546 OLD TESTAMENT 



social and civil life, who established and guaranteed the unity, the 

 solidarity, and the perpetuity of their nation and of every clan and 

 every family within it, whose own life and activity pervaded and 

 enveloped them, who beset them behind and before and laid his 

 hand upon them. 



(4) The influence of the Hebrew poetical literature so great 

 both intensively and extensively how is it to be accounted for? 

 Following merely one line of direction, we naturally compare the 

 New Testament Apocalypse. It is also largely a Jewish book sur- 

 charged with old-world conceptions, images, and phrases, such as 

 those which stimulated the thought and imagination of the Old 

 Testament seers and poets; and it also strikingly illustrates the 

 power of poetry to raise men above the evil present and to maintain 

 in the darkest hour the supremacy of faith and trust in the divine 

 and the ideal. Outside of this narrow analogy of the New Testament 

 poetry, there is nothing that can be brought into comparison with 

 the poetry of the Hebrews. Contrast, if you will, the quality of the 

 Psalms, as a whole, with that of modern or even medieval Christian 

 hymns, which often please and sometimes move, but rarely thrill 

 us, and with the lack of the simple universal human touch in other 

 religious liturgies, which are almost powerless outside of their own 

 circles of worshipers! I venture to suggest the following as among 

 the causes of the influence of the national poetry of Israel : 



(a) Hebrew poetry was national as well as individual, and therefore 

 wielded a power at once concentrated and diffusive. When it ceased 

 to be national, it not only languished as an artistic product, but lost 

 its distinctive moral force. It may be observed that the poetry of 

 the ancient Greeks, who, along with many contrasts, yet show more 

 analogies with the Hebrews than do any other non-Semitic peoples, 

 lost its moral effectiveness also when it ceased to be national, as it 

 had been in the old creative epoch when, in the words of Professor 

 Jebb, "poetry was interwoven with the whole texture of Greek 

 life." 



(6) We may go yet further and add another element to the causes 

 of the moral supremacy of the Hebrew poetry. We must compare 

 not merely one species of literature with another, but also modern 

 with ancient literature. Old Testament poetry was informed with 

 a dynamic energy such as modern poetry seldom wields because the 

 poet thought and felt and sang as making up, along with his people 

 and his God, one single indivisible force. Against many of the gains 

 of our modern life we have to set off the irreparable loss of this old- 

 world association of the human individually and socially with the 

 divine. The resultant of the working of the forces, mental, moral, 

 and emotional, released by the pressure of this conception upon 

 devout and loyal souls, may almost be expressed in terms descriptive 



