The life and literature of the ancient Hebrews

Front matter

REFERENCE LIBRARY

DATE

TITLE.

Preface

1900. This school of Biblical interpretation may be termed modern, because it has come into existence in England and America during the present century ; it may be termed scientific, because in the study of the Bible it assumes nothing respecting the origin, character, and authority of the Bible, but expects to determine by such study what are its origin, character, and authority ; it may be termed literary, because it applies to the study of Hebrew literature the same canons of literary criticism which are applied by students of other world-literature ; it may be termed evolutionary, because it assumes that the laws, institutions, and literature of the ancient Hebrews were a gradual development in the life of the nation, not an instantaneous creation nor a series of instantaneous creations. The other school may be termed the ancient school, because it prevailed in the church from a very ancient period until the latter half of the nineteenth century ; the theological school, because it assumes as settled that the Bible is a revelation from God and consequently possesses certain characteristics which it thinks such a revelation must be assumed to possess ; the traditional school, because it accepts as presumptively, if not conclusively true, certain opinions respecting the date, authorship, and character of different books in the Bible which have been traditionally held in the church from a very early period.

PREFACE

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I accept frankly, fully, and without reserve the first of these schools, and have written this book for a double purpose : first, to tell the general reader what is the spirit and what the methods and the general conclusions of this school respecting the Bible ; and second, to show that these do not imperil spiritual faith, — that, on the contrary, they enhance the value of the Bible as an instrument for the cultivation of the spiritual faith.

What will the New Criticism do with the Bible, is a fair question to ask, and the time has come to give it at least a partial answer. The believer in the New Criticism replies that it has already brought back into the Bible some books which had almost dropped out of it, such as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job ; that it has relieved from some ethical difficulties some other books, such as Joshua and Leviticus ; that it has made credible as fiction some passages which had been incredible as history, such as the legend of the Fall and the satire of Jonah; that it has made practically applicable to our own time other portions of the Bible, such as the civil laws contained in Exodus and Deuteronomy ; that it has given a new and deeper spiritual significance to still other portions, as to some of the Psalms and to the latter half of the Book of Isaiah. The end is not yet ; but enough has been accomplished to satisfy the believer in the New Criticism that its effect will

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PREFACE be to destroy that faith in the letter which killeth, and to promote that faith in the spirit which maketh alive ; to lead the Christian to see in the Bible a means for the development of faith in the God of the Bible, not an object which faith may accept in lieu of God’s living presence ; to regard the Bible, not as a book of philosophy about religion, but as a book of religious experiences, the more inspiring to the religious life of man because frankly recognized as a book simply, naively, divinely human.

I am indebted to so many authors of whose original investigations I have made free use that I attempt no acknowledgment to them here. Kecognition of my obligations to them will be found in the notes scattered through the volume.

It should be added that in the preparation of this volume I have followed the lines and used freely the material employed on the course of Sunday evening lectures on the Old Testament given in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., in the winter of 1896-97, and the subsequent course of lectures given before the Lowell Institute of Boston on the same theme, in the winter of 1899-1900; but that the book is not a reproduction of either course.

LYMAN ABBOTT.

Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, N. Y.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

II. Hebrew History 27

III. Prehistoric Traditions rewritten ... 52

Chapter I

The word “ Scriptures ” means writings ; the word “ Bible,” a transliteration of the Greek word “ Biblia,” means books. In both cases the plural form indicates the fact that from the earliest ages the Bible has been recognized to be, not a writing or book, but a collection of writings or books. When the singular form is used in the New Testament, the reference is generally, if not always, to a specific passage ; when the writer is referring to the whole collection of the Old Testament, he uses the plural form.^ The Bible is a library of sixty-six different books, written by a great number of writers, writing for the most part without cooperation. These books have for convenience’ sake been bound

1 Illustrations of the use of the singular to denote a particular hook or passage are afforded by Mark sii. 10 ; xv. 28 ; John vii. 38 ; X. 35 ; Acts viii. 32 ; Rona. iv. 3 ; Gal. iv. 30 ; 1 Tim. v. 18. Illustrations of the use of the plural to indicate all the books of the Old Testament are afforded by Matt. xxi. 42 ; xxii. 29 ; xxvi. 54 ; Luke xxiv. 27 ; John v. 39 ; Rom. i. 2 ; xv. 4.

together, but for careful study they must be considered separately. This is not equivalent to the declaration that there is no other unity in this book than the mere mechanical unity made by the binder’s art. That there is a real ethical and spiritual unity will appear all the more clearly from a study of them as separate books or writings ; but that they are really, not merely formally or apparently, independent is the first fact which the student of the Bible must recognize. There is nothing new or startling in this assertion ; it has always been known that the Bible is a collection of independent writings by different authors ; but modern criticism is at once using this fact in its study of the Bible, and laying emphasis upon it as the result and by the methods of its study.

Scientific investigation of any subject may be said to consist of the two correlative processes of analysis and synthesis. By the first the object is separated into its several parts ; by the second it is put together again into an organic whole. The Bible has always been subjected to these processes ; but in the older form of study it was to a considerable extent regarded as one book, by one divine author, though divided into separate books, chapters, and verses for convenience of study. The analysis then consisted in this separation of the one book into separate books, chapters, and verses, and was a mechanical rather than a literary analysis ; the synthesis consisted in putting these verses together in new relations for the purpose of constructing a system of theology or perhaps of ethics. In this synthetic process little or no attention was paid to the fact that the Bible is a collection of books written by different authors, at different times, under different circumstances, for different purposes, and possessing different degrees of spiritual development. Sometimes the text was wrested from its context, and made to bear a meaning which it certainly did not bear in the mind of the original writer, as in the common citation of the verse, “ As a tree falls, so shall it lie,” cited as a proof-text against the possibility of a future probation ; ^ sometimes it was used to support a doctrine the opposite of that intended by the author, as in the not infrequent citation of the text, “Touch not, taste not, handle not,” as authority for total abstinence, when in the original it is quoted by Paul from ascetic teachers only for the purpose of condemning it, and the philosophy which he supposes it to represent.^ Occasionally

^ “ It may be noted, as an illustration of the way in which the after-thoughts of theology have worked their way into the interpretation of Scripture, that the latter clause has been expounded as meaning that the state in which men chance to be when death comes on them is unalterable, that there is ‘ no repentance in the grave.’ So far as it expresses the general truth that our efforts to alter the character of others for the better must cease when the man dies, that when the tree falls to south or north, towards the region of light or that of darkness, we, who are still on the earth, cannot prune, or dig about, or dung it (Luke xiii. 8), the inference may be legitimate enough, but it is clear that it is not that thought which was prominent in the mind of the writer.” The Cambridge Bible, Ecclesiastes, p. 206.

2 Col. ii. 21. See Alford’s Greek Testament and T. K. Abbott’s International Critical Commentary.

this use of texts regardless of their authorship and original intent led to amusing results. Many years ago, when this use of the Bible was more common than it is now, a Judge of the Supreme Court of New York said in a legal decision, “We have the highest possible authority for saying ‘ Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.’ ” The next morning the New York “ Herald ” commented on this opinion substantially as follows : “We find that it was the devil who said, ‘ Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life : ’ now we know who it is that our Supreme Court Judges regard as the highest possible authority.”

But this textual use of the Bible was by no means confined to misuses such as these. One has only to turn to any theological sermon of one of the older New England divines, such as Jonathan Edwards or Nathaniel Emmons, or to the collection of texts accumulated in footnotes in support of the articles of the Westminster Confession of Faith, or in such a Roman Catholic collection as “The Divine Armory of Holy Scripture,” to see that in this older method of Bible use no attempt was made to consider the comparative weight, the local meaning, or the original application of Scripture texts; all were treated as of equal value, and applied regardless of their literary significance and human authorship.^

^ Thus the Divine Armory cites as authority for “ the noble lineage, immaculate conception, and virginity” of the Virgin

And such use of Scripture was measurably justified by the conception which the fathers more or less consciously entertained concerning the Bible as one book, whose real author was God, though it was written by many human amanuenses. In studying the statutes of a State we do not inquire who reported them, nor even what legislator proposed their enactment; for the authority of the statute is in the legislature, not in the reporter nor in the individual legislator. In studying the decisions of a court, all we care to know about the reporter is that he has given a fairly correct report of the decision ; even the personality of the individual judge who wrote the opinion is a matter of wholly secondary significance ; for the authority rests in the court whose decision is announced, not in the judge who announces it nor in the reporter who records it.^ Somewhat similarly, the character and circumstances of the individual writer in the Bible were not improperly ignored by those who held that he was only an amanuensis or reporter, or at least quasi private secretary, who recorded, though to a certain extent in his own language, the authoritative and inerrant, if not absolutely verbally dictated, utterances of an omniscient God. It was even sometimes affirmed that we can only think in

Mary, the verse from the Song of Songs: “Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is no spot in thee ; ” and the Westminster Confession of Faith cites in support of the doctrine that the hopes of the unregenerate are illusory and vain the argument of Bildad that Job must have been a great sinner or his prosperity would not have come to naught (Job viii. 13, 14), language, and therefore, if the thoughts of the writers were inspired, the words must have been dictated.^ Those who entertained this conception of the Bible paid little or no attention to the specific character of the different writers or the different writings. No account, for example, was made of the fact that the Book of Job is largely a hot debate between disputants who take absolutely antagonistic views of the same problem ; their utterances were quoted as of equal authority. A quotation from an old poem affirming that the sun and moon stood still to prolong the victory of Joshua and make more overwhelming the defeat of his enemies was regarded as scientifically author-

^ “ Calovius was the author of the theory which is usually denominated the Orthodox Protestant theory. According to him, inspiration is the form which revelation assumes, and nothing exists in the Scriptures which was not divinely suggested and inspired {divinitus suggestum et inspiratum) . Quenstedt, Baier, Hollaz, and others followed, affirming that the writers were dependent upon the Spirit for their very words, and denying that there were any solecisms in the New Testament. The Buxtorfs extended inspiration to the vowel-points of the Old Testament. This view was adopted in the Formula Cons. Helv., and Gisbert Voetius extended inspiration to the very punctuation. This doctrine was an absolute novelty.” Religious Encyclopedia, Schaff- Herzog, article Inspiration. Compare also article on Inspiration in Encyclopaedia Britannica. These extreme views were not, however, those of the most eminent of either the Roman Catholic or the Protestant divines ; the Westminster Confession of Faith implies a spiritual rather than a literalistic doctrine of inspiration in its declaration (chapter i., § 5), “ our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and \dth the word in our hearts.”

itative, to be reconciled if possible with the postulates of modern science, but, whether reconciled or not, to be accepted.^ Such inconsistencies in the historical narratives as the statement in one account of the Deluge that the animals went by twos into the ark, and in another that some of them went by sevens, 2 or in the Book of Samuel that Jehovah moved David to number Israel, and in the Book of Chronicles that Satan tempted him,^ it was thought necessary to harmonize on the theory that both statements proceeded from one infallible author and were recorded by infallible penmen. Inter-

^ “ ‘ The Book of Jasher ’ was in all probability a collection, rhythmical in form and poetical in diction, of various pieces celebrating the heroes of the Hebrew nation and their achievements.” The Cambridge Bible, Josh. x. 13. Compare The Bible Commentary on the same. Compare also the Polychrome Bible, Book of Joshua, p. 72. Of this passage (Josh. x. 12, 13) it says : “ The quotation is poetic and figurative, as in the Song of

Deborah (Judg. v. 20), the stars fought against Sisera; it seems, however, to have been misunderstood and taken literally by subsequent editors. It means simply : May God grant us victory before the sun sets. Similarly Agamemnon prays to Zeus that the sun may not set before Priam’s dwelling is overthrown (II. 2, 413 ff.). At the bidding of Athene the sunset was delayed for the sake of Ulysses (Od. 23, 241 ff.), and, on another occasion, hastened at the command of Hera, in order to save the Greeks (II. 18, 239 ff.). Of course, if there were an adequate motive for a miracle here, or any appreciable evidence that a miracle took place, scientific objections would be irrelevant, because, from the very idea of a miracle, its physical antecedents and mechanism are unintelligible and cannot be discussed. But there is no reason to suppose that the narrative originally stated that a miracle happened.”

2 Compare Gen. vi. 20, and vii. 9, with Gen. vii. 2, 3.

2 2 Sam. xxiv. 1 ; 1 Chron. xxi. 1.

pretations of history found in the Bible which attributed the wholesale massacre of the Canaanite to Jehovah’s direct command, ^ expressions contained in it of the natural feeling of the persecuted exiles crying out to Jehovah for vengeance on cruel Babylon, 2 it was deemed necessary to make congruous with the command of Christ, “But I say unto you. Love your enemies,” since both were assumed to have emanated equally directly from the same divine Author.^

The modern student of the Bible frankly recognizes these self-contradictions in the Bible, and they do not trouble him, because they do not militate

^ Josh. viii. 2 ; x, 40.

2 Ps. cxxxvii. 8, 9. Stanley in his History of the Jewish Church treats of the apparent contradiction between certain teachings in the Old Testament and others in the New Testament thus : “ That this inferiority of the Old Dispensation was an acknowledged element in the ‘ gradualness and partialness ’ of Revelation, inevitably flows from the definition of Revelation as given by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘ God who in sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past to our fathers ’ ” (p. 280), and refers to Chrysostom’s Homily on 1 Cor. eh. xiii., where he says, quoting Ps. cxxxix. 21, 22 : “ Now because he has brought us to a more entire self-command ... he bids us rather admit and soothe them. ... We must not hate but pity.” This is an application of the evolutionary philosophy long before evolution was recognized as a philosophy.

® Much ingenuity has been displayed in the endeavor to reconcile the apparent contradictions in the Bible between different authors, or between Biblical authors and scientific conclusions, or the moral consensus of mankind. Some treatises of considerable ability have been devoted wholly to this task. See, for example, J. W. Haley’s An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (1873), and Robert Tuck’s A Handbook if Biblical Difficulties^ 2 vols. (1886).

against his conception of the inspiration of the writers or the character and authority of their writings. The differences between the old view and the new view are radical and even revolutionary, and the advocates of the new method seem to me mistaken when, to guard against the fears of the timid, they endeavor to minimize the differences between the new and the old. The question between the two is not merely whether there are some errors in the science or history of the Bible, still less whether there were any in the original autographs, long since lost. The point of view, the methods of study, the theological assumptions which underlie that study, and the results attained, differ, and differ very widely. It is a great deal better to recognize these differences frankly than to attempt to conceal them either from others or from ourselves.

By the modern school the method of dividing the Bible into a series of texts, treating them all as of equal authority and weight, because equally words of God, and constructing a system of theology by piecing them together, is not only abandoned as antiquated ; it is frankly condemned as unscientific and erroneous. A new method is proposed to take its place ; this new method goes by the infelicitous title of the “ Higher Criticism.’’ I call it infelicitous because, while to scholars its meaning is perfectly clear, to many people it is not, for the simple reason that it is a technical term, and in it the words are used in a technical and non-popular sense. To the non-scientific reader criticism of anything signifies judgment of it, and generally such judgment as discovers and exhibits its imperfections ; to such the phrase “ higher criticism ” suggests a superior kind of judgment of the Bible, and connotes a kind of spiritual egotism in the higher critic. To the scientific student the word “ criticism ” applied to the Bible means “ inquiry into the origin, history, authenticity, character, etc., of the literary documents ” ^ of which it is composed. Lower criticism means such inquiry into the text or into particular texts, and is equivalent to textual criticism ; higher criticism means inquiry into the documents as a whole, their integrity, authenticity, credibility, authorship, circumstances of their composition, and the like, and is equivalent to literary criticism.^ Applied to the study of Shakespeare, the question. Is the disputed line to be read “ To the manner born ” or “ To the manor born ” ? would belong to lower criticism ; the question, how largely the sonnets of Shakespeare are really autobiographical in their character, how largely they are dramatic impersonations of sentiment, would belong to higher

1 Century Dictionarg.

2 Higher Criticism is sometimes called philosophical study of the Bible. “ It is named the Higher Criticism because it is higher in its order and in its work than the Lower or Textual Criticism. This department of criticism has lived and worked under this name for more than a century. . . . The Higher Criticism devotes its attention to the literary features of the Bible. It has four great questions to answer : As to the integrity of the writings ; as to the authenticity of the writings ; as to literary features ; as to the credibility of the writings.” C. A. Briggs, D. D., The Study of Holy Scripture, pp. 92 and 95.

criticism. It would be a mistake to suppose that either lower criticism or higher criticism is peculiar to the present half-century; there have always been both a textual and a literary study of the Bible, both a lower and a higher criticism ; but in our time new emphasis has been attached and new importance given to the literary study, or higher criticism. In these articles I shall discard technical expressions, because the book is not intended primarily for technical students ; I shall, therefore, speak of the literary study, rather than of the higher criticism, of the Bible.

Employing a new method in its study of the Bible, the new school approaches this study with a different theological assumption from that of the old school. The difference is not easily defined ; but it is all the more important because it is rather spiritual than philosophical, and therefore transcends exact definition. The old theology laid emphasis on what is called the transcendence of God; the new theology on his immanence. The old theology regarded God as apart from matter, and creating the world as an architect or builder by mechanical processes ; as apart from nature, and directing it as an engineer his engine ; as apart from humanity, and ruling over his subjects as a king ; as apart from man, and mysteriously joined to him in the incarnation of the God-man. The new theology conceives of God as dwelling in matter, shaping it as the soul shapes the body ; dwelling in nature, and ruling it as the soul rules the body ; dwelling in man, and controlling him less by law and power than by influence, less as a king rules his subjects than as a father controls his loyal son ; entering into man in the incarnation, and becoming God manifest in the flesh, Christ being the God-in-man rather than the God-and-mand This theological point of view applied to the Bible changes our conception of inspiration and revelation. The new view believes in revelation, but conceives it less as a disclosing of an external God to man than as an unveiling of God in human experience ; it believes in inspiration, but it conceives of inspiration less as an addition to human experience of something superhuman than as a transfusion of human experience by a Spirit who is superhuman. It consequently regards the Bible, not so much an addition to human knowledge of certain truths before unknown if not unknowable, as the record of a spiritual consciousness in certain souls, which is possible, in varying degree, to the souls of all. Taking as its definition of religion “ the life of God in the soul of man,” it regards the Bible as a book of religion rather than as a book about religion ; that is, as the transcription of the experiences of men who were conscious of the life of God in their times, their nation, and their own souls. This consciousness of God in themselves constituted their inspiration ; and in this consciousness of God in their own souls God was

1 For an excellent outworking of this doctrine of the divine immanence as applied to all branches of theology see The Religion of To-morrow, by Frank Crane.

revealed to them. Just in so far as this consciousness of God awakens a corresponding consciousness of God in us, is it a revelation of God to us, and no further. The Bible is, therefore, to be conceived, not as an unnaturally divine hook, nor as a book partly divine and partly human ; it is a divine-inhuman book, and to us all the more divine because human. Through it God is revealed to our consciousness, because in it God is seen revealed in the consciousness of its writers. We see God in it, not apart from human consciousness, but in human consciousness, not as he is in himself, but as he was seen, felt, realized, by holy men. As the supreme revelation of God to man in life is God dwelling in man in the incarnation, so the supreme revelation of God to man in literature is God dwelling in the writers of the books which constitute the literature.

When, therefore, he who is accustomed to the conception of an infallible and inerrant book asks the modern student how, on this conception of the Bible as a divine-in-human book, it is possible to separate the divine from the human, and tell what is divine and what human, the answer is that it is no more possible to make such a separation in the Bible than it is to separate the divine from the human in Christ. The Bible is not a composite of divine gold mixed with human alloy, which we must somehow separate from the alloy in order to get a standard degree of fineness. It is rather like oxygen mixed with nitrogen in the air that we may better breathe it. What reader can tell how much of his thinking is inspired by Carlyle, bow much by Robertson, how much by Thackeray, how much by Browning ? The more thoroughly he has thought over what he has read, and the more he has made that thought his own, the less he can distinguish the sources and the inspiration of his thinking. So the closer these holy men were to God, the less possible it was for them to tell what of their thoughts were divine in source and what were their own ; still less can we make such a discrimination. Nor is it desirable to do so. What we need is not merely God, but God in us ; and therefore a book which gives us a record of the experiences of men in whom God dwelt is a more valuable book to conduct us to God than a book which should give us, were such a book possible, a representation of God apart from men. The fact that the writers were men of like passions as we ourselves are, that they saw in part and prophesied in part, and saw as in a glass darkly makes them the better interpreters of the life of God to us, in our partialism and our imperfection. This collection of books is a record of the experiences of men who had in larger or lesser degTce the consciousness of God dwelling in them. It is a record of religious experience, and that is a record of the life of God in the soul of man ; not of the life of God only, but of the life of God in the soul of man ; and the man in whom God dwells is quite as essential to the religious revelation as the God who dwells in him, because religion is the combination of the two, God and man, dwelling together.

It does not, therefore, disturb us in the least to find human error and imperfection in the collection. W e find, and we should expect to find, writers holding the scientific opinions of their times, thinking the world was flat ; that the province in which they lived was nearly the whole of it ; that the Mediterranean was the “ Great Sea ” ; that the stars and sun and moon revolved around the earth on which they lived, and were made simply to light it. We find them absolutely ignorant of the laws of nature ; never, therefore, even entertaining the question whether laws of nature were violated or not, but looking at all phenomena with childlike interest, as little children look at such phenomena now. We find them with as little ability to exercise critical historical judgment as to exercise scientific judgment, accepting without criticism the legends that come down to them, and seeking in them for some vision or some modification of their vision of God in his world. We find them from the first believing that God is a righteous God, and demands righteousness of his children ; but in the earlier stages not knowing what righteousness is, and growing to a broader and better conception of righteousness as the race grows in age and in experience. And to find such errors, scientific, historical, philosophic, in this record of the religious experience of a race, does not disturb in the least our faith that the collection contains a revelation of God in man and to man.^