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frequently a personification. The writer identifies himself with the pious nation of Israel as a whole, or with the pious worshippers in the Temple. He is at one with them in feeling, aspiration and belief, and this union of spirit with the community gives an added fervour and intensity to his speech.

It is impossible to date with accuracy all the 150 Psalms in our present collection. It is probable that most of them were written after the return from Babylon in 537 B.C. A very considerable number may be safely assigned to the century between Nehemiah and Alexander the Great. Many were doubtless written in the 157 years between Alexander's conquest of Syria and the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes. Lastly, there are a few which in all probability were written during and after the Maccabean revolt, so that we cannot safely fix the completion of the Psalter much before 130 B.C. Of the reasons why some 73 out of 150 Psalms were ascribed by the editors to David, I have already spoken in Part I.

§ 11. The Synagogue, the Wise Men and the Wisdom Literature.— Alongside of the Temple there grew up in post-exilic times another institution of far deeper significance. It is the Synagogue. Synagogue, again, is a Greek word, and means a bringing together, hence an assembly or place of assembly. Just because no man might sacrifice except at Jerusalem, the need arose for a system of public worship in the numerous Jewish communities outside the capital, which should be satisfying and yet legal. Out of this need grew up the synagogue. I cannot attempt the shortest history of the synagogue in this place, but I must just point out that whereas at the Temple the servitor could only be a priest, the minister and teacher at a synagogue could be a layman. Thus with the synagogue there now first comes upon the stage the figure of the Rabbi. He is not called Rabbi at first, but Wise Man or Scribe or Teacher. He is the expounder and interpreter of the Law. In the age of Nehemiah, the Priest, the Teacher and the Scribe are usually one and the same. The under-priests, or Levites, are also frequently associated with teaching. Later on, however, the Wise Man and the Rabbi are often laymen, and sometimes opposed to the religious and political views of the official priesthood. And just as the Temple was overshadowed in religious significance by the synagogue, so the Priest was overshadowed by the Wise Man or Rabbi.

The Wise Man was the teacher of the people in their synagogues and schools. But he too became a writer, so that a whole division of the Bible, represented by three separate books

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(to which two other books in a later collection, called the Apocrypha, are closely allied), is due to the literary industry of the Wise Men. The first and earliest of these three books is called the Book of Proverbs. As its name implies, it is for the greater part a collection of maxims and adages-'wise saws and modern instances'of unknown authorship and date. But the editing or revision of these maxims (as well as the creation of many) was the work of the Wise Men, and the more consecutive and important portions of the entire book were probably written by a few chosen spirits among them within the fifty years which precede and the fifty years which follow the conquest of Syria by Alexander the Great (i.e. between 380 and 280 B.C.).

The division of the Bible to which the Book of Proverbs belongs is known as the Wisdom Literature. Its two other portions are the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes. The dates of these are uncertain, but they were perhaps written between 380 and 180 B.C., the one, Job, nearer to the earlier limit, the other, Ecclesiastes, nearer to the later. Outside the Bible there are two books, one written in Hebrew and the other in Greek, which also belong to the Wisdom Literature. The date of the one is about 180 B.C.; the date of the other falls at the earliest at the very close of our third period, and very possibly beyond it. These two books are called respectively Ecclesiasticus (or the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon. They both form part of that collection of Graeco-Jewish writings to which I have before referred, commonly known as the Apocrypha. From both of them I shall quote hereafter.

§ 12. The Books of Chronicles.-We have thus noticed two ways in which the nascent Bible was being increased during the period between Nehemiah and the Maccabean revolt: first, by the Psalmody of the Temple, and secondly, by the Wisdom Literature. The Psalter, the Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes together make up rather more than an eighth of the whole Hebrew Bible.

But the literary activity and the religious thought of these 250 years were not confined to these particular books. They found expression in other ways, and have left their record in still other books.

Of contemporary history there seems to have been none. But I ought to mention that the work of our 'Levitical idealist,' who told the story of the Judæan monarchy and of the restoration period till at least the second visit of Nehemiah, was written about 300 B.C. We must be grateful to that writer for one reason especially: it is apparently to him that we owe the preservation of

those precious fragments of Ezra's and Nehemiah's memoirs, which were quoted in Part I. After his time, the restoration period was separated from his main work (known now as the Books of Chronicles), and cut off into the two independent Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. But originally the three now separate books formed one whole.

§13. Students of prophecy.-Even as there were no historians or chroniclers of current events during these three hundred years, so too there were no prophets-no prophets, that is to say, in the older sense of the word, no men like Isaiah or Jeremiah, or even like Haggai and Zechariah. In one of the later Psalms the words occur: We see not our signs; there is no more any prophet.' Into the causes of this decline of prophecy I cannot here enter. One great reason is that it was not wanted as it had been wanted before the Exile. There was no more any worship of Baal or Ashtoreth against which to protest. The Jews were now ardent worshippers of one God, ardent believers that all divinity was summed up and contained in that one and only God. The accepted laws of the state embodied precepts of justice and charity. It is beyond legitimate doubt that the average morality, no less than the average religiousness, of Judæa in 300 B.C. was very considerably higher than in 600 B.C. The primary occupation of the prophets was gone. Not that the best teaching of the prophets had been completely absorbed. Far from it. But it could be taken up and reproduced by other kinds of teachers. A Psalmist could declare: The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.' The Wise Man could urge: The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord: but the prayer of the upright is his delight.'

If there were no prophets, there were many students of prophecy. And these students edited, and added to, the prophetic utterances of older times. They were not conscious of any breach of faith in doing so, and some of their additions show that they too were possessed in varying measure of the divine spirit. For several of their additions contain noble thoughts and high teaching. We have already seen how the collection of prophecies now known as the Book of Isaiah was constantly being added to, and some of these additions we have still to hear.

§14. The fifteen Prophetical Books.-The collection of Prophets' in the present Hebrew Bible consists of three large 'books' and twelve little ones. The three large ones are the 'books' of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The twelve little ones are usually grouped together as a single book and called the 'Minor Prophets.'

Of

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these twelve minor or rather shorter prophets the two oldest, and by far the greatest and most important, are Amos and Hosea. A third, Micah, was a contemporary of Isaiah. To his short book there were added words from an unknown prophet who lived in the reign of Manasseh. A famous excerpt from him has been quoted on p. 391 of Part I. During the reign of Josiah there may probably be placed the two prophets, Nahum and Zephaniah. A sixth minor' prophet, Habakkuk, may be assigned to the reign of Jehoiakim. I have not attempted to make any extracts from these three writers, for they are very difficult and very obscure. The seventh and eighth of the minor prophets in order of time are Haggai and Zechariah, of whom we have already heard. To the Book of Zechariah considerable additions were made at a later date. The ninth prophet, Malachi, belongs to the age of Ezra. His short book is also difficult and unsuitable for use in a Bible for home reading. It needs long and elaborate explanations. The tenth prophet is Obadiah, a younger contemporary perhaps of Malachi, whose vision,' extending only to twenty-one verses,' is concerned with Edom. The eleventh prophet is Joel. He appears to be an exception to the rule. For his date almost certainly falls after Nehemiah, but, nevertheless, he is an independent and original prophet, and not merely a student of, or an adder to, the prophecies of others. His prophecy contains more than one famous passage, and at least one striking religious maxim: 'Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God.' The twelfth and latest prophet' is Jonah. But his short book, one of the very greatest in all the Bible, has not been properly included among the prophets at all. It is not a prophecy, but a tale: a story with a purpose,' like that story of Ruth which we have already heard.

§15. Religious tales.-Religious or moral tales in the form of history or of fiction constituted another kind of literature in which the thoughts and teaching of the age found expression. Ruth is the oldest of these tales: it was perhaps written in the Nehemian age as a protest against the exclusive and separatist policy pursued by Nehemiah and his colleagues. Jonah has a similar tendency; its date is uncertain, and one can only say that it was probably not written much before 400 or much after 300 B. C. A third example in the Bible of the story with a moral is the Book of Esther. It was written at a time when gratitude for national deliverance was mingled in equal parts with hatred of foreign dominion. Lastly, as a fourth example, but wholly different in quality, of the religious story comes the Book of Daniel. This

book was written, as we shall hear, during the course of the Maccabean revolt. Its date can be fixed with certainty between the years 168 and 164 B.C. It is a remarkable work both for its own sake and also because it is, so far as we know, the first instance of a novel type of religious literature, of which there are many other surviving examples outside the Bible. It is the literature known as Apocalyptic, or revealing.

§ 16. The Song of Songs.-In this list of Biblical books which were written from Nehemiah to the Maccabees, I have omitted one short book of uncertain date which stands quite by itself. It is called the Song of Songs. What a wonderful collection the Bible is! What amazing variety there is contained in it! For this Song of Songs is neither more nor less than a poem about Love, not the religious love of man to God, but the love of man and woman for each other. It is probable that this poem about love was included in the Bible because the editors erroneously supposed that it was a religious allegory, partly also because the writer of it assumed in his poem the person and name of Solomon. But whatever the reasons, we may be rightly glad that the Song of Songs is in the Bible-in the book of books that is at once human and divine. For is not this mingling of the human and the divine the very essence and reality of love? If the Song of Songs had not been preserved to us through the Bible, we should not possess the simple and supreme glorification of love in those superb lines:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart,

As a seal upon thine arm:

For love is strong as death;

The passion therefore is hard as Sheol:

Its heat is the heat of fire,

A very flame of the Lord!

Many waters cannot quench love,

Neither can the floods drown it:

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would utterly be despised.

§ 17. The influence of Greece.-Were the Jews influenced in their religious ideas by their foreign masters? The influence of Persia is doubtful and obscure, but the influence of Greece is certain and significant. Through the conquests and settlements of the great Alexander, Greek thought and culture were introduced into the East. And as the most important consequence of this introduction,

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