Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/299

 of personality beyond anything which even an Ezekiel might have anticipated. The cosmopolitan spirit aroused in Ezekiel by the world-wide associations of Babylon had been checked by the necessity of stopping, even at the cost of a relapse into narrow Hebræism, that merger of Hebrew in Aramaic language and thought which was insidiously progressing. Side by side with the scribes learned in the Torah had arisen an inferior class of interpreters, whose business was the rendering of the archaic Hebrew into the popular Aramaic. Moreover, something worse than Aramaised language was resulting from Hebrew contact with their Semite kinsmen; conceptions more or less opposed to monotheism were creeping in under cover of reverence for angels. It has been observed that the Book of Malachi indicates the craving for "messengers," or intermediate spirits, between that Yâhveh whose very name had become "incommunicable" and his people. Psalms written after the return place the "angels" or "messengers" of Yâhveh at the head of the creation. In Ezekiel and Zechariah the innermost circle of angels is "dimly arranged in the mystic number of seven." In the Book of Daniel for the first time we have two names of angels, Michael and Gabriel. In the Book of Tobit a third, Raphael, is added; Uriel follows next; and then, "with doubtful splendour," as Dean Stanley says, Phaniel, Raguel, and the rest. Such were the dangers to which Aramaising influences were exposing Hebrew language and thought.

But no such dangers were, at first at least, perceptible on the side of Hellenism. Greek language and thought might well seem too widely separated from Hebrew to allow any popularisation of Hellenic influences. From the Greeks, accordingly, philosophic borrowing might