Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 75:298 (Apr 1918)
Article: The Bible And Literature
Author: Thomas E. Barr

BSac 75:297 (Jan 1918) p. 213

The Bible And Literature

Thomas E. Barr

We have been accustomed to credit the Grecians with a genius for art, a development of faculty and taste for the beautiful which stamped their whole life. Even the rigorous Spartans could not wholly divest themselves of this expression. So, to the Romans of old we grant a genius for government equaled by none of the later nations. The whole people bore this mark. Wherever the Roman went he was’ the embodiment of law and authority; and he found a practical way of holding the allegiance of outlying peoples while yielding to their local customs and using their local administrations in the exercise of government.

In the same way the Jewish people had a genius for spirituality. Their history was the outworking of religious problems, because that was the tendency of their thought. They were used as the medium of developing the thought and spirit which has been that of Christian civilization, because they were so fitted by nature. From whatever source it came, this is the fact. Perhaps Father Abraham left the impress of his spirit upon his descendants more powerfully than other founders of peoples have done. Perhaps the unity of life through the family development until Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt had knit them into exceptional oneness. Then their isolation even in their prosperity, deepening to

BSac 75:297 (Jan 1918) p. 214

the exclusion of their enslavement, stamped permanently their character.

Whatever the reasons,—and these, with the personality of the founder of the nation, must have been among them, — the fact is that no other nation ever showed such a characteristic. They were religious above all things. They developed the highest type of monotheism among peoples who were vastly more powerful than they and who were all polytheists. They claimed a relationship to the one God, Jehovah, different from the relationship boasted of by other peoples with their gods. They were his chosen people, with whom he entered into covenant, and to whom he had committed a promise, concealed in form at first, which should be fulfilled for the glory of the nations of the earth.

Their teachers developed an ethical standard higher in its demand, more searching in its application, than even the Egyptians knew. They rose to the conception of Jehovah not only as the one God whom they were to worship, but as the Lord of all the earth, before whom the gods of other peoples were but as figments of the imagination, and who exercised dominion over all peoples and demanded obedience and reverence from them. They came to a spiritual consciousness which is of the universal man. The Psalms of David are the songs and prayers of every nation who believe in the God of the Bibl...