i 'k -' s.is./s- PRINCETON, N. J. "^ Presented by~^0-^rR7\VA\ \J<:7\n~DvAVe^ ^33, Division JD.^ i .1 I I ^p UtM. 5Ma6l)m5ton 0laU!icn, £). ID. THE LORD'S PRAYER. i6mo, $i.oo. APPLIED CHRISTIANITY. Moral Aspects of Social Questions. i6mo, $1.25. WHO WROTE THE BIBLE? A Book for the People. i6mo, ;5i-2S. TOOLS AND THE MAN. Property and Indvistry under the Christian Law. i6mo, $1.25. RULING IDEAS OF THE PRESENT AGE. i6mo, $1.25. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. ^e\jeii lii??Ung Bible Boofes A SUPPLEMENT TO WHO WROTE THE BIBLE^'^^"-' ^rr^'vif miici MAH 1 H 191 BY /^T. fn-r^^ u WASHINGTON GLADDEN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1897 COPYRIGHT 1897 BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO THE PEOPLE OF MY CARE WHOSE GENEROUS CAJTDOR AND UNFAILING KINDNESS HAVE ALWAYS SUPPORTED MY BEST ENDEAVORS TO SPEAK THE TRUTH THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED PREFACE In the little book entitled " Who Wrote the Bible ? " it was necessary to treat in an extremely cursory manner the several bibli- cal writings. In the course of ten short chapters the sixty-six books of the Bible all passed under review ; but a few words re- spectmg' its origin and character could be given to each. There appeared to be good reasons for taking a few of the Old Testa- ment books and subjecting them to a more careful examination. The reader of this volume will discover that this was done in a series of popular lectures. They were given on Sunday evenings to a thoughtful con- gregation. They are printed substantially as they were spoken ; I have not greatly chastened the familiar and direct manner of speech. On each of these books many volumes have been written ; no one will expect to find in these brief discourses an adequate exposition of any of them. I have only wished to bring to the knowledge of those who heard them and of those who shall read IV PREFACE them a few of the more important results of recent biblical study. In the Introductory Essay I have considered somewhat carefully the duty of Christian pastors with respect to their use of the Book from which they draw the substance of their teaching. The kindness with which the other little book has been received by Christians of all creeds, on both sides of the sea, ought to be here acknowledged. To a far greater extent than I could have expected, it has been em- ployed as a text book in Bible classes, and in assemblies of Sunday-school teachers; from several sources I have received skill- fully arranged analyses of the several chap- ters, with supplementary and illustrative suggestions, which must have added greatly to the value of the book in the hands of students. To many kind letters which have come to me from readers of the book I have been unable to reply ; let this be the testi- mony of my gratitude that so many have found in it that which satisfies their reason and confirms their faith in the truth which the Bible reveals. WASHINGTON GLADDEN. First Congregational Church, Columbus, Ohio, October 11, 1897 CONTENTS Page I. Introductory 1 II. Judges 43 III. Esther 68 IV. Job 97 V. ECCLESIASTES 128 VI. The Song of Songs . . . . 154 VII. Daniel 177 VIII. Jonah 246 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS INTRODUCTORY The chapters which follow are devoted to the study of a number of books of the Old Testament in which serious difficulties of interpretation are presented to the ordinary reader. This book, like the one entitled " Who Wrote the Bible ? " has been written for the plain people ; it is not for the schol- ars ; they will find in it nothing which they do not know ; doubtless they will fail to find much which they deem important. Nor is there anything here with which intelligent pastors are not familiar. Most of the younger ones have heard all that is here pre- sented in the theological seminaries ; in their clubs and in private conversation they speak freely of these matters. But in their ])ublic ministry some of them are reticent. They 2 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS think it unsafe to trust the people with the truth about the Bible. It is this conclusion of cowardice which deserves, just now, to be challenged and put to rout. A more base- less, a more dangerous theory has rarely in- vaded the minds of Christian teachers. The absurdity of it ought not to require demon- stration. The Bible is the book whose pur- pose it is to guide men unto the truth ; and we are saying, under our breath, that it is not safe to let men know the truth about the Bible ! If there is one book in the world concerning which all men are entitled to know the truth and the whole truth, that book is the Bible. If there is one book in the world concerninf]^ whose orio-in and char- acter there must be no concealment, no de- ceit, no prevarication, that book is the Bible. Nay, if there is one book in the world which can well afford to have the whole truth about it told, that book is the Bible. Counsels of cowardice in dealing with this book are an insult to the book and to the Spirit of truth who speaks through it. If the Bible is a book for the people, intended to be read by them, and suited for their instruction, then they are entitled to know all the facts about it. They cannot use it wisely unless they INTRODUCTORY 6 know what kind of book it is. Concealment of the truth from them is liable to result in serious practical error. A long, dark cata- logue of crimes and wrongs can be traced directly to a misunderstanding of the true character of the Bible by men who believed themselves to be doing God's will. The murder of Servetus by the ministers of Geneva is explained by their erroneous view of the Bible. Since an infallible book justi- fied the extermination of the Canaanites, it must be right, they argued, to exterminate heretics. The slaughter of witches by the thousand was the direct result of mistaken views about the Bible. Massacres most foul, persecutions most dire, have been the fruit of mistaken teachings respecting the charac- ter of the Bible. It is not safe to put the Bible into any man's hands until you have told him distinctly that it is not the kind of book which many people suppose it to be. " Of crude morality," says Professor A. B. Bruce, " there are numerous instances in the Old Testament ; and no one can use it as a perfect guide who does not understand this." It was the failure to understand this which led to the terrible persecutions and atrocities of which the Church of the Middle Ages was 4 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS guilty. '' When Innocent III. was giving to Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, his infamous advice to entrap the Count of Toulouse to his ruin, he appealed t0' Scriptural authority both for his falsity and his ruthlessness. ' We advise you,' he said, ' to use cunning with the Count of Toulouse, treating him with a wise dissimulation, that the other heretics may be more easily destroyed.' ' Slay them all,' said Arnold of Citeaux to the brutal Albio'ensian Crusaders : ' God will discrimi- nate his own.' We look on the Crusades in the light of poetry and romance ; we ad- mire the meekness of Godfrey of Bouillon in refusing to wear a crown of gold when his Saviour, had worn a crown of thorns. But how did the Crusaders behave in their journey, in the brutal massacre of defense- less and unoffending Jews ? And how did they behave in Jerusalem itself? Happy the innocent women and children whose heads they swept off with one stroke of the sword, or whom they stabbed to the heart at a single blow ! But besides these murders they snatched infants from their mothers' arms and hurled them on the stones, or with horrid mutilation dashed their heads against sharp angles ; and they made men and boys INTRODUCTORY 5 marks for their archers, shooting at them till they leapt down the precipice ; and others they tortured inconceivably ; and others they burnt alive at slow fires. And what was the plea for the commission of these and other execrable atrocities ? The savage com- mands to exterminate, said to have been given by Moses to the rude serfs who. h^d fled from Egypt into the wilderness." ^ Doubtless many of these iniquities were justified to the minds of their perpetrators through a misinterpretation of Scripture ; but many of them, also, it must be con- fessed, were founded uj)on an exact inter- pretation of the passages quoted, and were a simple reproduction of the spirit of those passages. What the Crusaders did was pre- cisely what the writer of the One Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Psalm wanted to do. They did not misinterpret him. And the fundamental error of many of those who have found warrant in the Bible for cruelty and oppression was not merely their faihire to get the true meaning of the writers, but their failure to understand the true nature of the book, — their erroneous belief that the 1 Farrar's The Bible : its Meaning and Supremacy^ pp. 190, 191. b SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Bible in all its parts is equally inspired and equally authoritative. That is a dangerous belief, as history abundantly proves. It is not only safe, therefore, to tell the people the truth about the Bible, it is very unsafe to conceal from them the truth, and to leave them under the bondage of an erroneous tradition. If the people are to handle the Bible they must know what ele- ments it contains, and how to discriminate among them. To hold that it is not safe to give them this knowledge is amazing fatuity. This is the conclusion to which an in- creasing number of wise and well-instructed Christian ministers have been gradually com- ing for quite a number of years. The state of mind in which they now find themselves is not one into which they have been swept by any sudden gust of popular opinion ; much less have they been seeking for reasons wherewith they might weaken the authority of the Bible ; it is the reverent and careful study of the Bible itself which has brought them to the position where now they are. Ever since the publication of Robertson Smith's Lectures on "The Old Testament in the Jewish Church," which, to many English-speaking ministers, was the first INTRODUCTORY i example of a sincere and scholarly effort to make the Bible tell its own story, they have been slowly coming to the conclusion that the traditional theory of the Bible cannot be maintained and that the truth concerning it must be made known to the people. Yet the difficulty and discomfort attendant upon such a disclosure often deter them. The uprooting of such a tradition is not a wel- come undertaking. Pain is given to many devout souls ; an opportunity of accusation and censure is afforded to those ignorant and jealous defenders of the faith who are always on the watch for error, and an occa- sion of stumbling is furnished to those who are prone to evil. I cannot wonder that many pastors are loath to speak frankly about this matter ; I myself hesitated long, and I know that my motives were not wholly unworthy. But it seems clear that the time for frank speaking has fully come. The question is up, and it must be answered, one way or the other; it cannot wisely or honestly be evaded. Is the traditional view of the Bible the true view ? That is the question which must be met. If Mr. Moody's theory of the Bible is the true theory, Mr. Moody is right in 5 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS demanding that it be boldly and faithfully taught, and that no man be countenanced as a Christian minister who fails to teach it. If, on the contrary, that theory of the Bible is untrue, those who know it to be untrue must say so without fear or equivocation. Mr. Moody is right in insisting that between his theory of the Bible and that which he op- poses no compromise is possible. If he is right, the scholars against whom he is lift- ing up his voice are flagrantly wrong. If the Bible is what Mr. Moody declares that it is, it is not what the great majority of modern Biblical students and investigators believe it to be. It is one or the other ; it cannot be both. " How can absolute infalli- bility be blended with fallibility ? How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in de- fective and fallible manuscrij^ts, in defective and fallible expressions, or in translations which are liable to every kind of error ?" ^ The traditional and popular theory of the Bible asserts that the Bible contains no errors of fact or doctrine ; that every part of it was written under immediate divine supervision ; that it is God's book ; that He is 1 Quoted in Farrar's The Bible : its Meaning and Su- premacy, p. 123. INTRODUCTORY 9 the author of the whole of it ; that the men who wrote it were simply penmen, following his dictation; that every portion of it is equally sacred, equally authoritative. For substance, this is the theory. The theologi- cal refinements about the difference between verbal and plenary inspiration, the specula- tions about dynamic inspiration and the in- spiration of illumination, are neither known nor intelligible to the common people ; the view which they hold connotes the strongest implications of absolute inerrancy. They have been taught and they believe, what eminent theologians have told us, that " a proved error in Scripture contradicts not only one doctrine but the Scripture's claims, and therefore its inspiration in making those claims." This popular theory of the Bible is, al- most wholly, an a j^^i'Ori theory. It is framed from men's notion of what must be, rather than from their investigation of what is. "What we need," they argue, "is an infallible guide. A guide that is not infalli- ble cannot be trusted. If God has procured the writing of a book for this purpose it must be infallible. To say that it is not is to oppugn his omniscience or his goodness." 10 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS This is the process of reasoning by which the theory of an infallible book is mainly supported. It rests upon the assumption that men can tell beforeliand what God would do. It does not rest on any claim which the Bible makes for itself. There is no such claim. In the nature of the case there can be none. For so far as we are able to dis- cover, not one of those men whose writings have been gathered together in the collection which we name the Bible had any concep- tion, when he was writing, that his work would form part of such a compilation. He wrote to supply some immediate need of those whom he knew ; the idea that he was writing part of what we call a Bible did not occur to him. At any rate no intimation appears of such a consciousness. How then could any one of the writers of this book have claimed inerrancy for the whole book, since the existence of such a book was not conceived by any of them ? If the claim of inerrancy for the whole Bible is set up, in the Bible, it must, in the nature of the case, be set up by each writer for his own writ- ings. But in fact no such claim is made by any of them. INTRODUCTORY 11 It is true that the New Testament writers refer to the Old Testament writings, which in their day had been gathered into a some- what indefinite collection, and sometimes S23eak of them with strong approval. It is not true, however, that they giiarantee the inerrancy of all these wi'itings. The text which has so long done duty in support of the proposition was mistranslated. It is not "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine ; " it is "Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching." So runs the Revised Version. To make this cover a claim for the inerrancy of all the Old Testament writ- ings is greatly to stretch its obvious mean- ing. But if the New Testament writers cannot be quoted as guaranteeing the iner- rancy of the Old Testament writings, much less can they be called as witnesses to prove the infallibility of that portion of the Bible which they themselves contributed ; for of the future use which was to be made of their narratives and letters they do not seem to have dreamed. There is no word, therefore, in the Bible, in which a claim of inerrancy, covering the whole Bible, is set up. Not only so, but the Bible itself, as we 12 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS have it in our hands, is all the while crying out to us that it is not the kind of book which tradition represents it to be. On al- most every page some evidence appears that a literal exactitude of expression has not been thought of ; that we have the work of men who were not at all concerned about verbal or literal inerrancy. If any words ought to have been infallibly reported they are the words of Jesus Christ, but no two of the Evangelists give us a verbally identical report of what He said. If Matthew re- ported Him with absolute accuracy, Mark and Luke did not. " Take the words in which Christ instituted the Last Supper, and his last words to his discij)les before his ascension, and the inscrij^tion on the cross, and the Lord's Prayer. Amid perfect unity of substance there is no identity in the verbal details, but omissions, additions, and verbal variations ; and in St. Luke and St. Mat- thew we have variant records even of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount." ^ The quotations made by the New Testa- ment writers from the Old Testament writ- ings show how little they esteemed this 1 Farrar's The Bible: its Meaning and Supremacy, p. 110. INTRODUCTORY 13 doctrine of inerrancy. Very often they give the substance of what they quote but change the form of it considerably ; most often they use the Septuagint, the Greek transhition of the Okl Testament, which is a faulty version, often inaccurate, sometimes misleading. In many such ways the Bible makes haste to disclaim for itself that character of ab- solute inerrancy with which modern biblio- laters have sought to invest it. No intelli- gent person who will dismiss from his mind all the notions concerning the Bible which have been supplied to him from tradition and a priori reasoning, and will let the Bible tell him its own story, can ever derive from an inductive study of its pages the dogma of Biblical infallibility. It is this careful study of the Bible, and nothing else, which has resulted in rendering incredible the dogma of Biblical infallibility. But what have we in place of this dogma ? We have the doctrine of a book which is a precious depository of divine truth, — of truth contained in no other book ; and be- yond comparison more valuable than that contained in any other book ; a book which gives us a revelation of God infinitely more perfect than any other sacred writings have 14 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS given ns, since it records for us the life and words of Jesus Christ, who is, in the high- est sense, the manifestation of God; and shows us the preparation for his mission and the beginning of the great consummation which we pray for when we say " Thy king- dom come." To one who believes that no event of history can be compared, for mo- mentousness, with the advent of Jesus Christ upon this planet, it is not necessary to prove that the book which tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ and reports for us the substance of what He said is not to be ranked with other books ; that it occupies a place apart, and is worthy to be called the Book of books. It is easy, also, for one who re- gards Jesus Christ as the central personality of human history, to see that many records of the Bible which precede his advent, as well as those which follow his ascension, are so closely connected with Him as to glow with his light and pulsate with his life. That these records are, in the main, veracious, is not to be gainsaid ; no theory which treats the Bible as a tissue of pious frauds is under discussion here. The transcendent value of our Bible is not in this place disputed. He who says that it is no more than any other mTRODUCTORY 15 good book does not express the mind of those devout critics who insist that the truth about it must be tokl. To them it is much more than any other book, and it is pre- cisely because it is so much more to them than any other book can be that they de- mand that it shall be honestly treated, that no lies shall be told about it, and no extrava- gant and untenable claims made for it ; that the people shall be taught to take it for what it is and to use it as it ought to be used, with reverential trust but with rational discrimination of its parts. The great words with which Richard Hooker ends the second book of his " Ecclesiastical Polity " must be laid to heart : " Whatsoever is spoken of God or things pertaining to God otherwise than truth is, though it seem an honor, it is an injury. And as incredible praises given unto men do often abate and impair the credit of their deserved commendation, so we must likewise take great heed, lest, in attributing to Scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which it hath more abundantly to be less reverently esteemed." Such is the grave disservice which many of its super- serviceable friends are now rendering to the 16 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Bible. "The attempt," says Mackennal, " to attach a name of special sanctity to all the contents of the Bible ends in the degra- dation of that name itself." The worst enemies of the Bible in this land to-day are some of its most orthodox champions. That these are, in a true sense, Sacred Writings, and that they contain a revela- tion from God found nowhere else in litera- ture, is the belief of the writer of this book. There is treasure here, beyond price. The only question is whether, like every other treasure of God bequeathed to man, it is contained in an earthen vessel. Is there a human element in the Bible ? In an im- portant sense it is God's book ; is it in any sense man's book ? That men had some- thing to do with the writing of it is not denied, but how much ? Were they only passive instruments in the hand of God, — writing machines used by Him, — or did their own thought and feeling find utterance in these words ? If the Bible does contain a human element, it must contain imperfec- tion. If men's thoughts and feelings do find expression in it, more or less of error and defective moral judgment must be looked for. What are the facts? What does a INTRODUCTORY 17 reverent study of the Bible show us? Is this an earthen vessel ? Are there no traces of human error and imperfection in the medium through which this revelation is conveyed to us ? One who starts with the assumption of Biblical inerrancy is, of course, disabled for such an investigation. He assumes the thing to be proved. He holds that because this is God's book it cannot contain any admixture of error. He thinks that to ques- tion the accuracy of any statement, whether historical or scientific, is to impugn the veracity of the Spirit of truth. If he finds on one page a contradiction of what is written on another, he shuts his eyes and de- nies that such a contradiction exists. That which is infallible is beyond the judgment of the human intellect. A man who begins with the theory that the Bible is infallible deprives himself at the outset of the right of forming or expressing any opinion con- cerning the accuracy or inaccuracy of any statement which it contains. In the pre- sence of such an assumption the human reason is paralyzed. Those who do not make this sweeping assumption, and who suppose that our rea- 18 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS son must be used in judging the Bible as well as in " trying the spirits," cannot fail to discover, in a reverent study of the Bible, many evidences of human error and imper- fection. They are here, — palpable, unde- niable ; and it is fatuous to ignore them or exjilain them away. The treasure is in earthen vessels. The a prioi'i theory that a book of God must be errorless is shattered by an inductive investigation of the Bible itself. The men who wrote these books were not infallible men, and they were not supernaturally protected against error. What is it that we find when we rever- ently study these ancient writings ? We find, to begin with, indubitable evi- dence that many of them are of a composite character, made up of documents which have been pieced together not always skill- fully, since they sometimes overlap, and sometimes show wide gaps in the narrative. That several of the Old Testament books are thus constructed is scarcely denied, in these days, by any respectable scholars. One of the latest of the conservative writers is willing to rank among the orthodox, " schol- ars who have conceded that Genesis discloses evidences of older documentary and tradi- INTRODUCTORY 19 tional authorities, in narratives and snatches of poetry, and genealogical tables, and who admit different layers of legislation in the middle books of the Pentateuch, not neces- sarily committed to writing by Moses ; who, for example, grant that Deuteronomy is a separate book, completed in its present form after the death of Moses, that the priest code is from a different hand, and that Genesis is a fusion of different elements." ^ But a book which has been constructed after this manner cannot be the kind of book which the people believe in. It is absurd to conceive of Omniscience gleaning up fragments of old human documents and joining them together after this fashion. Still less conceivable is it that the work should have been done by Omniscience in that manner in which, as we shall plainly see, it has been done in Joshua and Judges. Some of the conservatives make merry over the analysis by the Higher Critics of the documents into the four original sources, and it must be admitted that much of this work seems fanciful in the extreme ; but let these conservative teachers take pains to point out to their congregations such pal- ^ Behrends's The Old Testament under Fire, p. 103. 20 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS pable facts as are contained in the last chap- ters of Joshua and the first chapters of Judges, and reconcile them with the theory that Omniscience is responsible for the au- thorship of these books. Such facts as these require explanation. They do not militate against the belief that the record is, on the whole, true and valuable ; but they show that it was put together by men who were human enough to make mistakes ; and they effectually dispose of the theory that a super- human freedom from error was conferred upon all Biblical writers. We find, also, that the Bible contains a considerable element of religious fiction. That the books of Esther and Daniel and Jonah belong in this class of literature will be made evident, I trust, in the following studies. The uses of such fiction are mani- fest, and the great ethical and spiritual value of some of these ancient stories will appear ; but as soon as we have recognized the true character of these writings, the standards by which we judge them must be changed. We are no longer burdened with proofs of the historicity of imaginative tales ; our attention may rest upon the lessons which they are intended to convey. INTRODUCTORY 21 Most important of all is the discovery which must be made by candid students of the Old Testament, that these Scriptures represent a moral development, whose ear- lier stages connote an imperfect morality. It is not enough to say that evil deeds and bad characters are faithfully portrayed ; con- duct which falls far below the morality of the New Testament is sympathetically de- scribed; the writers admire and approve actions which the law of Christ expressly condemns. These men of the olden time sometimes claim the divine authority for the performance of deeds which directly contravene the elementary principles of mo- rality ; they represent God as commanding men to commit the most abominable crimes. It is not true that these atrocities are com- mon in the Old Testament : other elements prevail in all these ancient records, and the humanity and compassion which they reveal are signs of the Divine Spirit working out in the customs and laws of Israel a large and genial morality ; but mingled with all this are the survivals of old barbarisms, which still darken the lives of the people and color the judgments of the writers of these Scriptures. There can be no doubt 22 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS that Moses believed himself to be com- manded by God to order the extermination of all the Midianites ; that he supposed himself to be righteously indignant when the warriors spared the women and chil- dren ; and that the compromise made with the warriors by which they were finally required to kill all the captive males old and young, and the married women, but were permitted to keep for themselves the unmarried women, represents the ideas of morality which were current in those days. We must believe, however, that the writer was mistaken when he represented that all this was done under the command of Je- hovah. And when the writer of the book of Deuteronomy recites a law requiring the Israelites utterly to destroy every living thing in the neighboring cities which they were about to besiege and capture, — "to save nothing alive that breathe th ; " and when Samuel gives orders to Saul going forth against the Amalekites, to " slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," we must sup- pose that this does not really represent the mind of the Spirit. Doubtless the people who did these things believed that they I NT ROD UCTOR Y 23 were doing God's will ; but when the writ- ers that record their doings explicitly tell us that they were acting under the divine direction, we know that the writers must be mistaken. There is nothing else to say about it ; excuses, evasions, palliations are not only futile, they are an insult to com- mon sense. That the moral standards of these Old Testament writers are sometimes low and defective is truth that no honest man must deny. It is not merely true that they describe for us unworthy actions : it is true that they sometimes justify and com- mend unworthy actions. Now all this, which the careful student of the Bible is sure to find, must be distinctly told to all the people. It is quite contrary to what they have been commonly taught respecting the Bible, but it is the truth, and they need to know it. The composite char- acter of many of these writings ; the way in which they are pieced together, out of older documents ; the fact that some of them are undoubtedly works of fiction ; the fact that amidst all that is pure and benign in their teachings there are elements of crude and imperfect morality, — commands attributed to God, which He could never have given, — ■ 24 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS all this the minister of the gospel in these days is bound to teach his people. When this has been clearly taught he may proceed to settle his account with the Higher Critics, but not till then. After he has shown his people the truth respecting these most pal- pable results of modern Biblical study, he may hew Wellhausen in pieces before the Lord, as Samuel hewed Agag. But per- haps, by that time, there will be less need of the immolation. For myself I am not disposed to deny that much which has been given out by the Higher Critics appears to be far-fetched and fanciful. The minute analysis of the Hexa- teuch which some of them have set before us does not commend itself to my credence. And many of their conjectures respecting dates and divisions of documents appear to me untenable. But this is the history of every science. Always the atmosphere of active scientific research is full of visionary guesses and wild hypotheses. All sorts of theories are put forth tentatively^ to chal- lenge attention and to await verification. For some of these, foundations of fact are finally supplied ; many of them quickly perish. The science of Biblical Criticism INTRODUCTORY 25 must pass through the same vicissitudes. Many conjectures have been ventured for which sufficient evidence has not been found. But not a few hypotheses have been abundantly verified. The assured re- sults of this work are now considerable. If some of the students who have been ex^^lor- ing this field have seemed less reverent than could have been desired, and if some have even exhibited a disposition to discredit the Scriptures, there has still been a large num- ber of devout and careful men to whom the Bible is a sacred book, and who are not dis- posed to admit any new theory respecting its origin for which there is not ample proof. The patient studies of these reverent scholars have made some things very plain. And those who adversely discuss the Higher Criticism are bound to bring out these well- established results, and make them clear to the minds of those to whom they speak. It is easy to make a large and impressive ex- hibit of the things that have not been proven and that probably never will be proven by the Higher Critics, and thus, by implication, to cast discredit upon all their work ; there is no branch of science which cannot easily, in this way, be rendered ridiculous in the 26 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS eyes of the un instructed. Any expert rhe- torician could take the subject of chemistry or electricity and gather up the visionary and exploded hypotheses concerning it, and hold them up to ridicule, and make a great many ignorant people believe that they are pseudo-sciences ; that there is nothing in them but unmitigated nonsense. We have had a good deal of this kind of work, in our pulpits and newspapers, from those who have sought to discredit the Higher Criti- cism. It is very effective work ; the igno- rance and prejudice to which appeal is made are highly responsive to such incitement ; and one can without difficulty win great ap- plause as a defender of the faith ; but it be- comes, now and then, a serious question just how much popular applause a public teacher can safely allow himself. And it may be well to suggest that those who undertake the public discussion of the Higher Criticism ought to give some attention not merely to its failures, but also to its admitted suc- cesses. If with a sincere disposition to know the truth they will try to inform them- selves respecting the points which have been fairly settled by these studies, and if with entire candor they will lay these results be- INTRODUCTORY 27 fore their hearers, they may then, with pro- priety, expose the vagaries of Biblical science. But when the clear gains of criticism have been laid before the people, the traditional theory of the Bible will have passed from. the earth ; and the teachers will find enough to do in furnishing; to their cono^reo-atioiis a new working theory, by means of which these sacred writings may be firmly held and profitably used. What, then, shall wise pastors tell their people concerning this book, and the manner in which they may use it ? It is safe to tell them that the book is a revelation from God, since it contains the record of the Life that is the light of men ; and gives us the history of the providential preparation of the world for his manifestation, and the narrative of the planting and training of his Church. It is not an infallible book ; but it is a book in which life and immor- tality are brought to light ; it is the one book of all the world which clearly shows men what life means, and what are the true relations of the life that now is to the life that is to come. To say that all parts of it are equally inspired and equally authorita- tive is to make a foolish assertion ; but it is 28 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS not difficult for those who will seek divine guidance to find it in the truth which will make them wise unto salvation. Without the guidance of the S23irit of truth, the Bible is no better than any other book ; with that guidance no man will go astray in his interpretation. To those who believe that the Incarnation is the central fact of human history, the words of Christ must be the master words of this literature and of all literature. In these we have a standard by which all these writings must be judged. Whatever in any part of this book agrees with " these say- ings " of his we may safely accept as divine truth ; whatever contradicts or conflicts with his teachings we may regard as a partial revelation. Yet it must not be inferred that those portions of the Bible in which the revelation is partial and the morality imperfect are of no use to us. They are of great value. They show us the stages through which religion and morality have passed ; they illustrate for us the ethical and spiritual development of the human race. And just as embryology shows us that all human beings pass through every form of lower INTRODUCTORY 29 life to reach the human form divine, so we, in our moral development, often find our- selves facing the same problems which an- cient Israel was forced to confront, and the history is full of instruction for us. Those naive biographies, also, which bring the ancient men so vividly before us, never concealing their weaknesses and crimes, are profitable for instruction in righteousness. Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Joshua and Samuel and David, as they appear in this literature, have guided the aims and in- vigorated the courage of many generations of Bible readers. We must, indeed, be on our guard against accepting all the judg- ments of the writers of these sketches ; for sometimes, as we have seen, they recount with evident approbation deeds that are not worthy of our praise ; but in far the larger number of cases the judgment as it stands is true, and needs no correction in the light of Christian standards. There are even Psalms in the Hebrew Psalter whose senti- ment no Christian can utter ; but the greater number of them give wings to our faith and adoration ; how many of our loftiest thoughts and noblest purposes have found voice in these hymns of the olden times ! And the 30 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS great prophecies — how constantly do they lift up the loftiest standards before men and nations ! Verily the truth is here in these ancient Scriptures, and it is for us to sepa- rate it from the error with which it is min- gled. And that is by no means an improb- able task. The Spirit of all truth who speaks to us through these Scriptures waits to guide us in all our study of them. He is as near to honest and reverent souls to-day as ever He was ; and his illmninating ray will make all these doubtful things plain. Dean Farrar's wise words are worth repeat- ing:— " If it be asked, How then are we to know what is the word of God contained in Scripture ? or if it be argued that it is im- possible to disintegrate the word of God from the word of man, the answer is that this is exactly what Christians have already had to do again and again. They have been thrown, just as the Jews were, on the ordinary means of criticism and spiritual discernment to discover what entire books did, and what did not, deserve the title of canonical ; and their decision has repeatedly shown itself to be fallible. To this day the millions of the Roman Church accept as INTRODUCTORY 31 canonical books of the Apocrypha, some of which fall far below the level of many writino's both heathen and Christian. For some centnries books were admitted into the canon which are now excluded from it, or books excluded from it which are now ad- mitted to belong to it. The question ' How then are we to recognize the word of God ? ' is an entirely faithless one. We recognize it precisely as the Christian Church has always done. All Christians have set aside lar^e sections of the Old Testament as be- longing to an abrogated dispensation. They even treat some passages of the New Testa- ment as not binding on them in the letter. They set aside no small part of Scripture as having been relative and transient. They recognize that the Tabernacle was a glorious symbol, but do not find anything which specially reaches them in long chapters about its upholstery and joinery, ' its boxes and tables and rings and lamj^s and loops and bowls and curtains and candlesticks and ram skins and badger skins and pans and shovels and basins and clothes ' — quite irrespective of the question whether they emanated from Moses, or whether, as many critics suppose, they are not much older than the era of the 32 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Exile. In spite of the Council of Jerusalem, which claimed the direction of the Holy Spirit, they do not abstain from blood or from things strangled. In spite of St. James, they do not anoint the sick with oil. If they were not constantly falling into the error of forgetting that Christ is ' alive for- evermore,' — if they believed his promise that the Spirit should lead them unto all essential truth, they would not try to de- throne Him and set up a book in his place. Is it indeed the case that we have nothing to guide us with certainty about the way of salvation, unless we put a genealogy of Chronicles or a chapter of Numbers or Esther on the same level as the Sermon on the Mount ? Did not St. John tell us to try the spirits ? Did not St. Paul say, ' Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good ' ? Did not our Lord ask ' Why even of your- selves judge ye not what is right ? ' 'To those who follow their reason in the inter- pretation of the Scriptures,' said Lord Falk- land, ' God will either give his grace, or assistance to find the truth, or his pardon if they miss it.' ' If after using diligence to find truths we fall into error, when the Scriptures are not plain,' said Chillingworth, ' there is INTRODUCTORY 33 no clanger in it. They that err and they that do not err shall both be saved.' " ^ But some cautious teachers who admit all that has been urged are yet fearful of the results which may follow the abandonment, by the people, of the dogma of Biblical infal- libility. The Bible, they say, has been the great promoter of social and national well- being. The lands where the Bible has been read and honored are the lands that are hap- py and prosperous and free. The Queen of England was speaking advisedly when she told the Indian prince that the Bible was the source of England's greatness. And will not the change which now is passing upon the opinions of Christians respecting the character of the Bible so weaken its au- thority that we shall lose all these precious fruits of its influence ? Will the Bible which criticism now offers us have the power to lead and mould, to leaven and control society, which the Bible of the last three centuries has wielded ? The question is one that calls for serious reply. In the first place, it must be ad- mitted that it was not the error and the imperfect morality of the Bible which gave 1 The Bible : its Meaning and Supremacy^ pp. 127-129. 34 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS it the kind of power referred to. It was not tlie human elements which it contains, nor the partiahiess and defectiveness of its revelation which gave it the hold that it has had upon the life of the Protestant nations. So far as these errors have been taken for truths, and this imperfect morality has been accepted as perfect morality, so far the in- fluence of the Bible must have been impaired. It must be better to recognize defects, even in the Bible, as defects, than to mistake them for excellences. Nor could it have been the simple belief that the Bible is infallible which has wrought all these beneficent wonders. A mere intel- lectual conviction of that kind, even if it is in accordance with fact, has no practical value. A man may believe every article of the most orthodox creed and be no better for it. But if we now clearly see that the Bible is not infallible, the belief in its infallibility must have been an erroneous belief. Shall we say that the moral progress which has been so closely connected with the Bible is the fruit of an erroneous belief ? Shall we say that the only way to secure a continuance of this progress is to exhort the people to hold fast to an opinion which is paljDably unsound ? INT ROD UCTOR Y 35 In truth, it is not the belief of the people in the inerrancy of the Bible which has brought forth this precious fruit ; it is their belief of the truth which the Bible reveals. It is the belief in Jesus Christ and in his gos- pel ; the acceptance of the truth He taught ; the faithful following of the life He lived, which has made the desert to rejoice and the wilderness to blossom as the rose. It is the outflowing into the world of the truth and love of which the Bible is full that has done all this glorious work for mankind. That truth and love are there to-day ; not one jot or tittle has been taken from them, nor can be ; they can speak for themselves, and will speak ; na3% it is not within the power of man to silence them. To recognize the fact that the vessel is partly earthen does not dim the lustre of the treasure it contains ; it rather enhances it. To admit that Esther exhibits a low morality does not deprive the book of Isaiah of any of its glorious meaning, nor cast any stigma upon the noble philosophy of Job. To admit that the One Hundred and Ninth Psalm is the utterance of a dark spirit does not rob the Twenty-Third Psalm of any of its uplifting consolation. If the Light of the world is in that book it will continue to 36 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS shine ; no speculations of man can cloud its radiance. It is, however, probable that the deepest reason for the reluctance of some to aban- don the dogma of Biblical infallibility has not yet been mentioned. That is the notion that some kind of infallible guide is neces- sary in religion ; that it is quite impossible for us to live worthily or to teach correctly, or to maintain and propagate the institutions of religion, unless we have some standard or authority to which we may make aj^peal, whose decisions are errorless and final. This is the fundamental assumption of Roman Catholic philosophy; it has resulted in the erection of an infallible church, over which an infallible Pope now rules. When the Reformers abandoned the infallible church they still retained the fundamental assump- tion on which it was based and substituted for a Church a Book. It is now about time to see that the fundamental assumption is all wrong ; that no infallible rule in religion is either desirable or possible. We want guid- ance, instruction, help ; we do not want any form of words which can be pointed to as fixed, changeless, absolute truth, to which nothing can be added, and from which no- INTRODUCTORY 37 tiling can be subtracted. We do not need it, and we cannot have it. We cannot have it because words are not fixed symbols ; they change their meaning as men change ; a phrase which meant one thing five hundred years ago may mean something quite differ- ent to-day. An infallible revelation cannot be committed to such a fluctuating medium as language is. And there are certain pecul- iarities of the lano:uao:es in which the Bible was written — the Hebrew language espe- cially — which render this conception of an inerrant revelation a simple absurdity to any one who knows anything about them.^ But such a fixed and infallible revelation is not only precluded by the very nature of language, it does not conform to the laws of the spiritual realm. We are always dealing, in this realm, with the phenomena of life and growth, and infallibility is a conception which is wholly inapplicable to anything that lives and grows. It is a purely mechanical idea ; it has nothing to do with the phenom- ena of life ; it belongs in quite another or- der. There are no infallible spring beauties, crocuses, elm-trees, ears of corn. There is what we may consider an ideal, a type, for 1 See Who Wrote the Bible 1 cliap. xii. 38 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS all these organisms ; but that is something purely intellectual, — something that no man ever saw. Some organisms come nearer to the imagined type than others ; but abso- lute perfection of structure and form does not exist. There is always room for im- provement. Nothing into which God has breathed his life is infallible. Nothing that grows is even for one moment infallible ; the very condition of progress makes a fixed standard inconceivable. Infallibility may be predicated of a watch or a rifle or a cash register, — not of a fruit tree or a field of grain or a human life. Your artist will tell you that he has never seen a perfect face ; your oculist that he has never seen a perfect eye. And when we pass into the spiritual realm thB very law of the highest life involves perpetual movement forward from the less to the greater, from one degree of virtue and attainment to another. Knowledge must always grow from more to more, and our ideals themselves, the very norms of charac- ter, must change and enlarge as experience widens. Robert Browning has shown us the true philosophy of spiritual life : — " By such confession straight he falls Into man's place, a thing nor God nor beast, INTRODUCTORY 39 Made to know that he can know, and not more : Lower than God who knows all and can all, Higher than beasts which know and can so far As each beast's limit, perfect to an end. Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more ; While man knows partly and conceives beside, Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, And in this striving, this converting air Into a solid he may grasp and use, Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone. Not God's and not the beasts' ; God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. Such progress could no more attend his soul Were all it struggles after found at first And guesses changed to knowledge absolute, Than motion wait his body, were all else Than it the solid earth on every side, Where now tlirough space he moves from rest to rest. Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect He could not, what he knows now, know at first ; What he considers tliat he knows to-day Gone but to-morrow he will find misknown ; Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns Because he lives, which is to be a man. Set to instruct himself by his past self ; First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, Next as man may, obliged by his own mind. Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. God's gift was that man should conceive of truth, And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake As midway help till he reach fact indeed." If this is the true philosophy of human development, then it is evident enough that a precise and inflexible rule of life is the very 40 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS thing that man does not want. " Forgetting the things which are behind, stretching for- ward to the things which are before '^ — this is the posture of the spiritual mind. All our thoughts about the spiritual life, all our ideas of conduct and character, must conform to this fundamental fact. Rigid and inflex- ible formularies are not to be desired. The revelation which we need from God is not an infallible rule, applicable to all condi- tions of life and grades of intelligence ; it is rather a path of light through the ages, giv- ing us direction, but leaving us free, in the light of great principles, to settle for our- selves the problems of every hour, and of every generation. Such a guide the Bible is. When we use it as it was meant to be used we find wise guidance and safe con- duct through life ; we have a lamp for our feet and a light to our path. When we take its every word as an infallible rule of life it makes us often bigots, not seldom j^erse- cutors, sometimes murderers. The letter killeth ; the spirit giveth life. Strange that with such a solemn warning speaking al- ways to us out of the Bible itself, we should have chained ourselves so long to the dogma of verbal inerrancy ! The very thing which INTRODUCTORY 41 the apostle tells us is fatal to the life of faith is the thing which we have insisted on as the corner-stone of orthodoxy. Let lis trust that the times of this igno- rance are now well past. We are learning to free ourselves from the bondage of the letter. Having found that God has not given us an infallible Book, it is beginning to dawn on us that He never meant to give us any such thing ; that all his plans for our spiritual education would have been de- feated if He had done it. But we do believe that He has given us, in his good providence, a book of peculiar worth, a book out of which we may learn more concerning Him and his kincfdom of riohteousness and love than from all the rest of the books in the world ; a book which tells us many of the things which it is of the utmost consequence that we should know, and which are found nowhere else ; a book which it becomes us to study reverently and patiently, penetrat- ing below the letter that killeth to the spirit that giveth life. The familiar discourses which follow may serve to illustrate, in part, the principles af- firmed in this introductory essay. They are the endeavors of a busy pastor, who makes 42 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS no claim to high scholarshij), to show his people some o£ the more sure results of re- cent Biblical study. The books selected are confessedly among the most difficult books of the Old Testament, — those in which the conclusions of modern scholarship diverge most widely from the traditional theory. I trust it will appear that after the results of candid critical investigation have all been accepted, we have something left, even in these puzzling books, of real spiritual value. I will even hope that this new way of look- ing at them may impart to some of them a deeper reality and larger significance than they ever had before. II JUDGES Out of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, seven have been selected for study in the familiar discourses which fol- low. To two classes of persons I trust that these discourses will be especially service- able. The first class includes those who reject some or all of these books as worth- less, finding them rather stumbling-blocks than helps to faith, and discovering in them reasons for the rejection of the entire Bible. I hope to show these skeptics that their judg- ment is hasty and superficial; that these books, though not, perhaps, what they have sometimes been represented to be, are, when you handle them intelligently, of great value, capable of giving us instruction and inspi- ration. The other class consists of those who re- gard the Bible as a book equally inspired in all its parts, every sentence of which was 44 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS dictated by the Holy Spirit, the whole of which is therefore equally inerrant and au- thoritative. I hope to make it plain to these persons that this view of the Bible is unten- able. I shall be asked why I indulge this hope. I shall be told that I ought to leave them in peace with the traditional theory ; that it is no kindness to them to disturb a belief which gives them comfort. My answer is, that it is far better for them to know the truth. The view which they are entertaining cannot be held in these days by any fairly well-in- formed man without constantly doing vio- lence to his intelligence and his integrity. The errors, the contradictions, the moral im- perfections which appear in some of these books, which thrust themselves before every wakeful reader, and to which the attention of the whole world has been sharply called by modern investigation, must be met and accounted for by the advocate of Biblical infallibility. His task is to explain them away. It is a large undertaking. In prose- cuting it, his intellectual integrity and his moral honesty are likely to suffer a serious strain. He is compelled to resort to evasions and subterfuges of argument which are not JUDGES 45 good for the character of any man. Often he silences his reason by throwing back upon the Scripture itself the whole burden of the absurdity, and pleading that such things are inherent in a revelation. There is a story of a lad who was reading the narra- tive, in the second book of Samuel, of the woman bathing on the housetop. Never having seen a house without a peaked roof, he was troubled by the apparent improba- bility, and so expressed himself to his father. " Hush, my son ! " solemnly whispered the devout parent, " with man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible." The story not inaptly describes a kind of intel- lectual abjectness which men are wont to display in the presence of the Bible. Not only, as in this case, do they make mysteries when there are none, but they are free to assume that not only mysteries, but mistakes, contradictions, preposterous absurdities, are possible with God ; that when we find them lying on the face of one of these books of Scripture we must accept them as divine verities ; that the refusal to do so dishonors God, because this is God's book. Such a practice is morally injurious in a high de- gree. If any man thinks he approves him- 46 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS self to God when he does violence to his reason and his moral sense, he gravely misconceives God's character. If any man thinks he is honoring God when he insists on attributing to Him the ignorance and superstition of man which we find in these ancient writings, he needs to revise his the- ology. It is, therefore, in the definite expectation of important moral gains to those who take part in them that these studies are under- taken. That some may perversely use the truth here brous^ht to lisfht is not to be de- nied ; no truth is so high or so precious that depraved minds will not turn it into a savor of death unto death. That risks are in- curred in the telling of any truth is a fact which we cannot hide from ourselves. But, after all, there can be no worse moral evil than insincerity ; no more deadly peril in handling the Bible than that which is in- curred by those who conceal the truth about it ; no greater irreverence than that which imputes to God the blind judgments and moral crudities of men. With the sincere wish that we may be preserved from these perils, and not less from rash speculations and overbold assump- JUDGES 47 tions, let iis turn to the study of these an- cient Scriptures. The independent study of these seven books is a perfectly legitimate proceeding, for they are independent books. There is, as we have seen, no evidence that any one of the writers of these thirty-nine books of the Old Testament knew or ima- gined, when he was writing his book, that it would be included, with many others, in a collection to be called the Bible. This col- lection was not made by prophets nor in- spired men ; the question what books should be taken in and what left out was settled by men who could lay no claim to supernatural guidance. I am not, however, questioning the selection. Some of these books are worth more than others, but there is none that we can now afford to spare. Some of those which have been great stumbling- blocks to faith are full of instruction for us when we rightly use them. The point to be observed now is, that we have here not a continuous literary production, but a col- lection of books ; " The Divine Library," Canon Kilpatrick calls it. And it is, there- fore, legitimate to select from among these any which we may desire for separate study. First upon the list of those which we have 48 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS thus selected is the book of Judges. The book has in the Hebrew Bible the same title, " Shophetim," which is the plural of the word meaning judge. It jiurports to be a history of the Israelitish people during the period which intervenes between the death of Joshua and the commonwealth under Eli and Samuel. Both of the two last named were regarded as judges, but their jurisdic- tion was of a broader and more permanent character than that of the personages of the book. The period covered by these annals was one of great turbulence and insecurity; there was no regularly organized govern- ment ; the tribes dwelt apart, and were not always friendly. " In those days there was no king in Israel ; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." ^ It was an- archy, tempered not by a policeman, but by a judge. The word connotes more than the function of a judicial officer ; these judges were popular leaders and magistrates. Thir- teen of them are named ; the exploits of seven of these, Othniel, Ehud, Barak, Gid- eon, Abimelech, Jephthah, and Samson, are told at considerable length ; six of them 1 Chap. xxi. 25. JUDGES 49 are simply mentioned, with the number of years during which they exercised leader- ship. The book consists of three parts : the in- troduction, which comprises the first chapter and five verses of the second ; the history of the Judges proper, beginning with the sixth verse of the second chapter and extending through the sixteenth chapter : and an ap- pendix relating two incidents of the earlier history, which have nothing to do with the Judges. The manner in which the materi- als of the book are put together is highly interesting and instructive. It is evident that it is a compilation of documents of va- rious ages. The introduction is the oldest and the most valuable part. It relates the history of the occupation of Palestine by the twelve tribes, showing us how successive incursions were made into this territory by the different tribes, some of which were more suQcessful than others in dispossessing the Canaanites. A few of the tribes drove out the aborigines ; some of them were not able to expel the natives, and settled among them. The Jebusites, for example, held the for- tress of Jerusalem, and it was never per- manently in possession of the children of 50 SEVEX PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Israel until the days of David. Others of the tribes, partly for economic reasons, suf- fered the Canaanites to remain, and when the conquerors were waxen strong they made slaves of the conquered. This narrative of the occupation of Canaan by the twelve tribes, as it stands here at the beginning of the book of Judges, is apparently a truth- ful record ; and it is interesting to compare it with statements concerning the occupa- tion which occur in the book of Joshua. Several portions of this first chapter are found, word for word, interspersed through the book of Joshua. Let me read you, for example, the account of the taking of Debir, which is found in the first chapter. "And from thence he went against the inhabitants of Debir. (Now the name of Debir beforetime was Kiriath-sepher.) And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kiriath-sepher, and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife. And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it ; and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife. And it came to pass, when she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field: and she lighted down from off her ass ; and Caleb said unto her. What JUDGES 51 wouldest tliou ? And she said unto him, Give me a present ; for that thou hast set me in the kind of the South, give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether sjirings." If now you turn over to Joshua xv. 15-19, you read this same story, word for word, just as it is here narrated. It is, of course, incred- ible that two independent writers should have told the story in exactly the same words : one must have borrowed from the other, or else, which is much more credible, both borrowed from an older document. What makes this more probable is that sev- eral portions of the first part of Judges are thus, as I have said, incorporated into the narrative in Joshua. The writers of both Joshua and Judges had access to the same old document. The writer of Joshua made extracts from it, and inserted them in his narrative here and there ; the writer of the Judges brought his quotations together here in the introduction to his book.^ 1 " These notices display a strong similarity of style, and in some cases even verbal identity with a series of passages somewhat loosely attached to the context, pre- served in the older strata of the book of Joshua. Thus Judg. i. 21 (the Benjamites' failure to conquer Jerusalem) agrees almost precisely with Josh. xv. 63, the only mate- 52 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS But there is a discrepancy here which the wit of man cannot reconcile with the theory of an infallible record. The writer of the Judoes tells us that these incidents of the occupation occurred after the death of Joshua. The writer of the book of Joshua puts them all before the death of Joshua. There is nothing to say about this, except that one of these writers must be mistaken. This incident about Caleb and his daughter, which I have read to you, must have taken place either before or after the death of Joshua. If the writer of Joshua, who puts rial difference being that the failure is there laid to the charge, not of Benjamin, but of Judah ; i. 20, and 10-15, agrees in the main with Josh. xv. 14-19 ; i. 27, 28 with Josh. xvii. 12, 13 ; i. 29 with Josh. xvi. 10. Most of the verbal differences are due simply to the different rela- tions which the fragments hold, in the two books, to the contiguous narrative. Josh. xvii. 14-18 (complaint of the House of Joseph, and xix. 47 Dan) are very similar in representation (implying the separate action taken by individual tribes) and in phraseology. It can hardly be doubted that both Judg. i. and these notices in Joshua are excerpts from what was once a detailed survey of the conquest of Canaan : of these excerpts some have been filled in with the narrative of Joshua ; others have been combined in Judg. i. so as to form, with the addi- tion of the opening words, After the death of Joshua, an introduction to the period of the Judges." — Driver's Introduction to the Old Testament, pp. 153, 154. JUDGES 53 it before the death of Joshua, is right, the author of Judges, who puts it after his death, must be wroug. What difference does it make, you want to know, which is right ? It makes not a particle of difference to me, I answer, be- cause I recognize the fact that these sacred writings are not free from error ; and be- cause their value to me is not lessened in the slightest degree by the discovery of such discrepancies. This incident is a graphic and realistic little picture of social man- ners in that early time ; as such it is inter- esting and valuable ; the precise date at which it occurred is of no consequence. But these conflicting passages, and there are scores of such, do make it absurd to speak of the Bible as an infallible book. That is a fact which we must look squarely in the face. Not until we are ready to deal hon- estly with the Bible in all these matters are we prepared to receive the instruction it has to give us. The composite character of the book is also made clear even to the ordinary reader by a little observation. In the first chapter, and the first five verses of the second, we have a narrative of 54 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS what happened after the death of Joshua. In the sixth verse of the second chapter we begin to read as follows : *' Now when Joshua had sent the people away, the chil- dren of Israel went every man unto his inheritance to possess the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work of the Lord, that he had wrought for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died, being an hundred and ten years old. And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in Timnath- heres, in the hill country of Ej^hraim, on the north of the mountain of Gaash." If this were a consecutive and orderly narrative, written by one hand, the fact of the death would probably be stated before the events that happened subsequently to the death ; but if we have here ancient documents pieced together without much care for literary consistency, the present state of the composition is easily understood. It is interesting also to note that the words which I have just read are found in the last chapter of the book of Joshua. Here, again, one writer must have borrowed from JUDGES 55 the other, or else both borrowed from an older narrative. The stories of the greater Judges, which form the body of the book, are told with an evident religious motive. The writer wants his history to enforce a religious lesson ; he evidently believes that all history is profit- able as illustrating the moral government of Jehovah. All these narratives begin by saying that the children of Israel did evil in the sight of Jehovah, and that He deliv- ered them over to the oppression of this or that oppressor ; after they had suffered awhile under this oppression they cried unto the Lord, and He raised up for them this or that Judge, who subdued their oppressors ; then the land had rest for a short period, after which the people relapsed into dis- obedience, and were again delivered over to another oppressor. In all these stories, says Dr. Driver, " we have the same succession of apostasy, subjugation, the cry for help, deliverance, described often in the same, always in similar phraseology." ^ The apostasy seems to have consisted al- ways in forsaking the worship of Jehovah, and following after Baal, Astarte, or the 1 Op. cit. p. 155. 56 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS other gods of the neighboring nations. The writer's point of view is that Jehovah is the God of Israel, that fidelity to Him is the highest duty, that this must bring the people peace and prosperity, and that the disasters and oppressions under which from time to time they have suffered have been the direct consequence of their departure from Him and their worship of strange gods. We find that this worship of Jehovah is not, however, the pure spiritual worship taught by the prophets ; and it is difficult to believe that the Judges, who are here described and praised, — or the author who tells their story, — had ever seen even the decalogue, in the form in which we have it now. For although the worship of Je- hovah is insisted upon as binding upon the people of Israel, it is assumed that He is the national God, that other nations have gods of their own, whom they are bound to worship, and that the power of Jehovah is by no means universal and unlimited. Thus we read in the first chapter (v. 19) that "Jehovah was with Judah, and he drave out the inhabitants of the hill coun- try ; but he could not drive out the inhabit- ants of the valley, because they had chariots JUDGES 57 of iron." The naivete of this primitive conception is very striking. So, too, when Jephthah argues with the king of the Ammonites against the rightfulness of the invasion of the territory of Israel, he says : " Wilt thou not possess that which Che- mosh thy god giveth thee to possess ? So whomsoever Jehovah our God hath dispos- sessed before us, them will we possess." The argument of Jephthah, as Professor Moore expresses it, is that " the conquests of a people are the conquests of its god, who bestows upon them the territory of the conquered ; they hold it by a divine right which should be respected by others who hold their own territories by the like title. Chemosh is the national god of Moab, and Moab is the people of Chemosh, just as Yahveh is the god of Israel and Israel the people of Yahveh. . . . The reality and power of the national god of Moab were no more doubted by the old Israelites than those of Yahveh himself." ^ And not only is the religion of this book thus purely ethnic, the worship of images is a more or less regular feature of it. Thus Gideon, after his great victory over 1 Commentary on the Judges^ p. 294. 58 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS tlie Midianites, solicits from each of the warriors of his band the coverings which they had taken from the bodies of the slain, and of these he constructs an ephod^ which is here, clearly, an image, probably an image which is intended to represent Jehovah. He sets it up in his own city of Ophrah, and the people gather there to worship it. A single sentence here expresses disapproval of this image worship, but there is reason to believe that this comment was added by a later hand. In the story of Micah, in the seventeenth chapter, no such disapprobation is suggested. That story of Micah is one of the most striking in the book. Micah was a man of Mount Ephraim who steals from his mother a large amount of silver, and whose conscience troubles him, so that he restores it. His mother, in gratitude for the recovery of her money, takes a portion of the silver and makes an idol of it, which she gives to her son, who keeps it in his house. An ephod and a teraphim were the foundation of their religious establishment, — and these were small household images, probably images of Jehovah, — intended, as the narrative shows, to be used as oracles. Having erected a shrine, Micah needed a JUDGES 59 priest, and he took a young man of the neighborhood (perhaps his own son) and consecrated him for that service. But pre- sently there came along a wandering Le- vite, a member of the priestly tribe. " And Micah said unto him, Whence comest thou ? And he said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehem-judah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place. And Micah said unto him. Dwell with me and be unto me a fa- ther and a priest, and I will give thee ten pieces of silver by the year and a suit of apparel and thy victuals. And the Levite was content to dwell with the man, and the young man was unto him as one of his own sons. Then said Micah, Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing that I have a Levite for my priest." He has a shrine with the necessary images, and a priest to minister before it ; now he is sure of the favor of Jehovah. But shortly a scouting party of the chil- dren of Dan who are prospecting for terri- tory which their tribe may occupy, passing this way, find this shrine and this oracle, and consult it as to the direction which they shall take. Following the counsel of the oracle, they travel northward and dis- 60 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS cover an eligible site; then they return, and are conducting their tribe to its new seat among the northern hills. But as they rej^ass the house of Micah the bright thought strikes them that they might as well capture these idols of Micah, whose guidance has been so profitable to them ; and they make a raid upon tlie shrine, and seize the images and are making off with them. " What do ye ? " cries the hired priest. " And they said unto bim, Hold thy peace, lay thy hand upon thy mouth and go with us, and be to us a father and a priest ; is it better for thee to be priest unto the house of one man, or to be priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel ? And the priest's heart was glad, and he took the ephod and the teraphim and the graven image and went in the midst of the people." After a little, Micah and his neighbors set out in pursuit, but the Danites laugh at him and he returns bereft of his gods, with a heavy heart, to his home. The Danites with their captured images and their con- script priest go on their way rejoicing ; and after they have put to the sword the peoj^le of the territory which they have chosen, and have burnt their city, they set up their JUDGES CI graven image and install their priest, and the worship tlms inaugurated continues through many generations. And now it transpires that the young Levite, the hero of this remarkable adventure and the founder of this religious institution, is none other than the grandson of Moses. In all this narrative there is no hint of any disapproval of their conduct ; the fabri- cation of these graven images, their use as oracles, the erection of this shrine, are treated as matters wholly legitimate, and the sharp practice of the Danites in ravishing the shrine and carrying off the household gods of Micah is told without a syllable of disap- proval. It is evident that the writer sees nothing in it which seriously conflicts with his notions of religion and morality. I cannot examine, so fully as I wish I might, the narratives of this remarkable book. The story of Jephthah and his daugh- ter is a most striking revelation of the moral and religious condition of these peo- ple. Jephthah vowed, on the eve of a great battle, that if victory should be granted him he would make a burnt offering of the first living: thins: that came forth from his door to meet him on his return ; it was his 62 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS daughter wlio met him, — and although it filled him with dismay, he kept his vow. " I have opened my mouth unto the Lord,'* he said, " and I cannot go back," " and he did with her according to the vow which he had vowed." The commentators have made desperate attempts to explain away this ter- rible story, but it is useless. The author means that we shall understand that Jeph- thah offered his daughter to Jehovah, as a burnt offering, in fulfillment of his vow. " One wishes," says Dr. Martin Luther in his Commentary, "that he had not sacri- ficed her, but the text stands there plain." ^ And the author of the book sees nothing to censure in his conduct, and evidently be- lieves that Jehovah was pleased with the fulfillment of the vow. If you have read the book through care- fully, you do not need that I should re- hearse the stories of Othniel and Ehud, and Deborah, and Gideon, and Samson. These are wonderful stories ; they possess a peren- nial interest for readers of all generations ; they have their uses, of which we shall pre- sently speak ; it is only necessary to remem- 1 ' ' Man -will er habe sie niclit geopf ert, aber der Text steht Klar da." JUDGES Q>3 ber that they do not uniformly represent to us the mind of Christ ; that the thoughts of the writers and the compilers of these stories are not always such thoughts as we ought to think about God and religion, about man and his duties. What, then, is the real value of the book? I answer, first, that it is a picture of a dark age, of the darkest age, probably, of Hebrew history. It brings before us in a series of realistic sketches the conditions of life and thought in a time when the know- ledge of God was dim, and the ethical ideas of men were crude. The Hebrews are the people to whom, in later ages, the highest and purest conceptions of religion and of righteousness were given, but these concep- tions were the result of a long training and a severe discipline, and this book of Judges shows us what the Hebrews were in the beginning, out of what kind of stuff the pro2)hets and lawgivers and psalmists of Israel were developed. Perhaps you saw at the Columbian Exposition the Bell tele- phone, in all the stages of its development, from the first crude apparatus to the per- fected instrument. It is very instructive to observe such an evolution. And the 64 SEVEX PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Bible gives us a chance to study the evolu- tion of the religious thought of one race, — the one race whose religious thought is most significant and precious. These folk-stories of the Judges are, for this purpose, of un- speakable value. The people of that rude time are permitted to bring before us, in their own way, their ideas about God and their conceptions of human conduct. Upon these pages, with the utmost simplicity and sincerity, they tell us their thought, they live out their life ; we see them working, worshiping, scheming, fighting, journeying, sojourning ; nothing is hidden from us ; their crudest ideas, their most heathenish beliefs are laid bare to our view, — and this not by some one who stands outside, and moralizes about it from a higher plane, but by themselves, for the stories, though brought together by a later compiler, are, for substance, clearly the handiwork of men who lived when such conceptions were cur- rent. Such, then, were the raw materials of hu- manity, out of which were to be constructed the sublimities and glories of the Hebrew faith. Men like Gideon and Othniel and Barak and Jephthah and Samson, with their JUDGES C5 crude notions about Jehovah, with their idol- atries and indecencies and treacheries and barbarities, were to become, under the edu- cation of the Spirit, such chivalrous heroes as David, such noblemen as Hezekiah, such clear-si ohted moralists as the authors of the Proverbs, such seers as Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea and grand old Amos, such sing- ers as those who wrote the Psalms, such spiritual philosophers as the author of the book of Job. A most precious product of divine inspiration is this spiritual faith of Israel ; here, in the Judges, we see the hole of the pit out of which it was digged. There are historical values, here, also, which must not be overlooked. Doubtless we get in the story of Deborah and Barak, in the story of Gideon, in the story of Jeph- thah, some substantial additions to our his- torical knowledge respecting the struggles of Israel with the neighboring powers. And, more than this, there is stimulus and inspiration for virtue in the conduct of these heroes and heroines of Israel. We do not need to copy their barbarities : Jesus Christ has taught us how to discriminate between the good and the evil in their conduct ; but we can never read this record without hav- (j(j SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS iiig our courage strengthened and our patri- otism quickened. Gideon's dauntless deeds, Deborah's flaming speech, Samson's sublime self-sacrifice, — the unhesitating self-abnega- tion of the daughter of Jephthah, all kindle in our hearts the fire of noble endeavor. And higher than all is the lesson of the whole book, that tlie one supreme thing is to be faithful to your highest convictions. All these stories make this clear ; it is the one truth that they all emphasize. Fidelity to Jehovah brought welfare and liberty and peace to Israel ; disobedience to Him brought bondage and misery. Now Jehovah and his law was to these Israelites the highest truth they knew. It was a very crude notion that they had about Him ; but He represented to them the best life of which they could conceive. They knew that when they for- sook Him and went after Baal and Astarte with their licentious rites, they were prefer- ring the lower to the higher. For them, as for us, there was a law in the members warring against the law in the mind, and when they dethroned the angel and enthroned the beast they knew that they were wrong. This primary conviction the book every- where confirms ; it bears witness that when JUDGES 67 men follow the highest that they know, it is well with them ; and that when they for- sake the highest that they know and go after other gods it is ill with them. And this, I say, is the supreme lesson of life. It is just as true for us as it was for those half- savage Israelites. There are a good many of us, I fear, who are doing just what they did : we are false to our ideals ; we are not fol- lowing the highest truth we know ; we are seeking gains, prizes, pleasures that do not ennoble, but rather degrade us ; these are our idols, for an idol is anything to which a man turns when he forsakes his ideals ; and by as much as our ideals are higher and purer than those of the old Israelites, by so much is our condemnation greater than theirs, our bondage harder to break, our loss more nearly irreparable. The book of Judges teaches us this lesson : that fidelity to the highest truth you know is the straight path to life. If we learn this lesson out of this book we shall have reason to thank God that He has hidden for us in one of the puzzling books of the Bible a pearl of great price. Ill ESTHER In our English Bibles the book of Esther follows the historical books, Kings, Chroni- cles, Ezra, and Nehemiah ; but the arrange- ment of the Hebrew Bibles is different. The three divisions of the Hebrew Bible contain the Law, the Prophets, and the Ketubim or Writings ; and this order re- presents the Jewish idea of their comparative value. The first division, the Law, includes the first five books of the Bible, and is to the Jew the most precious portion of the book. The second division, the Prophets, includes the books of Joshua, the Judges, Samuel, and Kings, as well as those which we call the prophetical books, Daniel only ex- cepted ; and this division is regarded by them as second in value to the Law. The Ketu- bim or Writings includes the remaining books of the Bible. Among these we find The Psalms, The Proverbs, Job, The Song of Songs, Kuth, The Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, ESTHER 69 Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles. This third division was consid- ered by the Jews to be the least valuable of their Scriptures, though they placed a high estimate on some of these books, as we shall see. Most of these are undoubtedly of a late date ; and the later writings were not so highly prized as the earlier ones. It will be observed that five of the seven Old Testa- ment books which we have chosen to study are found in this less esteemed division of the Jewish Bible. It would seem, there- fore, that some of the difficulties which we find in them may have occurred to the Jews themselves. Yet their judgment of the worth of these Scriptures cannot be given much weight in our decision concerning them ; the Rabbinical notions of what is excellent in Scripture do not always evince a clear spiritual insight. Respecting the books contained in the first and second divisions of the Hebrew Bible, there has been, so far as I know, no controversy among the Jews themselves. But the contents of this last division have been somewhat disputed. About Ecclesi- astes. The Song of Songs, The Proverbs, and Esther, there were differences of opinion 70 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS among the doctors of the law. There were those who contended that this book of Esther shoukl not be included among the sacred writings because of its total lack of religious- ness. " The book of Esther," says Kyle, " the composition of which may very probably be assigned to the third century B. c, became in later days one of the most popular writ- ings of the Ketubim. But its admission to the Canon was either so long delayed or was afterwards, for some reason, regarded with such disfavor that in some quarters, among the Jews of the first century a. d., as we shall see later on, it was omitted alto- gether from the list of sacred books." Professor Ryle quotes from the Talmudic literature several discussions about Esther. In one of them the book, Esther, is person- ified, and represented as petitioning for ad- mission to the Canon, and the reply of " the Wise " is interpreted as meaning that it be- longs in neither of the three classes of Scrip- ture, and that a fourth class cannot be made to receive it. Rabbi Jehudi is reported as deciding that " the book of Esther defileth not the hands " — is not inspired. Other rabbins give a contrary opinion, furnishing very dubious and fantastic reasons for it. ESTHER 71 " Such sayings imi)ly," says Professor Kyle, " that there had been some hesitation in ac- cepting the canonicity of the book.^ But the difficulties that had been felt vanished before the application of these strange methods of interpretation." ^ This protest was not silenced until the first century of our era. While our Lord was teaching in eTerusalem, the right of Eccle- siastes and Esther to be regarded as Holy Scriptures must, therefore, have been still discussed by some learned Jews.^ Not only 1 " Down into the second century of our era the canon- ical authority of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, and Esther was warmly debated by Jewish scholars." — Wildeboer's Origin of Canon of Old Testament, p. 72. 2 Canon of the Old Testament, 2d ed., pp. 149, 210-212. 2 Some of the scholars think that the discussions of the Rabbis respecting the canonicity of Esther, which we find reported in some of tlie Talmudical books, were only exercises in dialectic, objections being raised for the sake of answering them. The fact, however, remains that it was precisely those books whose title to a place among the Scriptures is most questionable upon which they exercised their dialectic. I do not know that any such debates are reported about Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos or Micah. It would seem that there must have been some doubt in tlieir minds concerning the moral and religious character of this book. On this whole subject see the learned and thorougli discussion of Dr. G. Wilde- boer, in The Origin of the Canon of the Old Testament, where the author makes it clear that the discussions 72 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS was this true, but quite a number of the books which are now excluded from our Protestant Bibles, the books of the Apocry- pha, were undoubtedly included in that Greek translation of the Old Testament which seems to have been used by Jesus and his disciples, and from which most of their quotations were undoubtedly made. It became necessary, therefore, for the Christians, when they began to use the Old Testament Scriptures, to determine for them- selves how many of these Old Testament books were sacred writings. Should they re- ject Esther and Ecclesiastes and Solomon's Song ? Should they take in the Maccabees and Judith and Esdras and the Wisdom of Solomon ? It took them a long time to make up their minds. Athanasius counted Esther among the apocryphal books ; Am- philochius of Iconium says that some think tliat Esther should be regarded as belong- ing to the Holy Scripture ; Augustine lets into his collection some of the apocryphal books, but puts out Esther ; Gregory of Nazianzen omits it from his catalogue. of the Talmud are not, as Strack maintains, mere critical fencing, but represent serious doubts as to the right of the book to its place among the Sacred Scriptures. ESTHER 73 In speaking of the objections to Old Tes- tament books which caused some of the Fa- thers to demand their withdrawal from the Canon, Professor Ryle says : " Opposition to the book of Esther appears to have taken this open form. Its withdrawal may, of course, have only expressed a local preju- dice due to the teaching of some influential Rabbi. But the fact of the book having been actually excluded from a Jewish list of Canonical Scripture merits attention. For, although we learn of it from a Christian source, the position of the book of Esther in certain other Christian lists which profess to give the contents of the Hebrew Canon indicates the suspicion with which it was apt to be regarded. Melito, the Bishop of Sardis (circ. 170 A. D.), sent to a friend a list of the Old Testament Scriptures which he professed to have obtained from accurate inquiry, while traveling in the East, in Syria. Its contents agree with those of the Hebrew Canon, save in the omission of Esther." ^ Professor Ryle proceeds to discuss the question whether this omission was acciden- tal or intentional, and comes to the con- clusion that it was probably intentional 1 Canon of the Old Testament, p. 203. 74 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS " For, " lie says, " the same unfavorable opin- ion which the omission would denote is not only expressed in the Rabbinical discussions mentioned in the previous chapter, but is also implied in the position allotted to the book in other Christian writings which claim to reproduce the contents of the Hebrew Canon." And he readily concedes that to Christian readers of those days " the char- acter of the book may very naturally have given rise to difficulties. Its spirit and teaching seemed to have little in common with the New Testament." ^ The learned and judicious Professor San- day, after mentioning the long dissent of the Christian Fathers to the canonicity of Esther, adds : " There was certainly room for such objection. The book of Esther derives no sanction from the New Testa- ment. It has often been pointed out that it does not even mention the name of God ; and it adds nothing to the sum of revela- tion. The book, as we have seen, after a time secured its place in the Jewish Canon and through the Jewish passed over into the Christian canon ; but more, we may believe, by way of tacit acquiescence than of active approval." ^ 1 Pp. 20-4, 205. 2 Inspiration, p. 214. ESTHER 75 The fact thus appears that good men both in the Jewish and in the Christian churches until a hite date disputed the ad- mission of this book to the canon of the Scripture. Indeed, so late as the time of the Reformation Dr. Martin Luther was quite positive in his judgment that the book had no rightful ])lace in the Bible. " We have excluded some books," he said, " but this, most of all, deserves to be cast out. It Judaizes too much, and contains much hea- then naughtiness." If you and I should venture, therefore, to question the historical accuracy of this book and the soundness of its morality we should find ourselves in good company. One can very well afford to be called a heretic along with Athanasius, and Augustine, and Gregory of Nazianzen, and Martin Luther. The gradual weakening of the Christian protest against the book of Esther was due, perhaps, in part, to the gradual strengthen- ing: of the Jewish theories concerniu": the sacredness of the book. For though, as I have said, it was one of the books in dispute among the Jews up to the beginning of our era, from that time onward Jewish opinion became more and more positive and enthusi- 76 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS astic respecting it. This was partly because of its connection with the feast of Purim, which was becoming more and more popu- lar, and largely because of its extrava- gant representations of Jewish prestige and power. From being one of the disputed books of the Ketubim it came to be the most esteemed of all ; so that one of their great authorities, Moses Maimonides, ex- presses the opinion that when the Messiah shall come, all the prophetical books and all the books of the Ketubim except Esther will be done away ; that the only Bible which the Jews will need in that great day will be the Pentateuch and the book of Esther. How much the opinion of such a writer is worth on a question of inspiration I leave you to say. So far as the decision of the Christian Fathers with respect to this book was founded on Jewish opinion, it does not rest on a good foundation. Let us briefly review the story. The scene is laid at Shushan the palace, by which is undoubtedly intended Susa, the Persian cap- ital. The ancient Elam, lying a few hundred miles north of the head of the Persian Gulf, is one of the oldest seats of civilization. The people who originally inhabited the ESTHER il region appear to have been Semites, but they were driven out, as the Celts were driven out of England by the Saxons ; and the Cushite invaders became the permanent occupants of the country. The territory lies east of the Tigris, a fertile plain stretching back to mountains with ample pasturage, from which streams with abundant and pure water descend to the great river. Elam, later known as Susiana, was a tributary province of Babylon ; but when the Per- sians became the dominant race Darius the Great built Susa, the Shushan of this story. The climate was better than that of Perse- polis, or Babylon, and the water was purer ; it became the favorite capital of the great king. The palace was almost an exact copy of that at Persepolis, the ruins of which have been uncovered; there is a familiar picture of the lions mounting the mighty staircase to the terrace where a few pillars, lonely in the moonlight, stand as monuments of the grandeur forever gone. This is Perse- polis, and the palace at Susa was built after the same plan, except that this grand stair- case was not repeated. The son of Darius who succeeded him was known by the Persians as Khschyarschan ; 78 SEVEX PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS the Hebrews spelled it Acliascliverosch, which our translators have softened into Ahas- uerus ; the Greek form of it is Xerxes. It seems clear that the story intends to bring before us the great Persian despot whose stupendous exploits Herodotus has rehearsed in his glowing narrative. Darius his father had been meditating the invasion of little Greece, for whom he had no more love than Abdul the Infamous has to-day. In the midst of his preparations he suddenly died, and Xerxes, on his succession, having put down an insurrection among his subject Egyptians, took up his father's unfinished enterprise. Four years were devoted to the gathering and equipment of the army and the navy ; all the countries of the East and even Africa were drawn upon for troops, and the land and naval forces that were finally led through Asia Minor and up the Mediterranean formed, undoubtedly, the big- gest marching aggregation of human beings that ever has been gathered together since the world began. The fighting men are said by Herodotus to have numbered 2,500,000, and the fleet consisted of 1207 fighting vessels, besides 3000 smaller vessels. The camp followers ESTHER 7y greatly swelled this number ; Herodotus wishes us to believe that there were six millions in all. It is generally safe to di- vide the figures of an Oriental historian by five ; even so, there may have been a mil- lion men in the Persian host. I do not need to tell the story, the bridging of the Hellespont, the cutting of the canal through the peninsula of Athos ; the march through those very plains and defiles of Thessaly where the Turks and the Greeks have been fighting just now ; the immortal struggle at Thermopylae, where the Greeks of to-day threatened to make their final stand ; the capture and destruction of Athens, the vic- tory of the Greek fleet at Salamis, and the cowardly and precipitate flight of Xerxes, with the scattering and destruction of his stupendous army, very few of whose battal- ions ever found their way back to Persia — all this is a very old story. All that we know of Xerxes leads us to feel that he was one of the sort of men of whom the world cannot have too few. Vainglorious, pusil- lanimous, licentious, and bloodthirsty, he was a nearly perfect embodiment of most of the qualities which a ruler of men ought not to possess. When a father who had sent 80 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS five sons into his great army begged tliat the sixth might stay at home, he showed his sympathy with the father by having the body of this sixth son cut in twain and making the father march between the two halves of it on his way to Greece. When a storm destroyed his bridge over the Helles- pont, he not only cut off the heads of the engineers who built it, but he ordered three hundred lashes to be administered to the rebellious Hellespont, and a pair of fetters to be thrown into it. The author of the book of Esther probably knew something about Xerxes ; and most of what is told us of Ahasuerus might w^ell enough have been true of the Persian despot. So far as the king's character is concerned the verisimil- itude is fairly close. This, then, is the king with the unpro- nounceable name and the insatiable ambi- tion, who is said to have made a great feast for his nobles, lasting 180 days, and then for all the people of Susa, continuing a full week. Some say that it was a feast in celebration of that conquest of Greece which he was going forth to win, and that it oc- curred just before his departure on that ill- fated campaign ; that he spent the last six ESTHER 81 months of his preparation for the invasion in a drunken orgy. But this is conjecture. On the last day of this debauch, having nearly exhausted the resources of indecency, he summons his queen to exhibit her beauty before his drunken nobles; when she re- fuses, as by all the traditions of his court, as well as the instincts of womanhood, she was bound to do, he deposes her. Here the story weakens. Such a king would cer- tainly have cut off her head. Out of all the kingdom the most beauti- ful young women are now drawn to Susa, and out of this array of beauty the king selects a Jewish maiden, Esther, and installs her in the place of Queen Yashti. Her Hebrew name is Hadassah ; Esther, which means the " Star of Love," or Yenus, is her Persian name. She has been brought up by her cousin Mordecai, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and it is he who has secured for her this elevation, though her nationality is not known to the king. Soon after her coronation, Mordecai was enabled through Esther to give information concerning a plot against the king's life ; the king hanged the conspirators and bade Mordecai's good deed to be inscribed in the archives of the kingdom. 82 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS After this Xerxes raised to a high rank a certain Ham an, and commanded all his courtiers to do obeisance to him. Mordecai wor.ld not bow, and Haman, to avenge the insult, plotted the destruction of the whole Hebrew race. The king yielded to Haman's prayer and the fatal decree was issued, to take effect eleven months from date. All the Jews, young and old, in every province, were to be massacred and their goods con- fiscated. The date of the massacre was fixed by lot. Now Esther, instigated by Mor- decai, at the peril of her life intervenes, pre- senting herself, uninvited, before the king; having won his favor, she secures a pro- mise to give her anything she asks for, even to the half of the kingdom. The result of all the dramatic complications, which I will not stop to detail, is that Haman is hanged, and Mordecai made Grand Vizier ; and while, according to Oriental ethics, no royal decree could be abrogated, a supplementary decree was issued, authorizing the Jews not only to stand for their lives on the day appointed for their extinction, but to kill as many as they pleased of the Persians. The story represents that before that day came the Persians were so intimidated by the power ESTHER 83 of Mordecai that they did not dare to touch the Jews, but simply stood still and were slaughtered by the Jews to the number of 75,000. In the palace of Susa itseK 500 Persians were slain on the first day by the infuriated Jews, while not a Jew suffered, so far as we are told. After this day of blood Xerxes, apparently feeling that his fair queen must be pretty well satiated with the carnage which had been going on under her eyes, asked her if she wanted any more, and she begged that the slaughter might be permitted to go on for one more day, during which 300 more of the Persians were butch- ered. The ten sons of Haman had been killed the first day ; and Esther stipulated also that their dead bodies might be brought forth and publicly hanged upon the gallows, all of which was done at her request, and for her delectation. The fourteenth and fif- teenth daj^s of the Jewish month Adar are kept in memory of this event as days of gladness and feasting, and of sending por- tions one to another. This is said to be the origin of the feast of Purim. Two questions now arise concerning this book, — the same questions that occurred to pious Jews in Palestine when our Lord was 84 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS on the earth, and to such saints as Athanaslus and Augustine and Gregory and Luther. The first question is whether this is a true narration of historical events, and the sec- ond whether the conduct which the book evidently approves is right conduct. Is the moral teaching of the book sound teaching ? And this is the main question. The book might be a historical romance, founded on fact, — as some books of the Bible undoubt- edly are, — and still be highly useful because of the good instruction which it conveyed. The fact that the story of the Prodigal Son is a work of imagination in nowise affects its value. For purposes of inspiration no fact that ever occurred is worth more to the world than this bit of fiction. If the book of Esther were proved to be largely a work of the imagination, containing historical in- accuracies and scientific improbabilities, its usefulness would not be discredited pro- vided its representation of the great truths of conduct and character were true and right. But if the impression which the book is calculated to make upon the mind respect- ing human conduct is a wrong impression, if its standards are low, if its ideals are false, then it is not of much use to try to prove that it is historically true. ESTHER 85 The fact that the book recites wicked and bloody deeds does not condemn it. Wicked and bloody deeds are often occurring and must sometimes be rehearsed. Other books of the Bible relate to us great impieties and atrocities, but they are ordinarily related in such a way that our moral judgment is called forth against them. David committed a great sin ; but he was rebuked for it by the prophet and humbly confessed it. The writ- ers who tell these stories ordinarily make us feel that they approve the good and con- demn the evil. It is not always true, as we have seen, but it is generally true. Is this the fact respecting the writer of the book of Esther ? Those for whom I am writing have read the book, and can answer for themselves. For my part, I think that those pious Jews of the first century, and those Christian fathers and reformers of later centuries, who denied that this book was inspired of God, were entirely right. In the first place, the absence of the reli- gious element is notable. Not only is the name of God absent from the book, there is no mention of any religious act or exercise except the fasting of Esther. Prayer is not 86 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS alluded to ; there is no reference to tem- ple or altar or sacrifice. By one of Morde- cai's remarks — " Who knoweth but thou hast come to the kingdom for such a time as this ? " — a belief in Providence is suggested. " The point of view," says Dr. Driver, " is throughout purely secular ; the preservation of the race as such, and its worldly great- ness, not the perpetuation and diffusion of its religion, are the objects in which the author's interest is manifestly centred." ^ But it is less because of a lack of religious- ness than because of a bad morality that the book falls under condemnation. That a petidant courtier like Haman shoidd have plotted the destruction of the Jews is not impossible, and the heroic efforts of Mordecai and Esther to avert this calamity might have entitled them to praise. But the kind of vengeance which they are said to have induced this despot to inflict upon the Persian people admits of no justification. The intended massacre of their race appears to have been instigated solely by Haman ; there is no intimation that any other Persian had any part in it ; indeed, there is a sen- tence which seems to mean that the people of 1 Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 457. ESTHER 87 Persia were horrified at the decree. When it was published, it is said that " the city Shushan was perplexed." Yet when Ham an, who is the sole instigator of this atrocity, is deposed and hanged, and Mordecai is made prime minister in his place, Mordecai and Esther proceed to slaughter 75,000 of these innocent Persians, as vengeance for a deed that was never done by anybody, and which those who were murdered do not appear to have even thought of doing. We are given to understand that this 75,000 included not only Persian men, but " their little ones and their women." ^ All this appears to the 1 A sample of the curiosities of exegesis is seen in the attempt of some of the interpreters to make out that the phrase "little ones and women," in viii. 11, is gram- matically the object of the verb "assault," rather than of the previous verbs " destroy, slay, and cause to per- ish ; " i. e., that the decree of Mordecai did not authorize the destruction of the women and children of the Per- sians, but only the destruction of those Persians who were seeking to destroy their women and children. It is an interesting example of the lengths to which traditional- ism can go in twisting language for the concealment of troublesome facts. The fact that the decree of Morde- cai is intended to be an exact duplication of the decree of Haman (iii. 13), and that it permits the Jews to do to the Persians exactly what the Persians had been author- ized to do to the Jews, can scarcely be doubted by any careful reader. The Vulgate makes the matter clear: 5« SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS author of the book of Esther a highly proper and praiseworthy proceeding. Much is made by the apologists for the book of the fact that the terms of the decree authorize nothing more than self-defense on the part of the Jews. It is evident that this is what the writer set out to say ; but in telling the tale his imagination was per- mitted a loose rein, and he ended by repre- senting the Persians as standing utterly cowed and helpless before the onset of the Jews. Besides, he tells us that the power of Mordecai was so great and universal that the whole force of the kingdom was on the side of the Jews ; this does not sound like a story of self-defense : — " The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces '* Oranes inimicos suos, cum conjiigibus ac liberis, et uni- versis domibns, interficerent et delerent." Nearly all the most conservative commentators give the text this inter- pretation, though some of them assert that the Jews did not carry this part of the decree into execution. Their authority for this assertion they carefully conceal from us. Indeed, the sparing of women and children in such a massacre would be an exceptional occurrence. The text of the decree describes what was customary in the wars of that period, and what was abundantly authorized by the Jewish Scriptures in the extermination of the Canaanites. ESTHER 89 of the King Ahasuerus to lay hand on such as sought their hurt ; and no man could withstand them, for the fear of them was fallen upon all the people. And all the princes of the provinces and the satraps and the governors and they that did the king's business helped the Jews ; because the fear of Mordecai had fallen upon them. For Mordecai was great in the king's house, and his fame went forth throughout all the provinces, for the man Mordecai waxed greater and greater. And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto all that hated them. And in Shushan the i^alace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men." i And when, after the first days' carnage in the palace, Esther begs that the slaughter may go on before her eyes another day, the writer sees in this gross savagery nothing to disapprove. The book contains no syl- lable which intimates that Mordecai and Esther were actuated by an improper spirit, or that they overstepped the limits of justice and righteousness. It is sometimes said by 1 Chap. ix. 2-6. 90 SEVEX PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS the ajiologlsts that the book is a colorless record, neither praising nor censuring the acts it narrates ; but every reader knows that Mordecai and Esther represent the writer's ideals of human virtue. The Christian teacher who represents this book as teaching a sound morality or as expressing the mind of the Divine Spirit takes upon himself a heavy responsibility. If the book is not a safe guide in morals or religion, it would be, as I have said already, quite absurd to argue that it is historically infallible. If the spirit which insj)ired it does not teach sound morals, we need not expect it to teach the truth about historj'-. And there is plenty of evidence that the book is a historical fiction and one which makes very free with facts. There is good reason for doubting that Xerxes ever had a queen by the name of Esther. His queen between the seventh and the twelfth years of his reign was Amestris. We know much about her, and it is not likely that she would have tolerated a rival. More- over the book represents Esther as the queen, and the only queen. She might have been a favorite of the monarch ; his queen she certainly was not. ESTHER 91 The manner in which the queen is selected in this story is also contrary to the histori- cal fact ; the Persian king was required to choose his queen from one of six noble families ; and the laws of the Medes and the Persians in matters of this kind were not likely to be tampered with. In fact, all that is related about the de- cree for the massacre of the Jews which was not executed, and the decree for the massa- cre of the Persians which loas^ taxes our cre- dulity. Xerxes was a somewhat irrespon- sible monarch, but we can hardly imagine that even he would order the extermination of a whole race ; for Palestine was at that time a Persian dependency, and the slaugh- ter must have involved the »Tews in Palestine as well as those dwelling in Persia, — not less than two millions of people. Nor can we quite believe that this Jewish prime min- ister could have so completely terrorized the warlike Persians that when their turn came they should have tamely stood still and been slaughtered by the Jews, to the number of seventy-five thousand, without lifting a finger to defend themselves, — especially when they knew that they were wholly undeserving of this venofeance. 92 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS On tlie whole, we are justified, on many grounds, in doubting whether anything just like this ever happened in Susa or anywhere else. There may have been an attempted slaughter of Jews in Persia, which was foiled by the courage and devotion of some Jewish maiden in the court of the king ; but many fictitious embellishments have probably been added to the story by this writer. " Though," says Dr. Driver, " the narrative cannot reasonably be doubted to have a historical basis, it includes items that are not strictly historical ; the elements of the narrative were supplied to the writer by tradition, and, aided by his knowledge of Persian life and customs, he combined them into a consistent picture ; in some cases the details were colored already by tradition before they came to the author's hand, in other cases they owe their present form to the author's love of dramatic effect. An evident collateral aim of the narrative is to magnify the importance and influence of the Jews. ... It is in some of the details con- nected with his picture of the Jews that the author's narrative is most open to the suspicion of exaggeration. It is probable, in fact, that the danger which threatened ESTHER 9^ the Jews was a local one, and that the massacre which they wrought upon their foes was on a much smaller scale than is represented." ^ Upon the historical and critical questions here involved, many of us would feel dis- inclined to venture an opinion, but any of us may have an opinion upon the moral teaching of the book ; and if the author is convicted of grave error in this respect, it is rather superfluous to claim for him his- torical inerrancy. There are traits in the narrative which win our approval. The stanch patriotism of Mordecai and Esther; their passionate grief over the disaster that threatens their people ; the heroism of Esther in taking her life in her hand and venturing into the king's presence, saying, " If I perish, I per- ish," — all this is exemplary and noble. If the writer could have contented himself with making Esther and Mordecai the res- cuers of their people (we could have justi- fied him in getting Haman happily hanged in the operation), the book might have been as precious as Jewish national partiality has represented it to be ; but the last three 1 Introduction, pp. 453, 454. 94 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS chapters are the expression of a moral sen- timent which is utterly at war, not only with the ethics of the New Testament, but with the teaching of the Old Testament as well. Evvald is right when he says that " in passing to Esther from other books of the Old Testament we pass from heaven to earth." The book is here in the Bible, and it has its uses. There is no other book in the Bible that it is so hard to account for ; there is none which needs to be handled so care- fully ; nevertheless it has its uses. It is useful, for one thing, as a standing illustration of how little Jewish tradition is worth in deciding a question of inspira- tion. It is useful as a picture of an Oriental court ; for in spite of the exaggerations re- specting the details of the massacres, the representation of life at the court of Xerxes in the palace of Susa is probably substan- tially correct. Above all, it is useful as showing us the kind of character that has passed for an ideal of womanhood in former ages. There is reason to fear that many Christian read- ers have suffered some confusion of their ESTHER 95 moral sense in reading the sympathetic de- lineation of the character of this author's heroine. Vashti is the character which most demands our sympathy, but the art of the writer seeks to transfer all our affection to Esther. To take the view of this character which the author of this book intends us to take is quite impossible for any one who knows anything of Christian morality ; but on the supposition that the writer of this book is inspired of God, his view of the character must of course be taken. It is not good for us to try to justify or to excuse such conduct as this, or to think about it in the way that the author of this book thinks about it. And we may say that this book is chiefly useful as a dark back- ground on which we may see more clearly the brightness of the Christian morality. The character of Esther serves us best when we think of it as a type of womanhood, once deemed admirable, which Jesus Christ has made it impossible for us to regard with any other feelings than wonder and pity. Perhaps his eye was on this book when He said : " Ye have heard that it was said. Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy, but I say unto you love your 9G SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven ; for He maketh his sun to shine on the evil and the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and the unjust." IV JOB The book of Job consists of five parts. The first part, or prologue, which occupies the first two chapters, is in prose. It intro- duces to us a man of Uz, an Arabian emir of great wealth and probity, " the greatest of all the sons of the East," — a man who was " perfect and upright, one who feared God and eschewed evil. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daugh- ters. His substance also was seven thou- sand sheep and three thousand camels and four hundred yoke of oxen and five hun- dred she asses and a very great household." He is represented as a man of great piety, careful to observe not only the law of right- eousness, but the ceremonial requirements as well. From this glimpse of a great and fortu- nate human personality, the scene suddenly changes to the heavenly courts where Jeho- vah is seated on his throne, and " the sous 98 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS of God," who appear to be liis angelic at- tendants, present themselves before Hmi. " And Satan came also among them." This Satan of the Book of Job is by no means the Prince of Darkness of whom we read in later Scriptures ; he is that one of the officials of the court of heaven whose duty it is to question the claims of men to the favor of God, and to prevent the unworthy from sharing his blessings. The conversa- tion between Jehovah and Satan respecting the character of Job is reported. Jehovah asserts the integrity of his servant Job ; Satan questions it, asserting that Job is not disinterested ; that adversity would disturb his loyalty. Jehovah gives Satan full power to test the patriarch's character by the dir- est calamities ; but when all his vast wealth has been swe^Jt away and his sons and daugh- ters have been torn from him, his answer is, " The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord. " Again the council of heaven is convened, and the Adversary returns to confess him- self foiled by Job's fidelity, but to urge that the infliction upon him of the terrible physical curse of elephantiasis will weaken his allegiance. Still Job endures his suffer- JOB 99 ing without outcry. Months pass by ; his condition is known to all his friends. At last three of them came to visit him, " every one from his own place : Eliphaz the Te- manite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite ; and they made an appoint- ment together to bemoan him and to comfort him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice and wept. And they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground, seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him, for they saw that his grief was great." Thus ends the prologue. The second part comprises the body of the book, and is in poetry. It is a great debate, a series of speeches, in which Job's three friends dis- cuss with him the significance of his calam- ities. This dialogue is introduced by a sol- emn malediction pronounced by Job upon the day of his birth. Then follow three cycles of speeches, each cycle consisting of six. Each of the three friends delivers his thought, and is replied to by Job. Elij^haz speaks and Job answers ; then Bildad speaks and 100 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Job answers : then Zophar speaks and Job answers. And this order is thrice repeated, although, owing to some errors and trans- positions of copyists, the last triplet appears in our Bibles to be an imperfect one. After these three rounds of high debate, another character introduces himself and with himself the third part of the book. It is Elihu, who is represented as a young man with ideas of his own on this transcen- dent theme. He has been listening to the others and conceives that he can add some- thing to what has been said. In the midst of his speech a storm has been gathering, and out of the storm and the whirlwind is heard the voice of the Almighty rebuking the superficialities of all who have spoken, and flooding the whole theme with light from the eternities. The sublime utterance of the Most High constitutes the fourth part of the book. When this august voice has ceased we hear, in the silence, a few contrite words from Job, and then follows the fifth part of the book, the epilogue, in prose, which nar- rates the restoration to Job of health and prosperity. The three self-constituted cen- sors are rebuked by Jehovah for not speak- JOB 101 lug the tiling that is right concerniug God as his servant Job has done. His friends now return to him, and eat bread in his house ; every man brings him a piece of money and every man a ring of gold. " So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: and he had fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first Jemimah, the name of the second Ke- ziah, and the name of the third Keren-hap- puch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job : and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren. And after this Job lived a hundred and forty years, and saw his sons and his sons' sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days.'' The first question before us is whether this book is a recital of facts which actually occurred and a report of speeches actually made, or whether it is a work of the imagi- nation. The general belief has been that it is purely historical ; that a man named Job lived in the land of Uz, which is supposed to have been the northern part of Arabia ; 102 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS that the conversation concerning him be- tween Jehovah and Satan actually took place as here reported : that the calamities here narrated overtook him, exactly as here de- scribed ; that then his three friends whose names are accurately given came and sat silent with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, after which the colloquy here given took place in the words here re- cited. This theory of the book, which has been held, I suppose, for substance, by most Pro- testant readers, is burdened with some diffi- culties. In the first place, all the narrative portions seem to be constructed after an ideal or artificial plan ; it seems remarkable that in each of the four great catastrophes by which his property was swept away and his family destroyed, there was just one sur- vivor left to tell the tale. God's providences do not ordinarily operate by a rule so exact and mathematical. It seems also remark- able that in the two reported conversations between the Almighty and the Adversary, exactly the same words should have been used each time. The constant use of the sjrmbolical numbers, three, five and seven ; and the statement that after his restoration JOB 103 he had exactly as many children as he had before, the sexes being represented as before, while his flocks and herds numbered exactly twice as many, indicates that we are not dealing with historical occurrences, but with a work of the imagination. Furthermore, it is not at all probable that four real men ever came together, in any country in any age, and talked to one another after the manner of these four men. For this is poetry of the most elaborate and or- nate character ; it represents the finest kind of literary art, and men do not carry on con- versations in language of this description, no matter how cultivated they may be nor how deeply they may be moved by thought or passion. Scott gives us in " The Lady of the Lake " some animated conversations between Fitz James and Roderick Dhu; but I sup- pose that no reader imagines that the two chiefs — if they ever existed — really talked to each other in just that language, in per- fect rhythm and resounding rhyme. Shake- speare gives us in Julius Caesar some eloquent controversy between Brutus, Cassius, Marc Antony, and others ; but we do not con- ceive that it is a stenographic report of what was said on those occasions. When we find 104 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS language of this description put into the mouths of men in a book, we do not, outside of the Bible, ordinarily suppose that we are reading the very words of the speakers. But it may be said that these were in- spired men ; and that if God inspires a man. He can just as well inspire him to talk poetry as plain prose. To this it may be replied that these men, according to the story itself, could not have been inspired. Leaving Job out of the account for the present, we may safely affirm that Eliphaz the Temanite was not an inspired man ; neither was Bildad the Shuhite, nor Zophar the Naamathite. These characters are all, in the last part of the book, sharply re- buked by Jehovah himself for having dark- ened counsel by words without knowledge ; for having spoken concerning God the thing that was not right. Their whole line of aro^ument is condemned and set aside by the Almighty Himself. We can hardly suppose that God inspired them to speak error and then rebuked them for speaking it. No : there could have been nothing supernatural about the speech of these men, if, according to the supposition we are now considering, they were real men. And real JOB 105 men do not, without supernatural aid, make use in conversation of language like this. The dialogue, as Dr. Driver says, " contains far too much thought and argument to have been extemporized on the occasion, and is manifestly the studied product of the au- thor's leisurely reflection." It seems almost puerile to argue a point like this ; and yet the suggestion that we are dealing here with a great dramatic poem — a work of the imagination — is re- garded by many pious people at this day with consternation. A neighboring pastor told me of the alarm which a remark of this kind created among his flock. " Job a dramatic poem ! A dramatic poem in the Bible ! " There are those to whom a state- ment of this nature appears to be little short of blasphemy. They want to know if you think that the book is all a lie. No : it is not all a lie. Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Pro- gress " is not all a lie. The story of the Good Samaritan is not all a lie. The au- thor of the Book of Job was not telling lies when he fashioned the framework of this story and constructed the simple dramatic machinery by means of which his great thoughts were to be set forth. Undoubtedly 106 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS lie supposed that his book would be read by persons of ordinary common sense. Prob- ably it never once entered his mind that any- body would ever take his work for a literal history, any more than it occurred to Shake- speare, when he wrote " The Tempest," that any one would accept it as a recital of facts which actually occurred, and of speeches which were really made. Outside of the Bible we are able, usually, to use our rea- soning powers in the interpretation of liter- ature ; very small children soon learn to distinguish between fact and fancy. It is high time that we had learned that the collection of books which we call the Bible contains a great many kinds of literature, — history, law, philosophy, poetry, essays, ser- mons, stories, — and that we must learn to apply to each the canons appropriate for the judgment of that class of writings to which it clearly belongs. We must not read hymns as if they were sermons, or essays as if they were laws, or fiction as if it were history. We must try to get the point of view of the writer, and understand the purpose he has in view, and the method by which he is working. When we are once able to get into our minds a few of JOB 107 these very rudimentary ideas about literary form, we shall be able to realize that the author of the Book of Job is neither a historian nor a liar, but a poet, a great dramatic poet, who is able to use his art, under divine inspiration, for the most sub- lime purposes. There has been much speculation about the date at which the poem was written, and the matter is not well settled. It is an interesting but not an important question. My own opinion is that it was written dur- ing or after the exile, — that it is a compar- atively late book. Respecting its authorship we have absolutely no knowledge. There was an old tradition that Moses wrote it, which is of course even more absurd than the the- ory that Bacon wrote the plays of Shake- speare. It must have been written long after the people of Israel had dwelt in their own land. Walled cities are familiar to the writer; he lives in a community of which kings, princes, nobles, counsellors, judges, are the ornaments ; there must be a settled government. '' Courts," says Mr. Raymond, "are called by notice given; criminals are arrested ; complaints are heard ; lawsuits are conducted concerning disputed 108 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS inheritances ; the magistrate, sitting in the gate, makes summary judgment ; witnesses testify ; sureties are offered for accused parties ; accusers present their charges in writing ; the prison and the stocks await the condemned, or capital punishment is in- flicted by the sword. . . . Yet the tone of society seems to be demoralized. The judges are bribed by the rich to wrong the poor ; the sins denounced in public are practiced secretly ; slaves are cruelly wronged ; the victims of power are oppressed ; men ad- mire and are fain to imitate the successful tyrant." ^ All this is found in the book itself, in picture and simile and allusion. Such a state of society was present to the mind of the writer, and also to the minds of those for whom he wrote, else his book would not have been intelligible to them. This takes us down into the time of the kingdom, and probably to the later years of the kingdom. It is, however, remarkable that the whole ecclesiastical and liturgical machinery of the Jewish church is ignored by this writer. It did not suit his purposes to deal with the ritualistic side of religion ; he was studying 1 The Book of Job, p^. 31, S2. JOB 109 a question in wliich tlie introduction of that element would only confuse thought; he shows his great skill in passing it by. When we speak of this as a dramatic poem, and a work of the imagination, it is not necessary to deny that it may have a historical foundation. " Hamlet " rests on a historical foundation ; so does " Macbeth ; " yet they are works of imagination. '^ The Ring and the Book " is founded on fact ; Mr. Browning dug the substance of the story out of an old law report. In Ezekiel Job is referred to as if he were a well-known person. It is possible, of course, that the allusion here may be literary. We often speak of Polonius, or Colonel Newcome, or Mr. Pick- wick as though they were real characters. It is, however, altogether probable that Job was an historical person, and that traditions concerning him were current among the Jews. " To determine," says Dr. Driver, " precisely what elements in the book be- long to tradition is, of course, no longer pos- sible. But probably tradition told at least as much as that Job, a man of exceptional piety, was overtaken by unparalleled mis- fortunes ; that he broke out into complaint against God's providence, and refused to be 110 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS satisfied or calmed by the arguments of his friends, but that he never absolutely dis- carded his faith in God, and was finally re- stored to his former prosperity. This his- tory is made by the author of the book the vehicle for expounding his new thoughts on the religious and ethical significance of suf- fering." 1 For this is the great theme of the book. Job, as the prologue tells us, bore the heavy calamities that befell him without a word of murmuring. He did not understand this dispensation, but he was silent ; he could have said of himself what the Psalmist said : " I was dumb ; I opened not my mouth, because thou didst it." But when his three friends came and sat down around him on the ground and looked at him for seven days without opening their lips, he lost control of himself and cursed, not God, but his own bitter existence : — " Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the nig-ht which said, there is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness ; Let not God regard it from above, Neither let the light shine upon it ! Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own; ^ Introduction, p. o87. JOB 111 Let a cloud dwell upon it ! Let all that maketh black the day terrify it ! Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery And life unto the bitter in soul ? Which long for death, but it conieth not. And dig for it more than for hid treasures, Which rejoice exceedingly And are glad when they can find the grave." This outburst of Job's passionate com- plaining unmuzzles his three friends, and they proceed, in order, to deal out to him their admonition. For as Dr. Davidson says, they had not come simply for purposes of condolence. " Along with their pity they had brought their theology with them, and they trusted to heal Job's malady with this." We may picture the characters of these three friends, as revealed in their words. " Eliphaz," says Canon Cook, " represents the true patriarchal chieftain, grave and dignified, and erring only from an exclusive adherence to tenets hitherto unquestioned, and influenced in the first place by a genuine regard for Job and sympathy with his afflic- tion. Bildad, without much originality or independence of character, reposes partly on the wise laws of antiquity, partly on the authority of his older friend. Zophar dif- fers from both ; he seems to be a young 112 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS man ; his language is violent and at some times even coarse and offensive. He repre- sents the prejudiced and narrow-minded bigots of his age." That is one conjecture. You can judge for yourselves whether it is reasonable. The theology which the three friends have brought with them assumes that human suffering is always the penalty of sin ; that the existence of suffering is there- fore the clear indication of sin ; that Job's great afflictions prove him to be a great sin- ner, and that he ought to repent and humble himself before God that his sins may be for- given and his sufferings removed. So Eli- phaz urges in his first speech : — *' Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being in- nocent, Or when were the upright cut off ? According as I have seen, they that plow iniquity And sow trouble, they reap the same. By the breath of God they perish And by the blast of his anger are they consumed." As for me I would seek unto God, And unto God would I commit my cause." Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth ; Therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty, For he maketh sore and bindeth up, He woundeth, and his hands make whole." Beginning in this rather diplomatic man- JOB 113 ner, tliese three friends press upon Job, through thirty chapters of this book, their theory that his sufferings are evidence of grievous iniquity for which he should be duly penitent. Job answers all this pious exhortation sternly and stoutly and bitterly. He does not, probably, intend to deny that he some- times errs, though he does apply to himself the adjective " perfect " with which he is de- scribed in the first verse of the book. But he knows that he is not such a sinner above all others, as that he should suffer these un- paralleled disasters and miseries. He main- tains his own integrity. He denies that these evils can have been justly inflicted upon him by his Maker. The doctrine that all suffering is punishment he indignantly repudiates. And when his friends press it upon him more and strenuously he rouses himself and denies more hotly than a good man should. Bildad has said, " Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, Neither will he uphold the evil doers." Nay, says Job : — * ' He destroy eth the perfect and the wicked ; If the scourge slay suddenly, He will mock at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked." 114 SEVEX PUZZLING BIBLB BOOKS To this fact of tlie success and prosperity of bad men Job returns again and again. His friends keep asserting that the good are always prosperous and the wicked always unfortunate, and Job with the utmost vehe- mence denies it. "Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea wax mig-hty in power ? Their seed is established with them iu their sight, And their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, Neither is the rod of God upon them. They send forth their little ones like a flock, And their children dance. They sing to the timbrel and harp, And rejoice at the sound of the pipe. ......... jf Yet they said unto God, Depart from us, For we desire not the knowledge of thy ways." Job loses all patience with his three friends because they refuse to recognize this palpa- ble truth. He more than intimates that their words are cant ; that they are syco- phants in the presence of the Almighty Power. And his exasperation with their special pleading is such that he is driven into an attitude of bitter complaining not only against his fate, but against God, who has suffered these calamities to come upon him. JOB 115 *' God delivereth me to the ungodly, And casteth me into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease and he brake me asunder ; Yea he hath taken me by the neck and dashed me to pieces, He hath also set me up for his mark, His archers compass me round about, He cleaveth my reins asunder and doth not spare, He poureth out my gall upon the ground, He breaketh me with breach upon breach, He runneth iipon me like a giant. I have sowed sackcloth upon my skin, And have laid my horn in the dust, My face is foul with weeping-, And on my eyelids is the shadow of death, Although there is no violence in mine hands And my prayer is pure. O earth, cover not thou my blood And let my cry have no resting place ! " What a tragical appeal it is — to the dumb earth, to keep his blood-stains fresh in the sight of heaven, and to the vital air not to let his bitter wail die into silence ! Job recognizes the power of God ; he knows that any resistance to God's power is vain ; but God's justice he openly chal- lenges. And he begs for the privilege of standing before God and pleading his own cause : ' that I knew where I might find him, That I might come even to his seat. I would order my cause before him And fill my mouth with arguments." 116 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Sometimes he seems to despair utterly, and some of the expressions of confidence which the old version put into his mouth are of doubtful genuineness. Thus the phrase " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," — which has so long been quoted as the triumph of his faith, — is now more carefully translated, " He will slay me ; I have no hope." Yet now and then he seems to feel that an end must come to these sufferings, and that his wrongs will be righted. " He knoweth the way that I take. When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold." And in one great outburst of the larger hope he seems to see a future deliver- ance : — " O that my words were inscribed in a book, That with an ii'on pen and lead They were graven in the rock forever. But I know that my Vindicator liveth And that he shall stand up at the last upon the earth, And after my skin hath been thus destroyed Yet from my flesh shall I see God, Whom I shall see for myself And mine eyes shall behold and not another." This great confession of faith has usually been supposed to refer to deliverance in a future life, and this may be the meaning ; JOB 117 but It seems more natural to me to interpret it as the expectation of vindication here. Even though the loathsome disease from which he is suffering may destroy his skin, yet from the flesh he will Lehold the ap- pearance of God as his vindicator. The twenty-ninth, thirtieth, and thirty-first chapters contain Job's final summing up of his own case. He looks back to the day when he was loved of God and honored of men ; he contrasts with that happy fortune the misery and contempt into which he is now fallen, and then he utters his last solemn and splendid assertion of his own blameless- ness of life. As Dr. Driver says : " The chapter is a remarkable one ; it contains the portrait of a character instinct with nobil- ity and delicacy of feeling, which not only repudiates any overt act of violence or wrong but also disowns all secret impulses to impure or dishonorable conduct." This picture which Job here gives us of his own life is one of the noblest in all literature. It is the likeness of a gentleman, a noble- man, a pure and blameless knight of God ; there is no man of this generation who could think of a higher honor than to be able with truth to repeat these words of Job : — 118 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS *' If I have walked with vanity And my foot hath hasted to deceit ; If my step hath turned out of the way And mine heart walked after m^ine eyes, And if any spot hath cleaved to my hands, Then let me sow and another eat, Yea let the produce of my field be rooted out. If I did despise the cause of my manservant Or my maidservant when they contended with me, What then shall I do when God riseth up ? And when he visiteth, what shall I answer him ? Did not he that made me in the womb make him ? If I have withheld the poor from their desire, Or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail. Or have eaten my morsel alone And the fatherless hath not eaten thereof, — If I have seen any perish for want of clothing. Or that the needy had no covering ; If his loins have not blessed me, And if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep, If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless. Because I saw my help in the gate ; Then let my shoulder fall from the shoulder blade, And mine arm be broken from the bone. If I have made gold my hope, And have said to the fine gold. Thou art my confidence ; If I rejoiced because my wealth was great And because my hand had gotten much. If I beheld the sun when it shined Or the moon walking in brightness And my heart hath been secretly enticed. And my mouth hath kissed my hand. This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judges : JOB 119 For I should have lied to God that is above. If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, Or lifted up myself when evil found him ; If my land cry out against me And the furrows thereof weep together ; If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money Or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life : Let thistles grow instead of wheat And cockle instead of barley." At tlie conclusion of this noble speech is the simple rubric : " The words of Job are ended." Elihu, who seems to have been a by- stander, now steps forth, and delivers his judgment on this weighty theme. " Against Job," it is said, " his wrath was kindled, because he justified himself rather than God. Also against his three friends was his wrath kindled because they had foimd no answer [to Job's argument] and yet had condemned Job." Speaking thus, in his warmth, Elihu unfolds his theory, which is certainly far more reasonable than that of the three friends, that suffering is not always punitive, but that it is disciplinary ; not penalty but chastening. Mr. Moulton in his analysis divides this speech into three parts : in the first he puts this theory of his in an address to Job, but Job does 120 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS not respond ; then he turns to the three friends, and seeks their approval, but they are silent ; then he looks up to heaven " and finds in the sky a fresh text for the great- ness of God. While he is gazing upon it the sky shows signs of change and the tokens of a rising storm mingle with his words." Finally out of the storm and the whirl- wind speaks the voice of God in one of the most sublime portrayals of the wonder and majesty of the creation that has ever been uttered. " Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth ? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest ? Or who stretched the line upon it ? Whereupon were the foundations thereof fastened ? Or who laid the corner stone thereof When the morning--stars sang together And all the sons of God shouted for joy ? " Or who shut up the sea with doors When it brake forth and issued out of the womb ? When I made the cloud the garment thereof And thick darkness a swaddling band for it, And prescribed for it my decree And set bars and doors And said. Hitherto shalt thou come but no further And here shall thy proud waves be stayed ? JOB 121 Hast thou commanded the morning- since thy days be- gan, And caused the dayspring to know its place ; That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, And the wicked be shaken out of it ? Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea ? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep ? Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee, Or hast thou seen the gates of the shadow of death ? Hast thou comprehended the breadth of the earth ? Declare, if thou knowest it all. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, And as for darkness, where is the place thereof ; Who hath cleft a channel for the waterflood, Or a way for the lightning of the thunder. To cause it to rain on a land where no man is, On the wilderness where there is no man, To satisfy the waste and desolate ground. And to cause the tender grass to spring forth ? Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades Or loose the bands of Orion ? Canst thou lead forth the signs of the Zodiac in their season ? Or canst thou guide the Bear with her train ? Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens ? Canst thou establish the dominion thereof in the earth ? Oanst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds That abundance of waters may cover thee ? Canst thou send forth lightnings that they may go. And say unto thee, Here we are ? " The whole recital of the wonders of the creation so impresses Job with the wisdom 122 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS and greatness of the Creator that he is awed into silence and humility. The problem of suffering has not been solved, but the truth is borne into his mind that the universe is too vast for a mortal to criticise, that he can comprehend neither its evil nor its good. The conclusion to which he is forced is that which Carlyle says will overpower the mind of any man, if he will stop and think about it, — that the Creation is " an unspeakable, godlike thing, towards which the best atti- tude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration, and humility of soul, — worship, if not in words, then in silence." And this is really the lesson of the book. Job's friends are sharply reproved by Jeho- vah, in the epilogue, for not having said about him the thing that is right ; and Job, though rebuked by Jehovah for his temerity in challenging the divine justice, is com- mended for refusing to believe that the suf- ferings of men are always a sign of God's displeasure. Why good men suffer, the book does not tell us ; it states the whole problem with wonderful breadth, but it leaves us with the understanding that the reasons, in any given case, are apt to be shrouded in mystery ; that there is nothing JOB 123 for us to do but to put our trust in the infi- nite wisdom and goodness. Thus it appears that the Divine Wisdom is represented as sweeping aside the whole argument of the thirty-five preceding chap- ters, — not only the theology of the three friends, but in large part also Job's answers. Of course much truth has been uttered by all these speakers ; many wise and beautiful things have been said by all of them, for much truth may be uttered in support of a false proposition ; it is true, but it does not apply to the case in hand ; truth is stated, but false conclusions are drawn from it. The three friends had spoken many wise words, and Job had spoken some unwise ones ; none of them was wholly right. The testimony of Jehovah declares that in the main con- tention Job has been nearer right than his friends have been. But the whole contro- versy had been on the wrong track and had failed of disentangling the truth. If the author of this book expresses in any part of it the mind of the Holy Spirit, it is proba- ble that he expresses it in the words which he puts into the mouth of Jehovah ; and if these words are true, the thirty-five chapters preceding them are certainly not infallible 124 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS teaching. There is a great deal that is true and beautiful in them, but we must learn how to separate the truth from the error with which it is mingled. The great lesson of the book is, as I have said, that God's ways are inscrutable ; that we cannot always interpret his providences ; that good men suffer in this world as well as evil men ; that when one is overtaken by sudden misfortune we have no right to con- clude that God is angry with him, or that he is any greater sinner than his prosperous neighbors. But there is another lesson not much less important. Professor Moulton states it thus : " The strong faith of Job which could even reproach God, as a friend reproaches a friend, was more acceptable to Him than the servile adoration which sought to twist the truth in order to magnify God." And Professor Green of Princeton thus states it : The three friends " had really inculpated the providence of God by their professed defense of it. By disingenuously covering up and ignoring its enigmas and seeming contradictions they had cast more discredit upon it than Job by honestly holding them up to the light. Their denial of its appar- JOB 125 ent inequalities was more untrue and more dishonoring to the divine administration, as it is in fact conducted, than Job's bold affir- mation of them." Wise words are these, sound words, per- tinent and timely words. Lying for God is a poor way of proving your loyalty to Him. Does not the same principle apply to the current discussion about the Bible ? Are not those who are " disingenuously covering up and ignoring its enigmas and seeming con- tradictions " casting " more discredit upon it " than are those who are " honestly hold- ing them up to the light " ? Is not the denial of its palpable inaccuracies and human ele- ments more dishonorable to the Bible than the bold affirmation of them ? Is it not, in short, as safe to tell the truth about God's book as about God's providence? There are those who suppose that they are showing their reverence for the Bible by quibbling and evasion, and the concealment of the truth. But the Bible itself, through the book of Job, by the very lips of the Most High, administers to these shifty defenders a sharp rebuke. It is to be hoped that they will heed it. 126 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS I am conscious that I have given to this noble book but a lame and fragmentary treatment. Very little of its beauty and inspiration have I been able to bring you ; for though these words are largely the speech of erring men, they are words out of which we can draw a great deal of divine wisdom. The whole atmosphere of the book is pure and quickening ; how different from that of Esther or of the Judges ! We are lifted to a lofty plane of thought ; we are confronted with the sublimest realities ; we are awed and humbled and comforted. One can quite assent to Carlyle's strong assertion that " there is nothing written, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit," and the spiritual power is not less than the literary beauty. " One feels indeed," he says, " as if it were not Hebrew ; such a noble uni- versality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, dwells in it. A noble book; all men's book ! It is our first, oldest state- ment of the never-ending problem — man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on this earth. And all in such free, flowing outlines ; grand in its sincerity, in its sim- plicity, in its epic melody and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the JOB 127 mildly understanding heart. So true every way ; true eyesight and vision for all things, material things no less than spiritual; the horse, — hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? he laughs at the shaking of the spear! Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime re- conciliation ; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind, — so soft and great ; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars." ^ 1 On Heroes, Lecture II. ECCLESIASTES The llebrew name of the book of Eccle- siastes is Koheleth, It is derived from a verb which means to assemble, to call to- gether ; it appears, therefore, to have some- thing to do with a congregation. Some of the old interpreters, as Luther, conceived that it must describe the presiding officer or teacher of the congregation ; hence Luther called the Book " Prediger^^ or Preacher, — " Der Prediger Salomo.'''' Our old version follows this rendering, and calls Koheleth Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. It is an open question whether this conveys the true mean- ing of the Hebrew. Perhaps the assembly alluded to meets not for instruction, but for discussion ; and Koheleth may, as Plumptre suggests, mean debater or reasoner, rather than preacher, — one who discusses with some philosophic bent the great question whether life is worth living. It has been assumed that Ecclesiastes, or ECCLESIA8TE8 129 Koheleth, is King Solomon. That was tlie Jewish tradition, and Christian scholars of a former day generally accepted it. One of the things, however, that modern scholar- ship has found out is that Jewish tradition is not always trustworthy. When we exam- ine the reasons given in the ancient Jewish writings for the acceptance of these tradi- tions, we often discover that they are base- less ; they rest, in many instances, on the most fantastic and whimsical evidences. The fact that Jewish tradition ascribes the book to Solomon is not, then, conclusive evidence that he wrote it. But the book itself, it is said, names him as its author. Its first sentence is, "The words of Kohe- leth, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." No other son of David but Solomon was ever king in Jerusalem. And in the twelfth verse of the first chapter we read : "I, Ko- heleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem." This explicit testimony of the writer, it is argued, must settle the question, proving that the author of the book was Solomon, the son of David, king of Jerusalem. But the speaker, in any literary work, is not always the writer. David Copperfield is the speaker in the book that bears that 130 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS name, but the book was not written by Da- vid Copperfield. Even if a book bears the name of a historical person, and that person is represented as speaking, we do not always know that this person wrote the book. Era Lippo Lippi is a historical person; I have seen pictures that he painted ; and there is a poem which bears his name, and in which he is represented as speaking, but he did not write the poem. Eobert Browning wrote it. The same is true of many poems of Brown- ing in which historical persons are the sole speakers, — Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Rabbi Ben Ezra, and others. And a more signi- ficant instance is found in the Apology of Socrates, familiar to most of us, — the death song of one of the noblest spirits that has lived on the earth. This apology is all in the first person, and Socrates is the speaker ; but the writer of the book is not Socrates, it is Plato. Doubtless Plato gives us the spirit of the last plea of Socrates, but it is in his own language. Now it is certainly possible that we have in this book of Eccle- siastes an example of this form of literature, in which a historical person is made the mouthpiece of the author, through whom he expresses his views of life. ECCLESIASTES 131 In the case of this book, as in that of Job, a crude and ignorant literalism has obscured the origin of the book, and given vogue for centuries to theories which are even child- ishly erroneous. It has been asserted that if the book is not the work of Solomon, it is a literary imposture. But Dean Plumptre has all literature behind him when he says : " With some writers of the highest genius, as with Robert Browning or Tennyson, a mon- ologue or soliloquy of this character has been a favorite form of composition. The speeches in Herodotus and Thucydides, the Apologies written in the name of Socrates by Xenophon and Plato, the Dialogues of Plato throughout, are instances in which no one would dream of imputing fraud to the writers, though in all these cases we have, with scarcely the shadow of a doubt, the words of the writers and not of the men whom they represent as speaking. The most de- cisive, and in that sense crucial instance of such authorship is found, however, in the book which presents so striking a parallel to Ecclesiastes, the Apocryphal ' Wisdom of Solomon.' There also, both in the title and the body of the book, the writer identi- fies himself with the Son of David. It was 132 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS quoted by early Greek and Latin Fathers as by Solomon. . . . No one now dreams of ascribing it to Solomon. No one has ever ventured to characterize it as a fraudulent imposture. It has been quoted reverentially by many Protestant writers, cited as Scrip- ture by many of the Fathers, placed by the Church of Kome in the Canon of Scripture, and recognized by Church of England crit- ics as entitled to a high place of honor among the books which they receive as deu- tero-canonicaL" ^ It is possible, then, to regard this book as the work of some later author, who has chosen to put his own thoughts into the mouth of Solomon. Let us see whether there are any facts which support this hy- pothesis. If Solomon the great king of Israel did write this book, is it not somewhat strange that in all the books of the Bible written after Solomon's day — the histories, the books of the prophets — there is not a single reference or allusion to it ? Does it not seem probable that if any writings of their great- est king had been in existence, they would 1 " Introduction to Ecclesiastes," in Cambridge Bible, pp. 20, 21. ECCLESIASTES 133 have been known to these prophets and his- torians, and that some one of them would have been apt to alkide to them ? But you search the Old Testament in vain for any reference to this book. " Absolutely the first external evidence which we have of its existence," says Dean Plumptre, " is found in a Talmudic report of a discussion (dur- ing the century before the birth of Christ) between the two schools of Hillel and of Schammai, as to its admission into the Canon of the Sacred Books. It was debated under the singular form of the question whether the Song of Songs and Koheleth polluted the hands, — i. e. whether they were so sacred that it was a sacrilege for common or unclean hands to touch them. Some took one side, some another. . . . Different rabbis held different opinions. So again another Talmudic tract reports that the ' wise men wanted to declare Koheleth apoc- ryphal because its statements contradicted each other,' — and that they did so because * they found in it sentiments that tended to infidelity.' " ^ Is it probable that a book which had come down from the age of Solo- mon, with the clear testimony of his author- 1 Op. cit., p. 21. 134 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS ship, and had for nine centuries been attrib- uted to him, would, in the century before Christ, have been attacked and challenged in this way by the Jewish rabbis ? As Dr. Plumptre says : " Such a discussion, in such a case, would have been an example of a bold criticism which has no parallel in the history of that period of Jewish thought." The book itself contains certain state- ments which are inconsistent with the the- ory of a Solomonic authorship. In the first chapter we read : " I, Koheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem." How could Sol- omon have written that ? Was there a time in his life when he was not king ? " The tense of the verb in ' I was king over Israel ' can only carry the sense ' I was king, but am king no more.' " ^ He says : " I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I have got- ten me great wisdom above all that were be- fore me in Jerusalem. . . . Also I had great possessions of herds and flocks above all that were before me in Jerusalem." But there had been no one before Solomon in Jerusalem except his father, who captured the stronghold and held it during his reign. " AH " is a strange word .for Solomon to ^ Cox's Ecclesiastes, p. 15. ECCLESIASTES 135 use in such a connection. The expression is one that a later writer, looking back on a long line of kings who had reigned in Jerusalem, might have carelessly used ; but it could not have been employed by Solomon, Could Solomon have written this ? " More- over I saw under the sun in the place of judgment, that wickedness was there ; and in the place of righteousness that wicked- ness was there. Then I returned, and saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun ; and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they have no comforter ; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but there was no comforter." Could a powerful monarch have spoken in this bit- ter and complaining way of the injustice and oppression which were going on in his own realm, which he had ample power to prevent, and which it was his duty to detect and punish? The whole picture of society in this book indicates a period very different from that of the golden days of Solomon. " The po- litical situation described in the book," says Plumptre, " the hierarchy of officials, the tyranny, extortion, and corruption of pro- 136 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS vinces, the supreme authority of the great king, practically issuing in the despotism of a queen, a minister, or a slave, the revelry and luxury of the court, all are painted with a vividness which implies experience of mis- government such as that which meets us in Nehemiah and Esther," ^ in the days of the Persian domination, or in the still later days of the Greek tyranny. " The au- thor of Koheleth," says Driver, " evinces no kingly or national feeling ; he lives in a period of political servitude, destitute of pa- triotism or enthusiasm. When he alludes to kings he views them from below, as one of the people suffering from their misride. His pages reflect the depression produced by the corruption of an Oriental despotism, with its injustice, its capriciousness, its revo- lutions, its system of spies, its hopelessness of reform. He must have lived when the Jews had lost their national independence and formed but a province of the Persian Empire ; perhaps even later, when they had passed under the rule of the Greeks. But he adopts a literary disguise, and puts his meditations into the mouth of the king whose reputation it was to have been the 1 Ecclesiastes, p. 30. ECCLESIASTE3 137 great sage and philosopher of the Hebrew race." ^ These are probabilities drawn from the book itself, which tend to establish its late origin. But there is something more than probability. The Hebrew scholars tell us that the book could not have been written in the days of Solomon ; that the forms of the language forbid the supposition. Words, idioms, constructions are used which did not exist in the time of Solomon. Those who know something about the growth of their own language know that it has passed through many stages of development, and that there are great differences between the early and the modern English. Not to go back to Chaucer and Mandeville, it is not difficult for those who are not great scholars to distinguish the English of Thomas More and Melville and Ascham and Spenser and Sidney from that of Coleridge and Macaulay and Arthur Helps and Matthew Arnold. One of these later writers might imitate an earlier one ; but one of the earlier ones could by no means have written in the style of one of the later ones, because many of the words used by these later ones did not 1 Introduction, p. 441. 138 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS exist in the times of the earlier ones, and the forms of many of the words used by both writers have greatly changed, and syn- tatic constructions and locutions have come into vogue in later times which the earlier writers never heard. If, therefore, Ruskin's '' Crown of Wild Olive," or Arnold's " On Translating Homer," had been published first in England with the name of Francis Bacon or Walter Raleigh appended, and with the announcement that it was a posthumous work of the old writer, never before printed, any fairly bright High School pupil could have told you, in five minutes, that the work was pseudepigraphic, that the name had been feigned ; because no man in the sixteenth century could have written that kind of English. Now it is by evidence of precisely this nature that the Hebrew scholars assure us that the book of Ecclesi- astes could not have been written during the century when Solomon lived. Evidence of this kind is as decisive as any kind of evi- dence can be. Scholars who are familiar with the development of linguistic forms, when they come upon language like that of the Hebrew of Ecclesiastes, are just as sure that it did not originate in the days of King I ECCLESIASTES 139 Solomon as you are wlieu you see a Pull- man train standing at the station, that it was not built in the seventeenth century. It is by such facts that men as reverent and devout and conservative as any on the earth have been brought to the conclusion that Ecclesiastes must have been written cer- tainly as late as 330 b. c, perhaps as late as the beginning of the second century be- fore Christ. Luther came to this conclusion long ago ; and modern scholars as orthodox as Hengstenberg, Keil, and Delitzsch are perfectly certain about it. " Solomon did not write the book himself," says Luther, " but it was composed by Sirach in the time of the Maccabees." Professor De- litzsch, who is the most conservative of all the great German scholars, says : " If the Book of Koheleth be of old Solomonic origin, then there is no history of the Hebrew language." And Dr. Ginsburg, a great Hebrew authority, asserts that " we could as easily believe that Chaucer is the author of Rasselas, as that Solomon wrote Koheleth." All these results, you will observe, are derived from a careful study of the book it- self. Instead of accepting the tradition of the Jews, and the guesses and preconceived 140 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS theories of the early Fathers, the higher criticism goes directly to the book itself and asks it to reveal its own secrets. The expert witness holds up to the light the pajjer on which the will is written, and dis- covers a kind of veining in the paper which was made by a machine that was not invented until after the date of the will. He does not guess, he knows, that that date is wrong. The document itself has told him so. Now there are water-marks in language, as well as in paper, and the trained philologist speaks of what he knows. As to the date at which the book was written there is, then, very little doubt that it must have been nearly seven centuries after the death of Solomon, certainly no earlier and probably later than the time of the prophet Malachi. What, now, is the teaching of the book ? That is perhaps the most perplexing question of Biblical interpretation. There is no book which has given the interpreters more trou- ble. Its structure appears to be composite and fragmentary ; Luther's saying, " It is, as it were, a Talmud put together out of many books," is a venture in the right di- rection. Several disconnected essays, inter- ECCLESIASTES 141 spersed with proverbs, are thrown together ; perhaps it is only the first of these, occupy- ing the first chapter and part of the second, that the author wishes to put into the mouth of Solomon. It is easier to interpret the other parts of the book, if we disconnect them from that character. When one tries to understand the teach- ing of the book as a whole, he is confounded by the confusion of the commentators. Dr. Ginsburg, in the "Encyclopedia Britan- nica," gives us a few of the interpretations : " We are positively assured that the book contains the holy lamentations of Solomon, together with a prophetic vision of the split- ting up of the royal house of David, the destruction of the temple, and the captivity ; and we are equally assured that it is a dis- cussion between a refined sensualist and a sober sage. Solomon publishes in it his re- pentance, to glorify God and strengthen his brethren ; he wrote it * when he was irreli- gious and skeptical, during his amours and idolatry.' ' The Messiah, the true Solomon, who was known by the title of Son of David, addresses this book to the saints ; ' a profli- gate, who wanted to disseminate his infa- mous sentiments, palmed it upon Solomon. 142 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS It teaches us to despise the world with all its pleasures, and flee to monasteries ; it shows that sensual gratifications are man's greatest blessings upon earth. It is a philo- sophic lecture addressed to a literary society upon subjects of the greatest moment ; it is a medley of heterogeneous fragments belong- ing to various authors and different ages. It describes the beautiful order of God's moral government, showing that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord ; it proves that all is disorder and con- fusion, and that the world is the sport of chance. It is a treatise on the summum honum ; it is a chronicle of the lives of the kings of the house of David, from Solomon down to Hezekiah. Its object is to prove the immortality of the soul ; its design is to deny a future existence. Its aim is to com- fort the unhappy Jews in their misfortunes ; and its sole purport is to pour forth the gloomy imaginations of a melancholy misan- thrope. It is intended to open Nathan's speech touching the eternal throne of David, and it propounds by anticipation the modern discoveries of anatomy and the Harveian theory of the circulation of the blood. ' It foretells what will become of man or angels ECCLESIASTES 143 to eternity, and according to one of the latest and greatest authorities, it is a keen satire on Herod, written 8 b. c, when the king cast his son Alexander into prison.' " Such an assortment of explanations may indicate that it is not an easy book to under- stand. Those who propose to take the whole Bible just as it reads will be obliged to put their intellects through a good many contortions before they get through with this book. The Jewish rabbis in the Synod of Jamnia who wished to reject it from the Canon on the ground that it contradicted itself had some reason for their criticism. The book is not self-consistent. The author was living in a very dark day. His nation's hope was almost extinguished ; the foreigner had devastated its fields and sacked its cities and carried its people into exile ; the long- cherished expectations of Messianic glory were hopes deferred that made the heart sick. There is so much of failure and dis- appointment and misery round about him that he is driven to take a very gloomy view of life. He doubts if the great kings, even, find any profit in all their splendor ; the objects for which men are striving appear to him nothing but emptiness. 144 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. What profit hath man of all his labor wherein he laboreth under the sun ? One generation goeth and another genera- tion Cometh, and the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he ariseth. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north ; it turn- eth about continually in its course, and the wind returneth again to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full ; unto the place where the rivers go, thither they go again. All things are full of weariness ; man cannot utter it ; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done ; and there is no new thing under the sun." Life is a weary round, a treadmill, — roads that lead nowhither, aims that mock our endeavor, fruits that turn to ashes on our lips. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Then he brings in Solomon, and makes him tell of his great acquisitions and ac- cumulations and triumphs, and how little they are worth after all. It is all vanity. ECCLESIASTES 145 Men strive after wisdom, but what is the use of wisdom ? the gains thereof are real gains, no doubt, but they are brief : the wise man dies as the fool dies. Nor is the pursuit of pleasure any more satisfactory. " All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet his appetite is not filled." We toil to gather riches, but who knows who will inherit them ? He turns to religion and its institutions, but they seem to him full of insincerity and emptiness : much of this worship is the sacrifice of fools ; there are too many words and there is too little meaning. He turns to politics, and the corruption and oppression of the rulers and the syco- phancy of courtiers fill him with disgust. In the midst of all these illusions he betakes himself to bitter cynicism : — " In my fleeting- days I have seen Both the righteous die in his rig-hteonsness And the wicked live long in his wickedness ; Be not too righteous therefore, Nor make thyself too wise lest thou be abandoned. Be not very wicked, nor yet very foolish, Lest thou die before thy time : It is better that thou shouldest lay hold of this, And also not lay hold of that ; For whoso feareth God will take hold on both. Their wisdom alone Is greater strength to the wise 146 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Than an army to a beleaguered city ; For there is not a righteous man on earth Who doeth good and sinneth not." ^ The very cautious and conservative com- mentator whose translation I have quoted thus paraphrases this passage : — " He has seen both the righteous die in his righteousness without receiving any re- ward from it, and the wicked live long in his wickedness to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. And from these two mysterious facts, which much exercised many of the Prophets and Psalmists of Israel, he infers that a prudent man will neither be very righteous, since he will gain nothing by it and may lose the friendship of those who are content with the current morality ; nor very wicked, since, though he may lose little by this as long as he lives, he will very surely hasten his death. It is the part of prudence to lay hold on both ; to permit a temperate indul- gence both in virtue and vice, carrying nei- ther to excess, — a doctrine still very dear to the mere man of the world. In this tem- perance there lies a greater strength than that of an army in a beleaguered city ; for no righteous man is wholly righteous (vs. 1 Chap. vii. 15-20, Cox's Translation. ECCLESIASTES 147 19-20) ; to aim at so lofty an ideal will be to attempt ' to wind ourselves too high for mortal man below the sky ; ' we shall only fail if we make the attempt ; we shall be grievously disappointed if we expect other men to succeed where we have failed ; we shall lose faith in them and in ourselves ; we shall suffer many pangs of shame, re- morse, and defeated hope ; and, therefore, it is well at once to make up our mind that we are and need be no better than our neighbors ; that we are not to blame our- selves for customary and occasional slips ; that, if we are but moderate, we may lay one hand on righteousness and another on wickedness without taking much harm. A most immoral moral, though it is as popular to-day as ever it was." ^ In this vein of cynicism, Koheleth turns his glass toward womankind, with this re- sult : — *' Then I and my heart turned to know this wisdom And diligently examine it, To discover the cause of wickedness, vice. And that folly which is madness ; And I found woman more bitter than death ; She is a net ; Her heart is a snare and her hands are chains ; 1 Ojj. cit., p. 200. 148 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Whoso is g-oocl before God shall escape her, But the sinner shall be taken by her. Behold what I have found, saith the Preacher, — Taking things one by one to reach the result — I have found one man among a thousand, But in all that number a woman I have not found." ^ Any man who can say all this of his mo- ther, his sister, his wife, his daughter, is in a mood from which we may all pray to be delivered. " All is vanity and a striving after wind ! " This is the unending refrain. And what makes life seem so unreal and phantasmal is the feeling that death ends it all : — " Yet I said to my heart of the children of men God hath sifted them. To show that they, even they, are but as beasts. For a mere chance is man. and the beast a mere chance, And they are both subject to the same chance ; As is the death of the one so is the death of the other ; And both have the same spirit ; And the man hath no advantage over the beast, For- both are vanity ; Both go to the same places ; Both sprang from dust and both turn into dust ; And who knoweth whether the spirit of man goeth up- ward. Or the spirit of the beast goeth downward? Wherefore I saw that there is nothing better for man Than to rejoice in his labors, For this is his portion." 1 Op. cit., chap. vi. 25-28. ECCLESIASTES 149 " Thus," saj^s Samuel Cox, whose transla- tion of this passage I have quoted, "after risino: in the first fifteen verses of this third chapter to an almost Christian height of patience and resignation and holy trust in the providence of God, Koheleth is smitten by the injustice and oppression of man into the depths of a pessimistic materialism." ^ It was this ghastly and chilling skepticism that robbed life of its significance. Koheleth had lost the strong hope of his countrymen in the triumph of good upon the earth. That had always been their confidence. Life beyond the grave was not the common expec- tation of Old Testament saints and prophets. The immortality which they looked for was a coi'porate immortality, — the continuance of their nation and their life in that. But Ko- heleth had come to despair of the Messianic kingdom, and he had not yet gained a sure hold of the hope of personal immortality which his people brought back from Persia. Perhaps he hated the Persians too fiercely to be willing to believe a doctrine which they were teaching. Thus he stands on that desolate theologi- cal watershed which divides the old hope 1 Ecclesiastes, p. 148. 150 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS from the new ; the one he has lost, and the other he has not found. His dark mood reflects this uncertain grasp of the future. " No doubt,'* says Dr. Driver, " he would have judged human nature less despairingly- had he possessed a clear consciousness of a future life. But the revelation of a future life was only accomplished gradually ; and though there are passages in the prophets which contain this truth in germ, and though the intuition of it is expressed at certain sublime moments by some of the Psalmists, yet these passages altogether are few in number, and the doctrine formed no part of the established creed of an ancient Israelite. Koheleth shares only the ordinary old He- brew view of a shadowy half -conscious exist- ence in Sheol ; he does not believe in a life hereafter in the sense in which the apostles of Christ believed it." ^ You think, doubtless, of those passages in which he speaks of retribution. " Know thou that for all these things God will bring thee to judgment;" " God shall bring every work into judgment with every hidden thing, whether it be good or evil." But we must beware of reading our New Testament ideas 1 Introduction, p. 443. ECCLESIASTES 151 into all this phraseology. The judgment of which he is thinking is probably the pro- vidential retribution of this life, not of the next. That passage in which he speaks of the dust returning to the earth, and the spirit to the God who gave it, seems to us to inti- mate his expectation of future existence. It does not agree with what he has said in an earlier chapter : " Who knoweth the spirit of man whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth down- ward to the earth?" Is this a later and more hopeful mood? Do we here discern the triumph of faith over skepticism ? The question is not without difficulty, but I in- cline to this opinion. The prevailing mood of the writer is one of doubt and despair, but there are gleams of faith and hope. It is not quite fair to call him a pessimist, for his faith in God does not forsake him. More than once, in these dismal moods, there comes into his soul a flash of seonian light. Sometimes he is inclined to take the epicurean view of life, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ; " but the sobering thought overtakes him that even these joys of the sense are the gifts of God and cannot 152 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS profit us without his blessing. " Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion and to re- joice in his labor, — this is the gift of God." " Though a sinner do evil a hundred times, and prolong his days, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God." These are the voices of faith which are heard from time to time, above the monotonous outcries of doubt, and the cynical counsels of hedonism. On the whole, then, I think we may re- gard this book as the picture of the struggle of a soul, in one of the darkest periods of the world's history, with its own doubts and fears. The prevailing tendency of most of these moralizings is skeptical and hopeless ; the writer feels that life is all a miserable tangle, yet he holds fast to his belief that " God 's in his heaven," and it brings him round to a hope, if not a confidence, that somehow, some time, it must be " all right with the world." No man who believes in a living God can be altogether a pessimist. And I do not see how he can continue to doubt the continuance of life after death. This, as I believe, is the more sure word of ECCLESIASTES 153 promise to which tliis writer comes at tlie end. Let us hear the solemn words with which he closes : — " Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth, Before the evil days come, And the years approach of which thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them ; Before the sun groweth dark, And the light and the moon and the stars, And the clouds return after the rain : When the keepers of the house shall quake, And the grinding-maids shall stop because so few are left, And the women who look out of the lattices shall be shrouded in darkness, And the sound of the mills shall cease, And the swallow fly shrieking to and fro. And all the song-birds drop silently into their nests. There shall be terror at that which cometh from the height. And fear shall beset the highway ; The almond also shall be rejected And the locust be loathed And the caper-berry provoke no appetite ; Because man goeth to his long home, And the mourners pace up and down the street ; Before the silver cord snappeth asunder And the golden bowl escapeth ; Before the pitcher be shattered at the fountain And the wheel is broken at the well ; And the body is cast into the earth from which it came, And the spirit retumeth to God who gave it." ^ 1 Ecdesiastes, Cox's Translation, p. 107. VI THE SONG OF SONGS " The Song of Songs, which is Solo- mon's," is the title of that book of the Bible which ranks next to Ecclesiastes in difficulty of interpretation. Indeed, there are many who would readily yield to this book the palm on the score of obscurity. The first sentence of Mr. Adeney's recent admirable commen- tary, in the Expositor's Bible Series, is this : "The Song of Solomon is a puzzle to the commentator." The category in which we have put it thus appears to be justified. It is a poem which gives expression in strains of great intensity and beauty to the passion of love, — the love of man and woman, which has always been the central theme of novel and lyric and drama. On the face of it there is no indication of any religious pur- pose ; there is not a word about worship or prayer, or any relation between man and God ; the name of the Most High is only mentioned in one phrase which describes THE SONG OF SOXGS 155 jealousy as " a very flame of the Lord," — and that, perhaps, is no more than a famil- iar Hebrew figure of speech, — a metaphor for something very hot. For all that ap- pears to the casual reader, or even to the careful student, this is simply a song or souses of human love. If it were not in the Bible, no other interpretation of it would even have been dreamed of. The question about the literary form of the book has been much discussed. " There are indications," says Mr. Adeney, " that it is a continuous poem ; and yet it is char- acterized by startling kaleidoscopic changes that seem to break it up into fragments. If it is a single work, the various sections of it succeed one another in the most abrupt manner, without any connecting links or ex- planatory clauses. The simplest way out of the difficulty presented by the many curious terms and changes of the poem is to deny it any structural unity, and treat it as a string of independent lyrics. That is to cut the knot in a rather disappointing fashion." ^ For my own part, I find it difficult to accept in their entirety any of the critical explana- tions of the form of the poem which have 1 Commentary, p. 3. 156 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS yet been offered. It possesses a certain continuity ; the heroine, the beautiful Shu- lamite, appears in every scene, and her character is consistent throughout ; but when we attempt to break up the poem into parts, and assign to each its appropriate character, the difficulties are very great. Still, the overwhelming majority of the scholars agree that we have in the book a dialogue, carried on by two or more speakers. The fact that no names are given, and that the changes of person are not marked, is no evidence that the form is not dramatic. In many of Mr. Browning's dramatic lyrics, the persons speaking suddenly change ; the only indication of the change is quotation marks, and of that device the Hebrew writer could not avail himself. In some of the Psalms we have two or more speakers, with no indication but the sense of the language of a change from one to another. In this poem it is evident that we have several speakers. The transition from the mascu- line to the feminine gender, and from the singular to the plural number, make this plain. What we seem to have, therefore, is a kind of operetta, in which the principal characters, two or three in number, sing to THE SONG OF SONGS 157 each other songs of love, very fervid and beautiful ; and in which certain other char- acters or groups of characters, choruses, perhaps, now and then join. The persons named in it are the Shulamite, a rustic maiden apparently from the North Country, and King Solomon. To some of the inter- preters it appears that another character, who plays an important part, is introduced. The main question among modern scholars is whether the dramatis personce include this third character, or whether the parts by some critics assigned to him are spoken by King Solomon. The theory of the book for which Profes- sor Delitzsch is chiefly responsible finds in the poem but two principal characters. King Solomon and the Shulamite maiden. The king has found her and is about to raise her to the throne ; the book begins with her introduction to the palace at Jerusalem, and consists of a description of the wedding festivities, with exchanges of passionate protestation between the royal lover and the rustic maiden, and now and then a response by the ladies of the court and other charac- ters acting as chorus. According to the other modern theory, 158 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS suggested first by Jacobi, and developed by Ewald, " there are," in the words of Dr. Driver, "three principal characters, Solo- mon, the Shulamite maiden, and her shep- herd lover. A beautiful Shidamite maiden, surprised by the king and his train on a royal progress in the north, has been brought to the palace in Jerusalem, where the king hopes to win her affections, and to induce her to exchange her rustic home for the honor and enjoyments which a court life could afford. She has, however, already pledged her heart to a young shepherd ; and the ad- miration and blandishments which the king lavishes upon her are powerless to make her forget him. In the end she is permitted to return to her mountain home, where, at the close of the poem, the lovers appear hand in hand, and express in warm and glowing words the superiority of genuine, spontane- ous affection over that which may be pur- chased by wealth or rank." Such are the two modern theories of the structure of this poem. Before we compare them, it will be well to consider some of the older interpretations. The last chapter contains a succinct resume of various ex- planations of Ecclesiastes ; the tale of the THE SONG OF SONGS 159 interpretations of the Song of Solomon is even longer. The Jewish commentators pro- duced a great variety of explanations, more or less mystical and allegorical, finding in the poem all sorts of occult meanings ; and Christian exegetes, following hard after them, have gTeatly extended the list. In " Who Wrote the Bible ? " Dean Farrar's summary of these interpretations is quoted, and it may be well to repeat it here as an instance of the way in which the book has been handled : — " It represents, say the commentators, the love of the Lord for the congregation of Israel ; it relates the history of the Jews from the exodus to the Messiah ; it is a con- solation to afflicted Israel ; it is an occult history ; it represents the union of the di- vine soul with the earthly body ; or of the material with the active intellect ; it is the conversation of Solomon and Wisdom ; it describes the love of Christ to his Church ; it is historico-prophetical ; it is Solomon's thanksgiving for a happy reign ; it is a love- song unworthy any place in the sacred canon ; it treats of man's reconciliation to God ; it is a prophecy of the Church from the cruci- fixion until after the Reformation ; it is an 160 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS anticipation of the Apocalypse ; it is the seven days' epithalamium on the marriage of Solomon with the daughter of Pharaoh ; it is a magazine for direction and consolation under every condition ; it treats in hiero- glyphics of the sepulchre of the Saviour, his death, and the Old Testament saints ; it refers to Hezekiah and the ten tribes ; it is written in glorification of the Virgin Mary." ^ Such is the fruit of the allegoriz- ing tendency. When the human imagina- tion is let loose upon a piece of literature like this with the idea of finding some occult meaning in it, it is capable of yielding some very fantastic results. This tendency to allegorize was developed among the Jews in the centuries just before Christ, and was taken up by some of the Christian fathers who followed the apostles. Some of these early teachers, both Jewish and Christian, were able to find the most subtle and mysterious meanings in the most commonplace statements of the Bible. Thus Philo tells us that in the text, " With my staff I passed over the Jordan," Jordan means baseness, and the staff means disci- pline ; so that Jacob must be interpreted as ^ History of Interpretation, p. 32. THE SONG OF SONGS 161 saying, " By discipline I triumph over base- ness." By " the green herb of the field," in the first chapter of Genesis, we must un- derstand that portion of the mind which is perceptible only by intellect. The verse " God did not rain upon the earth " signi- fies that God did not grant perception to the senses. In the farewell address of Moses, where he speaks of the plenty of the promised land which the people are to enjoy, — great and goodly cities, houses full of all good things, cisterns hewn out, and vineyards and olive-trees, — we are told that cities mean " general virtues," and houses " special vir- tues," and wells '' noble dispositions toward wisdom," and vineyards and olive-trees " cheerfulness and light." So in later days Origen explains that the six water-pots of stone in the miracle at Cana signify that the world was made in six days ; and that the two or three firkins apiece which they held indicate the moral and literal and sometimes spiritual sense of the words of Scripture ; also, that in the incident of Palm Sunday, the ass represents the Old Testament, the ass's colt the New Testament, and the two disciples sent to untie them are the moral and the mystic senses ; while Methodius 162 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS wishes us to believe that the calf, the goat, and the ram of three years offered by Abra- ham in sacrifice were his soul, his sentient faculty, and his mind. We need not greatly wonder that teachers like these — and the church was full of them — were able to turn the Song of Songs into endless allegories. With the growth of learning, much of this fantastic inter- pretation dropped away; but one or two leading conceptions persisted and still per- sist, and the book in most quarters is even now supposed to be an allegory. In the allegorical interpretations the chief charac- ters are commonly supposed to be two ; one of these interpretations makes the book symbolical of the relation of God to the believing soul ; another, and the most com- mon one, makes it symbolize the love of Christ for his Church. King Solomon, in the drama, is supposed to represent Christ, and the Shulamite maiden the Church ; the rapturous songs of love express, as in a fig- ure, the spiritual and divine affection be- tween the Church and her Lord. Some color is given to this interpretation by those passages in the Revelation which speak of the Church as the Bride, the Lamb's THE SONG OF SONGS 163 wife, and also by certain words in Paul's epistles, in which he adopts the same sym- bolism. And it must be admitted that many devout men in all ages have read this mean- ing into the words of this old song, and have found consolation and help in the thought that the relation of the Lord to his people could be expressed in its tender words. Still, the allegorical interpretation is one that nearly all devout scholars of the pre- sent day have abandoned. The reasons for rejecting it are obvious enough. In the first j)lace, there is not a sign or a hint anywhere in the poem that the writer intended us to take it in a mystical sense. An allegory must disclose its purpose. It need not tell us in plain words that it is so intended ; something a little less frank than the devices of Snug the Joiner and Snout the Tinker and Flute the Bellows-mender wiU serve ; but the hidden meaning must be always shining through the symbol ; the structure of the allegory must clearly reveal what it coyly conceals. " These allegories," says Robertson Smith, " are never without internal marks of their allegorical design. The language of symbol is not so perfect that a long chain of splendid ideas can be 164 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS developed without the use of a single spirit- ual word or phrase ; and even were this pos- sible, it would be false art in the allegorist to hide away his sacred thoughts behind a screen of sensuous and erotic imagery so complete and beautiful in itself as to give no suggestion that it is only the vehicle of a deeper sense. Apart from tradition, no one, in the present state of exegesis, would dream of allegorizing poetry which in its natural sense is so full of purpose and meaning, so apt in sentiment, and so perfect in imagery as the lyrics of Canticles. We are not at liberty to seek for allegory, except when the natural sense is incomplete. This is not the case in the Song of Solomon. On the con- trary, every form of the allegorical inter- pretation which has been devised carries its own condemnation in the fact that it takes away from the artistic unity of the poem and breaks natural sequences of thought." Take any allegory with which you are familiar, and you will see at once that the symbolism is transparent. There is no pos- sibility of mistaking the spiritual intent of the story, the general drift of the teaching. You are not long in doubt when you begin to read " Pilgrim's Progress," as to what kind THE SONG OF SONGS 165 of literature you are reading, and what it means. You know that Bunyan is giving you in these flesh-and-blood forms a kind of mask, in which he wishes to disclose spirit- ual facts. But this poem gives no indica- tion of allegorical intention, and the list of interpretations which I have given to you shows that if the writer was trying to convey any particular spiritual truth, he has met with very indifferent success. In the second place, if the book were an allegory representing the relations of Christ to his Church, it would seem that either Christ himself or some of the apostles would have been likely to refer to it. Paul made use of this very conception of the Church as the spouse of Christ ; but he does not allude to this book, nor is there any refer- ence to it in the New Testament. In the third place, an interpretation which makes the addition of one more inmate to the harem of that royal rake. King Solomon, the type of the spiritual affection between Christ and his Church is one of dubious moral quality. The character of this king, as it is set before us in the history, is not one that we can complacently accept as a type of the pure and undefiled Nazarene. 166 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS "Now King Solomon loved many strange women," says the record, " besides the daugh- ter of Pharaoh ; . . . and he had seven hun- dred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines ; and his wives turned away his heart." If we make allowance here for con- siderable Oriental arithmetic, the tradition still abides that this man was one of the coarsest and most wanton voluptuaries of history. The theory that he was reformed through his love for a rustic maiden, and that this poem recites the circumstances of his reformation, is one for which there is no historical foundation. " Solomon, the son of David, with all his wisdom, played the fool. The foremost man and Hebrew of his time, he gave his heart to ' strange women,' and to gods whose ritual was not only idolatrous, but cruel, dark, impure. In his pursuit of science, unless the whole East belie him, he ran into secret magical arts, incantations, divinations, an occult intercourse with the powers of ill. In all ways he departed from the God who had enriched him with the choicest gifts, and sank, through luxury, extravagance, and excess, first into a j)re- mature old age, and then into a death so un- relieved by any sign of penitence or any J THE SOXG OF SONGS 167 promise of amendment that from that day to this rabbis and divines have discussed his final doom, many of them leaning to the darker alternative. This * uxorious king, whose heart, though large, Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell To idols foul,' is the Solomon of history." ^ The natural basis of the allegory, if Solo- mon and the Shulamite are the only charac- ters represented, is the addition of one more favorite to the seven hundred, more or less, of Solomon's harem. There are flattering promises that she shall be preferred above the rest, but this scarcely changes the char- acter of the man, nor of the transaction. A¥e may admit that polygamy of this wholesale sort was not, to the people of the ninth century before Christ, so monstrous a thing as it is to us ; but if we have here a divinely inspired book, the inspiration which created it must have known that the day would come when such a character as that of Solomon would be egregiously unfit to typify the blessed Christ. No matter in what colors this song might paint him, his dark record stands upon the pages of the 1 Ecclesiastes, by Samuel Cox, p. 18. 168 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Book of Kings ; and I decline to believe that the Spirit of truth and wisdom ever selected him to represent in allegory the blameless Nazarene, or that the transaction represented in this theory of the poem can fitly symbolize to us the relation between Christ and his Church. Another consideration has weight with me. That devout souls have read their own devotion to Christ into these fervid words, I have admitted. But it is also true that the use of this book as an allegory has often imparted to religious speech a sickly sentimentalism which is fatal to all genuine manly and womanly piety. The terms in which these lovers address each other are not terms in which believers can profitably hold fellowship with their Lord. The erotic religiousness which has found its excuse in the allegorical interpretation of this book has often been a very disgusting thing. Some of the hymns in which this kind of sentiment has found expression are offensive to all right feeling. The reasoning which condemns the alle- gorical interpretation also obliges us to set aside that otlier modern interpretation which makes this the celebration of a love THE SONG OF SONGS 169 affair between King Solomon and the Shu- lamite maiden. I should like to believe that this book has some ethical uses, and I doubt whether the marital or morganatic relations of King Solomon to any woman on the earth can be profitably considered in any kind of literature, no matter how exquisite may be the poetic drapery in which the corrup- tion is clad. It is true that the advocates of this theory try to show that the royal rake was purified by this experience ; but, as I have said, the history is silent about any such reformation ; and the foundation which the poem gives us for such a theory is very insecure. Accordingly I am constrained to adopt the theory of the book to which the great name of Ewald has been given, and which is adopted by Oettli, and Driver, and Rob- ertson Smith, and Adeney, and our own Dr. Griffis. This is what is known as " the shepherd hypothesis," by which the dia- logue is distributed among three principal characters, one of whom is the shepherd lover of the Shulamite maiden, from whom she has been torn and transported to the court of Solomon ; to whom, in spite of all the blandishments of the kinof and the 170 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS temptations of the court, she remains faith- ful, and to whom she returns in the last scenes rejoicing in deliverance from gilded infamy, and exultant in the consummation of an unpurchasable and inextinguishable love. That there are difficulties in this interpre- tation I do not deny ; it is not easy to fit all the parts of the dialogue to this scheme ; nevertheless the dramatic and psychological improbabilities are perhaps no greater by this interpretation than by the other, and the moral anomalies are certainly much less. Understanding the book in this way, it does seem to yield us a noble and beautiful mean- inof. There will still be Orientalisms with which we must reckon ; the frankness of the speech of these lovers is not according to modern etiquette ; the book cannot all be read aloud profitably in any company ; and we can see some wisdom in the ancient Jew- ish regulation that it was not to be put into the hands of any one under thirty years of age ; still, with the signification which we are now considering, it is not an impure book ; the fervent passion to which it gives utterance is one of the strongest and highest principles in human nature ; and the lesson which it teaches ennobles human life. THE SONG OF SONGS 171 I cannot undertake the analysis of tins poem ; if any of you care to study its struc- ture, to see how its dialogue is distributed among these characters, you may find in Dr. Griffis's little book ''The Lily among Thorns " a popular arrangement of its parts. Nor woukl it be possible, as I have inti- mated, to quote from it at length. Although, in the words of Mr. Adeney, " a poem that contains these principles must be allowed to have an important mission in the world, it does not follow that it is suitable for public or indiscriminate reading. The fact that the key to it is not easily discovered is a warn- ing: that it is liable to be misunderstood. When it is read superficially, without any comprehension of its drift and motive, it may be perverted to mischievous ends. The antique Oriental pictures with which it abounds, though natural to the circumstances of its origin, are not in harmony with the more reserved manners of our own condi- tions of society. As all the books of the Bible are not of the same character, so they are not all to be used in the same way." ^ As poetry the book takes a very high rank. "The movement," says Dr. Driver, 1 Commentary, p. 59. 172 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS " is graceful and light ; the imagery is beau- tiful and singularly picturesque ; the author revels among the delights of the country; one scene after another is brought before us, — doves hiding in the clefts of the rocks, or resting beside the water-brooks ; gazelles leaping over the mountains or feeding among the lilies ; goats reclining on the sloping sides of Gilead ; trees with their varied foli- age, flowers with bright hues or richly-scented perfume are ever supplying the poet with a fresh picture or comparison ; we seem to walk with the shepherd lover himself among vineyards and fig-trees in the balmy air of spring or to see the fragrant, choicely fur- nished garden which the charms of his be- trothed call up before his imagination." ^ This lovely song of the springtime, for example, has woven its music and its color through all the world's literature. It is supposed to be the maiden's reminiscence of her own betrothal to the shepherd : — " The voice of my beloved ! behold he cometli, Leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart : Behold, he standeth behind our wall, He looketh in at the windows, He glanceth through the lattice. ^ Introduction, p. 420. THE SONG OF SONGS 173 My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, The rain is over and gone ; The flowers appear on the earth. The time of the singing of birds is come, And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land ; The fig tree ripeneth her green figs And the vines are in blossom ; They give forth their fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away ! " And these words also, with which the rural pair depart from the palace to their home in the North Country, and the maiden avows the purity and intensity of her invio- lable love, are memorable for their beauty : " I am my beloved's, And his desire is toward me. Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field, Let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early into the vineyards ; Let us see whether the vine hath budded and its blos- som be open, And the pomegranates be in flower : There will I give thee my love. The love apples give forth fragrance, And over our doors are all manner of precious fruits, new and old, Which I have laid up for thee, my beloved. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: For love is strong as death. Jealousy is cruel as Sheol : 174 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can the floods drown it : If a man would give all the substance of his house for love He would utterly be contemned." From a girl who has flung a palace in the face of a king, these words are not without meaning. The poem has, then, for me, a deep signi- ficance ; it is the celebration and glorifica- tion of that pure passion of love which is the deepest thing in human life, and which ought to be regarded always as one of the most sacred things. It is neither an acci- dent, nor a morbid perversion of human thought which has given to this great theme a place so central in all literature ; it is love or the lack of it which makes or mars most human lives. " What is so old as love- making," asks Mr. Adeney, " and what so fresh ? At least ninety-nine novels out of a hundred have a love-story for plot ; and the hundredth is always regarded as an ec- centric experiment. The pedant may plant his heel on the perennial flower, but it will spring up again as vigorous as ever. This is the poetry of the most commonplace exist- THE SONG OF SONGS 175 ence. When it visits a clingy soul the desert blossoms as the rose. Life may be hard and its drudgery a grinding yoke ; but with love ' all tasks are sweet.' ' And Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.' That experience of the patriarch is ty|3ical of the magic power of true love in every age, in every clime. To the lover it is always ' the time of the singing of birds.' Who shall tell the value of the boon that God has given so freely to mankind, to sweeten the lot of the toiler and shed mu- sic into his heart ? But this boon requires to be jealously guarded and sheltered from abuse, or its honey will be turned into gall. It is for the toiler, — the shepherd whose locks are wet with the dew that has fallen upon him while guarding his flock by night, the maiden who has been working in the vineyard ; it is beyond the reach of the pleasure-seeking monarch and the indolent ladies of his court. This boon is for the pure in heart ; it is utterly denied to the sensual and the dissolute. Finally, it is re- served for the loyal and true as the peculiar reward of constancy." ^ 1 Op. cit., p. 58. 176 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS Is this the meaning of the poem ? If it is, then we need not look for allegorical in- terpretations or mystic symbolisms ; the simple story that the poem tells is full of highest and divinest signification. If the Bible has given us a book which teaches us this pure and ennobling lesson, there is a deep and true sense in which we may re- gard that book as having been given by in- spiration of God. VII DANIEL The book o£ Daniel has played a large part in the history of the Christian church. Probably no other book in the Bible has been so much interpreted ; it has furnished the expounders of millennial theology with a large part of their material ; century after century its enigmatic numbers have been calculated and recalculated to make them fit the schemes of the prophets who distinctly saw the end of the world drawing nigh. I remember as well as if it were yesterday a blackboard hanging in the pulpit, on which some of these figures in Daniel were added and subtracted by the preacher, showing with the precision of mathematics that the world must come to an end in 1843. That was the date at which we were then living. And 1 remember well the chilling fear which fell upon the heart of a child at the sight of these ominous figures, a fear which was never lifted till the sun rose bright and 178 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS clear on New Year's Day, 1844. That blessed morning banished many terrors, and loosened the grip of uncanny sujierstition. I have heard the ravens croak, ever since, with considerable equanimity. The apocalyptical numbers in this book of Daniel lend themselves to the mystic specu- lators about future events. There is one particular term of seventy weeks at the end of which something is to happen ; and it is explained that these are weeks of years, whatever that may mean. Seventy weeks are four hundred and ninety days ; and the commentators have generally supposed that each day in this reckoning was a year. But when this period begins nobody knows ; some say at the captivity, some at the de- struction of Jerusalem, some at the death of Christ ; and there is nothing in the world to hinder anybody from putting the termi- nus a quo at the time of the battle of Wa- terloo or the landing of the Pilgrims, and then looking out for something veryjmpor- tant to happen at the end of four hundred and ninety years from that time. The de- termination to find in these numbers some- thing of deep prophetic significance has racked the brains and unsettled the reason DANIEL 179 of great multitudes of Christians ; and all this speculation and calculation and prog- nostication lands us in the middle of No- where. " So tar," says Farrar, " from find- ing any agreement in the opinions of the Christian Fathers and commentators on the subject, we only find ourselves weltering in a chaos of uncertainties and contradic- tions." ^ It would seem that such a result might have suggested, before this time, that the attempt to deal with these symbols as prophetic might as well be abandoned ; that some other explanation of their meaning might as well be sought. The first six chapters of this book are written in the third person, and the remain- ing six chapters in the first person. The first part of the book is about Daniel ; the sec- ond part seems to be written by Daniel. The change from the third to the first person is explained by some commentators on the supposition that in the earlier chapters we have extracts from the diary of Daniel and that in 'the later chapters he describes his own visions. If we have here a historical work, Daniel was a Jew who lived at Babylon in the reign of Nebuchadrezzar (in this book 1 The Book of Daniel p. 06. 180 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS erroneously called Nebuchadnezzar) ; and who became by far the most conspicuous personage under the king in the whole realm. In the words of Dean Farrar, " If we accept as historical the particulars nar- rated of him in this book, it is clear that few Jews have ever risen to so splendid an eminence. Under four powerful kings and conquerors, of three different nationalities and dynasties, he held a position of high authority among the haughtiest aristocracies of the ancient world. At a very early age he was not only a satrap but the prince and prime minister over all the satraps of Baby- lonia and Persia; not only a magian but the head magian, and chief governor over all the wise men of Babylon. Not even Joseph as the chief ruler over all the house of Pharaoh had anything like the extensive sway exercised by the Daniel of this book. He was placed by Nebuchadrezzar ' over the whole province of Babylon ; ' under Darius he was president of the Board of Three, to whom all the satraps sent their accounts ; and he was continued in office and prosper- ity under Cyrus the Persian." ^ Such a mighty man as this should leave a 1 Op. cit. p. 4. DANIEL 181 large mark upon all history, sacred and pro- fane. We have considerable history of these times, on ancient monuments and inscrip- tions ; we know much about the great mon- archs and their great deeds ; but of Daniel no hint is given in any of these historical sources. In the Old Testament, outside of this book, the name of Daniel is mentioned by only one author, the prophet Ezekiel, who must have been his contemporary. Twice Ezekiel uses the name of Daniel. In one passage, where he is addressing the Prince of Tyre, he says : " Behold thou art wiser than Daniel ; there is no secret that they can hide from thee." In another passage, threatening destruction against Jerusalem, the proj^het declares that " though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness ; " " they shall deliver neither son nor daughter." These references to Daniel, in the Book of Ezekiel, are very perplexing. When Ezekiel wrote these words Daniel must have been a young man, perhaps not more than twenty-one or twenty- two years of age, certainly not much more than thirty ; and such a man to a Jew would 182 SEVEN- PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS seem a mere youth ; why Ezekiel should put him between two ancient patriarchs, like Noah and Job, we cannot understand. It would be as if a writer of to-day, wishing to mention three of our most renowned and most revered statesmen, should speak of George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Adams. It would seem a little in- congruous to put a contemporary, no matter how upright and honorable, into such a jux- taposition with two ancient worthies. The natural inference would be that the Daniel of whom Ezekiel spoke was some hero of the faith who had lived long before his day. If, however, as some explain, the amazing eminence of Daniel, as described in this book, entitled him to be ranked in this way with Noah and Job, then it becomes still more strange that we have no word of refer- ence to him in the other books of the Old Testament which deal with this period. The histories of Ezra and Nehemiali give us all the details of the return of the exiles from Babylon ; but of Daniel they do not seem to have heard. Daniel was living, according to the book, when the first captives returned to Jerusalem ; but he was not among them, DANIEL 183 and neither he nor any of the historians of that time explain why he did not go. " We might have assumed," says Farrar, " that patriotism so burning as his would not have preferred to stay at Babylon or at Shushan when the priests and princes of the people were returning to the Holy City. Others of great age faced the perils of the Kestora- tion ; and if he stayed behind to be of greater use to his countrymen we cannot account for the fact that he is not distantly alluded to in the record which tells how ' the chief of the fathers, with all those whose spirit God had raised, rose up to go to build the house of the Lord which is at Jerusalem.' " ^ Nor is it easy to understand why the three later prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Mal- achi, are wholly silent about Daniel. They do not seem to have heard of him ; and their expectations respecting the future of their own nation are very different from those which this book expresses. They are look- ing for the immediate and glorious rehabili- tation of the Hebrew nationality, while Daniel seems to look for centuries of bond- age and persecution. But how could these prophets of the post-exilic period have been 1 Op. cit. p. 11. 184 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS silent respecting sucli a hero and prince as Daniel is here represented to have been ? In some of the Apocryphal books we find a great deal of information about Daniel ; but these are known to be romantic tales with no historical value. Not only is there no mention of Daniel in the Old Testament (apart from those two references in Ezekiel which seem to refer to some person who lived long before the day of this Daniel), but there is no allusion to the book of Daniel nor to any of the events mentioned in it, nor to any of the visions described in it. What is still more striking, the place which this book occupies in the Hebrew Bible shows that it must have been ad- mitted to the Canon at a very late date. In our Bibles it stands among the propheti- cal books ; it is reckoned as one of the four greater prophets ; but in the Hebrew Bibles it is not among the prophets at all ; it is among the Ketubim or writings which were esteemed less valuable than the other two divisions, the law and the prophets, and it is almost at the end of the list ; it follows after Esther, and is only followed by Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles. This is a DANIEL 185 pretty strong* iiulication of the late origin of the book. If it had been written by sueh a prince and prophet as Daniel is here repre- sented to be, as early as the sixth century before Christ, it would almost certainly have been placed by the Jews in the col- lection of the prophets. At least three books which were certainly written after this is supposed to have been written are in that collection ; while this book is almost at the end of the collection of less sacred writ- ings made up later and appended to the law and the prophets. One of the Apocryphal books, written by Jesus the Son of Sirach about 200 B. C, has a list of the Hebrew worthies ; among them he names Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets, but he does not speak of Daniel. This is a strong indication, not, of course, a proof, that the book was not in existence at the beginning of the second century before Christ. Some of the statements of the book are in keeping with what we know of the his- tory of the times, but others appear to con- flict with our knowledge, and it is difficult to understand how they could have been 186 SEVEN PUZZLING BIBLE BOOKS written by one who was living in Babylon at that date. In the first verse we read that Nebu- chadrezzar besieged Jerusalem, and carried away some of the vessels of the temple in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah. It was at this time, ac- cording to the story, that Daniel was taken captive. But in the twenty-fifth chapter of Jeremiah we are told that in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah warned the people of Jerusalem that Jehovah was about to send against them Nebuchad- rezzar the king of Babylon. The terms which Jeremiah uses makes it evident that Nebuchadrezzar had not before appeared before the gates of Jerusalem. The error is not serious ; it only indicates a lack of familiarity with the facts which a writer livino- at the time would not have exhibited. In the second chapter of Daniel the dream of Nebuchadrezzar which Daniel interpreted is fixed in the second year of his reign ; but in the first chapter we are told that Daniel and his three companions had been by command of the king for three years under the lore of Ashpenaz the master of tlie eunuchs, before anything was known of his power of interpretation. DAM EL 1