In the speeches put into the mouth of Solomon in 1 Kings, in which reference is made to "statutes and commandments spoken by Jehovah by the hand of Moses," there is abundant evidence that their composition must be assigned to a much later date. They are full of references to the captivity in a foreign land and return from exile (1 Kings viii. 46—53, and ix. 6—9). Similar references to the Exile are found throughout the Book of Kings, and even in Books of the Pentateuch which profess to be written by Moses. If such a code of sacred writings had been in existence in the time of Josiah, instead of rending his clothes in dismay when Shaphan brought him the Book of the Law found by Hilkiah, he would have said, "Why this is only a different version of what we know already."
On the whole the evidence points to this conclusion. The idea of a one Supreme God who was a Spirit, while all other gods were mere idols made by men's hands; who created and ruled all things in heaven and earth; and who loved justice and mercy rather than the blood of rams and bullocks, was slowly evolved from the crude conceptions of a jealous, vindictive, and cruel anthropomorphic local god, by the prophets and best minds of Israel after it had settled down under the Monarchy into a civilized and cultured state. It appears for the first time distinctly in Isaiah and Amos, and was never popular with the majority of the kings and upper classes, or with the mass of the nation until the Exile, but it gradually gained ground during the calamities of the later days, when Assyrian armies were threatening destruction. A strong opposition arose in the later reigns between the aristocracy, who looked on the situation from a political point of view and trusted to armies and alliances, and what may be called the pietist or evangelical party of the prophets, who took a purely religious view of matters, and considered the misfortunes of the country as a consequence of its sins, to be averted only by repentance and Divine interposition.
It was a natural, and under the circumstances of the age and country quite a justifiable proceeding on the part of the prophetic school to endeavour to stamp their views with Divine authority, and recommend them for acceptance as coming from Moses, the traditional deliverer of Israel from Egypt. For this purpose no doubt numerous materials existed in the form of legends, traditions, customs, and old records, and very probably some of those had been collected and reduced to writing, like the Sagas of the old Norsemen, though without any idea of collecting them into a sacred volume.
The first attempt in this direction was made in the reign of Josiah, and it had only a partial success, as we find the nation "doing evil in the sight of the Lord," that is, relapsing into the old idolatrous practices, in the reigns of his three next successors, Jehoiachin, Jehoiachim, and Zedechiah. But the crowning calamity of the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and the seventy years' exile, seems to have crushed out the old aristocratic and national party, and converted all the leading minds among the Jews of the Captivity, including the priests, to the prophetical view that the essence of the question was the religious one, and that the only hope for the future lay in repentance for sins and drawing closer to the worship of Jehovah and the Covenant between him and his chosen people. Prophets disappear from this period because priests, scribes, and rulers had adopted their views, and there was no longer room for itinerant and unofficial missionaries. Under such circumstances the religion, after the return from the Exile, crystallized rapidly into definite forms. Creeds, rituals, and sacred books were multiplied down to the third century b.c. or later, when the canon was closed with the Books of Chronicles and Daniel and the later Psalms, and the era began of commentaries on the text of a Koran or Bible, every word of which was held to be infallibly inspired.
The different crystals in solution have now united into one large crystal of fixed form, and henceforward we are in the full age of Talmudism and Pharisaism.
It is not to be supposed, however, that the books which thus came to be considered sacred were the inventions of priests and scribes of this later age. Doubtless they were based to a great extent on old traditions, legends, and written annals and records, compiled perhaps in the reigns of Solomon and his successors, but based themselves on still older materials. The very crudeness of many of the representations, and the barbarism of manners, point to an early origin. It is impossible to conceive any contemporary of Isaiah, or of the cultured court of Solomon, describing the Almighty ruler of the universe as showing his hinder part to Moses, or sewing skins to clothe Adam and Eve; and the conception of a jealous and vindictive Jehovah who commanded the indiscriminate massacre of prisoners of war, women and children, must be far removed from that of a God who loved justice and mercy. These crude, impossible, and immoral representations must have existed in the form of Sagas during the early and semi-barbarous stage of the people of Israel, and become so rooted in the popular mind that they could not be neglected when authors of later ages came to fix the old traditions in writing, and religious reformers to use them in endeavouring to enforce higher views and a purer morality. It is from this jungle of old legends and traditions, written and re-written, edited and re-edited, many times over, to suit the ideas of various stages of advancing civilization, that we have to pick out as we best can what is really historical, prior to the foundation of the Monarchy, from which time downwards we doubtless have more or less authentic annals, and meet with confirmations from Egyptian and Assyrian history.
The first figure which arrests our attention in the Old Testament as possibly historical, is that of Abraham. Prior to him everything is plainly myth and legend. We have two accounts of the creation of the universe and of man in Genesis, contradictory with one another, and each hopelessly inconsistent with the best established conclusions of astronomy, geology, ethnology, and other sciences. Then follow ten antediluvian patriarchs, who live on the average 847 years each, and correspond manifestly with the ten reigns of gods or demi-gods in the Chaldæan mythology; while side by side with this genealogy is a fragment of one which is entirely different, mentioning seven only of the ten patriarchs, and tracing the descent of Enoch and Noah from Adam through Cain instead of through Seth.
Then comes the Deluge with all the flagrant impossibilities which have been pointed out in a preceding chapter; the building of the Tower of Babel, with the dispersion of mankind and confusion of languages, equally opposed to the most certain conclusions of history, ethnology, and philology. The descent from Noah to Abraham is then traced through ten other patriarchs, whose ages average 394 years each, and similar genealogies are given for the descendants of the other two sons of Noah, Ham and Japheth. It is evident that these genealogies are not history but ethnology, and that of a very rude and primitive description, by a writer with imperfect knowledge and a limited range of vision. A great majority of the primitive races of the world, such as the Negroes and the Mongolians, are omitted altogether, and Semitic Canaan is coupled with Turanian Hittite as a descendant not of Shem but of Ham. It is unnecessary to go into details, for when we find such an instance as that Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, it is evident that this does not mean that two such men really lived, but is an Oriental way of stating that the Phœnicians were of the same race as the Canaanites, and that Sidon was their earliest sea-port on the shore of the Mediterranean.
The whole of this Biblical literature prior to Abraham is clearly myth and legend, and not history; and whoever will compare it dispassionately with the much older Chaldæan myths and legends known to us from Berosus and the tablets, can hardly doubt that it is taken mainly from this source, revised at a later date, in a monotheistic sense. Whole passages are simply altered by writing "God" for "gods," and pruning off or toning down grotesque and revolting incidents. To give a single instance, where the Chaldæan solar epic of Izdubar, in the chapter on the passage of the sun through the rainy sign of Aquarius, which describes the Deluge, says that "the gods smelt the sweet savour of the sacrifice offered by Hasisadra on emerging from the ark, and flocked like flies about the altar," Genesis says simply that "the Lord smelled a sweet savour"; and where the mixture of a divine and animal nature in man is symbolized in the Chaldæan legend by Bel cutting off his own head and kneading the clay with the blood into the first man, the Jehovist narrative in Genesis ii. says, that "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." But when we arrive at Abraham we feel as if we might be treading on really historical ground. There is the universal tradition of the Hebrew race that he was their ancestor, and his figure is very like what in the unchanging East may be met with to the present day. We seem to see the dignified sheik sitting at the door of his tent dispensing hospitality, raiding with his retainers on the rear of a retreating army and capturing booty, and much exercised by domestic difficulties between the women of his household. Surely this is an historical figure. But when we look closer, doubts and difficulties appear. In the first place the name "Abram" suggests that of an eponymous ancestor, like Shem for the Semites, or Canaan for the Canaanites. Abram, Sayce tells us, is the Babylonian Abu-ramer or "exalted father," a name much more likely to be given to a mythical ancestor than to an actual man. This is rendered more probable by the fact that, as we have already seen, the genealogy of Abraham traced upwards consists mainly of eponyms: while those which radiate from him downwards are of the same character. Thus two of his sons by Keturah are Jokshan and Midian; and Sheba, Dedan, and Assurim are among his descendants. Again, Abraham is said to have lived for 175 years, and to have had a son by Sarah when she was ninety-nine and he one hundred; and a large family by Keturah, whom he married after Sarah's death. Figures such as these are a sure test that legend has taken the place of authentic history.
Another circumstance which tells strongly against the historical character of Abraham is his connection with Lot, and the legend of Lot's wife. The history of this legend is a curious one. For many centuries, in fact down to quite modern times, the volcanic phenomena of the Dead Sea were appealed to as convincing confirmations of the account in Genesis of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, and hundreds of pious pilgrims saw, touched, and tasted the identical pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed. It is now certain that the volcanic eruptions were of an earlier geological age, and that the story of Lot's wife is owing to the disintegration of a stratum of salt marl, which weathers away under the action of wind and rain into columnar masses, like those described by Lyell in a similar formation in Catalonia. Innumerable travellers and pilgrims from early Christian times down to the seventeenth century returned from Palestine testifying that they had seen Lot's wife, and this was appealed to by theologians as a convincing proof of the truth of the Scripture narrative. Some saw her big, some little, some upright, and some prostrate, according to the state of disintegration of the pillars pointed out by the guides, which change their form rapidly under the influence of the weather, but no doubt was entertained as to the attestation of the miracle. It turns out, however, to be one of those geological myths of precisely the same nature as that which attributed the Devil's Dyke near Brighton to an arrested attempt of the Evil One to cut a trench through the South Downs, so as to let in the sea and drown the Weald. The episode of Lot and his daughters is also clearly a myth to account for the aversion of the Hebrews to races so closely akin to them as the Moabites and Ammonites, and it could hardly have originated until after the date of the Book of Ruth, which shows no trace of such a racial aversion.