Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Unterschied zw. Griechenland und Israel: Philosophie - Gesetz (Hosea, Plato); Israels "Gesetz" als Antwort auf die Krise der Gesellschaft (Moses)

Kurzinhalt: (Hosea) he found the root of the evil in the "want of knowledge" concerning matters divine. Up to this point his analysis was literally the same as Plato's Republic, das Bundesbuch

Textausschnitt: 27/10 In the crisis of the ninth century begins the Israelite concern with the codification of the law in written form. Probably the oldest code extant is the brief collection of commands in the Yahwist (J) account of the Sinaitic legislation, in Exodus 34:17-26. Not much later but considerably more extensive is the Elohist (E) code of Exodus 20:23-23:19, commonly designated as the Book of the Covenant ...
()
30/10 When the covenant and the law are broken, then the people have no knowledge; and a people without knowledge of the order of God will perish, as 4:14 formulates it succinctly: "A people without insight must come to ruin." The passages in their aggregate characterize a society in spiritual and moral confusion; and in grieving over the state of confusion they develop a technical vocabulary for its description. Men are in a state of ignorance. But it is not an ordinary ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what never was learned. For the children of Israel have heard a good deal of the God whom they now do not know. The ignorance is a forgetfulness. And since God is a being not to be forgotten involuntarily, the want of knowledge is a rejection of God. (326f; Fs)
31/10 In order to appraise the meaning of Hosea's prophecies, we have to recall what appeared in the section on "The Struggle for Empire" as the difference between the Israelite and Hellenic types of symbolization. The idea of the psyche, we said, could not be fully developed in Israel because the problem of immortality remained unsolved. Life eternal was understood as a divine property; afterlife would have elevated man to the rank of the Elohim; and a plurality of elohim was excluded by the radical leap in being of the Mosaic experience. As a consequence, the eroticism of the soul that is the essence of philosophy could not unfold; and the idea of human perfection could not break the idea of a Chosen People in righteous existence under God in history. Instead of philosophy, there developed the construction of patriarchal history, a specific kind of humanism, and ultimately the apocalyptic hope for divine intervention in history. (327; Fs) (notabene)
32/10 The prophecies of Hosea reveal the limitations imposed by the initial compactness of Israelite experiences. The prophet tried to describe a society in crisis, and he found the root of the evil in the "want of knowledge" concerning matters divine. Up to this point his analysis was literally the same as Plato's in the Republic. Plato, as Hosea, diagnosed the evil as an ignorance of the soul, an agnoia concerning the nature of God. But Plato could proceed from his insight to an analysis of the right order of the soul through its attunement to the unseen measure. And he even developed the concept of "theology," in order to speak in technical language of true and false conceptions of divinity. Under the condition of the more compact experiences and symbols in Israel, Hosea could not find the answer to his problems in the attunement of the soul to the divine measure, but had to seek it in a renewed conformity of human conduct to the measure as revealed in the "word" and the "law" of God. Not the advance toward philosophy but the return to the covenant and the law was the Israelite response to the challenge of the crisis. (327; Fs) (notabene)
33/10 If the new concern about the covenant and the law is understood as the response to a crisis of mundane existence, functionally of the same type as the response through philosophy in Hellas, certain problems of Israelite history will become more intelligible. Before the ninth century we hear little of Moses and his work. To be sure,