dships Plato
pictures; the dramatic fortunes of the outlaw; the family tragedies full
of crime and horror; the dark story of Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom; the
passion of fatherhood in fullest intensity, with the agonized prayers for
the sick child and the heartbroken lament over Absalom; the group of
valiant captains and their chivalrous exploits; the risk of life to bring
to their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of
Bathsheba and Uriah--lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke;
the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it all
is! Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or a tragedy.

It is largely this picturesque dramatic quality which made the English
Bible in its early days the favorite book of the English people, and has
kept for it always so high a place. But the attempt to reduce a story
like David's to terms of spiritual edification has been difficult above
measure, ever since mankind advanced beyond the half-barbaric age in
which the story was told. Judged by our standards, the ethics of the
story are often low, and its religion is largely a superstition. What
brings the Almighty on the scene is most frequently some great calamity,
which priest or soothsayer interprets as a divine judgment. Often there
is attributed to him the quality of a jealous Oriental despot. The
justice he enforces is often injustice and savagery. Take the story of
the Gibeonites. A three years' famine in Israel was explained by
Yahveh's oracle as a retribution for the breach of faith by Saul, many
years before, with the Gibeonites, whom he had persecuted in defiance of
ancient compact. David thereupon invited the Gibeonites to name the
requital which would appease them, and they asked for the death of seven
sons of Saul. So David delivered the seven innocent men into their
hands, "and they hanged them before the Lord."

The Zeus of Homer is offensive to religious feeling because he fully
shares the sensuality which we account one of the great defects of
humanity. From that blemish the Hebrew idea of God is always free. The
hostility between Yahveh and the heathen gods has its deep ethical
significance in the struggle of chastity against licentiousness, to which
the religious sanction brings reinforcement. But the Hebrew God has a
savage and vindictive quality, which only slowly and partially
disappears. Originally, it is probable, the God of the sun and fire,
beneficent to