CANON MOZLEY ON JAEL.
DR. MOZLEY has just given us a remarkable successor to the very remarkable volume of University sermons to which we called attention last summer. It is a volume on "The Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, and their Relation to Old Testament Faith,"* and it has all the same marks of a powerful and original mind which we observed in the volume of University sermons. Indeed, as a continuous study of the rudimentary conditions of human thought, even as developed under the immediate guidance of a divine teacher, this volume has a higher and less fragmentary in- tellectual interest than the last. We are not intending, however, to attempt in this paper any criticism or estimate of it as a 10hole, but only of the attempt made in it to remove one of the leading difficulties of those who, while they look the moral and spiritual perplexities of revelation full in the face, yet are not prepared to give up the plenary inspiration of Scripture, at least in relation to matters of moral and religious teaching. Such appears to be Canon Mozley's position. He accepts all the utterances of the Jewish prophets as divinely inspired for the day and generation to which they were addressed, * Ruling Ideas in Early Agee, and their Relation to Old Testament Faith. By J. BAdozley, D.D, Regius Professor of Divinity, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. Itivingtorul.
and he accepts Deborah—very needlessly, we think, solely on the ground that she stirred up a great national revolt, predicted Sisera's defeat, and pronounced a great paaan over her victory,— as one of the great spiritual succession of the Jewish prophets. Thus he regards her enthusiastic praise of the conduct of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, in welcoming Sisera into her tent, giving him of her best, and then assassinating him during his sleep, as unanswerable testimony to the fact that at least in that day, and for the still rudimentary conscience of Israel
— not the less rudimentary that it was a conscience trained by divine discipline—the conduct of Jael was really praiseworthy, even when judged by the highest standards by which a Hebrew prophet of that age could test it. Dr. Mozley's exposition of the case is very able, and extends over so many pages, that it is not easy to sum- marise it with anything like justice to him. But it is in substance as follows. He lays down, and verifies by very telling illustrations from Greek, Roman, Persian, and Hebrew history, the proposition that the idea of the individuality of man,—of man's individual existence and individual responsibility therefore for his own sins,
— had not emerged in any national history till a much later period than this. The family unit, the tribal unit, the national unit, were much clearer, at all events in all but Hebrew history, than the personal unit, and even in Hebrew history, though compara- tively early the law forbade in all ordinary cases the practice of punishing the children for the father's sins, yet it was hardly before Ezekiel's time that the sense of individual responsibility came so clearly out, that it could be thought in any sense
unjust to let the innocent members of a domestic, or tribal, or national whole suffer with and for the guilty members of that whole. On great occasions, when it was necessary to make a great impression on the minds of the multitude, that exaggeration of justice which includes all that in any way belongs to the guilty person in one condemnation with him, and punishes a family or a society as if they were indivisible from each other, prevailed long after the time of the Judges among the Hebrew's, and it was not till the Prophet Ezekiel denounced it as distinctly contrary to the newer conception of divine justice which was then emerging, that this inchoate and undiscriminating kind of retribution began to be repudiated by the higher natures among the Hebrews. Dr. Mozley holds, and in a very fine passage illustrates the opinion, that this rude and imperfect conception of justice may have been as neces-
sary a phase in the growth of a higher conception, as the optical confusion of infants between adjoining objects certainly is a neces- sary phase in the training which teaches them eventually to disen- tangle their visual impression of one object from that of the one next it:—.
"Nor, perhaps," says Dr. Mozley, "is the consideration valueless, that in the early stages of society, before civil government was formed, and before man had become a trained and disciplined being, as in a degree he is now, some strong idea, such as that which is contained in saying, 'You belong to another, you are the property of another,' may have been necessary to control and keep in bounds the native insolence and wild pride, the obstinacy, the fierceness, the animal caprice, the rage, the spite, the passion, of the human creature. When man was rude and government was weak, there was wanted for the control of man some idea which could fasten upon him and overcome him, and be in the stead of government and civilisation. Such an idea was this one. The nature that can be coerced by nothing else, can be tamed by an idea. Instil from his earliest infancy into man the idea that he belongs to another, is the property of another, let everything around proceed on this idea, let there be nothing to interfere with it or rouse suspicions in his mind to the contrary, and he will yield entirely to that idea. He will take his own deprivation of right, the necessity of his own subservience to another, as a matter of course. And that idea of himself will keep him in order. He will grow up with the impression that he has not the right of ownership in himself ; in his passions, any more than he has in his work. He will thus be coerced from within himself, but not by himself, i.e., not by an active faculty of self-command, but by the passive reception of an instilled notion which he has admitted into his own mind, and which has fastened upon him so strongly that he cannot shake it off." (pp. 42 42.)
That describes very powerfully what we may well conceive to be a condition preparatory to morality,—a condition preparing man for the state in which duty takes the place of such illusions of habit,—but it is clearly not a moral phase of being at all. Now, assuming such general principles as these, Dr. Mozley maintains that the exterminating wars against the Canaan- Res were perfectly consistent with the highest ethical concep- tions then attained by the Hebrews. So far as the Hebrew people were concerned, not only was there in that day, to their perceptions, no injustice in making the innocent suffer for the guilty, but they hardly discriminated between the two, and any effort to have taught them to do so, would have been more likely to diminish their horror of the contamination of Canaanitish sins, than to individualise and define Israel's sense of merit and demerit.
So far we feel the full force of Dr. Mozley's argument, but when he comes to apply it to justify Deborah's panegyric on the treachery of Jael, he seems to us completely to break down. His position is this ;—though the Kenites were not at war with the Canaanites under Jabin and Sisera, yet they were so closely connected with the Hebrews as to be worshippers of one God, and to understand, therefore, all that was involved in the war between the army of the Israelites and the host commanded by Sisera. Joel, conjectures Dr. Mozley, doubtless shared the moral enthusiasm of the war, and was inwardly bound by the same obligations as the Israelites themselves. She would probably look upon Sisera as the very life of the Canaanitish cause, and regard his destruction,—the destruc- tion, that is, of the captain of .the host who seems to have been the mainstay and mind of that cause,—as the final blow which would secure the triumph of the chosen people. We are quite willing to grant all this, though it is more or less hypothetical ; but when Dr. Mozley goes on to say that if once Jael had con- ceived the idea that Sisera ought to be killed, this necessarily in- volved the notion also that he had no claim on her good-faith, we cannot follow him at all. He lays it down repeatedly and very strongly that "in early rude ages, and in the periods of tribe or clan, when the sword takes so prominent a part, deceit takes an equally prominent part. The one law is made to flow in thought logically from the other. The sword takes away life ; he has no right to truth-speaking who has no right to life." And again, "the dispensation did not respect the rights of man to life ; it was no more, then, than an agreement with such a foundation that it should not respect the rights of man to truth ; and that *hen- a great enemy of the sacred nation lost one right, he lost the other too." In another place, Dr. Mozley repeats this in a yet stronger form, though we are not quite sure whether he there merely ex- presses the views of others, or also adopts them as his own :— "the duty of sincerity is so plainly connected with the law of human fellowship, that to say that upon the dissolution of that law no consequence at all could follow to that duty, would be a strange assertion. The duty of truthfulness cannot co-exist with the duty of killing." That is very strange ethical doctrine. It is, we suppose, the duty of the authorities of a jail to put the condemned criminal to death, but bait they no duty of truth- fulness to him on that account ? It also appears to us to be wholly untrue to say that no truth can be expected between enemies in rude ages. The " lliad " shows that in a rude age the truce between two armies was held binding, and that he who treacherously broke the truce was supposed to bring evil on his cause and his people. In fact, however true it may be that violent ages have always been ages of fraud also, it is not true that even in rude times there have been no limits to such frauds between enemies. The frauds which are held legitimate as between open enemies, are not held legitimate at all between those who are at peace with each other, or even between enemies who, under given conditions, agree to trust each other's honour. And Jeers treachery was clearly the treachery of one who knew she was trusted because she was regarded as belonging to a friendly tribe. It seems to us perfectly clear either that Deborah was allowing her own triumphant vengeance to carry away her better mind in the panegyric she pronounced on Jael, or that if that were not so, the spokeswoman of the chosen people, after all their discipline in righteousness, fell to a much lower level of morality than that to which a much ruder and less religious people, without any know- ledge of God, has often attained. Such an act as Jael's would, we think, find no approbation in Homer. The crafts and treacheries of open enemies are vaunted enough in Homer, but not the crafts and treacheries of those who avail themselves of the profound trust of guests in hosts with whom there is no quarrel, to assassinate those guests. The treacherous breach of the truce between the Greeks and Trojans by Pandarus, though suggested by the malign craft of a hostile deity, was a trivial treachery compared to Jul's.
The truth is that Dr. Mozley's explanation does not apply to the case. The sin of requiting trust by treachery is not one which requires a complete conception of human individuality, to bring it out in all its baseness. If there be enough sense of indi- viduality to repose trust and to recognise the trust so reposed, there is quite enough to bring out the baseness of him who avails him- self of it to entrap his victim. It is not true that a man who has no right to his life has no right to be treated sin- cerely. On the contrary, the very fact that duty compels you to take a man's life gives such a man a first claim on your honesty. Clive's treatment of Omichund, which Dr. Mozley quotes from Macaulay's essay, seems to us one of the wickedest acts of the last century. Moreover, the Hebrew law inculcated reverence for strangers with at least as much earnestness as other ancientlaws ; and it is no answer to say that Jael shared the Hebrew enmity to Sisera, unless he knew that her tribe, or that she herself, so shared it,—and this obviously he did not know. It is probable enough, —we are far from contesting it,—that Deborah was so absorbed in the atmosphere of patriotic passion, that she could not see the baseness of the act which had removed this great danger out of her path. But then let us not say that in any intelligible sense Deborah was, in this case at least, a moral teacher, inculcating a higher standard of morality than could have been attained outside the illuminated circle of divine revelation. We believe Deborah's praise of Jael to prove that on one of the gravest and simplest points of rudimentary morality, the high-spirited woman who represented the chosen people showed her own profound ignorance of the God whom she worshipped, and of the righteousness by which that worship ought to have been characterised. And if Jael is to be properly described as a prophetess only because she predicted the victory over Sisera, and though there is not a glimpse of any true moral or spiritual life in her prophecy, then there is one Hebrew prophetess who certainly perverted the divine teaching which she ought to have transmitted. But in point of fact, there is nothing on earth, except the old habit of deferring implicitly to the authority of one or two magic words, to prevent our saying that Deborah was a patriot, a woman of the type of Joan of Arc, capable of exciting great national enthusiasm, and of composing pwans as magnificent as the best of those of Tyrteeus, but not, in the moral and spiritual sense, a prophet at all.
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