shall assign his portion."[1] Thus are the cosmopolitan and personal spirits found in company among the Hebrews, as among the Greeks and Romans, and the twofold process of social expansion and individual emancipation from clan restraints again meets us.
It is this union of the individual with the social spirit which makes Ezekiel perhaps the most interesting figure in Hebrew literature. In him we have a link between the oldest forms of Hebrew life and that spirit of Greek philosophy which the conquests of Alexander and his successors were to introduce into Israel. In him we have a thinker and poet and priest who explains at once the narrowness and the breadth of which the Hebrew mind has proved itself capable. From him, as in two streams, we may watch the learned individualism which was to terminate in Sadducean materialism and the puerilities of the Talmud, and the life-giving spirit of social sympathy which was to expand into the morality of Christ, taking their rise as from a common source. But, unlike some of his Greek contemporaries, Ezekiel does not appear to be conscious of the grave ethical problems raised by individualism. Pindar has learned the value of an individual future life of reward or punishment as the great sanction of personal morality. But the shadow-world of Ezekiel is little more than the Odyssean Hades. For Ezekiel Sheôl is indeed a place far wider, far more grandly vague than the subterranean home of the clan; the shadow-world has expanded into the gathering-place of whole nations, and the idea of Sheôl has become world-wide. In Ezekiel's "land of the underparts," which he contrasts with "the land of life," are fallen nations with their graves all round"—Ashur and his company, Elam and her multitude, Edom,
- ↑ Ezek. xlvii. 21–23.
