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more clearly than the Hebrew the belief of the writer in God's providential guidance; and other lessons may be derived from it: the deep sense of personal vocation to do God's work, faith in self-sacrificing intercession,' courage, patriotism, and a steadfast adherence to the true faith even amid heathen surroundings, which the modern European in India, Africa, or Japan might imitate with advantage1. There is no difficulty in recognizing the canonical value. of the book of Ruth, which some would regard as a polemical product of Ezra's reforms, marking possibly a tendency to reaction against the puritanical narrowness of the time 2. If this be a correct account, the book of Ruth fulfils much the same function as that of Jonah. It bears witness to the universality of God's purpose of grace and to His compassion for the heathen who lay beyond the pale of the covenant.

Finally, the book of Daniel, apparently composed as a manual of consolation for the confessors and martyrs of the Maccabean period, is a specimen of prophecy in its later apocalyptic form. With this type of literature the modern western mind can only imperfectly sympathize; but the fact is undeniable that apocalyptic writings exercised a very powerful influence on Jewish thought during the last two centuries before Christ3. The book now in question bears witness to the strong hold which Messianic hopes had gained upon the imagination of the faith

ap. Köhler, Über Berechtigung der Kritik, &c., p. 31. Cornill's estimate of the book is very severe, Einleitung in das A. T. p. 138. Cp. Meinhold, Jesus und das A. T. pp. 97, 98; Hunter, After the Exile, part i. pp. 237, 238. 1 See some suggestive notes of Professor Lock in Sanday, Bampton Lectures, pp. 222–223. Cp. Ryle, O. T. Canon, p. 176.

2 Cp. Hunter, op. cit. pp. 44 foll.

3 Cp. Drummond, The Jewish Messiah, p. 8: 'The authors of the various apocalyptic works... are not justly open to a suspicion of wilful deceit. Our modern taste accords little welcome to this kind of literary inventiveness, and our modern strictness may regard it as not altogether permissible, but I see no reason why it may not have been practised by high-minded and honourable men.' See also Kuenen, Religion of Israel, ch. x [Eng. Tr. vol. iii. p. 114].

ful; it shows how effectively they sustained drooping faith under the pressure of persecution. It also illustrates the characteristic religious practices of Judaism, its fervour in prayer and fasting, and its growing sense of the merit of almsgiving1. Moreover, the book of Daniel indicates a certain advance in religious thought, due probably in a measure to the contact of Israel's religion with that of Persia 2. Again, it illustrates the remark of Darmesteter that to the Jewish mind human life and the world's history were a drama. The book is an attempt to grasp the history of the world as a whole ". It is dominated, not only by an unshaken confidence in the ultimate triumph of truth, but also by an overmastering sense of a universal divine purpose which overrules all the vicissitudes of human history, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflicts of nations, and the calamities that overtake the faithful.

Such is a general description, with one or two unimportant omissions, of the contents of the Hagiographa. They display to us in very varied forms the religious mind and character which the teaching of the prophets and the discipline of the Law had brought to maturity. But they also contribute to the Old Testament an element of many-sided sympathy which otherwise it might have lacked, since some of the 'Writings' reflect the experience derived from contact with Gentile thought and life, while others are the product of that habit of direct communion with God by which man gains the power to penetrate the hidden mysteries of the unseen world. The Hagiographa, in a word, give a universal character Cp. Dan. iv. 27. Cp. Riehm, ATI. Theologie, pp. 397, 401. On our Lord's references to the book, see Valeton, Christus und das A. T. PP: 49 foll.

1

2 e. g. in the doctrine of angels, the clearer conception of Satan, and possibly the idea of a resurrection of the body. Cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, ch. ix. The influence of Persia, however, on Jewish thought must not be overrated. See Hunter, op. cit. part i. pp. 82, 83; Nicolas, Des doctrines religieuses des Juifs, partie i. ch. 2.

3

By Jerome, ad Paulinum, 14, Daniel is described as 'temporum conscius, et totius mundi piiorop.' Cp. Kuenen, op. cit. ch. x, and Westcott in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, art. ‘Daniel.'

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to the Bible. All the sacred books,' says Origen, 'breathe the spirit of fullness, and there is nothing in them which does not descend from the plenitude of the divine majesty'.' But these writings especially, both in what they are and what they are not, seem to testify to the presence and operation of the Spirit who bloweth where He listeth, and from whom the secrets of no human heart are hid. It is this remarkable universality of scope which differentiates the literature of the Hebrews from that of other races. Granted that the sacred books of India, Persia, or China display real traces of divine inspiration, or at least of providential guidance, it nevertheless remains true that the Bible alone has proved itself adequate to the task of instructing the ignorance, assuaging the griefs, and ministering to the perplexities, not of one race merely, but of mankind.

In this lecture we are chiefly concerned with the books of the Hagiographa as throwing light on the divine purpose for the individual soul, thereby laying the foundations of personal religion. It seems to be specially their function to prepare the way for three truths which in the New Testament are openly proclaimed: first, the doctrine of immortality; secondly, the mystery of divine providence; thirdly, the fruitfulness of suffering. Christ Himself openly reveals these truths, and in so doing He responds to the most anxious questionings of the human heart. In the Old Testament, however, we are dealing only with the intuitions and presages of holy men, dimly anticipating a future solution of their perplexities. In their searchings of heart we are enabled to study the spiritual needs which God's self-revelation in Christ was designed to satisfy-needs the very consciousness of which was inspired by Him. The function of the Bible in the Church is not so much to originate faith as to aid and educate it: and faith may be helped as well by a sympathetic recognition of difficulties as by

1 Hom. in Jerem. xxi. 2.

the solution of them, by actual examples or life-like pictures of faith perplexed not less than by instances of faith triumphant and crowned.

I.

It is natural to deal first with the idea of a future life—an idea which is by no means entirely wanting in the theology of the Old Testament, but which necessarily demanded a moral basis in the human mind. There could be no doctrine of personal immortality at a stage in civilization when as yet the sense of individuality was undeveloped. Amid the conditions of primitive society the individual as such was practically unrecognized. In religion, we are told, as well as in civil affairs, 'the habit of the old world was to think much of the community and little of the individual life. . . . The God was the God of the nation or tribe, and He knew and cared for the individual only as a member of the community'.' The Old Testament indeed represents the redemptive movement as beginning with an individual man's venture of faith, but it is with a family or tribe, in course of time with an entire nation, that Almighty God establishes His covenant-relationship. We may indeed see a rudimentary recognition of the individual in the doctrine that Jehovah visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him; this implies that the welfare of a small group of persons within the nation or tribe would depend on the conduct of a single member of the group 2. But in the main it is obviously true that the status and duty of each individual was determined by the character and calling of the nation. Certainly the Israelite is enjoined ever to bear in thankful remembrance the vocation

1 Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, pp. 241, 242; R. W. Church, Discipline of the Christian Character, Serm. i.

2 Cp. Riehm, ATI. Theologie, p. 28.

and the privileges of his people1: and there seems to be, in the pre-prophetic period at any rate, no thought of the salvation of the individual apart from that of the nation. From the Mosaic point of view a man's position depended upon his relation to the covenant people. He was accepted and recognized, so to speak, by Jehovah only in so far as he could claim lawful membership in the elect nation. It is only when viewed collectively that Israel is honoured with the title of Jehovah's son 2. The individual Israelite had no right to appropriate personally either the style or the privileges of sonship. He enjoyed filial dignity only in virtue of his incorporation into the community which collectively inherited the promises vouchsafed to the patriarchs 3. An individual and personal sonship scarcely makes its appearance within the confines of the Old Testament.

The utmost that we can clearly discern in the religious history of Israel is a gradual and progressive moral discipline paving the way for a doctrine of personal immortality and salvation, which without such a preparatory education might have appeared incredible and even unwelcome to human thought. Now we find the moral groundwork of the doctrine of immortality, the premisses as it were from which the conclusion might have been drawn, and was in a measure actually drawn, in two great verities-the one characteristic of the age of Mosaism, the other of the troubled period of Israel's later history: (1) the truth of man's relation as an individual soul to God, (2) the truth

1

Cp. Deut. iv. 7; vi. 7-9. König holds an opposite view to that stated in the text, but his arguments fail to carry conviction. See his Religious History of Israel, pp. 178 foll. 2 Exod. iv. 22.

3 Cp. Riehm, ATI. Theologie, p. 28: 'Die sittlich-religiöse Bedeutung der Persönlichkeit ist noch nicht völlig erkannt. Gott steht im Verhältniss zu dem ganzen Volke, aber der einzelne nennt ihn nicht Vater. Nur das Volk als solches ist erwählt, und einzig als Glied desselben hat der einzelne an dieser Erwählung teil. Jede Störung des Gemeinschaftsverhältnisses zwischen Gott und Israel wird daher auch von ihm nicht bloss schmerzlich, sondern auch als Störung seiner persönlichen Beziehungen zu dem Höchsten empfunden.' See also Oehler, Theology of the O. T. i. 259.

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