Various

“ Where it is possible to make legitimate and unambiguous comparisons, the ethical and spiritual superiority of Old Testament thought has been convincingly demonstrated, and to the re-shaping and re-writing of the older history and the older traditions the Old Testament owes its permanent value. While the history of the great area between the Nile and the Tigris irresistibly emphasizes the insignificance of Palestine, this land’s achievements for humanity grow the more remarkable as research tells more of its environment. ”

“ Thus a super-spatial and super-temporal interpretation of that first markedly Jewish setting and apprehension of the Christian truth became as necessary as the attachment to the original contingencies. The Fourth Gospel, inexplicable without St Paul and the fall of Jerusalem, is fully understandable with them. The attribution of the book to an eye-witness nowhere resolves, it everywhere increases, the real difficulties; and by insisting upon having history in the same degree and way in John as in the Synoptists, we cease to get it sufficiently anywhere at all. ”

“ Only some such position as Abbé Loisy’s critical summing up (1903) brings out its specific greatness. “What the author was, his book, in spite of himself, tells us to some extent: a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrine formation; a believer without, apparently, any personal reminiscence of what had actually been the life, preaching and death of Jesus; a theologian far removed from every historical preoccupation, though he retains certain principal facts of tradition without which Christianity would evaporate into pure ideas; and a seer who has lived the Gospel which he propounds.” ”

“ Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. ”

“ Damascus, Israel and Judah.—The appearance of Assyria in the Mediterranean coast-lands had produced the results which inevitably follow when a great empire comes into contact with minor states. It awakened fresh possibilities—successful combination against a common foe, the sinking of petty rivalries, the chance of gaining favour by a neutrality which was scarcely benevolent. The alliances, counter-alliances and far-reaching political combinations which spring up at every advance of the greater powers are often perplexing in the absence of records of the states concerned. ”

“ The Satan is introduced in the prologue, exercising his function as minister of God in heaven; but it is to misinterpret wholly the doctrine of evil in the Old Testament to assign to the Satan any such personal importance or independence of power as that he should be called before the curtain to receive the hisses that accompany his own discomfiture. The Satan, though he here appears with the beginnings of a malevolent will of his own, is but the instrument of the sifting providence of God. ”

“ Post-exilic Judaism.—With Nehemiah and Ezra we enter upon the era in which a new impulse gave to Jewish life and thought that form which became the characteristic orthodox Judaism. It was not a new religion that took root; older tendencies were diverted into new paths, the existing material was shaped to new ends. Judah was now a religious community whose representative was the high priest of Jerusalem. Instead of sacerdotal kings, there were royal priests, anointed with oil, arrayed with kingly insignia, claiming the usual royal dues in addition to the customary rights of the priests. ”

“ But there was no part of his dominions in which John inspired personal devotion. Originally accepted as a political necessity, he soon came to be detested by the people as a tyrant and despised by the nobles for his cowardice and sloth. He inherited great difficulties—the feud with France, the dissensions of the continental provinces, the growing indifference of England to foreign conquests, the discontent of all his subjects with a strict executive and severe taxation. But he cannot be acquitted of personal responsibility for his misfortunes. ”

“ Jews enjoyed neither rights nor privileges; in the 18th century they were still without rights but they had privileges. A grotesque feature of the time in Germany and Austria was the class of court Jews, such as the Oppenheims, the personal favourites of rulers and mostly their victims when their usefulness had ended. These men often rendered great services to their fellow-Jews, and one of the results was the growth in Jewish society of an aristocracy of wealth, where previously there had been an aristocracy of learning. ”

“ Prophecy of the Hebrew type has not been limited to Israel; it is indeed a phenomenon of almost world-wide occurrence; in many lands and in many ages the wild, whirling words of frenzied men and women have been accepted as the utterances of an in-dwelling deity. What does distinguish Hebrew prophecy from all others is that the genius of a few members of the profession wrested this vulgar but powerful instrument from baser uses, and by wielding it in the interest of a high morality rendered a service of incalculable value to humanity. ”

“ If in more recent times progress in Judaism has implied more or less of revolt against the rigors and fetters of Qaro’s code, yet for 250 years it was a powerful safeguard against demoralization and stagnation. No community living in full accordance with that code could fail to reach a high moral and intellectual level.
It is truer to say that on the whole the Jews began at this period to abandon as hopeless the attempt to find a place for themselves in the general life of their country. ”

“ And if the work of criticism has brought a fuller appreciation of the value of these facts, the debt which is owed to the Jews is enhanced when one proceeds to realize the immense difficulties against which those who transmitted the Old Testament had to contend in the period of Greek domination. The growth of the Old Testament into its present form, and its preservation despite hostile forces, are the two remarkable phenomena which most arrest the attention of the historian; it is for the theologian to interpret their bearing upon the history of religious thought. ”

“ Job’s mind reaches the deepest limit of estrangement. There he not merely charges God with injustice, but, unable to reconcile His former goodness with His present enmity, he regards the latter as the true expression of God’s attitude towards His creatures, and the former, comprising all his infinite creative skill in weaving the delicate organism of 425 human nature and the rich endowments of His providence, only as the means of exercising His mad and immoral cruelty in the time to come. When the Semitic skin of Job is scratched, we find a modern pessimist beneath. ”

“ The insignificance of the Jewish community in Palestine was their salvation. The reforms of Nehemiah were directed towards the establishment of a religious community at Jerusalem, in which the rigour of the law should be observed. As a part of the Persian Empire the community was obscure and unimportant. But the race whose chief sanctuary it guarded and maintained was the heir of great traditions and ideals. In Egypt, moreover, in Babylon and in Persia individual Jews had responded to the influences of their environment and won the respect of the aliens whom they despised. ”

“ Moses Mendelssohn, both by his career and by his propaganda, for ever put an end to these conditions; he more than any other man. Born in the ghetto of Dessau, he was not of the ghetto. At the age of fourteen he found his way to Berlin, where Frederick the Great, inspired by the spirit of Voltaire, held the maxim that “to oppress the Jews never brought prosperity to any government.” ”

“ Tradition, in fact, is concentrated upon the rise of the Judaean dynasty under David, but there are significant periods before the rise of both Jehoash and Uzziah upon which the historical records maintain a perplexing silence.
The Hebrews of Israel and Judah were, political history apart, men of the same general stamp, with the same cult and custom; for the study of religion and social usages, therefore, they can be treated as a single people. ”

“ The application of machinery to the production of personal ornaments in gold and silver can only be economically and successfully carried on when there is a large demand for similar objects, that is to say, objects of precisely the same design and decoration throughout. In machine-made jewelry everything is stereotyped, so to speak, and the only work required for the hand is to fit the parts together—in some instances scarcely that. A design is made, and from it steel dies are sunk for stamping out as rapidly as possible from a plate of rolled metal the portion represented by each die. ”

“ A man may be a good carpenter without being a joiner at all, but he cannot be a joiner without being competent, at least, to supervise all the operations required in carpentry. The rough labour of the carpenter renders him in some degree unfit to produce that accurate and neat workmanship which is expected from a modern joiner, but it is no less true that the habit of neatness and the great precision of the joiner make him a much slower workman than the man practised in works of carpentry. ”

“ It is naturally impossible to treat them from any modern standpoint as fiction; they are honest even where they are most untrustworthy. But the recovery of successive historical nuclei does not furnish a continuous thread, and if one is to be guided by the historical context of events the true background to each nucleus must be sought. The northern kingdom cherished the institution of a monarchy, and in this, as in all great political events, the prophets took part. The precise part these figures play is often idealized and expresses the later views of their prominence. ”

“ In the early 14th century, the age of Dante, the new spirit of the Renaissance made Italian rulers the patrons of art and literature, and the Jews to some extent shared in this gracious change. Robert of Aragon—vicar-general of the papal states—in particular encouraged the Jews and supported them in their literary and scientific ambitions. Small coteries of Jewish minor poets and philosophers were formed, and men like Kalonymos and Immanuel—Dante’s friend—shared the versatility and culture of Italy. ”

“ It is difficult to trace the biblical history century by century as it reaches these last years of bitter conflict and of renewed prosperity. The northern kingdom at the height of its power included Judah, it extended its territory east of the Jordan towards the north and the south, and maintained close relations with Phoenicia and the Aramaean states. It had a national history which left its impress upon the popular imagination, and sundry fragments of tradition reveal the pride which the patriot felt in the past. An original close connexion is felt with the east of the Jordan and with Gilead ”

“ So long as Herod lived there was no insurrection. Formally he was an orthodox Jew and set his face against intermarriage with the uncircumcised. He was also ready and able to protect the Jews of the dispersion. But that ability was largely due to his whole-hearted Hellenism, which was shown by the Greek cities which he founded in Palestine and the buildings he erected in Jerusalem. In its material embodiments Greek civilization became as much a part of Jewish life in Palestine as it was in Alexandria or Antioch; and herein the rabbis could not follow him. ”

“ Even in the second series Job can hardly bring himself to face the personal issue raised by the friends. His relations to God absorb him almost wholly—his pitiable isolation, the indignities showered on his once honoured head, the loathsome spectacle of his body; abandoned by all, he turns for pity from God to men and from men to God. ”

“ Such vicissitudes were the ordinary lot of the Jews for several centuries, and it was their own inner life—the pure life of the home, the idealism of the synagogue, and the belief in ultimate Messianic redemption—that saved them from utter demoralization and despair. Curiously enough in Italy—and particularly in Rome—the external conditions were better. The popes themselves, within their own immediate jurisdiction, were often far more tolerant than their bulls issued for foreign communities, and Torquemada was less an expression than a distortion of the papal policy. ”

“ We cannot well claim more than these three kinds of reality for the first and the last signs, the miracle at Cana and the resurrection of Lazarus.
For the marriage-feast sign yields throughout an allegorical meaning. Water stands in this Gospel for what is still but symbol; thus the water-pots serve here the external Jewish ablutions—old bottles which the “new wine” of the Gospel is to burst (Mark ii. 22) . Wine is the blood of the new covenant, and He will drink the fruit of the vine new in the Kingdom of God (Mark xiv. 23-25) ”

“ Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited about his extraordinary character and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely different from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which were then a staple article of manufacture in Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in ease and variety; and the writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our language. But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead ”

“ Other prophets of the same age speak much of dearth and failure of crops, which in Palestine then as now were aggravated by bad government, and were far more serious to a small and isolated community than they could ever have been to the old kingdom. It was indeed by no means impossible that Jerusalem might have been altogether undone by the famine caused by the locusts; and so the conception of these visitants as the destroying army, executing Yahweh’s final judgment, is really much more natural than appears to us at first sight, and does not need to be explained away by allegory. ”

“ A common ground for Judaism and Samaritanism is obvious, and it is in this obscure age that it is to be sought. But the curtain is raised for too brief an interval to allow of more than a passing glimpse at the restoration of Judaean fortunes; not until the time of Nehemiah, about 140 years after the fall of Jerusalem, does the historical material become less imperfect. ”

“ Although Palestine had not been depopulated, and many of the exiled Jews remained in Persia, the standpoint is that of those who returned from Babylon. Settled in and around Jerusalem, they look upon themselves as the sole community, the true Israel, even as it was believed that once before Israel entered and developed independently in the land of its ancestors. They look back from the age when half-suppressed hostility with Samaria had broken out, and when an exclusive Judaism had been formed. The interest of the writers is as usual in the religious history ”

“ More jurist than theologian, John defended the rights of the papacy with rigorous zeal and as rigorous logic. For the restoration of the papacy to its old independence, which had been so gravely compromised under his immediate predecessors, and for the execution of the vast enterprises which the papacy deemed useful for its prestige and for Christendom, considerable sums were required; and to raise the necessary money John burdened Christian Europe with new taxes and a complicated fiscal system, which was fraught with serious consequences. ”

“ Graceful, ingenious, fanciful, elegant, fantastic by turns, his objects of jewelry and goldsmithery have a solid claim to be considered créations d’art. It has also been felt in Germany, Austria, Russia and Switzerland. It must be admitted that many of the best artists who have devoted themselves to jewelry have been more successful in design than in securing the lightness and strength which are required by the wearer, and which were a characteristic in the works of the Italian craftsmen of the Renaissance. ”

“ Indeed so severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and a keen hunger and thirst for God’s aid, together with such cultual acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge of the Christian rites. ”

“ His violent impatience, however, under his afflictions and his covert attacks upon the divine rectitude only served to confirm the view of his sufferings which their theory of evil had already suggested to his friends. And thus commences the high debate which continues through twenty-nine chapters.
The three friends of Job came to the consideration of his history with the principle that calamity is the result of evil-doing, as prosperity is the reward of righteousness. Suffering is not an accident or a spontaneous growth of the soil; man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards ”

“ Moreover, a spiritual revival mitigated the crushing effects of material ruin. The synagogue had become a firmly established institution, and the personal and social life of the masses had come under the control of communal law. The dialectic of the school proved stronger to preserve than the edge of the sword to destroy. Pharisaic Judaism, put to the severest test to which a religious system has ever been subject, showed itself able to control and idealize life in all its phases. ”

“ Any conclusion can be reached only by an induction founded on matters which do not afford perfect certainty, such as the comparative development of certain moral ideas in different ages, the pressing claims of certain problems for solution at particular epochs of the history of Israel, and points of contact with other writings of which the age may with some certainty be determined. The Jewish tradition that the book is Mosaic, and the idea that it is a production of the desert, written in another tongue and translated into Hebrew, want even a shadow of probability. ”

“ External research constantly justifies the cautious attitude which has its logical basis in the internal conflicting character of the written traditions or in their divergence from ascertained facts; at the same time it has clearly shown that the internal study of the Old Testament has its limits. Hence, in the absence of more complete external evidence one is obliged to recognize the limitations of Old Testament historical criticism, even though this recognition means that positive reconstructions are more precarious than negative conclusions. ”

“ In 1807 Napoleon convoked a Jewish assembly in Paris. Though the decisions of this body had no binding force on the Jews generally, yet in some important particulars its decrees represent principles widely adopted by the Jewish community. They proclaim the acceptance of the spirit of Mendelssohn’s reconciliation of the Jews to modern life. They assert the citizenship and patriotism of Jews, their determination to accommodate themselves to the present as far as they could while retaining loyalty to the past. ”

“ When Eleazar opened the temple-gates to admit those who wished to worship God, John of Giscala introduced some of his own men, fully armed under their garments, and so got possession of the Temple. Titus pressed the attack, and the two factions joined hands at last to repel it. In spite of their desperate sallies, Jerusalem was surrounded by a wall, and its people, whose numbers were increased by those who had come up for the passover, were hemmed in to starve. The famine affected all alike—the populace, who desired peace, and the Zealots, who were determined to fight to the end. ”

“ Again, the poet’s purpose, as the prologue shows, was to teach that afflictions may fall on a man out of all connexion with any offence of his own, and merely as the trial of his righteousness; and hence he allows Job, as by a true instinct of the nature of his sufferings, to repudiate all connexion between them and sin in himself. And further, the terrible conflict into which the suspicions of the Satan brought Job could not be exhibited without pushing him to the verge of ungodliness. These are all elements of the poet’s art; but art and nature are one. ”