OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND THE MODERN PREACHER.* IN his Yale

Lectures Dr. George Adam Smith is concerned chiefly with the future position of the Old Testament in the Christian Church. He does not omit, however, to refer to its influence in the past. It was one of the many paradoxes of mediEeval history that the ancient Semitic book of the hated Jews, rather than the New Testament, was the Bible of the men of the Middle Ages. New Testament ideas were not altogether neglected, but they were often half disguised under Old Testament imagery. The reason of this was that the New Testament, written in an age when there were neither Christian Kings nor Christian nations, could afford but little guidance to those who had to organise Teutonic' tribes and Roman provincials into nations professing Christianity in their public life. But in the Old Testament they read of a

• Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament : Eight Lectures m the Lyman Beecher Foundation, Yale University, U.S.A. By George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D. London: Hodder and Stoughton. [6e.] people who received laws, a constitution, and a hierarchy from

God, and these served as a model for the medimval States. It was no small gain for the nations of Europe to have such an exemplar set before them. . In times of unbridled passions and triumphant force, rulers and subjects were taught that Kings reigned by the grace of Almighty God, who _would call all men to account for their deeds. They were taught like. wisethat the poor and the down-trodden were objects of Ria

special care, and to this teaching, which took a strong hold of the mediEeval mind, was due the lavish almsgiving by which the strong frequently endeavoured to atone .for. their lack of righteousness. !There were disadvantages connected with the predominance of the Old Testament. It was possible

to defend barbarous customs and cruel laws by appealing to Old Testament precedents, and neither lawyers nor Church.

men failed to avail themselves of them. In connection with this last circumstance, Dr. Smith justly remarks that our attitude towards the Old Testament must be one of freedom, not of slavish imitation, if we would avoid error, and even crime. It is, as we have said, however, with the future of the Old Testament that the lectures are mainly concerned. Within a comparatively short period of time a great change has taken place in the views of Semitic scholars regarding the age and the character of the Old

Testament Scriptures. Of the present position of Old Testament criticism a lucid and informing sketch is given in the first lecture. The .result of the survey is that for the period before the time of Moses there is no history properly so-called. The familiar narratives about .the patriarchs are not biographies, but tales composed in a later age to account for the geographical distribution and character of the tribes of Israel, and of the neighbouring nations. Dr. Smith adds that it is probable, although impossible of proof, that the stories of the patriarchs; thus replete with the circumstances and conceptions of a later age, have at the heart of them certain historical elements.

The earliest chapters of Genesis, according to the lecturer, are in no sense history. They contain a great epic of humanity possessing in an eminent degree the truth of poetry, and of a deep human experience, but not the truth of history. What is recorded never happened as definite historical events, but has happened many times and in many ways in the course of the history of humanity. Having spoken of the story of the Fall, Dr. Smith continues

"The Fall of Man in the Garden is not the only Fall in the Book of Genesis, and every one of the others is traced to a similar source : the increase of knowledge and of power unaccompanied by reyerence; the opening of the eyes to the desirable things of life which gradually come within the reach of us all as the apple came within the reach of Eve. We have this presented to us in the form of several laborious cycles of progress, each ending in a colossal catastrophe. One of them relates the increase of man- kind in numbers, their progress in intellectual and national power, their stagnancy iii hate and the desire for vengeance. Another tells us how men multiplied, how the pride and beauty of the race wedded with the sons of God, and wickedness became so great that God resolved to destroy men from the face of the earth. Another describes the rise of architecture. Men settle in Shiner, they build cities, their art and their power increase, hat their pride and impiety a.Lso, tilt God comes down and confounds the colossal and irreverent ambition of their works. All three stories contain much legendary material from several different sources. Their authors have also been unable to throw off that fear of God, which is east out only by the perfect love taught by Christ, and under which Pagan races have ever iinaginedthe Deity to be jealous of the intellectual and material achievements of His creatures. Yet in all the greater relief that they lie beneath so sombre a heaven, the noble and permanent lessons of the inspired authors stand forth : that human genius and human wealth, if not accompanied by faith and obedience to God, mean the develop- ment of a fatal pride, whose end is the destruction of many indi• yiduals, and the retardation of all human progress."

It is not to be expected that these views will be accepted without misgivings, and without some energetic protests from the advocates of traditional opinions. No such revolutionary demand has been made in the domain of religious ;thought within the Church since the scholars and reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries called upon their fellow- Christians to cease to give credit to a large part of early ecclesiadical history, and to the martyrologies and legends of the saints. And there is no department of human thought so conservative as the religious, which is bound up with strong emotions, and is always reluctant to part with the ancestral supports of piety, even when better are offered: We need not wonder, therefore, that many pleas are put forth to "consider the old thought again." We cannot conceal our opinion, however, that the new

views, although they may be modified in details, have come to stay, or, as Dr. Smith expresses it, that modern criticism

has won its war against the traditionalists. The results reached are not the guesses of a few isolated and capricious scholars, but are due to the labours of a large company of acute and profound investigators of various countries, and in many cases of very different religious opinions. They have been exposed to the ordeal of friendly and unfriendly criticism, and although there are still a few distinguished dissentients, such as Professor Sayce and Professor Hommel, it may be said with confidence that they are accepted by a vast majority of the serious students of the Old Testament. Even those who do not profess to be experts in Semitic learning cannot fail to see that the above conclusions are in harmony with the general results of all other investigations into ancient history.

Unless we postulate a perpetual miracle %by which the his- toriographers of Israel were transformed into modern his-

torians, it was inevitable that myth, legend, and occasional tendency-writing should find a place in their pages. Another remark may be added. All the "gifts of civilisation," to use the expression of the late Dean Church, have come to men gradually, in broken and inexact forms, appealing in the first instance to phantasy, rather than to reason and. the sense for facts.

Notwithstanding his many departures from traditionalism, Dr. Smith is an uncompromising advocate for the traditional doctrine of a special divine revelation having been granted to Israel. He concedes that before the days of the great prophets the religion of Israel was in many respects similar to, and in not a few details almost identical with, general Semitic religion. With regard to this similarity be writes :—

" The God of early Israel was a tribal God ; and His relation to His people is described in the same way as Israel's neighbours describe the relation of their gods to themselves. Israel looked to Jahweh as the Moabites looked to Chemosh for leadership in war, for decisions upon justice—including the detection of criminals and lost property and the settlement of questions of inheritance—and for direction as to the ritual of worship. They prayed to Him to let them see their desire on their enemies, ascribed their victories to His love for them, their defeats to His anger, and they devoted to Him in slaughter their prisoners of war, and the animals they captured from their foes; all exactly as their Moabite neighbours are reported, in very much the same language, to have done to Chemosh the God of Moab Again, the ritual of Israel is full of exact analogies to the ritual of Semitic sanctuaries from Cyprus to Southern Arabia. The sacrifice of certain animals at certain seasons of the year; the smearing of lintels and other objects with blood; the anointing of pillars in honour of the Deity; the presence of human sacrifices with as much infrequency and sense of the awful crisis that demands them as elsewhere in the Semitic world; the worship of images by Jacob's family, by David, and at the sanctuaries of the northern kingdom; the discovery of the Deity's will through dreams, in ecstasy, or by lot ; the attesta- tion of the Divine word by physical signs accompanying it; circumcision ; the law of blood-revenge and its mitigation by the rights of sanctuary; the sacrifice of spoil of war to the Deity; all these things have not only for the most part the same names as in other Semitic languages, but—except for a higher moral character, which, however, only sometimes distinguishes them— they are the same as among other Semites in intention and details of execution."

Renan's characteristic explanation of Israel's Monotheism, that it was due to their early desert home, is rejected for the very sufficient reason that the other Semitic tribes did not become Monotheists. Dr. Smith maintains, moreover, that the similarity of Israel's faith to that of other Semitic tribes before the age of the great prophets, and its sudden elevation in religious power and in ethical dignity through the ministry of the prophets, is the strongest apologetic for the doctrine of the Church that Israel received a revelation and an inspira- tion from God.

In the above remarks we have dwelt chiefly on the earlier lectures, in which there is more to which exception may be taken by some than in the later lectures. In the lectures on the teaching of the prophets and on the Books of Wisdom there is a great deal that will attract the sympathy, and, we may add, the admiration, of all ; for the author possesses in a high degree the art of luminous exposition, which brings remote times near, and makes ancient thoughts intelligible to modern readers. The circumstances under which the lectures were delivered will account for one feature in them which will

not please all readers,—we mean their apologetic tone. Addressed in the first instance to students of the Divinity School in Yale University, the lecturer felt himself under the necessity of defending views which must have appeared un- conventional, if not heterodox, to many of his hearers. His apologetic will no doubt be welcomed by many preachers who have adopted his opinions, but feel a difficulty in using them for purposes of edification in Christian pulpits. Others, however, will regard them as unwelcome interruptions to the progress of admirable expositions, feeling, moreover, that truth itself is always the best edification, and stands in need of no special pleadings. We do not quite like the passage in the first lecture in which our Lord is described as the "first critic of the Law." The authority of our Lord has frequently been appealed to by the advocates of traditional orthodoxy to establish the authorship of Psalms, or to determine the interpretation of passa gee of the Old Testament. Dr. Smith has been tempted to follow their example, and not quite happily, we think, when he appeals to a recorded saying of our Lord which some higher critics of the New Testament— they have also a right to be heard—regard as of doubtful authenticity, and is certainly of doubtful interpretation. It is never well to bring the name of our Lord into the con- troversies which divide the rival schools of Biblical critibism. We should add, however, that those features to which we take some exception were almost inevitable when the occasion and subject of the lectures are taken into account, and they are proofs of the lecturer's sympathy with the needs and trials of the young preacher, and of his desire to bring the new science into harmony with the old faith.