shall not pass away (see vii, 9-14, 27). Such is the final victory, when the judgment is set (vii, 26), and the king who has spoken "words against the Most High" loses his malign power. "Here," says the author, "is the end of the matter" (vii, 28), — as if all else were subsidiary. The more specific disclosure, indeed, of "what shall be in the latter time of the indignation" (cf. viii, 19), "belongeth to the appointed time of the end," and can be reckoned in times; but this is final and supreme. We call this kind of theme apocalyptic,1 and many students take its novelty as if the author of Daniel had introduced it. It is not new. The author has merely put into vivid description and imagery subjects that from the beginning of literary prophecy have risen like the promise of dawn from beyond their horizon. It is the kind of theme that deals with such matters as the judgment of the world, the coming kingdom of heaven, the life hereafter, the times of the end, matters which, ignoring the intermediate chain of cause and circumstance, or political vicissitude, reveal a foreshortened event, opening thereto a boundless field of intuition and realistic imagination. The prophets before Daniel, busy with environing conditions, could not let themselves go in apocalyptic; but many apocalyptic elements, more or less succinct or fleeting, occur in their writings. It remained for the author of Daniel, speaking as if from the time of its early outlook, to give it the charm of vision and symbol and story and concentrate it upon its personal consummator, at the same time publishing it at the point in Jewish history where it would do the most immediate good. For what is more than this his prophecy too, as soon as he has predicted the end of Antiochus (xi, 45), is foreshortened, and goes out in a variegated picture of resurrection (xii, 2), of the glory of good teaching (3), of increased knowledge (4), and of a mingled goodness and wickedness (10) not 1 For a definition of "apocalyptic," see above, p. 147, note 2. unlike the condition depicted in Isa. xxxii, 1-8. To Daniel himself the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end" (vss. 4, 9), and he puts no period to the "thousand three hundred and five and thirty days" (vs. 12); but when the seal is broken "they that are wise shall understand (vs. 10), and over it all shines afar the surviving and victorious kingdom which it is the central purpose of the book to reveal, the kingdom that "shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High" (vii, 27). NOTE. Professor R. H. Charles, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, gives the following list of passages in the canonical Old Testament apocalyptic: Isa. xxiv-xxvii; xxxiii; xxxiv-xxxv (Jer. xxxiii, 14-26?); Ezek. ii, 8; xxxvii-xxxix; Joel iii, 9-17; Zech. xii-xiv; Daniel. To these he ought certainly to have added much of the Second Isaiah, and especially its culminating prophecy of new heavens and a new earth, chapters lxv, lxvi. We have seen how remarkably the Book of Daniel fitted itself to the desperate crisis of its Maccabean age. Not less remarkable is the way in which it met and conThe Literary Vehicle and trolled its age's literary tendencies and tastes. Its Stimulus story form of invention was already a favorite vogue; we have seen this in Esther and Ruth and Jonah.1 In its age also the custom was rising, and soon to become very prevalent, of writing books in the name or personality of great ones of history; we have seen this in Ecclesiastes and his personation of Solomon, and many uncanonical works of the succeeding time carry it on. Most notable of all, however, is the stimulating effect of its apocalyptic theme, fresh and awakening as this proved to be. It is not too much to say the Book of Daniel set the imagination of devout Judaism aflame. For the moral austerity of the classical prophets it substitutes the words and imagery of an old-time mage (Daniel never poses as a prophet), speaking in the visioned lore of Chaldean speculation. Thus it opened 1 Cf. what is said of Daniel, pp. 280, 281, above. The a new and fascinating field already to a degree warranted in Scripture but never before exploited. From this time onward, until about A. D. 100, apocalyptic speculation was very popular, its most prominent work, the Book of Enoch, appearing less than a century after Daniel. It was largely from the ideas exploited in these extra-canonical books — ideas of last judgment, the kingdom of heaven, the Son of man, resurrection, heaven and hell, the end of the agethat the terms and conceptions were derived to which our Lord adjusted his teaching and ministry. He found in these, as in the older Scriptures, much both to adopt and to correct.1 Only the Book of Daniel, however, in this apocalyptic strain, attained to an assured place in the Hebrew canon. As the Book of Daniel by its bold use of mystic vision revived and exalted the Jewish hope, so more than a century before (cir. 300 B. C.) the Chronicler, by his résumé of the nation's history in the clerical Résumé of mood, had brought the record of the Judean Judaism dynasty and the Temple cultus continuously onward to the reorganization on priestly and Pentateuchal principles under Ezra and Nehemiah; at which point, as the record ends here, we have before us for Biblical values a stationary and static Judaism, in which "Jerusalem had ceased to be the head of an independent state and had become merely a municipality governed by a church." 2 We have already reviewed this work of the Chronicler, in the section on "The Later Cultus Literature."3 I call him "The Chronicler," in the singular number, because the three works (or rather two) of which the series is made up seem to have come originally from the pen of one author or editor and to have been composed with reference to each other. These two, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles, are the latest history given in the Hebrew canon. Chronicler's 1 See below, p. 528. 2 Cf. above, p. 408. 8 See above, pp. 403-414. In the arrangement of this division of the canon, EzraNehemiah, though its story reaches to a later date, is put before Chronicles. Its object is to carry the history on from Cyrus's edict of return to the establishment of law and cultus under Ezra and Nehemiah, as marked by the reception of the Pentateuch and the Levitical organization of the priestly service. From this point the Jewish history, its Biblical values all in, may be taken for granted. In the As placed after Ezra-Nehemiah, and thus at the very end of the whole canon, the Book of Chronicles (1 and 2 Chronicles originally a single book) reads like kind of appendix or supplement to the whole course of Scripture annals, designed to make it homogeneous with the matured Judaism of the end. Its title implies this, and as translated into Greek asserts it. It begins with Adam (1 Chron. i, 1); but except for names and genealogies in which the priestly line has a generous share, it has no occasion to enlarge upon events until the Davidic house and the southern kingdom enter, after which the detailed résumé, though traversing the ground already covered by Samuel and Kings, is shaped and colored to the Judaic and Levitical model until the surviving commonwealth, with the Pentateuch as constitution and the Temple as capitol, has passed from monarchy to high-priesthood. "The law was given through Moses" (John i, 17), and the completed organization under that law is portrayed at the literary frontier of the Hebrew Bible. By this the older dispensation is ready to be estimated through the ages. II The Pause between the Testaments. To the Jews, thus fortified in their ancient covenant, this doubtless meant a finality; though their most liberal and far-seeing prophets had not read their destiny so (cf., for instance, Jer. xxxi, 31-34; Isa. xlix, 5–7), nor would the opening of apocalyptic vision and reckoning have it so. Not a finality closed to further additions, it was rather a pause until time and conditions should be ripe for enlargement and fulfillment in more universal relations. Meanwhile let us note what shape the Old Testament canon assumes, with what modifications, as thus it rounds out its third division and pauses at its literary frontier. The Provincial Facing the Universal In its later years the Hebrew culture had two centers of activity and influence, one at Jerusalem, where were its scribes and rabbis and religious zealots, the other at Alexandria, which we may call the capital of the Dispersion, where were its scholars and thinkers, and where numerous communities of outland Jews must subsist under foreign conditions. Among these latter circles not only must the Hebrew literature maintain its rivalry with the most cultivated literature of the world,1 it must be put into the language medium which its own devotees could use. That language medium, now becoming universal for world intercourse, was the Greek. Accordingly, almost coetaneously with the final shaping of the Hebrew book came the earliest version of it, the Septuagint translation, done by Alexandrian scholars. The event was momentous. One may call it the first stroke against Hebrew exclusiveness, the first step beyond the pause. It was like the provincial called to face the universal; an outlying parochial literature to exhibit itself before more finely developed tastes and standards of culture. It could not well escape some tendency to pliability and modification. Rigidly Jewish as it remained in substance, it must in form become readable also to the Greek literary sense. We have called the Jewish people, educated by the treading in of their venerable literature, the people of a book. This Old Testament in its three coördinate divisions of Law, Prophets, and Writings, is their book, as it were a 1 Cf. above, p. 431. |