A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
22.PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA
The fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the seventh century B.C. it would have seemed as though the whole civilized world was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian empire and they had conquered Egypt; Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible. The trade of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities of the Phœnician coast, had thrown out colonies that grew at last to even greater proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded before 800 B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have already noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build ships on the Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time of the Pharaoh Necho, a Phœnician expedition sailed completely round Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the Greeks
were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the one they had
destroyed, and the Medes were becoming “formidable,” as an Assyrian
inscription calls them, in central Asia. In 800 B.C. no one could have
prophesied that before the third century B.C. every trace of Semitic
dominion would be wiped out by Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that
everywhere the Semitic peoples would be subjects or tributaries or
scattered altogether. Everywhere except in the northern deserts of
Arabia, where the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life,
the ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his
Akkadians went down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were
never conquered by Aryan masters.
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in these
five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its
ancient traditions and that was this little people, the Jews, who were
sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And
they were able to do this, because they had got together this
literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It is not so much the
Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running
through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the
people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they
were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship,
adventure and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible
and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of
Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods
embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and
the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new
idea, this God of the Jews, in the heavens, high above priests and
sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen
them to be his peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the
capital of Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by
their sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when
they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many
Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many Phœnicians,
speaking practically the same language and having endless customs,
habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be attracted by this
inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and its
promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the Spanish
Phœnician cities, the Phœnicians suddenly vanish from history; and as
suddenly we find, not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt,
Arabia, the East, wherever the Phœnicians had set their feet,
communities of Jews. And they were all held together by the Bible and
by the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only their
nominal capital; their real city was this book of books. This is a new
sort of thing in history. It is something of which the seeds were sown
long before, when the Sumerians and Egyptians began to turn their
hieroglyphics into writing. The Jews were a new thing, a people
without a king and presently without a temple (for as we shall tell
Jerusalem itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held together and
consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of
the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor foreseen
nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new kind of
community but a new kind of man comes into history with the development
of the Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a
little people just like any other little people of that time clustering
around court and temple, ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led by
the ambition of the king. But already, the reader may learn from the
Bible, this new sort of man of which we speak, the Prophet, was in
evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance of these
Prophets increases.
THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II
THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II
This obelisk (in the British Museum) of the King of Assyria mentions,
in cuneiform, “Jehu the son of Omri.” Panel showing Jewish captives
bringing tribute
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse origins.
The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the Prophet Amos wore
the goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had this in common, that
they gave allegiance to no one but to the God of Righteousness and that
they spoke directly to the people. They came without licence or
consecration. “Now the word of the Lord came unto me;” that was the
formula. They were intensely political. They exhorted the people
against Egypt, “that broken reed,” or against Assyria or Babylon; they
denounced the indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of
the King. Some of them turned their attention to what we should now
call “social reform.” The rich were “grinding the faces of the poor,”
the luxurious were consuming the children’s bread; wealthy people made
friends with and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and
this was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly
punish this land.
ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK
ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK
Captive Princes making obeisance to Shalmaneser II
These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied. They
went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they spread a new
religious spirit. They carried the common man past priest and temple,
past court and king and brought him face to face with the Rule of
Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the history of
mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to
a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united
and at peace under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent
reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much
prejudice, and much that will remind him of the propaganda pamphlets of
the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period
round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a
new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an
appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices
and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.