II. THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS

Through all the turmoil of the time the Jews maintained their traditional love of scholarship, and produced more than their share of the lasting literature of the age. To this period belong some of the finest portions of the Bible. Near the close of the third century a Jewish poet (or poetess?) composed the lovely Song of Songs: here is all the artistry of Greek verse from Sappho to Theocritus, but with something undiscoverable in any Greek author of the time—an intensity of imagination, a depth of feeling, and an idealist devotion strong enough to welcome the body, as well as the soul, of love, and to turn the flesh itself into spirit. Partly in Jerusalem, mostly in Alexandria, partly in other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Jews wrote—in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek—such masterpieces as Ecclesiastes, Daniel, part of Proverbs and Psalms, and most of the greater Apocrypha. They composed histories like Chronicles, novelettes like Esther and Judith, and idyls of family life like the Book of Tobit. The Soferim changed the Hebrew script from the old Assyrian to the square Syrian style, which has remained to this day.¹¹ Since most of the Jews in the Near East now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the scholars explained the Scriptures in brief Aramaic Targums, or interpretations. Schools were opened for the study of the Torah, or Law, and the explanation of its moral code to growing youth; such explanations, commentaries, and illustrations, handed down from teacher to pupil across the generations, supplied in a later age most of the material of the Talmud.

By the close of the third century the scholars of the Great Assembly had completed the editing of the older literature, and had closed the canon of the Old Testament;¹² it was their judgment that the age of the prophets was ended, and that literal inspiration had ceased. The result was that many works of this epoch, full of wisdom and beauty, lost the chance of divine collaboration, and fell into the unfortunate category of Apocrypha.* The two books of Esdras may owe something of their literary excellence to King James’ translators; but these can hardly be credited with the touching account of how Esdras asked the angel Uriel to explain why the wicked prosper, the good suffer, and Israel is in bondage; to which the angel answers, in powerful similes and yet simple speech, that it is not given to the part to understand or judge the whole.

The prologue of Ecclesiasticus describes it as a Greek translation, completed in 132, of discourses written in Hebrew two generations before by the translator’s grandfather, Jesus the son of Sirach. This Joshua ben Sirach was both a scholar and a man of affairs; after seeing something of the world through travel he had settled down to make his home a school for students; and to them he delivered these essays on the wisdom of life.¹³ He denounces the rich Jews who have abandoned their faith to cut a better figure in the Gentile world; he warns youth against the courtesans who wait for it everywhere; and he offers the Law as still the best guide amid the evils and pitfalls of the world. But he is no puritan. Unlike the Chasidim he has a good word to say for harmless pleasure; and he protests against the mystics who reject medicine on the ground that all maladies, having come from God, can be cured by God alone. The book is rich in epigrams, of which the most renowned brings together the rod and the child. “The number of whippings laid to his account,” said Renan, “must be incalculable.”¹⁴ It is a noble book, wiser and kinder than Ecclesiastes.

In the twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus we are told that “Wisdom is the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world.” Here and in the first chapter of Proverbs are the earliest Hebrew forms of the doctrine of the Logos—Wisdom as a “demiurge,” or intermediate creator, delegated by God to design the world. This hypostatizing of Wisdom as personified intelligence becomes a dominating idea of Jewish theology in the last centuries before Christ. Alongside of it runs increasingly the conception of personal immortality. In the Book of Enoch, written apparently by several authors in Palestine between 170 and 66 B.C., the hope of heaven has become a vital need; the success of wicked power and the misfortunes of a pious and loyal people could no longer be borne unless that hope might be entertained; without it life and history seemed to be the work of Satan rather than of God. A Messiah will come who will establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and will reward the virtuous with everlasting happiness after death.

In the Book of Daniel the whole terror of the age of Antiochus IV finds a voice. About 166, when the faithful had been persecuted to the death for their beliefs, and ever larger enemies were advancing upon the Maccabean band, one of the Chasidim, probably, undertook to rekindle the courage of the people by describing the sufferings and prophecies of Daniel in the days of Nebuchadrezzar in Babylon. Copies of the book passed secretly among the Jews; it was given out as the work of a prophet who had lived three hundred and seventy years before, had borne greater trials than any Jew under Antiochus, had emerged victorious, and had predicted a like triumph for his race. And even if the virtuous and faithful found indifferent fortune here, their reward would come at the Last Judgment, when the Lord would welcome them into a heaven of unending happiness, and plunge their persecutors into everlasting hell.

All in all, the extant Jewish writings of this period may be described as a mystic or imaginative literature of instruction, edification, and consolation. To the Jews of earlier ages life itself had been enough, and religion was not a flight from the world but a dramatization of morals by the poetry of faith; a powerful God, ruling and seeing all things, would reward virtue and punish vice in this existence on earth. The Captivity had shaken this belief, the restoration of the Temple had renewed it; it broke down under the bludgeoning of Antiochus. Pessimism now had a clear field; and in the writings of the Greeks the Jews found the most eloquent exposures of the injustices and tragedies of life. Meanwhile Jewish contact with Persian ideas of heaven and hell, of a struggle between good and evil, and the final triumph of good, offered an escape from the philosophy of despair, and perhaps the ideas of immortality that had come down from Egypt to Alexandria, and those that had animated the mysteries of Greece, co-operated to inspire in the Jews of the Greek and Roman periods that consoling hope which bore them up through all the vicissitudes of their Temple and their state. From these Jews, and from the Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks, the idea of eternal reward and punishment would flow down into a new and stronger faith, and help it to win a disintegrating world.