Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

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. Serving Southern Investors for 67 Years The Robinson-Humphrey Co., Inc. Municipal & Corporate Bonds & Local Stocks Robinson, Humphrey & Co. Members of New York Stock Exchange 1901 RHODES-HAVERTY BUILDING JA. 1-0316 Atlanta, Georgia Long Distance 421 SAM FINLEY, Inc. ASPHALT PAVING Driveways — Parking Areas — Streets Roads — ESTIMATES INVITED 292 North Ave., N. W. Phone TR. 6-7353 ATLANTA, GA. Holiday Greetings HENRI’S BAKERY for discriminating people COMPLETE CATERING SERVICE Fully Equipped to Seat and Serve Any Size Party ANYWHERE Atlanta or Out of Town HOT OR COLD 3251 Peachtree Rd., N.E. at Piedmont — CE. 7-0202 ATLANTA, GA. The Southern Israelite 21