Part 10 (1/2)
The prophecies of Zechariah (cc. 1-8) are definitely dated; they spring out of a definite historical and religious situation which is everywhere apparent and consistent. Not so the chapters which follow (cc. 9-14). The t.i.tles (ix. 1; xii. 1) have a different form (”Burdens”), the situations which give their background to the oracles are wholly unlike that which stands out so clearly in Haggai and Zechariah; the character of the prophecies, with their affected obscurity, easily penetrable, doubtless, to contemporaries, but impenetrable to us who have not the historical key, and their apocalyptic eschatology, are in strong contrast to the manner of Zechariah; the evidence of diction confirms that of situation and content.
It has, therefore, long been recognized that none of these prophecies can be by the author of Zech. 1-8: they are anonymous oracles which have been appended at the close of his book or of the Book of the Minor Prophets. They are not all by the same author: cc. 12-14 contain two pictures (xiii. 1-xiii. 6; xiv. 1-21) of the final onset of the heathen on Jerusalem, their destruction, and the golden age of pious prosperity that ensues, variations of Ezekiel's original in the great prophecy of Gog (Ezek. 38-39) which gave the scheme for all subsequent revelations on the last times. A notable difference between the two pictures is that in Zech. 12 the heathen are destroyed by the clans of Judah, who deliver Jerusalem; while in c. 14 Jerusalem is taken by the heathen and subjected to all the horrors of a sack, half of its inhabitants being carried into slavery, before Jehovah himself, descending on the Mount of Olives, fights against the nations and cleaves the mount itself in twain.
In cc. xii. 1-xiii. 6 concrete features of the author's time are probably discernible, in the fact, for instance, that Judah (that is the inhabitants of the other towns and the country) besieges Jerusalem in company with the neighbouring heathen peoples, and in the striking animosity displayed toward the prophets, who are in the same condemnation with the idols and arouse much intenser feeling (xii.
2-6). Our ignorance of the internal history of the Jewish community for two or three centuries is, however, so complete that these allusions furnish us no clue.
In Zech. 9-11 also there are two sections, viz. ix. 1-xi. 3 and xi.
4-17 + xiii. 7-9. The age of these can be fixed with greater confidence by the external historical situation. The heathen power the overthrow of which ushers in the golden age is named, in ix. 13, the Greeks. Egypt and Syria (”a.s.syria”), that is, the kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, shall be brought low (x. 11). ”The land of Hadrach,” to which the first oracle is directed, is in all probability the region of Antioch, the Seleucid capital. The bad ”shepherds” of cc. 11; xiii. 7-9, who are over the flock of G.o.d, are very good likenesses of the Jewish high priests of the Greek time, though it is impossible to identify the concrete historical persons and events of c. 11. Taking all together, we shall not go amiss in ascribing these to the early part of the third century B.C.--say between the year 200, when Judaea came under Seleucid rule and the religious persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabaean revolt, to neither of which is there any allusion in the chapters. Chapters 12-14 may perhaps be put in the century before.
MALACHI.--A third appendix to the Book of Zechariah is the anonymous book which we call Malachi. The earliest t.i.tle, ”The Burden of the Word of the Lord against Israel,” is word for word the same as that in Zech. xii. 1 (cf. ix. 1), and doubtless was prefixed by the same editor. Subsequently, perhaps to give the book an independent status and thus round out the number of the Minor Prophets to twelve, the words ”by 'My Messenger'” (Heb. _malaki_; iii. 1 f.) were added.
Jewish tradition in later times identified this messenger with Ezra.
In the versions the word was naturally taken for a proper name.
The book consists of two parts, Mal. i. 2-ii. 9, which from i. 6 on is addressed to the priests, and ii. 10-iv. 3, to the people at large.
The priests treat the wors.h.i.+p in the temple with professional disrespect, under which lurks an equally professional scepticism. Any kind of blemished or diseased victim is good enough--the prophet invites them to make such a scurvy gift to the governor! The perpetual routine of sacred services they find tiresome. They are no less negligent in their other great function as the religious teachers and guides of the people. The _Tora_, that is, the revealed will of G.o.d, is committed to them, and they, degenerate successors of the faithful priests in the good old times, have not only themselves abandoned the right way, but have caused many to fall by their false instructions.
They have earned the contempt in which men hold them. The curse of G.o.d is on them.
One of the most notable words in the Bible stands in this indignant denunciation (Mal. i. 11 f.). Jehovah's own priests in his own temple treat his wors.h.i.+p with contempt; he refuses their offerings: ”For from the rising of the sun to the setting, my name is great among the nations, and in every place pure sacrifices are burnt to my name among the nations, saith Jehovah of Hosts; but _ye_ profane it by thinking that the table of Jehovah may be polluted and his food despised.” That the sacrifices of the heathen may be ”pure” sacrifices, though not according to the Mosaic rite, because all true wors.h.i.+p is the wors.h.i.+p of the true G.o.d, is a conception quite unparalleled in the Old Testament. The author's polemic against the priests of Jerusalem has doubtless made him say more than he would have stood by as a dogmatic statement; more, indeed, than any church has ever been ready to acknowledge, but it was fitting that it should be said, for it is the final consequence of the ethical conception of religion of which the Hebrew prophets from Amos on are the exponents.
Of the remaining oracles, one (Mal. iii. 6-12) urges to the honest consecration of the t.i.thes (dues to the temple); another (ii. 10-16), as commonly interpreted, condemns the marriages with heathen women which so disturbed the soul of Nehemiah and Ezra, and especially the divorce of native wives to take foreign ones; but the language should perhaps rather be taken as figurative for foreign wors.h.i.+p. The two remaining prophecies (ii. 17-iii. 5; iii. 13-iv. 3) are addressed to such as thought that G.o.d did not trouble himself about men's affairs: the long threatened day of doom gave no sign of coming, nor was the promised reward of serving G.o.d bestowed. The prophet declares that the Day will come, sudden and terrible, and the unG.o.dly will get their deserts. The last verses (iv. 4-6) are not improbably an addition by an editorial hand.
CHAPTER XXI
PSALMS. LAMENTATIONS
The Book of Psalms counts one hundred and fifty hymns, and this evidently by design, for the Greek Version, which sometimes unites in one what are two psalms in the Hebrew and divides one Hebrew psalm into two, comes out with the same number. It is divided into five books, as is indicated in the Revised English Version, vis. Book I., Pss. 1-41; Book II., Pss. 42-72; Book III., Pss. 73-89; Book IV., Pss.
90-106; Book V., Pss. 107-150, each book ending with a liturgical doxology. The rabbis were probably right in the opinion that this fivefold division was made in imitation of the five books of the Pentateuch, but in some cases, as we shall see, the limits correspond to those of older separate books. The psalter has not inaptly been called the hymn book of the second temple. We learn from Jewish tradition that certain psalms were used in the liturgy of the Herodian temple on certain days or at certain seasons, and to many of them musical or liturgical directions are prefixed and interludes are noted (”Selah”), from which, apart from tradition, such a use would be inferred. It is evident from the familiarity with the Psalms which is shown in the New Testament and in contemporary Jewish writings, both Greek and Hebrew, that, like our hymn books, the Psalter was largely used for private devotion and edification.
The poems contained in the Psalter are from different ages and authors, and of widely diverse religious worth and poetical excellence. Some of them are unsurpa.s.sed in the religious literature of the world; others are the tedious production of authors who, like so many hymnists of all climes, were neither born nor made poets.
Thanks to the translators, such pieces are a great deal better, so far as expression goes, in the Authorized English Version or in Luther's, than the original.
A modern hymn book is seldom, if ever, a fresh compilation from the sources; it is habitually made up from collections already in use, with the addition, perhaps, of the editor's gleanings from the sources, or of recent poems. The names of the collections thus used may be given, and the names of the authors--often taken along without verification. Editors of hymn books have also generally allowed themselves great liberties with the text of hymns, altering them to suit their own taste or the religious and theological idiosyncrasies of their sect; abridging, transposing, expanding, without scruple; and only in very modern times has a tardily awakened literary conscience constrained them to give notice of such changes. In this way mediaeval Catholic poets are made to sing good Protestant songs, or Calvinists and Methodists to drop their s.h.i.+bboleths and express themselves in a manner acceptable to Unitarians. The familiar hymn,
”O for a thousand tongues to sing my dear Redeemer's praise,”
has been adapted to Buddhist use as,
”O for a thousand tongues to sing my holy Buddha's praise, The glories of my teacher great, the triumphs of his grace,”
with similar changes throughout, and if we did not know the Christian hymn, we might take the author for a good s.h.i.+n-shu Buddhist, though an indifferent poet.
The editors of the Psalter proceeded in the same way, and the older recollections on which they worked can in part be recognized. It is observed that Books II. and III. of the Psalter (Pss. 42-89), or, more exactly, Pss. 42-83, must once have formed a collection by themselves, whose editor was averse to the use of the proper name Jehovah, and accordingly altered the text of the hymns where this name occurred by subst.i.tuting the appellative G.o.d (Elohim), giving rise to such strange expressions as ”O G.o.d, my G.o.d.” Thus Ps. 53 is the same with Ps. 14, but wherever Jehovah stands in Ps. 14, ”G.o.d” takes its place in Ps.
53; Ps. 70 is merely an extract from Ps. 40 (vss. 13-17) with the same change. In the latter, however, copyists, influenced by the parallel pa.s.sage, have restored ”Jehovah” in one (Greek) or two (Hebrew) places, as they have done in other of these psalms. This occurrence of the same hymn in two parts of the Psalter, of which another instance is Ps. 108 (made up of parts of two psalms in the elohistic book, lvii. 7-11, and lx. 5-12), is itself presumptive evidence that these parts once existed separately. At the time when the musical directions were prefixed to the psalms, the last two books (Pss. 90-150) seem not to have been included in the temple hymn book; for these directions, scattered through Pss. 1-89, are lacking from that point on, notwithstanding the fact that a larger proportion of the psalms in Pss. 90-150 were manifestly composed for public wors.h.i.+p than in Pss.
1-89.
The t.i.tles of Psalms give the names of other collections from which individual psalms were taken. Thus twelve psalms, Pss. 42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87, 88, are hymns or songs of the Korahites, and eleven, Pss. 50, 73-83, of Asaph, who were according to the Chronicler--a good authority on the wors.h.i.+p of his time--families, or hereditary guilds, of temple musicians, and seem, in this capacity, to have had special hymn books containing psalms which they sang, and which may also have been composed by members of the guild. The fact that the Korahite and Asaphite psalms are not scattered through the present Psalter, but appear in groups, and only in the elohistic hymn book (Pss. 42-89), confirms this view. When they were incorporated in the collection, the source was indicated by prefixing the name of the guild book to the individual psalms.
Another group of fifteen psalms (Pss. 120-134) bear in their t.i.tles, ”The Song of the Ascents,” a phrase which, by the irregularity of its form, shows that it was transferred mechanically from the t.i.tle of the collection (”The Songs of the Ascents”) to the individual poems. The ancient interpretation makes the ”ascents” the fifteen steps, or ascending platforms, on which the levitical orchestra stood at the festival of the water-drawing on the evening after the first day of Tabernacles (hence the Authorized Version, Song of Degrees, i.e.