In order to lay down a true plan of the Hebrew government, it will be necessary to inquire whether, besides the common ends of government--the protection of the life, liberty, property, and happiness of the governed--the lawgiver had any special views in its institution. If so, the government would naturally be adjusted to those ends; and it can hardly be understood, without a knowledge of the particular views, which it was intended to answer. Now it is certain that such special designs entered into the mind of the Jewish lawgiver and modified his system of government.
By the free choice of the people, Jehovah was made the civil head of the Hebrew state. Thus the law-making power and the sovereignty of the state were, by the popular suffrage, vested in him. It is on this account that Josephus and others after him have called the Hebrew government a theocracy. Theocracy signifies a divine government. The term is justly applied to the Mosaic constitution. Yet there is danger of being misled by it, and thence of falling into error respecting the true nature and powers of the Hebrew government. It may be too broadly applied. There was a strong infusion of the theocratic element in the Hebrew constitution. Still it was but an element in the government, and not the whole of the government. In other words, the Hebrew government was not a pure theocracy. It was a theocracy, but a theocracy in a restricted sense. Every student of the Hebrew history knows that the Hebrew people, like other nations, had their civil rulers, men who exercised authority over other men, and were acknowledged and obeyed as lawful magistrates.
What, then, was the true province of the theocracy? What were its leading objects? These objects, as I conceive, without excluding others, were chiefly two. One was to teach mankind the true science of civil government. It corresponds with the goodness of God in other respects, that he should make a special revelation on this subject. I hold it to have been an important part of the legislation of the Most High, as the lawgiver of Israel, to show how civil authority among men should be created, and how it should be administered, so as best to promote the welfare and happiness of a nation, and also how the relations between rulers and ruled should be adjusted and regulated. But another object of the theocratic feature of the Hebrew government, and the leading one undoubtedly, was the overthrow and extirpation of idolatry. The design was, first, to effect a separation between the Israelites and their idolatrous neighbors, and, secondly, to make idolatry a crime against the state, that so it might be punishable by the civil law, without a violation of civil liberty. A fundamental purpose of the Mosaic polity was the abolition of idolatrous worship, and the substitution in its place, and the maintenance, of true religion in the world. The only agency adequate to the production of this result, as far as human wisdom can see, was this very institution of the Hebrew theocracy.
The design of the present chapter is to examine and unfold the true nature and bearing of this element of the Hebrew constitution.
In Exodus 19:4-6, we find this remarkable and important record. God there addresses the Israelites thus: "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Now, therefore, if ye will hear my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people; for all the earth is mine, and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation."
The nature of this covenant is still more clearly disclosed in a further account of it, in the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy. "Ye stand this day," says Moses in an address to his countrymen, "your captains of your tribes, your elders and your officers, and all the men of Israel; that ye should enter into covenant with Jehovah thy God, and into his oath that he maketh with thee this day, that he may establish thee this day for a people unto himself (for ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt, and how we came through the nations that ye passed by, and ye have seen their abominations and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them); lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away from Jehovah our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations." Here we have what Lowman, not inaptly, calls the original contract of the Hebrew government. Two principles constitute the sum of it; viz. (1) the maintenance of the worship of one God, in opposition to the prevailing polytheism of the times; and (2) as conducive to this main end, the separation of the Israelites from other nations, so as to prevent the formation of dangerous and corrupting alliances.
Without stopping to inquire critically into the meaning of the several expressions here employed, the general sense of the transaction is plainly to this effect: If the Hebrews would voluntarily receive Jehovah for their king, and would honor and worship him as the one true God, in opposition to all idolatry, then, though God, as sovereign of the world, rules over all the nations of the earth, he would govern the Hebrew nation by laws of his own framing, and would bless it with a more particular and immediate protection.
This view is confirmed by the testimony of St. Paul, if bishop Warburton has correctly interpreted a passage in his letter to the Galatians.1 Speaking of the law of Moses, the apostle says, "It was added because of transgressions." It was added. To what was it added? To the patriarchal religion of the unity, says the learned prelate. To what end? Because of transgressions, that is, according to the same authority, the transgressions of polytheism and idolatry, into which the rest of mankind were already absorbed, and the Jews themselves were hastening apace.
To this agrees the opinion of Maimonides, the most learned and judicious of the Hebrew doctors. He observes that the first intention of the Mosaic law, as is clearly evident from many parts of the Scriptures, was to eradicate idolatry, and to obliterate the memory of it, and of those who were addicted to it; to banish everything that might lead men to practice it, as pythons, soothsayers, diviners, enchanters, augurs, astrologers, necromancers, etc.; and to prevent all assimilation to their practices. He assigns this general reason for many of the laws, that they were made to keep men from idolatry--incantations, divinations, soothsaying, passing through the fire, and the like.
Idolatry had now reached its most gigantic height, and spread its broad and deadly shadow over the earth. To preserve the doctrine of the unity, in the midst of a polytheistic world, was the fundamental design of the Mosaic polity. To this all other purposes, however important in themselves, or useful in their general action, were both subordinate and subservient. If this were a design worthy the wisdom and goodness of God, none of the means adapted to promote it can be beneath his contrivance, or can, in the least degree, derogate from the dignity and perfection of his nature.
This single observation sweeps away at once the foundation of most of the silly ridicule, with which infidels have amused themselves in their disquisitions on these venerable institutes. Statutes, which at first sight, and considered apart from their true relations and intentions, seem frivolous, and unworthy the wisdom and majesty of God, assume quite a different air, and appear in a light altogether new, when viewed as necessary provisions against the danger of idolatry.
Let me illustrate this observation with a few examples. In the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus2, we find the following law: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard." This law has called forth many a sneer from men, who, without any remarkable claim to such a distinction, arrogate to themselves the exclusive title of free thinkers. But to those who really think with freedom and candor, it will appear a direction, not only proper, but important, when it is known that it was aimed against an idolatrous custom, which was extensively prevalent, when the law was given. Herodotus says that the Arabians cut their hair round in honor of Bacchus, who is represented as having worn his in that manner, and that the Macians, a people of Libya, cut their hair so as to leave a rounded tuft on the top of the head, just as the Chinese do at the present day. Bochart, cited by Patrick, notes that the Idumaeans, Moabites, Ammonites, and other inhabitants of Arabia Deserta, are called "circumcised in the corners," that is, of the head. The hair was much used in divination among the Greeks. Homer represents it as a common custom for parents to dedicate the hair of their children to some god, which, when they came to manhood, was cut off, and offered to the deity. In accordance with this custom, Achilles, at the funeral of Patroclus, cut off his golden locks, which his father had dedicated to the river god Sperchius, and cast them into the flood. Virgil represents the topmost lock of hair as sacred to the infernal gods. Idolatrous priests, ministers of a false religion, made the mode of cutting the hair and beard, forbidden by Moses, essential to the acceptable worship of the gods, and efficacious in procuring the several blessing prayed for by the worshippers. It was to eradicate idolatry, which was, so to speak, the hinge on which the whole law turned, that Moses introduced this prohibitory statute into his code.
In the twenty-third chapter of Exodus,3 the following statue occurs: "Thou shalt not seethe (boil) a kid in his mother's milk." Dr. Clarke thinks that the sole design of this law was to inculcate a lesson of humanity. It is probable, however, that it was directed against an ancient custom of idolatry. Dr. Cudworth cites a manuscript comment of a Karaite Jew on this place, to the effect that the ancient heathen were accustomed, when they had gathered in all their fruits, to take a kid, and boil it in the dam's milk, and then, in a magical way, to sprinkle with it their trees, fields, gardens, and orchards, thinking thereby to make them more fruitful. Spencer has shown that the same idolatrous custom, prompted by a similar motive, prevailed among the ancient Zabii.
A similar reason there was for the statute, which forbade the wearing of "garments mingled of linen and woolen."4 Maimonides informs us that he found it enjoined in old magical books that the idolatrous priests should clothe themselves in robes of linen and woolen mixed together, for the purpose of performing their religious ceremonies. A divine virtue was attributed to this mixture. It was supposed that it would make their sheep produce more wool, and their fields better harvest.
On the same ground rested the law, which enjoined that "the woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment."5 Maimonides found it commanded in the books of the idolaters that men, in the worship of Venus, the Astarte or Ashtaroth of the Phenicians, should wear the dress of women, and that women, in the worship of Mars, the Moloch of the East, should put on the armor of men. Macrobius cites the old Greek author Philocorus, as saying, concerning the Asiatics, that, when they sacrificed to their Venus, the men were dressed in women's apparel, and the women in men's to denote that she was esteemed by them both male and female. It was a common practice of idolatry to confound the sexes of the gods, making the same deity sometimes a god, and sometimes a goddess. The Cyprians represented their Venus with a beard and scepter, and of masculine proportions, but dressed as a woman. The Syrians worshipped her under the form of a woman, attired as a man. At Rome, they had both a male and female Fortune, also, as Servius and Lactantius tell us, an armed Venus. This doctrine of a community of sexes in their gods led the idolaters to confound, as far as possible, their own sex, in their worship of them. Hence the custom, so widely diffused, of men and women wearing a habit different from that of their sex, in performing religious rites. Julius Firmicus describes this manner of worship as common among the Assyrians and Africans. From them it passed into Europe. It was practiced in Cyprus at Coos, at Argos, at Athens, and other places in Greece. At Rome, it does not appear ever to have become a common practice, but we read of Clodius dressing himself as a woman, and mingling with the Roman ladies in the feast of the Bona Dea.
The law which prohibited the sowing of a field with mixed seeds6 was based on a like reason. It is true that Michaelis and Dr. Clarke regard this prohibition as simply a prudential maxim of agriculture, designed to make the Israelites careful to have their seed as pure as possible, and so to prevent the evils of negligent and slovenly farming. More reasonable appears the opinion of Maimonides, Spencer, and Patrick, who regard the statute in question as directed against idolatry, the very name and memory of which the Mosaic law sought to blot out and destroy. Maimonides interprets Leviticus 19:19 as forbidding the grafting of one species of tree into another, and says that the prohibition was designed to guard the Israelites against a most abominable end corrupting practice of idolatry. The Zabii performed this kind of grafting, especially of olives into citrons, as a religious rite, accompanying it, at the moment of insertion with the most indecent actions. Dr. Spencer observes that it was a rite of idolatry to sow barley and dried grapes together. By this action the idolaters consecrated their vineyards to Ceres and Bacchus, and expressed a dependence on these deities for their fruitfulness. It was, in effect, a renunciation of the care and blessing of the true God, and a declaration of their hope in the favor of idol gods. Bishop Patrick well remarks that, if the Israelites had followed this custom, it would have made the corn and the grapes that sprang up from such seed, impure, because polluted by idolatry.
These laws, and others which infidelity has dared to reproach and ridicule as frivolous, did the divine wisdom enact, in order to eradicate idolatry, and establish the fundamental truths of the existence and unity of the living God. The design of them was, to keep the Israelites from walking in the ordinances and manners of the nations, which were cast out before them.7 And to this end they were well adapted. It was essential, that the idolatrous ceremonies of the gentiles should be prohibited, because, if they had been permitted, they could not fail to lead to idolatry.
We find a very remarkable law in Leviticus 17:1-7. It forbids, even on pain of death, the killing of any animal for food, during the abode of the Israelites in the wilderness, unless it was at the same time brought to the altar, and offered to the Lord. This certainly appears, at first view, not only harsh and rigorous, but even unjust and tyrannical. But it was aimed against idolatry, which as we shall soon see, was treason in the Hebrew state, and therefore justly punishable with death. The statute is thus translated by Michaelis: "Whoever among the Israelites killeth an ox, sheep, or goat, either within or without the camp, and bringeth it not before the convention-tent, to him it shall be accounted bloodguiltiness; he hath shed blood, and shall be rooted out from among his people; and this, in order that the children of Israel may bring to the door of the convention-tent their offerings which they have hitherto made in the field, and give them unto the priest, to be slain as feast offerings in honor of Jehovah; that his priest may sprinkle the blood on the altar of Jehovah, and burn the fat as an offering perfume in honor of him; and that no man may any more make offerings to satyrs, running after them with idolatrous lust." "The reason and design of this law," observes the same writer, "we have no need to conjecture; for Moses himself expressly mentions it. Considering the propensity to idolatry, which the people brought with them from Egypt, it was necessary to take care lest, when any one killed such animals as were usual for sacrifices, he would be guilty of superstitiously offering them to an idol. This precaution was the more reasonable, because, in ancient times, it was so very common to make an offering of the flesh it was intended to eat. And hence arose a suspicion, not very unreasonable, that whoever killed animals, usually devoted to the altar, offered them of course; and, therefore, Moses enjoined them not to kill such animals otherwise than in public, and to offer them all to the true God; that so it might be out of their power to make them offerings to idols, by slaughtering them privately; and under the pretense of using them for food." This law was expressly repealed on the entrance of the nation into the promised land,8 when the enforcement of it would have become a hardship and a tyranny.
There is a part of the Mosaic code to which I must call the reader's attention in this connection; I mean that which concerns clean and unclean meats. The law upon this point has ever been most open to the ridicule of unbelievers. It descends to so minute a detail, that men, ignorant of its true nature and end, have, on account of its apparent unfitness to engage the concern of God, hastily concluded against its divine original. But if they would but take the trouble to reflect that the purpose of separating one people from the contagion of universal idolatry was a design not unworthy of the governor of the universe, they would see the brightest marks of divine wisdom in an institution which took away from that people the very grounds of all commerce, whether of trade or friendship, with foreign nations. Doubtless the design of this institution, as of most others in the Mosaic system, was manifold. Among the ends to be answered by it, a not unimportant one was to furnish the chosen tribes a code of wholesome dietetics. That considerations of this nature entered into the legislator's mind, is the unanimous opinion of the best interpreters, both Jews and Christians. Maimonides labors, with great zeal and learning, to prove the correctness of this view of the law. Dr. Adam Clarke speaks of the animals denominated unclean as affording a gross nutriment, often the parent of scorbutic and scrofulous disorders, and of those called clean as furnishing a copious and wholesome nutriment, and free from all tendency to generate disease. M. de Pastoret, a celebrated French writer, notices the constant attention of Moses to the health of the people as one of the most distinguishing traits in his character as a legislator. The flesh of the prohibited animals, that of the swine especially, was certainly calculated to aggravate, if not to produce, that shocking malady, the leprosy, which was endemic in the East, and prevailed, to a frightful extent, among the inhabitants of Palestine. Purposes of a moral nature also entered, beyond all question, into the general design of the law. The distinction of meats tended to promote the moral improvement of the Israelites by impressing their minds with the conviction that as they were a "peculiar," so they ought to be a "holy nation," by prohibiting the eating of flesh whose gross and feculent nature might stimulate vicious propensities, and by symbolizing the dispositions and conduct to be encouraged and cultivated, or to be abhorred and avoided. Dr. Townley cites, as concurring in this view, Levi Barcelona, Eusebius, Origen, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and others.
But, though this law aimed to promote the health and morals of the Hebrews, such considerations did not exhaust the scope and intention of it. Its leading design was to counteract idolatry, by separating the Israelites from their idolatrous neighbors, and so preventing the infection of their example in religion and manners. This opinion does not rest on mere conjecture; nor even on the basis of logical deduction from admitted premises. The main intention of the law is unequivocally declared in the twentieth chapter of Leviticus9: "Ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you; ... ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean; ... and ye shall be holy unto me." The wisdom of this provision, considering the end in view, is most admirable. "Intimate friendships," observes a sagacious writer, "are in most cases formed at table; and with the man with whom I can neither eat nor drink, let our intercourse in business be what it may, I shall seldom become as familiar as with him, whose guest I am, and he mine. If we have, besides, from education, an abhorrence of the food which each other eats, this forms a new obstacle to closer intimacy. Nothing more effectual could possibly be devised to keep one people distinct from another. It causes the difference between them to be ever present to the mind, touching, as it does, upon so many points of social and every day contact. It is far more efficient, in its results, as a rule of distinction, than any difference in doctrine or worship, that men could entertain. It is a mutual repulsion, continually operating. The effect of it may be estimated from the fact that no nation, in which a distinction of meats has been enforced as part of a religious system, has ever changed its religion."
It is perfectly evident from the history of the Israelites that their entire isolation from other nations was the only means, save a miraculous control of their understanding and will, of abolishing idolatry among them. Polytheism was then the universal religion of mankind; and the Jews, as Michaelis has observed, often appear to have had their heads turned, and to have been driven, as if by a sort of frenzy, to the belief and worship of many gods.
Yet this circumstance, strange as it now appears, when duly considered, forms no just ground even of wonder, much less of any supercilious self-complacency on our part. Opinions are extremely infectious, as we ourselves have but too many proofs, in the thousand extravaganzas of the times. Let us not flatter ourselves, that, had we lived then, we should have been superior to the most absurd and besotted follies. Even Solomon, a learned man and a philosopher, to say nothing of his inspiration, incredible as it seems to us, built idol temples, and sacrificed to strange gods. The Jews in our day are exposed to a similar influence from Christianity, which is powerfully felt by them. Their peculiarities are invaded by Christian institutions and manners. In our country, for example, the festival of Christmas is extensively observed by them, though it is, strictly speaking, no more a part of their religion or manners, than the festival of Baal-peor. I was myself once invited to the celebration of this festival in a Jewish family. On my venturing to call the attention of my host to the incongruity of such an observance by a Jew, be admitted it, and added that he had said the same thing to his children that very morning, when they had asked him for Christmas presents. Their reply to him was, "that all children received presents that day, and they wanted them as well." This conversation let much light into my mind on the defection to idolatry of the ancient Israelites.
Another point. Those who wonder at frequent lapses of this people, forget that idolatry did not consist simply in the worship of those "dead things called gods of gold and silver," or of "some vile beast laid over with vermilion set fast in a wall." On the contrary, idolatry touched all the infirmities of the human heart. The splendid festival of the idol worshipper veiled the most voluptuous practices, and initiated into the most infamous mysteries. The heart of the Israelite was of flesh, sensual and carnal, like that of other men. Idolatry was an appeal to his susceptibility of sensual impressions and pleasures. It was a stealth into dark and voluptuous rites. It offered a ready ailment to the secret and wavering passions of the rebellious Hebrews. Hence their frequent lapses into the vile rites of their idolatrous neighbors, despite the clear proofs, with which they had been favored, of the unity and sovereignty of the divine being. That madness of debauchery which was exhibited in the city of Gibeah10 reveals the true source of so obstinate an attachment to the idolatry, which consecrated such vices.
The idolatry of the ancient Israelites had, moreover, this material circumstance of mitigation. They never, at the very height of their polytheistic madness, formally renounced the worship of Jehovah. The follies of idolatry are endless, and among them a leading one was the belief in what Warburton calls "gentilitial and local gods." The former accompanied the nations, by whom they were worshipped, in all their migrations; the latter were immovable, fixed to the spots where they were adored, or, as the learned prelate has quaintly expressed it, "the one class were ambulatory, the other stationary."
Those principles led to an intercommunity of worship, so that the adoption and worship of a new deity was by no means looked upon as a necessary renunciation of those worshipped before. Thus it is recorded of the mixed rabble of idolaters, with whom the king of Assyria, after the conquest and removal of the ten tribes, had peopled Samaria, that "they feared Jehovah, and served their own gods."11 So also Sophocles makes Antigone say to her father, that "a stranger should both venerate and abhor those things, which are venerated and abhorred in the city where he resides." Celsus gives, as a reason for such complaisance, the doctrine that the several parts of the world were, from the beginning, parceled out to several powers, each of whom had his own peculiar allotment and residence. It was the same idea that led Plato to adopt and advocate the maxim that nothing ought ever to be changed in the religion we find established in a country.
In accordance with this principle, the Israelites combined the worship of idols with the worship of the true God, who, in amazing condescension, assumed the title of a tutelary local God, and chose Judaea as his peculiar regency. Thus, when the people "made a calf in Horeb,"12 it was evidently designed as a representative of the God who had wrought deliverance for them; for Aaron proclaimed a feast to Jehovah, not to Isis or Osiris. So Jeroboam, when he set up the golden calves at Dan and Bethel,13 does not give the slightest intimation of a formal intention to renounce the worship of Jehovah. And Jehu, one of his successors, while he still persists in the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that is, in the worship of the calves, actually boasts of being a zealot for Jehovah.14 Instances of the like nature are scattered throughout the Old Testament Scriptures; and they prove conclusively, as Warburton has observed, that "the defection of Israel did not consist in rejecting Jehovah as a false god, or in renouncing the law of Moses as a false religion; but in joining foreign worship and idolatrous ceremonies to the ritual of the true God. To this they were stimulated, as by various other motives, so especially by the luxurious and immoral rites of paganism."
