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Introduction
to Genesis
This summary of the book of Genesis provides information about the
title, author(s), date of writing, chronology, theme, theology, outline, a
brief overview, and the chapters of the Book of Genesis.
The first phrase in the Hebrew text of 1:1
is bereshith
("in [the] beginning"), which is also the Hebrew title of the book
(books in ancient times customarily were named after their first word or two).
The English title, Genesis, is Greek in origin and comes from the word geneseos, which appears in
the pre-Christian Greek translation (Septuagint) of 2:4;
5:1. Depending on its context, the word can mean
"birth," "genealogy," or "history of origin." In
both its Hebrew and Greek forms, then, the traditional title of Genesis
appropriately describes its contents, since it is primarily a book of
beginnings.
Chs. 1-38 reflect a great deal of
what we know from other sources about ancient Mesopotamian life and culture.
Creation, genealogies, destructive floods, geography and mapmaking,
construction techniques, migrations of peoples, sale and purchase of land,
legal customs and procedures, sheepherding and cattle-raising -- all these
subjects and many others were matters of vital concern to the peoples of
Mesopotamia during this time. They were also of interest to the individuals,
families and tribes of whom we read in the first 38 chapters of Genesis. The
author appears to locate Eden, humankind's first home, in or near Mesopotamia;
the tower of Babel was built there; Abram was born there; Isaac took a wife
from there; and Jacob lived there for 20 years. Although these patriarchs
settled in Canaan, their original homeland was Mesopotamia.
The closest ancient literary parallels to Ge
1-38 also come from Mesopotamia. Enuma
elish, the story of the god Marduk's rise to supremacy in the
Babylonian pantheon, is similar in some respects (though thoroughly mythical
and polytheistic) to the Ge 1 creation account. Some of the features of certain
king lists from Sumer bear striking resemblance to the genealogy in Ge
5. The 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh
epic is quite similar in outline to the flood narrative in Ge
6-8. Several of the major events of Ge 1-8 are narrated in the same
order as similar events in the Atrahasis
epic. In fact, the latter features the same basic motif of
creation-rebellion-flood as the Biblical account. Clay tablets found in 1974 at
the ancient (c. 2500-2300 b.c.) site of Ebla (modern Tell Mardikh) in northern
Syria may also contain some intriguing parallels.
Two other important sets of documents demonstrate the reflection
of Mesopotamia in the first 38 chapters of Genesis. From the Mari letters,
dating from the patriarchal period, we learn that the names of the patriarchs
(including especially Abram, Jacob and Job) were typical of that time. The
letters also clearly illustrate the freedom of travel that was possible between
various parts of the Amorite world in which the patriarchs lived. The Nuzi
tablets, though a few centuries later than the patriarchal period, shed light
on patriarchal customs, which tended to survive virtually intact for many
centuries. The inheritance right of an adopted household member or slave (see 15:1-4), the obligation of a barren wife to
furnish her husband with sons through a servant girl (see 16:2-4), strictures against expelling such a
servant girl and her son (see 21:10-11), the authority of oral statements in
ancient Near Eastern law, such as the deathbed bequest (see 27:1-4,22-23,33) -- these and other legal
customs, social contracts and provisions are graphically illustrated in
Mesopotamian documents.
As Ge 1-38 is Mesopotamian in character and background, so chs. 39
- 50 reflect Egyptian influence -- though in not
quite so direct a way. Examples of such influence are: Egyptian grape
cultivation (40:9-11), the riverside scene (ch. 41),
Egypt as Canaan's breadbasket (ch. 42),
Canaan as the source of numerous products for Egyptian consumption (ch. 43),
Egyptian religious and social customs (the end of chs. 43;
46), Egyptian administrative procedures (ch. 47),
Egyptian funerary practices (ch. 50)
and several Egyptian words and names used throughout these chapters. The
closest specific literary parallel from Egypt is the Tale of Two Brothers,
which bears some resemblance to the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife (ch. 39).
Egyptian autobiographical narratives (such as the Story of Sinuhe and the Report of Wenamun) and
certain historical legends offer more general literary parallels.
Historically, Jews and Christians alike have held that Moses was
the author/compiler of the first five books of the OT. These books, known also
as the Pentateuch (meaning "five-volumed book"), were referred to in
Jewish tradition as the five fifths of the law (of Moses). The Bible itself
suggests Mosaic authorship of Genesis, since Ac
15:1 refers to circumcision as "the custom taught by
Moses," an allusion to Ge
17. However, a certain amount of later editorial updating does
appear to be indicated (see, e.g., notes on 14:14; 36:31; 47:11).
The historical period during which Moses lived seems to be fixed
with a fair degree of accuracy by 1 Kings. We are told that "the fourth
year of Solomon's reign over Israel" was the same as "the four
hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of Egypt" (1Ki
6:1). Since the former was c. 966 b.c., the latter -- and thus the
date of the exodus -- was c. 1446 (assuming that the 480 in 1Ki
6:1 is to be taken literally; see Introduction to Judges:
Background). The 40-year period of Israel's wanderings in the desert, which
lasted from c. 1446 to c. 1406, would have been the most likely time for Moses
to write the bulk of what is today known as the Pentateuch.
During the last three centuries many interpreters have claimed to
find in the Pentateuch four underlying sources. The presumed documents,
allegedly dating from the tenth to the fifth centuries b.c., are called J (for
Jahweh/Yahweh, the personal OT name for God), E (for Elohim, a generic name for
God), D (for Deuteronomic) and P (for Priestly). Each of these documents is
claimed to have its own characteristics and its own theology, which often
contradicts that of the other documents. The Pentateuch is thus depicted as a
patchwork of stories, poems and laws. However, this view is not supported by
conclusive evidence, and intensive archaeological and literary research has
tended to undercut many of the arguments used to challenge Mosaic authorship.
Genesis speaks of beginnings -- of the heavens and the earth, of
light and darkness, of seas and skies, of land and vegetation, of sun and moon
and stars, of sea and air and land animals, of human beings (made in God's own
image, the climax of his creative activity), of marriage and family, of society
and civilization, of sin and redemption. The list could go on and on. A key
word in Genesis is "account," which also serves to divide the book
into its ten major parts (see Literary Features and Literary Outline) and which
includes such concepts as birth, genealogy and history.
The book of Genesis is foundational to the understanding of the
rest of the Bible. Its message is rich and complex, and listing its main
elements gives a succinct outline of the Biblical message as a whole. It is
supremely a book that speaks about relationships, highlighting those between
God and his creation, between God and humankind, and between human beings. It
is thoroughly monotheistic, taking for granted that there is only one God
worthy of the name and opposing the ideas that there are many gods (polytheism),
that there is no god at all (atheism) and that everything is divine
(pantheism). It clearly teaches that the one true God is sovereign over all
that exists (i.e., his entire creation), and that he often exercises his
unlimited freedom to overturn human customs, traditions and plans. It
introduces us to the way in which God initiates and makes covenants with his
chosen people, pledging his love and faithfulness to them and calling them to
promise theirs to him. It establishes sacrifice as the substitution of life for
life (ch. 22). It gives us the first hint of God's
provision for redemption from the forces of evil (compare 3:15 with Ro 16:17-20) and contains the oldest and most
profound statement concerning the significance of faith (15:6; see note there). More than half of Heb
11 -- a NT list of the faithful -- refers to characters in Genesis.
The message of a book is often enhanced by its literary structure
and characteristics. Genesis is divided into ten main sections, each beginning
with the word "account" (see 2:4;
5:1; 6:9;
10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1 -- repeated for emphasis at 36:9 -- and 37:2). The first five sections can be grouped together and,
along with the introduction to the book as a whole (1:1
-- 2:3), can be appropriately called "primeval
history" (1:1 -- 11:26). This introduction to the main story
sketches the period from Adam to Abraham and tells about the ways of God with
the human race as a whole. The last five sections constitute a much longer (but
equally unified) account, and relate the story of God's dealings with the
ancestors of his chosen people Israel (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph and
their families) -- a section often called "patriarchal history" (11:27 -- 50:26). This section is in turn composed of
three narrative cycles (Abraham-Isaac, 11:27 -- 25:11; Isaac-Jacob, 25:19 -- 35:29; 37:1; Jacob-Joseph, 37:2 -- 50:26), interspersed by the genealogies of
Ishmael (25:12-18) and Esau (ch. 36).
The narrative frequently concentrates on the life of a later son
in preference to the firstborn: Seth over Cain, Shem over Japheth (but see NIV
text note on 10:21), Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau,
Judah and Joseph over their brothers, and Ephraim over Manasseh. Such emphasis
on divinely chosen men and their families is perhaps the most obvious literary
and theological characteristic of the book of Genesis as a whole. It strikingly
underscores the fact that the people of God are not the product of natural
human developments, but are the result of God's sovereign and gracious
intrusion in human history. He brings out of the fallen human race a new
humanity consecrated to himself, called and destined to be the people of his
kingdom and the channel of his blessing to the whole earth.
Numbers with symbolic significance figure prominently in Genesis.
The number ten, in addition to being the number of sections into which Genesis
is divided, is also the number of names appearing in the genealogies of chs. 5
and 11 (see note on 5:5). The number seven also occurs frequently.
The Hebrew text of 1:1 consists of exactly seven words and that of 1:2
of exactly 14 (twice seven). There are seven days of creation, seven names in
the genealogy of ch. 4 (see note on 4:17-18; see also 4:15,24; 5:31), various sevens in the flood story, 70 descendants of
Noah's sons (ch. 10), a sevenfold promise to Abram (12:2-3), seven years of abundance and then seven
of famine in Egypt (ch. 41), and 70 descendants of Jacob (ch. 46).
Other significant numbers, such as 12 and 40, are used with similar frequency.
The book of Genesis is basically prose narrative, punctuated here
and there by brief poems (the longest is the so-called Blessing of Jacob in 49:2-27). Much of the prose has a lyrical
quality and uses the full range of figures of speech and other devices that
characterize the world's finest epic literature. Vertical and horizontal
parallelism between the two sets of three days in the creation account (see
note on 1:11); the ebb and flow of sin and judgment in
ch. 3 (the serpent and woman and man sin
successively; then God questions them in reverse order; then he judges them in
the original order); the powerful monotony of "and then he died" at
the end of paragraphs in ch. 5; the climactic hinge effect of the phrase
"But God remembered Noah" (8:1)
at the midpoint of the flood story; the hourglass structure of the account of
the tower of Babel in 11:1-9 (narrative in vv. 1-2,8-9; discourse in
vv. 3-4,6-7; v. 5 acting as transition); the macabre pun in 40:19 (see 40:13); the alternation between brief accounts
about firstborn sons and lengthy accounts about younger sons -- these and
numerous other literary devices add interest to the narrative and provide
interpretive signals to which the reader should pay close attention.
It is no coincidence that many of the subjects and themes of the
first three chapters of Genesis are reflected in the last three chapters of
Revelation. We can only marvel at the superintending influence of the Lord
himself, who assures us that "all Scripture is God-breathed" (2Ti 3:16) and that the men who wrote it
"spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2Pe 1:21).
Literary Outline:
A.
"The account of the heavens and the earth" (2:4
-- 4:26)
Thematic Outline:
A.
Adam and Eve in Eden (2:4-25)
a.
The rising of the waters (7:11-24)
H.
The Spread of the Nations (10:1 -- 11:26)
III.
Patriarchal History (11:27 -- 50:26)
──《New International Version》
Introduction to Genesis
Genesis is a name taken from the Greek, and
signifies "the book of generation or production;" it is properly so
called, as containing an account of the origin of all things. There is no other
history so old. There is nothing in the most ancient book which exists that
contradicts it; while many things recorded by the oldest heathen writers, or to
be traced in the customs of different nations, confirm what is related in the
book of Genesis.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Genesis》
00 Overview
INTRODUCTION TO THE
PENTATEUCH
The Title: Pentateuch
The title, Pentateuch, is the Greek name given by the LXX
translators to the five books of Moses, the name by which they were known among
the Jews being “The Law,” Torah. In the Scriptures it is called “The
Book of the Law” (2 Kings 22:8),
“The Book of the Covenant” (2 Kings 23:2;
2 Kings 23:21;
2 Chronicles 34:30),
“The Book of the Law of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 17:9;
2 Chronicles 34:14),
“The Law of Moses,” “The Book of Moses,” or “The Book of the Law of Moses” (see
2 Chronicles 25:4;
2 Chronicles 35:12;
Ezra 6:18; Ezra 7:6; Nehemiah 8:1;
Nehemiah 13:1).
The division into five books is by many thought to be also due to the LXX
interpp. The Jews, however, retain the division, calling the whole chamishah
chomeshc torah, “The five quinquernions of the Law,” though they only
distinguish the several books by names derived from a leading word in the first
verse in each. Thus Genesis they call Bereshith, i.e., “in the
Beginning,” Exodus Shemoth, “the Names,” etc. (Speaker's Commentary.)
Israel’s Lawgiver: his
narrative true and his laws genuine
I. The man Moses.
That the Moses of the Bible is a Man and not an Idea, it is the leading object
of these pages to prove. The genuine impulse of the believing heart and the
first clear judgement of the unbiassed mind concur in rejecting with
indignation, as plainly incompatible with the Divine authority of the Holy
Scriptures, the unnatural and groundless fancy that the greater portion of the
laws and the history of Moses is a fiction in which Moses, the brother of
Aaron, had no personal part. Moses, the great Lawgiver of Israel, is in the new
criticism no longer a real man, as the Church both Hebrew and Christian has in
all ages believed him to be; but an Ideal Person made up of different men, of
whom Moses, the leader of Israel out of Egypt, is the first; and a thousand years
after his death Ezra, the leader of the second company of exiles out of
Babylon, is the greatest and nearly the last. Between these two the critics
interpolate, and after them they add, various unknown men in Jerusalem or in
Babylon; all of whom together, known and unknown, make up the ideal lawgiver
and historian whom they call Moses. Besides Moses, who is most unwarrantably
credited with having left only a few laws in writing, with others given by him
orally, and Ezra, who is quite arbitrarily accused of having written many laws
in the name of Moses, there is a third great writer of whose name the critics
make much use--the prophet Ezekiel. Him, indeed, they can by no means fashion
into their ideal figure of Moses; but they maintain the unfounded supposition
that his closing prophetic vision contains a sketch of new ceremonial laws for
Israel after the Captivity. But, if so, Ezekiel is a standing witness against
their scheme of Moses having been personated by subsequent priests or prophets
when they had new laws to introduce; for he openly announces all he has to
write, not in the name of Moses, but in his own name from the mouth of the
Lord. The critics conceive three Codes of Laws in the Mosaic Books: the first
in Exodus 21:1-36;
Exodus 22:1-31;
Exodus 23:1-33,
probably given in substance by Moses; the second in Deuteronomy, written about
the time of Josiah; the third, the Levitical or Priestly Code, scattered
through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and held to have been written mainly
during the Exile.
II. The ideal
Moses of the critics. In proceeding to examine the subject we note that this
ideal Moses of the critics disowns his own ritual, that he denies their alleged
fact of the degradation of the Levites in Babylon, and that his personation of
Moses extending over a thousand years is an impossible unity.
1. Their ideal Moses in the Second Temple disowns half its ritual.
(1) The critics’ ideal Moses ordains no vocal praise, which constituted half
the ritual of the Second Temple. This part of the Temple service is
described by Kuenen in these glowing terms: “In the period of the Sopherim
(scribes) temple song and temple poetry were at their prime. The Psalms which
we still possess have been rightly called ‘the songs of the Second Temple.’
Sacrifices were killed and part of them burnt upon the altar just as formerly.
But their symbolic signification could very easily be lost sight of. On the
contrary, there was no need for anyone to guess at the meaning of the Temple
songs. The service itself had thus assumed a more spiritual character, and had
been made subservient, not merely to symbolic representation, but also to the
clear expression of ethic and religious thoughts. What a pure and fervent love
for the sanctuary pervades some of the Psalms! The Temple which could draw such
tones from the heart must in truth have afforded pure spiritual enjoyment to
the pilgrim.” Yet no place for these songs is provided in the entire Levitical
ritual, although they formed, not indeed the most essential part, yet the
second half of the sacred service. The framework of the Levitical ritual, as we
now have it, is accepted by the critics for their ideal Moses, and held by them
to be complete; having received its crowning ordinance in the solemn service of
the great Day of Atonement more than a thousand and fifty years after the
giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. For the perfect consummation of this ritual
there was every possible facility; there was ample time to frame it in one
century after another; there was no check of conscience in attributing new ordinances
to Moses, and in surrounding them with fictitious incidents in his life; and
when the ecclesiastical and civil authorities concurred in new laws or
ceremonies they could either be added in a mass like Deuteronomy, or
interpolated piece by piece as in the other Mosaic books. In the new theory
this ritual was meagre and imperfect till the time of the Second Temple; new
ordinances had been suggested and ordained by Ezekiel; these were modified and
greatly extended by the priests in Babylon, most of all by Ezra; and after him
they were still further supplemented in Jerusalem till they took the final form
in which we now possess them. Now there can be no conclusion more certain than
that, when the Levitical ritual under the name of Moses was completed, the
songs of the Levites in the Temple formed no part of that ritual. If they had,
they could on no account have been omitted; they were sung by ministers in the
Temple divinely appointed to the office; at the great annual feasts they formed
a leading and a most attractive part of the festival; and at the daily
sacrifices in the Temple the Levites “stood every morning to thank and praise
the Lord, and likewise at even.” If we believe the Holy Scriptures the
Levitical ritual for the Tabernacle was absolutely completed by Moses himself;
and this magnificent service of song was by Divine command added afterwards by
David in preparation for the Temple. All this is set aside by the new critics,
according to whom Ezra comes up from Babylon with more than half of the
ordinances in Exodus, Numbers, and Leviticus added by himself and inserted
under the name of Moses. But he adds no ordinance of song! He inserts in the
law the minutest ceremonial observances; he thinks it needful to prescribe how
many days the cleansed leper after entering the camp is to live outside of his
own tent, although camp and tent had both been removed a thousand years before
the ordinance was written; yet in his institutions he entirely omits one half
of the daily service in God’s Temple!
(2) The critics’ ideal Moses ordains music without song for the Sanctuary. Whilst
Ezra’s ritual is absolutely silent on the worship of God in His temple with
song or with harp, it is by no means silent on the sacred music with which, and
with which alone, the Lord was to be praised in his Tabernacle. The acceptable
praise of the Holy One in His holy place was not left to the will of man, or to
observances casually arising, but was expressly and most definitely ordained.
Not however by Moses himself, according to the critics, but either by Ezra, or
by an unknown priestly scribe of the Exile, writing in the name of Moses, the
sacrificial praise was ordained in these very definite terms (Numbers 10:1-10).
It is inconceivable that Ezra should have written such an ordinance in Babylon
and brought it up with him as the ritual to be followed in the Temple, for he
brought up Levites and singers with him to Jerusalem, and in his day there was
confessedly the full service of song in the Temple. But this severe and simple
institution expressly limits the whole sacrificial service to the priests, it
excludes the Levites from sounding the trumpets, and allows no voice of song or
sound of harp over the sacrifices. If it be pleaded that although this
ordinance was by no means appointed by the personal Moses, it may have been
written by some unknown priest before Ezra’s time, the difficulty is not
lessened; for Ezra lets it remain as his own ritual, and as such he ordains it
with authority in Israel. Nor is it any outlet to plead that Ezra and his
successors made a shift for the omission by inserting in their histories what,
according to the new criticism, they knew to be false, and ascribing the
service of praise to David; for Ezra’s code comes with the superior authority
of Moses five hundred years after David, and cancels all that differs from it.
According to the new critics the sounding of the two silver trumpets by the
priests is the entire service of praise that is allowed by the Levitical
ordinances of the Second Temple! The ideal Moses of the critics therefore wants
one-half of their own idea; their idea is the ritual of the Second Temple; and
their ideal Moses severely disowns the magnificent half of the service which
morning by morning and evening by evening filled that Temple with the lofty
praises of the Lord of Hosts, whose mercy endureth forever.
2. Their Moses in Babylon denies their Babylonian origin of the
order of the Levites. The Babylonian origin of the Levitical office is one of
the main pillars on which the Levitical structure of the critics rests. If the
distinction between the priests and Levites in the Book of Numbers was made by
Moses, their theory of the Priestly Code loses one of its chief supports, or
rather falls into pieces. Ezra, who is fancifully made either to write the
ritual laws of Moses, or to be responsible for them, writes for us really with
his own pen, and clearly states that the distinction between the priests and Levites
did not originate in Babylon. But before considering the positive testimony of
Ezra on the subject, we shall briefly notice--
(1) The argument against the antiquity of the Levites. The negative
argument of the critics is that the distinction between Levites and priests
made by the Levitical law in Numbers is not elsewhere recognized before the
Exile. But the argument from subsequent silence regarding an institution that
professes to have been clearly laid down and fully recognized in the nation, is
extremely fallacious; and in this case it is maintained only by denying the
historical truth of the Books of Chronicles, which is to set aside their
inspiration, and by arbitrarily refusing the testimony to “the priests and the
Levites” in 1 Kings 8:4.
Whilst, however, the complete silence of the few prophetical books after the
Exile, when the distinction confessedly existed, is to be taken in so far
over-against the previous silence, the evidence from the last book of the Old
Testament is very remarkable. The prophet Malachi not only does not recognize
the existence of the two orders, but appears even to set it aside, and to
regard the whole tribe of Levi as sacrificing priests, at a time when,
according to the critics, the distinction between priests and Levites had
existed for more than ninety years, and had been recently laid down in the code
of Ezra with the severest penalties for neglecting it. The evident explanation
is that from the days of Moses the distinction had been so universally
acknowledged that there could be no risk of mistake in designating the priests
as Levites, which they were, although the mere Levites were not priests.
(2) Ezra’s testimony to their antiquity. The affirmative evidence
of the pre-Exile distinction between the priests and the Levites is clear, and
determines both this special question, and with it one chief part of the whole
controversy. The affirmative proof adduced by the critics is in the last portion
of Ezekiel, which is neither law nor history, but a prophetic vision of a
character that cannot be taken in a literal sense, as shown by its accounts of
the division of the land and by the living waters flowing east and west from
the Temple. But if it were to be taken into account in this inquiry, all that
it could be proved to indicate is that Ezekiel appears to use the term
“Levites” for the “Priests” exactly as Malachi uses the corresponding term
“sons of Levi.” The most probable meaning of his language is that “the Levites
[i.e., the priests, the Levites] that are gone away far from Me shall
not come near unto Me to do the office of a priest unto Me. But the priests the
Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of My sanctuary, shall come
near to Me to minister unto Me” Ezekiel 44:10;
Ezekiel 44:13;
Ezekiel 44:15),
both the erring and the faithful having been Levite priests. The supposition of
the critics is that in this prophecy of Ezekiel the distinction of the two
orders had its origin; that as the fruit of his vision all the sons of Levi,
who were not sons of Zadok, were shut out from the priesthood and degraded to
the lower rank of Levites; that this degradation may account for the small
number of Levites who were willing to leave Babylon; that it was incorporated
in the law of Moses by Ezra or some other priest in Babylon, not in its true
form of degradation, but under the false pretence of honour to the Levites; and
that it was first put into practical operation on the return of the exiles to
Jerusalem. Every thoughtful reader of the Bible ought to shudder at this
scheme, for it turns the Scriptural account of the Levites, in Numbers 8:5-26,
not merely into a fiction, but into a base falsehood, invented to transform
their merited disgrace in Babylon into a high honour conferred on them by Moses
a thousand years before; and it makes the history in the sixteenth chapter, of
the awful destruction of Korah and his two hundred and fifty men by the direct
judgment of God, to be a mere fable devised in Babylon to exalt the priesthood.
Now Ezra in his own person states that the distinction between priests and
Levites existed four hundred years before the captivity, not that it originated
then, but was then in existence. In the narrative of the founding of the Temple
in Ezra 3:10,
there is the clear testimony that “they set the priests in their apparel with
trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord,
after the ordinance of David, king of Israel.” Quite apart from any theory of
our own, we accept equally all the Scriptures, but because these words are not
written in the first person many of the critics will not allow them to have
been written by Ezra; and against all reason they deny the authority of the
words that are against their own theories, while they magnify every word that
can be turned in their favour. We therefore pass on to refer to chap. 8:15-20,
which some of them hold to be given to us in Ezra’s own words. If the vision of
Ezekiel in Babylon ordained for the first time the distinction of the Levites
from the priests, Ezra the scribe could not but be well acquainted with that
recorded ordinance; if the first practical operation of the new law was in the
first exodus from Babylon, Ezra the priest must have known exiles in Babylon,
both priests and Levites, who witnessed that exodus; and if the slowness of the
Levites to go up to Jerusalem with Zerubbabel and with Ezra was caused by their
official degradation, the fact must have been very familiar to Ezra. Now in
Ezra the Levites are named twenty times, and always in distinction from the
priests; in the following narrative Ezra expressly distinguishes between the
two orders; and he states plainly that David and his princes appointed the
Nethinim as servants to the Levites. That under the name of Levites, Ezra does
not include the priests, but designates those whom he had just called “sons of
Levi” (verse 15), is clear from the whole connection; in verses 29 and 30 he
speaks again of “the priests and the Levites”; and in Genesis 7:3; Genesis 7:24,
we read of “the priests and the Levites and the Nethinims.” Ezra, who most of
all represents the ideal Moses of the critics, thus plainly denies the
degradation of the Levites in Babylon, which is the main prop of all the alleged
Priestly Code.
3. Their ideal Moses of a thousand years is an impossible unity.
Receiving the sacred books in their natural sense, we have from the second
chapter of Exodus to the last chapter of Deuteronomy, including Leviticus and
Numbers, the space of forty years with the history of Israel and the laws given
by Moses during that period. It would not invalidate the argument to allow, as
many hold, that certain brief parenthetic explanations may have been added, as
by Ezra; but there is no need for such an allowance, and the simple position is
the best, that every line in these books from Ex
2:11 to Deuteronomy 33:29
is such as may have been written by Moses himself. In some parts another may
have written what Moses spoke, but all may naturally have been written by him.
Of Genesis also and the beginning of Exodus we fully believe him to be the
author, but in them he does not write from personal acquaintance with the
facts. On the other hand, the position taken by recent critics is that Moses
was or may have been the writer of the greatest of these laws, as well as of
institutions put into writing at a later period, that in the ages between Moses
and Manasseh other laws may have had their origin, that about the time of
Josiah Deuteronomy was written, that during the captivity in Babylon a new code
filling a large part of Exodus and of Numbers, and nearly the whole of
Leviticus, was written, chiefly by Ezra, and supplemented by other writers
after his death. The critics who take this view hold at the same time that the
scriptural writers constantly depict past events with a colouring of their own
time, which would inevitably lead them into obvious and numerous mistakes both
in time and place, in the fictitious productions of a thousand years. It is
incredible and impossible that writers in the wilderness, in Jerusalem, in
Babylon, and in Jerusalem again, should have pieced together a great body of
laws and ordinances, each man inventing and interpolating according to his own
mind; that they should all have agreed to sink their own names and to personate
Moses in the wilderness where none of them but himself had ever been; and that
none of them, prophet, priest, or scribe, after one or five, or seven or ten
centuries, should have written what was incongruous to Moses, in time, or
place, or language, or circumstance, or character. The unity of the acts and
writings of a living man through a period of forty years confirms his identity;
the unity of an ideal man through an alleged millennium of time, as if through
a single life, proves that the allegation is untrue, because such a unity is
impossible.
III. The author of
the Mosaic books the same throughout. The historical Moses of the Bible, the
author of the four specially Mosaic books, is thoroughly consistent in all his
writings; he is the same man in them all; in all his words, in all his recorded
events, in all his ordinances, in all his laws, and in all his character. He
employs no words which Moses, the brother of Aaron, could not have used,
narrates no event he could not have known, frames no ordinance he could not
have prescribed, writes no law he could not have issued, and assumes no
character in which he could not have acted.
1. There are no words in these books that could not have been used
by Moses. There are expressions in the books of Moses that are never used
afterwards; of which one of the most remarkable is in the frequent description
of the end of life, first applied to Abraham, that he was “gathered unto his
people,” and occurring in Genesis, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but in no later
books. There are also expressions common in the other books of the Bible, which
never occur in the books of Moses; such as the title “The Lord of Hosts,” which
is so frequent afterwards, but is never used by Moses. While these books of
Moses have thus their own peculiarities, there is no word or phrase found in
them which Moses himself could not have used. A very sufficient proof of this
statement is presented in the following passage, in which the phrases or words
that are adduced must be regarded as the most decided instances that can be
found of alleged terms which Moses could not have employed: “There has been a
great controversy about Deuteronomy 1:1,
and other similar passages, where the land east of the Jordan is said to be
across Jordan, proving that the writer lived in Western Palestine. That this is
the natural sense of the Hebrew word no one can doubt, but we have elaborate
arguments that Hebrew was such an elastic language that the phrase can equally
mean ‘on this side Jordan’ as the English version has it. The point is really
of no consequence, for there are other phrases which prove quite unambiguously
that the Pentateuch was written in Canaan. In Hebrew the common phrase for
‘westward’ is ‘seaward,’ and for ‘southward’ ‘towards the Negeb.’ The word
Negeb, which primarily means ‘parched land,’ is in Hebrew the proper name of
the dry steppe district in the south of Judah. These expressions for west and
south could only be formed in Palestine. Yet they are used in the Pentateuch,
not only in the narrative but in the Levitical description of the tabernacle in
the wilderness (Exodus 27:1-21).
But at Mount Sinai the sea did not lie to the west, and the Negeb was to the
north. Moses could no more call the south side the Negeb side of the tabernacle
than a Glasgow man could say that the sun set over Edinburgh. The answer
attempted to this is that the Hebrews might have adopted these phrases in
patriarchal times, and never given them up in the ensuing four hundred and
thirty years; but that is nonsense. When a man says ‘towards the sea,’ he means
it. The Egyptian Arabs say seaward for northward, and so the Israelites must
have done when they were in Egypt. To an Arab in Western Arabia, on the
contrary, seaward means towards the Red Sea.”--(The Old Testament in the
Jewish Church, p. 323). The objection to the employment by Moses of the
phrase in Deuteronomy 1:1,
translated “this side of Jordan,” is not here pressed: and for its use by him
we must refer to our previous examination of the objection (Our Old Bible:
Moses on the plains of Moab, p. 18). The literal translation “on the other
side of Jordan” is certainly the best, if it is clearly understood that Moses
means by these words the same eastern bank of the river on which he now stands.
Of men before or since, “the man Moses” was the one to whom most of all that
final stand on the plains of Moab was “the other side of Jordan,” from the
earnestly coveted land of rest for the “wandering foot” of the tribes of
Israel. But the author leaves this point as of no consequence, and takes up the
expressions used for the South and the West in Exodus 27:1-21,
and elsewhere, not only in the narrative, but in the description of the
Tabernacle, which he holds to prove beyond all question that the Pentateuch was
written in Canaan. If these strong assertions were true, they would take a
chief place in the whole argument of the book. Let us look first at the more
general arguments on the two phrases, and then at the special arguments on
each.
2. The general argument on the South and the West. “In
Hebrew,” Professor Smith says, “the common phrase for ‘westward’ is ‘seaward,’
and for ‘southward’ ‘towards the Negeb,’” and because these designations, as he
holds, could only have been formed in Palestine originally, he repudiates the
idea that they could have been used by Moses for the description of the
Tabernacle in the wilderness; thus disproving, as he believes, the historical
authenticity of the account given to us in Exodus. That the common Hebrew word
for the west originally meant the sea is allowed by all, though not that the
term for the south was derived from the Desert of Judah; but words often lose
their original meaning in all languages, and it seems probable that in the days
of Abraham these terms were used for the west and the south in general without
any definite reference. In the promise of the land in Genesis 13:14,
Abraham is asked first to look northward in a Hebrew term that is entirely and
confessedly general; and when he is asked next to look southward, it is
probable that this term is taken like the corresponding one in a merely general
sense. Then he looks eastward, for which again the Hebrew term is absolutely
general, rendering it in like manner probable that the corresponding westward
is also general. As regards the alleged foolishness of supposing that Moses in
the wilderness used the terms for the south and the west which the patriarchs
had employed in Canaan, in must be remembered how distinct Israel must have
been kept from the Egyptians although dwelling amongst them, how ardently they
clung to the promised land and all its associations, and how Egypt was for them
only a place of temporary exile. Canaan was to Israel the land alike of the
past and of the future; there they had already buried their father Jacob, who
had bound them by oath not to leave his body in Egypt; and they kept the bones
of Joseph to carry up with them in their exodus. There is no reason to think
that in coming out of Egypt, “where they heard a language that they understood
not,” they spoke a different Hebrew from that of their fathers in Canaan; and,
as already noted, words once embodied in a language often retain their meaning
without reference to their origin. For Moses himself Canaan was the promised
land to which he was to lead his people Israel; the north, south, east, and
west in the promise that constituted Israel’s claim to the land were written on
his memory and in his heart as with a pen of iron and the point of a diamond;
and when he was recording the history of Israel, wherever he stood, there could
be nothing so natural to him as to retain those hallowed terms, alike on
account of the past and of the future, unaffected by Israel’s passing exile
from the land of their fathers.
(2) The argument from the South. As regards the South,
before it can be said that “at Mount Sinai the Negeb was to the north,” it must
first be proved that the Negeb derived its name from the dry steppe of Judah,
and next that it always retained this purely local meaning, and was not used to
signify the south in general. Gesenius, taking parchedness for the origin of
the word, makes first of all its general meaning to be the south, of which he
gives several examples, as in Exodus 27:1-21,
and Psalms 126:1-6.
Afterwards he gives two specific meanings, of which the first is the southern
district of Palestine and the second is Egypt, both of which he takes merely as
special applications of the more general term for the south. Furst, in his
Hebrew Concordance and in his Lexicon, agrees with Gesenius in giving the south
as the meaning of the Negeb, in deriving it from parchedness, and in
recognizing the Negeb of Judah as a name originating in the general term for
the south. That critics should hold their different opinions on the origin of
one of the Hebrew words for the south is of slight importance; but the argument
takes a graver form when it is held out merely that the Negeb was originally the
Desert of Judah, but that it retained this restricted meaning exclusively, and
did not come to signify the south in general. The author’s affirmation on this
point is so decided as to call for a detailed proof of the error. In the nature
of the case many or most instances of the occurrence of the term Negeb
determine nothing on its more special use, as in the designation of the
southern aspect of the temple (1 Kings 7:25),
which will be held to refer to the south of Judah, although the only natural
reference is to the south in general. But a testing example occurs in Ezekiel 20:46-49;
Ezekiel 21:1-5,
where the prophet living in Chaldea, north of Palestine, prophesies against
“Jerusalem, the holy places, and the land of Israel,” under the designation of
the south in three different Hebrew terms. One of these terms, and the only
repeated one, is the Negeb; but here it cannot possibly mean the Southern
steppe, for this would lower a great and leading prophecy against Jerusalem and
the whole land to a mere denunciation of the wilderness of Judah. In like
manner in the Book of Daniel the Negeb is used twice in the eighth chapter for
the south in general quite apart from Palestine (Daniel 8:4; Daniel 8:9);
and ten times in the eleventh chapter for the land of Egypt (Daniel 11:5-40).
It is, then, most certain that the critic is in error; and that the Hebrew word
used by Moses for the south side of the Tabernacle is a general designation of
the south, and would be used at Mount Sinai as freely and as correctly as in
Palestine.
(3) The argument from the West. If Professor Robertson
Smith’s opinion on the origin of the term for the south were correct, there
would be little occasion left for discussion concerning the west, for if the
dry steppe of Southern Judah gave its Hebrew name to the south in general,
still more readily might the name of the Mediterranean Sea become a general
designation for the west. There is conclusive proof that when a Hebrew said,
“towards the sea,” he might simply mean the west and not the sea. Professor
Smith writes that “the Egyptian Arabs say seaward for northward, and so the
Israelites must have done when they were in Egypt.” But the author of the book
of Exodus, writing either in Egypt or of it, and with an intimate knowledge of
the country, speaks of a strong “sea wind” Exodus 10:19)
carrying the locusts into the Red Sea. According to this view, it must have
been a “north wind,” as in the present speech of the Egyptian Arabs; but a
north wind would not have carried the locusts into the Red Sea. The Vulgate,
our English Bible, Gesenius, Furst, Keil, and Delitzsch render it a west wind.
There are good critics who hold that it may be taken more widely for a sea
wind, in the sense of a wind from the northwest; but we are not aware that any have
rendered it a north wind.
The evidence is not for, but against the supposition that Israel
in Egypt called the north wind a sea wind; for it seems probable that it is the
west wind that is here spoken of under the old Hebrew term for the sea without
any reference to the origin of the word. But there are other passages where the
term has clearly no reference to the sea, that is, the Mediterranean or Great
Sea, but simply means the West; and in that sense it might be equally used in
Palestine or anywhere else. In Canaan it is so used in Joshua 15:12,
“and the west border was to the great sea, and the coast thereof.” If Professor
Smith’s contention were right, these words would signify, “and the (great) sea
border was to the great sea”; but, although he maintains that when a man says
“towards the sea, he means it,” it is evident, on the contrary, that the writer
does not at all refer to the sea, but simply to the west. In like manner before
entering Canaan, in Numbers 34:6,
Moses is commanded to say to Israel, “As for the western border, ye shall even
have the great sea for a border; this shall be your west border.” But according
to the view before us the verse must bear this impossible meaning, “As for the
(great) sea border, ye shall even have the great sea for a border; this shall
be your (great) sea border.” Ezekiel in the same way uses the term for the west
as distinguished from the sea: “The west side also shall be the great sea”
(chap. 47:20). That the word is constantly used for the west is allowed by all,
but Professor Smith maintains that it could be so used only as meaning the
Mediterranean Sea. But in these three passages it is used not only with no
reference to the Mediterranean, but with a most definite and express
distinction of the term from that which is used for that sea. It is, therefore,
exactly equivalent to our English term west; and there can be no reason why
Moses should not have used it in describing the tabernacle in the wilderness of
Sinai.
3. These books narrate no facts which Moses could not have recorded.
The most conspicuous example of a supposed error in date is presented by the
old and oft repeated objection to the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy from the
statements in Deuteronomy 2:12,
that “the children of Israel succeeded them (the Horims), when they had
destroyed them from before them, and dwelt in their stead; as Israel did unto
the land of his possession, which the Lord gave unto them;” and again in chap.
4:38, “to drive out nations from before thee, greater and mightier than thou
art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is
this day.” These statements, however, instead of being objections, serve as
proofs of the Mosaic authorship of the book, because so skilful an imitator of
Moses, as the Deuteronomist is allowed by our opponents to have been, would
have avoided the use of expressions that might lead to searching questions. In
Moses himself there was no occasion to avoid them, because his own
previous narrative had amply explained them. The supposed reference in these
passages to “the conquest of Canaan” is an entire mistake; there is in them no
mention of the conquest of central Canaan, and there is no allusion to it. In
the second and third chapters there is a full rehearsal by Moses of the
conquest by Israel of the kingdoms of Sihon, king of Heshbon, and of Og, king
of Bashan, “nations greater and mightier” than Israel; and the reference is to
the “possession” and “inheritance” of their lands “as it is this day.” There is
no ground whatever for the plea of a later date which the critics have founded
on these expressions, as if they referred to the central land of Canaan. Again,
in Deuteronomy 4:38,
“To drive out nations before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring
thee in, to give their land for an inheritance, as it is this day,” there is
likewise no difficulty, for the verse describes exactly the historical
situation of Israel in the closing days of Moses.
4. These books contain no religious ordinance that Moses could not
have instituted. The work of Ezra in Jerusalem is held by the critics to
constitute an epoch in the history of Israel, not in the true sense of moving
his people to keep the original law of Moses, but of inducing them to accept a
new ritual under the old authority of his name. But the whole proof of the new
keeping of ritual Egyptian Arabs say seaward for northward, and so the
Israelites must have done when they were in Egypt. But the author of the book
of Exodus, writing either in Egypt or of it, and with an intimate knowledge of
the country, speaks of a strong “sea wind” (Exodus 10:19)
carrying the locusts into the Red Sea. According to this view, it must have
been a “north wind,” as in the present speech of the Egyptian Arabs; but a
north wind would not have carried the locusts into the Bed Sea. The Vulgate,
our English Bible, Gesenius, Furst, Keil, and Delitzsch render it a west wind.
There are good critics who hold that it may be taken more widely for a sea
wind, in the sense of a wind from the northwest; but we are not aware that any
have rendered it a north wind. The evidence is not for, but against the
supposition that Israel in Egypt called the north wind a sea wind; for it seems
probable that it is the west wind that is here spoken of under the old Hebrew
term for the sea without any reference to the origin of the word. But there are
other passages where the term has clearly no reference to the sea, that is, the
Mediterranean or Great Sea, but simply means the West; and in that sense it
might be equally used in Palestine or anywhere else. In Canaan it is so used in
Joshua 15:12,
“and the west border was to the great sea, and the coast thereof.” If Professor
Smith’s contention were right, these words would signify, “and the (great) sea
border was to the great sea”; but, although he maintains that when a man says
“towards the sea, he means it,” it is evident, on the contrary, that the writer
does not at all refer to the sea, but simply to the west. In like manner before
entering Canaan, in Numbers 34:6,
Moses is commanded to say to Israel, “As for the western border, ye shall even
have the great sea for a border; this shall be your west border.” But according
to the view before us the verse must bear this impossible meaning, “As for the
(great) sea border, ye shall even have the great sea for a border; this shall
be your (great) sea border.” Ezekiel in the same way uses the term for the west
as distinguished from the sea: “The west side also shall be the great sea” (Ezekiel 47:20).
That the word is constantly used for the west is allowed by all, but Professor
Smith maintains that it could be so used only as meaning the Mediterranean Sea.
But in these three passages it is used not only with no reference to the
Mediterranean, but with a most definite and express distinction of the term
from that which is used for that sea. It is, therefore, exactly equivalent to
our English term west; and there can be no reason why Moses should not have
used it in describing the tabernacle in the wilderness of Sinai.
5. These books narrate no facts which Moses could not have recorded.
The most conspicuous example of a supposed error in date is presented by the
old and oft repeated objection to the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy from the
statements in Deuteronomy 2:12,
that “the children of Israel succeeded them (the Horims), when they had
destroyed them from before them, and dwelt in their stead; as Israel did unto
the land of his possession, which the Lord gave unto them;” and again in Deuteronomy 4:38,
“to drive out nations from before thee, greater and mightier than thou art, to
bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day.”
These statements, however, instead of being objections, serve as proofs of the
Mosaic authorship of the book, because so skilful an imitator of Moses, as the
Deuteronomist is allowed by our opponents to have been, would have avoided the
use of expressions that might lead to searching questions. In Moses himself
there was no occasion to avoid them, because his own previous narrative had
amply explained them. The supposed reference in these passages to “the conquest
of Canaan” is an entire mistake; there is in them no mention of the conquest of
central Canaan, and there is no allusion to it. In the second and third
chapters there is a full rehearsal by Moses of the conquest by Israel of the
kingdoms of Sihon, king of Heshbon, and of Og, king of Bashan, “nations greater
and mightier” than Israel; and the reference is to the “possession” and
“inheritance” of their lands “as it is this day.” There is no ground whatever
for the plea of a later date which the critics have founded on these
expressions, as if they referred to the central land of Canaan. Again, in Deuteronomy 4:38,
“To drive out nations before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring
thee in, to give their land for an inheritance, as it is this day,” there is
likewise no difficulty, for the verse describes exactly the historical
situation of Israel in the closing days of Moses.
6. These books contain no religious ordinance that Moses could not
have instituted. The work of Ezra in Jerusalem is held by the critics to
constitute an epoch in the history of Israel, not in the true sense of moving
his people to keep the original law of Moses, but of inducing them to accept a
new ritual under the old authority of his name. But the whole proof of the new
keeping of ritual institutions at this great historical epoch consists in
Israel erecting green booths for the Feast of Tabernacles on the roofs of their
houses, and in their courts, and in the courts of the Temple, and in the
streets of the water gate and of the gate of Ephraim; and this is expressly
stated to have been only the revival of an old ordinance of the personal Moses,
the predecessor of Joshua. This is all that can be proved to constitute the new
epoch under Ezra. In the reading of the Law and the observance of its
ordinances the marked noting of this solitary instance of neglect clearly
warrants the inference, that the people were not aware of a similar neglect in
the range of other ceremonial institutions, but that they knew them to have
been kept by the nation, at least under their better kings. But against all
reason the contrary conclusion is drawn, that this exceptional instance is
given as an example of a universal neglect of the ceremonial law. In other
respects, however, this particular record is of primary importance; but before
examining it we shall look at the notices of other ordinances in the post-Exile
Scriptures.
According to the law of Moses, or according to any supposed
traditional law of which there is any trace in the Scriptures, he could not
have been sentenced to this punishment for theft or for any other crime
whatever save the one of putting out his brother’s eye or his brother’s tooth.
Therefore the law of retaliation is of necessity recognized in the Deuteronomic
Code as in full force, and is made the express basis of extending the same
penalties to the crime of perjury. If the law had become obsolete or been limited
to the case of false witness, the enactment as against perjury was a dead
letter; for the perjured man would not have forfeited his own eye or his own
tooth, if the man whom he accused was not liable to forfeit his for the imputed
crime of putting out his neighbour’s eye or his neighbour’s tooth.
(5) These books contain no circumstances or character in which Moses
could not have acted. The oldest are likewise the newest objections that have
been taken to the manner of writing in these books; it has been and is alleged
to be unnatural that an author should write his own history in the third
person. That the writer of a nation’s history, with which his own is
inseparably bound up, should speak of himself in the third person need not seem
artificial to us; and the usage was well enough known in ancient times,
although it may seldom occur, for the obvious reason that historians for the
most part narrate the acts of others and not their own. The familiar and very
important example of Caesar’s “Commentaries” is acknowledged as an instance of
a narrative in which the narrator so speaks of himself; but exception may be
taken to the lateness of the date, and to the circumstance that the writer is
not a Hebrew. This is not, however, the earliest date of such a mode of
writing, and it was used by the Greek and by the Jew, as well as by the Roman.
Three hundred and fifty years before Caesar, Xenophon in his “Expedition of
Cyrus” constantly speaks of himself as Xenophon, just as Moses speaks of
himself; and also, like Moses, he narrates his own words in the first person.
Proof, however, is asked, “that any Hebrew ever wrote of himself in the third
person.” Our blessed Lord so speaks of Himself in John 3:13-18,
and elsewhere; so does the disciple whom Jesus loved: and so also Ezra (Ezra 9:1; Ezra 9:5; Ezra 10:1; Ezra 10:5; Ezra 10:10,
and in 7:6, 11, 27, 28; 8:1). In later times, Josephus in his history of the
Jewish war constantly writes of himself in the third person, and gives his own
words in the first, using this form of writing quite as much as Moses did. The
following is a single instance out of many, and in it this author, so
familiarly known, furnishes a very definite reply to the demand for a Hebrew
writing in this manner: “Upon this, Josephus declared, to them what Caesar had
given him in charge, and this in the Hebrew language, But the tyrant cast
reproaches upon Josephus. In answer which Josephus said--‘Take notice that I,
who make this exhortation to thee; I who am a Jew,do make this promise to
thee’” (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 6, Chap. 2)
. The old objection against Moses writing of himself as “very meek above all
the men that were upon the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3),
which Thomas Paine says is to “render him truly ridiculous and absurd,” rests
on not taking into account the circumstances of the case together with the
peculiarly high calling of Moses, who faithfully narrates for all generations
the Lord’s dealings with himself and with Israel, and records his own faults
and theirs. When a man’s character and motives are assailed, as with Job,
David, and Paul, he is justified in vindicating himself; and Moses speaks of
himself as the meekest of men, in reference to the accusation by Aaron and
Miriam that he had usurped authority which belonged equally to them. This
meekness was contrary to his own natural character; was acquired through Divine
training in a retirement of forty years; and had so thoroughly imbued him, that
he insisted with the Lord to choose any man except himself for Israel’s
deliverance out of Egypt, on which his heart was so intently set. The record of
this meekness serves the threefold end of explaining the unjustifiableness of
the attack against him, his own singular silence under it, and the Lord’s
remarkable interposition on his behalf; whilst the accompanying record of the
words of the great God as distinguishing Moses from all other prophets by
speaking to him “mouth to mouth,” is in reality much more exalting to him than
the testimony of his being the humblest among sinful men.
IV. THE CHURCH IN
ALL AGES ACCEPTED ONLY THROUGH ATONING SACRIFICE. If the Levitical ritual were
accepted as instituted by Moses at Mount Sinai, there would be no question of
the Divine appointment of sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin under that
dispensation; but the refusal of the ceremonial law to Moses is accompanied by
the denial of pardon through sacrifice, either under Moses or in the previous
history of the Church from the beginning of the world. “The law was given by
Ezra” is the new interpretation or rather contradiction of the old Divine
words, “the law was given by Moses.” Let us, therefore, look first at the
earlier history before the prophets, and then at the position taken by the
prophets.
1. The character of sacrifice before the time of the prophets.
2. The teaching of the prophets regarding sacrifice.
1. Like Jeremiah he bids Israel in the Lord’s name to cease from
offering sacrifices to Him if they will not cease from sacrificing to idols
(chap. 23:39, 20:39).
2. Like Jeremiah he proclaims the great acceptableness to the Lord
of sacrificial offerings from an obedient and single-hearted people (chap.
20:40).
3. Like the other prophets he does not definitely express the
connection of pardon with sacrifice, although the pardon of sin is at the very
foundation of the promised acceptance of their sacrifices. But, on the one
hand, pardon is promised to the penitent sinner (chap. 33:14, 16); and on the
other hand the cleansing and the forgiveness of sin are represented as coming
not by the blood of slain beasts, but through an atonement provided directly by
God Himself and reaching the inmost conscience (chap. 37:25-26).
4. This promise of inward cleansing by sprinkling with clean water
clearly proves that the Levitical law was not introduced by Ezra, but was well
known both to Ezekiel and to the exiles for whom he wrote, to whom otherwise
the expression would have been unintelligible. It plainly refers either to the
command given to Moses for the Levites in Numbers 8:7.
The spiritual promise of the prospect as clearly refers to a ritual ordinance
taken in its spiritual sense as David’s prayer, “Purge me with hyssop and I
shall be clean,” which the critics so unwarrantably deny to David, who in their
account could not have known a law that was introduced by Ezra. In Ezekiel the
sprinkling with the cleansing water of the old Levitical rite is taken in a
spiritual sense, and plainly overturns the theory of the new critics. If it be
said that Ezekiel’s promise might have reference to Ezra’s future ritual, this
is plainly to reverse the Divine order and to put the spirit first and the
letter afterwards. But even so the argument fails, because according to the
critics Ezekiel sketched his own new code of ritual laws in considerable
detail, and if the “sprinkling with clean water” had not referred to the
ancient rites of Moses but to his own future code he could not have failed to
introduce it in his alleged ritual. But in his great vision there are abundant
spiritual waters flowing from the threshold of the sanctuary to give life and
beauty, but no ceremonial sprinkling of water on the unclean. The certain
inference is that the prophet, who was himself a priest, refers to the Levitical
ordinances given by Moses at Mount Sinai; and that this reference quite sets
aside the most uncritical conjecture of these ordinances having originated in
Babylon.
4. By the prophets, as by the Psalms, it is always to be borne in
mind that the Lord was preparing Israel for the Great Sacrifice by which all
the Levitical sacrifices were to be abolished, and of which they were all only
types and shadows. This great element in the prophetic writings serves to
explain any more difficult expressions, taken in connection with the bold
abruptness of the prophetic style. In answer to inquiring Israel, Micah says
concisely, “The Lord hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what cloth the
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with thy God?” The prophet does not say that no more than these is required,
but that no more is required “of thee,” because the Lord Himself had “shown man
what was good.” Now what is “the good” which the Lord had shown to Israel? not
doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly, which the Lord requires of
men; but the good which God Himself provides and reveals, and which had been so
brought out to Israel by Micah’s older contemporary, the great national
prophet, Isaiah (Isaiah 55:1-3).
This good is in the sure mercies of David, given as “a witness and leader to
the people,” the same as “the Servant whom the Lord upheld,” whom “it pleased
the Lord to bruise,” on whom “the Lord laid the iniquity of us all,” whose soul
He “made an offering for sin,” and through whose coming sacrifice the prophet
proclaimed, “Comfort ye my people, cry unto Jerusalem that her iniquity is
pardoned, for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” If
this suggested connection between the words of Micah and of Isaiah seem too
remote, there is no doubt of the meaning of Isaiah’s own words. While he
declares that “Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof for a
burnt offering,” he proclaims a free pardon to Israel, because on His Righteous
Servant “the Lord hath laid the iniquities of us all, and made His soul an
offering for sin.” (A. Moody Stuart, D. D.)
History of the
Pentateuchal, Composition Controversy
Philo and Josephus both held that Moses actually penned the last
eight verses of the Pentateuch. The former was of opinion that Moses, as
prophet, could narrate his final earthly fate; the latter judged that Moses
told of his death and burial out of humility, in order to prevent his own
apotheosis. If the Mosaic origin of a part of the Pentateuch could be defended
only by such artificial assumptions, can we wonder that, after the time of
Philo and Josephus, the number of those constantly increased who doubted more
and more the Mosaic origin of the entire Pentateuch? Of course, the part of the
Pentateuch which was at first denied to Moses was small. So among the Jews the
editors of the Babylonian Gemara (Baba Bathra, fol. 14, 15) ascribed
only eight verses of the book of the law to Joshua Deuteronomy 34:5-12).
“For they ask,” says the Talmud at this place, “if Moses while alive could have
written, ‘And Moses died there’? Did not Moses write only as far as this verse,
and Joshua add the following eight verses? “Outside of Jewry also it was the
account of Moses’ death which gave occasion in the first instance for doubting
the Mosaic composition of the entire Pentateuch. According to a passage contained
in the third of the Clementine Homilies, written about 160 A.D., Moses intended
to hand down the primal religion by word of mouth only, and entrusted the law
to seventy wise men; but after his death, contrary to his own intention, the
law was committed to writing. From the account of Moses’ death Deuteronomy 34:5),
however, it is clear that this transcription of the law, the Pentateuch, did
not come from him. Later, moreover, the Pentateuch was repeatedly destroyed,
and then enlarged by additions which were made to it, again written down.
Celsus also, as is reported by Origen (4, 42) in the eight books which he wrote
against him, held that the Pentateuch did “not come from Moses, but from
several uncertain persons.” There lurks something also of criticism of the
absolute Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch in the words with which the learned
Jerome addressed Helvidius: “Whether thou callest Moses the author of the
Pentateuch, or Ezra the restorer of this work, I do not object.” These words
contain an echo of the notice (Ezra 7:11; Ezra 7:14)
that Ezra came in order to teach in Israel statutes and judgments according to
the law of God which was in his hand. At a later date, in the mediaeval
centuries, as in regard to many other things, so also in regard to the origin
of the Pentateuch, the sparks of historical discernment, which had blazed up
earlier, were almost entirely extinguished. But as it was generally the chief
purpose and achievement of the reformers to dig through the strata of
ecclesiastical tradition to the primary sources of Christianity, so the friends
of the Reformation waked to a new and vigorous life the knowledge which had
existed in earlier centuries regarding the origin of the Pentateuch. In 1520,
Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt, at whose hands Luther had received the oath in
1512 when he became doctor of the Holy Scriptures, declared, in his “Treatise
on the Canonical Scriptures”: “It is certain that Moses gave the people the
God-delivered law; but to whom the wording of the five books and the thread of
the representation belong,--as to that there may be doubt” (§ 81). And farther:
“The proposition can be defended that Moses was not the composer of the five
books, because after his death we still find the self-same thread of
representation” (§ 85). Perhaps, however, someone may forget that the
evangelical Church owes its origin to the striving after historical truth, and
affirm that Carlstadt was a radical spirit. But Luther also, in his lectures on
Genesis (delivered 1536-1545; Opera Latina, Erlangen edition, vol. 9, p.
29 et seq.), commenting upon Genesis 36:31,
says: “The question arises whether these kings lived before or after Moses. If
they lived after Moses, then he himself could not have written this, but an
addition has been made by another; such as is also the last section of
Deuteronomy. For he did not say of himself: ‘There hath not arisen another
since Moses with whom God spake face to face.’ The same is true again of what
is there narrated concerning” the grave of Moses, etc., unless, one should say
that he foresaw and prophesied this with the help of the prophetical sprat.
There is another fact also from which it can be perceived that doubts regarding
the absolute Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch were called forth by the plain
finger marks which existed; namely, that in the sixteenth century several
scholars of the Roman Catholic Church, although in general friends of that
which had been handed down, shook violently the tradition regarding the origin
of the Pentateuch. For example, Andreas Masius wrote, in the preface to his
commentary on the book of Joshua, which was printed in Antwerp in 1574 (p. 2):
“Easily refuted, yes, even invented, is the opinion of the ancientJews, which
they have left behind in their Talmud, regarding the authors of their holy
books. I at least am of the opinion that Ezra, either alone or together with
cotemporaries who possessed distinguished piety and scholarship, illuminated (afflatum)
by the heavenly Spirit, compiled (compilasse) not only this book of
Joshua, but also that of the Judges, that of the Kings, and other books of the
Holy Bible, from various records which had been preserved by the congregation
of God. Good arguments can even be adduced to show that the work of Moses,
which is called Pentateuch, was pieced and elucidated long after Moses’ time at
least by the interpolation of words and sentences. To mention, for example,
only one argument, Cariath-arbe [Kiriath-arba] is there often named Hebron, and
yet weighty authorities have reported that this name was given to that city by
Hebron, the son of Caleb.” The heaping up of proofs tending to show that Moses
was not the real author of the Pentateuch, has had, in general, the following
course:--
1. As far as the argument from matter is concerned, the so-called
post-Mosaica were at first presented in a more and more complete form; that is,
all those statements of the Pentateuch which, according to a natural
interpretation, could not have been made until after the time of Moses: “And
the Canaanites were then in the land” (Genesis 12:6);
Bethel Genesis 12:8;
Genesis 13:3;
comp. Joshua 18:13;
Judges 1:23);
Hebron Genesis 13:18;
comp. Joshua 14:15;
Joshua 15:13;
Judges 1:10);Daniel
(Genesis 14:14;
Deuteronomy 34:1;
comp. Jos Judges 18:29);
mention of the kingdom (Genesis 36:31);
land of the Hebrews (Genesis 40:15;
for a difference, see Ex Leviticus 18:25;
Leviticus 18:28;
Numbers 15:32);
the villages of Jair Deuteronomy 3:14;
Joshua 13:30;
Judges 10:3 et
seq.); the law for the king (Deuteronomy 17:14-20),
etc. Then, after the appearance of the first edition of Eichhorn’s
“Introduction to the Old Testament” (1780-1783), the material differences
between the three middle books of the Pentateuch on the one side and
Deuteronomy on the other, were more and more clearly recognized (by Vater, De
Wette, Riehm, and Kleinert). In distinction from Exodus 20:24-26,
Deuteronomy demands most strongly unity in the place of worship (chap. 12.),
and over against Leviticus 10:3;
Numbers 18:4;
Numbers 18:7,
Deuteronomy accords to all members of the tribe of Levi the same right to
exercise the priestly office Deuteronomy 18:1-7).
In spite of this, the five scholars named, as well as many others, decided that
all the books of the Pentateuch agree, at least in their religious and ethical
principles, and therefore they concluded that the kernel of the Pentateuch can
be, and actually is, the work of Moses. But finally a new succession of
scholars believed themselves to have made the discovery that even the religious
and ethical principles of the Pentateuch differ from those which, according to
their view, actually prevailed in the earliest ages of Israel. These latter
principles they have constructed out of those circumstances which, according to
the judgment of the Old Testament writers, and especially of the prophets, were
rather violations of the legitimate religion of Israel. This construction was
supported also by the assumption that Israel’s religion is only one phase of
the general evolution of all religions.
2. The stylistic peculiarities of the individual parts of the
Pentateuch were found in the following manner. To begin with, even in the earliest
times it had been observed that the words for “God” (Eloheem)
and “the Lord” (Jahve) alternate in a remarkable manner in the opening
chapters of Genesis (Tertullian adv. Hermogenem, Cap. 3, and Augustine, De
Genesi ad literam 8:11) . But, inasmuch as this interchange can also be
regarded as a material difference, it is not amazing that Spinoza referred to
no predecessor when he remarked (1670) that the words of different parts of the
Pentateuch are different, that the order of arrangement is careless, and that
tautologies exist. Eight years later, Richard Simon pointed out that, from the
divergent writing of many proper names, from repetitions, from the fragmentary
order, and from the varieties of style, it must be concluded that the
Pentateuch did not receive its present form from Moses. It was, however,
Eichhorn who later gave (1780) to a chapter of his introduction the title “The
Proof from Style” (Der Beweis aus der Sprache). Ilgen, who was
the first (1798) to apply the names “Elohist” and “Jehovist,” was also the
first to find that, of these two writers, one alone always uses certain
expressions. But it was Vater (1805) who, with the greatest acumen,
investigated the literary construction of the whole Pentateuch, and especially
of Deuteronomy. Following him, Staihelin (1831), Knobel (1861, in the
concluding part of his commentary on the Pentateuch), and Kleinert (1872, in Das
Deuteronomium und der Deuteronomiker), have rendered especially
valuable service in the detection of the stylistic differences in the
Pentateuch These have been the kinds of critical observations, and this the way
in which their volume has been constantly increased.
Thus it is that exegetes and historians, in the course of the last
two centuries, have been led to propose the following views as to the sources
of the Pentateuch, and the origin of that work.
1. On account of the post-Mosaica discovered in the Pentateuch, it
was supposed that the original work of Moses had been added to in individual
passages.
2. Since the events narrated in the first book occurred in part
several centuries before Moses, and in part at a still earlier period, to the
former supposition was added this--that the contents of Genesis were drawn by
Moses from the writings of the patriarchs, which are distinguishable by
characteristics both of matter and manner.
3. The path once entered upon was pursued ever further. All five
books of the Pentateuch were divided into sections, according to their peculiar
characteristics of matter or manner. Vater was the first who, in his commentary
on the Pentateuch (vol. 3, pp. 395, 423 note), put forth the opinion
that the Pentateuch had resulted from the conjunction of several compositions,
which from the outset had stood in no relation to one another--the fragmentary
hypothesis. Several scholars give their assent to this theory.
4. But it was soon recognized that a very large number of sources of
the Pentateuch had been assumed without sufficiently cogent reasons. Therefore,
various scholars put forth and supported the proposition that only two
documents can be distinguished in Genesis and the first part of Exodus, a basal
document (the Elohist), and a supplemental document (the Jehovist),--the
supplementary hypothesis.
5. But, much as this view was recommended by its simplicity, it
could not maintain the supremacy forever. It suffered from the fault of being
altogether too simple; for it gave no satisfactory answer to the question why
the supposed supplementer had brought in so many repetitions, for example, in
the story of the flood; why, for example, he had inserted before Genesis 6:9-22
the Genesis 6:1-8.
Further, a document could not properly be regarded as supplementary to
which--for example, in the twelfth chapter--by far the greater part belongs.
Finally, that which Ilgen had already recognized could not be forgotten,
namely, that those parts belonging to the supposed supplementer do not form a
consistent whole; for example, chapter 22, because there the names Eloheem and
Jahve alternate, and because the notice of the second appearance of the angel (Genesis 22:15)
begins without any words of preparation, while the promise pronounced by the
angel (Genesis 22:16-18)
constitutes a causeless repetition of 12:3,
4. On similar grounds Knobel and Delitzsch, in their commentaries on
Genesis, both of which made their first appearance in 1852, decided that the
Jahvist has borrowed his materials mainly from two ancient books, which are
mentioned as “Book of the Wars of Jahve” (Numbers 21:14),
and as “Book of the Righteous” (Joshua 10:13;
2 Samuel 1:18).
Next Hupfeld, in “The Sources of Genesis” (Die Quellen der Genesis, 1853,
pp. 103, 125, 152), put forth these three propositions. The Book of the Jahvist
(Genesis 2:4
b, etc.) was once a connected and independently existent narrative of the
oldest recollections of Israel. Further, a second Elohist must be distinguished
from the first. Finally, parts of all these three independent documents were
worked together by one editor to form our present Pentateuch. This is the
renewed documentary hypothesis. Since Hupfeld, almost all of those scholars who
are at all friendly to Pentateuchal criticism have adhered, and still adhere,
to this theory.
6. Quite recently a new advance seems to have been begun; for some
think that they have discovered reasons for separating the work of the Jahvist
into a first, second, and third stratum. Such, in particular, has been
Wellhausen’s position, expressed in his articles on the composition of the
Hexateuch, under which name he embraces the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua.
But the grounds on which this splitting up of the Pentateuch, this dissolution
of the tradition of Israel, is demanded, are untenable: and equally incorrect
is the opinion of a second group of critics who hold that no part of the
Pentateuch, not even the Decalogue, was derived from Moses. This is the latest
position maintained by Wellhausen in his “Prolegomena to the history of
Israel.” Now, since Israel possessed an especial and lively sense for the
cultivation of its history (comp. Exodus 13:8-10;
1 Samuel 7:12;
1 Samuel 30:25;
2 Samuel 1:18;
2 Samuel 18:18,
etc.); since it actually kept the patriarchal and the Mosaic stages separate;
since furthermore, a progress of a varied character has been reported; since
also the faults of individual heroes and of the people have not been concealed;
and since, finally, the degrees of the aberrations from virtue are
distinguished--for all these reasons it is to be maintained that essentially
correct traditions of Israel’s history, not excluding even the times of the
patriarchs, have reached us. Further, since all the historical recollections of
Israel contain innumerable echoes of Moses’ activity; since also the very
earliest prophets knew a legitimate national religion, which they derived from
Moses (for example, Hosea 12:10-14);
since, furthermore, all the prophets make mention of a sum of laws as the basis
of the common jurisprudence (Amos 2:4; Hosea 4:6; Hosea 8:12);
since, finally, individual parts of the Pentateuch correspond in fact to that
stage of the religious, moral, and ritual history of Israel which is described
in the oldest sources of the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings--therefore the
Mosaic origin of these parts of the Pentateuch at least cannot be denied. These
are, in the first place--
On the Authenticity of the
Pentateuch
The Truth of the History,
both of common and miraculous events, contained in the Four Last Books of it.
I. That the Jews
have acknowledged the authenticity of the Pentateuch, from the present time
back to the era of their return from the Babylonish Captivity, a period of more
than two thousand three hundred years, admits not a possibility of doubt. But
how far have we reason to believe that the Pentateuch was not first compiled
after the Babylonish Captivity, from the indistinct traditions of the history
of the Jewish nation, which, in an absence of seventy years from their country,
may perhaps have lost all clear records of former events? In answer to this
suspicion I observe, that it is not supported by any semblance of probability,
because the period of seventy years was not long enough to lose all clear
public records of former events: nineteen years of the Captivity of the Jewish
nation had elapsed before the burning of the Temple, and the carrying away the
last of the people; it is therefore perfectly credible that many individuals
then alive may have survived the close of the Captivity, and witnessed the
rebuilding of the second Temple; and of this really having taken place we have
direct testimony (Ezra 3:12; Nehemiah 7:64).
Still further. Not only the individuals who remained could compare the
circumstances which had existed before the Captivity, and thus could not be
deceived by so gross an imposition as any attempt to fabricate, as the public
code of the national religion and government, a new compilation never before
heard of; but we know that writings of far less importance were preserved. For
example: no priests were admitted to resume their offices who could not trace
back their genealogy to Aaron and the heads of the Levites contemporary with
Moses. In the book of Ezra, who presided over the Jews after their restoration
from the Babylonish Captivity, the particular families are specified, “who
sought their register among those that were reckoned by genealogy, but they
were not found; therefore were they, as polluted, put from the priesthood” (Ezra 2:62).
Nor was this exactness in tracing genealogies confined to the priests; we are
told of others, who “could not show their father’s house and their seed,
whether they were of Israel” Ezra 2:59-60).
And the reason of this exactness is plain from this: that such of the Jews as
believed their prophets, expected a return into their native land after a
period of seventy years, and preserved their genealogies, as the titles on
which they might resume their properties, with the same care which they had
always employed from the very first commencement of the state. Now is it
possible that the whole nation should lose all public records of their public
law, when they preserved public records of the descent of private families? Is
it possible that the genealogies of the priests and their distinct offices
should be preserved, while the Law that describes these offices, and assigned
them to different families, was forgotten? Is it probable the identical vessels
(Ezra 6:5),
and furniture of the Temple which had been carried away at the beginning of the
Captivity, should be restored as they are recorded to have been, and that no
one copy of whatever code existed to regulate the laws and religion of the
whole nation, as well as the Temple worship, should be preserved? The only
thing which gives the least plausibility to this suspicion is, that we are told
that the Jews had during the Captivity (as these objectors say) lost their
language; hence it is rashly inferred that they also lost all records in the
language. Now the real fact is this: that the original language of the Jews had
indeed degenerated among the great mass of the people, by the corruption of
foreign dialects; but the learned part of the nation still perfectly understood
it, and were able to interpret it with ease; and the records contained in it (Ezra 2:2; Ezra 6:18)
lost nothing of their clearness or their use. Further, this very circumstance
supplies no weak presumptive argument, that as the Pentateuch which now exists
is written in pure Hebrew, it was composed before the Captivity. This probable
conclusion acquires almost resistless force, when we consider the direct
testimony, first of the Jews, and next of the Samaritans. The tenor of their
history after the Captivity represents the Jews, not as regulating their
religion and policy by any new Law, but as reviving the observance of the old
Law given by Moses, interpreting it with humble veneration, and submitting to
it with the most prompt obedience. Ezra is distinguished as the scribe, because
he was a ready scribe in the Law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had
given; and very many others also are mentioned, “who caused the people to
understand the Law.” Undoubtedly it is probable that Ezra prepared for use new
copies of the Mosaic Law, that a sufficient number might be ready to supply the
demands of the people. In doing this he may have inserted some notes, to
explain or complete passages obscure or defective. But what symptoms are there
in this history of a new compilation, a code of doubtful authority, a
collection of uncertain traditions? How idle is it to talk of these things,
when the fact is so plainly the reverse. We have yet a stronger proof that the
Law thus offered to the people was not a selection and revival of such former
Laws alone as suited their present temper and situation; such laws as were
agreeable to the general wishes of the people, and therefore might be supposed
to obtain general submission without any minute inquiry into their authority.
No, the case was otherwise; the code thus received enjoined in some instances
sacrifices the most severe and distressing to individuals, sacrifices which no
politic governor would have ventured to propose, and which no people would have
submitted to, if any doubt could have been raised as to the authority of the
Law requiring them. For, as the Scribes read the book of Moses in the audience
of the people, therein was found written Nehemiah 13:1;
Nehemiah 13:3)
that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of the
Lord forever; now it came to pass, that when they had heard the law, that they
separated from Israel all the mixed multitude.” Even this must have created
great discontent, and excited much opposition, if the authority of the law
requiring it had not been clear and unquestioned. But there was yet a more trying
proof of obedience required. The Mosaic code commanded that Jews should not
intermarry with any of the neighbouring idolatrous nations. On the dissolution
of the state and the dispersion of the people at the Captivity, this law was
violated in numerous instances; on the reassembling of the people, the
violation was too glaring to escape the notice of the zealous supporters of the
Divine code. The history of Ezra describes in the strongest colours the
feelings of grief and alarm which this discovery excited, the vast numbers who
were involved in this guilt, and the high rank and authority of many of the
offenders (Ezra 9:1-15; Ezra 10:1-44).
The greatness of the sacrifice may be estimated by the severity of the
penalty under which it was enjoined: “Whosoever would not come within three
days, to comply with this law, all his substance was to be forfeited, and himself
separated from the congregation.” And the offenders assembled in great numbers,
and certain of the elders and judges were appointed to examine the matter, and
so many did the inquiry extend to, that it held for three entire months; and
among the offenders we find many of the Priests and Levites; it was not
therefore a contrivance of theirs to strengthen their influence. In a word, I
rely on this fact as a full proof, that the code the Jews received after the
Captivity was in all respects the very same they had been subject to before it;
not then newly compiled, not then artfully modified; but brought forward
exactly as they found it, in the known records of the nation, and submitted to
with scrupulous reverence, as of undoubted and Divine authority. Strong as this
proof is, we have another, which may perhaps be deemed even stronger; the
Samaritans 2 Kings 17:24
to the end; Ezra 4:1-24; Nehemiah 4:1-23;
Nehemiah 6:1-19),
we know, from the period of the Captivity became the most bitter enemies of
the Jews; this animosity was greatly enflamed at the close of the Captivity,
because the Jews would not permit them to join in building the Temple. These
Samaritans must then have derived their knowledge of the Mosaic institutions
from a code which existed at the commencement of the Captivity. They would
never have received as the rule of their religion a new compilation, formed by
their enemies at the very moment when they rejected their alliance, and would
not acknowledge them as partakers of their religion, or admit them to worship
at their Temple. And what is the code which the Samaritans acknowledged? The
Pentateuch, and nothing but the Pentateuch. This they preserved, written indeed
in a different character from that which the Jews use; they have in some few
places altered it, to support the claim of their Temple to a precedence and a
sacredness above the Temple at Jerusalem; but in all other respects it is
precisely the same with the Pentateuch which is preserved by the Jews with the
same scrupulous reverence, as of unquestioned Divine authority. Does it then
admit a doubt that the code thus received by these two hostile nations bad been
acknowledged by both as of Divine authority before that hostility took place? I
conclude that the Pentateuch was the known sacred Law of the Jews before the
Babylonish Captivity commenced, about 580 years before our Saviour’s death.
Further: An argument of a similar nature brings us through a period of 377
years, and establishes the authority of the Pentateuch, from the destruction of
the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonish Captivity, back to its separation from
the kingdom of Israel under the son and immediate successor of Solomon. From
the revolt of the ten tribes, it became the decided political interest of their
monarchs, to alienate them as far as possible from the religion and the Temple
of the monarch of Jerusalem. The very first king of Israel discerned this
interest, and prosecuted it to the utmost of his power, without the least scruple
as to the religious or moral consequences of the means which he determined to
adopt (1 Kings 12:26).
Now, to the full and secure completion of this design, the Pentateuch interposed
the great obstacle. It allows no such separation of the tribes; it supposes
them all united in one confederate body, governed by the same common counsel,
recognizing one High Priest, by whom they were to consult the oracle; and
commands all the males of the twelve tribes to repair three times a year to
their common Temple, to join in a common form of worship, in adoration of their
common God. This system was therefore entirely un-favourable to the views of
the kings of Israel. If, then, its authority had not been acknowledged before
the separation of the two kingdoms, would these monarchs, so watchful and so
politic in guarding their separate sway, have permitted it be introduced and
received, to be fabricated and imposed upon the whole Jewish race, and
published before the face of that part of it which they governed, as the system
which both nations, when united, had acknowledged as of Divine authority?
Assuredly not, except that code had been previously
and universally admitted as of Divine origin, which they knew
their subjects had been long habituated to reverence and obey. I conclude from
hence, that the authority of the Pentateuch was acknowledged antecedent to the
separation of the kingdom of Israel and Judah, above 970 years before the birth
of Christ. But perhaps it may be asserted, that the support which the
Pentateuch gives to the claims of the kings of Judah, renders it probable that
it may have been compiled for the purpose of favouring their views; and that
perhaps its authority was rejected by the kings of Israel and their subjects,
though the history of their opposition is now lost--the kingdom of Judah having
long survived that of Israel, and reunited all the Hebrews under one common
government; and having perhaps taken care to obliterate all records that could
justify the past or lead to a future separation. To this I answer, that the
Samaritans, who, though hostile to the Jews, acknowledged the Pentateuch,
succeeded to the ten tribes in the possession of their country; that they were
intermingled with their posterity; and that it is not possible such a
circumstance could have taken place, as that the original Samaritans should
have rejected the Law which the Jews received, and for a series of 230 years
should have combated its authority: and that immediately after their successors
should have received this Law, and this only, as of Divine origin, without
preserving the least trace of its ever having been disputed; though an
hostility as strong subsisted between them and the restored Jews as had before
the Captivity divided the separate kingdoms. Two particular examples, deserving
peculiar attention, occur in the Jewish history, of the public and solemn
homage paid to the sacredness of the Mosaic Law, as promulgated in the
Pentateuch, and by consequence affording the fullest testimony to the
authenticity of the Pentateuch itself; the one in the reign of Hezekiah, while
the separate kingdoms of Judah and Israel still subsisted; and the other in the
reign of his great-grandson Josiah, subsequent to the Captivity of Israel. In
the former we see the pious monarch of Judah assembling the Priests and
Levites, and the rulers of the people, to deplore with him the trespasses of
their fathers against the Divine Law, to acknowledge the justice of those chastisements
which, according to the prophetic warnings of that Law, had been inflicted upon
them, to open the house of God which his father had impiously shut, and restore
the true worship therein according to the Mosaic ritual (with the minutest
particulars of which he complied, in the sin offerings and the peace offerings
which, in conjunction with his people, he offered, for the kingdom and the
sanctuary and the people, to make atonement to God for them, and for all
Israel); and thus restoring the service of God as it had been performed in the
purest times. Not less remarkable was the solemn recognition of the Divine
authority of the Pentateuch by King Josiah and the whole people of the Jews,
whose pious monarch while he was “yet young began to seek after the God of
David his father,” destroying idols and banishing idolatry throughout the
entire extent of his dominions, and proceeding to repair the House of the Lord,
that he might restore His worship with due solemnity. On this occasion, says
the narrative, when they brought out the money that had been brought into the
House of the Lord (to receive which they had probably opened the most secret
and secure place for a deposit in the Temple) “the priests found a book of the
Law of the Lord given by Moses” (more accurately by the hand of Moses, possibly
the sacred autograph of Moses himself originally deposited in the Ark); “and
Hilkiah said to Shapham the Scribe, ‘I have found the book of the Law in the
House of the Lord, and he delivered the book to Shapham, who read it before the
king.’” The passage read seems to have been that part of Deuteronomy which
contains the prophetic declarations of the Lawgiver against the future
apostasies of his people, which were so awful and severe as to excite the
utmost terror in the young and pious monarch (2 Chronicles 34:19-21).
And Huldah the prophetess, who was consulted, declared that God would certainly
fulfil the denunciations of that Book; but yet that, in consequence of the
humiliation and repentance of the king, “he should be gathered to the grave in
peace, neither should his eyes see all the evil which God would bring upon
Jerusalem.” The sacred history proceeds to detail the particular circumstances
of the Levites being employed in their due courses (2 Chronicles 35:18),
and the solemn celebration of the Passover, “as it is written in the book of
the covenant”; and there was no such Passover, says the history, kept in
Israel, from the days of Samuel the prophet; probably because the recent
captivity of the ten tribes awakened the fears and secured the universal
concurrence of all Judah and Israel, who were present, as well as of all the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, who now concurred with the king (2 Kings 23:24),
“to perform the words of the Law, which were written in the book that Hilkiah
the priest found in the House of the Lord.” Which could not possibly have been
any other than the Pentateuch of Moses; probably the very copy written by
himself. These facts and arguments seem sufficiently decisive. They may be
confirmed by another argument from the internal structure of the Pentateuch,
which I do not recollect to have seen noticed; and which not only meets this
objection, but goes further, and seems to prove it highly improbable that the
Pentateuch should have been compiled and received, if of a late date or
doubtful authority, during any period of the regal government in Judah. The
argument is this: that the civil form of government which the Pentateuch
exhibits is not regal. The Jewish government was, what no other ever was, a
theocracy; in which the last appeal was to Jehovah himself expressing His will
by the oracle; and in which there was no power either to make or repeal new
laws, the laws of the nation being the laws of Jehovah. We must also observe,
that the judge was rather an occasional than a constant magistrate, nominated,
or at least approved by the oracle; never invested with authority for more than
his own life, and without the least idea of a hereditary right. Further, the
Mosaic code does not merely appoint a constitution, of which kingly government
was no part; but it notices this government as an innovation which the people
would introduce, after the example of the surrounding nations; and it lays the
kings under restraints which were equally irksome to their sensuality and their
ambition (Deuteronomy 17:16,
etc.). When the Jews first solicited from Samuel a king, after they had lived
near four hundred years under their original form of government, he was displeased,
and represented this demand as in some degree a rejection of God as their king;
and he stated in strongest terms the oppressions and the mischiefs they should
suffer under the kingly government. Now it is remarkable, that the restraints
imposed by the Mosaic Law were grossly and fatally violated by Solomon, the
most renowned and powerful of the Jewish kings. On this fact then I argue: that
if the Mosaic Law had not been universally known and revered as of Divine
authority long before the time of Samuel, it could never have been compiled and
received during the kingly government. He would not have ventured to oppose the
wishes of the people in appointing a king, on the pretext of its being a
rejection of God for their king; nor would he have attempted to impose such
restraints on the monarchs of the Jews, if unsupported by a previously admitted
authority. Such a fabrication would never have escaped detection and exposure,
either by Saul, who for the last years of his life was in constant enmity with
Samuel; or by Solomon, who amidst his power and prosperity must have felt his
fame wounded, and his passions rebuked by the stern condemnation of the Mosaic
Law. The preceding argument shows the extreme improbability of a supposition
which has been sometimes resorted to: that Samuel was the compiler of the
Pentateuch. We have now ascended to within less than four hundred years from
the promulgation of the Mosaic Law; a period during which the Jews had lived in
the uninterrupted possession of the land in which they were settled by Moses
and his immediate successor; and without any fundamental alteration in the form
of that government under which they were originally placed. And if we have
reason to believe that the Pentateuch was admitted as the true system of the
Mosaic Law at the close of that period, no possible era during its continuance
can be pointed out, at which the fabrication of such a code may be supposed
probable or so much as credible; no motive or circumstance can be assigned as
the origin of such a fabrication, or to account for the ready and universal
credit which it must have obtained; no body of men, even no individual, can be
discovered whose interest it was to form such a fabrication, or who could have
had an influence sufficiently powerful and permanent to give currency. The
history of the Jews proves, indeed, that they were very far from adhering
strictly to the Mosaic Law during that period. We find that they frequently
violated it in the grossest manner, and fell into great disorders and idolatries,
and in consequence suffered great calamities. But what was the general effect
of these calamities? That they repented of their disobedience, and again
submitted to the Law of Moses as the Law of God. Now would this have been
natural if they entertained any doubts of the authenticity of the code
containing that Law? We are not, however, driven to rest the universal
reception of the Pentateuch on presumptive arguments or probable conjecture
alone. We have the most decisive and uninterrupted, the most positive and
direct external testimony. We have a number of different tracts, acknowledged
by the Jews as not only genuine, but Divine. These works are, the latest of
them, written during or shortly after the Babylonish Captivity, as their very
language indicates. They take up the history of the Jews from that period, and
carry it regularly back to their first settlement in their country by Joshua,
the successor of Moses, and thus bring us into contact with the legislator
himself. They are to a certainty written by a great variety of persons and for
very different purposes; some of them plain histories, and almost chronological
annals; other of them prophetical and mysterious; others poetical and popular;
hymns in praise of God, His providence, and laws, or celebrating great national
events or deploring national calamities. And all these multiplied and various
compositions unite in presupposing the existence and the truth of the
Pentateuch; and uniformly refer to and quote it as the only true and genuine
account of the ancient history and known laws of the Jews. They recite its
facts, they refer to its laws, they celebrate its author; they appeal to the
people, to the kings, to the priests; they rebuke and threaten them for
neglecting the Mosaic Law, as it is contained in the Pentateuch; and what is
most decisive, they never once give the least hint of any rival law, of any new
compilation of any doubt as to its authenticity.
II. We may also
remark, that the nature of several laws concerning property was such, that if
they had not been enacted before its distribution among the people, and
established as the tenure and condition on which it was held, their
introduction at any subsequent period would have excited a great ferment and
great opposition. Such was the Law of release from all debts and all personal
servitude every seventh year (Deuteronomy 15:1-23;
Leviticus 25:1-55);
and that Law which ordered that if the property of any family had been
alienated by sale, it should be restored to the family every fiftieth year, or
year of jubilee. All who know the commotions which attempts to discharge debts,
and change the distribution of property, have always excited, and who recollect
the examples of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, in this matter, will be sensible that
a code containing such regulations as these could not have been established as
the regular Law of the Jewish state, without opposition, except before the
distribution of property, and as the condition on which it was held; and
therefore before the settlement of the Jews in the land of their inheritance.
Another regulation as to property occurs in Leviticus 19:23-25,
of a singular kind. Now, would such a regulation as this have been observed, if
it had not been established on clear authority, before the Jews took possession
of the Promised Land? And if it never had been established and observed, what
motive could have induced a fictitious writer to load his account with so
improbable and so apparently useless a circumstance? I now proceed to confirm
the conclusion thus derived from the testimony of the Jewish nation, still
farther, by considering the internal structure of the history itself. If the
Pentateuch is not the work of Moses, it is a forgery imposed upon the nation in
his name. It is totally impossible this should have been done during the life
of the legislator, or immediately after his death, during the lives of his
contemporaries. If then the Pentateuch was not the original record of Moses
himself, it was the work of some compiler in a period long subsequent, who
assumed the character, and wrote in the name of the Jewish Lawgiver, to answer
some design different from genuine truth. And if so, we can hardly fail of
discerning, in the texture of the work itself, marks of a compilation long
subsequent to the facts it relates. We cannot but perceive some traces of the
particular purpose for which it was composed. On the most cursory perusal of
the four last books of the Pentateuch, it seems most evident that the main
facts (considering at present only such as were not supernatural) were so
public, so singular, and so important, affecting in their consequences the most
valuable rights and interests of every order of society, nay, almost of every
individual; that we cannot suppose any man could have ventured to fabricate a
false account of them, and have been successful in gaining for such a
fabrication that universal credit and permanent authority which it has been
proved the Pentateuch certainly obtained amongst the Jews from the very
commencement of their state. The rapid increase of the Jews in Egypt, the
severe oppression they sustained there, the treasure cities, and other public
works raised by their labours, above all, the cruel edict to destroy all their
male children, in order, gradually and totally, to exterminate the nation; all these
were facts which must have been engraven on the hearts, and handed down in the
traditions of every Hebrew family. Nor were the circumstances which led to
their departure from the Land of Bondage, less public and notorious. Let it be
remembered that this history does not recount the origin and growth of an
infant colony, or the emigration of a savage horde, but the march of a numerous
nation; for they “journeyed about six hundred thousand men, besides women and
children; and a mixed multitude went up also with them, and flocks and herds,
and very much cattle”; while the magnificent structure of their Tabernacle, the
distribution of property, the tribe of the Levites set apart for ministers of
Divine worship and for public instructors, and the code of their religious and
civil institutions, prove that a great degree of civilization prevailed amongst
the Jews at the very time when these facts were said to have taken place. Now
can we believe a nation so great and so civilized were universally and palpably
deceived as to a whole series of facts, so public and important as this history
details? If, then, the leading events of the Pentateuch were so public, so
momentous, and so recent, that the history detailing them could have found no
credit had it not been true; if the laws and institutions it contains were so
important, and of such a singular nature, that had they not been derived from
unquestioned authority they could never have been adopted; it remains to
enquire how far the relation carries with it marks of truth, even in its
minutest detail. Now in this view, the first character of the Pentateuch which
strikes us is the perfect artlessness and simplicity of its style and
structure. Nothing is more evident in the entire structure of the Pentateuch,
than its being written without the least effort to form an elaborate and
engaging history, an impressive and beautiful composition. A writer who had
such a design would have separated the history from the laws; the former he
would have related with such a selection of circumstances as would most
interest and affect his reader; the latter he would have delivered in some
regular system, and avoided minute detail and frequent repetitions. On the
contrary, the author of the Pentateuch proceeds in such an order as was indeed
most natural to a writer relating the different occurrences which took place,
exactly as they took place; but which renders his work exceedingly irregular,
and even tedious as a composition. Additional proofs that the writer of the
Pentateuch was careless of ornament, and attentive to objects which no mere
inventor of a fiction would have thought of, and no compiler even of a true
history, who designed to interest and amuse his readers, would have dwelt on,
may be derived from the manner (see Deuteronomy the first twenty-three
chapters) in which the rules about sacrifices, the distinctions of meats, clean
and unclean, the different modes of contracting pollution, and the rules about
purification, and, in particular, about the symptoms and the cure of leprosy,
are detailed. We must not forget that these rules continued to be observed
amongst the Jews; that they are so minute, they could scarcely have been
remembered distinctly for any length of time, if they had not been written;
that this account of them must therefore have been published very soon after
they were first observed; that many of them are so tedious and burdensome that
they would not have been submitted to, if the authority inculcating them had
been at all doubtful; in short, if they had not been inculcated by the same
authority which regulated the rest of that religious and civil system of which
they form a part. It follows, that they were observed from the time when the
Jewish Lawgiver established his code, and that they were published either by
him, or immediately after him. The frequent genealogies (see Numbers 1:1-54;
Numbers 2:1-34;
Numbers 3:1-51,
and especially 26 and 34) which occur in the Pentateuch, form another strong
presumptive proof that it was composed by a writer of a very early date, and
from original materials. The genealogies of the Jewish tribes were not mere
arbitrary lists of names, in which the writer might insert as many fictitious
ones as he pleased, retaining only some few more conspicuous names of existing
families, to preserve an appearance of their being founded in reality. But they
were a complete enumeration of all the original stocks, from some one of which
every family in the Jewish nation derived its origin, and in which no name was
to be inserted whose descendants or heirs did not exist in possession of the
property which the original family had possessed at the first division of the
Promised Land. The distribution of property by tribes and families proves some
such catalogue of families as we find in the Pentateuch must have existed at
the very first division of the country. These must have been carefully
preserved, because the property of every family was unalienable, since, if
sold, it was to return to the original family at each year of jubilee. The
genealogies of the Pentateuch, if they differed from this known and authentic
register, would have been immediately rejected, and with them the whole work.
They therefore impart to the entire history all the authenticity of such a
public register. Again, we may make a similar observation on the geographical
enumerations of places in the Pentateuch Exodus 14:2; Exodus 15:27;
Exodus 17:7;
comp. Numbers 20:1-29;
Numbers 21:1-35;
Numbers 33:1-56;
Numbers 34:1-29;
Numbers 35:1-34;
also Deuteronomy 1:1-46;
Deuteronomy 2:1-37;
Deuteronomy 3:1-29);
the accounts constantly given of their deriving their names from particular
events and particular persons; and on the details of marches and encampments
which occur, first in the progress of the direct narrative, when only some few
stations distinguished by remarkable facts are noticed, and afterwards at its
close, where a regular list is given of all the stations of the Jewish camp.
All this looks like reality. Whenever the Pentateuch was published, it would
have been immediately rejected, except the account it gives of the origin of
these names, and of the series of these marches, had been known to be true by
the Jews in general. An inventor of fiction would not venture upon this, as it
would facilitate the detection of his falsehood; a compiler long subsequent
would not trouble himself with it, except in some remarkable cases. The very
natural and artless manner in which all circumstances of this nature are
introduced in the Pentateuch increases the probability of its being the work of
an eyewitness, who could introduce them with ease; while to anybody else it
would be extremely difficult and therefore unnatural; since it would render his
work much more laborious, without making it more instructive. All these things bespeak
a writer present at the transactions, deeply interested in them, recording each
object as it was suggested to his mind by facts, conscious he had such
authority with the persons to whom he wrote, as to be secure of their
attention, and utterly indifferent as to style or ornament, and those various
arts which are employed to fix attention and engage regard; which an artful
forger would probably have employed, and a compiler of even a true history
would not have judged beneath his attention. Now, though it does not at all
follow that where these arts are used, falsehood must exist; yet their absence
greatly increases our confidence that we shall meet nothing but truth. But the
most decisive character of truth in any history is its impartiality. And here the
author of the Pentateuch is distinguished perhaps above any historian in the
world; whether we consider the manner in which he speaks of the Hebrew
patriarchs, the Jewish nation in general, or of its legislator and his nearest
relations. Of the patriarchs, he speaks in such a way as not only did not
gratify the vanity of his countrymen, but such as must have most severely
wounded their national pride. He ranks some of their ancestors very high
indeed, as worshippers of the true God, and observers of His will, in the midst
of a world rapidly degenerating into idolatry; yet there is not one of them
(Joseph perhaps excepted) of whom he does not recount many weaknesses, which a
zealous partisan would have been careful to suppress; and to many he imputes great
crimes, which he never attempts to palliate or disguise. Of the Jewish nation
in general, the author of the Pentateuch speaks, it may be said, not only
impartially, but even severely. He does not conceal the weakness and obscurity
of their first origin, that “a Syrian ready to perish, was their father”; nor
their long and degrading slavery in Egypt; their frequent murmurings and
criminal distrust of God, notwithstanding his many interpositions in their
favour; their criminal apostasy, rebellion, and resolution to return to Egypt;
first, when they erected the golden calf at Mount Sinai; and next on the return
of the spies from the land of Canaan, when they were so afraid of the
inhabitants that they durst not attack them: he repeatedly reproaches the people
with these crimes, and loads them with the epithets of stiff-necked,
rebellious, and idolatrous. He inculcates upon them most emphatically, that it
was not for their own righteousness that God gave them possession of the
promised land. He declares to them his conviction that in their prosperity they
would again relapse into their rebellions and idolatries, and imitate the foul
vices of those nations, whom God had driven out from before them for there very
crimes. The impartiality of the author of the Pentateuch is not less remarkable
in the mode in which he spoke of the nearest relations and connections of the
Jewish lawgiver. His brother Aaron is related to have been engaged in the great
crime of setting up the golden calf, to have joined with his sister Miriam in
an unjustifiable attack on the authority of Moses, and to have offended God so
much that he was excluded from the promised land; and the two eldest sons of
Aaron are related to have been miraculously put to death by God Himself, in
consequence of their violating the ritual Law. The tribe and kindred of the
Lawgiver are not represented as exempt from the criminal rebellion of the Jews
on the return of the twelve spies. Caleb and Joshua, who alone had opposed it,
were of different tribes, one of Judah, and the other of Ephraim. In a word,
nothing in the narrative of the Pentateuch exalts the characters of any of the
near relatives of Moses and Aaron, except only in the instance of Phinehas, the
grandson of Aaron; who, for his zeal in restraining and punishing the
licentiousness and idolatry into which the Midianitish women had seduced his
countrymen, was rewarded by the high priesthood’s being made hereditary in his
family. The most decisive proof of impartiality is, however, found in the
manner in which the Pentateuch speaks of Moses himself. The entire account
which the book of Exodus delivers of the private life of Moses, for the eighty
years which preceded his Divine mission to deliver the Israelites, is comprised
in twenty-two verses. All is plain and artless, full of the simplicity of
patriarchal life, and unmixed with a single circumstance tending to exalt the
personal character of the Lawgiver, or mark him out as peculiarly fitted for so
high a destiny. Compare with this short and modest narrative, the
embellishments which national vanity added in subsequent traditions, and which
Josephus collected and adorned. Now, what I contend for is this, that if the
Pentateuch had been compiled by any historian guided by the mere uncontrolled
feelings and partialities of the human mind, we should discover them in his
describing the character of the man who is represented as the legislator and
head of the nation who were the chosen people of God. I could show by a minute
induction, that nothing of this kind occurs in the Pentateuch, and that
multiplied instances of it are found in Josephus, who is yet admitted to be an
historian of general veracity and integrity. I have but one further remark to
make, and that is, that we find, although the subject matter of Josephus is
essentially the same with that of the Pentateuch, yet, in the selection and
order of their circumstances they differ, exactly as we should expect the works
of a compiler anxious to interest and keep up his reader’s attention, would,
whenever composed, differ from the original narrative of an eyewitness,
detailing (as Moses did) every circumstance as it occurred, and totally
careless of everything but minute precision and strict fidelity. All these
differences, I contend, strongly illustrate and confirm the originality and the
truth of the Pentateuch; and tend to prove it was the work of an eyewitness,
and even of an eyewitness whose business and anxious care it was to superintend
and direct every circumstance of what he described; such an eyewitness was
Moses, and Moses alone. If then he was the author, can we doubt the truth of
the narrative? Were not the leading facts too recent, too important, to admit
of the least falsification? Is not the detail formed with such artlessness and
simplicity, such particularity and minuteness, such candour and impartiality,
that we cannot doubt of its truth, even in the most minute particulars?
III. The exordium
to the book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 1:1-3)
is exceedingly remarkable. It states that it is not, like the books of Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers, a direct narration or journal of the various events
which occurred to the Jewish legislator and nation, from the commencement of
their deliverance from Egypt; but that it was a recapitulation of everything
which Moses thought it necessary to notice, in addressing the people shortly
before his death, at the close of the forty years, during which he had acted as
their Lawgiver and judge. I direct attention to this peculiar character of the
last book of the Pentateuch, because it seems to me to supply the ground work
of an argument for the genuineness and truth of the entire, somewhat different
from those which I have seen generally and distinctly noticed. I have
endeavoured to collect the topics in proof of the authenticity and truth of the
works ascribed to Moses; from their general reception among the Jews; from the
important and public nature of the facts they relate; from the simplicity of
their style and structure; from the particularity of their narrative, natural
to an eyewitness, and to an eyewitness alone; and especially from the admirable
impartiality they everywhere display. But if the distinct nature and purpose
ascribed to the book of Deuteronomy really belongs to it, a comparison of this,
with the preceding books of the Pentateuch, ought to afford a distinct proof of
the truth and authenticity of all, from the undesigned coincidences between
them. The direct narrative was written at the time of the transactions as they
were passing; the recapitulation was delivered at a period long subsequent to
many. The former was intended to record all the particulars of the events most
necessary to be known. In the latter it was intended to notice only such
particulars as the immediate object of the speaker, in addressing the people,
rendered it expedient to impress upon their minds. In each the laws are
intermixed with the facts, and both laws and facts are referred to for
different purposes and on different occasions. This gives room for comparing
these statements and allusions, and judging whether they agree in such a manner
as appears to result, not from the artifice which forgery or falsehood might
adopt, but from the consistency of nature and truth. We may thus weigh the
different testimonies of the same witness, delivered at different times and on
different occasions, and judge, as it were, by a cross-examination of their
truth. And we may remark that if a coincidence appears in minute and unimportant
circumstances, it is therefore the more improbable it should have been
designed:--also the more indirect and circuitous it is, the less obvious it
would have been to a forger or compiler. If the situations in which the writer
is placed, and the views with which at different times he alludes to the same
facts are different, and the terms which he employs are adapted to this
difference, in an artless and natural manner, this is a strong presumption of
truth. Finally, if the direct narrative, and the subsequent references and
allusions, appear in any instance to approach to a contradiction, and yet, on
closer inspection, are found to agree, this very strongly confirms the absence
of art, and the influence of truth and reality. Having thus expounded the
general meaning of my argument, I proceed to exemplify it by some instances,
which seem sufficient for establishing the conclusion contended for. Some
presumption that the four last books of the Pentateuch were really composed by
an eyewitness, at the time of the transactions, arises from their describing
the nation and the lawgiver in circumstances totally different from any which
ever existed before or after that peculiar period; from their adapting every
incident, however important, every turn of expression, however minute, to these
peculiar circumstances. The Jews are supposed to have left the land of Egypt,
and not yet possessed themselves of the land of Canaan. In this interval the
nation was all collected together, never before or after; it then dwelt in
tents, never before or after; no one possessed any landed property or houses;
no local distinctions, no local tribunal could then exist; these and a variety
of other circumstances of the same nature necessarily attended this peculiar
situation. Now such is the nature of the human mind, that though it may be easy
to imagine a peculiar situation of fictitious characters, and describe their
conduct in this situation with sufficient consistency, as in a poem or a
fiction entirely unconnected with reality, yet, when characters that have
really existed are described in circumstances entirely or even partly
fictitious; when it is necessary to combine a considerable degree of truth with
a certain portion of fiction; when it is necessary to describe this unprecedented
and fictitious situation, not merely in general terms, but in a very minute
detail of facts and regulations; to connect it with particular times and places
and persons, to combine it with subsequent events which were real, and with the
laws and customs which the writer himself lives under, and which prevail
through an extensive nation; then, indeed, it requires no ordinary ingenuity,
and no common caution, to preserve a perfect consistency; never once to suffer
the constant and familiar associations which perpetually obtrude themselves
upon the mind from present experience to creep into our language or sentiments,
when we wish to describe or relate facts suitable only to past experience. Nay,
admit that all this may possibly be done, it certainly can be done only by
great care and art; and it is, I should conceive, next to impossible but that
this care and art should somewhere or other betray itself in the turn of the
narrative or the expression. Now, an attentive perusal of the Pentateuch will,
I doubt not, prove that it is written without any the least appearance of art
or caution; and it is certain, beyond all doubt, that its facts, sentiments,
and language are adapted to the peculiarities of the situation which have been
noticed. The present tense is constantly used in speaking of the facts in the
wilderness: “I am the Lord, who bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt”: the
future, in speaking of anything to be done in the land of Canaan Exodus 34:11-13;
Exodus 34:23-24).
Thus, also, it is perpetually supposed in every direction, as to public
matters, that the whole congregation can be collected together at the shortest
warning. We are told (see Leviticus nine first chaps.; also Leviticus 10:5)
of dead bodies carried out of the camp; of victims on particular occasions
being burned without the camp Leviticus 4:21;
Leviticus 8:17;
Numbers 19:9).
This peculiarity of situation mixes itself with every circumstance of the
narrative, directly and indirectly, in express terms, and by incidental
allusions, and always without any appearance of art or design. But to proceed
to compare the direct narrative with the recapitulation. We may observe, that a
variety of circumstances which it was natural and necessary to notice on the
entrance of the Jews into the land of their inheritance, occur for the first
time in the last address which Moses delivered to the people on the borders of
Canaan. Then, and not before, does the legislator speak of the “place which the
Lord should choose to put His name therein” (Deuteronomy 12:5).
Then, and not before, does he add to the precepts concerning the observance
of the three great feasts, that they were to be celebrated at that holy place.
Then, and not before, does he enjoin the Jews to bring their offerings, their
sacrifices, their tithes, and the firstlings of their flocks and of their
herds, to the same holy place, and not to eat them in the gates of their own
cities; and if that House of the Lord should be too far for them Deuteronomy 14:23)
to turn their offerings into money, and employ that for the celebration of the
religious festivals, at the place which the Lord should choose. Now also does
the legislator add to the rules relating to the Levites, that which gave them a
right of (Deuteronomy 18:6)
migrating from any other city, and joining with those who were employed in the
service of God at the place which He should choose. Thus, also, in
recapitulating the regulations of the civil law, the legislator now, for the
first time, introduces the (Deuteronomy 16:13;
Deuteronomy 19:11;
Deuteronomy 21:18)
appointment of judges and officers in the different cities which they should
inhabit; and fixes the right of appealing in difficult eases from these judges
to the high priest and his assessors at the place which the Lord should choose;
and determines what the elders of each city may finally decide on, and the
manner in which they should examine the cause, as in the instances of an
uncertain murder (Deuteronomy 21:1-23)
of the rebellious son, and in the ceremony of taking or refusing the widow of a
brother who had died childless. The city, the gate of the city, the elders of
the city, are now perpetually introduced, never before. We may also observe
that in this last address, when the people were going to attack the great body
of their enemies, and as they conquered them, were to inhabit their land, different
circumstances are mentioned, suited to this new situation. The causes which
were to excuse men going to war are now first stated: “Having built a new
house, planted a new vineyard,” or “betrothed himself to a wife” Deuteronomy 20:5,
etc.); all of which supposed a separation of the people from the common camp of
the whole congregation, in consequence of possessing the promised land. Now
also the rules about Deuteronomy 20:19)
besieging cities, about not destroying such trees round them as were good for
food, are specified much more minutely than before, because now sieges would be
frequent. Now, also, Moses enlarges more frequently and more fully than he ever
did before on the fertility and the excellence of the promised land. This was
natural; such a topic at an earlier period would have increased the murmurings
and the impatience of the people at being detained in the wilderness; whereas
now it encouraged them to encounter with more cheerfulness the opposition they
must meet with from the inhabitants of Canaan. These general and obvious
features of difference, which distinguish the last book of Moses from the preceding
ones, when compared with the evident artlessness and simplicity of the
narrative, seem to result from truth and reality alone. Such differences were
natural, nay, unavoidable, if these books were really composed by Moses who was
the witness of the facts, and the author of the Laws which these books contain.
They would be much less likely to occur, if any other man were the author, even
if he were an eyewitness; and they are totally unlike the general detail of a
remote compiler, or the laboured artifice of fiction and forgery.
IV. I shall now
state a few instances where the undesigned coincidence, the exact suitableness,
which we have been noticing in the recital of the natural events of the
history, are also observable in the relation of the miraculous facts and
allusions to them. We may remark, then, that in the direct narrative, the
miracles are related minutely and circumstantially. The time, the place, the
occasion of each being wrought, are exactly specified; and such circumstances
are introduced, as, when considered, prove the miraculous nature of the fact,
though no argument of that kind is instituted. The miracles also are related in
the exact order of time when they happened, and the common and supernatural
events are exhibited in one continued, and, indeed, inseparable series. Now,
had the recapitulation of events been formed for the purpose of gaining credit
to a doubtful narrative of supernatural facts, we should, I presume, perceive a
constant effort to dwell upon and magnify the miracles, to obviate any
objections to their reality; we should find their writer accusing his
countrymen of obstinate incredulity, asserting his own veracity, and appealing
in proof of the facts to that veracity. But it is most evident that nothing of
this appears in the book of Deuteronomy. The people are never once reproached
with having doubted or disbelieved the miracles, but constantly appealed to
having seen and acknowledged them; though, notwithstanding this, they did not
preserve that confidence and that obedience to God which such wonderful
interpositions ought to have secured. The speaker never produces arguments to
prove the miracles, but always considers them as notoriously true and
unquestioned, and adduces them as decisive motives to enforce obedience to His
laws. This is the only purpose for which they are introduced; and such
circumstances in the history as, though not miraculous, would show the
necessity of obedience, are dwelt on as particularly as the miracles
themselves. Thus the object of the three first chapters of Deuteronomy is to
assure the people of the Divine assistance in the conquest of Canaan, and to
convince them of the guilt of not confiding in that assistance. For this
purpose the speaker alludes to the former disobedience of the people, when
forty years before they had arrived at the borders of Canaan; and mentions the
miracles they had previously to that time witnessed, in general terms, merely
as aggravations of their guilt. Is not this whole exhortation natural? Is not
the brief incidental introduction of the miracles, and their being blended with
other facts not miraculous, but tending to impress the same conclusion,
natural? Does not the whole appear totally unlike the timidity and artifice of
fiction or imposture? It might be proved by a minute induction of every
instance in which the miracles are referred to in Deuteronomy, that the
allusion is naturally suggested by the nature of the topic which the legislator
wishes to enforce; and that it is addressed to the people in that manner, which
would be clear and forcible if they had been spectators of the miracle alluded
to, and on no other supposition. Thus the whole miracle is never related, but
that leading circumstance selected which suited the present subject. I add some
few instances of incidental allusions to miracles, to show how naturally they
are introduced, and how exactly the manner in which they are spoken of, suits
the situation of Moses himself, addressing the eyewitnesses of the fact. The
Ten Commandments had been the only precepts of the Law, which God had
distinctly proclaimed from Mount Horeb to the assembled nation of the Jews; the
rest of it had been promulgated by Moses himself as the Divine command. Now,
how does he argue with the people, in order to induce them to receive what he
announced as the Divine will, equally with that which God Himself had directly
proclaimed? He might have urged that the miracles which God had wrought by him
established his Divine authority; that the Ten Commandments being of preeminent
importance, God had Himself proclaimed them to impress them the more deeply,
and chosen to employ him as the medium of conveying the rest of the Law. He
might have urged the severe punishments which God had inflicted on those who
had contested against His Divine mission (as he does in another passage), and
rested the point on these arguments; but he chooses a quite different ground.
He states that the people had declined hearing the rest of the Law directly
from God Himself, and had entreated that it should be conveyed to them through
him. Now, if this argument had never been used by the legislator, if the fact
had never occurred, if the Pentateuch had been the invention of fancy, or even
the compilation of some historian long subsequent to the events, what could
lead him to clog his narrative with such a circumstance as this? In short, what
but truth and reality could suggest such an argument, or gain it the slightest
credit from the people to whom it was addressed?
V. I have
endeavoured to deduce presumptive proofs of the authenticity and truth of the
Jewish history from the structure of the narrative in which it is presented to
us--and to show that these proofs apply with equal clearness to the miraculous
as to the common facts; both being interwoven in one detail, and related with
the same characters of impartiality, artlessness, and truth. This conclusion
will receive great confirmation should it be found that the common events of
the history, if we attempt to separate them from the miraculous, become unnatural,
improbable, and even incredible, unconnected, and unaccountable; while, if
combined with the miracles which attend them, the entire series is connected,
natural, and consistent. For this purpose, let us consider the objects to which
this narrative naturally directs our attention: the character of the Jewish
legislator, the resistance he encountered from the Egyptian government, the
disposition and circumstances of the Hebrew people, and impediments which
presented themselves to their settlement in the land to which they emigrated.
Let us review the narrative of these events, separating the leading facts not
miraculous, which form the basis of the history, from the miraculous; and
consider whether it be rational to receive the former and reject the latter.
Let us first contemplate the character and conduct of the legislator. Born at
that period when his nation groaned under the most oppressive and malignant
despotism which ever crushed a people; rescued by a singular providence from
that death to which he was destined by the cruel edict of Pharaoh; adopted by
the daughter, and educated in the court of that monarch, there is reason to
believe, with the inspired martyr St. Stephen, that he was “learned in all the
wisdom of the Egyptians,” and that he may have been “mighty both in words and
deeds” (Acts 7:22):
that is, conversant in learning, skilled in writing, and judicious in conduct;
for his own positive declaration prevents us from believing him eloquent. If we
exclude the idea of a Divine interposition, we must believe that at the end of
forty years, without any outward change of circumstances, merely from a rash
and sudden impulse, this exile, so long appearing to have forgotten his people,
and to have been by them forgot, resumes, at the age of fourscore, the project
which, in the full vigour of manhood, and the yet unabated ardour of youthful
confidence, he had been compelled to abandon as desperate. He forsakes his
family and his property, revisits his nation, determined again to offer himself
for their leader, and to attempt their deliverance. Yet he appears not to have
cultivated in the interval a single talent, and not to have formed a single
preparation to facilitate his enterprise. Of eloquence he confesses himself
destitute; of military skill or prowess, he never made any display; he appears
to have formed no party among the Jews, no alliance with any foreign power; he
had certainly prepared no force. But it will be said he employed an engine more
powerful than eloquence or arms with an unenlightened people, who looked upon
themselves as the favourites of heaven, and who long had hoped for their
deliverance by a Divine interposition. He claimed the character of an ambassador
commissioned by the God of their fathers, to free them from the bondage under
which they groaned; he supported his claim by some artful deceptions and
mysterious juggling, which his former acquaintance with Egyptian magic enabled
him to practise; and this was sufficient to gain the faith and command the
obedience of a superstitious race, always credulous, and now eager to be
convinced of what they wished to be true. Thus we may account for his success.
This might appear plausible, if the only thing wanting was to prevail on his
countrymen to quit the land of bondage; but let it be remembered that the great
difficulty lay in the necessity of prevailing on the Egyptians to permit their
departure. Supposing the Hebrew slaves were willing to encounter the difficulties
of emigration, and the dangers of invading a warlike nation (a point by no
means certain); yet who shall prevail on their proud and mercenary lords to
suffer them to be deprived of their service? Every circumstance which would
enable a chief to establish his party with the one, would rouse suspicion,
resentment, and opposition, in the other. A very short period elapses, and what
is the event? No human force is exercised, not a single Israelite lifts the
sword or bends the bow; but the Egyptian monarch is humbled, his people
terrified, they urge the Israelites to hasten their departure. They are now
honoured as the masters of their late oppressors; they demand of the Egyptians
(in obedience to the express injunction of Jehovah) silver, and gold, and jewels,
as the remuneration due to their past unrequited labours, conceded by Divine
justice, and obtained by Divine power; as the homage due to their present
acknowledged superiority, and the purchase of their immediate departure. The
Egyptians grant everything; the Israelites begin their emigration: “Six hundred
thousand men on foot, besides women and children; and a mixed multitude went
with them, as well as flocks and herds, and much cattle” (Exodus 12:37-38).
But, notwithstanding his unparalleled success in his main project, the leader
of this great body acknowledges himself to have acted in a mode utterly
destitute of the slightest human foresight or prudence; for this multitude are
so little prepared for their emigration, that they had not time so much as to
leaven the bread which they brought out of Egypt. And as if in the first step
to display his total neglect of every precaution which a wise leader would
adopt, he takes no care to guide them in such a course as would enable them to
escape from pursuit, or contend to advantage with their pursuers. He leads them
into a defile, with mountains on either side, and the sea in front. At this
moment the Egyptians recover from the panic, under the influence of which they
had consented to their departure; and they pursued after them, and soon
overtook them. Perhaps at this crisis, despair inspired them with courage. No,
all is dismay and lamentation. Here now is a second crisis, in which no human
hope or help appears to sustain their leader: on one side a regular disciplined
army, assured of triumph--on the other, a rabble of women and children and men
as spiritless as they, expecting nothing but certain death, lamenting they had
left their servitude, and ready to implore their masters to permit them again
to be their slaves. But if their leader had betrayed unparalleled imprudence in
exposing his host to such a danger, the high strain of confidence he now speaks
in is equally unparalleled. What would this be in any mere human leader, but
the ravings of frenzy? Yet, wonderful to relate, the event accords with it. The
Israelites escape “by the way of the sea” (Exodus 14:11-12);
the Egyptians perish in the same sea, we know not how or why, except we admit
the miraculous interposition which divided the Red Sea, “the waters being a
wall on the right and left hand” (Exodus 14:13-14),
to let His people pass free; and when the infatuated Egyptians pursued,
overwhelmed with its waves their proud and impious host. Let us now pass by the
intermediate events of a few months, and observe this people on the confines of
that land, to establish themselves in which they had emigrated from Egypt.
Their leader, with his usual confidence of success, thus addresses them: “Ye
are come unto the mountain of the Amorites, which the Lord our God doth give
unto us. Behold the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee; go up, and
possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not,
neither be discouraged” (Deuteronomy 1:20-21).
But the people propose to adopt some precautions which human prudence would
naturally dictate. “We will send men before us (say they) to mark out the land,
and bring us word again, by what way we must go up, and into what cities we
shall come.” They are sent. They report: “The land is a good land, and
fruitful; but the people be strong,” etc. At this discouraging report this
timid and unwarlike race were filled with the deepest terrors. In vain did
Moses and Aaron fall on their faces before all the congregation; in vain did
two of the chief men, who had searched out the land, and who adhered to them,
represent its fertility, and endeavour to inspire the host with a pious
confidence in the Divine protection. So incurable was their despair, and so
violent their rebellion, that they resented, as the grossest crime, the advice
of these honest and spirited men; for “all the congregation bade stone them
with stones till they die.” They even determine to abandon altogether the
enterprise; to depose their leader in contempt of the Divine authority which he
claimed; to elect another captain, and return to Egypt. At this crisis, what
conduct would human prudence have dictated? No other, surely, than to soothe
the multitude till this extreme panic might have time to subside; then
gradually to revive their confidence, by recalling to their view the miseries
of that servitude from which they had escaped, the extraordinary success which
had hitherto attended their efforts, and the consequent probability of their
overcoming the difficulties by which they were now dispirited; then gradually
to lead them from one assault, where circumstances were most likely to ensure
victory, to another, till their courage was reanimated, and the great object of
their enterprise might be again attempted with probability of success. But how
strange and unparalleled is the conduct of the Jewish leader! He denounces
against this whole rebellious multitude the extreme wrath of God; instead of
animating them to resume their enterprise, he commands them never to resume it;
instead of encouraging them to hope for success, he assures them they never
shall succeed; he suffers them not to return to Egypt, yet he will not permit
them to invade Canaan. He denounces to them that they shall continue under his
command; that he would march and countermarch them for forty years in the
wilderness, until every one of the rebellious multitude then able to bear arms
should perish there; and that then, and not till then, should their children
resume the invasion of Canaan, and infallibly succeed in it. Now let me ask in
seriousness and simplicity of mind, can we believe that such a denunciation as
this could have been uttered by any human being, not distracted with the
wildest frenzy, if it had not been dictated by the clearest Divine authority;
or if uttered, whether it could have been received by an entire nation with any
other sensation than that of scorn and contempt, if the manifestation of the
Divine power from which it proceeded, and by which alone it could be executed,
had not been most certain and conspicuous? But can we be sure, it is said, that
it was ever uttered? I answer, yes; because it was assuredly fulfilled. And its
accomplishment forms the last particular I shall notice in the history of this
unparalleled expedition, as exhibiting a fact partly natural (for the existence
of a whole nation in a particular country for a certain length of time is an
event of a natural kind), yet inseparably connected with a continued miraculous
interposition, which, if not real, no human imagination could have invented,
and no human credulity believed. I mean the miraculous sustenance of the whole
Jewish nation of six hundred thousand men, besides women and children, for
forty years, within the compass of a barren wilderness, where a single caravan
of travellers could never subsist, even marching through it by the shortest
route, without having brought with them their own provisions. Yet so long the
host of Israel remained in it. In the interval they were fed with food from
heaven, even with manna, until in the plains of Jericho they did eat of the
corn of the land; and the manna ceased the morrow after they had eaten the old
corn of the laud. Here then I close this argument. And I contend that the
existence of the Jewish nation in the wilderness for forty years, their
submission during that period to the authority of their leader, without
attempting either to return to Egypt or to invade Canaan, is a fact which
cannot be accounted for, without admitting the uninterrupted and conspicuous
interference of the power of Jehovah, miraculously sustaining and governing
this His chosen people; and by consequence establishing the Divine original of
the Mosaic Law. (Dean Graves.)
The mosaic legislation
The legislative Books of the Pentateuch, from Exodus to
Deuteronomy, may be contemplated either in the light
in the
legislative Books. Many of the laws are without sense or purpose, except in
regard to circumstances which disappeared with the Mosaic period. Further, we
have this remarkable declaration. Though the entire Pentateuch in its present
form should not have been the work of Moses, and though many laws are the
product of a later age, still the legislation, in its spirit and character as a
whole, is genuinely Mosaic; and in dealing with the Pentateuch we stand, at
least as to the three middle Books, upon historical ground, evidently meaning
upon historical ground as opposed to that which is unauthenticated or
legendary. And what is thus generally asserted of the spirit and character of
the Pentateuchal laws, is asserted for an important share of them as to both
the contents and even the form. These statements--it would not be fair to call
them admissions--go to the root of the whole matter, and leave us in possession
of that forwhich alone I contend: namely, that the heart and substance of the
legislative and institutional system delivered to us in the Pentateuch is
historically trustworthy. If this be so, it still remains highly important to
distinguish by critical examination what, if any, particular portions of the
work in its actual form may be open to question as secondary errors or as
developments appended to the original formation; but the citadel, so long
victoriously held by faith and reason, both through Hebrew and through Christian
ages, remains unassailed, and the documents of Holy Writ emerge substantially
unhurt from the inquisitive and searching analysis of modern time. When it is
attempted to bring down the Books of the Pentateuch from the time of Moses, by
whom they profess to have been written, to the period of the Babylonian
Captivity, and this not only as to their literary form, but as to their
substance, the evident meaning and effect of the attempt is to divest them of a
historical and to invest them with a legendary character. At the same time, it
should be borne in mind that those who have not seen reason to adopt the
negation theory above described, leave entirely open numerous questions
belonging to the institutions of the Israelites. It is not extravagant to assume
that laws given to them as a nomad people, and then subjected to the varying
contingencies of history for many centuries, may or even must have required and
received adaptation by supplement, development, or change in detail, which the
appointed guides of the people were authorized and qualified to supply, not in
derogation, but rather in completion and in furtherance of the work of Moses,
which remained his in essence from first to last. It is admitted, however, that
the whole question must be tried on historical and literary grounds. On such
grounds I seek to approach it, and to learn by testing what in the main is
fact, what in the main is speculation, and to a great extent fluctuating and
changeful speculation. It is never to be forgotten that our point of departure
is from the ground of established historic fact. The exodus from Egypt, the
settlement in Palestine, the foundation there of institutions, civil and
religious, which were endowed with a tenacity of life and a peculiarity of
character beyond all example: these things are established by Scripture, but
they are also established independent of Scripture. They contribute a threefold
combination of fact, which, in order to make them intelligible and coherent, in
order to supply a rational connection between cause and effect, require not
only a Moses, but such a Moses as the Scripture supplies. They build up a
niche, which the Scripture fills. At all times of history, and specially in
those primitive times, when the men made the countries, not the countries the
men, these great independent historic facts absolutely carry with them the
assumption of a leader, a governor, a legislator. All this simply means a
Moses, and a Moses such as we know him from the Pentateuch. And this leads us,
I do not say to, but towards, the conclusion that whatever be the disparaging
allegations of the critics, they must after all in all likelihood turn upon
matters of form or of detail, but that the substance of the history is in
thorough accordance with the historic bases that are laid for us in profane as
well as in sacred testimony. If so, then we have also to bear in mind that the
phenomenon is most peculiar, and could only have been exhibited to the world as
the offspring of a peculiar generating cause. A people of limited numbers, of
no marked political genius, negative and stationary as to literature and art,
maintain themselves for near a thousand years, down to the Captivity, placed in
the immediate neighbourhood, and subject to the attacks, of the great Eastern monarchies,
as well as of some very warlike neighbours. They receive the impress of a
character, so marked, that not even the Captivity can efface it, but on the
contrary helps to give a harder and sharper projection to its features. It
retains its solidity and substance while everything else, including great
political aggregations, such as the Hittite monarchy, becomes gradually fused
in the surrounding masses; and this even when it has been subjected to
conditions such as at Babylon, apparently sufficient to beat down and destroy
the most obstinate nationalism. Can it be denied that this great historic fact,
nowhere to be matched, is in thorough accordance with, and almost of itself
compels us to presuppose, the existence from the outset of an elaborately detailed
and firmly compacted system of laws and institutions, under which this peculiar
discipline might gradually shape, determine, and mature the character of the
people? Wherever we turn, we seem to find the broad and lucid principles of
historic likelihood asserting themselves in favour of the substance of the
legislative Books, apart from questions of detail and literary form. In its
great stages, we are entitled to treat the matter of the narrative Books as
history entitled to credit. An elaborate organization with a visible head and a
hereditary succession is, after a long lapse of time, substituted for a regimen
over Israel, of which the main springs had been personal eminence and moral
force. It is represented in the Scripture, and it seems obvious, that the
transition from this patriarchal republicanism to monarchy was in the nature of
a religious retrogression. It showed an increasing incapacity to walk by faith,
and a craving for an object of sight as a substitute for the Divine Majesty
apprehended by spiritual insight, and habitually conceived of as the head of
the civil community. This view of the relative condition of republican and of
regal Israel is confirmed by the fact that with the monarchy came in another
regular organization, that of the schools of the prophets. Prophecy, which for
the present purpose we may consider as preaching, instead of appearing as
occasion required, became a system, with provision for perpetual succession.
That is to say, the people could not be kept up to the primitive, or even the
necessary, level in belief and life, without the provision of more elaborate
and direct means of instruction, exhortation, and reproof, than had at first
been requisite. Notwithstanding the existence of those means, and the singular
and noble energy of the prophets, the proofs of the decline are not less
abundant than painful, in the wickedness of most of the sovereigns, and in the
almost wholesale and too constant lapse of the Israelites into the filthy
idolatry which was rooted in the country. And again, it is not a little
remarkable that the enumeration by name of the great historic heroes of faith
in the Epistle to the Hebrews ends in the person of King David, with the first
youth of the monarchy. The only later instances referred to are the prophets,
named as a class, who stood apart and alone, and were not as a rule leaders of
the people, but rather witnesses in sackcloth against their iniquities. Taking
the history from the Exodus to the Exile as a whole, the latter end was worse
than the beginning, the cup of iniquity was full, it had been filled by a
gradual process: and one of the marks of that process was a lowering of the
method in which the chosen people were governed, it became more human and less
Divine. Under these circumstances, does it not appear like a paradox, and even
a rather wanton paradox, to refer the production of those sacred Mosaic Books,
which constituted the charter of the Hebrews as a separate and peculiar people,
to the epochs of a lowered and decaying
spiritual
life? They formed the base on which the entire structure rested. It is hardly
possible to separate the fabric from its foundation. Had they not been recorded
and transmitted, it would have been reasonable, perhaps necessary, for us to
presume their existence. They could only spring from a plant full of vigorous
life, not from one comparatively sickly, corrupt, and exhausted. And so again
we have, in the historic Moses a great and powerful genius, an organizing and
constructing mind. Degenerate ages cannot equip and furnish forth illustrious
founders, only at the most the names and shadows of them. Moses stands in
historic harmony with his work. As we stand on historical ground in assuming
that Moses was a great man, and a powerful agent in the Hebrew history, so we
stand on a like basis in pointing to the fact that from the Captivity onwards
(to say nothing of the prior period, as it would beg the question) the Jewish
nation paid to the five Books of the Pentateuch a special and extraordinary
regard, even beyond the rest of their sacred Books. These were known as the
Torah; and the fact of this special reverence is one so generally acknowledged,
that it may without discussion be safely assumed as a point of departure.
Before, then, any sort of acceptance or acquiescence is accorded to notions
which virtually consign to insignificance the most ancient of our sacred Books,
let us well weigh the fact that the devout regard of the Hebrews for the Torah
took the form, at or very soon after the Exile, of an extreme vigilance on
behalf of these particular Books as distinct from all others. If (such was
their conception) we secure the absolute identity of the manuscripts, and
reckon up the actual numbers of the words they contain, and of the letters
which compose the words, then we shall render change in them impossible and
conservation certain. The Hebrews were the only people who built up by degrees
a regular scientific method of handling the material forms in which the
substance of their Sacred Books was clothed, and this system had begun to grow
from the time when a special reverence is known to have been concentrated upon
the Torah. It may have commenced before the Captivity. It may have preceded,
and may probably have been enhanced by, the division of the kingdoms. It must
have been in great force when, soon after the Captivity, schools of scribes
were entrusted with the custody of the text of the law as a study apart from
that of its meaning. Now in our time we are asked or tempted by the negative
criticism to believe that all this reverence for the Books of the Pentateuch,
having primarily the sense for its object, but abounding and overflowing so as
to embrace the corporeal vehicle, was felt towards a set of books not
substantially genuine, but compounded and made up by recent operators who may
be mildly called editors, bat who were rather clandestine authors. Is this
probable or reasonable? Is it even possible that these books of recent
concoction, standing by the side of some among the prophetical Books possessing
a greater antiquity, should nevertheless have attracted to themselves, and have
permanently retained, an exceptional and superlative veneration, such as surely
presumes a belief in the remoteness of their date, the genuineness of their
character, and their title to stand as the base, both doctrinal and historic,
of the entire Hebrew system? And now let us look for a moment at the rather
crude and irregular form of the Mosaic books from Exodus to Deuteronomy. Taken
as a whole, they have not that kind of consistency which belongs to
consecutiveness of form, and which almost uniformly marks both historical and
legal documents. They mix narrative and legislation: they pass from one to the
other without any obvious reason. They repeat themselves in a manner which
seems to exclude the idea that they had undergone the careful and reflective
reviews, the comparison of part with part, which is generally bestowed upon
works of great importance, completed with comparative leisure, and intended for
the guidance not only of an individual but of a people. They are even accused
of contradictions. They appear to omit adjustments necessary in the light of
the subsequent history: such, for instance, as we might desire between the
sweeping proscription not only of image worship, but of images or shapen
corporeal forms, in the Second Commandment, and the use actually made of them
in the temple, and the singular case of the serpent destroyed by Hezekiah. It
seems not difficult to account for this roughness and crudeness of authorship
under the circumstances of changeful nomad life, and the constant pressure of
anxious executive or judicial functions, combined with the effort of
constructing a great legislative code, which required a totally different
attitude of mind. The life of Moses, as it stands in the sacred text, must have
been habitually a life of extraordinary, unintermitted strain, and one without
remission of that strain even near and at the close. As some anomalies in the
composition of the Koran may be referable to the circumstances of the life of
Mahomet, so we may apply a like idea to the shape of the legislative books. It
is not difficult to refer the anomalies of such authorship to the incidents of
such a life, and to conceive that any changes which have found their way into
the text may yet have been such as to leave unimpaired what may be called the
originality as well as the integrity of its character. But how do these
considerations hold if we are to assume as our point of departure the
hypothesis of the negative extremists? Under that supposition the legislative
books were principally not adjusted but composed, and this not only in a manner
which totally falsifies their own solemn and often repeated declarations, but
which supposes something like hallucination on the part of a people that
accepted such novelties as ancient. In addition to all this, they assumed their
existing form, so wanting as to series and method, in a settled state of
things, in an old historic land, with an unbounded freedom of manipulation, at
any rate with no restraint imposed by respect for original form, and with every
condition in favour of the final editors which could favour the production of a
thoroughly systematic and orderly work. Does it not seem that if the
preparation and presentation of the Hebrew code took place at the time and in
the way imposed on us by the doctrine of the thorough disintegrationist, then
we stand entirely at a loss to account for the form of the work before us? And
conversely do not the peculiarities of that form constitute an objection to the
negative hypothesis, which it is an absolute necessity for its promoters to get
rid of as best they can? I subjoin one further topic of the same class as fit
to be taken into view. The absence from the legislative books of all assertion
of a future state, and of all motive derived from it with a view to conduct,
has been already noticed. The probable reason of that absence from a code of
laws framed by Moses under Divine command or guidance, is a subject alike of
interest and difficulty. It has sometimes occurred to me as possible that the
close connection of the doctrine with public religion in the Egyptian system
might have supplied a reason for its disconnection from the Mosaic laws, even
as I suppose we might, from other features of those laws, draw proof or strong
presumption that, among the purposes of the legislator, there was included a
determination to draw a broad and deep line, or even trench, of demarcation,
between the foreign religions in their neighbourhood and the religious system
of the Hebrews. Be this as it may, it is enough for my present purpose that the
absence of the doctrine of a future state from the work cannot be held to
discredit the Mosaic authorship. But does not that absence clearly discredit the
idea of a post-exilic authorship? Is it conceivable that Hebrews, proceeding to
frame their legislative books, after the Captivity, and long after the
dispersion of the ten tribes, and after the light which these events had thrown
upon the familiar ideas of a future life and an underworld, as held both in the
East and in Egypt, could have excluded all notice of it from their system of
laws? If they could not so have excluded it, then the fact of the exclusion
becomes another difficulty in the way of our accepting any negative hypothesis
concerning the substance of the legislative books. It seems, then, that it is
difficult to reconcile the results of the negative criticism on the Pentateuch
with the known reverence of the Jews for their Torah, which appears absolutely
to presuppose a tradition of immemorial age on its behalf, as a precondition of
such universal and undoubting veneration. But if this be necessary in the case
of the Jew, how much more peremptorily is it required by the case of the
Samaritan, and what light does that case throw upon the general question? The
Samaritan Pentateuch is one of the most remarkable monuments of antiquity. Its
testimony, of course, cannot be adduced to show that the books following the
Pentateuch have been clothed from a very ancient date with the reverence due to
the Divine Word, and is even capable of being employed in a limited sense the
other way. But as respects the Samaritan Pentateuch itself, how is it possible
to conceive that it should have held, as a Divine work, the supreme place in
the regard of the Samaritans, if, about or near the year 500 B.C., or, again,
if at the time of Manasseh the seceder it had, as matter of fact, been a recent
compilation of their enemies the Jews? or if it had been regarded as anything
less than a record of a great revelation from God, historically known, or at
the least universally believed, to have come down to them in the shape it then
held from antiquity? The Samaritan Pentateuch, then, forms in itself a
remarkable indication, even a proof, that, at the date from which we know it to
have been received, the Pentateuch was no novelty among the Jews. But may we
not state the argument in broader terms? Surely the reverence of the Samaritans
for the Torah could not have begun at this period; hardly could have begun at
any period posterior to the Schism. If these books grew by gradual accretion,
still that must have been a single accretion. A double process could not have
been carried on in harmony. Nor can we easily suppose that, when the ten tribes
separated from the two, they did not carry with them the law on which their
competing worship was to be founded. In effect, is there any rational
supposition except that the kingdom of Israel had possessed at the time of
Rehoboam some code corresponding in substance, in all except mere detail, with
that which was subsequently written out in the famous manuscripts we now
possess? Let us close with a plea of a different order, one which, admitting a
probable imperfection of the text, deprecates, as opposed to the principles of
sound criticism, any conclusion therefrom adverse to its general fidelity. It
has caused me some surprise to notice
Testimony of the
Pentateuch to itself
1. In the outset it is important to keep apart two questions that are
not seldom confused. It is one thing to be the recipient of a revelation; it is
another thing to write down such a revelation. The whole Pentateuch may be
Mosaic, and yet Moses need not, sua manu, have written a single word in
it, nor the Pentateuch, in its present shape, date from his age.
2. The direct evidence of the Pentateuch as to its literary author
is very meagre. The only passages in which Moses is said to have written any
portion of the words spoken to him by the Lord are Exodus 17:14,
24:4 (cf. Exodus 5:7),
34:28; Numbers 33:2;
Numbers 17:2
sqq.; Deuteronomy 31:9;
Deuteronomy 31:24
(cf., Deuteronomy 5:26,
as also Deuteronomy 17:18;
Deuteronomy 28:58;
Deuteronomy 28:61;
Deuteronomy 29:19-20;
Deuteronomy 29:26;
Deuteronomy 30:10).
Of these Exodus 34:28
refers only to the writing of the ten commandments upon the two tables; Numbers 17:2
refers only to the writing on rods; Numbers 33:2
only to the list of desert stations, and these passages thus furnish their own
limitation. In Exodus 24:4
we are told that Moses wrote “all the words of the Lord,” and in verse 7 these
“words” are identified with “the book of the covenant,” which he read to the
people, and to which the audience promised obedience. In the nature of the case
this cannot refer to the whole Pentateuch, for the simple reason that it could
not have existed at that time. It refers to a particular set of laws given in
the chapters preceding the twenty-fourth. Hengstenberg considers this book of
the covenant to be composed of chap. 20:2-14, and chaps. 21 to 23. There are
then left only the two most difficult, but also most promising passages, viz., Exodus 17:14,
and Deuteronomy 31:9,
In
the former passage we read that the Lord commanded Moses to“write this for a
memorial in a book.” A “book” in the Hebrew is a written document of any kind
or length. The Israelites then had other “books” besides their law books (cf.
Numbers 21:14).
What is meant here is doubtless that Moses wrote or caused to be written the
affair of Amalek, and that this document was incorporated into the Pentateuch.
In Deuteronomy 31:9;
Deuteronomy 24:1-22
matters seem to be more satisfactory. In the first passage it is said that
Moses “wrote this law”; in the second that he “made an end of writing the words
of this law in a book.” What is meant by “this law”? Is it the whole
Pentateuch? Of the law here meant, it is said in verse 10 sqq., that every
seven years, at the feast of the tabernacles, it shall be read before all
Israel, in order to instruct the people in their duties toward Jehovah. It must
accordingly have been a document of such a kind that it could be read on such
an occasion; and, secondly, it must have been formulated in such a way as to
impress their duties upon the children of Israel. Both these features point not
to the whole Pentateuch as such, but to the law in the exhortatory form in
which it is presented in Deuteronomy. A fair explanation here seems to compel
us to restrict “this law” in this connection to the Book of Deuteronomy, and
doubtless to the strictly legal second half. We do not then think that we have
any direct testimony of the Pentateuch to prove that Moses himself wrote or
caused to be written the whole of the five books. He is declared to be the
writer of portions of Exodus and Numbers, and of the legal portion and possibly
the whole of Deuteronomy. Whether he also Wrote the rest of the Pentateuch, or
larger portions thereof, is not directly stated.
3. It is deeply significant, over against the somewhat scanty and
disappointing testimony in reference to the writer of the Pentateuch, when we
ask for the evidences as to the person who was chosen of God to promulgate the
revelations, that the testimony is simply overwhelming. Moses may or may not
have written these books, yet the contents of the last four, at least in their
great bulk, claim to have been given by God to Moses. Yet it would be unfair to
conclude that Moses must be regarded as the medium through whom Jehovah
revealed every word and syllable in our present Pentateuch. Moses is nowhere
declared to be the recipient of the whole Pentateuch as such, but of certain
parts or portions. And here the question in each case arises, whether the
testimony to the Mosaic source that heads each section covers all the ground,
until the same declaration is made of a new section. In many instances this is
probably the intention; in other cases it is not so certain, and in some quite
doubtful. It may, however, be asserted that the great bulk and mass of the
Pentateuch, from that period on which Moses first was called to his mission Exodus 3:2
sqq.), both the legal portion and also the historical narratives,
claim to be the revelation of Jehovah given to His servant Moses. This still
leaves open the critical and literary question as to whether into this Mosaic
bulk or mass foreign elements were introduced then or later, and also the
historical question as to the time and manner in which these Mosaic revelations
were written, collected, or received their present shape, and the changes, if
any, which they may have undergone in this process.
4. The indirect evidence on this point is also abundant. The
Pentateuch contains a large number of laws, and narrates numerous events which
can be understood only from the historical background of the sojourn and
journey of the children of Israel through the desert under the leadership of
Moses. From the standpoint of the advanced critics, these laws and events are
glaring anachronisms, and could be explained only as bold fraudes piac. Then
there are other laws which, if not in their own character indicative of the
Mosaic age, yet in the occasion which caused their promulgation connect with
that age, and can be rationally and reasonably understood only from this point
of view. Thus the law on the great day of atonement (Leviticus 16:1-34)
is based upon the historical events recorded in Leviticus 10:1
sqq. Then the whole section Exodus 25:1-40;
Exodus 26:1-37;
Exodus 27:1-21;
Exodus 28:1-43;
Exodus 29:1-46;
Exodus 30:1-38;
Exodus 31:1-18,
is intelligible only from a Mosaic era. In Numbers 10:1-8,
in which the method of calling together the congregation is described, we have
again the Mosaic era presupposed. The same is true of Numbers 1:1
sqq., with its statistics; chap. 4, containing the description of the
arrangement of the people’s camp in the wilderness; chap. 4, with its
regulations concerning the services of the Levites in the camp . . . The
evidence of the Pentateuch concerning itself may be thus summed up: Directly,
it is claimed that the great bulk of the last four books are Mosaic in the
sense that they are revelations of God to Moses, and portions of them in the
sense that Moses himself wrote or caused them to be written. Indirectly, the
testimony points to the author of the last four books as also the author of the
first, as also that a large number of the laws and much of the history in these
four books presuppose the Mosaic age. Whether these conclusions are applicable
to the whole and entire Pentateuch or not, or whether these five books contain
also direct or indirect evidence of post-Mosaic elements can be discussed only
later, after it has been determined what the internal character of these books
is.
5. What is the testimony of the Pentateuch concerning itself, both
in regard to the substance and matter it brings, as also in regard to the books
as a literary composition? In regard to the first point the evidence is
overwhelming that these five books claim to be a revelation and the history of
a revelation. The Pentateuch proceeds from the premises that the fall of man
has seriously interfered with God’s plans for man’s welfare, and that God’s
providential guidance of man is specially directed toward his restoration and
re-establishment. God chooses from among the peoples of the earth one family,
that of Abraham, and later one nation, that of the descendants of Abraham, and
enters into a special covenant with them in order to accomplish His great ends
in mankind.
6. Concerning the Pentateuch as a literary work there is but little
direct testimony. But that the author did not simply mechanically record
revelations directly given, but based at least part of his work on other
literary documents, is plainly enough stated . . . The inspiration of the
Pentateuch certainly does not consist in this, that the author received all his
information from the Holy Spirit as something entirely unknown to him before,
but rather in directing him to make the correct use of the means of information
at his command . . . The great evil of modern Pentateuchal criticism does not
lie in the analysis into documents, but in the creation upon this analysis of a
superstructure of pseudo-history and religion that runs directly counter to the
revealed and historic character of the Pentateuch. But as little as this
analysis justifies such a building of hay and stubble, just so little does this
abuse of this theory by advanced critics justify conservative men in refusing
to accept what the evidences seem sufficient to warrant. The Pentateuch is
essentially Mosaic, in the sense that the laws were promulgated through him. It
becomes then an historical question as to the manner in which these laws were
first written down and afterwards united into one code.
7. There are a number of passages which apparently can be explained
only on the supposition that they were written in a period later than Moses.
The existence of these would seem to prove that the collecting of the Mosaic
revelations and the final editing was not accomplished until a later day.
8. What is the value of this evidence of the Pentateuch concerning
itself? The testimony of a witness is measured by the amount of credence given
to his words. Apodictically, no historical point can be proved. It is regarded
as certain and sure only in the degree as its evidence is considered reliable.
The same is the case with regard to the Pentateuch. What divides scholars in
this department into such antagonistic camps is not the exegesis of this or
that passage, but the “standpoint” of the investigators. The conservative
scholar accepts the authority of the Pentateuch over against canons and laws
drawn from philosophical speculations. The advanced critic, on the basis of his
ideas concerning the nature of religion in general and revelation drawn from
extra-biblical sources, regards his deductions as better testimony than the
simple statements of the Pentateuch, and accordingly interprets the words of
the Pentateuch in accordance with his philosophy. It is for this reason that he
finds mythology in Genesis where others find history. In the nature of the case
no historical fact can be proved with mathematical certainty. It is only a question
of a greater or less degree of probability. Internal and external evidence must
combine to determine this degree of probability. For the conservative scholar
the conviction that the Pentateuch is an inspired work is a ground for
believing its statements concerning itself. This conviction of inspiration he
gains not by logical reasoning or historical criticism, but as a testimonium
spiritus sancti. Another reason for accepting it is its acceptance as
Mosaic and Divine by Christ and the New Testament. A conservative scholar is
convinced that this authority is a better ground for belief than his own
theories and hypotheses, in case these should clash with the former. (Prof.
G. H. Schodde.)
Summary of the Evidence as
to the Date of the Pentateuch
I. In the Book of
Genesis we have no legislation, and only one prophetic passage; it is composed
essentially of histories. That portion of the narrative which lies before the
time of Abraham it is improbable (on literary grounds) was the work of
contemporaries, though we cannot say it is impossible. The remainder may have
been so; since writings fully equal in literary development to its pages are
extant of very ancient date. It is certain, from its use of archaisms, that the
book belongs to a much earlier period of Hebrew literature than the times of
Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah. Turning, then, to the evidence afforded by the
narrative itself, it appears that there are considerable portions which must be
assigned to pre-Mosaic periods. One of these must have been composed as early
as Abram’s migration into Canaan; another probably during his lifetime; while
the bulk were written during the early part of the sojourn in Egypt. These
latter passages comprise portions of the history of Abraham, of Ishmael, and
notably of Jacob; and among them may be also reckoned the blessing of Jacob,
the historical basis of which distinctly points to this epoch as the time of
its composition. To ascertain precisely how much of Genesis was written at this
period would require a careful investigation into its structure, style, and
phraseology, such as cannot here be attempted. It must suffice to know that
some considerable part was then written. The latter part of Genesis was
composed by one familiarly acquainted both with the details of Egyptian life
and customs, and also with the Egyptian language; at latest, therefore, by a
contemporary of Joshua, but quite probably by one of a previous generation.
Several brief notes, chiefly of an explanatory character, scattered throughout
the book require the time of Joshua for their composition; or they may have
been added later. In either case, their occurrence testifies indirectly to the
early date of the narrative which stood in need of them. Only one passage of
any length, the list of Edomite kings, seems to call for a later date (the
reign of Saul), but this is doubtful. On the whole, then, we arrive at this
result:--the Book of Genesis was completed, or all but completed, in its
present form probably before the death of Joshua, but its contents appear in
the main to be of an earlier date, and are in part certainly the work of
contemporaries.
II. The Book of
Exodus consists of history and legislation, the former somewhat preponderating.
In a literary point of view, all the evidence for early date applies here with
full force, and requires the assignment of the book to a period long anterior
to that of the prophets. The narrative is marked in its first sections by a
great familiarity with Egypt, and in the succeeding ones by an equally striking
familiarity with the desert; a combination scarcely explicable except on the
view of strictly contemporary origin. This view is confirmed by the presence of
an explanatory note in one place; and also by the historical basis of the song
of Moses. The legislation is shown to be contemporary both by its essentially
historical character, its subject matter, its phraseology, and its references
to Canaan as still future, as well as by its own claim; while history and
legislation are so intertwined that the evidence for each tends not a little to
strengthen and increase that for the other. With the exception of about three
verses, there can be little doubt that the whole of Exodus was written before
the death of Moses.
III. The Book of
Leviticus consists almost wholly of legislation; about three chapters only
being occupied with narrative, and one with prophecy.
The literary argument, owing to the absence of Egyptian words, is
here somewhat less striking than in Exodus. This, however, is amply compensated
for by the fulness of evidence in regard to the laws. Not only is there the
witness of their own claim, and the many links, of the most varied character,
which bind them one after another into the history of the wanderings: but when
scrutinized internally, their references to the place where they were first
delivered, and the persons concerned in their first accomplishment, their
allusions to Egypt on the one hand and Canaan on the other, all point clearly
to their origin in the wilderness at some period before the death of Aaron. The
character of the narrative sections, and the historical basis and hortatory
peculiarities of the prophetical chapter, fully accord with, and further
sustain, this conclusion.
IV. The Book of
Numbers is occupied with narrative and legislation, much interspersed, in about
equal proportions, with some prophecy. In a literary point of view it holds
much the same position as Leviticus. The narrative, wherever opportunity
offers, displays a similar familiarity with Egypt and the desert to that observed
in Exodus, though from the nature of the case the range of evidence is
considerably less extensive. The phraseology in one or two sections points to a
time of composition which may be later than Moses, but need not be later than
Joshua. The most notable point in Numbers, however, is the way in which a large
portion of its laws are linked into the history, some by the narration of their
historical origin, some by the connection between their enactment and the
events which followed, some by their own intrinsic character and subject
matter. Both narrative and laws must clearly have been recorded by the same
hand, and that a contemporary one. Much of what was said above in regard to
Leviticus also applies here. The historical basis of the prophecies is unmistakably
that of the wilderness. Saving only the doubtful narrative sections above
referred to, therefore, Numbers must be assigned to a similar date with Exodus
and Leviticus.
V. The Book of
Deuteronomy is composed in the main of prophecy and legislation, in nearly
equal parts, with a little narrative as setting. In both these departments the
evidence of Mosaic date is very striking. The laws abound with references to
Egypt and the wilderness journey, while they frequently speak of Canaan as
unpossessed. On comparing these laws with those in the other books, they are
found to differ from them precisely as their respective dates would have led us
to expect. The new laws in Deuteronomy are largely occupied with topics
especially suitable to the close of Moses’ career; while the modified and
repeated laws point in the clearest manner to the beginning and end of the
desert wanderings, as the times when they must severally have been written, if
their divergences are to be rationally explained. This latter branch of
evidence of course affects portions of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, as well
as Deuteronomy, and affords valuable additional testimony to their early date.
The hortatory prophecies of Deuteronomy, both in their personal allusions,
their subject matter, their aim, their tone, and their style, point most
clearly to the time of Moses, as that in which they were composed; while the
enormous differences, in all these respects, between them and the later
prophetic writings render it wholly incredible that they could have originated
at the same time with these. Similarly, the historical basis of the predictive
passages is distinctly the close of Moses’ life. Thus the whole of the
substance of Deuteronomy is proved to be unmistakably Mosaic. The narrative
sections must of necessity be somewhat later than the addresses; they may be
referred with great probability to about the close of Joshua’s leadership. It
will have been observed in this survey of results, that in most of the books
there is something which must be referred to post-Mosaic times. Especially is
this the case in Genesis and Deuteronomy; though similar phenomena are seen
also in Exodus, and perhaps in Numbers. The specific time to which this late
matter points is, as a rule, the period between Moses’ death and Joshua’s, or
thereabouts. It is probable, therefore, that in this period the entire
Pentateuch received its final editing. (G. Warington, B. A.)
Originality and Design of
the Jewish Ritual
If the great Jehovah, the moral Governor of the word, did in
reality separate the Jewish nation to be the depositaries of true religion and
sound morality, in the midst of an idolatrous world, and for this purpose
brought them forth out of Egypt by a series of stupendous and uncontrolled
miracles; if He promulgated to them the moral law of the Decalogue, with the
most awful display of Divine power and majesty; if He established over them, as
their form of national government, a theocracy, which could not be supported
without the continued interposition of an extraordinary providence; if He
retained them in the wilderness for forty years, to discipline and instruct
them, until the entire generation, which had been familiarized to the idolatry
and corruptions of Egypt, had perished; and if He then planted them in the land
of Canaan by a supernatural power, driving out before them its inhabitants, or
compelling the Jews to exterminate them, as a punishment for their inveterate
idolatry and its attendant crimes, commanding them carefully to avoid all
similar profanation and guilt, under the terror of suffering similar
punishment--if these facts have been established, so as to prove that the
Jewish Lawgiver was clearly delegated by God to institute a particular form of
worship, with a variety of regulations and rites, to preserve the separation of
this chosen people from the surrounding nations--then the supposition that he
should borrow anything from these rites and customs, in order to accommodate
his system to the prejudices, habits, and propensities of his countrymen, becomes
unnecessary, in proportion as we more clearly discern that he possessed
authority to conciliate attention and enforce obedience without resorting to
any such artifice. And if such an expedient was unnecessary, surely its
adoption is extremely improbable. Thus to blend Divine appointments and human
inventions; to degrade the worship of the great Jehovah with the intermixture
of rites, originally designed to honour the basest idols; to reprobate the
whole system of idolatry, all its profanations and crimes, with the most
vehement and indiscriminate condemnation, and prohibit every attempt to
introduce any part of it, under the severest penalties; and yet secretly, as it
were, pilfer from it some of its most attractive charms, varnish them with a
new colouring, and exhibit them as the genuine features of true religion; this
seems altogether irreconcilable with the dignity of an inspired Legislator, and
the purity of a Divine law, and indeed forms a scheme so jarring and
inconsistent, that it appears utterly incredible it should be adopted by Divine
Wisdom. It is true, some parts of the Jewish religion derived their origin from
an authority more ancient than that of Moses: the observance of the Sabbath
appears to have been coeval with the creation, and the use of sacrifice to have
been instituted by God immediately after the fall. These, therefore, it is
perfectly natural to suppose, had been received by other nations from the
remotest antiquity, and when adopted into the Mosaic institutions, it was only requisite
to free them from the superstitions and corruptions with which they had been
blended, restore them to their original purity, and direct them to their true
object. In truth, the whole tenour of the Jewish law exhibits not a studied
imitation, but a studied opposition to the principles and rites of idolatry.
That law required the worship of the one true God exclusively; idolatry
worshipped a rabble of deities. The Law proscribed all use of images, or
resemblance of any creature, as emblems of the Divinity; idolatry multiplied
them. The Law abhorred and condemned all impure rites and all human sacrifices;
idolatry too frequently employed them. The Law forbade all necromancy and
divination; it made no use of the inspection of the entrails of victims, or the
observation of the flight of the birds, to discover future events; it relied
for this, when necessary, on the Divine oracle consulted by public authority,
and answering from the sanctuary, when the Divine glory was displayed, by a
distinct and audible voice. The Law forbade a variety of practices, in
themselves apparently innocent, but which we know were employed in the
superstitions of idolatry; such as worshipping in high places or in consecrated
groves. Thus Maimonides notices that the prohibition against rounding the
corners of the hair on the head and the beard was given because the idolatrous
priests were accustomed to use that particular tonsure. He assigns a similar
reason for not making a garment of linen and woollen mixed together, this being
a particular dress in idolatrous rites. Hence also he accounts for the
prohibition against eating the fruits of the trees they should find in the land
of Canaan for three years, which by the planters had been consecrated to idols.
Thus also idolaters were brought to believe that it was acceptable to their
gods to sow the ground on particular occasions with certain mixtures of seeds,
which was therefore prohibited. Idolaters were accustomed to use blood in
consulting the dead, to consecrate bats and mice, and other insects, as a
sacrifice to the sun; these, therefore, were pronounced unclean. And it is
abundantly evident, that all the peculiarities of the Ritual, as to its rites,
sacrifices, and purifications, and its distinctions between things clean and unclean,
contributed to guard against the infection of idolatry; not only by an
opposition of rites and sacrifices, which would make the worshippers of Jehovah
regard with habitual horror and contempt the rites and sacrifices of idolaters,
but by establishing a similar opposition even in the customs of common life,
and the use of even daily food, which would render all familiar intercourse
between the peculiar people of Jehovah and idolaters impracticable. This effect
really followed wherever these precepts of the law were observed. Thus,
according to Josephus, when the Midianite women are represented as conferring
with the young men whom their beauty had captivated, stating their fears of
being forsaken by their lovers, and receiving their assurances of attachment,
they go on: “If then,” said they, “this be your resolution not to forsake us,
since you make use of such customs and conduct of life as are entirely
different from all other men, insomuch that your kinds of food are peculiar to
yourselves, and your kinds of drink not common to others, it will be absolutely
necessary, if you would have us for your wives, that you worship our gods; nor
can there be any other demonstration of the kindness which you say you already
have and promise to have hereafter for us, than this, that you worship the same
gods that we do. Nor has anyone reason to complain that, now you are come into
this country, you should worship the proper gods of the same country,
especially while our gods are common to all men, and yours such as belong to
nobody else but yourselves? So they said they must either come into such
methods of worship as all other came into, or else they must look out fur
another world, wherein they may live by themselves, according to their own
laws.” The same feeling of aversion and contempt from this studied opposition,
not only in religious rites, but in the customs of common life, was universal
amongst the heathens towards the Jews. Tacitus, in his eloquent but ignorant
and gross misrepresentation of their origin and manners, expresses it strongly:
“Moses” (says he), “that he might attach the nation forever to himself,
introduced rites new and in opposition to the rest of mankind: all things we
hold sacred, are there profane; and what we deem abominable, are with them
permitted.” And again, “they slaughter the ram in sacrifice, as if in contempt
of Ammon; and they also offer up an ox, which the Egyptians worship under the
name of Apis.” The decided feeling of opposition and hostility which the whole
Jewish system excited, not merely in the vulgar, but in the most enlightened
heathens, is evident in the passage already quoted from this philosophic
historian; and still more in those which follow, where he terms their “rites
perverse and polluted”; and while he remarks the good faith and benevolence for
which they were noted in their intercourse with each other, charges them “with
an hostile hatred towards the rest of mankind,” and declares that “those who
adopt their principles and customs, not only use circumcision, but are taught
to despise their own gods, to renounce their country and to hold in contempt
brothers, children, parents.” Thus decided was the contrast between not only
the general principles of Judaism and idolatry, but also the particular rites
of each--a contrast by which the Jewish Ritual so effectually contributed to
the end for which it was originally designed, even to serve as a partition wall
to separate the chosen people of God from the surrounding nations, and form a
barrier against the corruptions of heathenism--a purpose with which the
supposition, that it borrowed and consecrated many of these rites and
practices, appears to be entirely inconsistent. The evidence on which this
supposition is founded has been proved to be as inconclusive as the supposition
itself appears to be improbable. Witsius has shown, with a clearness which
renders it altogether unnecessary to discuss the subject afresh, that the
authors on whose testimony the superior antiquity of the Egyptian religion has
been maintained, and who have asserted or supposed that the Mosaic Law derived
from this source many of its principles and rites, lived so long after the
facts, were so grossly ignorant of the Jewish history and system, so rash or so
prejudiced, that their testimony can have no authority to obtain credit, not
merely, as he expresses it, with a strict investigator of antiquity, but “even
with any man of plain sense and moderate erudition.” In truth, the fancied
resemblance between the rites of Judaism and idolatry amounts to little more
than this: that in both were priests, temples, altars, sacrifices, festivals,
calculated to catch the attention, captivate the senses, and engage the
imaginations of the worshippers by their splendour or their solemnity. Should
it be asked, Why should an inspired Lawgiver, instead of a simple and purely
spiritual worship, adopt a Ritual, thus, in the variety and the splendour
attending it, bearing even a remote resemblance to the more gross inventions of
idolatry? it may be answered: that the Jewish Ritual, with its temple, its
festivals, its priests, its sacrifices, its distinctions of food, its
purifications, etc., not only served as a barrier against idolatry, but
contributed to give the true religion dignity and attraction in the estimation
both of strangers and of the Jews themselves. It marked out the Hebrew nation
as a holy people, a nation of priests to Jehovah their God and King; it
attached them to their religion by the habitual association of festive rites,
of national exaltation and prosperity; it engaged their imagination and their
senses, made them feel the necessity of circumspection and purity when they
approached the presence of God, and by all these means formed some counterpoise
to the seduction of idolatry. It is further to be remarked, that the
appointment of the Tabernacles first, and of the Temple afterwards, as the
sanctuary where Jehovah the God and King of Israel would manifest His presence
by a visible display of His glory, and give answers to the public and solemn
applications, made through the high priest, to discover the will of this the
supreme Sovereign of the Hebrew nation, gave rise to many peculiarities of the
Jewish Ritual. Hence the solemn worship of the whole Church was to be directed
to that place where Jehovah dwelt; and it was therefore declared unlawful, by
this Ritual, to have any altar, or to offer any sacrifice, but before this
presence, in honour of which the Ritual appoints the magnificence of the
Temple, of the holy and most holy place, and the religious respect with which
they were to be approached. For the same reason the Ritual appoints so many
priests as servants to attend on the Presence, and to minister before the Lord
Jehovah, who were to be invested in their sacred office by many solemn rites of
consecration, and distinguished by a peculiar and splendid dress. This honour,
continues Lowman, which ought to distinguish Jehovah as above all gods, in the
perfections of His nature and supreme authority, is further well expressed by
the whole ceremonial of the sacrificial rites: whether we consider the things
that were to be offered, or the persons who were to offer them--the several
kinds of sacrifices, whole burnt offerings, peace offerings, sin and trespass
offerings, which were to honour God as the supreme governor of the world, as
forgiving iniquities, transgressions, and sins, as the author of all blessings,
spiritual and temporal. These are plainly designed to give unto Jehovah, as
their God, the glory due unto His name. Thus all the ritual holiness is manifestly
designed for the same end, that “they might be a holy people, as their God was
a holy God.” Hence the Ritual distinctions of unclean foods and of several
pollutions, as well as the ritual purifications after legal uncleanness,
expressed a due honour to the presence of Jehovah; constantly representing how
fit, how becoming it was, for those who were honoured with the nearest approach
to this Presence, to keep themselves pure, purged from all filthiness of flesh
and spirit, that they might honourably serve so pure and so holy a God. I will
close my remarks on this subject, by removing a very ill-grounded prejudice,
too frequently entertained, against the Jewish Ritual as a system intolerably
burthensome. I observe, with Lowman, that it is the Ritual of a national, and
not a personal worship. In this view, all objections against the Jewish Ritual
as personally burthensome, tedious, or expensive, evidently appears to be
wholly founded on ignorance and error; while as a system of national worship,
it was most wisely adapted to the great designs of the Jewish economy, even to
preserve the Law, and the worship of the great Jehovah, in the Jewish race, and
to prepare the way for the promised MESSIAH, in whom all the nations of the
earth were to be blessed. (Dean Graves.)
The Character and Aims of
Mosaic Legislation
Many and diverse have been the theories advanced concerning the
origin and nature of law. Some ascribe the origin of law to the will of the
people, others to the wisdom of the rulers, some to the power of the strongest,
others to the ordinance of a social compact. But the law given by Moses
originated in a source distinct from any of these.
1. The idea lying at the root of all the Mosaic legislation was the
theocratic idea. Every ordinance instituted by Moses, whether civic or
ceremonial, political or ecclesiastical, was based upon the recognition of the
supreme sovereignty of God. The lofty tribunal before which every action was to
be tried, judged, and sentenced, did not sit upon earth--its chair was in
heaven. The judgment seat of Jehovah was the final court of appeal for the Jew,
because the code of Moses declared itself to be the code of God. One of the
aims, therefore, of the Mosaic legislation was to bring man face to face with
God in the manners, customs, and usages of common daily life.
2. But the Mosaic code was instinct with a still deeper and more
prophetic purpose. “The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ.” It
was the “shadow of good things to come,” of which Christ “is the substance.”
The statutes of Moses served as a pedagogue to the world, leading
the steps of its childhood into the school of spiritual knowledge, there to be
trained, in the fulness of time, for the salvation of Christ, “who is the end,
the completion, the fulfilment, of the law.” This purpose the Mosaic
legislation accomplished by two principal instruments.
Christ in the Pentateuch
What I wish to suggest, and as far as I may, to prove, is this:
that a substantial unity may be discovered between the earlier revelations of
God and that confessedly more perfect and final revelation which was made in
Jesus Christ. I wish to show that in the Pentateuch, as St. Augustine has said
of the Psalms, you may hear “the voices of Christ and His Church.”
1. Perhaps the most obvious consideration with regard to the
presence of Christ in the Pentateuch is that which arises from the prophetical
character of the sacred books (2 Peter 1:19).
It is not so much that there are definite undeniable predictions of the coming
of the Son of God in the flesh, though I do not say that these are wanting; but
it is rather the general aspect of the events recorded and the uniformity of
the direction in which they seem to point. The most obvious illustration of
this prophetical character is the reference to the “seed of the woman” (Genesis 3:1-24.).
It is no question how much or how little Adam and Eve understood of the
promise; there is but little to guide us to an opinion upon this point; neither
is it even a question how much their children understood before the coming of
Christ; but the question is, in what light the Church of Christ is compelled to
view the promise, now that it has been illustrated by the life and death of the
Lord Jesus and the establishment of His kingdom. And looking upon the words
spoken by the Almighty to Adam and Eve thus, we can hardly refuse to allow that
they are prophetic of Jesus Christ and the triumph of Him and His people over
the evil one. The next conspicuous outpouring of the prophetic Spirit is in the
case of Abraham (Genesis 22:18;
cf. Galatians 3:16).
The design of such promises seems to have been, so far as the ancient
recipients were concerned, not to give them an infallible insight into
futurity, but to give them light enough to comfort, encourage, and guide them;
and so far as we are concerned, upon whom the ends of the world are come, the
design seems to have been, that we should perceive the mutual adjustment of
prophecy and fulfilment as of lock and key, and so should recognize the one
Divine hand which has ordered events from the beginning till now. (See also Genesis 49:10;
Numbers 24:17;
Deuteronomy 18:15.)
Nor are the prophetical utterances of the Pentateuch estimated at their right
value, unless they be taken as the first terms of a series; later on in the
history of the ancient Church we have clearer language still, but those later
prophecies would lose much of their force, and would not have been so effectual
as they proved to be in educating the Jewish mind to the hope of a Messiah, in
leading men to wait for the Consolation of Israel, if they had not been
prefaced by the prophetical language of the Pentateuch, and so made links in a
continuous chain stretching from the first Adam to the second, and binding
together the earliest hint of redemption with the great Redeemer Himself.
2. The Church of Christ has ever seen and loved to see in the
historical events and the ordinances of the ancient dispensation, types and
shadows of those greater blessings and clearer revelations which were reserved
for the days of the gospel. And it is hardly necessary to say that the
sacrifices of the old dispensation found their explanation and fulfilment in
the sacrifice of the death of Christ.
3. There is one other declaration of Christ in the Pentateuch which
ought to be noticed. The phrase “preludings of the Incarnation” has been
happily used as descriptive of those manifestations of God to men of old time,
to which I am about to refer. I will adduce two instances. The first shall be
that of the three men who visited Abraham before the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah. One of these men seems to be made by the story
identical with the Lord; and we can hardly resist the conclusion that the
person in question was the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity. For the second
instance I refer to the history of Jacob and the man with whom he wrestled (Genesis 32:24).
The point to be noticed is, that although the wrestler is spoken of as a man,
still when he gives the name of Israel to Jacob the reason assigned is this,
“as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”
4. One of the most striking features of the Pentateuch, to a mind
considering its contents philosophically, is its anthropomorphic character. The
revelation is intensely human, and yet there is no sinking of the Majesty of
God. The principle of the Pentateuch is that of revealing God to man through
humanity; God may be said to be stooping to man in order to lift up man to
Himself. The full meaning of the Pentateuch can be found only in the
Incarnation. The Pentateuch is anthropomorphic, because it is the preface to
the record in which we read that God became man; there is a deep underlying
unity between the shadowy record of God’s early communion with His creatures
and the clearer record of His perfect communion with them in the person of His
Son. (Bp. Harvey Goodwin.)
Historical Siting of the
Books important
In a recent number of the “Contemporary Review” a voice from
Oxford pleads in a temperate and harmless looking article for the recognition
of the new critical movement. To those who can read between the lines, that
article will be noticeable for what it leaves unstated. And to those who are
unacquainted with the bearings of the questions discussed the effect will be
misleading. There are three propositions in it in particular on which I wish to
make a passing remark.
I admit, however, that the main difference which the evolution
conception would introduce into Old Testament doctrine would be a difference in
the setting. But what would that difference mean in regard to the doctrine? The
Oxford professor evidently thinks it would be immaterial. Let us take an
example or two.
INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK
OF GENESIS
Name and Character of the Book
The Jews have no title for this book but its first word--Bereshith
(in the beginning). The Greeks called it Genesis (origination). All
thoughtful men have recognized the value and dignity of this book as “the
stately portal to the magnificent edifice of Scripture.” It is the oldest
trustworthy book in the world, and conveys all the reliable information we
possess of the history of man for more than two thousand years. The Vedas are
ancient hymns and legends; the Zendavesta is a speculation on the origin
of things; but Genesis is a narrative, written with a grave archaic
simplicity. It is characteristically a book of origins and beginnings--it
contains the deeply-fastened and widely-spread roots of all futurity. There is
nothing afterward unfolded in the relationships of God with man, that is not at
least in rudiment, or germ, to be traced in Genesis. (D. Fraser, D. D.)
The Importance of the Book
The Book of Genesis is a record of the highest interest, not only
as being probably the oldest writing in the world, but also because it is the
foundation upon which the whole Bible is built. As well the Jewish as the
Christian religions have their roots in this book, and there is even no
doctrine of Christianity, however advanced, which is not to be found, at least
in outline, therein . . . This consistency of Holy Scripture with itself is
made the more remarkable by the fact that in Genesis we have records of an age
far anterior to the exodus from Egypt. Though the hand be the hand of Moses, the
documents upon which the narrative is founded, and which are incorporated in
it, date from primeval times. Upon them Moses based the Law, and subsequently
the prophets built upon the Pentateuch the marvellous preparation for Christ.
But though given thus “by diverse portions and in diverse manners,” through a
vast period of time, and under every possible variety of culture and outward
circumstance, the Bible is a book which from first to last is at unison with
itself. It grows, proceeds onward, develops, but always in the same plane. It
is no national anthology, full of abrupt transitions and violent contrasts,
with the writings of one age at variance with those of another, and with
subsequent generations ashamed of and destroying what went before. Rather like
some mighty oak it has grown slowly through long centuries, but with no
decaying limbs, no branches which have had to be lopped away . . . From Genesis
to Malachi there is in Holy Scripture a steady and homogeneous growth,
advancing upwards to a stage so high as to be a fit preparation for the full
sunshine of the gospel; and in the Book of Genesis we find the earliest stages
of this work founded upon pre-Mosaic documents. (Dean Payne Smith.)
The Book of Genesis is probably the most important contained in
the Bible; it forms the basis of all revelation; is necessary to account for
the moral condition of man, and his consequent need of redemption by Christ.
The history, doctrine, and prophecy of all the inspired writings take their
rise in its narrative, and without it would be unintelligible to us. The Book
has an historical importance. It informs us of the creation of the world--of
the coming forth of man to inhabit it, and of his development into a family, a
tribe, a nation. It also contains the record of many great and influential
lives, and presents them with the pictorial vividness, with the simplicity and
pathos of primitive times. Thus the Book of Genesis contains the history of the
world’s early progress, as presented in the lives of the most influential men
of the times. It is therefore most important, certainly most interesting, and
supremely reliable, as the outcome of a Divine inspiration then for the first
time given to man. The Book has a doctrinal importance. It narrates the
creation of man, with his temporal and moral surroundings. It teaches the
Divine origin of the soul; that life is a probation; that communion with God is
a reality; that man is gifted with moral freedom; that he is subject to Satanic
influence, and that a violation of the law of God is the source of all human
woe. Here we have the only reliable account of the introduction of sin into the
world; the true philosophy of temptation, the true meaning of the redemptive
purpose of God, the universal depravity of the early race; and we have
exemplified the overruling providence of God in the history of the good. The
Book has an ethical importance. It teaches the holy observance of the Sabbath
as a day of rest and prayer; the intention and sanctity of marriage; and in its
varied characters the retribution of deceit and envy. The morals of the Book
are most elevating, and are especially emphatic in their appeal to the young.
Nor are these principles contained merely in cold precept, but are invested
with all the force and reality of actual life. Hence they are rendered
preeminently human, attractive, and admonitory. The Book has a political
importance. It traces the growth of social and national life; it indicates the
method of commerce during the ancient times; it also proves that the national
life of men may be rendered subservient to Divine ideas, and be made the medium
for the advent of spiritual good to humanity. (J. S.Exell, M. A.)
The Form and Matter of the
Narrative
A part of the internal evidence lies in the form of the narrative.
Its great simplicity, purity, and dignity; the sharp contrast which marks it,
when laid side by side with the noblest forms of collateral tradition; the
manner in which it is content to leave the mysterious and seemingly incredible,
without toning it down, and without trying to explain it--these are some of the
marks of a record of facts; of facts apprehended simply and clearly in their
real relations; and of facts so profoundly impressing themselves upon a line of
serious men, as to be held in tradition clear and unmixed, like bars of gold
and inestimable jewels transmitted from generation to generation. Another part
of the internal evidence lies in the matter of the narrative. Everything in it
is weighty. There is not one trivial line. The profoundest themes are
successively under treatment, and a purely original light irradiates them all.
(D. N. Beach.)
With the utmost directness and in smaller compass than that of the
briefest of the articles that today stigmatize it as an “old Hebrew legend,”
this venerable book notes and answers the whole round of questions which modern
thought agrees to reckon as involving the fundamental data of history, and to
the solution of which in detail successive volumes are still being given. In
the form given to the facts, from the description of the earth as emerging out
of chaos to that of Israel about to emerge out of Egypt, and from the rejection
of Cain’s progeny to the dismissal of the Oriental civilizations with
incidental allusion, there is always deliberate and intelligent rejection of
that which has become obstructive or indifferent--that is to say, a recognition
of the eminently modern notion of progress as dependent on the elimination of
the unfit. But all the facts mentioned do not become even a background. There
is a narrowing selective process. “The heaven and the earth” at first appear,
but the earth alone is taken as the subject of the story. Chaos then passes,
darkness falls apart, the blue vault lifts, the waters shrink, and light, air,
and solid land emerge. So also the myriads of swarming life in its lower forms
recede that man may stand single and conspicuous in the foreground. Forthwith
his history cleaves apart from that of “the ground from which he was taken,”
through the inspiration of the breath of God; and the lower creatures are
equally shut out as furnishing no “helpmeet for him.” The process of
elimination goes steadily on in the strictly human history. Cain “went out,”
and reappeared no more. His stock, like that of Ishmael and Esau afterward, is
soon dismissed from the record. The animalized antediluvians who were “flesh”
were blotted out, and the idolatrous Chaldeans were left out of history, while
Noah and Abraham alone were “selected” as “fitted” to “survive.” The same rigid
discrimination is exercised in fixing the range of history.
The narrator goes on his chosen way avoiding much. He does not
ignore, but neither does he dwell upon the growth of music, handicraft, or the
beginnings of social and civic institutions. He is not insensible to the
overhanging shadow of the massive Assyrian or Egyptian civilizations. But they
do not awe or divert his thought. He leaves Nimrod’s tower unfinished and
Pharaoh’s palace without an heir, while he pushes on to a shepherd’s tent to
detect in Judah and the Messianic promise the true thread of coming history. It
was a marvellous prescience. For the tribe of Judah alone survives in an
unbroken lineage from that earlier world, and all history today counts backward
and forward from the date when that Messianic promise was fulfilled. (J. B.
Thomas.)
Of the Pentateuch itself, the first book, Genesis is preparatory
to the other four. These record the growth of the family of Jacob, or Israel,
into the peculiar people; the constitution of the theocracy; the giving of a
code of laws, moral, ritual, and civil; the conquest of part of the land
promised to the forefathers of the nation; and the completion of the
institutions and enactments needed for a settled condition. For this order of
things the first book furnishes the occasion. (Prof. J. G. Murphy.)
Unity of Plan and Purpose
Throughout
The book begins with a general introduction, from Genesis 1:1
to Genesis 2:3,
wherein the creation of the universe is related in language of simple grandeur,
very possibly in words handed down from the remotest antiquity, than which none
could be more fitted here for the use of the sacred historian. After this the
book consists of a series of Toledoth, or genealogical histories, the
first of which is called “the Toledoth of the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 2:4);
the others being the respective histories of the different families of man,
especially of the ancestors of the people of Israel, from Adam to the death of
Joseph . . . As a rule, in each of these successive Toledoth, the
narrative is carried down to the close of the period embraced, and at the
beginning of each succeeding portion a brief repetition of so much as is needed
of the previous account is given, and with it, very often, a note of time. (Speaker’s
Commentary.)
Whether these primary documents were originally composed by Moses,
or came into his hands from earlier sacred writers, and were by him revised and
combined into his great work, we are not informed. By revising a sacred
writing, we mean replacing obsolete or otherwise unknown words or modes of
writing by such as were in common use in the time of the reviser, and putting
in an explanatory clause or passage when necessary for the men of a later day.
The latter of the above suppositions is not inconsistent with Moses being
reckoned the responsible author of the whole collection. We hold it to be more
natural, satisfactory, and accordant with the phenomena of Scripture. It is
satisfactory to have the recorder, if not an eyewitness, yet as near as
possible to the events recorded. And it seems to have been a part of the method
of the Divine Author of the Scripture to have a constant collector,
conservator, authenticator, reviser and continuator of that book which He
designed for the spiritual instruction of successive ages. We may disapprove of
one writer tampering with the work of another; but we must allow the Divine
Author to adapt His own work, from time to time, to the necessities of coming
generations. (Prof. J. G. Murphy.)
Holiness, sublimity, truthfulness--these are the impressions left
upon the mind of the thoughtful reader of Genesis. There is meant by this its
subjective truthfulness. It is no invention. The one who first wrote it down,
and first spoke it to human ears, had a perfect conscious conviction of the
presence to his mind of the scenes so vividly described, and a firm belief in a
great objective reality represented by them. It is equally evident, too, that
it is the offspring of one conceiving mind. It never grew, like a myth or
legend. It is one total conception, perfect and consistent in all its parts.
There is nothing ideal about it. Myths and legends are the products of time;
they have a growth. Thus other ancient cosmogonies, though bearing evidence of
derivation from the one in Genesis, have had their successive accretions and
deposits of physical, legendary, and mythological strata. This stands alone in
the world. It has nothing national about it. It is no more Jewish than it is
Assyrian, Chaldaean, Indian, Persian, or Egyptian. It is no imitation. Copies
may have been made from it, more or less deformed, but this is an original
painting. The evidence is found in its simplicity, unity, and perfect
consistency. Its great antiquity is beyond dispute. It was before the dawning
of anything called science. We are shut up to the conclusion of its subjective
truthfulness and its subjective authenticity. At a very early day, to which no
profane history or chronology reaches, some man, who was not a philosopher, not
a poet, not a fable maker, but one who “walked with God,” and was possessed of
a most devout and reverent spirit,--some such man, having a power of conception
surpassing the ordinary human, or else inspired from above, had present to his
soul in some way, and first wrote down or uttered in words, this most wonderful
and sublime account of the origin of the world and man. He believed, too, what
he wrote or uttered. He was conscious of some source, whether by words or
vision, whence he had received it, and he had no doubt of its relation to an
outward objective truth which it purported to set forth. (Tayler Lewis, LL.
D.)
The Beauty and Utility of
this Book
We cannot wonder at the expression of the great German Reformer,
Luther: “Nihil pulchrius Genesi, nihil utilius.” “There is nothing more
beautiful than the Book of Genesis, nothing more useful.” There is, indeed, a
beauty in it, which cannot be discovered in any other ancient work: there is a
utility in it which we cannot fail, on inquiry and investigation, to
appreciate. It is the record of the creation of the material world and of the
founding of the spiritual world; and as such it stands at the head of all
Scripture, as the authentic basis of the whole Bible, while, in the most
special sense, it is the basis of the Pentateuch. It is, says Lunge, the root
whose trunk extends through all Scripture, and whose crown appears in the
Apocalypse; or, as Delitzsch has expressed the same idea: “Genesis and
Apocalypse, the Alpha and Omega of the canonical writings, correspond to each
other. To the creation of the present heaven and the present earth corresponds
the creation of the new heaven and the new earth on the last pages of the
Apocalypse. To the first creation, which has as its object the first man Adam,
corresponds the new creation, which has its outgoing from the Second Adam. Thus
the Holy Scriptures form a rounded, completed whole--a proof that not merely
this or that book, but also the canon, is a work of the Holy Spirit.” (R. W.
Bush, M. A.)
The Book of Genesis as a
Whole, a Suggestive Picture of the World in which we Live
When we read over this Book of Genesis we find great expectations
and great promises in the beginning and throughout its progress, and in the end
disappointment and great darkness. “In the beginning, God!” what expectation
does not this grand exordium awaken, when we remember who God is and what He
is; what His glory, what His power, what His love, what His grace! “In the
beginning, God”--How does it end? “A coffin in Egypt!” That is the end. So,
too, with the great promises made to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob. “I will
be a God to thee.” “I will be thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.” What
glorious expectations are excited there, and what is the end? A coffin in
Egypt. Now, this seems to me to be just a picture of this world, so far as we
can see, and so far as we can know. It is this world, as it is to sight and as
it is to science. There are glorious expectations here. We look back to the
origin of things, and we find wonderful preparations. We can trace back the
history of our earth through the geological epochs, and find extraordinary
development, wonderful evolution--rising, rising, rising up through inanimate
creation, and then through the animate creation, until at last it reaches its
crown and consummation in man; and now what glorious prophecies are there in man’s
nature, and what magnificent expectations in connection with his work and
destiny! But, after all these hopes are so excited and stimulated, and we soar
as high as heaven in our skyward aspirations, the end is a coffin. In Egypt
perhaps. Yes, in Egypt. Egypt is a great country. It is the land of the
pyramids. It is the land of the Sphinx, of science and art, of culture and
civilization. In this nineteenth century civilization, of which we are so
proud, we have better than Egyptian culture. We have better than Egyptian art.
We have lordly magnificence all around us. There is wonderful progress in
inventions and discovery--there seems no limit to the possibilities of
inventive art and genius--the Egypt of the future bids fair to throw the Egypt
of the present as far into the shade as it has already cast the Egypt of the
past; but what is your portion and mine in the Egypt of the future? A coffin in
it. Yes, that is the end for you and me and every one of us, so far as this
world is concerned: a coffin in Egypt. In this world as in Genesis, there is
much blessed light. There are many beautiful things in it; many things to
admire, many things to impress us and inspire us; but it all ends in darkness.
Hope springs exultant at the outset. Then it is “the evening and the morning.”
But when you reach the end you find the order has been sadly inverted. It is
now the morning and the evening and the night. Can it be of God then, of Him
who calls Himself “the Father of Lights”? Can it be that the development which commenced,
“In the beginning, God,” shall end with a coffin? No, it cannot be. If it had
been, “In the beginning, Fate,” or, “In the beginning, Chance,” or, “In the
beginning, Law,” it might have been. But seeing that it is, “In the beginning,
God,” it cannot be. But is it not the end? Yes; but of what? Of Genesis. It is
only the end of the beginning. That is the explanation of it all. Here is the
key by which we can get out of the dark dungeon. “Now we see through a glass
darkly.” Now we know in part. Now we see only the beginnings of things. That is
the reason they sometimes look so dark and so dreadful. And though to sight,
and even to science, death seems to be the end of all our hope, remember that
to faith it is the end of the beginning only. What a cheering thought it is to
think that this life, that seems bounded by a grave, that seems to have so dark
an end, is only the Genesis of our history. All the rest is yet to come, beyond
the coffin in Egypt. It is because this life is only our Genesis that there is
so much of prophecy in it, and so much of promise in it, and so little of
fulfilment here. But beyond the coffin in Egypt there is an Exodus, without any
wanderings. There is Joshua, the captain of the Lord’s host in the heavenly
places; and Judges Matthew 19:28;
1 Corinthians 6:2-3),
but no desolating wars. There are Kings, but no Prophets (“whether there be
prophecies; they shall cease”). There are Psalms, but no Lamentations. There
are Gospels without a Cross. There are Acts of loving service without a
dungeon. And whether in that world beyond the grave there be any need of
Epistles, I cannot tell; but this we know, that there shall be a glorious
Apocalypse, when the veil is drawn and the glory is seen. “It doth not yet
appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear”--He on whom all
hopes are centred; to whom all the types did point; of whom all the prophets
spake; in whom all the promises have been fulfilled--when He shall appear, the
second time, in His glory, “we shall be like Him.” And what our surroundings
shall be then we cannot tell; but we know that there will be the fulfilment of
every true desire and longing of the sanctified soul. All these promises, all
these expectations, all these aspirations of our Genesis life, will be
fulfilled in the coming Apocalypse of glory. (J. M.Gibson, D. D.)
The early chapters of
Genesis
GENESIS THE THIRD: HISTORY, NOT FABLE
I. The Place
which the Mosaic Account of the Creation and Fall of Man occupies in Holy
Scripture. In some scientific circles, in which Christian faith has no place,
this narrative is now regarded as one of many similar fables of the early
world, the truth being that there was no first man, and no fall of man, but a
gradual rise from the animal level up to humanity, through the ages of an
immeasurably distant past. In other scientific and theological circles, where
Christian faith still maintains its hold on revelation in general, the
narrative is regarded as an allegory wholly destitute of historical reality,
but setting forth in pictorial form the early struggles of man with the lower
forces of nature, and the ascension of the spirit, through discipline and
temptation, to the heights of faith in God. Among Christian believers of this
class it is now boldly affirmed that it is impossible to attach any historical
value to the idea of the ruin of a world by the common ancestor of the race. I
have thought that it might be a moderately useful contribution to the cause of
Scriptural Christianity to show, in opposition to such methods of dealing with
Holy Scripture, what may be fairly alleged in support of the historical reality
of this narrative, and what may be fairly said in reply to the more common
objections to its literal credibility. Our business will be to clear the ground
by showing the place which the narrative of the creation and fall of man
occupies in the Bible. There can be no hesitation in affirming that the books
of the Old Testament, and emphatically the books of the New Testament, with one
consent, treat the narrative of the recent creation and fall of man as
historical, and make it the basis of the whole system of Divine dispensations
towards our race which they profess to record. In modern writings the assertion
is frequently made that the earlier chapters of Genesis are manifestly
symbolical, and demand no faith in their literality. But in the Book of Genesis
there are no signs of symbolism in the earlier portion. If there is a simple
realistic style in ancient prose history anywhere, that style is found in the
Book of Genesis, from the beginning to the end. It is surely a great violence
in criticism to represent the author or compiler of Genesis as distinguishing
in his own mind between the allegorical quality of his earlier and later
chapters. Whether true or not, most certainly he delivers them as if he
believed them to be true, and true in their literal sense; the first chapter
relating to a very recent action of God in refitting the earth, and in creating
man and certain animals upon it; the second and third recounting the moral
trial of the newly-made human beings in order to decide the question of eternal
obedience to their Maker, with the result of loss of life through sin, and of
the prospect of immortality. The narrative professes to account for the
entrance of death into the human world, and this problem could not be solved by
an allegory. If the presence of direct Divine action, asserted in this
narration, is sufficient ground for rejecting its literality, consistency will
require the rejection of the whole subsequent narrative of Scripture on the
same ground. The story in Genesis is not more open to objection for this reason
than any other parts of the Bible. The whole Bible, certainly, may be a false
record; but it is impossible to save or defend a long supernatural history
simply by attempting to allegorize its earliest chapters. It is, I think, easy
to show that, throughout the New Testament, in the teaching both of Christ and
the apostles, the narrative of Eden is not only taken for historic truth, but
is made the basis of Christianity itself as a religion of redemption. In St. Matthew 19:3-6
we find our Lord Jesus Christ establishing the sanctity of the marriage union
for all mankind from the beginning of the world, and forbidding divorce, except
for unfaithfulness, on the basis of the truth of the Mosaic account of the
creation of Adam and Eve, and on the authority of the words said to be spoken
on the occasion of that first marriage. This is repeated in Mark 10:2-9.
Christ’s teaching surely is Christianity, or an important part of it, and He
here most distinctly founds His own legislation in respect to the
indissolubleness of marriage, except for the cause of adultery, on the
historical reality of the narrative in Genesis. If He took this part of the
narrative as historical truth, it is certain that He did not look upon the
remainder as allegory. If the story of Adam and Eve is a fable, and these
persons had no real existence, then the alternative is that Christ founds His
law of marriage, one of the most important laws in any religion, on a fable
which He mistook for a truth. And with that primary mistake His authority as a
Divine legislator falls altogether. In St. John 8:44
ourLord again refers to the Edenic narrative, and supplies the explanation of
the temptation by the serpent. But if Jesus Christ did not rightly understand
the origin of the race which He came to save, did not understand, in fact, why
they required to be saved, mistook an allegory for a history, and falsely
imagined the action of an Adam, and of an adversary who had no real existence,
what remains in His teaching to which it is possible to attach any real
importance? It will be requisite to carry the allegorizing process much
further, and to convert the gospel history itself and all our Lord’s teaching
into a fabulous representation of truths which He Himself did not understand,
and which have nothing whatever to do with authentic history. If next we pass
from Christ to His biographers and apostles, we find St. Luke, in the genealogy
of Jesus, placing “Adam, the son of God,” at the summit of the table, evidently
with as firm a persuasion of his real personality as that of any of his
successors. If we open the Epistle to the Romans, we find St. Paul, the chief
apostle of the gospel, in his chief doctrinal Epistle, addressed to the chief
Church in Christendom, laying the very foundation of the doctrine of salvation
through the Incarnation, in the historic truth of the Fall of man in the Book
of Genesis. Nine times in eight verses does St. Paul affirm the literal truth
of the Edenio history, and represent the Redemption in Christ as having a
distinct relation to the entrance of sin and death therein described. If St.
Paul was in error here at the foundation, he erred at least along with his
Master, as we have seen; and if he erred in his belief on the Fall, and we can
certainly know it, it is quite certain that there is nothing whatever left in
his doctrinal teaching respecting the Redemption to which any Divine authority
can be attached. He is mistaken in the two loci of his theological system. It
is, nevertheless, an error which he repeats in many forms in his writings.
Thus, in chap.
16:20 of the same Epistle, he promises the Romans, in manifest
allusion toGe 3:15, that “the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s
head.” “The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.” Again, in
writing several years before to the Corinthians, when treating of the
resurrection of the saints to eternal life, in the glory of God, he had thus
spoken of the origin of death and of the cause of resurrection in these words:
“Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that
slept. For since by man came death--by man came also the resurrection of the
dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in the Christ shall all be made alive.”
And lower down, when speaking of the different constitutions of the animal and
spiritual humanities, he adds: “There is a natural, or soulual, or psychical
body, and there is a spiritual or pneumatical body. And so it is written, The
first man Adam became a living soul, or psyche, the last Adam became a
life-giving spirit, or pneuma. Howbeit, that is not first which is
spiritual or pneumatical, but that which is natural, or soulual, psychical,
then that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, choikos, a
man of dust. The second Man is of heaven. As is the man of dust, such also are
the men of dust, and as is the heavenly One, such also are the heavenly ones.
And as we have borne the likeness of the man of dust, we shall also bear the
likeness of the heavenly One” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22;
1 Corinthians 15:44-49).
How is it possible to avoid seeing that in every expression of these verses St.
Paul refers to the detailed account of the creation of Adam in the second and
third chapters of Genesis, and treats the whole narrative, not only as
historical, but as the record of an essential part of the general system of the
Divine dealings with humanity in its psychical and pneumatical stages of development
under its two federal heads, Adam and Christ Again, in the same Epistle (1 Corinthians 11:8),
St. Paul gives as a reason why women were to be attired in a manner to represent
subjection to man, thus: “For a man ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as
he is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man. For
the man is not out of the woman, but the woman out of the man. Neither was the
man created for the woman, but the woman for the man.” Can there be any doubt
that the apostle here refers to the words of Genesis 2:23,
and reasons from them as a true history? In his Second Epistle St. Paul does
not hesitate to hold up the example of Eve’s weakness as a warning to the
philosophical Corinthians. In his Epistle to the Ephesians the apostle quotes
the words of Genesis 2:24,
“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother,” etc., just as our
Lord had done before him, to describe to his converts the law of marriage union
fixed at the creation of Adam and Eve--a quotation without the force or
authority even of antediluvian legend, unless he held the history as authentic,
real, and indisputable. In his First Epistle to Timothy he assigns as a reason
for the subjection of women and their silence in church, so far as teaching in
the Church is concerned, the original constitution of things and the truth of
the narrative of the Fall in Eden. It is easy to see that St. Paul regarded the
Edenic history as a fable no more than he looked on the rest of the Old
Testament as mythical or allegorical. Indeed, there is no narrative in the Old
Testament which St. Paul so frequently refers to in his writings as true and
instructive as that of the earlier chapters of Genesis. In the same manner
Apollos, or whoever wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, speaks of the history of
the antediluvians in his eleventh chapter, from Abel downwards, as if equally
authentic with that of all subsequent ages. St. John, in his Epistle, refers,
as we have seen, similarly to the history of Cain and Abel as a practical
instruction in the ways of piety and faith. And, lastly, in the Apocalypse, not
only is the scenery of the earthly paradise taken as a type and symbol of
loftier realities beyond, but “the devil and Satan” is twice pointed out as the
“man killer from the beginning,” and described as “the ancient serpent, which
deceiveth the whole world,” so as to fix beyond dispute the diabolical nature
of the power which brought upon our first parents ruin and destruction (Revelation 12:9;
Revelation 20:2).
Everyone who has followed attentively this complete induction of Biblical
reference to the Mosaic history of man’s creation and fall must allow that the
modern attempt to resolve the early chapters in Genesis into an allegory or a
fable is inconsistent with any rational recognition of the inspiration or
authority of Jesus Christ and His apostles. It seems to me quite useless to
disguise this conflict between the Bible and--not science, but that which, in
the opinion of not a few in our time, is thought worthy of the name of science.
There can be no doubt that it is held for certain by many, including no small
number of able and accomplished persons, that modern discovery has decisively
proved the immense antiquity of man, his animal origin, and, consequently, the
falsity of the Mosaic cosmogony and Edenic story, so that the fable of “Eve and
the Apple” and the “talking serpent”--to use the favourite profane description--is
widely regarded as a test measurement of any man’s ignorance and credulity. A
man who will believe that is proved to be both ignorant of facts and
undeserving of argument. Who that reflects on this state of things can fail to
conclude that there is some great mistake somewhere? If the so-called
scientific view of man’s origin is really scientific--that is, is a matter of
certain knowledge, and not of mere guess work (and nothing less than certain
knowledge is science)--why, undoubtedly it follows that not merely Moses was
mistaken, but that Christ and all His apostles were mistaken also. Christianity
is one complicated mistake, for it founds a doctrine of redemption on the
history of the recent creation and fall of Adam, on the moral and not animal
origin of sin; and if the Adam of Genesis never sinned, because he never
existed, Christ was certainly not “sent from God,” and “died in vain.” Is it,
then, possible that this so-called scientific conclusion of the antiquity of
man, and of his bestial origin, is only a hideous delusion, notwithstanding the
loud tones in which some are proclaiming it? Is it possible that, when closely
examined, this theory of man’s immense antiquity, however boldly affirmed by
some, is resting at this moment chiefly on the substructure of so-called
inferences from the growth of stalagmite and the age of gravels, which rouse
nothing less than the indignation of men of the very first rank in knowledge,
who grieve to see a mere succession of changing guesses represented to the multitudes
as ascertained European science? Is it possible that statements which were put
forth a few years ago in support of this theory have, one after another, been
compulsorily withdrawn? Is it true that, in general, ordinary men’s assurance
of its truth is in inverse proportion to their detailed acquaintance with the
state of the evidence? And, lastly, is it a fact that if it were attempted at
this moment to make it a test of membership in any of the great scientific
societies of Europe to confess the truth of the evolution theory in general, as
universally and irrevocably established--much more the evolution of man from
the animal races as proved with any show whatever of positive evidence--or even
the remotest antiquity of the present race of man as supported by any decisive
evidence at all, there is not one of these societies--English, French, German,
or American--which would not be rent asunder by a violent convulsion of
opposing conviction, from the Royal Society downwards, so deep, so strong, so
indignant is the revolt of many of the leading lights of biology and
archaeology against the notion that anything has been demonstrably settled to
shake the public faith in the recent and direct Divine creation of the human
race? Professor Stokes, one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, a man
closely conversant with the principal scientific men in Europe, in a paper
recently read before the Church Congress, and repeated in a revised form
elsewhere, said that in the absence of biological knowledge of our own what
must be done in order to test the value of opinions involving such momentous
issues for all mankind is to examine the mode of argument of these writers in
departments with which we are more familiar, and to compare the utterances of
biological leaders in Europe and America with one another, so as not to be
carried away by the authority of one or two considerable names. Science
signifies absolute knowledge, not the opinion of some distinguished scientific
men. What is absolutely known for certain is accepted by properly qualified
investigators in all lands. Tried by this test, the widely diffused notions of
the animal origin and remote antiquity of the human race break down instantly.
There is scarcely a single fact in the interpretation of which the leading
biologists and archaeologists of the world are agreed--certainly not one which
can serve as a basis for a theory solid enough to overthrow the teaching of
Divine revelation.
II. The General
Objections Urged against the Truth of the History of the Fall. It is wonderful
sometimes to listen to the objections to the supernatural Bible history which
are made by men who are well acquainted with the work of God in nature. The
objection, if it means anything at all, means that you must not associate the
idea of Deity with details in the universe, but only with universal laws; that
to impute to God minute or definite acts of creation or providence, or to think
of Him as the “man in the next street”--to use Dr. M. Arnold’s phrase--is to
dishonour the idea of an Eternal Cause. The notion seems to be that the
Infinite Mind can be occupied only with general and abstract ideas, and not
with the detailed application of laws or forces, as if these abstract and
general ideas were anything more than the algebraic symbols required by the
weakness of finite minds, or as if we could even conceive of an all-pervading
intelligent Deity who did not see all general ideas in every one of their
special applications, and, if He worked at all, worked in detail. Now, let any
man who believes in an intelligent Power behind nature, and working in nature,
think of what we know of the interior economy of a spider’s nest, an anthill, a
beehive, as described by Lubbock and Romanes, and then tell us whether Creative
Power is too great for details. Why, all natural history proves that God
“taketh care” for animals down to the very animalculae--in Christ’s sublime
language, that “not one of them is forgotten before Him.” There is no remedy
for disbelief in Bible history, because of its details of Divine action and
interference, so effectual as study of natural history both in animal and
vegetable life. The objection to the supernatural element in the history of
paradise is but one specific example of a wider objection to the supernatural
altogether, and lies equally against the whole recorded history of the Bible.
Those who are resolved to account for all things by the single action of
natural causes will allow of no Divine direct agency whatsoever, and against
these objectors it is idle to attempt to establish the truth of this particular
supernatural history; but those who admit the reality of Divine direct agency
in the subsequent history of man are to the last degree unreasonable in
objecting to the record of such agency at its commencement. The Bible is one
prolonged denial of the doctrine that a uniform course of nature is an adequate
description of the history of this world. It is professedly a record, from
first to last, of a series of direct interferences of God, both in creation and
providence, supernatural because the end to be attained was above law--the
salvation of man; and this series of interferences becomes credible to the mind
precisely in proportion as it is studied in connection with nature, studied as
a whole, and studied in the light of its alleged object, the bestowment of
eternal life on sinful and dying men. Assuredly the earlier chapters of Genesis
are full, in every line, as was likely if man had a beginning in God, of
statements of such direct Divine operations. In the first chapter we see
Almighty God directly creating certain animals at the time of the creation of
man. We see Him directly creating woman “out of man,” the reverse of the
subsequent order of nature. In the third chapter we see God placing man in the
paradise, under a special trial of his moral nature, arraigning him for
disobedience, and then passing sentence on the man, the woman, and the serpent
tempter. This style of writing is not peculiar to the opening pages of Moses.
It continues to the end of the Bible--the assertion of the direct, constant,
minute, supernatural action of God in mercy and in judgment. Now, when such
statements do not meet with the assent of faith, faith which discerns the truth
even in the miracle, the counter feeling which they raise is that of strong
disbelief, and generally of ridicule, ridicule being the expression of the
sense of incongruity and total incredibility. Accordingly the Bible is in our
time either believed as a supernatural whole, or, quite logically, rejected and
ridiculed as a whole. Nothing is easier than to ridicule the Bible by comparing
it with common life. The more closely men study the uniformity of nature and
the ordinary course of events, the more will they be struck with the
extraordinary quality of the miraculous record of Scripture; and, unless they
have spiritual reasons for believing it, the more incongruous and ridiculous
will it all appear. But such a sense of the ridiculous offers no solid basis of
argument. It requires little candour to admit that any true account of the
origin of mankind must be, in its circumstances, exceedingly unlike our modern
development, and that to require similarity to our own experiences as the
condition of belief in such an account is a sign of a somewhat narrow
apprehension. Whatever theory of man’s origin be adopted, the beginning must
have been so unlike the ending that, if unlikeness to our own experience is to
bring down ridicule, no theory can escape it. Even if the favourite notion be
true, that man originated in some collateral ancestor of the anthropoid apes or
gorillas, it must have been a day of wonder in “the infinite azure of the past”
when that black-faced, long-tailed, hairy monster, described for us by Mr.
Grant Allen, first thought and spake as a man; and another day, much unlike our
own, when this developed brute first stood upright, and found a half-rational
helpmeet in a similarly developed female anthropoid. If ridicule here is to be
the test of truth, ridicule excited by unlikeness to modern experience, the story
of Adam and Eve, glowing fresh in strength and beauty from the direct hand of
God, will bear comparison with that of the infinitely slow development of this
prognathous brute of pseudo-science, whose fierce dull eye gradually gleamed
with reason, and whose bellowings and roarings, during the course of thousands
of years spent amidst the post-glacial morasses and jungles (Dr. Max Muller
says it is quite inconceivable), gradually subsided into human speech. A second
difficulty which has been felt in the reception of the Edenic story as
historical is what is spoken of as its childish tone, in which the Almighty
Creator is represented as working with His hands as a potter or sculptor;
walking, talking, professing ignorance of the hiding place of Adam; and then
condemning His new made creatures to death when tempted to make progress in
intelligence by a speaking serpent. That is one way of putting the case. Now
let us try the effect of another. This narrative presents a succession of the
sublimest ideas of which the human mind is capable. The expression of them is
indeed childlike, in the simplest language, language suitable to the childhood
of the world; but there is nothing childish, nothing unworthy of the faith of
the manliest intelligence, and nothing unworthy of the Infinite Lord of Nature
dealing with mankind in its beginnings. The Bible as a whole is credible and
defensible, partly because it offers a history of humanity from its infancy to
its mature age, the race having, as a matter of fact, passed through the stages
of individual life from childhood to maturity; so that the early portion of the
Bible, professing to record revelations of God in the earliest stages of man’s
life, wins credibility from reflective readers just because its opening pages are
answerable in style to the opening ages of the world. Had they been less
childlike in tone, they would have lacked one necessary note of genuineness in
the adaptation of the Divine Father’s voice to the early understanding of His
sons. The books of the nursery are indeed childlike in tone, but often embody
the maturest wisdom; and no wise man dreams of deriding his own childhood, or
of burning the library of his children’s nursery. Judged by these canons, the
histories of Genesis assume a place of high importance in the annals of the
world. As a record of early religious literature, compared with the deciphered
rubbish of Egypt and Chaldea, it is a preeminent example of the survival of the
fittest. Let us now point out some of the noble thoughts which underlie the
Edenic story.
1. Here, then, first of all, we find the sublimest possible
conception of man’s original. Man is Deiform, the image of the Infinite Being
on earth, the direct creation of the Eternal Mind and Will. He is formed of the
dust of the ground, Adamah, from which he takes his name of Adam, or Earth--dust
and ashes, in the language of Abraham. He is formed as the last link in a
series of animal lives, and on one side of his nature strongly resembles those
beasts which perish. He belongs to the Vertebrata. His form has been
typified and foretold in a long succession of old-world prophecies, in the
structure of previous animals. But he does not spring from the earth, or from
previous forms, as they did. He is specially fashioned by the Almighty Hand;
God is represented as moulding him, working out in living art the eternal idea;
and then as breathing into him, by direct afflatus of Divinity, the breath of
life. The seal of the living God, of the Infinite Life, is on his forehead, and
though capable of dying, he is not made to die. There is no idea in the modern
books on the Descent of Man so grand as this.
2. An equal splendour and originality characterizes the relation of
the creation of woman. As if foreseeing the debasing gorilla philosophy of the
last days, here, in the very dawn of history, the strongest possible
contradiction is given, while humanity was still in its beginning, to the
notion of human derivation from the animals. For a modified gorilla a modified
simian would have served well enough. But Adam was of a Divine original, “made
in God’s image,” and therefore Eve, in her glory and beauty, is the direct work
of the Supreme Sculptor, Painter, Poet, and Lifegiver; fashioning out of Adam
himself the woman who should be one with him in life and love forever and ever.
Here is the strongest possible denial of the bestial original of humanity. He
could not pair with the lower races, for his origin was directly from the
sacred fount of Deity. The building up of the frame of Eve out of materials of
bone and flesh taken from the entranced form of Adam is only a specific
difference under the general principle that living beings descend from each
other, under the plastic agency of God; and in this case the form of the action
was specially fitted to lay the foundation of spiritual marriage, the only true
human marriage, in the consciousness of their deep unity in Him. It is God who
“joins together” man and woman in a unity which is no mere partnership or
trading company with limited liability, but a unity consecrated by the bond of
God’s Spirit, and which, therefore, “no man may put asunder.”
3. Next observe that the man and woman thus formed are designed for
immortal life. So long as Adam abstained from the forbidden tree he is free to
take of the tree of life, the effect of which is to cause him to “live
forever.” To take of one tree was death, but to take of the other was life
eternal. What can convey more clearly the sublime idea that man was originally
designed for a dependent but endless life in God?
4. But if man is not a “beast of the field,” and if a “beast’s heart
is not given him,” neither is he here represented as an automaton. He is free,
and is placed at once under the necessity of choosing between good and evil,
truth and falsehood, right and wrong, God and self-will--in an immediate trial.
He must, by a deliberate choice under temptation, against all lower seduction,
declare his allegiance to the Eternal, as the condition of the endless life. It
was a trial of faith; that is, of intelligent voluntary choice of the Infinite
Life and. Perfection as Ruler and Lord, precisely in the same sense in which we
are tried in the contest between faith and unbelief. How could this faith be
tested? The law of the Ten Commandments was, as Mr. Henry Rogers has pointed
out in one of his memorable letters, inapplicable. The law of the fifth, sixth,
seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments was unsuited to a creature who
had but one single earthly relationship. There must, therefore, be appointed some
positive external trial, by which the question of allegiance might be
determined at once and forever. The test selected was the taking of the fruit
of a tree which was called the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which
was good for food, desirable to the eyes, and in some mysterious sense
described as a “tree desirable to make one wise.” This tree appealed, by its
complex qualities, to the whole nature of man on its un-moral side, to the
lower senses of taste and smell, to the sense of beauty, above all to his
intellectual curiosity and ambition, as carrying with it some awful mystery of
“knowledge of good and evil” which should liberate him from dependence on the
Creator’s word--in fact, from a life of faith in God. It was a test which
brought out the whole strength of the two counter attractions by which their
being was drawn in two opposite directions, towards God the Infinite or away
from Him. Between these two the choice must be made for eternity of loyal
obedience or of empirical rebellion. And the lower attraction was supplemented
by the permitted assistance of a living tempter, enforcing the seduction of the
inanimate object, since the rejection of animated evil was as much due to God
as the rejection of the inanimate. In Adam’s case, the still further fidelity
was required of deafness to the voice of his wife when she became an auxiliary
to the seduction. What is there of ridiculous in such a trial? It precisely
resembles in its essence the trial to which every man in the world is still exposed--the
trial of faith and fidelity to God, to right, to duty as against created forces
of seduction. How shamefully is this lofty trial now misrepresented! Here is
not one word of “an actual apple”--the fruit is not named; the material
attractiveness is scarcely noticed, in the emphasis given to the intellectual
attractions of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”--the temptation to
know good and evil experimentally, apart from the will and word of the Creator.
It was a test of the root principle of obedience to the Eternal Mind and Will,
the prime condition of co-existence in eternity with God; since such obedience
of faith is, and must be in all worlds, but the fulfilment of the primary law
of created free agency. For pride is the sin through which “fell the angels.”
III. The Sentences
Pronounced on the Man, the Woman, and the Serpent tempter. We now proceed to
examine the narrative of the trial of Adam in paradise on the side of its
results, with a view to an opinion on its credibility when taken as a real
history. And, first of all, I observe that the narrative, as it stands in the
Book of Genesis, ought not to be made answerable at the bar of modern thought
for the traditionary accumulations which have gathered round it after
thirty-four centuries of rabbinical and theological comment upon it. It is
defensible as it stands in the primitive record; but, I admit, wholly
indefensible and incredible as interlined by the additions of a later
philosophy and tradition. On the face of the narrative as it stands we find
only that, after other things set in order, and other living beings created,
“God made man of the dust of the ground in His own image, and breathed into him
the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” This last expression,
applied in the Hebrew original hundreds of times to the animals, signifies only
that man, animated by the Divine Spirit, became a “living creature.” It most
certainly was not intended to signify that Adam was created in possession of an
indestructible life. On the contrary, being made “in God’s image,” he was a
creature that might live forever if God so pleased; but he might also die and
pass away if he disobeyed his Maker. On the face of the narrative it appears
plainly that, being created in the likeness of God, and allowed access to the
“Tree of Life,” he was originally designed for immortality--for life eternal;
but it was conditional on the obedience of faith. If he transgressed, he would
“die.” The object set before him, therefore, was to secure, by faith in God, an
absolute possession of the eternal life for which God made him. If he departed
from the living God, and set up himself to be a self-determining power, to be
“as God, knowing good and evil,” he would “return to the dust whence he was
taken.” This is all that is in the narrative. The penalty of withdrawing from
God was death--the termination of his life (just as death would have borne that
meaning to him for all other living beings in the world), and with that, of
course, the life of the unborn race which he represented. If now we examine
closely the history of the consequences resulting from the disobedience of our
first parents, through whom it is falsely said that we have become “guilty and
accursed of God,” it is seen at once, as was pointed out seventeen centuries
ago by Irenaeus, the scholar of Polycarp, the disciple of St. John the Divine,
in his second book on Heresies, that God pronounced no curse whatever on Adam
or on Eve after their transgression, much less on their posterity. It is said
that God “cursed the ground for Adam’s sake,” cursed it with comparative
sterility, so as to demand extraordinary toil in its cultivation. The lightning
passed from the head of Adam to the soil, whence he should draw his sustenance.
Similarly, there is no single word of a “curse” pronounced on Eve. The life
penalty of her offence was sorrow in child bearing; but child bearing itself
was a blessing, not a curse. The curse turned aside from her also, and
descended on the serpent deceiver. The ground and the serpent were accursed,
but not Adam and Eve. They were both to undergo the death penalty, and to
“return to the dust whence they were taken,” and thus were “constituted
sinners”; but, first, the penalty was deferred, and, secondly, in the very act
of sentencing them to death, God spake a word of hope and restoration through
the “seed of the woman.” And then it was that Adam called his wife by a new
name, “Evah,” or Life, because she was to be the mother of a world of living
beings which would never have existed but for the promised “seed of the woman”
and the suspension of the sentence. Their continued life was itself a sign of
the pardoning mercy of God, abstaining from the infliction of the threatening
that “in the day” of their transgressions they should “surely die.” The
postponement of death rendered possible the existence of mankind, and the birth
of their Deliverer who should “crush the serpent’s head.” If, next, we turn to
consider the results of the transgression recorded in the Genesis fragment,
probably of antediluvian antiquity, we find first of all a statement that the
sense of shame in nakedness entered into the human world with sin, and as the
effect of it. Few features in the narrative have been more steadily derided
than this, that both man and woman were created in a state of nakedness, and
that the sense of outward shame began only with the sense of transgression,
leading to the first attempt at imperfect clothing. No ridicule has been more
inconsiderate and superficial. The account given in Genesis is at least a
striking solution of a problem under atheistic views hopelessly insoluble.
Think of it. The whole world of living creatures is either unclothed, or, if
dressed in plumage or fur, is so dressed by nature for protection from the
weather, or for flight, or for beauty, and not as a remedy for any shame at
exposure of the body or any part of it. There is no trace of this feeling in
the animal world throughout all its ranks. Even our nearest analogues, the most
unsightly anthropoids, are destitute of any similar instinct of
self-concealment. Whence the irresistible instinct through which the most noble
and beautiful forms in the whole world clothe themselves from view, just in
proportion as culture and civilization render them more majestic and more beautiful?
and in a world where all the rest of animated nature is “naked, and is not
ashamed”? The fact is indisputable. Not the most infidel or the most beautiful
nation in Europe, in its finest, warmest climate, could possibly venture to
live one day absolutely unclothed. Absolute public nudity is itself a synonym
for disgrace and shameless vice in all nations and ages. Even the
half-nakedness of modern fashion and of theatrical display is condemned by the
public conscience. Let those who ridicule the narrative in Genesis be pleased
to give us some account of this phenomenon. Will anyone assign a more rational
account of this extraordinary exception to the rule of nature among living
creatures than this--that the sense of shame in nakedness, the outward crimson
blush at exposure of the person, the impulse to hide and cover, entered with
sin, with sin of a crimson dye, entered when the ancestors of the race had
cause to be inwardly ashamed of themselves; and that this sense of shame is the
perpetual mark of the truth of this narrative; just as the tremendous and
abnormal toils of mankind regarded as a historic whole, and the still more
tremendous and thoroughly exceptional infliction denounced on woman--however
varying with climate--equally confirm our faith in the Mosaic account of the
circumstances attending the first origin of our race and nature. We now arrive
at the last point in the history--the temptation by the serpent. So heavily has
the difficulty been felt ofwhat is called this “miraculously talking reptile,”
that I suppose the prevailing mode of explaining this incident in the history
of the Fall, even by those who do not reject the historical reality of Adam and
Eve, is by resorting to the notion that there was no serpent at all concerned
in the transaction, any more than in Christ’s temptation by the devil; but that
this reptile name was assigned allegorically to an invisible spirit, who did
not in any way appear, but who enforced the temptation presented by the tree of
knowledge of good and evil by his murderous suggestions. There is no doubt that
under this view the essential elements of the narrative may be preserved
intact, and the foundation of Christian faith remain unshaken, against the
assaults of honest unbelievers. But, after paying the utmost attention to these
allegorical hypotheses of interpretation, I confess that I follow the majestic
intelligence of Milton, rather than modern critics, in thinking that a deeper
study of the ease will enable and compel us to hold fast to the literal and
natural interpretation here also. But I frankly admit that we do not expect to
persuade anyone to adopt this old-fashioned conclusion who does not accept the
following premises as a basis of argument:--
1. That the narrative, as a whole, in Genesis 3:1-24,
of the recent creation and trial of Adam in paradise, is a true story,
contradicted by nothing that is really ascertained by modern science, and that
there is no more reason a priori for converting into an allegory one
part of the narrative than the other.
2. That it is necessary, in order to do justice to any part of the
Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, to bring the light thrown by the Bible
as a whole, as a record of the work of God, on to each special portion of it.
3. The acceptance of the mysterious Scripture doctrine of fallen
angels, with one mighty adversary of truth and right at the head of them, the
mortal enemy of mankind and the permitted tempter for a short season of the
servants of God. Suppose it be true, as is laid down uniformly in Scripture,
that although man is tempted by the envious evil power who receives permission
to try his faith, this whole process of trial is, in all its details, under the
strictest Divine limitation and control, so that Satan can, neither by himself,
nor by angels, nor by his human agents, go one step further than God “suffers
them.” Suppose it he true that God will permit no well-disposed person to be
“tempted above what he is able to bear”; suppose, as in the dramatic history of
Job, revealing ancient beliefs, Satanic power is never allowed to advance
beyond the line dictated by a merciful regard to man’s infirmity, and that each
trial is regulated and limited by the Divine knowledge of an honest soul’s
resources of resistance; suppose that this law was applied to the temptation of
our newly created first parents, and that, in their youthful and inexperienced
state, knowing nothing of the history of the universe, or of the fall of angels,
or the purpose of God, it was forbidden to Satan to assail their life or tempt
them in the form of an equal or a superior, so that the permission to tempt was
limited by the most humiliating condition--that the temptation must come, if at
all, through the apparent action of one of those undeveloped and inferior
animals which sported around them. Under such conditions the action of the
murderous adversary becomes, at least, more intelligible. But you will ask,
last of all, What reasonable explanation can possibly be given of the alleged
curse on the serpent--“On thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all
the days of thy life”? Professor Huxley has sometimes said, in former years, to
his pupils at Jermyn Street: “Serpents have in all ages of the world, so far as
I know, gone upon their bellies; yet in the Book of Genesis it seems as if at
least an early specimen once went erect, a thing unknown before; and he was
punished by being reduced to creep and crawl forever, on the general plan of the
ophidia.” Professor Huxley has an excellent defence for his sardonic gloss in
the example of some Christian commentators, who have alleged this to be the
meaning of the Divine curse on the serpent. But there is not a word in the
narrative supporting such a notion. Suppose we take the history thus, and offer
an explanation in the terms following to the evolutionists and paleontologists,
which, from their point of view will, I think, be acknowledged to be more
credible, because more consonant to the facts: “Gentlemen, you have taught us
as the result of your studies of animal nature, of which we all alike are
proud, that the probable doctrine--at least over large areas of life--is that
of the evolution of species, theone from the other, through all past history.
You have taught us that the class of reptiles filling up the space between
fishes and birds has in past ages, and in the existing world, contained nine
orders, of which four are now existing and five are extinct, having left their
fossil remains in the sedimentary rocks below. Among these nine orders of
reptiles, one order alone--that of serpents--is, and always has been, through
all past ages, wingless, finless, footless. The germs of hinder legs are
concealed in some few kinds of serpents, as in the boa constrictor, enough to
show their relationship with the eight other orders of limbed reptiles, which
fill up the space between fishes and birds. Now, of you, gentlemen, as
evolutionists, I, as an expositor of Scripture respectfully ask, Supposing this
curse on the serpent was really uttered by the Author of nature, by a living
God, who knew all past history, and all anatomy, and therefore knew the strange
abnormal history of the serpent order, through all its generations up till
then--that is, knew the history of the one reptile order which alone among nine
never developed its limbs, or any of the organs of locomotion which belong to
all the other eight, since the Permian epoch; and supposing--as I must ask you
to suppose for the sake of argument--this narrativeof man’s trial in paradise,
as explained in the later portions of the Bible, were true, so that the serpent
was the organ of a brighter but viler intelligence--I put it to you,
evolutionists, would it be utterly irrational to take the words of the Supreme
Judge thus, speaking first to the serpent, but more profoundly to the evil
power which had sunk so low as to employ this reptile form, ‘Because thou hast
done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the
field. Upon thy belly hast thou gone from the days of old, the one undeveloped,
crawling, limbless reptile among all the kindred orders above thee and beneath
thee! And on thy belly shalt thou go all the days of thy life, so long as the
world shall last; no higher development awaits thee, no evolution into a nobler
type; but still carrying the marks, in thy unborn hinder limbs, of a better
kinship, thou shalt go on hissing, crawling, poisoning the world, hateful and
hated, striking man’s heel, yet punished by his enmity, until the time comes
when thou shalt be added to the already extinct orders of reptiles, and the
“woman’s seed,” destined to endless duration, shall bruise thee out of the
creation’”? Such a meaning, I think, might have been conveyed in full
biological truth by such a Divine Speaker to such a serpent. Here would be no
implication of his being reduced from a previous higher form to a limbless
creeper, but a sentence of continued crawling on the ground, without any hope
of evolution into a noble development. And, on the supposition that the typical
serpent form concealed some mighty spirit of evil, the antagonist of human
life, how awful the deeper enigmatical meaning of the words of the Judge, not
understood by the fallen pair, but understood well enough by the object of the
curse--“Origin of evil! thou hast sunk so low from thy once heavenly
brightness--so low in envy, spite, and murder, as willingly to take even a
reptile form, and that form the hatefullest, to reach thy end. Crawl, then,
Spirit of Darkness, to the end of thy days, and ‘lick the dust,’ with all the
enemies of sun light and righteousness. For evil is not noble, and is not
eternal, and has no future evolution into greatness and victory. Thou
thoughtest to devour this man of ‘dust’ in thy abhorred embrace, but thy malice
shall be defeated; thy victim shall be rescued from thy fangs; man shall attain
to the life immortal; the Seed of the woman shall crush thy head, and the dust
of death ‘shall be the serpent’s meat.’ God shall bruise thee and thy seed under
man’s feet shortly.”
IV. The Philosophy
of the Hebrews on Good and Evil compared with Asiatic Dualism. It appears that
in ages preceding the times of Moses by at least a thousand years the evil
power which has ruined the work of the supreme goodness was represented all
over the world by the name of the Serpent. In the very earliest epoch of the
Egyptian monarchy there is evidence that the legend of Osiris was firmly
established, of which the essence was that this son of the supreme god was put
to death by the poisonous serpent, from the effects of whose murderous attack
he is delivered by resurrection and final enthronement in the celestial realms.
The same idea is found in ancient India, in the redemptive story of Krishna,
who is depicted as setting his foot on the serpent’s head. Moses, therefore,
has recorded, in the narrative of the Fall of man, a history which had much
earlier diffused itself over the post-diluvian world in more or less corrupted
traditions. In a word, the universal traditions of mankind confirm, even amidst
their fanciful variations, the record which stands at the beginning of Genesis,
as all subsequent revelation confirms the original reality whence those
traditions sprang. But there is this difference between the beliefs of the whole
civilized world in ancient times and the doctrine of the Hebrew religion,
that, without exception, the heathen worshippers deified evil as well as good,
and regarded it as engaged in an eternal and often successful conflict with a
god of goodness; while, from one end to the other of the Mosaic and Christian
revelations evil is represented as an incident, vanishing and temporary, in the
everlasting dominion of supreme righteousness and love, a conviction which
imparted a wholly new aspect both to religious worship and to religious
character. The place and value of the Hebrew revelation in the systems of
Asiatic thought will appear the more clearly if we picture to ourselves the
earlier movements of the human mind in contemplating the mystery of life, where
natural speculation was unaided by light from heaven. Let us endeavour to throw
ourselves backward in fancy to that early time when the knowledge of the true
God had been lost amidst growing heathenism. How would thoughtful men attempt
under such conditions to solve the problem of the world? Clearly there would
emerge in succession two leading explanations of this scene of mingled good and
evil, moral and physical, in which chaotic darkness seems struggling with the
light and order which could create a kosmos. Of these, the first and the more
ancient was the dualistic, based on faith in spiritual powers; the second and
more recent was the sceptical, or Buddhistic, based on scientific observation
of things visible, and the positive rejection of Divine causes in accounting
for the state of the world. The earliest step downwards from the patriarchal
religion (which acknowledged one God, and traced up the origin of evil to the
rebellion of created free agency) was into dualism, or the exaltation of evil
to the rank of a Divine power coeval with the good. If in our time a mind so
great as Mr. John Stuart Mill could, in his latest works, indicate some
tendency to this solution of the mystery, is it to be wondered at if men whose
philosophy was primitive and tentative found an easy if terrible resource in
such a doctrine? If, further, they started from a primitive tradition of
personal evil agency in the supernatural sphere, it was inevitable that the
idea of an evil demon should be aggrandized into the idea of an evil deity. Of
this early dualism several things must be noted. Its essential identity of
principle must not be lost sight of under varying forms of expression. Its
reign extended over all Central Asia and India and China in the ages preceding
the Buddhistic “reform.” The relative prominence given in different ages and
countries respectively to the good or the evil powers was determined by the
physical, intellectual, and moral conditions of the nations who embraced the
general doctrine. The inevitable tendency of dualism among ignorant nations in
a state of suffering is towards religious pessimism--the special service of the
malignant deity, in order to propitiate him by atrocious rites, or to ward off
his injuries. The beneficent power will no doubt endure neglect, but hatred is
inexorable. Hence the Moloch worship of Syria, the devil worship of Asia, of
which some awful relics survive even to this day among the far-descended
aborigines of Ceylon. Hence, too, the remarkable fact that although the
Medo-Persian dualism, as organized by Zerduscht in a remote antiquity, gave the
supremacy to Ormuzd, the Eternal Light, in the course of ages of conflict the
popular mind, acted upon by terror and misery, by superstition and magian
priestcraft, had, by the time of Cyrus, arrived at so complete a prostration
under the shadow of the power of darkness, whose secrets the magians professed
to know, that much of the territory had been abandoned to sterility from a
conviction that it was useless to fight with destiny, an enemy who was
omnipotent and eternal. With the reviving fortunes of the people under the
bright and energetic rule of the Medo-Persian kings, and very probably through
the diffusion of Hebrew ideas in the East, a more luminous faith returned to
the nation. A profound theological revolution signalized the reign of Darius
Hystaspes, the final result of the happy victories of Cyrus. Darius records it
in the famous triumphal inscription on the rocks of Behistun. He asserts that
he has overthrown the magians, for ages leagued with Ahriman, and declares that
Ahuramasda or Ormuzd is king. It was as great a revolution as if Satan had been
worshipped in terror for ages in England, and then suddenly a political
revolution had revived the worship of God. In the more ancient sculptures of
Nineveh and Persepolis abundant memorials occur of the varying types of
dualism. In every better period of these monarchies the king is, represented as
under the protection of the beneficent deity, depicted as a winged human form
surrounded by the wheel of nature, while the evil power, symbolized by a
dragon, is portrayed only in a form of subjection or comparative defeat. With
these brief historical indications in view, it is easier to estimate aright the
value of the original Hebrew monotheism, and of its successive dispersions, as
factors in ancient Asiatic thought. At a time when India was dimly striving to
uphold faith in a beneficent deity against a malignant energy which was itself
divine; at a time when Zerduscht, in Central Asia, was more vigorously
maintaining the same faith against a popular superstition which was ever
darkening into the direful worship of Ahriman, Moses and the sons of Israel
were maintaining at once against Egyptian polytheism, and against all the might
of Eastern dualism, the existence and supreme sovereignty of one living and
true God, the Almighty, the just, the merciful, in whose government evil was a
possible, perhaps inevitable, incident, arising from the defect of the
creature’s freewill or the slothfulness of the creature’s intelligence, but
which had no root in the nature of things. It is this idea of the Infinite as
one living eternal personality which has bound the Jewish race together by the
sublimest of spiritual ties from first to last. They were monotheists when
Egypt, in the times of Amenophis and Aahmes, were bowing down before a Pantheon
of gods and goddesses--symbolized by oxen, by beetles, and by hooded cobras--in
a superstition redeemed from contempt by the single sublime legend of Osiris.
They were then monotheists, believing and declaring the unity of God, as Lord
of universal nature, the God of the heavenly forces and of a man’s
conscience--the Eternal God, in whose sight evil is but a transitory incident,
the outcome of the creature’s freewill; one God, the everlasting antagonist of
moral evil, destined speedily to be vanquished as the serpent beneath the heel
of humanity. Yes, when all Asia held evil to be incurable and eternal and
divine, the race of Abraham held that evil was “but for a moment,” and that
God’s goodness and justice alone were eternal; and they stuck unto this
testimony age after age without varying, the witnesses alone and unconquerable
in antiquity to the sole sovereignty and eternity of God. And it is they who
have taught this lesson to the nations of the modern world. If we, the gloomy
dwellers in these half-lighted lands of the North, are still agonizing in the
terrific folds of an evil power who is a match for all goodness, and the
destined tormentor of the universe forever, we owe it to Abraham and his sons,
and to those precious books which have held their own race together through all
their wanderings. Under these references in thought, it becomes doubly
interesting to note the phrases in which Christ and His apostles describe the
relations of the good and evil powers. The New Testament affirms, as we have
seen, in every form, the historical truth of the Genesis narrative. In the
Gospels, Christ’s Messianic life begins with a temptation by a personal devil.
In Christ’s teaching Satan is a real personality; he is a mighty king, and, in
a lower sense, lord of this world. He claims all political sovereignty as his
gift. He is “the prince” or ruler “of this world.” But his origin is in
measurable time, and his history is that of a murderous apostate who once dwelt
in the light, but “standeth not in the truth.” His destiny, too, is eternal
damnation and destruction. So in St. Paul’s writings there is a “kingdom of
darkness” and a “course of this world” from which Christians are delivered.
There is even a “god of this world” and a “prince of the aerial powers”; there
are evil “princedoms in the heavenlies,” but here, again, evil is a recent
evolution--the work of unreason, of will that prefers government by passion to
government by Divine law. And its end is destruction. St. John adds: “The
Kosmos passeth away and its passion, but he that doeth the will of God abideth
forever.” It is but faintly we can imagine how the world of mankind breathed
more freely when these glorious truths were first heard in Asia, crushed down
under the dark ancestral belief in an eternal reign of evil, and beneath the
stupefying fatalism to which it inevitably leads. When, then, Christ was made
known as the messenger of the one eternal power of good, warring against an
evil power which was not Divine and was not eternal, He was gladly listened to
by Europeans and Asiatics, who had been confounded between the rival theories
of dualism and atheism. We are now in a position to appreciate more correctly
the contention of those who would regard as a fable, having no foundation in
fact, the history of the entrance of evil through the serpent tempter, placed
at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Surely it could have been no mere fable,
no mere allegory, which thus carried a whole theology, and philosophy, and
civilization along with it. It showed God the Beneficent as supreme,
omnipresent, and eternal; and evil as a reptile perishing power. It engaged the
will of mar, to a personal conflict, both in nature and in human life, with a
mighty but a conquerable foe. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,”
was the battle cry through all ages. It showed all honest men that nothing was
noble except goodness, nothing immortal but righteousness; that even the
strongest and subtlest wickedness was ever ready to descend to the meanest
concealments and falsehoods to attain its ends; but that all those ends should
fail, because the history of the earth and of mankind was destined to be that
of a prolonged conflict of right against wrong, resulting in the enthronement
of Justice in the person of the true Osiris, the Son of Mary, who is also the
Son of God. Lastly, turning to our own times, we are still in the thick of this
awful and worldwide conflict; but oh, how glorious the retrospect of the war
against evil, how marvellous the succession of victories already won, and how
thrilling the hope that now shortly the atmosphere shall be cleansed from the
pestilent influence of that dark “power of the air” which rains down falsehood
and death upon the nations! The belief in the living God is nowhere stronger
than among many of the very foremost students of nature. The belief in Christ,
the Son of God, is nowhere more fervent than among many of those who have
fathomed all the depths of ancient and modern philosophy. The belief in the
Bible, as a whole, is nowhere more profound than among many of those who
command a view of the literature of the world in all ages. And the belief in
life eternal, through the Word made flesh, is nowhere more potent than in many
of those who know all the reaches and “oppositions of science falsely so
called.” (Edward White.)
Some Objections to the
Literal History of the Fall Examined
I. First, as to
the severity of the penalty inflicted upon the violation of the command not to
eat of the tree of knowledge, it must be remembered that morality being founded
in the will of God, whatever He commands or forbids, though in itself perhaps
indifferent, is of indispensable obligation. The injunction, therefore, not to
eat of the fruit of a particular tree was as binding upon the protoplasts as
any moral precept whatsoever, and the infringement of it was an act of
rebellion against the sovereign authority of heaven. Some circumstances also
convict it of more than ordinary criminality. They were then in the keen relish
of new-created existence; the impression of the Almighty’s goodness was still
fresh upon their minds; they, in all likelihood, held familiar converse with
Him; and they well knew that their being, their faculties, their happiness, all
they possessed and enjoyed, as well as all the glories of creation, were
derived from His bounty and goodness. Their disobedience, then, evinced the
blackest ingratitude. The breach of so easy a command as to abstain from one
single tree, when full liberty was given to taste all the other delicious
fruits of paradise, greatly aggravated the offence; and the eating of that
particular tree, which the Almighty had reserved, as it were, holy unto
Himself, was a kind of sacrilege. As all necessary knowledge was communicated,
and all needful aid imparted to them, their transgression was wilful and
presumptuous; it was, in the strong language of Horsley, “nothing less than a
confederacy with the apostate spirit against the sovereign authority of God.”
The motives, likewise, for the commission of the offence, a secret distrust of
the Divine promises, and the diabolical pride of aspiring to be like God,
rendered it a deed of unparalleled atrocity.
II. The curse
pronounced upon the ground, and the consequent sterility of the earth, was a
merciful dispensation even towards Adam, who, having this standing memorial of
his transgression, would be the more earnest in his repentance, and from
experiencing the toils and hardships of life, would be the more resigned to
leave this world when summoned away by death. To his posterity it was an act of
mercy to take away some of the fascinations of a world which was to be only a
temporary sojourn; and by diminishing its allurements, to stimulate their hopes
of a better. The labour required for the attainment of food, and clothing, and
needful comforts, is attended with many beneficial effects; and the earth, with
all its barrenness, weeds, poisons, tempests, and convulsions, is better
adapted to a probationary state for creatures such as we are than if it
revolved in perpetual serenity and brought forth its fruits with spontaneous
fertility.
III. Such being the
case, it were unreasonable to complain of the fallen pair’s dismission from
paradise to a state of labour and toil. It was an act of justice, inasmuch as
they had forfeited all right to the happy bowers of Eden by violating the
Divine command; and of mercy, inasmuch as they were thus brought to a sense of
their destitution and of their dependence upon God, and were taught
experimentally to quit this world without regret. The bloom, and verdure, and
pleasures of paradise might well suit a state of contented innocence; but pain,
and toil, and anxiety are no less befitting fallen creatures, whose appetites
are to be conquered by labour and abstinence, and whose holy aspirations would
die away unless quickened by a train of calamities and sickness. Nor could it
be any longer desirable for the lamenting pair to continue in a place every
object of which would remind them of their seduction and disobedience. In vain
might the feathered songsters carol in the groves; for them the opening flowers
would have no beauty, no fragrance; the fruits would pall upon their appetite;
and, as the charm that springs from conscious innocence was fled, they would
have wandered amidst the sweets of paradise without enjoyment or content.
IV. Why God
suffered Adam to be seduced when such fearful punishment was to be the
consequence is among those secret things which belong to the Lord our God. What
can we know of the Divine counsels, we who are but of yesterday, whose
existence is but a span, and whose utmost intellectual ken can scarcely peep
into the confines of immensity? From all, however, that we can comprehend, from
everything we can observe in the moral and the natural world, we are led to the
belief that the present transitory scene is a part of a stupendous scheme
tending through all its gradations to consummate the counsels of Divine
benignity and love. God could, no doubt, by an exertion of omnipotent power,
have prevented the introduction of evil into the world, but we find He has made
men free agents; He has subjected them to the temptations of sin, to pain, and
to death; and His design in permitting such a state of things, we humbly
believe, is the production of higher degrees of ultimate happiness.
V. This supplies
us with an adequate answer to the question, why the Almighty suffered the devil
to tempt the first pair when He must have foreseen that they would become the
victims of his treachery. It was not in any mutability of His designs, not in
abandonment of the works of His hands, that He granted this permission to the
apostate spirit, but because He had predestinated in His eternal foreknowledge
and decree to bring good out of evil, and to make even the malignity of the
arch-fiend instrumental to His own glory. Man was created free; an easy duty
was enjoined, and the penalty of disobedience laid before him; he had
sufficient power and abilities to stand; it was not, therefore, by an
irresistible necessity that he fell, but by an abuse of his own free agency;
and Satan was permitted to make trial of him, because God, who foresaw the
consequences, foresaw that it would, in the end, be productive of a greater degree
of glory to Himself and of happiness to His creatures. In the same way we may
often account for the often condemned ordination of Providence, by which all
mankind were subjected to condemnation and death for the sin of one man. It is
easy to harangue upon the apparent injustice exercised towards the whole human
race, who thus share in the punishment, though not in the crime. But such is
the course and constitution of nature, where children suffer for the vices of
their parents, and where even a whole nation is oppressed and afflicted by the
errors and wickedness of one individual. That the innocent often suffer through
the crimes of the guilty, and that the dire effects of sin are extended to the
unoffending, are matters of daily experience; and if such circumstances are
reconcilable with the Divine administration, as the Deist must allow, why
should he condemn the appointment by which the penalty of Adam’s transgression
is transmitted to his posterity? Both cases are similar, and both must be
referred to the sovereign will and pleasure of the Deity, who, as we reverently
believe, has for infinitely wise and good reasons established this order of
things, since all His counsels and designs are laid in the immensity of His
benevolence. Some beneficial purposes answered by it our faculties are able to
discover, among which must be numbered its excellent adaptation to a
probationary state and the evidence it supplies of a future existence, where
the irregularities of this will be adjusted, and where all the instances of
terrestrial partiality and injustice will be rectified according to the rules
of inviolable equity. The grand solution, then, is to be sought in the cheering
and consolatory doctrine that all things are working together to produce
ultimate felicity, and that, through the benevolent appointment of God, all
partial evil will finally end in universal good. This may be inferred from the
attribute of transcendent benevolence in the Godhead, as well as from a
contemplation of the Divine love and mercy displayed in the works of creation;
and, aided by the light of Christianity, we are able to point out some of the
benefits arising from the Fall, which, on a superficial view, may appear to be
attended only with fatal and unhappy consequences. And, first, we are placed in
a state of greater security than Adam under the paradisiacal covenant,
notwithstanding the comparative perfection of his nature and the unsullied
purity of his heart. Though the protoplasts had retained their integrity, yet
some of their descendants might, by virtue of their freewill, have fallen from
their righteousness, and introduced sin and death into the world, the
consequence of which would have been irretrievable misery, there being no
covenant to admit transgressors into favour. The atonement, perhaps, might have
been made, though the first offence had not been committed till many centuries
after the creation; but who shall say whether this would have been consonant
with the wisdom of the Divine mind? Or if it had, who shall say whether some
good might not have arisen from the early more than from the late entrance of
sin into the world? On such a subject, however, it is right for the frail
children of the dust to speak with reverential humility. Unbecoming in man is
the presumption of deciding what might have taken place under a different order
of things. Let us rather accept the ransom with grateful hearts, and, while
revering the unbounded benignity of God, let us strive to participate in the
offered pardon by a religious life conducted on the principles of Christian
faith. Secondly, we are capable of attaining greater happiness than if our
first parents bad continued in their integrity. The terrestrial paradise
presents only a faint image of the celestial paradise of God; and it is most
agreeable to infinite mercy to suppose that the loss of the happiness of the
one will be followed by the acquisition of still greater felicity in the other.
And if this transitory life has its pains and its miseries, it has also its
consolations and its hopes; if it be a state of probationary difficulty, it is
alleviated by spiritual aid and cheered by the most glorious promises; if sin
abounds, we know its remedy; and when we err, we know that there is also room
for reconciliation, of which the transgressor could have but a transient hope
under the Adamitical covenant of works. Exulting in the prospect of the
exceeding and eternal weight of glory to be revealed hereafter, when the
ransomed shall come to the celestial Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon
their heads, we are led to believe that the first sin in the garden of Eden was
permitted in mercy to mankind, and to exclaim with an ancient writer, “A happy
Fall; and happy unhappiness which was the occasion of so great happiness!”
Thirdly, the glory of the Divine attributes is more advantageously displayed by
the grand scheme of human redemption through the blood of Christ and
sanctification of the blessed Spirit than it could have been by the
uninterrupted innocence of the first man. The state of paradise gave evidence
to the might, the majesty, and the goodness of the Deity, but if it had
continued unchanged, where would have been the stupendous plan whereby infinite
mercy is exhibited to intelligent beings seated upon the same throne with
infinite justice? There could have been no room for the ways of Providence in
calling, justifying, sanctifying, and glorifying the faithful which now form
the subject of unceasing admiration and gratitude. Such are the consolatory
views of the present, and the enlivening hopes of the future, which we are
taught in the sacred writings to draw from the primeval transgression. Little
as they may avail with the Deist, who objects to revelation in general, they
will be embraced by every Christian with the transports of gratitude and
veneration which a Christian alone can feel. But if we consult the light of
nature only, there is no more difficulty in accounting for God’s permitting the
temptation and fall of Adam than upon any other hypothesis for His permitting
the origin of sin and its miserable attendants which are allowed to exist. All
our reasonings upon the moral government of the world presuppose the existence
of a great Creator; and if we believe Him to be infinitely wise and good, as
may be inferred from a contemplation of His works, we must believe that the
widespread evil is, in some way or other, consistent with infinite wisdom and
goodness. (G. Holden, M. A.)
Another View of the Early
Records of Genesis
It would be the veriest truism to say that the earliest records of
Genesis excel in interest and in religious importance almost all other portions
of the Bible. It is obvious at once that the facts they narrate and the
problems they raise lie at the root, not only of all Old Testament theology,
but still more of all New Testament theology. Take them away, or rather take
away the great truths they teach, and our faith loses its natural foundations;
it becomes a lovely flower without a root, a shining river without a source, a
vast building without a base. So it has been said, and rightly said, that the
whole of the Bible is only the unfolding of Genesis 3:15.
If, however, it is a truism to assert the extreme importance of these records,
it is also a truism to assert their extreme difficulty. God, in His wisdom, has
joined these two things together, so that what the devout Christian most
strongly clings to as inspired is most fiercely assailed as false and
legendary. Nor must we say simply “most fiercely assailed.” It would be an
affectation most unworthy of the “children of light” to deny or to ignore the
fact that the assaults made upon these records in the name of science are to a
large extent unanswered and unanswerable. One of the first things which the new
science of geology established with certainty was the now acknowledged fact
that the world is of great and incalculable age, and was formed and fashioned
through enormous periods of time. This discovery cut up by the root the old and
very natural idea that the world was made in six literal days. The “days,”
accordingly, were lengthened out into “periods” of indefinite duration, and
many schemes were propounded whereby the successive creations of Genesis might
be reconciled with the results of geological research. It is not too much to
say that all these attempts at reconciliation, and the many thoughtful and once
popular books in which they were set forth, have become discredited and out of
date; having in many cases a certain plausibility, they were fatally vitiated
by one or other (or both) of these things: they either strained the text in
order to force it into conformity with the facts, or they manipulated the facts
in order to extort some apparent confirmation of the text. No assignable “six
periods” are known to geology, nor can the order of creation as revealed to
Moses be read into the testimony of the rocks except by an ingenuity which is
as painful to the man of faith as it is unconvincing to the man of science. The
only real result of striving to maintain the geological truth of the first
chapter of Genesis is to empty it of all truth by making it mean anything which
it seems convenient at the moment it should mean. The same conflict, with the
same result, has gone on concerning the Deluge of Noah. Nothing, as Bishop
Wordsworth justly argues, can be more plainly stated than the universality of
that Deluge and the utter destruction of all human and animal life outside the
ark. Yet that universality and that total destruction is as plainly
contradicted by the whole strength of scientific evidence. If anyone fails to
realize the strength of that evidence, let him study briefly the present
distribution of the animal tribes on the earth’s surface. Let him take one
single fact from amongst the multitude, and let him consider that all the
animals in Australia are marsupials, and that these are the only marsupials in
existence, saving a single family in North America. Will he maintain that the
marsupials of Australia really came out of the ark? that the many hundred
ancestors of all their families--widely differing in size, in form, and in
habits--journeyed together across land and sea from Ararat, nowhere settling,
nowhere breeding, until they, and they alone, reached their future home? Will
he maintain the same thing of the Lemuroids of Madagascar? Not to multiply
instances, it is no exaggeration to say that if all the land animals, even of
the three continents, came out of the ark, then there is no science of natural
history, and the distribution of animal life in different lands is not simply
an arbitrary thing without explanation, but is a delusive thing irresistibly
suggesting a false explanation. Probably, therefore, there is not to be found a
single person who has made himself acquainted with natural history who believes
that the present distribution of animal life in the globe was even seriously
affected by the Noachian Deluge. If believed at all, it is regarded as a very
local and partial catastrophe overwhelming possibly the whole tract inhabited
by man, probably only that tract which was inhabited by a particular race of
men. These two cases are examples of those in which the fixed conclusions of
science have compelled us to abandon the apparently plain historical
declarations of those Scriptures which we love and reverence with all our
hearts as the inspired Word of God. There are other cases, in which the
conclusions of science, not at present fixed, nevertheless promise to become so
in a very short time. The evidence of geology in favour of the great antiquity
of man, far beyond any antiquity which can be assigned to Adam and Eve as
historical personages, is already tolerably convincing, and bids fair to become
overwhelming. Similarly the evidence of history and philology is strong in favour
of a far more ancient era of separate languages than any which can be assigned
to the Tower of Babel; and this evidence, too, bids fair to become conclusive.
In either case, a really devout man, who believes that the sober and confirmed
conclusions of science are the indirect teaching of God Himself, must keep the
question open in his own mind, and must be ready to revise, if need be, what
has hitherto been his understanding of the Scriptures. The problem, as it
presents itself to a devout Churchman, is this: Here is a record, apparently
historical, to the inspiration and spiritual truth of which Christ and the
Church and his own soul bear testimony--such testimony as he could not for a
moment set aside. And yet reason, and the course of nature, and the testimony
of the rocks, proclaim aloud that this record is not historically true. What,
then, shall he think? Is there no form of literature which might at once bear
the weight (so to speak) of inspiration, and satisfy at the same time the
required conditions? There is one, and only one; and that one the most ancient
of all the forms into which the thoughts of men ran spontaneously when first
they sought to put their thoughts on record. At the beginning of all histories
stand myths, and those myths are historic in form but (more or less) unhistoric
in substance, Is it lawful to hold that sacred history, like all other history,
which runs its natural course from the first, begins with myths? No doubt it is
at first sight a startling, and even a shocking position. The very word “myth”
has gathered associations around it which jar painfully upon a devout mind in
connection with the Word of God. But this feeling may disappear if we look at
the matter more calmly.
A genuine “myth” is not false, if we imply by “false” any
intention to deceive. The myth is true in its own way, often profoundly true.
Sometimes it embodied a great fact, sometimes a deep yearning, sometimes a
noble aspiration. No one now would throw a national myth away because it is not
historically true; he would treasure it up reverently, he would try to find oat
what it meant to convey; he would not weave it into a prosaic record of actual
events, but he would not value it less highly in its own sphere. This being so,
the question presents itself thus: Is it incredible that the Holy Spirit of God
should adopt the most primitive of the known forms of literature as the vehicle
of His earliest revelations to men? Is it not at least possible, however
strange at first sight, that the Holy Spirit should have employed myths in the
first instance, even as He employed poems, parables, visions, in other places?
If it be in itself not incredible, if it be a possible position for a loyal
Churchman to take up, it is unquestionably a position of enormous strength. In
the first place, it preserves and completes the thorough “naturalness” of the
Bible as to its outward and human element. As the true Divinity of our Lord did
not in the least mar or hinder the development of His perfect humanity, even
from its smallest and humblest beginnings, so the most devout belief in the
inspiration of Holy Scripture need not hinder anyone from recognizing its
entire conformity to the general type of all other literatures. If it should
appear that the earliest inspired documents are myths, then the written Word
would but dimly reflect in its development the humility of the incarnate Word,
who, being God, was yet at one definite time an unborn Babe. In the second
place, such a position is one absolutely unassailable from the side of science.
As things are at present, the believer in inspiration is ever being attacked,
and ever being driven backwards, from one position to another. No sooner has he
taken up, with much difficulty, some new line of defence than this too is
turned and made untenable by some fresh advance of science on one side or other
of the field. But if he can say boldly, “These writings are myths, not
histories,” then all conflict ceases; science and history are left in full and
free possession of the territory which belongs to them, which God has marked
out for them and allotted to them from the beginning; faith and religion are
left in undisturbed sovereignty within their own domain, the domain of moral
and of spiritual truth. In the third place, the theory which regards these
early records as myths, while it does not sacrifice anything that is valuable
in them, does very greatly enlarge their highest value by giving due prominence
to their moral and spiritual truth. It does not sacrifice even their historical
value (as it might easily be accused of doing); for, in saying that such and
such a story is a myth, the critic does not mean for a moment to say that it is
a falsehood or a fiction, or to empty it of historical significance; he only
means to say that it is not to be read as a literal statement of facts. It
would be the extreme of folly to say that there was no element of historic
truth in the first ten chapters of Genesis: unquestionably there is, only that
element is not distinctly assignable; perhaps it will never be exactly fixed,
although it will be approximately fixed by the progress of historical science.
Meanwhile that value of these records, which the Church has ever recognized as
their true value, remains wholly independent of the progress, and even of the existence,
of historical science. Being myths as to their literary form and human origin,
they are parables for all practical intents, and share to the full those
wonderful advantages which have so greatly commended the parable to the use of
the Holy Spirit, and which all men feel instinctively if they cannot express.
The records of Genesis were written, it is certain, not for one age, but for
all--for the uninquiring ages of the past, with their utter ignorance of
everything beyond their own immediate relations to one another and to God; for
the ages of inquiry, present and to come, with their rapidly growing knowledge
of the world, For the past and for the present it was alike needful that those
records should not clash with their ignorance or with our knowledge; neither
anticipating then what God would teach men to find out thereafter, nor limiting
and confusing now what He had led them to discover. Now, in point of fact, no
one can help seeing that this purpose has been answered, to a great extent, by
the peculiar form into which these earliest revelations are thrown, and would
be answered still more completely if they were clearly recognized as myths.
Does it make any difference to the welfare of immortal souls whether the world
was brought into its present form in six days or in countless ages? whether the
race of men appeared upon the globe six thousand years ago or six hundred
thousand? whether the woman was actually made out of one of the man’s ribs or
whether that only typify her derivative and subordinate position? What really
does concern immortal souls is that the moral and spiritual lessons of these
records should be drawn out in the spirit of St. Paul and of the early teachers
of the Church. The story of Adam and Eve was applied by our Lord and by St.
Paul, and ought to be applied by the Church of Christ today, to define the
mutual relation of the sexes and the Divine ideal of marriage. The same story
was used by St. Paul, and ought to be used by the Church today, in order to set
forth what is for us perhaps the most important, and certainly the least
appreciated, of Christian doctrines, the spiritual relation betwixt Christ and
His Church. Yet where do we find this teaching worked out upon the outlines
laid down for us by an inspired apostle? Who ever hears a sermon preached upon
it? Bishop Wordsworth, in his invaluable commentary, has indeed done much, but
much more remains behind. The allegory is carried on, not only in the sleep of
Adam and the opening of his side; not only in the name he gave his bride and
the words he used of her; but also in the sentences which God pronounced upon
them after the Fall. “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire
shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,” is, of course, a
sentence fulfilled in the case of women in general, although not now as a
curse. But it is in a much deeper and truer sense fulfilled in the Church of
Christ. “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children” is the very law of her
spiritual fruitfulness, a law which must always, and under all advantages, hold
good, however much she may think to escape it. Without pain and conflict and
distress, and even agony, she will never get to herself spiritual children. The
calm serenity in which mere schools of thought may thrive can never be for her,
unless it be to die in. Who does not hear, as he thinks upon this deep saying,
the sad voice of the great apostle complaining, “My little children of whom I
travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you”? It was in, the nature of
things that he should suffer the birth-pangs once in the travail of their first
conversion; but it was hard, very hard, that he should have to go through the
same distress again for them. “And thy desire shall be to thy husband”; of
course it is, and this desire is that he should rule over her absolutely and
without any hindrance or cessation. But there may be noted in this word
“desire” an element of pain, which comes out most strongly and affectingly in
the hymns and prayers which are the voice of the Bride; it is a yearning
desire, a longing desire, in which there is much of unsatisfied and a little of
afraid; it is the destiny of the Bride now to long for the Bridegroom with a
sense of weariness at His long delay, of faintness because He cometh not, almost
of dread lest, coming, He be not wholly pleased with her. All this, and much
more, which is so profoundly evangelical, is in the sentence on the woman; for
it springs from the great conflict between the sin of earth and the love of
heaven. Again, the sentence on the man only finds its real significance when
understood of the Second Adam. Because He hearkened to the voice of His wife,
of the Church which He foreknew; because He listened to the cry of His own in
many lands, in many tongues, “O come, O come, Emmanuel”; therefore He came, and
was made man, and did eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and
got to know all physical evil as well as good by way of experience; and all
moral evil, too, as well as good, by way of temptation and of constant
struggle. And therefore, because He had laid Himself open to all this, was the
ground cursed for His sake, and in sorrow did He eat of it all the days of His
life. Thorns also and thistles did it bring forth to Him, all that could annoy
and vex His gentle soul; and thorns, too, in literal truth, wherewith to crown
His head. Much more there is in the same passage, but this may suffice as one
instance, out of so many, of the marvellous wealth of these sacred myths in
moral and spiritual teaching. This great treasure would be available, far more
than it is now, if these records were boldly treated as allegories, if the
reader and the preacher were not hampered and perplexed by having to ask and
answer (if he can) a thousand useless questions, as to whether Adam and Eve
were really the ancestors of the whole human race; as to whether the Euphrates
and the Nile ever really flowed from one source; as to whether all existing
tongues were really separated from the Hebrew less than three thousand years
before Christ. Again the question presses us--May a loyal Churchman hold and
teach that these records are myths, inspired indeed, but not strictly historic?
In all fairness it must be conceded that the objections to such a solution are
serious and weighty. Many who do not feel the difficulties of the present
position very keenly will deem these objections fatal. In the first place, it
will be said by many that the myth is not such a form of literature as could
become the vehicle of Divine teachings. As no one was responsible for the myth,
as it could not be traced to any definite source, so no one could have been
inspired to indite it, and therefore it could not itself be inspired in any
intelligible way. It is, however, sufficiently certain and allowed that many of
the proverbs and sayings which go by the name of Solomon’s were drawn from
common life; they must have been current among the “wise,” and done duty in
expressing the common sense and feeling of men long before they were caught up
(so to speak) by the Holy Ghost, and set in the firmament of Scripture. There
is also many a fragment of national song and of popular lore in the historical
books. That must surely be an unduly narrow view of inspiration which would
exclude the spontaneous products of the national mind, the anonymous poetry,
the deep sayings, which form so large and so true a part of the literature of
an archaic age. It may not be possible to say how such can be inspired, but
neither is it necessary: the inspiration of the written Word, like the incarnation
of the personal Word, passes all human definition. In the second place, it will
be put forth as an unanswerable objection by many that to acknowledge anything
mythical in the beginning of Scripture is to introduce such an element of
vagueness and mistiness as will destroy the value of all the rest; “For where,”
they will say, “are you to stop? If the story of the Tower of Babel appear a
myth to one, why not the story of Jacob and Esau to another, and the story of
the Exodus to a third?” Unquestionably it is of the nature of myths to slide
insensibly into history, so that it is mostly impossible to draw the precise
line between them. But the practical difficulty which ensues may easily be
exaggerated. The narrative, which is obviously mythical to begin with, becomes
obviously historical as it goes on, and is accepted without reserve as history.
Most of the reigning families of Europe are descended from divine beings
through lists of ancestors half-historical, half-mythical. Does any real or
considerable confusion result from that? In the third place, it will be urged
(and this is no doubt the gravest objection) that the mythical theory is
already a deadly weapon in the hands of unbelief. If myths are possible in the
Old Testament, can we say that they are impossible in the New? May not the
Resurrection itself be a myth, as many have taught, and teach now? It may, of
course, be called a myth, but it would not and could not be a myth in the same
sense in which the story of paradise is a myth; it could only be a myth in that
corrupt sense of the word in which it is a euphemism for a lie, If we read, in
some fragment of primitive tradition, that such and such a hero was the
grandson of Wodin, we rightly call it a myth; if a special correspondent
telegraphs that such and such a general has gained a splendid victory, because
he wished him to gain the victory: we rightly call it a disgraceful falsehood.
There is no real similarity between them, although both may be called (in
different senses) mythical. No one would use any harder word than “unhistoric”
of the legend of St. George and the Dragon, because it was simply an
atmospheric myth turned into a Christian allegory. A reported fight between a
dwarf and a dog, which never happened, was rightly spoken of in very different
language. It is unhappily true that the mythical theory has been carried into
the New Testament, where it has no sort of place, and therefore it is an object
of very natural suspicion in the beginning of Genesis, where it is in exact
accordance with the conditions of the age. But it should be remembered why it
has been carried into the New Testament, and with what result, in order to see
whether there be any similarity whatever in the two cases. The Resurrection has
been resolved into a myth on the simple a priori ground that miracles
are incredible, and on no other. The whole character of the narrative, of the
men, of the age, is dead against it; a mythical resurrection, tacked on to an
actual crucifixion, is a monstrosity which does violence to human intelligence
in general, and to all the conditions of the special case in particular. The
earliest records of Genesis are recognized as myths, in accordance with their
apparent character and the genius of their age, on the plain a posteriori ground
that science has demonstrated what internal evidence suggested, that they are
not historical. Again, if the Resurrection be a myth, then our hope is vain,
and we are, of all men, most miserable; if the story of the Fall be a myth, it
does not lose one particle of its moral and spiritual value, and none is any
the worse. What is there in common between a criticism which destroys the
gospel and Christianity itself, and a criticism which removes certain early
records from one literary category to another? Lastly, it will be urged that
our Lord and His apostles continually quote these stories as if they were
histories. Most assuredly, and the parables of our Lord Himself are quoted
every day in a thousand pulpits exactly as if they were veritable histories.
Those who now believe that the early records of Genesis are myths,
scientifically and historically considered, have no more hesitation in talking
about Adam and Eve, Enoch and Noah, than they had before, or than they have now
in talking about the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. In order to justify
the use made of parables from the New Testament, or of myths from the Old, it
is not in either case necessary to assume that they are historically true; it
is only necessary to assume that they are inspired, and are therefore warranted
by the Holy Ghost to be true for all moral and spiritual purposes. They are in
the Bible, and that is enough for the loyal Churchman. The Bible is the Word of
God, and as long as he uses any part of it for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness, he knows he is perfectly safe. If
he go further, and imagine that the holy writings were given either to
anticipate or to contradict the discoveries of natural and historical science in
their own proper field, he is assuredly deceived. (R. Winterbotham, M. A.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》