NOTES FOR BIBLE STUDENTS BY BENJAMIN B. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D.1
(Continued from page 344.)
1 These “Notes” are taken from “The Bible Student and Teacher.” Dr. Warfield is a professor of theology in Princeton, New York, and a learned expositor and defender of sound doctrine.—ED.
IT is worth while to observe, however, precisely what is set aside by the criticisms of Meyer and his successors. It is no more than that the term “little ones” means directly (Meyer says “schlechtin”) “disciples,” and was current as a well-known synonym of that term. It would be too much to claim that it could not be, or even never was, employed by the Rabbins to designate “disciples” figuratively. It would be too much to say even that the passage in the Bereshith Rabba referred to has no bearing on such an employment of it. We observe that, undeterred by such criticism, Dr. Edersheim still appeals to this passage (Life and Times of Jesus, Ed. 1, I., 652) to show that a fuller meaning might be borne to our Lord’s contemporaries by the phrase “these little ones” than it bears to us. “It shows,” he remarks, “that the phrase ‘little ones’ would naturally be understood as ‘the children'” (inverted commas his) “who were still learning the elements and who would by and by grow into ‘disciples.'” It would seem to be used here, then, in his opinion, not indeed of “disciples,” but of “disciples in the making,” and on our Lord’s lips, therefore, to designate His followers not exactly as “disciples,” but at least as inchoate disciples.
How far this view is justified, and what the real bearing of the passage in the Bereshith Rabba is on the meaning of the phrase as used by our Lord, may perhaps be best estimated, however, by reading it more at large. We translate it from Wünsche’s version (p. 191 seq.):—”What, then, was the distress in the days of Ahaz? Aram pressed from before and the Philistines from behind. It was just like a prince whom his tutor wished to destroy, but considered that if he killed him himself he would forfeit his life to the king, but if he should rather simply take his nurse from him he would die of himself. So also Ahaz said: Where there are no lambs, there are no rams; and where there are no rams, there are no sheep; and where there is no sheep, there is no shepherd; and where there is no shepherd, there the world can not subsist. Accordingly he thought: Where there are no children learning, there are no disciples; where no disciples, no sages; where no sages, no elders; and where no elders, there are no prophets; and where there are no prophets, there God does not let His Shechina rest on them (see Is. viii. 16). Rabbi Hunja bar Eleasar said: Why is the King called Ahaz? Because he destroyed the houses of assembly and instruction. Rabbi Jacob bar Abbi, in the name of Rabbi Acha, referring to Is. viii. 17, 18, “And I wait for the Eternal who hides his face from the house of Jacob” said: There is no heavier hour than that in which God says, “I hide my face” (see Deut. xxxi. 18); and from that hour I wait for the fulfilment of the word of Deut. xxxi. 21, “It shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed.” Of what profit is this? “Behold I and the children whom the Eternal has given me are a sign and a wonder in Israel” (see Is. viii. 18). Were they then his children? They were certainly His disciples. They were, however, so dear to him that they were as if his children. When King Ahaz began to destroy the houses of assembly and teaching they began all to cry. Woe!”
It is dangerous to launch out ever so little upon the sea of Rabbinical interpretation. But the central idea of this passage appears to be the importance of the rising generation. Ahaz, wishing to root out the worship of God in Israel, wisely began by destroying the Church and school, shrewdly arguing that if he dried up the supply of worshippers at its source the stream would die out of itself. And the Rabbis, so far commending this unrighteous ruler, remind themselves that in the rising generation is the hope of the nation and of the church and school alike. The passage cited by Wetstein thus appears to be in essence but a study of correlatives, the gist of which is that the hope of everything hangs on the children: when no children are in the schools then there can come out into the work-a-day world nothing good; sages, elders, prophets alike fail, and God can not visit His people. Of course it is all spoken from the Rabbinical standpoint, and it is children in the school that are in mind; but we can not see that the words “little ones” means in the context anything but just “children.” That the idea, nevertheless, of the affectionate designation of “disciples” by the tender name of “children” was by no means foreign to the Rabbinical mind appears from the latter portion of the passage we have quoted. There Is. viii. 18 is interpreted as having reference to these children of the mind rather than of the body. The general result we derive from this passage is therefore that, although it affords no proof that the specific phrase “the little ones” was current among the Rabbis in the sense of “disciples,” it does clearly exhibit that the affectionate application of the term “children” to one’s disciples was by no means alien to Rabbinical feeling, as, indeed (since they too were men) it could not well be. Nothing could be more touching than the simple words with which our extract closes, which tell us that Isaiah’s pupils were “so dear to him” that they were as his children; and nothing could more aptly illustrate the employment by our Lord of the designation “these little ones” of His disciples, if that phrase in its literal connotation denotes children.
The source of the suggestion to our Lord of the particular phrase, “These little ones,” as a designation of His disciples, remains, however, even after we have heard the Rabbis, still to seek. We have seen that it is natural to think and speak of one’s disciples as his “children,” and that the passage quoted by Wetstein from the “Bereshith Rabba” seems to indicate the use among the Rabbis of the term “little ones” for “children.” But we are afraid that when we have said this we have not said quite all. It would seem that we must add that this particular term, as applied by the Rabbis to children, appears to be freighted not so much with affectionate feeling as rather with the simple implication of immaturity. If we may trust the Lexicographers, children were “little ones” to the Rabbis only as undeveloped and unripe things, not yet arrived “at years of discretion.” The “katan” and “katanna” were simply the “boy” and “girl” in opposition to the mature man and woman. Although then this term for children was occasionally transferred by them metaphorically to their pupils, it was not in a very pleasant sense. The “little one” among the pupils was just an “abortion”—one who set himself up in his immaturity in opposition to his master’s ripe learning, or one who, while yet fit only to learn, prematurely assumed the functions of a teacher (tract SOTAH 22a, quoted by both Levy and Jastrow sub voc.). It was assuredly not from this circle of ideas that our Lord derived his use of the phrase.
It is worth remarking further that this term, employed by the Rabbis to express the immaturity of childhood, never occurs in the Old Testament as a designation of children. Children are never spoken of as “little ones” in the Hebrew Old Testament. Readers of the English Bible will no doubt be surprised by such a statement, since the English Bible is sown thickly with such a designation. But this is wholly due to the English translators, who render thus a Hebrew collective noun (taph), the suggestion of which is not smallness of size, but trippingness of gait. To the Hebrew, in other words, children appealed not as “little ones,” but as “toddlers” (Gen. xxxiv. 29; xliii. 8; xlv. 19; xlvi. 5; xlvi. 12, 24; l. 8, 21; Ex. x. 10, 24; Numb. xiv. 31; xvi. 21; xxxi. 9, 17; xxxii. 16, 17, 21, 24; Deut. i. 39; ii. 34; iii. 19; xx. 14; xxix. 11; Josh. i. 14; viii. 35; Judges xviii. 21; 2 Sam. xv. 22; 2 Chron. xx. 13; xxxi. 18; Ezra viii. 21; Esther iii. 13; viii. 11; Ezek. ix. 6. Yet other terms with other implications are used in Ps. cxxxvii, 9; Job xxi. 11; Jeremiah xiv. 3; xlvi. 4; Zech. xiii. 7, where the term “little ones” occurs in the Authorised Version). This term (“taph“), moreover, is never rendered in the Greek Old Testament by the Greek phrase meaning “little ones” which our Saviour employs. The Greek phrase “little ones” in the sense of “children” is thus just as unexampled in Biblical usage as is the corresponding Hebrew one. (Students will perceive at a glance that such passages as Gen. xlv. 20; Is. lx. 22 for the Hebrew, and Gen. xlii. 32; 1 Sam. xvi. 11; 2 Chron. xxii. 1, in the Greek, where “little one” means distinctly “THE little one,” that is, the smallest child, are not exceptions to this statement.)
Nor, indeed, would it have seemed much more natural to a Greek affectionately to designate children “little ones” than it did to the Hebrews. Their term for “little” did not easily suggest fewness of years, but rather smallness of size, with an implication of triviality; and when applied to people in a metaphorical sense it was apt to convey a tinge of reproach. No passage is adduced in Stephens’ “Thesaurus” where it is used as a substantive, singular or plural, in the sense of “child” or “children.” It occurs, no doubt, as an adjective qualifying the word “child”: “You deceive me with words as if I were a little child,” for example, we read in “Theognis” (254)—where its essentially uncomplimentary implication is apparent. But this is something very different from its use without substantive to mean “child” or “children.” It is also found in an epithet attributed to individuals in the classics, as in the New Testament (“James the Less,” or rather “the Little”) and in Rabbinical Hebrew (“Samuel the Little”): thus we read in Aristotle of “Amyntas the Little” and in Xenophon of “Aristodemus, called the Little,” and in Aristophanes of “Kleigenes the Little.” But no more in the classics than in the New Testament or Rabbinical Hebrew is it inferiority of age that is expressed (cf. Meyer or Mark xv. 40). There seems thus to be no obtrusive point of connection in either Hebrew or Greek usage to explain naturally the selection by our Lord of “these little ones,” conceived as a designation for “children,” as an endearing diminutive to designate His “disciples.”
If we search the Old Testament, indeed, for a possible point of departure for the framing of such a phrase as our Lord uses, there is but one passage which readily suggests itself. We refer to Zech. xiii. 7. This passage in our Revised English Version is as follows:—”Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts; smite the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered; and I will turn My hand upon the little ones.” This remarkable prophecy our Lord quotes (Matt. xxvi. 31; Mark xiv. 27), recognizing in Himself Jehovah’s Shepherd, who is also Jehovah’s fellow, and in His own apprehension and crucifixion the smiting of the shepherd by which the sheep of the flock should be scattered abroad. This recognition implies the application of the term “the little ones” in the last clause of the verse to His followers. The Hebrew vocabular here employed is not the ordinary Hebrew word for “little” things used in later Hebrew for “children,” nor yet the Biblical term so frequently rendered in our English version “little ones,” but a word used in the precise form in which it here occurs in this passage only, but occurring in related forms often elsewhere, ordinarily with the implication of youthfulness (Gen. xix. 31, 34, 35, 38; xxv. 23; xxix. 26; xliii. 33; xlvi. 14; Josh. vi. 20; 1 Kings xvi. 34; Job xxx. 1; xxxii. 6; Jer. xlvi. 4), though sometimes also with that of insignificance (Judges vi. 15; 1 Sam. ix. 21; Is. lx. 22; Jer. xiv. 3; xlvi. 4; Micah v. 2). The implication of the word as used in this verse, as well as its general connotation, commends it powerfully to us as possibly forming the starting point for the forming of the phrase which our Lord uses. Clearly it is equivalent, not as Chambers and Shegg, for example, take it, to “the poor of the flock” of Zech. xii. 7, but rather to “the little ones of the flock” o Jer. xlix. 20, 50; l. 45—if indeed there is any distinction intended between “the little ones” and the flock at large, and these “little ones” are not rather to be conceived as the flock itself called “the little ones” in an access of tenderness, possibly with additional implication of the humbleness of their estate and the humility of their hearts (cf. in general Köhler). If we suppose our Lord’s phrase to be based on this passage of Zechariah, the fundamental implication of its employment would seem to be a conception of His followers less as His “children” than as His “little sheep” or His “lambs.” The two implications are not, however, mutually exclusive, but, on the contrary, run into one another; so that even in this contingency the passage from “one such little child” in Matt. xviii. 5 to “one of these little ones” in Matt. xviii. 6 would be neither inexplicable nor unnatural.
The suggestion that our Lord’s phrase “these little ones” may find its root in Zechariah’s “little ones,” together with the uncertainty whether Zechariah’s “little ones” are identical with the flock or must rather be looked upon, with the majority of the commentators, as only a portion of the flock—the truly pious remnant—raises the question whether our Lord by “these little ones” meant all His disciples or only a specially designated class of them. The latter has been quite commonly supposed, and interpreters have busied themselves in defining what are the characteristic qualities of this particularly specified class. Hahn, for example, strenuously argues that the disciples at large can not be meant, but that the designation presupposes that there are greater and smaller among the disciples (cf. Luke vii. 28); and that the essence of the exhortation, in Luke xvii. 2 at least, is that the greater must not despise the lesser. Similarly Godet supposes that the “little ones” are “beginners in the faith,” “those yet weak in faith;” and Alford appears to think that it is worth considering whether the “lower and less advanced converts” may not be meant. Surely, however, the idea of such distinctions within the limits of Christ’s followers is not only without support from the contexts in which the phrase occurs, but is distinctly inconsistent with them. In Matt. x. 42, for example, such a distinction is definitely negatived by the parallelism by which the “little ones” are identified with the “disciples.” Its assumption would leave wholly out of account, also, the defining “these.” Our Lord was addressing His disciples and speaking (verse 40) of the reception accorded to them. “THESE little ones” can therefore only mean them. The matter is even plainer in Mark ix. 42, where “these little ones” takes up again the “you” of the preceding verse; they are therefore identified definitely with the disciples at large. They are besides openly defined as “those that believe.” that is to say, as “believers” in their essential character as such. Much the same may be said of Luke xvii. 2, in the context of which there is a distinction noted between brother and brother, but not between greater and lesser. While the whole drift of Matt. xviii. 5-14 is to exalt “the little ones” and to identify them just with that body of chosen ones to whose salvation the will of the Father is pledged. It may be taken as exegetically certain, therefore, that by “these little ones” our Lord does not intend to single out a certain section of His disciples—whether the weakest in faith or the most advanced in that humility of heart which is the fruit of a great faith—but means just the whole body of His disciples. This is, therefore, simply one of the somewhat numerous general designations which He gives to His disciples, by which to express His conception of their character and estate and the nature of His feelings towards them.
What, then, is the conception of His disciples and His feeling towards them which our Lord expresses in the use of this designation? In their answers to these questions, too, the commentators differ very widely among themselves. The disciples were called “little ones,” thinks Reuss, because they were drawn from the most humble and least distinguished portion of society; they were so called, thinks De Wette, because they were despised and meanly esteemed for Christ’s sake; they were so called, thinks Dr. Riddle, in recognition of their weakness in themselves, in the midst of the persecutions of the world. As many voices, so many opinions. Among them all the characteristically crisp and clear-cut note of Bengel on Matt. x. 42 commends itself to us: “‘Little ones,’ see chapter xi. 11; Zech. xiii. 7: a sweet (suave) epithet for disciples.” “A sweet epithet”—that is, a loving epithet, a term of endearment. That surely is the main import of the epithet: it is an utterance of deep-reaching tenderness, the very expression of endearment.
Other implications may be present, but they are certainly secondary. Among these the chief one assuredly is the neediness of the disciples. The passages in which the epithet occurs are pre-eminent for their note of protecting care. They read like the cry of a mother’s heart for her child; they have in them something of the fierceness of the mother’s protecting love (Matt. xviii. 6 seq; Mark ix. 42; Luke xvii. 2); and all of the passion of her brooding tenderness (Matt. x. 42; Mark ix. 41). And they run up into that marvellous declaration of the eighteenth chapter of Matthew that no man and no thing can snatch the objects of this love out of the Saviour’s hands. We think we should not go wrong, therefore, if, neglecting everything else, we should say that our Saviour calls His disciples “these little ones” because He thinks of them as the particular objects of His protecting care and gives in this designation of them a supreme expression to the depth and tenderness of his love for them. It is thus the diminutive of endearment by way of eminence; the purest expression, among all His affectionate names for His disciples, of the fondness of His love for them. They were His friends and His children: His sheep and His lambs; but above all these they were “His little ones”—His “little ones” who needed Him and whom He would never fail in their times of need, even though their times of need be all times—as indeed they are.