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CHAPTER XII

THE HEAVENLY IDEAL IN CONFLICT:

JEREMIAH AND EZEKIEL

IN Isaiah and in the prophets contemporary with him, but most of all in Isaiah, we see the return to a purity in the conception of the divine ideal such as there had not been since Abraham, and a higher morality than even Abraham had been able to conceive. Not that I am disparaging the great Israelites who intervened between Abraham and Isaiah, such as Moses and Samuel and David and Elijah; but all of these looked upon warfare and blood-shedding not only as legitimate, which in the difficult circumstances of life it sometimes is, but also as a divine method of action, when aimed against the enemies of God; and herein they were mistaken. Though this mistake was not formally repudiated by any of the prophets of the Old Testament, it lost its hold upon them; it is the sword of the spirit which the prophets use, not the sword of physical warfare.

Changes in religious conduct are not, however, to be accomplished with absolute suddenness; and a greater spirituality was not the only difference which now began to show itself between the Israel of the past and that Israel which in the reign of Hezekiah was sending out its first tender buds. Another tendency showed itself; the tendency to centralise religious worship, and to make it uniform. This was not naturally a tendency of the prophets; who, though they assumed as a matter of course a unity of spirit in religion, were elevated above a compulsory unity of outward worship. Still the prophets of Judah did regard with great affection the city of Jerusalem; the past history of Israel was dear to them, and the temple, and the sacred ark which had had so long and remarkable a history; so that to a certain extent the spirituality of the prophets did go hand in hand with centralisation in religion. The priests, in the reign of Hezekiah, were in alliance with the prophets; less spiritual, but more disposed to

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centralisation; the prophets disapproved of the abundance of sacrifices carried on throughout the country because such worship was merely material, the priests, because it was apt to discard authority. Both prophet and priest contended against the Baalworship, though this was not so prevalent in Judah as in northern Israel; it is only distantly referred to in Isaiah and Micah.

These tendencies of prophet and priest had no small influence on king Hezekiah himself, to whom we must ascribe the first serious attempt forcibly to centralise the religion of Israel; his proceedings are thus described in the second book of Kings (xviii. 4):

He removed the high places, and brake the pillars, and cut down the Asherah: and he brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan (i.e. a piece of brass).

It is likely that Isaiah looked with some approval on these measures of king Hezekiah; but we do not know his precise attitude towards them. One cannot help thinking that Hezekiah's reforms went dangerously beyond the common sentiment of the people of Judah in his day; for in the next reign, the reign of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah, a tremendous reaction took place, and idolatry was introduced into the kingdom of Judah to an extent never known before. The reformers of Hezekiah's time, who no doubt resisted this reaction to the utmost of their power, were swept away with great bloodshed; for we read that Manasseh "shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another" (2 Kings xxi. 16). Tradition says that Isaiah was one of those so slain; but there is no certain record of this.

If the reign of Hezekiah had been one of external prosperity, his reforms would probably have endured without challenge. But the invasion of Sennacherib produced the greatest suffering in Judah, and weakness as well as suffering, and the religious policy of Hezekiah, it is plain, excited distrust in the mass of the people. Thus it befell that the reign of his successor Manasseh was what it was, a time of degradation, referred to afterwards with remorse and horror. Fifty-five years did Manasseh reign in Jerusalem. As to what was happening in those cities of Judah whose inhabitants had been swept away by Sennacherib, there is no record; probably the poorest of the people were left; and some restoration of inhabitants there must have been, for the

cities of Judah are not spoken of afterwards as a mere desolation, either in the second book of Kings or in the prophecies of Jeremiah. But all religious guidance had gone out of the land: not one single prophet is named as living and teaching during the whole of this long reign. Random idolatries, aimless superstitions, held by turns the undiscriminating minds of king, nobles, and people. The lofty encouragements of Isaiah dwelt in the minds of a few, but by the people at large they were absolutely forgotten. We do not even know for certain one single event that happened during these fifty-five years. Long afterwards it was alleged, and the story is found in the second book of Chronicles, that Manasseh was captured by the king of Assyria, and taken in chains to Babylon, where under the pressure of calamity he is said to have repented of his polytheistic idolatry; and being presently restored to his kingdom, he is said to have abolished all his idols and the idolatrous altars. But it is impossible not to regard this story as a fable, invented for a purpose regarded as pious. We find the full flood of idolatry going on in the reign of Amon, the son and successor of Manasseh, and even in the early years of the reign of Josiah; and not the smallest hint is given of the previous abolition of idolatry by Manasseh, which would have necessitated a restoration of the idols which had been cast away. And how could the writer of the books of Kings have been ignorant of so striking a fact as the repentance of Manasseh, if it had really occurred? For it would have been an event not easily to be forgotten. If, again, we ask whether the Chronicler is a writer capable of romancing, it is difficult to deny this, in view of the immense victories which he attributes to the pious kings Abijah and Asa, and other narratives which will easily be discovered on a perusal of the books of Chronicles. Further, though it is no doubt possible that the king of Assyria, if he took Manasseh captive, should have located him in Babylon (which at that time was subject to Assyria), yet it is difficult not to think that the Chronicler is here naming Babylon as the capital of the Assyrian monarchy, which it never was. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian monarchy; but long before the books of Chronicles were written, Nineveh had been so utterly destroyed that only the faintest memory of it dwelt in the minds of men, and it is not once mentioned in the books of Chronicles. The Chronicler may very well have forgotten that there ever was such a city.

We may say then with some confidence that Manasseh never was taken captive, but lived out the whole of his impious life on

the throne which he had inherited. A strong-handed king he must have been to live so long in his dangerous position. But it is likely that he was popular with most of his subjects, whom he allowed to go their own ways in religious matters; and it would seem also that he took possession of much of the half-deserted land of northern Israel. At all events we find part of this land subject to his grandson Josiah; and if Josiah himself had subdued it, we should probably have been told of this. However this may be, the people of Judah showed no desire to overthrow Manasseh or his descendants; and when Amon, the son of Manasseh, was slain by his own servants, Josiah son of Amon quietly became king, a boy only eight years old.

Then the reformers took heart again. When I speak of the reformers, it must be understood that I mean those who, for more than a thousand years, had been cherishing the Abrahamic tradition; who had been keeping it separate, all along, from the religions of the nations round them; who had valued it in its historical aspect, as a true record of divine powers and promises; who had associated it with a morality in which the duties of man to man were recognised and set forth in detail. I do not claim for these, who were the nucleus of the race of Israel, perfect insight, or even perfect candour and truthfulness; their principles had the crudity of a barbarous age; and when they acquired power, they were guilty of persecuting acts which are to be regretted. But their aim was great, and seriously pursued; they had the conception of a righteous Power beyond the range of human sense, to whom our obedience is due; they strove to bring their fellow-countrymen, and indeed all nations, to the cognisance of this Power. While acknowledging their faults, we must not ignore the debt we owe them.

Outside the circle of these ardent souls, the people of Judah in the reign of Josiah were imbued with a religion of varying strictness or laxity. They had never ceased to regard Jehovah as the national God of Israel; but most of them thought that, if Jehovah failed them, they might as well have a second string to their bow in Baal, or Moloch, or the Sun-god. To the pure worshippers of Jehovah, to the believers in a righteous God, to the followers of the Mosaic tradition (which came from Abraham), this polytheism was abhorrent; but how were they to overcome it? The greatest single piece of evidence which they had, to prove the power and love of God, lay in the deliverance of Israel from the Egyptian bondage; and to the exhibition of this event,

in words that might pierce and convince, many of them now devoted all their strength.

In the reign of Hezekiah, the people of Judah had not been so steeped in the practices of the surrounding nations as to give an acute stringency to the problem, how pure religion was to be recommended and enforced. But the reign of Manasseh had made it possible that the traditions of Abraham and Moses would absolutely die away, choked by the congeries of surrounding superstitions; and many deeply religious persons among the people of Judah, when the reign of Josiah gave them an opportunity of expressing themselves, felt the keenest stimulus towards giving such an account of the miracles of the Exodus and of Mount Sinai as should never be forgotten by God's chosen people. That the deliverance of Israel from Egypt had been achieved by miracles was not in that age denied or disputed; and it was inevitable that when the strong attempt was made, in the reign of Josiah, to bring back the people of Judah from idolatry and polytheism to the worship of Jehovah as the single unique Deity, great stress should be laid on these miracles.

I must relate immediately the attempt which was made on these lines; but meanwhile let it not be forgotten that a nobler argument than that of miracles was, even in that age, being offered to the people of Judah for the purpose of convincing and confirming them in the pure truth of religion. When the prophet Jeremiah sought to bring back his fellow-countrymen to the pure worship of God, he did indeed refer to the history of the Exodus; and it is likely that he believed in the miracles of the Exodus; but it is not from the point of view of the miracles that he makes his appeal. This is what he writes (Jeremiah ii. 4–7):

Hear ye the word of Jehovah, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel: thus saith Jehovah, What unrighteousness have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain? Neither said they, Where is Jehovah that brought us up out of the land of Egypt; that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that none passed through, and where no man dwelt ? And I brought you into a plentiful land, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

It will be seen that, even if Jeremiah believed in the miracles, it is not the miracles as such that he trusts in; it is the love and goodness of God in which he trusts; this he felt as communicated to his own heart, and he urges others so to act that they may

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