We find, then, that human speculation had a great function to perform in so acting upon OT dogma as to soften and widen it in the direction of the larger truths of the perfect revelation in Christ. This revelation was certainly the more sop! received and apprehended that the Greeks had lived and thought. The contribution of the thinkers of the West to the universal religion was their philosophical culture and spirit. That, joined to the sacred depository of truth that composed the faith of the Hebrews, went to form a religion wide enough for every section of humanity. It wanted only the material force of Rome to fuse the nations into the outward and political union that was to consolidate the deeper union which the interchange of spiritual thought and feeling had already in great measure brought about.
3. Decay of the older Hebraism. — If, moreover, in the later canonical books we already find traces of the influx of foreign influences on the one hand, we also discover signs of the decay of pure Hebraism on the other. In particular, we can discern in Ezekiel and Zechariah distinct traces of the pro- cess by which the old supremacy of the prophet passed first into the hands of the priest, and ‘sub- sequently into those of the scribe, the spiritual ancestor of the NT Pharisee. For instance, it is very significant that in the fifth vision of Zechariah the two ‘anointed ones’ who jointly sustain the spiritual life of Israel are the civil and priestly heads of the nation, and that the prophet is accorded no place by their side. Quite foreign, too, to the older prophecy is the way in which Zechariah introduces mediators to bridge the dis- tance between men and Jahweh, who is conceived as reigning in the remote heaven and maintaining intercourse with the world through the medium of invisible messengers. In Malachi we detect not only a certain scholasticism of style that is new, but also, as contrasted with Isaiah and the other great prophets, a tincture of the legalistic spirit (44) which was destined to become so strong in the near future. ‘Joel starts, like any older prophet,
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from the facts of his own day, but these hurry him at once into apocalypse ; he calls, as thoroughly as any of his predecessors, to repentance, but under the imminence of the day of the Lord, with its supernatural terrors, he mentions no special sin and enforces no single virtue. The civic and per- sonal ethics of the earlier prophets are absent. In the Greek period, the oracles, now numbered from the ninth to the fourteenth chapters of the Book of Zechariah, repeat to aggravation the ex- ulting revenge of Nahum and Obadiah, without the strong style or the hold upon history which the former exhibits, and show us prophecy still further enwrapped in apocalypse.’* That the ceremonial had now taken precedence of the moral and the spiritual is also clear from a comparison of the historical books of this period with those of earlier times. The Chronicler is concerned chiefly about the outward holiness of Israel, and knows nothing of the ethical earnestness of the older prophets. In the Apocryphal literature of the Gr. period we see the spirit of Pharisaic Judaism alto- gether in the ascendant.
4. The foregoing considerations supply us with a convenient basis for the classification of the Apocrypha. They range themselves into three classes according to the national influences under which they were composed, and it will be im- portant for our present inquiry to view them in that connexion, bearing in mind, of course, that no classification of this sort can be absolutely exhaus- tive, and that traces of Pers. influence, ¢.g., may be met with in books prevailingly Gr. or Pal. in their origin, and vice versd. +
(1) The Persian-Palestinian books. These are characterized chiefly by their deep-seated horror of idolatry; by the extraordinary value they attach to alms-giving and other works of bene- volence ; by a very elaborate doctrine of angels, and especially of demons; by the prominence they give to the miraculous; by a distinct doc- trine of immortality, and indications of belief in a future judgment; by the doctrines of the mediation of the saints and the efficacy of prayers for the dead ; and by the sure hope of the resur- rection of the just. To this class belong Tobit, Baruch, 2 Mac., and the Additions to Daniel. Here it will be observed, on the one hand, what a curious deviation there is in some particulars from OT doctrine, and, on the other, how marked an approximation there is on some other points towards the NT position.
(2) The pure Palestinian books, viz. Sirach, 1 Maceabees, and possibly Judith. These are dis- tinguished by their keen attachment to Judaism, as seen in the way in which they magnify the Law, and celebrate the praises of Zion and the temple services; by the much smaller place given to the miraculous ; by their defective ideas about a future life, the only immortality known to them being apparently that of being remembered; by their silence concerning the resurrection ; and by their crude notions with respect to a Divine retributive judgment. Here we are in contact with the cen- tral stream of Judaism, and hence find no such decided deviations from OT doctrine as in those books written under Persian influence. There is, however, as might be expected, also less of real development towards NT positions. The Pharisaic party, we know, were dominant in Palestine, and did what they could to prevent foreign influences from being introduced. There was thus less vio- lent collision between opposing elements, and hence less pronounced results were produced both in the