Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/87

Rh literature with them was simply a medium for the conveyance of religious instruction and the awakening of devotional feeling. The Hebrew religion, a pure monotheism, the teachings of a long line of holy men—patriarchs, lawgivers, prophets, and priests —stretching from Abraham down to the fifth century B.C., is contained in the sacred books of the Old Testament Scriptures. In these ancient writings, patriarchal traditions, histories, dramas, poems, prophecies, and personal narratives blend in a wonderful mosaic, which pictures with vivid and grand effect the various migrations, the deliverances, the calamities—all the events and religious experiences in the checkered life of the Chosen People.

Out of this old exclusive, formal Hebrew religion, transformed and spiritualized by the Great Teacher, grew the Christian faith. Out of the Old Testament arose the New, which we should think of as a part of Hebrew literature: for although written in the Greek language, and long after the close of the political life of the Jewish nation, still it is essentially Hebrew in thought and doctrine, and the supplement and crown of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Besides the Sacred Scriptures, called collectively, by way of pre-eminence, the Bible (The Book), it remains to mention especially the Apocrypha, embracing a number of books that were composed after the decline of the prophetic spirit, and which show traces, as indeed do several of the later books of the Bible, of the influence of Persian and Greek thought. These books are generally regarded by the Jews and Protestants as uncanonical, but in the main are considered by the Roman Catholics as possessing equal authority with the other books of the Bible.

Neither should we fail to mention the Talmud, a collection of Hebrew customs and traditions, with the comments thereupon of the rabbis, a work held by most Jews next in sacredness to the Holy Book; the writings of Philo, an illustrious rabbi who lived at Alexandria just before the birth of Christ; and the Antiquities of the Jews and the Jewish Wars by the historian Josephus, who lived and wrote about the time of the taking of Jerusalem by Titus; that is, during the latter part of the first century after Christ.