CHAPTER II

THE COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH

The Literary Analysis and its Conclusions—Based on a Theory and an Assumption—Weakness of the Philological Evidence—Disregard of the Scientific Method of Comparison—Imperfection of our Knowledge of Hebrew—Archæology unfavourable to the Higher Criticism—Analysis of Historical Sources—Tel el-Amarna Tablets—Antiquity of Writing in the East—The Mosaic Age highly Literary—Scribes mentioned in the Song of Deborah—The Story of the Deluge brought from Babylonia to Canaan before the time of Moses—The Narratives of the Pentateuch confirmed by Archæology—Compiled from early Written Documents—Revised and re-edited from time to time—Three Strata of Legislation—Accuracy in the Text—Tendencies—Chronology.

The book of Genesis ends with the death of Joseph. When the five books of the Pentateuch were divided from one another we do not know. The division is older than the Septuagint translation, older too than the time when the Law of Moses was accepted by the Samaritans as divinely authoritative. As far back as we can trace the external history of the Pentateuch, it has consisted of five books divided from one another as they still are in our present Bibles.

An influential school of modern critics has come to conclusions which are difficult to reconcile with this external testimony. Instead of the Pentateuch it offers us a Hexateuch, the Book of Joshua being added to those of Moses, and of the origin and growth of this Hexateuch it professes to be able to give a minute and mathematically exact account. Very little, if any of it, we are told, goes back to the period of Moses, the larger part of the work having been composed or compiled in the age of the Exile. It is true, the theories of criticism have changed from time to time; what was formerly held, for instance, to be the oldest portion of the Hexateuch being now regarded as the latest; but each generation of critics has been equally confident that its own literary analysis was mathematically correct. At present the hypothetical scheme most in favour is as follows.

The earliest part of the Hexateuch, at all events in its existing form, is a document distinguished by the use of the name Yahveh, and sometimes therefore termed Yahvistic or Jehovistic, but more usually designated by the symbol J. The Yahvist is supposed to have been a Jew who made use of older materials, and lived in the ninth century B.C. His work begins with ‘the second’ account of the Creation, in the middle of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, and the last trace of it is to be found in the story of the death and burial of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy. His style is said to be naïve and lively, and his conceptions of the Deity grossly anthropomorphic.

Next in order to the Yahvist comes the Second Elohist (symbolised by the letter E), whose title is derived from the period, not very far distant, in the history of criticism, when what is now known as the Priestly Code was assigned to a First Elohist. The Elohist is characterised by the use of the word Elohim, ‘God,’ rather than Yahveh, and the critics have discovered in him a native of the northern kingdom. To him belong the ‘Ten Words’ which represent the original form of the Ten Commandments, as well as the history of Joseph. He is said to have written with a certain theological tendency, to which is due his predilection for introducing dreams and angels into his narrative. His date is ascribed to the eighth century B.C., and the combination of his narrative with that of the Yahvist (J.E.) produced a composite work to which the name of Prophetic or Pre-Deuteronomic Redaction has been applied. The Redactor endeavoured to reconcile the contradictions between the two narratives by various harmonistic expedients; his success was not great, and the nineteenth century critic accordingly believes himself able not only to separate the two original documents, but to point out the additions of the Redactor as well.

Contemporaneous with this work of redaction was the appearance of a new book, the so-called Book of the Covenant. This was of small dimensions; at any rate, all that remains of it is contained in a few chapters of Exodus (xx. 24-xxiii. 33, xxiv. 3-8). It was added, however, to the Prophetic Redaction, and the Mosaic Law for the first time was introduced to the world.

But now appeared a book which was of momentous consequences for both the history and the religion of Judah. This was the book of Deuteronomy, or rather the middle portion of the book of Deuteronomy (chaps. xii-xxvi.), the rest of the book being a subsequent addition. This abbreviated Deuteronomy, it is assumed, is ‘the book of the Law’ which Hilkiah the high priest declared he had ‘found in the house of the Lord’ in the reign of Josiah, and it is further assumed that the word ‘found’ is intended to cover a ‘pious fraud.’ The Egyptian inscriptions mention books of early date which had been similarly ‘found’ in the temples, and some of these books really seem to have been forgeries of a later date.[126] Modern criticism has determined that Hilkiah and his friends imitated the example of the Egyptian priests in the case of Deuteronomy. At all events, the results were instantaneous and revolutionary. The king and his court believed that they had before them the actual commands of their God to the great lawgiver of Israel, and the Jewish religion underwent accordingly a radical reform. Nor did the effect of the supposed discovery end here. Like the forged Decretals in mediæval Europe, the book of Deuteronomy had a continuous and wide-reaching influence upon Jewish thought. Its teaching was matured during the Exile, and out of it grew that form of Jewish religion of which Christianity was the heir. The book of Deuteronomy (symbolised by D) in the first as well as in the second or enlarged edition belongs to the latter part of the seventh century B.C. But the Hexateuch was still far from complete. During the Exile a book of the Law, now contained in Lev. xvii.-xxvi., was written and promulgated, the author, it appears, having been incited to his work by Ezekiel’s ideal of a theocratic state. This book of the Law was followed by a far more ambitious production, the ‘Priestly Code’ (generally known as P, and not unfrequently called the ‘Grundschrift’ by German writers). The Priestly Code embodies what earlier critics knew as the work of the First Elohist; it not only in the name of Moses shapes the ritual and religion of Israel to the advantage of the priests, but it attempts to trace the history of the revelation which resulted in that religion back to the Creation itself. The name of Elohim is again a distinguishing feature in the narrative, which is described by the ‘critics’ as formal and pedantic, as affectedly archaistic, and as disfigured by a strong theological tendency. Wellhausen and Stade assure us that it transforms the patriarchs into pious Jews of the Exile. And yet it was just this narrative, which we are now told bears so plainly on its face the marks of its late age and sacerdotal character, that hardly twenty years ago was declared by the critics themselves to be the oldest portion of the Hexateuch!

By this time the Hexateuch was nearly ready to become the Pentateuch, which should be read by Ezra before the Jewish community as ‘the law of God’ (Nem. viii. 8), and be accepted by the hostile Samaritans as alone authoritative among the sacred books of Israel. All that was needed further was to combine the existing books into a whole, smoothing over the inconsistencies between them and supplying links of connection. The ‘final Redactor’ who accomplished this task lived shortly after the Exile, and has been identified with Ezra by some of the critics. Whoever he was, he was naturally more in harmony with the spirit and ideas of the Priestly Code than he was with those of the Prophetic Redaction, or even of Deuteronomy; indeed, it is hard to understand why he should have troubled himself about the Prophetic Redaction at all. Between the Jewish religion of the days of Asa or Jehoshaphat and that of the period after the Exile a great gulf was fixed.

It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch is justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a dark and illiterate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would be historically valueless.

Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the Israelitish tribes in Canaan. Doubt is thrown even on their residence in Egypt and subsequent escape from ‘the house of bondage.’ Moses himself becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose sepulchre was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no need of indicating contradictions—real or otherwise—in the details of the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve; the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been discovered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the question.[127]

The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none. The use of writing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the monarchy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B.C., and the alphabet would have been employed for monumental purposes long before it was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf’s theory of the origin and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have done so.

The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a theory and an assumption. The theory is that of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological, not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases. Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined accordingly. That it is sometimes necessary to cut a verse in two, somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further. Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported, all have their origin in Astruc’s separation of the book of Genesis into two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the other it is replaced by Elohim.[128]

The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive history, and has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It may be that the historical results based on the complicated and ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same fate.

In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some later ‘Redactor.’ Thus ‘the tabernacle of the congregation’ is declared to have been an invention of the Priestly Code; and therefore a verse in the First Book of Samuel (ii. 22), which happens to refer to it, is arbitrarily expunged from the text. Similarly passages in the historical books which imply an acquaintance on the part of Solomon and his successors with the laws and institutions of the Priestly Code are asserted to be late additions, and assigned to the very circle of writers to which the composition of the Code is credited. Indeed, if we are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly historical literature of the Old Testament was written or ‘redacted’ chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and easy way of rewriting ancient history, but it is neither scientific nor in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be with the methods of the philologist.

When, however, we come to examine the philological evidence upon which we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a European scholar of the nineteenth century can analyse with mathematical precision a work composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse, and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can attain to truth only by the help of comparison; we can know things scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclusion can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this, however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but from the so-called ‘tact’ and arbitrary judgment of the individual scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose. The ‘critical’ theory of the origin and character of the Hexateuch closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe; like the latter, it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality.

Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have required a special revelation to discover the fact. We may lay it down as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great, but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be established with any pretence to scientific value.

There is yet another reason why the new theory of the origin of the Mosaic Law stands self-condemned. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient East as if they were modern German professors and their literary audience. The author of the Priestly Code is supposed to go to work with scissors and paste, and with a particular object in view, like a rather wooden and unimaginative compiler of to-day. And so closely did the minds and methods of the authors of the Hexateuch resemble those of their modern European critics, that in spite of their efforts to conceal the piecemeal nature of their work, as well as of the fact that it actually deceived their countrymen to whom it was addressed, to the European scholar of to-day it all lies open and revealed. When, however, we turn to other products of Oriental thought, whether ancient or modern, we do not find that this is the way in which the authors of them have written history, or what purports to be history, neither do we find their readers to be at all like those for whom the Hexateuch is supposed to have been compiled. The point of view of an Oriental is still essentially different from that of a European, at all events so far as history and literature are concerned; and the attempt to transform the ancient Israelitish historians into somewhat inferior German compilers proves only a strange want of familiarity with Eastern modes of thought.

But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is violated by the endeavour to foist philological speculations into the treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language; it is moreover a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is preserved in the Old Testament, and the errors of copyists and the corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which is questionable; there are numerous others in the case of which it is certainly wrong; and there is passage after passage in which the translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see them through a glass darkly. Not unfrequently the reading of the Septuagint—the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text—differs entirely from the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the Hexateuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently-discovered Hebrew text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is not altogether justified.

How, then, can a modern Western scholar analyse with even approximate exactitude an ancient Hebrew work, and on the strength of the language and style dissolve it once more into its component atoms? How can he determine the relation of these atoms one to the other, or presume to fix the dates to which they severally belong? The task would be impossible even in the case of a modern English book, although English is a spoken language with which we are all supposed to be thoroughly acquainted, while its vast literature is familiar to us all. And yet even where we know that a work is composite, it passes the power of man to separate it into its elements and define the limits of each. No one, for instance, would dream of attempting such a task in the case of the novels of Besant and Rice; and the endeavour to distinguish in certain plays of Shakespeare what belongs to the poet himself and what to Fletcher has met with the oblivion it deserved. Is it likely that a problem which cannot be solved in the case of an English book can be solved where its difficulties are increased a thousandfold? The minuteness and apparent precision of Hexateuchal criticism are simply due, like that of the Ptolemaic theory, to the artificial character of the basis on which it rests. It is, in fact, a philological mirage; it attempts the impossible, and in place of the scientific method of comparison, it gives us as a starting-point the assumptions and arbitrary principles of a one-sided critic.[129]

Where philology has failed, archæology has come to our help. The needful comparison of the Old Testament record with something else than itself has been afforded by the discoveries which have been made of recent years in Egypt and Babylonia and other parts of the ancient East. At last we are able to call in the aid of the scientific method, and test the age and character, the authenticity and trustworthiness of the Old Testament history, by monuments about whose historical authority there can be no question. And the result of the test has, on the whole, been in favour of tradition, and against the doctrines of the newer critical school. It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of the narratives of the Pentateuch; it has proved that the Mosaic age was a highly literary one, and that consequently the marvel would be, not that Moses should have written, but that he should not have done so; and it has undermined the foundation on which the documentary hypothesis of the origin of the Hexateuch has been built. We are still indeed only at the beginning of discoveries; those made during the past year or two have for the student of Genesis been exceptionally important; but enough has now been gained to assure us that the historian may safely disregard the philological theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the books of the Pentateuch from a wholly different point of view. They are a historical record, and it is for the historian and archæologist, and not for the grammarian, to determine their value and age.

The investigation of the literary sources of history has been a peculiarly German pastime. Doubtless such an investigation has been necessary. But it is exposed to the danger of trying to make bricks without straw. More often than not the materials are wanting for arriving at conclusions of solid scientific value. The results announced in such cases are due partly to the critic’s own prepossessions and postulates, partly to the imperfection of the evidence. It is easy to doubt, still easier to deny, especially where the evidence is defective, and the criticism of the literary sources of a narrative has sometimes meant an unwarrantable and unintelligent scepticism. To reverse traditional judgments, to reject external testimony, and to discover half-a-dozen authors where antiquity knew of but one, may be a proof of the critic’s ingenuity, but it does not always demonstrate his appreciation of evidence.

Criticism of the literary sources of our historical knowledge is indeed necessary, and a recognition of the fact has much to do with the advance which has been made during the present century in the study of the past. But it must not be forgotten that such criticism has its weak side. Internal evidence alone is always unsatisfactory; it offers too much scope for the play of the critic’s imagination and the impression of his own idiosyncrasies upon the records of history. It resembles too much the procedure of the spider who spins his web out of himself. It is wanting in that element of comparison without which scientific truth is unattainable. To determine the age and trustworthiness of our literary authorities is doubtless of extreme importance to the historian, but unfortunately the materials for doing so are too often absent, and the fancies and assumptions of the critic are put in their place.

The trustworthiness of an author, like the reality of the facts he narrates, can be adequately tested in only one way. We must be able to compare his accounts of past events with other contemporaneous records of them. Sometimes these records consist of pottery or other products of human industry which anthropology is able to interpret; often they are the far more important inscriptions which were written or engraved by the actors in the events themselves. In other words, it is to archæology that we must look for a verification or the reverse of the ancient history that has been handed down to us as well as of the credibility of its narrators. The written monuments of the ancient East which belong to the same age as the patriarchs or Moses can alone assure us whether we are to trust the narrative of the Pentateuch or to see in it a confused medley of legends the late date of which makes belief in them impossible.

As has been said above, Oriental archæology has already disclosed sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean. On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic; on the other hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been decisively ruled out of court. Let us take the second point first.

In 1887 a large collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters was found by the Egyptian fellahin among the ruins of the ancient city now known as Tel el-Amarna, on the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Siût. The city had enjoyed but a brief existence. Towards the close of the eighteenth dynasty, the Pharaoh, Amenophis III., had died, leaving the throne to his son, Amenophis IV., a mere lad, who was still under the influence of his mother Teie. Teie was of Asiatic extraction, and fanatically devoted to an Asiatic form of faith. This devotion was shared by her son, and soon began to bear fruit. Amon of Thebes had to make way for a new deity, who was worshipped under the visible form of the solar disk, and the old religion of Egypt of which the Pharaoh was the official head was utterly proscribed. It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war; the very name of Amon was erased from the monuments where it occurred, and the king changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the glory of the Solar Disk.’ But in the end, Khu-n-Aten had to quit the capital of his fathers and establish himself with his adherents and courtiers in a new city further north. This city, Khut-Aten, as. it was called, is now represented by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna.

Here the Pharaoh was surrounded by his followers, a large proportion of whom were Asiatics, chiefly from Canaan. The court of Egypt, as well as its religion, became Asiatised. The revolution in religion was also accompanied by a revolution in art. The old hieratic canon of Egyptian art was cast aside, and an excessive realism was aimed at, sometimes even to the verge of caricature. In the centre of the new city a temple was raised to the new divinity of Egypt, and hard by the temple rose the palace of the king. Its ornamentation was surpassingly gorgeous. Its walls and columns were inlaid with precious stones, with coloured glass and gold; even its floors were painted with scenes from nature which are of the highest artistic excellence, and statues were erected, some of which remind us of the best work of classical Greece.[130]

But the glory of Khut-Aten was short-lived. The latter years of the reign of its founder were clouded with religious and civil dissension. Religious persecution at home had been followed by trouble and revolt abroad in the Asiatic provinces of the Empire. When Khu-n-Aten died, his enemies were already pressing around him, and the perils that threatened him in Egypt obliged him to return no answer to the despairing appeals for help that came to him from his governors in Palestine. Hardly had the mummy of the king been deposited in the superb tomb that he had carved out of a mountain amid the desolation and solitude of a distant gorge, when the spoiler was at hand. The royal sarcophagus never reached the niche in which it was intended to be placed; the enemies of the ‘Heretic King’ hacked to pieces its granite sides as it lay upon the floor of the inner chamber, and scattered to the winds the remains of its occupant. The destruction of Khut-Aten soon followed; one or two princes of the family of Khu-n-Aten did indeed struggle for a brief while to maintain themselves upon his throne, but before long Amon triumphed over the Solar Disk. The great temple of Aten was razed to the ground, and its stones carried away to serve as materials for the sanctuaries of the victorious god of Thebes. The palace of Khu-n-Aten was destroyed, the religion he had essayed to force upon his subjects was forgotten, and the Asiatic officials who had filled his court were driven into exile. The city he had built was deserted, never to be inhabited again.

The clay tablets found by the fellahin were discovered on the site of the Foreign Office of the ‘Heretic King,’ the bricks of which were each stamped with the words ‘The Record Office of Aten-Ra.’[131] It adjoined the palace, and we learn from a clay seal found among its ruins by Professor Petrie that it was under the control of a Babylonian. This, however, was not extraordinary, since the foreign correspondence of the Pharaoh was carried on in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian system of writing. In fact, the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that the Western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over the civilised Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic intercourse was the language and script of Chaldæa. Not only the writing material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia. So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to communicate with their Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evidence that the memoranda made by the official scribes of the Pharaoh’s court, at all events in Palestine, were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary.[132] That the Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from one another in order to assist the learner.

The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in Western Asia must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was written in Palestine or in Northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia. The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the contrary, education must have been widely spread; the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and not unfrequently enter into the most unimportant details.

They were sent from all parts of the known civilised world. The kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, the Egyptian governors of Syria and Canaan, even the chiefs of the Bedâwin tribes on the Egyptian frontier, who were subsidised by the Pharaoh’s government like the Afghan chiefs of to-day, all alike contributed to the correspondence. Letters, in fact, must have been constantly passing to and fro along the high-roads which intersected Western Asia. From one end of it to the other the population was in perpetual literary intercourse, proving that the Oriental world in the century before the Exodus was as highly educated and literary as was Europe in the age of the Renaissance. Nor was all this literary activity and intercourse a new thing. Several of the letters had been sent to Amenophis III., the father of the ‘Heretic King,’ and had been removed by the latter from the archives of Thebes when he transferred his residence to his new capital. And the literary intercourse which was carried on in the time of Amenophis III. was merely a continuation of that which had been carried on for centuries previously. The culture of Babylonia, like that of Egypt, was essentially literary, and this culture had been spread over Western Asia from a remote date. The letters of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel to his vassal, the king of Larsa, have just been recovered, and among the multitudinous contract-tablets of the same epoch are specimens of commercial correspondence.

We have, however, only to consider for a moment what was meant by learning the language and script of Babylonia in order to realise what a highly-organised system of education must have prevailed throughout the whole civilised world of the day. Not only had the Babylonian language to be acquired, but some knowledge also of the older agglutinative language of Chaldæa was also needed in order to understand the system of writing. It was as if the schoolboy of to-day had to add a knowledge of Greek to a knowledge of French. And the system of writing itself involved years of hard and patient study. It consisted of a syllabary containing hundreds of characters, each of which had not only several different phonetic values, but several different ideographic significations as well. Nor was this all. A group of characters might be used ideographically to express a word the pronunciation of which had nothing to do with the sounds of the individual characters of which it was composed. The number of ideographs which had to be learned was thus increased fivefold. And, unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the forms of these ideographs gave no assistance to the memory. They had long since lost all resemblance to the pictures out of which they had originally been developed, and consisted simply of various combinations of wedges or lines. It was difficult enough for the Babylonian or Assyrian to learn the syllabary; for a foreigner the task was almost herculean.

That it should have been undertaken implies the existence of libraries and schools. One of the distinguishing features of Babylonian culture were the libraries which existed in the great towns, and wherever Babylonian culture was carried this feature of it must have gone too. Hence in the libraries of Western Asia clay books inscribed with cuneiform characters must have been stored up, while beside them must have been the schools, where the pupils bent over their exercises and the teachers instructed them in the language and script of the foreigner. The world into which Moses was born was a world as literary as our own.

If Western Asia were the home of a long-established literary culture, Egypt was even more so. From time immemorial the land of the Pharaohs had been a land of writers and readers. At a very early period the hieroglyphic system of writing had been modified into a cursive hand, the so-called hieratic; and as far back as the days of the third and fifth dynasties famous books had been written, and the author of one of them, Ptah-hotep, already deplores the degeneracy and literary decay of his own time. The traveller up the Nile, who examines the cliffs that line the river, cannot but be struck by the multitudinous names that are scratched upon them. He is at times inclined to believe that every Egyptian in ancient times knew how to write, and had little else to do than to scribble a record of himself on the rocks. The impression is the same that we derive from the small objects which are disinterred in such thousands from the sites of the old cities. Wherever it is possible, an inscription has been put upon them, which, it seems taken for granted, could be read by all. Even the walls of the temples and tombs were covered with written texts; wherever the Egyptian turned, or whatever might be the object he used, it was difficult for him to avoid the sight of the written word. Whoever was born in the land of Egypt was perforce familiarised with the art of writing from the very days of his infancy.

Evidence is accumulating that the same literary culture which thus prevailed in Egypt and Western Asia had extended also to the peninsula of Arabia. Dr. Glaser and Professor Hommel, two of the foremost authorities on the subject, believe that some of the inscriptions of Southern Arabia go back to the age of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties; and if they are right, as they seem to be, in holding that the kingdom of Ma’n or the Minæans preceded that of Saba or Sheba, the antiquity of writing in Arabia must be great.[133] The fact that the Babylonian dynasty to which Amraphel belonged was of South Arabian origin supports the belief in the existence of Arabian culture at an early period, as do also the latest researches into the source of the so-called Phœnician alphabet. We now know that in the Mosaic age it was the cuneiform syllabary, and not the Phœnician alphabet, that was used in Canaan, while the oldest inscription in Phœnician letters yet found is later than the reign of Solomon. On the other hand, the South Arabian form of the alphabet contains letters which denote sounds once possessed by all the Semitic languages, but lost by the language of Canaan; and though some of these letters may be derived from other letters of the alphabet, there are some which have an independent origin. The caravan-road along which the spices of the South were carried to Syria and Egypt passed through the territory of Edom; inscriptions of the kings of Ma’n have already been discovered near Teima, not far from the frontiers of Midian; and it may be that we shall yet find records among the ranges of Mount Seir which will form a link between the early texts of Southern Arabia and the oldest text that has come from Phœnician soil.

The Exodus from Egypt, then, took place during a highly literary period, and the people who took part in it passed from a country where the art of writing literally stared them in the face to another country which had been the centre of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the home of Babylonian literary culture for unnumbered centuries. Is it conceivable that their leader and reputed lawgiver should not have been able to write, that he should not have been educated ‘in the wisdom of Egypt,’ or that the upper classes of his nation should not have been able to read? Let it be granted that the Israelites were but a Bedâwin tribe which had been reduced by the Pharaohs to the condition of public slaves; still, they necessarily had leaders and overseers among them, who, according to the State regulations of Egypt, were responsible to the Government for the rest of their countrymen, and some at least of these leaders and overseers would have been educated men. Moses could have written the Pentateuch, even if he did not do so.

Moreover, the clay tablets on which the past history of Canaan could be read were preserved in the libraries and archive-chambers of the Canaanitish cities down to the time when the latter were destroyed. If any doubt had existed on the subject after the revelations of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, it has been set at rest by the discovery of a similar tablet on the site of Lachish. In some cases the cities were not destroyed, so far as we know, until the period when it is allowed that the Israelites had ceased to be illiterate. Gezer, for example, which plays a leading part in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, does not seem to have fallen into the hands of an enemy until it was captured by the Egyptian Pharaoh and handed over to his son-in-law Solomon. As long as a knowledge of the cuneiform script continued, the early records of Canaan were thus accessible to the historian, many of them being contemporaneous with the events to which they referred.

A single archæological discovery has thus destroyed the base of operations from which a one-sided criticism of Old Testament history had started. The really strong point in favour of it was the assumption that the Mosaic age was illiterate. Just as Wolf founded his criticism and analysis of the Homeric Hymns on the belief that the use of writing for literary purposes was of late date in Greece, so the belief that the Israelites of the time of Moses could not read or write was the ultimate foundation on which the modern theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been based. Whether avowed or not, it was the true starting-point of critical scepticism, the one solid foundation on which it seemed to rest. The destruction of the foundation endangers the structure which has been built upon it.

In fact, it wholly alters the position of the modern critical theory. The _onus probandi_ no longer lies on the shoulders of the defenders of traditional views. Instead of being called upon to prove that Moses could have written a book, it is they who have to call on the disciples of the modern theory to show reason why he should not have done so. And it is always difficult to prove a negative.

It may be said that the positive arguments of the modern hypothesis remain as they were. That is possible, but their background is gone. And how conscious the Hexateuchal analysts were of the importance of this background, before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, may be seen from their desperate efforts to rid themselves of the counter evidence afforded by the Song of Deborah. ‘Out of Machir,’ it is there said (Judg. v. 14), ‘came down lawgivers, and out of Zebulun they that handle the stylus of the scribe.’ In defiance of philology, the latter words were translated ‘the baton of the marshal’! But _sopher_ is ‘scribe’ here, as elsewhere in Hebrew; and his _shebhet_, or ‘stylus,’ is often depicted on the Egyptian monuments. In the Blessing of Jacob, which is allowed to be of early date, like the Song of Deborah, the _shebhet_ is associated with the _m’khoqêq_ or ‘lawgiver’ (Gen. xlix. 10). The word _m’khoqêq_, however, meant literally an ‘engraver,’ one who did not write his laws on papyrus or parchment, as the scribe would have done, but caused them to be engraved on stone, or metal, or clay.[134] In either case they were written down; and written documents are thus implied not only in the expression ‘the stylus of the scribe,’ but in the word ‘lawgiver’ as well. The Song of Deborah, by general consent, belongs to the oldest period of the Hebrew settlement in Palestine; it belongs also to an age of anarchy and national depression; and, nevertheless, it is already acquainted with Israelitish lawgivers and scribes, with engravers of the laws and handlers of the pen. It is little wonder that its evidence was explained away in accordance with a method which is neither scientific nor historical.

As historians, we are bound to admit the antiquity of writing in Israel. The scribe goes back to the Mosaic age, like the lawgiver, and in this respect, therefore, the Israelites formed no exception to the nations among whom they lived. They were no islet of illiterate barbarism in the midst of a great sea of literary culture and activity, nor were they obstinately asleep while all about them were writing and reading.

But even the analysis of the Hexateuchal critics fails to stand the test of archæological discovery. Nowhere does there seem to be clearer evidence of the documentary hypothesis than in the story of the Deluge. Here the combination of a Yahvistic and an Elohistic narrative seems to force itself upon the attention of the reader, and the advocates of the disintegration theory have triumphantly pointed to the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the story in support of their views. If anywhere, here, at any rate, the external testimony of archæeology ought to be given on the side of modern criticism.

And yet it is not. It so happens that among the fragments of ancient Babylonian epic and legend which have come down to us is a long poem in twelve books, composed in the age of Abraham, or earlier, by a certain Sin-liqi-unnini, and recounting the adventures of the Chaldæan hero Gilgames. It is based on older materials, and is, in fact, the last note and final summing-up of Chaldæan epic song. Older poems have been incorporated into it, and the epic itself has been artificially moulded upon an astronomical plan. Its twelve books, in each of which a new adventure of its hero is recorded, correspond with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the months of the year that were named after them. The eleventh month was presided over by Aquarius, and was the month of ‘the Curse of Rain’; into the eleventh book of the poem, accordingly, there has been introduced the episode of the Deluge.

The story of the Deluge had been the subject of many poems. Fragments of some of them we possess, and the details of the story were not always the same. But the version preserved in the epic of Gilgames became what we may term the standard one; the very fact that it was embodied in the most famous of the epics made it widely known. When it was discovered by Mr. George Smith in 1872, its striking resemblance to the story of the Flood in Genesis was at once apparent to every one. In details as well as in general outline the two accounts agreed; even in the moral cause assigned to the Deluge—the sin of man—the Babylonian story alone among traditions of a Deluge was at one with the Biblical narrative.

A comparison of the Chaldæan and Biblical accounts leads to the following results. The resemblances between them extend equally to the Elohistic and the Yahvistic portions of the Hebrew narrative. Like the Elohist, the epic ascribes the Deluge to the sins of mankind, and the preservation of Xisuthros, the Chaldæan Noah, and his family to the piety of the hero; all living things, moreover, are involved in the calamity, except such as are preserved in the ark; its approach is revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who instructs him how to build ‘the ship’; Ea also, like Elohim, prescribes the dimensions of the ark, which is divided into rooms and stories, and pitched within and without; ‘the seed of life of all kinds’ is taken into it, together with the family of Xisuthros; the waters of the Flood are said to cover ‘all the high mountains,’ and to destroy all living creatures except those that were in the ark; this latter, too, had a window; and when the Deluge had subsided and Xisuthros had offered a sacrifice on the peak of the mountain, Bel blessed him and declared that he would never again destroy the world by a flood while Istar ‘lifted up’ the rainbow, which an old Babylonian hymn calls ‘the bow of the Deluge.’[135]

Like the Yahvist, on the other hand, the Babylonian poet sees in the Flood a punishment for sin, and makes it destroy all living things except those that were in the ark. He also states that Xisuthros sent forth three birds, one after the other, in order to discover whether the waters were subsiding, two of them being a dove and a raven, and that while the dove turned back to the ark, the raven flew away. After the descent from the ark, moreover, Xisuthros, we are told, built an altar and offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain whereon it had rested, and there ‘the gods smelled the sweet savour’ of the offering. In certain cases the epic even explains what is doubtful or obscure in the Hebrew text. Thus it shows that in the account of the sending forth of the birds one of the birds has been omitted; and that consequently, in order to complete the number of times the birds were despatched from the ark, the dove is sent forth twice, while the raven, instead of being the last to leave the ark, has been made the first to do so. In the Babylonian story the order is natural. First, the dove flies forth, then the swallow or ‘bird of destiny,’ and lastly the raven who feeds on the corpses that float upon the water, and accordingly does not return. But the ‘bird of destiny’ carried with it heathen and mythological associations. It has therefore been omitted by the Biblical writer, the result being to throw the narrative into confusion.[136]

The Babylonian origin of the Flood, again, alone explains the statement that it was partly caused by ‘the fountains of the great deep’ being broken up. The ‘great deep,’ called Tiamat in Babylonian mythology, had been placed under guard at the Creation, according to Chaldæan belief, and so prevented from gushing forth and destroying mankind. The whole conception takes us back to the alluvial plain of Babylonia, liable at any time to be inundated by the waters of the Persian Gulf, and is wholly inapplicable to a mountainous country like Palestine, where rain only could have produced a flood.[137]

There are even indications that in the Biblical narrative the mythological ideas and polytheistic phraseology of the Babylonian story have been intentionally contradicted or suppressed. Thus, not only is the whole colouring of the narrative sternly monotheistic, but God Himself is made to reveal the approach of the Deluge to Noah, in contrast with the Babylonian version, according to which the god Ea announced the coming catastrophe to the Chaldæan Noah without the knowledge of the supreme god Bel. And when the Flood was past, Bel was enraged that any should have escaped living from it, and the other deities had to intercede before he could be pacified. So, too, whereas the Babylonian poet tells us that the Chaldæan Noah closed the door of his ship, in the book of Genesis it is Yahveh Himself who does so. In the view of the Biblical writer, nothing was to be allowed to lessen the omnipotence of the God of Israel.

It will be noticed that the coincidences between the Babylonian and Hebrew narratives are quite as much in details as in general outlines, and these coincidences cover the Hebrew narrative as a whole. It is not with the Elohist or with the Yahvist alone that the Babylonian poet agrees, but with the supposed combination of their two documents as we now find it in the book of Genesis. If the documentary hypothesis were right, there would be only two ways of accounting for this fact. Either the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian story upon the mutual understanding that the one should insert what the other omitted. There is no third alternative.

As the Babylonian epic was composed in the age of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel, neither of the two alternatives is likely to be accepted by the advocates of the Hexateuchal theory, and the whole theory, consequently, must be ruled out of court. It breaks down in the first test case to which the results of archæological discovery can be applied, a case, moreover, in which its plausibility is unusually great. Henceforth the historian who pursues a scientific method may safely disregard the whole fabric of Hexateuchal criticism.

The story of the Deluge itself suggests what may be put in place of it. With all its likeness to the Babylonian story, the Biblical narrative has nevertheless undergone a change. It has been clothed not only in a Hebrew, but also in a Palestinian dress. The ship of the Chaldæan Noah has become an ark, as was natural in a country where there were no great rivers or Persian Gulf; the period of the rainfall has been transferred from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in Babylonia, to ‘the second month’ of the Hebrew civil year, our October and November, the time of the autumn or ‘former rains’ in Canaan, while the subsidence of the waters is made to begin in the middle of ‘the seventh month,’ when the ‘latter rains’ of the Canaanitish spring are over; and the dove is said to have brought back in its mouth a leaf of the olive, a tree characteristic of the soil of Palestine. Though the Biblical narrative has been borrowed from Babylonia, it has been modified and coloured in the West. Even the hero of the Babylonian poem has become the Noah or Naham of Canaan.

We have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets how this could have come about. There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in the history of Western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldæa were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite conquests of the fourteenth century B.C., and the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge, adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such deliberate intention of controverting the polytheistic features of the original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia, and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.

But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the historical narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still dominant on the shores of the Mediterranean. So far from being popular traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of Solomon’s kingdom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series of ‘redactors,’ they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will have made their way westwards like the Chaldæan legends found among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the Pentateuch not only Israelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish, Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.

The progress of archæological research has already in part fulfilled this expectation. ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has been found at Muqayyar, and the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites—or, as we should call them, Canaanites—were settled there, and have even brought to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and Ishmael.[138] Even the name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of an ‘Amorite’ witness to a contract in the third generation before Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contemporaries, Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid’al or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his associates had been denied a claim. The ‘nations’ over whom Tid’al ruled have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully vindicated. Jerusalem, instead of being a name first given to the future capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its earliest title; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Amarna letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his father or his mother, but through the arm of ‘the mighty king.’ If we turn to Egypt, the archæological evidence is the same. The history of Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with Egyptian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, we shall see presently that its geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in the history of Egypt.

Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history contained in the Pentateuch has been shown by archæology to be authentic. And it must be remembered that Oriental archæology is still in its infancy. Few only of the sites of ancient civilisation have as yet been excavated, and there are thousands of cuneiform texts in the Museums of Europe and America which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for Biblical criticism, were found, and the disclosures made by the early contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of still more recent discovery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical genuineness of the Pentateuchal narratives; and it raises the presumption that with the advance of our knowledge will come further confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian’s path is clear; the Pentateuch has been tested by the comparative method of science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt with accordingly like other historical works. The philological theory with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and ‘redactors,’ must be put aside, along with all the historical consequences which it involves.

But it does not follow that because the philological theory is untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because it has attempted to build up a vast superstructure on very imperfect and questionable materials; because, in short, it has attempted to attain historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one can study the Pentateuch in the light of other ancient works of a similar kind without perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its author—or authors—has made use of a large variety of older materials. Modern Oriental history has been written in the same manner; a book, for instance, like the Egyptian history of El-Maqrîzî, though the production of a single mind, nevertheless embodies older materials which have been collected from every side. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Chaldæan Epic of Gilgames, bears the same testimony. The growth of the Book of the Dead, the ritual which was needed by the souls of the Egyptian dead in their passage to the next world, can actually be traced.[139] It included and combined the doctrines of more than one school of early Egyptian theological thought, and in later days was extensively interpolated and modernised. Not only were glosses, once intended to explain the obscurities of the archaic phraseology, incorporated into the text, but even whole chapters were added to the work. The Epic of Gilgames similarly embodies other poems or portions of poems, of which the Episode of the Deluge is an example. Yet no Assyriologist would dispute for a moment that from beginning to end it is the work of one author.

Archæology has already shown us that we are right in believing that the Pentateuch also has been compiled out of earlier materials. The story of the campaign of Chedor-laomer must have been derived from a cuneiform tablet; the story of Joseph seems to have been taken from a hieratic papyrus. The account of the Deluge has made its way from Babylonia to Canaan in the days when the culture of Chaldæa extended to the Mediterranean. We thus have narratives which presuppose an acquaintance not only with Babylon and Egypt, but also with Babylonian and Egyptian documents.

So, too, the list of Edomite kings contained in the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis must have been extracted from the official annals of Edom. It is a proof that such annals existed, that the Edomites, like the rest of their neighbours, were acquainted with the art of writing, and that their official records were accessible to a Hebrew scribe.

We cannot doubt the authenticity of the list, even though the ancient territory of Edom has not yet been explored, and no Edomite inscriptions consequently have as yet been found to verify it. The list, therefore, does not yet stand in the same fortunate position as the account of Chedor-laomer and his allies, which has been verified by archæological discovery. Here even the names of the foreign kings have been preserved in the Hebrew text with marvellously little corruption. The whole account must have come from a cuneiform document coeval with the event it narrates. That is to say, we can here trace one of the Pentateuchal narratives not only to a written source, but to a written source which is at the same time a contemporaneous record.

We may conclude, then, that the Pentateuch has been compiled from older documents—some Babylonian, some Egyptian, some Edomite; others, as we may gather from the nature of their contents, Canaanite and Aramæan—and that many of these documents belong to the periods to which they refer. This, however, is not all. In certain cases we can approximately fix the latest date at which they could have been employed and combined in the form in which we now find them. Thus in the geographical chart of Genesis (x. 6), Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim. This takes us back to the time when Canaan was a province of the Egyptian empire; when that empire came to an end the description ceased to be possible. After the epoch of the nineteenth dynasty and the Hebrew Exodus, Canaan and Egypt were cut off from one another geographically and politically, and Canaan could never again have been called in Semitic idiom the brother of Mizraim. It became instead the brother of Aram and Assur.

Here, therefore, the limit of age prescribed by archæology forbids us to pass beyond the Mosaic epoch. Moses, in short, is the compiler to whom the archæological evidence indicates that the tenth chapter of Genesis goes back in its original shape. But by the side of this evidence there is other evidence also which tells a different tale. Gomer, or the Kimmerians, as well as Madai, are named among the sons of Japhet, and the Assyrian monuments assure us that neither the one nor the other came within the geographical horizon of Western Asia before the ninth century B.C. It was in the ninth century B.C. that the Assyrian kings first became acquainted with the Medes, while the Gimirrâ or Kimmerians did not descend upon Asia from their seats on the Sea of Azof until about B.C. 680. The same reasoning which gives us the Mosaic age as that of the geographical chart of Genesis in its primitive shape gives us the seventh century B.C. or later for the date of another portion of the same chapter.

The list of the kings of Edom, again, is introduced by the remark that ‘these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.’ It was not inserted in the book of Genesis, therefore, until after the age of Saul, a conclusion which is supported by the fact that the first king named seems to be Balaam, the son of Beor, who was a contemporary of Moses. If, accordingly, the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Insertions and interpolations must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made.

That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the text of the prophetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious circumstances. Isaiah, for instance, has copied a prophecy directed by one of his predecessors against Moab; and after breaking it off in the middle of a sentence, has adapted it to the needs and circumstances of his own time. On the other hand, a long-established Jewish tradition, which has found its way into the Second Book of Esdras (xiv. 21-26), makes Ezra rewrite or edit the books of Moses. There is no reason to question the substantial truth of the tradition; Ezra was the restorer of the old paths, and the Pentateuch may well have taken its present shape from him. If so, we need not be surprised if we find here and there in it echoes of the Babylonish captivity.

Side by side with materials derived from written sources, the book of Genesis contains narratives which, at all events in the first instance, must have resembled the traditions and poems orally recited in Arab lands, and commemorating the heroes and forefathers of the tribe. Thus there are two Abrahams; the one an Abraham who has been born in one of the centres of Babylonian civilisation, who is the ally of Amorite chieftains, whose armed followers overthrow the rearguard of the Elamite army, and whom the Hittites of Hebron address as ‘a mighty prince’; the other is an Abraham of the Bedâwin camp-fire, a nomad whose habits are those of the rude independence of the desert, whose wife kneads the bread while he himself kills the calf with which his guests are entertained. It is true that in actual Oriental life the simplicity of the desert and the wealth and culture of the town may be found combined in the same person; that in modern Egypt Arab shêkhs may still be met with who thus live like wild Bedâwin during one part of the year, and as rich and civilised townsmen during another part of it; while in the last century a considerable portion of Upper Egypt was governed by Bedâwin emirs, who realised in their own persons that curious duality of life and manners which to us Westerns appears so strange. But it is also true that the spirit and tone of the narratives in Genesis differ along with the character ascribed in them to the patriarch: we find in them not only the difference between the guest of the Egyptian Pharaoh and the entertainer of the angels, but also a difference in the point of view. The one speaks to us of literary culture, the other of the simple circle of wandering shepherds to whose limited experience the story-teller has to appeal. The story may be founded on fact; it may be substantially true; but it has been coloured by the surroundings in which it has grown up, and archæological proof of its historical character can never be forthcoming. At most, it can be shown to be true to the time and place in which its scene is laid, and so contains nothing which is inconsistent with known facts.

Such, then, are the main results of the application of the archæological test to the books of the Pentateuch. The philological theory, with its minute and mathematically exact analysis, is brushed aside; it is as little in harmony with archæology as it is with common sense. The Pentateuch substantially belongs to the Mosaic age, and may therefore be accepted as, in the bulk, the work of Moses himself. But it is a composite work, embodying materials of various kinds. Some of these are written documents, descriptive of contemporaneous events, or recording the cosmological beliefs of ancient Babylonia; others have been derived from the unwritten traditions of nomad tribes. The work has passed through many editions; it is full of interpolations, lengthy and otherwise; and it has probably received its final shape at the hands of Ezra. But in order to discover the interpolations, or to determine the written documents that have been used, we must have recourse to the historical method and the facts of archæology. Apart from these we cannot advance a step in safety. The archæological evidence, however, is already sufficient for the presumption that, where it fails us, the text is nevertheless ancient, and the narrative historical—a presumption, it will be noticed, the exact contrary of that in which the Hexateuchal theory has landed its disciples.

But, these same disciples will urge, what becomes of those three strata of legislation which we have so successfully disentangled one from the other in the Hexateuch, and have shown to belong to three separate and mutually exclusive periods of Israelitish history? Has not literary criticism proved that no reconciliation is possible between the enactments and point of view of the Book of the Covenant on the one side, and those of the Deuteronomist on the other, or between the legislation of the Deuteronomist and that of the Priestly Code? The altar of earth or rough-hewn stones, which may be built on any high place, makes way for the altar of the temple at Jerusalem, and this again for the ideal altar of the tabernacle in the wilderness. One sanctuary takes the place of many; the priesthood is confined first to the tribe of Levi, and then more especially to the sons of Aaron; while the simple feasts of harvest rejoicing, which were celebrated by early Israel in common with its neighbours, are replaced by sacrifices for sin and solemn festivals like the Day of Atonement.

It is strange that these inconsistencies were left to European scholars of the nineteenth century to discover, and that neither the contemporaries of Ezra, who allowed themselves to be bound to the yoke of a law which they believed to be divine, nor the Samaritan rivals of the Jews, should have ever perceived them. The fact seems to the historian to throw some doubt on their real existence, and he can leave them to the tender mercies of Dr. Baxter, who has met the literary critics on their own ground, and seriously damaged their house of cards.[140] The historian can have nothing to do with a theory which not only requires the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament to be rewritten in accordance with it, but also declares at once every passage which tells against it to be a gloss and interpolation. History, like science, is not built on subjective judgments.

At the same time, there is an element of truth in the work of the ‘literary analysis.’ Years of labour on the part of able and learned scholars cannot be absolutely without result, even though the labourers may have been led astray by the will-o’-the-wisp of a false theory and have followed a wrong line of research. The minute examination to which they have subjected the text has revealed much that had never before been suspected; and they have made it clear that the historical books of the Old Testament are compilations, not free, moreover, from later interpolations, even though we cannot share the confidence with which they separate and distinguish the different elements. They have made it impossible ever to return to the old conception of the Hebrew Scriptures and the old method of treating Hebrew history. Where they have been successful has been on the negative rather than on the reconstructive side. For reconstruction, the scientific instrument of comparison was wanted, and this the literary analysts did not possess.

The Old Testament books themselves make no secret of the fact that they are compilations. The books of the Kings name the sources from which a large part of them has been drawn, and the books of Samuel (2 Sam. i. 18) quote David’s ‘Song of the Bow’ from the book of Jasher. The same work is referred to in the book of Joshua (x. 13), and in Numbers (xxi. 14) we have an extract from the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord. Old poems are introduced into the text, like the Song of Deborah or the Blessing of Jacob; even an Amorite song of triumph is cited in Numbers xxi. 27-30. The so-called ‘Book of the Covenant’ of the literary critics takes its name from a real ‘book of the covenant’ in which the first legislation promulgated at Sinai was written down by Moses, according to Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, and read by him ‘in the audience of the people;’ while the Song of Deborah expressly states that the forces of Zebulun, which took part in the war against Sisera, were accompanied by scribes, like the armies of Egypt or Assyria.

That Moses could not have written the account of his own death was discovered even by the Jewish rabbis; and references to the ‘Book of the Covenant’ and the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ prove that the Pentateuch in its present form has not come down to us from the Mosaic age. The materials may be Mosaic; it may thus be substantially the work of the great Hebrew lawgiver, but the actual work itself is of later date.

How far may we trust the accuracy of the traditional Hebrew text? Modern criticism has been inclined to pronounce the text corrupt, not unfrequently because the critic himself cannot understand it, and to deal pretty freely in conjectural emendations. The Greek text of the Septuagint is invoked against it, and undue weight is often given to its variant readings or omissions, as, for instance, in the case of the history of Saul. Doubtless the Septuagint text is of great value; it goes back to a period centuries older than the oldest Hebrew MS. that has survived to us; but it was made by Jews of Alexandria, whose knowledge of the sacred language of their nation was not always complete or exact. The recent discovery of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus has gone far to shake our confidence in the readings of the Septuagint, as a comparison of it with the Greek translation made only two generations later has shown that passages are omitted in the latter, through simple carelessness, or perhaps inability to understand them. The discovery has also not been in favour of the emendations of literary and philological criticism, not one of the many attempts made to restore the lost Hebrew original having turned out to be correct.[141]

On the other hand, a comparison of the Hebrew Scriptures with the clay books of Assyria is on the side of accuracy in the text. The scribes employed in the libraries of Assyria, and presumably, therefore, in the older libraries of Babylonia, were scrupulously exact in their copies of earlier texts. Where the tablet which they copied was injured and defective, it was stated to be so, and the scribe made no attempt to fill up by conjecture, however obvious, what was missing in the document before him. He even was careful to note whether the fracture was recent or not. Where, again, he was not certain about the Assyrian equivalent of a Babylonian character of unusual form, he gave alternative representatives of it, or else reproduced the questionable character itself. Perhaps the most striking example of the textual honesty of the Assyrian and Babylonian scribes is, however, to be found in a compilation known as the _Babylonian Chronicle_—a chronological abstract in which the history of Babylonia is given from a strictly Babylonian point of view. Here the author candidly confesses that he does ‘not know’ the year when the decisive battle of Khalulê took place, which laid Babylon at the feet of Sennacherib; his materials for settling the matter failed him, and, unlike the modern Hexateuchal critics, he abstained from conjecture. We are more fortunate than he was; for, as we possess the annals of Sennacherib, in which the Assyrian king gives a highly-coloured account of the battle, we are able to determine its date.

In the later days of the Jewish monarchy there was a library at Jerusalem similar to those of Assyria and Babylonia, and we hear of the scribes belonging to it in the days of Hezekiah re-editing the Proverbs of Solomon (Prov. xxv. 1). There are indications that they were as careful and honest in their work as the scribes of Assyria whose example they probably followed. Thus the names of Chedor-laomer and his allies are preserved with singular correctness, as well as the forms of two geographical names which seem to imply translation from a cuneiform original.[142] So, again, the Aramaic inscriptions of a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III. found at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, show that in one case at least the spelling which we find in the books of Kings has remained unchanged since the eighth century B.C. As in the books of Kings, so at Sinjerli, the Assyrian name Tukulti-Pal-Esarra is incorrectly written Tiglath-pileser, with _g_ instead of _k_, and even the country over which he ruled is in both cases written _plene_ (with the symbol of the vowel _u_). On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are many clear and unmistakable corruptions of the text. In the fourteenth chapter of Genesis itself the name of the city Larsa has been transformed into Ellasar;[143] elsewhere glosses have been received into the text, while there are whole passages which are either ungrammatical or unmeaning as they now stand. Ancient authors, whether Hebrew or otherwise, did not write nonsense; and if the natural rendering of a passage does not make sense, we may feel quite sure that it is corrupt.

The historian of the Hebrews, then, is bound to treat his authorities as the Greek historian would treat Herodotos or Thucydides or any other writer on behalf of whose character and age there is a long line of external testimony. The results of the ‘literary analysis’ may be left to the philologist, as well as the conjectures and theories that have been substituted by scholars of the nineteenth century for early Israelitish history. They have vanished like bubbles wherever they have been tested by the archæological evidence, which, on the other hand, has vindicated the substantial truthfulness of those Old Testament statements which had been scornfully thrown aside.

Where it is possible, the Biblical narratives must be compared with the discoveries of archæological research; where this cannot be done, they must be examined from the historical and not from the philological or literary point of view. We are bound to assume their general credibility and faithfulness, except where this can be historically disproved, and to remember that while on the one hand inconsistencies in detail do not affect the general historical trustworthiness of a document, the agreement of such details with the facts of archæology or geography—more especially when they are of the kind termed ‘undesigned coincidences’—is a powerful argument in its favour. Above all, we must beware of that favourite weapon of literary criticism, the argument from silence, which is really merely an argument from the imperfection of our own knowledge, and which a single instance to the contrary will overthrow. The literary criticism of the Old Testament is full of examples of the argument that have been demolished by the advance of Oriental archæology.

Let this accordingly be the rule of the historian: to believe all things, to hope all things, but at the same time to test and try all things. And the test must be scientific, not what we assume to be probable or natural, but external testimony in the shape of archæological or geographical facts. The history of the past is not what ought to have happened according to the ideas of the critic, but what actually did happen.

Such a manner of treating our authorities does not, of course, exclude our recognition of what the literary critics call their several ‘tendencies.’ No history, worthy of the name, can be written without a ‘tendency’ of some sort on the part of the writer, even though it be not consciously felt. We must have some kind of general theory within the lines of which our facts may be grouped; and however much we may strive to be impartial, our conception of the facts themselves, and our mode of presenting them, will be coloured by our beliefs and education. The historian cannot help writing with an object in view; the necessities of the subject require it.

That the historical books of the Old Testament should have been written with a ‘tendency’ is therefore natural. And literary criticism has successfully pointed out in the case of one of these books what the ‘tendency’ was. If we compare the books of Chronicles with those of Samuel and Kings, the contrast between them strikes the eye at once. The interest of the Chronicler is centred in the history of the Jewish temple and ritual, of its priests and Levites, and the manifold requirements of the Law. His history of Israel accordingly becomes a history of Israelitish ritual; all else is put aside or treated in the briefest fashion. The incidents of David’s reign narrated in the books of Samuel are subordinated to elaborate accounts of his arrangements for the services in the tabernacle or temple; the history of the northern kingdom of Israel, which lay outside that of the temple at Jerusalem, is passed over in silence; and the Passover held in Hezekiah’s reign, about which not a word is said in the books of Kings, is dwelt upon to the exclusion of almost everything else. Nor, had we only the Chronicler in our hands, should we know that the pious Hezekiah had entered into an alliance with the Babylonian king and boastfully displayed to his ambassadors the treasures of the Jewish kingdom, thereby bringing upon himself the rebuke of the prophet Isaiah. All that the Chronicler has to say on the matter is that ‘in the business of the ambassadors of the prince of Babylon, who sent to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart’; and even here a theological turn is given to the occurrence by the motive assigned for the embassy. As a matter of fact, we know from the cuneiform inscriptions that the real object of Merodach-baladan was to form a league with the princes of the West against their common Assyrian enemy, to which, as the books of Kings inform us, was naturally added a polite inquiry after Hezekiah’s health.

‘Tendencies’ there are, therefore, in the historical writings of the Old Testament; they would not be human productions if there were not. The authors have had one great object in view, that of showing from the past history of the people that sin brings punishment with it, while a blessing follows upon righteous action. They believed in the Divine government of the world, and wrote with that belief clearly before them. They believed also that Israel was the chosen nation in whose history that Divine government had been made manifest to mankind, and that the God of Israel was the one true omnipotent God. In this belief in a theodicy they were theologians, like most other Oriental writers. But their theological point of view did not prevent them from being historians as well. It did not interfere with their honestly recording the course of events as it had been handed down to them, or reproducing their authorities without intentional change. Doubtless they may have made mistakes at times, their judgment may not always have been strictly critical or correct, and want of sufficient materials may now and then have led them into error. But when we find that no attempt is made to palliate or conceal the sins and shortcomings of their most cherished national heroes, that even the reverses of the nation are chronicled equally with its successes, and that the early period of its history is confessed to have been one of anarchy and crime, and not the golden age of which popular (and even historical) imagination loves to dream, we are justified in according to them, in spite of their theological ‘tendencies,’ a considerable measure of confidence.

It will have been noticed that chronology—the skeleton, as it were, on which the flesh of history is laid—has been alluded to in the previous chapter only in the vaguest possible manner. ‘The age of Abraham,’ ‘the age of the Exodus,’ ‘the Mosaic age,’ are the phrases that have been used in referring to Old Testament events. Israelitish chronology in the true sense of the word does not begin till the reign of David, and even then we have to deal with probabilities rather than with facts. Like Egyptian history, which has to be measured by dynasties instead of dates before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty, the early history of the Hebrews has no chronological record. Before we can attach dates to the events of the patriarchal period or the Exodus, it is necessary to find synchronisms between them and the dated history of other peoples.

It is a commonplace of Biblical students that numbers are peculiarly liable to corruption, and that consequently little dependence can be placed on the numbers given in the text of the Old Testament. But the conclusion does not follow from the premiss. The later dates of Israelitish history are for the most part reliable, and it would be strange if the causes of corruption were fatal only to the dates of an earlier period. Moreover, the numbers fit into a self-consistent system, the several fractions of which agree with the whole summation. Such a self-consistent system would perhaps demand acceptance were it not that there are three such systems, rivals one of the other, and mutually incompatible. One is that of the Massoretic Hebrew text, which makes the period from the Creation to the call of Abraham exactly 2000 solar years (or, 2056 lunar years), 1600 of which extend from the Creation to the Deluge, and the remaining 400 from the Deluge to the call of Abraham. A second is that of the Septuagint, according to which the period from the Creation to the Flood is 2200 solar years (or, 2262 lunar years), 1600 of these elapsing between the Creation and the birth of Noah, and 600 from that event to the Flood, while 1200 are counted from the Flood to the call of the patriarch. The third is that of the Samaritan text which divides the period into two halves of 1200 years each; the first 1200 comprising the time from the Creation to the birth of the sons of Noah, and the second 1200 the rest of the period.

It is obvious that all these systems are like the similar chronological systems of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, or the Hindus, mere artificial schemes of an astronomical character, and differing from the latter only in their more modest computation of time. For historical purposes they are worthless, and indicate merely that materials for a chronology were entirely wanting. The ages assigned to the patriarchs before the Flood, for example, stand on a level with the reigns of the ten antediluvian kings of Chaldæa which are extended over 120 sari, or 432,000 years. The post-diluvian patriarchs are in no better position; indeed, one of them, Arphaxad, is a geographical title, and the Septuagint interpolates after him a certain Kainan, of whom neither the Hebrew nor the Samaritan text knows anything.

Even after the call of Abraham, Hebrew chronology is equally uncertain. The length of life assigned to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is surprising, though not quite impossible, but the dates connected with it do not always agree together. How, for example, can Abraham have had six children after the death of Sarah (Gen. xxv. 1, 2), when the birth of Isaac nearly forty years before had been regarded as extraordinary on account of the patriarch’s age? Or, again, to quote the words of Professor Driver[144]: ‘Do we all realise that according to the chronology of the Book of Genesis (xxv. 26, xxvi. 34, xxxv. 28) [Isaac] must have been lying upon his deathbed for _eighty years_? Yet we can only diminish this period by extending proportionately the interval between Esau’s marrying his Hittite wives (Gen. xxvi. 34), and Rebekah’s suggestion to Isaac to send Jacob away, lest he should follow his brother’s example (xxvii. 46), which from the nature of the case will not admit of any but a slight extension. Keil, however, does so extend it, reducing the period of Isaac’s final illness to forty-three years, and is conscious of no incongruity in supposing that Rebekah, _thirty-seven_ years after Esau has taken his Hittite wives, should express her fear that Jacob, then aged seventy-seven, will do the same!’

The length of the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt has been the subject of endless controversy. The Old Testament statements in regard to it are clear enough. Abraham is told (Gen. xv. 13) that his descendants shall ‘serve’ the Egyptians and be ‘afflicted’ by them for 400 years. As a generation was counted at thirty years, this implies that the whole period spent in Egypt was 430 years, though the statement is not quite exact, since Joseph lived more than thirty years after the settlement of his brethren in the land of Goshen, and their servitude and affliction did not begin till after his death. In Exodus (xii. 40) we are informed explicitly that ‘the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.’ Four hundred and thirty years, therefore, must have been the length of time during which Israel was officially regarded as having lived in Goshen.

But it is difficult to reconcile it with another statement in Gen. xv. 16, where it is said that ‘in the fourth generation’ the children of Israel should return to Canaan. As the words were spoken to Abraham, the fourth generation would be that of Joseph himself. Since this seems out of the question, they are usually interpreted to refer to Moses and Aaron, who are placed in the fourth generation from Levi. Moses and Aaron, however, did not ‘come again’ to Palestine, and the genealogy of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. xxvii. 1) makes the generation that did so the seventh from Joseph. Time, in fact, cannot be reckoned by generations; we do not know how many links in the chain may have been dropped, ‘son’ in Semitic idiom being frequently equivalent to ‘descendant,’ while the names are often merely geographical, like Gilead and Machir in the genealogy of Zelophehad, and therefore have no chronological value. It was, however, the mention of ‘the fourth. generation’ which produced the rabbinical gloss, alluded to by S. Paul (Gal. iii. 17), according to which the four hundred and thirty years of Gen. xv. 13 did not mean the time during which the Israelites were ‘afflicted’ in Egypt, but—in spite of the definite assertion to the contrary—a period which included the lives of the patriarchs as well as the government of Joseph.

If the statements in regard to the period of the Israelitish settlement in Egypt are contradictory, the statements in regard to the lapse of time from the conquest of Canaan to the building of Solomon’s temple are still more so. In 1 Kings vi. 1 we read that the foundations of the temple were laid in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign, and four hundred and eighty years after the Exodus from Egypt. If we add together the numbers given in the book of Judges, they amount to four hundred and ten years, thus leaving only seventy years for the wanderings in the desert, the judgeships of Eli and Samuel, the reigns of Saul and David, and the first four years of Solomon! The endeavours that have been made to get over the difficulty have all been fruitless. Wellhausen and others, for instance, have conjectured that the four hundred and eighty years are intended to represent twelve generations, each being reckoned at forty years, and the seventy years assigned to the five ‘lesser judges’ being overlooked. But the conjecture is destitute of support, and is contrary to such notices as we have of the number of generations which covered the period of the judges. Moreover, the five lesser judges do not constitute a group by themselves.

The period of four hundred and eighty years cannot be reconciled with the genealogies any better than with the apparent chronology of the book of Judges. Between Nahshon, who was a contemporary of Moses, and Solomon, only five generations are given (Ruth iv. 20-22); and between Phinehas and Zadok, whom Solomon removed from the priesthood, there were only seven generations of priests (1 Chron. vi. 4-8). Doubtless some of the links in the ancestry of David have been dropped, but that can hardly be the case as regards the priests. Seven generations would give, at the most, not more than two hundred and ten years.

That the number four hundred and eighty, however, has really been based on the number forty seems probable. Forty years in Hebrew idiom merely signified an indeterminate and unknown period of time, and the Moabite Stone shows that the same idiom existed also in the Moabite language.[145] Thus Absalom is said, in 2 Sam. xv. 7, to have asked permission to leave Jerusalem ‘after forty years,’ although the length of time was really little more than two years (2 Sam. xiv. 28 _sqq._), and Jewish tradition has supplied the lost record of the length of Saul’s reign with a date of forty years. The period of forty years, which meets us again and again in the book of Judges, is simply the equivalent of an unknown length of time; it denotes the want of materials, and the consequent ignorance of the writer. Twenty, the half of forty, is equally an expression of ignorance; and the only dates available for chronology are those which represent a definite space of time, like the eight years of Chushan-rishathaim’s oppression of Israel, or the six years of Jephthah’s judgeship.

We can learn nothing, accordingly, from the books of the Old Testament about the chronology of Israel down to the time of David. For David’s reign we have the seven years of his rule at Hebron, followed by the thirty-three years of his sway over the whole of Israel. For the reign of Solomon we have again the indeterminate ‘forty years’; but since Rezon of Damascus, like Hadad of Edom, was ‘an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon,’ it is probable that the reign did not actually last more than thirty years at the most. Even the chronology of the divided kingdom after the death of Solomon, in spite of the synchronisms the compiler of the books of Kings has endeavoured to establish between the kings of Judah and those of Israel, has been the despair of historians, and scheme after scheme has been proposed in order to make it self-consistent. The Assyrian monuments, however, have now come to our help, and shown that between the time of Ahab and that of Hezekiah it is forty years in excess.

For Hebrew chronology, therefore, we must look outside the Bible itself. At certain points Hebrew history comes into touch with the monumental records of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria; and if we are to date the events it records, it must be by their aid. Egypt can assist us only after the rise of the eighteenth dynasty; before that period it is as much without a chronology as the Israelites themselves. But the case is different as regards Babylonia and Assyria. In Babylonia time was dated by the reigns of the kings and the events of the several years of each reign. The extensive commercial relations of the country, and the contracts that were constantly being drawn up, made accurate dating a matter of necessity. The Assyrians were even more exact than the Babylonians; they were distinguished among Oriental nations by their strong historical sense, and at an early epoch had devised an accurate system of chronology. The years were reckoned by a succession of officers called _limmi_, each of whom held office for a year and gave his name to it, the king himself, during the earlier period of Assyrian history, taking the office in the first year of his reign. Lists of the _limmi_ were kept, and a reference to them would show at once the exact age of a document dated by the name of a particular _limmu_. None of the lists hitherto discovered are, unfortunately, older than the tenth century B.C.; but, thanks to those that have been found, from B.C. 909 to 666 we have a continuous and accurate register of time.

Abraham was the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Amraphel, and the position of Amraphel among the Babylonian kings has been given us by the native annalists. He was the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon, and reigned fifty-five years. Unfortunately, the only copy we possess at present of the native Babylonian list of dynasties is broken, and owing to the fracture of the tablet, a doubt hangs over his precise date. The most probable restoration of the text would make it about B.C. 2300.[146] Between this and the Exodus there would be an interval of more than a thousand years.

Dr. Mahler has attempted to fix astronomically the dates of the two leading Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, Thothmes III. and Ramses II., and his dates have been accepted by Brugsch and other Egyptologists. If his calculations are correct, Thothmes III. will have reigned from the 20th of March B.C. 1503 to the 14th of February B.C. 1449;[147] and Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression, from B.C. 1348 to 1281. The eighteenth dynasty, accordingly, would have commenced about B.C. 1600, and the Exodus would have taken place subsequently to B.C. 1280.

If Apophis II. was the Hyksos king under whom Joseph governed Egypt, he would have lived four generations before Ahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty.[148] The ‘four hundred years,’ therefore, during which Israel was evil-entreated in Egypt (Acts vii. 6) will correspond with the era of four hundred years mentioned on a stela discovered by Mariette at San, the ancient Zoan.[149] The stela commemorates a visit paid to Zoan in the reign of Ramses II. by Seti, the governor of the frontier, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, and ‘the four hundredth year of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the Sun, who loved him, also named Set-Nubti, beloved of Harmakhis.’ Since Set or Sutekh was the Hyksos god, and Zoan the Hyksos capital, it is clear that we have here a Hyksos era, the four hundredth anniversary of which fell in the reign of Ramses II. It seems probable that it marked the accession of the third and last Hyksos dynasty. According to Manetho, as reported by Africanus, this lasted for one hundred and fifty-one years, which would take us to about B.C. 1720, and the same date is obtained if we calculate the four hundred years of the stela of Sân, back from the thirtieth year of Ramses II. One generation more—the thirty additional years given in Exod. xii. 40—will bring us to the period of the Exodus, which, as we shall see hereafter, must have taken place under Meneptah, the son and successor of Ramses II.

The precise connection between the Hyksos and Hebrew eras must be left to the future to discover. At present, the only reference found to the first is that on the stela of Sân. Some connection, however, there must be between them, like the connection between Zoan and Hebron indicated in Numb. xiii. 22, where it is said that ‘Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.’ The Hyksos were invaders from Asia, and between them and the Hebrews there may have been a closer relationship than we now suspect.

Two approximate dates have accordingly been found for early Hebrew history. One results from the synchronism between Abraham and Amraphel, and may be set down as about 2300 B.C.; the other is the synchronism with Egyptian history, which gives us about B.C. 1720 for the settlement of the Hebrew tribes in Goshen. We must now see what light can be thrown by the Egyptian monuments on the date of the Exodus.

Various reasons had led an increasing majority of Egyptologists to regard Ramses II., the most prominent figure in the nineteenth dynasty, if not in the whole history of the Pharaohs, as the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville’s excavations at Tel el-Maskhûta on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund.[150] Tel el-Maskhûta proved to be the site of Pi-Tum, the Biblical Pithom, and to have had the civil name of Thuku or Thukut from the nome of the district in which it was situated. Brugsch had already pointed out that Thukut is the Succoth of the Old Testament, the Egyptian _th_ corresponding to the Hebrew _’s_, and Succoth was the first stage in the flight of the Israelites after their departure from Raamses (Exod. xii. 37). Pi-Tum was the sacred name of the city, which was dedicated to Tum, the setting Sun.

The monuments found on the spot showed that the founder of the city was Ramses II.; and since the Pharaoh of the Oppression was also the builder of Pithom (Exod. i. 11), those who attach any credit to the historical character of the Biblical statement must necessarily see in him the great Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty. The conclusion is further supported by the name of ‘Raamses,’ or Ramses, the second of the two cities which it is said the Hebrews were employed in building. Ramses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, and the grandfather of Ramses II., was the first king of Egypt who bore that name; and the shortness of his reign, which does not seem to have exceeded two years, as well as the disturbed condition of the country, would have prevented him from undertaking any architectural works. Ramses II., however, was essentially a building Pharaoh; he covered Egypt from one end to the other with his constructions; he founded cities, erected or restored monuments, and not unfrequently usurped them. There was more than one city or temple of Ramses which owed its existence to his architectural zeal and was called after his name. As the date of the third Ramses of the twentieth dynasty is too late to fit in with any theory of the Exodus, there remains only Ramses II. for ‘the treasure-city’ mentioned in Exodus. Ramses II. restored Zoan, and made it a seat of residence; this will explain why, in Gen. xlvii. 11, Goshen is proleptically said to have been situated in ‘the land of Rameses.’ Brugsch has made it probable that ‘the city of Ramses’ referred to in an Egyptian papyrus was Zoan itself.[151]

If Ramses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the Exodus will have been one of his immediate successors. The choice lies between Meneptah II., who succeeded him, his grandson, the feeble Seti II., and the usurper Si-Ptah, with whom the dynasty came to an inglorious end. The Egyptian legend of the Exodus given by Manetho places it in the reign of Meneptah; and a stela discovered at Thebes in 1896 by Professor Petrie makes any other dating difficult. Here the ‘Israelites’ are spoken of as having been brought low, ‘so that no seed should be left to them’; and since their name alone is without the determinative of locality which is added to the names of all the other conquered populations associated with them, we may conclude that they had already been lost in the desert, and, so far at any rate as was known to the Egyptian scribe, had no fixed local habitation.[152] As this was in the fifth year of Meneptah’s reign, B.C. 1276, according to Dr. Mahler’s chronology, the Exodus from Egypt may be approximately assigned to B.C. 1277. The period of oppression, according to the calculation in Gen. xv. 13, would consequently have commenced in B.C. 1677, or nearly a hundred years before the expulsion of the Hyksos.

It must be remembered, however, that the date is more precise in appearance than in reality. It depends partly on the accuracy of Dr. Mahler’s calculations, which is disputed by Professors Eisenlohr and Maspero, partly on our regarding the round number 400 as representing an exact period of time. If we knew in what year of Ramses II.’s long reign of sixty-seven years the stela of Sân was inscribed, we should be better able to check the reckoning. As it is, we have to be grateful for what we have already learned from the excavated monuments of the past, and to look forward with confidence to more light and certainty in the future.

Footnote 126:

This, however, is beginning to be doubtful, in view of the discoveries made by Messrs. de Morgan and Amélineau in 1886-87.

Footnote 127:

For the logical goal of the ‘Higher Criticism,’ see Bateson Wright, _Was Israel ever in Egypt?_ (1895.)

Footnote 128:

The theory of Jean Astruc, the French Protestant physician, was set forth in his _Conjectures sur la Genèse_ published anonymously at Paris in 1753. In this he assumes that Moses wrote the book of Genesis in four parallel columns like a Harmony of the Gospels which were afterwards mixed together by the ignorance of copyists. Astruc intended his work to be an answer to those who, like Spinoza, asserted that Genesis was written without order or plan. It is interesting to note that Dr. Briggs in his able defence of the ‘critical’ hypothesis (_The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch_, pp. 138-141) quotes with approval Professor Moore’s appeal to Tatian’s _Diatessaron_—a mere ‘patchwork’ of the Gospels—in support of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch.

Footnote 129:

See Bissell, Introduction to _Genesis printed in Colours_ (1892), pp. xi-xiii; also p. vii, where he says: ‘The argument from language outside the divine names requires extreme care for obvious reasons. It is admitted to be relatively weak, and can never have more than a subordinate and supplementary value. There is no visible cleavage line among the supposed sources.’ Professor Bissell’s work is an attempt to represent by different colours the text of Genesis as it has been analysed and disintegrated by the ‘higher critics,’ and the result at which he arrives in his Introduction is that the analytical theory is a house built upon sand. As regards the account of the Flood, in which ‘it is claimed’ that two distinct narratives can be distinguished from each other, he remarks: ‘Two flood-stories, originating, according to the theory, hundreds of years apart, and literally swarming with differences and contradictions ... are found to fit one another like so many serrated blocks, and to form, united, a consecutive history whose unity, with constant use for millenniums, has been undisputed till our day. Is this coincidence, or is it miracle? But let us take a closer look. We shall find no loosely joined, independent sections, but mutually dependent parts of one whole. An occasional overlapping of ideas, a repetition for emphasis, or enlargement, in complete harmony with Hebrew style, there undoubtedly is. But there is also a marked interdependence and sequence of thought wholly inconsistent with the theory proposed. Let the reader test what J’s story would be alone. Beginning it has none; no preliminary announcement of the catastrophe; no command to make preparations; no report of Noah’s attitude.... And so P’s story, taken by itself, would be equally incomplete.... As to the alleged discrepancies in other respects, they appear, as we have seen, to be true in other cases, only after the text is rent asunder. The lighting system of the one does not exclude the one window of the other; nor the covering for the roof, the door in the side. Without the door, for which one document alone is responsible, how is it supposed that the occupants of the ark got in and out of it? If objects are thrown out of their due perspective, as in a mirage, it need surprise no one if they appear distorted and grotesque.... It is particularly in the matter of language and style that resort is taken to this illogical and dangerous means of text-mutilation. There are certain stylistic peculiarities of one or the other document, it is claimed, which are fixed from the usage of previous chapters. But unfortunately for the scheme, they appear not unfrequently in the wrong place. For instance, the expression “male and female” is held to be characteristic of P, J using another for it. In vii. 3, 9, J uses this expression twice, and our critics must make the redactor deny it. The oft-recurring formula, “both man, beast, and creeping thing and fowl of the air,” is found in the first chapter of Genesis, and so is said to be characteristic of P. Here J has it in vi. 7 and vii. 23, and the redactor is called in to square the document to the theory.... In all these changes we are supposed to have the work of a redactor. How is it possible? What motive could a redactor have had for it? It is claimed by our critics that he has left the principal points of contrast between the two great documents from which he compiled in their original ruggedness. The principal changes made, with rare exceptions, are of single words, detached phrases, verses or parts of verses,—every one of them changes in what was originally homogeneous matter to what is now heterogeneous, from what was once true, from the point of view of the document, to what is now false!’

Footnote 130:

Cf. the plates in Flinders Petrie’s _Tel el-Amarna_ (Methuen and Co., 1894).

Footnote 131:

Literally, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record Office.’ Many of the bricks with the inscription upon them still lay on the spot when I visited it in 1888.

Footnote 132:

See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 222.

Footnote 133:

Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen zur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_, pp. 2 _sqq._

Footnote 134:

See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 56 _sq._

Footnote 135:

The Elohist and the Chaldæan story further agree in making the hero of the Deluge the tenth in descent from the first man.

Footnote 136:

See my _Archæological Commentary on Genesis_, in the _Expository Times_, July and August, 1896.

Footnote 137:

Cf. Gunkel, _Schöpfung und Chaos_, p. 114.

Footnote 138:

See above, p. 13.

Footnote 139:

Naville, _Das aegyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie_, Einleitung; Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’ Archéologie égyptiennes_, i. pp. 325-387.

Footnote 140:

_Sanctuary and Sacrifice_, by W. L. Baxter (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1895).

Footnote 141:

Cowley and Neubauer, _The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus_, p. xviii.

Footnote 142:

Ham for Am or Ammon, and Zuzim for Zamzummim (Gen. xiv. 5); see my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 160, 161.

Footnote 143:

This probably stands for the Babylonian al-Larsa, ‘the city of Larsa.’

Footnote 144:

_Contemporary Review_, February 1890, p. 221.

Footnote 145:

Mesha says in the inscription (l. 8): ‘Omri took the land of Medeba, and [Israel] dwelt in it during his days and half the days of his son, altogether forty years.’ The real length of time was not more than fifteen years.

Footnote 146:

Oppert dates the reign B.C. 2394 to 2339; Sayce, B.C. 2336-2281; Delitzsch, B.C. 2287-2232; Winckler, 2264-2210; and Peiser, 2139-2084; while Hommel suggests that the compiler of the list of dynasties has reversed the true order of the first two dynasties in it, and accordingly brings down the date of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel three hundred and sixty-eight years. This would better suit the Biblical data, but so far nothing has been found on the monuments in support of the suggestion. Dr. Hales’s date for the birth of Abraham was B.C. 2153.

Footnote 147:

_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1889, pp. 97-105.

Footnote 148:

The ‘prince’ of Thebes who revolted against Apophis was Skenen-Ra Taa I., whose fourth successor was Ahmes.

Footnote 149:

_Revue Archéologique_, March 1865.

Footnote 150:

E. Naville, _The Store-city of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus_ (1885).

Footnote 151:

_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1872, p. 18; see also J. de Rougé, _Géographie ancienne de la Basse-Égypte_, pp. 93-95.

Footnote 152:

Cf. the articles of Sayce and Hommel in the _Expository Times_ for August, October, and November 1896, pp. 521, 18, and 89.