rome relies solely on military force and administrative
power, Jerusalem uses the devices of churches; its leaders
begin by annexing the traditions, the ancient glories, the
legends, the national reminiscences of their neighbours,
before annexing their consciences and, ultimately, their
territory.
By a piece of brilliant audacity the priests of Jerusalem
were about to lay at once the first stone of their work.
Without avowing an ambition that would have brought
violent hostility upon them, they set to work on a plan
that was conceived for ages.
The territory of Jerusalem and its surroundings had
no past; but, as we said, a few ancient legends survived
among their Palestinian neighbours. Monuments, tombs,
and stone columns preserved the remembrance of heroic
names and adventures; traditions were cherished that
told of deeds of earlier days; sanctuaries were still found,
sometimes half ruined, which went back to an age long
before the time of David and Solomon. The priests of
Jerusalem resolved to appropriate the names, adventures,
traditions, and legends of their neighbours. It was the
beginning of the conquest. Above all things they strive
to give a Jewish character to the traditions of Palestine,
to bring local legends into the Jewish cycle, to persuade
52
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
the Palestinians that they are brothers. Finding no past
among themselves, the priests of Jerusalem resolutely
seize the past of their future subjects, and the great
national epic, which ought to be an epic of Jerusalem, is
going to be an epic of Palestine.1
Then, with no less brilliant decision, they put into
circulation the word which, since it symbolised the past
that they were restoring, symbolised their ambition. To
the empire of David and Solomon, which had disappeared
five hundred years before, they gave a name which was
destined to create a unity between the scattered populations
of the then divided Palestine. They did not invent this
name; they rescued it from oblivion, and adopted it. It
was the name Israel.
In a certain sense it might be said that the Mosaic
books were written for the purpose of launching the name
Israel, which represented the programme of the Jerusalem
aristocracy. If Israel was not a new name, we may be
sure that it had no longer any meaning at the time of the
Restoration. It had been borne, a thousand years before
Esdras, by the last nomads to settle in Palestine ; and,
among the populations whose destruction, as we saw, is
recorded on it, the column of a pharaoh mentions Israalou.
David and Solomon had afterwards united under their
domination all the Bene-Israel, but their empire had not
cohered. After Solomon the tribes of the north are rent
from the tribes of the south. The former make up the
kingdom of Ephraim; those of the south form the
kingdom of Judah. Two and a-half centuries later the
destruction of the Ephraimitic empire throws the ancient
tribes of the north into a chaotic condition. The Judaic
kingdom lasts another century and a-half; then it in
turn disappears in the conflagration lit by Nabuchodo-
nosor, and we have to come to the age of Cyrus and the
end of the sixth century to witness the restoration, or
1 See Appendix III.
THE NATIONAL EPIC OE AN IMPERIALISM 53
creation, of the cities of Palestine. At that time there are
a certain number of small populations speaking the same
language and having analogous religions. Possibly they
descend from the ancient Israelitic tribes, but they are
none the less isolated from each other. All recollection
of ancient Israel is obscured. It is even declared that
Judah alone was restored of the ancient twelve tribes of
Israel; the others have disappeared. And the unlimited
complaisance of commentators has, down to our own
time, disposed them to seek the lost tribes in the centre
of Asia, in Madagascar, or in Japan.
The priests of Jerusalem at once give a meaning and
some prestige to the name of Israel by applying it to the
ancient kingdom of David and Solomon. A certain unity
immediately appears among the populations of Palestine.
They are found to have common ancestors, they form one
large family, and, as far back as the legends of Palestine
reach, they discover a national history; a new fatherland
has been created. But, in making an Israelitic kingdom
of the provinces of the former Judaic sultan David, the
men of Jerusalem indicated that, since all the territory of
Palestine had once been united under the sceptre of
Jahveh’s favourite king, it must be united again some
day, and that, as in the time of David, Jerusalem must
be its centre and capital.
The name Israel is, then, merely the myth in which
the men of Jerusalem have symbolised their ambitions.
It is a Utopia endowed with a past. Renan, after and
before many others, wrote a history of the people of
Israel. We know Israelitic tribes fourteen hundred years
before the present era; we then become acquainted with
two Hebrew kingdoms; lastly we find a Jewish people.
But we must erase from history the expression, “ the
people of Israel,” or leave it only in the sense of being the
ideal of the Jewish people.
The priests of Jerusalem had thus conceived a history
of their past in which they would absorb the precious
54
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
relics of their neighbours whom they proposed one day
to annex. But, although it stretched farther back than
the past of Jerusalem, the past of their Palestinian neigh-
bours was soon exhausted, and the most ancient of their
memories scarcely reached more than a couple of centuries
ahead of David, to the time of the Judges. Beyond the
Judges lay the dark night of barbarism.
One must remember that at the time of the Judges
those whom we call the Israelites are Bedouins, scarcely
settled on the land. Whence do they come ? Through
what adventures have they passed ? How can these
mysteries be penetrated ? It was necessary for the com-
mentators to be affected with dogmatism just as much as
the priests of Jerusalem were in the fourth century, not
to advance a fatal question, an absolute non possumus, to
the Mosaic records.
One day hordes of nomadic shepherds and marauders
arrive in the midst of the plains of western Syria, dragging
their flocks and their women behind them. With their
weapons in their hands, they have slowly crossed the
desert in search of a fountain to assuage their thirst, a
grain-pit to sack. Now they discover a more temperate
clime, a soil that is watered with dew every night, streams,
and green trees. The indigenous populations are not
strong enough to resist them, and they settle, vagabond
troops brought from the depths of the unknown like a
cloud of locusts in the wind of the desert......What critic
will be able to retrace the migrations of these locusts ?
Egyptology has not yet found any trace of the Israelitic
episode. In the present state of the science it is almost
certain that, if nothing has yet been found, it is because
nothing exists. Do we need to add how the Biblical
record, in all that relates to the sojourn in Egypt and the
exodus, swarms with material improbabilities, geographical
errors, and historical impossibilities ? It is a clear proof
of an imaginative composition.
We may grant that a name, the possibility of a fact,
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Flavius Josephus tells, was not built until the end of the
fourth century.1 However that may be, we find the
antagonism of Jerusalem and Samaria in the earliest
pages of Jewish history. By the fourth century Samaria
was a rival, if not an enemy, of Jerusalem.
The other Palestinian States were incapable of resisting
Jewish influence. Most of them merely vegetated, or
remained stationary. The priests who ruled at Jerusalem
saw their authority extend on every side.
Their ambition grew with their success.
Judaea has always been a poor country. The thousand
square miles which represented the little State in the fifth
century consisted of a vast plateau which was for the most
part sterile, and gradually merged into the desert toward
the south. The State of Samaria in the north was more
fertile; but the plains of Gaza in the west, and the rich
valleys of Galilee beyond Samaria, excited the envy of the
wretched mountaineers of Jerusalem. The populations
of these regions spoke the same language. Though they
were often at enmity, they seemed to belong to the same
family. Why should not the Jews succeed in imposing
their leadership on the others ?
From the remotest period of the history of the ancient
kingdom of Judah, which they had set themselves to study,
the names of David and Solomon shone with the aureole
which illumined their sombre genius. David and Solomon
had not been humble sultans, like their successors; their
empire had reached from the Mediterranean to the Jordan,
from Lebanon to the southern deserts. David, the first
king of Jerusalem, and king of nearly the whole land of
Palestine, was quite enough to suggest to the cupidity of
the Jerusalem aristocracy the idea of the kingdom of
which Jerusalem would be the capital.
The Persian Empire had not allowed the thousand
small States and slight territorial unities it had con-
1 Appendix II.
PROGRESS OF THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 45
federated to enlarge their boundaries at each other’s
expense. The satrap who governed the Syrian region
was at Sidon. Both at Jerusalem and Samaria there
were lieutenants representing his authority. Under the
Persian dominion there was no chance for Jerusalem to
enlarge its power in any other than a religious sense.
But religious aggrandisement meant political aggrandise-
ment. The Persian government merely exacted the pay-
ment of the tax. Once that was paid and order was
respected, every man who worshipped the god of Jeru-
salem obeyed the clergy of Jerusalem. To introduce the
Jewish religion into the towns of Palestine was to secure
the acceptance of the Jewish law, the recognition of the
Jerusalem aristocracy as master, and a fresh source of
revenue for the temple through the tithes.
In this way, under the suzerainty of its Persian masters,
Jerusalem could become the capital and the metropolis of
the ancient cities of Palestine. Its aristocracy did not,
however, confine itself to this ambition. Had it not the
right to expect and to hope that at some future date—it
might be far or it might be near—the Persian Empire,
against which its neighbours, Phoenicia and Egypt, were
constantly rebelling, and which showed evident signs of
decrepitude at the end of the fifth century, would fall
to pieces? It had succeeded too well, in virtue of its
nationalism, in restoring the little State of Jerusalem, in
spite of countless difficulties, not to consider itself justified
in entertaining such high ambitions. Nationalism, a
necessary condition of the development of a young people,
proves inadequate unless it is enriched with that spirit
of expansion, domination, and conquest which we call
imperialism. Thibet is, perhaps, a model of the nation-
alist state. More gifted peoples are not content merely
to endure; they wish to grow, and they unconsciously
feel that he who does not grow will perish. It is the
law of imperialism.
The ancient kingdom of Judah had been independent.
46
ESDEAS
Could not the new State, which they dreamed of building
within the frontiers of the former Davidic empire, secure,
with the help of Jahveh, its political independence ? The
possession of Palestine—the free and peaceful possession
of Palestine—was the formula which the priests of Jeru-
salem were about to write on every page of their books.
It was the programme they had undertaken to carry out
ever since the close of the fifth century.
It is at this period that literature is born at Jerusalem.
From this point the study of the history of Judaism
becomes a study of its books—the books of the Bible—
in the order in which they were composed.
We are singularly fortunate in having the history of
Judaic ideas recorded in a series of books that had issued
from such a depth of the Jewish soul, had been so passion-
ately lived by the Jewish soul, and were so vehemently
symbolical of the Jewish soul, that no literature of any
other people forms so adequate an expression of the
history of that people.
With some sublime pages, the books of the Bible are
undigested compilations of badly-made records, contra-
dictory, devoid of art or style. The smallest chapter of
a Greek or Roman writer seems to be all harmony, logic,
and truth, when one approaches it from the chaos of
Hebrew remains. But so strong a soul suffers, hopes,
and uplifts itself so vigorously in this confusion that the
wretched people lives again for us through all the years of
its terrible career. We have but to follow the series of
these books to retrace, from its very source, the course of
the great river that will one day be the river of Christian
tradition.
The fifth century is the century of the Medic wars.
Asia is failing to subdue Greece, and Greece is beginning,
in Asia Minor, to conquer Asia. Isolated from these
glorious episodes, lost in the most obscure corner of a
small province of the vast Persian Empire, living among
mountains on which no echo ever falls of the great events
PROGRESS OF THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 47
in the north, the Jewish State, with a religious fanaticism
that is merely an exalted nationalism, succeeded in giving
itself a remarkably original character.
Before Jerusalem was destroyed by Nabuchodonosor
the State of Judah was a small nation. After the
Restoration the Jewish State is a congregation, a church,
a group without political independence, military power, or
lay chief, governed by its priests under the suzerainty of
the Persian satrap.
But there is in the bosom of this little church so
profound and ardent a soul that without armies, by the
sole power of its vitality, it will come to conquer a portion
of the civilised world. Everywhere else men’s ambitions,
dreams, and fevers find an expression in deeds; here it is
all expressed in the name of a god who is the soul of the
people, and in whom the people are concentrated.
Literature only makes its appearance among a people
when it has reached a certain stage of its development.
Quarter of a century after Esdras the Jewish State is
sufficiently confident of its spirit, its institutions, and its
ideal to have a literature at length. The story of this
literature will henceforth be the history of the imperialism
of Jerusalem.
Chapter III.
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
§ 1. The National Epic of an Imperialism.
The literature of the Jews is born at Jerusalem in the
fifth century before the present era. It has from the first
all the characters of primitive literatures.
The general character of primitive literatures is to take
the shape of a series of epic fragments, independent of
each other even when they continue the same subjects.
As epic fragments, they relate the history, legends, and
fables of the past. A concern about origins is found at
the beginning of all literatures; every people, as soon as
it becomes self-conscious, demands that it be told whence
it came. Being independent of each other, these epic
fragments are short compositions that are held together
by no unity, unless it be the unity of inspiration. Called
rhapsodies in ancient Greece, they gave themselves in
Judaea the name masJial, the meaning of which would
afterwards be somewhat altered; their writers are
moshlim. And we beg to be allowed to use these two
words, unfamiliar as they are, rather than words borrowed
from a foreign environment.
Besides this general character, which is common to all
primitive literatures, a certain number of special char-
acters are due to the different situations of various peoples.
In the west of Asia the first writers are local priests. The
priests are powerful among newly-formed societies; at
Jerusalem they govern the State. Art, in the sense of a
composition for its own sake, does not exist among the
primitive Orientals, and some of them, such as the Jewish
people, will never rise to its level. With them literature
48
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And now a new phenomenon appears. Representations
of the deity are so severely condemned that people confuse
the ancient representations of Jahveh with the figures of
the other gods of Palestine. Idolatry means the worship
of images; it may apply to the worship of an image of
Jahveh, just as well as to the worship of images of other
gods. The older Israelites had been guilty of idolatry in
worshipping Jahveh under a human or animal form; but
they had not worshipped foreign gods, such as Camos and
Milkom, under these material forms. The Jews of the
Esdras school would make no distinction between Jahvic
and foreign idolatry; the one was coupled with the other
in a common execration; and, when some centuries had
passed, the prophets did not even understand that these
material representations had belonged to Jahveh. This
failure to understand the ancient religion of Israel is, as
Maurice Vernes has shown, one of the proofs of the
extremely late date of the prophetical books.
In after years the idea of a god without material repre-
sentation will be one of the forces of the Judaism which
becomes Christianity, when it presents itself to minds
that love abstraction and are weary of the symbolism
of the Greek divinities. But we must understand that in
the fifth century, and as long as the temple of Jerusalem
stood, this cult of a god without images, instead of being a
spiritual cult, was just as grossly materialistic as that of
the other gods. At Jerusalem, just as everywhere else,
the local god is honoured by the immolation of animals.
The beasts are slain before the altar. The priest is a
sacrificer—in other words, a butcher. The Mosaic legis-
lation will publish a manual of slaughtering; and, when
Jerusalem becomes the holy city, the goal of countless
pilgrims, the temple will be a vast slaughter-house where,
in honour of the unseen god, the blood of animals will flow
without ceasing.
THE FIRST INSTITUTIONS
39
§ 3. The First Institutions.
Meantime the institutions which were inspired by the
great design of centring all the strength of the Jewish
soul on the name of Jahveh were gradually rising.
The Babylonian influence, which will presently prove
overwhelming at Jerusalem, is not yet appreciable except
in so far as it dominates the whole civilisation of western
Asia. The disciples of Esdras shut themselves sternly
within their walls, under the shadow of their temple.
The Jewish element rules as exclusively as is possible.
Then the nationalism of the Jews clothes itself at once
with the religious garb which it will never again lay
aside. The form of government becomes a theocracy.
The institutions, evolving round the religion of Jahveh,
assume a religious form. The laws, civil as well as
hygienic, will become religious laws. The government
will assume a religious character, and the leaders of the
State will rule in the name of Jahveh, and be priests.
How did the priests of the local god attain, in the
fifth century, to the government of the State of Jerusalem ?
In the absence of documentary evidence, we can only say
that the historical probabilities point to the priests as the
only men, after the Restoration, who were capable of
exercising authority in the town and its neighbourhood.
The State of Jerusalem advances under the supervision
of its Persian masters; the emperor who reigns at Susa,
and the satrap who governs in Syria, grant the Jews full
liberty of administration, provided that they live in peace
and pay the tribute. There was not, and could not be,
a Jewish army, and assuredly there was no military
caste. The Persian hegemony laid no other specific
obligation on its subject-peoples than political submission
and taxation. There was, then, nothing of a military
character at Jerusalem to take the lead. The extreme
poverty and lack of commerce and industry during the
40
ESDRAS
century which followed the Restoration prevented the
formation of a middle class. Industry never flourished
at Jerusalem. Commerce remained scanty when the
Persian peace was established in the east. An oligarchy
of merchants was hardly more possible than a military
oligarchy in the Jerusalem of the fifth and fourth
centuries. The domination of a petty sultan, a sort of
pacha ruling under the suzerainty of the Syrian satrap,
could not have been set up without at least a semblance
of national military authority. Supported solely by the
power of Persia, it would have been odious to the people.
The Persian Empire never inclined to have its small
vassal states administered by prefects. It was only the
organisation of Rome that would send functionaries to
the other end of the world. In view of the impossibility
of any other form of government, therefore, a clerical
government was almost inevitable, from the very nature
of the situation. And it was found that this government
corresponded with the needs of the people of Jerusalem.
Was the patriotism of the Jews formulated in the
name of the national god because a priestly government
was the only one possible at Jerusalem in the time of
Esdras ? Or did the government of Jerusalem fall into
the hands of the priests because Jewish patriotism
expressed itself in the name of the national god ? It is
probable that cause and effect acted together and gave
rise to a twofold logical necessity; the priestly govern-
ment confirmed the patriotism of the Jews in a religious
form, and the concentration of their patriotism in a
religious form decisively strengthened the priestly govern-
ment.
From the time of Esdras—that is to say, from the time
when the Jewish State began to live—the priests found
themselves at the head of the social hierarchy. There
was neither military caste, nor oligarchy of merchants,
nor despotic pacha. The Persian lieutenant represented
the distant military power, to which no one dreamed of
THE FIRST INSTITUTIONS
41
offering resistance, and the local police sufficed to maintain
order. There was a sacerdotal caste; and the leader of
the priests, the high-priest, governed. The first care of
the Jewish legislators seems to have been to establish a
system of tithes on the harvest and on cattle, a scheme
of offerings, voluntary or involuntary, which would
rapidly gather into the hands of the priests all the wealth
possible in the miserable little country. The sacerdotal
caste was soon as rich as it was powerful.
It quickly formed itself into a hierarchy. Round the
person of the high-priest a certain number of families
seized the revenue and the authority. The Mosaic law
will give the name of priest-levites to these privileged
members of the priesthood. The simple levites, at a
lower level than these, formed a sort of army, maintained
and directed by the priests. Finally, at the bottom of
the sacerdotal caste there were the lowly functions of the
poor officers who were not even levites. If we imagine
the vast Catholic Church reduced to the proportions of a
Church having control of a community of less than thirty
thousand souls, we can picture to ourselves the bishops
with their pope, then the army of curates and vicars,
and, as was seen in the Middle Ages, the crowd of
humbler officials working in obscurity about the altar.
There was this difference, that at Jerusalem the priests
made and applied the laws and administered justice.
The executive and judiciary power, as well as the legis-
lative authority, belonged to them. They were the
heart, the brain, and the arm of Jerusalem.
Beneath the sacerdotal caste the people were distri-
buted in families of husbandmen, shepherds, and small
merchants. They were far removed from the life of the
patriarchs; nevertheless, beyond the little commerce that
was indispensable in any community, agriculture and the
rearing of cattle were the sole business of the Jews in
the Persian period. The legislation of Exodus, Deutero-
nomy, and, later, Leviticus, does not deal with any other
42
ESDEAS
customs than the quite primitive ways of an absolutely
territorial people, among whom there is great poverty.
Finally, the Sabbath is a theocratic institution; its
purpose, like that of the prohibition of mixed marriages
and the condemnation of any representation of Jahveh in
a material form, is to isolate the nationalism of the Jews
among the other peoples.
The Sabbath would have little interest if it were no
more than a day of idleness for the profit of the workers,
the slave as well as the free man, even to the beasts of
the fields. It is, on the contrary, the day consecrated to
Jahveh ; it is a sort of tithe that the Jew will take from
the week, the offering of a day which he owes to his god.
It is a taboo day. Let any man who doubts this open
his Bible :—
The seventh day is the sabbath of Jahveh, thy god...
Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt,
and that Jahveh, thy god, brought thee out thence through
a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore
Jahveh, thy god, commanded thee to keep the sabbath
day.1
The law of the third century puts the motive even
more plainly:—
Jahveh rested on the seventh day; wherefore Jahveh
blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.2
The man who desecrates the Sabbath is put to death.3
We must admit that the death-penalty would be excessive
if it were merely a matter of ensuring respect for a purely
humanitarian institution.
Even more than circumcision, which was common to
many of the peoples of Palestine and has not a great
importance in the Bible, the Sabbath is the outward mark
by which the children of Jahveh must separate themselves
from other men. He therefore does not merely order
1 Deuteronomy v. 14-15. 2 Exodus xx. 11. See also xxxi. 12-17.
8 Exodus xxxi. 14-15.
PROGRESS OF..THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 43
rest, but commands abstention from all work, of any kind
whatever, and an entire consecration to Jahveh.
The Jewish institutions are, therefore, organised on an
essentially nationalist basis, and in an essentially religious
form. The Persian suzerainty was the providential feature
which, by maintaining a general peace in the world,
allowed the theocracy to develop. If Jerusalem had been
independent, it would have needed an army, a military
power, and would have had the precarious existence of
all petty States. As a vassal of Persia, Jerusalem was
able to begin in freedom the extraordinary work of con-
quering Palestine, and then the world, with the arms of
a spiritual body.
§ 4. Progress of the State of Jerusalem.
In virtue of the nationalism which its priests had
imposed on it, the little State of Jerusalem enjoyed a
great prosperity from the end of the fifth century. The
Jewish soul was greater than that of neighbouring peoples.
Jerusalem was a centre, or, rather, a heart, from which
the strength streamed out on every side. The Jewish
activity—the activity of the men of Jerusalem—was felt
as far as the frontiers of the Palestinian territory.
In Palestine the State of Samaria alone made some
show of resistance to Judaism. We have not the needful
documents to tell the story of the development of Samaria.
Possibly the capital of the former kingdom of Ephraim
had preserved its regional supremacy, and it may have
been an important town in the sixth century, when
Jerusalem was only just beginning to revive. Possibly it
developed at equal pace with Jerusalem in the fifth
century, retaining, while Jerusalem enlarged, its moral
autonomy, with its temple on Mount Garizim in contrast
to the temple of Jerusalem. Finally, it is possible that
the temple of Mount Garizim, as the Jewish historian
44
ESDRAS
1124
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:24:15 PM »
“ Thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy love,”
commands Deuteronomy. That means: “ Thou shalt
love thy country above thyself.” The standard to which
the patriots were to rally was the name of the god.
Henceforth to offer outrage to Jahveh would be to insult
the flag. In great nations there is a blind and fierce idol,
with sword in hand, the Fatherland, which demands
human sacrifices, and to which fathers must bring their
children as holocausts. At Jerusalem the idol was named
Jahveh.
This exalted nationalism, of which we are now to
follow the development, was the cradle of Christianity.
§ 2. The Esdras School.
Tradition places in the year 458, three-quarters of a
century after the rebuilding of the temple, the arrival of
Esdras at Jerusalem. There was much dispute about
this date, and even about the historical reality of Esdras,
when the Elephantine papyri1 were found to confirm, not
indeed the historicity of Esdras, but the dating of the
events which are ascribed to him. We have therefore, in
this study, taken Esdras as the expression of the school,
political group, or national movement, which developed
at Jerusalem at this very epoch.
The work of the Esdras school consists of three great
leading achievements:—
1. The prohibition of any other cult than that of
Jahveh.
2. The prohibition of mixed marriages.
3. The prohibition of any representation of Jahveh in a
material form.
Prohibition op any other cult than that op
Jahveh.—In the older Jerusalem of the kings, and in
1 See p. xv.
32
ESDRAS
the restored Jerusalem of Zorobabel and Nehemiah, there
had not been any other cult, apart from insignificant
exceptions, than that of Jahveh. But in this the
Jerusalemites merely followed the common Palestinian
custom of worshipping no god but their own. With the
Esdras school the exclusion of foreign gods becomes a
formal proscription.
Was there some danger at Jerusalem, at the time,
of the intrusion of foreign cults ? At first communica-
tion between one people and another had been
rare and difficult, and the Persian empire did not
concern itself with proselytism. One cannot see how
the old Jahveh, in the depths of his sanctuary, could
be disturbed by any god of the district or by a Persian
god.
Did the danger come from the ancient gods of
Palestine, which Jahveh had once reduced to the condi-
tion of vanquished gods, as the Israelitic tribes subdued
their worshippers ? As we have said, these cults had not
disappeared; but they had become lowly popular super-
stitions, and it is impossible to imagine the ancient gods
of Canaan, in the Judah of the fifth century, otherwise
than as little agrarian gods, insignificant local demons,
which no more threatened the lord Jahveh than the altars
of a St. Antony of Padua contain a menace to the official
Catholic cult.
The obscurity of Jewish history at this period reduces
us to hypotheses. In any case, the legislation of the fifth
and fourth centuries betrays a constant preoccupation
with foreign cults and the ancient cults of Palestine.
With Esdras, in fact, the law of fierce patriotism, without
which the Jewish State could not exist, always took the
form of a kind of uncompromising fidelity to the national
god. Jahveh alone is the god of Jerusalem, is the in-
variable starting-point of the Jewish legislation. As soon
as there were any laws at Jerusalem, apostasy—that is to
say, the worshipping by a Jew of any other god than
THE ESDRAS SCHOOL
33
Jahveh—was denounced as the greatest of crimes, and
punished with death. One after another the most
frightful measures were passed to prevent the possibility
of a religious secession.
The text we are about to quote is about half a century
later than Esdras, but it will give an accurate idea of the
way in which the Esdras school were disposed to treat
anti-patriotism:—
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or
thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend,
which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying:
Let us go and serve other gods....
Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto
him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou
spare, neither shalt thou conceal him :
But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be
first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the
hand of all the people.
And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die;
because he hath sought to thrust thee away from Jahveh
thy god.....
If thou shalt hear say of one of thy cities, which
Jahveh thy god hath given thee to dwell there, saying:
Certain perverse men are gone out from among you, and
have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying: Let
us go and serve other gods....
Then shalt thou inquire, and make search, and ask
diligently.
And behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that
such abomination is wrought among you ;
Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city
with the edge of the sword, thou shalt curse it with all
that is therein, and thou shalt slay the cattle thereof with
the edge of the sword.
And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst
of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city and
all the spoil thereof every whit, for Jahveh thy god; and
it shall be an heap of ruins for ever; it shall not be built
again.1
The purpose of the Inquisition was to establish a
1 Deuteronomy xiii. 6-16. [The few modifications of the English text
are in accordance with the author’s reading of the Hebrew.—J. M.]
D
34 ESDRAS
religion. The purpose of the atrocities of Deuteronomy
was to found a nation.
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages.—This was, perhaps,
the special work of Esdras.
The princes came to me [says Esdras, in the book
which is ascribed to him] saying: The people of Israel,
and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated
themselves, in regard to their abominations, from the
people of the lands.
Eor they have taken of their daughters for themselves,
and for their sons ; so that the holy seed have mingled
themselves with the people of these lands.
And when I heard this thing, I rent my mantle and
my garment, and plucked off the hair of my head and of
my beard, and sat down astonished until the evening.1
And later on :—
Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons,
neither take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek
their peace or their wealth for ever; that ye may be
strong and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an
inheritance for your children for ever.2
And foreign women were expelled, with the children
they had had.
The narrative is legendary; but the fact seems to be
historical, and there is reason to allow Esdras the honour
of having accomplished it. All the Hebrew books make
the prohibition of mixed marriages one of the funda-
mental laws of Judaism. When they have to relate the
apostasies of Solomon, they will ascribe them to the
influence of the foreign princesses introduced into his
harem. When they have to describe the edifying life of
the typical heroes of Judaism—the life of Abraham and
his descendants—they will marry them solely to women
of their own race. Indeed, the Deuteronomic law was
explicit:—
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them [the
surrounding nations] ; thy daughter thou shalt not give
1 Esdras ix. 1-4.
2 Esdras ix. 12.
THE ESDRAS SCHOOL
35
unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy
son.
For they will turn away thy son from following me,
that he may serve other gods.1
The prohibition to take a foreign wife was a powerful
means of maintaining at Jerusalem the exclusive cult of
Jahveh ; that is to say, of promoting a purely national
development. Later the Jewish writers will speak of the
sacredness of their race, and will shrink from the mixed
marriage as a sacrilege. But in the fifth century there is
only question as yet of inspiring a fierce nationalism,
under the pretext of an absolute consecration of the Jewish
families to Jahveh. We have to come to the first century
before the present era to find the Jews relaxing in their
observance of the old law, and to St. Paul to discover
their entire rejection of it.
Historians admire the decision with which the men of
Jerusalem made for themselves this anti-human law,
which, in repelling from them the women of the surround-
ing populations, at the same time isolated them in the
midst of those peoples.
Prohibition to Represent Jahveh in a Material
Form.—Here the historian does not merely admire the
opportuneness of a severe law, but is amazed at a con-
ception so profound that he can hardly grasp its reali-
sation.
How will it be possible to make this enormous differ-
ence between Jahveh and the other gods? How will it
be possible to isolate him so jealously in the heart of the
Jewish people ? How can they make of him so excep-
tional a god that the cult of other gods will never mingle
with his, and the Jewish fatherland will be for ever the
sole deity of these ardent hearts ?
The men of Jerusalem in the fifth century imagined
that the other gods, such as Camos, Bel, or Rimmon,
1 Deuteronomy vii. 4.
36
ESDRAS
might be represented as an ox, a serpent, or a fish, as of
either or both sexes, but that Jahveh should have no
representation or emblem; that he should rule, sexless
and invisible, in the storm.
The critic finds it difficult, in view of the scarcity of
documents belonging to the period, to say how the idea
came to the Jews of the fifth century of a god without
images. Possibly it was suggested to them by the Iranian
religion, which had no representations of Ormuzd; though
the influence of Iranism on the Jews seems to be later
than the fifth century, and it is at Babylon and in the
Babylonian civilisation that the men of Jerusalem were
educated. There may have been some accidental cause.
Perhaps the destruction of all the emblems of Jahveh at
the time of the Babylonian conquest, the extreme misery
of the Jerusalemites at the time of the Restoration, the
impossibility of making divine images rich and magnificent
enough to represent the god of whom they now dreamed,
or a repugnance to their rude and inadequate images,
inclined them to dispense with a material representation
of their deity altogether. We do not know. Accidental
causes are unknown, the deeper cause is clear. In impos-
ing this new law, he whom we call Esdras yields to a
powerful political need. The man of genius is but the
mouthpiece of a group. He seems to stand out in
advance because he is the first to formulate clearly
the law which is vaguely muttered by those about him.
At times he seems to be in opposition to his contem-
poraries, but it is an illusion. He is merely overpowering
their inertia, pressing them toward the goal to which they
are unconsciously tending. So extraordinary a novelty as
a god without images in the Palestine of the fifth century
must be explained by the normal development of a
nationalism which was pushed to its extreme conse-
quences. For the Jews of the fifth century Jahveh, or
the Jewish fatherland, had to be something unique,
something monstrously and incredibly isolated. This
THE ESDRAS SCHOOL
37
was necessary for the preservation of Jahveh; in other
words, that the Jewish fatherland might survive amidst
so many dangers.
Take ye therefore good heed to yourselves lest ye make
you a graven image, the similitude of any figure,
The likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast
that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that
flieth in the air,
The likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground,
the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the
earth:
And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when
thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all
the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them,
and serve them.....
And if ye corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image,
or the likeness of anything, and shall do evil in the sight
of Jahveh, thy god, to provoke him to anger,
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day
that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land.1
Similar is the command of the Decalogue :—
Thou shalt have none other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make thee any graven image......2
After the period of Esdras there is no representation of
Jahveh in the temple. At the bottom of the sanctuary
there is a curtain, and the holy of holies behind the
curtain is an empty room. The Jewish god dwells there
unseen. The golden bulls, the bronze serpents, the old
ephod and matsebali and asherah, are memories of
abomination; or, rather, they change their meaning.
The golden bulls are now identified with the angels of
Jahveh, the Kerubim; the bronze serpents with the
Saraphim; the ephod becomes a ritual garment; the
matsebali is now merely a commemorative column. The
asherah alone perishes in the wreck; it is taken to be a
representation of the Phoenician Astarte. The old cult
disappears, is proscribed, and becomes criminal.
1 Deuteronomy iv. 16-26.
2 Deuteronomy v. 7-8.
38
ESDRAS
1125
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:23:21 PM »
For twenty centuries the Jewish and Christian ortho-
doxies have taught that the destiny of Israel can only be
interpreted as a prolonged miracle. History will simply
say that the development of the Jewish State, among the
other States of Palestine, has been a similar success to
the development of the Athenian republic among the
republics of Hellas, or to the even more extraordinary
development of Rome among the cities of Italy.
What is the Jewish people in its beginning ? A few
miserable shepherds or husbandmen, a few lowly artisans
and poor folk without chiefs, who have gathered round
the ruins of a dismantled city, three parts destroyed by
fire, from the terror of looting hordes and hostile neigh-
bours. Then, when a better age begins and a great peace
fills the world, the little town is gradually rebuilt, the
temple of its national god restored, its walls raised once
more in spite of a thousand difficulties, and some security
is provided for its inhabitants and its outskirts. We are
now in the middle of the fifth century. There is still no
organisation, no written law, at Jerusalem. The town,
except for its modest temple and perhaps a few houses, is
no more than a cluster of huts with an encircling wall.
There is no civilisation; it is the dubious age when a
people barely begins to exist. Savagery and misery lie at
the gates. It is much the same with Samaria, the old
capital of Ephraim, with the sacred towns of Bethel and
Silo, and with the small Syrian towns, the towns of Moab,
Ammon, Edom, and Philistia. Jerusalem, for all its
temple and its walls, remains a humble city of Palestine.
It is at this moment that the evolution commences
from which Christianity will issue. The date is fixed by
the name of Esdras.1
The story of Esdras, as we read it in the book which
bears his name in the Bible, is, like almost all the Biblical
stories, a doctrinal legend; that is to say, a legend with
the purpose of establishing a religious dogma. Criticism
1 See Appendix II.
26
ESDRAS
can glean only two or three facts from it, and the greatest
obscurity surrounds the person, and even the age, of Esdras.
Was he the man of genius who first organised the popu-
lation of Jerusalem? Was he the head of a school of
reformers ? Is his name merely the symbol which con-
ceals a popular movement, or the geographical expression
which denotes a group ? It is supposed that Esdras was
a real personage, a priest of Jahveh; that he, in par-
ticular, forbade the Jerusalemites to have foreign wives,
and that he came after Nehemiah. But if his personality
is, and must apparently remain, shrouded in irremovable
obscurity, the work done, whether it was the work of one
(as is the more probable) or of many, or, better still, the
collective work of the nation, is clear and intelligible. It
is the first affirmation of the nationalism which was the
point of departure of Judaism.
When the men of Jerusalem had rebuilt the temple of
their god and restored their walls, it seems that, instead of
slumbering in their comparative security, they went on to
give a profound consideration to their situation, their past,
and their future; and that this profound meditation laid
the foundation of their fortune. The other peoples round
about them, Samaria, Moab, and Edom, similarly situated,
did not rise above the needs of daily existence. It seems
that the men of Jerusalem stopped to reflect, and interro-
gated their destiny. The others, accepting the lot which
chance dealt out to them, were content to live. The men
of Jerusalem trembled for themselves ; they dwelt on the
two long centuries, the horrors of which were barely over.
This little population, restricted to the few acres which
lay between the Cedron and the valley of Ben-Himmon,
shuddered to find itself conquered, isolated, and so weak,
and it reflected anxiously on its past. With the terrible
memories of ruin and deportation, with the painful recol-
lection of the slow and burdensome restoration, they
contrasted the memory of their earlier glories. Among
the older folk one still heard tell of the former greatness
THE BEGINNING
27
of the nation’s heroes, the victories of David, and the
splendour of Solomon. They dreamed of the old Davidic
kingdom, and in exaggeration made it stretch from the
desert to the great sea. They told marvellous tales of the
temple so magnificently huilt by Solomon, and contrasted
with it the poor edifice of Zorobabel. While other nations
drowsily accepted things as they were, the men of Jeru-
salem asked themselves why this thing had happened to
them, and why that; why this former grandeur and why
the fall. They could not reconcile themselves to the
thought that they had once been great, and were now
miserable, unless it were for some extraordinary reason.
They put themselves the fateful question, Why, which is
the root of all resurgence.
The naive theology of the tenth, the eighth, and even
the sixth century, taught that the victories of nations were
the victories of their protecting gods, and their defeats a
defeat of the god. A victory effaced a defeat. Jahveh,
once beaten under Achaz, had had his revenge under
Ezekias. It was a very natural idea in the turmoil of
brigandage, sometimes profitable, sometimes a failure,
among the ancient populations of Palestine. But the
frightful events which had ensued, the Chaldaean invasion,
the ruin and exile, had definitely brought these tribes into
subjection, and had meant the defeat of their gods. And
each people continued, as before the Babylonian conquest,
to honour its own god. Moab worshipped Camos, Ammon
worshipped Milkom. In the same way Jahveh reigned at
Jerusalem. Just as Camos was the territorial god of
Moab, Jahveh remained the territorial god of Judah.
Nevertheless, while the neighbouring peoples acknow-
ledged the defeat of their gods, the men of Jerusalem
proclaimed that their god had not been conquered. On
the very morrow of the Babylonian deportation, under
the ignominy of the Persian domination, they declared
that Jahveh was the terrible master who had thought fit
to chastise his people, and now thought fit to restore it.
28
ESDRAS
They affirmed that their disasters and their ruin and
oppression were the work of their national god himself.
In appearance, there was no change of the old traditions
in the Palestine of the fifth century; but in reality the
whole soul was revolutionised in the men of Jerusalem.
While the others thought it enough to cultivate the
protecting deity, who sent the sun and the dew, the men
of Jerusalem put their own despair, anxiety, and pride
into the terrible soul which they gave to Jahveh. It was
a prodigious effort of a few heroic men. The other gods
had become poor secondary deities, oppressed with their
people, now, under the Persian hegemony, ruling only the
small happenings of their little towns. The men of
Jerusalem had the boldness to proclaim that their god
had triumphed, that he had deliberately allowed the
downfall of his people, and that he now willed its
restoration. Jahveh was no longer a mere territorial
god, sitting in the ark, a lover of fat. He appeared to
Esdras, to the Esdras group, in the agony of their
humiliation, as the terrible master who had done every-
thing.
Why had Jahveh willed these abominable things—the
burning of his temple, the destruction of his town, the
dispersal of his people, and the desolation of his land
during two hundred years ?
As a stricken soul, which has felt the throes of agony,
is determined to learn the cause of its misfortune, and, if
it is to live again, absolutely needs to know why it came
so near death, so the Esdras group invented the only
answer which seemed fit to reassure its life.
This answer had to be the powerful stimulant which
would restore the patriotism of the people, and exalt that
patriotism into the most sombre fanaticism. The men
of Jerusalem must be united in a savage love of their
city. Patriotism must in future fill every heart until
there is no place for any other feeling. The love of
Jerusalem, their country, must flash forth in the depths
THE BEGINNING
29
of their souls so vividly that for ages to come its walls
will need no other light.
What was there, then, among these peoples of southern
Syria to correspond to what we now call our country ?
At Jerusalem this thing was Jahveh; in Moab men called
it Camos; in Ammon it was Milkom; in Tyre, Bel and
Astarte; at Damas, Rimmon; and in Philistia, Dagon. If
this exalted patriotism had been born in Moab or at
Damas, it would have found expression in the names of
Camos or of Rimmon. Being born at Jerusalem, it was
uttered in the name of Jahveh.
The man, or the group, known as Esdras announced
that Jahveh had devastated his land, scattered his people,
destroyed his town, and burned his temple, because his
town had denied him, and his temple had witnessed the
setting-up of foreign idols in face of his jealousy. That
meant that the land of Judah had been laid waste, its
people scattered, and the town destroyed, because their
ancestors had let the love of their country grow cold in
their hearts; because the people had not held together in
the great national solidarity; because nationalism, which
alone makes a people great, had been enfeebled in the
town of Jerusalem.
The defeat, the ruin, the deportation, the obscure
misery, and the servitude had punished the soul of Judah
for not maintaining the great passion for one’s country,
for lack of which every people is condemned to death.
Esdras expressed that when he proclaimed that Jahveh
had punished his people for being unfaithful to him, for
having worshipped other gods. The restoration, the
return of hope, the better prospect, would reward the
Jewish people, if it drew together in a fiercely exclusive
nationalism. Esdras expressed that when he announced
that Jahveh restored the life of his faithful children, and
promised them a happy future if they consecrated them-
selves entirely to him.
Historically, it was false to say that the old kingdom of
30
ESDRAS
Judah had been faithless to Jahveh. We know that
Jahveh had always been worshipped in Judah, and it is
impossible to conceive that any other national god than
Jahveh had been worshipped there. But Esdras was not
concerned with historical criticism; and the glorious
untruth of those who restored the Jewish nation to life
in the fifth century met none to contradict it. The soul
that has come back from the death-agony, and seeks to
know why it has suffered, does not need a true answer;
it needs a reply that will prove a remedy. The untruth
of Esdras was the sole remedy that could, and did, save
the Jewish soul. After such dire catastrophes, in the
midst of continual danger, in face of a future full of peril,
it was necessary to put soul into a people that would live.
It was necessary to say to it: “ Behold thy flag! In that
is thy strength. If thou wilt keep thy eyes on that
emblem, thou shalt be strong. If thou turnest away,
doubt not that thou art lost. Know that, as often as thy
fathers rallied to it they won glorious victories. And
when they turned away from it remember Nabuchodo-
nosor the conqueror, remember they blackened home and
scorched vine, remember the exile by the rivers of
Babylon. Thou hast been conquered, Judah, because
thou didst betray Jahveh. Thou hast recovered because
thou hast returned to him. Be faithful to Jahveh, Judah,
and thou shalt be happy.”
It was thus that the profound and desperate meditation
of the men of Jerusalem, in the fifth century, saved them.
It was thus that the earlier local god of Judah, the
protecting Jahveh of Judah, like to the Camos of Moab
and the Milkom of Ammon, was transformed, enlarged,
animated, and became the formidable being whom we
afterwards find depicted in the Bible.
At Jerusalem, then, the religious question was a
national question. The unutterable name, Jahveh, of
which scholars are unable to find the origin, has this
meaning, and may be thus translated: our Fatherland.
THE ESDRAS SCHOOL
31
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