will multiply it. ... And I will multiply the fruit of the tree, and the increase of the field, that ye may receive no more the reproach of famine among the nations."1

More than that, as the "suffering servant" of Yahweh, Israel had borne the griefs and carried the sorrows of the world. Now God will divide her a portion with the great, and she shall divide the spoil with the strong. She will not fail nor be discouraged till she have set justice in the earth, and the isles shall wait for her law.2 Such was the glorious vision of world-wide service which God put into the heart of the Great Unknown, the most "evangelical" of the Old Testament prophets. The overthrow and humiliation of her archenemy Babylon, prophesied in Is. 13, 14 and Jer. 50, 51 as Cyrus began his victorious career, seemed to promise a new era. These political disturbances could bring onlj advantage and enlargement to the little nations suffering under the heel of Babylonian oppression. As Assyria and Babylonia had come "out of the north" to punish Israel for her sins, so Persia came to restore her, now purified by suffering, to her rightful position of leadership.

How miserably the little community in Judea after the Return failed to realize these magnificent ideals! We cannot understand the development of Jewish expectations of the coming of the messianic kingdom without observing the effect upon it of the nation's political fortunes. T'he whole period from the Return in 538 B. 0. to the rebellion of Bar-Cochba in 135 A. D. may be best understood as a succession of disappointed hopes. The expectations of the returning exiles, which had probably been moulded by Ezekiel's elaborate theocratic Utopia, may be seen clearly reflected in Second Isaiah. Twenty years later, as Haggai and Zechariah show us, these expectations had not been at all realized, yet, on the occasion of the disturbances which closed Cambyses' reign, they blaze up again as ardent as before. Even the Temple had not been rebuilt.1 Yet these prophets are animated by a new hope : Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the governor of Judea, are two anointed ones under whom the glories of David's kingdom are to be revived.2 Did the heavy hand of a Persian satrap crush these ambitions before they blossomed? We do not know, but Malachi, Ezra, and Nehemiah show how far they came from realization. Ezra and Nehemiah introduced the Law, hoping thereby to prepare Israel for her glorious mission ; but again there came no transformation in the outward conditions of the nation. How often during the next two hundred and fifty years the national hopes flamed up, history has not recorded. Probably each generation could tell its tale of uprisings.

Yet, outwardly, there never came a time, from the Return in 538 to the Maccabean uprising in 168 B. C., when any ambitious expectation on the part of the Jews would seem to have been justified. The city was small and without military, commercial, or political importance. In spite of the fact that, much of the time, civil and ecclesiastical power centered in the high priest as the head of the nation and its representative in all foreign affairs, the Temple was insignificant and unattractive, the worship of Yahweh frequently neglected, and the pious Jews who kept the Law were few, and had to suffer, not only' from the heathen round about, but also from the rich and powerful among their compatriots, who were usually ungodly.

This inglorious period was brought to a close by the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes, their Syrian over-lord, to blot out the Jewish racial and religious distinctiveness. His persecutions brought about the revolt of the priest Mattathias and his three sons, Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan, and Simon, whose sufferings and exploits constitute this period one of the most glorious in the whole history of the race. Simon's son, John Hyrcanus, was hailed by enthusiastic admirers as prophet, priest, and king, and thus combining all the highest of the age-long ideals of his people.1 To many it appeared that the sufferings of the pious in the persecutions of Antiochus and the wars for freedom had actually fulfilled the ancient prophecies of the woes of the day of Yahweh, and that now the new age had begun. But the next two generations of the dynasty showed such unendurable cruelty and despotism, or such puerile weakness, that its representatives were hailed as monsters that devoured the people.2 Their reigns seemed to be ushering in the last woes rather than the messianic age, for they persecuted and slaughtered the righteous Pharisees. When, at length, their jealousies and quarrels and incapacity brought about the Roman conquest and the rule of the Idumean Antipater and his son Herod, the execration of the pious knew no bounds. No effort to realize the national hopes could have begun more splendidly, none could have failed more ignominiously. With the Maccabean fiasco in mind, it is easy to appreciate the situation of official Judaism in Jesus' day. After such a lesson no pious and thoughtful Jew could expect the kingdom of God to come by military or political measures. The logic of events, the bitterness of repeated disappointments, drove them for an hundred years to complete distrust of human efforts. If the kingdom of God was to be realized on earth, it must be by some entirely supernatural interference with the course of history. Belonging mainly to the middle and upper classes of society

'Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; Levi, 8:11-15; 18:2-13; Josephus, Antiquities, xiii 10, 7; War i 2, 8; Charles, Book of Jubilees, p. 187.

"lest. XII Patr., Judah 21:7; 22:1 f.

and being therefore fairly comfortable, the Pharisees did not feel keenly the pressure of political oppression and social injustice. It is a significant fact that no reference to the kingdom of God has been handed down from any Jewish rabbi of the time of Jesus. They were interested in the law, not in the coming of a new day. The Sadducee, likewise, was satisfied with the status quo, just as is the modern politician, so long as nothing interferes with his perquisites. As is usually the case, it was among the lower-middle and under classes that the sense of social wrongs and the passion for reform made itself felt.

It was most natural that the longing for social justice should find its means of expression in the apocalyptic movement. The prophets had proclaimed the coming of the terrible day of Yahweh to punish the nation for its sins against the poor and the needy, the widow and the fatherless.1 All through the dark days after the Exile the pious had suffered from the oppression, not merely of their heathen neighbors, but also, and perhaps more bitterly, from their own unscrupulous fellow-countrymen. Again and again in the Psalms they voice their complaint and cry to Yahweh for relief.

"Why standest thou afar off, 0 Yahweh?
Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?
In the pride of the wicked the poor is hotly pursued.
 

He sitteth in the lurking-places of the villages;
In the secret places doth he murder the innocent.
 

He lieth in wait to catch the poor.

And the helpless fall by his strong ones.

Arise, 0 Yahweh; 0 God, lift up thy hand:

Forget not the poor.
Break thou the arm of the wicked.
 

Yahweh, thou hast heard the desire of the meek:
Thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine
 

ear to hear;

To judge the fatherless and the oppressed,
That man who is of the earth may 'be terrible no
 

more."1

The Psalms of Solomon, written probably a generation before the birth of Jesus, complain continually of the "sinners" who assail the "righteous" in their insolence, but express the fullest confidence that God cares for the latter and will eventually "raise up unto them their king, the son of David," who will rule in righteousness to the destruction of their enemies and the great good fortune of Israel.2 Likewise the Assumption of Moses, written during the lifetime of Jesus, complains that the rulers of Israel, probably the Sadducees, are "destructive and impious . . . treacherous men, self-pleasers, gluttons, gourmands . . . devourers of the goods of the poor, saying that they do so on the grounds of their justice."3

The apocalyptic movement in Judaism, then, was in opposition to the officials of the nation. The language we have just quoted, as well as the character of their beliefs, shows that the Sadducees had no sympathy with it. Official Pharisaism is also excluded by the nature of its interests4 and by the absence of any evidence of their attention to the matter. It was among the people, suffering under the misgovernment and economic exploitation of their for

eign over-lords and Sadducean or Herodian rulers, that fertile soil was found for the development of the spirit of discontent and revolution. As in Latin countries dissatisfaction finds vent in armed revolution, in Eussia in soviet government, in English speaking countries in conventions, resolutions, and elections, so among the Jews the one natural expression was in apocalyptic movements.

Men who are suffering deeply find it hard to wait for God's own good time. They tend to believe that, if they match their prayers with effort, God will the sooner intervene. And so there were among the Jews constantly increasing unrest and numerous popular uprisings under pretended messiahs—the so-called Zelotic movements, always opposed by the Sadducees and Pharisees and put down by Rome with an iron hand. Official Judaism rejected the social question;1 with it they rejected and tried to suppress its chief expression, the apocalyptic movement.

In A. D. 66 the inevitable happened. Pure repression without constructive statesmanship worked its customary result. Goaded by a series of tactless, incompetent, or cruel and rapacious procurators, the people put their theology to the test. The limit of endurance had been reached; God must intervene to save his people. Popular sentiment swept even many of the Pharisees into the great revolt against Rome. It would seem that the terrible defeat which the nation suffered, the destruction of the city and Temple and the cessation of the sacrifices, would have convinced the most bigoted that the political type of messianic hope was entirely mistaken. No doubt many did learn the lesson. Yet a generation later the Jews of the Diaspora rose against Rome—and were savagely punished. Again, after another short generation, under an adventurer who called himself Bar-Cochba, "son of the star," and who was hailed by the great Rabbi Akiba as messiah, there came another Jewish revolt, as bitter and as severely punished as that of 66-70. It was the last, dying gasp; hereafter official Judaism, as represented by the rabbis and the Talmud, gave up political ambitions entirely, dreamed little of the return of the Golden Age, and saw few millennial visions. Suffering, hope, disappointment, these three words, repeated again and again, record the history of Judaism from the Exile to Bar-Cochba. To this period of almost continual suffering, of alternate hope and despair, belong the Jewish visions and revelations that prepared for Jesus' proclamation of the coming kingdom of God.

Apocalyptic literature is at once the cause and the product of these disappointed hopes. On the one hand it held out the promise of an impossible ideal future, a promise sworn by God himself. The tragic consequences of this hope are seen in the three great Jewish uprisings against Rome and the countless minor ones. On the other hand, these books were the outcome of despair. They were written to hearten a people that was suffering to the limit of endurance, to promise them that their tortures should last but a little longer, to encourage them to hold out to the end, when God would intervene to punish their oppressors and give them all that heart could wish. They come, not out of times of prosperity and peace, but of war and disturbance.1 Some are stormy petrels, omens of coming disaster, others are the vultures that gloat and gorge as the evil passes over the land. Apocalypticism was a counsel of despair.

Such was the relation of political history to the development of apocalypticism. We turn now to study the effect of the religious development of Judaism upon its eschatology. 1 See above, p. 5, quotation from Dewey. ,

II. The Effect Of Theie Religious Development

UPON THE HOPES OF THE JEWS

As to the inner development of Judaism during this period, that is, the development of its moral and religious thinking, the details are obscure, but certain great facts stand out as the arches of the bridge of the centuries. The most significant of these are the canonization of the Law and of the whole Old Testament, and the development of the eschatological hope. Around these two complementary ideas, the Law and the coming kingdom, centers practically all the literature which has been preserved from this period. We are concerned with the literature that has to do with the coming kingdom; but we must note how the canonization of the Law affected both the form and content of apocalyptic literature. '

After a most interesting history, Jewish law crystalized into the form which we find in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible,1 about 450 B. C. Under the priestly influence of Ezra and others like him, with the aid of such lay administrators as Nehemiah and prophets like Malachi, the Law, substantially as we now have it, was forced upon the Jewish communities in Egypt, Babylonia, and Palestine in the latter part of the fifth century before Christ.2 These five books were thought to contain a sufficient and authoritative revelation of the will of God. The one duty of the true Israelite was to study and understand it fully and obey it unreservedly. Therefore scribism gave itself unremittingly to the interpretation and inculcation of the Law, and the Jewish people for the most part accepted the scribes as their religious teachers.1 It was quite a lawyer-like reverence for the small technicalities of law which gave to Pharisaic legalism those characteristics which Jesus so unsparingly criticized. Jewish legalism was fundamentally incapable of grasping the great social and religious ideals of the Prophets and was thus constitutionally, although unwittingly, opposed to the larger hope of the coming kingdom.

The greater part, and the best part, of the Old Testament was written before the acceptance of the Law under Ezra. During the next three hundred years the remainder was written, and the whole received its present form. During this period also a definite doctrine of inspiration arose. It was generally agreed that "prophecy never came by human impulse, it was when carried away by the holy Spirit that the holy men of God spoke," and that "all scripture is inspired by God."2 It was also generally agreed that God had given his message to the world through the ancient lawgivers and prophets, and that the Spirit no longer spoke to men. The prophetic voice was stilled. So sure is the anonymous writer of Zechariah 13 of this (about 200 B. C.) that he believes that any one who claims to prophesy is a deceiver, and suggests that "his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth."3 About 200 B. C. the prophetic canon was closed. Judaism is no longer a living faith, but a book religion; even Daniel receives new revelations by the study of ancient prophets.4

Accordingly, it was believed that only books which had come down from the ancients, from the times when God still spoke to men, were really inspired. While there was fair unanimity in the opinion that those we now have in the Old Testament belong in this category, there were many other writings, some of them short fugitive pieces, some of them large books, which seemed to many to have equal claim to a place in the sacred literature of the race. On the whole, the Jewish people dealt wisely, though somewhat blindly, with these difficult questions, and we have reason to be grateful that they selected so much, and omitted so little that was good. The most serious error in their principles of selection was this, that only the ancient was believed to be inspired. The inevitable result of this conception of inspiration was that new ideas, as such, were denied a hearing. No one dared to claim to exercise the prophetic gift, or to speak in the name of Yahweh. From Zechariah (B. C. 520) to Jesus there are, I believe, only two pieces of Palestinian Jewish literature the names of whose authors are known: Joel, about whom we know nothing else, and Jesus ben-Sira, whose book never got into the canon. The scribe of these times thus again found himself denied any active participation in the apocalyptic movement, while prophetic spirits would consciously or unconsciously find themselves out of sympathy with scribism and Pharisaism.

The development of Judaism was profoundly influenced by foreign civilizations. There never had been a time when the nation was completely isolated. But from the time of Ahaz, when it was caught in the maelstrom of world politics, this unique little people had to measure itself continually with the far richer and more imposing arts, sciences, literatures, philosophies, and religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, and Greece. Being so much the poorer, it must borrow heavily and develop its own resources along lines either analogous or antagonistic to the ideas it met. In some instances it took the one attitude, in some the other. From the highly developed demonology, eschatology, and astrology of Babylonia and Persia the Jew borrowed many beliefs and practices, and especially the myths and other forms in which these ex