ment of a "canonical," or official, sacred literature began under King Josiah before the Exile. At that time, the "first edition" of Deuteronomy was brought forward from the Temple at Jerusalem, and officially adopted through the influence of the party which had obtained control of the government (p. 191, supra). According to the Deuteronomic law, the entire machinery of worship was to be centralized in the capital city. From this achievement, as a beginning, the "Law of Moses," or "Torah," was prepared on the basis of traditions, documents, and law codes, that had been accumulating for many centuries.

The men who brought together into a single corpus the complicated material called the "Torah," will never be known. But we have the account of Ezra, "the priest and scribe" (Ezra 7:21), a half-mythical figure, who looms up suddenly in the post-exilic period with the "Torah" in his hand. This Law, which we may suppose to be approximately our "Pentateuch," was publicly adopted and acknowledged by the Jewish authorities in the age now under consideration (Neh., chap. 8). But it is important to observe that even the Jewish tradition itself admits that the Law had no vogue before the Exile. "Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers did not keep thy Torah, nor hearken unto thy commandments and thy testimonies wherewith thou didst testify against them (Neh. 9:34).

The other books of the Hebrew Bible were prepared and adopted at various times between the Exile and the Christian Era.-The Torah was the nucleus around which the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, took form. The times at which the other books were written and taken up into the sacred literature are not known to us; but the indications are that the Hebrew Bible came into existence very slowly. When the Sacred Canon was at last completed, it was referred to, not as one book, but as "the Law, the Prophets, and the

Writings" (Torah, Nebiim, u' Kethubim). Thus we see that the Old Testament, in the form under which it stands before us, reverses the actual order of historical development, for the prophets did their work before the Law was known; and the Torah was one of the results of their struggle.'

'Not until after the Exile did the word "torah" acquire the modern, technical sense of the "Mosaic" law (Ezra 7:6 ff.). On the canon, see Wildeboer, Origin of the Old Testament Canon (London, 1895), pp. 22, 31; and Ryle, Canon of the Old Testament (London, 1904); chap. v.

CHAPTER XXII

JUDAISM AS EXTERNAL AUTHORITY

The teachings of the insurgent prophets now became one element in a legal scheme of religion. The preparation and adoption of the Torah took place after the Exile because the mind of Israel was now ready for it. If the people had not been prepared for the Law by the experiences of their national history, they would not have accepted it in the post-exilic period. The history of all the nations of antiquity records the growth of traditions which, in one way or another, came to be accepted as authoritative. Hebrew life was no departure from this rule. In the time before the Exile, two traditions, represented by two opposing schools of prophecy, battled for legal recognition and status. In the final issue, the Baal tradition was defeated; and the Yahweh tradition became "authoritative" in the eyes of posterity. Law is not the cause of social evolution; it is rather a deposit of history, and a condition of subsequent experience. The Mosaic Law, instead of being the force that set the peculiar development of Israel in motion, was itself the product of that evolution.

To the Jews, the Torah was the most sacred part of the Hebrew Bible. While the entire Old Testament was looked upon as the product of divine inspiration, the Jews venerated the Torah as the result of a peculiarly high revelation. In the Law of Moses, God spoke with a weight and an intensity not found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Hence the books of the prophets were placed on a level of inspiration decidedly inferior to that of the Torah. This appears to be strange to the modern Christian who has been taught that the divine quality attaches equally and uniformly to the entire Old

Testament. But the Jew found nothing unnatural or difficult in such an apprehension of the Scriptures.

The Torah enthroned the priesthood, and silenced the prophets. The adoption of the Torah was a visible guaranty that the law of God was no longer a subject of party dispute. The conflict of rival schools of prophecy had ended. From now on, the divine will could not be an open question, as it had been before the Exile. For the commands of God were now crystallized in the form of a book. Religion was made a matter of minute and carefully prescribed rites and ceremonies designed to guard and preserve the worship of God from all profane contact. The worship, or "cultus," was in charge of administrators, or priests. The commands of God, being in written form, the scribes and priests were its natural executors and interpreters. The practical effect of the Torah, therefore, was to set the priestly class in the very center of Jewish life.

Thus we see why there was no place for new prophets among the controlling factors of the Jewish church. Prophecy, which was one of the most important forces in the evolution of the Bible, was banished from history by the Bible itself. "There is no more any prophet!" exclaims a post-exilic writer, whose words are a commentary on this phase of Judaism (Ps. 74:9).

But while there was no longer a field for the ministry of new prophets like Amos and Hosea, the work of the pre-exilic prophets was not lost. Their essential demands were present in the Torah itself; and their books, although viewed as the product of a lower degree of inspiration, were included within the Hebrew Bible. The very insistence of the Jewish church upon the exclusive worship of One God made it impossible to ignore the work of the remarkable men whose labors had raised ethical monotheism into a living power in the world.

The legal ritual did not satisfy the highest spiritual needs, but it practically extinguished idolatry. It gave palpable expression to the

spiritual nature of Jehovah [Yahweh], and around and within the ritual, prophetic truths gained a hold of Israel such as they had never had before. The book of Psalms is the proof how much of the highest religious truth, derived not from the Law but from the Prophets, dwelt in the heart of the nation, and gave spiritual substance to the barren forms of the ritual.'

Under Judaism, Bible religion took the form of an authoritative decree laid down by an oriental sovereign.-As Jewish life dropped out of touch with the past, the pre-exilic history of the Hebrews was less and less understood. The ancient writings remained, it is true; but the scientific method of historical research had not yet been born. In this atmosphere the Hebrew Bible (our "Old Testament") reached its final shape. Yahweh was now systematically pictured as the Creator of the universe. The Old Testament, in fact, begins as a kind of universal history. But in the third chapter of Genesis the purpose of Scripture comes to light. The problem of "good and evil" emerges into view (Gen., chaps. 3 f.). Yahweh's first method of dealing with the problem is that of physical destruction through the Flood (Gen., chaps. 6 f.). When this fails he tries the method of ethical redemption, by training the children of Abraham to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen., chaps. 12 f.). From out of the flame and smoke and thunder of Sinai he promulgates the "Torah," as a finality, once for all, just as an absolute oriental sovereign lays down his decrees (Exod., chaps. 3 f.). The modern conception of historical development was impossible to the ancient mind. So under Judaism the Bible religion took a form which (unconsciously) denied the fact of development itself.

1 W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (New York, 1891), pp. 313, 314; cf. Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1903), p. 153.