6. Comp. Ab. ii. 5
7. Jer. Chag. i. hal. 7, towards the end; Jer. Pes. iii.7.
8. Ab. Z. 3 b.
It is necessary to transport oneself into this atmosphere to understand the views entertained at
the time of Jesus, or to form any conception of their infinite contrast in spirit to the new doctrine.
The abhorrence, not unmingled with contempt, of all Gentile ways, thoughts and associations;
the worship of the letter of the Law; the self-righteousness, and pride of descent, and still more
of knowledge, become thus intelligible to us, and, equally so, the absolute antagonism to the
claims of a Messiah, so unlike themselves and their own ideal. His first announcement might,
indeed, excite hope, soon felt to have been vain; and His miracles might startle for a time. But
the boundary lines of the Kingdom which He traced were essentially different from those which
they had fixed, and within which they had arranged everything, alike for the present and the
future. Had He been content to step within them, to complete and realise what they had
indicated, it might have been different. Nay, once admit their fundamental ideas, and there was
much that was beautiful, true, and even grand in the details. But it was exactly in the former that
the divergence lay. Nor was there any possibility of reform or progress here. The past, the
present, and the future, alike as regarded the Gentile world and Israel, were irrevocably fixed;
or rather, it might almost be said, there were not such - all continuing as they had been from the
creation of the world, nay, long before it. The Torah had really existed 2,000 years before
Creation;9 the patriarchs had had their Academies of study, and they had known and observed
all the ordinances; and traditionalism had the same origin, both as to time and authority, as the
Law itself. As for the heathen nations, the Law had been offered by God to them, but refused,
and even their after repentance would prove hypocritical, as all their excuses would be shown to
be futile. But as for Israel, even though their good deeds should be few, yet, by cumulating them
from among all the people, they would appear great in the end, and God would exact payment
for their sins as a man does from his friends, taking little sums at a time. It was in this sense, that
the Rabbis employed that sublime figure, representing the Church as one body, of which all the
members suffered and joyed together, which St. Paul adopted and applied in a vastly different
and spiritual sense.10
9. Shir haShir. R. on Cant. v. 11, ed Warshau, p. 26b.
10. Eph. iv. 16.
If, on the one hand, the pre-eminence of Israel depended on the Land, and, on the other, that of
the Land on the presence of Israel in it, the Rabbinical complaint was, indeed, well grounded,
that its `boundaries were becoming narrow.' We can scarcely expect any accurate demarcation
of them, since the question, what belonged to it, was determined by ritual and theological, not
by geographical considerations. Not only the immediate neighborhood (as in the case of
Ascalon), but the very wall of a city (as of Acco and of Cęsarea) might be Palestinian, and yet
the city itself be regarded as `outside' the sacred limits. All depended on who had originally
possessed, and now held a place, and hence what ritual obligations lay upon it. Ideally, as we