Chapter XLV. Divine Retribution: Reward and Punishment.

1. The feeling of equity is deeply rooted in human nature, demanding reparation for every wanton wrong and yielding recognition to every benevolent act. In fact, upon this universal principle is based all justice and to a certain extent all morality. Judaism of every age compresses this demand of the religious and moral nature of man into the doctrine: God rewards the good and punishes the evil. This doctrine, which is the eleventh of Maimonides’ articles of faith, constitutes the underlying presumption of all the Biblical narratives as well as of the prophetic threats and warnings and those of the Mosaic law, in so far as earthly success and prosperity were regarded as the rewards of God and earthly misfortune and misery as His punishments. In the same degree, however, as experience contradicted this doctrine, and as examples multiplied of wicked persons revelling in prosperity and innocent ones laboring under adversity and woe, it became necessary to defer the divine retribution more and more to the future—at first to a future on earth and later to one in the world to come, until finally it developed into a pure spiritual conception in full accord with a higher ethical view of life.

2. As long as in the primitive process of law the family or the clan was held responsible for the crime of the individual, ancient Israel also adhered to the idea that “God visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation,” as Jeremiah still did(946) in full accord with the second commandment. It was in a far later stage that the rabbis interpreted the words “of those who hate Me” in the sense of individual responsibility.(947) Only in accordance with the Deuteronomic law which says: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin,”(948) did the religious consciousness rebel against the thought that a later generation should suffer for the sins of its ancestors, and hence the popular adage arose, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge.”(949) It is the prophet Ezekiel who refutes once and for all the idea of a guilt transmitted to children and consequently of hereditary sin and punishment, insisting on the doctrine that personal responsibility alone determines divine retribution.(950) But here a new element affects divine retribution. God’s long-suffering and mercy do not desire the immediate punishment, the death of the sinner. He should be given time to return to a better mode of life.(951)

But the great enigma of human destiny, which vexes the author of the seventy-third Psalm and that of the book of Job, still presses for a better solution. It is true that the popular belief and popular legends which are preserved in post-Biblical writings as well, insisted on a justice which requites “measure for measure.”(952) Still insight into actual life does not confirm the teaching of the popular philosophy that the “righteous will be requited in the earth” and that “evil pursueth sinners.”(953) The unshakeable belief in the justice of God had to find another solution for life’s antinomies, and was forced to reach out for another world in which the divine righteousness would find its complete realization.

3. Biblical Judaism with few exceptions recognized only the present world and the subterranean world of shadows, a view preserved in its essentials by Ben Sira and the Sadducees, who were subsequently declared heretics. In contrast to them Pharisaic or Rabbinic Judaism teaches a resurrection after death for a life of eternal bliss or eternal torment, according as the divine judgment finds one righteous and another wicked. We may leave aside the consideration that the first impulse toward a Jewish belief in resurrection came from the non-fulfillment of the national hope, wherefore it was always bound up with the soil of the Holy Land, as will be seen in