Chosen Peoples | Page 3

enemies are the enemies of the Lord." And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a "Man of War" who demands "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and cries with savage sublimity:--
I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries, And will recompense them that hate Me, I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, And my sword shall devour flesh.
Judaism has even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. "We utterly destroyed every city," Deuteronomy declares; "the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of the cities." David, who is promised of God that his seed shall be enthroned for ever, slew surrendered Moabites in cold blood, and Judas Maccab?us, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral city of Ephron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male in it, and passed across its burning ruins and bleeding bodies. The prophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations--the phrase is his, not Adam Smith's--streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. "For that nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.... Aliens shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee. Thou shalt suck the milk of nations." "The Lord said unto me," says the second Psalm, "Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of Me and I will give the nations for thine inheritance.... Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron."
Nor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. Every Saturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for material prosperity and the promise of ultimate glory: "Thou shalt lend unto many nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee." "Our Father, our King," he prays at the New Year, "avenge before our eyes the blood of Thy servants that has been spilt." And at the Passover Seder Service he still repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath on the heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling. "Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!"

II
Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia, which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball," should be found really resembling Jud?a, whose national greeting was "Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; whose medi?val poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned in secret, performed in daring." And, as a matter of fact, some of these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework: the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is to be avenged is the blood of martyrs "who went through fire and water for the sanctification of Thy name."
But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore--as completely as Jesus did--that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck over Belgium and not of a medi?val Jew over the desolated home of Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she would like to kill every German--man or woman--with her own hand!
And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James Hinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it." And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can give us the clue to the Bible. This is the only "Guide to the Perplexed," and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when by allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a