Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered. Kaufmann Kohler
of the law of holiness, by which they desired to regulate the entire conduct of man. Thus, religion was no longer confined by the limits of nationality, but was transformed into a spiritual force for all mankind, to lead through a revelation of the One and Holy God toward the highest morality.
8. The development of thought brought the God-seeking spirits to the desire to know His will, or, in Scriptural language, His ways, in order to attain holiness in their pursuit. The natural consequence was the gradual receding of the power of imagination which had made the enraptured seer behold God Himself in visions. As the Deity rose more and more above the realm of the visible, the newly conceived truth was realized as coming to the sacred writer through the spirit of God or an angel. Inspiration took the place of revelation. This, however, still implies a passive attitude of the soul carried away by the truth it receives from on high. This supernatural element disappears gradually and passes over into sober, self-conscious thought, in which the writer no longer thinks of God as the Ego speaking through him, but as an outside Power spoken of in the third person.
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A still lower degree of inspiration is represented by those writings which lack altogether the divine afflatus, and to which is ascribed a share of the holy spirit only through general consensus of opinion. Often this imprint of the divine is not found in them by the calm judgment of a later generation, and the exact basis for the classification of such writings among the holy books is sometimes difficult to state. We can only conclude that in the course of time they were regarded as holy by that very spirit which was embodied in the Synagogue and its founders, “the Men of the Great Synagogue,” who in their work of canonizing the Sacred Scriptures were believed to have been under the influence of the holy spirit.88
9. Except for the five books of Moses, the idea of a mechanical inspiration of the Bible is quite foreign to Judaism. Not until the second Christian century did the rabbis finally decide on such questions as the inspiration of certain books among the Hagiographa or even among the Prophets, or whether certain books now excluded from the canon were not of equal rank with the canonical ones.89 In fact, the influence of the holy spirit was for some time ascribed, not only to Biblical writers, but also to living masters of the law.90 [pg 041] The fact is that divine influence cannot be measured by the yardstick or the calendar. Where it is felt, it bursts forth as from a higher world, creating for itself its proper organs and forms. The rabbis portray God as saying to Israel, “Not I in My higher realm, but you with your human needs fix the form, the measure, the time, and the mode of expression for that which is divine.”91
10. While Christianity and Islam, its daughter-religions, must admit the existence of a prior revelation, Judaism knows of none. It claims its own prophetic truth as the revelation, admits the title Books of Revelation (Bible) only for its own sacred writings, and calls the Jewish nation alone the People of Revelation. The Church and the Mosque achieved great things in propagating the truths of the Sinaitic revelation among the nations, but added to it no new truths of an essential nature. Indeed, they rather obscured the doctrines of God's unity and holiness. On the other hand, the people of the Sinaitic revelation looked to it with a view of ever revitalizing the dead letter, thus evolving ever new rules of life and new ideas, without ever placing new and old in opposition, as was done by the founder of the Church. Each generation was to take to heart the words of Scripture as if they had come “this very day” out of the mouth of the Lord.92
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Chapter VII. The Torah—the Divine Instruction
1. During the Babylonian Exile the prophetic word became the source of comfort and rejuvenation for the Jewish people. Now in its place Ezra the Scribe made the Book of the Law of Moses the pivot about which the entire life of the people was to revolve. By regular readings from it to the assembled worshipers, he made it the source of common instruction. Instead of the priestly Law, which was concerned only with the regulation of the ritual life, the Law became the people's book of instruction, a Torah for all alike,93 while the prophetic books were made secondary and were employed by the preacher at the conclusion of the service as “words of consolation.”94 Upon the Pentateuch was built up the divine service of the Synagogue as well as the whole system of communal life, with both its law and ethics. The prophets and other sacred books were looked upon only as means of “opening up” or illustrating the contents of the Torah. These other parts of [pg 043] the Mikra (“the collection of books for public reading”) were declared to be inferior in holiness, so that, according to the Rabbinical rule, they were not even allowed to be put into the same scroll as the Pentateuch.95 Moreover, neither the number, order, nor the division of the Biblical books was fixed. The Talmud gives 24, Josephus only 22.96 Tradition claims a completely divine origin only for the Pentateuch or Torah, while the rabbis often point out the human element in the other two classes of the Biblical collection.97
2. The traditional belief in the divine origin of the Torah includes not only every word, but also the accepted interpretation of each letter, for both written and oral law are ascribed to the revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai, to be transmitted thence from generation to generation. Whoever denies the divine origin of either the written or the oral law is declared to be an unbeliever who has no share in the world to come, according to the Tannaitic code, and consequently according to Maimonides98 also. But here arises a question of vital importance: What becomes of the Torah as the divine foundation of Judaism under the study of modern times? Even conservative investigators, such as Frankel, Graetz, and Isaac Hirsch Weiss, not to mention such radicals as Zunz and Geiger, admit the gradual progress and growth of this very system of law, both oral and written. And if different historical conditions have produced the development [pg 044] of the law itself, we must assume a number of human authors in place of a single act of divine revelation.99
3. But another question of equal importance confronts us here, the meaning of Torah. Originally, no doubt, Torah signified the instruction given by the priests on ritual or juridical matters. Out of these decisions arose the written laws (Toroth), which the priesthood in the course of time collected into codes. After a further process of development they appeared as the various books of Moses, which were finally united into the Code or Torah. This Torah was the foundation of the new Judean commonwealth, the “heritage of the congregation of Jacob.”100 The priestly Torah, lightly regarded during the prophetic period, was exalted by post-exilic Judaism, so that the Sadducean priesthood and their successors, the rabbis, considered strict observance of the legal form to be the very essence of religion. Is this, then, the true nature of Judaism? Is it really—as Christian theologians have held ever since the days of Paul, the great antagonist of Judaism—mere nomism, a religion of law, which demanded formal compliance with its statutes without regard to their inner value? Or shall we rather follow Rabbi Simlai, the Haggadist, who first enumerated the 613 commandments of the Torah (mandatory and prohibitive), considering that their one aim is the higher moral law, in that they are all summed up by a few ethical principles, which he finds in the 15th Psalm, Isaiah XXXIII, 15; Micah VI, 8; Isaiah LVI, 1; and Amos V, 4?101
4. All these questions have but one answer, a reconciling one, Judaism has the two factors, the priest with his regard for the law and the prophet with his ethical teaching; and the Jewish Torah embodies both aspects, law and doctrine. [pg 045] These two elements became more and more correlated, as the different parts of the Pentateuch which embodied them were molded together into the one scroll of the Law. In fact, the prophet Jeremiah, in denouncing the priesthood for its neglect of the principles of justice, and rebuking scathingly the people for their wrongdoing, pointed to the divine law of righteousness as the one which should be written upon the hearts of men.102 Likewise, in the book of Deuteronomy, which was the product of joint activity by prophet and priest, the Law was built upon the highest moral principle, the love of God and man. In a still larger sense the Pentateuch as a whole contains priestly law and universal religion intertwined. In it the eternal verities of the Jewish faith, God's omnipotence, omniscience, and moral government of the world, are conveyed in the historical narratives as an introduction to the law.
5. Thus the Torah as the expression of Judaism was never limited