John Robertson 
 
 The "Critical Thpory" of Dputeroncmy ^ 
 
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 THE 
 
 "CEITICAL THEORY" 
 
 DEUTERONOMY, 
 
 i^'IpInineJr in n f ectnrc, 
 
 REV. John' ROBERTSON, M.A. 
 
 ARBROATH. 
 
 (JHtiiniursfj: 
 JOHN IVIACLAREN & SON, PRINCES STREET. 
 
 GLASGOW : DAVID BRYCE AND SON. ABERDEEN : A. AND R. MILNE. 
 1880. 
 
PKEFATORY NOTE. 
 
 This lecture appears, at the suggestion of some who heard it, just as 
 delivered to my own congregation. It does not deal with Bible difficulties, 
 but explains the critical theory which is produced to explain them, and 
 indicates certain unlikelihoods and difficulties that attach to the theory in 
 itself, as held mainly by Graaf, Wellhausen, Eeuss, &c. In Professor 
 Smith's case there are special peculiarities. From his last defence it 
 appears that he holds by the mass of the legislation in Deuteronomy being 
 Mosaic, and he way be understood to regard the history into connection with 
 which the legislation is brought to be a record of facts to a very large extent. 
 The Jehovist document may be accepted by him as real history, and the 
 setting of the legislative programme to be matter of fact. Moses may, in 
 short, have given the second law on the Plains of Moab in the main, and as 
 a discourse, while the portions that imply a later date may be the only new 
 portions of the book, and the only portions for which we are indebted to the 
 prophetic writer of the book who belonged to the age between Hezekiah and 
 Josiah. But in that case the sum and substance of the new theory is 
 abandoned, and the old theory adopted as, in point of fact, the true one. 
 There is but one way in which the new theory can be upheld, and that is by 
 supposing the history of Deuteronomy to be parable, and the crossing of the 
 Jordan and the settling in the land to mean the carrying through and com- 
 pletion of the work of reformation undertaken by Hezekiah. 
 
 It will be seen that there is no necessity for ignoring the difficulties in the 
 so-called books of Moses, nor even for meeting them, in order to bring the 
 theory to the test of common sense, or discarding it on the ground of its impro- 
 bability, and the extraordinary extravagances to which it leads. The theory 
 may stand even self-condemned when taken on its own merits as an explana- 
 tion of the difficulties ; and we are not bound to produce a theory that will 
 explain the difficulties before we test this theory on its merits, and feel con- 
 strained to give it up. What are the difficulties it raises ? What the veri- 
 similitude of its hypothesis ? What character does it give to the entire 
 structure, not only of the Biblical record, but of the history of Israel 1 What 
 air of fable or the opposite does it throw around our Bible and our Bible's 
 contents ? These are questions that may be discussed and decided, apart 
 altogether from the real difficulties of Bible history and Bible law as we now 
 possess them, and apart also from what might be called first-rate Hebrew 
 scholarship. " The higher criticism," an eminent proficient in it once said to 
 the writer of these pages, " is common sense." May not the entire difficulties 
 of the law of Moses disappear less or more, and disappear soon, when the 
 higher critics themselves have wrought out a theory in the direction of dating 
 its construction, in its present form, shortly after the revolt of the ten tribes ? 
 
 JOHN EOBERTSON. 
 
 Abbroath, 19th May, 1880. 
 
..•-^ 
 
 
 THE 
 
 CEITICAL THEORY OF DEUTEEONOMY. 
 
 EliBA TA. 
 
 Prefatory Note and Page 14, line 8, /or Graaf, read Graf. 
 Prefatory Note, line 8, for may, read rim.<t. 
 
 as 1 can, and it i appear to some to speak less in the way of 
 denunciation than they would adopt, or to others less in the 
 way of apology and defence than they would like, I trust you 
 will set it down to my intense anxiety to be impartial, and to 
 look at both sides as they should be looked at. 
 
 A great current of critical investigation has come over 
 Europe during the last half-century. Science and religion have 
 alike felt it. Nothing is taken on trust, everything is searched 
 out, and not a fragment almost of old opinion remains unsifted. 
 Along with the critical goes the sceptical, and the challenge is 
 freely thrown out whenever there is the slightest reason for 
 doubt. If the scientific investigator comes not on material 
 evidence for a soul, he says he knows nothing of it. If the 
 Biblical critic comes upon a difficulty which seems insurmount- 
 
PREFATOKY NOTE. 
 
 This lecture appears, at the suggestion of some who heard it, just as 
 delivered to my own congregation. It does not deal with Bible difficulties, 
 but explains the critical theory which is produced to explain them, and 
 indicates certain unlikelihoods and difficulties that attach to the theory in 
 itself, as held mainly by Graaf, Wellhausen, Reuss, «&c. In Professor 
 Smith's case there are special peculiarities. From his last defence it 
 a,ppears that he holds by the mass of the legislation in Deuteronomy being 
 Mosaic, and he may be understood to regard the history into connection with 
 
 bability, and the extraordinary extravagances to which it leads, xne tneory 
 may stand even self-condemned when taken on its own merits as an explana- 
 tion of the difficulties ; and we are not bound to produce a theory that will 
 explain the difficulties before we test this theory on its merits, and feel con- 
 strained to give it up. What are the difficulties it raises ? What the veri- 
 similitude of its hypothesis ? What character does it give to the entire 
 structure, not only of the Biblical record, but of the history of Israel ? What 
 air of fable or the opposite does it throw around our Bible and our Bible's 
 contents ? These are questions that may be discussed and decided, apart 
 altogether from the real difficulties of Bible history and Bible law as we now 
 possess them, and apart also from what might be called first-rate Hebrew 
 scholarship. " The higher criticism," an eminent proficient in it once said to 
 the writer of these pages, " is common sense." May not the entire difficulties 
 of the law of Moses disappear less or more, and disappear soon, when the 
 higher critics themselves have wrought out a theory in the direction of dating 
 its construction, in its present form, shortly after the revolt of the ten tribes ? 
 
 JOHN EOBERTSON. 
 
 Abbroath, 19th May, 1880, 
 

 THE 
 
 CRITICAL THEOEY OF DEUTEEONOMY. 
 
 I HAVE no intention to enter on any discussion. My object 
 is exposition, not refutation. This course I take to be miore 
 becoming, as I believe it will be more beneficial, in the circum- 
 stances in which our Church is placed. A man who may be 
 called in a few days to be a judge, ought not beforehand to 
 be an advocate, either on behalf of the theory in question or 
 against it. But it is certainly right that both we and the 
 Church should understand it, what it is, and what issues are 
 involved in it. I shall deal as fairly with the whole matter 
 as I can, and if I appear to some to speak less in the way of 
 denunciation than they would adopt, or to others less in the 
 way of apology and defence than they would like, I trust you 
 will set it down to my intense anxiety to be impartial, and to 
 look at both sides as they should be looked at. 
 
 A great current of critical investigation has come over 
 Europe during the last half-century. Science and religion have 
 alike felt it. Nothing is taken on trust, everything is searched 
 out, and not a fragment almost of old opinion remains unsifted. 
 Along with the critical goes the sceptical, and the challenge is 
 freely thrown out whenever there is the slightest reason for 
 doubt. If the scientific investigator comes not on material 
 evidence for a soul, he says he knows nothing of it. If the 
 Biblical critic comes upon a difficulty which seems insurmount- 
 
4 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 able, he raises at once the question whether he should not let 
 the Bible go. It is a matter of thankfulness to myself, and I 
 am sure it will be so to every right-thinking soul that, in the 
 critical theory of Deuteronomy as adopted by some parties in 
 our Church, we do not require to face this most sad of all 
 issues, but have to do with parties who profess to hold, and 
 hold most firmly, by all that is most sacred in the Word of 
 God, and who contend that it does not damage the theory in 
 itself to admit, and admit most willingly, that men have held 
 it, and do now hold it, who have no faith in the Bible as the 
 inspired "Word of God according to our Confession. Our only 
 true and proper course accordingly is to try it upon its merits, 
 or at least to use all possible efforts to understand and estimate 
 it at its proper value. It were a WTong thing to accept it or to 
 reject it, after a blindfold fashion, to uphold or decry what we 
 do not know. 
 
 The problem in hand is not one of Deuteronomy merely. 
 It concerns the lohole five books of Moses, and embraces the 
 book of Joshua, aye, and Samuel and Kings and Chronicles 
 as well — all the books of law and history in the Old Testa- 
 ment, less or more. The men who have gone into it, and 
 have formed a theory about it, have embraced in their investi- 
 gation the whole range of Jewish history and Jewish legislation, 
 and have dealt with the entire structure of priestly and of pro- 
 phetic action. Their conclusions regarding Deuteronomy are 
 modified, less or more, by their conclusions regarding these, 
 and it is their object to construct a complete scheme of law 
 and history Avhich will at once lie alongside the law and history 
 of other nations, and allow of gradual growth and development 
 in the institutions, sacred and civil, of Israel's people, as much 
 so as we find among other peoples, and which will, at the same 
 time, account for and explain the difficulties in the records of 
 Israel's religion in a more satisfactory and profounder way than 
 they have yet been accounted for. To get room, in short, for 
 development and progress on the one hand, and rationally to 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. O 
 
 enter into tlie aims and methods of the writers on the other 
 hand, this is the proposed goal of their labours, and for one 
 thing all of them stoutly contend — viz. this, the right to 
 study and estimate those records on their own merits, to make 
 them speak for themselves, and adopt the most rational method 
 of explaining naturally all the difficulties that occur in them, 
 Avithout being bound by the iron hand of traditional belief or 
 human authority. How shall the entire circle of books be 
 brought into the highest harmony and their relation to one 
 another be determined, on the most satisfactory basis ? It is 
 the facts of the history — the realities of the case — they all 
 profess to long for and to discover. Thus far they and we 
 must go together. 
 
 I have said, friends, the problem is not one of Deuteronomy 
 merely. It is one of Genesis, one of Exodus, one of Leviticus, 
 one of Numbers, one of Joshua, one of Kings, one of Chroni- 
 cles, one, too, of Samuel. Every one of these books is brought 
 forward to contribute its share to the conditions of the pro- 
 blem as well as to its solution. Exodus is placed alongside 
 Deuteronomy, and its contents are compared with those of 
 Deuteronomy. Leviticus has its laws and its place in the 
 five so-called books of Moses, and these must be compared 
 with the law and the situation of things presupposed in 
 Deuteronomy. Samuel and Kings have their practices and 
 customs, and stories of prophets and of men of God, and 
 these must throw light on the meaning of Deuteronomy, and on 
 the institutions it professedly establishes, and Avlien the Chroni- 
 cles do not appear to say what Kings say and what Samuel 
 supports, the chronicler is corrected, and his weaknesses and 
 tendencies are not excused. The place of Deuteronomy 
 among the books, the tone of its composition, the author of 
 it, the meaning of it, the late or early character of its legisla- 
 tion, the historical or dramatic character of its contents, 
 depend on what these books say, and what the nature of the 
 revelation they make regarding it and themselves is. The 
 
6 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY, 
 
 critics do not begin by putting a certain construction on certain 
 incidental statements of Jesus, and then go to the records 
 and form their ideas of those records accordingly, but they 
 go to the records themselves first to see what is in them, and 
 then hear what Christ has to say about them, and thus 
 understand Christ's words in the light of them. 
 
 1. Let me refer to the difficulties they profess to find in 
 the books, and specially in this book of Deuteronomy. Some 
 of these are on the surface, others of them are underground, 
 and lie in the heart of the history which the records profess to 
 narrate. All of them consist of seeming discrepancies between 
 the law as you find it in Deuteronomy, and the law as you find 
 in the other books, say specially Exodus, Leviticus, and Num- 
 bers. For example, God is represented in Exodus xxi. 7, as 
 forbidding a Hebrew maidservant to be set free like a man- 
 servant, at the close of seven years.* In Deut. xv. 12-17, the 
 law is the same for both. Manservant and maidservant alike 
 are to be set free. In Exod. xxii. 31, flesh torn of beasts 
 in the field is to be thrown to the dogs. In Leviticus also, 
 xvii. 12-15, the native Israelite and the protected stranger 
 are forbidden to eat it. But according to Deut. xiv. 21, the 
 protected stranger is allowed to eat of it. Similar differences 
 appear with respect to the laws of offering. God in the 
 book of Numbers, xxviii. 27, prescribes seven sheep, two 
 bullocks, and one ram, as a burnt-offering for the day of 
 Pentecost. The law in Lev. xxiii. 19, ordains seven lambs, 
 one bullock, and tivo rams for the same service on the same 
 day of Pentecost. Again, the feast of Pentecost is called 
 the feast of ^.arvesi in Exod. xxiii., where the oldest legislation 
 is supposed to be recorded ; while in Exod. xxxii., and in 
 Deut. xvi., where a later legislation is alleged to be found, 
 it appears under the name of the feast of weeks, and in 
 Numbers it has yet another designation, — viz., the day of the 
 
 * Conf. Professor Smith's Answers to the Libel and Eeuss's " L'Histoire Sainte 
 et la Loi." 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONO^tlY. 7 
 
 first-fruits. Moreover, the age at which the Levites were to 
 commence their service in the tabernacle, is declared in one 
 part of Numbers to be thirty, in another to be twenty-five. 
 And the provisions made for the maintenance of the priests 
 and Levites in Deuteronomy are different from those made 
 in the Levitical books. These are difiiculties on the surface 
 — superficial — which are, it may be, " symptomatic of some- 
 thing constitutional in the system, like an outbreak in the 
 skin." But the hardest difficulties, and those on which the 
 greatest stress is laid, lie deeper down in the very framework 
 of the history and the legislation. For example, there is a 
 clear distinction drawn between the priests and Levites in 
 some parts of Exodus, and in Leviticus and Numbers. The 
 priests are all the sons of Aaron, they alone are entitled to 
 offer sacrifice or burn incense before the Lord ; their special 
 office is to minister at the altar and within the veil, and on 
 certain occasions, and in the person of the high priest, or in 
 their own person, to bless the people. No Levite may dare 
 to touch the altar or the holy vessels. Levites are simply 
 servants given to the priests. The priests stand before the 
 Lord. They stand before Aaron, the priest. And the fate 
 of Korah teaches how sacredly the distinction between the 
 two had to be observed. It was a crime for the Levites to 
 pretend to the priesthood, or at least to venture to offer 
 incense. But when we turn from Exodus, Leviticus, and 
 Numbers to Deuteronomy, all Levites are possible priests, and 
 there is no distinction whatever drawn between them save this, 
 that the priests are officiating Levites. Descent from Aaron 
 is not a necessary qualification for the priesthood ; all Levites, 
 as occasion occurs, may act as priests. The tribe of Levi is 
 said to be separated for the priesthood, not the sons of Aaron. 
 And it is the parties who belong to the tribe of Levi that 
 are, according to the second form of the law in Deuter- 
 onomy, appointed to stand before the Lord, to minister in 
 His name and bless the people. Or, again, with reference to 
 
O THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 the jAace of worship, we read in the twentieth chapter of 
 Exodus, where the legislation is admitted by the most advanced 
 critics to be Mosaic, and to have been given at Sinai — that 
 Israel was to be permitted to build an altar of earth, and to 
 offer sacrifices thereon in all places where Jehovah recorded 
 His name, or as it may very well be rendered, " where He set 
 a memorial of His name." The law ran in precise conformity 
 Avith the old practice of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob. Wherever tlie Lord appeared unto His people, there 
 an altar might be built without sin or guilt. The Lord's 
 appearance warranted worship, and worship was by an 
 altar and a sacrifice. But the Deuteronomic code is, 
 they allege, totally in opposition to all this. There was, 
 according to it, but one place in all the land of Israel 
 where men might worship, and that one place was the 
 spot which Jehovah God should choose to make His 
 name dwell there. To this one sanctuary, all sacrifices, 
 tithes, vows, and sacred dues of every sort must be brought. 
 The offering of sacrifice or the building of an altar in any 
 other place which the people might choose, was absolutely 
 forbidden, and esteemed a crime against the Lord their God. 
 Aye, and even with respect to the right of the people to kill 
 animals which they meant to use for food the law of 
 Deuteronomy gives one class of instructions, and the Book of 
 Leviticus gives another. According to Leviticus, every 
 domestic animal slaughtered either in the camp or in the 
 open field, must be presented at the door of the tabernacle 
 of the congregation. In Deuteronomy, God allows animals 
 to be killed for food in any town, and eaten, like game, by 
 the clean and the unclean alike, when the sanctuary 
 happens to be too far away from the parties who use the 
 food. These and such as these are difficulties which are 
 supposed to be founded on a difference of times and circum- 
 stances in the history of Israel, when the records were 
 formed, and to indicate that the laws in Deuteronomy, and 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 9 
 
 in Leviticus, and in Exodus, instead of having all been given 
 at one time by the Lord to Moses, or by Moses himself to 
 the people, at Sinai, had a gradual growth, and were promul- 
 gated at different times by the Lord through the prophets to 
 the people as occasion called for them, and the people's sins 
 required to be provided against. First came the law in 
 Exod. xx.-xxiil, the oldest of all, and the only purely 
 Mosaic one. Next came the law of Deuteronomy, some seven 
 centuries and a-half later, about the middle of the eighth 
 century before Christ, and fifty or sixty years or more, say 
 before Josiah's reign. Thereafter, some three centuries it 
 may be, after the return from the exile, and the complete 
 re-establishment of the temple and the temple worship 
 under Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel, and the Prophets of 
 the restoration, came the complete priestly code of Leviticus, 
 and as the signs or marks determining the order of these, you 
 have — 1. The many altars of the 20th chapter of Exodus ; 
 2. The one altar of Deuteronomy ; and 3. The complete 
 hierarchical position of the priests in Leviticus and Numbers 
 and the latter parts of Exodus. The first and second eras 
 are distinguished by this, that the earlier one allows an altar 
 at every place where the Lord appears, while the latter one 
 prohibits all altars except the one at Jerusalem in the 
 temple. The second and third eras are distinguished by 
 the fact, that in the earlier, or Deuteronomic era, there is 
 no difference between priests and Levites save this, that the 
 priests are the Levites actually officiating, while in the later, 
 or Levitical, the priests are a hierarchy, — viz., the sons of 
 Aaron ; and the other Levites stand related to them, much as 
 a layman is to a priest in the Church of Rome or England. 
 
 IL It becomes plain at this point that the critical theory 
 of Deuteronomy calls for a reconstruction of our whole ideas 
 with respect to the legislation of Moses and the religious 
 history of the kingdom of Israel. The old theory of explain- 
 ing such difficulties as are called into special prominence by 
 
 A 2 
 
10 THE CEITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 the new and higher criticism will not suit the exigencies of 
 the case, and must, according to it, be cast utterly aside. 
 The difference between the two is not one of Mosaic author- 
 ship, nor one of date of composition. Moses, indeed, on 
 the one theory — the old traditional or orthodox theory — 
 may have been the author of the Pentateuch, or the 
 author of Deuteronomy, or the author of part of Deuter- 
 onomy, and part of Exodus, and part of Leviticus, and 
 part of Genesis, or all of some of them. He may, however, 
 have been the author of neither. Another and later writer 
 than he may have gathered up Moses' fragments of law, 
 and Moses' manuscripts of Israel's journeys, and all the 
 materials he may have left for the composition of the 
 law books, which are in that case really his own, and 
 are substantial and trustworthy Mosaic law and history. 
 And this later writer may have written these books as Ave 
 possess them under the guidance of God's Spirit just as faith- 
 fully and trustworthily, nay, ten thousandfold more so, than 
 John Hill Burton, our royal historiographer, has written an 
 account of what took place in Queen Mary's days, or 
 Froude has recorded the sayings and doings of Queen Eliza- 
 beth and her Court. But on the new critical theory, Moses 
 can neither be the writer of the book, nor the author of the 
 laws, nor the maker of the history contained in Deuteronomy, 
 in any complete or real sense. The nucleus of a law and the 
 background of a history there may be. The trumpet-blast of 
 Sinai, and the ten words spoken from the mountain-top by the 
 lips of Jehovah in the ears of the people, and the wandering 
 through the wilderness of some insignificant Shemitic tribe, and 
 the exodus from Egypt, and the entrance into Canaan, and 
 the subjugation of the Canaanites in a marvellous way may 
 remain, to give foundation to the after history, and sow the 
 seeds of prophetic life, and priestly service, and Davidic 
 royalty, and Solomonic wisdom, and the post - exilian 
 hierarchy. A Moses there may have been, nay, there was, 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 11 
 
 trained in Egypt an adopted son of Pharaoh's court, and 
 a notable leader and lawgiver, the founder of the nation's 
 greatness. The main facts regarding his existence and his 
 power are true. But that is all. The Moses who is repre- 
 sented as establishing the sacerdotal code of law in its 
 completeness, and building the tabernacle in the wilderness, 
 and prophetically arranging everything for the kingdom and 
 for after ages, according to God's perfect ideal and at once, 
 never did exist. The real distinction between the old theory 
 and the new (for the Deuteronomic code is regarded on all 
 hands as the starting-point of the new) Hes in this : The 
 old, grounding on the apparent matter-of-factness and histor- 
 ical character of the books, regards it as certain that God's 
 ideal system of theocratic institutions, prophetical, priestly, and 
 regal, was given at once, and to begin with, in its completed 
 form, a few unimportant details, merely to be adjusted after- 
 wards, according to the exigencies of the times — the whole ideal 
 fitting in to all times. The new, reconstructing and remodel- 
 ling the materials in the books according to the light whi'Ch 
 it fancies certain indications in the old books and certain 
 difficulties in the old theory throw upon the history, finds the 
 merest skeleton of legislation to have been enacted at Sinai, 
 and the entire books which now pass under the name of the law 
 of Moses, and which passed in Christ's day under the same name, 
 to be the outcome of many centuries of the nation's growth 
 under its judges, and its prophets, and its priests, and its 
 kings. Professor Robertson Smith himself puts the contrast 
 thus : " The very essence of the traditional view (meaning the 
 orthodox view, twenty-two centuries old) of the Pentateuch 
 is, that the law of Israel did not grow up by successive revela- 
 tions adapted to changing circumstances, but was framed by 
 Divine wisdom in a shape independent of all change of national 
 conditions within the limits of the dispensation. The legisla- 
 tion w^as essentially prophetic ; even the form of its words is 
 sometimes addressed to future generations. The critics whom 
 
12 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 I follow hold that the so-called Mosaic legislation, in its 
 present form, is a matter of growth ; that only the funda- 
 mental laws of the theocracy were given to Israel through 
 Moses ; that these laws were modified and added to from time to 
 time by prophets or other divinely-guided leaders of the Old 
 Testament dis23ensation ; that the Pentateuch, accordingly, in 
 its legislative as well as its historical parts, is made up of 
 documents written at different times, from Moses till after the 
 exile, each of which inaugurated a new era of religious history, 
 and was meant to be a divinely-inspired legislative pro- 
 gramme for the people." It were not difficult to detect 
 bias in these statements coming from the Professor in the 
 heat of discussion ; but they establish all the same the view 
 I take of the true nature of the critical theory, which has been 
 expounded so fully abroad, and has been adopted, less or more, 
 by Professor Smith ; and which, indeed, he believes to be, in a 
 modified form, perfectly consistent with our beliefs in inspira- 
 tion and our confessional doctrine of the Scripture.* But 
 
 III. The theory is seen in its entire strength, or rather in 
 its wonderful weakness, when we look at it in its work of 
 reconstructing the books that have hitherto gone under the 
 name of Moses' law, and consider, as we must, the account 
 it gives us of the material contained in them. It is quite 
 easy to imagine a growth of law in Israel under the prophets ; 
 easy to believe that the system of sacerdotal service was not 
 complete in David's day ; or that the law of the one sanctuary 
 was not given till a century or two before Josiah's time ; or 
 that the distinction between Levites and priests to be found 
 in Leviticus did not exist till the temple was rebuilt, and the 
 life of the nation was about to expire. It is easy to conclude 
 that there was a Jehovist author, who penned a book, or a 
 fragment of a book, which has been incorporated now, less or 
 more, into the book of Exodus, and forms at this date a portion 
 
 * It is to be clearly understood that there are many parts of the general theory, 
 and these the most obuoxious, which Professor Smith does not adopt. 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 13 
 
 of the so-called law of Moses — nay, the very kernel of it. It is 
 easy to hold that a Deiiteronomist followed, writing under Divine 
 inspiration, or without Divine ins2)iration, who condemned the 
 many altars which had become seats of idolatry, and instituted 
 a law that the Lord should be worshipped only in Jerusalem. 
 It is easy to see how, in all likelihood, if we judge by what 
 we see in other nations and other religions, the full ritual 
 code of priestly service should be the last element of the law 
 to be completed and committed to writing, and should be 
 written at a period, when declension had begun, by an Elohist 
 priest or prophet. But it is a much more difficult thing to 
 understand how the law of Moses should have taken its 
 present shape under such circumstances, and to reconcile its 
 present form with high regard for truthfulness or honourable 
 representation, if the theory be deemed correct. Those who 
 know the history of the theory at length advanced, and know 
 the variety of conclusions come to tentatively, as well as the 
 extraordinary suppositions made in order to make it plausible, 
 know how much thought and hard work and speculation it 
 has cost to get over the verisimilitude of the historical and 
 legislative details of the five books, called the books of Moses, 
 not to speak of Deuteronomy in itself, and to become con- 
 vinced that we have not a really Mosaic code of law before us, 
 which God delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai as the ideal and 
 standard to which the morals and the religion of the nation 
 should in all time be. brought. I will not trouble you with 
 an account of its construction and growth. Edouard Reuss, 
 Professor in the University of Strasburg, led the way in 
 laying the foundations of it forty years ago, unable to satisfy 
 himself with the labours of previous scholars, who had 
 adopted the hypothesis of an original work supplemented by 
 various revisionists and enlarged by partial incoherent 
 additions. He maintained that the principal interest of the 
 critic ought to rest on the date of the laws, and that the 
 history of Israel could only be correctly estimated or con- 
 
14 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 striicted by a knowledge of the order in wliich these laws 
 were given ; that Deuteronomy as a book was the oldest 
 written code of law in the Pentateuch ; that Ezekiel lived 
 before the drawing up of the ritual code, or of those laws 
 which definitely organised the hierarchy ; and that the writer 
 of the Pentateuch clearly distinguishes himself from the old 
 prophet Moses. Ewald, Hupfeld, Noeldeke, Schrader, Riehm, 
 most of all Graaf, and in his train Merx and Wellhausen followed 
 in Germany, Kuenen in Holland, and Kayser at Strasburg. And 
 now here is the sum total of their labours, given by the old 
 man at Strasburg, who more than forty years ago opened the 
 campaign. You will take it, I trust, for what it is worth; I 
 simply translate it that you may understand the issue and 
 have an unbiassed representation of the whole result : — " The 
 history of the migration from Egypt, and of the estab- 
 lishment of the Israelites in the land of Canaan, as it is con- 
 tained in the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Joshua, has 
 not been written by contemporaries, eye-witnesses of the 
 facts which they relate. It has reached us as it shaped itself 
 in the course of ages, in the form of popular tradition, and 
 under the influence of religious ideas whose germ had for- 
 merly been deposited in the bosom of the nation by its first 
 prophet and conserved and developed and propagated there- 
 after by his successors, whose venerable and persevering 
 efforts, age after age, succeeded in making those ideas take root 
 in an ever-widening circle. We have not history, properly so 
 called, in those books, but the legend of the oldest epoch of 
 which the people and its leaders have preserved any remem- 
 brances. What is given us in Genesis as the history of the 
 origin of the nation can only be regarded as pure })oetry. 
 For according to the natural course of human things, that 
 would transport us into ages of incalculable antiquity, because 
 it is not possible that in the space of four or five generations 
 a single pair should become millions. There is nothing in 
 the book but legend, an idealised reflex of real and historical 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 15 
 
 facts. It is a series of myths of different origin and of divers 
 tendencies. It is a national epic poem, as it has been 
 justly called, worthy of being compared with those of other 
 nations of antiquity, which has been created one of them by the 
 purity of the religious conceptions which form the cement of 
 it, and which is in many respects superior to all the others." 
 Again, " The laws which form the most important part of the 
 Pentateuch cannot have been promulgated, at least in greater 
 part, in the circumstances with which they are placed in rela- 
 tion." Yet again, the account given by the same author of the 
 Jehovist production from which the historical portions of 
 Deuteronomy are taken is this — " The work was essentially 
 historical* It began in the first age of humanity by relating a 
 certain number of myths, Avhich very probably took their rise 
 in the bosom of the Israelitish people and in the soil of Palestine. 
 But its principal object was to relate the history of the people of 
 God, from the first revelations and promises made to the patri- 
 archs, to the entire realisation of these which took place when 
 Israel got possession of the land of Canaan. We say a history, bat 
 we do not understand by that a narrative based on documents, 
 and thus offering only facts, duly authenticated and calling 
 for no sifting. Already the incoherencies and the contradic- 
 tions which have been signalised in so great numbers would 
 prove that such is not the nature of the work. It is nearer 
 the truth to say that almost the entire circle of its narratives 
 bears the stamp of legend and even of myth. What it gives 
 to us is simply the substance of popular traditions, already 
 very poetical in themselves, and which, far from having lost 
 in the course of transmission to us aught of the charm of 
 their first conception, have only gained in this respect additional 
 attraction under the pen of a writer whose talent, not less 
 than his sympathetic intelligence, has known well how to 
 guarantee it to them for ever. We cannot better characterise 
 this composition than by calling it the national epic of Israel. 
 
 * " L'Histoire Sainte et la Loi, 1879." 
 
16 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 If it is not poetry in form, it is poetry at its foundation. 
 Everything is idealised in it — the persons, the facts, the men, 
 the things. The patriarchs and Moses — those grand figures 
 which dominate the history, and which sum it up in their 
 persons — are in continual and intimate relationship to God, 
 and the distance which separates the mortal man from the 
 eternal Creator seems to have no existence in their experience." 
 This is the sort of history in the mould of which the legislative 
 programme of Deuteronomy is cast, and out of which it is 
 made to spring. I will not detain you with more from Reuss ; 
 but I cannot avoid giving you two results from another critic, 
 whose work on the history of Israel, recently published, has 
 taken a foremost place in the productions of the higher criticism. 
 I mean Wellhausen. * The first respects Deuteronomy proper ; 
 the second respects Exodus and the construction of the taber- 
 nacle, which he regards, as does Reuss also, to be the product 
 of the priestly author's brain who lived after Ezekiel's day, 
 and composed the priestly code which is held to date from 
 Nehemiah's governorship. Both will illustrate the same general 
 truth. (1.) The Deuteronomist, according to Wellhausen's 
 notion, while placing, by a well-known fiction, his instructions 
 or discourses in the mouth of Moses, guards himself from call- 
 ing for the immediate practice of these instructions. " Ye 
 are not yet passed over Jordan," says the writer, whether 
 under inspiration or not under inspiration no matter. 
 The people are engaged in a work of reformation, and 
 the law must enter in vigour only when the people shall 
 have finished the conquest of the country, and shall have 
 come to enjoy repose after having completed their work. So 
 the crossing of the Jordan is a parable. In the opinion 
 of this critic, the writer of the book of Deuteronomy, 
 who gave the signal for the reformation of Josiah, modifies 
 the materials with which tradition furnishes him, corrects the 
 
 * For an admirable r6sum6 of Wellhausen, see " Eevue de I'Histoire des Reli- 
 gions." Paris, 1880. 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 17 
 
 old enactments, sometimes permitting wliat was forbidden, 
 sometimes forbidding what was permitted, and gives in the 
 book which he composes legal expression to the struggle of 
 the era, putting all into the mouth of Moses, and moulding 
 his lansruafje of a later time to suit the older time, so that he has 
 Moses teaching in figure what he teaches in Moses' name. The 
 book is, accordingly, parable throughout. (2.) There is only a 
 single step beyond this when, in the much later production of 
 what is called the priestly code which dates from the days of 
 E^ra, 444 B.C., you find the erection of the tabernacle in the 
 wilderness made a portion of the early sacerdotal history of 
 Israel, and you are told in the most matter-of-fact fashion that 
 Moses was instructed by God to erect it, although no such 
 structure ever existed. It is Wellhausen's opinion, and it is 
 Eeuss's opinion also, that the entire tabernacle, whose erection 
 is given with such detailed simplicity in so many chapters 
 of Exodus, is ideal — the structure of it a piece of mental work 
 on the part of the author who composed the priestly code, 
 a projection of the temple into the far-back past by an ima- 
 ginative intellect, who wished to gain the prestige of antiquity 
 for his religious ritual, and for the first temple's model, and for 
 the first temple's services, rather than a veritable building 
 which Bezaleel fashioned with his hands and Moses had the 
 model of from God. This, friends, was the style in which 
 the materials in our sacred books grew from age to age, till 
 at length in the age succeeding Ezra, after continuous addi- 
 tions by the chronicler, by the Talmud, and by religious 
 customs, the sacerdotal code and the history which is now to 
 be found in the texts of the Pentateuch got enriched, en- 
 livened, and surcharged with legend, and the entire books 
 passed from the hands of the priests into the hands of the 
 scribes or lawyers in the age which separated Xehemiah from 
 Alexander the Great, and all the different codes of law and 
 history got fused into one great Mosaic whole, the same which 
 we possess, without regard to order of time or material 
 
18 THE CEITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 " Literary men worked at them. It is not said whether under 
 the influence of inspiration or not. Nobody can tell the 
 precise epoch when the enterjDrise was undertaken or finished 
 Tradition has not preserved the names of those who were 
 charged with the task." But this is certain, and has been 
 proclaimed at last, that, in putting their materials into shape, 
 these men have placed the code second which should have 
 been placed first, and have been the means of giving to 
 the earlier legislation the absurd name of Deuteronomy. 
 Here is the latest account of the whole matter. I again 
 quote from Reuss. " Three documents were in hand. The 
 less ancient was a priestly code of law which had regulated 
 for a longer or shorter time the public and national worship. 
 Another was also a law-code, but moral, and of an older date, 
 the Deuteronomic one which had proclaimed the principles 
 previously preached by the prophets, and which had got infused 
 into the constitution of the religion of all the members of the 
 great Israelite community. A third, which had been written 
 by the Jehovist, related in a manner at once popular and 
 picturesque the history of the origin of the nation from the age 
 of the promises they loved, and loved so much the more because 
 the actual issue of events had given the lie most sadly to those 
 promises. These three documents, the oldest of them dating 
 from about the golden age of the northern kingdom, the 
 latest from about Ezra's day, were pieced together clumsily, 
 after a fashion which, indeed, at first sight might shock or 
 offend a modern reader accustomed to the rules of orderly 
 and rational composition, but which, at the same time, we 
 ought to be grateful for, inasmuch as not having effaced con- 
 tradictions, nor modified nor suppressed what was inharmo- 
 nious, it has afforded to the higher critics an opportunity of 
 studying the literary history of those olden times. We have 
 them at this hour in the so-called law of Moses almost 
 intact, and we owe it to the artless and the modest writers of 
 those five books in one that Ave can recognise the ideas which 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTEROXOMV. 19 
 
 were originally deposited in the heart of the nation, and can 
 reconstruct on a solid and satisfactory basis the entire history 
 of Israel's religion. While the book was being written, what 
 could be more natural than that the historical outline of the 
 events supposed to be recorded, either as parable or as fact, 
 should be followed, and that Genesis should go first, the laws 
 dated from Sinai second, and that the others which were 
 alleged to have been published in the plains of Moab should 
 be reserved to the closing part of the book." 
 
 IV. We have reached at length the position whence we can 
 rightly grasp aU and see, as see we should, the objections 
 that lie against such an elaborate piece of critical reconstruc- 
 tion in the region of sacred books. 
 
 1 . The entire history of the law of Moses, and of the law 
 itself, is less or more parabolical or figurative, and Deuter- 
 onomy, which lies at the basis of the whole, is the key to 
 the understanding of the whole. If you do not understand 
 Deuteronomy aright, you do not and cannot understand either 
 Exodus or Leviticus or Numbers or Genesis aright, nay, n-^r, 
 I win add, either Samuel or Kings or Chronicles, or the 
 history or the law — priestly, political, moral — of the nation 
 of Israel. Everything is shaped and moulded in this theory 
 by the first-written laAv-code. That first-written law-code is 
 Deuteronomy. Its teaching in history and in law is paraboli- 
 cal, and the teaching of all the law partakes largely of the 
 parabolic also. I need not say how contrary to appearances 
 all this is. 
 
 2. Critical difficulties on which the theory is based are 
 very much exaggerated. I do not say so merely on my own 
 authority, or give it as a mere opinion of mine. Professor 
 A. B. Davidson, of Edinburgh, whom some men are unwise 
 enough and ill-informed enough to number, if not among the 
 tainted, at least among the suspected, says in an article which 
 has been misunderstood as too conceding, " "We certainly 
 think that those who have drawn attention to the discrepancy 
 
20 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 between history and the theology of the priesthood have 
 exaggerated it." And again, " We confess to sympathise with 
 Dr. DeHtzsch in his dislike to what he calls the ' new theory.' " 
 Take, for example, the difficulty about all the Levites being 
 priests or the priests being simply officiating Levites, which 
 leads the critics to suppose that Deuteronomy must have 
 been of late origin. Their theory is, that anybody at 
 the outset, belonging to any tribe, might officiate as priest, 
 and that the distinction betw^een the tribe of Levi and 
 the other tribes was not made at Sinai, but away down 
 in later times. But do we not find in Judges the case of 
 Micah, who said, " Now I know the Lord will bless me, seeing 
 I have a Levite to my priest." That proves how strongly 
 the idea of the tribal priesthood of Levi had got rooted in 
 the nation shortly after Joshua's day, and before there was a 
 king in Israel. Again, as to the subject of the one altar of 
 which we hear so much. There cannot be a doubt that far 
 too great stress is laid on that, and that the time at which 
 critics till now have fixed the choosing by Jehovah of the 
 place to which all Israel go to worship, has been a blunder. 
 Two years ago I settled in my own mind, and propounded 
 to some learned critics, the opinion that Bible history shows 
 that God neither chose nor meant to choose the one place 
 wdiere He should cause His name to dw^ell to the exclusion 
 of all others, till the Temple of Solomon was built. Dr. 
 Davidson, of Edinburgh, had doubts about believing it. 
 What now ? We find he regards it as a settled fact."^ And 
 Wellhausen, the leading critic for the time being on the new 
 theory's side, adopts it, and has proved it beyond all question. 
 This fact sweeps away at a stroke the whole structure of the 
 new criticism as to the difference between Exodus and 
 Deuteronomy about the one altar, down at least to Solomon's 
 day. " Worship during the time of the judges and the early 
 monarchy was legitimate at various altars simultaneously 
 
 * Art. British and Foreim Ev. E. 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 21 
 
 If Deuteronomy be Mosaic, this is how pious men of the 
 age of the judges understood it. If it be not Mosaic, this is 
 still what it means." 
 
 3. The improbabilities to which it leads are very striking. 
 We have simply to consider a single instance and we shall 
 see. It is a part of the theory, as we have seen, that the 
 tabernacle was not built, and that the elaborate service 
 recorded in Leviticus was not in ordinary use in the wilder- 
 ness, nor had any existence till after the Temple was built. 
 The entire story of its construction and of the Levitical code 
 originated in the mere desire of the writer of Exodus, who 
 lived in the days of Ezra or of Malachi, to give an air of 
 antiquity to the Temple and its ritual. Now, suppose all 
 this to be true. What then ? Why, you have a priestly 
 author concocting in his own fancy all the matter-of-fact-like 
 matter we have in Exodus about the taches of brass and the 
 ouches of gold, the ten curtains, twenty and eight cubits long 
 and four cubits broad ; about the fifty loops ; about the 
 curtains of goat's hair, thirty cubits long and four cubits 
 broad ; about the rams' skins dyed red ; about the badgers' 
 skins ; about the pillars and the sockets, and the hangings 
 and the cords, and the pins ; and then setting all these 
 dowTi as prescribed and particularised by God ; aye, all that 
 under Divine inspiration, while never any such thing took 
 j)lace. I for one cannot believe that, and few common- 
 sense Christians will. 
 
 4. The unhkelihobd and questionable character of its 
 morality are against it. Is it likely, my friends, that if God 
 spake by a prophet, and sent him forth to say to the people 
 how grievous their sin was in turning away from the living 
 God, the God of Israel, He should make Moses speak ; and not 
 do as He does in Isaiah and Ezekiel and Amos, and all the 
 prophets, saying. Thus saith Jehovah ? Is it consistent with 
 the high moral tone of all that Jehovah does and says in Israel, 
 so far as the history of the kings and the writings of the 
 
22 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 prophets are concerned, that He should instruct or inspire a 
 prophet to write new laws and put them in Moses' mouth, 
 and construct a parabohc history which the people could 
 scarce see through, or which, if they did see through, they 
 would consider a ruse to gain their ear and secure their 
 obedience ? I certainly shall be loath to accept such a thing, 
 or to peril my character for credulity on such a notion. 
 
 5. The difficulty of reconcihng Christ's thoughts and 
 Christ's words with such a view are against it. I will not 
 say it is not possible for Jesus to use the word " Moses " 
 when He speaks of what Moses says, now in one place, now 
 in another place in Deuteronomy, as the simple equivalent of 
 what He finds in the book, and to put the language in His 
 mouth which the book puts into his mouth, and to see all in the 
 sense in which the author of the book saw it. But it seems 
 most plain that there are indications of Christ really believing 
 that He was speaking of words really and truly spoken by 
 Moses, and of things really and truly done by Moses in a 
 most commonplace, natural, and historical sense. Take for 
 example the law about divorce in the 19th chapter of 
 Matthew. The Pharisees did not say. Why does Moses 
 command to give a writing of divorcement ? If they had 
 done that, they had referred their language to the book. 
 But they said, " Why did Moses command ? " and referred 
 their words to Moses, the person, using an historical tense. 
 And Jesus in His reply does the same : " Moses, because of 
 the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your 
 wives ; but from the beginning it was not so." These words 
 are taken from the very portion of Deuteronomy which is 
 said not to have been spoken by Moses at all, and they are 
 law, not history ; you will find them in the 24th chapter. 
 Again, in Mark xii. 9-26, the same thing occurs ^\ath respect 
 to Exodus. Jesus refers both to the book and to the person — 
 to the book as the book of Moses, and to the person as the 
 Moses to whom God spake at the bush. Again, in John, 
 
THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 23 
 
 with respect to the whole law, " Did not Moses give you the 
 law ? " I will not multiply instances. Christ and His 
 apostles can hardly be supposed to have done anything else 
 than believe that a real Moses did really say what he is 
 alleged to say in Deuteronomy and in all the Pentateuch, and 
 to do all he is alleged to do. Nothing could be more natural 
 than that Peter, in the Acts, meant to say that Moses — the 
 literal Moses, who was brought up in Pharaoh's court — said 
 unto the fathers, " A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise 
 up unto you of your brethren, hke unto me ; him shall ye hear 
 in all things, whatsoever he shall say unto you." You know 
 where that is to be found — viz., in the 18th chapter of 
 Deuteronomy, Again, the very portion of the book which 
 Moses is declared never to have spoken — mark, I say "spoken," 
 not " written," for it is one thing for Moses to have said all 
 he is represented as saying, and done all he is represented to 
 have done, in the book of Deuteronomy, or Exodus, or Levi- 
 ticus, or Numbers, and another to have written either one or 
 other of these books in the form in which we now have them. 
 Brethren, let me say it — till all these things are cleared up, 
 and the unnaturalness of the theory removed, I shall stick 
 by the old view — that the law of Deuteronomy, and the law 
 of Exodus, and the law of Numbers is law which the Lord 
 gave by Moses. It matters not to me who wrote it in a book 
 nor how it was written, if only I am certified it was written 
 by a prophet, and written under God's guidance. 
 
 It is right, in closing, that I should say I have not dealt in 
 all this particularly with the view which Professor Kobertson 
 Smith, of the New College, Aberdeen, takes of Deuteronomy or 
 the Pentateuch. He strives to adopt the theory in a general 
 sense, and still to hold by the Church of Scotland view of 
 inspiration and the Word of God. This is something which 
 the Germans and the higher critics of the Contiuent have not 
 attempted. Inspiration is little, and the Westminster Con- 
 fession nothing to them. How far success is possible in the 
 
24 THE CRITICAL THEORY OF DEUTERONOMY. 
 
 line whicli Professor Smith pursues, it is hard to say. This 
 only is certain — Professor Keuss modifies his views and meets 
 the objections of opposing critics on the precise ground 
 which Professor Smith adopts, and he certainly does not 
 preserve the Westminster doctrine of inspiration or the Word 
 of God. Here is what he says in answer to the objection 
 that such an hypothesis as he adopts makes the law of Moses 
 a work of fraud, and the entire Old Testament, as well as the 
 New, in some sort, repose upon a barefaced lie. "Calm 
 yourself a little as you discuss so grave a question," says 
 he. "The objection would be frightful if it were treated 
 of false decretals, — audaciously invented to give credit to 
 ambitious and unlawful pretensions. It falls to the ground 
 so soon as it is proved that all is reduced to the com- 
 mitting unto writing of the substance of the teaching of ten 
 or twelve generations of prophets who could in good conscience 
 trace up to the first of them all — viz., Moses — the principles 
 which they never ceased to preach, and which had been trans- 
 mitted from hand to hand, and from mouth to mouth, in the 
 schools, under the direction of men surrounded by the respect 
 of their contemporaries, and whom posterity had crowned 
 with a legendary glory. There was nothing new, save in the 
 form. The body, or substance, was a resume of venerable 
 work. Oral preaching had not produced the effect which 
 those men had a right to expect of it. And they tried another 
 method which, as we know from history, had little better 
 success for the time being. But Providence held a third in 
 reserve which ended by giving credit to the two foregoing, 
 and making them respected." In a note, the same venerable 
 author adds : The only veritable innovation we know in the 
 Deuteronomic code is the absolute prohibition of worship 
 outside Jerusalem. 
 
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