I HAVE first to offer an apology for an unintentional plagiarism in my title. ‘The Interpretation of Scripture’, as you all know and as I remembered too late, is the name of the contribution to the famous volume of essays and reviews made nearly a hundred years ago by Benjamin Jowett. Jowett was then Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, but ‘owing to his having incurred suspicions of heresy by the liberality of his religious opinions, he was deprived for ten years'-I am quoting the Dictionary of National Biography-'of the emoluments of his office’.

Some years later, in r870, Jowett became Master of Balliol, the college to which in r879 Claude Montefiore was admitted as an undergraduate; and there is thus some connection, howbeit a distant and tenuous one, between at least the title of my address and the distinguished scholar and religious leader in whose honour it is being delivered.

Having established the connection, however, I shall not dwell on it, since-if I may quote the DNB again-'Jowett's essay on the Interpretation of Scripture only served to increase the suspicion of heresy entertained against him.’ I can only pray that you will be kinder, or I luckier.

In this lecture I propose inviting your attention to a matter which, in one form or another, is always cropping up. It is an old-fashioned problem and does not bother everyone; but it is at the bottom of most disputes on scriptural subjects and indeed on many other subjects too. Someone expresses an opinion and backs it up with a biblical quotation. His friend produces another opinion and another quotation. What are we to do about it? An opinion is an opinion and a quotation is a quotation. Are there any grounds for choosing between them?

As a fact we do choose between them. We follow the one and reject the other. But when it comes to justifying our choice we are almost always at a loss. We cultivate a blind eye. We look the difficulty firmly in the face, and pass on.

But the difficulty remains, and it is not a theoretical one only. We all know, and we have it too on high authority, that ‘the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose'; but when we meet such a one-'an evil soul producing holy witness ’-how can we hope to set about refuting him?

BEFORE I come to my theme it may be well to remind ourselves of a few facts of literary history.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam some ten months after this great and famous university was inaugurated, on 24- November 1632, and died at the Hague on 21 February 1677. His fame rests principally on two books, the Tractatus Theologico-politicuspublished anonymously in 1670 and the Ethica published in 1677 by his friends as a part of his Opera posthuma. Of these two books it was the former, the Tractatus Theologico-politicus, which in its time created the stir. The Ethica waited for notice a full hundredyears.

Yet, once noticed, the Ethica came into its own; the Tractatus passed into history. The Tractatus belongs to time, the Ethica to eternity; and it is this distinction, the distinction between the things of time and the things of eternity, so strikingly exemplified in the history of Spinoza's own work, which is the main lesson that men of religion today can derive from the study of Spinoza.

We are assembled this evening in order to learn for our present need from a thinker of the seventeenth century born and bred in this city of Amsterdam; and the first question we should ask ourselves is why it should be just this city, this people, this country and its institutions, which made his life, and thinking, possible. And not his life alone. Seventeenth-century Holland first set the example followed so nobly by Holland of the twentieth century of offering refuge and peace to the wanderer and homeless. I read to you a few sentences from a letter of one of them written in May 1631:

It is René Descartes who is writing, in this very city of Amsterdam, a year before Spinoza was born; and he praises the industry and prosperity of its inhabitants, its public order and private amenities, its allowing everyone to pursue his own affairs without interference. Spinoza, writing nearly forty years later, sees deeper.

WE are all mystics nowadays but we need not be contentiously so. As we have been told recently by a Professor of Education (and he surely ought to know): ‘The hot breath of the charismatic behind one's back is disconcerting.' Yet we of the milder sort may still keep in heart. For it would be strange, would it not, if the alleged greatest of all experiences should be confined to a few, a very, very few? I know that, on a similar plane, there are very few great painters, great poets, great philosophers, great technologists, great chemists, great mathematicians: we ordinary folk lack the power of great creation. But we have at least the power of appreciation; and I imagine that appreciation is of the same kind, although not perhaps of the same order, as creation. We do have in us something, however scanty, of the creative artist or thinker: we are not cut off from them completely. As Mr E. M. Forster remarks somewhere: ‘We are rapt into a region near to that where the artist worked.’ So my query with regard to the mystic vision remains. Is it conceivable that just this, allegedly the greatest prize of all, is denied to the vast majority of mankind?

The first of the suggestions I am going to make is that it is not so denied. We all in our own way, and in our own degree, sense the divine. I know I am using doubtful words and I shall seek a later occasion to clear them up somewhat. But if we take as a preliminary pointer a remark from an early essay of the late Clement Webb: ‘A theory of the world may fairly be called Mysticism in which the ultimate truth and reality of things is held to be a unity the consciousness of which is attainable as a feeling inexpressible by thought', are we indeed all strange to such a feeling? Have we not all of us, at different times and in various situations, had this conviction of unity thrust, as it were, upon our consciousness without our being able to give a reasoned account of it? Even in the sphere of everyday action, do we not sometimes ponder and ponder some perplexity' and of a sudden, somehow, our path becomes clear.

THE recent Cambridge production of the Antigone has given occasion to ponder again Antigone's spirited declaration on the Unwritten Laws. King Creon, on political grounds, has forbidden the burial of Poly ne ices. Antigone, on religious grounds, has defied him; and she has justified herself by distinguishing between the changing regulations of a human ruler and the eternal laws of heaven. Creon says to her: ‘Knewest thou the edict that forbade this deed?', and the dialogue proceeds:

That is all we hear, the bare affirmation of the difference in kind between ad hoc regulation and law; but the action of the play proceeds to show that it is the eternal law of heaven, not the fiat of the ruler, which prevails. The play is called by the name of Antigone but its central figure is not Antigone. It is the bearer of political power, the king; and the play demonstrates the breakdown, in the person of Creon, of the political point of view. Political authority is essentially temporary and relative, a device to meet the changing circumstance of ever-shifting power. It is myth, not truth. When it claims to be absolute, it is doomed. It nullifies itself and engenders its own destruction.

There is a very similar, yet very different, story in the Bible, King David lusted after Bathsheba and contrived to have her husband killed. But the thing David had done, we are told, displeased God, and God sent a prophet to David, and the prophet told the king about a rich man and a poor man, and how the rich man took the poor man's one ewe lamb, and David's anger was greatly kindled against the man and he cried: ‘As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this is worthy to die; and he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing and because he had no pity'; and Nathan said to David: ’Thou art the man.

Introductory

1. The great bodies of constructive ideas on which modern Western civilization is built are conventionally traced back to Israel, Greece and Rome: morals and religion to Israel, the sciences and the plastic and literary arts to Greece, law and public administration to Rome. If this is true, it is true only roughly. No civilization can exist without possessing in some measure every one of these activities. Greece and Rome had religion and much of it survives today, just as Israel and Greece had, and bequeathed, law. Indeed, religion and art and science and law appear everywhere (howbeit in varying degrees) together. Further, there is much in modern Western civilization which is unique and original to it, and where the ‘legacy’ from the past is most apparent, it has been most modified in use.

This essay will make therefore no exclusive or pre-eminent claims. It will try to present Jewish thought as a coherent system of ideas; but it will be mindful of the fact that the truer the ideas, the more they may be expected to have appeared elsewhere. Nor will it insist on the connection between Jewish thought and the individuals known as Jews. In a sense, Milton's Paradise Lost or Randel's Messiah or Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job are Jewish, although their authors were not. One may compare the connection of mathematical thought with its first inspiration in Greece, or of the Roman road with its original Roman builders. Roman roads were also built by other than Roman citizens; and mathematical thinking, although brought into the world with and by the Greeks and remaining (possibly) true to its Greek type, has produced results far beyond any Greek achievement. An old talmudic saying is helpful here. Why was the Law given in the wilderness? the rabbis ask, and answer: In order that no one country could claim proprietary rights to it.

2. This is true of ideas of any kind. They are by nature universal. They arise, presumably, in individuals, and they develop their power through communities. But to speak of them in sole association with one person or community is to belie their character. Indeed, the more general they are, the more their character as ideas is manifested.

To explain my title, I offer two illustrations. The first is well known, and I adduce it only because its significance is often overlooked.

The Mishnah in Sanhedrin recounts the way in which the old Jewish court tried to bring home to witnesses in a capital case the uniqueness of human life and the consequent responsibility of their position. The court would have them brought in, we read, and would admonish them as follows:

The Mishnah then goes on:

AS it stands thus, this statement is completely general. The original creation was of one man, and from that one man came the life of all human beings. To preserve one life is thus to preserve a whole world of humanity: to destroy one life is to destroy a whole world. This is obviously the sense meant, and this is obviously the proper text; and so we find it-I am quoting the late Professor J. N. Epstein-in all exact manuscripts and early references. Our printed texts however insert the word meyisrael, and therefore read not ‘whoever preserves or destroys one life’, but ‘whoever preserves or destroys one Jew'. The addition of the word meyisrael produces a sudden, and ludicrous, deflation.

A similar point may be noted in out text of a verse (21) in the last chapter of Isaiah.

THERE have been many attempts at a pocket definition of Judaism. There is Hillel's, in reply to a would-be convert's request to be taught Judaism while he stood on one leg: ‘What you do not like yourself, do not do to others. ‘ There is the medieval rabbi's (in the words of the psalmist): 'In all thy ways know God.’ There is the prophet Jonah's: ‘I am a Hebrew and I reverence the God of Heaven who made the sea and the dry land.’ A famous one is that of Micah: ‘He hath told thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth God require of thee but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?’ What is common to all these summary statements is that they are couched in terms of general moral values. Like Micah's pronouncement, they are concerned with no one person or group of persons but with man.

The content of Judaism would thus seem to be universal, yet its bearers are a particular people, the Jews; and the history of Judaism is the story of the balance (often an uneasy one) between the universality of the doctrine and the particularity of its transmitters. The connection between the two is laid down clearly from the very first. God is represented as having 'known’ Abraham (that is, singled him out from all others) in order that he should command his children and his household after him to practise the ‘way of God, that is, to do justice and judgment’. Here, too, the terms used are completely general: justice, judgement, the way of God; and the children of Abraham are to be the vehicle through which the way of God (that is, the way of justice and judgement) is to be displayed.

This is the doctrine of the ‘chosen people', a doctrine which has been misunderstood by both Jews and non-Jews, and which has done much harm. It is so easy to claim to be the chosen people, and to forget that the choice means duty, not privilege. In itself no one people is any better, as in itself no one people is any worse, than any other.

THE prophets did not talk to scholars. They talked to the ordinary man; and when the old synagogue tradition prescribed weekly readings from the Prophets like those from the Law, it arranged that, just like the lessons from the Law, they should be read both in the original and in a vernacular translation, that is, presumably, for the benefit of the ordinary man.

Of course that was a dangerous practice. Bible reading in the vernacular always was dangerous. It gave people ‘ideas’. It sometimes made them disrespectful to the powers that be, and the powers that be did not like it. There is an episode in the history of the haftarah (as the weekly lesson from the Prophets read in the synagogue is called) which in this regard I find instructive. A noted rabbi is reported in the Mishnah to have laid it down that the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, beginning ‘Cause Jerusalem to know her abominations', is not to be used as a prophetic lesson. As the commentators explain (I should have thought superfluously), it is not to the credit of Jerusalem. You see the tendency, and it is the same everywhere and at all times. We must not be told about our misdeeds. It is bad for what is called, somewhat curiously, ’morale'.

I am glad to be able to say that in this particular instance the synagogue did not make that mistake. To its credit, the objection, although from a very famous rabbi, was overruled. The official decision is that the chapter in question may be used as a public lesson, and should be translated and read publicly in the vernacular.

This encourages me in my layman's view that the importance of the prophets, both for their generation and for us, is not that they speak ‘comfortable words’ (though they do that too at times), but that they dared to say things which are very uncomfortable indeed but which happen to be true. Their interest was not in morale (so-called) but in something very different: morals.