Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/211

 never realized in the imperfect kingship of the past. Thus the Psalms were necessarily viewed as prophetic; and meantime, in accordance with the common Hebrew representation of ideal things as existing in heaven, the true king remains hidden with God. The steps by which this result was reached must, however, be considered in detail.

The hope of the advent of an ideal king was only one feature of that larger hope of the salvation of Israel from all evils, which was constantly held forth by all the prophets, from the time when the seers of the 8th century proclaimed that the true conception of Yahweh’s relation to His people could become a practical reality only through a great deliverance following a sifting judgment of the most terrible kind. The idea of a judgment so severe as to render possible an entire breach with the guilty past is common to all the prophets, but is expressed in a great variety of forms and images. As a rule the prophets directly connect the final restoration with the removal of the sins of their own age; to Isaiah the last troubles are those of Assyrian invasion, to Jeremiah the restoration follows on the exile to Babylon, to Daniel on the overthrow of the Greek monarchy. But all agree in giving the central place to the realization of a real effective kingship of Yahweh; in fact the conception of the religious subject as the nation of Israel, with a national organization under Yahweh as king, is common to the whole Old Testament, and connects prophecy proper with the so-called Messianic psalms and similar passages which speak of the religious relations of the Hebrew commonwealth, the religious meaning of national institutions, and so necessarily contain ideal elements reaching beyond the empirical present. All such passages are frequently called Messianic; but the term is more properly reserved as the specific designation of one particular branch of the Hebrew hope of salvation, which, becoming prominent in post-canonical Judaism, used the name of the Messiah as a technical term (which it never is in the Old Testament), and exercised a great influence on New Testament thought—the term “the Christ” ( ) being itself nothing more than the translation of “the Messiah.”

In the period of the Hebrew monarchy the thought that Yahweh is the divine king of Israel was associated with the conception that the human king reigns by right only if he reigns by commission or “unction” from Him. Such was the theory of the kingship in Ephraim as well as in Judah (Deut. xxxiii.; 2 Kings ix. 6), till in the decadence of the northern state Amos (ix. 11) foretold the redintegration of the Davidic kingdom, and Hosea (iii. 5; viii. 4) expressly associated a similar prediction with the condemnation of the kingship of Ephraim as illegitimate. So the great Judaean prophets of the 8th century connect the salvation of Israel with the rise of a Davidic king, full of Yahweh’s Spirit, in whom all the energies of Yahweh’s transcendental kingship are as it were incarnate (Isa. ix. 6 seq.; xi. 1 seq.; Micah v.). This conception, however, is not one of the constant elements of prophecy; other prophecies of Isaiah look for the decisive interposition of Yahweh in the crisis of history without a kingly deliverer. Jeremiah again speaks of the future David or righteous sprout of David’s stem (xxiii. 5 seq.; xxx. 9) and Ezekiel uses similar language (xxxiv., xxxvii.); but that such passages do not necessarily mean more than that the Davidic dynasty shall be continued in the time of restoration under worthy princes seems clear from the way in which Ezekiel speaks of the prince in chs. xlv., xlvi. As yet we have no fixed doctrine of a personal Messiah, but only material from which such a doctrine might be drawn. The religious view of the kingship is still essentially the same as in 2 Sam. vii., where the endless duration of the Davidic dynasty is set forth as part of Yahweh’s plan.

There are other parts of the Old Testament—notably 1 Sam. viii., xii. (belonging to the later stratum)—in which the very existence of a human kingship is represented as a departure from the theocratic ideal, and after the exile, when the monarchy had come to an end, we find pictures of the latter days in which its restoration has no place. Such is the great prophecy of Isa. xl.–xlviii., in which Cyrus is the anointed of Yahweh. So too there is no allusion to a human kingship in Joel or in Malachi; the old forms of the Hebrew state were broken, and religious hopes expressed themselves in other shapes. In the book of Daniel it is collective Israel that, under the symbol of a “son of man,” receives the kingdom (vii. 13, 18, 22, 27).

Meantime, however, the decay and ultimate silence of the living prophetic word concurred with prolonged political servitude to produce an important change in Hebrew religion. To the prophets the kingship of Yahweh was not a mere ideal, but an actual reality. Its full manifestation indeed, to the eye of sense and to the unbelieving world, lay in the future; but true faith found a present stay in the sovereignty of Yahweh, daily exhibited in providence and interpreted to each generation by the voice of the prophets. And, while Yahweh’s kingship was a living and present fact, it refused to be formulated in fixed invariable shape.

But when the prophets were succeeded by the scribes, the interpreters of the written word, and the yoke of foreign oppressors rested on the land, Yahweh’s kingship, which presupposed a living nation, found not even the most inadequate expression in daily political life. Yahweh was still the lawgiver of Israel, but His law was written in a book, and He was not present to administer it. He was still the hope of Israel, but the hope too was only to be read in books, and these were interpreted of a future which was no longer the ideal development of forces already at work, but wholly new and supernatural. The present was a blank, in which religious duty was summed up in patient obedience to the law and penitent submission to the Divine chastisements. The scribes were mainly busied with the law; but no religion can subsist on mere law; and the systematization of the prophetic hopes, and of those more ideal parts of the other sacred literature which, because ideal and dissevered from the present, were now set on one line with the prophecies, went on side by side with the systematization of the law, by means of a harmonistic exegesis, which sought to gather up every prophetic image in one grand panorama of the issue of Israel’s and the world’s history. The beginnings of this process can probably be traced within the canon itself, in the book of Joel and the last chapters of Zechariah; and, if this be so, we see from Zech. ix. that the picture of the ideal king claimed a place in such constructions. The full development of the method belongs, however, to the post-canonical literature, and was naturally much less regular and rapid than the growth of the legal traditions of the scribes. It was in crises of national anguish that men turned most eagerly to the prophecies, and sought to construe their teachings as a promise of speedy deliverance (see ). But these books, however influential, had no public authority, and when the yoke of oppression was lightened but a little their enthusiasm lost much of its contagious power. It is not therefore safe to measure the general growth of eschatological doctrine by the apocalyptic books, of which Daniel alone attained a canonical position. In the Apocrypha eschatology has a relatively small place; but there is enough to show that the hope of Israel was never forgotten, and that the imagery of the prophets was accepted with a literalness not contemplated by the prophets themselves.

It was, however, only very gradually that the figure and name of the Messiah acquired the prominence which they have in