CHAPTER VII.

Close of the Feast of the Passover 313

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

The present work contains a picture of the Jewish people, in which their ecclesiastical and civil constitution, their social and domestic life are represented, as they existed at the time when the advent of the Messiah was at hand.

From his boyhood the author had been inspired, by the perusal of similar works on Pagan antiquities, with the wish to exhibit such a picture of the Jewish nation; and, encouraged by men whose opinion he valued, he had at an early period of life formed the resolution to undertake it, had sketched the general outline of his work, and even executed particular parts of it. Just at this time, however, it pleased the Disposer of events to call him from the situation of leisure in which he had hitherto been placed, to the execution of an office, whose multiplied duties left him little time for any other occupations; and he was compelled to abandon the design which he had so long cherished. It was not without pain that he resolved to make this sacrifice of an object which had long directed and animated his studies. The images which it had left in his mind recurred from time to time, and revived his former wishes. In particular, whenever he had occasion, in the discharge of his pastoral duty, to narrate the histories of the Bible, the question arose in his mind, whether it might not be possible to delineate the peculiar system of life in which these writings originated, according to the picture which they had left in his own mind, without descending to all the minutiæ of antiquarian detail? In pursuance of this thought, he has devoted his few and interrupted hours of leisure, to the work which he now offers to the indulgence of the reader, for which he hopes with the more confidence, having had such large experience of it on a former occasion.

The plan of the work is the following. A young Jew, who had been enamoured of the prevailing Grecian philosophy, has returned to the observance of the law of his fathers, at one of those important crises in life which decide the character of succeeding periods. Bent on the fulfilment of the law, which he believes it impossible to accomplish any where but in the place where the altar of Jehovah is fixed, he makes a journey from Alexandria, where he had been brought up, accompanied by his uncle, to Jerusalem, in the spring of the year 109 before the birth of Christ, remains there during the half year which included the principal religious festivals; becomes a priest; enters into the married state; and, by the guidance of Providence, and varied experience, attains to the conviction, that peace of mind is only to be found in believing in Him who has been promised for the consolation of Israel.

The plan now traced, while it offered an opportunity of delineating the progress of an interesting change in the sentiments of Helon himself, seemed also to present the means of combining with this a living picture of the customs, opinions, and laws of the Jewish people. No period of their history seemed so well adapted to the design of this work, as that of John Hyrcanus. It is about this time that the books of the Maccabees close; it is the last era of the freedom and independence of the people, whose character and institutions at the same time were so nearly developed and fixed, that very little change took place between this and the time of our Saviour. It was possible, therefore, to give a picture which, as far as relates to usages and manners, should be applicable to the times of the New Testament. By selecting this period, it was more easy to avoid the inconvenience of placing fictitious characters in contact with the real personages of history, than if the time of our Saviour had been chosen. Hyrcanus and his sons have only in one instance been brought upon the scene, and even here care has been taken to keep them as much as possible in the back-ground, to avoid mingling the individual realities of history with a series of events, which the author has invented to answer the design of his work.

It was in the last years of the long reign of Hyrcanus that the opposing sects of Sadducees and Pharisees first became conspicuous, and the one hundred and ninth year before the Christian era is the date of the destruction of Samaria. In the description of the temple, however, I have allowed myself to anticipate a little, in order to describe its magnificence in the days of Herod, whose temple was that to which our Saviour resorted. In the description of the customs of sacrifice and prayer, I have ventured to use, but with moderation, the accounts of later times.

One thing it must be allowed to the author to remark, in order to prevent the misapprehensions of those, who do not know what properly belongs to a work like the present, and that is, that he is by no means to be understood as uniformly declaring his own views; and he particularly wishes this to be borne in mind in reading the first part.[1]

Footnote 1:

The translator wishes by no means to be supposed to agree even in those opinions, which, from the manner of bringing them forward, appear to be the author’s own. The discourses of the old man of the temple with Helon, in the second volume, are evidently an anticipation of Christianity, founded upon the author’s views of the doctrines of the New Testament. Those who agree with him in these views will think it reasonable, that such anticipations of the nature and office of the Messiah should be attributed to a Jew who was piously expecting his appearance; those who do not, will perceive that the _prolepsis_ which the author has allowed himself adds nothing to the evidence of the doctrines in question. I have passed over these parts of the work generally without remark, the only authority which could have been alleged in support of them being passages of Scripture, respecting the meaning of which the Christian world is far from being unanimous in its opinion.

It is well known that the want of a lively and distinct picture of those local and national peculiarities which are presented in the Bible, revolts many from the perusal of it, and exposes others to very erroneous conceptions. It is the author’s prayer to Him, from whom these precious records have proceeded, that the present work may serve, under his blessing, to make the perusal of the Scriptures more attractive and edifying; and he hopes those who shall drink with pleasure from his humble rill, will not be satisfied without going to the fountain of living waters.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

The work which is now offered to the public, appeared in Germany in 1820, unaccompanied by notes or even references to Scripture. The author alleged, as a reason for this omission, that the majority of readers would not concern themselves about authorities, and that the few who did might easily find them. He was, however, soon convinced, by the expression of public opinion, that he had underrated the curiosity of the former class, as much as he had overrated the patience of the latter; and promised to remedy the deficiency. As the work had been partly translated into Dutch and illustrated with notes, by the Professors Vanderpalm and Clarisse, he purposed to add his own notes to theirs, when their translation should be completed. It was my original intention to have waited for the appearance of this appendix; but as four years have now elapsed, and I have been unable to hear any tidings of it from Germany, I thought it better to endeavour to supply the defect. Having no clue whatever to guide me to the sources of the author’s statements, it may happen that I have not assigned the precise authority which he had in view; and, in justice to him, the reader will not conclude, that all which is not fortified by a reference is destitute of a warrant from antiquity, but only that the passage in which it is found has not occurred to me.

The liberty which I have used with the original consists wholly in retrenchments. Of these alterations some have been made to prevent repetition and diffuseness: in a very few instances what appeared evidently fanciful or unfounded has been silently effaced.

The reader who is not acquainted with any other authority for Jewish antiquities than the Old and New Testament, will not, perhaps, be displeased to find here a brief statement of the sources whence the materials of the following work have been derived. He who chooses a distant age for the scene of such a fiction as this, and endeavours to give the form and colour of reality to the dim and broken outlines, will find himself at a loss, even in delineating the best known ages of Greece and Rome. But our author has undertaken a task of still greater difficulty. The Jews were entire strangers to those kinds of literary production, in which the living manners of a people are preserved to posterity: literature among them was devoted to higher objects than comedy, satire, and ethical description. The history of our Saviour, it is true, carries us into the very bosom of domestic life among his contemporaries; and the knowledge which we thus acquire is peculiarly valuable, from the stamp of truth which is impressed on every part of it. But if we learn much from this source, there is still more of which we are left ignorant. Next to the books of Scripture, the Antiquities and History of the Jews by Josephus, are the most authentic sources of information. Philo, occupied in pursuing the phantoms of allegorical interpretation, gives less aid than might have been expected from his voluminous writings. Among the Fathers of the Christian church, Jerome, who was long resident in Palestine, has left us, in various works, very important information respecting the geography, natural history, and customs of the country. Of the heathen writers, even the gravest and most learned so pervert and confound every thing relating to the manners and religion of the Jews, that they cannot be trusted for any thing beyond geography, and the details connected with it.

The Rabbinical writings of the Jews are chiefly occupied with that traditional law, which, in our Saviour’s time, had almost strangled, by its parasitical growth, the genuine stock of the Mosaic institutions: but they also contain much information respecting civil and religious customs, especially the ritual of the second temple. According to the Jewish doctors, there existed two kinds of law; the _written_, promulgated on Sinai, and preserved in the Mosaic books; and the _oral_, delivered at the same time,[2] but handed down, traditionally, by a succession of teachers, to the captivity; and thence from Ezra to the time of Rabbi Judah _Hakkadosh_, (the holy,) who lived about the middle of the second century after Christ. As the dispersion of the Jews had rendered the oral transmission of their learning more difficult and uncertain, he reduced the traditions of the doctors into a system, to which the name of the MISHNA (repetition) was given. It consists partly of civil and criminal laws, partly of a ritual for the great Jewish festivals; in both, the Mosaic precepts bear a very small proportion to the later additions. The Mishna itself was soon found to need commentary and supplement; and the _Gemara_ of Jerusalem was compiled by Rabbi Jochanan, and two disciples of Judah Hakkadosh, to supply its deficiencies. This collection appears to have been received as of authority by the Jews of Palestine, who cultivated Rabbinical learning in the academies of Tiberias and Jafnia. In the sixth century, Rabbi Asa, president of the school of Sora, in the Babylonian territory, where the Jews were numerous and flourishing, compiled another Gemara. The original work of the Mishna, with the addition of one or the other of these Gemaras, forms the _Talmud_ (doctrine) of Jerusalem or Babylon.[3] The Talmud is the oracle of the Jewish doctors, venerated by the greater part of them as of equal if not greater authority than the law itself; though many, as the whole sect of Karaites, deny its authority. Probably the first step towards the religious improvement of the modern Jews, must be the abandonment of the Talmud, and a return to the simplicity of the Mosaic law.

Footnote 2:

See Maimonides, Preface to the Mishna, in Surenhusius, vol. i.

Footnote 3:

Basnage, Hist. of the Jews, b. iii. c. 5-7.

Besides this great repository of their traditions, the Jews have commentaries of their Rabbins, of uncertain age, on books of Scripture, under the name of _Medraschim_; and collections of their sayings. I do not mention here their cabalistical writings; which are, evidently, too fanciful and absurd, to furnish materials to the antiquary.

After participating in the darkness of the middle ages, Jewish literature and science revived with great brilliancy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from the connection of the Jews with the Saracens of Spain, and their acquaintance with the Aristotelian philosophy. Of the learned men who arose about this time, Jarchi, Aben Ezra, and David Kimchi, are most celebrated for their grammatical and critical works: Moses Ben Maimon, or Maimonides, for the vigour of his understanding, and his knowledge of the ancient rites and ceremonies of his nation. He gave consistency and systematic form to the Jewish doctrines, and his articles are the standard of Jewish orthodoxy. The age at which these authors lived, however, prevents us from receiving them as original testimonies to any thing which concerns the state of the Jews before the destruction of their polity. The question how far Rabbinical authority can be relied on for Jewish antiquity, resolves itself at last into the credibility of those who wrote in the first five centuries after the Christian era, and especially of the Mishna and the Gemaras.

It is now pretty generally admitted, that these works are very delusive guides, in respect to the times of the Old Testament. But it might be thought, that, having been compiled at so short an interval after the destruction of Jerusalem, we might have trusted to them safely for information respecting the times of the preaching of the Gospel, and the immediately preceding period. And it cannot be denied that some advantage is to be derived from them in this way, but much less than might have been expected.[4] It is not necessary to have recourse to works, which, like the _Entdecktes Judenthum_ of Eisenmenger, have been written purposely to expose the Talmuds to contempt; it is sufficient even to consult the professed extracts of what is useful in them, such as the works of Lightfoot (a name not to be mentioned without respect and gratitude) to be convinced how large a proportion is frivolous subtlety or groundless fiction. Indulging themselves in an unbounded license of invention, to solve difficulties, or exaggerate the glories of their nation and religion, they incur the usual penalty of those who violate the truth, and are suspected of falsehood, even when they may be innocent. The rule which Schöttgenius lays down—_eligendum est quod Scripturæ Sacræ magis convenit et quod cæteris paribus aliorum antiquiorum auctoritas sequendum suaserit_—affords no guide in respect to those accounts which Scripture does not confirm, nor yet by its silence necessarily invalidate. Here an author can only follow his own judgment and feeling of probability. The reader must determine for himself, whether, in the Pilgrimage of Helon, only due weight has been given to Rabbinical authority. I have endeavoured to enable him to ascertain, by the references, what rests on this, and what on more solid ground.

Footnote 4:

“Ne credant se ex Talmude multum in antiquitatibus Hebraicis profecturos. Nam ubi Judæi, post destructionem templi, inter se adhuc disputant, quomodo hæc vel illa res suscipienda fuerit, quam tuto horum decisioni credas, qui te multo quam antea incertiorem relinquunt.” Schöttgen. Hor. Heb. ii. 804.

The descriptions given by travellers of the present manners of the people of Palestine, Syria, and Arabia, have furnished another and less fallacious means of completing the picture of Jewish life. Allied to the children of Israel, according to the testimony of Scripture and their own traditions, by a common origin, and experiencing little change from age to age, these nations still present the strongest conformity with the manners described in the Bible; nor has any thing contributed more to its illustration, than the use which modern critics have made of oriental voyages and travels. The Arab Sheikh, among his flocks and herds, recalls the very image of patriarchal times; allowing for the change which religion has made, the mourning and the festivity, the diet, dress, and habitation, of the present natives of these regions, will be found nearly what they were two thousand years ago. It is true, that we advance a step further, when, from the present state of the east, we describe what it was at this distant period, than when we merely illustrate scriptural allusions from modern oriental manners: but among the various descriptions which might be given, _that_ will be nearest to the truth which is most accordant with the known usages of eastern nations; and though this presumption can never amount to a positive proof of its accuracy, the reader is not misled, provided he is informed on what he relies. The author has also occasionally attributed some of the practices of the modern Jews to their ancestors of the Asmonean period; and, perhaps, the singular inflexibility which characterises the manners not less than the faith of this people, may justify him in so doing.

The reader may possibly think that too flattering a portrait of the Jews has been drawn in the Pilgrimage of Helon. Whoever is acquainted with an earlier work of the same author, _Die Glockentöne_, will perceive at once, that the piety, enthusiasm, and ardent feeling, the sensibility to the _religio loci_, which mark the hero of the narrative, are the characteristics of the writer’s own mind. And as every variety of temperament exists in every age of the world, there is nothing unnatural in the creation of such a character as that of Helon among the Jewish people, if it only acts and is acted upon, according to the principles and motives of the times to which it is referred. If, in the description of the national character, he has heightened its virtues, or touched its faults with a lenient hand, it must be remembered, that this was the almost inevitable consequence of that warm interest in his subject, without which he could have had no power to engage his readers’ feelings. To those who cannot be satisfied, unless the Jews are described as sunk in all the vices which mark a people for the vengeance of heaven, I would suggest how improbable it is, that the religious and moral advantages which they enjoyed should not have made them better than those whose corrupt religion, if it had any, had a pernicious influence on their morals—or that Providence should select the instruments of the moral regeneration of mankind from among a people, whose depravity equalled or exceeded that of the heathen world. Were this a proper place for entering on such a discussion, it might not be difficult to show how unjustly we identify the whole body of the people with the hypocritical Pharisees whom our Lord rebuked; or infer their ordinary character from what Josephus says of the atrocities committed by them, when stung by oppression, engaged in a desperate struggle for independence and existence, and maddened by faction and fanaticism; under the influence of which, Christian nations have manifested an equal disregard of justice and humanity.

The translator may perhaps be singular in regarding the Jewish people, even in the last days of their national independence, as objects rather of commiseration than abhorrence; but surely there can be no question, that the language in which they are perpetually spoken of must tend to retard the event, which every true Christian earnestly desires, the removal of that veil of prejudice which hides from them the evidence of the divine origin of the Gospel. Beneath the exterior appearance of passive submission, which fear and oppression have taught the Jew to assume, and the habits of sordid worldliness to which our unjust laws condemn him, lurks a deep-seated animosity against the Christian name—a name associated in his mind with the brutal outrages of fanatic mobs, the extortion and cruelty of tyrannical rulers; and though last, not least in bitterness, the harsh and contumelious language with which his nation is assailed, as if they were branded with the curse of heaven, and a perpetual memorial of its vengeance. While the feeling continues which such reproaches necessarily perpetuate, the efforts of Christians for the conversion of the Jews will probably be as fruitless as they have hitherto been. It would well become the disciples of the religion of love, to set the example of conciliation; and to renounce the use of language which is equally unfavourable in its influence on those who employ and those who endure it.

Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo!

HELON'S PILGRIMAGE

TO

JERUSALEM.