ETHANIM (c'lTNij, 'ABafuLr B, 'Aea»tl)i A, Ethanim, 1 K »'). See Time.
ETHANUS, one of the ' swift scribes ' who wrote to the dictation of Ezra (2 Es H"). The name occurs in the MSS variously as Ecanus, Ecbanus, Elkana, etc.
ETHBAAL (Sv^nn 'with Baal,' i.e. enjoying hi« favour and protection ; 'Ie0f()da\ B, 'la^daX A, 'I(9Sdii\ Luc.).— King of the Sidonians, and father of Jezebel wife of Ahab king of Israel (1 K 16'').
According to Jos., Ittobaal ('IW/SaXoi, EiBui- PaXot, i.e. Vyj'iBK ' Baal is with hira,' a form of the name preferred by Thenius, Stade, etc.) was king of the Tynans and Sidonians {Ant. VIII. xiii. 1), and is stated by Menander the Eiihesian to have been a priest of Astarte who attained to the throne by the murder of the usurper Phelles (C. Ap. i. 18). This identification with the Etlibaal of K is allowed by modems. The Taylor cylinder, col. ii. 48, mentions a later king of Sidon of the same name ; Assyr. Tuba'lu (Schrader, COT, on Gn 10").
C. F. BlTRNEY.
ETHER (vii;), Jos 15" 19'.— A tovra of Judah noticed with Libnah, apparently near the plain of Philistia, given to Simeon, and near Rimmon. The site is unknown.
ETHICS.— The treatment of this subject is in- volved in a certain amount of dilficulty, from the fact that while the ethical character of the whole Jewish dispensation is strongly and unmistakably marked, tiiere is no ethical system, strictly so called, in the Bible at all. The ethical ideas, like the metaphysical ideas, underlie the histories, the prophecies, the legislation, and the writings of the apiMtles ; they are not deduced or criticised, but as.-<umed as premises. For such a purpose as that of the present article they have to be ex- tracted and presented systematically ; and there is always danger that when this is done some greater precision of definition may be given to the ideas than they really possessed.
There is another difiiculty, even greater than this, which arises from the critical discussions recently raised over the authorship and date of books. This pres.ses more hardly on the student ol OT ideas than of Christianity. For even if the date of individual books of the NT be uncertain, the margin of uncertainty is comparatively narrow ; and the period within which they all must fall is, comparatively speaking, a short one. Hence
critical questions may be neglected without any serious loss. But with the <)T it is ditl'erent. We can no longer take for granted tlie traditional order or date of the books; and, what is much more serious, the period within which they must all have been written is a very long one, so that it would be unreasonable to expect tliat the ethical
foint of view can have suH'ered no serious change, t is obviously impossible to discuss the various critical questions by the way. We can only call attention to the part they play in the whole dis- cussion of our present subject, and then leave them aside. The plan of the present article is, then, to set forth the ethical ideas in the Bible, as far as possible, without reference to the literary history of the books, following such order as the subject itself seems to require.
I. In the OT AND Apocbypha. — The first point requiring attention is one of great imjiort- ance, which will have decisive significance in regard to our whole subject-matter. With the partial exception (considered later) of the Sapien- tial Books, tlie whole of the Jewish Scriptures are under the sway of religion. The ruling idea of life was conditioned by the prevalent conception of God, and the peculiar relation in which the Jewish people stood towards Him. Hence the larger portion of the discussions with which othei ethical writings have ma<le us familiar, has no place whatever in Jewish literature. Greek ethi- cal speculation busied itself with the questions of the end of life, or the ideal order of life, or the nature of virtue, or the sanction of the moral law. But to the Jewish mind all these questions were prejudged by the peculiarly close relation of religion with life. The God they worshipped was to the Jews the source and the sanction of the moral law. Their moral evolution consisted in their gradual discovery of the full meaning of their primary ethical conviction. Their notion of the content of the ethical idea varied as time went on ; their history is, in a sense, reflected in their ethical evolution. Things which at one time were thought compatible with the due worship of God, cease to be thought so ; but the general relation in which they stand to God remains un- disturbed : morality is, to them, the embodied will of God.
It follows necessarily from this that there are, roughly speaking, two, and only two, questions for the Jewish moralists. (1) What conduct does God command? (2) What conduct does God forbid? Why He ordains or prohibits one or another line of conduct does not matter to them. They are concerned only with the fact. The answers to these remoter questions may, to some extent, be revealed in the process of moral evolution, but they are not of {)rimary interest or importance. The central question is that of the actiutl content of the divine law.
It might seem, at first sight, as if this theory of the moral law must exclude a people from any marked development in ethical matters. The most cursory glance, however, at the actual facts would destroy this supposition. The law of God is adapted to various stages in the progre.is of the people, and enforces the morality characteristic of the stage at which they are. It is obvious that this must nc(es.sarily have been the ca.se. If, as the Jews believed, (iod Himself revealed the moral law to them, it must necessarily have been in terms which they could understand. It would have been idle, for instance, to promulga'e to a nation, as yet only in the tribal stage of its exist- ence, a law which assumed the existence of settled civic ideas. Thus the conviction of the special union of God with His people, and interest, in their moral life, affects the character of the evolu-