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HINTS ON OLD TESTAMENT
THEOLOGY

HINTS ON
OLD TESTAMENT
THEOLOGY

BY

ARCHIBALD DUFF, M.A., D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY AND HEBREW
LITERATURE IN THE UNITED COLLEGE, BRADFORD

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908

DEDICATED TO
THE GOVERNORS AND FACULTY OF
THE UNITED COLLEGE
ON THE COMPLETION OF THIRTY YEARS OF
EFFORT TO EXHIBIT THE COMING OF JESUS
BY HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE
OLD TESTAMENT IN FELLOWSHIP
WITH THEM

PREFACE
The usual sort of preface is not necessary ; for Chapter i. is a
Prelude, and serves the purpose of such usual preface. That
Prelude was prepared to introduce the succeeding essays,
as they appeared from week to week in the issues of the
Christian Commonwealth during the past year. They were
written to help Pastors and Teachers in fitting the newer
results of Old Testament study to the needs of their
constant teaching. Many of the readers of the articles
have expressed urgent desire to have the articles in a more
permanent form beside them. Through the courtesy of
Messrs. Black this more permanent form is now possible. A
good deal of enlargement and alteration has been possible ;
and much of this has grown out of answers to questions which
were sent in to the writer as the articles were appearing.
Here let it be said that such questioning is always the best
way of learning concerning any subject ; and therefore the
writer trusts that readers will continue to send him their
questions, which he will endeavour to handle to the best of
his ability.
Warmest thanks are due to Mr. A. Dawson, the Editor of
the Christian Commonwealth, for the constant kindness with
which he has allowed the articles to appear; although
they must have always seemed suited rather more for the
Classroom than for the pages of a popular periodical.
A. D.
New Year's Day, 1908. b

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Prelude  . . i
II. The Road we must take  7
III. The First Climax in our Path .... 30
IV. Judaism after Hebraism: An Epilogue and a
Prologue  28
V. The Propositions to be Proved .... 39
VI. The Earliest Ancestors of Jesus, their Age
AND THEIR HOME  51
VII. How those Earliest Fathers of Jesus served
God  62
VIII. The Religious Books of those far-off Fathers
of Jesus  70
IX. How the Early Ancestors of Jesus thought of
Law  77
X. The Morals and Religion of Babylon five
hundrfd years before Abraham . . . 93
XI. The Religion of Abraham : Forewords . . 104
XII. Abraham: The Records about him . . .118
XIII. Of Moses and his Religion  145
XIV. The Hebrews in Moses' time, seen in Extra-
Biblical Literature of that date . . 165
XV. Summary: The Tribal Religion before Amos . 170
APPENDIX : A List of Helpful Books . . .176
INDEX  .... 181
INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES ... .187

CHAPTER I
A PRELUDE
The directors of the International Series of Sunday-school
Lessons have rendered a signal service to Sunday-school
teachers and to all of us. We may long for a day when
each pastor, as he chooses his texts and topics weekly for
feeding his Master's sheep, will choose also the topics and
texts for feeding His lambs. But meanwhile no more timely
choice could have been made by the International Committee
than their choice of Genesis as textbook for lessons. For
teachers and writers of preparation columns will, of course,
examine commentaries and the Bible dictionaries' articles.
They have already done so, and they have found much said
in these about the " lahwist." A prominent person asked
lately : " The lahwist ! What is the lahwist ? " The Sunday
School Unions are therefore on the alert, and are employing
skilful Old and New Testament teachers to lecture on " The
lahwist: What is it? Where has it been found? Who
wrote it, and where and when ? And what has it to do with
Christians ? " But other new things are being, perforce,
discussed. For since Genesis Chapter ii. is discovered
to be an extract from an ancient work, fairly well known
as the " lahwist," or " J" ; so also ere the teachers come to that
they have already learned that Genesis Chapter i. is such a
A

2 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
newly-discovered extract from another old although younger
work known as the " Priestly " narrative, or " P " ; and ere long
it will be learned that the story of Abraham's purpose to sacrifice
his son is found to be an extract from still another old book,
older than Chapter i. and younger than Chapter ii., and
known as the " Elohist," or " E." So all the while the teachers
will be losing any possible nervousness about these new-dis
covered and unwonted opinions concerning Genesis.
Let us pause to notice that of late three large new encyclo
paedias of Bible knowledge have been published ; all showing,
by the way, what a great demand has arisen for such know
ledge. The three works might be characterised in brief
thus : —
First, there is the " Encyclopaedia Biblica,"* a thoroughly
scientific work prepared by the ablest scholars of our time,
and without any effort to uphold traditional theories.
This might almost be called the Guide for to-morrow as
well as to-day. Of course, it might go without saying that
this work bases all its Old Testament articles on the most
scholarly analysis of the Pentateuch, etc., into its original
elements derived from the three very old Hebrew documents
which we have described as the " lahwist " or " J," the
" Elohist " or " E," and the " Priestly " Book or " P," to say
at present nothing of other ancient works that have also been
used in writing that Pentateuch in the form in which we
possess it.
Secondly we may set the " New Bible Dictionary." | This
* In four 4to volumes at 20s. net each, edited by Drs. Cheyne and
Black on the basis of plans prepared by the late Prof. W. Robertson
Smith, and published by A. and C. Black,
f Also in four 4to volumes at 20s. each, to which a fifth volume has
since been added, edited by Dr. Hastings, and published by T. and T.
Clark.

A PRELUDE 3
is a comparatively cautious effort to be as nearly scientific as
may be consistent with upholding traditional views. This
attitude of caution is shown quite clearly in a singularly naive
sentence in the editor's preface. He says that in his
Dictionary the results of recent investigation are indeed set
forth, but no use has been made of "unaccepted idiosyn
crasies." One desires at once, of course, to ask the editor
who it may be, if he will be so gracious as to tell us, who
possesses the prerogative of " accepting " or of refusing to
accept this or that. Is it the editor himself? Certainly
there are a great many of the conservative minds among us
who would demur greatly at approving much that this editor
accepts and allows into his pages. His position is an
impossible one. But that position is of signal service to the
cause of progress ; we will not wish his words unsaid. For
here is a work ostensibly meant to be cautious, to be, as it
were, the Guide of yesterday as well as in a measure for to-day ;
and yet this rather conservative Dictionary uses as real the
three elements of the Pentateuch described above, viz. : " J,"
" E," and " P." Nay, more, all the Old Testament work in
the four volumes of this "Hastings" Dictionary virtually
assumes that these results of modern study are not at all hypo
thetical, but absolutely reliable. To use Dr. Hastings' own
expression, he counts these four documents " accepted things."
The remaining great new encyclopaedia of Bible know
ledge is the " Jewish Encyclopaedia," * and this work, pre
pared for the use of Jews and representing the scholarship of
a host of these, uses freely the three documents described
above. * In twelve volumes, 4to, at 21s. each, edited in New York by a large
committee of both Jews and Christians, and published by Funk and
Wagnalls.

4 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
We may rest assured, then, that the study of the three
documents — "J," "E," and "P" — by all our teachers and
preachers will speedily result. Therefore the sooner all know
what the documents are, and what their use means for Old
Testament study, the better. Let us repeat this, for it needs
to be borne in on every mind, that even conservative theologians
count that the lahwist and the Elohist and the Priestly book
are among the " accepted " facts of Christian knowledge. It is
thus already " accepted " teaching that Genesis is not one
book, but is rather a library ; wherein various narratives, first of
Creation then of Floods, are set together. Then various
accounts concerning Abraham and concerning the other
Patriarchs, and likewise various views concerning Moses, the
Exodus and so on, are combined in the various books, save Ruth,
all the way from Genesis to Kings. The whole is a library
of different narratives concerning many subjects, all arranged
according to subjects, not according to writers. The discovery
of all this has dislocated much of the thinking that was
customary. Among the wisest words uttered of late is the
reminder given us by the able Old Testament scholar, Dr,
Peake, who is a Primitive Methodist, that the study of the
Old Testament in the last thirty to fifty years has altered
many conceptions among us and all through our churches.
Take a couple of illustrations : —
(i) A teacher of lay preachers set one of them the other
day to write an essay on Hosea's divine oracle condemning
utterly Jehu's bloody deeds (Hos. i, i), and this was to be
compared with Elisha's divine oracle, a hundred years earlier,
commanding certain men to do those bloody deeds (2 Kings,
ix.). This particular lay preacher had previously been
asserting seriously that truth is one and only one, and that
no one should be allowed to preach aught but that one truth.

A PRELUDE 5
Yet he wrote in his essay, "Here we see that we cannot
expect the godly men of one age to be bound by the views of
the godly souls of a century before."
(2) Another illustration may be seen in the publication of
the supplemental or fifth volume of the second and more
conservative of the Biblical cyclopedias characterised above.
The preface of this volume asserts that knowledge of Hamu-
rabi's code, written 2300 B.C., is absolutely necessary to the
Bible student. And the dictionary's article on Hamurabi
teaches us that his code, 500 years older than Abraham, had
most probably great influence on the Mosaic codes, especially
on Exodus xxi. to xxiii., which was written many hundreds
of years later. These are new ways of thinking, and very new
indeed they are. The conclusion from such things is that all
Christian teachers must feel how we have to do with a long
progress of races and no mere fixed set of doctrines, when we
try to understand the Bible ; and, besides, we have inevitably
to do with other peoples besides the Hebrews, other peoples
who had high culture, in laws and otherwise, long before the
Hebrews had such.
The Theology of the Old Testament is not what it used to
be. What is it, then ? And does it cause dispeace in the heart ?
Shall we have to give it up if we are to have the peace which
Jesus purposed ? Or can these new enlargements and dislo
cations give us enlarged faith in Him ? We must say at once
point-blank that if it does not show us just what He has
showed us of the heart of the Great Father, then we shall
have to give it up. For Jesus holds us. He has laid His
Hand of Love upon us so mightily that we should give up
even a God, were he not altogether like Jesus. Jesus is the
greatest thing in all the world to us. Search for knowledge
of Him is the most urgent of all studies. But such search

6 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
leads us at once to read the Old Testament. So now in
answer to the timid questioner we say that a historical study
of the Old Testament is just what must show us what the
actually historical Jesus was in respect of a very large side of
His life : in respect of His inherited racial nature, and His
inherited tendencies of mind ; in respect of the treasures of
thought gathered by Him during His education and training ;
and in respect of the peculiarities of His audiences, which
must have moulded all His utterances and efforts and plans.
How can we possibly expect that these historical elements in
His being should be different in their essence and in their
power to influence us from any actually historical elements
that we discover from other sources ! They cannot be
different. And in any case we dare not neglect them : we
dare not neglect any facts concerning Him. The Old Testa
ment is the literature that moulded Jesus' school days, and
all His thinking and all His Jewish life : we must know that
if we would know Him. Again, we must know the story of
His Fathers; for we cannot know such a One as He was
without knowing His Fathers, His descent, His coming. On
both accounts we must search the Old Testament. It is more
sure to-day than ever that we must search the Old Testament
in order to know Jesus ; and until and unless we learn some
thing else to be true, we shall expect to find in the beginning
and all along through our study of the Old Testament, and of
the Hebrews and Jews whose literature it is, just the same
God who set Jesus at the summit of all that story. We shall
expect to find God's heart and God's way from first to last
the same; always He must have been the God of saving,
redeeming love, just as Jesus told men they would find Him
to be. In this faith let us look on the main outlines at least
of the great story of " How Jesus came."

CHAPTER II
THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE
Following our prelude, let us sketch in forecast the path
that is before us : or let us set out a sort of menu of the rich
feast of story we are to enjoy. Rich, verily, it is, as the story
of all that religion which led especially to the coming of Jesus.
Rich also it is, very rich, in its wealth of events, of persons,
of ideals, of faiths, of doctrines, of efforts made, and of hopes
cherished. Is there only one Old Testament doctrine ! No,
verily, there are many Old Testament doctrines ; for every
two persons or prophets or writers differed from each other,
and often they differed very widely. Very rich is the story
in the abundance of literary autographs we possess, set down
and sent down by men living all along those ages. We may
fall short indeed in our description of it all ; but before us is
the material for it in wealthy abundance, ready for all loving
readers. To begin by setting down the first page of the story — or
shall we say the first section of this Old Testament Theology
or History of Hebrew Religion ? — might make someone ask,
" But what is it to lead to ? " So we had better give here a
bird's-eye view of the whole, in a rapid outline of all the
many ages.

8 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
We have, then, in brief to see in the course of our present
quest, as follows : —
First is to be studied The Story of Hebraism. And it
runs from the beginning on to about 500 b.c. It is the
picture of how in age after age Hebrew men sought after
God, and how by His lovingkindness they grew in such
seeking. Secondly, then follows The Story of Judaism, i.e., the
story of the Jews from 500 b.c. to a.d. i ; or say to a.d. 30,
or even later. This latter tale is as rich, indeed, as is the
former. Methinks the latter is almost the more fascinating,
it is so full and it leads on to Calvary.
Now let us go back and set down outlines of at least some
part of Hebraism. And it must be studied in two separate
periods : (I) The Period of Tribal Iahwistic Hebraism,
ending 750 b.c. We note in detail: —
(A) Here we have first many records older far than the
Old Testament documents. And in these : —
1. We must watch and can watch the Origins of Hebraism
from, say, 10,000 b.c. down to 3,000 b.c. And we shall find
at once that : —
(i) We can learn and understand something of the very
origin of the Hebrews' language and the languages of their
kinsmen, all of which go back at least to that far-off date.
Then,— (ii) We can trace back the origins of the various kin peoples
to their first home in Central Arabia.
(iii) We can watch great moving masses or migrations of
these, five or more of them, following one after another in the
long lapse of ages. They went out chiefly to the Delta of
the Euphrates.
(a) But here the earliest migrators supplanted a still earlier

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE 9
people and a singularly high and noble civilisation and
worship and literature, which had flourished till they were
supplanted about, say, 5000 b.c.
(b) The first of these Semitic migrations, which became the
Babylonian people, developed in all ways of life till, say,
3800 B.C. At that date there were composed documents of which
we possess not mere copies, but the actual originals, prepared
under a King Sargon of Agade and a King Gudea. We can
see some such actual documents in the British Museum.
(iv) It was in those ages that men sang the great Babylonian
Epics, copies of which are in our hands to see and handle
and read to-day. They sang (a) concerning Creation, or
rather concerning Spring-lime ; (b) concerning Delta-Floods ;
(c) concerning Hades; and (d) concerning a Great Deliverer,
Marduk, who was a God-man, and to whom every knee in
earth and in heaven should bow. These epics, or rather
traditions of them, were known long, long afterwards among
the Hebrews ; and they were used all through the literature
which we possess in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Prophets, etc., as
we shall see.
(v) Ere we pass on, let us observe (a) that the Hebrews
themselves did not begin to exist as a people until about
1800 B.c, the supposed date of Abraham, or even until
1400 B.C., the supposed date of Moses. But in far earlier
days their fathers, of course, existed ; and those ancestors
must have thought much in those ages concerning God and
life and all its fulness. So we have to go back far beyond
Abraham to see the origins of the Hebrew life and religion.
Observe, also (b), that there was already a rich civilisation
where those first fathers came to dwell, and that we have
rich material for discovering the story of it all. We can see
and appreciate the culture of those far, far-off days, and

io OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
especially their trade as it went out along all the water
ways, down the Persian Gulf, up the Euphrates, along the
Mediterranean, and through the Red Sea. It is startling, but
true, that we can read that rich story of 3800 B.C., i.e., nearly
6000 years ago, in documents written then, which are now
before our eyes. We can tell thus fairly exactly what were the
early origins of Hebraism.
2. But here, in our outline of these pre-Biblical records, we
reach an important stage in the course of those Origins. For
soon after 3000 B.C. there was a fresh great migration from
Central Arabia to the Delta of the Euphrates. It was, besides,
what may be called the " Canaanite " migration, the very
migration to which the prehistoric Hebrews themselves
belonged. These new immigrators planted new governments
on the great Delta, and there one dynasty after another
ruled over them. About 2300 B.C., i.e., 500 years before
Abraham, an early king of one of the earlier of those dynasties
was a great man-of-law. His name was Hamurabi. Around
him was a high civilisation. There was much fine agriculture,
and commerce, and art, and science, surgeons, banks,
shipping, and all that these mean. Hamurabi codified and
wrote out a digest of the nation's laws for all these sections
of his society. He was a wise, humane, and deeply religious
man. We possess to-day the actual copy of his code, that he
caused to be carved so long ago. It is preserved in the
Museums of Paris. We shall study this code, and see in it
the king's own character, and that of his people. Singularly
enough, even conservative theologians agree that this code,
i.e., the legal methods and language of this people of 2300
B.C., so long before Abraham, and 900 years before Moses,
had a great deal to do with forming the legal systems of the
Hebrews that were drawn up, as we see them in Exodus,

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE n
Chapters xxi. to xxiii., 1600 years after Hamurabi wrote
the Babylonian code. Here, indeed, then we are able to
learn much concerning the Origins of Hebraism.
3. But now we can go farther: we have more light on
those Origins. A few years ago a box of documents, carved
on slabs, was found in the village of Tel-el-Amarna on the
banks of the Nile. These documents date from 1400 b.c.
We can actually read now the very letters that were written
then. Among other things they include letters from persons
in Palestine, from Jerusalem and the like ; and naturally such
letters reveal to us much of the condition of the people and
things in Palestine at that date. It was the very date when
Moses is said to have lived. So here we can gather what life
was around Moses and his people, from letters — not copies,
but actual letters, — written in his time, 1400 B.C.
(B) Thus we pass to Biblical records. We now reach
times of which we can get pictures from documents contained
in the Old Testament itself. Embedded there in the books
of Genesis, etc., down to Kings, is, first of all, the so-called
Iahwistic literature. In brief outline we note that we shall
discover how —
1. This lahwist shows us the actual religion of the Hebrews
as they practised it before the Prophets made their great
Moral Revolution.
2. We shall see also where and how we can find and read
this Iahwistic literature.
3. We shall look upon and estimate its moral level. And
then, 4. We shall understand why the Prophets had to con
demn it.
(C) Ere we go further, it is fair to ask now, Is there not
some new doctrine in the Old Testament Theology that has

12 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
been outlined in part in the past pages ? Has this sort of
Old Testament Theology always been taught ? If we purpose
to hold fast to traditional theology, shall we follow this present
outline? (i) In reply, it must be said that certainly the
knowledge of many of the things we are to describe and use
is new. The knowledge of the Tel-el-Amarna letters is new.
So is our knowledge of the laws and code of Hamurabi quite
new. Also new is our knowledge of the documents in the
British Museum, dating from and actually written in 3800 B.C.,
and written then in a society that was highly civilised. But
while our knowledge is new, none the less old are the facts.
The documents have all been buried through the ages on
those eastern plains, and thus carefully preserved just as they
were written so long ago, and awaiting our reading of them.
All through the long, long ages the Great Father has known
them. He put them there by His Providence, and that
Providence has all along intended to give us these surprises
through this new knowledge. Moreover, God has thus pur
posed all along to give us new opinions, new ideas, new
doctrine. He has intended to compel us to alter our old
theology. He has bidden us think out new and ever newer
theology. Traditionally, we have taught certain doctrines
concerning the origin and growth of the Hebrews, but here
were facts all ready to compel us to advance.
(2) Consider how the dates put in our Bibles at the top of
the columns of marginal references have been for many a
day telling us that the world was created in 4000 B.C. ; but we
have now discovered documents that were actually written in
that year and farther back, by men and society that were
already of a highly civilised sort. And since these show a
high state of culture existing then, therefore busy and
thoughtful men had already lived for very many ages.

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE 13
(3) Again, it was thought traditionally that the law-book
contained in Exodus Chapters xxi. to xxiii. was written
originally by Moses in 1400 B.c; but we find that, under
Providence, one of the origins of that Law-book was a
Babylonian Code written 900 years before 1400 B.C., and
we possess now the actual original of that Babylonian
Law-book, i.e., Hamurabi's Code. Our knowledge has
changed ; our opinions are changing. Much new theology
is clearly compulsory, and already holds easily every
thoughtful theologian. So much for what is new in that
part of Old Testament Theology that has already been
outlined. (D) To recall what we have done : we have seen in out
line what may be called, —
(I) The Theology of the Origins of Hebrew Religion;
and of Iahwistic Religion, and this we have outlined : —
(1) As we learn of these origins in various literature that is
much older than the literature of the Old Testament — to wit,
in (i) Sargon I's writings, (ii) Gudea's writings, (iii) Hamurabi's
code, and (iv) the Tel-el-Amarna letters.
(2) We have said that we are to learn of these origins still
more nearly in the Iahwist's narrative, a book written about 900
B.C., which shows us Hebrew religion before the time of the
Prophets, Amos and his comrades. We may call this " the
Tribal Iahwism " ; it is the religion of the writers of that
old Iahwistic book and of the people who wrote it. The book
was used in making up our Bible books from Genesis to Kings,
and the first extract from the ancient book is contained in
Genesis ii. Then, since we find when all its parts are set con
tinuously together, that the work tells the story of Solomon ;
therefore it was written about 900 B.C. Its religion is just of
the sort that students read of in W. Robertson Smith's

14 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
" Religion of the Semites"; and it is well illustrated by the
awful oracles of Elisha uttered about 850 B.C. Such was
Tribal Iahwistic Hebraism.
We pass forward now from this outline of the Origins to
outline the next great portion of Old Testament Theology,
namely, The Great Moral Hebraism. Here we shall have
to study the marvellous Revelation and message of Grace
which Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and others grasped about 750 B.C.,
a century after the awful and cruel oracles of Elisha. Their
Revelation worked a tremendous Revolution. A brief out
line of this is the following : —
(II) The Great Moral Revelation in the oracles of the
first writing Prophets, and the great Religious Revolution
which they produced. At once —
{A) We shall proceed in this section to ask, What were
the Prophets ?
(1) Who was Amos ?
Here we may be suffered to pause and set down some brief
reminiscences of the course of progress of knowledge of the
kind that we are discussing, for the tale will help to impress
on us the practical value of the work we seek to do. The .
late Rev. Hugh Price Hughes took part in the first great
assembly, held in the old Eastbrook Wesleyan church in
Bradford in 1892, at which the foundations were laid for the
now great Free Church Federation. At the close of splendid
service done by his public utterance, Mr. Price Hughes sought
out the present writer, who had just then published a first
volume of Old Testament Theology for the purpose of making
known to teachers and the public what is to be learned by
means of modern study concerning Amos, Hosea, and their
great comrades. Mr. Hughes grasped the writer's hand
warmly, saying, '* I thank you for your ' Amos ' ; he has been

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE 15
prophesying in St. James's Hall these several Sundays past."
This illustrates the practical value of such a study, as men like
Mr. Hughes see it. About the same time the Labour leader
Ben Tillett met the same Old Testament teacher, and said,
"Ah, I know you; your men have told me of 'Amos,' and
I am trying to do as he did." That also was a note of the
practical value of this modern study. For how many a day
have those Prophets lain unused, to say nothing of their being
misused !
But who really was underneath all this result ? It was the
teacher of that teacher, Professor Bernhard Duhm, of Basel,
then of Gottingen, who published thirty years ago a book on
" The Theology of the Prophets, as a Foundation for the
History of the Inner Development of Israelite Religion."
Here may be recorded a due tribute : for while some teachers
tried to check the use of Duhm's book long ago, a present-
day principal* of one of our theological colleges saw its
momentous power and value, and he himself translated it into
English. The insight of him who thus translated, his noting the
epoch-making significance of Duhm's book, marked him out
clearly as a guide for the future. That book has completely
revolutionised Old Testament Theology. Before it was pub
lished, writers on Old Testament Theology were accustomed
to treat simply of two great subdivisions of their subject.
The first subdivision was " Mosaism," and here was arranged
everything and every thought that the Bible tells of in the
Pentateuch and Joshua and Judges, as if all that is written
there had belonged to one homogeneous system. The first
five Bible-books at least were said to be all the work and the
thought of one man, Moses, and all was one consistent system ;
no idea of perspective entered for a moment into the method
*Rev, Principal P, T. Forsyth, M.A., D.D.

16 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
of the Old Testament theologians who described this so-
called " Mosaism." The " Moses " himself, as they tried to
conceive him, must have been a man without any trace of
mental growth in his soul. He was conceived as a man with
out a perspective ! Then the theologians proceeded to
describe what they called " Prophetism " ; and here again
there was ho perspective ; for it was taught that all the
Prophets knew and held simply to one system of faith and
teaching. How poorly had those noble men's words been
read ! Besides, the writers of that sort of Old Testament
Theology supposed the Prophets to have been simply preachers
of " judgments " of God against the Hebrews for supposed
backsliding from Mosaism. But Duhm's work proceeded on
the basis of the demonstrated fact that the so-called Mosaism
did not precede Prophetism, but followed it ; if, indeed, the
two terms Mosaism and Prophetism could be used at all with
any show of studious accuracy. The Prophets, said he,
preached a Moral Reform and a change from the previous
poorly moral Tribalism. Besides, each prophet made his own
advances from the positions of his predecessors; and, one
after the other, each of them prepared the way for farther ad
vances by his successors. Then, said Duhm, it was that
naturally there resulted a series of efforts to legislate concerning
what was good, and these efforts were themselves an organi
cally ever-progressing growth. That was the way in which
Hebrew Law or Mosaism arose. It was never one system ;
it was always a growing thing, and always a fruit of the preach
ing of prophets. Duhm* showed that the whole story of
Hebrew religion was a vividly moving development in every
* Duhm's Work, thus described as written thirty-three years ago,
has never been published in English. But ere long a new and enlarged
edition will appear ; and not only in German, but also in English,
through the enterprise of Messrs. A. and C, Black.

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE 17
way ; and that Hebrew literature is the series of records which
the Hebrew life, ever busy and eager and aspiring, uttered
concerning itself; not indeed writing these down as " history,"
but rather as " preaching," or as tracts to be circulated.
Turning back now to our outline, we said that we shall
have to ask :
(1) Who was Amos; what did he say ; and where? And
we shall see : especially (a) that his new and infinitely precious
oracle was " Seek good, and God will be with you." — Amos,
Chapter v., 14. Observe: not when you find good, but when
you seek it, will God be with you, was Amos's gospel.
(b) We shall find that he sprang forward to preach and
help thus, just in a time of terrible distress.
(c) This means that the old tribal Iahwism, with its care
for tribal instincts only, had failed to save the Hebrews amid
the terrible raidings then carried on by the imperial Assyria ;
and a new lahweh religion was to be all taken up with
Goodness. That was the great Moral Revelation made to
and through Amos.
(2) We shall see the same Revelation in Hosea; but Hosea
was far deeper, tenderer, and more studious than Amos.
(3) In Isaiah we shall see the same Revelation and Revolu
tion in a man all concerned with Politics, with the State, with
the young King Ahaz whom he saved, and with the govern
ment of Hezekiah which he condemned.
(4) Then Micah's simple but noble work must be studied.
(B) Next we shall have to turn to watch the successive
results of this great Moral movement.
(1) We shall see these first in the Elohist. But some
one asks, " Now, what is the Elohist ? "
(a) It is the second in time of the original narrative
writings that have been used to make up Genesis, Exodus,
B

18 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
and all the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
It begins in Genesis, Chapter xx., or perhaps in Chapter
xv. ; it tells how Abraham gave up his faith that he ought to
sacrifice Isaac ; it tells of the wonder-children : Joseph, Moses,
Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, David, all so different from the
Iahwist's men of the same names ; and it originates the Ten
Commandments of Exodus, Chapter xx.
(b) This Elohistic story must have been written by men
living beside the Prophets, or just after them.
(c) It leaves entirely the morals of the Iahwistic story, and
virtually condemns them.
(rf) It exalts God far away above the old ideas about Him ;
and says that his character was never known until Moses
saw it.
(«) It sets about an education of the people in high moral
duties, and believes in testing the people to see whether they
will rise to these.
(/) It alters entirely the theory of sanctuaries.
(2) Then followed as a second result of the Moral Prophets'
work, and in natural succession to the Elohists, the series of
men who wrote and constructed our book of Deuteronomy.
Examining closely, we shall find that —
(«) These emphasised the unity of lahweh, the Hebrew
God ; not the unity of the real God, but the unity of
lahweh. This was, however, a considerable step towards
Monotheism : it was a beam of the dawn. See Deut. vi. 4.
(6) They emphasised unity of organisation, and insisted
that to this end there must be only one altar or place of
sacrifice in all the land. See Deut. xii.
(c) We shall see how this put an end to sacrifice as the
way of worship for most people. People in homes far away
from the one altar would have to learn to worship by prayer

THE ROAD WE MUST TAKE 19
and meditation at home. We shall find that this must have
caused the rise of Synagogue worship; and indeed the
practices of the Synagogues go back to the time of those
Deuteronomist writers.
(C) Then King Josiah's Reformation, 620 b.c, must be
studied ; for, —
(1) It adopted Deuteronomy as the charter for an entirely
new system of government and religion. See 2 Kings xxii. ff.
(2) But soon Jeremiah showed, with profound penetration,
that under this Deuteronomic charter and system a new
formalism was growing which was hollow and helpless ; men
sang, " We are saved; so we may do as we like." Jer. vii. 10.
(3) The exile — or, rather, let us use a plainer word and
say the slavery — with slave-bands of men, women and children
tramping away the long thousand miles from Judah to
Babylon, ended the little Hebrew State.
(d) Ere we pass on to outline next the highest blossom
of the prophetic Hebrew religion, a picture of the sublime
climax that was reached in slavery ; let us note that we have
thus far drawn up a forecast of a series of proofs of these
things : (1) That in time of trouble true preachers sprang to
the front to help ; also (2) that the prophets' help lay in
bringing in a Religion of Goodness ; and, finally, (3) that
the way of God has evidently always been to save — i.e., to be
just what Jesus says He is.

CHAPTER III
THE FIRST CLIMAX IN OUR PATH
We are about to proceed to give an outline of the remaining
period of Hebraism, namely, of the final steps by which the
best of the exiles or slaves away in Babylon, between 600 and
500 b.c, rose to a height of faith and ideal so sublime that
Christians have always felt it to be a veritable anticipation of
the climax attained in Jesus. Let us, then, devote a whole
chapter to it. But let us recall first the course we have
already described, so that we may see how the whole shows
God, the Cause of it all, to have been always and altogether
and truly a Saviour.
Thus we have seen, for example, how (1) each fresh migra
tion of the Hebrews' Semite forefathers, from their earliest
homes out into the plains of the Euphrates, was a gracious
work of God, an act of rich love, giving comforts, education,
civilisation, culture, salvation to unnumbered souls. Then
(2) the faith that was sung 5000 b.c and earlier still in the
old epics of Creation and of Spring-time was a joyful belief
that the God-man Marduk brought salvation from the powers
of death. Therefore was He exalted to sit on high, that all
should bow to Him ; and He, the good Saviour, should rule
the fates of all men. (3) Then again, in God's great provi
dence, society was led to think out Hamurabi's laws for truest

THE FIRST CLIMAX IN OUR PATH 21
life, so far as that could then be seen, to the end that all
things might be safe in earth and heaven. (4) Again, the
Iahwists picture the steady elevation of the Hebrew folk, or
its evolution, if we will, until David united them into a true
state; and that was again a true salvation. (5) Yet again, the
saving help came in another day of trouble, when once again
man's extremity was God's opportunity; for it has long been
thought, but thought wrongly, that the troubles of Samaria
and Judah in the early years of the Prophets were judgments
sent of God to punish the little peoples for idolatry. But it
was not idolatry, it was not badness so much, but imperial
oppression that was ruining all the land and people, when the
prophets sprang to the front, and preached " God is with
those who seek goodness." Thus the task of these prophets
was to save men from sorrow and from a mere tribal and low
moral and religious level, up into a verily new vision of God's
heart. Once more, (6) the search for goodness in rules and
codes for conduct, that culminated in the strange Deutero
nomic idea of a unity that was to be secured by having only
one altar for all the land, was another work of salvation. For
it meant that worship at altars could no longer be for every
man the way of communion with God ; and so this strange
rule of the one altar was a finger-post pointing to Jesus at the
well near Samaria speaking to the woman there His great
word, "Worship in the Spirit."
Thus we have recalled the centrally characteristic feature of
all that rise and progress of religion in Hebrew souls so far
outlined, and we find that it was always God's Saving Care for
Men. We can now proceed easily to tell of: —
(D) The climax of Hebrew religion in the exile. It was
the close of Hebrew life as nationally visible. The true

22 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Hebrew souls ascended a cross ; or rather they went out into
all the world, a band of great missionaries. They died as a
nation as well as individually, that all ends of the earth might
live. Hebraism ceased to be : there was no longer a Hebrew
nation. Here came into being the grandest missionary
purpose and life and proclamation that the world has known.
Let us sketch it.
In the years 600 to 588 b.c. the best of all the poor
conquered Hebrews were carried away 1,000 miles over
mountains, rivers, wide deserts, away to the Delta of the
Euphrates. Certain it was that many — nay, most — could never
go back : for how many aged would drop and die on the long
tramp ; how many babes would perish, since their mothers
must grow faint and fail ; how many fathers, broken
hearted, would be the vulture's horrid feast, and leave a long
white line of skeletons to mark the way ! Was it strange, or
was it not most natural, nay, was it not just the way of Gbd,
that those hearts should be moved in their depths to cry :
" Why, O our God, lahweh, do we suffer ? Why does Thy
people suffer ? How will God justify His ways ? How will
He set right the wrong ? "
Five different answers were given to that question by the
Hebrews of the exile. Five different men or sets of persons
wrestled with the hard problem, and have left their solutions
for us to read in five different pieces of literature. As
preachers and teachers for the people of our day, we must
listen to these five answers ; if we should study them for no
other more historic end. In outline, they are : —
(i) First, Ezekiel's answer. He wrote : " It is all to the
end that we may know that the Zion-Iahweh is the true God."
Sixty times does Ezekiel set down that refrain, that ends
almost each oracle he writes. He wrote also that lahweh

THE FIRST CLIMAX IN OUR PATH 23
must have a people ; and to this end, having lost His old
original folk in the exile, He will work a great miracle, raising
the dead from the old graves of Canaan to live again in a
newly ordered land. Then " lahweh will Himself go thither."
Then should men know why the righteous had suffered ; for
after the suffering their God lahweh would give this beautiful
joy. (ii) The second answer is found, strangely enough, in
Leviticus, Chapters xvii. to xxvi. Reading these, we have
to learn :
(a) How these chapters are a book in and of themselves.
(b) How that book is made of two or more interwoven but
distinct codes of laws.
(c) That it ends its paragraphs with a characteristic
refrain : " Be ye holy and devoted, for lahweh is so." It is
for this reason that students call these ten chapters " The
Holiness Law," or " H."
(d) Also the book comes from the very time of Ezekiel ;
and, —
(e) Its answer to the great problem of suffering is : " We
have been enslaved so sadly because we needed to be more
devoted seekers after goodness." This man's religion
therefore is, The true soul must practise " Holiness," i.e.,
" Devotion to our God, lahweh, since He is Devoted to
us." (iii) But now we reach a far more wonderful flight of mind
and purpose in Isaiah, Chapters xl. to lv., or most of that
" Second Isaiah " which is called at times the " Comfort
Poem." The singer of this stately chant has an answer all
his own : it is very familiar to us : —
(a) How often have we listened rapt as some soaring tenor
voice has sung : —

24 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
" Comfort ye My people !
They have received double the due for all their sin ;
They are to go back to Zion.
Prepare their way, the divine Iahweh's way, across the wilderness."
(b) History explains this song. The Persian conqueror
Cyrus seemed about to conquer the Euphrates lands, over
throwing the Empire of Babylon, to become the World's
Emperor himself. Would he not then, needs be, set the
Hebrew slaves free? Was he not Iahweh's Messiah?
(c) The singer's theory is, therefore, that the people had
forfeited Iahweh's favour; but now He had requited them
doubly for their faults, (d) Now He was sending His own
Anointed warrior, Cyrus the conquering Medo-Persian
prince, to destroy the slave-holding Babylon, and to send the
Hebrew people safe home to Canaan, (e) We may pause to
note that the word " Messiah " is not used in the Hebrew
here. Indeed it is not used anywhere in the whole Old
Testament. " Messiah " is really not a Hebrew word, but
was invented by the early Christians of Jewish nationality to
distinguish Jesus specially. It is what Semitic grammarians
call a "frequentative" word, and means "one who is
repeatedly or constantly anointed." The word that is applied
to Cyrus and to all others, kings and priests, who in the Old
Testament literature are called " anointed," is not Messiah,
the oft-anointed, but " Masiah," i.e., the once-anointed and
yet deservedly thus appointed. But we must not forget that
this term " Anointed " is applied to Cyrus exactly as much
as to David or to a High-priest. (/) A strange theory was
the singer's concerning suffering and sin. He believed that
his God could punish them with a double punishment ; and
having actually done so, He must liberate them now. It was
a poor idea of God ! Strange, too, was the faith that only by

THE FIRST CLIMAX IN OUR PATH 25
such material restoration could men be blessed : strange, and
yet that was the old Hebrew faith of the singer of Isaiah,
Chapter xi. and onwards.
(g) But the song failed to inspire the slaves. For it was a
dangerous thing to excite such a mutiny of slaves ; the masters
would resent it. Besides, most of the slaves had by this time,
say 560 b.c, already lived thirty years in this Euphrates-land.
To many it was the only home they had ever known, and these
would scarcely be willing to go away to Zion. The song is
very beautiful, but a far finer was soon to be sung.
(iv) For, inserted here and there in that " Comfort Song,"
of Isaiah xl. to lv., are four Lyrics, penned by quite another
hand, uttering an altogether different answer to the great
problem of sorrow.
(a) One is in Isaiah xiii. 1-4. It says : " The Spirit of
our God is with His chosen souls even here in Babylon. Here
He is making them fit teachers for the whole wide world,
here far away even more than they could yonder be in the
old home-land."
(b) Then a second time, in Chapter xlix. 1-6, the lyrist
sings on :
" Cyrus is not coming to set us free ! Our disappointment is great.
We hoped to go, but we learn we are to stay,
Here in this metropolis of all the world,
Where all roads centre and whither all men come !
Here we can touch, through these, all the nations :
So here we are to stay, and to teach all souls to the ends of the earth,
Concerning our beloved God lahweh, and His great love for all."
(c) Next, in Chapter 1. 4-9, the same lyric singer tells yet
again how bitterly all who think with him have suffered ;
yet he chants : — "Our God is for us:
Who then can be against us? "

26 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Let us note, as we go, that it was surely from these
verses that Paul learned to write his words of triumph in
Rom. viii. 31.
(d) Then the final lyric of Chapters Iii. 13 to liii. 12
reaches up, nay, down, to the greatest faith of all, singing in
its dirge : —
" The truest of us all has fallen beneath the blows;
Despised, done to death !
And lahweh ordered it all : so He willed it.
But all who have looked on such a sufferer
Will surely now turn, startled, from scorn to remorse ;
And will cry, ' 'Twas I that sinned, not he ! '
So the sinning ones shall be won over
To the sufferer's side, and so they shall be saved ! "
(v) The last of the five answers to the problem, " Why
is there this suffering ? " is that found in the " Job " book.
"All solutions fail," it says, "until we gain a vision of God."
That overwhelms us, and we bow before Him in submission.
Such was the last Hebrew word concerning God. The
best Hebrews accepted a strange, grand fate : they would face
slavery and suffering and national dissolution ; they would go
out of national life, out into all the world, so as to be a light
to lighten all nations concerning the character of lahweh, their
God. Well they might ! He was always a Saviour 1 O
glorious consummation this of ail the Ascent of those Hebrews,
and of all that the Prophets had done and preached !
Strange, most strange, it is to have it to say, that at this
very time of mid-exile the ends of the earth were all hungry
for such food of souls. Confucius in China was echoing his
people's cry for life : so in Persia were the neo-Zoroastrians
hungry : in India Buddha was near to birth ; and so in Greece
were Socrates and ^Eschylus. To all these hungry hearts
might come and quite possibly may have come messages of

THE FIRST CLIMAX IN OUR PATH 27
life from the Hebrew slaves of Babylon. We do not indeed
know aught that is definite in these cases, save the definite
fact that so many ends of the earth were hungry, and also the
definite fact that the true Hebrew souls desired to remain in
slavery in Babylon in order that they might give of their own
living bread, the Love of their God lahweh, to men in all
ends of the earth.
Yet that is not exactly all ; perhaps best of all, though
seeming least, it is that help was sent to Judah itself with its
poor remnant just beginning to live again, and hungry for help
for their souls. These were nascent Judaism ; and to them the
children or great-grandchildren of the exiles, after 150 long
years of settlement on the Euphrates, were able to send a
Nehemiah to carry the most precious book that became the
sacred Charter of Judaism. Those descendants of the exiles
did then send to Jerusalem a message of Saving, of which we
have definite historical knowledge. To study this Judaism in
outline will be our next task.

CHAPTER IV
JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM ; AN EPILOGUE
AND A PROLOGUE
I — The Epilogue to Hebraism
The pulpits soon will and soon must proclaim the treasures
of Old Testament study such as have just been outlined.
And indeed some sermons are telling of Isaiah LIII., and of
Jeremiah as very probably the original suffering servant who
is pictured in that great chapter. Plenty of similar material
is all ready for everybody to use. Every hearer will sing,
" Te Deum " ; many, hearing already, do cry, " O God, I
thank Thee ! "
As we turn from Hebraism, at its sublime height in
Isaiah liii., let us note some gains and guidance.
(i) Let us count over the books or parts of the Old
Testament that we have pointed to as the literature of Hebrew
times — i.e., of the times before the Exile. What Bible books
are to be studied if we would know and tell of the really
Hebrew religion ? Here following is the list : —
(i) We have to note that much literature older than
the Bible must be studied, else we cannot realise the quarry
from which the Hebrew thoughts were digged. The older
books are: (a) Babylonian epics of Creation and the like;

JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM 29
(b) the wonderful Hamurabi Laws, 900 years older than
Moses ; and (c) the Tel-el-Amarna letters, describing Palestine,
and written 1400 b.c. — i.e., documents that we can handle
and that were actually engraved in the days of Moses.
(ii) Then the Iahwistic parts of Genesis and the like come
next in our list as the oldest Hebrew literature. But no
correct impression will be obtained unless this Iahwistic book
is read continuously. It is of little use merely to mark the
Iahwistic passages in a Bible, and then to try to read them ;
for the effect on the eye and mind ,is injurious.
(iii) The next Hebrew literature in order of time is the
Prophecies of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah taken in this
order. Isaiah i. to xxxi. only, however, is really Isaiah's,
and not even all of that. The best guide here is Cheyne's
polychrome " Isaiah."
(iv) Next in chronological order is the Elohistic work
which begins in Genesis xx. and runs on at intervals to
Kings. It is, as we said, the new version of story written
under the influence of the prophets, when the Iahwists'
story was felt to be undesirable. It may be reconstructed
and used just as was advised above in the case of the
lahwist. (v) The next duly following Hebrew literature is Deutero
nomy ; not indeed the whole, but the main body of the book,
Chapters v. to xxvii. being enough for learners to set out
with. (vi) Nahum and Zephaniah follow next.
(vii) Also the story of Josiah in 2 Kings xxii. ff.
(viii) Now the student will read Jeremiah ; although it is
difficult to read the book without the guidance of, say,
Driver's or Bennett's " Introduction," or of the present
writer's " Hebrew Theology and Ethics," with its appendixes.

30 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(ix) Habakkuk may next be read, unless we have to follow
even wiser counsels than are yet common to English readers ;
for Professor Duhm has recently thrown much light on the
precious little book and counts it a product of the times of
the Ptolemies, i.e., after Alexander the Great.
(x) Now, reaching the early days of Exile, we must read
(a) Ezekiel, (b) Leviticus xvii. to xxvi., (c) Isaiah xl. to lv. ;
and then (d) the four little lyrics ; Isaiah xiii. 1-4, xlix.
1-6, 1. 4-9, Iii. 13 to liii. 12 ; and finally (e) Job must be
studied. Let the reader, student, preacher, teacher try to follow this
plan, and let him not be afraid to trust the help of men who
have worked their way all along the course. The so-called
" man in the street " is often said to be an adequate referee
on such questions. He is no more fit to be trusted here
than he would be at the helm of a great ship. As, why
should he ?
(2) May we help the student here by pointing to a few
mistakes which some make, and which may as well be
avoided : —
(i) The lahwist must not be consulted as a teacher of
Christian morality. He was a very early Hebrew; and,
indeed, being the oldest, he is the most valuable and reliable
narrator in Hebrew literature. But he lived when tribalism
was the principle of life, religion, and conduct. The doctrine
of a " God who is Good " came in later ; the Prophets
preached that, and so discredited the Iahwists' teaching.
But the lahwist is all the more excellent as a background
against which we can see and feel the white light, purity,
beauty, and love of the Prophets. Let us remember this
when we read the stories of Adam in Eden, of Abraham's
horrible treatment of Hagar, of Joshua the raid-leader, of

JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM 31
David the warrior of low morals, and of Elisha the blood
thirsty. So indeed we shall truly honour those men
themselves. (ii) The great Ten Commandments or Decalogue is the
result of the Prophets' preaching. It is the careful crystallisa
tion of the mind of Amos and Hosea and others. This was
its origin ; Moses could not have conceived it.
(iii) It is sometimes said, even by thoughtful preachers who
desire to be truly historical, that Jesus preferred " the Pro
phets " to the laws and duties commonly called " Mosaic."
But such a preference was not really possible. Those laws
and duties were efforts to carry out the counsel of Amos and
his comrades, which said,
" Seek goodness !
Then lahweh will be with you."
Such " legal " efforts were simple indeed, and often short
sighted ; but they were never actually narrow. The writers
of them were always altering to-day what they had directed
yesterday. (iv) The hope of Isaiah xl. ff., that Israel should return,
was clearly a material hope, and not the highest ideal. The
far higher faith came to the singer of Chapter xlix. 1-6, who
said:
" Now hath lahweh revealed this to me,
It were a trivial thing that thou should'st restore Israel to its land.
Thou shalt stay in Babylon :
To be a missionary of thy God's love
To all the ends of the earth."
So ends our outline and epilogue concerning Hebraism.

32 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
II — The Prologue to Judaism
Now we turn to the prologue for our outline of Judaism.
Judaism is much more accessible to us than is Hebraism ;
and the literature of Judaism is by far the more abundant.
Is it as noble, as precious, as important? Who can say
" No " to such a question, when it is remembered that know
ledge concerning the Jews is knowledge of the people Jesus
spoke to, and loved, and died for ? How strange that we
have been wont to speak with reverence of a " Divine
discipline of Israel," and then have, in general, neglected to
study closely the story of Israel as it goes on after the exile in
the life and religion of Judaism ! Why is this ? What has
made most men somewhat careless of those centuries from
500 B.C. to 1 a.d. ? Why have we hesitated to attribute
Inspiration and Faith, Psalms and Apocalypses to these
centuries ? The reason is perhaps simple and clear : is it not
because Malachi stands last in the English Bible ? Saintly
souls have actually said : " There was no inspired Old
Testament utterance from God to men after the last words
of Malachi," which end with,
. " Lest I smite the earth with a curse."
Good men have thought that no revelation came after that,
until Jesus was born in Bethlehem. But that dream is
incredible : God be thanked, it was entirely wrong. We
proceed now to see a whole wealth of Divine Inspirations
that were vouchsafed to the Jews between 500 b.c. and Jesus.
This is the literature of Judaism, to which we are to turn.

JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM 33
Judaism in Outline : and especially Concerning
its Birth
We are starting out to view a road, the road of the early
Jews, b.c, that is seldom regarded at all. Naturally we may
expect novelties ; things old enough, indeed, but commonly
neglected. Even liberally-minded readers will be likely to
say that we set before them too much innovation. May we
be bold enough to use an argument such as this : " We are
approaching the King Jesus Himself! Is it improbable that
we shall find many great things around Him and before Him
that have not been always thought of ? " The dazzling
brightness of His being, the overwhelming effect He pro
duced, have in some sense paralysed men's eyes, and for long
ages they have been unable to look clearly at the generations
just before Him. But ought we not to look all the more
carefully on those times, and all the more readily on those
forecourts of His presence ?
We have seen Hebraism rise in Isaiah liii. to a sublime
height, a height that seems comparable only with Calvary ;
and that great climax of Hebrew religion meant, as we saw, a
voluntary abdication of the personal and separate life of
those Hebrews. They were willing to remain away from
their own land, and from any national hopes they had had ;
they were willing to die as a nation in order to be foreign
missionaries. Those best, highest, true Hebrews believed
firmly that their God lahweh wished them so to be and so to
do. They wrote down their faith that it " pleased the Lord
lahweh to bruise them " to death as Hebrews, that they
might "show His saving character to the ends of the earth."
Therefore we must say that the true Hebraism had thus come
to an end ; it had entered into unseen life in other peoples.
> LA-  L^e "

34 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Scholarly men in general agree that Hebraism ended at the
Exile, say, 600 to 500 B.C.; and that what came afterwards as
a national life of a people, and as a religious system and
movement, was Judaism.
At the Exile then Judaism was born. This name means
of course, that the people lived mostly in Judah or Judea : we
usually call them Jews. And these Jews had a truly great his
tory from this time onward until Jesus came. A great deal of
our Bible belongs to this time and this history. Let us set down
here a bare and briefest outline or table of contents of that
Jewish History, mentioning at the same time the literature
that belongs to each stage in it. It must include descrip
tion of:
(I) The Rise, or birth, of Judaism.
1. The material for this was the little remnant left in
Judah by the slave-masters who drove off the exiles to Babylon.
2. We must next see whether the sort of men who wrote
Isaiah xlix. and liii. could or ever did come back from
Babylon to Judaea. Could they abandon their mission ?
3. The new prophets of Judaism : Haggai, Zechariah, and
Malachi, must be questioned to let them tell us their mind on
this point.
(II) The student will next turn to the new and great
Charter of Judaism, namely, that Document that was brought
to help the young but troubled society in Jerusalem in
430 B.C. by the Persian courtly officer, Nehemiah. He was,
of course, a descendant, after, several generations, of those
noble Hebrews of a hundred and fifty years before who had
been enslaved and carried away to Babylon, and who had
there resolved to stay in slavery in the far-off metropolis of
the world, so as to be able to send out thence a light con
cerning their God lahweh to all the ends of the earth.

JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM 35
1. The student has to learn how this Charter has of late
years been rediscovered and studied by Hebrew scholars.
We know as the result of such study that Nehemiah's Book
is the Priestly Book " P " that begins in Genesis cc. i., v., &c,
and which is especially full and rich when it describes a sanc
tuary and a system of worship, from Exodus xxv. onwards
into Numbers : portions of it are found even in the books of
Kings. It must have been composed after Ezekiel lived, i.e.,
between 500 and 450 b.c
2. This must be examined to see what sources its authors
used in composing it. Some were of course old Hebrew
sources ; but Parsee ideas and other things that were learned
in Babylon influenced the composition and the character
of it, and therefore Parseeism must be studied.
3. Next must be watched the speedy Fates that befell this
Charter :
(«) In its combination with the old Iahwistic and
Elohistic books, these being inserted at the suitable places
into the Priestly Charter book, which was of course the
Foundation Document.
(b) About 300 b.c the writer of the books of Chronicles
described in his work a far more elaborate system of worship;
and sought to introduce thus his own ideas of what a true
system of worship should be. That Chronicler's system,
with its very highly elaborated methods, imputed the origin
of these to David as author, and not to Moses. For this
reason it must have been that the book lay, as it evidently
did a long time, under suspicion ; and yet by and bye it
became adopted. Its system was the official method alluded
to in Luke i. 5, where Zechariah is said to have been a
member of the Chronicler's " Course of Abijah." *
* See 1 Chron. xxiv. 3 to 19, especially verse 10.

36 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(c) Later on the Charter was enlarged at the hands of the
writer of the so-called " Book of Jubilees," or New Genesis
Story. (d) Farther, and far more thoroughly, it has been changed
and enlarged in the Mishnah. or Talmud and its Continua
tions, wherein arose gradually through many centuries a new
" Moses-law," with its notable and often lofty spirit and its
essential principle of steady and rapid growth. This began to
be composed before 200 b.c, and has grown larger and larger
almost ever since.
(Ill) The student must then see the wonderful Bloom of
Judaism especially under the first Ptolemies, the Kings of
Egypt from 300 to 200 B.C.
1. Then Judaism was full of an inspiration that translated
all its old Hebrew books into Greek for the use of Jews
scattered in Greek lands, and wrote many new religious books
in that tongue : the whole collection of these being called the
Septuagint, because of a curious fancy about their authorship,
as was supposed, by seventy writers in Egypt. Was there not
here a deep spiritual eagerness and what we may call a real
missionary activity ?
2. So also the Jews of that period wrote much in Aramaic,
a language which is a sort of Syriac. This was for the Jewish
people in Palestine who had forgotten how to speak Hebrew,
and knew that Aramaic language only. In both these versions,
the Greek and the Aramaic, we see a sort of early Bible
Translation Society at work. Great, indeed, was the missionary
spirit, faith, and labour of that Judaism. Do we begin to
understand the atmosphere where a Jesus could be born, and
a Paul, and all the others who companied with them ?
3. But Judaism bloomed also in a very thoughtful,
reflective way, that we might call a Philosophy of Common

JUDAISM AFTER HEBRAISM 37
Life and Business. There were collected or written in those
years from 400 b.c to a.d. 100 much in Hebrew and much
in Greek of what we call the " Wisdom " books. Amongst
these were our "Proverbs" with the various collections
included therein ; also the " Wisdom of Sirach's Son,"
" The Wisdom of Solomon," and " Ecclesiastes," i.e.,
" The Preaching."
4. Also the religion and thoughtfulness were richly fed by
Sermons in the synagogues, the churches of the times, that
were planted in all towns and communities. We can read
to-day the sermons then preached ; they were largely expository
of the old Hebrew books. Some were official, yet liberal ;
some, written in Jerusalem especially, used the texts very
curiously ; but it will not do for any one to-day to laugh at
those sermons, for they are what Jesus listened to when He was
a boy. They are called Dragoman-Books, or " Targums,"
i.e., expositions ; and they explained the old Hebrew books
for the people in the language that they and He spoke.
5. But there was a still more wonderful movement and
feature of those times, for there arose a sort of men and
women called in the Psalms " The Saints." These were often
poets, and a great many of our Jewish hymns or Psalms, some
of rich beauty, have come to us from those " Saints." It would
almost seem as if most of the religious thought in those days
was given to song, often glad or at times bitterly sad.
(IV) Lastly, there was a terrible Trial of Judaism, indeed
there were two or more times of such trial ; and they both
fell upon the devoted folk no long time before Jesus was
born. 1. For, first the illustrious madman Antiochus IV., King
of Syria, ground them down cruelly. It was then that the
Maccabees struggled and conquered this fierce although gifted

38 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
oppressor, about 180 b.c. Many a Psalm is an outpouring
of the troubled hearts of those years, or again a song of joy
in victory. 2. Now arose the New Kingdom under the care of those
Maccabees ; but with this arose speedily the question, Was it
to be David's kingdom or another's? This controversy
caused a bitter trial of all men's souls ; to wit, in the hatred
that sprang up between the Government-men or Sadducees
on the one hand, and the Dissenters or Pharisees on the other.
It is this hate and bitterness that has given us some fearful
" cursing Psalms " which we ought never to repeat.
3. Then the Roman Emperors came, about 60 b.c, and
destroyed the New Kingdom. This was the most terrible trial
of Jewish hearts. Amid the burning agony the " Solomon
Psalms " were sung ; and, singularly, it has to be observed
that there arose in those Psalms, in the veriest darkness, one
of the highest faiths of all story; for the poor overwhelmed
Jews cried out and sang out in such songs a hope and faith
that there would surely and soon appear a greater Anointed
One, even the King lahweh himself, as " Messiah." Tbe Jews
just before Jesus conceived the great idea of a kingdom
amongst them ruled by a God-Man !
4. How many sat then in weary longing and in wondering
outlook ! We can see the work of a further inspiration
among these : it produced the Apocalyptic books of those
days, i.e., the Revelations of Daniel, of Enoch, of Ezra,
of John, and many another.
Then it was that Jesus came, a Son of man and a Son of
God. He was to become the King of the Jews, and the King
of all the Ages. He lived : He died : He fulfilled all the
noble ideals of Judaism.

CHAPTER V
THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED
We have thus seen in outline the whole course of the history
of Hebrew and Jewish religion, known as Old Testament
Theology. We turn back now to seek to grasp the story in
fuller detail.
But let us raise one question here that must have arisen
already, perhaps frequently, in the reader's mind, viz., " Can
you prove all the statements you have made ? " There are
two answers to that question : (i) That is what we are now
going to do. Hitherto we have only been setting down a sort
of table of contents. Now we turn back to seek to give
demonstration of the reality of all. But (2) this demonstra
tion can be made successful, or in any way possible, only if
the reader works out the investigations for himself. Only to
those who will read along the lines suggested at point after
point, and only to the genuine student, will demonstration be
possible. We turn back to the beginning of our outlines, and let us
be at once very definite by setting down the series of proposi
tions, somewhat as Euclid does, which we purpose to prove.
At least we may here set down several of such.

40 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
The Propositions of Modern Old Testament
Theology
In stating these we will move backwards from the days of
Jesus step by step to the earlier points. It is always right
and for a Christian it is imperative, to begin by realising our
vital relation to our Lord Jesus. We know Him dwelling in
our own souls, and as all our ground of confidence, as we
look out on the world and worlds around us. We know the
Christ-Ideal that He has inspired as our whole way of life,
and as our hope for ever. It is with our eyes on that, and
on " Him in the midst," that we shall set down the following
propositions. They are all rays of light that the student finds
beaming on him from fact after fact in Hebrew and Jewish
story, and they are all promises of interpretations, and bright
illuminations of those facts ; they come to us as we see the
facts, and at the same time know that He is the centre of
them and also is beside us. Let us observe carefully that no
history dare ever be altered to make it fit in with something
that came to be believed later on; and yet we appreciate
history fully just when we see whither it leads us. In the
following articles we shall hope to set down with the utmost
historical strictness what were the facts ; we shall also be able
always to say we see how precious these facts are, because
Jesus stands at the summit of their long ascending line. All
culminates in Him.
We turn to our propositions : —
(I) The first is that there is a common readiness and a
strange willingness widespread among ministers and teachers
to undervalue ihe Old Testament. In detail : —
(i) There is a common disregard of the fact that the Old

THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED 41
Testament is the material for a very large part of the story of
Jesus. (2) There is an obstinate refusal to study His history with
the same scientific care that we give to the history of other far
less important subjects. His history is held off at arm's length
as something outside of the divinely logical order of this world.
We are told He was not " natural," and must not be studied
naturally. Many sorts of excuses are made for being inexact ;
or for being, in plain words, " Uncritical." The very word
" criticism " is a bogey that many are actually afraid of. But
a "critic "is simply a student, and therefore when ministers
condemn criticism, or warn men against it, they are condemn
ing study. Ministers should cease condemming study.
(3) The acquaintance of most persons with the Old Testa
ment is deplorably small. A young business-like lay preacher
of good ability, a reader of good literature, a student of Plato
as well as of Shakespeare, acknowledged recently to the present
writer that all he knew of Genesis was : " In the beginning
God " ! Some sermon which he had heard had that for text ;
but neither the text nor the sermon had moved him to read
any more of the book.
(4) It is the traditional method of use of the Bible, and
the theory of its nature as something apart from " literature "
and apart from real " Nature," that have caused this shelving
of the precious book and this lack of care to study it.
(II) But now we may pass to a more positive proposition
viz., Christianity arose amid a rich religious life. This actual
and glorious fact has been almost entirely ignored. The
Jewish personal life, the home and social life, business life, and
worship life amid which Jesus was born were full of deep
eagerness, great faith, earnest thought, beautiful sentiment
and diligent toil. A good deal could be said to redeem the life

42 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
of other nations of that day from the opprobrium commonly
heaped upon them ; but our business here is with the Jews.
They have been misjudged : they have been left unstudied.
How strange this is, seeing that Jesus's home was a Jewish
home ! But He has been treated as if He walked in mid-air,
with little reality in his loved name, " Son of Man." Let us
observe in detail that : —
(i) The students' work, or shall we say the " scientific
method," in those days was of course not what it is now-
The care of thoughtful men at present, their accuracy, and
general level of faithfulness to facts have all been built up for
us in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the English Revolu
tion, the Revival in the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial
Revolution; and in the Philosophical Development running
in and through all these movements of the past five hundred
years. We need not expect to find nineteen centuries ago
exactly the same method of study and of historical observa
tion that we prize as our own to-day.
(2) Again, it is too easy to dishonour the Jewish society of
Jesus' day. The tradition has grown with the ages that the
Jewish people when Jesus came were utterly bad as a whole,
and that nearly all individuals were bad ; for traditional
opinion would exclaim " Was not Jesus executed by them ! "
But Paul's patriotic words have been discounted, if not
forgotten, by those who hold to that traditional opinion. He
wrote :
"Israelites ... of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came."
And again —
" Jesus . . . who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh.''
All the traditional dishonour dealt out to Jews is seen to
be unwise when we watch how the thoughtful Jews of to-day

THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED 43
are steadily giving more and more honour to Jesus. Very
many of them claim Him as their highest national person and
character. We shall win far more Jews to love Jesus when
we respect them fairly, and when we learn what they are and
have been.
(3) A part of our present proposition is that the Psalms,
which Christians regard so peculiarly as their own characteristi
cally Christian songs, are really the Jewish Hymns, or Hymn
Books of Jesus' day. The use of them by not a few Scottish
churches as almost the only truly sacred songs, and their use
by all Anglicans as necessary to be read through from Psalm I.
to CL. once in every month, simply show that very much of
the Christian songful mind is just the same mind that the
Jews cherished and uttered in Jesus' day. And there is good
reason for such identity of the two sorts of Song Worship,
Jewish and Christian, when we think of the high ideals of
many of those Psalms, and of their passionate yearnings
towards God, their rich feeling of His presence, His grace,
and His power; and when we really know their intense faith
in the reality of God, and in the certainty that His Anointed
King will come, and will be none other than God Himself;
and when we try to realise also their wondrous gazing into
the other worlds of the Invisible Beyond.
In these studies that are before us an important part of
our task must be to show the details of this unity. The fact
of such unity makes Christianity in one sense the continuation
of Judaism ; and as we examine deeply we learn that very
much of Judaism was most truly worthy to be thus continued.
On the other hand, we shall have to plead earnestly that true
Christian judgment or criticism, if none object to that good
word, will refuse to use in its worship Psalms that, while
Jewish indeed and of Jesus' day, are yet far below the level to

44 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
which Jesus wished to raise men. He preached earnestly
against such : He cried to those who practised the morality
and sang the purposes of such Psalms, "Change your
mind ! "
(4) A part of our present proposition is that from the
business skill of Judaism we learn much of that businesslike
devotion and ability with which we believe we serve God
truly. Have not many of us drunk in as children, from our
fathers' and mothers' readings, the wise godliness of the
Books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes ? And are not these
books genuinely Jewish literature ? Of course, the detailed
proof of this proposition is to be given in later essays.
(5) The worship of the Jews was in essence neither sacrifi
cial nor was it sacerdotal. To realise this is of deep import
ance. Even where we find that Jesus engaged along with
His comrades in worship which seems to possess something
of these qualities, we shall be easily able to prove that the
seeming is very far from being the essential reality.
(6) Our final and highest sub-proposition concerning
Judaism is, that it was full of the same spirit that animates
to-day our foreign missionary societies and our noble society
for translation and dissemination of sacred scriptures.
Let us close the detailed statement of this proposition
concerning the Jews with a joyful declaration, that never in
the olden days did there live a more firm faith in the unity
of the Old and New Testaments than lives now as the result
of genuine modern Old Testament Theology.
The two propositions thus far enunciated have concerned
more intimately the Judaism around Jesus : we have now to
pass on to others that speak of Hebraism. They shall deal
with some main features that we propose to demonstrate, as
discovered of late in the religion of the Hebrews. We

THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED 45
shall move then still farther backwards from the Christian
days, receding away into the ages long before Jesus came ;
and so we proceed to our third proposition : —
(III) The history of Hebrew religion shows that God was
always revealing Himself to men, and in their hearts and
experiences, as a Being just like Jesus. In a word, God has
always been a Great Saviour. When, in the writer's student
days in the Andover Theological Seminary in New England,
the men asked their brilliant but invalid teacher of Homiletics,
Professor Austin Phelps, to venture to preach two sermons in
the Seminary Chapel, because we all longed to hear the man
preach who so well taught us by his lectures how we ought to
learn to preach, the beloved saintly man consented ; and his
first sermon had for text Isaiah XLI. 17-20 :
"When the poor and needy seek water and there is none . . .
" I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.' '
Then the Professor announced his theme, " Man's
Extremity is God's Opportunity." No need here to recount
the heads of that sermon : it was a brilliant panorama of all
history ! And the preacher's crystal-like utterance and
elaboration of his fine theme as the secret of Man's History
were all based on the Old Testament. Similarly and briefly
we are going to show in the pages following how : —
(1) Twice over in the history that we learn from the Old
Testament and its companion books we find that God's
Providence lifted men from very low levels and ideals away
up to the sublime height of readiness for Death on the Cross
and Conquest thereby over all deaths. That height was truly
reached on Calvary. There indeed that Death hangs, the
awful record of some of the wisest Jewish men's horrible
sin ; but at the same moment that giving Life away was full
of the Power of Very God to compel all men in all ages to

46 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
cry, as the Roman soldier cried, " Truly this was the Son of
God ! " Jesus there filled up that Roman's ideal of the real
character of God; the soldier's soul bowed before God
Manifest, and he was lifted into sublime companionship with
Jesus and with God.
(2) But there was an earlier case of the same faith, and
death, and victory. Have not all Christians, since the
deacon Philip's sermon to the Ethiopian, begun at the
Scripture written in Isaiah liii. and preached " Jesus " ?
All of us have seen that the writer of that sublime Hymn,
and of the other great lyrics like it in the Isaiah-book, had
caught in his soul an ideal of a man of God who was
determined to teach, and to bless and to " save " men, even
to the ends of the earth. The writer of Isaiah liii. knew a
soul who had seen the heart of lahweh, the great God of
Righteousness, and who for that Iahweh's sake lost his own
life even in shame. That dying righteous servant of lahweh
had taken away the guilt of every sinner who, beholding him,
had fallen down and cried, " O ! my lahweh, Thou art here in
this man whom I slew. He was right : I was wrong. He
has won me to himself and to Thee ! "
(3) Thus, in the Christian story and in the Hebrew story
before it we have the two climaxes ; in our future pages we have
to demonstrate that in the earlier of these the line of progress
up to such height began away down on an almost brutal level
of conduct. The low tribalism and inhumanity of the
patriarchs was the nether point ; but upwards ran the sloping
way, all upwards, up to God, even to God Manifest in the
" Suffering Servant " of Isaiah liii.
Again, in the later case of rise to such sublime height as
Calvary was, we shall show how weak, and even how morally
l<?w, was the first state of the poor folk left with Jeremiah

THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED 47
when the Hebrews were carried away into the exile in Babylon.
Yet again all upward ran the sloping road in Judaism, to
Calvary, and to Jesus hanging there. Truly the God of Pro
vidence has been a God manifesting Himself always as a
Saviour, since he has wrought thus again and again in story.
(4) But we shall prove also that it was this same providen
tial saving guidance of men by the Spirit of God that destroyed
the old faith in sacrifice as true Worship. This is a point and
a feature where many will hesitate ere they agree ; but no
proposition in Euclid is more demonstrably true. Study of
Deuteronomy will convince even a timid student of the cor
rectness of this sub-proposition. And it is a truth for which
to cry " Praise God." God was thus leading men towards
worship in the Spirit.
(5) We have again this greatest of all our propositions to
declare when we say that in the Prophets Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, and Micah, God inspired a very miracle of salvation.
For He taught those preachers, by the mental operations
which He works in men's souls, to stand up in days of
darkest suffering and to convince their people of a new and
nobler idea of God. So those Prophets were led, taught,
inspired to lift the people away up from the low, feeble
tribalism that they had trusted in, and from the faith and
practice of the early days before Amos into a grasp of the
idea which Amos and his comrades proclaimed concerning
goodness, and into a fellowship with a God who always is
where goodness is sought. Verily that was salvation ! We
are to furnish a full detailed story of these facts.
(6) Again, it was a great saving work God did when in His
providence He touched the earliest Hebrews and set their
minds toward the light. Here it is not so much the lowness
of those tribal nomads in and of itself that calls out our

48 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
dislike, and our pity too ; it is something more striking still.
For we are to see that the nations all about the early Hebrews
were already highly civilised, educated, and cultured. The
Babylonians we shall find to have been a highly organised
people, commercially healthy, governmentally powerful, reli
giously well ordered some two thousand to three thousand
years before the Hebrews appeared as a violent, marauding
body of wandering tribes issuing from the desert. For, even
one thousand years before these tribes fell so low the Baby
lonians published a Digest of Civil Law that is a valuable
study for legal men to-day. Nay, more : long after the apparent
birth of the Hebrews, in the nomad tents of Abraham, and
very far later, when in some maturity they established a king
dom ; even then David, the king of that kingdom, was base
and practised deeds that we ought not to describe. Yet it
was among such folk, among such men, women, and homes,
and in tribes of such poor mind, that the great Saviour God
lifted the people's eyes and souls to wonder while Amos
preached. Then as that people listened and gazed, they saw
as Amos saw ; and the whole nation was lifted and taught to
respond to the cry, " Seek good and God will be with you."
So high did they rise, and so far did they move at once. But
then again they moved on ; until, one hundred and fifty years
later, a Jeremiahc ould preach, and Isaiah xlix. and liii.
could be conceived and written and read and loved. As we
read the Old Testament thus historically, we cry, " What hath
God wrought ? From of old He is the same, the Saviour."
(IV) We must declare now another proposition, the truth
of which will follow directly in consequence of that which has
just been stated, although it may be hard for many to receive.
Modern study or " criticism " is saving the Old Testament ;
and it is doing far more, for it is making that great old litera-

THE PROPOSITIONS TO BE PROVED 49
ture fairly gleam with brilliant light, and exhibiting in it a
fascination that outdoes all bright romance. The romance
of this reality is finer than that of any fiction. In detail ; —
(1) The analytical work, done and virtually completed in
the narrative and legal books from Genesis on to Kings, has
revealed to us treasures as precious as the buried Assyrian and
Babylonian libraries can show. We shall have to prove, as
these essays continue, that there are three full and interwoven
narratives beginning in Genesis and running on into Kings ;
and that when these are untwisted from their present combined
condition, they prove to have lost almost nothing from the
original completeness of each. The three stories arestill virtually
complete. Besides, it was no unfaithfulness that caused their
combination ; what did so was rather the desire to preserve
all three. All honour is to be paid to those editing Jews who
combined and thus saved them for us.
(2) The free use of these three original documents, through
their publication in forms perfectly accessible to everyone, will
lead a great step farther. We shall thereby be able to see
easily what they are when compared with each other, how they
differ, and how the writers learned from each other. We
shall see thus before our eyes the actual living facts of the
history of Hebrew literature, which will then live grandly
before us. But more, inestimably more : we shall then be
able to trace the history of the Hebrew religion. That
will live before our eyes, and a wondrous sight it is going
to be.
(3) A great change will come about in the use of the Old
Testament. In a word, everybody will be eager to use it.
To-day it is not so much a sealed thing as a feared thing.
And all the while it is really a most lovable book, as it will
soon be a most beloved book. For, like other books, no one
D

50 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
will fear to read it ; and then, reading it, all shall see its great
beauty. " The truth shall make us free." The Bible, read
as Literature, will make itself and us also free from
our present terrible neglect of it. Let it be said plainly : it
is those who do not treat it as literature that are ceasing to
read it.

CHAPTER VI
THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS, THEIR AGE
AND THEIR HOME
Now we begin our study of the History ; and at once we
look away very far back, to try to see how long ago there were
records written that can be called the Story of the ancestors
of Jesus.
It has been commonly supposed that Abraham, living
about 1800 lo 1600 b.c, was the earliest real Father of tbe
Hebrews and the Jews, and of Jesus. But, of course,
Abraham himself had ancestors ; and if we can know some
thing about them, why should we not hear it ? The question
springs at once, Why need we trouble ourselves about
Abraham at all ? The answer is ready, " We would see
Jesus." This is the principle that makes all the Old Testa
ment literature precious : this quest for Jesus' story has
created all of the real love there has been for the Old Testa
ment in the past, and this quest it is that is multiplying that
love manifold to-day. So then we would know Abraham ;
and it needs little proof that the character of the man is what
we need most to know. It was the character of that man
that made all the consequences of his life so valuable: it
made the strange consequences soon after him ; and made
stranger still the wonderful consequences later on, when the

52 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Prophets arose. Now since our desire to know Abraham's
character depends on the fact that he was a great feature in a
line of ancestry ; therefore, clearly we had better learn all that
can be known about the ancestors of Abraham himself. So
we ask, —
(I) First, how far back can we go in becoming acquainted
with these ? Let us answer at once : some ten thousand
years at least before Christ. What! 10,000 B.C., when in
our marginal Bibles at the first chapter of Genesis there stands
" 4004 b.c" as the date of the Creation of all things ! Yet
even so it is. There are several proofs of this.
(1) The plainest has been suggested by the late Professor
W. Robertson Smith in the introductory chapter of his
" Religion of the Semites," * a book that we shall have more to
do with presently. Here is his exposition by stages, with its
consequences : —
(i) We know that there have been four or five different
groups of Semitic peoples, and possibly more. It is no
matter whether the name " Semitic " be a correct name to
apply to these ; but there have been in the story of the world
some five or six sister groups, peoples or languages, so like
each other that we must say they make up one great family.
They are similar, as sisters are ; yet each is of its own in
dividual sort, just as it is with all sisters. Their names are : —
(a) The Babylonian-Assyrian languages, spoken along the
Euphrates and Tigris ;
(b) The Canaanitic languages, which include Hebrew,
Moabitic, and Phoenician — in short, the old languages of
Canaan's southerly half;
(c) Also the Aramasan or, as we often say, Syrian group,
* Published by A. and C. Black, first edition 1889, second enlarged
edition 1894.

THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS 53
which includes all the speech of northern Palestine, of
Damascus, and of the nearer neighbourlands ;
(d) The Minaite, or Sabasan, i.e., south-western Arabian
tongues ;
(e) Certainly also the Ethiopic; and, —
(/) Chief of them all, as finest and probably purest and
most like the mother of all, is the Central Arabic, the Arabic
of the far-away hidden inner lands of Arabia.
(ii) These five or six tongues and groups of tongues have
such general resemblances as you find, to illustrate by another
group or sisterhood, in what we call the Aryan languages, i.e.,
the Teutonic, Scandinavian, Celtic, Latin and Greek, Slavonic,
Persian, and the far-away Sanscrit speech. These eight Aryan
languages must have had one common mother-speech. In
other words, there was a time long ago when our fathers and
the Russians' fathers and the Sanscrit fathers and so on all
lived together, until one tribe migrated away, and then
another; and then in the new homes each tribe's speech
became a little altered, and all were no longer exactly the
same, but were sister tongues.
(iii) Just so the five or six Semitic sister tongues belonged
to peoples whose fathers had all lived together at one time,
until one by one some sections migrated away. Thus there
arise these great questions : —
How long did they live together before they began to
migrate; and when did they begin to migrate? This must
be our first inquiry. Later on we shall ask where did they
migrate from, or what was the early home of them all ?
(iv) We can tell a good deal about the time when they
began to migrate ; and we do it in this way. These Semitic
sister-languages have one peculiarity quite different, and even
very different, from languages like English or Latin. It is

54 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
strange to say and hard it is to believe, yet true it is, that their
root-words, as we call them, had no vowels ! A Semitic root
has nothing but consonants ! They used the vowels a, i, u ;
but these did not affect the root-meaning, but gave only a
" Voice " shading, so to speak. For example, to us bad and
bid and bud mean three quite different ideas. Not so to the
Semites, Hebrews, etc. ; with them these three words meant
the same idea in different " Voices." The one was active, the
other passive, and so on. Besides, when they wanted to make
longer words, they could not add a vowel ! Vowels were not
usable for such a purpose in Semitic ; if they wished to lengthen
a root- word, they had to add on a third consonant; so, e.g.,
they had to change bad to badl, and so on. Then it is an
additional notable fact that they did change most of their two-
lettered ideas or words into three-lettered ones, as theological
college students find out by looking into their curious Hebrew
dictionaries. (v) Is this all mere mystery and idle, unpractical lore ?
Not so, in any sense at all. For note this, that every one of
those five or six Semitic sisters through all their history and
development still continued to possess exactly this same
idiosyncrasy. Nearly all the main words in all five languages
are, so to speak, three-legged. Therefore it is as clear
as it can be that the beginning of their separation and
migrations must have taken place after that odd three-
leggedness had been invented and had become quite common
and ingrained.
(vi) Now, whoever visits the British Museum and looks
into the Babylonian Rooms will see pages of clay tablets or
stone books, with the dates on the specimens, telling when
those books were written. Some of them were written and
dated, as we are told by those who can translate them, 3800

THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS 55
B.C., 4000 B.C., and before that. But already, in 4000 B.C.,
the languages used in those pages possessed this three-legged
peculiarity fully developed ! So we conclude that the time
when the five or six Semitic sister-peoples ceased to live
together and to take pains to make this curious development
must have been long before 4000 b.c. They must have com
pleted that development a very long time before that date.
Therefore the fathers of Abraham, who were the fathers of
Jesus, were all living together in their earliest homes long be
fore 4000 b.c. ! A busy thoughtfulness must have been
already wonderfully common and keen among them in long
ages before that day ; for they were then slowly working out
that curious three-lettered style of language.
(vii) Nay, more, we are going to see that the first migrators
were already finely cultured people, merchants, builders,
farmers, rulers, when we first find them writing in Babylon.
They must have become so on the banks of the Euphrates,
when they had then already been away a long time from their
first home. This carries us with our fixture of their migrating
date back to perhaps 5000 b.c. at least.
(viii) And now how long before they migrated had the
early united fathers lived in their first home ? Long enough,
of course, before 5000 B.C., to work out into everyday use
that three-lettered system of words. But they must have
lived and developed long enough, too, before that to work
out into everyday use the two-lettered sort of words that they
must have had before they began to add a third consonant
It is surely clear that we must set down as their first date, as
we said above, at least the ten thousand years before Christ.
Then, so long ago, may we picture the early fathers of Jesus
busy, thinking, farming, waking and sleeping, loving, living
and dying ; and they lived in Faith that there was a Great

56 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Care for them in their homes and land, their skies and their
lot. For the Great God and Father could not leave them
orphaned, and they could not think of Him as doing so. We
shall presently see how really He loved them, and gave them
the truest blessings of life. We have thus tried to reason
along the one philological line of evidence concerning the
beginning of the times of Hebrew story, or rather of the story
of the mother-people of whom the Hebrew people were a
daughter-folk. We have seen reason to hold that that
beginning must date away back at about 10,000 B.C. Our
effort to reason out this date, and to see how old it is,
depended on the time that must have elapsed for a great
peculiarity in language to grow up, and not only to grow up
but to enter into the very nature of half a dozen different
peoples. Since it must have so entered into the nature of these
peoples while they were still all joined in one, and before they
had begun to hive off; and since they began to hive off some
5000 years B.C., therefore, we have argued, the early Fathers of
Jesus, that is, the Fathers of the Jews and of the Hebrews,
must have been busy in their fields and tents, their houses
and sanctuaries, and among their flocks and fruits, their
dates and vines, their sowings and reapings, and in all their
industries and fellowships nearly as far away back as 10,000
b.c This is our first argument, and it seems to compel
assent. (2) But now this is confirmed by another line of thinking,
which is more sociological.
(i) When the earliest migrators that we know of, commonly
called the First Babylonians, came out of their old Semitic
home, wherever it was, and settled down on the rich plains
of the Delta at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris, they
found a highly-cultured people there before them. How do

THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS 57
we know this ? For this reason : the invaders' records tell
us that they, the immigrants, learned the way of writing which
those invaded people used ; and that way of writing remained
the Babylonian and Assyrian way of writing down to times
that we may call the recent past. That old way of writing is
commonly called Arrowheaded script, or Cuneiform, because
the letters seem made of marks like arrowheads, obtained by
pressing the corner of a little square bar of metal upon a clay
slab. The slabs were then baked in the hot sunshine or
otherwise. So in this old alphabet which the Babylonians
adopted we possess what might almost be called written
records of those old folk who were the dwellers on that Delta
before the invading Babylonians went thither. Those pre
decessors were quite well known to the Babylonians, for
these latter have told us a great deal about them. They
were called Sumerians, at least some of them who lived near
the sea were so called, and others farther north were called
Accadians. It is their alphabet, the letters of the Script, as
we say, of those old Sumerians and Accadians, that we see
in the Arrowheaded writings, or Cuneiform documents,
that we can look upon in abundance in the British Museum.
Note well that the language of many of the documents that
are written in Cuneiform letters may be genuine Babylonian,
or, indeed, it may belong to some quite different language ;
but the wonderful fact is that this alphabet became, as it
were, a universal alphabet for the civilisation, the trade, law
courts and governments of those long-ago days. Those
Sumerians of 10,000 to 5000 B.C. were so cultured, so educated,
so skilled in writing that the invading Semitic conquerors sat
down at the feet of the conquered, and learned that conquered
people's ABC. How like this is to the way of the Norman
conquerors of our own land, who sat down and learned good

58 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Saxon from the conquered people ! The man of mind con
quers the man of war after all !
(ii) All this means that civilisation and thoughtfulness and
mental growth had been going on among the old Sumero-
Accadians in the cities and villages and fields of that Euphrates
Delta for ages before 5000 b.c And thoughtfulness means
confidence ; thoughtfulness is confidence in one's own mind
and judgment ; and it is confidence in the laws of things
around us ; and it is more also, for it is confidence in the
Great Soul Who orders all. Such confidence is a religious
thing; it is godliness: and in a faithful man it is goodness,
righteousness, holiness, and beauty of soul. When we think
truly of those men and women and children of long ago, our
souls learn that they were God's loving children of that far-off
time ; and we are compelled to believe that their Great Father
cared for them and loved them in His own wonderful and
powerful ways.
(3) We can add another singular sign and proof of the great
age of those people. We may call it the astronomical proof.
We are presently to move down successively and steadily from
the earlier to the later times as we study the history ; but let
us make even now a wide leap for a little while away from
those people of 5000 b.c down the ages to the year 747 B.C.
In that year there was a wise predecessor and ancestor of our
friend Nebuchadrezzar of the times of Jeremiah and of the
book of Daniel. Nebuchadrezzar's thoughtful ancestor was
a Babylonian prince called Nabonassar. He was not only a
prince, but also a student of history, and of the stars, and of
the ways in which stars mark out time and days and years for
us. Prince Nabonassar saw that his people looked up to the
sky to learn when springtime was coming; they said that
spring should come when a certain set of stars, a constellation

THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS 59
which we call " The Twins," stood right in the east at sunrise.
The people and their fathers had looked for that sign in all
the past generations, even from the time of the Sumerians.
But in some way the sign had gone wrong ; indeed, when we
consult the astronomers, they tell us that those stars do
necessarily go wrong, although not irregularly so, but regularly
a little more so every year. The whole body of stars is
always moving away westward, so to speak ; or, to put it
better, the sun is always moving eastward through the body
of stars. The fact is that, if you guide yourself by the stars
or constellations, you will find what the astronomers tell us
we must find, namely, that spring comes a little earlier every
year. In other words, the bright, glad summer-bringing sun
travels regularly a little to the east every year, so that the
warm sunshine which brings the flowers and the birds and the
lambing time is always a little earlier, by the stars, every year
Nabonassar saw this amid his studies, in the year 747 B.C. He
saw that the sign of " The Twins " was not to be found on the
horizon at sunrise in spring, but was a good deal further west.
The sign or constellation of stars that was on the horizon
just then was another, called " The Ram." There are really
twelve such signs of the Zodiac, each one filling up one-
twelfth part of the whole great ring or equator which circles
round the sky from east to west, and so on the other side
round again to the east. The spring sign was wrong, for the
Sun had gone east by two whole signs in the course of the
ages that ended in 747 B.C. So Nabonassar made a law that
the calendar must be altered, and that the next but one set of
stars, called " The Ram," should be henceforward called the
" Spring sign." But that shows plainly that between the times
when " The Twins " had been fixed as the sign for spring
and Nabonassar's time there must have rolled away some

60 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
4,000 years ; for the sun goes east by one whole sign in
2,000 years. You have only to work a little calculation in
division to see that this is true. Ask an astronomer how
far the sun moves back in one year, and then see how long it
would take to move back two twelfth parts of the whole round
sky, for each of these signs is just one-twelfth of the whole
sky. The Sumerians had had Spring at the time of the sign
of "The Twins:" therefore they lived 4,000 years before
Nabonassar and this new law that he made in 747 B.C. So
do the stars of heaven throw light on the story of men ; and
the great circle of the skies binds us and all the farthest ages
and peoples together, "linking us all as with golden chains
about the feet of God."
(II) Having thus learned the first date of the settlement of
the Babylonians on the Delta to have been about 5000 to
4000 b.c, let us turn back to those early days and seek the
answer to another important question that we put above :
Whence did these migrators come ? Where was the early
home of the fathers of the Babylonians, Hebrews, and Jews,
and of the fathers of Jesus ? The answer must have been
suggested all along our road : to wit, Arabia was that early
home. Arabia is still the purest well of Semitic life; it
has still the purest of Semitic speech. The great Arabian
Peninsula has in its interior an immense region of fine
fertility, where finest dates grow, and where the most precious
horses, or rather their mothers, all live. It is almost
utterly shut off by natural barriers from the outer world, so
that its people live together in that secluded state which
favours slow, long, and sure development. But it cannot
feed such growth indefinitely, and when growth of the popula
tion is at long intervals superabundant, then migration to
some other land is forced by the need of new means of sus-

THE EARLIEST ANCESTORS OF JESUS 61
tenance. Therefore at long intervals in those ages migrating
surplus populations wandered to the north-east, where lie
the rich, alluvial, food-bearing plains of the Delta of the great
rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Enough is thus said to indicate
all we need concerning the precious Semitic cradle of the
World's Salvation. It was in the heart of Arabia.

CHAPTER VII
HOW THOSE EARLIEST FATHERS OF JESUS
SERVED GOD
(I) Let a few very simple considerations introduce the
matter that is here to come before us. Will the time come
soon when the students of classical history and the historians
of Greece and Rome will feel bound to take parallel move
ments among the Hebrews into consideration ? We teach
our Sunday-school classes about the stories and affairs of the
Hebrews written of in the Books of Kings, and which happened
between iooo and 600 b.c. Do we expect our public-school
teachers to confirm those Sunday-school lessons when they
are explaining, say, the beginning of the Greek Olympiads in
760 b.c and the founding of Rome in 753 B.C. ? These
were the very years when Amos and Isaiah were actively
setting out to preach reform. Why should that most fateful
fact be left unmentioned by teachers of history ? We dis
course on the rise of Greek tragedy, and on yEschylus's plays
written in 450 b.c. as expositions to the Greeks of the great
laws of righteousness in the plans of Providence. We tell
how in those plays ^Eschylus lifted up a picture of vicarious
suffering for human sin. Do we turn amid such discussions
and point to the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where a Hebrew
discussed the very game questions just a few years before

HOW THE EARLIEST FATHERS SERVED GOD 63
^Eschylus did so ? Or should we laugh at any one who
suggested that perhaps ^Eschylus got his theory from those
Hebrews ? The fact is that we do laugh at such an idea.
Why should we ? There is no reason why we should ; but
there is a reason why we do. Hebrew writings have not
been treated as literature ; and the Hebrew people have been
treated as not a real and ordinary human people, but as a
peculiar people, having a special Divine discipline all to
themselves, with a history that must not be criticised and
ought not to be studied on the same historical method that
we apply to Greece and Rome. How many of us still say
that the Hebrew people and their origin were extra-natural ;
how often do some affirm stoutly that the Bible is not litera
ture ? So even thoughtful people like teachers of history in
our schools and universities have acquired a habit of smiling
if it be suggested that Hebrew History or Biblical statements
have anything to do with the History of Greeks and Romans
and other peoples like ourselves ! Can we wonder, in the face
of such affirmations as we have described ? Deplorable they
are in their weakness, also in their effects.
There is one method we can follow in our modern Old
Testament Theology, by which we can, as it were, turn the
flank of this injury, which makes light of the honour of
Hebrew story on the one side and on the other side bars the
scientific completeness of Greek and Roman and other
history. That method of deliverance is all ready to our
hands : it is, of course, that the Hebrew literature be brought
into line with all literatures and works of all minds and of
all men, that so we may be able to watch all of the actual
thoughts and life processes of the Great Spirit ; omitting none,
not even omitting Hebrew literature from the list, as has been
our unfortunate habit.

64 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
But there is a set of facts and phenomena in the life of
men that is sure to compel us to follow this method sooner or
later. Consideration of these facts is already heralded by the
happy truth that men are coming to look to trade and industry
and their movements as the real places where men may most
serve God, and where they do serve Him most signally when
ever they do not yield to selfish temptation. Trade must be
studied from the religious point of view.
Not in the governments of the world by kings and the
like is the chiefest movement and manifestation of God's
kingdom ; certainly not so much as we have supposed. Not
in the development of the philosophies or theologies of the
schools, at least not so much as we have supposed, must we
look to see the minds of men thinking out the thoughts of the
mind of God. Not in these but in trade and industry is His
living action mostly present. Ministers are beginning to
point to this fact, as they sway the people by their sermons
This is part of the Christ-gospel of our time. In trade and by
it men procure the things of God, from earth and sea and all
sources ; then through trade they hand these over to the
children of God for their food and raiment and all comfort.
So it is that God's human family shall live and be glad, and
go forward through the ages. Say not that trade is often
used for selfish ends ; so indeed are all good things. Of
course, the trader is a child of God, as well as other men are ;
therefore the trader too must receive blessing, as well as bring
it. Let us correct our harsh judgment of trade, and our occa
sional saying that it is the domain of the devil, by remembering
a few things, to wit : —
(i) Trade is a great world of mutual trust and confidence
reposed by men in one another. It has been so through
thousands of years past : it is so now. Else, what is it ?

HOW THE EARLIEST FATHERS SERVED GOD 65
And how dare any one touch trade otherwise ? Traders set
out, at least, by believing in one another ; and this faith is
at heart the love of one for another.
(2) Trade is full of deeds of kindness, from many of the
stronger toward many of the weaker lives. Doubtless more is
needed, but doubtless far more is practised than is ever pro.
claimed on the house-tops. Always this has been true.
(3) When a man has gained enormously and is, in a word,
a millionaire ; everybody is quite satisfied that his gains should
be heavily taxed for the public good. Witness the general
satisfaction over the budgets that increase the death duties.
This means that everybody believes trade to be something that
ought to benefit everybody, and not the trader only ; and which,
when duly governed, does so benefit everyone.
(4) Trade joins together the ends of the earth and brings
face to face the widely separated peoples ; trade makes paths
to reach all the fields of fertility, even across the deserts of
land or of sea ; trade finds and reveals God's hidden gifts ; and
it does a still nobler deed, for it causes the thoughts of the few,
their wisdom, and their faiths to become the possession of
multitudes afar as well as near. Trade cries " Peace on earth
and goodwill among men ! "
(5) Finally, in such wise does trade unify all the peoples into
one people : thus it creates Monotheism. Let us feel the point
of this truth, touching the history before us. On the one hand
it is quite possible that trading travellers brought the Hebrew
doctrine of Isaiah liii. to the circles in Greece where ^Eschylus
learned it. On the other hand it is also quite possible that
trading travellers carried afar from some great centre the
influences that founded Rome in 753 b.c, and began the
Greek Olympiads in 760 b.c ; and possibly the like influences
helped to inspire the outburst of great reformation in thought
E

66 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
and in morality which the Hebrew prophets, Amos and Hosea
and Isaiah, expressed at exactly the same date. We may not
be quite sure where the wonderful centre was ; but who shall
deny these possibilities ? Who shall make light of their
significance for all time ?
(II) Now let us study early Babylonian trade. We may
turn away back the three thousand years and more beyond
those great days of Israel and of Greece and of Rome ; and we
shall see that trade and industry in Babylonia were the great
way of serving God which the early ancestors of Jesus
practised. May we not use the language of the Protestant
Reformers of four hundred years ago, and say that " those far-
off men and women lived with God, and were at one with Him,
and had the joy thereof, just by fulfilling the duties of their
callings " then, as we do now ? They were, of course, uncon
scious that their life and happiness were just what Luther and
we to-day are ever seeking to formulate as a true theology, but
they were happy in such life ; and no man has ever been happy,
or ever can be happy, in any other way. We turn then to
hear a little of the story of trade and industry in 5000 to
4000 B.C.
(1) The migrations of overcrowded and hungry populations
from inner Arabia out to the comforts of the fertile Delta of
the Euphrates were undoubtedly due in part to the messages
brought in from the Delta to the interior by traders, telling
how out yonder were abundant food and joys and all the free
intercourse with the wider world which the great waterways
afforded. (2) The earliest royal persons in Babylonia whose names
we know were Sargon I. of Accad and his son and successor,
Naram-Sin. They lived probably about 3800 B.C. For a
long time we possessed and could read only legends about

HOW THE EARLIEST FATHERS SERVED GOD 67
these kings ; and it is notable that the legends said or sang
how Sargon had a supernatural birth, like many another hero
of legend. But now we have in our hands writings recorded
by Sargon himself; and from these we know his real history,
and learn that he was a great traveller and conqueror, and
had made many expeditions specially to Phenicia. Thither
he must have gone by means of ships up the Euphrates, and
by aid of all trading methods that armies need. Thither he
had gone doubtless that he might look out upon the
Mediterranean, and reach across it to the wonderful civilisa
tions on its coasts and islands. He must have purposed to
trade, and to let his people trade with all those western
peoples. But King Sargon was also a temple builder;
therefore he employed merchants and masons, architects and
artists, with all the purveyors of food and the like that such
civilisation inevitably demands. If we would hear a notable
tale about Sargon I., here it is : In 540 b.c there was
reigning over Babylonia, Nabonidus, that last of the kings of
Babylon, who was deposed by Cyrus when the Hebrew exiles
expected to go back to their native land. Nabonidus was
not a great soldier, nor a diplomat ; but he was a student,
and especially did he love to investigate religious archaeology.
When he had dug down to the foundation-stone of a certain
temple in his city and had read the inscription thereon, he
engraved another inscription beside it, wherein he tells us that
Sargon I. had laid that stone 3200 years before. So well
known was Sargon, as a great leader in civilisation. He was
a great farmer, manufacturer, and merchant, as well as a
ruler. He could have done nothing, he would have been
nothing without large industry and commerce. He and his
served God thus through Trade.
(3) Recall again another great ruler whose work and

68 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
writings remain to this day abundant, although they date
from so far away. He was Gudea, Prince of Shirpurla, a
town on the Babylonian Delta, of about 2800 or 2600 b.c.
These dates we give a good deal as they appear in " The
Records of the Past," * edited by Professor Sayce, vols. i.
and ii. ; and in Mr. King's article, " Babylonia," in the " En
cyclopaedia Biblica." It is of much interest to read Gudea's
inscriptions on a statue now in the Louvre Museum in Paris,
where he tells of his building temples. He adorned these
with rare stones brought from near Sinai, with cedar from
Lebanon, and with copper from Arabia, as it seems. Gudea
was himself an architect. He had many helpers, such as the
shippers who brought all those goods and stores from the far
lands along the Euphrates or round the coasts of the Per
sian Gulf and the Red Sea, and from the Mediterranean. He
describes the boats his sailors used. He made bricks for his
buildings ; he carved fine devices and inscriptions ; he made
cunning shrines of fine woods for the sanctuaries. All these
he did by the hands of many skilled workmen. But, further
more, he brought fruits, dates, and other palm products from
Arabia for offerings to his God. He assembled and bred
large herds and flocks, especially for sacrificial purposes, but
certainly also for food. Therefore he must have employed
and directed the ordered companies and multitudes of men
and families that had charge of all these operations. Here
then was a large and widely ramifying trade, and by this the
king and his people fulfilled their callings to which they were
called of God.
Lest any reader may question whether in all this industry
and the trading necessary to it there weie much of that good
ness and that regard for life and worth that mark true godli-
* New Series. Published by Messrs. Bagster.

HOW THE EARLIEST FATHERS SERVED GOD 69
ness, be it noted that kindness is everywhere exalted and
ordained by Gudea in his inscriptions. Slaves were to be set
free at all religious festivals ; evil was to be removed far from
the temples and the homes ; the rich and strong were praised
for refraining from all selfish doing. The law ran : "No
tomb is to be destroyed ; no son is to illtreat his mother."
So did those far-off fathers of our Lord Jesus understand the
law of conscience ; and so did they serve their God, by pre
paring for men all they needed. In trade and industry they
fulfilled the callings whereto they believed that their God
had called them. King Gudea, so very far away, was a great
leader of industry and trade, of men and women all busy in
homes and farms, mills and warehouses, and boats and cara
vans. It was in such tasks that men in those days were the
real servants of God.

CHAPTER VIII
THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS OF THOSE FAR-OFF
FATHERS OF JESUS
Mr. R. Blatchford had an article in a recent Clarion, in
which he expressed finely the real value of the Old Testament.
He gave it as the Rev. R. J. Campbell's view. The view is
that those Scriptures are " the words of men in age after age
among the Hebrews and Jews expressing their own ideas of
God and of righteousness." Mr. Blatchford proceeded to say
that while this is quite reasonable and manifest, it destroys
" the foundations of the national religion." We are not con
cerned to defend " the national religion." But Mr. Blatchford
went further still, and argued that if the Bible has only this
sort of value, then no man knows God's will ; no man knows
whether or not there is a God. Was this argument in earnest ?
Or did not Mr. Blatchford desire by it to taunt English folk,
and especially our national religious leaders, with conceit ? It is
verily a philosophy of Little Englanders to think that if
England's national religion goes, then all religion goes ! Mr.
Blatchford's sly sarcasm is something to be thankful for. We
may go forward with quiet disregard of all claims that any
national religion can be the only support for God, the one
prop for the Almighty loving Spirit of all the ages ; so we do
go forward now, in our course of study of history, to see rich

THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS 71
and great and profound religious literature among peoples
living some six thousand to twelve thousand years before
William of Normandy conquered our little island.
Let us first recapitulate a little to recall what we have done.
We have run in outline over the whole course of the history
of religion among Hebrews and Jews, from the earliest days of
their ancestors down to Jesus. Next, we turned back to study
in details the Origins of Hebrew religion, to see how it arose
among the earliest ancestors of the Hebrew people long before
there were any real Hebrews at all. This investigation
occupies us now, and it is going to occupy us until we reach
the great Moral revolution which the prophet Amos and his
comrades wrought in the eighth century before Christ, when
the loftier moral Hebrew religion arose in its rich greatness
and beauty, truth and power. In our study of " Origins " we
have already looked at certain fields, viz. :
(I) We have watched what the great Semitic family was
before its members separated, and what the five or six
separated sister Semitic peoples were. In the order of their
going out from home there were probably the Babylonian-
Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Aramaeans, the Minaeans, the
Ethiopians; while the Arabians really remained in the old home.
(II) We have searched for the dates when they lived
together and when they began to separate.
(Ill) We have tried to be sure of the place where their
original home was.
(IV) We have looked at the ways in which they served God,
i.e., what things the most powerful motive they knew led them
to do. We saw that their service of God lay in trade. In
their trade and industry they fulfilled the duties of their
callings, and thus gave highest blessing to their fellows and
were at peace in their souls and so were with God.

72 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(V) Now we have to examine the inner life of their souls ;
and we shall do this, in the first place, by listening to what
they said and thought concerning God and unseen things, as
this can be seen in their literature. For the present let us
examine such parts of that literature as speak directly of the
powers that work in nature. Then we shall examine the
literature that speaks of duty, of right, and of laws.
i. We have a large quantity of that old literature of the
Babylonians and Assyrians in our hands, and very much of it
has been translated into our own tongue, or into French or
German, by the almost superhuman skill of scholars of these past
two generations. Those whowish to readin itfor themselves will
find a great deal in the " Records of the Past." * Moreover
the articles on Assyriology, etc., in the " Encyclopaedia
Biblica," f and in the " New Bible Dictionary," t will tell the
student where to find other books in English on the subject-
Readers of German will turn to Schrader's " Keilinschriften,"
edited by Drs. Zimmern and Winckler, § to " Der Alte Orient,"||
also to Professor Gunkel's " Schopfung u. Chaos," T &c> &c.
Indeed, many able pens are busy making this long-lost litera
ture a well-known matter of reading for every one.
2. The splendid library of the Assyrian Emperor Assur-
banipal, who reigned about 650 b.c, was buried in ruins at
* See the new series, edited by Professor Sayce, and published in
six small volumes by Bagsters.
•f Published by A. and C. Black.
J Published by T. & T. Clark.
§ The recent edition is not translated into English. We could wish
that Principal Whitehouse of Cheshunt College, who translated the
first edition, would add one more great service to all he has done for
us by translating this second edition.
|| A series of quarterly pamphlets published by Hinrichs, in Leipzig.
^f This also awaits a translator.

THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS 73
the fall of Nineveh in 608-7. But tne books in it were all
made of slabs of clay and stone, so that they have not been
destroyed but rather preserved by being thus buried. We
excavate them, as it were, " fresh from the press." Our
excavators and scholars are letting us consult the pages of that
very library itself, and not mere copies altered by meddlers in
later days.
3. From this library have been brought to us several
copies of Assyrian poems concerning " Creation," also con
cerning the " Flood," and concerning '' Ishtar," i.e., Esther or
Persephone, and her " Descent into Hades," as well as a host
of writings on all sorts of subjects, commercial, legal, political,
grammatical, astronomical, and the like.
4. Many of these books were actually engraved on the
slabs about 650 b.c, but were in reality copies or new editions
of far older books. Indeed, some copies of such far older
books have been dug up in the ruins of cities much older than
Nineveh; and some copies of the Poems of Creation, now in our
hands, must have been written about 2000 B.C. We can go
still further back; for a Code of Laws written 2300 B.C.,
which we shall examine presently, makes a quotation from the
substance of the " Creation " poems. So also does that King
Gudea whom we found busy in many a sensible and truly good
way among his people in Shirpurla in 2600 or even 2800 B.C.
Let us then study the mind uttered in those very old
" Creation " Epics.
5. Here is the substance of the poems. They sing, —
(i) Of two Great Powers who ruled the world when all was
one vast stormy ocean. The male Power, Apsu, was of less
account than his dread consort Tiamat. It is important to
note here, by the way, that the Hebrews of later days called
this dread God " Tehom," a male deity, and not female as in

74 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
the Babylonian view.* Tiamat was a Personification of the
Power manifest in the Great Deep with all its dreadful storms
and devastations.
(ii) Generations of younger Divine Powers were produced
by this Pair of Powers as the ages rolled on. But strangely —
or shall we say naturally enough ? — the original Pair, and espe
cially the Tiamat or Tehom Power, looked jealously on the
workings of those succeeding Powers as they strove to build
up life in every way. Conflicts came, terrible strife of ele
ments was in the Unseen : there was war in heaven, wherein
many of the later-born powers sided with the first Pair, or
with Tiamat, and fought against the Powers of New Progress.
Again and again these latter Progressive Spirits failed, and
the dread Storm Power Tiamat drove back and forced down
all good growth, swallowing up all life in her awful depths.
(iii) Then the host of the Advancers cried out to a noble
Spirit among them named Marduk, or Merodach, or Mor-
decai, summoning him to lead the defence and the attack
against the dread Power of the Flood and Storm ; whereupon
the spirit Marduk answered :
" Yes, I will lead ; but on one condition :
" I will bring salvation,
" If I be exalted to be Supreme Ruler.
" Let the ' Tablets of Destiny ' be entrusted to me I
" Let every knee bow to me !
" On that condition I will be Captain of Salvation.''
With joy all those others united in pledging themselves to
this exaltation : all things and beings should be made one
under this Saviour Marduk's sceptre.
(iv) Now the terrible war began. Marduk faced Tiamat
* See Gen. i. 2 ; vii. 11 ; viii. 2 ; also many passages in Exodus,
Deuteronomy, Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Psalms and
Proverbs.

THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS 75
in person. He was armed with the Lightning, as his spear.
He drove a great Wind into the maw of the Storm and Flood
Power, till her strength relaxed. He clave her in twain with
his sword. One-half of that Watery Power he threw up to
the sky and nailed it there; one-half he threw down to the
lowest deep, to be imprisoned there.
(v) Then all the other Powers bowed the knee to Marduk,
crowned Him with the Royal Crown, and gave to Him the
Tablets of Destiny. Henceforth the Saviour from the deadly
power of the stormy ocean became the King of all kings and
men. Now stars were made to shine, and the signs of the
Zodiac were marked clearly on the sky, to tell henceforth to
all what the seasons should be and how they should regularly
bring all the blessings of life on earth.
Such, then, is the substance of the Babylonian Creation
Epics. It may be noticed already by some, as we shall show
later on, that the Hebrews learned all about this poetry, from
their ancestors doubtless ; and they used it in writing their
own poems in Genesis, Job, Isaiah, Psalms, and elsewhere
How often is Tehom named in all these books !
(vi) But now it is clearly taught in the poems that the con
flict is not one battle, over and gone for ever ; but that the
one terrible fight is symbolical of an eternal war that goes on,
wherein the Saviour-power is always overcoming the dread
Power of the Ocean and the Storm that would hinder the joy
and the life even of her own progeny, and would drown all
beings under the dark, deep, dreadful waves.
(vii) It is clearly taught also that the Epics are just a pic
ture of the constant conflicts that go on in Nature : all means
the warring of darkness against light, of night against day, and
especially of winter against summer, in the storms and rains
and floods of every November and December ; until at last

76 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
the Healing Power blows the spring wind into the stormy,
cloudy Ocean Monster. Then the strength of that Destroying
One is relaxed ; then one-half of the deadly damps are thrown
up to heaven to make the clouds, and the beauty, and
the life-giving drops in the skies; while the other half is
driven away from the land, down off the submerged fields,
down into the delta channels, down into the depths of earth
to feed there the wells and springs that nourish all roots and
herbs and trees.
(viii) Shall we not say that this Babylonian " Creation "
Song is the original of our Christmas Carols ; or, better, it is
just the long-ago original of Browning's Spring Song that
Pippa sings ? It is the poem, not of one first creation, but
of the creation that goes on every year. Men could not sing
of the first Creation ; for they could not have seen it, and
could not really conceive it. But they knew, on that delta
land, the terrible ravages of the floods that covered wide
leagues every winter, and that slew all hopes of continuing
growth. Then the poet, nay, many poets and the whole
poetical people, sang, in their own old-time language :
" God's in His heaven,
" All's well with the world :
" The year's at the spring,
" The Saviour rules."
And they were right. The word " God " meant the idea
" Saviour." And every true saviour has Divine power : the
old Babylonian ancestors of Abraham and of our Lord Jesus
knew that in their hearts. Is it not our modern recognition
of such faith at the real heart of every religion that is inspir.
ing our foreign missionaries to a great new campaign and
conquest ? The student of Hebrew Origins finds a lesson of
faith for all Christian Souls.

CHAPTER IX
HOW THE EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS
THOUGHT OF LAW
Let there be here a few prefatory words : —
(i) Someone who has read the great Creation poems of the
Babylonian religion may say, perhaps, that we have not
pointed out what a number of different Deities the poetry
mentions. No, for we have been seeking to look within and
underneath the dream of so many Deities, to see how really
these were meant as " Powers " in Nature, to use Wordsworth's
name for God. " Nature never did betray,
" The heart that trusted in her."
The one great Nature shot out its many influences and
powers ; and as men thought of these with trust or with
anxiety, they regarded them a good deal as they regarded one
another, namely, as separate beings. Shall we, then, say with
condemnatory tone that they had gods many and lords many ;
and shall we shrink from the early ancestors of Jesus as sad
polytheists? That word "polytheist" has come to be an
epithet of dishonour or depreciation to give to a person or to
a people. Seriously taken and valued, is it quite so bad?
Some very good men and well-trained thinkers, both of old

78 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
schools and newer ones, tell us that there must be a Dualism
in the government of this world. Is not that a present-day
Polytheism ? They say, " God makes us ; yes, but there are
some things like ' evil' that surely//'* does not make; and
some very real things exist in this life," they tell us, " that the
God and Maker and Father of Jesus cannot have made."
So we have even to-day many good teachers who are not quite
Monotheists. So it looks. And here is a still more
remarkable thing : if you study many thoroughly religious
men, each one of whom has great faith in God, and each one
of whom has, moreover, the genuine faith that God is with
him and in him, in his body and in his mind, in his opinions,
in his whole being, so much as to make him very independent,
then in each of these good men you will find a tendency to
act and to speak as if they had each a different God ! Strange
it is, but fairly true, that great religiousness tends to make
men seem at least to have many gods, by leading them to go
each one very determinedly in his own way, and according to
his own individual conviction. Here is a sort of present-day
or even perpetual polytheism ; and it can hardly be con
demned out and out in such cases. That is one side of the
question and of the facts.
Where, then, do we get the opposite tendency ; the
tendency, namely, towards believing in and acting on the
principle that all things in this world belong to one well-knit
system, and to one great Managing, Creating, Combining
Spirit ? In short, when do we behave like monotheists ? We
do so in two sorts of circumstances : (i) when we obey our
sense of duty to join hands with all other souls to form
society, the state, the fellowships of nations ; and (ii), still
more remarkably, when we face the fact that every soul
believes it is right to do Right. There is unity in mind in

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 79
that fact and in that conduct. Moreover, (iii) starting
thence, everybody sets out to study what is right ; in the firm
confidence, not that the same acts will be right for everybody,
but that when everybody does what he believes is right, then
there will be another manifestation of the great actual
monotheism in the beautiful harmony among all of us and in
all the world. It is when we turn to men's plans for duty
and their laws for life, for home, for industry, for trade, that
we discover unmistakably the unity of all men, and their
underlying acquaintance with the One Great God.
We come in such wise to see how very far on in practical
and therefore true monotheism those far-off ancestors of the
Hebrews, and of the Jews and of Jesus, had risen.
(2) We must make another prefatory note. Certainly as we
go forward some surprises await us : some very new facts
about very old things are to come before our eyes. For as
we think about the times five hundred years before Abraham,
every real student of religion will see how well men living long
before Abraham studied duty, how they studied law, how they
collected and arranged admirably a code of laws for life and
business of all sorts in the delta around Babylon, half a thou
sand years before Abraham was born and grew up, and emi
grated to the West and wandered about with his herds in
Palestine ! * This seems strange ; but almost more strange
still it is to find that the little book of Hebrew laws contained
in Exodus xxi. to xxiii. was made up in good part out of
that old Babylonian code which was one thousand five hundred
* It is very interesting to find this discovery of pre-Abrahamic Law in
Babylonia quite acknowledged by gentlemen who still think it best to
controvert and oppose the Historical Criticism of Hebrew Literature.
The reader may see a good deal of such acknowledgment in a volume
of E.ssays published recently by the Victoria Institute,

80 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
years old when the Exodus chapters were written ! The
Hebrews had in some way inherited the splendid treasure ;
and they were so wise as to use it for their own little nation's
guidance. No doubt trade and traders were the inevitable
means of communication of such treasures from one land and
one age to other lands and other ages, even across the thou
sand miles between Babylon and Palestine, and the thousand
and more years between the Babylonian King Hamurabi of
2300 B.C. and the days of the Hebrew prophet Amos of
750 b.c For we shall find that the old code of Hamurabi
had much to do with trade and traders, and with travelling
merchants, caravan men, shipmen, and the like. All these
were bound to know such rules and codes, and at the very
least to have heard of them. So the Hebrew merchants of
Amos' day were sure to be aware of the Babylonian laws and
codes. How easy and natural, then, it would be for the Elo
histic * writers of Exodus xxi. to xxiii. in 700 B.C. and
their successors the Deuteronomists to embody in their
works much of the substance of the old code, so far as it
suited their purpose ? So we turn to the story of this old
code and of the King of Babylon who wrote it.
I — The Origin of the Code
This king, Hamurabi, reigned about 2300 B.C.; some,
indeed, reckon his date as 2100 B.C. Note in passing that
Abraham's supposed date is 1800 B.C. In the literature that
has come down to us from those far-off days we find a great
quantity of business documents, lawyers' deeds about land and
the like ; we find also government records, especially lists of
* Full explanation of these terms is coming later on, See Chapter
xi. pp. 106 ff. apd chapter xii. pp. 125 ff.

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 81
kings and of dynasties which were commercially necessary
because the business documents were dated as written in such
and such a year of such and such a king and dynasty. In
these royal lists we read how Hamurabi reigned some forty-
three years as the sixth king of his dynasty ; we learn also
that his devotion, toil, and skill exalted him so highly in
power as well as in honour that after his first thirty years he
united a number of little independent kingdoms into the one
new greater kingdom of Babylon. He was the first monarch
in this noted nation which stood, as Hamurabi created it, for
nearly two thousand years after him. That was not his
greatest work and merit, but only a consequence of it ; for in
his first thirty years he had unweariedly developed all the
industries, trade, and economies of his people and their land,
as we are to see. Then his wisdom led him to arrange his
great code of laws for the proper conduct of all that business
in his kingdom. We have clear evidence that he must
have searched out and • studied many an older code, for
the careful law-student of to-day is easily able to analyse
Hamurabi's work, and to point out older elements taken
up and arranged duly into the new system. Indeed, quite
a number of just such older elements have been found
in much older documents. Best of all, Hamurabi was
able to arrange all the rules in his code with such system
atic method as would be followed to-day by a clear
headed minister of justice. Presently we shall write out
the plan of the whole so that any one of us may easily grasp
it all. Some rather conservative students are anxious to have
Hamurabi identified with the Amraphel of Genesis xiv.
That identification may or may not be proved reliable ; but if
it be correct, a good many fresh difficulties will arise concern-
F

82 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
ing the other stories of Abraham that we possess.* Besides,
whether it be correct or be not so, there will always remain
the splendid fact that about Abraham's time, and a few cen
turies earlier, Babylonian society had a system of law and a
customary study of law, at the discovery of which present-day
students of jurisprudence feel themselves compelled to bow in
reverence. So had God inspired the students of law in
Babylon in 3000 to 2000 B.C. So much for the story of the
construction of the great code of King Hamurabi.
II — The Discovery of the Code
We turn to the story of its preservation in the very form in
which Hamurabi had it carved on stone so long ago, not less
than 4000 years ago ; and we must tell the story — like a
startling novel — of its discovery just lately.
(1) The Code had long been known by quotations from it
and the like, through the carefully calculating toil pf scholars
who did not live to see it found in its original and entire
form. That is an illustration of what results from the kind of
study, which literary men call " higher criticism," i.e., the
investigation and criticism that are concerned with documents
as a whole, in distinction from the " lower critical " work
which is concerned with individual words in a document, the
spelling of them, their syntax, and the like. None of these
documents were known fifty years ago, and their language was
not known, nor even the alphabet of it, a century ago ; but
soon after such Babylonian writings began to be understood
by scholars, laws were found, a few here and a few there,
which were so much linked with the name of Hamurabi that
the prince of Assyriological students, Prof. Frederick Delitzsch,
* See below, chapter xi, p. 141, concerning the " M " record.

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 83
coined the expression, "The Code of Hamurabi"; and he
predicted confidently that the whole Code would one day be
found. (2) And so it has been found. But, curiously enough, it
was found, not in Babylonian lands, but in Shushan, in the
ruins of that famous old city of the Elamite nation lying away
to the east of the river Tigris. How did it come thither?
In this way : Elam was the bitter enemy of Babylon, and the
two were almost always at war with each other. Victories
were then, as usually, not always on the same side; and a
sad enfeeblement and conquest by Elam came over Babylon
just about 1000 B.C. That was, by the way, just about the
time of the Hebrew King David; and possibly David's
liberty to found his monarchy came partly because great
Babylon was so feeble. In any case, we know now that the
old Babylonian king Hamurabi's own Royal copyiof the Code,
carved under his own eyes on a black stone pillar, was carried
away by the Elamite soldiers to their own country as a
valuable trophy. It remained there ever since, until it was
found in 1901 and brought to Paris. It may be seen by any
one now in an annexe of the Louvre Museum. The French
Government's excavator, M. de Morgan, discovered the large
black stone pillar, seven feet high and some two feet across,
with a picture of Hamurabi himself on the upper part repre
senting him receiving his Code from his God. Engraved
below are the laws : first stands a valuable preamble ; then
follow the 280 paragraphs of laws; then comes a notable
subscription with solemn authorisations.
All has been published in many translations ; but especially
important is the edition of the Roman Catholic Father
Scheil. Readers should see Mr. Johns's description in the
fifth volume of Hastings' Bible Dictionary, and it is well to

84 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
read also Mr. C. Edwards' very handy volume on the Code
and its relationships, issued by the Rationalist Press.

Ill — The Contents of the Code
We have seen how wonderfully the original royal copy was
recently discovered. Not much preface is necessary as we
seek to give a brief precis of the enactments laid down in it by
King Hamurabi. But let us remind ourselves (i) that our
business with the Code is not to master its legal features,
The business of Old Testament Theology is to watch the
movement, not of law, but of religious life among the Hebrews,
and therefore of course among the far earlier states and
communities whence the Hebrews arose. Then (2) let us
remember that even literary history of this collection of laws,
or of any other literary product either of the Hebrews or of
their predecessors the Babylonians, or of their successors the
Jews, is not our great aim. Old Testament Theology may be
helped by literary study, but it must aim above all things to
set forth the history of religion as that culminates in Jesus.*
* The old fancy that the Bible was a book of rules for us has
disappeared, With that fancy must go the custom of writing what was
called " Introduction to the Old or to the New Testament." In such
works a great deal of learning was displayed in literary discussions of
the books of the so-called " Canon." It was asked : " Who wrote this
book ? When was it written ? What does it contain ? " &c. These
were all useful studies ; but notably the plan of their arrangement,
which was always according to the order of the books in the Hebrew
Bible, detached them from their proper places in the order of history.
And all parts of one book, say Genesis or Isaiah, had to be discussed
at one and the same time ; whereas a student knows now that Genesis
or Isaiah is made up of many writings, belonging to many different
dates, and these were not set together in historical order at all. The
true method of study of the Old Testament must be to follow the

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 85
Such, then, is the reason why we study Hamurabi's code in a
course of Old Testament Theology, just as by and by we shall
have to study what are called " Apocrypha," and much other
literature besides: Once more, (3) let us observe, as we read
this code, how thoroughly we have to leave the fancy that
there was a real " Divine Selection of Israel," or " A Divine
Discipline of Israel " as distinct from the selection or the
discipline of any other people. Remembering these principles
we proceed to examine : (A) in detail the laws contained in
Hamurabi's code ; then, after giving this outline of the whole,
we shall try to state, (B) What are the great moral features of
it; and then (C) We shall say what was the kind of religious
ness that filled King Hamurabi, and inspired him to work as
he did.
A — The Laws of the Code in Detail
(1) There are not any clear sections or chapters marked off
in the series of 282 regulations; and yet it is easy to see that
the king or his law officers had in their minds a pretty clear
order of topics to be handled. The logical carefulness which
is evident all through the work startles us when we think what
its date was. A very good subdivision of the whole was
given in the Nineteenth Century for December 1903, by Professor
Lehmann of Berlin. Here it is in substance :
(i) Laws Nos. 1 to 25 concern Crimes and Penalties.
(ii) Nos. 26 to 41 are Rules for Royal Servants.
(iii) Nos. 42 to 65 provide for Agriculture.
course of Religious History, and to take up each bit of the Scripture
writings for study of its author, etc., just at the point when that bit
comes in chronologically. Now this implies that we must bring in
and must discuss as we go along, a large number of works, books, and
documents which are not in the Bible at all.

86 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(iv) Here follows a blank space on the stone ; for Nos. 66
to 99 have been chiselled out, doubtless by the Elamite
raiding prince in order to carve in something about himself.
(v) Nos. ioo to 119, and an appendix, Nos. 120 to 126,
treat of Mercantile Agencies, Debts, Rents, and Wages.
(vi) Nos. 127 to 192 concern the Family and Inheritances;
and an appendix, 193 to 195, prescribes certain Mutilations
as Penalties.
(vii) Nos. 196 to 227 are largely the Lex Talionis — i.e.,
" An eye for an eye," &c. Here, e.g., are the Rules for pro
cedure in cases of Surgical Malpractice.
(viii) Finally, Nos. 228 to 282 treat of Bargains, of Methods
of Payment, of Fees and the like ; and the section and the
Code close with Rules for Punishments.
(2) Such a brief outline can only make a thoughtful
person desire more. So we give a fuller analysis with special
illustrations ; and still following Professor Lehmann's plan, we
subdivide (i), Nos. 1 to 25, thus : —
(a) Nos. 1 to 5 condemn False Witnesses. These must die,
but in some cases there is an ordeal by water. Notably, this
whole matter of Witnesses concerns failure to pay duly for
corn. Condemnation is pronounced also on all efforts to
bribe. (b) Nos. 6 to 13 treat of Theft. Punishment is in some
cases to be by death, in others by payment of thirty times the
sum stolen ; and there are details concerning a remand of the
accused. A child-stealer must die.
(c) Nos. 14 to 20 concern Slave-trade. Here let us note
only that a person accused of the serious crime of abducting
a slave may be allowed to " appeal to the Gods " ; and this
seems to have been some very awful way of taking an oath by
which to protest one's innocence.

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 87
(d) Nos. 21 to 25 treat of Burglary. In some cases the
culprit is to be burned.
(3) It would be somewhat wearisome to work through the
whole Code in this way ; enough of such minuter detail has
been given. Let us rather give the spirit of the rest of the
sections, with any needful illustrations.
We may pause, however, to reflect on the features already
before us, and to consider how wonderful it is to find this great
Law-book existing so full and so wise, and this so very long
ago, even 500 years before Abraham. At the cost of a little
delay amid our narrative we may well emphasise these out
standing wonderful facts. That the Law-book existed so long
before Abraham is a fact ; and it was a product of the civilisa
tion of the Babylonian State dwelling then on the Delta of the
Euphrates. It was when this high Babylonian civilisation had
moved on for half a millennium longer that, as we are told,
Abraham, the progenitor of all Hebrews, felt moved to
emigrate westward and to wander about in nomadic life and
in guerilla fashion. Did lahweh his God move him to this
emigration ? Certainly we must say that He did ! What is a
man's God but that Power within him and around him that
moves the man ? We must count it a fine feature in the heart
of whoever described that migration, that we find him thus
writing and believing that it was lahweh that moved Abraham
to go. That is one of the better features of the Iahwistic
story (" J " in Genesis xii.) and of the Iahwistic religion of its
writers, as we shall see ere long. But the notable and singular
fact at our present point in the study is that in 1800 b.c
Abraham left behind him undoubtedly a high civilisation
going on in his old Babylonian home. He wandered away
from such civilisation, and fell back, as it were, by atavism, to
a primitive and low level, as we are to see. And it was a long

88 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
time, even 800 years, ere his descendants rose again from their
life as wandering and fighting men and tribes until, in 1000 b.c,
they were able to organise themselves into a settled nation and
State under King David. One defect in Old Testament study
hitherto has been that these now clear facts used to be entirely
unknown. It was supposed that Abraham left behind him in
Babylon nothing but badness. So great a scholar as Dr. John
Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, two
hundred years ago, laid down that mistake as one of the first
principles of his great work on the ritual laws of the Hebrews;
a work that was justly described by the late Prof. W. Robertson
Smith as the foundation of the Science of Comparative
Religion. No wonder that everybody has fallen into the same
mistake as Spencer made about those old Babylonians and
their civilisation. But no real student can make that mistake
now. We find, therefore, that a Christian teacher must needs give
full importance to the fact that there were those Babylonian
cities and banks, farms and warehouses, canals and ship
yards, medical schools and law courts, and a full royal
entourage of police, priests, and devotees. We are bound to
know the homes and families and education of that day. And
how did God work amid all these? This is our main
question : How did God care for those people ? What did
He make them think out and set down as Rules for
Righteousness ?
" The people, Lord, the people ;
" Not thrones and crowns, but men :
" Didst Thou then save the people ? "
We will risk dryness to answer this by further description
of the Code. We have already described (i) the details of
Laws 1 to 25.

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 89
Now (ii) Nos. 26 to 41 concern royal servants. No army
conscript must dare to buy a substitute. But a soldier's
interests were carefully guarded, even should he fall on a
foreign field.
Next (iii), concerning Rents and Irrigation Works, we find
in Laws 42 to 65 that no rent for desert-land brought into use
was to be due until the fourth year of use. Bad weather was
not to be held as an excuse for failure of ability to pay rent,
but owner and renter might always arrange terms. There is
shown in all these rules a familiarity with disastrous floodings,
natural on such a Delta ; and when such intervened, then
agricultural loans were to bear no interest. These were
possibly government loans. The tenant was responsible for
due preservation of the dams that protected his fields, as such
dams protect the land in Lincolnshire, or more signally still
in Holland. He who negligently left the sluices of those
dams open was ordered by the code to pay heavily to all who
were injured by the resulting inundations. Rents for garden-
farmed land were heavy, running up to one-third of the pro
duce ; but the figure due was to be reckoned according to
the value of all neighbouring garden-lands.
We have said much concerning this section, for it shows
that England to-day may well consult the Babylonian people
of 4000 years ago concerning land and farming, and how
these may be regulated with success.
(iv) Here follows the gap from Nos. 66 to 99 caused by
the Elamite king's defacing chisel. Probably the Elamite
intended to chisel in some record of his own ; unfortunately
he failed to do so, else we should probably have known
exactly who he was. Fortunately, however, the substance of
what is chiselled out is known from other fragments of the code.
The lost rules concerned farming of date-palms and the like.

90 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(v) Now come in Nos. 100 to 119, the Banking and
Brokerage Law of those days. Strict written accounts and
statements, and calculation of interests, and affidavits were
required. Along with this is given the Law of Liquor-
selling; singularly, the trade was in the hands of women.
This means that it was not carried on for private gain, but
belonged to the State ; evidently also it was under the
strictest religious surveillance, and was entrusted to women's
more merciful regard for the drinker's needs and his perils.
(vi) The sixth section governed the Home; it treats first
of marriages with wives and concubines and " Hagars," and
then of children's inheritances. The wife's interests were
carefully protected under written covenants, with penalties,
even to brand-marking, for any man found breaking the law.
Various kinds of troubled wedlock could be dissolved, but
the separated wife must have full provision and comfort.
The rule for a " Hagar " is notable for our coming study of
Abraham. Babylonian law said : " If the ' Hagar ' be proud
towards her mistress, the master whose natural spouse she
has become shall return her to slavery in his own establish
ment, but he must not sell her unless she prove barren."
There are careful specifications for dower. Incest was
punished most heavily.
The legal provisions for Children are set out in great
detail. They concern adoptions, as e.g., by simply saying to
a lad, " My son " ; they provide also for disinheritances in
case of repeated bad conduct; they discuss also executor
ships, and especially they make provision for daughters.
There was legal arrangement that girls might become
" Temple Devotees," and also for their becoming " author
ised public girls " ; but in both cases, especially in the latter,
the well-being of the girl and her due possession of property

EARLY ANCESTORS OF JESUS 91
were strenuously assured. Here was no case of flinging such
girl-life to ruin. The common word of dishonour flung to
day at prostitution by calling it a feature of " Modern Baby
lon " is entirely unjust to Babylon. Society and law to-day
treat such girls savagely and barbarously ; in comparison,
Babylon was manly.
(vii) The Babylonian Lex Talionis follows in Nos. 194 to
227, and it protected life most jealously. A deceitful nurse
was to have her breast amputated. In minute detail are
enumerated the parts of the body that a blow or a stab may
injure; and for whose injury the injurer must suffer the
retaliation due in each several case, according as the
sufferer was a slave, or an equal, or a person of higher rank.
But blood-money could be paid, by arrangement. The
surgeon failing in an operation on man or beast had to
suffer the retaliation ordained ; but if he succeeded his
payment was fixed and sure.
(viii) The final section concerning Bargains, Hire, and
other payments is full of interest. Here are prescribed the
dues to house-builders, to ship-builders, to ship-lessees, and
to navigators who are successful ; and the fines on those who
make shipwreck, or whose house-building is insecure. Next
come the rules for making good the injuries done to cattle in
any way, as by a lion, or in an accident, or by the "act of
God"; also for making good any injury done to persons by
an ox, a dangerous one or otherwise. Next stands a careful
schedule of Wages payable especially to farm-hands, shep
herds and carriers ; and also payments due for the use of
oxen, asses and the like, for draught purposes or for thresh
ing or for breeding. There are also laws for the treatment
of slaves at work, and in sickness, and when at fault.
Such is a very meagre sketch of Hamurabi's Laws for the

93 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
conduct of society in 2300 B.C. The reader may recall here
that Exodus in Chapters xxi. to xxiii. contains a Code,
that Deuteronomy in Chapters xii. ff. has another, and that
Leviticus xvii. to xxvi. has two or more combined. All of
these are related to Hamurabi's Code. We shall study them
at the historical points where they belong — viz., the Exodus
Code about 700 b.c. ; the Deuteronomy Rules a little later,
say 650 b.c ; and the Levitical Combination about 580 B.C.,
in the time of the Exile. At those points we shall inquire
what influence Hamurabi's work exerted on the codes drawn
up by Hebrews so long afterwards. Here we have to try
to realise the moral level which the Hamurabi Code exhibits
as attained to in Babylon five hundred years before Abraham
was born, and long before that Hebrew Father emigrated
from Babylon to the west.

CHAPTER X
THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 500 YEARS
BEFORE ABRAHAM
A leader in the Labour party, conversing about this very
Code, said : " Is it not possible that the slabs dug up as you
tell us in those old ruined cities, and the pillar that has been
found with the Code on it, are recent and are fabrications and
clever deceptions palmed off upon us ? " The answer is ready
and easy : we reply at once that there are indeed such false
fabricators seeking payment for lies ; but never one of them
or any set of them manages to plant the deceptions correctly
in all the proper places over an area of many hundred square
miles ; and never do they manage to keep providing the
fabrications steadily through thirty to fifty years ; and never
do they manage to elude the vigilance of the scientific men of
a score of universities in Europe and America. Such whole
sale deceit on the one hand and wholesale gullibility on the
other are unthinkable.
But that Labour leader's astonishment and hesitation
illustrate for us a feature of mind that is of much interest.
They mean that it is very hard for the so-called " hard-
headed " man to free himself from the old fancy that the dates
in the margins of our Bibles must be right. What a multitude
still believe that the world was created only 4,004 years B.C. !

94 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Men and women may have given up reading Genesis, and
they may have ceased being Sunday-school teachers, because
as they say the whole atmosphere in religious societies seems
to be full of arguing in a circle. And yet such men and
women are shy of questioning the statements on the pages of
Genesis, even such as are only found in the margin ; for they
fear that in some dim sort of way Genesis has to do with the
Unseen Spirit whom they know and really honour. Now,
how can we change for these souls that dim sort of relation
into an actual and glorious relation, of trustfulness ? We can
do so by letting the actual light of history shine in on
Genesis ; and chiefly we must let the actual moral conditions
of the old times stand out in reality for all they are worth,
whether good or bad. We proceed therefore to study —
B— The Morals of Babylonia 500 Years before
Abraham
We shall try to understand the morality of that land by
setting down in common language and clear light what were
the moral qualities of the King Hamurabi's laws. We shall
seek to understand what features of Babylonian society the
Code reveals and what qualities the King and his people felt
they ought to prize.
(1) First, plainly Home was very precious in their view.
And in their homes unquestionably the father was chief.
Next to him stood the sons ; they were the father's representa
tives, and became his executors when he was gone. The
wife ranked quite after these in importance. But here two
features in the system strike us : the one very pleasing, the
other not altogether so. Most carefully secured provision was
made for the wife when widowed or divorced, and this pleases

THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 95
us ; but, then again, it is not pleasing to know that there were
three sorts of spousal relation in which a woman might stand.
The proper wife might see beside her a concubine ; nay, more,
a "Hagar." We use this word, adapting it from the language
of Genesis, although it is not in the Code ; and we mean by
it "a slave woman who was used as a natural mother."
While this was far below our Christian standard of the status
due to a spouse of any kind, yet we are bound to say that
the " Hagar " was carefully defended against all cruel treat
ment, neglect, or exposure. We shall see later on that the
Hebrew tribalism allowed a cruel exposure of a Hagar which
Hamurabi's Code would not have tolerated. We shall find
this cruelty described quite coolly by the Iahwistic story of
Abraham as something not at all wrong. We have already said
in our last chapter that according to Hamurabi's Laws daughters
might have either of three different destinations; and even
those who became devotees were peculiarly sacred, and
guarded by the most inviolable protections ; they received also
by law a careful and adequate maintenance.
(2) But in Babylonian society of that time there was
another and entirely different class, — namely, the Slaves. The
class Bimana was not divided into the two genera, men and
apes, but into three : — men, slaves, and apes. And yet the
laws for just treatment of slaves were clear and severe ; more
over, some of the laws indicate that there was a tendency
among members of that old-world society to help the slave to
run away.
(3) The chief feature of industrial life was Agriculture.
The long ages of nomadism and cattle-herding were in the
past among those old Babylonians. When, 500 years later,
Abraham became a nomad, he fell back into the ways of the
ruder times that had been before his Babylonian ancestors

96 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
became tillers of the soil. The Babylonian agriculture had
several handmaid industries, most important of which were
water-engineering and dam-building, canal-making for irriga
tion, and sluice watching; but there were, besides, the
warehousemen who stored produce, and the carriers who
transported it to the users, and the conveyancers-at-law who
wrote and guarded the farming agreements. Then farming
was sometimes on wide fields of grain, and sometimes in
gardening of the intensive sort. The people of those days
understood also and practised the reckoning of all sorts of
agricultural values, the relative values of lands, and the
the value of labour whether of man on land or on water, or
of draught cattle ; and they laid it down by law that each
value should be duly honoured.
(4) How can we begin to say how richly they prized the
Commerce they carried on ? They traded at home ; and then
in the farther lands up the rivers, or to the south along the
Persian Gulf, and also in the very far countries reached by
way of the Indian seas, and by coasting round into the Red
Sea, and so landing in Africa ; also by portaging across from
the Upper Euphrates by way of Damascus to the Phoenician
coast, and then sailing all through the waters and borders and
islands of the Mediterranean. The carrier was a very impor
tant man ; he carried fruits and goods, and also goodwill and
honest payment and helpfulness, to the ends of the earth, and
then he brought the like back again. We cannot wonder now
so much when we read Isaiah xlix. 1-6, written in Babylon
and perhaps in its great metropolis in 550 b.c, and its project
that Hebrew slaves there at that time shall carry the know
ledge and love of their God to the ends of the earth ! Babylon
had been preparing for that by its trading routes and methods
through the one thousand seven hundred years from Hamu-

THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 97
rabi's time onward. Let us make it quite clear also that
commercial men under Hamurabi carried on their trade trust-
worthily. Their laws ordained strictly exact documentary
agreements, accounts, and acknowledgments; the insistence
on this is constant and precise.
(5) The next feature we must consider in Hamurabi's
society is the State itself. The State was the combination of
all the other features of society ; and Hamurabi's Code regu
lated exactly the business of its king and his officers and the
various ranks of men. There was conscription, and a severe
one, for the army ; there were courts of justice, whose presi
dents were regarded as " Gods," and before whom it was an
awful solemnity to make an affidavit ; then there were pro
fessions, legal, medical, and military ; and there was nursing
where women were professional ; also architects and seafaring
men were important classes of citizens. For all these ele
ments in the State the Code ordained due method and full
protection. (6) But men in those days knew also and thought much
about the World as a whole. It would be a mistake to leave
unnoticed here the clear conception then existing, and duly
regarded in the Code, concerning a great World that was more
than the national territory, for it included all the lands whither
the traders of Babylon might travel. It included also the
skies and the stars, and all their great regular motion and
passing and returning, their marking the seasons and the pro
cesses of the earth, as she was ever yielding her rich fruits to
satisfy every living thing. The Babylonian Code and Life
knew a system of the Universe ; and king and people exalted
the duty of conforming to its order.
(7) Finally, in all these features of society that people saw
the deep Unseen values that dared not be ill-estimated. G

g8 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
They knew the meaning of the words " WE OUGHT." They
thought of an Almighty control upon them, pointing out to
them the sense of moral obligation, and leading them up to it
as to the only wellspring of life. To have any real peace in
life, or, in simple phrase, to be their own true selves, they
knew they had to do right. They carefully thought out and
wrote down all the laws which they counted right. They
bound themselves to keep those laws ; and in all this they
were bowing under an Unseen, Inevitable Power. We are
presently to see how they thought of the Personality of such a
Power.
C — The Inner Religion of King Hamurabi and
his Code, and his People in Babylon, in 2300 b.c.
We shall gather together now the more peculiarly religious
features of Hamurabi's Code and of the Babylonian life about
him. We are standing gazing in at the gate whence Abraham
ere long went out to the West, out from the home and from
the worship of his Fathers, to wander as an emigrant, drawn
by the hidden voices within answering to the Power wooing
away out in unknown far-away lands. Let us stand a little
longer here, to listen to the breathing lips and the beating
hearts of God-fearing men who, or whose sons, knew Abra
ham. If they did not know him, they knew the Invisible
Voice that spoke to him and also to them, and they heard
God's voice in conscience, saying, " Do right " ; they felt,
each one of them felt, that the great Unseen One cared
enough for all to say unceasingly to every one, " Do right."
That was indeed the never-failing love of God for each child
of man ; and they were acquainted with it, as their fellow-
countryman Abraham also no doubt was. He obeyed the

THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 99
Divine inspiration in his sense of duty, of desire, and of joyful
purpose ; and all these were nurtured in him, as they only
could be nurtured in him, just as they were nurtured in his
fellow Babylonians, by the religion of the homeland on the
Euphrates, and ages earlier in Arabia. Therefore we turn to
look on the religion of the people and king in Babylon.
(1) These things must be said as preface : —
(i) The presence of the spiritual element in a man or in
his work may elude our ordinary modes of observation, but
there is a way of detecting and disclosing it. We see deep
spiritual emotion in Hamurabi the moment we discover and
begin to estimate his sense that he was controlled by an
Unseen Spirit. Indeed his own statements that he was so
controlled do not represent fully how deeply he felt that
control. He did not think of. saying that the sense deeply
realised within him that he must do justly and that he must
be righteous was actually the sense of being controlled by
Him whom we call God ; but we have learned that it was so.
We have reached some comprehension of that great fact to
day, but he did not live so late as even yesterday. And yet
his virtual acknowledgment of Divine control is very abundant,
rich, and impressive.
(ii) It has been pointed out by writers upon the Code that
there are in it few rules for religious observances. True, and
yet there are some ; and they are serious. We read often in
the Rules that a man must make what we would call an
affidavit on oath; and clearly the real act thus appointed
to be performed was to stand up and speak to God. That
was a religious observance.
(iii) It is in the preface to the whole and in the sanctioning
appendix that we find all the wealth of Hamurabi's utterance
of faith in Power above him. The preface or superscription

ioo OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
gives, as it were, the commission which the King believed he
had received, and which he felt he could receive, from none
less than the Highest. The appendix or subscription acknow
ledges all the high endowments for his royal tasks that he
believed he had received from the Gods; and it prays for
Almighty confirmations of all the Laws.
(2) Now we may analyse his more strictly religious state
ments, and ask what was the idea of God in his soul when he
wrote : " I, Hamurabi, the exalted one, do humble myself
before the great Elohim."
(i) The nearest thought with him is that it was the Saving
God Merodach that had appointed and instituted him as
Governor of men, to conduct and direct, to establish Right
and Rights and Justice in the land, for the good of the
people. As this Divine Merodach for his great saving
Service, as we saw above, was believed to have received the
Tablets of Destiny over the multitudes of mankind ; so now
it was from this all-supreme and gracious source, the Will
of Merodach, that there comes this King's commission. This
is surely a fine faith, and a profoundly religious feature in his
nature. (ii) This Merodach with his saving work was held to be in
fellowship with many other Powers ; for how else, as Hamurabi
would have said, could men express the numberless potencies
of the Unseen ! The men of those days felt what we call the
infinity of the operations of the Unseen ; and they gave
names and even personification to these. They thought of
the Power that was the first source of all ; they thought of
the Power that is manifest in mind, in the minds of men and
in the Great Mind working through all minds ; they knew the
Power beaming out through the sun to give life, and a Power
shining from the moon also to cause the months ; they knew

THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 101
also the Power that works in fertility, and the Powers evident
in war and in disease, in birth and in mercy. But they
knew that all these Powers worked together. They called on
them all as ONE; and they had a great name for that Divine
ONE. We shall come back to this presently.
(3) Now let us watch how Hamurabi thought of the
attitude of this sum of all Powers, and of each Power in that
infinitely complex Power, towards himself. Can we say he
thought God loved him ? Certainly, for : —
(i) It is a Divine Power, he says, that " has endowed him
with penetration." " The Great Prince whose decisions take
first place, the Great Thinker, the Omniscient," has given to
me, Hamurabi, " understanding and prudence." What a
faith in the Divine care for a mind !
(ii) It is " this Supreme Power that has delighted mankind
by calling the King " to all high and beautiful and tender
tasks. Hamurabi knows himself to be the " elect shepherd "
of that Supreme Power. What higher faith could he have
than to say, " I am called of God " ?
(iii) These utterances mean that Hamurabi is conscious of
a personality in himself which can receive such a call. He is
in fact a personality that is rich in finest features ; features
not of his own creation, but created for him and in him by
Divine Power. He is "the prudent king favoured of the
Power that beams in the sunshine." So he is " the pure
prince whose prayers are heard by the Power Who makes all
fertility." (iv) Hamurabi lays before his God all his work for his folk
and in his laws, and prays to Him that these laws may abide
for ever. He believes that the Great Powers will guard all
his Code, and will help for ever all kings and men who
uphold these laws. And he solemnly declares his faith and

102 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
his prayer that these Heavenly Powers, singly and in their
totality, will also judge any " man, whether he be king, or
prince, feudatory or citizen, or whatever be his title," " who
heeds not the words written upon the pillar ; and who scorns
Hamurabi's malediction, nor fears the curse of God." How
strikingly Hamurabi identifies himself and his mind in these
maledictions and curses with God and God's mind ! How
singularly also does he utter his estimate of what he has
written, almost exactly in words used long after by Jews and
by Christians ! * He believes firmly that each Power in God's
Kingdom, the Powers in Mind, in the Sun, in the month-
making Moon, in Fertility, in War, in Mercy, in Disease, will
help him in his legal cares. He believes that they all work
together to make One Great Providence, and that that One
infinite Divine Providence will establish the King's good Code.
(4) Thus we are led to note what Hamurabi believes to be
the very specially Divine aims in calling him, and in making
him God's Anointed one, and in breathing the Divine Mind
into him. These aims of God are the characteristic features
of the Soul of God ; and so here we see what Hamurabi
thought was the very Heart of God. Let us enumerate them.
He believed that : —
(i) The purpose and aim of God are to make Life abundant,
in earth and beast and man.
(ii) God's Heart's wish is to foster agriculture and trade,
in fields and in flocks, by "giving pasture and drinking
places," and "abundant waters for the inhabitants"; with
"expansion of plantations, and with accumulated corn"; by
" filling the people's lives with sufficiency even during dearth " ;
by "assuring to them their goods in peace," and by "making
riches to abound."
* See Deut. iv. 2, xii. 32 ; Prov. xxx. 6 : Rev. xxii. 18, 19.

THE MORALS AND RELIGION OF BABYLON 103
(iii) The Divine Powers aim at " rooting out all banditti,*
destroying the base and wicked, holding back the strong from
oppressing the feeble " ; likewise do they love to restore the
best blessings to far-off and weaker lands,
(iv) And they purpose all manner of comforts for body
and for soul as well in the homes of the people, and for the
widow and orphan especially.
(v) They mean "to illuminate the land, and to establish
justice in the earth."
(vi) Above all, the Gods love and cherish the God-fearing
soul ; that is, the reverent man, who makes glad the mind of
God and of all the world.
Such was the Religion of this King of Babylon and of his
people in 2300 b.c All this is thoroughly confirmed by far
more literature than the Code. We can read many Hymns
and Prayers and Confessions that date from those far-off days ;
and in these it is very evident that the Unity of God came
to be more and more clearly grasped, and cherished
inwardly as a ruling faith. From such a people it was that,
after 500 years, there went out as a wandering emigrant to the
west, ABRAHAM, the Father of the Hebrews. We have
now to look at him in his Bedouin-like life, and in the half-
wild Tribes of his descendants.
* Later on we shall see that these Rules and purposes would have
been unpleasant reading for the invading Hebrews, or Habiri banditti
of Moses' time concerning whose guerilla warfare we read in the Tel-
el-Amarna Tablets.

CHAPTER XI
THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM : FOREWORDS
Let this term " Abraham " stand for the father of the
Hebrews himself, and also as a symbol for all those early
heads and tribes or clans within the one large Hebrew tribe
down to what we call the time of Moses and the Exodus from
Egypt. In a word, let the name stand for all the Hebrews
from 1800 to 1400 b.c We may call it the days of the earlier
or Nomadic Tribalism.
(I) Here, then, our first consideration must be that we
come now evidently to what is more commonly called Bible-
story. Let us therefore remind ourselves :
1. That our aim and our task are not "Bible study "as
such ; our aim and our business are STUDY OF JESUS.
It is Old Testament Theology that we are seeking, that is, it is
knowledge concerning GOD, and of men's ideas of God, that
we are discovering, in so far as this is to be got from the Old
Testament. Therefore it is that we study the religion of the
Jews, and the religion of the Hebrews; therefore also we do
not need to use the Old Testament until it begins to give us
that knowledge of the Hebrews which we can get there and
nowhere else. Just here we may see how there is a justifica
tion for one sense in which the expression " infallible Script
ures " may be used ; for, of course, the Old Testament is the

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS 105
only source to which we can go for most of our knowledge of
Hebrew religion in Abraham's and Moses' days. There is
no other original literature on the subject, or at least on very
many parts of the subject ; so the Old Testament may be
called the " infallible " scripture, in that sense.
2. But as we begin now to use the Bible, we do not by
any means propose simply to repeat what is said about
Abraham in Genesis. Why not ? Because at the first
moment when we begin to read Genesis thoughtfully, we find
that it contains in its first two chapters two very different
stories of the first things and men : it has two entirely different
stories of Creation. Then ere long, when it speaks of Abraham,
we find that there are three very different accounts of him.
These stand interwoven in the work for a very simple reason :
the possessors of the stories wished to preserve them all
three ; so they arranged them together, much as we arrange
books together on the same shelf if they treat of the same
subjects, and even though they may disagree in what they
say about those subjects. These simple facts used to be un
known ; and even earnest students as well as good men
generally supposed that the books of Genesis to Deuteronomy
were originally written down as they now stand by one and
the same writer. But a hundred years ago or more it dawned
on thoughtful minds that there are those three different stories,
and some other things besides, thus interwoven in Genesis.
The earnest awakening of men in the eighteenth century to
thoughtfulness concerning religion and mind, and literature
and history, and life and all its blessings in this world, had for
one of its effects this discovery concerning Genesis. Ever
since then until recently the minds of Old Testament theolo
gians have been intent on tracing out each of these three
separate stories, and busy untwining them from their inter-

106 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
woven state, so as to get at the mind of each original
writer, and at the ideas of the time in which each lived. All
this toil has been so thoroughly done, and so successfully,
that we may now say we know those three separate stories
accurately, and we can use them confidently in any study we
wish to make of the history of the Hebrew people who pro
duced them.
3. Let us halt here awhile to consider how the student
of Old Testament texts sets about this unravelling of the many-
stranded cord which we find in the Pentateuch and the books
of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The outset of the road
at least may be indicated.
(i) When our love for our Saviour and Master Jesus awakens,
we desire at once to see Him in His home and, as one has put
it graciously, " in the midst " of all things in this life and world
and in the midst of its great story. Especially does a thought
ful soul say, " I must know Him as He lived in the midst of
His own home and His own people, and as one living in the
stream of His people's thinking and religion and history." For
that history and religion and thinking were His history and
religion and thinking, and they were therefore very really a
part of Him. Now the Pentateuch was the Synagogue's reading
book, and it was the home reading book and the school book
for every body in Jesus' days. We simply must try to read it,
if we are truly to know Him ; and we must know it with a
thoughtful comprehension of all it meant around Him and in
Him. We reflect also that all those Old Testament books
were the literature of the Jewish people and the Hebrew people
before them ; and, if he who would know the story of the
development of any people must learn it by a thorough study
and mastery of their literature and its organic growth, then we
simply must study and master the Hebrew and Jewish litera-

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS 107
ture historically if we mean to understand the development of
which Jesus was the culminating point. Certainly the matter
becomes most serious when it is considered thoughtfully ; and
it will not do for any pastor or teacher, or indeed any Christian,
to say, " I cannot trouble myself with the Old Testament ; and
if I look into it at all, I shall do so merely to pick what suits
me for a text for a sermon or for a devout meditation."
Plainly, those who do such a thing, and they are numerous, are
doing dishonour to Jesus. The Old Testament, historically
read, is a large part of Jesus ; if we choose, we may call it the
story of "Jesus before Bethlehem."
(ii) So the really devout man turns to the Old Testament
at its first page, just as our Master did so often ; and there he
reads at once the first chapter of Genesis. The wise man will
read it again and again ; and he will mark, not how he may
devise edifying remarks about it or sermons on snippets of its
verses, but what are its own real characteristics. Let us notice
these. (a) It is a remarkable piece of literature in many ways.
The first peculiarity one notices and cannot help noticing is
that throughout this whole first chapter of Genesis the word
" God " is used as the name of the Deity, and it is used
exclusively. This is remarkable ; and all the more so is it
because, as soon as we reach the middle of the fourth verse
of the second chapter, we find another name used. There
the name " LORD God " is used, and then this second
name is used almost exclusively through several chapters.
That is a literary fact which cannot be ignored. This
discovery, duly weighed, leads us to closer study of the first
chapter. (6) We begin to realise that it is a poem ; it is not indeed
lyric poetry, but it is certainly what is usually called a didactic

108 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
poem. It has a number of stanzas with a regularly recurring
refrain, or rather two or three such refrains recurring ever and
anon with such regularity that we soon know just where to
expect each one of these. In such form the writer purposed
evidently to impart a certain philosophy of the Generation of all
things. (c) Presently we can see quite clearly that this writer
conceived of things as beginning in a region that was flooded;
and where, as the light broke through the darkness, the solid
land gradually appeared out of receding waters and grew quite
dry. It was just a springtime ; and out of the drying land
seemed to shoot all hetbs and trees, as indeed they always do
on drying delta- lands. This philosophy must have been thought
out on the Delta of the Euphrates. Notably, on that Delta
the people did make their year begin in the springtime, when
the great river's floods fell away.
(d) Out of the waters rose winged things, all gnats, flying
insects, and the like ; such do always seem to spring from
warm damps. The emerging, or if we choose, the evolution
of many other kinds of life is also described.
(e) At last comes the fashioning of mankind ; and this is
not a springing of man out of something else, as had been the
beginnings of other things, but it is an actual forming. Highest,
if last, this mankind comes ; and not as one but as a pair,
male and female together. These are formed and fashioned
by the hands of a company of Gods, not as if one God alone
were busied with this highest task. Singularly the pair is said
to have been planned, marked out, as it were, before actual
formation, according to the shape and the very outline of the
shadow of Deity. One is inclined to ask, was not the plural
Deity supposed by the author to be two-sexed ?
(f) The philosophy which the poet of this chapter seeks to

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM : FOREWORDS 109
teach is of a lofty rank ; he counts the race of man to which
he belongs a noble line, created for mastery and even for force
ful subjugation of all other things. Notably, those other things
were all only emanations in a way, and not the God's own
handiwork, like man. And the poet was a man of high level
in his courtesies too : he counts woman quite man's equal in
rank, by origin and in prerogative as well. Both he and she
are to subdue and equally to rule.
(g) There are not a few other points of great interest in our
poet-philosopher's discourse, especially some that concern the
nature of the Deities, and of the relation of them to men and
things ; as also in the style of the writing.
(iii) But we have indicated enough, and may pass on to the
remarkable change that appears in the next chapter of this
book, at the middle of the fourth verse.
(a) We have said already that here Deity is quite differently
denominated. He is called the " LORD God ; " or, as we
ought to read, according to the words and meaning in the
Hebrew tongue, He is " Iahweh-Elohim," which means
" Divine lahweh." Thus, a personal name is given to the
Deity in this chapter. Here, then, is a first and somewhat
startling fact, that there is a marked difference between the
ideas of God as held forth in these two chapters.
(b) Now, whoever has read carefully the Pentateuch
must have noticed that this name " lahweh " is declared in
Exodus vi. 2ff. to have been unknown to all the Hebrew
people before the days of Moses, to whom that passage says
it was first revealed. Clearly, Genesis, chap. i. acts on the
belief expressed in Exodus vi. ; and Genesis, chap. ii. does
not so act, but makes as if all Hebrews from the first day of
the world knew the name " lahweh " quite well. The matter
proves thus to be of no little importance ; at all events, the

no OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
difference seemed serious to those old writers and to the
people whose own literature it was.
(c) But, proceeding, we find that there are quite a number
of other differences between the two chapters that thus open
the Book of Genesis. The second chapter is a poem, as was
the first ; but now this chap. ii. is a really lyric and popular
song, not for the philosophical circle, but for the tent door and
the camp fire.
{d) The first day, according to the second chapter's song,
was dry and dusty, as is the autumn time in the land of
Palestine; so it must have been written in that land, for
among the people there the year does begin at the autumn time,
when all things begin to sprout afresh. In this second poem
the plants do not sprout up as of themselves, as they naturally
did in chapter i., from the wet and muddy soil implied
there ; they must be planted, according to this singer's ideas.
Ere they are so planted, and while as yet they could not be so
because there is no rain to water the dry, hard earth, an
autumn mist ascending slowly moistens the powdery dust.
(e) Now is sung the first wonderful event. The Deity
lahweh draws together some of the moistened dust, and
thereof, as a potter would, He moulds a shape : it lies there
silent and still, just like the quiet body of one dead and
lying in the customary tomb in Canaan. But now lahweh,
the life-breather, breathes into the nostrils of that quiet form ;
and at once the form becomes a living man, whom the Deity
lahweh sets in a delightful enclosure as an abode.
(/) Iahweh's second work is to make and plant all herbs
and trees amid the enclosure which the man is to tend and to
protect. (g) While now the man may be a man in form indeed, yet
he is only a child ; for he knows not the difference between

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS in
what is beneficial and what may hurt. Presently there dawns
in him a singular monition that it is best to remain the
simple, unwitting child; for with mature knowledge there
will soon come an end of life. And yet his childlike nature
has a quaint childlike wisdom which is seen in the next stage
in his progress.
(h) For lahweh pities his solitary state ; He seeks to pre
pare for him a fit companion, and fashions and brings to him
all sorts of beasts to see if haply some one of them may be
such a fit comrade. And this child-man cries out to each,
and tells to each its real nature and place ; talking thus with
all the beasts and birds as children talk, simply indeed, yet
with the wonderful superiority as well as familiarity that the
simple man-child has amid all other creatures. No one of
these beasts, however, is found fit to company with the
solitary man for all time. So ends the man's first day of
life, a busy day indeed ; and then he sleeps, with the child's
deep slumber.
(z) On the new day, the second day of the World and
Man, there is one new creation, if only one ; for ere the man
awakes, lahweh has separated him in twain and has fashioned
one " side of him " * into a woman. So beside the Man is now
a fit counterpart, the Woman ; she who at once holds his love,
and for whose daughters henceforth forever men will leave all
else that may be dear, that they may cleave each man unto
his wife.
(iv) What a number of evident differences there are between
these two chapters, and between the two poems in them !
The Deities are different, so the Theologies are different ; the
places and scenery are different, one scene being in the
Babylonian Delta and the other in Canaan ; and the order
* So the Hebrew has it.

112 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
of Creation in the one is quite different from the order in the
other. In the first chapter Man and Woman are created last
of all but together and co-equal ; both are highest, and both
are to rule with equal subduing power over all else. In the
second account Man is the first work of creation, but not Man
with Woman ; the wife appears here last of all, and as the
second day's only work. Many other differences will be clear
enough to the careful reader, but we may not stay to tell of
them save to point out how different is the style of the one
story from the other. Indeed the first is not a story, it is a
philosophical discourse ; while the second is a genuine lyric,
and like a very fairy tale in its delicious, quaint music of the
garden, in its converse of Man with the beasts there, and then
in the dawning vision of Woman, and in the song of love and
home. (v) We say at once, as we realise all these things, that the
great Spirit does not bring about such differences by letting
one and the same man sit down and write these two poems,
first the one and then the other, in the same hour. Here are
the products of two minds ; and indeed here is the product
of two very different ages.
(vi) But now we find farther and quite naturally that these
two men, or two ages, continue to be represented alterna
tely all the way through the books on down to the
" Kings." Nor are these all we find ; there are three com
plete stories interwoven all along the course, and with them
are also interwoven at least three notable books of Law.
Why were they interwoven ? To preserve them all, of course,
as we have already seen.
(vii) The task of unravelling them is not at all too difficult
for those who know their Hebrew well and also their Greek,
and whg will fallow the plain rules of literary examination

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS 113
such as we are bound to use in all other literary study.
Since " all history is the mirror of God's mind, and all things
are the expression of His power,"* and since all literature is
a part of these things ; therefore these precious pieces of
Hebrew literature may not be left out of the world's great
treasure of literature, and counted as outside " the expression
of His power." If we love God truly, and honour that litera
ture fairly, it must be valued as literature as highly as the rest
and handled as faithfully. Then it will yield a rich harvest
of help in light upon our great theme, " What was Jesus ? "
(4) We may now say plainly that it is just this most
necessary unravelling of the stories of the Biblical books that
is often called " Higher Criticism," and although this is not
quite a correct use of the expression, yet it is fairly useful.
We must note, also, that of course no one can undertake this
work of Higher Criticism fully or satisfactorily who is not able
to work at the books in their own Hebrew language ; and
for good reasons, he must also know his Greek very well.
But that does not mean that any one who studies the Old
Testament must first work through this criticism and unravel
the intertwined old stories for himself. Just as any one can
study the geology ot England without first examining for him
self every rock and every layer of rock in the land, if he will
only read thoughtfully the words of those who have devoted
all their attention to those rocks and layers; so any one may
study and master and use the results of those Old Testament
students who have devoted all their attention to this field of
investigation. (5) If we remember this simple fact, we may be helped out
of the still lingering superstition that all of the Old Testament
must be in some way usable as a text-book or collection of
* F. R. Swan, " The Immanence of Christ in Modern Life," passim.
H

114 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
lessons for everyone, whether old or young, to-day. For
example, if any one thinks he must use as a Sunday-school
lesson the story of the man and woman and serpent in Eden,
given in Genesis iii. ; let him listen to the historian who points
out that that story comes from the Iahwistic writers of about
900 b.c, who lived not only long before Jesus, but also before
the moral revolution wrought by the prophet Amos and his
comrades in 750 to 700 B.C. It is far from wise to expect
that Iahwistic school of writers to teach us what ought to be
the real Christian doctrines concerning Sin and its first
beginnings in this human race of ours. The careful historian
will show us incontrovertibly that no moral teaching that is
suitable for us and our children could be taught us by those
Iahwists ; because by the very nature of their Tribal religion
and ideas of duty they could conceive of Abraham treating
Hagar as he did, and could tell of that conduct as a thing
quite proper in the eyes of his readers in his own times.
Moral lessons for children to-day cannot be fairly taken from
the Iahwists ; and their narrative, even of Eden, cannot be
used as a basis for a great Christian doctrine. The fact that
we have sinned rests elsewhere, not there.
(6) Our entry on the use of Bible material leads us thus
evidently at once to serious issues. And so we have to meet
some earnest questions, thus : —
(a) Does someone ask what we are to do for lessons if we
do not use the Eden story ? The answer is ready and very
precious : we reply by asking why we spend our time in
Sunday school so unhistorically over Eden while we have
neglected so utterly to teach in the Sunday school and in the
pulpit the lessons concerning the work of Jesus, the work of
the Holy Spirit, the work of God, that are written in the
nineteenth century, and in the eighteenth century, and the

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS 115
seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, to go no farther back?
Why do not our children and our men and women hear
constantly of Luther and Zwingli, and of Calvin and Knox,
and of the Reformation ; also of Robinson and the Pilgrims,
and of Cromwell and Bunyan, Baxter and Milton and the
Puritans ; likewise of Edwards, and Watts, and the Wesleys,
and Venn, and Fuller? Why have we no lessons on the
great Revival, the grand Missionary Inspiration, or the first
Temperance Crusade; and on Political Freedom, on Sir
Robert Peel's gift of Bread to the Hungry, on Free Education,
and on Peace at the Hague. Why do we not teach about
our Hymns, and Tennyson and Browning? But, stay, we
must go back to the Old Testament, though the purpose in
our digression is obvious. "These things ought ye to have
done." We Christians have left undisplayed — oh, so much —
of the work of God in Christ.
(b) But we need " not leave the other things undone."
Is it still asked, What must we do with the Old Testament ?
Plainly, it is its " story " that we need to teach, not the
" stories." The stories belong to and fit the lower moral and
mental condition of centuries very long gone by ; while the
story is the picture we can see of the gradual Rise of those
Hebrews from the days and ways of cruelty, — the cruelty of
Abraham towards Hagar, and the cruelty of the lahwist in
telling that story, and others like it. They rose from that up
to the level of Jesus. We are seeking the story of the Rise
up from that depth to the day when a Hebrew slave in
Babylon could plan for a world's mission, as in Isaiah xlix.,
and could lift up the Crucifixion, or the same salvation by
suffering, in Isaiah liii. Yes, the Old Testament must,
must be used for that purpose, and then it will be used
truly ! We must cease using it superstitiously !

116 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(c) Finally, the use of all three sorts of narratives in
Genesis as if they were one, and as if they agreed exactly with
one another, has a deadening effect on the mind. He who
reads Genesis i. and ii. with their two different stories of
Creation, and tries to convince himself and his hearers, young
or old, that these two stories coincide or agree, or were written
by the same man and are only intended to supplement each
other, twists violently his own literary sense. He does also
what is more serious : he twists his moral sense, and that of
his audience. Then naturally the audience, and often even
the teacher himself, begin to think there is something not
quite right about the Bible ; and they seek refuge from this
difficulty by laying the volume aside. So reading of the Bible
ceases, through wrong use of it.
(7) By such meditations we are preparing ourselves to
appreciate duly the rich Biblical literature that we possess
concerning Abraham. Here, then, let a word of honour be said
concerning those to whom honour is due. We cannot name
all who deserve honour in this matter. It were needless to
name the heroic students in other countries who have toiled
in the past century to discover fully and to expound thoroughly
all that old literature. Nor will we try to name the host of
devoted men who are doing similar work in our own land in
the present time. But let us name a name that will ever be
held in more and more increasing honour. Colenso did such
careful work, such accurate work, such brilliant work for the
Pentateuch fifty years ago, that to-day all students of the Old
Testament in England and abroad acknowledge him as one of
the wisest scholars, one of the safest guides, one of the most
gifted and skilful leaders. His volumes are just beginning to
be prized. We do not build a sepulchre for this prophet,
who was stoned : we know that he is not dead, but liveth

THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM: FOREWORDS 117
and speaketh. He is alive, like his Master, for evermore. We
might go on to speak in like manner concerning William
Robertson Smith, another crucified son of man. But we will
only add that Robertson Smith's great teacher and colleague
Wellhausen, is outliving all the ignorant dishonour that once
was heaped upon him. Wellhausen has been and is perhaps
the greatest soul among all the living lovers of the Bible.
(8) The final word among these forewords is that we have
three, or indeed four, separate literary sources of knowledge
concerning Abraham, and our next task is to compare these,
Then out of these four very various reports concerning him we
have to try to reconstruct his actual history, and, finally, we
must estimate his religious character. The four reports are :
(i) The Iahwistic description, written about 900 B.C.,
before the great prophetic and moral revolution ; (ii) the
Elohistic description, written, say, 750 to 700 B.C.,
during or after that moral change ; (iii) the priestly
record, written about 450 B.C. by Jews after the exile; and
(iv) the strange " Melchizedek " story of Genesis xiv., written
later still. We shall use and refer to the translations and
paragraphs of these various records, as they are given in the
author's "Old Testament Theology," vol. ii., and in his
" Abraham and the Patriarchal Age." In the latter " J " is
on pp. 6 to 21 ; " E," on pp. 21 to 31 ; " P," on pp. 31 to
40.

CHAPTER XII
ABRAHAM : THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM
(I) As we open the Four Records, and read each in its
Reconstructed state, let us say on the threshold a few plain
things : —
(i)Many a minister and rather timid theologian cries out that
he longs for reconstruction. Let such men, of their good
ness, listen to a twofold answer to this welcome longing.
Here in our present task we are giving the Reconstruction ;
and, indeed, it is just a Reconstructive work that has been
busying Old Testament students for a long time. The
analytical work was necessary to be done first ; but that was
virtually completed twenty-five years ago, and the agreement
of the men who have worked at it is astonishing. There is
a fine and remarkable consensus, and there has long been
such consensus on all important points in the Analysis or
Unravelling Work. Many books are already in the hands of
the public* which describe the Reconstruction, as in simplest
fashion we are here seeking to do.
(2) We cannot but be deeply moved as we note in many
* The following works may be named : (1) All the works of
Robertson Smith. (2) Wellhausen's " History of Israel," 1878.
(3) Kittel's "History of the Hebrews,'' 1896. (4) Addis's " Hebrew
Religion," 1907. (5) Marti's " Hebrew Religion. " Nos. 3 to 5 have been

ABRAHAM : THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 119
minds a difficulty in freeing themselves from traditional and
customary ways of thinking. Of course, many a traditional
way is very valuable, but the real value is to be seen and used
only when the tradition is not allowed to rule, but is ruled
and is made to unfold itself and disclose the old kernel idea
or historical event that became encrusted with unreal fancies.
(a) For example, we may name the tradition that " Moses "
wrote all the " Books of Moses." The tradition arose
because the Pentateuch was, so to speak, the Book of the
Doctrines of the " Mosaic," i.e., the Jewish, Religion and
Worship ; and this fact that it was believed to be the Mosaic
Doctrine gave easy origin to the fancy that Moses was the
writer. Said they, "The Author of the Mosaic Revelation of
Exodus, &c. must have been the Author of the Record
of it." But the tradition that Moses wrote the books breaks
down absolutely when we find that those books, and several
other books with them, were woven together some noo years
after Moses lived, and that they were woven together out of
three or four older books : one, the Iahwistic book (J),
written about 900 B.C., i.e., half a millennium after Moses ;
another, the Elohistic (E), written two centuries later still,
say 700 b.c ; and the third, the much later book which tells
all about the gorgeous tabernacle and the high priest, priests
and Levites, which is known now as the Priestly book (P),
and which was written about 450 B.C. away in Babylon. If
we can grasp these clear vertebrce or joints in the framework of
our great history of Jesus, then the glory of that history will
rise upon us.
published by Williams and Norgate. (6) " Hebrew Theology and
Ethics," by the present writer : pub., Nimmo, 1901. (7) Above all,
many articles in the "Encyclopaedia Biblica," A. and C. Black, 1901,
and in the other Bible Dictionaries.

r20 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(b) Another traditional blind alley is the fancy that all
those books are in some mysterious way a sort of law book
for us, a part of the great Canon of God ; and therefore
Religious and Christian lessons must be made out of every
part of this canon, lessons even for little children, and for
busy wage-earners, and so on. One is tempted to wish that
that terrible word " Canon " had never been invented. It
has its value, of course ; it is a relic of the " rules of govern
ment " of the great "Socialist" system of early Christianity
that grew up out of the first Christians' desire to see no
brother hungering, and to send him from one town where
he was unemployed to brethren in some other town who
would give him employment. Naturally there came to be
rules of membership for such a system, and one of these
was the Rule, or so-called Canon of authorised books to be
read and examined on. But Jesus set no canon. He did
not even use much of the really original Old Testament;
He used no " ruling books."
(3) Someone says: "Yet, after all, these books are the
material out of which we are to build up the story of our
great Saviour and Lord Jesus. Surely no books are so
precious ; surely our lessons should be taken from these
rather than from any other books." A two-fold answer is
ready :
(i) We must certainly use the story of Jesus, for which
these stories are the material. The wise man will read the
latter carefully, and then he can teach the former skilfully.
(ii) But again, as we have already hinted, are not the
books that tell us of the genuine Christian progress of the
nineteenth century, its missionary records, its glorious hymns,
and a myriad more phenomena, — are not all these really parts
of the history of Jesus and of His royal guidance and of His

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 121
redeeming triumphs? Of course they are. Thou thyself,
O soul, art a bearer of the Lord Jesus formed within thee.
All thy own simple story — domestic, industrial, and national
— is His story : teach concerning that.
(4) When we grasp these facts we can go on to ask what
were the various records about Abraham, what they signify,
and what they prove. So we shall ask, first : —
(i) What the Iahwistic folk in 900 B.C. thought in their
simple way about Abraham. Those Iahwists of that date
were not at all students of history ; but they loved to paint
what they were able to conceive might have been the story
of their ancestors of 1800 b.c, i.e., 900 years earlier. They
made mistakes, as we shall see. Moreover they fancied and
believed and set down some things that are not wholesome
reading for any but the historically analysing student. But
God was holding them in all this ; that was the way in which
He made them. As it is His way with simple souls now, so
it was His way with those Iahwistic people in Elijah's day.
(ii) Then after our study of the Iahwists' story of the
Patriarch, we shall ask what ideas about Abraham those
Elohistic people had who helped Amos and Isaiah in the
great Moral Reformation. The Elohists lived and wrote about
750 to 700 B.C., and so were in order of time the next
narrators after the Iahwists. Here at once we shall find
these Elohistic reformers and comrades of the prophet
neglecting and even contradicting what the Iahwistic story
had said 200 years before. We must be ready for such con
tradictions and we must learn to grasp what they mean. It
is easy to consider that the Elohists who helped Amos to say,
" Seek good and lahweh will be with you, as you wish,"
could not believe that the greatest Hebrew ancestor, Abraham,
had done such unholy deeds as the Iahwists had thought it

122 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
was quite right for their Abraham to do, and for them to
write down and tell. Naturally the reforming Elohists took
the Iahwistic story all to pieces, and then rewrote it in quite
another form in order to picture what their views of right and
wrong led them to suppose was the real story, or at least
ought to have been so. Of course this process was not his
torically justifiable; but we do not expect them to have been
historians. They simply said what they believed it was right
to say. If we hesitate with our approval of such writing, we
must remember that they firmly believed that it was their
God that inspired them to alter the old record as they did ;
and they believed that His inspirations within themselves
proved the Iahwists to have been mistaken. They said some
things had not happened which the Iahwists had said did
happen. They altered the unholy stories about Abraham, and
they put in some entirely new stories also. They made this
most important of all changes, that they gave an entirely new
picture of God ; they gave their picture of the God whom
they thought Abraham must have known and worshipped. We
shall see that they never speak of Abraham as calling his God
" lahweh." Never once did they let a patriarch before Moses'
time use that name for God. For that plan and change they
had a singular reason, a very theological reason, and really
not an historical reason at all. Here " E," * and so also " P "
in after ages, depart clearly from the historical fact, which
we gather from "J."
(iii) The difficulties are going to multiply upon our hands :
they grow more serious and startling when we find that " P,"
the Priestly man of Nehemiah's day, 450 B.C., departs indeed
much farther than " E " does from the story which the
* Henceforth we may use the initial letters " J,'' " E," " P " ; instead
of the full words lahwist, Elohist, &c.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 123
Iahwists had written and believed 500 years earlier. This
Priestly writer of Nehemiah's time gives us a story of Abraham
that is certainly much better than either of the older stories
in a moral sense, but which is incredibly strange and incorrect
in the strictly historical sense.
(II) We proceed to consider the wise and proper way of
using the Records. We have said those introductory words
in order to lead up to the correct method of valuing the
different stories, to guide us in going beneath them all, and to
show us how we may put the finger upon the actual historical
facts concerning the old patriarch.
( 1 ) Our wise plan must be to read the separated stories,
each one by itself. We must examine " J " first, making a
careful estimate of its contents and nature; then we
must read " E " similarly ; and then we must handle " P " in
like manner. It is vain to try to conceive what these Docu
ments and their stories are, unless we see them separately.
Anyone could pick out the various bits for himself and so
might set together fully by itself the whole of each story, by
carefully following the analysis that has been made by those
who can use the Hebrew text. That would not indeed be a
difficult task ; yet certainly very few feel able to do it
thoroughly. But students have already printed the three records, or
nearly all of them, in separate and complete form ; and the
work of such students can be used comfortably. Dr. Bacon,
Professor of New Testament Theology in Yale University,
U.S.A., did this work while he was a Congregational pastor
in Oswego, New York. His " Genesis of Genesis " and
"Triple Tradition of the Exodus"* are invaluable. The
* Both published by the Students' Publishing Society, Hartford,
U.S.A., 1893-4.

124 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
present writer has tried to follow Dr. Bacon by printing the
lahwist and the Elohist in full in his " Old Testament
Theology," vol. ii.,* and also in a summary form in his
" Hebrew Religion and Ethics," f while in his " Abraham and
the Patriarchal Age " | he has given all the stories and various
literature, so far as these concern Abraham, in full translation
and arranged in chronological order.
(2) For our work here, we shall suppose that these three,
or four, restored separate records have been read by those who
follow our present course of study, and we shall simply state
briefly the sum of the contents of each distinct story separately.
We are much mistaken if this procedure does not show the
reader that very much less is said about Abraham than is
ordinarily supposed. Moreover, if very little is actually said
about this ancestor in Genesis, it is far more surprising to
look for mention of him in the books of the prophets Amos,
Hosea, and Isaiah, who were busy in their great preaching
and reforming work just at the very time when the Elohists
were busy writing their new story. What does Amos tell us
about Abraham ? And what have Hosea and Isaiah to say
of this great first Hebrew ? We shall find, if we look, that
there are no references made to this patriarch in the writings
we possess of any prophet living before the exile, 600 B.C.
It seems incredible ! But it is true that Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,
Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, who all preached the
keenest appeals to the Hebrews to seek Goodness, took no
text and no help from the story of Abraham ! The most
remarkable fact of all is that " Hosea seems deliberately to
avoid the subject." Those early prophets had not risen to any
* Published by A. and C. Black, 1900.
t Published by Scribner's Sons, and by Nimmo, 1902.
X Published by Dent, 1903.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 125
enthusiasm for Abraham ; and, indeed, how could they, when
the only record they knew about him was the Iahwistic book
with its often unholy incidents ? Let us add that Ezekiel,
ch. xvi., has a story of the first patriarch, that is amazingly
different from all the other accounts ; for the prophet declares
him to have been an Amorite, and his wife a Hittite. The
name " Abraham " is not used here, and appears only once in
all Ezekiel.
(Ill) We proceed to give outlines of the three or four
records, " J," " E," " P," and the " Melchizedek " (" M ")
story of Genesis xiv. See the author's " Abraham."
1 — The Iahwists' Record concerning Abraham.
This " J " record, written about 900 B.c, has eleven short
paragraphs concerning the Patriarch. See "Abraham " pp. 6 ff.
(i) The first paragraph tells of early Hebrew ancestors
emigrating from the Babylonian regions on the Delta of the
Euphrates and the Tigris, where King Hamurabi had reigned
so well in earlier centuries. Abraham was one of these
emigrators ; he was a sort of sheikh or prince, and he had high
princely relations. He seems to have been the leader of a
kind of mutineers, or at least of pioneers, who broke away from
the well-ordered nation under a deep inward impulse, and
pushed away out to find a new life in the west.
(ii) The second paragraph tells how, in going thus, this
man was conscious of inner illumination and impulse and
believed that it was given him by the lahweh whom he
worshipped as his own well-known and well-beloved Deity.
Under this impulse, says "J," he reached Canaan and was a
nomad there, and wherever he planted the tents of his com
pany he erected a " Slaying-place," commonly called an

126 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
"altar," in our versions, where he and his held fellowship
with the God lahweh by means of feasts of the flesh of the slain
animals. Especially, says " J," did Abraham haunt the regions
about Shechem, that very central high mountain pass which
was always a favourite place of worship. Doubtless this was
because of its position, and because it was visible from almost
any part of the country. *
(iii) Then we read in the next section that the company
grew, and some part of it hived off. But here comes a state
ment that is certainly unhistorical. The separated sub-
company are said to have gone and settled where the Dead
Sea is now; but geologists tell us that the fault or cataclysm that
made the sunken Dead Sea occurred vast ages before 1800 B.C.
It was not a volcanic cataclysm at all, as the " J " story seems
to imply, but a simple subsidence ; and this subsiding process
must have required many ten thousands of years to produce
the present condition.
(iv) The fourth paragraph is a picture of an elaborate cere
mony of worship carried on by means of a Slain-Feast, with
earnest prayers, followed by a consciousness of Iahweh's certain
purpose to bless and to answer with rich joys.
(v) Now comes a sad tale. Abraham turns out from his
tent, and from his camp and away into the desert, his natural
wife Hagar, forcing her thus to wander alone among all
fierce dangers ; until, out and away there, her babe and his is
born. The lahwist does, indeed, tone down the horror of
this a little by telling us how surely lahweh would care for the
outcast wife and son, the mother and the new-born babe.
But this is just a touch of that peculiar sense, notable in this
* Dr. G. Adam Smith, in his " Geographical History of Palestine,"
has thrown valuable light on this naturally central position of Shechem.
His index will guide the student to several references to the matter.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 127
Iahwistic writer, that the ways of his times were not as good as
they ought to be. Read now, however, the next paragraph. ,.j
(vi) For this next section startles us in two ways. It is a
genuine picture of what we call the anthropomorphic ideas of
the Iahwists. They represent the God lahweh as visiting
Abraham, sitting at his table and conversing with him,
especially about his strongest desire, which was his longing for
another son. This startles us, for it is very unlike our way of
thinking of God ; and it is also startling that lahweh should be
so friendly with him who had so abused Hagar. It is clear
that the Iahwists thought, after all, that their God did not
seriously disapprove of Abraham's awful treatment of an
expectant mother. A God is always conceived by a worshipper
to be just something like the worshipper himself, only of
course more powerful. A man's picture of his God is always
really a picture of the man himself. So it has always been,
therefore we can tell what the character of those Iahwists was
by watching what character they thought their God had.
(vii) A paragraph and picture follow here which give the
Iahwists' idea of the cataclysm which came, as they thought
upon the plain that became the Dead Sea. They were mis
takenly trying to conceive how the great geological change had
come about ; but their effort shows plainly how little they
really knew of the events of Abraham's time, for had they known
they could not have located there an impossible occurrence.
Yet the effort is valuable, just because it makes us sure of the
historical reliability or otherwise of the " J " narrators. They
go on to add a horrible story that is all the more undesirable
because it implies a slur on two sister Semitic tribes, the
Moabites and the Ammonites. Yet there the story stands ;
and we must not try to think it is not there, or that the
Iahwists did not put it there. They did, and that was their

128 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
way ; alas, that was their religion. That was tribal religion ;
it was full of horrible jealousies and cruelties in deed and
word. (viii) The story tells now how a son is born to Abraham
and his princess wife ; for " princess " is the meaning of
" Sarah." This new-born patriarch's name, Isaac, means that
he and his were a " laughing or merry folk," as was natural in
tribalism, on one side of its character.
(ix) We read next that the tribe had wide relationships,
and that all the related clans were united by peculiar customs
of ritual and worship.
(x) The writers go on, however, to record their faith that
there was always the central family line which the God lahweh
favoured specially. Here, of course, " J " is claiming the
special Divine favour of his own tribal Deity for his own
tribal kin; and this ought to be noted carefully. The
Iahwists said and believed that lahweh favoured this line;
it does not therefore follow that we are bound to believe that
God, the great true Spirit, favoured the family specially. To
think so would be indeed to make the words of the Iahwists
into a Canon for us ; and that we must not do, and we cease
doing it as soon as we realise what the Iahwists were. In
deed, the Iahwists themselves never dreamed that lahweh was
the God of all men, or that Iahweh's will and purpose had any
concern with us or any non-Hebrews. He belonged only to
the Hebrew clans and their relations ; and the Iahwists would
have been amazed had they been told that the ways of their
God should ever be supposed to be a law for any other
beings. (xi) In the next section this favoured line is said to have
been closely linked in blood-kinship with Aramaean peoples
near Damascus in the North-east.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 129
(xii) We discover finally a section that must have belonged
to a secondary Iahwistic story, and which pictures Abraham
as willing to enter into blood-kinship with Pharaoh of Egypt,
as others of his line were also willing to do. The efforts to
form this alliance were rather dishonourable ; all the same,
some such efforts were evidently made. Such sort of records,
that impute faults to the story's great hero, are always doubt
less true history.
2 — The Elohists' Record concerning Abraham.
As we proceed to study the " E " story, it is of much perti
nence and importance to relate the following incident, and to
estimate its significance. The presiding officer at a recent
notable denominational ordination counselled the young can
didates for the ministry seated before him to allow the mutual
contradictions of Biblical scholars to be enough answer to
their startling critical propositions and advancing ideas.
Oddly enough, and very significantly, this presiding officer
then at once proceeded to discount this advice by bidding his
young friends keep in sympathy with those same Biblical
scholars. " Distrust them, yet learn from them ! They are
not of our sort ; but they are sometimes of the right sort as
teachers ! " That was the substance of his advice.
Let us propose to such a presiding officer and to his young
candidates for ordination this query : Do the Old Testament
scholars utterly contradict each other as to the existence of
the three elements or original documents and sources that we
have declared to be discoverable in Genesis, Exodus, &c. ?
If the scholars are not to be followed when they do not agree,
and for the reason that they contradict each other ; then surely
here they should be followed, for clearly they do not contra
dict each other in this discovery of " J," " E," and " P," a
discovery made and acknowledged by all of them. The pre-
1

130 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
siding officer at the ordination gave an illustration of the
scholars' contradiction of one another : he found such a con
tradiction in a recent critical assertion that Luke did actually
write the third Gospel, whereas many students had previously
doubted whether Luke could have written that little book.
Now, in the first place, that report of a critical assertion con
cerning Luke is certainly to be taken in a seriously modified
way. And, in the second place, even if Professor Harnack,
the critical scholar in question, had actually asserted that
" what was formerly believed concerning Luke " is now
found to be fact, as the presiding officer puts it ; then this also
is certain, that the scholar and the presiding officer base their
beliefs and their statement concerning Luke on two quite
different foundations. The scholar bases his utterances on
strict literary and historical analysis of the documents and the
evidence. The presiding officer's very word " we " means
evidently the Traditional Voice of the Pulpits. Will that
presiding officer now submit all such traditional utterances to
strict historical examination, and will he abide by the result ?
Happily, indeed, our presiding friend is not fully satisfied
with traditions, either for his young ministers or for himself;
and he counsels a learning from the Biblical scholars. He is
wise ; and the first thing and the main thing for the young
ministers to learn is the method of the Biblical scholars. The
results obtained by scholars must be improved daily, and may
be altered very much from time to time, and there may seem
to be at times among them some self-contradictions ; but all
the time the scholars with their literary questionings are
determinedly seeking to learn the laws of the universe and of
God, the methods of the actual creation of things and men,
and of worlds and thought, and of customs and opinions and
records. These laws are the laws of God, and His laws
change not. Let us find God's laws.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 131
We turn to our study of the second of the three or four
documents concerning Abraham. We have looked at the
Iahwistic account of him, and now we have to place beside
that the parallel Elohistic account written evidently under
very different conditions. The Iahwistic writers living about
900 b.c, seem to have set down just the traditions current in
their own time, with the regnant idea of joy in the Davidic
monarchy threading through all that they wrote. The Elohists
lived and thought and wrote some two centuries later, about
750 to 700 b.c. ; and they were the literary men alongside of
Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. So while those Prophets preached
moral reform, the Elohistic Narrators sought to further the
same reform by circulating a new written account of the past.
By such a written account the purpose was, we may believe)
to condemn and reject the old tribal and poorly moral religion
of the Iahwists. The new Elohistic account was based on
the reformed moral principles ; and the new story refused to
think of Abraham as doing things that the Iahwists had quite
naturally set down as deeds of his. The Elohists were under
the ruling influence of a new theology as we have seen already,
and they had gained a quite new idea of the Divine nature
and the Divine ways and deeds of the God whom nevertheless
they still loved to call Iahweh.
The new aim and spirit are clearly manifest in the first
peculiarity that meets the eye the moment we read " E." It
is that as the prophets Amos and Isaiah and Hosea preached
that the people did not know the real God lahweh, so the
Elohists describe Abraham as knowing nothing at all about
lahweh, but only knowing Gods, i.e., Elohim, in general. It
is because of this way of theirs that we, call them Elohists.
Said the Elohists, " The real lahweh is far above us : He
does not sit at the tent door, to eat and to talk. He gives us
revelations indeed, but they come by voices from the sky or in

132 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
dreams. He is not easily known ; there were long ages
when He was not known at all, and in these later days
most of us have forgotten what He is and what are His mind
and ways and will. We have to learn it all again, and then to
learn more still. So also the true goodness is very different
from what we have thought : it needs to be learned amid slow
testings and trial, and by suffering."
Now we must see at once that all this theological tendency in
the Elohists and their altering an older story, so as to make it
agree with their new theology, must clearly prove them not
strictly historical, although the moral and theological levels of
" E " are higher by far than those of the Iahwists had been.
The Iahwists' reports are historically the more valuable, at
least so far as we can now see. We turn to describe the six
paragraphs of " E " as these are translated in the present
writer's "Abraham."*
(i) The first paragraph is to be found, strangely enough,
not in Genesis but in the Book of Joshua. It is a little un
certain how the opening lines of the " E " story ran : they
have not been preserved in Genesis, but are quoted in the
Farewell Address attributed to Joshua. We find there that on
the whole " E " agrees with " J " in counting Abraham as a
migrator from the Euphrates Delta to Canaan, where he became
a nomad. And now at once " E " says that the Patriarch
worshipped " the Gods." The name " lahweh " is not used;
as we have said, it is carefully avoided by " E " until we are
told in Exodus iii. that Moses learned it and made it known
to his suffering companions as a great word of cheer for
them. (ii) In the second paragraph Abraham is pictured as
anxious about his family. But through the influence of a
* See "Abraham and the Patriarchal Age," pp. 21 ff. ; also "Old
Testament Theology," vol. ii. pp. 319/.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 133
dream he becomes convinced that all will by-and-bye be well ;
although for four centuries his descendants are to be in slavery
in a foreign land. Note here : (a) that the method of vaticinium
post eventu, i.e., of prediction reported after the things pre
dicted have occurred, is quite naively practised. Of course,
his prediction is supposed to have been given in 1800 b.c,
but the story of it could not be written down until at least the
time of Moses in 1400 B.C., i.e., 400 hundred years later.
Note also (b) that the story of slavery in Egypt is historically
correct ; for " J " and " E " agree in reporting it, and other
writers report it also. And we note (e) that at once we find
that dreams are the means of Divine communication with man.
The Gods are far away in the Unseen, and are not Abraham's
every-day companions, as lahweh had been according to " J."
(iii) Paragraph third describes the abduction of Sarah by
a neighbouring sheikh ; this act being due to the untruthful
ness of Abraham. Abraham excuses his untruth ; " for," he
says " the sheikh and his people do not know the Gods, and
so they will be murderous." Observe :
(a) This excuse has a touch of the influence of the prophet
Hosea, who taught that knowledge of God would keep men
from evil.
(b) Abraham is described by the Gods as a " Prophet,"
i.e., one who has received inspiration by a Divine afflatus,
and has therefore a closer knowledge of God and a great
influence with him. The function of the Prophet is naturally
therefore to approach God and to plead concerning men who
have done wrong. Thus we find that in the Elohists' economy
the Prophet is regarded as of very marked importance : he
above all men must be protected from injury, he must be
honoured, and must be trusted. This reflects exactly the
attitude of the people in the age to which we have attributed
" E " ; for then the works of the Prophet Amos and his com-

134 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
rades were held to be of extreme importance, as is evident
from the fact that their written utterances were preserved, and
that in a remarkably perfect condition. We see that when we
read " E " we are in the neighbourhood of those Prophets.
(c) The " E " story is probably historically correct in saying
that the early Hebrews were subject to abductions. But the
imputation of the character and functions of the Prophets of
750 b.c to the Abraham of 1800 B.C. is rather an unhistorical
Elohistic effort to exalt the prophetic influence by counting it
a thing of such hoary age.
(iv) The fourth paragraph gives quite a new picture of
Abraham's conduct towards Hagar. " J " had told us, un
hesitatingly, that Abraham turned her out to the wildest
dangers with her babe unborn. Not so " E " ! He writes
that the child Ishmael is already quite a boy, old enough to
laugh at the baby Isaac, ere he and his mother are cast out.
It is thus Ishmael's fault, not Hagar's, that the two are
expelled. And " E " makes Abraham take the ejection very
much to heart; he is fairly manly. He gives the expelled
ones a supply of food and water ; and he lifts the little boy
Ishmael and sets him on the mother's shoulder. Here, then,
"E " is far and away above " J " in moral ideal.
(v) The paragraph following seeks to explain the origin
of a famous well, which is a sanctuary. It was a place where
Abraham was acknowledged as an equal by another nomadic
sheikh of great and even royal importance.
(vi) Now we reach the last and the greatest of all the
Elohistic pictures. Abraham is described as purposing to
slay his son Isaac for a sacrificial feast in honour of the Gods,
Who are to share the feast. He is cfuite convinced that the
act is ordained by the Gods and is his own bounden duty.
But he alters his mind at the very last and most critical
moment. Here evidently the Elohists are trying to fight

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 135
against the practice of child-sacrifice, which was quite common
in 700 b.c and even much later.* " E " has seen into God's
heart far more deeply than " J " had, and knows that God
desires the opposite of what " J " thought he desired. The
Elohistic companions of the Prophets say in effect, "Why,
Abraham gave it up 1100 years ago!" Quite possibly they
were correct, although the Iahwists had said nothing about
such a renunciation of the practice. Probably the Iahwists
knew well enough about the practice, but did not count it at
all wrong ; they may have known of Abraham's renunciation
of it, but did not count its renunciation by him a thing
of enough importance to be recorded. But the Elohists felt
it very important to teach the people by such a story that
they ought to give up their customary child-sacrifice.
Such, then, is the whole extent of the Elohistic story con
cerning Abraham ; not a very large record, as we see.
We have now before us virtually or nearly all that is neces
sary for deciding what we can say was the actual history of
Abraham and his fellow patriarchs. Clearly, the two sources
of information that we have already studied do not tell us
much. And there is little or nothing more to be added.
The Iahwistic Narrators of 900 b.c had the most to tell us,
in their eleven or twelve paragraphs. Two hundred years
later the Elohists have only half as long a story. The Patri
arch did not bulk largely in their view as a text or theme for
Moral instruction, as how could he ; and we remember that
Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah never say a word about him. Those
* See Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's prohibitions of it : Jeremiah vii. 31,
xix. 5, xxxii. 35, and Ezekiel xvi. 20, xx. 26 : all of which passages
show that the custom was known , not as an old and past and theoretical
evil, but as a practical and present habit. The last passage named is
especially significant as declaring that lahweh had commanded the
people to practise such sacrifice ! Even the eating the human flesh is
described in Ezek. xvi. 20 : " sons slain for eating " !

136 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
great Moral reformers did not use him in their preaching ; nor
did any prophet so use him until the Exile time, for Nahum,
Zephaniah, and Jeremiah leave him out of all notice.
However, we have to see that there was something else
said about him in the ages long afterwards, when the Hebrews
were all gone and the new Judaism had arisen. As we pass to
a sight of that later narrative, let us observe why it has been
right and imperative to linger rather long over this topic
"Abraham." In religious periodicals there is a nascent
awakening and a murmur that it will be well for ministers
and churches to begin to provide for the people, and the
earnest would-be Bible readers, some idea of the results of
modern Biblical study. Men and women who feel that they
must think about religion far more, and far more correctly, than
has been customary for many a day, are discovering that they
simply cannot read the Old Testament through in the old way.
In plain words, the old way of thinking and the old attitude
towards God and the Bible have proved useless. This is why
some teachers feel compelled to say plainly : " We must have
a New Theology ! " At least we must study a Modern Old
Testament Theology. At the same time some writers in the
weekly religious press cry out that they only wish their Old
Testament Instruction to be very devout. We will not com
plain of those who tell teachers to be more devout; they
cannot counsel that more strongly than a teacher's own heart
does. So it has been out of eager devotion, and out of in
tense desire to know the Story of Jesus and to tell it, that we
have devoted so many pages to this subject : " What was
Abraham ? " We are compelled by love of Jesus to ask
what we can know of this earliest definitely Hebrew Ancestor
of our Saviour and Master. The study of how He came,
" according to the flesh," is the indispensable method of learn
ing to know Him in whom " the Word was made flesh and

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 137
dwelt among us, full of Grace and Truth ! " What does his
tory say about the racial beginning of that beam of light in
man on earth ?
But now we return to the Records. We have asked : first,
what do the Iahwistic writers tell us ? Then, secondly, we
inquired what changed story the Elohistic writers gave, as they
worked alongside of the Prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and
under the same great converting, reforming, revealing in
fluence that inspired those great men ?
3 — The Priestly Record Concerning Abraham.
Thirdly, now we have to set down all that the Priestly
writers, " P," thought it best to tell about their first Hebrew
ancestor ; and we shall find that it was not much. Recall for
a moment who they were, and that they lived beside Nehemiah,
450 b.c, a century and a half after the Exile began. The
first prophet in the Exile, Ezekiel, had believed that that
slavery in Babylon was a judgment of God against the
Hebrews, because of their failure to practise the Deutero
nomic plan of a worship ; and he believed that he must preach
to them, not less than Deuteronomy prescribed, but a still
more elaborate system. So he sketched in Babylon a plan
for what he thought would be the right worship. Ezekiel's
plan must have been brought to Jerusalem, but it was never
carried out ; and indeed it could not, for it was too academic,
so to speak, and impracticable. But then, instead of it, the
Priestly or " Ezra " writers on the Euphrates in Nehemiah's
time drew up in " P " their still more elaborate plan ; they
sent it from Babylon to Jerusalem, and it was at once put
into practice.
Now, as an introduction to this Plan for Worship,* those
* It is to be found in Exodus xxv. and onward into Leviticus.

138 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Priestly writers wrote a new Story of Creation, and of the
Flood and Noah, and of Abraham and his descendants.
They wrote very meagre accounts of these things, for their
great interest lay elsewhere ; they were most eager to describe
their New Plan of Ritual and Priestly Worship, which they
claimed to be just what Moses had received on the Mount of
Sinai. Of course, they would have claimed that the inspiration
of lahweh had told them it was so. For their Story of the
earliest things they followed a combination of the " J " and
" E " narratives, but by no means adhering to these as if they
were infallible. " P " alters " J " and " E," just as " E "
had altered " J " long before ; for " P " has his own theories,
and he alters history to fit them.
Now one of these " P " writers' theories was that the
Hebrew God lahweh was never known by that name and
character till Moses lived. This had been an Elohistic theory,
as we have seen ; and the " P " writers accepted it, as we
may see in Exodus, chapter vi. " P's " theory is indeed more
elaborate than " E's " : for "P " tells us that the Patriarchs had
known their God by a definite name, but that name was " El-
Shaddai." No Patriarch ever knew the Great Name "lahweh."
Another of their Priestly ideas was that there could not be
any proper worship until the proper plan for it was given to
Moses on Mount Sinai ; for just that plan was, thought they,
what Moses received on that mountain. Indeed, so long as
they did not know lahweh, how could they possibly worship
Him. The Priestly writer or School has still other pecu
liarities, but now we know enough to understand the " P "
story, which we proceed to sketch. See " Abraham," pp. 31 ff.
(i) The first paragraph says that it was no impulse from
God that led Abraham to go from the East to Canaan : he
simply went on what some would call his merely human
initiative. And reading further in the narrative, we find that

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 139
" P " teaches deliberately that Abraham never had any
intercourse with any Gods at all until the patriarch was 99
years old ! Then a Deity who called Himself El-Shaddai
spoke to the lonely man and directed him to practise
circumcision. A strange story and theory this is indeed, but
the reader will find it is exactly as we say. Why should the
Deity bid him circumcise ? For this reason doubtless, that it
seemed a matter of great importance in Jerusalem in 450 b.c
to exclude from Jewish privileges all persons who were not
full-blooded descendants of the Hebrews. This must have
been the inspiring occasion for the Priestly writers' construc
tion of this story of Abraham and circumcision ; it was to
secure a secret bodily mark upon every genuine Jew. But
" J " and " E " had mentioned nothing of this sort, and of
course the story cannot belong to actual history.
(ii) In the next paragraph we find another unhistorical
statement of this " P " story ; but it imputes to Abraham a
much more manly character as a husband than " J " or even
" E " had allowed. Both the latter had pictured him turning
Hagar out ; but " P " pictures him keeping Hagar's son,
Ishmael, always at home, as his first-born and honoured child.
The moral character of the Jews in " P's " time was far
higher than the character of the Hebrews of David's time or
of Elijah's day. The moral influence of the Prophets had
been working in the people for 300 years when the " P "
narrators wrote. This is why " P " could not make Abraham
seem to have been so cruel. But of course " P " cannot be
giving us correct history in this matter, although it is a more
desirable story; very certainly "J" and "E" cannot have
been giving a merely fancy picture when they said that
Abraham was cruel. Nay, more, for the same reason the
worst of all three stories, namely the Iahwist's, must be the
most nearly correct. We cannot suppose that the Iahwists

140 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
invented their cruel story of Abraham : for what reason could
possibly be assigned for such an invention ? They could not
have any spite against the Patriarch, nor could they have any
other reason for relating anything but the best they knew.
And what they knew must have been learned by them as it
was handed down through the ages in tradition, which likewise
was fairly sure not to make the story any worse than the
reality. The reality must have been what we to-day call
cruel. (iii) There is only one more paragraph in "P's" story
of the first Hebrew Patriarch; it tells us that Abraham
secured a piece of landed property in Canaan by purchase.
But here again " P " is no doubt historically wrong, although
" E " has a somewhat similar statement ; for both " J " and
" E " tell us that the early Hebrews seized their first landed
possession in Canaan by violence. Of course " P " was
anxious to say that they did obtain such land, but he would
also wish to teach that they came by it honourably. In such
a case the worse story is sure to be the true one, as we have
seen above, especially when it is contradicted by a later and
more desirable tale.
Such, then, is the little all that " P " has to tell us of
Abraham ! Strange, but true, that this great charter of the
Jews adds virtually nothing to our knowledge of that first
ancestor of their race. " P's " great value is that it lets us
see the religious and moral condition, — not of the early
Hebrews — but of the Jews of Nehemiah's time, 450 B.C. It
illustrates also their methods of dealing with old records ;
for it shows how they felt free to alter such records without
hesitation in order to make them suit the doctrines which
they held, and which, of course, they believed their God had
taught them. It was their doctrine and their particular
opinions that were important to them above all things ; to

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 141
them their opinions were far more important than what we
would call historical accuracy. Indeed, they would never
dream of such accuracy as at all important.
4 — The Fourth or Melchizedek (" M ") Record.
There is a fourth story, " M," concerning our patriarch
Abraham. It is contained in Genesis xiv. The writer of
this lived very certainly not long before Jesus was born-
And yet the tradition recorded by this writer, namely, that
Abraham was a rather powerful fighting sheikh, was no doubt
perfectly correct, as we shall see presently.
(IV) — Summary Concerning Abraham
Now let us set together in summary all that we know
correctly concerning the patriarch and his early followers.
There is, indeed, not much to be asserted,
1. Those people were immigrants into the Western Land,
having come away from the Euphrates Delta under an inward
impelling influence; and certainly that influence stirring
them to uncontrollable restless movement was God. He
was the influence that had been mighty for ages, among
their still earlier ancestors. The guiding spirit is always
God, for there is none other ; and so the " J " nanators were
quite right in saying it was lahweh who urged Abraham to
go. The inner, moving, inevitable hand and voice in each
soul and man are the voice and the hand of that man's God,
the Unseen Power whom he must obey. And it must be a
historical fact that Providence led this Canaanite emigration
from Babylon to the West.
2. Abraham, for so we may call the first of those wan
derers, since the word means simply the " High Father," —

142 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
this Abraham and his early descendants were, like the
Bedouins of to-day, both shepherds and men of war. They were
thoroughly religious ; they felt and acknowledged the voice
and guidance of their Divine Patron and fellow-tribesman,
whom they called " lahweh." But this God's interests were
entirely for this one tribe ; and He and they could be and
were fiercely cruel towards any tribe, or person, or God that
dared to cross those interests. Their worship consisted in
the joy which is rightly called " thanksgiving," uttered in
shout and song over a feast of slain flesh ; there and then in
the strength of excitement by such food they would pledge
themselves afresh in devotion to one another and to their
Patron Deity, lahweh. Very certainly Abraham thought it
right to sacrifice even as a slain feast the firstborn son of a
family, so that the God and the clansmen might together drink
the fresh, hot clan-blood. So they thought they were renew
ing very really their tribal strength, to prepare themselves for
a battle, or for a solemn covenant, or for simple entrance on a
new year or season. We have evidence that they did all
these things, which seem to us indeed faulty and even in
some respects very wrong. But Abraham was probably one
of the first to rebel against this custom of sacrificing a human
victim. He had hitherto believed firmly that lahweh
required such sacrifice; but like an old mutineer and a
revolutionary spirit, as he was from the day of his marching
out from Babylon, he felt a new inner and Divine voice
saying, " Do this no more : slay no more the firstborn." He
gave the custom up, although he must, have risked the con
demnation of his co-tribesmen for doing so ; but let us add
that herein this old Abraham was verily leader of his race in
that unhesitating practice of advance in thinking, and in word
and in practice which has characterised all the Hebrews and
Jews. We can pay him this highest of all possible honour.

ABRAHAM: THE RECORDS ABOUT HIM 143
3. In morals what were Abraham and his early people?
All for the tribe, no matter what cruelty it might cost. Did
the safety of a tribesman, or even of a stranger lodging within
the limits, " touching the tent ropes " for a night, demand it ;
or did purity of tribal blood cry for it : then blood flowed,
the life even of one's own child and its mother was hurled to
the wilderness and to want and destruction.
4. Very certainly those tribesmen, growing and spreading
flourishing or hungering, were for a time enmeshed in the
power of a Southern Micri nation.* Even there they became
a powerful factor in the life around them. At length they
broke away again, eastwards or northwards this time, and
not westwards; then by guerilla warfare, like that of
Bedouins, full of many almost indescribable cruelties, they
ravaged the whole of Palestine until they became its
masters. 5. There is one more fact concerning that early ancestor
and his sons ; and it is for us, perhaps, the most momentous
fact of all. Renan's picturesque " Histoire d'lsrael " has on
* The Hebrew word " Micri " was a name commonly used by
Hebrews for the inhabitants of any land outside the Hebrews'
country if that land was defended against the Hebrews, or fortified to
exclude them. The word means "the inhabitant of a Major, " and a
Macor means " a place of defence," a " fortification." So Egypt was
called by the Hebrews "Micraim," i.e., the place of the "twofold
fortification." Of course, the word was not used by the Egyptians
concerning themselves at all. There seems to have been a double line
of defences of some sort running across the Isthmus of Suez or
thereabouts, built there to keep away from Egypt all sorts of invaders
that might come from the north. But any such defended land would
be called Major or Micraim by the Hebrews, so long as there was a
wall defending it against them ; and as there were not a few such
places so named, an inhabitant or native of any one of these would be
called a Micri. Hagar, e.g., was called a Micri woman, but she may
have been no Egyptian at all, but perhaps an Arabian.

144 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
a certain page the gay Frenchman's curling smile over the
fact that a mediaeval Catholic singer found his chief witnesses
for his Christianity in a king who was impure and a woman
who was a witch. For, says Renan, the " Dies Irae "
chants, — "Teste David cum Sibylla."
This selection or discovery of strange foundations is a common
way with men in their affairs of religion ! Here is a simple
truth, though it is startling. But it is more ; for it was a
comfort ordered of God that the Elohists and the Priestly
writers could paint their Abraham as a prophet, as the first
marked among a holy seed, and as receiver and channel o^
the grace of God that endures to the uttermost, and that
pardoneth iniquity, casting all our sins into the depths of the
sea.* Such a transformation was made by the later Hebrew
imagination out of the Iahwists' cruel first ancestor,
Abraham ! Even so does God let later ages learn to love
the poor past. So does God cast men's sins, other men's
and our sins, into the depths of the sea. We must not
altogether condemn the mediaeval Catholic's ways of weaving
in some untrue fancies of tradition among the facts of the
past, and his concealment of the reality from all eyes save the
student's. We must not altogether abuse the post-Reforma
tion theologians, who read into and all over the great Gospel
of Jesus their own calculations and dogmatic fancies. These
do serve one good purpose : they let us see, for our warning,
the history and nature of the men who tacked on and read
in such fancies. All the while the devout student can fear
lessly search and find and exhibit the real and true history
of the older past. The beauty of the truth abides. Such
lessons does historical Old Testament Theology learn from
the several surprising records concerning Abraham.
* See Micah vii. last verses.

CHAPTER XIII
OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION
(I.) Let us say a few prefatory words.
(i) We are thus brought in our course of study to face the
common and powerful traditional opinion that Moses was the
Founder of the nobler Moral Hebraism which is especially
crystallised into form in the " Ten Commandments " of
Exodus, Chapter xx. We are bound to examine this opinion
with the historical student's tests. Enough has indeed already
been seen or said that quite contradicts that customary opinion.
(i) We have found that the Tribal Hebraism that could be
very cruel continued to be the religious and moral way of all
the Hebrews down to about 750 B.C., when the Prophets
supplanted it with what was far nobler. This Tribalism was
the Religion of the Iahwistic literary men of, say, 900 B.C., and
it was also the religious way of the powerful Prophets Elijah
and Elisha of, say, 850 B.C., with their devotion to lahweh,
which was at times an awful ferocity. All this could not well
result from a high Moral level. Moses, living 1400 B.C.,
cannot have introduced such a high Moral System.
(ii) The Decalogue of Exodus xx. is part of the Elohistic
Document. It is the fundamental portion of " E's " codifi
cation of those high Moral principles which the Prophets
Amos and his comrades preached. This Decalogue dates
therefore from about 750 to 700 b.c

146 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(iii) We have, however, still to examine the actual records
concerning Moses. We shall proceed to them presently.
(2) Ere we do so, the question just considered leads us
most naturally to observe the great mistake made by the
customary claim that " the Bible is not, indeed, a revelation,
but is a record of a revelation." It should go without saying
that this is as wrong as to say that English literature is a
record of English history. English literature may be the
complex of material which the historian must examine and
use in order to learn the facts of English life and so be able to
write the history ; but English literature was surely not written
in order to give a record of English history ! Far from it.
So the Bible which is the Hebrew and Jewish literature
was not created or written as a record of Hebrew history or
of any part of that history. Far from it. Let us lay aside
the old-fashioned error about the Hebrew literature being not
quite like other literatures ; that mistake caused the Bible to
be feared, and to be laid on the shelf. The real and precious
fact is that in order to know the historical Jesus, we must
study the Hebrew literature ; and therein lies the great value
of the Bible, and of other Hebrew and Jewish literature
which has unfortunately been left out of the collection.
(3) A remarkable statement just published by a number of
eminent Congregationalists has a paragraph concerning the
Bible which runs thus : — "We believe that the Bible is God's
Book, because it enshrines the Divine revelation culminating
in the historic coming of Christ, His life, death, and
resurrection, and the Gospel therein contained." This is
evidently an effort to declare the essential importance of
historical use of the Biblical literature, and therefore the
utterance is to be heartily welcomed. It is a mark of the
scientific attitude taken and asserted by Congregational
theologians in general. It marks also an epoch of great

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 147
advance both in thinking and in public utterance concerning
religion. There are notable defects in the language certainly:
e.g., the term " Bible " itself is indefinite, because we wonder
whether The Apocrypha is included by the term. Then the
expression " God's Book " is vague and invidious. What
books are not God's books ? The word " enshrined " is vague.
Is it " enshrines " as a casket enshrines a jewel ; or rather, on
the other hand, as a nation's literature enshrines its mental
and religious history ? Again, why say " culminates in Christ,"
and not "culminates in Jesus"? The latter is the more
historically accurate word. But the close of the paragraph
almost redeems the whole from any fault, so excellent is it to
read of the " Gospel " as contained, not in certain writings or
a canon or a set of doctrines, but in a process of history.
(4) Another customary and mistaken opinion is that " the
Hebrews were Providentially appointed to be the teachers of
Religion, just as to Greece was given the light of Philosophy
and the Arts." This is again an error. Japan is one of the
most artistic peoples of to-day, and we can hardly say that
Japan owes her art to the influence of Greece; moreover,
there was high art in Babylon and in Egypt long ere Greece
produced Phidias. We are told at times, too, that " to Rome
was portioned out the education of mankind in government,
jurisprudence and the domain of the practical." This error
is also out of date, for we have seen in former chapters in these
pages that old Babylon had codes and legal methods of
profound value, and of importance even for the jurists of
to-day, which were thought out a thousand years ere Rome
was born.
So when we hear it said that lo the Jewish people was
assigned the supreme dignity of unfolding the relations
between the soul and the unseen, between man and his God,
we have to reply that this also is an error, as most thoughtful

148 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
people are coming to know. God has unfolded these relations
to every human soul in the voice of conscience.
(5) Finally, in preface to our study of Moses, let us recapitu
late. We have studied the "Origins of the Hebrews," so far as to
know (i) their early Fathers in Arabia, and then the following
generations in their rich civilisation, literary, legal, commercial,
and agricultural, on theBabylonianDelta. (ii) We have examined
carefully all that can be found concerning the Hebrews' early
ancestor, Abraham, and his more immediate successors.
(II.) We are passing forward now to study their next great
leader, to whom much of their literature attributes the religious
consolidation of the tribe, the " Moses " who was the
Deliverer of his fellow-tribesmen from their subjection in
Micri-land, and their Guide in a new Nomadism in the south
of Palestine, until they began to seize the fertile lands of the
north, where they slowly settled. What was this Moses ?
What does the historical student learn about him from the
various accessible sources ?
There is, of course, the Hebrew literature to be examined
carefully, both as it is to be found in the Narrative Books, and
also as it is seen in the books of Prophets; and here the
evidence which the Prophets give will be seen to be of peculiar
value for the religious valuation of Moses. Indeed, the traditional
theory that it was the work of Moses that really led up to the
work of the Prophets would lead us to expect in their preaching
abundant signs of his influence, and of his real nature. There
are in our hands also, of recent years, other documents of great
value, viz., the so-called " Tel-el-Amarna " tablets, which were
written, as we now possess them just about the very time when
Moses lived. These outside sources ought to be instructive ;
and indeed they are so. We turn first to the Hebrew literature,
and we have here an interesting task before us.
Of course, we should naturally look at once to the books,

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 149
or sections, of the Pentateuch called " Exodus," " Numbers,"
and " Deuteronomy " for information. But ere we take the
evidence they can give, let us make some little criticism of
their value. In these books are interwoven, as we know, the
Iahwistic, Elohistic and Priestly narratives. We need not now
repeat as much as we had to say in Abraham's case concerning
the work of discovering these separate documents, or about the
distinguishing characteristics of each. Whoever is ready and
anxious to be guided thoroughly through the analysis of these
books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy ought
to obtain, even at much cost, the masterly volume of Dr. B. W.
Bacon, of Yale University, entitled " The Triple Tradition of
the Exodus," a study of which will make most of the difficult
points in the problem clear. This work will give to the
student most of the reasons which guided the present writer
in constructing volume ii. of his " Old Testament Theology,"
in which the Iahwistic Narrative is given in full, as is also
given in full the much later parallel Elohistic Narrative. We
may turn to those volumes * for knowledge of these two
documents. The Priestly document has not yet been printed
in full ; but it is not very difficult to mark the proper
passages in an ordinary English Bible, and so construct " P "
for one's self. To give an outline of the whole of either
" J " or " E " or " P " would require too much space for these
pages ; but, in addition to the fully-printed Narratives
described above, the student will find full synopses of " J "
and of " E " given in the present writer's " Hebrew Theology
and Ethics." f But now, how shall we make adequate use of
* (1) Bacon's "Triple Tradition of the Exodus," published in 1894 ;
and (2) Duff's " Old Testament Theology," vol. ii., 1901, A. and C.
Black. (3) Indispensable also are the " Encyclopaedia Biblica," and the
other Bible dictionaries. The "Introduction to the Old Testament,"
by Bennett, or by Cornill, or by Driver, should also be consulted.
| Published by Scribner's Sons, and by John Nimmo, 1903.

ISO OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
these narratives for our purposes ? The matter is, fortunately,
more simple than might be feared. There is one feature in
the triple set of stories which may give us a clue for unravelling
the whole rather knotty problem. It is what they severally
say about the great occurrences on the summit of the notable
mountain of the Revelation to Moses, in the Sinaitic
Peninsula ; a place which it seems impossible to identify
to-day. Let us compare the three descriptions of those
occurrences : —
i — The Iahwist's Mosaic Decalogue.
First, we find that the Iahwistic writer says : —
(i) Moses climbed a mountain, which this " J " calls
" Sinai " ; and this particular name ought to be noted, for it
is of much importance for our study.
(ii) " J " says that there lahweh gave Moses "tables of stones,"
on which were written " ten things." We shall see later on
how the writing was performed.
(iii) We find that the " ten things " were all of them direc
tions for worship : viz., as to " Who was to be worshipped,"
" When there were to be festivals," and " What was to be
offered." (iv) All this is to be found in Exodus xxxiv. i to 28.
The name " Sinai " is given especially in verse 2 ; the com
mands are detailed in verses n to 2 6 ; and in verse 2 7 f. these
are called " The Ten Words," or " The Ten Things."
2 — The Elohist's Two Mosaic Decalogues.
The Elohist has quite a different story : he tells us of
two sets of tables, the first ten being described in Exodus xx.
and a second ten in Exodus xxiii. The various items of
his story of such twice-repeated gifts are : —
(i) The mountain which Moses climbed was called

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 151
" Horeb." Here, we see, is an alteration of the tradition,
which is significant.
(ii) " E " says in Exodus xx. that lahweh gave indeed
" ten things,"* but these were very largely Moral directions :
they were just the Ten Commandments, commonly so called,
which we know so well. Here, then, is a very great alteration
of the tradition ! It is remarkable that when we look
closely at these Moral directions we soon realise that they are
just embodiments of the fine Moral demands which the
preaching of Amos, Hosea and Isaiah urged upon the people.
In brief, the Decalogue, as we usually call it, is clearly the
effort of Elohistic narrating writers to bring into the people's
daily life that reformed conduct which Amos and his fellow-
prophets declared to be the true and only way which lahweh
desired them to follow. The Elohist's original Ten Com
mandments, as we read them in Exodus xx., are the product
of the great Moral Reformation of 800 to 700 b.c
(iii) But " E's " story goes on to say, as we know, that
Moses broke that original set of tables, with its Moral Com
mandments ; and that then lahweh dictated to Moses a new
set, which were to be kept in the ark.
(iv) Then we find that this new set, which is to be found in
Exodus xxiii., is all taken up with Worship ! In short, this
set is virtually the old Iahwistic ceremonial set. So we see
how the Elohistic writers know quite well the Iahwistic " Ten
Things," and know, too, that the people around them regard
these as the " Moses-Decalogue " ; but they teach that their
own new " Ten Things " were really the original ones, which
were given first ; and that the Iahwistic " Ten " were given
* The Elohist now uses largely the name "lahweh," although not,
indeed, always. We saw, of course, that in Exodus iii. " E " describes
Moses receiving the information that this was the name or character
of the true and gracious Elohim, i.e. the Gods of these Hebrews.

152 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
only as a secondary plan, as it were, " for the hardness of
their hearts," which had caused the loss of the first Ten.
(v) They say now, as it were, that the inspiration of God
has told them what was upon those broken original tables,
and now they are recovered and proclaimed afresh. All the
same, must we not decide that this Elohistic story is not the
true historical account ? The Iahwistic account seems far
more likely to be true ; and " J's " Decalogue seems certainly
to have been the really original " Ten Things."
3 — The Priestly Sinaitic Revelation.
We pass on to consider the Priestly story; but we
need not say much about it.
(i) In the first place, " P " goes back in a way to the " J "
report, and seems to prefer that ; for he says that the mountain
was not Horeb, as the Elohists had made it, but was Sinai,
as the Iahwists had said. Here we have a most valuable
illustration of the freedom which not only those Hebrews,
but also after them the Jews, exercised in altering records
made by the writers of earlier days. They did so twice over
even in a case like this of the " Ten Commandments," which
are supposed by many nowadays to have been the most sacred
thing which Moses gave. Moreover —
(ii) Secondly, " P " says that Moses received on the Sinai
mountain not a Moral Decalogue at all, but rather a Cere
monial one, as the Iahwists had said. Was this why " P "
says " Sinai," as " J " had done ? For according to this great
Priestly writer the Revelation that Moses received on Sinai
was just a. plan for a sanctuary. This was in his opinion the
greatest thing for lahweh to give and for men to receive.
From this examination we are compelled to conclude that
the real story of Moses is to be got from the Iahwists ; not,
of course, by taking everything they say as exact history, but

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 153
by careful estimation of the data. The other two stories are
excellent pictures of their own times — i.e., the latest or " P "
picture is a reflection for us of Jewish society in 450 B.C., and
" E," the next earlier, pictures the spirit and mind and teaching
of the Reforming Prophets and their Hebraism of 750 B.C.
But quite distinctly " J " gives us the traditions of, at latest,
the times of David and his successors, as they lived and
thought, and worshipped and wrote, down to 850 B.C. Thus
the result of our criticism is, that we may lay aside those later
theories and turn to consult the lahwist almost exclusively,
fairly confident that we shall learn from him what MOSES
really was.
(Ill) We will not at once examine the Hebrew record, but
will turn for a time in another direction to seek other valuable
guidance, and that for special reasons. Archaeological dis
coveries and statements are so abundant and so highly valued
in these days that it will be wise to listen here to some things
that the men of the spade, like Professor Flinders Petrie, are
telling us about the Exodus from Egypt, and about Moses.
After hearing from this class of investigators we shall return
and examine the old Iahwist's evidence.
Let us preface the archseologist's opinion by a wise state
ment recently made concerning the principles of all historical
investigation. It was made by Rev. Professor Schmiedel, of
Zurich, in his admirable little book on John, prepared for
ordinary readers.* He says there, concerning " the Historical
Sense " : " Whoever studies history knows that, if he will
understand events and persons, he must always ask in the
first place how these events and persons are related to other
occurrences and human beings in whose midst they occur.
There are, indeed, plenty of things which will not be altogether
* This is now translated, and will speedily appear among the
publications of Messrs. A. and C. Black.

154 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
explained to us, even when we follow this method of examina
tion ; yet every observer of history knows that he would be
fighting against the great purpose to be attained, if he were to
set aside these kinds of explanations which lie close to his
hand and which apply constantly in all human affairs, and
were instead to try to explain things by claiming that they had
happened as wonders, and uncertain wonders at that, as
unusual wonders and as effects of direct interferences by the
hand of God quite different from His own constant and regular
Divine Providences. In all other fields of history we avoid
carefully such explanations : it is only in the field of what is
called Sacred History that any one prefers the darkness to the
light, the incomprehensible to the comprehensible, and what
is full of wonders to what is natural." We may well be
guided by such sane counsel.
Now we may listen to that prince of archaeologists and
excellent student of affairs and men past and present, Professor
Flinders Petrie, as he speaks in his recent magnificent volume
on " Researches in Sinai." We wish to get the real history
of " Moses " : here is a student of the very places and scenes
where Moses did his work. Moreover, it may be interesting to
some to know that Professor Petrie is what is called " an enemy
of Higher Criticism " ; he laughs at the work of the analytical
students of Genesis, Exodus, &c, as that has been described
in the preceding pages. True, he shows himself to be a good
deal in the dark as to what the analysts have really done.
He declares, however, as results of his own archaeological
study, some things that are anything but orthodox ; e.g., he
holds that there were only 5000 persons in all among the
Hebrew folk whom Moses led out of Egypt, and he says that
the number 600,000 given in Exodus and commonly supposed
to have been the correct number is quite wrong ! He holds
also that the mountain of the " Lawgiving " was not Mount

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 155
Sinai; for the 5000 persons could not have lived there for
cold and hunger ! So he contradicts flatly many statements
made in the book of Exodus. He says that the real place of
the Lawgiving was Mount Serbal, the centre of a quite fertile
region, which is a good distance away from the actual Sinai.
Again, he holds that there could not be a tribe of Levi, Moses'
supposed tribe, before the Hebrews reached Palestine ! More
seriously still, he has a theological discussion on the meaning
of " miracles," wherein he concludes that the phenomena so
called are always nothing more than the " natural events,"
viewed as the Oriental views many of these.
We have, therefore, in Professor Flinders Petrie one who
believes that he must oppose the work of the modern Hebrew
student, and that he must place complete reliance on his own
archaeological methods ; and yet we have in him a man who
aims at being true to scientific, i.e., historical method, as
expounded above by Professor Schmiedel. So long as this
method is followed, or is held up as the true method, we are
satisfied. Let us see what results he has reached by the
archaeological work which he has done, and done so finely in
Sinai. His great new volume describes his exploration of the
Sinaitic peninsula, the region of the famous Hebrew wander
ings. We should add that he photographs what he describes,
and photographs may be trusted, for they cannot very easily
tell unreliable tales. We can see in Mr. Petrie's photographs
just what sort of a land the Sinaitic regions are. He describes
the remains of extensive mining operations thereabouts, tur
quoise mines and copper-mining work, which were carried on
near Sinai for ages beginning at least some 3000 years b.c,
and lasting all through the " Mosaic " period. There are
still to be seen in the region abundant monuments, inscrip
tions and the like which were made by one after another of
the successive Pharaohs ; these princes caused records of their

156 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
mining work to be inscribed upon rocks and pillars on the
spot. Besides, there is a huge temple, in ruins indeed, but
sufficiently intact to let us see how truly Sinai was a great
religious centre for the Egyptians and other peoples. Pro
fessor Petrie's report is one that cannot well be ignored, and
it is most instructive. But the Hebrew analytical student
must be pleased to find that this report is wonderfully like
what the analysts of the Hebrew give, in spite of Petrie's dis
like of their analysis. The agreement is so striking that we
propose now to quote Petrie ; and then we shall go back to
describe the Hebrew analysts' results. Surely this procedure
should be satisfactory.
Professor Petrie says as follows : * " Finally, let us sketch
out what a cultivated Egyptian would have said of the
Israelites' history, so far as we can at present understand it:
' A Bedawy tribe had wandered down from Mesopotamia to
Southern Palestine. There they had connections with
various neighbouring peoples, Moabites and Ammonites,
whom they looked on as akin to themselves. A dearth in
Syria made them emigrate into Egypt, where a part of them
stayed on as settlers in the eastern border of the Delta.
These were employed by Ramessu II. on his public works.
The attack on their kindred Israelites in Palestine made them
restless, and this was encouraged by other Bedawyn coming
into the same district. One of them, who had been well
educated by us, had run away into the desert and settled in
Sinai. Seeing that the land was sufficient to support his
kindred, he came back and tried to get permission for them
to go on a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain. This was
refused ; but many troubles of a bad season, and a plague at
last, so disheartened us that, in the confusion, some thou
sands of these tribes escaped into the wilderness. They
* " Researches in Sinai," pp. 221, &c.

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 157
safely crossed the shallows of the gulf, but a detachment of
troops following them was caught and swept away. After
settling beyond the reach of our Government, and living in
the desert for many years, they took advantage of the victories
of Ramessu III. in Palestine. After he had completely
crushed the Amorites and other inhabitants, these Israelites
(with many of their kindred tribes) pressed in to occupy the
bare places of the land, and succeeded in taking many of the
towns. In the half-empty land they quickly increased, and
took into their alliance many others of the kindred peoples
so that in a couple of hundred years they became as many as
half of our own Delta people. So soon as we had recovered
from our divisions in Egypt we resumed our place in Pales
tine, and took a large quantity of gold from the king of these
Israelites, as we had done before from all the Syrians; but
since those times the Assyrians have hindered our former
suzerainty.' Such an account," concludes Petrie, " may be
only one side of the truth, but it is somewhat the way in
which the old-established kingdom of Egypt would look on
this episode. . . . Such seem to be the data for future
dealing with this question."
We add here only the expression of our great thankfulness
that Professor Petrie and his archaeological researches and
scientific work are finely clearing away much grievous
traditional prejudice.
(IV.) — The Biblical Accounts of Moses.
Now we turn back to the Narratives, and to the Prophets.
At this point we may well hesitate to go forward. It is not
hard to see the reason. Traditional fancies about Moses, and
concerning the encircling events, are very deeply rooted in
the hearts of us all. If we are to feel the meaning of the real
facts, we must be led gently up to a good deal more " detach-

158 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
ment " than has as yet been faced. The grip that tradition
has upon most excellent teachers may be seen in the pages
of many well-known and even widely trusted works ; for to
Moses has been ascribed in such works the founding of the
highest Iahweh-Religion. This ascription we have already
seen to be incorrect and unhistorical. Another illustration
of the firm grip upon us which Mosaic tradition has, but
from which we must seek detachment, is the fact that
Deuteronomy and its companion books are declared by many
an eminent teacher to have been monotheistic in faith. That
is, however, simply another traditional mistake. We must
turn to study " Moses " with an expectation that many tradi
tional ideas about him may have to be laid aside. Let us
arrange our Biblical material for the picture of the " Moses "
in two sections : First, let us inquire what we learn from old
Hebrew literature outside of the Pentateuch, as e.g., in the
Prophets. Secondly, we shall ask, what do we learn from
the Iahwistic Narrative; for we have seen that the Elohistic
Story cannot serve us, as it is a dogmatically altered docu
ment, and therefore pictures the times after the Prophets, and
not the times of the real Moses.*

i — The Moses of the Prophets.
First, then, what do the Prophets say? At least what
say those who lived before the Elohists had made their
dogmatic alterations and so had set up a new and incorrect
picture of the ancient leader ? We ask the Prophets what
they have to tell us, but there is almost no answer.
The only one of them who says anything about that
leader and deliverer is Hosea; he does not give the name of
the hero of old, but says simply, " By a prophet did lahweh
* Of course the Priestly story is alsp not usable,

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 159
bring Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was Israel
preserved." * The word " prophet," Hebrew " nabhi," means
" worthily inspired."
Thus, when Hosea makes his one and only reference to
the deliverer, his sole point is to bid the people remember
that when lahweh caused the great salvation in the past it
was an " inspired " man that He commissioned for the task.
Naturally enough, he says that. But if Hosea had thought
that Moses had accomplished the great work of giving a
splendid moral utterance like the Ten Commandments, how
could the Prophet have failed to use a lever so great and so
valuable for his own purpose of moral elevation of Israel ?
There are some teachers to-day who do not hesitate to affirm
that the Ten Commandments are the very foundation of
Christianity, yet we find a Hosea leaving these unused !
Surely he did not know them, although he knew about the
deliverance from Egypt by a great leader, whom he calls a
" prophet." Evidently Hosea knew, as the Iahwistic writers
had said, that Moses was a warrior, and a mighty one, full of
the awful and warlike inspiration that would fit him to lead in
the crucial struggles against even the terrible kings of Egypt,
and to face and to overcome all the perils and enemies in the
deserts south of Palestine. So the people of Hosea's time
certainly thought of Moses as the very embodiment on earth
of their God lahweh, the terrible warrior God, the great if
often invisible Tribal Deity, who cared only for His Hebrew
tribe. That is all of Hosea's contribution to our knowledge
of Moses. And it is the entire sum of all the references or
allusions to the Deliverer by any prophet before Jeremiah, a
whole century after Isaiah. Here is a startling fact, that
the greatest prophets, Amos and Isaiah, who preached so
earnestly the true nature of lahweh, and the true way to
* Hos. xii. 13.

160 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
worship him, and who accomplished so much for the high
moral Hebrew religion, never once refer to Moses at all. If
Moses had been so important a factor as tradition thinks in
founding that Moral Hebrew religion, or Reformed Iahwism,
with its devotion to real life and goodness, how could those
two teachers make no use of him ?
Jeremiah also speaks of Moses,* but only once ; and then
mentions him as an intercessor with God for men. No, not
one of the great prophets uses Moses at all to help in their
work of building up the high moral Hebraism ! The import
ance attributed usually in later times to Moses is due not
even to Ezekiel, nor to Isaiah xl. ff. ; but it is due to the
Judaism that grew up after the Exile, and especially to the
Priestly Document, that quite unhistorical teacher of cere
monial dogmas. And it is important to remember that the
Chronicles denied that Moses was the founder of even the
Jewish worship, but declares that David was its founder.
Of course, even these slight notices of Moses by Hosea
and Jeremiah are valuable and help us a good deal. We
shall see how they agree with what we get elsewhere. Indeed,
we see already that they tell us pretty nearly what Professor
Flinders Petrie has learned from his purely Egyptian sources.
2 — The Iahwistic Moses.
We turn now to ask the Iahwists what they have to
tell us in strict historical accuracy about " Moses." And here
at once we criticise them even still further, and shall be com
pelled to drop as unhistorical some part of what they narrate.
For they lived about the time of Elijah, or about 900 b c,
and their Iahwistic picture must be coloured by the influence
of what the writers saw around them. A Iahwistic narrator
in 900 b.c could not tell us exactly what Moses was, as a
* Jeremiah xv. 1.

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 161
twentieth-century historian would have to tell it ; for certainly
no man then could be that sort of an historian at all. So
we must weigh what is said. And as we have been helped by
examination of what both " J " and " E " say concerning the
" Ten Words," so now we shall look to the Iahwists' Decalogue
at once, and examine still more closely the ten rules laid down
therein.* (i) The first says, "Count lahweh to be among all the
Gods the Very Jealous Deity." So the Iahwists believed there
were many Gods, and they say that Moses had believed so
before them. There can be no doubt that this report is quite
correct. Moses and the Hebrew tribe around him were not
at all monotheists ; and the tribal God in whom they trusted
was a bitterly jealous being, j-
(ii) The next rule is, " Do not make molten images of
lahweh." We have learnt from Professor Flinders Petrie
that the Egyptians worked in metals, and that they cast
ingots and fashioned this and that out of the metals on the
very spot where, says Petrie, they stayed a long time in the
Sinaitic peninsula. What more likely than that their jealous
leader, the enemy of everything Egyptian, when leading his
tribe through that region, full of such Egyptian images, should
lay down just such a rule : " Make no molten image of your
God ; make nothing such as the Egyptians make here ! "
(iii) The third rule is, " Sacrifice to lahweh," i.e., use for a
slain feast in His honour, " every first-born creature." We
remember that it is not the lahwist but the Elohist who tells
us that Abraham gave up making a slain feast of his own first
born son. This rule to sacrifice every first-born is therefore a
very old one, and pictures doubtless exactly the old Mosaic
* Exod. xxxiv. See " Old Testament Theology," ii. 178 ff.
-j- It is interesting to find Ezekiel alluding to this faith, and that
with a curious dislike of it. See Ezekiel viii. 3, etc. L

i6a OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
worship. Quite possibly the direction to make an exception
of the human first-born and to ransom first-born children is
a rather late addition. As late as Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
600 B.C., men sacrificed children as slain feasts. The words of
Ezekiel xvi. 20 and xxiii. 37 are startling : " These [children]
hast thou sacrificed to be devoured."
(iv) The fourth rule is, " Keep the ' Sabbath,' that is the
'cutting-off' on every seventh day," We may understand this
direction by considering that the moon governed the divisions
of time among the very early Semitic ancestors of the
Hebrews, and a seven days circle of religious observances
marking the "quarters of the moon" was a part of the old
Semitic system. Every seven days, i.e., when the new quarter
began, a "cutting-off" ceremony was naturally observed. So,
no doubt, Moses may have laid down that rule. Yet not the
whole of this fourth rule could come from Moses ; for how
could he direct nomads in the desert about the ploughing and
reaping of which the rule speaks ? The latter part which
thus concerns settled farm life has certainly been added since
Moses' day.
Rules v., vi., vii., viii., and ix. are all of them, wholly or
largely, rules for agricultural life, and they cannot have been
in the Tables of Laws set out by the Deliverer for use by the
nomads in the desert. They are rules that grew up after the
settlement in Palestine, probably in the times of the so-called
" Judges." (x) Rule tenth forbids tribesmen making a sacrificial feast
for lahweh by cooking a pregnant goat with its unborn little
one within it. This may well have been a rule given to
nomads ; and who shall say that the fierce tribesmen did not
need it !
Now, singularly enough, we have found that there were
possibly only five rules laid down by Moses, instead of ten ;

OF MOSES AND HIS RELIGION 163
there were as many as there are fingers on one hand, instead
of on two. The whole was probably on one slab originally,
not on two. Take with this the singularly coincident fact
that the lahwist has only five plagues, and not ten as usually
supposed, and we shall feel that perhaps we are not far wrong
in surmising that Moses' original set of rules did number just
the five.
Did the great leader actually bring to his people any rock
tablet with writing upon it ? Where could such be found, as
as he sought communion with his Deity in the lonely spots
among those Sinaitic mountains and glens ? Is it, then, very
difficult to conceive of his finding such a slab with strange
writing upon it away up in the loneliest secret and sacred
places of those mountains which are described by Professor
Flinders Petrie as a working-place and a worship-place of
Egyptian craftsmen ? Those craftsmen made just such
hieroglyphic inscriptions. There are such slabs lying there
now ! And what if those markings were in hieroglyphic
characters that were so hard for the Hebrews to interpret
that long afterwards the Elohists could quite reasonably claim
that the Iahwists had misunderstood the carved inscriptions,
and that they ought really to be read in the quite different
way which the Elohists declared to be the original and truly
Divine way ?
(3) Now we may turn to a few other passages in the
Iahwists' story. In one * we read of a most interesting part
of the conception that the people of Iahwistic times had
concerning their God. It is a feature that is very certainly as
old as Moses, nay, even far older. The passage gives us a
picture of seventy of Israel's elders, with Moses, Aaron, Nadab
and Abihu sitting away up in the hidden holy places of the
mountains in fellowship with the visible God lahweh at a
* Exodus xxiv. 9 ff.

164 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
solemn sacrificial feast. We may well quote : — " And there
was underneath His feet something like a fabric of the
brightness of sapphire, and like a very beam of the heavens
for purity. But unto those noblemen of the sons of Israel
He shot not out His power. So it came to pass that they
beheld the Gods, and also they ate and drank." There
we have a most graphic picture, and a truly historical
expression of the kernel nature of that old Tribal way of com
munion with God. Another beautiful passage is found farther
on,* ascribing " loving-kindness " to lahweh. It expresses
indeed the Iahwistic theology, but very certainly not that of
the actual Moses. Much more exactly like the really Mosaic
religion are the passages which describe the earliest body of
" Priests," namely the Levites, as originally the warrior body
guard of Moses, and as a fiercely bloody company of
defenders of the prerogatives of the " Jealous lahweh."
* Exodus xxxiii. 17 ff.

CHAPTER XIV
THE HEBREWS IN MOSES' TIME, SEEN IN EXTRA-
BIBLICAL LITERATURE OF THAT DATE.
The Tel-el-Amarna Tablets.
We have so far tried to see just what Moses was by listening
to the reports in the Hebrew literature concerning him, but
going backwards, first hearing the evidence of all the great
Prophets, from 750 B.C. onwards, and then that of the
Iahwistic Narrators who wrote about 900 to 800 B.C. We have
examined the information given by the Iahwists as it stands
written in their Decalogue, or Pentalogue ; and then also in
various pictures they give of the ways and the worship of their
people in and after the days of Moses — i.e., from 1400 b.c to
1000 B.C., when David ruled. We have seen that the folk
were a warlike and fierce tribe, who worshipped a God whom
they called "lahweh," One who was altogether of their own
sort. Their religion is what we may call a stern Tribalism,
that cared for no tribe but their own, and had bitter hatred
and death for any tribe or soul that dared to cross their tribal
path. These people were just the sort of folk to invade a
rich country like Palestine, to seize its fertile fields and settle
there, and then to be themselves economically subdued under
the very people whom they had destroyed ; subdued not by
arms but by the arts of peace which they learnt from their
victims. We could see plenty more evidence of this nature
of theirs and of their story in their own Iahwistic records ;
but no more is now necessary, since the picture of Moses and

166 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
his people is thus already complete. For a little while, how
ever, we shall listen to some thoroughly confirmatory evidence
that is virtually absolutely reliable because it was written at
the very time it tells of. This is the evidence found in the
Documents discovered lately in Egypt at Tel-el-Amarna.
(I) First, then, let us describe the origin of these Documents.
They were written as some of the archives of the Egyptian and
Babylonian and other governments of the fifteenth century b.c,
the century of the Exodus. They were written, moreover, with
out the slightest purpose of either praising or dishonouring the
Hebrews whom they describe. They are now commonly known
as the "Tel-el-Amarna Tablets," or the royal records of the
King of Egypt called Amenhotep IV., re-named by himself
Akhenaten, of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. That
Eighteenth Dynasty ruled the great Nile lands from about
1580 to 1320 B.C., the very period that is believed to have
seen the Hebrews delivered from their slavery in Egypt.
Akhenaten was almost the last king in the Dynasty ; he reigned
from 1383 onwards for about twenty years. Th's was just the
time when the Hebrews were settling in Palestine, after having
been led out of the Egyptian bondage by Moses. Akhenaten's
royal records contain many references to those Hebrews. It
is interesting to note, in passing, that this king's father, Amen
hotep III., had found his bride away in the north of Palestine ;
her name, Queen Thi, has recently become well known. We
possess various pictures of her ; and her very tomb and coffin
have been found. This Queen Thi brought a new religion
into Egypt and persuaded her spouse to embrace her faith, a
far higher faith than the Egyptians had had, even though it has
to be called Sun-Worship. The king was so thoroughly
moved — andshallwe not sayreformed? — that, when he accepted
his new faith, he forsook his old royal city of Thebes, some
300 miles away up the Nile from Cairo, and planted a new

THE HEBREWS IN MOSES' TIME 167
capital city for his kingdom 150 miles lower down the river,
at a spot that is now known as the Mound of the Amarna, or
Tel-el-Amarna. Here his son, Amenhotep IV. or Akhenaten,
ruled after him, and tried to carry out great internal reforms
and improvements in the condition of his people and their
homes. This is why we have suggested that the new religion
of the exalted father, mother, and son, was much nobler than
the previous ways. But, like many another blessing, the reform
was hated, and it was flung away as soon as the younger king
had died. Then the new capital city was destroyed and left
in ruin to this day ; to let us find now among the ruins many
a precious remnant of the ancient Gospel of that royal trio.
Among those remnants and relics left buried in the fallen
palaces there were found, in 1887 to 1888, cases of archives
on slabs, packed in decaying wooden boxes with marble covers.
The Egyptian peasants hard by had known of this find for some
time and had counted it all a treasure trove, and had sold many
a piece of it ; yet, although a few documents from the priceless
collection have wandered away in the hands of greedy curiosity-
hunters, nevertheless a goodly number of the whole are now
safely lodged in the national museums in Cairo, Berlin, and
London. A valuable volume showing nearly 300 of them, in
transliteration and translation, has been published by Prof.
Hugo Winckler of the University of Berlin. There are also
several excellent descriptions and valuations of the whole acces
sible, from the scholarly hands of Prof. Flinders Petrie, Prof.
Bennett of Hackney College, and Prof. Jastrow of New York.*
(II) Now of their Contents. The documents are well
described by Prof. Bennett as of three classes : —
"Petrie's "Tel-el-Amarna'1; Bennett's Polychrome "Joshua," pp. 46
to 55 ; Jastrow has various articles. The very thorough transliteration
and translation of the whole by Prof. Winckler has not been published
in English.

168 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(i) Many are the correspondence of the two Egyptian kings
whom we have named on the one hand ; with a certain king of
the land of Mitani away up in Syria, a king of Babylon and kings
of the Hittites, and probably also of Cyprus on the other hand.
(2) Many others are correspondence of those Egyptian
Princes concerning Northern Syria and Phoenicia, especially
with a king of those lands, by name Aziru, who was a vassal
of Egypt. The earlier kings of the eighteenth Egyptian
Dynasty had extended their power far up the east coast of the
Levant, and had governmental relations with the Semitic
peoples in Palestine. Here let us say, by the way, that it is
not at all unlikely that these relationships may have given the
occasion for just such a share taken in the Egyptian Govern
ment by men from the far north as the Hebrew narratives tell
about their hero Joseph having taken. However, our business
at present is to point out that this set of documents now under
our consideration tells how the Prince Aziru and also a Prince
Rib-Addi of North Palestine were both suffering sadly from
attacks and plunderings that were carried on by a wandering
and warlike folk called the " Habiri." These marauders and
invaders had already plundered and taken Sidon, Beyrout, and
Arvad : and the Babylonian King complains to the Egyptian
Ruler that such robbing hordes should be better checked by
the Egyptian King, who is their suzerain or overlord. One
little bit of the tale of troubles is quite piquant : the Baby
lonians say that they cannot get their postal matter across
Palestine because the Habiri hold up the mails so incessantly !
(3) The third set of letters tells more about Southern
Palestine, called in later times Judea. Much is here said
about a city called " Jerusalem." Its Prince, Abdi-hiba by name,
appeals to Egypt for help against those same mischievous Habiri.
(Ill) Now, finally, we may sum up in brief the result of all
this, as it belongs to and affects our search.

THE HEBREWS IN MOSES' TIME 169
(1) Society was going on in the great kingdoms in Assyria
to the north-east of Palestine, and in Egypt to the south-west,
and in other kingdoms such as that of the Hittites to the
north-west, very much as we gathered from our study of the
days and deeds of the Babylonian King Hamurabi of nearly
a thousand years earlier. Civilisation was by no means
lacking; nay, rather was it rich and abundant.
(2) The Egyptian King was so busy with home affairs that
colonial possessions of his in Palestine were not very well pro
tected. He was really the sovereign of that land, but was not
controlling it thoroughly.
(3) Palestine was in trouble. Hittites were pouring in from
Asia Minor, in the north-west; but, worst of all, a warlike people
were invading everywhere, and especially in the south and around
Jerusalem. These people were known as the " Habiri." They
were just such a folk as we have seen moving north from Egypt
by way of Sinai, in the Iahwistic narrative; and scholars are very
well agreed that the Habiri were none other than the Hebrews.
(4) Thus the Hebrews whom Moses was freeing at this very
date, and leading away northwards from Egyptian subjugation,
were doubtless this fierce sort of Bedouin people, nomadic,
independent in spirit, and seeking to grasp the lands of
Palestine by unresting inroads and guerilla warfare. All this
agrees exactly with what we have gathered from all the evidence
obtained from the Hebrews' own literature after a careful
criticism of it. Such added evidence have we thus found con
firming our estimate of the character of the people whom
Moses led out and whom Joshua is said to have captained
in many a most bloody fight.
(5) Such a Deliverer, Warrior, and Invader,then,wastheactual
Moses ; and such a fierce Bedouin-like people were naturally his
successors, all the way down the four hundred years from 1400
B.C. until the Davidic Monarchy was established in 1000 b.c

CHAPTER XV
SUMMARY— THE TRIBAL RELIGION BEFORE AMOS.
We have gained somewhat the same impression concerning
these Hebrews from all the different sources we have
examined. First we examined the story and picture of the
earliest Hebrew forefather, Abraham, as we gathered it out
of the epic poetry in the old Iahwistic literature in Genesis
concerning him and his immediate progeny. All this told
us of nomads who were powerful and wild; fierce to those
outside their clan, and very cruel even to the feebler parts of
their own households. Next, when we read the clearly old
elements in the story of Moses, we found the same character
persisting still. The strong leader used for his bodyguard a
set of men who compelled submission to their chiefs word
and way by the fiercest, bloodthirsty use of their swords ; and
everything else in the picture we get, whether positive evidence
from the Iahwists or negative evidence from the Prophets, or
archaeological and apparently independent accounts furnished by
Professor Flinders Petrie, shows the same tribal characteristics.
Then, thirdly, we examined the record so unimpeachably laid
down to our hands in the Egyptian Government archives,
dating from the very days of Moses and from the generations
just after that great leader had brought his followers into the
Palestinian lands. Wheresoever the tribal centre of those
warlike nomads may have been, they must have seemed almost
ubiquitous as well as ruinous to the annoyed governors and

THE TRIBAL RELIGION BEFORE AMOS 171
envoys of the Egyptian kings on the south-west or of the
Assyrian kings on the north-east. The guerilla bands were
for ever swooping down on the rich but luckless cities, or
across the fertile lands in the Palestinian dependencies of these
two sets of rulers; and the wild tribesmen were enriching
themselves with spoil of cattle and foods, household wealth
and precious metals, or with lands that they seized and settled
on. Now, fourthly, how thoroughly is all this like the picture
that we see as we read, if we can bear to read, the sometimes
most ferocious details in the books of " Joshua " and " Judges,"
" Samuel " and " Kings " ! The warlike methods of the captain
Joshua have given serious trouble to many a teacher or preacher
who has anxiously tried to use them for his lessons ; and who
has felt that the bloody episodes in these collections are surely
no lessons for us or for our children. Our best lovers of the
Bible are coming to acknowledge this. Deborah the "Bee,"
sting-armed as her name signifies, and the companion woman
or Amazon or Fury who shares with the " inspired " Deborah
the lurid glories of a campaign described in the Book of the
Judges; also the Gideon, and the Jephthah, and other battle
leaders or vengeance dealers immortalised in that fairly blood
curdling book, are all of them just the Tribalist men and women
that might be expected to follow in the succession of a Iahwistic
Abraham and Moses. These were no weaklings ; they were
heroes, like the Saracens or the Crusaders, or any of those
mediaeval knights whose nobility lay in their quick, fierce
readiness and power to break a lance against the vizor of a
foe, and to break the poor head of that foe as if it were vile
vermin, hated of God as well as of man. That was Tribalism;
and that was the conduct and the way of Life produced and
taught by Tribal Religion. Fifthly, and yet it is merely a con
tinuation of this panorama, the same kind of life and society
went on into, and through, and long after the days of the

172 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
David who established the Monarchy strongly about 1000 b.c
For the work of that notable man Samuel, whose actual
history between noo and iooo B.C. is not at all an uncertain
matter but one of the surest facts of those times, was of the
same fierce sort, sparing neither man nor prince, blood nor
reputation. He could kill cruelly for the interests of his tribe,
which were always the interests of his God lahweh. We need
not speak in detail of Saul and his cruelties, or of David and
his ways that cannot well be described in print or in pulpit,
much less in a Sunday school. But we read on, and we find
that long after David there was written a book that might be
called " The Records of the Great Days and Deeds of Elijah
and Elisha," * two men who moved their people powerfully
about 900 to 850 B.C. That book proves, by its very existence,
how the people gloried in the bloodthirsty cruelties that those
two very great Hebrews believed to be the true and glorious
ways of lahweh. So fierce and awful was Elisha, according
to the opinion of the Hebrews themselves, that a hundred
years after him another prophet, Hosea, declared in the name
of lahweh that the murders which Elisha had directly
instigated, in the name of lahweh also of course, must be
awfully avenged, even to the destruction of the whole nation
of Israel. j-
Such, then, was Tribal Hebraism in the early nomad days ;
such it was again in the days of the determined, aye, inspired
march away northwards to the land where the Hebrews
settled down ; and so it was again in the generations when
they were fiercely conquering the peoples of Palestine ; again,
also, such was it when they were settling down in agricultural
pursuits ; still so was it also when they had learned the value
of united government ; and, finally, such it was when those
* See 1 Kings xvii. to 2 Kings xiii.
t Compare 2 Kings ix. f., and especially ix. to 10, with Hosea i. 4f.

THE TRIBAL RELIGION BEFORE AMOS 173
two great national hero-prophets, Elijah and Elisha, swayed
the multitudes even as late as the ninth century (900-
800 B.c.) and later still.
But how marvellous a change came in 750 B.C. ! Tribalism
broke down, in face of fearful foreign oppressions, and then
the Great God of the Universe moved certain men to be
Preachers of a New Life, a New Religion, a New Safety.
God revealed in these Preachers' souls a far higher conception
of Life, and of Man, and of God. God saved men from
Tribalism by the preachers of Moral Hebrew Righteousness.
This was the great work of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and their
comrades. We are to go on to see that in later studies.
Meantime, someone is perhaps asking himself once more :
" Are these terrible stories of blood and of fierce interest in
one tribe a proper material for lessons for to-day, and
especially for our children ? " No one can doubt that the
answer ought to be " No, no ; certainly not." If any one
teaches children these stories as pictures of the mind of the
Almighty Ruler who is to be obeyed, and like Whose life our
life should be, then the outcome will be a blood-thirst in
people. What wonder that the Englishman who can hold a
weapon says, " Let us go out and kill something " ! Nay,
more; if we teach that the Old Testament, just as it stand],
is all of it a book of lessons concerning Jesus, can we be
reasonably surprised when people stay away from the churches
where that Jesus is thus preached ? We have perhaps become
a little more reasonable than religious people used to be,
especially in our statement of our ideas concerning the use of
the Bible ; but we have a good deal more to do in adjusting
to these improved opinions our actual manipulation of the
Book in the pulpits and in our choice of appropriate lessons
for our children. As we began these chapters with anxious
outlook upon our Sunday-school lessons, so do we close.

174 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
We regret that our young people leave our Sunday schools ;
but have we alienated their moral sense by giving them
lessons on Joshua the fierce and, might we not say, the savage
tribal Hebrew, as if this Joshua were a Jesus? Conscience
cries here : " Set your house in order, then invite your kins
folk and acquaintance to sup with you."
But we are not going to let men leave out of use all those
books of the Old Testament and all knowledge of those
people ! Does any one fear that ? Why, what have we been
doing in these pages but urging a real use of it all ? We
simply must use it ; but we dare not use it in any other
than the historical way. Even the Hebrew Tribalism is the
absolutely essential foundation ground which the skilled
teacher must know, if he is going to build up the great
picture of the elevation of that people to a moral level and
a nobility that are marvellous almost beyond credibility.
That Tribalism is the dark background against which we can
see the beauty of the Vision of God that followed. And as
we shall look back from the fellowship of the great men of
God, an Amos, a Hosea, an Isaiah, a Micah, a Jeremiah, we
shall be moved to deep thankfulness that we have been able
to read the story of what the men before the prophets were.
Knowing the one, we shall know the other. A lack of this
historical and comparative estimate is exactly the reason that
the wonderful work of those prophets was for so many long
ages scarcely valued at all. The prophets do become
gloriously precious when we know the Tribal poverty and
cruelty ; and the Tribalist ways of Abraham and Moses and
all the others become full of intense interest when we know
the height above them to which the Prophets rose. Then,
and then only, do we know the rich value of the Old Testa
ment. One thing more we must add. We may seem to some

THE TRIBAL RELIGION BEFORE AMOS 175
to have laid quite aside those other elements in the narrative
books, namely, much of the Elohistic story, and the Law
documents that are in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and much
of the Priestly System. But these are all to come into use as
the materials for our farther chapters of the History ; and of
course they must come in at their right places. Then, as
already shown by our discoveries thus far, these other
elements are going to shine out in a far greater glory than any
one could dream of under the old way of reading them.
The End of the Period of the Tribal Religion
of the Hebrews.

APPENDIX
A LIST OF HELPFUL BOOKS
(I) Books on Matters in general concerning OLD
TESTAMENT Study, i.e., On the Contents of the various
parts of the O.T. ; and on various special parts of the Course
of External Events ; also on Geographical and Biographical
subjects ; and on many special sub-divisions in the field of
Theology. The student should consult the following : —
(i) The ENCYCLOPEDIA BIBLICA, published by
A. & C. Black, 4 vols. 4to, which is a genuinely and fearlessly
scientific work.
(2) The JEWISH ENCYCLOPAEDIA, published by Funk
& Wagnalls, 12 vols. 4to, which is a work for Jews, but is very
liberal. (3) The NEW BIBLE DICTIONARY, T. & T. Clark,
5 vols. 4to. This is excellent indeed, but is intended to be
cautious, and not too advanced.
(4) Not a few of the older Bible Dictionaries and the
General Encyclopaedias such as Herzog, Smith, Chambers,
and chief of all the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, in
its last edition, contain a great deal of valuable information.
No one could do better than study the articles in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica on " Bible," " Hebrew Language,"
" Israel," " Pentateuch," &c, which were written chiefly by
Professors Wellhausen and Robertson Smith. These articles
are classic contributions to the whole study, if only because of
the fact that on them was based the unfortunate heresy trial
of Professor Robertson Smith. Portions of the " Britannica "
can in some cases be obtained containing the special articles
named, and these would be of great service to the enquirer.
(5) A veritable gold mine of information is THE TRA
DITIONS AND BELIEFS OF ANCIENT ISRAEL, by
Canon Cheyne, published by A. & C. Black.

APPENDIX 177
(6) A similar most valuable new work is THE EARLY
TRADITIONS OF GENESIS, by Prof. A. R. Gordon,
D.Litt., of Montreal, published by T. & T. Clark.
(7) Dr. G. A. Smith's HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
OF THE HOLY LAND is invaluable.
(8) Baedeker's PALESTINE and EGYPT are perhaps
even better guides to the Geography.
(9) Petrie's two books named in our pages, and Chilperic
Edwards's on HAMURABI'S CODE are excellent.
(II) BIBLE Texts :—
(1) Best of all are the volumes of the POLYCHROME
BIBLE, in English translation, with Notes, published by
James Clarke & Co. Nothing surpasses them. Unfortunately,
only the books of LEVITICUS, JOSHUA, JUDGES,
ISAIAH, EZEKIEL, and PSALMS have as yet appeared
in English. But every earnest student will strive to possess
these. A large number of volumes of the Hebrew Text, with
Notes, have been issued.
(2) The REVISED VERSION of the Old Testament is
of much service ; unfortunately, by the Rules of the Revision
views which only the little handful of masters of the subject
pleaded for were put into the margin. In using the R.V.
the wise man will constantly consult that margin.
(3) The AUTHORISED VERSION cannot be called a
students' translation in any satisfactory sense ; for many
passages were purposely mistranslated in order to make them
agree with the doctrinal opinions of the time of the translation,
about 1600 a.d. For this very reason, of course, the A.V. is
excellent material for study of the English Theology of that
date. Otherwise it is only an English classic, unsurpassed of
course in that respect.
(4) The CENTURY BIBLE, issued under the Editor
ship of Principal Adeney, is useful ; it marks on the
margin in large initials the places where one or another of
the original Documents begins to be used in the text. The
Prefatory matter is often excellent.
(5) Bacon's GENESIS OF GENESIS and his TRIPLE
TRADITION OF THE EXODUS are of the very highest
M

178 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
value, as they exhibit the text of the books of Genesis,
Exodus, and Numbers in various type to indicate the different
original sources. Valuable critical exposition is given,
especially in the " Exodus " volume ; and " J," " E," and " P "
are re-constructed separately.
(6) Professor Addis's DOCUMENTS of the Hexateuch is
helpful. (7) The present writer has endeavoured to exhibit the
results of analysis of the various books in the following : —
(i) In volume ii. of his OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
are printed in full the IAHWISTIC Document and the
ELOHISTIC Document, each restored to the original form
which it had before being interwoven in the construction of
the books of Genesis, &c, on to Kings. This is published
by A. & C. Black.
(ii) A Summary Outline of each of these, " J " and " E," is
given in his HEBREW THEOLOGY AND ETHICS, pub
lished by Scribner's Sons and John Nimmo.
(iii) In his ABRAHAM AND THE PATRIARCHAL
AGE, published by Dent, is given all the Biblical information
concerning Abraham, each original source being printed con
tinuously and in full so far as it speaks of the patriarch.
(Ill) WORKS ON OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
proper : —
(1) Easily first here must stand Wellhausen's HISTORY
OF ISRAEL, published by Williams and Norgate.
(2) The works of the late Professor Robertson Smith are
classic. The chief volumes named here as follows are all
published by A. & C. Black.
(i) THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE JEWISH
CHURCH, still unsurpassed as a guide into the whole field.
(ii) THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. Second edition. A
splendid study of the Hebrew heroes of prophecy.
(iii) THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES. Second
edition. This is the Masterpiece of the Master. Alas ! it was
left unfinished at his death. This work is indispensable
in any thorough study of Hebrew Religion.
(3) The posthumous work of the late Professor A. B.

APPENDIX 179
Davidson on OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY, published
by T. & T. Clark, shows that he looked forward towards
handling the subject in what he called the chronological and
therefore genetic order. But the published volume lacks just
that most desirable quality, and none could have given it more
ably than the veteran Davidson. However, the book is full
to overflowing of rich material for the student.
(4) The English translation of Schulz's O.T. THEOLOGY
has the same fault of insufficient chronological arrangement.
(5) Kittel's HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS, in English
translation, published by Williams and Norgate, discusses
ostensibly the general movement of the History ; but all
along the way the development of the Religious life is richly
illustrated. This book is exceedingly good.
(6) Professor Addis has recently given us an admirable
volume in the " Crown " Library of Williams and Norgate, on
THE HEBREW RELIGION, and this may well be used
as the student's vade mecum.
(7) In the same series is also an excellent work on THE
RELIGION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Professor
Marti, in translation, of course.
(8) The late Rev. R. A. Armstrong, of Liverpool, pub
lished at Williams and Norgate's an admirable book, a trans
lation of the Dutch Professor Knappert's work on THE
RELIGION OF ISRAEL, which is well worthy of study.
(9) Professor Bennett's handy, if tiny, OLD TESTAMENT
THEOLOGY has the two disadvantages that it is so very,
small and that it is not chronological, but treats of a topic,
e.g., the nature of Deity, as if it were nearly the same for all
Old Testament time.
(10) Dr. Buchanan Gray has a good Monograph on THE
DIVINE DISCIPLINE OF ISRAEL, which has, of course, the
defect that it seems to imply that Israel was treated in a dif-
ferentwayfromotherpeoplesbytheGreatSpirit. Such treatment
by a God who is the Father of Jesus is essentially impossible.
(n) Professor Peake's Discussion of THE PROBLEM OF
SUFFERING IN THE OLD TESTAMENT is excellent
in its suggestions and illumination, as all his work is.

180 OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
(12) One of the more significant books and studies of recent
years has been Canon Cheyne's American Lectures on JEWISH
LIFE IN PALESTINE AFTER THE EXILE. The book is
an indication of the happy fact that men are beginning to
see that we must know Judaism as it was just before Jesus
came if we are to realise historically what He himself was.
(13) Cornill's PROPHETS, although a small book, is
invaluable. (14) The present writer's own works on this subject have
been named above, with the exception of the first volume of
OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY, which treats of the four
great Moral Prophets of the century 800 to 700 B.C., Amos,
Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, and discusses their genetic relation
to each other.
(IV) Mention should be made furthermore of the various
works on INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT ;
especially Bennett's, Cornill's, and Driver's. These discuss the
literary questions concerning each Old Testament book;
unfortunately they always follow the order in which these books
stand in the Hebrew Old Testament, which is of course
entirely un-historical. That order is, however, not so mis
leading as is the order followed in the English Bible.
But Kantzsch's LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTA
MENT, translated by Dr. J. Taylor, is chronological, and
surpasses all.
(V) It is unnecessary, as it would be impossible, to name all
the valuable Commentaries on O. T. books.
(VI) Finally the student must know how to compare the
Greek Old Testament, called THE SEPTUAGINT, or
" LXX.," with the Hebrew ; and for such purpose a LXX. text
is necessary. An excellent help in such comparison is Swete's
INTRODUCTION TO THE LXX.
(VII) Every student needs a Concordance; and none is
better than that in quarto by Dr. Young.

INDEX

Aaron, 163
Abdi-hiba, 168
Abijah or Abia, 35
Abraham, 9 f , 18, 30, 48, 51, 55, 76,
79 f, 82, 87 f, 90, 92, 95,98!, 103 ft,
148 f, 161, 170 f, 174
Accad and Accadian, 57 f, 66
Accepted views, 3 f
Adam, 30, 108 ff, 114
Addis, Prof., 118 f, and Appendix
Advance, 12, 21, 36, 42, 47, 55, 74,
122, 131, 139
^Eschylus, 26, 62 ff
Affidavits, 86, 90, 97, 99
Africa, 96. 106 ff
Agade, 9 ; and see Accadian
Agriculture, 10, 56 ft', 68, 85, 91, 95 f,
102, 148, 162, 172
Ahaz, 17
Akenhaten, 166 ff
Alexander, 30
Alphabets, 57 f
Altar, 18, 21, 126
Amenhotep III. and IV., 166 ff
Ammonite, 127, 156
Amorite, 125, 157
Amos, 14 f, 17, 29 ff, 47 f, 62, 66, 74,
80, 114, 121, 124, 131, 133, 137, 145,
IS1. J59. I7°, 173 f
Amraphel, 81 f
Analysis of Narrative Books, 1 f, 13,
17. 35, 49. 82, 105 ff, 118, 145 ff,
174 f
Ancestors of Jesus, 6, 32, 40 ff, 51 ff
62 ff, 70 ff, 77 ff, 106 f
Anointed, 24, 38, 43, 102
Anthropomorphism, 127
Antiochus, 37 f
Apocalypse, 32, 38
Apocrypha, 85, 147
Apsu, 73
Arabia, 8, 10, 53, 60 f, 66, 68, 71, 99,
143. !48

Aramaic and Aramaean, 36 f, 52 f, 71,
128
Archaeology, 67, 153 ff, 170
Architects, 55, 67 f, 91, 97
Ark, 151
Armies, 67, 89, 97, 157
Arrowhead Writing, 57, 72 f, 82
Art, 10, 68, 147
Aryan, .153
Assurbanipal, 72 f
Assyria, 17, 49, 52, 57, 71 ff, 157, 171
Astronomy, 58 ff, 73, 97
Atavism, 87
Aziru, 168

Babylon, 9, 13, 20, 24 f, 31, 34, 47 ff,
52 ff, 60, 66 ff, 71 ff, 77, 79 ff, 87 ff,
119, 125, 137, 142, 147 f, 166,
168 f
Baron, Dr. B. W., 123 f, 149, and
Appendix
Banditti, 103, 168 f
Banking, 10, 88, 90
Bedouin and Bedawy, 103, 142 f. 156
169
Bennett, Dr., 29, 149, 167 and Appx.
Beyrout, 168
Bible Dictionary, New, 2 ff, 5, 72, 83
119, 149
Biliteral roots, 53 ff
Birth, supernatural, 67
Blatchford, R., 70
Blood, 91, 142, 170 ff
Boats and Shipping, 37, 67 ff, 80, 88,
91, 96 f
Bribery in H's Code, 86
Bricks, 57
Browning, 76
Buddha, 26
Building, 91
Burglary, 87
Business, 37, 44, 80 ff N

1 82

INDEX

CAtRO, 167
Called of God, 66, 68, 71, 87, 98, 101 f,
125, 138, 141
Calvary, 8, 33, 38, 45 ff
Campbell, Rev. R. j., 70
Canaanite, 10, 52, 71, no f, 125, 132,
138, 140 f
Canon, 84 f, 120, 128
Captain of Salvation, 9, 20, 74 f,
100
Caravans and Carriers, 69, 80, 96
Carvings, n, 68, 82 f, 155
Catholic, 144
Cattle, 59, 68, 91, 95 f, 102, in, 171
Charter, 19, 27, 34 ff
Cheyne, Rev. Prof. , 2, 29 and Appx.
Children and Child Sacrifice, 1, 17,
22, 27, 48, 62, 90, 94 f, 114 f, 134 f,
142 f, 162, 171 ff
Children of God, 5, 8, 64 ff, 78, 98,
127, 142
China, 26
Christ Ideal, 5 f, 19 ff, 40, 46 f, 64, 76,
106, 114 f, 120 f, 136, 144
Christian Commonwealth, Preface
Christianity, its Rise, 41 ff
Christmas, 76
Chronicles, 35, 160
Circumcision, 138 f
Civilisation, 9 ff, 20, 48, 55 ff, 67 ff,
80 ff, 92 ff
CUy Tablets, 54, 72 f
Climax, 20 ff, 33, 46, 115, 174
Code of Hamurabi. See Law
Colenso, 116 f
Comfort Poem, 23 ff, 30 f
Commandments, Ten. See Deca
logue
Commerce, 10, 48, 64 ff, 79, 81, 88,
96 f
Concubine, 90, 95
Confucius, 26
Congregationalist, 146 f
Conscience, 98, 148, 174
Conscription, 89, 97
Consonantal Roots, 54 f
Copper, 68, 155
Cornill, Prof., 149 and Appendix
Creation, 9, 20, 28, 52, 73 ff, 77, 105 ff,
116, 138
Crimes in H's Code, 85 ff
Criticism, 41, 43, 48, 82, 105 ff, 113,
129 f, 154, 160
Crucifixion, 42, 45, 115 ff
Cuneiform. See Arrowhead Writing
Cyrus, 24 f, 67

Damascus, 53, 96, 128
Dams, 89, 96
Daniel, 38, 58
Date-palms, 50, 60, 68, 89
Dates, 12, 30, 52 ff, 58 ff, 62, 67, 81,
93 f, 119, 121, 126, 133, 145, 151 f,
166 ff
Daughters, 90, 95, in
David, 18, 21, 24, 31, 35, 38, 42, 48,
83,88, 131, 139, 144, 153, 160, 165,
169, 172
Dawson, A. , Preface
Dead Sea, 126 f
Death, 22 f, 26, 32 f, 38, 45 f, 55, 86,
no, 146, 167
Deborah, 171
Decalogue. See Ten Command
ments & 18, 31, 145, 150 ff, 161 ff,
i°5
December, 75
Deities, 73 ff, 77, 97, 100 ff, 108 ff,
125 f, 128, 131 ff, 142, 159, 161,
163 f
Delitzsch, Prof. F., 82 f
Deliverer, 9, 63, 74, 148, 159, 162,
169
Delta , 8, 10, 22, 56 ff, 60 f, 66, 79, 87 ff,
108, m, 125, 141, 148, 156
Destiny- Tablets, 74 ff, 100
Deuteronomy, 18 f, 21, 29, 47, 74, 80,
92, 105, 137, 149. 175
Development, 9, 15 f, 42, 55, 60, 81
Devotee-girls, 90 f, 95
Devotion, 23, 116
Discipline, Divine, 32, 63, 85
Dissenters, 38
Dissolution of Hebrew People, 19,
21 f, 26, 33 f
Doctrine in Old Testament, 7, 16, 30,
114, 119, 132, 138, 158, 164
Dragomans, 37
Driver, Dr., 29, 149 and Appendix
Dualism, 77 f
Duhm, Prof. 15 f, 30
Dynasties, 10, 80 ff, 166
ECCLEStASTES, 37, 44
Eden, 30, noff, 114
Editors of Hebrew Documents, &c,
13. 35 ff, 49- 73. 81, 105, 112 f, 119,
122 ff, 132, 137 f, 149 ff
Education, 1, 6, 18, 44, 62, 103, 106,
115 f, 120, 132, 173 f
Edwards, Chilperic, 83 f and Appx.
Egypt, 36, 129, 133, 143, i53ff; 160 f,
163, 166 ff

INDEX

183

Elam, 83, 86, 89
Elijah, 121, 139, 145, 160, 172 f
Elisha, 4, 14, 31, 145, 17a f
Elohist or " E," 2, 17 f, 29, 35,49,
112, Ii7ff, 129 ff, 138 ff, 144 f, 149 ff,
158, 161, 163, 175
Encyclopaedia Biblica, 2, 68, 72, 119,
149, and Appendix
Enoch, 38
Epics, 9, 20, 28, 73ff, 107, 170
Esther, 73
Ethics, 119, 124, 149 ; also see Morals
and Appendix
Ethiopians, 46, 53, 71
Euphrates, 8, 10, 20, 22, 24 f, 27, 52,
55 ff, 66 ff, 87,96, 108,125, J32> x37>
141
Evo ution, 21, 108
Exile, 19 ff, 28 ff, 34, 46f, 67, 92, 96,
n.S, 124, I36f, 160
Exodus, 4f, 13, 17 f, 35, 74, 79 f, 109,
119, 123, 129, 137, 145, 149ff, I53ff,
164, 166
Exposition, 37, 52, 62
Ezekiel, 22 f, 30, 35, 74, 125, 135, 137,
160 ff
Ezra, 38, 137
Fate of Priestly Document, 35 f
Fates of Men , 20, 74 f, 100
Feasts and Festivals, 126, 134, 142,
150, 161 ff
First-born, Sacrific"; of, 134 f, 142, 161 f
Floods, 4, 9, 73 ff, 89, 108, 138
Food, 115
Forgeries, 93
Forsyth, Dr. P. T., 15
Frequentative Words, 24
Genesis, 1 ff, 9 ff, 17, 29 f, 41, 49, 52,
74 f, 81, 84, 87, 94, 105 ff, 123 ff, 129,
132 ff, 138 ff, 170
Genesis of Genesis, 123^ and Appx.
Gideon, 18, 171
God, 5 f, 9, 12, 16 ff, 20 ff, 28 ff, 45 ff,
56, 58, 60, 62 ff, 70 ff, 76 ff, 87, 96 ff,
109 ff, 120 ff, 147 f, 154, 159 ff,
171 ff
Godliness, 44, 58, 68
Godman, 9, 20, 38, 74 f, 100
Good, 17 ff, 31, 47 f, 58, 68, 93 ff, 121,
160
Gospel, 144, 167
Greece, 26, 36 f, 62 f, 65 f, 147
Gudea, 9, 13, 68 f, 73

Guerilla, 103, 143, 169, 171
Gunkel, Prof., 72
Habakkuk, 30, 74
Habiri, 103, 168 ff
Hades, 9, 73
Hagar, 30, 90, 95, 114 f, 126 f, 134,
139 f. 143
Haggai, 31
Hamurabi, and see Law, 5, ioff, 20,
29, 80 ff, 94 ff, 169
Harnack, Prof., 130
Hebraism, 8, 14, 28 ff, 34,44, 145, 160,
172
Hebrew Language, 8, 28 ff, 52 ff, 79 f,
92
Herds, 68, 91, 95, 171
Hezekiah, 17
Hieroglyphics, 163
High Pr est, 24
Historical Jesus, 6, 33, 38, 40 ff, 5iff,
62 ff, 70 ff. 77 ff, 104ft*, I2° ff. J46
Historical Method, 15 f, 27, 41, 48 f,
64 f, 79, 84 f, 94, 105 ff, 117, 121, 130,
153 ft", I44> I7S
Hittites, 125, i68f
Holiness Law or " H," 23, 30
Home, 51 ff, 90, 94
Horeb, 150 ft'
Hosea, 4, 14, 17, 29, 31, 47, 66, 124,
131, 137, 158 ff, 172 ff
Hughes, Rev. H. P., I4f
Hymns, 37, 43, 103, 115, 120
Iai-iweh, 17 f, 22 f, 26 f, 33, 87, 109 ff,
119, 122, 126 ff, 131 ff, 149 ff, 161 ff
172
Iahwism and Iahwistic, 8, 13 f, 18,
114, 117, 119, 121 ff, 149 ft"
lahwist and "J," 1 ff, 11, 18, 29f, 35,
114, 119, 121 ff, 147 ff, 160 ff, 170
Idiosyncrasies unaccepted, 2
Immanence, 113
India, 26, 96
Industry, 56, 64, 66, 69, 79, 95 f
Infallibility, 104 f
Inspirations, 25, 32,38,76, 87, 99, 112,
115, 122, 133, 159
International S. S Lessons, 1
Introduction to Old Testament, 29,
84 f, 149, and Appendix
Irrigation, 89, 96, 102
Isaac, 18, 128, 134
Isaiah, 14, 17, 23 if, 29 ff, 45 ft", 62,65^
74 f, 84, 121, 124, 131, 151, 159, 173 f
Ishmael, 126 1", 134, 139 f

1 84

INDEX

Ishtar, 73
Israel, 15, 31 f, 42, 66, 85
" J." See lahwist
Japan, 147
Jastrow, Prof., 167
Jealous Deily, 127 f, 161, 164
Jehu, 4 f
Jephthah, 171
Jeremiah, 19, 29,46, 48, 58, 124, I35f,
159 f. 174
Jerusalem, n, 27, 34, 37, 137, 139, 168
Jesus, bis aim, 19 ft"; his Ancestors,
5iff, 62ft", 7off, 77ff; his Anoint
ing and Christhood, 24, 38, 147 ;
his Coming, 33, 36, 38, 120 ; his
Centrality, 40, 104, 106 f ; I is Edu
cation, 5 f, 45, 106 ; his Home, 41 f,
106 ; his Ideal, 20, 40, 47 ; his
Name, 25 ; his Peace 5 ; his Power,
5, 45 f, 114 f; his Preferences, 31;
his Preaching, 21, 44, 144 ; his
Revelation, 19, 45 ff, 136 f, 146 ;
his Sonship of God, 38 ; his Story,
120, 136, 173
Jewish. See Judaism
Jewish Encyclopaedia, 3 and Appx.
Job, 26, 30, 75
John, 38, 153
Johns, Mr., 83, and Appendix
Jonah, 74
Joseph, 18, 168
Joshua, 15, 18,30, 106, 132, 167, 169,
171, 174
Josiah, 19, 29
Jubilees, Book of, 36
Judaism, its Birth, 27, 33 f; its Bloom,
36 f; its Charier, 27, 34 ff; its
History, 46, 147 ; its Ideals, 38 ;
its Literature, 44 ; its Psalms, 43f ;
its Society, 42, 153 ; its Song, 37,
42 ff ; its Stoi y, 8, 28 ff ; its Trial,
37ff; its Worship, 119, I37ff
Judges, 15, 18, 106, 162, 171
Judgments, 16, 21
KrNGS, 10 f, 13, 17 ff, 29, 35 ff, 49, 66 ff,
75, 80, 94 ft", 125, 156, 166 ft", 171
Kittel, Prof., 118, and Appendix
Land-possession, 89, 96, 140, 169
Language, Hetrcw, 8, 52 ft'
Laws and Codes, 5, 10 ff, 20. 23, 29, 36,
48, 69, 77 ff, 93 ff, 112, 147, 150 ff,
161 f, 175
Laws of God, 120, 128, 130

Lawyers, 81 f, 85, 96
Lay-preachers, 4
Letianon, 68
Lehmann, Prof., 85 f
Levitees, 119, 155, 164, 170
Leviticus, 23, 30, 92, 175
Lex Talionis, 86, 91
Liquor-selling, 90
Literature, Hebrew and Jewish, 6, 17,
22, 28 ff, 44, 49 f, 63, 79, 105 ff, 113,
116, 146 f, 165, 170
Lord God, 107' ff
Love and Lovingkindness Manifest,
20, 27, 58, 65, 111 ff, 136, 164
Luke, 35, 130
Luther, 66, 115
Lyrics, 25 f, 30, no ff
' ' M." See Melchizedek
Maccabees, 37 f
Macor. See Micraim
Madman, The Illustrious, 37
Malachi, 32, 34
Man, 45, 76, 95, 105, 108 ft, 173
Marduk! See Merodach
Marriage, 90, 94 f, 126, 166
Marti, Prof., 118 and Appendix
Masiah and Messiah, 24, 38
Mediterranean, 10, 67 f, 96, 168
Melchizedek or "M," 81, 117, 125,
141
Merchants and Agencies, 55, 64 ff, 80,
86, 88, 96
Merodach, 9, 20, 74 ff, 100
Messiah. See Masiah
Micah, 17, 29, 47, 124, 144, 174
Micraim and Micri, 143, 147
Migrations, 9 f, 20, 30, 53 ff, 60, 66,
71, 79. 87> 9s. I2S. 132. 141
Mining, 155
Miracle, 14, 26, 155
Mishnah, 36
Mission and Missionary aim, 22, 31,
33 ff. 36- 44. 4&. 96, 115. 120
Mitani, 168
Moabite, 52, 127, 156
Molten Images, 161
Mono-Iahwism, 18
Monotheism, 18, 65 f, 78 1, 101 ff,
161
Moon, 102, 162
Moral Hebraism, 14, 145, 160, 173
Moral Revolution, 11, 16 ff, 117, 139,
151 ff '59
Morality, Christian, 30, 94 f
Mosaic and Mosaism, 5, 15 f, 119

INDEX

185

M

loses, 9 ff, 15 f, 18, 29, 31, 35, 103,
119, 132, 138, 145 ff, 165 ff, 170 f,
174
Museums, 9 f, 12, 54, 68, 83, 167
Nabonassar, 58 ff
Nabonidus, 67
Nahum, 29, 124, 136
Naram-Sin, 66
Narrative Documents, 11 ff, 17 f, 29,
34 f, 49, 87, 105 ff, 112, 118 f, 143 ff,
165, 170
National Religion, 38
Nebuchadrezzar, 58
Nehemiah, 27, 34 f, 122, 137, 140
New Bible Dictionary. See Bible
Dictionary
New Theology, 11 ft", 33, 132, 136
Nile, 11, 166 f
Nineveh, 72 f
Noah, 138
Nomad, 47 f, 87, 95, 125 f, 132, 141 ff,
148, 156 f, 168
Numbers, 35, 149
Ocean-Deity, 73 ff
Old Testament Theology defined, 84,
104; Method and Change. 1, 4, 63,
153 f; Results, 5, 44 ; Leaders, 116
Olympiads, 62, 65
Ordeal, 86
Origins, 8, 11, 13, 51 ff, 71 ff, 148
PALESTtNE, 11, 36, 80, no, 126, 148,
155 ff, 162, 165 ff, 171 f
Palms. 68, 89
Parsee. See Persia
Paul, 26, 36, 42
Peake, Prof. , 4 and Appendix
Pentateuch, 2 f, 15, 18, 106 ff, 116,
119, 149, 158
Persephone, 73
Persian and Parsee: Conqueror,
Emperor, Gulf, Influence, Officers,
10, 24, 26, 34 f, 96
Petrie, Prof. F. , 153 ff, 160 f, 163, 167,
170 and Appendix
Pharaoh, 129, 155
Pharisees, 38
Phelps, Prof., 45
Philosophy, 36, 42, 64, 108 ff, 147
Phoenicia, 52, 67, 96, 168
" Pippa passes," 76
Plague, 156, 163
Poetry, 9, 20, 23 ff, 30 f, 37 f, 73 ff,
107 ff, 115

Politics, 17, 97, 100 ff
Polytheism, 77 f, 100, 108, 161
Powers Unseen, 99 ff
Prayer, 103
Preaching, 17, 19, 21, 30, 37, 45 ff,
131, 159, 173
Precession of Equinoxes, 58 ff
Priestly Document or " P," 2 ff, 35,
107 ff, 117 ff, 122 ff, 137 ff, 149,
152, 160, 175
Priests, 119, 164
Problem of Exile and Suffering, 20 ff,
31, 33 ff, 46
Progress of Powers and Men, 5, 73 ff,
131
Prophets, 9, 11, 14 ff, 20 ff, 28 ff, 47,
62 ff, 71, 121, 124, 133, 137, 145 ff,
¦"SS. ""57 ff 173 f
Propositions of Modern Old Testa
ment Theology, 39 ff
Prostitution, 90 f, 95
Proverbs, 36 f, 44,74, 102
Providence, 12, 45, 58, 76, 102, 141
Psalms, 9, 32, 37 f, 43, 74 f
Ptolemies, 30, 36
Ram, Sign of, 59
Ramessu II. and III., 155 f
Reconstruction, 2. 106, 118, 124
Records of Past, 68, 72
Red Sea, 10, 68, 96, 157
Reformers, Moral, 62, 121 f, 131, 137,
151 ff, 160; Protestant, 42, 115,
144
Religion of Semites, 13 f, 52, 118 and
Appendix
Religious Books, Semitic, 70 ff
Renaissance, 42
Renan, 143 f
Rents in H's Code, 89
Revelation of God, 5, 14, 45 ff, 131 f,
146 f, 152
Revival, 42, 115
Rib-Addi, 168
Right and Righteousness, 78, 88, 97 f,
I42. ""73
Robertson Smith, 13 f, 52, 88, 117 f,
and Appendix
Rome, Emperors of, and Founding
of, History and Soldiers, 38, 46,
62 ff, 147
Sab^an, 52
Sabbath, 162
Sacerdotal, 44
Sacrifice, 18, 47, 134, 142, 161 ff

i86

INDEX

Sadducees, 38
Saints, 37
Samaria, 21
Samuel, 18, 171 f
Sarah, 128, 133
Sargon, 9, 13, 66 f
Saul, 172
Saving and Saviour, 19 ff, 26 f, 45 ff,
48, 74 ff, 100
Sayce, Prof., 68, 72
Scheil, Father, 83
Schmiedel, Prof., 153 ff
Schradr r, Prof. , 72
Scientific Method. See Historical
Method
Selection. See Divine Discipline
Semite, Home, Migrations, Peoples,
Religion, and Roots, 9, 14, 20, 24,
52 ff, 60 f, 162
Septuagint, 36 and Appendix
Serbal, Mount, 155
Sermons, 37 ; and see Preaching
Service of God, 62 ff
Shaddai, El, I38f
Shechem, 126
Shipping, 10, 67, 80, 88, 96
Shirpurla, 68, 73
Shushan, 83
Sibylla, 144
Sidon, 168
Signs. See Zodiac
Sin, 26, 114, 144
Sinai, 68, 138, 150, 152 ft", 161, 163,
169
Sirach, 37
Slab-literature, iof, 54, 73, 82ff, 93,
163, 167 f
Slaves and Slavery, 19, 22 ff, 34, 69,
86, 95, 133, 137
Slaying-place and Slain-feast, 125 f,
134, 142, 161 f
Smith, Dr. George Adam, 126 and
Appendix
Smith, W. R., Prof. See Robertson
Smith
Socialists, 120
Socrates, 26
Soldiers. See Conscription
Solomon, King, Wisdom, Psalms, 13,
37 f
Sons in H.'s Code. See Code
Spencer, Dr. J., 88
Spring, Signs, Songs, Times, 9, 20,
58 ff, 108
Stars, 58 ff, 97
State, The, 17, 97

Stories and Story, 115, 120, 136
Storm-God, 74 ff
Suez, 143
Suffering, Problem, and Servant, 22 ff,
46
Sumerian, 57 ff
Sun-worship, 166 f
Sunday Schools, 1, 113 ff, 172 ft
Supernatural Birth, 67
Surgeons, 10, 86, 91, 97
Synagogue, 19, 37, 106
Syria and Syriac, 36 f, 52 f, 157, 168
Tables of Stones, i<;of, 163
Tablets of Destiny, 74 ff, 100
Talmud, 36
Targums, 37
Tehom, 73 ff
Tel-el-Amarna, 11 ff, 29, 103, 148,
165 ff
Temperance,. 90, 115
Temples and Temple-building, 67 f
Ten Commandments, 18, 31, 145,
150 ft", 159, 161 ff
Thebes, 166
Theology, New, 5, 13, 33, 132, 136
Thi, Queen, 166 f
Tiamat, 73 ff
Tiller, Mr. Ben, 15
Tombs, 69, 116, 166
Trade, 10, 64 ff, 80, 86, 90, 96 f
Traditions and Traditional Method,
12, 41, 130, 144, 151, I57f. 160
Translation, 36, 44, 54, 72,83, 167
Travel and Travellers' Routes, 65,
67, 96 f
Tribalism and Tribal Hebraism, 8,
13 f, 16 f, 104, 114, 128, 142 f, 145,
159, 161, 165, 171 ff
Triliteral Roots, 53 ff
Turquoise Mines, 155
Twins, Zodiacal Sign of, 59 f
Uncritical, 41
Undervaluation of Old Testament,
40 f
Unity of Divine Powers, 77 f, 100 ff
Unity of Old Testament and New
Testament, 43 f
Unity of Worship, 18 f, 21
Universe, Conception of, 97, 100
Unseen, The, 97ff, 100, 141
Vaticinium, post eventum, 133
Vicarious Suffering, 26, 45ft, 62f
Victoria Institute, 79

INDEX

187

Wages in H's Code, 86, 91
Warehouses in H's Code, 96
Water-ways, 67 f, 80, 96
Wellhausen, Prof., 117 f and Ap
pendix
Whitehouse, Principal, 72
Wife in H's Code, 90, 94 f
Winckler, Dr., 72, 167
Wisdom Literature, 37
Witnesses in H's Code, 86
Woman, 95, in f

Wordsworth, 77
Worship, 18 f, 21, 35, 41, 43, 47, 125 f,
137 f. 150 f. 163. 166

Zechariah, Priest and Prophet, 34f
Zephaniah, 29, 124, 136
Zimmern, Dr., 72
Zion, 24 f
Zodiac, and Signs of, 59, 75
Zoroaster, 26

INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES

OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis, i. : pp. j., 35, 74, 107 ff,
116
ii. . pp. 1, 13, 107 ff, 116
iii. : p. 114
v- : P- 35
vii. 11 : p. 74
viii. 2 : p. 74
xii. : p. 87
xiv. : pp. 81 f., 117, 141
xv. : p. 18
xx : pp. 18, 29
Exodus, iii. : pp. 132, 151
vi. 2 : pp. 109, 138
xx. : pp. 145, 150 f
xxi.-xxiii. : pp. n, 13, 79 f,
?.2
xxm. : p. 1 50 1
xxv. : pp. 35, 137
xxxiii. 17 : p. 164
xxxiv. : pp. 150, 161
Leviticus, xvii.-xxvi. : pp. 23, 30,
92
Deuteronomy, iv. 2 : p. 102
v.-xxvii. : p. 29
vi. 4 : p. 18
xii. : p. 18, 92, 102
1 Kings, xvii.-2 Kings, xiii. : p. 172
2 Kings, ixf: pp. 4, 172
xxii. ff : pp. 19, 29

2 Chronicles, xxiv. 3-19 .- p. 35
Psalms, i.— cl. : p. 43
Proverbs, xxx. 6 : p. 102
Isaiah, i.-xxxi. : p. 29
xl.-lv. : pp. 23 ff, 30, 160
xii. 17-20 : p. 45
xiii. 1-4 : 25, 30
xlix. 1-6 : pp. 25, 30, 34, 48, 96
"5
1. 4-9 : pp. 25, 30
lii.f : pp. 26, 30
liii. : pp. 26, 28, 30, 33 f., 46, 48,
62, 65, 115
Jeremiah, vii. : pp. 19, 135
xv. : p. 160
xix. : p. 135
xxxii. : p. 135
Ezekiel, viii. 3 : p. 161
xvi. : pp. 125, 135, 162
xx. 26 : p. 135
xxiii. 37 : p. 162
Hosea, i. : pp. 4, 172
xii. 13 : p. 159
Amos, v. 14 : p. 17
Micah, vii. : p. 144
NEW TESTAMENT
Luke, i. 5 : p. 35
Romans, viii. 31 : p. 26
Revelation, xxii. 18 f : p. 102

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