Side by side with materials derived from written sources, the book of Genesis contains narratives which, at all events in the first instance, must have resembled the traditions and poems orally recited in Arab lands, and commemorating the heroes and forefathers of the tribe. Thus there are two Abrahams; the one an Abraham who has been born in one of the centres of Babylonian civilisation, who is the ally of Amorite chieftains, whose armed followers overthrow the rearguard of the Elamite army, and whom the Hittites of Hebron address as ‘a mighty prince’; the other is an Abraham of the Bedâwin camp-fire, a nomad whose habits are those of the rude independence of the desert, whose wife kneads the bread while he himself kills the calf with which his guests are entertained. It is true that in actual Oriental life the simplicity of the desert and the wealth and culture of the town may be found combined in the same person; that in modern Egypt Arab shêkhs may still be met with who thus live like wild Bedâwin during one part of the year, and as rich and civilised townsmen during another part of it; while in the last century a considerable portion of Upper Egypt was governed by Bedâwin emirs, who realised in their own persons that curious duality of life and manners which to us Westerns appears so strange. But it is also true that the spirit and tone of the narratives in Genesis differ along with the character ascribed in them to the patriarch: we find in them not only the difference between the guest of the Egyptian Pharaoh and the entertainer of the angels, but also a difference in the point of view. The one speaks to us of literary culture, the other of the simple circle of wandering shepherds to whose limited experience the story-teller has to appeal. The story may be founded on fact; it may be substantially true; but it has been coloured by the surroundings in which it has grown up, and archæological proof of its historical character can never be forthcoming. At most, it can be shown to be true to the time and place in which its scene is laid, and so contains nothing which is inconsistent with known facts.
Such, then, are the main results of the application of the archæological test to the books of the Pentateuch. The philological theory, with its minute and mathematically exact analysis, is brushed aside; it is as little in harmony with archæology as it is with common sense. The Pentateuch substantially belongs to the Mosaic age, and may therefore be accepted as, in the bulk, the work of Moses himself. But it is a composite work, embodying materials of various kinds. Some of these are written documents, descriptive of contemporaneous events, or recording the cosmological beliefs of ancient Babylonia; others have been derived from the unwritten traditions of nomad tribes. The work has passed through many editions; it is full of interpolations, lengthy and otherwise; and it has probably received its final shape at the hands of Ezra. But in order to discover the interpolations, or to determine the written documents that have been used, we must have recourse to the historical method and the facts of archæology. Apart from these we cannot advance a step in safety. The archæological evidence, however, is already sufficient for the presumption that, where it fails us, the text is nevertheless ancient, and the narrative historical—a presumption, it will be noticed, the exact contrary of that in which the Hexateuchal theory has landed its disciples.
But, these same disciples will urge, what becomes of those three strata of legislation which we have so successfully disentangled one from the other in the Hexateuch, and have shown to belong to three separate and mutually exclusive periods of Israelitish history? Has not literary criticism proved that no reconciliation is possible between the enactments and point of view of the Book of the Covenant on the one side, and those of the Deuteronomist on the other, or between the legislation of the Deuteronomist and that of the Priestly Code? The altar of earth or rough-hewn stones, which may be built on any high place, makes way for the altar of the temple at Jerusalem, and this again for the ideal altar of the tabernacle in the wilderness. One sanctuary takes the place of many; the priesthood is confined first to the tribe of Levi, and then more especially to the sons of Aaron; while the simple feasts of harvest rejoicing, which were celebrated by early Israel in common with its neighbours, are replaced by sacrifices for sin and solemn festivals like the Day of Atonement.
It is strange that these inconsistencies were left to European scholars of the nineteenth century to discover, and that neither the contemporaries of Ezra, who allowed themselves to be bound to the yoke of a law which they believed to be divine, nor the Samaritan rivals of the Jews, should have ever perceived them. The fact seems to the historian to throw some doubt on their real existence, and he can leave them to the tender mercies of Dr. Baxter, who has met the literary critics on their own ground, and seriously damaged their house of cards.[[140]] The historian can have nothing to do with a theory which not only requires the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament to be rewritten in accordance with it, but also declares at once every passage which tells against it to be a gloss and interpolation. History, like science, is not built on subjective judgments.
At the same time, there is an element of truth in the work of the ‘literary analysis.’ Years of labour on the part of able and learned scholars cannot be absolutely without result, even though the labourers may have been led astray by the will-o’-the-wisp of a false theory and have followed a wrong line of research. The minute examination to which they have subjected the text has revealed much that had never before been suspected; and they have made it clear that the historical books of the Old Testament are compilations, not free, moreover, from later interpolations, even though we cannot share the confidence with which they separate and distinguish the different elements. They have made it impossible ever to return to the old conception of the Hebrew Scriptures and the old method of treating Hebrew history. Where they have been successful has been on the negative rather than on the reconstructive side. For reconstruction, the scientific instrument of comparison was wanted, and this the literary analysts did not possess.
The Old Testament books themselves make no secret of the fact that they are compilations. The books of the Kings name the sources from which a large part of them has been drawn, and the books of Samuel (2 Sam. i. 18) quote David’s ‘Song of the Bow’ from the book of Jasher. The same work is referred to in the book of Joshua (x. 13), and in Numbers (xxi. 14) we have an extract from the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord. Old poems are introduced into the text, like the Song of Deborah or the Blessing of Jacob; even an Amorite song of triumph is cited in Numbers xxi. 27-30. The so-called ‘Book of the Covenant’ of the literary critics takes its name from a real ‘book of the covenant’ in which the first legislation promulgated at Sinai was written down by Moses, according to Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, and read by him ‘in the audience of the people;’ while the Song of Deborah expressly states that the forces of Zebulun, which took part in the war against Sisera, were accompanied by scribes, like the armies of Egypt or Assyria.
That Moses could not have written the account of his own death was discovered even by the Jewish rabbis; and references to the ‘Book of the Covenant’ and the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ prove that the Pentateuch in its present form has not come down to us from the Mosaic age. The materials may be Mosaic; it may thus be substantially the work of the great Hebrew lawgiver, but the actual work itself is of later date.
How far may we trust the accuracy of the traditional Hebrew text? Modern criticism has been inclined to pronounce the text corrupt, not unfrequently because the critic himself cannot understand it, and to deal pretty freely in conjectural emendations. The Greek text of the Septuagint is invoked against it, and undue weight is often given to its variant readings or omissions, as, for instance, in the case of the history of Saul. Doubtless the Septuagint text is of great value; it goes back to a period centuries older than the oldest Hebrew MS. that has survived to us; but it was made by Jews of Alexandria, whose knowledge of the sacred language of their nation was not always complete or exact. The recent discovery of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus has gone far to shake our confidence in the readings of the Septuagint, as a comparison of it with the Greek translation made only two generations later has shown that passages are omitted in the latter, through simple carelessness, or perhaps inability to understand them. The discovery has also not been in favour of the emendations of literary and philological criticism, not one of the many attempts made to restore the lost Hebrew original having turned out to be correct.[[141]]
On the other hand, a comparison of the Hebrew Scriptures with the clay books of Assyria is on the side of accuracy in the text. The scribes employed in the libraries of Assyria, and presumably, therefore, in the older libraries of Babylonia, were scrupulously exact in their copies of earlier texts. Where the tablet which they copied was injured and defective, it was stated to be so, and the scribe made no attempt to fill up by conjecture, however obvious, what was missing in the document before him. He even was careful to note whether the fracture was recent or not. Where, again, he was not certain about the Assyrian equivalent of a Babylonian character of unusual form, he gave alternative representatives of it, or else reproduced the questionable character itself. Perhaps the most striking example of the textual honesty of the Assyrian and Babylonian scribes is, however, to be found in a compilation known as the Babylonian Chronicle—a chronological abstract in which the history of Babylonia is given from a strictly Babylonian point of view. Here the author candidly confesses that he does ‘not know’ the year when the decisive battle of Khalulê took place, which laid Babylon at the feet of Sennacherib; his materials for settling the matter failed him, and, unlike the modern Hexateuchal critics, he abstained from conjecture. We are more fortunate than he was; for, as we possess the annals of Sennacherib, in which the Assyrian king gives a highly-coloured account of the battle, we are able to determine its date.
In the later days of the Jewish monarchy there was a library at Jerusalem similar to those of Assyria and Babylonia, and we hear of the scribes belonging to it in the days of Hezekiah re-editing the Proverbs of Solomon (Prov. xxv. 1). There are indications that they were as careful and honest in their work as the scribes of Assyria whose example they probably followed. Thus the names of Chedor-laomer and his allies are preserved with singular correctness, as well as the forms of two geographical names which seem to imply translation from a cuneiform original.[[142]] So, again, the Aramaic inscriptions of a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III. found at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, show that in one case at least the spelling which we find in the books of Kings has remained unchanged since the eighth century B.C. As in the books of Kings, so at Sinjerli, the Assyrian name Tukulti-Pal-Esarra is incorrectly written Tiglath-pileser, with g instead of k, and even the country over which he ruled is in both cases written plene (with the symbol of the vowel u). On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are many clear and unmistakable corruptions of the text. In the fourteenth chapter of Genesis itself the name of the city Larsa has been transformed into Ellasar;[[143]] elsewhere glosses have been received into the text, while there are whole passages which are either ungrammatical or unmeaning as they now stand. Ancient authors, whether Hebrew or otherwise, did not write nonsense; and if the natural rendering of a passage does not make sense, we may feel quite sure that it is corrupt.