George Foot Moore

“ Amos's God has a conscience—that was a new idea about gods!—and abhors such religion; he hates their festivals, refuses their sacrifices, spurns their hymns of praise. "But let justice roll down like floods, and right like an unfailing stream." That is the only worship he owns.
The standard of right is not one thing in Israel and another among the heathen: Amos [199] summons the Philistines and the Egyptians to behold with amazement and horror the doings in Samaria. ”

“ The conception of religion which dominates the whole book, but is most conspicuous in cc. 5-11, is the highest in the Old Testament. There is but one God, supreme in might and majesty, constant in purpose, faithful to his [60] word, just but compassionate; he is not to be imaged or imagined in the likeness of anything in heaven or on earth; idolatry, divination, and sorcery are strictly forbidden. The essence of religion is love (Deut. vi. 4) , the love of God to his people and their responsive love to him is the ruling motive in worship and conduct. ”

“ Yet the generations came and went, and the heathen still ruled the earth! Then, too, the Jews doubtless felt that they, as the people of God, had an exclusive claim on his affections, as he asserted exclusive claims to theirs. The author of Jonah not only extends to mankind God's word in Ezekiel, "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked? saith the Lord God, and not rather that he should return from his way and live?" but he asserts the all-embracing compassion of God. The one God is the creator of the heathen as well as of Israel, his merciful providence is over all his works. ”

“ The priests treat the worship in the temple with professional disrespect, under which lurks an equally professional scepticism. Any kind of blemished or diseased victim is good enough—the prophet invites them to make such a scurvy gift to the governor! The perpetual routine of sacred services they find tiresome. They are no less negligent in their other great function as the religious teachers and guides of the people. ”

“ That the sacrifices of the heathen may be "pure" sacrifices, though not according to the Mosaic rite, because all true worship is the worship of the true God, is a conception quite unparalleled in the Old Testament. The author's polemic against the priests of Jerusalem has doubtless made him say more than he would have stood by as a dogmatic statement; more, indeed, than any church has ever been ready to acknowledge, but it was fitting that it should be said, for it is the final consequence of the ethical conception of religion of which the Hebrew prophets from Amos on are the exponents. ”

“ The making of great history has often given a first impulse to the writing of history, and we may well believe that it was so in Israel, and that the beginning of Hebrew historical literature, in the proper sense of the word, was made with Saul and David. Around such figures the popular imagination always weaves a more or less translucent tissue of legend, and particularly about their youth before they come out on the stage of history, or the manner of their first appearance. ”

“ He argues the omnipotence of God in history from his omnipotence in creation, and makes large use of the evidence from the fulfilment of prophecy to prove that Jehovah is the only God; he can predict because he foreordains and brings to pass. With him begins the polemic, not against the worship of heathen gods, but against their existence. What the heathen bow down to are naught but helpless, senseless idols, the work of their own hands. ”

“ All that survives of Hebrew literature prior to the age of Alexander is preserved in the Jewish Bible. It is not until the beginning of the third century B.C. that we come upon books written by Jews in Hebrew or in Greek which are not included in the canon. It is, doubtless, only a small part of a rich and varied literature that has thus been rescued across the centuries; much the larger part of what was written in the days of the national kingdoms, for example, must have perished in the catastrophes which befell Israel in the eighth century and Judah in the beginning of the sixth. ”

“ Even among the aphorisms of the older collections, there are few that have the stamp of true popular proverbs, the wisdom of the generations finding the pregnant phrase in the mouth of the people; they are, what indeed they profess to be, maxims of the sages, fashioned with conscious art for a didactic end. And these sages seem to have been, like the Greek sophists, professional teachers of the youth of the well-to-do classes. ”

“ To understand this economy of revelation, or this pedagogic of religion, it is necessary to distinguish the times, and to determine the nature, authorship, and age of the several books or parts of books. The critical questions which lie at the threshold of every historical inquiry arise, therefore, in the study of the Old Testament, and much learning and acumen have been expended upon them, especially in modern times, by scholars of all shades of theological opinion. ”

“ Had he his own solution of the problem of theodicy to put in the place of that cruel dogma? Job, we have seen, finds no solution. In the speeches of Jehovah, where dramatic fitness would lead us to look for the author's solution if he had one, there is no refutation of Job's charges, no response to his pleadings. The speeches are splendid, but the gist of them is that God's ways are inscrutable. If man cannot comprehend God's operations in nature, what folly, what presumption, to pretend to fathom his dealings in providence! In that Job acquiesces for the soul of man. ”

“ A more radical difference exists in the Old Testament, however, because, for many scholars, Catholic and Protestant, the deliverances of the church, or the consent of tradition, or the testimony of the New Testament, or the concurrence of all these, outweighs, in such a matter as the unity and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the internal evidence of the books themselves, and makes it their task to show that the evidence which seems to contradict this attribution is, when properly interpreted, compatible with it ”

“ For the "too much" is always evil, even too much wisdom and virtue! "Be not over righteous nor put on too much wisdom, why shouldest thou die before thy time?" (vii. 16 f.) .
The author's religion makes God somehow the cause of what happens under the sun, the evil and the good. In one place he seems to express the belief that all that God does is fine and opportune, if man could only understand it; but God has denied man the intelligence to penetrate the secret of his ways. So there is nothing better for man to do than to be merry, and have a good time while he is alive! ”

“ This is not the place for a history of criticism: it must suffice to say that, as the result of the labours of many scholars in the last century and a half upon the problem of the sources and composition of the Pentateuch, historians are now generally agreed that four main sources are to be recognized, of which three run, in varying proportion, from Genesis to Numbers and reappear in Joshua, while the fourth is found in Deuteronomy and Joshua only. ”

“ Outraged love may smite [193] harder than offended righteousness, but its blows are remedial, not retributive or expiatory; its aim not to satisfy justice, but to recover the erring. The exile, which for Amos is the final vindication of God's righteousness in the death of the sinful nation, is for Hosea a chastisement which leads to repentance and restoration. He is therefore the author of that ideal of a golden age of godliness and uprightness and happiness, beyond the impending judgment or the present oppression, which is one of the leading motives of the so-called messianic prophecy. ”

“ The literary quality of the best in all these kinds is very high. The Song of Deborah (Judg. 5) , notwithstanding the imperfect state of the text, is one of the greatest of triumphal odes; parts of Job attain the height of the sublime; some of the Psalms are worthy of a foremost [29] place among religious lyrics; many oracles of the prophets are as noteworthy for the perfection of the expression as for the elevation of the thought; the laws are often formulated with admirable precision; in the art of narration the older historians are unsurpassed in ancient literature. ”

“ It was seen long ago by some of the Church Fathers that the law book which Hilkiah found and Josiah enforced can have been no other than Deuteronomy. The historian of the kingdoms, writing after the reforms of Josiah and the following reaction and believing that the prohibition of worship at the high places had been binding since the building of Solomon's temple, is at pains to say that none of the kings from Solomon to Josiah, not even those to whom otherwise he gives the best mark for piety, had paid any attention to this law, with the sole exception of a brief attempt by Hezekiah. ”

“ All this is, however, incidental to the main purpose of the book to exalt Jerusalem as the religious capital, its temple as the place which God has chosen for his abode, its liturgy as the correct form of worship, its priests and levites as the only ministry of valid orders and unimpeachable succession. It is not solely the pride of the churchman which prompts him to dwell on these things. ”

“ He feels himself a man of contention to the whole earth. He remonstrates, he reproaches God for having misled him, he resolves never again to speak in the name of the Lord; but there is within him as it were a burning fire shut up in his bones, he cannot hold in (Jer. xx. 7-18; see also xv. 10 f., 15-18; xii. 1-6) . These "confessions," as they have been called, are of the greatest interest; they are a revelation of the prophet's soul such as has no counterpart in the Old Testament, and, with Baruch's simple story, bring him as a man nearer to us than any of the other prophets. ”

“ The chapters contain a programme for the coming age when all the twelve tribes, gathered together from exile and dispersion, shall reoccupy the holy land, with a new, geometrical division of the territory, with a new plan for the city of Jerusalem, a new constitution for the state, a new temple after the old model, a reorganized ministry of religion, and a reformed worship. The ruling idea which runs through all is to make impossible those sins against the holiness of God, his land, his house, his people, which had been the cause of former ruin. ”

“ The moral conception of God had its roots far down in the religion of Israel, as may be seen in the older (certainly preprophetic) [146] strata in Samuel, and better still in the patriarchal legends, which received their present form in the same age; but after the establishment of the kingdom it was crossed by the national idea. It was not till the eighth century that the men came who thought through what the moral idea of God involves, and had the courage to proclaim its consequences, fatal though they might be to both state and church. ”

“ Judaism was the only true religion, its Scriptures the one divine revelation. The Law and the Prophets had the same precedence as in the Palestinian synagogue. Of the other Scriptures there was no authoritative and exclusive list, and among books read solely for private edification it is not likely that a very sharp line was drawn; but, on the whole, the practice of the Greek-speaking Jews does not seem to have been materially different from that of their countrymen in Palestine. ”

“ In all the sources of the Pentateuch the possession of Canaan is the goal toward which the whole history moves, from the call of Abraham to the last exhortations of Moses in the plains of Moab, and they must all have narrated, however briefly, the occupation of the country. The history of the conquest and division of Canaan is the subject of the Book of Joshua. ”

“ The high priests of the Samaritan temple were a branch of the Jewish high-priestly line, its ritual was the same, the Pentateuch was the Law in Shechem as well as in Jerusalem. If the Jews maintained that Jerusalem was the only place in the land where sacrifice might lawfully be made to God, the Samaritans made the same exclusive claim [122] for their temple: Shechem, not Jerusalem, was the place (unnamed in Deuteronomy) which God had chosen out of all the tribes to put his name there. At Shechem was held the first great religious assembly of Israel after the invasion of Canaan ”

“ It is evident from the familiarity with the Psalms which is shown in the New Testament and in contemporary Jewish writings, both Greek and Hebrew, that, like our hymn books, the Psalter was largely used for private devotion and edification.
The poems contained in the Psalter are from different ages and authors, and of widely diverse religious worth and poetical excellence. Some of them are unsurpassed in the religious literature of the world; others are the tedious production of authors who, like so many hymnists of all climes, were neither born nor made poets. ”

“ When Zedekiah revolted and the Babylonian armies a second time besieged Jerusalem, their faith in the inviolability of Zion, confirmed, rather than shaken, by the outcome of things in 597 B.C., when Jehoiachin surrendered and the holy city took no harm, made them refuse hearing to Ezekiel's prediction of ruin; they may even have dreamed that Nebuchadnezzar would find out his mistake and restore to Judah its legitimate rulers, chastened by experience, and pack Zedekiah and his advisers into exile in their place. ”

“ When we look the facts squarely in the face, the only counsel of wisdom is to make the most of what capricious fortune gives us in its friendly moods, to enjoy the pleasures life offers while we can, with abandon, but without excess. ”

“ He writes the history of Judah alone, touching upon the kingdom of Israel only in its relation to Judah. The desire to magnify and glorify the kingdom of Judah in its great days, especially under David and Solomon, to represent it as the most powerful, wealthy, and magnificent among the nations, not only of its time but of any time, frequently expresses itself in enormous exaggerations. ”

“ The Book of Esther, it was long ago observed, is singular among the books of the Bible in that there is no mention of God in it. It is Jewish with a sanguinary loyalty to race, but of Judaism as religion there is not a trace; it is in fact somewhat obtrusive by its absence. When Mordecai warns Esther that if she fails her people in their hour of need deliverance will come "from another place," the word God is ostentatiously avoided; before her great adventure she fasts three days, but there is no suggestion of prayer ”