CHAPTER II.

BETHER: THE BOOK OF JUDITH: THE JEWISH CANON.

During the first years which followed the war, it appears that a centre of population was formed near to Jerusalem, which fifty or sixty years later was destined to play a very important part. Two leagues and a quarter west-south-west of Jerusalem was a village until then obscure, known as Bether. Many years before the siege a great number of rich and peaceable citizens of Jerusalem, perceiving the storm which was about to break over the capital, had bought lands to which to retire. Bether was in effect situated in a fertile valley outside the important routes which connect Jerusalem with the north and with the sea. An acropolis commanded the village, built near a beautiful spring, and forming a sort of natural fortification; a lower plateau formed a sort of step to the lower town. After the catastrophe of the year 70, a considerable body of fugitives met there. Synagogues, a sanhedrim, and schools were established. Bether became a Holy City, a sort of equivalent to Zion. The little scarped hill was covered with houses, which, supporting themselves by ancient works in the rock and by the natural form of the hill, formed a species of citadel which was completed with steps of great stones. The isolated situation of Bether induces the belief that the Romans did not greatly trouble themselves about these works; perhaps also a part of them dated from before the time of Titus. Supported by the great Jewish communities of Lydda and of Jabneh, Bether thus became a sufficiently large town, and, as it were, the entrenched camp of fanaticism in Judea. We shall there see Judaism offer to the Roman power a last and impotent resistance.

At Bether, a singular book appears to have been 15composed, a perfect mirror of the conscience of Israel at that date, where may be found the powerful recollection of past defects and a fiery prediction of future revolts. I speak of the book of Judith. The ardent patriot who composed that Agada in Hebrew, copied—according to the custom of the Hebrew Agadas—a well-known history, that of Deborah who saved Israel from her enemies by killing their chief. Every line is full of transparent allusions. The ancient enemy of the people of God, Nebuchadnezzar (a perfect type of the Roman Empire, which, according to the Jews, was but the work of an idolatrous propaganda), desired to subject the whole world to himself, and to cause it to adore him, to the exclusion of every other god. He charges his general Holophernes with this duty. All bow before him save only the Jewish people. Israel is not a military people but a mountaineering race difficult to force. So long as it observes the Law it is invincible.

A sensible Pagan who knows Israel, Achior (brother of the light), tries to stop Holophernes. The one thing necessary, according to him, is to know if Israel fails to keep the Law; in this case, the conquest will be easy; if not, it will be necessary to beware how one attacks her. All is useless; Holophernes marches on Jerusalem. The key of Jerusalem is a place on the north, on the side of Dothaïm, at the entrance of the mountainous region to the south of the plain of Esdraelon. This place is called Beth-eloah (the House of God). The author describes it exactly on the plan of Bether. It is placed at the opening of a Wadi (Fiumara or bed of a watercourse), on a mountain at the foot of which runs a stream indispensable to the people, the cisterns of the upper town being relatively small. Holophernes besieges Beth-eloah, which is soon reduced by thirst to the direst extremity. But it is an attribute of Divine Providence to choose the weakest agents for the greatest works. A widow, a zealot, Judith (the Jewess), 16arises and prays; she goes forth and presents herself to Holophernes as a rigid devotee who cannot tolerate the breaches of the Law of which she has been witness in the town. She wishes to point out to him a sure means of conquering the Jews. They are dying of hunger and thirst; which induces them to fail with regard to the precepts concerning food, and to eat the first fruits reserved for the priests. They have sent to ask for the authorisation of the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, but at Jerusalem everything is relaxed, everything is allowed, so that it will be easy to conquer them. “I will pray to God,” she adds, “that I may know when they shall sin.” Then at the moment when Holophernes thinks himself assured of all her complaisances she cuts off his head. In this expedition she has not once failed to observe the Law. She prays and performs her ablutions at the appointed hours; she eats only of the meats which she has brought with her. Even on the evening when she is about to prostitute herself to Holophernes, she drinks her own wine. Judith lives after all this for a hundred and five years, refusing the most advantageous marriages, happy and honoured. During her life and for a long time after her death no one dares to disquiet the Jewish people. Achior is also well rewarded for having known Israel well. He is circumcised, and becomes a Son of Abraham for ever.

The author, from his singular taste for imagining the conversion of Pagans, from his persuasion that God loves the weak above all, that he is par excellence the God of the hopeless, approaches Christian sentiments. But by his materialistic attachment to the principles of the Law, he shows himself a pure Pharisee. He dreams of an autonomy for the Israelites under the autonomy of the Sanhedrim and their Nasi. His ideal is absolutely that of Jabneh. There is a mechanism of human life which God loves; the Law is the absolute rule of it; Israel is created to 17accomplish it. It is a people like to no other; a people whom the heathen hate because they know them to be capable of leading the whole world; an invincible people, because they do not sin. To the scruples of the Pharisee are joined the fanaticism of the Zealot, the appeal to the dagger to defend the Law, the apology for the most sanguinary examples of religious violence. The imitation of the book of Esther penetrates the whole work; the author evidently read that book not as it exists in the original Hebrew but with the interpolations which the Greek text offers. The literary execution is weak; the feeble parts—common-places of the Jewish agada, canticles, prayers, etc.—recall at times the tone of the Gospel according to St Luke. The theory of the Messianic claims is, however, little developed. Judith is still rewarded for her virtue by a long life. The book was doubtless read with passion in the circles of Bether and of Jabneh; but it may readily be believed that Josephus knew nothing of it at Rome. It was probably suppressed as being full of dangerous allusions. The success in any case was not lasting amongst the Jews; the original Hebrew was soon lost; but the Greek translation made itself a place in the Christian Canon. We shall see this translation known at Rome towards the year 95. In general it was immediately after their publication that the apocryphal books were welcomed and quoted: those novelties had an ephemeral popularity, then fell into oblivion.

The need of a rigorously limited canon of the sacred books made itself felt more and more. The Thora, the Prophets, the Psalms, were the admitted foundation of all. Ezekiel alone created some difficulties by the passages wherein be is not in accord with the Thora, from which he was extricated only by subtleties. There was some hesitation about Job, whose hardihood was not in accord with the pietism of the times. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of 18Songs were assailed with much greater violence. The picture so freely sketched in the seventh chapter of Proverbs, the altogether profane character of the Canticles, the scepticism of Ecclesiastes, were thought sufficient to deprive those writings of the character of sacred books. Happily, admiration carried them. They were admitted, so to speak, subject to correction and to interpretation. The last lines of Ecclesiastes appeared to extenuate the sceptical crudities of the text. In the Canticles the critics began to seek for mystical profundities. Pseudo-Daniel had conquered his place by dint of audacity and assurance; he failed, however, to force the already impenetrable line of the ancient prophets, and he remained in the last pages of the sacred volume side by side with Esther and the more recent historical compilations. The son of Sirach was stranded simply for having avowed too frankly his modern editing. All this constituted a little sacred library of twenty-four works, the order of which was thenceforward irrevocably fixed. Many variations still existed; the absence of vowel points left many passages in a state of deplorable ambiguity which different parties interpreted in a sense favourable to their own ideas. It was many centuries before the Hebrew Bible formed a volume almost without variants, and the readings of which were settled down to their last details.

As to the Books excluded from the Canon, their reading was forbidden, and it was even sought to destroy them. This it is which explains how books essentially Jewish, and having quite as much right as Daniel and Esther to remain in the Jewish Bible, are only preserved by Greek translations. Thus the Maccabean histories, the book of Tobit, the books of Enoch, the wisdom of the son of Sirach, the book of Baruch, the book called “the third of Esdras,” various chapters of which belong to the book of Daniel (the Three Children in the Furnace) Susannah, Bel and the 19Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, the letter of Jeremiah, the Psalter of Solomon, the Assumption of Moses, a whole series of agadic and apocalyptic writings neglected by the Jews of the Talmudic tradition, have been guarded only by Christian hands. The literary community which existed during more than a hundred years between the Jews and the Christians, caused every Jewish book impressed with a pious spirit and imbued with Messianic ideas to be at once accepted by the Churches. At the beginning of the second century the Jewish people, devoted as they were exclusively to the study of the Law, and having no taste save for casuistry, neglected these writings. Many Christian Churches, on the contrary, persisted in placing a high value upon them, and admitted them more or less officially into their Canon. We see, for example, the Apocalypse of Esdras, the work of an enthusiastic Jew like the book of Judith, saved from destruction only through the favour which it enjoyed amongst the disciples of Jesus.

Judaism and Christianity still lived together like those double beings which are joined by one part of their organisation though distinct as regards all the rest. Each of these beings transmitted to the other its sensations and its desires. A book which was the fruit of the most ardent Jewish passions, a book zealous for its first chief, was immediately adopted by Christianity, was preserved by Christianity, introduced itself, thanks to it, into the Canon of the Old Testament. A fraction of the Christian Church, it cannot be doubted, had felt the emotions of the siege, had shared in the grief and anger of the Jews over the destruction of the Temple, had sympathised with the rebels; the author of the Apocalypse, who probably still lived, had surely mourning at his heart, and calculated the days of the great vengeance of Israel. But already the Christian conscience had found other issues; it was not only the school of Paul, it was the family of the 20Master which passed through the most extraordinary crises, and transformed, according to the necessities of the time, the very memories which it had preserved of Jesus.