The sincerity of the Jews.—They preserve with faithfulness and zeal the book in which Moses declares that they have been all their life ungrateful to God, and that he knows they will be still more so after his death; that he therefore calls heaven and earth to witness against them, and that he has taught them enough.
He declares that finally God, being angry with them, would scatter them among all the nations of the earth, that as they have angered him, in worshipping gods who were not their God, so he will provoke them by calling a people which is not his people, and wills that all his words shall be eternally preserved, and that his book shall be placed in the Ark of the Covenant to serve for ever as a witness against them.
Isaiah says the same thing, xxx. 8.
However, they have kept at the cost of their life this very book which dishonours them in so many ways. This is a sincerity which has no example in the world, and no root in nature.
Every history which is not contemporaneous is open to suspicion, thus the books of the Sibyls and Trismegistus and so many others which have been credited by the world are false, and found to be false in course of time. It is not so with contemporaneous authors.
There is a great difference between a book written by a private man, and dispersed among a whole people, and a book which itself creates a people. We cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people.
The sincerity of the Jews.
Defective and final letters.
Sincere against their honour, and dying in its defence; this has no example in the world's history, and no root in nature.
They are visibly a people expressly formed to serve as witnesses to the Messiah, Isaiah xliii. 9; xliv. 8, they bear the books, and love them while they understand them not. And all this was foretold, that God's judgments might be entrusted to them, but as a sealed book.