for the redemption of Israel." At this
period the national hope was occupied with the figure of a Messiah, a
God-sent Deliverer, whose coming was to be the prelude to the
establishment of the divine kingdom. We learn from the Gospels what
various ideas were entertained by the Jews of the first century about
this "coming one," and how little Jesus Christ was felt to answer to
the common expectation.

A few words must be said of Jewish beliefs concerning the other
world. While there are traces of an old ancestor-worship in the
earlier parts of Jewish history, no belief of the kind had much
importance in Israel. The Jews shared the general belief of the early
world that the dead continued in a shadowy existence without any
power for action. They have an under-world, Sheol, where the dead
are; Isaiah has a magnificent description of the dead kings sitting
on thrones together in Sheol and rising up to greet a newcomer who
was a great potentate on earth, with the words "Art thou also become
weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?" The dead are conceived as
continuing in a weak and unsubstantial reflection of their former
selves. They can be fetched up to the earth by magic arts to tell the
future, but this was strictly forbidden at a very early time. The
Psalms and other later books contain many plain denials that man has
any continuance to look for after death. The religion of the Old
Testament, as has often been said, is for this life. God's rewards
are to be looked for before death; once gone to the grave one can no
more enjoy God's bounty or give him thanks. God's kingdom of the
future is also a kingdom of this world; Jerusalem is its capital, and
nature is to be transformed for it. In the later period of Jewish
history, however, the hope of the future which has been so entirely
abandoned, which Job, for example, in an early chapter puts so
peremptorily away from him, creates itself afresh in a new form. In
the time of Christ the Jews believe, as a matter of course, that men
will rise again. It has been contended that the Jews derived their
later doctrine of a future life from their contact with Persia, but
it is not necessary to account for it in this way. It arose naturally
among the Jews in more ways than one. The individual believer like
Job, entirely sure of his own innocence, and feeling that he was
doomed to die of his disease without any vindication in this life,
claimed that an opportunity should be found beyo