The Talmud, that mighty maze of Jewish thought, commencing after the return from the captivity, contains the history of the gradual progress and development of the national mind.  The study of the Talmud is necessary to the full understanding of the rise of Christianity.  Many of the parables and precepts of Jesus may have had their origin in these traditions and teachings.  For the Talmud contains much that is excellent, and the originality of Jesus was not in saying what never had been thought before, but in vitalizing all old truth out of a central spiritual life.  His originality was not novelty, but vitality.  We have room here but for a single extract.[379]

“‘Six hundred and thirteen injunctions,’ says the Talmud, ’was Moses instructed to give to the people.  David reduced them all to eleven, in the fifteenth Psalm:  Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle who shall dwell on thy holy hill?  He that walketh uprightly,’ &c.

“’The Prophet Isaiah reduced them to six (xxxiii. 15):  He that walketh righteously,’ &c.

“’The Prophet Micah reduced them to three (vi. 8):  What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

“’Isaiah once more reduced them to two (lvi. 1):  Keep ye judgment and do justice.

“’Amos (v. 4) reduced them all to one:  Seek ye me and ye shall live.

“’But lest it might be supposed from this that God could be found in the fulfilment of his whole law only, Habakkuk said (ii. 4):  The just shall live by his faith.’”

Thus we have seen the Jewish religion gradually developed out of the family worship of Abraham, through the national worship of the law to the personal and filial trust of David, and the spiritual monotheism of Job and the Prophets.  Through all these changes there ran the one golden thread of faith in a Supreme Being who was not hidden and apart from the world, but who came to man as to his child.

At first this belief was narrow and like that of a child[380] We read that when Noah went into the ark, “the Lord shut him in”; that when Babel was built, “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built”; that when Noah offered burnt-sacrifices, “the Lord smelled a sweet savor”; that he told Moses to make him a sanctuary, that he might dwell among the Israelites.  We have seen, in our chapter on Greece, that Homer makes Jupiter send a pernicious dream to Agamemnon, to deceive him; in other words, makes Jupiter tell a lie to Agamemnon.  But how is the account in I Kings xxii. 20-23, any better?[381]

But how all this ignorance was enlightened, and this narrowness enlarged, let the magnificent theism of the Psalms, of Job, and of Isaiah testify.  Solomon declares “The heaven of heavens cannot contain him, how much less this house that I have builded.”  Job and the Psalms and Isaiah describe the omniscience, omnipresence, and inscrutable perfections of the Deity in language to which twenty centuries have been able to add nothing.[382]