THE RABBINIC RELIGION 15
coming. When in the words of the Apocalypse of Baruch nothing was left save the Mighty One and His Law, the Rabbi was ready to guide his brethren along such of the old paths as they were still permitted to tread, and to shew them by precept and by example how to wait for the manifestation of the Sovereignty of God by taking upon themselves the Yoke and realising God's Sovereignty within them.
The work of the Rabbis, of Johanan ben Zakkai and his successors, was quietly heroic, and they succeeded so well in their reorganisation of Judaism that their work stands to this day. But—and it is here that the Apocalypses are directly concerned—they were able to carry their work through, just because they had dropped the conviction that had produced the Apocalypses. That is the reason why these Jewish documents, speaking generally, are preserved in Greek and not in Hebrew, by Christians and not by Jews.
I fear that I may seem to some of you to have wandered very far this evening from the proper province of Biblical Archaeology, and that some of my remarks may sound too vague and general, not to say homiletic, to be useful for the study of the ancient Apocalypses. But I am convinced that by far the most important thing for the student of these venerable documents, be he Jew or Christian, is to look at them from the right point of view, from the right historical point of view. They are not great in themselves. They are not worth much as literature, or as contributions to thought. They throw no light directly on the problems of our time, in the sense that Aeschylus or Plato, Amos or the Gospels, throw light. If one goes to the Apocalyptic literature for edification one does not get it. The most you arrive at is a sort of patronising approval for such elements as the ethical maxims in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
No, the value of the Apocalypses is of quite a different order. They are the most characteristic survival of what I will venture to call, with all its narrowness and its incoherence, the heroic age of Jewish history, the age when the nation attempted to realise in action the part of the peculiar people of God. It ended in catastrophe, but the nation left two successors, the Christian Church and the Rabbinical Schools, each of which carried on some of the old national aims. And of the two it was the Christian Church that was most faithful to the ideas enshrined in the Apocalypses, and it did consider itself, not without some reason, the fulfilment of those ideas. What is wanted, therefore, in studying the Apocalypses is, above all, sympathy with the ideas that underlie them, and especially
