prevail in his days, and the righteous shall be without number before him forever. "And I saw his dwelling place under the wings of the Lord of Spirits, and all the righteous are before him beautifully resplendent as lights of fire" (39: 6 f.). Elsewhere the Elect One is described sitting on a throne and so dwelling in the midst of the righteous (48: 3-5). He is said to judge Azazel and the wicked angels (55:4), and several passages might be quoted to show his office as judge in heaven.

We have before us, then, the fully developed theory that the Messiah who is to rule the coming kingdom is a superhuman person, pre-existent in heaven and only waiting for the time appointed to come from heaven and take the throne. He was created before the stars, but is kept hidden until the day of judgment. This is not so violent a hypothesis as we are at first inclined to think it. If Enoch, the antediluvian patriarch, sees all these things in vision, they must have some sort of existence in his time before they actually become real in the course of history. It is not probable that the writers asked themselves whether this was a real or an ideal pre-existence. In the later Jewish conception many things existed from eternity, or at least from the creation, which were revealed in time-the Law, for example. The book called the Secrets of Enoch declares that all souls were created in the beginning before the foundation of the world (Secrets of Enoch 23). The hypothesis of preexistence enables the author of Enoch to explain the vision of Daniel where the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven. To the oppressed people of God the thought of an angelic Messiah would be most welcome. His superhuman dignity would be a guarantee of power and permanency for his reign.

While this literature shows that the Messianic hope was cherished by a large section of the Jewish people in this period, it also shows how far the hope was from being consistent. The future glory is to be manifested in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem may be either on earth or in heaven; it may be

a new Jerusalem, a new creation, or it may be something already existing in heaven, shown to Adam, to Abraham, or to Moses. The home of the saints may be in the paradise in which Adam first dwelt, and which is either in one of the heavens or on the earth, in the far east or in the far west; or, on the other hand, the tree of life, the central object of that paradise, may be transplanted to Jerusalem (Enoch 24, 25, and 32). The place of punishment is to be below the earth and its entrance is the ill-omened Valley of Hinnom. Located thus, just under the walls of Jerusalem, it will contribute to the pleasures of the righteous, since they will be able to contrast their own happy state with that of the damned (Enoch 27, 62: 12; cf. Isaiah 66: 24). Yet the underworld is also conceived as a temporary paradise, one division of it being the place where the souls of the righteous are reserved until the resurrection. According to one view, when the righteous are raised the wicked will simply be left in this Hades. More general was the idea of a judgment for all men. The Messianic time is in some cases thought to last only a thousand years, during which the righteous will enjoy material good, will possess land of great fruitfulness, will sow seed that will increase a thousandfold, and will beget a thousand children (Enoch 10: 17-22). The two monsters, behemoth and leviathan, will be slain and given to the righteous for food, the earth will bring forth a thousandfold, each vine will have a thousand branches, each branch will have a thousand clusters, each cluster a thousand grapes, each grape will yield a cor of wine, and the manna will again fall from heaven so that no one need hunger (Apocalypse of Baruch 29). Similar millennial dreams were cherished in the Church, as we well know. They show the power which the apocalypses exercised over the minds of those who sighed for the redemption of Israel.

CHAPTER XIX

THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE

By common consent the book of Psalms represents the culmination of Israelitic religion. This is attested by the New Testament and by the place which the book has taken and still holds in the Christian Church. It is the culmination not only in tone but also in time, being one of the latest, if not the latest, of the Old Testament books. The tradition which ascribes, or which seems to ascribe, a large number of the poems to David as author is now generally given up. It is as certain as anything can be that the collection contains Maccabean compositions, and the final redaction of the book took place not long before the beginning of our era. This being so, it is not probable that any portion of it can be older than the Exile, and for our purpose it is safest to see in it the expression of Jewish piety of the latest period. That the book as we have it is made up from a variety of sources is evident on the surface. Poems similar in tone to the Psalms are found in some of the prophetic books and must be judged to be late insertions in those books.2

The Psalter is a book of devotion. It is often called the hymn-book of the second temple, but this is somewhat misleading. Some parts of it seem to have been contributed by the musical guilds (those ascribed to the sons of Korah, to Asaph, or Jeduthun), and the ascriptions of praise which fill the last section of the book are appropriate for the public service. But these make up only a fraction of the

1 The most convincing example is Psalm 74.

2 Examples are Isaiah 12 and 25: 1-5, the psalm of Habakkuk, already discussed, and several passages in Chronicles.

book. Many of the poems are distinctly petitions of the individual, and we must think of the book as one of those compendia of prayers such as our fathers often used for their private devotions. One of the most widely used of the Psalms ends with the petition: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, Yahweh my Rock and my Redeemer" (19:15). The sentence indicates that the preceding verses had been the murmured meditation of the reader in the time set apart for prayer. We see also that the long panegyric of the Law (Psalm 119) can never have been a part of the temple liturgy, and must have been composed as an alphabet of loyalty by a devotee of Israel's legal system. The believer was accustomed to engage in prayer three times a day, as one of the poems tells us (55: 18), and the use of a written guide to thought by those who felt unable to give extemporary expression to their aspirations cannot surprise us.

Although the collection had no direct connection with the temple service, there is no reason to doubt that it was used in the synagogues. The synagogue was originally the school in which the people were taught the Law. But people who gathered for instruction in religion were led to engage in common prayer, especially at times when the temple was inaccessible. The Psalms being expressions of the desires, beliefs, perplexities, and aspirations of the pious naturally suggested themselves as the appropriate formulæ for such common worship. The much-debated question of the ego of the Psalter is answered by this reflection. The most original of the Psalms are the expression of individual experience and individual emotion. But the communion of saints is communion in just these experiences. Hence came the adoption of these compositions for the public service. Then came the time when the more gifted members of the community, conscious of the common faith, ventured to compose psalms which should utter the faith, joy, or contrition which were shared by all. It is this which gives the book its value; it is the expression of a piety which was

shared by a considerable number of men whose situation was the same.

The majority of the Psalms are not didactic, though there are a few which may be so classed. The great majority are expressions of the religious feeling. They are They are "contemplative or intuitive, using the religious imagination or fancy rather than the logical faculty and the reasoning powers." 1 But since the feelings expressed imply certain beliefs we have no difficulty in ascertaining, at least in outline, the theology of the book. First of all, of course, Yahweh God of Israel is the God of the universe and the only God. For the most part this is so thoroughly assumed that the gods of the nations are not alluded to at all. Where reference is made to them it is to emphasise their impotence. It is, indeed, said that all the gods cast themselves down before him (977), but the reference may be to the angelic satraps of which we had evidence in the book of Daniel. The assurance that the gods of the nations are mere silver and gold, the work of men's hands, reads like an echo of DeuteroIsaiah (115:3-7). Yet, that the believer was tempted at times to pay some sort of reverence to these other alleged divinities is indicated by the energetic rejection of such a thought occasionally expressed (16 : 1-4).

It is the believer's comfort that Yahweh is all-powerful: "Our God is in the heavens; he has done whatever he pleased" (1153). A well-known poem emphasises the omnipresence as well as the omnipotence of Yahweh: "If I ascend to heaven thou art there; if I make my bed in Sheol thou art there; if I take the wings of the dawn and alight in the uttermost part of the sea, even there would thy hand lead me and thy right hand hold me" (139: 7-10). The older theology had not risen to the thought that Yahweh was present in the dark realms of the dead; even some of the Psalmists think that the shades of the departed are no longer before him; but our author reserves nothing from the divine omniscience.

1 Briggs, Commentary on the Psalms (International Critical Commentary), I, p. xcvi.