CHAPTER VII THE PURITAN ERA AND ITS LITERATURE [From 458 B. C. onwards] N THE foregoing chapter, dealing with the literary fruits I of the exile, we have traced the course of prophecy, its Retrospect and New Foothold most timely and characteristic product, beyond the limits of the return, to the time of Ezra the scribe, about eighty years after the recolonizing of the Holy Land. Here it reaches a point where we can glance back at the mighty prophetic movement as a whole.1 Rising at the menace of Israel's political doom, in the times of Joel, Amos, and Hosea, that movement has kept pace with the whole period of Israel's peril, suspense, break-up, and eventual restoration; faithfully interpreting it all as in the unfolding will and purpose of God, keeping the people's mind true to its duties and destinies; reaching its nodes of greatest stress and immediacy with Isaiah of Jerusalem, Jeremiah, and the Second Isaiah; forging onward in fervor and certitude toward a large Messianic future; then, after the return, gradually subsiding as the people's enthusiasm became chilled and disillusioned; going out finally in spasms of occasional warning and broken gleams of an apocalyptic new order. One can imagine that the Book of Malachi, sternly severe as it was, got little response in his generation, except from the handful of devout-minded souls (cf. Mal. iii, 16-18) in whom the spirit of a nobler order was still alive. That prophet was indeed sensible that his word was a final 1 For the general map of the prophetic movement, sketched from its beginning forward, see above, pp. 133-137. or rather pausing message to his people, a virtual postponement of prophecy to a more rewarding season. And later, probably about when the Daniel apocalypse was due, there came a time when men of religious aspiration were complaining, "We see not our signs; there is no more any prophet; neither is there among us any that knoweth how long" (Psa. lxxiv, 9). Such, broadly speaking, was the curve of rise, culmination, and subsidence of the prophetic strain in the development of Biblical literature. Conceived and maintained by men of lofty vision and faith, whose sole care was that Jehovah's word and will should prevail, it did untold service toward the race's realization of its noble mission and destiny. And its decline was not in failure or doubt, but in quiescence and pause, waiting, so to speak, until other strains could catch up with it. It was always a specialized utterance. As the literature of spiritual ideal and insight it had dealt with the crises and emergencies of the nation's experience.1 Hence its high plane of intensity; its formula of warrant "Thus saith Jehovah," fitting its impassioned appeals to high surges of zeal and resolve. It was a literature dynamic, inspirational. As such, however, prophecy was less mindful of the static levels of an established cultus and government, and of the cultural needs of domestic and individual life. Hence its natural subsidence when the restored nation's affairs had become uniform and prosaic, that equable progress whose annals are dull.2 It was giving place to a cultural régime of more pervasive and educative character. Accordingly, the ensuing period was one during which the people's response was more to the activities of scribes and priests and rabbis, who functioned as scholars, magistrates, and religious teachers. 1 See above, pp. 127-129. 2" Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.". MONTESQUIEU, quoted by Carlyle. Its historical remains from Nehemiah's time onward are very scanty. One judges its tone and mood partly by hints and inferences drawn from contemporary productions and partly by the literary situation at the coming of Jesus. It has been called, too indiscriminately I think, "the night of legalism." A more fitting name, suggestive of an analogous period in modern religious history, is The Puritan Era. The literature that gave character and color to this era calls now for consideration. The Dearth I. THE INITIATIVE FROM BABYLON It does not appear that when the Jewish people went back from Chaldean exile to the homeland they had with them any considerable number of scholars and of Learning writers. The situation was not favorable to rein Jerusalem finement of culture. Those who returned were virtually settlers and pioneers, whose energies must be employed in building homes and reclaiming the land. A spirit of piety and enthusiasm, roused by prophetic assurance, had brought them there, but this in itself was a slender support against the trials and disillusions they must encounter. Two generations of captivity in a strange land, without autonomy or methodical cultus, had impoverished their civic and religious thinking. We see this reflected in the moral conditions that Haggai and Zechariah recognized in their efforts to get the Temple rebuilt. It was a relatively primitive state of society, wherein the leaders were careless of duty and the priest's robes were dirty (cf. Zech. iii, 3). Nor, as it would seem, did matters greatly improve after the Temple was dedicated. It was not furnished with the robust devotion and loyalty that a recovered sanctuary service ought to have. This we see in the faithless and insincere conditions that Malachi found, at about the time of Ezra's arrival from Babylon. The people needed a new access of religious faith indeed, but also they needed a sounder infusion of thought and learning from their inherited store of tradition and instruction. They were not living up to their history and heritage. I Post-Exilic Men of Letters and their Work. From this unsatisfactory state of things in the Holy Land we return now to consider the situation of the Jewish communities still remaining in Chaldea and Persia. They constituted, as we have seen,1 the great majority of the people: the men of age and distinction and property and culture who were not so well fitted for the pioneer work of recolonizing, and whom in the large sense we recognize as the Jews of the Dispersion. It is to the representative thinkers and scholars of these communities, perhaps to guilds of these, that we are to look for the principal literary activity of the time beginning with the exile and continuing till perhaps a century or so after the return. Prophecy From the time of the situation disclosed in Ezekiel and Second Isaiah onward the history of the Jews who still remained in Chaldea and Persia is silent. We Succeeded by can judge of its tenor only by some of its literScholarship ary effects. As we have seen, the interest of the few salient stages known to us the hopeful return, the hardships of recolonizing the homeland, and the labor of a poverty-stricken people to rebuild their Temple - is transferred to Jerusalem. But this was the history of an essentially religious movement responding to the enthusiasm of prophets and priests. Its impulsion came rather from an imagined future than from a storied past, and the character of its devotees corresponded. The more intellectual and scholarly element of the nation remained in the land of their exile; for this had become to them an adopted home 1 See above, p. 327. where they could cultivate their ideals as well as in the shadow of the Temple. So long deprived of a sanctuary, they had come in their cultus to depend less on ritualistic forms and more on the spirit. A few simple customs, such as private and communal prayer, the observance of the Sabbath, and memorial fasting, sufficed them as well in neighborhood synagogues as in a centralized Temple. The development of the synagogue service, accordingly, is a characteristic feature of the Jews of the Dispersion. In all this silent experience their most valuable possession was the rich deposit of literature, historic and prophetic, which they had inherited from their fathers. To this they turned with a zest and reverence that they had never known before. It embodied the principles and ideals that had separated them from the mass of humanity and made them a nation. Its elements, well ingrained by their prophetically guided history, made them consciously superior, in a spiritual sense, to the highly civilized people among whom their lot was cast. This consciousness was the motive power of their unity and redemption. Accordingly, the regards of their men of insight and letters were turned to the work of collecting, coördinating, revising, and supplementing the fund of national literature which their past had bequeathed to them. It is this which we note as the dominant literary activity of the exile period in Chaldea; this it was which called together and unified their literature and made them the people of a book. What shape this fund of the nation's literature was in, when from its depositary in the Temple or in private keep Lines of Cleavage ing it was hastily gathered up and carried, probably with the first deportation, into the land of captivity, we do not know, but we can reasonably conjecture. It was doubtless in separate rolls, sheets, and tablets; some in fairly complete form, some in memoranda or fugitive collections; rudely classified, if at all; archives, |