THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CRITICS.* Six years," says the
Bishop of Natal in his introduction, " have elapsed since Part V. of this work was published," on the merits and defects of which we at that time expressed our judgment. The volume now before us is distinguished by the same sort of merits, and shows also, we regret to say, the same defect as those which have preceded it,—the merits of unwearied and minute research, of fairness in dealing with opposing arguments, and kindly feeling to opponents generally, and of outspoken honesty and fearlessness of statement, —the defect of not sufficiently appreci- ating the importance of the historical element to religious conviction.
The present volume of the Bishop's work, which is to be shortly followed and concluded by another part, comprises an investiga- tion into the structure and age of the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua, with a further examination of the Book of Deuteronomy by the light thrown upon it through investigation of the other books. These the Bishop dissects into,—(1) "An Origi- nal Story of the Exodus," printed in this part as a continuous narrative, freed from all extraneous matter ; and,—(2) " A Mass of Additional Matter," constituting nearly one-half of the present Pentateuch, written either during or after the Captivity, but so that it was already in existence and recognized as a portion of the Five Books of Moses at the time when the Samaritan Pentateuch was prepared, about B.C. 330, i.e., probably between B.C. 600 and 450," the part thus added comprising nearly the whole of the so-called " Levitical Law." (p. 555). This result, which substantially agrees with that arrived at by Dr. Kalisch in his recent commentary on the book of Leviticus, must
The Pentateuch and the hook of Joshua Critically Examined. By the Right Rev. Sohn William Coleus°, D.D., Bishop of Natal PartVL London: Longman. 187L
no doubt be very startling, if presented without preparation to persons accustomed to the traditionary, so-called orthodox, view of the age of the Mosaic Law. It would be quite impossible for us here to go into any detailed examination of the evidence on which it rests, while without such an examination no judgment worth its salt could be pronounced upon it. We must, therefore, refer those of our readers to whom an inquiry of this sort is attractive to the work itself, confining ourselves to some general considerations on the method employed by Bishop Colenso, and on the part belong- ing to history in the foundation of religious trust, which appears to us of much importance, both in order to secure the impartial in- vestigation of the sacred books by those who ought more especially to engage in such inquiry, namely, those who value them most; and to check the hasty conclusion to which some may rush, that because the traditional notion of revelation, as the coming-down from Heaven of ready-made, unerring truth, contained in a set of infallible books, is untenable, therefore there has been no such thing in the history of man as a true revelation of God at all, but the sources of our knowledge of the Divine are only conscience within, and sense, interpreted by science, without.
The method of investigation followed by the Bishop of Natal, in this part of his work, as in the preceding parts, and especially the fifth, is founded on the minute examination and statistical enumeration of peculiar words and phrases which appear in certain passages of the Pentateuch, but not in others ; and the comparison of them with similar phenomena in the writ- ings of the prophets or later historical works. This exa- mination has, we believe, never been so completely and syste- matically made before, even by the painstaking critics of Germany. The most important result of it seems to be, that while in the Book of Genesis and the first six chapters of Exodus there are a series of connected passages, constituting what the Bishop calls the Elohistic Narrative, containing a considerable number of linguistic peculiarities never found in the passages entitled by him Jehovistic in that book, or in those which form what he calls the Original Story of the Exodus in the Books of Exodus, Numbers, and Joshua, most of these peculiarities are found in the passages of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua assigned by him to the " Later Legislation," together with the peculiarities of expression which designate the non-Elohistic portions of Genesis, but which the Elohist never employs, while " in addition to them, these later pas- sages contain numerous formulas which were not used familiarly, or not at all employed by [the Elohist], besides a multitude of others more directly connected with the sacrificial, priestly, and ceremonial system, of which we find no trace in the earlier portion of the Pentateuch." (§ 549). We notice this statement more espe- cially because this agreement of expression between the Elohistic narrative and the passages of the Levitical legislation has been adduced by some eminent critics, and notably by Professor Kuenen, in a way likely to be used as a sort of off-hand knock- down weapon against the Bishop of Natal, namely, as an argu- ment to show that the Elohistic portions of Genesis are the most recent, instead of the earliest. But apparently the Professor has not had his attention drawn to the fact on which we have insisted above, that those passages which he agrees with the Bishop of Natal in assigning to a later date contain, along with expressions peculiar to the Elohist in Genesis, also many peculiar there to the Jehovist, combined with another set peculiar to themselves ; a state of things very natural, if the style of these later writers were formed from the study of an earlier work, in which the Elohistic narrative had already received its Jehovistic supplement and con- tinuation. But this difference of opinion leads us to consider a little more fully the degree of weight reasonably attaching to the method of applying linguistic peculiarities in order to determine the age and authorship of an ancient work.
Suppose that there existed in the English language a work written by Addison, and supplemented first by Johnson, then by Sir Walter Scott, and last by Lord Macaulay. No person well acquainted with English would have any difficulty in sifting out all the passages by Addison or Johnson, both from each other and from those by Walter Scott or Macaulay, as cleanly as a fine sieve might sift gravel from large stones ; and though he might have more difficulty in determining precisely what belonged to Scott and what to Macaulay, still in passages of any considerable length, he would probably succeed in doing this also. But now suppose English to have become a dead language, and that the diversity of authorship in this composite work was obstinately denied, in the absence of any contemporary testimony, by a set of persons who made it an article of religion to attribute the whole to Chaucer, what method of proving the composite nature of the work could be suggested better than that of crawling over its sentences, and tabulating the Addisonian, Johnsonian, Scottite, and Macaulayite peculiarities, so as to bring any impartial inquirer face to face with the absurdity of supposing that any writer would begin a chapter like Addison, put in a few sentences of Johnsonian, go on like Macaulay, then jump back to Addison, and finish in the style of Scott. Yet this is the sort of proposition to which the careful analysis of peculiarities of expression made by the Bishop of Natal reduces those who, in the face of them, main- tain the unity of authorship of the Pentateuch.
It is true that, in the case supposed, such an analysis would not by itself show in what order of time our four writers wrote. But now let us suppose that the passages ascribed to Addison, when sifted out and put together,were found to form a contin- uous story,while all the other passages were more or less fragmen- tary; and suppose it appeared also that this story contained allusions to events up to the reign of Queen Anne, but to none of a later date; that the Johnsonian fragments contained allusions to events as late as the second decade of the reign of George III., and those ascribed to Scott and Macaulay carried on the references to the middle of the nineteenth century, the conclusion that the Johnsonian frag- ments were composed after the Addisonian narrative and the Scottite and Macaulayite after them, would be a very safe one, while the relative dates of the respective contributions of Scott and Macaulay might remain in dispute. Now the reasoning by which the Bishop of Natal seeks to determine the age of the several parts into which his laborious analyses resolve the Pentateuch runs on all fours with that which in the case supposed we have imagined applied to determine the composition of our English work.
We have said thus much in defence of the method applied by Bishop Colenso in his investigations, without committing ourselves to the acceptance of the particular conclusions at which he has arrived, this being a matter where, as we have said, the reader should judge for himself by a research which, if it is to be made as it ought to be, will require a not inconsiderable amount of time and attention, because we think that the Bishop has to some ex- tent damaged the effect of his criticisms by mixing up with their ascertained results speculations of a more questionable kind, such as the supposition that the original Elohist was the prophet Samuel, or that the name of Jehovah was gradually introduced into use in the time of David ; and in consequence, the solid mass of valuable materials for the critical examination of the Pentateuch, accumulated in his former writings, to which his present volume makes a very important addition, has not received the attention that it really deserves.
Passing from the method employed by the Bishop of Natal to the results of his inquiries, his conclusion that the great system of the Levitical Laws, instead of being the work of the legislator to whom the Pentateuch attributes it, is really due to the pious zeal of the priests who led back the captives of Babylon to their own land, will appear to some minds almost a blasphemous denial of what they cling to as divine truth ; to others, as hypothesis too extravagantly improbable to deserve serious consideration. And no doubt it must at first sight seem absurd to suppose that any nation would accept a vast system of minute legislative enactments as the regulations observed by their ancestors for ages, when, in fact, the whole mass of details were of modern introduction. Nevertheless, it is the unquestionable Jewish tradi- tion that something very like this did take place after the Babylonish captivity. The Book of Esdras, which forms part of our Apocrypha, makes Ezra say, "The Law is burnt, therefore no man knoweth the things that are done of Thee, or the works that shall begin. But if I have found grace before Thee, send the Holy Spirit unto me, that I may write all that hath been done in the world since the beginning, which was written in the Law, that men may find Thy path, and that they who live in the latter days may live." (II. Esdras, xiv., 21, 22.) And a story is then told of Ezra receiving, in answer to his prayer, " a cup full, as it were, with water, but the colour of it was like fire ; and when he had drunk of it his heart uttered understanding and wisdom grew in his breast, for his heart strengthened his memory, and his mouth opened, and shut no more ; and the Highest gave understanding unto the five men," whom he had been pre- viously commanded to select, " and they wrote the wonderful visions of the night, that were told, which they knew not, and they sat forty days ; and they wrote in the day, and at night they eat bread." (lb. vs. 37.42.) Now what can be the origin of this story, which Irenteus, Tertul- lien, Clemens Alexandrinus, Augustine, and Jerome accept (Colenso vi., § 471), and which seems to have led to Ezra appearing in the Talmud as the counterpart of Moses (Ib., 470) but the tradi- tion that before the time of Ezra the "Law of Moses," in the shape in which we now possess it, was unknown ; that there were no copies of it of which the date could be traced back further than the return from the Captivity, when, as everything bad to be organized anew, among a generation who had grown up in a strange land, an opportunity of introducing new regulations under the garb of antiquity occurred such as the history of hardly any other nation offers?
We must refer our readers to the Bishop's work, especially the twenty-fifth chapter, for the various other arguments which support the view,—that the Levitical law really dates from this epoch ; by which it is not meant that the whole substance of the legislation was entirely new, but only that its present form was assumed at that time, and that a very large proportion of its provisions were then introduced, probably as expansions or supplements of older laws or customs. One striking fact, however, we may notice tending to confirm it, and that is the remarkable change in the character of Jewish literature commencing from the Captivity. The two centuries immediately preceding that event had been the age of prophetical activity. The eighth century B.C. pro- duced Joel, Amos, Micah, Nahum, and Isaiah. The seventh cen- tury was illustrated by Zephaniah, Habbakrik, Obadiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. After Ezra the prophets cease, with the exception only of Malachi. Even the heroic struggles and glorious successes of the Maccabees could not rekindle the smoulder- ing fire. A few Psalms, the book of Ecclesiastes, the Chronicles, and, be it said, pace the foretellers of the future, the book of Daniel, and the Apocrypha, make up the sacred literature of the age. The Jewish mind was fast sinking into the condition which produced Pharisaism in the time of Christ, and gave birth to the Talmud after the destruction of Jerusalem. Whence this astonishing alteration. If we accept the conclusions of the Bishop of Natal, Dr. Kalisch,ProfessorKuenen, andother eminent critics as to the age of the Levitical legislation, the answer is simple. It is to be found in the "Book of the Law." For centuries the great prophets had strug- gled to call forth, in their nation, a trust in the living God, the Jehovah of their Fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt, and had been training them through all their past history to be a people chosen to Himself, the witnesses to other nations of His "Law written in their hearts." At length, through the effect of a great political catastrophe, their teachings take root in the na- tional mind, which forthwith begins to guard itself against unfaith- fulness to its God in future, by putting on the heavy armour of a vast system of ecclesiastical observances, pervading the whole fabric of their lives, and inevitably passing into those grievous fetters of ceremonial slavery from which it required the coming of Christ to liberate the religion of the Spirit ; while, after all, only the freer spirit of the Aryan races was able to assimilate the spirit thus set free. If the result of critical research into the Old Testament Scriptures is thus to make intelligible that problem, on the common hypothesis most perplexing, how the nation which produced the Prophets before the Captivity could produce in the age of Christ only Scribes and Pharisees? why those whose ardent faith had sketched the indistinct outlines of the true Messiah rejected the great Deliverer when He came ? we may welcome its investigations, without that fear of their destroy- ing our faith in a Divine guidance of mankind which forms the secret, though we are satisfied unfounded, ground of the unwilling- ness to entertain them.
But this consideration brings us to the question of the deficiency alluded to above in the views put forth by the Bishop of Natal, from which his position as a Bishop of the Church of England ought, we think, to have preserved him. That deficiency is the non- appreciation of the importance of history to the maintenance of religious trust. Of the earnest personal piety of Dr. Colenso his published sermons leave no doubt. The very strength of the- support which he derives from the habitual approach to the Foun- tain of all good is, we believe, one great cause of the deficiency we have noticed. He does not see, because he does not feel, that by restricting the grounds of religious trust, as he practically does, to the personal feelings of the individual, supported by the recogni- tion of similar feelings in other men in the present or the past of the same or of other races, he is laying the foundation for a. scientific objection to religion which, if the belief in the manifestation by God of Himself to man through the course of human history should ever become extinct, must assume gigantic proportions, namely, the objection that if there is an intelligent, loving Being present with the indivi- dual as a support and guide, this Being never could have neg- lected the race ; and that if no trace of His action upon mankind can be pointed out, the notion of His presence with the individual must be a delusion, and religion, so far as it is distinct from
morality, can be only a gigantic blunder. To us this objection vanishes, because we recognize such an action in that manifestation of the Divine Essence which we believe to have been made in Christ, and we see in the conclusions at which the Bishop of Natal arrives as to the composition of the Pentateuch, assuming them to be the legitimate results of impartial research, nothing inconsistent with this faith. Doubtless if these conclusions are admitted, the popular ideas as to the nature of the divine action in the history of the Jews must be materially modified. The whole will become thoroughly humanized. The preternatural divine influence will withdraw from the prominent place which it occupies in the narrative, as we read it, to that invisible action familiarized to us by our own experience. But what the Scriptures may lose in supposed revealing power, they will gain in human interest. And surely those who thoroughly accept the faith that the Divine Essence has perfectly manifested itself to man, under the conditions of true humanity, should not be staggered at finding that its less full manifestations have been made through the medium of human nature, and not by processes which more or less nullify it. The sacred history does indeed change its aspect under the light of criticism. But it does not therefore cease to be a history, though a history whose importance is to be estimated, rather by the ideas of which it records the rise and development, and the consequences that have flowed from them, than by any phenomena accompanying their introduction. Not the less does this history remain the pre- paratory stage for the coming of our Divine Guide and deliverer from the hard service of selfish passion, who offers us, in that per- sonal attachment to Himself, on which, not on any particular theory, the Catholic faith is founded, the profound reconciliation of those apparently antagonistic principles, the deep sentiment of reverence and the unfettered freedom of critical investigation.
It may be objected to this conception that the falsehood involved in ascribing to Moses a body of laws really drawn up in the days of Ezra, is inconsistent with the idea of these laws entering at all into the divine preparation for the coming of Christ. But we may reply, were not the Jews punished for their acts? What prevented them from accepting Jesus as their Messiah so much as their blind attachment to this law of Moses, which, if the conclusions of modern criticism are trustworthy, was in truth the work of their fathers when Moses had been in Lis grave for centuries. On the other hand, this view of the origin of the Levitical law clears the divine government from the charge of what, upon the popular notion, must appear an injustice to the Jews,. in giving them, under the most solemn sanction, a law destined in the course of ages to become to them a fatal snare.
Yet again, when we consider the tenacious adhesion of the Jew to his old beliefs, and his ardent attachment to the idea of a,po]itical Messiah, we cannot but feel that, if the Jews as a nation had thrown themselves into the Christian Church, the Church would probably have perished in the politien1 ruin of the Jewish nation. To make the transition from the national to the universal creed possible, it seems necessary that the link between the Jewish nation and the spiritual body which was to succeed it should be broken, and this break the Jews produced by their own act in converting the teaching of their prophets into the Book of the Law. Thus their " casting away " became, in the language of St. Paul, "the fullness of the Gentiles." May we not hope that there is a development yet in store for them, perhaps through the influence of the critical research which seems to be crushing into powder that ' letter,' at once their trust and their chain ; that the time is coming when the more thorough union of Semitic faith with Aryan thought will be to the Church as life from the dead ?"
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