Jewish History and Politics in the Times of Sargon and Sennacherib

THE GREEK ORATOR.-THE HEBREW PROPHET. THE MODERN PREACHER.— SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS.-THE BOOK OF ISAIAH.-ITS ARRANGEMENTITS UNITY.-HYPOTHETICAL AND POSITIVE CRITICISM.

HE Spartan king told Xerxes that he was no match for

THE

the Greeks, because they, though free, had a master -the law-over them, which they feared more than the Persians did his despotic will.' And the Athenian orator, looking back on the great struggle after a generation or two had passed, gave his countrymen a farther explanation of their fathers' success against the barbarian myriads of the king of Asia:' he pointed out how they had done such noble and wonderful deeds, because they were already organized into a free commonwealth in which the good were honoured, and the bad restrained, by law; because they knew and held that it should be left to brute beasts to control each other by mutual violence, such as oriental kings and subjects lived by, but that it became men to define rights by law, to persuade to its maintenance or expansion by rational and instructive speech, and in their conduct to follow the guidance of both these,—the law their king, and speech their teacher.'

Had it been

The orator enunciated an eternal truth. less than eternal, it could not be still keeping its ground, and still sustaining the life of every nation which holds to it, or indeed, although we (not to judge of others) hold never

LAW AND FREE SPEECH.

so imperfectly to it for though we are ready enough to thank God that we English are not as other men, we might more reasonably reflect how often we are all on the verge of doing what lies in us to disturb the perfect play of those two forces, of entire obedience to the law and absolute right of discussion, according as either may check some private opinion or class interest; and how seldom we remember that one step beyond that verge lies the region of mutual violence with the correlates of despotism and insurrection in which its vitality consists. But this truth, this universal law of human society, has not only outlasted the polities of Greece, but was not first discovered there, as the Athenians supposed; nor was the exercise of this master right and power of words 'so originally and peculiarly the possession of Greeks alone among all living creatures, that' (as their panegyrist goes on to say) if any other people did acquire it from them, this only extended the name of Grecian to distinctions of mind as well as race, so that they were called by it who shared their education rather than those who had their blood.' Another people had been set, many centuries earlier, to work out some of the same, with some very different, problems of human society, and under not wholly dissimilar conditions, internal and external and while the Hebrew as well as the Greek could have pointed to various other proofs that his was a commonwealth, or constitutionally organized body-politic, as distinguished from the inorganic despotisms of Assyria or Persia, the one fixed on the same marks as the other did, as the characteristic ones: the 'Nomos and Logos' of the Greek were anticipated by their true counterparts the Law and the Prophets' of the Hebrew.*

Since this was published in 1853, it has received the support of a not dissimilar view of the position of the Hebrew Prophets by Mr. Mill. He says:-The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal despotism of China, were very fit instruments for carrying those nations up to the point of civilization which they attained. But having reached that point they were brought to a permanent halt for want of mental liberty and individuality,-requisites of improvement which the institutions that had carried them thus far entirely incapacitated them from acquiring; and as the institutions did not break down and give place to others, further improvement stopped. In contrast with these nations, let us consider the example of an opposite character, afforded by another and a comparatively insignificant Oriental people-the

ORATOK

THE GREEK ORATOR.

Isaiah, no less than Demosthenes, might have said that it was the office of the political speaker and adviser, ‘to see events in their beginnings, to discern their purport and tendencies from the first, and to forewarn his countrymen accordingly; to confine within the narrowest bounds those political vices of habitual procrastination, supineness, ignorance, and love of strife, which are inevitable in all states; and to dispose men's minds instead to enlightened concord and unanimity, and to the zealous discharge of their social duties and he too might have added, 'All these things have I done, and no creature can say that I have ever left any of them undone; I do not shrink from your scrutiny, be it never so strict.'* But there were

Jews. They, too, had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy. These did for them what was done for other Oriental races by their institutions-subdued them to industry and order, and gave them a national life. But neither their kings nor their priests ever obtained, as in those other countries, the exclusive moulding of their character. Their religion gave existence to an inestimably precious unorganized institution-the Order (if it may be so termed) of Prophets. Under the protection, generally though not always effectual, of their sacred character, the Prophets were a power in the nation, often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept up, in that little corner of the earth, the antagonism of influences which is the only real security for continued progress. Religion consequently was not there what it has been in so many other places-a consecration of all that was once established, and a barrier against further improvement. The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, that the Prophets were in Church and State the equivalent of the modern liberty of the press, gives a just but not an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in national and universal history by this great element of Jewish life; by means of which, the canon of inspiration never being complete, the persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling could not only denounce as reprobate, with the direct authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could give forth better and higher interpretations of the national religion, which thenceforth became part of the religion. Accordingly, whoever can divest himself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it was one book, which until lately was equally inveterate in Christians and in unbelievers, sees with admiration the vast interval between the morality and religion of the Pentateuch, or even of the historical books, and the morality and religion of the Prophecies, a distance as wide as between these last and the Gospels. Conditions more favourable to progress could not easily exist; accordingly, the Jews, instead of being stationary, like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the startingpoint and main propelling agency of modern cultivation.'-Representative Government, by John Stuart Mill, pp. 41, 42.

Demosthenes, de Coronâ, c. 73. This, and the preceding passages from Herodotus (vii. 104), Lysias (ii. 17-20), and Isocrates (iv. 53-56), are pointed out as characteristic of the political life of Greece, by Mr. Grote: History, vii. 498, ix. 116. I need hardly remind the reader that the greatness of ancient Rome, too, stood not in her laws alone, but in her laws and her free speech together; the tribune had as large a share as the senator in building up the Republic.

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Jewish History and Politics in the Times of Sargon and Sennacherib: An ...