angelology and demonology of Israel. The Hebrew word shēd or “demon” is no more than a Babylonian loan word, and came to designate the deities of foreign peoples degraded into the position of demons.[1] Līlīth, the blood-sucking night-hag of the post-exilian Isa. xxxiv. 14, is the Babylonian Lilātu. Whether the se’īrīm or shaggy satyrs (Isa. xiii. 31; Lev. xvii. 7) and Azāzēl were of Babylonian origin it is difficult to determine. The emergence of Satan as a definite supernatural personality, the head or prince of the world of evil spirits, is entirely a phenomenon of post-exilian Judaism. He is portrayed as the arch-adversary and accuser of man. It is impossible to deny Persian influence in the development of this conception, and that the Persian Ahriman (Angromainyu), the evil personality opposed to the good, Ahura Mazda, moulded the Jewish counterpart, Satan. But in Judaism monotheistic conceptions reigned supreme, and the Satan of Jewish belief as opposed to God stops short of the dualism of Persian religion. Of this we see evidence in the multiplication of Satans in the Book of Enoch. In the Book of Jubilees he is called mastēmā. In later Judaism Sammael is the equivalent of Satan. Persian influence is also responsible for the vast multiplication of good spirits or angels, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., who play their part in apocalyptic works, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch.
Probably the transcendent nature of the deity in the Judaism of this later period made the interposition of mediating spirits an intellectual necessity (cf. Ps. civ. 4). It also stimulated the creation of divine hypostases. First among these may be mentioned Wisdom. The roots of this conception belong to pre-exilian times, in which the “word” of divine denunciation was regarded as a quasi-material thing. (It is hurled against offending Israel, Isa. ix. 8.). In the post-exilian cosmogony it is the divine word or fiat that creates the world (Gen. i.; cf. Ps. xxxiii. 6, 9). Out of these earlier conceptions the idea of the divine wisdom (Heb. ḥokhmah) gradually arose during the Persian period. The expression “wisdom,” as it is employed in the locus classicus, Prov. viii., connotes the contents of the Divine reason—His conscious life, out of which created things emerge. This wisdom is personified. It dwelt with God (Prov. viii. 22 foll.) before the world was made. It is the companion of His throne, and by it He made the world (Prov. iii. 19, viii. 27; cf. Ps. civ. 24). It, moreover, enters into the life of the world and especially man (Prov. viii. 31). This conception of wisdom became still further hypostatized. It becomes redemptive of man. In the Wisdom of Solomon it is the sharer of God’s throne (πάρεδρος), the effulgence of the eternal light and the outflow of His glory (Wisd. vii. 25, viii. 3 foll., ix. 4, 9); “Them that love her the Lord doth love” (Ecclesiasticus iv. 14). This group of ideas culminated in the Logos of Philo, expressing the world of divine ideas which God first of all creates and which becomes the mediating and formative power between the absolute and transcendent deity and passive formless matter, transmuted thereby into a rational, ordered universe.
In later Jewish literature we meet with further examples of similar hypostases in the form of Mēmrā, Metatron, Shechinah, Holy Spirit and Bath kōl.
(d) The doctrine of pre-existence is another product of the speculative tendency of the Jewish mind. The Messiah’s pre-existent state before the creation of the world is asserted in the Book of Enoch (xlviii. 6, 7). Pre-existence is also asserted of Moses and of sacred institutions such as the New Jerusalem, the Temple, Paradise, the Tōrah, &c. (Apocal. of Baruch iv. 3-lix. 4; Assumptio Mosis i. 14, 17); Edersheim’s Life and Times of the Messiah, i. 175 and footnote 1.
11. Christ resumes the Broken Tradition of Prophetism.—The Psalms of Solomon and the synoptic Gospels (70 B.C.-A.D. 100) clearly reveal the powerful revival of Messianic hopes of a national deliverer of the seed of David. This Messianic expectation had been a fermenting leaven since the great days of Judas Maccabaeus. The conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth, however, were not the Messianic conceptions of his fellow-countrymen, but of the spiritual “son of man” destined to found a kingdom of God which was righteousness and peace. The Tōrah of Jesus was essentially prophetic and in no sense priestly or legal. The arrested prophetic movement of Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah reappears in John the Baptist and Jesus after an interval of more than five centuries. The new covenant of redeeming grace—the righteousness which is in the heart and not in externalities of legal observance or ceremonial—are once more proclaimed, and the exalted ideals of the suffering servant of Isa. xlix. 6 and Isa. liii. (nearly suppressed in the Targum of Jonathan) are reasserted and vindicated by the words and life of Jesus. Like Jeremiah He foretold the destruction of the temple and suffered the extreme penalties of anti-patriotism. And thus Israel’s old prophetic Tōrah was at length to achieve its victory, for after Jesus came St Paul. “Many shall come from the east and the west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. viii. 11, 12). The fetters of nationalism were to be broken, and the Hebrew religion in its essential spiritual elements was to become the heritage of all humanity.
Authorities.—1. On Semitic religion generally: Wellhausen’s Reste des arabischen Heidentums (2nd ed.) and Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites (2nd ed.) are chiefly to be recommended. Barton’s Semitic Origins is extremely able, but his doctrine of the derivation of male from original female deities is pushed to an extreme. Bäthgen’s Beiträge zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte (1888) is most useful, and contains valuable epigraphic material. Baudissin’s Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte (1876) is still valuable. See also Kuenen’s National Religions and Universal Religions (Hibbert lectures) and Lagrange’s Études sur les religions sémitiques (2nd ed.).
2. On Hebrew religion in particular: specially full and helpful is Kautzsch’s article “Religion of Israel” in Hastings’s D.B., extra vol.; Marti’s recent Religion des A.T. (1906) and his Geschichte der israelitischen Religion, are clear, compact and most serviceable, and the former work presents the subject in fresh and suggestive aspects. Wellhausen’s Prolegomena and Jüdische Geschichte should be read both for criticism and Hebrew history generally. Duhm’s Theologie der Propheten and Robertson Smith’s Prophets of Israel should also be consulted. Strongly to be recommended are Smend, Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte; Bennett, Theology of the Old Testament and Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets; A. B. Davidson, The Theology of the Old Testament, as well as the sections devoted to “Sacralaltertümer” in the Hebräische Archäologie both of Benzinger and also of Nowack. Budde’s Die Religion des Volkes Israel bis zur Verbannung, as well as Addis’s recent Hebrew Religion (1906), is a most careful and scholarly compendium. Harper’s Introd. to his Commentary on Amos and Hosea (I. and T. Clark) contains a useful survey of the history of Hebrew religion before the 8th century. Buchanan Gray’s Divine Discipline of Israel, and A. S. Peake’s Problem of Suffering in the O.T., are suggestive. See also S. A. Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine.
3. On the history of Judaism till the time of Christ, Schürer’s Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Christi (3rd ed.), vol. ii. and in part vol. iii., are indispensable. Bousset’s Religion des Judentums (2nd ed.), and Volz, Die jüdische Eschatologie von Daniel bis Akiba, are highly to be commended. Weber’s Jüdische Theologie is a useful compendium of the theology of later Judaism.
4. On the special department of eschatology the standard works are R. H. Charles, Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and Christian, and Schwally, Das Leben nach dem Tode, as well as Gressmann’s suggestive work Der Ursprung der israelitisch-jüdischen Eschatologie, which contains, however, much that is speculative. On apocalyptic generally the introductions to Charles’s Book of Enoch, Apocalypse of Baruch, Ascension of Isaiah and Book of Jubilees, should be carefully noted. See also Eschatology.
5. On the religion of Babylonia, Jastrow’s work is the standard one. Zimmern’s Heft ii. in K.A.T. (3rd ed.) is specially important to the Old Testament student. See also W. Schrank, Babylonische Sühnriten. (O. C. W.)
HEBREWS, EPISTLE TO THE, one of the books of the New
Testament. In the oldest MSS. it bears no other title than “To
Hebrews.” This brief heading embraces all that on which
Christian tradition from the end of the 2nd century was unanimous;
and it says no more than that the readers addressed
were Christians of Jewish extraction. This would be no sufficient
address for an epistolary writing (xiii. 22) directed to a definite
circle of readers, to whose history repeated reference is made,
and with whom the author had personal relations (xiii. 19, 23).
Probably, then, the original and limited address, or rather salutation,
was never copied when this treatise in letter form, like the
epistle to the Romans, passed into the wider circulation which
- ↑ Deut. xxxii. 17; Ps. cvi. 37. Baal Zebūb of the Philistine Ekron became the Beelzebub who was equivalent to Satan.
