The next prophet in the order of time is undoubtedly Amos. He tells us that he lived in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, about seventy years after Joel. He was a herdsman of Tekoa, a small city of Judah, twelve miles south of Jerusalem. In these days the Northern Kingdom was far more prosperous and powerful than the Southern; under Jeroboam II.
Israel had become rich and luxurious; and the prophet was summoned, as he declares, by the call of Jehovah himself to leave his herds upon the Judean hills, and betake himself to the Northern Kingdom, there to bear witness against the pride and oppression of its people. This messenger and interpreter of Jehovah to his people is a poor man, a laboring man; but he knows whose commission he bears, and he is not afraid. Stern and terrible are the woes that fall from his lips: the words vibrate yet with the energy of his righteous wrath.
"Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that sing idle songs to the sound of the viol; that devise for themselves instruments of music, like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph."
Such luxury always goes hand in hand with contempt of the lowly and oppression of the poor; it is so to-day; it was so in that far-off time; and this prophet pours upon it the vials of the wrath of G.o.d:--
"Forasmuch therefore as ye trample upon the poor, and take exactions from him of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink the wine thereof. For I know how manifold are your transgressions and how mighty are your sins; ye that afflict the just, that take a bribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right."
It is no wonder that Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, writhed under the scourge of the herdsman prophet, and wanted to be rid of him: "O thou seer," he cried, "go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: but prophesy not again any more in Bethel." But the prophet stood his ground and delivered his message, and it still resounds as the very voice of G.o.d through every land where the greed of gold makes men unjust, and the love of pleasure banishes compa.s.sion from human hearts.
The nearest successor of Amos, in this collection, seems to have been Hosea, who tells us in the opening of his prophecy that the word of the Lord came unto him in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king of Israel. There is some doubt about the genuineness of this superscription; but it was about this time, undoubtedly, that Hosea flourished. To which kingdom he belonged it is not known; probably, however, to Israel, with whose affairs his teaching is chiefly concerned. He must have followed close upon the herdsman of Tekoa; possibly they were contemporaries. His prophecy, too, is a blast from the trumpet of the Lord our Righteousness. Such an indictment of a people has not often been heard.
"Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of G.o.d in the land. There is nought but swearing and breaking faith, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery; they break out, and blood toucheth blood."
Especially severe is the prophet in his denunciation of the priesthood.
"They feed on the sin of my people, and set their heart on their iniquity. And it shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish them for their ways, and will reward them their doings."
These prophecies of Hosea are instinct with a severe morality; the ethical thoroughness with which he chastises the national sins is unflinching; but it is not all threatening; now and again we hear the word of tenderness, the promise of the divine forgiveness:--
"I will heal their backsliding. I will love them freely; for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel; he shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon."
Micah follows Hosea, at an interval of perhaps fifty years. He lived in a little village of Judah, west of Jerusalem, and exercised his ministry in both kingdoms, testifying impartially against the wickedness of Jerusalem and Samaria, though the weight of his censure seems to rest upon the Judean capital. His strain is an echo of the outcry of Amos and Hosea; it is the same intense indignation against the violence and rapacity of the rich, against corrupt judges, false prophets, rascally traders, treacherous friends. For all these sins condign punishment is threatened; and yet, after these retributive woes are past, there is promise of a better day. The great Messianic hope here begins to find clear utterance; the former prophets have seen in their visions only the restoration of the people of Israel; to Micah there comes the antic.i.p.ation of an individual Leader and Deliverer.
"But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth that is to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.... And he shall stand and shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his G.o.d; and they shall abide; for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth."
Thus slowly broadens the dawn of the Messianic hope.
The first part of the fourth chapter of Micah, which is a prediction of the glory that shall come to Zion in the latter day, is verbally identical with the first part of the second chapter of Isaiah. One of the prophets must have quoted from the other or else, as Dr. Geikie suggests, both copied from some older prophet.
After Micah comes the greatest of the prophets, Isaiah. He appeared upon the scene in his native city of Jerusalem about the middle of the eighth century before Christ. His work was mainly done during the reigns of Ahaz, "the Grasper," one of the vilest and most unG.o.dly of the Judean monarchs, and of Hezekiah, the good king, about a century and a half before the destruction of Jerusalem.
About this time Judea was constantly exposed to the rapacity of the great a.s.syrian power before whose armies she finally fell; sometimes her rulers entered into coalitions with the surrounding nations to resist the a.s.syrian; sometimes they submitted and paid heavy tribute. Egypt, on the south, was also a mighty empire at this time, constantly at war with a.s.syria; and the kings of Judah sometimes sought alliances with one of these great powers, as a means of protection against the other. They proved to be the upper and nether millstones between which the Jewish nationality was ground to powder. It was in the midst of these alarming signs of national destruction that Isaiah arose. Of the prophetic discourses which he delivered in Jerusalem we have about thirty; his words are the words of a patriot, a statesman, a servant and messenger of Jehovah. He warned the kings against these entangling alliances with foreign powers; he admonished them to stand fast in their allegiance to Jehovah, and obey his laws; yet he saw that they would not heed his word, and that swift and sure destruction was coming upon the nation.
And his expectation was not like that of the other prophets, that the nation as a whole would be saved out of these judgments; to him it was made plain that only a remnant would survive; but that from that remnant should spring a n.o.ble race, with a purer faith, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Of the Messianic hope as it finds expression in these words of Isaiah I have already spoken.
This Book of Isaiah contains thirty-one prophetic discourses, some of them mere fragments. There is reason for doubt as to whether they were all spoken by Isaiah; when they were gathered up, two hundred years later, some utterances of other prophets may have been mingled with them. Indeed it is now regarded as well-nigh certain that the last twenty-seven chapters are the work of a later prophet,--of one who wrote during the Captivity. Professor Delitzsch, in the last edition of his commentary on Isaiah, finally concedes that this is probable. The Book of Isaiah, he is reported as saying, "may have been an anthology of prophetic discourses by different authors; that is, it may have been composed partly and directly by Isaiah, and partly by other later prophets whose utterances const.i.tute a really h.o.m.ogeneous and simultaneous continuation of Isaian prophecy. These later prophets so closely resemble Isaiah in prophetic vision that posterity might, on that account, well identify them with him,--his name being the correct common denominator for this collection of prophecies."
These words of the most distinguished and devout of the Old Testament critics throw a flood of light on the structure not only of Isaiah, but of other Old Testament writings; they show how unlike our own were the primitive ideas of authorship; and how the Pentateuch, for example, drawn from many sources and revised by many editors, could be called the law of Moses; how _his_ name may have been the "common denominator"
of all that collection of laws.
I have shown, perhaps, in these hasty notices, something of the nature and purpose of five of these prophetic books. Of the rest I must speak but a single word, for the time fails me to tell of Zephaniah, who in the time of good King Josiah, denounced the idolatry of the people, the injustice of its princes and judges, and the corruption of its prophets and priests, threatened the rebellious with extermination, and promised to the remnant an enduring peace; of Jeremiah, who about the same time first lifted up his voice, and continued speaking until after the destruction of Jerusalem,--from whose writings we may derive a more complete and intelligible account of the period preceding the Exile than from any other source; of Nahum, who, just before the fall of Jerusalem, uttered his oracle against Nineveh; of Obadiah, who, after the fall of the holy city, launched his thunderbolts against the perfidious Edomites because of their rejoicing over the fate of Jerusalem; of Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, who wrote among the captives by the rivers of Babylon; of Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returning exiles, and whose courageous voices cheered the laborers who wrought to restore the city and the temple; of Malachi, whose pungent reproofs of the people for their lack of consecration followed the erection of the second temple, and closed the collection of the Hebrew prophets.
The limits of this small volume forbid us to enter upon several interesting critical inquiries respecting the component parts of Isaiah and Zechariah, and especially the matter of the variations of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text in the Book of Jeremiah. In this last named book we find the same phenomena that we encountered in our study of Samuel and The Kings: the Greek version differs considerably from the Hebrew; a comparison of the two ill.u.s.trates, as nothing else can do, the processes through which the text of these old doc.u.ments has pa.s.sed, and the freedom with which they have been handled by scribes and copyists.
The Hebrew text, from which our English version was made, is generally better than the Greek; but there are several cases in which the Greek is manifestly more accurate.
There is one book, reckoned among these minor prophets, of which I have not spoken, and to which I ought to make some reference. That is the book of Jonah.
It is found among the minor prophets, but it is not in any sense prophetical; it is neither a sermon nor a prediction; it is a narrative.
Probably it was placed by the Jews among these prophetical books because Jonah was a prophet. But this book was not written by Jonah; there is not a word in the book which warrants the belief that he was its author.
It is a story about Jonah, told by somebody else long after Jonah"s day.
Jonah, the son of Amittai, was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom in the days of Jeroboam II., far back in the ninth century. The only reference to him contained in the Old Testament is found in 2 Kings xiv. 25. But this book was almost certainly written long after the destruction of Nineveh, which took place two hundred years later. One reason for this belief is in the fact that the writer of the book feels it necessary to explain what kind of a city Nineveh was. He stops in the midst of his story to say: "Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days"
journey." That explanation would have been superfluous anywhere in Israel in the days of Jeroboam II., and the past tense indicates that it was written by one who was looking back to a city no longer in existence. "Nineveh was." The character of the Hebrew also favors the theory of a later date for the book. We have, therefore, a tale that was told about Jonah probably three or four hundred years after his day.
Is it a true tale, or is it a work of didactic fiction? I believe that it is the latter. It is a very suggestive apologue, full of moral beauty and spiritual power, designed to convey several important lessons to the minds of the Jewish people. I cannot regard it as the actual experience of a veritable prophet of G.o.d, because I can hardly imagine that such a prophet could have supposed, as the Jonah of this tale is said to have supposed, that by getting out of the bounds of the Kingdom of Israel, he would get out of the sight of Jehovah. This is precisely what this Jonah of the story undertook to do. When he was bidden to go to Nineveh and cry against it, "he rose up to flee unto Tarshish _from the presence of the Lord;_ and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish _from the presence of the Lord"_ (ch. i. 3). Is this actual history? Is this the belief of a genuine prophet of the Lord? What sort of a prophet is he who holds ideas as crude as this concerning the Being with whom he is in constant communication and from whom he receives his messages? If Jonah did entertain this belief, then it is not likely that he can teach us anything about G.o.d which it is important that we should know.
Thus, without touching the miraculous features of the story, we have sound reasons for believing that this cannot be the actual experience of any veritable prophet of G.o.d; that it is not history, but fiction. Why not? Can any one who has read the parable of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan doubt that fiction may be used in Sacred Scripture for the highest purpose?
But it is argued that the references to this story which are found in the words of Christ authenticate the story. Our Lord, in Matt. xii, 39-42, refers to this book. He speaks of the repentance of the Ninevites under the preaching of Jonah as a rebuke to the Jews who had heard the word of life from him and had not repented; and he uses these words: "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet: for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."
This confirms, say the orthodox commentators, the historical accuracy of the story of Jonah. "If," says Canon Liddon, "he would put his finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, would warrant belief in his own resurrection, he points to Jonah"s being three days and three nights in the belly of the whale." This use of the incident by our Lord clearly authenticates the incident as an actual historical fact. So say the conservative theologians. And so say also the men who labor to destroy the authority of Christ. Mr. Huxley perfectly agrees with Canon Liddon. He praises the Canon"s penetration and consistency; he agrees that there can be no other possible interpretation of Christ"s words. The ultra-conservative and the anti- Christian critics are at one in insisting that Christ stands committed to the literal truth of the narrative in Jonah. The inference of the ultra-conservative is that the narrative is historically true; the inference of the anti-Christian critic is that Jesus is unworthy our confidence as a religious teacher; that one who fully indorsed such a preposterous tale cannot be divine. It is instructive to observe the ultra-conservative critics thus playing steadily into the hands of the anti-Christian critics, furnishing them with ammunition with which to a.s.sail the very citadel of the Christian faith. It is a kind of business in which, I am sorry to say, they have been diligently engaged for a good while.
Now I, for my part, utterly deny the proposition which these allied forces of skepticism and traditionalism are enlisted in supporting. I deny that Jesus Christ can be fairly quoted as authenticating this narrative. I maintain that he used it allegorically for purposes of ill.u.s.tration, without intending to express any opinion as to the historical verity of the narrative. It was used in a literary way, and not in a dogmatic way. Our Lord speaks always after the manner of men,-- speaks the common speech of the people, takes up the phrases and even the fables that he finds upon their lips, and uses them for his own purposes. He does not stop to criticise all their stories, or to set them right in all their scientific errors; that would have been utterly aside from his main purpose, and would certainly have confused them and led them astray. He speaks always of the rising and the setting of the sun, using the phrases that were current at that time, and never hinting at the error underneath them. He knew what these people meant by these phrases. If he knew that these phrases conveyed an erroneous meaning, why did he not correct them? So, too, he quotes from the story of the Creation in Genesis, and never intimates that the six days there mentioned are not literal days of twenty-four hours each. He knew that those to whom he was speaking entertained this belief, and put this interpretation upon these words. Why does he not set it aside?
These questions may admit of more than one answer; but, taking the very highest view of Christ"s person, it is certainly enough to say that any such discussion of scientific questions would have been, as even we can see, palpably unwise. There was no preparation in the human mind at that day for the reception and verification of such a scientific revelation.
It could not have been received. It would not have been preserved. It would only have confused and puzzled the minds of his hearers, and would have shut their minds at once against that moral and spiritual truth which he came to impart. And what we have said about scientific questions applies with equal force to questions of Old Testament criticism. To have entered upon the discussion of these questions with the Jews would have thwarted his highest purpose. In the largest sense of the word these Scriptures were true. Their substantial historical accuracy he wished to confirm. Their great converging lines of light united in him. He constantly claimed their fulfillment in his person and his kingdom. Why, then, should he enter upon a kind of discussion which would have tended to confuse and obscure the main truths which he came to teach? If, then, he refers to these Scriptures, he uses them for his own ethical and spiritual purposes,--not to indorse their scientific errors; not to confirm the methods of interpretation in use among the Jews.
But Mr. Huxley insists, and all the ultra-conservative commentators join him in insisting, that Christ could not, if he had been an honest man, have spoken thus of Jonah if the story of Jonah had not been historically accurate. This is the way he puts it: "If Jonah"s three days" residence in the whale is not an "admitted fact," how could it "warrant belief" in the "coming resurrection"?" [Footnote: _The Nineteenth Century_, July, 1890.] Mr. Huxley is using Canon Liddon"s phrases here; but he is using them to confute those for whom, as he knows very well, Canon Liddon does not speak. Those who say that the story of Jonah is an "admitted reality" may, perhaps, be able to see that it "warrants belief" in the "coming resurrection." To my own mind, even this is by no means clear. I do not see how the one event, even if it were an "admitted reality," could "warrant belief" in the other. No past event can warrant belief in any future event, unless the two events are substantially identical. The growth of an acorn into an oak in the last century "warrants the belief" that an acorn will grow into an oak in the present century; but it does not "warrant the belief" that a city planted on an eligible site will grow to be a great metropolis. The one event might ill.u.s.trate the other, but no conclusions of logic can be carried from the one to the other. It is precisely so with these two events. There is a certain a.n.a.logy between the experience of Jonah, as told in the book, and that of our Lord; but it is ridiculous to say that the one event, if an "admitted reality," "warrants belief" in the other,--whether it is said by Mr. Huxley or Canon Liddon. Our Lord"s words convey no such meaning. In truth, if we are here dealing with scientific comparisons, the one event, if taken as an "admitted reality," _warrants disbelief_ in the other. What are our Lord"s precise words? "_As_ Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale"s belly, _so_ shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." We are told by Mr. Huxley and his orthodox allies that we must take this as a literal historical parallel, or not at all; that if we treat it in any other way, we accuse our Lord of dishonesty. What, then, was the condition of Jonah during these three days and nights? Was he dead or alive? He was certainly alive, if the tale is history--very thoroughly alive in all his faculties. He was praying part of the time, and part of the time he was writing poetry. We have a long and beautiful poem which he is said to have composed during that enforced retirement from active life. It would appear that his release took place immediately after the poem was finished. If, now, these events are bound together with the links of logic, if the one event is the historic counterpart of the other, the Son of man, during the three days of his sojourn in the heart of the earth, was not dead at all! He was only hidden for a little s.p.a.ce from the sight of men. He was alive all the while, _and there was no resurrection!_ It is to this that you come when you begin to apply to these parables and allegories of the Bible the methods of scientific exposition. This may be satisfactory enough to Mr. Huxley. I should like to know how it suits his orthodox allies.
The fact is, that you are not dealing here with equivalents, but with a.n.a.logies; not with laws of evidence, but with figures of rhetoric: and it is absurd to say that one member of an a.n.a.logy "warrants belief" in the existence of the other. There is no such logical nexus. The leaven in the meal does not "warrant belief" in the spread of Christianity, but it serves to ill.u.s.trate it. The story of the Prodigal Son does not "warrant belief" in the fatherly love of G.o.d, but it helps us to understand something of that love, and it helps us precisely as much as if it had been a veritable history, instead of being, as it is, a pure work of fiction.
"What sort of value," asks Mr. Huxley, "as an ill.u.s.tration of G.o.d"s methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened?" Such an admonition, he says, is "morally about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away."
Let us apply this maxim to some of Mr. Huxley"s homilies:--
"Surely," he says in one of his "Lay Sermons," "our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them. We should fear being banished for our neglect _to that limbo where the great Florentine tells us are those who during this life wept when they might be joyful_." [Footnote: _Lay Sermons and Addresses_, p. 92.] This limbo of Dante"s is not, I dare say, an "admitted reality" in Mr. Huxley"s physical geography. "What sort of value," therefore, has his reference to it? Is he merely raising the cry of bogy? He certainly does intend what he says as a dissuasive from a certain course of erroneous conduct. I venture to insist that he has a real meaning, and that, although the limbo is a myth, the condition which he intends to ill.u.s.trate by his allusion to it is a reality.
Once more: "I do not suppose that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature says,--
"A primrose by the river"s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more,"
would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and a central placentation." [Footnote: _Ibid_. p. 91.]
Does Mr. Huxley believe that Peter Bell was a historical person? If he was not, how, in the name of biological theology, could his dead soul have been roused by any information whatever? Yet these sentences of his have a real and valuable meaning. It is evident that Mr. Huxley does understand the uses of allegory and fable for purposes of ill.u.s.tration; that he can employ characters and situations which are not historical, but purely imaginary, to ill.u.s.trate the realities which he is trying to present,--speaking of them all the while just as if they were historical persons or places, and trusting his readers to interpret him aright.
Such a use of language is common in all literature. To affirm that our Lord could not resort to it without dishonesty is to deny to him the ordinary instruments of speech.
"We may conclude, then," with Professor Ladd, "that the reference to Jonah does not cover the question whether the prophet"s alleged sojourn in the sea monster is an historical verity; and that it is no less uncritical than invidious to make the holding of any particular theory of the Book of Jonah a test of allegiance to the teachings of the Master." [Footnote: _The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, i. 67. ]
It is evident enough, as Professor Cheyne has said, that the symbolic meaning of the book was the most important part of it in the New Testament times. But other and more obvious meanings are conveyed by the narrative. Indeed, there is scarcely another book in the Old Testament whose meaning is so clear, whose message is so divine. Apologue though it is, it is full of the very truth of G.o.d. There is not one of the minor prophecies that has more of the real gospel in it. To the people who first received it, how full of admonition and reproof it must have been! That great city Nineveh--a city which was, in its day, as Dr.
Geikie says, "as intensely abhorred by the Jews as Carthage was by Rome, or France under the elder Napoleon was by Germany"--was a city dear to G.o.d! He had sent his own prophet to warn it of its danger; and his prophet, instead of being stoned or torn asunder, as the prophets of G.o.d had often been by their own people, had been heard and his message heeded. The Ninevites had turned to G.o.d, and G.o.d had forgiven them! G.o.d was no less ready to forgive and save Nineveh than Jerusalem. What a wonderful disclosure of the love of the universal Father! What a telling blow, even in those old days, at the "middle wall of part.i.tion" by which the Jew fenced out the Gentile from his sympathy!
And then the gentle rebuke of Jonah"s petulant narrowness! How true is the touch that describes Jonah as angry because G.o.d had forgiven the Ninevites! His credit as a prophet was gone. I suppose that he was afraid also, like many theologians of more modern times, that if threatened penalty were remitted solely on the ground of the repentance of the sinners, the foundations of the divine government would be undermined. How marvelously does the infinite pity and clemency of G.o.d shine out through all this story, as contrasted with the petty consistency and the grudging compa.s.sion of man; and how clearly do we hear in this beautiful narrative the very message of the gospel: "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our G.o.d, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord."
May I say, in closing, that the treatment which the Book of Jonah has received, alike from skeptics and from defenders of the faith, ill.u.s.trates, in a striking way, the kind of controversy which is raised by the attempt to maintain the infallibility of the Bible. The _crux_ of all the critics, orthodox and heterodox, is the story about the fish. The orthodox have a.s.sumed that the narrative without the miracle was meaningless, and the heterodox have taken them at their word. In their dispute over the question whether Jonah did really compose that psalm in the belly of the fish, with his head festooned with seaweed, they have almost wholly overlooked the great lessons of fidelity to duty, of the universal divine fatherhood, and the universal human brotherhood, which the story so beautifully enforces. How easy it is for saints as well as scoffers, in their dealing with the messages of G.o.d to men, to t.i.the the mint, anise, and c.u.mmin of the literal sense, and neglect the weightier matters of judgment, mercy, and truth which they are intended to convey!
CHAPTER VI.