and prospers; on the other, Israel is to obey his laws and serve no other gods. This conception of mutual obligation is presented at the opening of the "Ten Commandments," and to this covenant relation the prophets again and again make appeal. The obligation to obey the law is not "This is the custom," or "Our fathers did so"; it is placed on the ground that the people has voluntarily accepted Jehovah as its god and lawgiver.
The meaning of this covenant and the symbols by which it was conceived, changed with the advance of the social relationships of the people. At first Jehovah was "Lord of Hosts," protector in war, and giver of prosperity, and the early conceptions of the duty of the people seemed to include human sacrifice, at least in extreme cases. But with later prophets we find the social and family relationship of husband and father brought increasingly into use. Whether by personal experience or by more general reflection, we find Hosea interpreting the relationship between God and his people in both of these family conceptions. The disloyalty of the people takes on the more intimate taint of a wife's unfaithfulness, and, conversely, in contrast to the concepts of other religions, the people may call Jehovah "my husband" and no longer "my master" (Baal). The change from status to contract is thus, in Israel's religion, fruitful with many moral results.
2. The Conception of a Personal Lawgiver.—The conception of a personal lawgiver raises conduct from the level of custom to the level of conscious morality. So long as a child follows certain ways by imitation or suggestion, he does not necessarily attach any moral meaning to them. But if the parent expressly commands or prohibits, it becomes a matter of obedience or disobedience. Choice becomes necessary. Character takes the place of innocence. So Jehovah's law compelled obedience or rebellion. Customs were either forbidden or enjoined. In either case they ceased to be merely customs. In the law of Israel the whole body of observances in private life, in ceremonial, and in legal forms, is introduced with a "Thus saith the Lord." We know that other Semitic people observed the Sabbath, practiced circumcision, distinguished clean from unclean beasts, and respected the taboos of birth and death. Whether in Israel all these observances were old customs given new authority by statute, or were customs taken from other peoples under the authority of the laws of Jehovah, is immaterial. The ethical significance of the law is that these various observances, instead of being treated merely as customs, are regarded as personal commands of a personal deity.
This makes a vital difference in the view taken of the violation of these observances. When a man violates a custom he fails to do the correct thing. He misses the mark.[49] But when the observance is a personal command, its violation is a personal disobedience; it is rebellion; it is an act of will. The evil which follows is no longer bad luck; it is punishment. Now punishment must be either right or wrong, moral or immoral. It can never be merely non-moral. Hence the very conception of sin as a personal offense, and of ill as a personal punishment, forces a moral standard. In its crudest form this may take the god's commands as right simply because he utters them, and assume that the sufferer is guilty merely because he suffers. We find this in the penitential psalms of the Babylonians. These express the deepest conviction of sin and the utmost desire to please the god, but when we try to discover what the penitent has done that wakens such remorse within him, we find that he seems merely to feel that in some way he has failed to please God, no matter how. He experiences misfortune, whether of disease, or ill-luck, or defeat, and is sure that this must be due to some offense. He does not know what this may be. It may have been that he has failed to repeat a formula in the right manner; it is all one. He feels guilty and even exaggerates his own guilt in view of the punishment which has befallen him. Job's three friends apply the same logic to his case.[50]
But side by side with the conception that the laws of Jehovah must be obeyed because they were his commands, there was another doctrine which was but an extension of the theory that the people had freely accepted their ruler. This was that Jehovah's commands were not arbitrary. They were right; they could be placed before the people for their approval; they were "life"; "the judge of all the earth" would "do right." We have here a striking illustration of the principle that moral standards, at first embodied in persons, slowly work free, so that persons are judged by them.
3. The Cultus as Morally Symbolical.—The elaborate cultus carried on by the priests, symbolized, however imperfectly, certain moral ideas. The solicitous care for ceremonial "purity" might have no direct moral value; the contamination from contact with birth or death or certain animals might be a very external sort of "uncleanness." Nevertheless, they emphasized in the most forcible manner a constant control over conduct by a standard which was set by a divine law. The "holiness" of the priests, as set apart to special service of Jehovah, emphasized the seriousness of their work; and further, it contributed to that distinction between spiritual and material, between higher and lower, which is a part of moral life. Moreover, while part of this value inheres in all ritual, the contrast between Jehovah's worship and that of other deities challenged moral attention. The gods of the land, the various Baals, were worshipped "upon every high hill and under every green tree." As gods of fertility, they were symbolized by the emblems of sex, and great freedom prevailed at their festivals. At certain shrines men and women gave themselves for the service of the god. The first born children were not infrequently sacrificed.[51] These festivals and shrines seem to have been adopted more or less fully by Israel from the Canaanites, but the prophets have an utterly different idea of Jehovah's worship. The god of Sinai rejects utterly such practices. License and drunkenness are not, as the cultus of Baal and Astarte implied, the proper symbols of life and deity. The sensual cannot fitly symbolize the spiritual.
Moreover, one part of the cultus, the "sin offering," directly implied transgression and the need of forgiveness. The "sins" might themselves be ceremonial rather than moral, and the method of removing them might be external—especially the process of putting the sins upon a scapegoat which should "bear upon him all their iniquities into a solitary land,"—nevertheless, the solemn confession, and the shedding of the blood which was the "life," could not but remind of responsibility and deepen reflection. The need of atonement and reconciliation, thus impressed, symbolized the moral process of reconstructing, of putting away a lower past, and readjusting life to meet an ideal.
4. The Prophets as a Moral Force.—The prophets were by far the most significant moral agency in Israel's religion. In the first place, they came to the people bearing a message from a living source of authority, intended for the immediate situation. They brought a present command for a present duty. "Thou art the man," of Nathan to David, "Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?" of Elijah to Ahab, had personal occasions. But the great sermons of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, were no less for the hour. A licentious festival, an Assyrian invasion, an Egyptian embassy, a plague of locusts, an impending captivity—these inspire demand for repentance, warnings of destruction, promises of salvation. The prophet was thus the "living fountain." The divine will as coming through him "was still, so to speak, fluid, and not congealed into institutions."
In the second place, the prophets seized upon the inward purpose and social conduct of man as the all-important issues; cultus, sacrifice, are unimportant. "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies," cries Amos in Jehovah's name, "But let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream." "I have had enough of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts," proclaims Isaiah, "new moons, and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies—I cannot away with iniquity and the solemn meeting." You need not ceremonial, but moral, purity. "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings;—seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow." Micah's "Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" seized upon the difference once for all between the physical and the moral; a completely ethical standpoint is gained in his summary of religious duty: "What doth God require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And the New Testament analogue marks the true ethical valuation of all the external religious manifestations, even of the
