religious community in Palestine when the exiles should be able to return.

The legislation thus produced in Babylon was a theoretical legislation. There was no opportunity of putting it into immediate practice. It gathered an authority, not of successful experience, but of religious explanation and constant repetition. There is difficulty even now in determining how much of that legislation was ever actually operative in Palestine itself. Great care must be taken, therefore, in estimating the conditions of Jewish life solely on the basis of the exilic prescriptions.

Side by side with this elaboration of the law continued the free spontaneous voice of prophecy. Some of the profoundest views of the meaning of life uttered by the prophets were born of the strange conditions of the Babylonian exile. § 4. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE THEOCRATIC COMMUNITY

The organization of Jewish society after the exile was largely ecclesiastical. Independent national existence was impossible under the dominance of the Persian rule. The limits of the Jewish community were restricted to Jerusalem and its environs, a district about the size of an ordinary American county. The kingship had disappeared, the court and military aristocracy, always more important in the North than in the South, had likewise gone, the trading Jews remained in Babylon where their fortunes were much brighter; naturally, therefore, the priests were the organizers of rehabilitated Judaism.

It was not a large or generous life. There were petty questions of the ownership of the restricted land area that remained to them. There were burdens of taxation to their Persian masters. There were jealousies with their neighbors, particularly those to the north, and there was a thoroughgoing endeavor to realize an ecclesiastical ideal of social organization.

The important religious institutions that have been so

determinative of Jewish life developed in this period. The law acquired its authority. The synagogue became the center of the community interests. The scribe became the teacher. The Sabbath was recognized as the fundamental religious observance. The Jews began to be the separate people and to take the attitude toward the world which made their history so tragic.

This all-pervasive ecclesiasticism was not congenial to the prophetic spirit, and it is probable that very little prophecy may be dated in the Persian period. It is a great mistake, however, to assume that the religion of the Second Temple was all external and conventional. The triumphant refutation of such a view and a noble testimony to the possibility of profound religious experience in connection with elaborate and prescriptive ritual is afforded by the fact that very many of the psalms, those lyrics of the religious soul, were written at this time and adapted to the service of the temple choirs.

$5. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE HEBREWS IN THE GRÆCOROMAN WORLD

Alexander the Great changed the face of the Eastern world. The life of every nation that he touched must be dated anew from his day. And neither the obscurity nor the seclusion of the Jew exempted him from the universal influence of the Greek thought, culture, language, and life. Paganism presented itself to the Jewish youth with a beauty and persuasiveness, and with a summons to freedom and to fortune such as had never been before. It accorded little with the rigid requirements and prescriptions of the law, but the law was already felt by many to be a burden grievous to be borne.

It might have been that Israel would have been swept into the current of the pervasive Hellenism and have lost its distinctive place in the world, but there was a repulsion as well as an attraction in the new influence. The noblest

spirits among the Jews were constrained to put an added emphasis upon all that had come down to them from their fathers. Hebrew religion found little help from the Greek, and it was religion that saved the Jew from extinction. Two forces were thus working to modify the social life of Israel. The pressure of Hellenism was molding it to its own model, and the strictness of the "Pious" was leading them to accentuate their separateness from the world.

The continuance of this antagonism through several centuries gave a peculiar intensity to Jewish life. And this became the more extreme as the antagonism became a struggle for existence against the Syrian tyrants, then an internal conflict under the secular rule of the later Maccabees, and then a bitter resentment against the iron domination of Rome. This was relieved only by the hope that the antagonism was to be resolved by the tour de force of the miraculous advent of the Messiah. Religion became largely the passionate expectancy of the ardent apocalyptic writings.

To this social situation Jesus came. He resolved the antagonism for himself in terms of a spiritual religion and a perfectly simple social program. His disciples followed him as far as they could understand him, and the Christian Church was the result.

"THE memory of man runneth not backward to the contrary"-so Blackstone, the great English jurist, explains the common law which is the basis of the administration of justice wherever the English language is known. It is the consensus of public opinion as to what is right. In this way law has grown up among all peoples. A primitive man is able to say only, "It is the custom."

Two examples of such custom, whose origin is lost in remote antiquity, and both of which found their place in Hebrew life, were blood revenge and the lex talionis. If a man were slain, it was felt that his kinsfolk had the right and duty to avenge his death. So fundamental was this right that public justice never supplanted private vengeance (2 Sam 3. 30), and the utmost that the law could do was to provide places of asylum for the unwitting man-slayer (Exod 21. 13). Blood revenge still exists among the Arab tribes to-day.

The lex talionis-eye for eye, tooth for tooth (Exod 21. 23ff.)-springs from an elemental sense of equity. At first the retaliation was effected by the injured party or by his friends, but with the development of social life some central authority undertook the responsibility. Thus also the amount of punishment would be more fairly assessed, as public sentiment took the place of private anger.

But while primitive people generally think of their cus

toms as of great antiquity, in point of fact they are constantly undergoing modification under the stress of new conditions. The decision in any disputed matter would always be made in accordance with precedent, and with a general sense of fitness. But new situations might cause a marked change of attitude. With the acquisition of private property it would be necessary to safeguard it from theft. Manifestly, restitution would be the equitable requirement together with some added penalty (Exod 22. 1).

Precedent arose in simple societies much as it exists among ourselves. Cases of dispute would be referred to the chief or headman, or perhaps, inasmuch as justice was always intimately associated with religion, to the priest of the tribe. Decisions would be rendered in accordance with acknowledged customs (compare Exod 18. 13-27). The remembrance of such decisions would persist and become determinative of future decisions; thus a body of precedent would grow up which would have the force of law.

Still another element in the growth of law was the presence of great personalities who would see confusion in the body of precedents, and would see opportunities of reform and improvement in the customs of the people. Such men would codify the existing law, simplifying, modifying, expanding it, removing the abuses which inevitably develop in any institution, and would then rightly present this new code of laws as the ancient and acknowledged principles of justice of the nation. We are familiar with such developments in the codes of Draco, Solon, Lycurgus in Greece, of Justinian in Rome, and of Edward I in England. And, indeed, there is practically the same process in operation in the great Code Napoléon in modern times.

There can be no better approach to the study of Hebrew legislation than an appreciation of the significance of the Code of Hammurabi, which was discovered in 1901, four thousand years after its promulgation by the great Babylonian king. The student of Hebrew social institutions should