Creation of the Bible

Preface

That creation which speaks for itself in the lowest forms of organic life in due time manifests the wisdom of the Creator in the high department of morals and spiritual development. Religion falls into line as the last of a series of creations. If the time has already arrived when thinkers abandon the long-accepted dogma of creation by fiat, adopting in place of it the philosophy of creation by development, it will not be long before it will be seen that religion is also developed, and that revelation grows. The latter begins in the narrow, the confused, and the primitive ; it advances in proportion to the moral, intellectual, and spiritual advancement of men.

" Like every other product of man's spiritual activity," says Professor Abraham Kuenen, " the Israelitish religion has its defects, its one-sidedness, the faults of its virtues." Nothing is so important to us as Israel's religion, and that other and better religion which has grown, and is still growing out of it. That the revelation contained in Israel's religion, and in the Christian outgrowth, may be studied in the light of its historical development, a number of books have iv PREFACE.

recently been written ; the present volume is a contribution to the same purpose.

To read Kuenen and Wellhausen with attention, and appreciation of their devout and excellent scholarship, is to acknowledge the truth of some of their conclusions ; and no careful investigator can now undertake the study of the construction of the Old Testament without consulting these eminent authors.

More than that : if the philosophy of evolution be accepted by any one, as the only reasonable explanation of the Cosmos, no theory concerning the Bible which is invalidated by that philosophy can be maintained by him.

To those who are satisfied with the old views, an attempt to find better ones must seem audacious and perilous ; but there are many who are unable to content themselves with the notion of the infallibility of the writers of the Bible ; to such this book is addressed by one who has pursued the study for the satisfaction of his own mind.

He does not profess to be a critic, but one who has resorted to the critics and historical criticism for help.

He has been aided, so far as the present volume is concerned, by such authors as Professors Wellhausen, Kuenen, Sanday, and Toy, Canon Driver, President Cone, Dr. Gladden, and others, both progressive and conservative.

Contents

I. The New Method of Study .

II. Divers Portions and Manners

III. Ezra the Scribe

II. Diveks Portions And Manners

Two questions in respect to the Bible, scholarship has asked, and is now endeavoring to answer. The importance of the questions is that upon their answers depend the idea we shall have of the nature of the Bible. These two questions are, first, " When was the Bible written ? " and, second, " How was it written ? " Let us give heed at present to the first question, and the answer furnished by modern religious scholarship.

In the first verse of the Epistle to the Hebrews these words occur : " God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners." God did not speak all at once, and once for all, but distributed his communications in the manner indicated. !For a very long time, therefore, there was no Bible. There came to be a Bible-making age. When that age arrived, then the things which were said in divers portions and divers manners by prophets and others were collected into one collection, known first as the " sacred writings," or for the most part, simply as the "writings," or Scriptures. There came a time when some person of adequate genius and comprehensive skill undertook to make a Bible out of materials scattered and incoherent. This person massed together that of human experience which appeared to him most important, and thus came into existence a collection of before disconnected writings and traditions, in a form which became the nucleus of a nation's hope and aspiration and religious feeling. That is the natural way of explaining the method in which the Bible came into existence.

If a man constructs houses, he goes to one quarry and gets stones fit for foundations ; to another quarry for a finer quality of stone, fit for the upper portion of his building. He goes into one forest and gets trees of one sort, for one purpose, into another forest and gets a different quality of wood for other purposes. He mines down in the earth for iron, and makes both tools and materials. Thus from that which had been in divers portions and manners, he constructs an edifice which had not been in existence before. (It can hardly be doubtful, I suppose, to the student, however doubtful it may be to others, that the Bible was constructed as really as any court-house or music-hall is constructed. It came into being as a human production as really as anything else which has ever become extant among us.

When were these various portions written? I mean, of course, with relation to each other. Were the first five books written first ? Were the next two written next ? and so on. It has become possible to answer these questions. A vast amount of knowledge comes to us, directly and indirectly, from comparing things with each other. We go all over the earth, and compare the products of different regions with each other. We compare climates, for one thing. We compare the animals and the plants and the various tribes and races of mankind with each other. No one can doubt that it is a most useful process.

Then we proceed to compare the habits and doings of people. We look at the dwellings of people long dead, and arrive at some knowledge of how those people who occupied the dwellings must have lived. For instance, we go into New Mexico and gaze upon the old habitations of the cliff-dwellers. We distinguish them from all other people, and identify them as cliff-dwellers. They contrived to climb up the precipitous cliff, and burrow in the rocks there, making for themselves a kind of nest, like the bank-swallow, at some height above the common level. Now in their domestic economies, people have never been in the habit of doing very many unnecessary things, and persisting in so doing. Therefore we search for the necessity of the great exertion required by these people in hollowing out these dwellings, perched thus on high. They proposed to make them inaccessible. They had that way of defense against roving and warlike tribes. They themselves, we therefore infer, were not so warlike and fierce as their neighbors ; they were more defensive than aggressive. We go on by comparison and reach a certain definite knowledge of these people, who may have long since become extinct on the earth. Then other peoples have built their dwellings on the level, of branches and twigs of trees, covered them with weather-proof clay, and erected a kind of stockade around their village. In certain localities that sort of erection marks a period of the development of the people of that region.

Along the valleys and passes of the mountain regions in Europe, crowning every spot of vantage, stands the ruin of a castle. That ruin marks a period known as the feudal. It locates itself at a certain definite time in the annals of the world. Equally, the remnants of dwellings built upon posts driven in the water on the shallow margin of Swiss lakes mark a far earlier mode of defense. The men of each period, — perhaps very widely separated in time, — being dead, yet speak to us by that which remains; but lake-dwelling, cliff-dwelling, and castle become obsolete, and pass into the stage of record and ruin.

If the dwellings and defenses of ancient people tell us a story which we can read, much more does the literature of a people tell us its story. If literature begins in some kind of sign language and hieroglyphic art, in tomb and temple inscriptions, it goes on to embody itself in larger and more enlightening form as time goes on. It is in the literature of the past that we discover the most clear and comprehensive record of the feelings and philosophy and religion and morals of an age. Moreover, it is by the literature of a people that we are able to identify the time of the golden or most progressive and prosperous age of that people.

But we must not expect exactness. We go to a considerable extent upon the ground of probability and inference. This has its disadvantages, especially to a certain class of minds, but it really makes no serious defect in the method itself. If our knowledge is simply approximate, so is the knowledge of the astronomer.

A journey of a hundred thousand miles undertaken by one of us would be a very great affair indeed. We might have to encircle the world with our tracks several times ; but for a ray of light it is no great matter. In the ethereal distances we do not lay much stress upon the inaccuracy of a hundred thousand miles. We have not yet determined the distance of our planet from the sun in anything less than millions as the unit. The students of history, if they go back far enough in the annals of time, find themselves unable to give us the dates we would perhaps like to have. Events came to pass, we know. Before them were events of which we know simply that they were antecedent ; and that, for very distant events, is practically all we require to know.

Literature known as sacred, or other, has its eras. A certain method of literature belongs to certain periods, as the Elizabethan era, and the like. We know, it is true, the date of the issue of some of Shakespeare's plays : we know the date of other important writings. Contemporaneous with the English period mentioned there was an era somewhat similar in the Low Countries. We have ascertained by the critical work of our scholars that Milton wrote "Paradise Lost " and other poems after the Dutch poet Vondel had written poems upon the same themes. Further than that, it is quite evident that Milton must have been a reader of Vondel before he wrote " Paradise Lost," or while he was writing it. Milton nowhere tells us that he read Vondel, and, so far as we know, none of his contemporaries have recorded such an opinion, but the student of the subject to-day is quite as certain that Milton had read Vondel as if Milton had declared the fact in plain language. So, then, it might be established beyond a question that a certain two poets were contemporaries, and that one wrote a little before the other.

Among our facts gathered by inference, but quite as surely known as almost any other facts, is this, that the Homeric poems antedate the Greek dramatists. As it is with other writings, so is it also with the sacred Scriptures. We are able to discover, from internal and other evidence, relatively when the books which compose the volume were written.

As illustrating the mode of ascertainment still further : certain words have recently come into vogue which were not coined a century ago. If, therefore, a poem were published in some volume of old poems, or purporting to be old poems, issued now as a new edition, and if this poem bore the date of 1780, for example ; and if in the poem were found the words " telephone," or " phonograph," or " steam-locomotive ; " or if allusions were made to Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, the battle of Waterloo, Black Friday, or Prince Bismarck, we would know at a glance that the date was wrong. It might be a mistake of the printer, or the date of one poem had been applied to another ; or through ignorance, or willful purpose, or jest, this misplacement of a date had taken place ; but the evidence that there was an error would be absolutely unmistakable. 1

There are many ways of determining whether a document was written after or before the beginning of the Christian era, just as there are means of determining, incidentally, that Paul was an earlier writer than Peter, for Paul's epistles were already extant among the people when the author of Peter's letter wrote. \It must have been so from the evidence afforded by the incidental remark of Peter that in Paul's writings were things hard to be understood. He had therefore read those things and found them difficult.

I have thus sketched those common methods which are employed by students in determining when different t portions of the Bible were written, but I have given only a few specimens of the ways of literary critics. All we require to know is that there are

1 Dr. Gladden gives a more striking illustration, Who Wrote the Bible ? p. 174.

modes, dictated by common-sense, and of universal application, which are used in the study of the Bible.

By study it has become ascertainable that the first parts of the Bible were not written first. When we take up a book, if we read the preface first, because that first stares us in the face, we involuntarily think of that as having been first written. Probably, in nine cases out of ten, it was written last. Usually, a man does not know how to write the introduction to his book until he has found out for himself what his book has come to be. Now we open our Bibles, and first of all begin with the beginning. We naturally suppose, from the arrangement, that the first word was first written ; but the student brings a great many tests to bear upon that matter, and by his tests, which are required by common-sense and literary criticism, he becomes very sure that the first book in the Bible was by no means the first produced. Beginnings do indeed come first in the order of nature, but not in the order of thinking. That is to say, description of beginnings comes late because such description is difficult, and much has to be learned before one knows origins and beginnings.

The common notion, gained we hardly know how, has been that a great man of the remote past, Moses by name, wrote the book of Genesis for our Bible. This notion has become so embodied in religious thought, and so belongs to reverence for the Bible, that a distinguished theologian of Princeton not long ago asserted that the Bible would be gone from us, and religion with it, or somewhat to that effect, if Moses did not write the books commonly attributed to his authorship. That statement is instructive, but it also escapes being amusing by only a little. For it might be paralleled with a saying that if Shakespeare did not write the plays credited to him we should have no book of that title left, and the dramatic art itself would suffer destruction. I think we might deal with any assertion of a similar kind in the same way. If the old notions of the substance of the earth came to be put aside, as they were, we still have the earth left, and can manage to live upon it after some fashion.

It seems to become plainer every day to critical and Christian scholarship that Moses did not write the five books which have been ascribed to him. To the rationalists among the critics it is quite as evident that Moses did not write the book of Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, as that nails of the sort known as " cut nails " were not made in the earlier times. The material which goes to the construction of the cut nail is very ancient, but the making is modern. As the age of nail-making by machinery is comparatively recent, so the age of Bible-making came long after the time of Moses. Probably that would be admitted by the most strenuous advocate of the conservative view. At the same time such an ad^ vocate would affirm that Moses wrote that portion of the Bible — or at least edited it — which is known as the Pentateuch. This is becoming more and more doubtful every day. The reason why that doubt grows to a certainty is that the time of Moses did not admit of such writing or such editorial work as has been attributed to him. If we find that the earlier part of the Bible was spoken of in the New Testament as the work of Moses, if we find that Jesus speaks of " Moses and the prophets," it will be well for us to remember that the fruits of an age are not infrequently grouped under the name of some great personage of that age. The age of Pericles, or of Charles the Great, is identified by the great names of the great personages. It is a matter of convenience, and not a matter of critical accuracy.

It is natural to look for the best literary work of any people, not in their less mature period, and not while they are most busily engaged in wars of conquest or defense, but when they have acquired their best experience, and have developed their best moral and intellectual strength. The evidences are abundant that Israel did not reach its best until long after the time of Moses.

An incident in the history of that people had a most important bearing upon the future of the world. This incident was looked upon as a calamity, and was in fact such ; but calamities, personal and national, may prove of the utmost importance in the work of a person or a people. There came a time when the Jews were overpowered by the superior forces of the Eastern empire, and were reduced to vassalage. There is something almost unique in this experience. The tradition runs, that when the progenitors of the twelve tribes went into Egypt, during a famine, and were hospitably received there, they were afterward reduced, to slavery, and that of the most bitter sort. The ancient way of disposing of conquered peoples was at one time to kill them. Afterward the modification of that cruelty was to make slaves of the conquered.

It is noticeable that when the Assyrian army compelled the surrender of the Jewish capital, they destroyed the city and the sacred temple, deporting the more valuable of its contents, but they did not make slaves of the inhabitants. Indeed, an imperial policy, which policy was then new in the world, favors the welfare of a conquered people, so far as that is consistent with the welfare of the empire. The Jews, therefore, were treated with consideration, although from motives of policy they were removed from the soil, and taken to the Babylonian provinces far to the eastward. This, which was to the Jews a fearful calamity, and all the more sorrowful to them because their affections and their religious feelings were so intimately associated with the temple, was nevertheless a very great blessing. It broke them out of their narrow exclusiveness, and brought them in contact with other peoples, who were perhaps foremost at that time in philosophy, art, and learning.

Our world is small, so long as we remain affixed to the soil where we were born. It is the old story of the eagles, securely nested and content, finding their nest broken up, and themselves pitched out of it and compelled to fly. It is a hard ordeal, but it is what makes eagles of the young birds. Judah, conquered by the imperial army, its old habitation broken into and broken down, and its people deported to the plains of Shinar, received an impetus which served it in its mission as nothing else at that time could. It had preserved an exclusive spirit and a spirit of hatred toward other nations.

There were surprises in store for it. There was a new mine of learning opened for its seers and wise men. Moreover; the humanity and even religious earnestness of the Persian conquerors of the Assyrian empire, by their friendliness, threw new light on old laws. The old narrowness was invaded by breadth.

Cyrus was reckoned to be within the mercy and purpose of Jehovah; he was a man girded divinely for his work. 1 After the days of the captivity were over, those patriot Jews who returned to their old home had more light than their captive fathers had possessed. They, or their leaders, wished to commit the old religion to a form more permanent than the old and somewhat chaotic traditions. They wished to put the new light into the old thoughts. It is evident enough, if one will be at pains to examine, that at the close of the captivity, Judah had arrived at the beginning of a golden period of Bible-making. It was then, for the first time, that the " scribe," or literary man, made his appearance, and began his work. J

Far more than the old temple and the old city walls and the old houses were rebuilt. The old law, and the old Mosaic traditions, and the old chaotic and scattered chronicles were also rebuilt, and the glory of the later house in that regard was vastly superior to that of the earlier house. The library of sacred literature was made. The hymns and the proverbs, and the laws and the legends, and the greater poems were made, not out of new material, but of the material afforded by the national traditions and feelings.

So we may say with a degree of certainty that

the Bible as we now have it began to be made, not in

the days of Moses, and not in the days of Samuel

and David and Solomon, but long afterward, in the

days of Ezra the scribe, or the first literary men of

Israel.

1 Isaiah xlv. 1-5.

III. Ezka The Scribe

It may be said that two Bibles were in use at the time of the opening of the Christian era. It is true that the one which was used in Jewish synagogues was still in an unfinished state at that time. There was some dispute among the learned as to the admission of some of the books we find in our Bible into the list of the sacred books. So that the question was still open as to what the Bible actually was. There was another Bible somewhat different from the Hebrew, and which was published in Greek. The Hebrew was mainly the language of religion, — as is the Latin in the Roman Church. It was not the language commonly spoken by the Palestinian people. They used a tongue known as the Aramaic. For more common use, as in the households of the rich, or in schools, it is probable that the Greek Bible was most in vogue. It was this Bible from which the larger portion of the quotations made by the apostles and Christ came ; but this Bible, written in the Greek tongue, differed in important respects from the Hebrew scrolls. It differed chiefly in containing much more than the Hebrew Bible.

We discover in our Bibles at present one book of Ezra. It is a short book of ten chapters. In the Greek Bible, from which Jesus and some of the apostles quoted, there are in addition two books of Ezra.

These additional books are quite lengthy in comparison. In the Bibles which contain them they are called the books of Esdras. Esdras is simply the Greek way of spelling the Hebrew word Ezra. Moreover, the genealogy given of the supposed writer, Esdras, is the same as that of Ezra, in the short book in our common Bibles.

Now the fact that Jesus and his apostles made somewhat copious quotations from this Greek Bible gives rise to the probability that it was in more common use than the Hebrew Bible, of which it was supposed to be a translation. Ezra certainly appears to have occupied a very important place in the annals of the nation. He was not only a great reformer, but in an important sense a prophet ; but his peculiar value to the Jewish nation seems to have been connected with his literary work. If we are to give any credit to the books in the Greek Bible which bear his name (even though written later than his time), it will become evident that his work was second in importance to no other in all the history of Israel.

It is an orthodox opinion (or has been until recently, and now it is a little difficult to tell precisely what an orthodox opinion is) that because Jesus referred to the Old Testament, and drew many things from the Old Testament, therefore the Old Testament as we now have it must be an infallibly true document. Since Jesus appears to have been acquainted with the Greek version of the Old Testament, and inasmuch as this version contains much that we now commonly reject, it is quite evident that there is no proof of infallible truth in the fact that Jesus quoted from the Bible then in existence.

Many things in the writing of Ezra, contained in the two long books bearing his name, appear incredible, and there need be no quarrel with those who determined what the Old Testament should be, because they rejected these books. Yet these books contain statements which throw light upon our Bible, and also show the eminent service of Ezra the scribe.

It appears that Ezra was born and was educated in Babylonia ; that he had his training with a number of other remarkable men. The probabilities are that he above all other men of his nation had the instinct, if we may so say, of literature. He responded to the influences around him. His fervent religious spirit found a task for him; it was to give to his nation the teachings of Jehovah, and of the wise men of the past, in the more durable form of a sacred collection.

Now the wise men of that age, as well as other ancient ages, were accustomed to speak much in an oracular form. In all the ancient literature, the priest, or prophet, or the sage consulted by the people as a guide, had a peculiar method of speech. [He did not tell his story in plain language, but in figures of speech;. So much was the figure of speech the mode of such talk that we, in our time, think the ancients were always speaking fables. The prophet or other guide of the people, who was subject to vivid impressions, put forth those impressions in statements we find hard to believe ; indeed, it is quite impossible to believe them. As I read the books of Esdras, it seems almost probable that it was never intended that the statements should be believed in their literal form. The words of wise men were given for wise men, that is, for those who could seek the meaning couched in parables, stories, and fables.

Ezra tells us that he was sitting one day under an oak, and that there came a voice out of a bush near by. This voice called him by name. Ezra arose and answered, " Here I am, Lord." Then the Lord answered him out of the bush, reminding him that it was from a bush God had talked with Moses long before : it was from the bush Moses went to lead the people of Israel out of bondage into Canaan. 1

It was time for the same thing to happen again. Israel was in captivity, though not of the bitter sort, and the period of the captivity had elapsed. There must now be a new Moses to lead the people out of captivity back to the land of promise. The voice speaks to Ezra, and Ezra answers. It is through this conversation that one may learn the state of things in Israel at that day. Ezra is to go upon his mission, and to make a new start for the nation. He tells the Lord that the law is burnt, and therefore " no man knoweth the things which God does." The idea conveyed is that the precious scrolls or tablets had been destroyed. If Moses had committed anything to writing, or if his successors had done so, the remnant of that had suffered destruction in the calamities which had come upon the house of Jacob. All that work must be done over again.

Therefore, as the story goes, Ezra is directed to gather the people, and bid them let him alone for the space of forty days. It was for the same space that Moses had been away from the people in communication with God. Having thus warned the people, Ezra is directed to prepare suitable materials for writing, and take with him five ready writers. He did as commanded, and the next day heard a voice bidding him 1 2 Esdras xiv.

drink what should be offered him. What he drank was of the appearance of fire. After drinking that potion the spirit of understanding was strong in him, and he spoke many things. The Highest gave understanding to the five men, and they wrote the wonderful visions of Ezra. Ezra tells us that his memory was strengthened, and that as a result of his visions a large number of books were written during the forty days of his seclusion. We are unable to determine whether the number of books thus prepared was two hundred and four, or nine hundred and four ; but it was a large number. It is in such a manner that we are told of the making of a collection of sacred books. We infer that for a long period, lasting at least seventy years, the sacred scrolls and other materials of the Jews had been out of existence. It is very natural to think that when a city has been destroyed by conquerors, its temple and other buildings razed to the ground, its sacred scrolls would be burned, or otherwise disposed of. So that if Moses had written the five books of the Pentateuch, as many think he did, and if later writers had written other books, such as the books of Gad the seer and Nathan the prophet, and the like (which books are mentioned in our Bible as having once existed), it would appear probable that these books had all suffered destruction. The tradition which is embodied in the books of Ezra alludes to the strengthening of the memory of the scribe. The use of memory is not to originate something, but to recall the events and sayings of the past.