THE MEETING OF GREEK AND JEW

19

there came the meeting of the Greek with the Hebrew. Readers of Plato, whether in the original or in the late Professor Jowett's beautiful English, will not need to be told what great and noble thoughts, on politics, on morals, and even on religion, were contained in Greek philosophy. With that philosophy the Jewish settlers in the new Hellenistic cities might gradually become familiar. For these Jews quickly acquired the use of the Greek language. In Alexandria, and in many other cities of that type, it soon became their mother-tongue. They spoke, thought, wrote and prayed in Greek. In the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus the Pentateuch, and after a time the entire Hebrew Bible, was translated into Greek. But of the immense importance of this translation in the past, and of its present-day value in enabling us frequently to correct the Hebrew text when corrupt, this is not the place to speak.

The headquarters of Greek or Hellenistic Judaism was Alexandria. The central synagogue of that city was one of its grandest buildings. And the service was conducted in Greek, the mother-tongue of the worshippers. A famous passage in the Talmud about this synagogue runs as follows: R. Judah says: "He who has not seen the double gallery of Alexandria has not seen the glory of Israel." It was a kind of basilica, one row of pillars within another. At times there were present 600,000 people, as many as the Israelites who left Egypt. There were seventy-one golden seats, corresponding to the seventy-one elders, and each seat contained gold to the value of 250,000 dinars. A platform of wood was built in the middle, and the verger stood on it with flags in his hand. When the moment came for the congregation to say Amen, he waved the flags, and all answered at the signal. The congregation sat in groups. The goldsmiths alone, and the silversmiths alone; the iron-workers had their own place, and so had the workers in brass, and the weavers. When a stranger or a poor man entered, he saw where the members of his trade were seated, and he made his way to them and found entertainment during his stay in the city, or support for himself and his household.'

Even in Judæa Greek influence gradually made itself felt. That influence was by no means wholly good, and the evil side of it led some men on to loose and careless living, and to apostasy from the national religion. But in such Biblical literature as seems to belong to the third century B. C. (300-200), we can perhaps trace some of the good and wholesome influences of Hellas. In those hundred years the Jews, both within and without Palestine, began to understand better than they had ever understood before the doctrinefor us so obvious and beautiful, but for them so hard and unsympa

thetic-that all nations are equally children of one God, and that the aim of the Jews should be not to widen the gulf between themselves and other peoples, but to bring these other peoples over to their own religion and to the knowledge of the one true God. Righteousness and peace should unite nation to nation and the common worship of a single God.

§ 18. Plan of the volume.-A last word of introduction as to the general scheme of the present volume. I propose to divide it into five sections (of two or more chapters), and to allot one section to each of the kinds of religious literature which have been enumerated in the foregoing paragraphs. In the first section (including four separate chapters) I shall give selected extracts from the Wisdom Literature. The next section will be devoted to the Books of Amos, Hosea and Joel, and to certain portions of the Book of Isaiah. The quotations from Isaiah will show how earnest and pious students of the post-Nehemian age edited and enlarged the fragments of pre-exilic prophecy. I shall thereby also fulfil a promise made in Part I, p. 373. The following short section will contain two of the tales mentioned in § 15, in striking and vehement contrast to each other. These will be the Book of Esther and the Book of Jonah. Upon them, in the fourth section, I will follow liberal extracts from the Psalter. And lastly, in a concluding section, I shall resume the thread of Jewish history from the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes, and continue it to the death of Simon the Maccabee. In that section will be included the Book of Daniel.

§ 1. Characteristics of the Book of Proverbs.-I have already mentioned that the Wise Men were the authors of a particular kind of religious writing known as the Wisdom Literature. Of this literature there are three very different specimens in the Bible, and yet different as they are from one another, there are points of contact and connexion between them. The Book of Proverbs is the oldest and the simplest. As its name implies, a large part of the book is made up of proverbs—detached aphorisms about life and conduct. Many of these proverbs are probably much older than the age at which the book as a whole was put together and compiled. The Wise Men collected, sifted and adapted the proverbial wisdom of their people and country. Nevertheless, these detached proverbs bear a marked family likeness to each other, as well as a general conformity to the type of proverbs all the world over. I can only allude in the briefest possible way to a few of these common characteristics, for I am not writing a commentary upon the Bible, but merely supplying the best or most profitable parts of it with the minimum of framework and explanation.

(1) The Proverbs are broadly human. They have no background of special history. The sages address their disciples not as Jews but as men.

(2) At the same time the results of a long struggle are assumed. That there is one God is no longer a matter of dispute, nor that this God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-just.

(3) As in other proverbs of other races, goodness tends some

times to be regarded as a matter of prudence. The Proverbs seem one long glorification and exemplification of the maxim, Honesty is the best policy.' Yet, as Mr. Moulton has so well said, their ethical spirit is not commercial. Their purpose is

6

not to bribe with offers of advantage, but to exclaim against the folly of thinking that there could be any path towards advantage except through rightdoing.'

(4) The sovereign virtue of the Proverbs is Wisdom. By wisdom we are not to understand knowledge in the sense of learneduess : we are to understand rather a practical insight into life and conduct, founded on the reverence of God. The sages' wisdom is religious. It is also moral, for wisdom and goodness become aspects of each other. But it makes a difference that the sages, as it were, get to goodness through wisdom. Though their wisdom is not learning, still it has a marked intellectual tinge, and this way of looking at goodness has been a strong, sometimes a too strong, element of Jewish ethics ever since the days of the first sages. Their ideal wise man is not merely good, but he is also, in a respectable sense of the term, worldly wise; he knows times and seasons, he knows how to behave in all the varying circumstances of life; he knows when to speak and when to be silent, how to take reproof and how to give it. The fool, on the contrary, is not only unrighteous, but he is also foolish in the ordinary sense of the word. He is described not only as a bad man, but also as a boor and a simpleton. This identification of folly and wickedness is more doubtful and dangerous.

(5) Calm and measured reflection seems the source of the Proverbs. There is an absence of fervour, of abandon, of enthusiasm. Their authors seem to stand a bit aloof from conflict and passion as well as from spiritual ardours and aspiration. This, again, is partly due to the necessities of the proverbial manner. Spiritual realities cannot be grasped by the intellect alone; feeling in its highest form is needed for their right apprehension, and this feeling must run over into the words that describe them. But an emotional proverb is almost a contradiction in terms. It is here that proverbial literature falls short. A purely intellectual conception of spiritual truth does not vitally touch us. It does not seem to unlock the deeper secrets; its key does not fit the most delicate wards of our nature; its answers do not satisfy our finer needs. The Book of Proverbs is at its best when it is least proverbial, as we shall see at the end of this chapter. It may also be noted as a curious and certain fact that the tendency of Jewish sages and teachers was to become more spiritual as time went on. It would almost seem as if the spiritual

THE MEANING OF WISDOM

23

effect of the monotheism to which the first generations of the postexilic sages had attained could develop but gradually. It was assimilated as an intellectual fact before it produced its inevitable spiritual quickening. Yet even if, from the ethical point of view, the range of virtue upon which the earlier sages dilate seems a little restricted, or its degree a little measured, this must be partly set down to the exigencies of the form in which their teaching is cast rather than to its spirit. He who was truly 'wise,' according to the full compass of our sages' teaching, would have possessed a moral character neither feeble nor commonplace. If we add item to item, the gross result is fairly adequate.

(6) Wisdom or goodness (with its opposite of folly or vice) is represented by the sages as expressing itself in several main directions. The wise man is humble; the fool is proud. The one is peaceful; the other contentious. The one is industrious; the other is slothful. The one is charitable and benevolent; the other is cruel and niggardly. The one is forgiving; the other revengeful. The one is sparing of words; the other is a chatterbox. The one is discreet; the other a talebearer. The one is temperate; the other a glutton. Above all, the one fears the Lord; the other despises Him. It is in the nature of antithetical aphorisms, like our Proverbs, to admit of no degrees. On the one side there is the sage who has all the virtues; on the other side there is the fool who has all the vices. But the value of the Proverbs is not thereby decreased. We must read them as tendencies. The old Jewish teachers knew well enough that men are not divided into two rigorous classes of good and evil.

(7) The whole Book of Proverbs contains thirty-one chapters, and may be divided into seven sections of very unequal length. The first section (which is probably latest in date and will come last in this volume) includes chapters i-ix. The second section, containing three hundred and seventy-five detached aphorisms, extends from chapter x. to xxii. 16. The third section reaches only from xxii. 17 to xxiv. 22. The fourth section, shortest of all, has only twelve verses (xxiv. 23-34). The fifth section, containing about one hundred aphorisms, includes five chapters (xxv-xxix). The sixth and seventh sections comprise about one chapter each (xxx, xxxi). One word more as to the form of the larger number of the detached or separate aphorisms. Each of them constitutes a distich, of which the second line gives usually the antithesis in thought to the first. Hence the second lines begin frequently with a 'but.' Sometimes, however, the second line is an amplification or a parallelism, and occasionally the first line gives a comparison and the second line provides the application.