THE SOBRIETY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT" No scholar will ever
refer to Mr. Baring-Gould as an authority on any of the various subjects to which he has devoted his volumes. He has, as a rule, only second-hand information, and that not always the latest, to impart. The critic fails to detect in his writings the higher sort of critical faculty ; but for the ordinary class of readers he produces very respectable books— though all are inlaid with amazing bits of absurdity—and the compilation before us supplies, in a graphic and compendious form, materials which are not, so far as we know, generally accessible to those who are only acquainted with the English language.
Drawing chiefly from German sources, Mr. Gould presents us in these volumes with sketches which he calls "The Legendary Lives of the Patriarchs," but which would be more accurately described in the language of St. Paul, as "Old Wives' Fables," only that they must have been very old and very foolish wives indeed who could ever have repeated them. For every life so called, here represented, from Adam to the prophet Zechariah, is a vast conglomerate of the unnatural, the grotesque, and the
impossible. The old wives who compounded them were not mothers in Israel, seeking to nourish the souls of their sons to valiant doing, daring, and endurance, by the early stories of the heroes of the race ; and no doubt very "strong meat" and " flesh-producing " many of these early stories are, even the sternest of them being shot with a grand faith in a "not-ourselves which makes for righteousness." Oh no! the genuine Hebrew mother had no used to call in exaggera- tion or magical marvels to make the past interesting to her children. No doubt, emotion of itself constitutes a glorifying medium, through which events that might seem common-place to others become to the individual magnified and exceptionally divine. At the same time, it must be allowed that if we possess any germ of authentic Jewish history at all, only the moat sober narrative could approximately reflect the de- velopment, if so we must term it, that took place between the days of Abraham and those of Samuel and King David. And when we turn to the Bible records which relate to this period, not at present to speak of others, we find them "moderate," pace Dean Stanley, in a nobler fashion than the moderation of the Kirk of Scot- land in the last century. Regarded as inaccurate traditions, which, to a very considerable extent, the accounts of the calling of Abraham, of the insurrection in Egypt, of the sojourn in the 'Wilderness, of the invasion of Palestine, and of the unification of the isolated tribes under Samuel must be regarded by history, still there is, under- lying all the accessory surroundings of marvel, a clearly discerni- ble human coherence, as well as a providential concurrence of events, which would constitute a fascinating and inspiring memory for the youth of Israel. Philosophy can interpret, without any spasmodic effort, the reasons for the forty years' By Rev. sojourn in the wilderness; fora people inured to slavery, contented to be slaves, and "lasting after the flesh-pots of Egypt," with all the irresponsibility and lack of demand upon righteous self-help and self-dependence which-serfdom involves, could never do the work of freemen, and so we read that with two exceptions all the genera- tions which came out of Egypt with Moses died in the wilderness. We can also see how a young chivalry, which had no traditions of slavery, threw itself like an avalanche, irresistibly, upon the bloated and decaying tyrannies which ruled Palestine, when Joshua crossed the Jordan. It is, again, the noble expression of poetry, representing the ardour of self-devoting and time- forgetting warriors, when we read that sunset and moonrise
seemed but a moment in a great day of conflict. Wo can, still further, estimate with tolerable sympathy the self- sacrifice of Samuel, when he consented to waive his own claims before the demands of a people which seemed ripe for monarchy. And fivally, the mission of the prophets of Judah and Israel testifying for "a Righteous Governor in heaven and earth," while the great majority of their contemporaries were bowing down before "a stream of tendency" which did not at all make for righteousness, is very intelligible and very tragic.
But when we open Mr. Baring-Gould's volumes, all the poetry, and all the divineness, and all the humanness have passed away. We find ourselves in a region of pedants who have turned into pinchbeck all the gold of Hebrew story. Let us select one or two examples. The Jewish traditions respecting the origin of man, preserved in the first two chapters of Genesis, are, no doubt, of a childlike character — we do not say or think they are childish — and modern science would claim our regard for what it perhaps erroneously considers "a more excellent way," though it, too, may be a true way, of accounting for the phenomenon of the first human personality. But these traditions, apart altogether from their great, and for a season, unique assertion, concerning a creative will, which ushered man into space and time, and the belief in which as the sole and efficient cause of all things visible and invisible, excluded by its very terms all possibility of polytheistic fear or fetichism, become grand and venerable, when we contrast them with the later Semitic extravagancies. According to these, Adam was made so tall that he stood with his head in heaven, while as he lay stretched on the earth he covered it completely. Thus no auctioneer taking an inventory of goods about to fall under his hammer could set about his catalogue in a more business-like and matter-of-fact way than do the Rabbis, when they inform us of the manner in which God accomplished the work of the day on which Adam was made. At the first hour, He gathered the dust of the earth ; in the second, He formed the embryo ; in the third the limbs were extended ; in the fourth, the soul was given ; at the fifth hour Adam stood upright, and at the sixth Adam named the aaimals. Having done this, God asked him, "What is my name ?" whereupon Adam replied, "Jehovah,"—an impossible Hebrew form of the name, it is true, but of course Adam could not be expected to anticipate Ewald on a mere question of vowel-punctuation. At the seventh hour, Adam married Eve,—a little beyond the modern canonical hour for the solemnization of matrimony, if the first hour was six in the morning ; but if it was six p.m., then the event came off in the " sma' hours," and the time was within the modern rubrical margin, but whether the Catholic faith will give one who was never baptized the benefit of the .doubt is a doubtful matter. At the eighth hour, however, Cain and his sister were born ; at the ninth, our first parents were forbidden to eat of the tree ; at the tenth, Adam fell ; at the eleventh, he was banished from Eden ; and at the twelfth, he felt the sweat and pain of toil ! The tree of life, again, was so broad at its base that it would take a good walker five years to march round it ! Daylight seems to dawn on Jewish history with the appearance of Abraham. The verifying faculty, whatever that may be, has many questions to ask concerning the great founder of the Hebrew name and faith. But whether these are all satisfactorily answered or not, the reverent student finds himself, when he reads of Abraham, in presence of a majestic personality, who walks the earth in devout allegiance to an unseen guide and protector, and who has the courage of, his con- victions. He believes that light and good are the heritage of man, and that even the destinies of all the families of the earth may be mightily influenced by the life of one soul who lives in affiance with a Will of Righteousness, who is prepared to sacrifice all to that Will. Shorn of the accidental, Abraham's story makes no vulgar demand on unscientific credulity, and Jewish history, winnowed by even the hurricane of modern scepticism, requires an extraordinary genesis for its development. But it is the faith of Abraham which is the transcendental element in his life, and if his great descendant, St. Paul, is to be allowed any authority in a question of this kind, it is this faith, or rooted trust, in a living Righteousness which is the secret of Abraham's greatness,—the germ out of which all the special grandeur and aloofness of the religion and fortunes of the children of Israel grew. On the other hand, the Rabbis converted the noble history into a fable of portentous incredibilities, so that from his birth to his death the father of the faithful becomes the subject of a series of exceptional experiences, which require such a great draught upon the mechanically marvellous at each succes- sive stage of his pilgrimage, that practically we are left without law or certain guidance on the common level of human life. Nimrod, as if the legend were fashioned by an adroit Jew out of the Christian tradition respecting Herod and the infant Jesus, is the relentless foe of Abraham from his nativity, concerning which the stars had, moreover, given him warning. In the hope of slaying Abraham amongst the number, this "mighty hunter" put to death no fewer than 70,000 children, in a large slaughter-house in which all expectant mothers had to undergo their travail. But Abraham's mother eluded the tyrant's vigilance. Her son was born in a cave, which his advent illuminated as with the bright- ness of the sun. The mother had to leave her infant in a very summary manner, lest her absence from home might provoke perilous inquiry ; but fortunately the angel Gabriel, who acts the part so universally of "general utility," in theatrical phrase, suckled him out of his forefinger ! We need not very much marvel, if any samples of this grotesque thaumaturgy came in the way of Roman gentlemen, that one of them speaks as he does of the Jewish credulity ; but the marvel is that we find a later Hebrew of the Hebrews, like Saul of Tarsus, emerging out of all the phan- tasmagoric environment so sublimely historical and spiritual. Criticism of the most positive character must confess itself to be in presence of, at least, a quite extraordinary phenomenon, when it finds the foremost representative of a religion of abnormal " signs " becoming the self-sacrificing apostle of a crucified man, whose shameful death angels did not interpose to prevent. But we are wandering far from Mr. Baring-Gould in thus writing, and must return, in conclusion, to his redaction of the intended sacrifice of Isaac. We do so, however, not so much with the intention of allowing the sobriety of the Biblical legend to vindicate itself, as with that of revealing to our readers the special virtues of Mr. Baring-Gould as a legendary commentator. After a great deal of dialogue, Isaac is made to say to his father, with the knife in his hand :—" Burn me to ashes, lay up my ashes in a coffer, let this coffer be preserved as a memo- rial of me in thy house, before my mother, and when thou passest by it, bid her remember me." [By the way, Sarah is not to be reminded of her slaughtered son near a well or a precipice, lest, like Duncan Gray in Burns' song, she should speak of "loupin' o'er a linn."] Now what do our readers think is Mr. Gould's "improvement" of this passage of filial tenderness ? As they could never guess, we supply it to them :—" Here, again—it may be fanciful, (may be ?)—but I cannot help thinking we have the type contained of Christ's presence perpetuated in the Church,--in the Tabernacle, in which the Host is reserved, that all passing may look thereupon and worship, and remember me' in the adorable Sacrament "!
One of the Rubrics commands that if any of the consecrated bread and wine shall remain after all present have communicated, "then the priest and such other of the communicants as he shall • then call unto him shall, immediately after the blessing, reverently eat and drink the same ; " but the rubric cannot be of much esteem in the regard of Mr. Baring-Gould, who, though a bene- ficed clergyman of a Reformed and Protestant Church, never allows even the most " remote " allusion to Protestantism to pass in his books without an emphatic protest against the Reformation. As we have said before, the most ordinary decency would demand a somewhat different estimate of the great moral revolution in- augurated by Luther than that which Mr. Baring-Gould is ever forward to announce as his. But perhaps he writes "ignorantly, in unbelief."
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