7.06. Chapter 2 - Israel's Woes Depicted
Chapter 2 Israel’s Woes Depicted
WE come now to the consideration of the second section, in which, as already stated, Israel’s present very woeful condition is depicted and used as the plea for God’s interposition and deliverance:
“O Jehovah God of Tzebaoth, How long wilt thou be angry [lit. ‘wilt thou smoke’] against the prayer of thy people?
Thou has fed them with the bread of tears, And given them tears to drink in large measure,”
Thou makest us a strife [or ‘a subject of contention’] unto our neighbours: And our enemies laugh among themselves.1
1 The word שָׁלִֽישׁ, shalish, means literally “the third part” (of some large measure). It is found elsewhere only in Isa_40:12, where it is rendered in the Authorized and Revised Versions simply “a measure.” The “measure” is probably the Ephah, the third part of which, as Delitzsch observes, though puny for the dust of the earth, is “a large measure for tears.”
Now, in reading these lines, which so truly and graphically summarise the experience of the Jewish people for so many centuries, we are first of all reminded of the fact that the Great Shepherd of Israel had purposed and provided something very different for His flock. Oh, there are green pastures prepared “upon the mountains of Israel” (Eze_34:14); there are “the waters of quietness” (Psa_23:2) flowing from “wells of salvation,” from which they might drink and be satisfied. How is it, then, that Israel has now to eat the bread of tears, and have tears in great measure for his drink? For an answer to this important question we need go no farther than Psalms 81:1-16. It is not without design that Psalms 81:1-16 immediately follows Psalms 80:1-19; for it supplies the explanation and answer to the “How long?” (Psa_80:4) and the “Why” (Psa_80:12) contained in it. The reason of Israel’s special sorrows is found in his peculiar relationship to Jehovah. The God of heaven condescended to enter into a special national covenant with this people when he brought them out of the land of bondage. Great and wonderful blessings were promised to them if they were “good and obedient” (Isa_1:19). This is how God solemnly charged and warned them:
“Hear, O My people, and I will testify unto thee;
O Israel, if you would but hearken unto Me!
There shall no strange god be in thee;
Neither shall thou worship any strange god.
I am Jehovah thy God, Who brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it.”
What He was ready to feed and satisfy them with He tells us in the last verse of that psalm:
“He should have fed them also with the fat of the wheat, With honey out of the rock, should I satisfy thee.”
“Oh that My people would hearken unto Me,”
He exclaims in yearning desire over them—
“That Israel would walk in my ways!”
“but”—He sorrowfully laments in the eleventh verse—
“My people hearkened not to My voice, And Israel would none of Me.”
Oh, how much there is included in Psalms 81:11 : “My people hearkened not: Israel would none of Me!”—it summaries Israel’s many transgressions, their stubborn unbelief and innumerable provocations of the Most High. Shall I stop to trace the beginning, progress, and climax of Israel’s disobedient and progressive apostasy? The first stage downwards was the disregard of the most solemn charge: “There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god”—which contains the keyote of the revelation given from Sinai, and the fundamental command of the decalogue.
I do not wish to dwell much on this point here, having already elsewhere1 pointed out the very humbling object-lesson which Jewish history presents in this respect to all the rest of mankind, and how it contradicts all the rest of mankind, and how it contradicts and the boasted assertions of human progress and development in relation to things spiritual and eternal.
1 See A Divine Forecast of Jewish History.
Modern so-called “progressive” Rabbis—confirmed and supported by many “modern” Christian theologians, who also no longer believe in a Divine revelation—speak boastfully as if the Jews had discovered or evolved the belief in One God. “This,” says one of the greatest of modern Jewish lights (viz., that the Jewish people “created Monotheism out of itself”), “is Israel’s imperishable merit.”1 But the very opposite is the truth. Not only did Israel not create the belief in one true and living God “out of itself,” but history testifies to the fact that Israel was naturally as prone to idolatry as any of the other Semitic peoples to whom they are related; and when left to themselves they could not even retain the knowledge of the living God after it had been divinely communicated to them. And if the light of the knowledge of God was maintained in their midst, the fact is to be ascribed, not to the “monotheistic genius” of the Jewish people, but to Divine acts and interpositions, in judgments and in mercy, of Israel’s God. Instead of claiming “imperishable merit,” as is done by modern Rabbis, Israel’s true prophets and psalmists confess with broken hearts that “to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers” (Dan_9:8); for though the God of Glory revealed Himself in our midst, and dealt with us as with no other nation, “though He commanded the clouds from above and opened the doors of heaven and rained down manna upon them to eat,” and showed them many other great and wonderful signs, “their hearts were not right with Him,” and they continuously “turned back and dealt unfaithfully like their fathers; they were turned aside like a deceitful bow. For they provoked Him to anger with their high places, and moved Him to jealousy with their graven images” (Psa_78:23-24, Psa_78:57-58).
1 “Es hat den Monotheismus in gewaltigem ‘Ringen mit Gott und Menschen’, wie die Bibel sagt, aus sich geschaffen. Das ist Israel’s unvergängliches Verdienst”—Das Judenthum, by Dr. M. Güdemann, Chief Rabbi of Vienna (p. 17); the edition from which I am translating was published in Vienna by R. Löwit in 1902. This was the beginning and the first stage in Israel’s national apostasy—the turning from God to idols. The climax was reached when, after a long-continued process of disobedience and self-hardening, and because their hearts were already alienated from God, Israel turned their backs upon Him who is “the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His person.” The Scribes and Pharisees in Christ’s time, and the majority of the Jews of the present day, would have us believe that they rejected Jesus of Nazareth because He wanted to mislead and turn them away from God and His holy law. Many of them in their ignorance sincerely believed and still believe this to be the case. But alas! this very ignorance is part of the awful consequences of Israel’s prior alienation from their heavenly Father, and from the true spirit of Moses and the prophets. No: Israel rejected Christ, not because He went counter to, or sought in any way to lead them astray from God, or because His teaching was contradictory to the Law and to the testimony which was already in their hands; but because, on the contrary, He sought to bring them back to God, and was Himself the very image of God, who as the only true Israelite, not only bore witness to the law and the prophets, but Himself magnified the Law, and fulfilled and exemplified it in His own life. How pathetic is the Gospel narrative in this respect! The self-deceived leaders of the people sought to justify their hostility to Jesus and their rejection of His claim on the ground of their zeal for God. “We have one Father, even God,” they said. But Jesus said unto them, “If God were your Father, ye would love Me; for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but He sent Me” (Joh_8:41-42). Again, they put it on the ground of their zeal for the Law; but His answer was, These very Scriptures which ye search, and for which ye profess such zeal, are “they which testify of Me.” “Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me; it is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man, therefore, that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto Me” (Joh_5:39-47; Joh_6:45).1 1 See Appendix 1—“Were the Jews Justified in Rejecting Jesus of Nazareth?” In the light of the gospel narrative and the history of Israel’s dealings with, and their attitude to, their Messiah, how solemn and full of significance is God’s complaint:
“But My people hearken not to My voice; And Israel would none of Me!” for in the rejection of Christ and in their resistance of the Spirit, Israel reached the climax of their progressive apostasy from their God. The sad and terrible consequence of it all is tersely set forth in Psalms 81:12 :
“So I gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust, And they walked in their own counsels.” So the Authorised Version reads: but the words in the original are much more forcible and striking, literally:
“So [or then] I sent them forth [or ‘cast them out’] in the stubbornness of their heart:
Let them walk [or ‘they shall walk’] in their own counsels.” This is the most terrible thing which an befall any man or nation—when God says, “Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone” (Hos_4:17), or in the words of personified Wisdom:
“They would none of my counsel;
They despised all my reroof;
Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, And be filled with their own devices” (Pro_1:30-31).
“So He sent them forth” It reminds us of the very solemn words of Hos_9:17, “My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto Him; and they will be wanderers among the nations.” And with this banishment from God’s presence, and their dispersion among the nations, began Israel’s night of weeping. What a long and dark night it has been to them! How terribly real and true have the words proved to be:
“Thou hast fed them with the bread of tears, And given them tears to drink in large measure”!
What other people under heaven have suffered and wept so much as the Jews? At the inauguration of Israel’s great and many national tribulations—at the very commencement of the prophetic period called “the times of the Gentiles”—Jeremiah, who was an eye-witness of the calamities which fell on his people at the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the first Temple by the Chaldeans, which marked the close of the first stage of Israel’s apostasy and punishment, exclaims: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow which is done unto me; wherewith Jehovah hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger.” And some five and a half centuries later, after the second stage of Israel’s national sin culminated in the rejection of Christ, which brought about the breaking-up of their national polity, and inaugurated the longer and more terrible captivity than the seventy years’ exile in Babylon, the historian Josephus, in commencing to write the history of The Jewish Wars, and particularly the final desperately heroic, but futile, death struggle with the great Roman world-power, says in his Preface: “Accordingly it appears to me that the misfortunes of all men from the beginning of the world, if they be compared with those of the Jews, are not so considerable as they were . . . this makes it impossible for me to contain my lamentation.” This was at the very beginning of our “Christian Era.” What would that historian have said if he could have foreseen the untold woes and miseries which have been heaped upon this people in the nineteen centuries which have intervened? As I write, there lies before me a rare book, written in the middle of the sixteenth century by the Jewish Rabbi and physician, Joseph ha-Kohen, who was born in Avignon in 1496, but was driven by persecution to Italy, where he died in 1575. It is a history of his people from the destruction of the second Temple down to his time. And what do you think is the title of the book? “Emek ha-Baca—‘the Valley of Tears.’ ” And the name, as he truly observes in his Preface, accurately describes its contents. “For everyone,” he says, “who will read it must do it with astonishment” (and as a Christian I must add also with shame and indignation) “in his heart, and as the tears stream down from his eyes he will be constrained to exclaim, ‘How long, O Lord; how long!’ ” It is one long martyrology, the record of a almost unbroken chain of unparalleled sufferings—a chronicle of massacres, oppressions, banishments, fiendish tortures, spoliations and degradations, which have been inflicted upon the Jews for the most part by so-called Christian nations. No wonder that another Jewish historian in Italy (Samuel Usque), who wrote a work in Portguese also early in the sixteenth century1 depicting the universal misery of his people, exclaims in his Introduction: “To which part of the world shall I turn to find healing for my wound, forgetfulness for my pain, and comfort for my heavy, unbearable sufferings? Among the riches and enjoyments of happy Asia I find myself a heavy-laden pilgrim. In sun-burnt Africa, rich with gold, I am a wretched, starving exile. And thou, Europe, my hell upon earth! What shall I say about thee? How shall I praise thee, vicious, warring Italy? Like a hungry lion hast thou fed on the torn flesh of my lambs! Ye corrupted French meadows, poisoned grass did my lambs eat on you! Proud, barbaric, mountainous Germany, thou hast thrown down and broken to pieces my young men from the top of thine Alps! Ye sweet and fresh waters of England, bitter and salt draughts did my flock drink of you! Hypocritical, cruel, and blood-thirsty Spain, ravenous hungry wolves have devoured and are still devouring my flock in thy midst. . . . It is the lot of every creature to experience change; but with Israel it is not so: his misfortune never changes, his sorrows never end.” “All peoples of the earth,” laments yet another Jewish author, Joseph Ibn Verga, in the middle of the sixteenth century, “are as one in their hatred against the Jews; all creatures in heaven and on earth are united in sworn hostility to them. Before the Jewish child can lisp, it is already followed or surrounded by hatred and scorn. We are despised as the lowest worms.”
1 The title of the work is Consolaçao as Tribulaçoens de Israel. I am translating the abstract from Professor Heman’s new and important work Die Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes, pp. 303, 304. To show that this is no mere hyperbole nor rhetoric, but literally true, I beg the reader to follow me in a summary of Jewish history among the so-called Christian nations, which—though it may form a long break in the continuous exposition of the scripture which we are considering—I feel myself constrained to include, because of the general lack of knowledge of the history of the scattered people since the destruction of the second Temple, and also because of the absence of any really satisfactory work in the English language on this most important subject.