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Joel and others — expressed in the famous lines:
The Lord shall judge between nations,
He shall decide between many peoples;
And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
And they shall learn war no more.
As I had occasion to write in my book Ancient Israel, “Read
wistfully, this majestic passage might be construed, as it so often
has been, to imply a desire for the brotherhood of man and for
universal peace on earth. In hard fact, the context precludes this
sentimental interpretation. Isaiah and Micah rigidly predicate
any such peace on the triumph of Israel; ‘Out of Zion shall go
forth the Law,’ they say, ‘And the word of the Lord from Jeru
salem’.” Yet it is short of the whole truth to assert that the inter
est of Isaiah and his fellow prophets “stopped short with their
own people Israel. ... For Israel, dwelling among other nations,
was intimately and constantly affected by their actions, and the
prophets’ attention was repeatedly called to include them.” So
that the position of tiny Israel “led the prophets to an outlook
that was universal in its ultimate implications. Believing firmly
that their God, the only God in existence, would ultimately de
liver them from all threats from other nations, so that no more
wars would come upon them, consciously aware that the Torah,
their religion, was the only code of laws and life by which man
could live, the prophets expressed the conviction that all the
peoples of the universe, after they had been through stress and
strain at the hands of each other through the will of God, would
come to realize that Israel and her religion and her God and His
abode on Zion — that these constituted the only proper way of
life in the entire world. The gentile peoples of the world would
then come streaming to the mountain of the Lord’s house,” in
order that, as Isaiah and Micah put it.
He may teach us of His ways,
And we may walk in His paths.
For out of Zion shall the Law go Forth,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
While it was the civilization of Israel which the prophets
would advocate for the other nations, and while nothing of the
gentile cultures was considered worthy of incorporation into the
Israelite way of life, the particularism of Israel and her prophetic
spokesmen did lay the foundation for the later concept of uni
versality. Gradually it came to be believed that all mankind, by
adopting the principles of Israelite belief and practice — that is,
by accepting the obligations of the Covenant — might enjoy the
fruits of God’s bounty in the manner that God promised His own
people Israel through His prophets. In this universalism, Biblical
Israel and her prophets were unique in the Ancient Near East.
When the Jewish descendants of the prophets, during the
Hellenistic and especially the Roman periods, became more fully
aware of living in a single great unified society that encompassed
all of the known world, they drew upon and expanded the uni
versalism of the prophets. The prophetic concept of the Coven
ant had aimed at making all men — of the Israelite society, to
be sure — equal in their essential human dignity. This concept,
in turn, led to one much broader in scope, of the universality and
inevitability of individual moral responsibility toward all men,
not merely neighbors and fellow Israelites. It is recorded (Baby
lonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a) that during the first century B. C.
E., a heathen converted by Hillel, the great exponent of liberaliz
ing Pharisaism in the days of Herod the Great, asked him for a
brief exposition of Judaism. Hillel is said to have replied, “What
is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole
Law. The rest is mere commentary.” Hillel recognized correctly
the implication of the Biblical verse: "And you shall love your
neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:18). This pre
cept was incorporated in Christianity and in the western tradi
tion, and transmitted from age to age with tremendous impact.
It is to the prophetic tradition more than any other source
that western civilization owes its noblest concept of the moral
and social obligations of the individual human being. Even if the
prophets preached only to their fellow Israelites and saw justice
only in the terms of their Covenant with their God, their ringing
words have carried from age to age their belief that justice was
for the weak as well as for the strong, that its fulfillment was as
much a matter of the spirit as the letter of the law, that one
could not serve God at the same time that he mistreated his fel
low men, that to love God was to love justice, and that the love
of justice placed within the conscience of each human being the
ultimate inescapable obligation to denounce evil wherever he
saw it, to defy a ruler who commanded him to break the Coven
ant, and to live in the law and the love of God no matter what
the cost.
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The Southern Israelite
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