Doubt is thrown even on their
residence
in Egypt and subsequent escape from "the house of bondage.
Universal Anthology - v01
Ofttimes, .
.
.
inflamed with rage .
.
.
The only cause .
.
. . . he had . . . a conflict fierce . . . and long . . .
Was this:
Within himself . . . atfirst ; . . . but . . . then . . . o'ercome
He struck me . . . and then fled . . . — But now . . . my
breath,
Father, . . . is failing . . .
Adam — —
O God ! . . . He dies.
Has that last sob cut off at once his voice
And life as well ! — Behold thee, then, at last,
Death terrible and cruel, who the daughter
Of my transgression art ! O ruthless Death,
Is, then, the first to fall before thy blows
A guileless youth like this ? 'Twas me the first,
And me alone, whom thou shouldst have struck down . . . — What shall I do without my children now ?
And this dear lifeless body, how can I
From Eve conceal it ? Hide from her the truth ?
In vain : but, how to tell her ? And, then, where,
Where bury my dear Abel ? O my God !
How tear myself from him ? — But, what behold I ?
Eve is approaching me with weary steps
From far ! She promised me that she would wait Beyond the wood for me . . . Alas ! —But I
Must meet her and detain her ; such a sight
Might in one moment kill her . . . How I tremble I Already she has seen me, and makes haste . . .
Adam —
Why, woman, hast thou come ? 'tis not allowed Farther to go : return ; return at once
Unto our cottage ; there will I erelong
Rejoin thee.
Eve — Heavens ! what see I ? in thy face What new and dreadful trouble do I see ?
Hast thou not found them ?
Adam — No : but, very soon . . ,. Do thou meanwhile retrace thy steps, I pray . . .
Kiss me . . .
He is dying . . . Unhappy father ! How
Eve, and Adam [running to meet her].
THE MURDER OF ABEL.
Eve —
And leave thee ? . . . And my children, where are they ? But, what do I behold ? thy vesture stained
With quite fresh blood ? thy hands, too, dyed with blood ? Alas ! what is't, my darling Adam, say !
Yet on thy body are no wounds . . . But, what,
What is the blood there on the ground ? and near it
Is not the ax of Cain ? . . . and that is also
All soiled with blood ? . . . Ah, leave me ; yes, I must, Imust approach ; to see . . .
Adam — Ipray thee, no . . . Eve —
In vain . . .
Adam. — O Eve, stop, stop ! on no account
Shalt thou go farther.
Eve [pushing her way forward a little'] —
But, in spite of thee, From out thine eyes a very stream of tears
I must see, at any cost,
Ispouring ! . . .
Thereason. . . Ah,I
My darling Abel . . . O unhappy I
The ax . . . the blood . . . Iunderstand . . .
Adam — Alas ! We have no sons.
Eve— Abel, my life . . . 'Tis vain To hold me back . . . Let me embrace thee, Abel.
Adam —
To hold her is impossible : a slight
Relief to her immense maternal sorrow . . .
Eve —
Adam, has God the murderer not punished ?
Adam —
O impious Cain ! in vain thy flight ; in vain Wilt thou conceal thyself. Within thy ears (However far away from me thou art)
Shall ring the fearful echo of my threats, And make thy bosom tremble.
Eve — Abel, Abel . . .
Alas,he hears me not! . . . —
That I discerned a traitor's mark, yes, traitor's, Between Cain's eyebrows.
Adam — Never on the earth That traitor peace shall find, security,
Or an asylum. — Cain, be thou accursed
By God, as thou art by thy father cursed.
see itnow! . . . therelies ! . . .
I ever told thee,
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 61
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? By Rev. A. H. 8AYCE.
(From "Early History of the Hebrews. ")
[For biographical sketch, see p. 25. ]
It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Penta teuch is justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a dark and illit erate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would be historically valueless. "
Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of the lit erary analysis " of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the Israelitish tribes in Canaan.
Doubt is thrown even on their residence in Egypt and subsequent escape from "the house of bondage. " Moses himself becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose sep- ulcher was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no need of indicating contradictions —real or other wise — in the details of the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve; the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been dis covered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the question.
The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none. The use of writ ing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the mon archy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B. C. , and
52 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
the alphabet would have been employed for monumental pur poses long before it was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf's theory of the origin and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have done so.
The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a theory and" an assumption. The theory is that of " the literary analysis of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological, not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases. Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined accordingly. That it is some times necessary to cut a verse in two, somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further. Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported, all have their origin in Astruc's separation of the book of Genesis into two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the other it is replaced by Elohim.
The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive his tory, and has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It may be that the historical results
WHO WKOTE THE PENTATEUCH? 53
based on the complicated and ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same fate.
In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some later "Redactor. " Indeed, if we are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly historical literature of the Old Testament was written or "redacted " chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and easy way of rewriting ancient history ; but it is neither scientific nor in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be with the methods of the philologist.
When, however, we come to examine the philological evi dence upon which we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a European scholar of the nine teenth century can analyze with mathematical precision a work
composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse, and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can attain to truth only by the help of comparison ; we can know things scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclu sion can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this, however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but from the so-called "tact" and arbitrary judgment of the in dividual scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose. The " critical " theory of the origin and character of the Hexa
64 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
teuch closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe ; like the latter, it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality.
Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have required a special revelation to dis cover the fact. We may lay it down as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great, but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be established with any pretense to scientific value.
But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is violated by the endeavor to foist philological speculations into the treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language ; it is, moreover, a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is preserved in the Old Testa ment, and the errors of copyists and the corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which is ques tionable ; there are numerous others in the case of which it is certainly wrong ; and there is passage after passage in which the translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see them through a glass darkly. Not unfre- quently the reading of the Septuagint — the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text — differs entirely from the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the Hexa- teuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently discovered Hebrew text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is not altogether justified.
How, then, can a modern Western scholar analyze with even approximate exactitude an ancient Hebrew work, and on the strength of the language and style dissolve it once more into its component atoms? How can he determine the relation of these atoms one to the other, or presume to fix the dates to which they severally belong ? The task would be impossible
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 66
even in the case of a modern English book, although English is a spoken language, with which we are all supposed to be thoroughly acquainted, while its vast literature is familiar to us all. And yet, even where we know that a work is composite, it passes the power of man to separate it into its elements, and define the limits of each. No one, for instance, would dream of attempting such a task in the case of the novels of Besant and Rice ; and the endeavor to distinguish in certain plays of Shakespeare what belongs to the poet himself and what to Fletcher has met with the oblivion it deserved. Is it likely that a problem which cannot be solved in the case of an Eng lish book can be solved where its difficulties are increased a thousand fold? The minuteness and apparent precision of Hexateuchal criticism are simply due, like that of the Ptole maic theory, to the artificial character of the basis on which it rests. It is, in fact, a philological mirage ; it attempts the im possible, and in place of the scientific method of comparison, it gives us as a starting point the assumptions and arbitrary principles of a one-sided critic.
Where philology has failed, archaeology has come to our help. The needful comparison of the Old Testament record with some thing else than itself has been afforded by the discoveries which have been made of recent years in Egypt and Babylonia, and other parts of the ancient East. At last we are able to call in the aid of the scientific method, and test the age and character, the authenticity and trustworthiness, of the Old Testament history by monuments about whose historical authority there can be no question. And the result of the test has, on the whole, been in favor of tradition, and against the doctrines of the newer critical school. It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of the narratives of the Pentateuch ; it has proved that the Mosaic age was a highly literary one, and that con sequently the marvel would be, not that Moses should have written, but that he should not have done so ; and it has un dermined the foundation on which the documentary hypothesis of the origin of the Hexateuch has been built. We are still, indeed, only at the beginning of discoveries ; those made dur ing the past year or two [1895-1896] have, for the student of Genesis, been exceptionally important ; but enough has now been gained to assure us that the historian may safely disregard the philological theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the books of the Pentateuch from a wholly different point of view.
56 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
They are a historical record, and it is for the historian and archaeologist, and not for the grammarian, to determine their value and age. To determine the age and trustworthiness of our literary authorities is doubtless of extreme importance to the historian, but unfortunately the materials for doing so are too often absent, and the fancies and assumptions of the critic are put in their place.
The trustworthiness of an author, like the reality of the facts he narrates, can be adequately tested in only one way. We must be able to compare his accounts of past events with other contemporaneous records of them. Sometimes these records consist of pottery or other products of human industry, which anthropology is able to interpret ; often they are the far more important inscriptions which were written or engraved by the actors in the events themselves. In other words, it is to archaeology that we must look for a verification or the reverse of the ancient history that has been handed down to us, as well as of the credibility of its narrators. The written monuments of the ancient East which belong to the same age as the patri archs or Moses can alone assure us whether we are to trust the narrative of the Pentateuch, or to see in it a confused medley of legends, the late date of which makes belief in them impossible.
As has been said above, Oriental archaeology has already dis closed sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean. On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic ; on the other hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been decisively ruled out of court.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that the western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over the civilized Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic intercourse was the language and script of Chaldaea. Not only the writing material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia. So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to com municate with their Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evi
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
57
dence that the memoranda made by the official scribes of the Pharaoh's court, at all events in Palestine, were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary. That the Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from one another in order to assist the learner.
The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in western Asia must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was written in Pales tine or in northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia. The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the contrary, education must have been widely spread ; the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and not un- frequently enter into the most unimportant details.
They were sent from all parts of the known civilized world. The kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, the Egyptian governors of Syria and Canaan, even the chiefs of the Bedawin tribes on the Egyptian frontier, who were subsidized by the Pharaohs' government like the Afghan chiefs of to-day, all alike contributed to the correspondence. Letters, in fact, must have been constantly passing to and fro along the highroads which intersected Western Asia. From one end of it to the other the population was in perpetual lit erary intercourse, proving that the Oriental world in the cen tury before the Exodus was as highly educated and literary as was Europe in the age of the Renaissance. Nor was all this literary activity and intercourse a new thing. Several of the letters had been sent to Amenophis III. , the father of the " Heretic King," and had been removed by the latter from the archives of Thebes when he transferred his residence to his new capital. And the literary intercourse which was carried on in the time of Amenophis III. was merely a continuation of
58 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
that which had been carried on for centuries previously. The culture of Babylonia, like that of Egypt, was essentially literary, and this culture had been spread over western Asia from a remote date. The letters of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel to his vassal, the king of Larsa, have just been recovered, and among the multitudinous contract tablets of the same epoch are speci mens of commercial correspondence.
We have, however, only to consider for a moment what was meant by learning the language and script of Babylonia in order to realize what a highly organized system of education must have prevailed throughout the whole civilized world of the day. Not only had the Babylonian language to be acquired, but some knowledge also of the older agglutinative language of Chaldsea was also needed in order to understand the system of writing. It was as if the schoolboy of to-day had to add a knowledge of Greek to a knowledge of French. And the sys tem of writing itself involved years of hard and patient study. It consisted of a syllabary containing hundreds of characters, each of which had not only several different phonetic values, but several different ideographic significations as well. Nor was this all. A group of characters might be used ideographi- cally to express a word, the pronunciation of which had nothing to do with the sounds of the individual characters of which it was composed. The number of ideographs which had to be learned was thus increased fivefold. And, unlike the hiero glyphs of Egypt, the forms of these ideographs gave no assist ance to the memory. They had long since lost all resemblance to the pictures out of which they had originally been developed, and consisted simply of various combinations of wedges or lines. It was difficult enough for the Babylonian or Assyrian to learn the syllabary; for a foreigner the task was almost herculean.
That it should have been undertaken implies the existence of libraries and schools. One of the distinguishing features of Babylonian culture were the libraries which existed in the great towns, and wherever Babylonian culture was carried this feature of it must have gone too. Hence in the libraries of western Asia clay books inscribed with cuneiform characters must have been stored up, while beside them must have been the schools, where the pupils bent over their exercises and the teachers instructed them in the language and script of the foreigner. The world into which Moses was born was a world as literary as our own.
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 59
If western Asia were the home of a long-established literary culture, Egypt was even more so. From time immemorial the land of the Pharaohs had been a land of writers and readers. At a very early period the hieroglyphic system of writing had been modified into a cursive hand, the so-called hieratic; and as far back as the days of the third and fifth dynasties famous books had been written, and the author of one of them, Ptah-hotep, already deplores the degeneracy and lit erary decay of his own time. The traveler up the Nile, who examines the cliffs that line the river, cannot but be struck by the multitudinous names that are scratched upon them. He is at times inclined to believe that every Egyptian in ancient times knew how to write, and had little else to do than to scribble a record of himself on the rocks. The impression is the same that we derive from the small objects which are dis interred in such thousands from the sites of the old cities.
Wherever it is possible, an inscription has been put upon them, which, it seems taken for granted, could be read by all. Even the walls of the temples and tombs were covered with written texts ; wherever the Egyptian turned, or whatever might be the object he used, it was difficult for him to avoid the sight of the written word. Whoever was born in the land of Egypt was perforce familiarized with the art of writing from the very days of his infancy.
Evidence is accumulating that the same literary culture which thus prevailed in Egypt and western Asia had extended also to the peninsula of Arabia. . . .
The Exodus from Egypt, then, took place during a highly literary period, and the people who took part in it passed from a country where the art of writing literally stared them in the face to another country which had been the center of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the home of Babylonian literary culture for unnumbered centuries. Is it conceivable that their leader and reputed lawgiver should not have been able to write, that he should not have been educated " in the wisdom of Egypt," or that the upper classes of his nation should not have been able to read ? Let it be granted that the Israelites were but a Bedawin tribe which had been reduced by the Pharaohs to the condition of public slaves ; still, they necessarily had leaders and overseers among them, who, according to the State regula tions of Egypt, were responsible to the Government for the rest of their countrymen, and some, at least, of these leaders
60 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
and overseers would have been educated men. Moses could have written the Pentateuch, even if he did not do so.
Moreover, the clay tablets on which the past history of Canaan could be read were preserved in the libraries and archive chambers of the Canaanitish cities down to the time when the latter were destroyed. If any doubt had existed on the subject after the revelations of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, it has been set at rest by the discovery of a similar tablet on the site of Lachish. In some cases the cities were not destroyed, so far as we know, until the period when it is allowed that the Israelites had ceased to be illiterate. Gezer, for example, which plays a leading part in the Tel el-Amarna correspond ence, does not seem to have fallen into the hands of an enemy until it was captured by the Egyptian Pharaoh and handed over to his son-in-law Solomon. As long as a knowledge of the cuneiform script continued, the early records of Canaan were thus accessible to the historian, many of them being contemporaneous with the events to which they referred.
A single archaeological discovery has thus destroyed the base of operations from which a one-sided criticism of Old Testament history had started. The really strong point in favor of it was the assumption that the Mosaic age was illiterate. Just as Wolf founded his criticism and analysis of the Homeric Hymns on the belief that the use of writing for literary purposes was of late date in Greece, so the belief that the Israelites of the time of Moses could not read or write was the ultimate foundation on which the modern theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been based. Whether avowed or not, it was the true starting point of critical skepti cism, the one solid foundation on which it seemed to rest. The destruction of the foundation endangers the structure which has been built upon it.
In fact, it wholly alters the position of the modern critical theory. The onus prohandi no longer lies on the shoulders of the defenders of traditional views. Instead of being called upon to prove that Moses could have written a book, it is they who have to call on the disciples of the modern theory to show reason why he should not have done so. . . . As historians, we are bound to admit the antiquity of writing in Israel. The scribe goes back to the Mosaic age, like the lawgiver, and in this respect, therefore, the Israelites formed no exception to the nations among whom they lived. They were no islet of illiter
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
61
ate barbarism in the midst of a great sea of literary culture and activity, nor were they obstinately asleep while all about them were writing and reading.
There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in the history of western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldaea were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite conquests of the fourteenth century B. C. , and the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge, adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such deliberate intention of con troverting the polytheistic features of the original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the Phoeni cian alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia, and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.
But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the histori cal narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still dominant on the shores of the Mediter ranean. So far from being popular traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of Solomon's king dom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series of " redactors," they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will have made their way westwards like the Chaldaean legends found among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the Pentateuch not only Is raelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish, Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.
The progress of archaeological research has" already in part fulfilled this expectation. " Ur of the Chaldees has been found at Muqayyar, and the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites — or, as we should call them, Canaanites — were settled there, and have even brought to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and Ishmael. Even the
62 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of an " Amo- rite " witness to a contract in the third generation before Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contempo raries, Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid'al or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his associates had been denied a claim. The " nations " over whom Tid'al ruled have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully vindicated. Jeru salem, instead of being a name first given to the future capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its earliest title ; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Armana letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his father or his mother, but through the arm of "the mighty king. " If we turn to Egypt, the archaeo logical evidence is the same. The history of Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with Egyp tian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, its geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in the history of Egypt.
Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history con tained in the Pentateuch has been shown by archaeology to be authentic. And it must be remembered that Oriental archae ology is still in its infancy. Few only of the sites of ancient civilization have as yet been excavated, and there are thou sands of cuneiform texts in the museums of Europe and America which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for Biblical criticism, were found; and the disclosures made by the early contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of still more recent dis covery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical genuine ness of the Pentateuchal narratives ; and it raises the presump tion that with the advance of our knowledge will come further confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian's path is clear ; the Pentateuch has been tested by the compara
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 68
tive method of science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt with accordingly like other histori cal works. The philological theory with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and "redactors," must be put aside, with all the historical consequences it involves.
But it does not follow that because the philological theory is untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because it has attempted to build up a vast superstruc ture on very imperfect and questionable materials ; because, in short, it has attempted to attain historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one can study the Penta teuch in the light of other ancient works of a similar kind with out perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its author — or authors — has made use of a large variety of older materials.
If the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Inser tions and interpolations must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made. That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the text of the pro phetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious circumstances. .
. . . he had . . . a conflict fierce . . . and long . . .
Was this:
Within himself . . . atfirst ; . . . but . . . then . . . o'ercome
He struck me . . . and then fled . . . — But now . . . my
breath,
Father, . . . is failing . . .
Adam — —
O God ! . . . He dies.
Has that last sob cut off at once his voice
And life as well ! — Behold thee, then, at last,
Death terrible and cruel, who the daughter
Of my transgression art ! O ruthless Death,
Is, then, the first to fall before thy blows
A guileless youth like this ? 'Twas me the first,
And me alone, whom thou shouldst have struck down . . . — What shall I do without my children now ?
And this dear lifeless body, how can I
From Eve conceal it ? Hide from her the truth ?
In vain : but, how to tell her ? And, then, where,
Where bury my dear Abel ? O my God !
How tear myself from him ? — But, what behold I ?
Eve is approaching me with weary steps
From far ! She promised me that she would wait Beyond the wood for me . . . Alas ! —But I
Must meet her and detain her ; such a sight
Might in one moment kill her . . . How I tremble I Already she has seen me, and makes haste . . .
Adam —
Why, woman, hast thou come ? 'tis not allowed Farther to go : return ; return at once
Unto our cottage ; there will I erelong
Rejoin thee.
Eve — Heavens ! what see I ? in thy face What new and dreadful trouble do I see ?
Hast thou not found them ?
Adam — No : but, very soon . . ,. Do thou meanwhile retrace thy steps, I pray . . .
Kiss me . . .
He is dying . . . Unhappy father ! How
Eve, and Adam [running to meet her].
THE MURDER OF ABEL.
Eve —
And leave thee ? . . . And my children, where are they ? But, what do I behold ? thy vesture stained
With quite fresh blood ? thy hands, too, dyed with blood ? Alas ! what is't, my darling Adam, say !
Yet on thy body are no wounds . . . But, what,
What is the blood there on the ground ? and near it
Is not the ax of Cain ? . . . and that is also
All soiled with blood ? . . . Ah, leave me ; yes, I must, Imust approach ; to see . . .
Adam — Ipray thee, no . . . Eve —
In vain . . .
Adam. — O Eve, stop, stop ! on no account
Shalt thou go farther.
Eve [pushing her way forward a little'] —
But, in spite of thee, From out thine eyes a very stream of tears
I must see, at any cost,
Ispouring ! . . .
Thereason. . . Ah,I
My darling Abel . . . O unhappy I
The ax . . . the blood . . . Iunderstand . . .
Adam — Alas ! We have no sons.
Eve— Abel, my life . . . 'Tis vain To hold me back . . . Let me embrace thee, Abel.
Adam —
To hold her is impossible : a slight
Relief to her immense maternal sorrow . . .
Eve —
Adam, has God the murderer not punished ?
Adam —
O impious Cain ! in vain thy flight ; in vain Wilt thou conceal thyself. Within thy ears (However far away from me thou art)
Shall ring the fearful echo of my threats, And make thy bosom tremble.
Eve — Abel, Abel . . .
Alas,he hears me not! . . . —
That I discerned a traitor's mark, yes, traitor's, Between Cain's eyebrows.
Adam — Never on the earth That traitor peace shall find, security,
Or an asylum. — Cain, be thou accursed
By God, as thou art by thy father cursed.
see itnow! . . . therelies ! . . .
I ever told thee,
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 61
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? By Rev. A. H. 8AYCE.
(From "Early History of the Hebrews. ")
[For biographical sketch, see p. 25. ]
It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Penta teuch is justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a dark and illit erate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would be historically valueless. "
Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of the lit erary analysis " of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the Israelitish tribes in Canaan.
Doubt is thrown even on their residence in Egypt and subsequent escape from "the house of bondage. " Moses himself becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose sep- ulcher was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no need of indicating contradictions —real or other wise — in the details of the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve; the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been dis covered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the question.
The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none. The use of writ ing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the mon archy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B. C. , and
52 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
the alphabet would have been employed for monumental pur poses long before it was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf's theory of the origin and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have done so.
The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a theory and" an assumption. The theory is that of " the literary analysis of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological, not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases. Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined accordingly. That it is some times necessary to cut a verse in two, somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further. Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported, all have their origin in Astruc's separation of the book of Genesis into two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the other it is replaced by Elohim.
The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive his tory, and has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It may be that the historical results
WHO WKOTE THE PENTATEUCH? 53
based on the complicated and ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same fate.
In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some later "Redactor. " Indeed, if we are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly historical literature of the Old Testament was written or "redacted " chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and easy way of rewriting ancient history ; but it is neither scientific nor in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be with the methods of the philologist.
When, however, we come to examine the philological evi dence upon which we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a European scholar of the nine teenth century can analyze with mathematical precision a work
composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse, and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can attain to truth only by the help of comparison ; we can know things scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclu sion can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this, however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but from the so-called "tact" and arbitrary judgment of the in dividual scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose. The " critical " theory of the origin and character of the Hexa
64 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
teuch closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe ; like the latter, it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality.
Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have required a special revelation to dis cover the fact. We may lay it down as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great, but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be established with any pretense to scientific value.
But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is violated by the endeavor to foist philological speculations into the treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language ; it is, moreover, a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is preserved in the Old Testa ment, and the errors of copyists and the corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which is ques tionable ; there are numerous others in the case of which it is certainly wrong ; and there is passage after passage in which the translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see them through a glass darkly. Not unfre- quently the reading of the Septuagint — the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text — differs entirely from the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the Hexa- teuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently discovered Hebrew text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is not altogether justified.
How, then, can a modern Western scholar analyze with even approximate exactitude an ancient Hebrew work, and on the strength of the language and style dissolve it once more into its component atoms? How can he determine the relation of these atoms one to the other, or presume to fix the dates to which they severally belong ? The task would be impossible
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 66
even in the case of a modern English book, although English is a spoken language, with which we are all supposed to be thoroughly acquainted, while its vast literature is familiar to us all. And yet, even where we know that a work is composite, it passes the power of man to separate it into its elements, and define the limits of each. No one, for instance, would dream of attempting such a task in the case of the novels of Besant and Rice ; and the endeavor to distinguish in certain plays of Shakespeare what belongs to the poet himself and what to Fletcher has met with the oblivion it deserved. Is it likely that a problem which cannot be solved in the case of an Eng lish book can be solved where its difficulties are increased a thousand fold? The minuteness and apparent precision of Hexateuchal criticism are simply due, like that of the Ptole maic theory, to the artificial character of the basis on which it rests. It is, in fact, a philological mirage ; it attempts the im possible, and in place of the scientific method of comparison, it gives us as a starting point the assumptions and arbitrary principles of a one-sided critic.
Where philology has failed, archaeology has come to our help. The needful comparison of the Old Testament record with some thing else than itself has been afforded by the discoveries which have been made of recent years in Egypt and Babylonia, and other parts of the ancient East. At last we are able to call in the aid of the scientific method, and test the age and character, the authenticity and trustworthiness, of the Old Testament history by monuments about whose historical authority there can be no question. And the result of the test has, on the whole, been in favor of tradition, and against the doctrines of the newer critical school. It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of the narratives of the Pentateuch ; it has proved that the Mosaic age was a highly literary one, and that con sequently the marvel would be, not that Moses should have written, but that he should not have done so ; and it has un dermined the foundation on which the documentary hypothesis of the origin of the Hexateuch has been built. We are still, indeed, only at the beginning of discoveries ; those made dur ing the past year or two [1895-1896] have, for the student of Genesis, been exceptionally important ; but enough has now been gained to assure us that the historian may safely disregard the philological theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the books of the Pentateuch from a wholly different point of view.
56 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
They are a historical record, and it is for the historian and archaeologist, and not for the grammarian, to determine their value and age. To determine the age and trustworthiness of our literary authorities is doubtless of extreme importance to the historian, but unfortunately the materials for doing so are too often absent, and the fancies and assumptions of the critic are put in their place.
The trustworthiness of an author, like the reality of the facts he narrates, can be adequately tested in only one way. We must be able to compare his accounts of past events with other contemporaneous records of them. Sometimes these records consist of pottery or other products of human industry, which anthropology is able to interpret ; often they are the far more important inscriptions which were written or engraved by the actors in the events themselves. In other words, it is to archaeology that we must look for a verification or the reverse of the ancient history that has been handed down to us, as well as of the credibility of its narrators. The written monuments of the ancient East which belong to the same age as the patri archs or Moses can alone assure us whether we are to trust the narrative of the Pentateuch, or to see in it a confused medley of legends, the late date of which makes belief in them impossible.
As has been said above, Oriental archaeology has already dis closed sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean. On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic ; on the other hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been decisively ruled out of court.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that the western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over the civilized Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic intercourse was the language and script of Chaldaea. Not only the writing material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia. So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to com municate with their Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evi
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
57
dence that the memoranda made by the official scribes of the Pharaoh's court, at all events in Palestine, were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary. That the Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from one another in order to assist the learner.
The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in western Asia must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was written in Pales tine or in northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia. The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the contrary, education must have been widely spread ; the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and not un- frequently enter into the most unimportant details.
They were sent from all parts of the known civilized world. The kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, the Egyptian governors of Syria and Canaan, even the chiefs of the Bedawin tribes on the Egyptian frontier, who were subsidized by the Pharaohs' government like the Afghan chiefs of to-day, all alike contributed to the correspondence. Letters, in fact, must have been constantly passing to and fro along the highroads which intersected Western Asia. From one end of it to the other the population was in perpetual lit erary intercourse, proving that the Oriental world in the cen tury before the Exodus was as highly educated and literary as was Europe in the age of the Renaissance. Nor was all this literary activity and intercourse a new thing. Several of the letters had been sent to Amenophis III. , the father of the " Heretic King," and had been removed by the latter from the archives of Thebes when he transferred his residence to his new capital. And the literary intercourse which was carried on in the time of Amenophis III. was merely a continuation of
58 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
that which had been carried on for centuries previously. The culture of Babylonia, like that of Egypt, was essentially literary, and this culture had been spread over western Asia from a remote date. The letters of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel to his vassal, the king of Larsa, have just been recovered, and among the multitudinous contract tablets of the same epoch are speci mens of commercial correspondence.
We have, however, only to consider for a moment what was meant by learning the language and script of Babylonia in order to realize what a highly organized system of education must have prevailed throughout the whole civilized world of the day. Not only had the Babylonian language to be acquired, but some knowledge also of the older agglutinative language of Chaldsea was also needed in order to understand the system of writing. It was as if the schoolboy of to-day had to add a knowledge of Greek to a knowledge of French. And the sys tem of writing itself involved years of hard and patient study. It consisted of a syllabary containing hundreds of characters, each of which had not only several different phonetic values, but several different ideographic significations as well. Nor was this all. A group of characters might be used ideographi- cally to express a word, the pronunciation of which had nothing to do with the sounds of the individual characters of which it was composed. The number of ideographs which had to be learned was thus increased fivefold. And, unlike the hiero glyphs of Egypt, the forms of these ideographs gave no assist ance to the memory. They had long since lost all resemblance to the pictures out of which they had originally been developed, and consisted simply of various combinations of wedges or lines. It was difficult enough for the Babylonian or Assyrian to learn the syllabary; for a foreigner the task was almost herculean.
That it should have been undertaken implies the existence of libraries and schools. One of the distinguishing features of Babylonian culture were the libraries which existed in the great towns, and wherever Babylonian culture was carried this feature of it must have gone too. Hence in the libraries of western Asia clay books inscribed with cuneiform characters must have been stored up, while beside them must have been the schools, where the pupils bent over their exercises and the teachers instructed them in the language and script of the foreigner. The world into which Moses was born was a world as literary as our own.
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 59
If western Asia were the home of a long-established literary culture, Egypt was even more so. From time immemorial the land of the Pharaohs had been a land of writers and readers. At a very early period the hieroglyphic system of writing had been modified into a cursive hand, the so-called hieratic; and as far back as the days of the third and fifth dynasties famous books had been written, and the author of one of them, Ptah-hotep, already deplores the degeneracy and lit erary decay of his own time. The traveler up the Nile, who examines the cliffs that line the river, cannot but be struck by the multitudinous names that are scratched upon them. He is at times inclined to believe that every Egyptian in ancient times knew how to write, and had little else to do than to scribble a record of himself on the rocks. The impression is the same that we derive from the small objects which are dis interred in such thousands from the sites of the old cities.
Wherever it is possible, an inscription has been put upon them, which, it seems taken for granted, could be read by all. Even the walls of the temples and tombs were covered with written texts ; wherever the Egyptian turned, or whatever might be the object he used, it was difficult for him to avoid the sight of the written word. Whoever was born in the land of Egypt was perforce familiarized with the art of writing from the very days of his infancy.
Evidence is accumulating that the same literary culture which thus prevailed in Egypt and western Asia had extended also to the peninsula of Arabia. . . .
The Exodus from Egypt, then, took place during a highly literary period, and the people who took part in it passed from a country where the art of writing literally stared them in the face to another country which had been the center of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the home of Babylonian literary culture for unnumbered centuries. Is it conceivable that their leader and reputed lawgiver should not have been able to write, that he should not have been educated " in the wisdom of Egypt," or that the upper classes of his nation should not have been able to read ? Let it be granted that the Israelites were but a Bedawin tribe which had been reduced by the Pharaohs to the condition of public slaves ; still, they necessarily had leaders and overseers among them, who, according to the State regula tions of Egypt, were responsible to the Government for the rest of their countrymen, and some, at least, of these leaders
60 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
and overseers would have been educated men. Moses could have written the Pentateuch, even if he did not do so.
Moreover, the clay tablets on which the past history of Canaan could be read were preserved in the libraries and archive chambers of the Canaanitish cities down to the time when the latter were destroyed. If any doubt had existed on the subject after the revelations of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, it has been set at rest by the discovery of a similar tablet on the site of Lachish. In some cases the cities were not destroyed, so far as we know, until the period when it is allowed that the Israelites had ceased to be illiterate. Gezer, for example, which plays a leading part in the Tel el-Amarna correspond ence, does not seem to have fallen into the hands of an enemy until it was captured by the Egyptian Pharaoh and handed over to his son-in-law Solomon. As long as a knowledge of the cuneiform script continued, the early records of Canaan were thus accessible to the historian, many of them being contemporaneous with the events to which they referred.
A single archaeological discovery has thus destroyed the base of operations from which a one-sided criticism of Old Testament history had started. The really strong point in favor of it was the assumption that the Mosaic age was illiterate. Just as Wolf founded his criticism and analysis of the Homeric Hymns on the belief that the use of writing for literary purposes was of late date in Greece, so the belief that the Israelites of the time of Moses could not read or write was the ultimate foundation on which the modern theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been based. Whether avowed or not, it was the true starting point of critical skepti cism, the one solid foundation on which it seemed to rest. The destruction of the foundation endangers the structure which has been built upon it.
In fact, it wholly alters the position of the modern critical theory. The onus prohandi no longer lies on the shoulders of the defenders of traditional views. Instead of being called upon to prove that Moses could have written a book, it is they who have to call on the disciples of the modern theory to show reason why he should not have done so. . . . As historians, we are bound to admit the antiquity of writing in Israel. The scribe goes back to the Mosaic age, like the lawgiver, and in this respect, therefore, the Israelites formed no exception to the nations among whom they lived. They were no islet of illiter
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
61
ate barbarism in the midst of a great sea of literary culture and activity, nor were they obstinately asleep while all about them were writing and reading.
There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in the history of western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldaea were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite conquests of the fourteenth century B. C. , and the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge, adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such deliberate intention of con troverting the polytheistic features of the original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the Phoeni cian alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia, and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.
But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the histori cal narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still dominant on the shores of the Mediter ranean. So far from being popular traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of Solomon's king dom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series of " redactors," they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will have made their way westwards like the Chaldaean legends found among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the Pentateuch not only Is raelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish, Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.
The progress of archaeological research has" already in part fulfilled this expectation. " Ur of the Chaldees has been found at Muqayyar, and the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites — or, as we should call them, Canaanites — were settled there, and have even brought to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and Ishmael. Even the
62 WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH?
name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of an " Amo- rite " witness to a contract in the third generation before Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contempo raries, Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid'al or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his associates had been denied a claim. The " nations " over whom Tid'al ruled have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully vindicated. Jeru salem, instead of being a name first given to the future capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its earliest title ; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Armana letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his father or his mother, but through the arm of "the mighty king. " If we turn to Egypt, the archaeo logical evidence is the same. The history of Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with Egyp tian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, its geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in the history of Egypt.
Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history con tained in the Pentateuch has been shown by archaeology to be authentic. And it must be remembered that Oriental archae ology is still in its infancy. Few only of the sites of ancient civilization have as yet been excavated, and there are thou sands of cuneiform texts in the museums of Europe and America which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for Biblical criticism, were found; and the disclosures made by the early contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of still more recent dis covery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical genuine ness of the Pentateuchal narratives ; and it raises the presump tion that with the advance of our knowledge will come further confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian's path is clear ; the Pentateuch has been tested by the compara
WHO WROTE THE PENTATEUCH? 68
tive method of science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt with accordingly like other histori cal works. The philological theory with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and "redactors," must be put aside, with all the historical consequences it involves.
But it does not follow that because the philological theory is untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because it has attempted to build up a vast superstruc ture on very imperfect and questionable materials ; because, in short, it has attempted to attain historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one can study the Penta teuch in the light of other ancient works of a similar kind with out perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its author — or authors — has made use of a large variety of older materials.
If the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Inser tions and interpolations must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made. That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the text of the pro phetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious circumstances. .
