The literary study of the Bible; an account of the leading forms of literature represented in the sacred writings, intended for English readers

Front matter

THE

AN ACCOUNT OF THE

LEADING FORMS OF LITERATURE REPRESENTED IN THE SACRED WRITINGS

Preface To The Second Edition

An author falls naturally into an apologetic tone if he is pro¬ posing to add yet one more to the number of books on the Bible. Yet I believe the number is few of those to whom the Bible appeals as literature. In part, no doubt, this is due to the forbidding form in which we allow the Bible to be presented to us. Let the reader imagine the poems of Wordsworth, the plays of Shake¬ speare, the essays of Bacon, and the histories of Motley to be bound together in a single volume ; let him suppose the titles of the poems and essays cut out and the names of speakers and divi¬ sions of speeches removed, the whole divided up into sentences of a convenient length for parsing, and again into lessons contain¬ ing a larger or smaller number of these sentences. If the reader can carry his imagination through these processes he will have before him a fair parallel to the literary form in which the Bible has come to the modern reader ; it is true that the purpose for which it has been split into chapters and verses is something higher than instruction in parsing, but the injury to literary form remains the same.

Of course earnest students of Scripture get below the surface of isolated verses. Yet even in the case of deep students the literary element is in danger of being overpowered by other interests. The devout reader, following the Bible as the divine authority for his spiritual life, feels it a distraction to notice literary questions. And thereby he often impedes his own purpose : .poring over a passage of Job to discover the message it has for him, and for¬ getting all the while the dramatic form of the book, as a result of which the speaker of the very passage he is studying is in the end

IV pronounced by God himself to have said the thing that is “ not right.” Another has been led by his studies to cast off the authority of the Bible, and he will not look for literary pleasure to that which has for him associations with a yoke from which he has been delivered. A third approaches Scripture with equal rever¬ ence and scholarship. Yet even for him there is a danger at the present moment, when the very bulk of the discussion tends to crowd out the thing discussed, and but one person is willing to read the Bible for every ten who are ready to read about it.

Now for all these types of readers the literary study of the Bible is a common meeting-ground. One who recognises that God has been pleased to put his revelation of himself in the form of literature, must surely go on to see that literary form is a thing worthy of study. The agnostic will not deny that, if every particle of authority and supernatural character be taken from the Bible, it will remain one of the world’s great literatures, second to none. And the most polemic of all investigators must admit that appre¬ ciation is the end, and polemics only the means.

I am desirous that the reader should, from the outset, understand exactly in what sense I use the words I have adopted as the title of this work — The Literary Study of the Bible. Of course, the Bible being a literature, there is a sense in which every careful treatment of Scripture has a claim to be called literary study. Yet, in the sense in which I use the term, the Literary Study of the Bible is a new study. Its newness rests, not upon sudden advance in our knowledge of Semitic peoples and institutions, but upon our changed attitude to the whole field of literary investiga¬ tion. It is not too much to say that the Study of Literature, properly so called, is only just beginning. In the past we have concerned ourselves, not with Literature, but with literatures : the writings of Greek, of Hebrew, of German writers have been reviewed in connection with the Greek, the Hebrew, the German language and history, as elements in Greek, Hebrew, German studies. We are now beginning to feel that there is a separate

V entity, Literature, which claims to itself a special type of treat¬ ment. Such a change is a rgpjelition of what has been seen else¬ where in the field of education andTesearch. There was a time when Greek and German philosophical works were considered to belong to the special studies of Greek or German ; now everyone will recognise a Study of Philosophy, one and undivided'),^!!! rela¬ tion to which Greek philosophy and German philosophy are con¬ tributing ^^nients. So the investigation which recognises the unity of literature, and frames its methods solely in application to this literary field, is the newer Study of Literature ; and in the spirit of this study the present work has been undertaken.

A fundamental change in the scope of literary investigation carries other changes with it. When literature was linked with language and history in one common study, it was inevitable that the historical element in literature should become prominent. In the broader field of independent literary study the historical side of literature falls into the background. In its place another ele¬ ment comes into prominence — what may be called morphological treatment : the inquiry into the foundation forms of literature, such as Epic, Lyric, Dramatic, the varieties of these, and the detailed structure by which each form is built up. Nowhere has literary morphology so important a place as in application to the Sacred Scriptures. If the question be of_Greek or of English, it is taken for granted that a large variety of literary types are to be expected. On the other hand, it comes to most people as a novelty to hear that the Bible is made up of epics, lyrics, dramas, essays, sonnets, philosophical works, histories, and the like. More than this, centuries of unliterary tradition have so affected the outer surface of Scripture, that the successive literary works appear joined together without distinction, until it becomes the hardest of tasks to determine, in the Bible, exactly where one work of litera¬ ture ends and another begins. The morphological analysis of Scripture thus urgently required is precisely the purpose to which I have applied myself in the present work : it is ‘ An Account of the leading Forms of Literature represented in the Sacred Writ-

VI ings.’ And its underlying principle is that a clear grasp of the outer literary form is an essential guide to the inner matter and spirit.

It is the more necessary to insist upon a distinctively literary - study of the Bible from the fact that the type of Bible study which at the present moment is most prominent, and which from the magnitude even of its undisputed results has a claim to that prom¬ inence, is of a different character. The ‘ Higher Criticism ’ so it is called in popular phraseology — seems to me in the main an historical analysis. Its allegiance is not to literature, but to Semitic Studies, in which literary questions are inextricably inter¬ woven with questions of language and history. It goes beyond the text of Scripture to a further inquiry into the authority of the existing text, its mode of composition, the dates and surrounding conditions of its authorship. Historic questions of this kind the Higher Criticism examines by historic methods. In the inquiry here undertaken topics like these will have scarcely any place. Literary investigation stops short at the question what we haVe in the text of the Bible, without examining how it. has come to us. Whoever may be responsible for the Sacred Scriptures as they stand, these are worthy of examination for their own sake ; and the literary study of the Bible brings to bear on these writings the light that comes from ascertaining the exact form they are found to present.

Among the chief difficulties of what is here attempted must be reckoned the large number of readers permeated with the exclu¬ sive historic spirit, to such an extent that they can recognise no other element in literary study. They would assume for the whole of literature what is true only for particular works ; seeing how Dryden’s Satires are without point for those who are unversed in Restoration politics, they fail to see that Shakespeare’s plays may produce their full effect even upon a reader who is unaware that the historical Macbeth was a good king. Such a spirit prevails largely among Bible scholars. Yet their own studies might have taught them differently. What is to be said about the question

Vll of Joel? No portion of the Bible is more captivating to the liter¬ ary instinct : but how is literature to be helped here by history ?

A few years ago the historians were in practical agreement that this prophecy was to be referred to the age of Joash ; now our criti¬ cal orthodoxy depends upon our recognising for it a post-exilic date. Between the two periods is an interval of some five centu¬ ries, and the variety of surrounding conditions is such that, as a distinguished Hebraist has said, the question of Joel is like the discussion whether a particular work was produced under William the Conqueror or under Cromwell. No discredit whatever at¬ taches to historic studies on the ground of this difference of opin¬ ions, for the simple truth is that the Book of Joel does not contain sufficient evidence for settling its date ; the case is like that of an indeterminate equation, to which there may be half a dozen equally accurate solutions. But in this case what becomes of the conten¬ tion that literature can be appreciated only in the light of its his¬ toric surroundings?

If we go outside the polemic atmosphere of Biblical Criticism it is easier to obtain recognition for the distinction between historic and purely literary treatment. Shakespeare has given us certain historical plays ; there arise in reference to these just the questions that are agitated in regard to the Sacred Scriptures. One critic thinks the plays the work of William Shakespeare ; another thinks they were written by Bacon ; another laughs at both opinions and believes the author unknown. Yet another discriminates, and by internal evidence discovers that the plays were composed by Shakespeare and certain coadjutors: he is ready, when called upon, to produce a polychrome edition in which the Shakespeare, the Marlowe, and the Fletcher elements will be distinguished to the eye. One commentator, like Coleridge, takes his history of England from the plays ; another contends that they are on this subject utterly misleading, the dramatist having first used untrust¬ worthy materials, and then altered freely with a view to other than historic effects. Yet it is clear that six persons representing these different historical views might unite amicably in a box at a theatre viii to witness the performance of one of these plays ; they might, not improbably, find themselves m entire agreement as to the literary force and significance of every passage. It would seem absurd, on the other hand, if one of these critics were to interrupt in order to protest that the passage just commenced by the actor was not Shakespeare’s, or that recent discoveries in Spanish state papers had shown the motive assigned in the play to Henry’s foreign policy to be incorrect, and if actors and audience, in the interests of accuracy, agreed to suspend the performance until these ques¬ tions could be settled. To state these obvious facts is, of course, not to depreciate the historic analysis of Shakespeare in the inter¬ ests of literary appreciation, but merely to claim that the two studies are entirely different.

Some, indeed, will admit that the historic and the literary studies are theoretically distinct ; but why, they ask, should the two not be united in practice ? They ought to be united, in the sense that the complete student will undertake both. But they must not be undertaken together ; for the whole method and spirit of the two are in opposition. Historic analysis must sceptically question the very details which literary appreciation must rapidly combine into a common impression. The perspective, moreover, of the two studies is different. Deute7'onomy is of equal importance in history and in literature. But if a modern critical work treats Deutero7io7ny it will be found that perhaps nine-tenths of the dis¬ cussion is concentrated on the ‘ Book of the Covenant,’ and the perplexing questions arising out of it : a paragraph or two is deemed sufficient for the ‘ hortatory matter ’ of the rest of the book. In the other treatment it appears that it is just this ‘ hor¬ tatory matter ’ which raises Deutero7iomy to a foremost rank as one of the world’s greatest collections of orations ; while the fifteen chapters containing the Book of the Covenant here sink to the subordinate place of a document cited in an oration. It is for the interest of accuracy in both studies that their procedures be kept distinct.

It is necessary, however, to go a step further than this. His-

IX toric and literary study are equal in importance ; but for priority in order of time the literary treatment has the first claim. The reason of this is that the starting point of historic analysis must be that very existing text, which is the sole concern of the morpho¬ logical study. The historic inquirer will no doubt add to his exam¬ ination of the text light drawn from other sources ; he may be led in his investigation to alter or rearrange the text ; but he will admit that the most important single element on which he has to work is the text as it has come down to us. But, if the foundation principle of literary study be true, this existing text cannot be truly interpreted until it has been read in the light of its exact literary structure. In actual fact, it appears to me. Biblical criti¬ cism at the present time is, not unfrequently, vitiated in its histor¬ ical contentions by tacit assumptions as to the form of the text such as literary examination might have corrected.

I will take a typical example. In the latter part of our Book of Micah a group of verses (vii. 7-10) must strike even a casual reader by their buoyancy of tone, so sharply contrasting with what has gone before. Accordingly Wellhausen sees in this changed tone evidence of a new composition, product of an age different in spirit from the age of the prophet : “ between v. 6 and v. 7 there yawns a century.” What really yawns between the verses is simply a change of speakers. The latter part of Micah is dra¬ matic, and a reader attentive to literary form cannot fail to note a distinct dramatic composition introduced by the title-verse (vi. 9) :

The voice of the Lord crieth unto the city, and the man of wis¬ dom will see thy name.” The latter part of this title — “and the man of wisdom will see thy name ” — prepares us to expect an addition in the ‘ Man of Wisdom ’ to the usual dra7Jiatis personce, of prophetic dramas, which include such as God, the Prophet, the Guilty Nation. All that follows the title-verse bears out what it suggests. Verses 10-16 are the words of God crying denunciation and threatening. Then the first six verses of chapter seven voice the woe of the Guilty City. At this point the Man of Wisdom speaks, and the disputed verses change the tone to convey the

X happy confidence of one on whose side the divine intervention is to take place ;

But as for me, I will look unto the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation : my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy : when I fall, I shall arise, etc.

I submit that in this case a mistaken historical judgment has been formed by a distinguished historian for want of that preliminary literary analysis of the text for which I am contending.

Historic errors based on the ignoring of literary structure may similarly be instanced from the popular opponents of modern crit¬ icism. There is hardly any point on which formal criticism is more unanimous than on the late date of Ecclesiastes : here all kinds of internal evidence by which such questions are examined combine in pointing to a date centuries later than that of the his¬ torical Solomon. Notwithstanding this, intelligent lay readers are slow to surrender the old tradition, and for a reason which must be received with respect : the book, they say, in unequivocal terms claims the historical Solomon for its author, and it seems to them preferable to suppose that circumstantial evidence may sometimes be misleading, rather than that a work of the solemnity of Ecclesi¬ astes should put itself forward under false pretences. This critical deadlock rests simply on the circumstance that both parties have neglected the preliminary step of literary analysis, and have tacitly assumed that the true form of the book was that unbroken con¬ tinuity in which nearly all Hebrew literature has been left by the unliterary tradition through which it has come down to us. When the structure of Ecclesiastes is strictly examined it is found to be a series of five independent Essays, separated (according to a regu¬ lar practice in Wisdom writings) by strings of disconnected brevi¬ ties, and further bound into a unity by a prologue and epilogue. The book being before us in its true literary form we are now in a position to ask. Does it claim the authorship of King Solomon? We look at the prologue and epilogue — the most natural places in which to find indications of authorship : and here there is not a

XI mention of Solomon or any suggestion of his personality. The disconnected brevities are examined : there is no trace of Solo¬ mon, and much that is totally unlike a royal speaker. Four out of the five essays are equally blank as to evidence of this or other authorship. Only one single essay out of the five connects itself with Solomon ; and when the matter of this essay is examined it is seen to take the form of an imaginary experiment, in the investi¬ gation of wealth, wisdom and power, put into the mouth of Solo¬ mon as the one character in history for whom such an experiment was possible. When the author — or ‘preacher’ — has finished with this experimental search for wisdom he drops altogether the personality of Solomon, and speaks for himself. All claim to Solomonic authorship disappears from Ecclesiastes when it is read in its true literary structure ; and the lay reader may open his mind to the unanimous testimony of critical evidence in favour of a later date.

Examples such as these illustrate, not merely the immediate point, that structural should precede all other analysis, but also my general contention for the separation and independence of historical and literary investigation. The history of the Sacred Scriptures is a branch of Semitic studies ; the discrimination of their literary forms belongs to the science of Comparative Litera¬ ture. The confusion between these two distinct spheres has ap¬ peared at other periods besides the present, and in relation to other departments of the literary field. When the Romantic Drama, that was destined to produce a Shakespeare, was slowly establishing itself, the force which opposed it, and pronounced it a violation of all literary art, came from the scholarship of the age. But it was Classical scholarship, drawing its conceptions and canons exclusively from Greek and Latin authors. Time was necessary before the irresistible power of Shakespeare and his contemporaries widened the field of view, and forced upon criti¬ cism so much of the comparative method as led them to recognise a new region of literary form, equally worthy of investigation with the older Classical types. Not less important and original will be xii

found the varieties of literary form yielded by the Sacred Scrip¬ tures, when these are investigated in the spirit of Comparative Literature.

I have spoken so far from the point of view of those who are specially Bible students. But a consideration of a different kind has had weight with me in the production of this book : the place in liberal education of the Bible treated as literature. It has come by now to be generally recognised that the Classics of Greece and Rome stand to us in the position of an ancestral literature, — the inspiration of our great masters, and bond of common associations between our poets and their readers. But does not such a posi¬ tion belong equally to the literature of the Bible ? if our intellect and imagination have been formed by the Greeks, have we not in similar fashion drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought? Whence then the neglect of the Bible in our higher schools and colleges? It is one of the curiosities of our civilisation that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves : literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of intoxication ; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law to the remotest corner of the universe, we go at school for literary impulse to the poetry that dramatises the burden of hopeless fate. Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace, our first poetic lessons are in an Iliad that cannot be appreciated without a bloodthirsty joy in killing.

We seek to form a character in which delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are training our taste in literatures which, if published as English books, would be seized by the police. I recall these paradoxes, not to make objection, but to suggest the reasonableness of the claim that the one side of our liberal education should have another side to balance it. Prudish fears may be unwise, but xiii there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely good that our youth, during the formative period, should have displayed to them, in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature — in lyrics which Pindar cannot surpass, in rhetoric as forcible as that of Demosthenes, or contemplative prose not inferior to Plato’s — a people dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of all moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid, and speech as musical, as when Sappho sang of love or ^schylus thundered his deep notes of destiny. When it is added that the familiarity of the English Bible renders all this possible without the demand upon the time-table that would be involved in the learning of another language, it seems clear that our school and college curricula will not have shaken off their mediaeval narrowness and renaissance paganism until Classical and Biblical literatures stand side by side as sources of our highest culture.

It remains to add that, in the present edition, the work has been revised, and partly re-written. The structural printing of Scripture, for which I contended in the first edition, has since been carried into effect in the volumes of the Modern Reader’s Bible.^ This has enabled me to reduce some of my lengthier illus¬ trations ; and also to be more precise in part of my systematisa¬ tion. In particular, I have attempted in a new Appendix (III) to reduce to a system Biblical Versification, with all its elabora¬ tions, so far as it is based upon parallelism of structure. The other Appendices, that which I call a Literary Index to the Bible (I), and another which contains a technical Table of Literary Forms (II), have been considerably revised. The order of the six books has been altered, and the matter of the first two books recast, chiefly in the interest of a more logical plan. As so much recasting might create difficulties in regard to references made in other books to the present work, I have (page 557) given a Refer- 1 Published by Macmillan.

XIV ence Table which connects the paging of the first and the present editions. The citations, as before, are from the Revised Version of the Bible and Apocrypha, for the use of which I am under obli¬ gation to the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge. It is with the greatest satisfaction that I have noticed, in the four years which have intervened since the first edition of this work, the rapid advance in public recognition of the specially literary study of the Bible. And the testimony of all who promote it concurs in con¬ firming what is the foundation axiom of my work — that an increased apprehension of outer literary form is a sure means of deepening spiritual effect.

RICHARD G. MOULTON.

Contents

PAGE

The Book of Job: and the Various Kinds of Literary Interest

ILLUSTRATED BY IT . 3

Book First Fij?st Principles Of Biblical Literature

I. The Fundamental Literary Form of Versification as

seen in the Bible . 45

II. The Lower Parallelism of Rhythm and the Higher

III. Classification of the Higher Literary ForxMs in Uni¬

versal Literature . 74

IV. Application of Literary Classification to Biblical Lit¬

erature . 83

Book Sixth

XVI. Forms of Proplietic Literature . 363

XVII. Forms of Prophetic Literature: The Doom Song . . 390 XVIH. Forms of Prophetic Literature: The Rpiapsody . . 404

XIX. The Rhapsody of ‘Zion Redeemed’ \_Isaiah y.\-\xv\] . 435

XX. The Works of the Prophets . 457

APPENDICES

I. Literary Index to the Bible . 479

H. Tables of Literary Forms . 513

HI. A Metrical System of Biblical Verse . . . .526

IV. A Reference Table to connect the Pages of the First

AND Second Editions . 557

XL

XH.

. 561

THE BOOK OF JOB: AND THE VARIOUS KINDS OF LITERARY INTEREST ILLUSTRATED BY IT

I

The story in the Book of Job opens by telling how there was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job ; how he was perfect | and upright, a man that feared God and eschewed jq^,.

evil. It tells of his great substance in sheep and The story Opens camels and oxen, and how he was the greatest of “ all the children of the east. Then it speaks of his seven sons and three daughters, and describes their joyous family life. And so scrupulous was the piety of Job that, when his sons and daughters had concluded a round of feastings at one another’s houses. Job rose early and sanctified them, lest perchance in their gaiety they had offended God.

Then the story passes to a Council in Heaven, at which the * sons of God came, each from his several province, to present themselves before the Lord ; and amongst them came the Adver- | sary from his sphere of inspection, the Earth. He in his turn j was questioned as to his charge, and Job was instanced by the Lord as a type of human perfection. But the Adversary, as his i office was, began to raise doubts as to this perfection. God had ^ made a hedge of prosperity about the man : if he were to put forth his hand, and destroy all at a stroke. Job might yet renounce ' his worship.

The Lord gave consent for this experiment to be made. So it came about that in the midst of Job’s prosperity there came a messenger to him and said :

The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them ; and the Sabeans fell upon them and took them away ;

yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword ; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee !

While he was yet speaking there came also another, and said ;

The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them ; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee !

While he was yet speaking there came also another, and said :

The Chaldeans made three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have taken them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword ; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee !

While he was yet speaking there came also another, and said :

Thy sons and thy daughters

were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house ; and behold,

there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead ;

and I only am escaped alone to tell thee !

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped ; and he said :

Naked came I out of my mother’s womb.

And naked shall I return thither !

The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away Blessed be the Name of the Lord !

So the experiment of the Adversary was over, and Job had not j fallen into sin.