about the Law" and gliding into an exclusiveness recalling old Hebrew life, the conquests of Alexander had brought Greek language and thought among the Semites. Malachi, last of the nâbîs, describes the state of social life in Israel before this new influence reached the Hebrews. Priestly traditions have "caused many to stumble at the Law;" and the declaration of a coming judgment on "false swearers, and those who defraud the hireling in wages, the widow, and the fatherless,"[1] reminds us of that social injustice against which Isaiah and Amos had formerly preached. The social spirit of the old Hebrew village communities was being again shocked by action from individual self-interest without a thought of common sympathy. "Have we not all one Father? Hath not God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers?"[2] But if the old political idea of a Hebrew League or Covenant (Berîth) thus meets us as an ideal of social sympathy, the dominant idea of Malachi, that God is "robbed in tithes and offerings," proves that the materialising spirit of Levitical rites rather than moral self-culture was at work.
Perhaps the earliest direct evidences of Greek influence in Hebrew literature are to be found in the Greek names of the musical instruments mentioned in the Book of Daniel.[3] Classical Hebrew was now dying out, as this very book, by its intermixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, clearly shows. But, though the social teaching of the nâbîs might thus seem to be perishing among narrow-minded descendants who were losing the very power of understanding their language, Greek influences were destined to produce an expansion of the old Hebrew social spirit, and a deepening of the weak Hebrew sense
