SECOND BLOW: The Destruction Of Yerusalem
The Great Reign Of Hezekiah
Hezekiah's Moral Reformation
It would be wrong to judge these various spiritual reforms merely externally. In some sort they constituted the counterpart of a profound moral transformation.
At. the end of the seventh century the idea of social justice appeared, which henceforward was to be shown by the feeling of mercy, of brotherly help, and of the fellowship of the wealthy man with his less fortunate contemporaries.
The prophet Amos, as we saw defined this 'justice' with concrete examples, and with disquieting statements about the spiritual level of the society of the time. From certain indications to be found here and there we can see how the great fortunes were accumulated. The peasant was always at the mercy of a drought or a plague of locusts; after a poor harvest he was obliged to borrow from a moneylender in order to continue. If the following year was as hard as the previous one he ran into further debt, always at a usurious rate of interest. By force of circumstances the debtor could no longer pay his debt and the lender applied for distraint on his possessions. The insolvent peasant with his whole family was then reduced to the rank of a slave and was sold as such. It was in this way that gradually the large estates came into existence. These estates were usually administered by greedy and merciless stewards, for the capitalist was very careful not to live in the country; he preferred a house in the city, where his immense income enabled him to enjoy all the pleasures of life.
The Mosaic Law exhorted the Yahwist not to forget his duty towards his brothers
Despite the cries of warning by Amos the people seem not to have understood the dangers threatening them. A little later YeshaYahu was no more successful. Man remained buried in his fierce egoism. It was every man for himself, with never a trace of any feeling of pity for the great mass of workers. There was never any question of brotherly actions. A man's life, it was thought, was what YAHWEH gave him, it was what he deserved. No one thought of helping his neighbour, at least outside the very restricted category of his own family. Life was hard; a man was master or slave, rich or poor. It was the duty of each individual to work in his own personal sphere, and so far as he could, better his own state. Of course, the Mosaic Law exhorted the Yahwist not to forget his duty towards his brothers, but these were very ancient texts and no one appeared to take any notice of them.
The historian finds this unrelenting frame of mind still flourishing at a very much later date in the developed civilizations of Greece and Rome, and this is true of the whole course of their history. There was no respect for the human person. But these peoples of the Mediterranean had one excuse at least: they were not under the rule of the Law of Mosheh.
Hezekiah was alive to danger
Hezekiah was alive to the danger that this iniquitous viewpoint represented for the people as a whole. Since he had determined to refashion the soul of his people to give them cohesion enough to attack the Assyrians one day at least -he was obliged in the first place to put an end to oppression of the peasant or city artisan by the wealthy class. If Yahudah was to be regenerated 'justice' must reign over the People of YAHWEH. And here collaboration with the prophet YeshaYahu proved very fruitful.
Already in the time of Amos the practice had begun of calling anaw (plural anawim) the 'poor of YAHWEH', the man whom the greed and hardness of heart of the rich reduced to a distressing and often hopeless position. Thereby the victim was practically excluded from the moral and spiritual benefits of the Covenant proclaimed on Sinai:
They trample on the heads of ordinary people and push the poor out of their path exclaimed the prophet Amos angrily Amoz-(Amos) 2:7
A few years later YeshaYahu returned to the same theme, transferring the set apart anathemas addressed to the grabbers of property to the merciless masters, the lying officials, the judges whose judgments could be bought:
By what right do you crush my people and grind the faces of the poor (anawim)? YeshaYahu-(Isaiah) 3:15
A turning-point of great importance in the history of the spiritual progress of humanity
Now this poor man, this beggar brought to his present plight by the egoism of his own people, this anaw appears as the friend, the dependent of YAHWEH. That is the social morality that is beginning to emerge. The love of YAHWEH is withheld from the oppressor and given to the oppressed.5 This great moral advance was sustained and advanced by the prophets Amos, Hosea, Micah and YeshaYahu, but it was Hezekiah who nonetheless remained its architect in the social field.
5 Shortly, the term anaw was to take on a wider spiritual meaning From its purely sociological meaning at first it then evolved to a spiritual sense. Soon the anaw was no longer to be a beggar, a slave, a proletarian, but the faithful Yahwist intent on putting the word of YAHWEH into practice. The anaw was always striving to discover what study of the Law would reveal to his heart. So we can observe the emergence of a really spiritual religion which henceforward came to be imperative for man who had hitherto been too much concerned with the meticulous performance of ritual. Here we come to a turning-point of great importance in the history of the spiritual progress of humanity.
The Destruction of the Kingdom by YAHWEH Destruction Sitemap Scripture History Through the Ages