hall
appear as the sun of righteousness with healing on its wings.(283)

5. The idea as expressed by the prophets, then, was that God's anger will
visit the wicked, and particularly the ungodly nations of heathendom, and
that He shall judge all creatures in fire.(284) This was significantly
altered under Persian influence, when the Jew began to regard the world to
come as promising to the righteous greater bliss than the present one.
Then the day of divine wrath meant doom eternal for evil-doers, who were
to fall into the fiery depths of Gehenna, "their worm is never to die and
their fire never to be quenched."(285) This became the prevailing view of
the rabbis, of the Apocalyptics and also of the New Testament and the
Church literature.(286) The Jewish propaganda in the Hellenistic
literature, however, combined the fire of Gehenna with the Stoic, or
pagan, view of a general world-conflagration, and announced a general
doomsday for the heathen world, unless they be converted to the belief in
Israel's one and holy God, and ceased violating the fundamental (Noachian)
laws of humanity.(287)

6. A higher view of the punitive anger of God is taken by Beruriah, the
noble wife of R. Meir,(288)--if, indeed, the wife of the saintly Abba
Helkiah did not precede her(289)--in suggesting a different reading of the
Biblical text, as to make it offer the lesson: "not the sinners shall
perish from the earth, but the sins." From a more philosophical viewpoint
both Juda ha Levi and Maimonides hold that the anger which we ascribe to
God is only the transference of the anger which we actually feel at the
sight of evildoing. Similarly, when we speak of the consuming fire of
hell, we depict the effect which the fear of God must have on our inner
life, until the time shall come when we shun evil as ungodly and love the
good because it is both good and God-like.(290)

Chapter XVIII. God's Long-suffering and Mercy

1. In one of the little known apocryphal writings, the Testament of
Abraham, a beautiful story is told of the patriarch. Shortly before his
death, the archangel Michael drove him along the sky in the heavenly
chariot. Looking down upon the earth, he saw companies of thieves and
murderers, adulterers, and other evil-doers pursuing their nefarious
practices, and in righteous indignation he cried out: "Oh would to God
that fire, destruction, and death should instantly befall these
criminals!" No sooner had he spoken these words