he new Judean commonwealth,
the "heritage of the congregation of Jacob."(100) The priestly Torah,
lightly regarded during the prophetic period, was exalted by post-exilic
Judaism, so that the Sadducean priesthood and their successors, the
rabbis, considered strict observance of the legal form to be the very
essence of religion. Is this, then, the true nature of Judaism? Is it
really--as Christian theologians have held ever since the days of Paul, the
great antagonist of Judaism--mere nomism, a religion of law, which demanded
formal compliance with its statutes without regard to their inner value?
Or shall we rather follow Rabbi Simlai, the Haggadist, who first
enumerated the 613 commandments of the Torah (mandatory and prohibitive),
considering that their one aim is the higher _moral law_, in that they are
all summed up by a few ethical principles, which he finds in the 15th
Psalm, Isaiah XXXIII, 15; Micah VI, 8; Isaiah LVI, 1; and Amos V, 4?(101)

4. All these questions have but one answer, a reconciling one, Judaism has
the two factors, the priest with his regard for the law and the prophet
with his ethical teaching; and the Jewish Torah embodies both aspects, law
and doctrine. These two elements became more and more correlated, as the
different parts of the Pentateuch which embodied them were molded together
into the one scroll of the Law. In fact, the prophet Jeremiah, in
denouncing the priesthood for its neglect of the principles of justice,
and rebuking scathingly the people for their wrongdoing, pointed to the
divine law of righteousness as the one which should be written upon the
hearts of men.(102) Likewise, in the book of Deuteronomy, which was the
product of joint activity by prophet and priest, the Law was built upon
the highest moral principle, the love of God and man. In a still larger
sense the Pentateuch as a whole contains priestly law and universal
religion intertwined. In it the eternal verities of the Jewish faith,
God's omnipotence, omniscience, and moral government of the world, are
conveyed in the historical narratives as an introduction to the law.

5. Thus the Torah as the expression of Judaism was never limited to a mere
system of law. At the outset it served as a book of instruction concerning
God and the world and became ever richer as a source of knowledge and
speculation, because all knowledge from other sources was brought into
relation with it through new modes of interpretation. Various s