ow rule of faith. The standpoint of the law which
prophetism had already overcome was again strongly maintained, the law
enriched with a number of new ordinances, and the essence of religion
made to consist partly in dogmatic speculation, partly in a merely
outward service, devoid of inner life. The Messianic prediction, or the
expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more
united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new
bloom and lustre,--which in the older prophets was the natural and
historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future
presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the
changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later
prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true
religion of which Israel was the bringer,--[51]returned, yet not as the
ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a dogma, the product of scriptural
interpretation. The pure monotheism, by which formerly a place in the
Providence of God had been allotted to everything, even to moral
evil,[52] became corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the
conception of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The angels,
originally the messengers of Providence, became under mythological
names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many middle beings who filled
the space between the Deity, existing apart from the world, and the
world. The lower world (sheol, [Greek: aides]), formerly the general
abode of the dead, of bad and good without distinction, was split into
two parts, paradise and gehenna, and became a place of recompense, and,
along with this, religion, once an end, became the means of warding off
a dreaded punishment, or of gaining a future of bliss. The doctrine of
immortality, as the continuation of man's moral development, which was
formerly unknown in Israel, appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the
form of a bodily resurrection of the dead, at first of the righteous
only, but afterwards in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation
of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just before the
end of the present state of things, the great judgment of the world, of
living and dead, was to be held, heaven and earth renewed, and the
kingdom of God founded. Beside the learned party of the Pharisees stood
the Sadducees, who subordinated religion to politics, rejected the
Messianic idea and the authority of tradition,