Chapter II: The Composition of the Pentateuch (1)

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.