NEW EDITIONS. — Hebrew and Christian Records: an historical inquiry concerrang the
Age and Authorship of the Old and New Testaments. By the Rev. Dr. Giles. 2 vols. (Trilbner.) The first of these two volumes deals with "Hebrew," the second with "Christian Records." Dr. Giles says in his preface, "My object has been to show in the first volume that the whole of the Old Testament, as it now appears, both style of language and order of events, is duo, not to the first establishment of the IIebrews in Canaan, fifteen hundred years • before Christ, but to the ro-entablishment of the nation five hundred years before our era ; and in the second volume, that the historical books of the Now Testament wore not in their present form before the year 150 after Christ." These are certainly not the conclusions of the latest and best criticism . on the subject, the first thesis being perhaps tho more extravagant of the two. To take one instance, we find it said, "It is generally admitted that the two books of Kings, &c., were written after the return of the Israelites from Babylon." Now nothing of the kind is generally admitted, for the editorship of Ezra is a very different thing indeed. As for the proofs adduced, they seem to us often quite childish. Take this instance, on the words, " Solomon reigned over all kingdoms, from the river unto the land of the Philistines." "The river must here mean the Euphrates, not the Jordan, for Solomon reigned to a groat distance beyond the Jordan eastward. This designation of the Euphrates as the river implies that the writer was well acquainted with it, that is to say, he wrote this account after the people for whom it was written had dwelt seventy years at Babylon upon its banks." And this is called criticism !—We have also a second edition of The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwiok, M.A. (Macmillan), containing "numerous alterations and additions," which have been separately published, and which indeed are important enough to deserve careful consideration.—Sir Charles Dudley Warner's In the Levant (Sampson Low and Co.) has reached a fifth edition—Mr. John Skelton's valuable Pauperism and the Boarding-out of Pauper Children in S'cotland (Blackwood) appears in a second edition, with a preface, from which we learn with pleasere that the movement has been sensibly helped forward by this admirable statement of facts and arguments.—We have to ackowledge what we suppose is the first volume of "The Illustrated Waverley Wavertey ; or, Sixty Years Since, (Marcus Ward and Co.) A brief memoir is prefixed.
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