standard of judgment for Israelite
and stranger.

3. The simple sense of justice inherent in the Jewish people admits so
little difference between our own God-consciousness and that of others,
that Scripture represents the Philistine King Abimelech as receiving a
warning from Abraham's God *JHVH*.(1256) As the Bible holds up Job, the
Bedouin Sheik, as the pattern of a blameless servant of God and true lover
of mankind,(1257) so the Talmud cites the Philistine Dama ben Nethina as
an example of filial piety.(1258) Altogether, the merits of the heathen
receive their full measure of appreciation throughout Jewish
literature,(1259) even though a narrow dissenting view occurs now and
then.(1260)

4. Still from the very beginning a tendency to relentless harshness
existed in one direction, when the pure worship of Israel's one and only
God was endangered. The early Book of the Covenant forbade every alliance
with idolatrous nations,(1261) and the Deuteronomic Code made this more
stringent by prohibiting intermarriage and even the toleration of
idolaters in the land, lest they seduce the people of God to turn away
from Him.(1262) The Pharisean leaders, the founders of Rabbinism, went
still further by placing an interdict upon eating with the heathen or
using food and wine prepared by them, thus aiming at a complete separation
from the non-Jewish world.(1263)

The contrast between Judaism and heathenism was further heightened by the
view of the prophets and psalmists, showing that the great nations were
the very embodiment of idolatrous iniquity, murderous violence and sexual
impurity, a world of arrogance and pride, defying God and doomed to
perdition, because they opposed the kingdom of God proclaimed by
Israel.(1264) Henceforth the term "the nations" (_goyim_) was taken by the
religious as meaning the wicked ones, who would not be able to stand the
divine judgment in the future life, but would go down to Sheol, or
Gehenna, to fall a prey to everlasting corruption, to the fire that is
never quenched.(1265)

5. Yet such a wholesale condemnation could not long be maintained; it was
too strongly contradicted in principle by the prophets and Psalmists, and
quite as much by the apocalyptic writers and Haggadists of later times.
The book of Jonah testifies that Israel's God sent His prophet to the
heathen of Nineveh to exhort them to repentance, that they might obtain
forgiveness and salvation like repentant Israel.(1266) Heath