Who Wrote the Bible? : a Book for the People

by Washington Gladden

"But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth that is to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.... And he shall stand and shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide; for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth."

Thus slowly broadens the dawn of the Messianic hope.

The first part of the fourth chapter of Micah, which is a prediction of the glory that shall come to Zion in the latter day, is verbally identical with the first part of the second chapter of Isaiah. One of the prophets must have quoted from the other or else, as Dr. Geikie suggests, both copied from some older prophet.

After Micah comes the greatest of the prophets, Isaiah. He appeared upon the scene in his native city of Jerusalem about the middle of the eighth century before Christ. His work was mainly done during the reigns of Ahaz, "the Grasper," one of the vilest and most ungodly of the Judean monarchs, and of Hezekiah, the good king, about a century and a half before the destruction of Jerusalem.

About this time Judea was constantly exposed to the rapacity of the great Assyrian power before whose armies she finally fell; sometimes her rulers entered into coalitions with the surrounding nations to resist the Assyrian; sometimes they submitted and paid heavy tribute. Egypt, on the south, was also a mighty empire at this time, constantly at war with Assyria; and the kings of Judah sometimes sought alliances with one of these great powers, as a means of protection against the other. They proved to be the upper and nether millstones between which the Jewish nationality was ground to powder. It was in the midst of these alarming signs of national destruction that Isaiah arose. Of the prophetic discourses which he delivered in Jerusalem we have about thirty; his words are the words of a patriot, a statesman, a servant and messenger of Jehovah. He warned the kings against these entangling alliances with foreign powers; he admonished them to stand fast in their allegiance to Jehovah, and obey his laws; yet he saw that they would not heed his word, and that swift and sure destruction was coming upon the nation. And his expectation was not like that of the other prophets, that the nation as a whole would be saved out of these judgments; to him it was made plain that only a remnant would survive; but that from that remnant should spring a noble race, with a purer faith, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Of the Messianic hope as it finds expression in these words of Isaiah I have already spoken.

This Book of Isaiah contains thirty-one prophetic discourses, some of them mere fragments. There is reason for doubt as to whether they were all spoken by Isaiah; when they were gathered up, two hundred years later, some utterances of other prophets may have been mingled with them. Indeed it is now regarded as well-nigh certain that the last twenty-seven chapters are the work of a later prophet,--of one who wrote during the Captivity. Professor Delitzsch, in the last edition of his commentary on Isaiah, finally concedes that this is probable. The Book of Isaiah, he is reported as saying, "may have been an anthology of prophetic discourses by different authors; that is, it may have been composed partly and directly by Isaiah, and partly by other later prophets whose utterances constitute a really homogeneous and simultaneous continuation of Isaian prophecy. These later prophets so closely resemble Isaiah in prophetic vision that posterity might, on that account, well identify them with him,--his name being the correct common denominator for this collection of prophecies."

These words of the most distinguished and devout of the Old Testament critics throw a flood of light on the structure not only of Isaiah, but of other Old Testament writings; they show how unlike our own were the primitive ideas of authorship; and how the Pentateuch, for example, drawn from many sources and revised by many editors, could be called the law of Moses; how his name may have been the "common denominator" of all that collection of laws.

I have shown, perhaps, in these hasty notices, something of the nature and purpose of five of these prophetic books. Of the rest I must speak but a single word, for the time fails me to tell of Zephaniah, who in the time of good King Josiah, denounced the idolatry of the people, the injustice of its princes and judges, and the corruption of its prophets and priests, threatened the rebellious with extermination, and promised to the remnant an enduring peace; of Jeremiah, who about the same time first lifted up his voice, and continued speaking until after the destruction of Jerusalem,--from whose writings we may derive a more complete and intelligible account of the period preceding the Exile than from any other source; of Nahum, who, just before the fall of Jerusalem, uttered his oracle against Nineveh; of Obadiah, who, after the fall of the holy city, launched his thunderbolts against the perfidious Edomites because of their rejoicing over the fate of Jerusalem; of Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, who wrote among the captives by the rivers of Babylon; of Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returning exiles, and whose courageous voices cheered the laborers who wrought to restore the city and the temple; of Malachi, whose pungent reproofs of the people for their lack of consecration followed the erection of the second temple, and closed the collection of the Hebrew prophets.

The limits of this small volume forbid us to enter upon several interesting critical inquiries respecting the component parts of Isaiah and Zechariah, and especially the matter of the variations of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text in the Book of Jeremiah. In this last named book we find the same phenomena that we encountered in our study of Samuel and The Kings: the Greek version differs considerably from the Hebrew; a comparison of the two illustrates, as nothing else can do, the processes through which the text of these old documents has passed, and the freedom with which they have been handled by scribes and copyists. The Hebrew text, from which our English version was made, is generally better than the Greek; but there are several cases in which the Greek is manifestly more accurate.

There is one book, reckoned among these minor prophets, of which I have not spoken, and to which I ought to make some reference. That is the book of Jonah.