problems, but certain things are clear enough. It was no doubt
a day of small things. The returned exiles aspired to play no great
political part ; their chief desire was to be left alone to practise their
religion. But insignificant as they might be in numbers and immediate influence, they were now a peculiar people. They were quite conscious of the fact themselves, and made their neighbours conscious
of it. They were the People: the rest of the world were Gentiles.
They now possessed the Law of God in black and white, a Law that had been given to them to keep at all costs.
From the days of Ezra begins that most characteristic product of Judaism—the Study of the Law. The community existed for the sake of the Temple and its worship, for the sake of the ritual practised at the Temple. To surround Jerusalem with a wall, and gradually to raise up a fence for the Tora, as a later age phrased it—that was a sufficient ambition. The Word of God had been already given to them, and so the race of the Prophets came to an end and that of the Scribes took its place.
The work of the Scribes was far more important than it was once thought to have been. The wise men of Israel who came after Ezra had the Law already, but it was they who brought the Prophets into the form in which we read them, and the Psalms, whatever ancient fragments they may possibly contain, were in the main their work. To the Prophets it had been given to make the Religion of Israel, but the Scribes made the Bible. It is difficult, when we think of the immense effect that the Old Testament has had, to find words high enough to describe the importance of the work of the Scribes for after generations. And yet it was secondary and derivative. The Scribes had not in themselves the direct and masterful authority that belonged to the Prophets who went before them. They were not commissioned themselves to say ‘Thus saith the Lord'. And so when the crisis came we find a new phenomenon. The Jew who feels himself to have a new message for his brethren shelters himself under a pseudonym. The original literature of the two centuries and a half that preceded the capture of Jerusalem is either anonymous, or it professes to be the work of some worthy of old time. It is a remarkable fact, that during the period when the Jewish Nation was actually playing a great part in the world’s history, a part which was the direct outcome of the ideas which animated the people, there are hardly any avowed Jewish writers, till we come to the commentator Philo and to the Christians. It was a literary age, and in it a great quantity of Jewish literature was produced, some of which had great influence. But almost all of
