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 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 AND ITS CRITICS: 
 
 Zhc 3ntro^uctor^ Xccture, 
 
 DELIVERED ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3KD, 1891, 
 
 GEORGE C. M. DOUGLAS, D.D., 
 
 I'KIXLU'AI, OK TllK FRKE CHURCH COI.I.ECE, CI.ASCOW. 
 
 GLASGOW: 
 JOHN N. MACKINLAV 
 
 1892. 
 PRICE SIXPENCE. 
 
.D73 
 
/^;:%^VM§F?;?/i^-^ 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 AND ITS CRITICS: 
 
 Zbc 3ntro^uctor^ Xccture, 
 
 DELIVERED ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3KI', 1891, 
 
 GEORGE C. M. "bOUGLAS, D.D., 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF THE FRf:E CHURCH COI.LE(;E, GLASC.OW. 
 
 GLASGOW: 
 JOHN N. MACKINLAV. 
 
 I 892. 
 PRICE SIXPENCE. 
 
TO THE MINISTERS OF THE FREE CHURCH OF 
 SCOTLAND. 
 
 No one in our Church could have been more surprised tlian I 
 myself was, when I was asked to teach the Hebrew Classes 
 in the College at Glasgow, which was opened in Session 1856-57, 
 and when I was elected Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament 
 Theology by the General Assembly of 1857. 1 wish no one to be 
 surprised by my now resigning. If I know myself I have always 
 cherished a high standard of ministerial and professional efficiency, 
 however sadly I feel that I have come short of my ideal. I can 
 only say that I have been habitually prepared to apply to myself 
 the practical treatment which seems to me theoretically the right 
 one for ministers and professors. 
 
 A very serious illncbS exactly fifteen years ago restrained me 
 from all work during the greater part of the session, and it left its 
 ineffaceable mark upon me. By the kindness of the College 
 Committee and of my own Senatus, approved by the General 
 Assembly, my labour was lightened ten years ago by an arrange- 
 ment which gave me an assistant year by year. But I felt that 
 this arrangement ought to be only temporary. And the Quin- 
 quennial Visitation of the College last session furnished n)e with 
 a suitable opportunity for intimating to the Church that I should 
 ask the General Assembly of 1892 to grant me a colleague, along 
 Avith whom I might continue to give service in the College as 
 I should find myself able. I could not indeed expect that this 
 plan would work well unless there should be a general' agreement 
 in its favour. I have since been led to suppose that I must 
 cherish little or no hope of this : and I have therefore intimated 
 to the College Committee that I shall resign the offices of 
 Principal and Professor into the hands of the General Assembly 
 which is to meet in May. 
 
 I publish my address given at the opening of the present 
 
 session, in order that the Church may know where I stand 
 
 and have stood v/hile occupying the posts to which I was 
 appointed. 
 
 G. C. M. D. 
 
 Glasgow, i^th Jamiary iSg2. 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CRITICS. 
 
 I DO not know that there is anythinfj of the nature of an 
 outward event closely related to our College to which 
 I ought to turn your attention to-day, unless I refer to a 
 loss which our Church and the whole Church has this year 
 sustained by the death of Robert W. Barbour. It is not 
 for me, on this occasion, to give a study of his character, 
 and of his work, which it has pleased God to make so short, 
 after having limited it by years of broken health ; nor is it 
 necessary, for he lives in the memory of multitudes who 
 knew him in very different spheres of usefulness and stations 
 of life. But he endeared himself wonderfully to every one 
 in this Hall, three years ago, when he filled the place of 
 Dr. Lindsay, who had been sent out by the Church as a 
 deputy to India. I am persuaded that to mention this is 
 enough ; that by doing so I recall thoughts and feelings 
 which I prefer to leave to make their own impression 
 without the addition of any reflections of mine, 
 
 I pass to other reflections which occur to me, in con- 
 nection with the work to which I was called, I may very 
 soon be able to say — that is, if am spared to the end of this 
 session — thirty-five ye_ars ago. That is the half of what 
 Scripture and common observation mark out as a full life- 
 time ; and, over the experience of a generation, and rather 
 more, I cannot well avoid looking back, to trace the course 
 of thought, in respect of the field of labour into which I was 
 sent unexpectedly, and into which I must soon leave others 
 to carry vigour of mind and body greater than mine now 
 
is. Perhaps some of these reflections may be useful and 
 interesting" to others as well as to myself 
 
 When I began, in 1857, the controversy in Great Britain 
 on the questions as to the authorship of different books of 
 the Old Testament was just taking shape, in connection 
 with the writings of Dr. Samuel Davidson. A little later 
 they came into prominence by the writings of Bishop 
 Colenso, and the controversies arising out of them ; and 
 since then the discussion has never ceased. Whilst the 
 battle is raging it is always difficult for the combatants to 
 rise above the noise and smoke, the confusion and excite- 
 ment of the struggle. One who has lived through so many 
 of these struggles, sometimes taking part, sometimes watch- 
 ing the course of events, may at least contribute something 
 which will aid the recruits who shall have to take part in the 
 contests of the future, enabling them to survey the ground, 
 and to comprehend where they stand. 
 
 The critical view in favour at that time, with those who 
 deemed themselves superior in discernment to the common 
 run of people, may be said to have been the one in favour 
 with the corresponding class in Germany from the last twenty 
 years of the eighteenth century and onwards. In breaking 
 away from the traditional beliefs in regard to the authorship 
 and composition of the books ot the Old Testament, they had 
 very naturally concentrated the most of their attention and 
 power upon the Pentateuch. They differed in many details 
 of importance, but in this they were at one — they denied that 
 Moses was the author. Some alleged proofs of their opinion 
 were pointed out in the style and language ; some matters 
 were held to be clearly an evidence that the composition 
 belonged to an age much later than the age of Moses ; and, 
 inasmuch as many actions recorded in the religious history 
 of Israel were inconsistent with the requirements of the Law, 
 it was reckoned more philosophical to hold that its rules 
 had not yet been laid down, than to hold that the known 
 laws of God were disobeyed. For these reasons, and for 
 
others of which I cannot now stop to speak, none of which, 
 however, have impressed me as convincing, this ground was 
 taken up — that, instead of Moses being the author of the 
 Pentateuch, it is a composite work, whose authors Hved at 
 later times — some of them much later. There was one fact, 
 as distinguished from inferences or conjectures, on which 
 much stress was laid, that there were two quite different 
 divine names running through the book of Genesis. A 
 French physician, Astruc, published a book at Brussels in 
 1753, in which he called attention to this fact, and suggested 
 that it helped us to discover the original memoirs of which 
 Moses had made use in composing Genesis. This harmless 
 opinion attracted little or no notice for a generation ; but 
 towards the end of last century it was taken up by several 
 writers, as a guide to the personality of at least two of the 
 real writers of the Pentateuch, named, from their use of the 
 two words, tne Elohist and the Jehovist. And starting 
 here, a multitude of critics arose to explain the process of 
 composition of the Pentateuch. Into the somewhat con- 
 fusing details of their various speculations I cannot now 
 enter. I content myself with saying that there were four 
 directions in which their controversies assumed prominence. 
 First, whether we had a set of fragments which had been 
 pieced together with greater or less neatness ; or, whether 
 there had nnt been one primary document — the original 
 work — to which supplementary writers had made additions 
 at various points. Secondly, who were the authors ? An 
 Elohist and a Jehovist were found to be too few for the 
 critical object in view, even when a place of considerable 
 influence was assigned to the Redactor (or Editor, in com- 
 moner language), whose duties would be different on the 
 fragmentist and on the supplementary hypothesis. Ac- 
 cordingly, there came to be distinguished an older and a 
 younger Elohist, an older and a younger Jehovist. There 
 was also a special writer for the last of the five books, which 
 gave trouble not unlike the trouble of the fourth Gospel, 
 
8 
 
 with its peculiar cycle of traditions, etc., to the critics of the 
 origin of our Evangelical narratives ; and perhaps there 
 were successive Editors. 77/zW/r, what was the character of 
 these several writers, apart from, or in addition to, their use 
 of certain divine names ? In one way of looking at them, 
 they came to be known as respectively prophetic and priestly 
 writers ; from another point of view, they were discriminated 
 as belonging to the kingdom of Judah or to that of the Ten 
 Tribes. Fourthly, there was the question of the date of each 
 of these writings, which somehow came to be combined in 
 the composition of our present Pentateuch. This especially 
 difficult and confusing branch of the inquiries brought out 
 answers so various and irreconcileable, that I need not con- 
 fuse you with the particulars. In general, I might say that 
 the date of the earliest was alleged to be the time of Samuel 
 and Saul, and thence onwards. The others appeared, it 
 would be difficult to say at what distances from one another, 
 and how far down the stream of Israelite history. There 
 was also a commonly accepted opinion that Deuteronomy 
 was a re-statement of the Law as given in the three middle 
 books : and that the account of the finding of the Law by 
 Hilkiah, in the reign of Josiah, referred to the publication 
 of this book of Deuteronomy, which had really been com- 
 posed not long before, yet possibly so long ago as in the 
 time of King Hezekiah's reformation ; though if this were 
 the case, it had lain in secret and unobserved by the people 
 at large, till the time of Josiah's reformation. 
 
 Of the other books of Scripture, as affected by the 
 criticism of that period, I shall refrain from saying more 
 than this, that by universal consent the latter part of Isaiah 
 was denied to be the writing of the prophet whose name 
 it bears. However, the criticism of the books other than 
 the Pentateuch was much less studied, and the results were 
 much less outstanding ; and it will be more convenient 
 to speak of them in connexion with the next period. 
 
 As the contribution of Astruc remained unnoticed for 
 
thirty years or more, and only then fructified, yet, then at 
 last with remarkable luxuriance, so the foundations of the 
 next cycle of critical speculations had been laid about the 
 year 1835, by three German writers. Vatke, von Bohlen, 
 and George : they asserted their fundamental principle, 
 that right philosophy led us to place the sketch at an 
 earlier date than the fully drawn picture ; for which reason 
 they looked on Deuteronomy as the oldest, instead of the 
 latest, of the books of the law. They seem to have had no 
 immicdiate followers worth naming in my rapid review ; 
 at least, this is so, if a man of greater name, Reuss of 
 Strassburg, who died this year at a very advanced age, 
 reached similar conclusions independently. But this new 
 opinion, which stands in diametrical opposition to the old 
 one, except in so far as their negative position agrees with 
 that of the earlier school of criticism in denying the author- 
 ship by Moses, has attained marvellous popularity since it 
 was worked into a comprehensive scheme by Graf in 1865, 
 and still more by Wellhausen ten years later, and also by the 
 Dutch scholar Kuenen.* I do not wonder that they became 
 tired of those earlier critical schemes, which nevertheless 
 are still upheld by some German critics of high name : 
 for besides being intricate, they are disintegrating 
 and destructive. In some respects we may see an analogy 
 between the Tuebingen School of New Testament 
 criticism and the Old Testament school headed by the 
 men I have named. The rise of both schools was due 
 to the felt want of some constructive principle, which 
 should be applicable to the whole literature of the Christ- 
 ian Scriptures in the one case, and of the Jewish Scriptures 
 in the other ; to the boldness and clearness with which the 
 needed principle was stated and applied ; and to the 
 readiness with which it fitted into certain philosophical 
 tenets popular at the period. Notwithstanding its 
 present popularity, and the strenuous efforts of able 
 
 '* He also is now dead. 
 
lO 
 
 and learned men to make it more so in our own country, I 
 venture to anticipate that it will pass away as the scheme 
 of Baur has passed. Wellhausen states three principles, 
 which he holds to be characteristic of the Jewish religion 
 and worship at three successive stages of development. 
 The ^frj/ of these is that Jehovah must be the sole object 
 of worship, no matter where or how. The second restricts 
 this worship to a single spot, at the central sanctuary. 
 The third proceeds on the acceptance and acknowledge- 
 ment of this restriction of worship to Jerusalem, and 
 terminates the process by imposing a thorough and 
 complete system of ritual. The first and freest stage 
 marks the book of the covenant at Sinai ; say as it is 
 given in Exodus xix.-xxiv. The second, restricting 
 worship to the central sanctuary, marks the book of 
 Deuteronomy. The third, with its completed ritual, 
 marks the priestly codex which occupies the most of the 
 three middle books of the Pentateuch. There are several 
 respects in which this scheme of arrangement for tjie books 
 might be compared with a scheme for expounding the 
 succession in the strata of rocks by a geologist, as charac- 
 teristics are pointed out by which these strata are recognised. 
 Again, as the geologist is perhaps content with stating 
 the relative or comparative ages of the strata, without 
 committing himself to the absolute date of any of them, 
 and yet he has some indications which may afford hints of 
 their actual age ; so these critics lay stress on the order of 
 succession, but admit that the actual date of composition 
 may be hard to determine, while yet there are indications 
 to which they attach high value. The first may reach 
 back to the very age of Moses. The second, involving 
 the struggle for a single sanctuary, may have had its 
 beginnings in the polemic of Hosea and Amos against 
 the high places and their degrading worship : and it 
 might naturally stand in some connexion with the reign of 
 Hezekiah in Judah, to whom a great reformation is 
 
II 
 
 attributed, and in whose time some critics think that 
 Deuteronomy was composed, though not pubHshed to 
 the world till the reign of Josiah, to which time I suppose 
 that critical opinion strongly inclines to ascribe its com- 
 position. The third stage of development may be seen 
 beginning in the book of Ezekiel, a priestly prophet 
 who lived through the destruction of the Jewish kingdom, 
 Church and State together ; but in his confidence that God 
 had a brighter future in store for Israel, a resurrection or 
 life from the dead, he had visions of a restored Temple, 
 and also of a ritual more precisely regulated than any- 
 thing hitherto known. These sketches of his were 
 expanded, no one can say exactly how : but they appear 
 in tolerably precise and finished form when Ezra comes 
 into view as much the most prominent figure in the 
 new Jerusalem, to which he came up clothed with 
 authority from king Artaxerxes to impose his book of 
 the Law on the Jewish people. But it is not affirmed 
 that the process was absolutely complete even in the 
 days of Ezra, though the predominant opinion seems to 
 be that not much of importance was added later. Ezra 
 bears the name of "the scribe," the technical name in 
 later Judaism for a professed or professional teacher 
 of the Law ; and Ezra's age is said to have been one 
 of literary activity. In his age, accordingly the so- 
 called Law took its form very much as this is known 
 to us ; and it was accompanied or buttressed by a number 
 of historical books, either compiled at that time from 
 older materials which were then accessible, or consisting 
 of some of these older books adopted into and incorporated 
 with the sacred collection. Let me however place 
 emphasis on two points in the new critical position, not to 
 be overlooked even in the shortest summary. The 
 one point is, that there is no such work as a Pentateuch, 
 whatever be the strength of tradition in favour of it 
 in the Christian Church, and before this in the Jewish 
 
12 
 
 Church : what we call the book of Joshua is intimately 
 connected with Deuteronomy, so that instead of a 
 Pentateuch, there is a Hcxateuch, or work in six volumes ; 
 and this imaginary name now appears, with scarcely the 
 thought that explanation is needed, in the writings of 
 the best men among these critics. And the other point is, 
 that they are not troubled by any number of texts, in any of 
 these writings, which do not fit into the alleged date 
 or stratum of theological teaching ; to them this is 
 simph-' the proof that such passages are interpolations, 
 foreign material which their principle enables them to 
 detect, as a geologist detects a boulder in a stratum 
 with which it is only accidentally connected. 
 
 The Law is only one of three divisions of the Hebrew 
 Bible, divisions which I always regret that the English reader 
 knows little about, owing to the arrangement of the books 
 in our translation having been borrowed from the Greek 
 and Latin translations, which early assumed a commanding 
 position in the Christian Church. The third division, called 
 the Hagiographa, or Holy Writings (Scriptures), however, 
 is generally less a subject for sustained study by the critics, 
 inasmuch as they reckon most of the books in it of less 
 intrinsic value or interest, and also relegate them to the 
 latest period of ancient Jewish literature, after the Captivity 
 — long after — perhaps so late as the time of the Maccabees — 
 some, perhaps, latei still. The partition-wall between the 
 first and the second divisions — the Law and the Prophets — 
 has been much weakened, if not effaced, by various steps in 
 the critical process. In the Hebrew Bible, the books of 
 Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are reckoned among 
 the Prophets, but the critics remove Joshua from these, to 
 unite it with the Pentateuch, as I have said ; and, on the 
 other hand, Moses having very much disappeared from view 
 as an author, the so-called books of Moses are reckoned to 
 be largely the productions of various unknown prophetic 
 writers. But when we come to books that contain more of 
 
prediction, those which English readers of the Bible are 
 accustomed to call " The Prophets," though there may be 
 allegations of more or less interpolation in them, these have 
 been generally accepted as the writings of the men whose 
 names they bear, except in two cases — the latter half of 
 Isaiah being attributed to some writer or writers long after 
 him, and the latter half of Zechariah (ch. ix.-xi. and xii.-xiv.) 
 to a writer or writers long before him. 
 
 Such is the hypothesis which receives general 
 assent in German critical circles, and has done so for the 
 last twelve years or more, after working its way for as many 
 previous years into favour ; but in this it simply follows the 
 fortunes of the previous critical scheme, which is now mostly, 
 given up. I wish you at this point to observe that the 
 foundations of a new scheme, as inconsistent with this one, 
 and as much opposed to it as it is to its conquered prede- 
 cessor, are being laid by scholars who are no more despised 
 or ridiculed by the school of critics presently fashionable, than 
 Vatke and his associates were when they began. The leaders 
 of this latest movement have been connected with Paris 
 and the language in which they write is French ; but they 
 are in touch with German critical speculation, and the 
 name of one of them, d'Eichtal, indicates at least German 
 origin. I may take as its expounder M. Maurice Vernes, 
 (who is alive, while his most prominent associates, 
 d'Eichtal and Havet, are both dead, I understand) — joint- 
 Director of Advanced Studies in the Sorbonne. I do not 
 wonder that they suppose the present fashionable criticism t>^ 
 
 to be played out, just at the time that many English 
 people, hitherto profoundly ignorant and indifferent, are 
 gulping down the whole of it with amazing relish. Vernes 
 sees clearly that there is no reason why Wellhausen's three 
 theological stages should come in the order he assigns 
 to them ; why, for instance, the older critical school had not 
 as good a shew of reason for their procedure when they 
 placed his third step second, and made the full ritual 
 
14 
 
 an earlier thing than the limitation to one central place of 
 worship. He sees that the notion of a prophetical age 
 succeeded by a priestly age is a piece of fantastic formal- 
 ism ; and that, historically, it is a mere assumption ; poets, 
 prophets, and priests naturally arising side by side, and 
 acting contemporaneously on the people of Israel. 
 
 Nor is he behind his rivals in the skill and boldness 
 with which he dissects a passage. He faces the great 
 alleged fact that Deuteronomy was the book of the Law 
 which was found in the temple during the struggle for 
 reformation under Josiah, to which Jeremiah gave his 
 support. He says that the book of Jeremiah evinces 
 no knowledge of Josiah's reformation ; it has not a word of 
 encouragement for the struggle, or of eulogium over what 
 has been achieved : Josiah's reformation is simply ignored. 
 On this account he presents a choice of inferences ; either 
 that the book of Jeremiah is not a faithful witness, or else, 
 that the narrative of the reformation in the book of Kings 
 is unworthy of credit : in the end, he seems inclined to 
 admit the justice of both inferences. He aims at shewing 
 that in the book of Jeremiah we may see three conflicting 
 classes of passages, which must have come from different 
 writers : one class asserting that no sacrifices were 
 instituted at Sinai, though Deuteronomy insists that there 
 were ; another class, in which the Laws given at Sinai 
 are known and accepted ; and a third class, in which, 
 though the covenant at the coming out of Egypt is known 
 as a fact, it is valued very low. For our book of Jeremiah 
 to have proceeded from three writers, he says, manifestly is 
 a process that requires time. Moreover if the book of 
 Deuteronomy really belongs to the epoch of Josiah's 
 reformation, he asks, how did it happen that this book 
 so easily and quickly took its place as a writing of 
 Moses, as Wellhausen and his allies must suppose, 
 while yet the reformation linked with it failed miserably ? 
 He does not deny that there was a prophet named 
 
IS 
 
 Jeremiah, though he pronounces the book spurious 
 which bears his name ; but he does not think him 
 a man of much importance since he is never named 
 in the historical books ; that is, I presume, taking 
 no account of Chronicles, which is of httle historical value 
 in the eyes of the critics. Similarly he dissects the book of 
 Deuteronomy, and proves to his own satisfaction that 
 besides the introduction, occupying most of the first four 
 chapters, there is a writer on to the end of the eleventh 
 chapter, who soars to the loftiest heights of spiritual 
 religion ; and another who follows him with a great many 
 details belonging to a narrower Jewish school. He 
 likewise pronounces Ezekiel to be a spurious book, because 
 the prophet whose name it bears had not a spirit sufficient- 
 ly cool and self-possessed to measure with his reed all about 
 plans for reconstructing the temple within a few years after 
 the fall of Jerusalem. He complains that if you wish 
 to know what the reigning school of critics have to say 
 of that marvellous book of Isaiah, and if you consult their 
 great expounder Reuss, (to whom nevertheless he looks up 
 with admiration) in his work on the Old Testament 
 writings, the ripened product of this critic's life-long studies, 
 you find the glorious unity of Isaiah torn to fragments, 
 as Reuss sends you to seven or eight different places 
 for an answer. And whereas that school are agreed 
 that the second Isaiah, whether he wrote more or less, 
 did write under the overwhelming influence of Cyrus 
 ever present and working among them : Vernes is certain 
 that Cyrus appears in the book, not as a contemporary, but 
 in the halo of a glorified past, with no historical element 
 in it, except what is after the model of the opening verses of 
 the book of Ezra, a book of much later date, and in 
 his eyes apparently not altogether reliable. And so with 
 the writings of the other prophets : they all have a great 
 catastrophe before their eyes, and then a restoration from 
 it ; and this double peculiarit}' in them Vernes holds to be 
 
evidence of composition some time, longer or shorter, after 
 the captivity, about the same date as the second Isaiah. 
 No doubt some people may be a little startled by his denial 
 of genuineness to the books which bear the names of 
 the prophets, books whose genuineness (allowing for minor 
 interpolations) has hitherto been the starting point of the 
 critical writers ; but he replies that by common consent 
 they deny the genuineness of the book of Daniel, and 
 bring it down to the Maccabean age ; and why may he not 
 do the same with the other books of prophecy? He says 
 that those prophetical writings are pervaded by three 
 characteristics : first, the certainty of restoration of the 
 people to their own land ; secondly, a religious propaganda 
 of the Jewish faith throughout the world ; thirdly, a 
 misconception, arising from ignorance, of the distant 
 religious situation among their ancestors before the exile, 
 who are reproached for constant unfaithfulness to God, 
 whereas they had been doing pretty well. All these things 
 in his opinion indicate the real age of the writers who 
 assumed the names of the old prophets ; they lived in that 
 age when things had taken shape and settled under those 
 universalist Greeks, the successors of Alexander the Great. 
 The so-called books of the prophets must then be regarded 
 as pseudepigraphous or pseudonymous, as critics assert in 
 the case of the Pentateuch, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, &:c. They 
 are productions, he sa)'s, of " creative genius, so that 
 the narrative has not even a historical residuum." And 
 these splendid monuments of creative imagination are 
 simply " illustrated religious lessons, which bring in the 
 patriarchs, Moses, Elijah, and so on." He holds indeed,, 
 that the historico-prophetical books were formed from 
 earlier histories which the genius of the compilers worked 
 up : but he does not rely upon their accuracy, and to him 
 everything before the time of king Saul is hopelessly 
 uncertain. Thus he attributes the books of Kings to 
 a writer who knew at least the principal parts of Deuter- 
 
onomy ; this writer depicted Josiah's reformation so as to 
 make it in harmony with that form of the book of 
 Deuteronomy which was known to him : but in point 
 of fact, the pretended centralisation of worship at Jerusalem 
 would have been as incredible an act of madness on the 
 part of Josiah, as it would be on the part of the Archbishop 
 of Paris to-day to forbid the saying of Mass anywhere 
 throughout his diocese except at the Cathedral of Notre 
 Dame. Ezra and Nehemiah are apparently the only books 
 which Vernes is prepared to accept as absolutely historical ; 
 nay, even in their case he finds a good deal of colouring by 
 the scribe, who lived a considerable time after the events. 
 
 But it may be asked, what does Vernes make of the 
 Pentateuch ? When the. supposed historical basis of 
 Deuteronomy along with Jeremiah has given way, the 
 critical schemes of Wellhausen and his associates and 
 followers crumble into ruins. Vernes had complained that 
 so sagacious and wary a critic as Reuss had torn Isaiah 
 into seven or eight fragments, and made it impossible to 
 study that marvellous book as a whole ; naturally, for 
 a like reason, he brings the same complaint against their treat- 
 ment of that no less marvellous work, the Pentateuch, 
 for the study of which you must go to five or six different 
 places in Reuss, and then content yourself with the study 
 not of the work as a whole, but of merely one or other 
 of those documents. Vernes is as far as well can be from 
 approving of the position which I occupy as a believer 
 in the Mosaic authorship. Nevertheless, perhaps he would 
 prefer my position to Wellhausen's. For he says : " If the 
 traditional school had the defect of conceiving a unity 
 of the Biblical works as implying a complete homogeneity, 
 the school of rational criticism, so meritorious in many 
 respects, as I am careful not to ignore, do the still greater 
 wrong of sacrificing the undisputed coherence of the whole 
 to the heterogeneousness of the parts." And again, having 
 rejected Wellhausen's three successive periods of compos- 
 
ition, which are alleged to be made manifest by the different 
 theological ideas and proclivities in the age o^ Moses, of 
 Josiah, and of Ezra, with an editor who contrived to com- 
 bine them in that last age, Vernes asks : " If criticism has 
 seen clearly, what are we to think of this editor, who 
 amalgamates in strange disorder three books corresponding 
 to three different social states ? and of this good public, I 
 mean the Jews of the Restoration, which absorbed without 
 inconvenience this indigestible mixture?" If I am to give 
 myself over to any of these critical schools, I think this 
 thorough-going criticism of Vernes' would have attractions, 
 on the score of consistency and strength, which I never can 
 feel for those speculations which are at present rampant in 
 Germany, from which they are imported wholesale by people 
 who have hitherto paid little attention to the subject. The 
 Germans are unrivalled as laborious investigators; but for 
 speculation in its most elegant and winning forms, I should 
 turn to the French. 
 
 For it must be remembered that Vernes also has his 
 constructive hypothesis. Instead of beginning with 
 the traditional dates of the different books, and following 
 the critics at present in fashion, as they weigh the 
 claims in favour of such dates with what can be said against 
 them, he starts on what he styles the regressive method. 
 He holds it certain that every thing was settled about the 
 Jewish Canon of Scripture (always with exceptions as to 
 the Hagiographa) before the Maccabean age, that is, before 
 B.C. 175 : and he asks, how little older than this we need to 
 reckon the books to be, which are comprehended in that 
 Canon? Two centuries, say from B.C. 200 back to B.C. 40D, 
 was the time in which Israel was reorganised as a religious 
 rather than a political society, and placed under the 
 supremacy of foreign sovereigns: during these two centuries 
 it found itself generally in peaceable conditions, such as 
 were singularly favourable for literary work, for the study of 
 the national legislators, historians, and theologians, for the 
 
19 
 
 activity of the school and of the learned circles which, he 
 supposes, applied themselves with jealous care to the recon- 
 stitution and exposition of the f^lorious past of the nation. 
 And he contrasts these two quiet literary centuries with 
 the two which went before, B.C. 400 back to B.C. 600, a 
 time of trouble and alarm, of destruction, of dispersion, and 
 of rcconstitution ; this was a period wholly incompatible 
 with the literary activities which the present fashionable 
 criticism assigns to it. And thus, he asserts, the sixth to 
 the fourth centuries, that is, from about B.C. 500 down to 
 B.C. 300, which were very much a blank in the political 
 history of Israel, " were a period of unparalleled activity, 
 religious, literary, legislative, and social. They are the 
 place of the blossoming, the crossing, the conflict, and the 
 final reconciliation of different tendencies, in the sublime 
 formula of The Law and the Prophets," 
 
 M. Havet went somewhat further than M. Vernes ; for 
 he seems to have dated the composition of the so-called 
 writings of the prophets, especially in consideration of the 
 bright Messianic pictures, in the reign of Simon Maccabeus, 
 between B.C. 143 and B.C. 135. 
 
 For my own part I agree with the fashionable school 
 that these are somewhat wild fancies. I do not for a 
 moment think it credible that within fifty or even eighty 
 years of the birth of the prophetess Anna, who was present 
 at the circumcision of the child Jesus, a mass of sacred 
 books should have come into existence, which she and 
 her contemporaries mistook for the genuine inspired 
 writings of men who lived several centuries earlier. But 
 in so agreeing with them, I wish to add two remarks. 
 For one thing, the same incredibility extends to their own 
 suppositions, that the so-called book of the prophet 
 Daniel is a composition of the Maccabean age, and that 
 the mass of the Psalms belong to somewhat the same 
 time : wild suppositions, which they are driven to put 
 forward in consequence of their making the Law and 
 
20 
 
 the organised worship of God so very late as they do. The 
 j other remark is, that the extreme positions of Vernes 
 and his allies are defended by arguments the very same in 
 ' style and nature as those of the followers of Kuenen 
 and Wellhausen, And when once a man has brought 
 himself to believe that those institutions of Jewish worship 
 and polity were the product of the handful of poor 
 Jews who colonised Judea after the Babylonian exile, 
 and yet were accepted without question or exception by the 
 whole of the Jewish people scattered throughout the 
 hundred and twenty seven provinces of the Persian empire, 
 from India to Ethiopia, and wider far than this, I see very 
 little difference in the extravagance of the respective 
 hypotheses, whether the composition and shaping occurred 
 in the fifth and fourth centuries or in the third and second 
 before Christ. 
 
 Not that I have any wish that discussions about the age 
 in which this and that book were written should monop- 
 olise your thoughts, or even get the largest share. We are 
 often asked about a book by critics, what matter does 
 it make who wrote it, and when ? To which I am ready to 
 reply in the most friendly manner, that it has been they 
 who have pressed such questions, and wasted their own and 
 their neighbours' strength in these discussions. At the 
 same time I wish it to be understood that we esteem their 
 arguments, at the very best, to be indecisive, convincing 
 only to those who wish to be convinced, and that we hold 
 to our old convictions. And further, while we concede the 
 utmost liberty we can to those who are enamoured of these 
 literary speculations, even while we believe them to be 
 mistaken, we attach very great importance to these 
 controversies on date and authorship, when the usual 
 beliefs have been discarded for a special purpose, and when 
 [the discussion is maintained by assumptions which have 
 been carried inti> the Church of Christ from the camps 
 of Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Anti-supernaturalism. 
 
PAMPHLET BINDER 
 
 "^^Z. Syracuse, N. Y. 
 Stockton, Colif. 
 
BS1160.D73 
 
 The Old Testament and Its critics : the 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00040 8114 
 
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