Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 43-49—“The Deuteronomic law was so short that Shaphan could read it aloud before the king (2 K. 22:10) and the king could read ‘the whole of it’before the people (23:2); compare the reading of the Pentateuch for a whole week (Neh. 8:2-18). It was in the form of a covenant; it was distinguished by curses; it was an expansion and modification, fully within the legitimate province of the prophet, of a Torah of Moses codified from the traditional form of at least a century before. Such a Torah existed, was attributed to Moses, and is now incorporated as ‘the book of the covenant’ in Exodus 20 to 24. The year 620 is therefore the terminus a quo of Deuteronomy. The date of the priestly code is 444 B. C.” Sanday, Bampton Lectures for 1893, grants “(1) the presence in the Pentateuch of a considerable element which in its present shape is held by many to be not earlier than the captivity; (2) the composition of the book of Deuteronomy, not long, or at least not very long, before its promulgation by king Josiah in the year 621, which thus becomes a pivot-date in the history of Hebrew literature.”
(g) From references in the prophets Hosea (B. C. 743-737) and Amos (759-745) to a course of divine teaching and revelation extending far back of their day.
Hosea 8:12—“I wrote for him the ten thousand things of my law”; here is asserted the existence prior to the time of the prophet, not only of a law, but of a written law. All critics admit the book of Hosea to be a genuine production of the prophet, dating from the eighth century B. C.; see Green, in Presb. Rev., 1886:585-608. Amos 2:4—“they have rejected the law of Jehovah, and have not kept his statutes”; here is proof that, more than a century before the finding of Deuteronomy in the temple, Israel was acquainted with God's law. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 26, 27—“The lofty plane reached by the prophets was not reached at a single bound.... There must have been a tap-root extending far down into the earth.” Kurtz remarks that “the later books of the O. T. would be a tree without roots, if the composition of the Pentateuch were transferred to a later period of Hebrew history.” If we substitute for the word “Pentateuch” the words “Book of the covenant,” we may assent to this dictum of Kurtz. There is sufficient evidence that, before the times of Hosea and Amos, Israel possessed a written law—the law embraced in Exodus 20-24—but the Pentateuch as we now have it, including Leviticus, seems to date no further back than the time of Jeremiah, 445 B. C. The Levitical law however was only the codification of statutes and customs whose origin lay far back in the past and which were believed to be only the natural expansion of the principles of Mosaic legislation.
Leathes, Structure of O. T., 54—“Zeal for the restoration of the temple after the exile implied that it had long before been the centre of the national polity, that there had been a ritual and a law before the exile.” Present Day Tracts, 3:52—Levitical [pg 169]institutions could not have been first established by David. It is inconceivable that he “could have taken a whole tribe, and no trace remain of so revolutionary a measure as the dispossessing them of their property to make them ministers of religion.” James Robertson, Early History of Israel: “The varied literature of 850-750 B. C. implies the existence of reading and writing for some time before. Amos and Hosea hold, for the period succeeding Moses, the same scheme of history which modern critics pronounce late and unhistorical. The eighth century B. C. was a time of broad historic day, when Israel had a definite account to give of itself and of its history. The critics appeal to the prophets, but they reject the prophets when these tell us that other teachers taught the same truth before them, and when they declare that their nation had been taught a better religion and had declined from it, in other words, that there had been law long before their day. The kings did not give law. The priests presupposed it. There must have been a formal system of law much earlier than the critics admit, and also an earlier reference in their worship to the great events which made them a separate people.” And Dillman goes yet further back and declares that the entire work of Moses presupposes “a preparatory stage of higher religion in Abraham.”
(h) From the repeated assertions of Scripture that Moses himself wrote a law for his people, confirmed as these are by evidence of literary and legislative activity in other nations far antedating his time.
Ex. 24:4—“And Moses wrote all the words of Jehovah”; 34:27—“And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel”; Num. 33:2—“And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of Jehovah”; Deut. 31:9—“And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, and unto all the elders of Israel”; 22—“So Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel”; 24-26—“And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of Jehovah your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee.” The law here mentioned may possibly be only “the book of the covenant”(Ex. 20-24), and the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy may have been orally handed down. But the fact that Moses was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), together with the fact that the art of writing was known in Egypt for many hundred years before his time, make it more probable that a larger portion of the Pentateuch was of his own composition.
Kenyon, in Hastings' Dict., art.: Writing, dates the Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, the first recorded literary composition in Egypt, at 3580-3536 B. C., and asserts the free use of writing among the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia as early as 4000 B. C. The statutes of Hammurabi king of Babylon compare for extent with those of Leviticus, yet they date back to the time of Abraham, 2200 B. C.,—indeed Hammurabi is now regarded by many as the Amraphel of Gen. 14:1. Yet these statutes antedate Moses by 700 years. It is interesting to observe that Hammurabi professes to have received his statutes directly from the Sun-god of Sippar, his capital city. See translation by Winckler, in Der alte Orient, 97; Johns, The Oldest Code of Laws; Kelso, in Princeton Theol. Rev., July, 1905:399-412—Facts “authenticate the traditional date of the Book of the Covenant, overthrow the formula Prophets and Law, restore the old order Law and Prophets, and put into historical perspective the tradition that Moses was the author of the Sinaitic legislation.”
As the controversy with regard to the genuineness of the Old Testament books has turned of late upon the claims of the Higher Criticism in general, and upon the claims of the Pentateuch in particular, we subjoin separate notes upon these subjects.
The Higher Criticism in general. Higher Criticism does not mean criticism in any invidious sense, any more than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was an unfavorable or destructive examination. It is merely a dispassionate investigation of the authorship, date and purpose of Scripture books, in the light of their composition, style and internal characteristics. As the Lower Criticism is a text-critique, the Higher Criticism is a structure-critique. A bright Frenchman described a literary critic as one who rips open the doll to get at the sawdust there is in it. This can be done with a sceptical and hostile spirit, and there can be little doubt that some of the higher critics of the Old Testament have begun their studies with prepossessions against the supernatural, [pg 170]which have vitiated all their conclusions. These presuppositions are often unconscious, but none the less influential. When Bishop Colenso examined the Pentateuch and Joshua, he disclaimed any intention of assailing the miraculous narratives as such; as if he had said: “My dear little fish, you need not fear me; I do not wish to catch you; I only intend to drain the pond in which you live.” To many scholars the waters at present seem very low in the Hexateuch and indeed throughout the whole Old Testament.
Shakespeare made over and incorporated many old Chronicles of Plutarch and Holinshed, and many Italian tales and early tragedies of other writers; but Pericles and Titus Andronicus still pass current under the name of Shakespeare. We speak even now of “Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar,” although of its twenty-seven editions the last fourteen have been published since his death, and more of it has been written by other editors than Gesenius ever wrote himself. We speak of “Webster's Dictionary,”though there are in the “Unabridged” thousands of words and definitions that Webster never saw. Francis Brown: “A modern writer masters older records and writes a wholly new book. Not so with eastern historians. The latest comer, as Renan says, ‘absorbs his predecessors without assimilating them, so that the most recent has in its belly the fragments of the previous works in a raw state.’ The Diatessaron of Tatian is a parallel to the composite structure of the O. T. books. One passage yields the following: Mat. 21:12a; John 2:14a; Mat. 21:12b; John 2:14b, 15; Mat. 21:12c, 13; John 2:16; Mark 11:16; John 2:17-22; all succeeding each other without a break.” Gore, Lux Mundi, 353—“There is nothing materially untruthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing the whole legislation to Moses acting under the divine command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution of the collection of Psalms to David, and of Proverbs to Solomon.”