The Maccabaean

[The writer of the following article was formerly associate professor of Semitic languages at the University of California, and is a member of the faculty of the Hebrew Union College, of Cincinnati. He is the son of Rabbi Isaac Margolis, and was born in Wilna in 1886. He was educated privately and in the schools of his native town, at the Leibnitz gymnasium of Berlin, and received his degree of doctor of philosophy from Columbia University in 1891. He is the author of an elementary text book of Hebrew Accidence and "The Theological Aspect of Reformed Judaism," in the Jewish Quarterly Review. He has hitherto been merely a sympathizer with the nationalist movement. "The Message of Moses" gives a hint of a firmer belief in the principles of nationalism in Jewish life.]

THOSE of us who have familiarized ourselves with the newer Biblical criticism of the last five years have learned that the sacred writers, though they are acquainted with the ancient myths and frequently borrow from them poetic images, characteristically divest the received figures and ideas of their mythological coloring; on the one hand by ethicizing them; that is, on the one hand by translating them into the language of moral ideals, and on the other by combining them with historical persons in Israel or with the nation itself. It may be said that the difference between the Christian attitude towards mythology and the Jewish consists in this, that Christianity transformed it into metaphysics, while in Judaism it became history.

Thus, to mention but one example, the pre-existent celestial Man of Oriental mythology became in Christianity the pre-existent and eternal Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, while in Judaism he developed into the Messiah, a national hero and a moral regenerator of his race, a most concrete personality who is to appear at a definite point in history. And so it fared with the mythological conception of the world- year and of the world-periods, each with its own new-born God as its ruler. The idea of the everlasting struggle between chaos and cosmos, the titanie dragon and the conquering god, destruction and creation, the evil and the good, which underiies the conception of the world-epochs, was utilized by the sacred writers to portray the struggle between Israel and the world; the world-epschs became periods in the formation and in the career of the nation; and the new-born god of heathenism the One God revealing Himself ın a progressive line, or, in the language of our own day, “proceeding from an indefinite, incoherent homegeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.” _

The God who, according to the Book of Genesis, made the covenant with Adam and Noah, was Elohim,—E’chim, an abstract eollective, as every beginner in Semitic grammar knows. To the concepts “word.” “man,” each still an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, corresponds the equally indefinite concept FElohim. representinz the sum total of divine energy, undifferentiated, unlimited in poteneies and therefore limited in effeetive power. A humanity roaming over the earth in hordes, worships Elohim, that ubiquitous and