by Will Durant
Nevertheless his denunciation falls where it belongs—upon economic exploitation and greed. Here his eloquence rises to the highest point reached in the Old Testament, in passages that are among the peaks of the world’s prose:
The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people and the princes thereof; for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? . . . Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! . . . Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees to turn aside the needy from judgment (justice), and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless. And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from afar? to whom will ye flee for help, and where will ye leave your glory?110
He is filled with scorn of those who, while fleecing the poor, present a pious face to the world.
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts. . . . Your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to hear them. And when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers I will not hear; your hands are full of blood. Wash ye, make ye clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment (justice), relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.111
He is bitter, but he does not despair of his people; just as Amos had ended his prophecies with a prediction, strangely apt today, of the restoration of the Jews to their native land,112 so Isaiah concludes by formulating the Messianic hope—the trust of the Jews in some Redeemer who will end their political divisions, their subjection, and their misery, and bring an era of universal brotherhood and peace:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For unto us a child is born: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. . . . And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse. . . . And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. . . . With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. . . . And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.113
It was an admirable aspiration, but not for many generations yet would ft express the mood of the Jews. The priests of the Temple listened with a well-controlled sympathy to these useful encouragements to piety; certain sects looked back to the Prophets for part of their inspiration; and perhaps these excoriations of all sensual delight had some share in intensifying the desert-born Puritanism of the Jews. But for the most part the old life of the palace and the tent, the market-place and the field, went on as before; war took its choice of every generation, and slavery continued to be the lot of the alien; the merchant cheated with his scales,114 and tried to atone with sacrifice and prayer.
It was upon the Judaism of post-Exilic days, and upon the world through Judaism and Christianity, that the Prophets left their deepest mark. In Amos and Isaiah is the beginning of both Christianity and socialism, the spring from which has flowed a stream of Utopias wherein no poverty or war shall disturb human brotherhood and peace; they are the source of the early Jewish conception of a Messiah who would seize the government, reestablish the temporal power of the Jews, and inaugurate a dictatorship of the dispossessed among mankind. Isaiah and-Amos began, in a military age, the exaltation of those virtues of simplicity and gentleness, of cooperation and friendliness, which Jesus was to make a vital element in his creed. They were the first to undertake the heavy task of reforming the God of Hosts into a God of Love; they conscripted Yahveh for humanitarianism as the radicals of the nineteenth century conscripted Christ for socialism. It was they who, when the Bible was printed in Europe, fired the Germanic mind with a rejuvenated Christianity, and lighted the torch of the Reformation; it was their fierce and intolerant virtue that formed the Puritans. Their moral philosophy was based upon a theory that would bear better documentation—that the righteous man will prosper, and the wicked will be struck down; but even if that should be a delusion it is the failing of a noble mind. The prophets had no conception of freedom, but they loved justice, and called for an end to the tribal limitations of morality. They offered to the unfortunate of the earth a vision of brotherhood that became the precious and unforgotten heritage of many generations.
V. THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JERUSALEM
The birth of the Bible—The destruction of Jerusalem—The Babylonian Captivity—Jeremiah—Ezekiel—The Second Isaiah—The liberation of the Jews—The Second Temple
Their greatest contemporary influence was on the writing of the Bible. As the people fell away from the worship of Yahveh to the adoration of alien gods, the priests began to wonder whether the time had not come to make a final stand against the disintegration of the national faith. Taking a leaf from the Prophets, who attributed to Yahveh the passionate convictions of their own souls, they resolved to issue to the people a communication from God himself, a code of laws that would reinvigorate the moral life of the nation, and would at the same time attract the support of the Prophets by embodying the less extreme of their ideas. They readily won King Josiah to their plan; and about the eighteenth year of his reign the priest Hilkiah announced to the King that he had “found” in the secret archives of the Temple an astonishing scroll in which the great Moses himself, at the direct dictation of Yahveh, had settled once for all those problems of history and conduct that were I being so hotly debated by prophets and priests. The discovery made a great stir. Josiah called the elders of Judah to the Temple, and there read to them the “Book of the Covenant” in the presence (we are told) of thousands of people. Then he solemnly swore that he would henceforth abide by the laws of this book; and “he caused all that were present to stand to it.”115
We do not know just what this “Book of the Covenant” was; it may have been Exodus xx-xxiii, or it may have been Deuteronomy.116 We need not suppose that it had been invented on the spur of the situation; it merely formulated, and put into writing, decrees, demands and exhortations which for centuries had emanated from the prophets and the Temple. In any event, those who heard the reading, and even those who only heard of it, were deeply impressed. Josiah took advantage of this mood to raid the altars of Yahveh’s rivals in Judah; he cast “out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal,” he put down the idolatrous priests, and “them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets”; he “defiled Topheth, . . . . that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech”; and he smashed the altars that Solomon had built for Chemosh, Milcom and Astarte.117
These reforms did not seem to propitiate Yahveh, or bring him to the aid of his people. Nineveh fell as the Prophets had foretold, but only to leave little Judah subject first to Egypt and then to Babylon. When Pharaoh Necho, bound for Syria, tried to pass through Palestine, Josiah, relying upon Yahveh, resisted him on the ancient battle-site of Megiddo—only to be defeated and slain. A few years later Nebuchadrezzar overwhelmed Necho at Carchemish, and made Judah a Babylonian dependency. Josiah’s
successors sought by secret diplomacy to liberate themselves from the clutch of Babylon, and thought to bring Egypt to their rescue; but the fiery Nebuchadrezzar, getting wind of it, poured his soldiery into Palestine, captured Jerusalem, took King Jehoiakim prisoner, put Zedekiah on the throne of Judah, and carried 10,000 Jews into bondage. But Zedekiah, too, loved liberty, or power, and rebelled against Babylon. Thereupon Nebuchadrezzar returned, and—resolving to settle the Jewish problem once and for all, as he thought—recaptured Jerusalem, burned it to the ground, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, slew Zedekiah’s sons before his face, gouged out his eyes, and carried practically all the population of the city into captivity in Babylonia.118 Later a Jewish poet sang one of the world’s great songs about that unhappy caravan:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.119
In all this crisis the bitterest and most eloquent of the Prophets defended Babylon as a scourge in the hands of God, denounced the rulers of Judah as obstinate fools, and advised such complete surrender to Nebuchadrezzar that the modern reader is tempted to wonder could Jeremiah have been a paid agent of Babylonia. “I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground,” says Jeremiah’s God, . . . “and now have I given all those lands into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, the King of Babylon, my servant. . . . And all nations shall serve him. And it shall come to pass, that the nation and kingdom which will not serve the same Nebuchadrezzar, the King of Babylon, and that will not put their neck under the yoke of the King of Babylon, that nation will I punish, saith the Lord, with the sword, and with the famine, and with the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand.”120
He may have been a traitor, but the book of his prophecies, supposedly taken down by his disciple Baruch, is not only one of the most passionately eloquent writings in all literature, as rich in vivid imagery as in merciless abuse, but it is marked with a sincerity that begins as a diffident self-questioning, and ends with honest doubts about his own course and all human life. “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife, and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me. . . . Cursed be the day wherein I was born.”121 A flame of indignation, burned in him at the sight of moral depravity and political folly in his people and its leaders; he felt inwardly compelled to stand in the gate and call Israel to repentance. All this national decay, all this weakening of the state, this obviously imminent subjection of Judah to Babylon, were, it seemed to Jeremiah, Yahveh’s hand laid upon the Jews in punishment for their sins. “Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.”122 Everywhere iniquity ruled, and sex ran riot; men “were as fed horses in the morning; every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.”123 When the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem the rich men of the city, to propitiate Yahveh, released their Hebrew slaves; but when for a time the siege was raised, and the danger seemed past, the rich apprehended their former slaves, and forced them into their old bondage: it was a summary of human history that Jeremiah could not bear silently.124 Like the other Prophets, he denounced those hypocrites who with pious faces brought to the Temple some part of the gains they had made from grinding the faces of the poor; the Lord, he reminded them, in the eternal lesson of all finer religion, asked not for sacrifice but for justice.125 The priests and the prophets, he thinks, are almost as false and corrupt as the merchants; they, too, like the people, need to be morally reborn, to be (in Jeremiah’s strange phrase) circumcised in the spirit as well as in the flesh. “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your heart.”126
Against these abuses the Prophet preached with a fury rivaled only by the stern saints of Geneva, Scotland and England. Jeremiah cursed the Jews savagely, and took some delight in picturing the ruin of all who would not heed him.127 Time and again he predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon, and wept over the doomed city (whom he called the daughter of Zion) in terms anticipatory of Christ: “Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!”128
To the “princes” of Zedekiah’s court all this seemed sheer treason; it was dividing the Jews in counsel and spirit in the very hour of war. Jeremiah tantalized them by carrying a wooden yoke around his neck, explaining that all Judah must submit—the more peaceably the better—to the yoke of Babylon; and when Hananiah tore this yoke away Jeremiah cried out that Yahveh would make yokes of iron for all the Jews. The priests tried to stop him by putting his head into the stocks; but from even that position he continued to denounce them. They arraigned him in the Temple, and wished to kill him, but through some friend among the priests he escaped. Then the princes arrested him, and lowered him by ropes into a dungeon filled with mire; but Zedekiah had him raised to milder imprisonment in the palace court. There the Babylonians found him when Jerusalem fell. On Nebuchadrezzar’s orders they treated him well, and exempted him from the general exile. In his old age, says orthodox tradition,128a he wrote his “Lamentations,” the most eloquent of all the books of the Old Testament. He mourned now the completeness of his triumph and the desolation of Jerusalem, and raised to heaven the unanswerable questions of Job:
How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! how she is become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! . . . Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. . . . Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let us talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?129
Meanwhile, in Babylon, another preacher was taking up the burden of prophecy. Ezekiel belonged to a priestly family that had been driven to Babylon in the first deportation from Jerusalem. He began his preaching, like the First Isaiah and Jeremiah, with fierce denunciations of idolatry and corruption in Jerusalem. At great length he compared Jerusalem to a harlot, because she sold the favors of her worship to strange gods;130 he described Samaria and Jerusalem as twin whores; this word was as popular with him as with the dramatists of the Stuart Restoration. He made long lists of the sins of Jerusalem, and then condemned her to capture and destruction. Like Isaiah, he doomed the nations impartially, and announced the sins and fall of Moab, Tyre, Egypt, Assyria, even of the mysterious kingdom of Magog.131 But he was not as bitter as Jeremiah; in the end he relented, declared that the Lord would save “a remnant” of the Jews, and foretold the resurrection of their city;132 he described in vision the new Temple that would be built there, and outlined a Utopia in which the priests would be supreme, and in which Yahveh would dwell among his people forever.
He hoped, with this happy ending, to keep up the spirits of the exiles, and to retard their assimilation into the Babylonian culture and blood. Then as now it seemed that this process of absorption would destroy the unity, even the identity, of the Jews. They flourished on Mesopotamia’s rich soil, they enjoyed considerable freedom of custom and worship, they grew rapidly in numbers and wealth, and prospered in the unwonted tranquillity and harmony which their subjection had brought to them. An ever-rising proportion of them accepted the gods of Babylon, and the epicurean w
ays of the old metropolis. When the second generation of exiles grew up, Jerusalem was almost forgotten.
It was the function of the unknown author who undertook to complete the Book of Isaiah to restate the religion of Israel for this backsliding generation; and it was his distinction, in restating it, to lift it to the loftiest plane that any religion had yet reached amid all the faiths of the Near East.* While Buddha in India was preaching the death of desire, and Confucius in China was formulating wisdom for his people, this “Second Isaiah,” in majestic and luminous prose, announced to the exiled Jews the first clear revelation of monotheism, and offered them a new god, infinitely richer in “lovingkindness” and tender mercy than the bitter Yahveh even of the First Isaiah. In words that a later gospel was to choose as spurring on the young Christ, this greatest of Prophets announced his mission—no longer to curse the people for their sins, but to bring them hope in their bondage. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of “the prison to them that are bound.”133 For he has discovered that Yahveh is not a god of war and vengeance, but a loving father; the discovery fills him with happiness, and inspires him to magnificent songs. He predicts the coming of the new god to rescue his people: