Harold B. Hunting

“ But the Hebrews from the beginning were proud of their race and ambitious for its glory. They believed that it had been promised to Abraham, their ancestor, that they should become a great nation in their land of Canaan. This hope had grown stronger and stronger. Stories of the greatness of King David were handed down from fathers to their children. To the best men and women among them the great teachings of such prophets as Amos and Isaiah were even more worthy of pride. "We have a knowledge of the true God," they said, "such as no other nation has. Surely there is a great future before us." ”

“ So there were Greeks on all sides of Jerusalem and throngs of Greek merchants and travelers were to be seen on the streets of every Jewish city and village.
The Greeks in some ways had as much to be proud of as a people as the Jews. Their sculptors had carved the most beautiful marbles in the world. Their poets had composed the most beautiful poems. Their philosophers were wiser than those of any other nation. Moreover, many of these Greeks who came into Palestine and other countries of Asia were filled with a truly missionary spirit. ”

“ In the earlier centuries men hardly knew that there was a world outside their own tribe and a few of their neighbors. There were no maps. Only a few could travel, and see for themselves how great a world there really was—and how many nations there were—made up of men like themselves. The common people of Asia scarcely knew that there was a Europe, and the enormous continent of Africa, except for Egypt, did not exist for them. ”

“ Their great teachers helped them to know what they really wanted or ought to want if they would be happy. Moses taught them the first lessons of justice as the foundation of happiness. The great prophets helped them to see that neither happiness nor justice was possible except as they knew and worshiped the true God—not a God of greed and anger to be bribed with sacrifices, but the God of justice and love. A few of the prophets also began to see that such hopes as theirs could not be for Jews alone but must include all mankind. ”

“ And those who were unfortunate were not always the lazy or thriftless. Sickness or accident or some pest which attacked the grain or the cattle would sometimes wipe out the entire property of one of those little peasant farmers and leave him and his children face to face with starvation and death. Now, in the old days in the desert, as long as the tribe had a crust of bread or a drop of water, the weakest and poorest could count on a share. But here in Canaan the poor, the widow, the orphan, did not always feel so surely the sheltering arms of kindness and brotherhood. ”

“ All these brave leaders helped the Jews to believe in themselves as a people. They listened to these men as they spoke in their synagogues in Judæa and in Babylonia. They handed from one to another the rolls on which their words were written. And ever the children heard from their mothers these hopes which kept them from being completely discouraged: "We are Jews. The Jewish nation is not going to be destroyed. Some day the exiles in Babylon will return to the old country. We will have a king of our own. And we will build the great nation which Jehovah promised Abraham." ”

“ Smoldering Hate Among the People
Whether they were actual plotters against Rome, like the Zealots, or whether they gave their strength to eager prayer to Jehovah for deliverance, the great mass of the common people among the Jews in the time of Christ were burning with a fierce patriotism and with a hatred against their oppressors such as we can scarcely imagine. The century of freedom under the Maccabees had made them all the more impatient of tyranny—and then to find themselves under such unspeakable tyrants as Herod and Pilate!—this was almost unendurable. ”

“ Desert Religion
Such a life of eager longings, fierce passions, and dark despair is a fertile soil for religion. And these early Hebrew shepherds were intensely religious. It is true that in the earliest days the fierceness and cruelty of their wars were reflected in the character of the gods in whom they believed. They thought of them as doing many cruel and selfish things. Yet a people who believe very deeply and seriously in their religion, even in an imperfect religion, are sure to be a force in the world. ”

“ And these eras still shine out for us as examples of what that kind of religion means in the life of a people. And the lives and words of the great prophets, and, greatest of all, the life of Jesus Christ, are a priceless legacy to us, who are still continuing the quest which Abraham began.
The truth which has been revealed to us.—All men, everywhere, who are longing and toiling for a [184] better chance for life and happiness and for knowledge and beauty and love for themselves and for their children, may now know that they are not without a mighty helper. ”

“ Just what Abraham looked forward to, we, of course, do not know. Probably his ideas were vague. Yet it seems that such men as he must have dreamed of a nation great in faith as well as in material wealth; a nation in which money would not be considered more important than justice and kindness; in which home life might be sweet and loving, free from the fear of want or the blighting influence of greed ”

“ Thousands of the northern Hebrews were carried away as exiles to other lands and never returned. The northern kingdom was a failure. The religious ideals and dreams of Abraham and Moses [98] had not yet been fulfilled. The common people had had little opportunity for happiness or growth in knowledge and goodness. But the southern kingdom still existed. And many a disciple of Hosea, some of them carrying scraps and rolls of papyrus on which his sayings were copied, fled to Jerusalem, and there sowed the seed of his great message of a God not only of justice but of love. ”

“ Moreover, the prophets Amos and Hosea had plainly foretold that some such calamity would be sent upon Israelites by Jehovah on account of their sins. But very few of them believed these brave and lonely preachers of the truth. "Jehovah send the Assyrians against us! Why, that is absurd! We are Jehovah's people, and he is our God. What has he to do with the Assyrians? He may chastise us, but not by sending foreign armies to conquer us. What would he do if we should be conquered? He would have no nation to worship him." ”

“ The Midianites.—Among the most harassing of these enemies for a time were the Midianites, who lived as nomads, roaming over the deserts just as the Hebrews themselves had done except that they made their living chiefly by robbery. Every spring just after the wheat and barley had begun to sprout, covering all the fields with a carpet of the brightest green, bands of these nomads would drive their flocks across the Jordan and turn them loose on the young grain while the men stood guard in armed bands. ”

“ The gods of the Egyptians were supposed to be especially strong: Osiris and Isis were the chief of their deities and they were believed to be the gods of the underworld—of Sheol, or Hades, the abode of the dead. So when these poor ignorant politicians at Jerusalem finally did succeed in arranging for an alliance with the crafty and deceitful kings of Egypt they said to themselves: "Now we are safe. The Assyrians cannot hurt us now. We have made a covenant with Death." ”

“ But Manasseh, who became king when Isaiah was an old man, was opposed to all these new ideas. Most of the people of Judah probably agreed with him. They still clung to the belief that the one sure way for a nation to be prosperous was to offer sacrifices to the most powerful gods. Now the kingdom of Judah, in spite of all their worship of Jehovah, was still subject to the empire of Assyria. Great sums had to be paid every year as tribute. "What fools those prophets are!" men said, as they talked together in the streets. "See how much stronger the Assyrian gods are than Jehovah!" ”

“ With one great word whose throbbing pity for the ignorance and sorrow of men makes it another of the great utterances of human lips, Micah cut the root of all such fears. Jehovah is not that kind of a God, he declared. He does not break out in fits of rage. He does not need to be wheedled back into good nature by costly offerings, perhaps even sometimes with the costliest offerings of all, one's own darling children. ”

“ Our task to-day.—In these modern times we are still trying to understand what Jesus wanted and to bring it to pass in reality. We are beginning to see that if all men are indeed sacred to our heavenly Father, then under the leadership of our everliving Christ, a fight is in store for us on behalf of all the millions of our brothers who are blinded by selfishness, haggard from want, embittered by injustice, stunted in soul and mind by ignorance, or tortured by all the agonies of war. ”

“ A worship based on greed.—The worship of such a god, or of a god who was thought of as being of such a character, would, of course, be very far from the love and adoration which we Christians are taught to offer to our Father, and was really far from the kind of worship advocated by devout Hebrews. It would be a sort of bargain-hunting worship: the people to bring gifts of the fat of lambs and libations of blood and wine, and the god to give them in return good crops of wheat and oil, and figs and grapes, and an abundance of silver and gold. ”

“ Every month a search was made throughout Judæa to see whether any Jew still had copies of the Scriptures. A heathen altar was set up in the temple at Jerusalem and swine were sacrificed upon it. To the Jews, who were taught to regard swine's flesh as unclean and unholy, nothing could have seemed more horrible.
Of course there were some traitors and renegades. But the great majority of the Jewish people were nobly true to the faith of their fathers. Hundreds and thousands, young and old, allowed themselves to be tortured and slain rather than take part in a heathen sacrifice. ”

“ A small, weak tribe, grazing its flocks around a good well, was always in danger lest a stronger tribe swoop down upon them to kill and plunder. There were many robber clans who did little else besides preying on their neighbors and passing caravans of traders. Nowhere was there any security. The desert and its borders was a world of bitter hatreds and long-standing feuds. Certain rival tribes fought each other at every opportunity for centuries with a warfare that hesitated at no cruelty or treachery. ”

“ We have slept through the night on our mat spread on the dirt floor of the house, with our cloak over us to keep us warm. Before daylight we are awakened by the older people moving about in the dim light of the burning wick in the saucer of oil. ”

“ Israel thus became a type of Him who was "despised and rejected of men." To be chastised and afflicted and oppressed is not so hard to bear if it is all a part of Jehovah's plan for men. The ideal in the Old Testament becomes a reality in the New.
So for the first time the idea came into the world that Abraham's dreams of a greater and nobler nation and God's promises to Abraham, Moses, David and the rest were not for the Hebrew people only, but for all men; that beginning with this little nation God was making a better world; a world of love, instead of selfishness and hate ”

“ It makes little difference to us what particular idler at any particular time sat in the palace at Jerusalem sending forth tax-collectors to raise funds for his luxuries. It is of very great interest and concern to us if there were daughters like Ruth in the barley fields of Bethlehem, if shepherds tended their flocks in that same country who were so fine in heart and simple in faith that to them or their children visions of angels might appear telling of a Saviour of the world. ”

“ If Jehovah would give these things, then worship Jehovah. If other gods and Baals would give more than Jehovah, worship them.
In short these sacrifices, as Hosea saw, were a kind of worship, and no worship is a mere formality, but is a vast influence for good or for ill. Because of these wrong ideas the sacrifices had come to be more and more an influence for evil. And you cannot have a righteous and happy human family in which men are just and kind to each other, without a true worship, growing out of a true idea of God. ”

“ Jehovah too weak to protect his people?—When, therefore, the Assyrians actually did come marching down from the Euphrates River, hundreds of thousands of them with their gleaming armor and their multitudes of horses and war chariots, and besieged and captured the city of Samaria, leaving it a ruin, most of the Hebrews, north and south, were sick with fear and bewilderment. For them with their false notions it could mean only one thing: their God, Jehovah, was [104] too weak to protect his people against the greater gods of Nineveh. ”

“ It is true that a few of the more fortunate, in each generation, saw some little advance over earlier generations in the good things of civilization. Such men as Nicodemus and Zacchæus, in the time of Jesus, lived in better houses, wore more comfortable clothes, and ate better food than did King David himself in an earlier, ruder age. But the common people of Jesus' day were not so well off as even in the days of Abraham. For as wandering shepherds they were free. Life might be a bitter struggle against wild beasts and drought and famine. ”

“ All nations like to think of themselves as superior to the rest of mankind. The Greeks used to despise all foreigners as "barbarians." We in America ridicule immigrants from other countries and call them unpleasant names. The Jews also made the same mistake of despising people of other races and nations. We find laws even in so just a law-book as Deuteronomy which are unfair to foreigners. Jews were forbidden to exact interest from fellow Jews, but they were permitted to exact it from foreigners. ”