Cornell UTO^rjsiti Jilratg BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Menrg W. Sage 1S9X AiShii^x lok/mir. Cornell University Library BS1180 .S76 1892 Old Testament in the Jewish church: a co olin 3 1924 029 281 256 llto'o^* ■ % 0©( &jf ??T .f>, The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029281256 THE OLD TESTAMENT JEWISH CHUKCH BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES : THE FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTIONS. Second Edition. Revised and enlarged by the Author. Demy 8vo, cloth. Price i^s. net. THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. New Edition, with Introduction and Notes by the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D.D. , Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford. Post Svo, cloth. Price los. 6d. THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE JEWISH CHURCH A COURSE OF LECTURES ON BIBLICAL CRITICISM By W. ROBERTSON SMITH SECOND EDITION REVISED AND MUCH ENLARGED LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 189s First Edition in Crown Zvo, published April 1881. Reprinted in May and September 1881. Second Edition^ revised and enlarged, in Demy 8vo, published April 181 Reprinted in June 1895. AMPLISSIMO • THEOLOGORVM • AEGENTINENSIVM • ORDINI QVOEVM ■ MVNBRE AD . GSADVM • DOCTOEIS • THEOLOQIAE • PROVECTVS • ESI HVNC . LIBRVM • SACRVM • ESSE VOLVIT • AVCTOR PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION In republishing these Lectures, eleven years after their first appearance, I have had to consider what to emend, what to omit, and what to add. First, then, a careful revision of the whole volume has enabled me to correct a certain number of errors, and to make many statements more precise. In the second place, I have pruned away some redundancies more proper to oral delivery than to a printed book ; and I have also removed from the " Notes and Illustrations " some things which seemed to be superfluous. As I was resolved to make no change on the general plan of the book, I at first hoped that these omissions would give me space for all necessary additions ; for though much good work has been done within the last decade on special problems of Old Testament Criticism, there are not many points where these special researches affect the general arguments and broad results which I desired to set forth. But on mature consideration I came to see that in one direction the book might be profitably enlarged without a fundamental change of plan ; it was desirable to give a fuller account of what the critics have to say about the narra- tive of the Old Testament Books. I have, therefore, made large additions to the part of Lecture V. that treats of the historical books, and, in consequence, have thrown the whole discussion of the Canon into Lecture VI. To the narrative vni PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION of the Hexateuch I have devoted a supplementary Lecture (XIII.). Further, I have rewritten the greater part of the Lecture on the Psalter (VII.), incorporating the main con- clusions of my article on this subject in the ninth edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica. I have also made considerable changes on Lecture XL, and at several other places I have introduced additional arguments and illustrations. Thus the book has grown till, in spite of omissions, it contains about one-third more matter than the first edition ; and so it now appears with a larger page, and with most of the notes placed under the text, instead of being relegated to the end of the volume. Of the few " Additional Notes " which still stand after the text, those marked B, C, and E, except the last paragraph of B, are taken from the first edition ; the others are new, and contain some observations which, I hope, may be of interest to Hebrew scholars, as well as to the larger class of readers for whom the book is mainly intended. W. EOBEETSON SMITH. Christ's College, Cambeidge, Z\st March 1892. PEEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The Twelve Lectures now laid before the public had their origin in a temporary victory of the opponents of progressive Biblical Science in Scotland, which has withdrawn nie during the past winter from the ordinary work of my Chair in Aberdeen, and in the invitation of some six hundred promi- nent Free Churchmen in Edinburgh and Glasgow, who deemed it better that the Scottish public should have an opportunity of understanding the position of the newer Criticism than that they should condemn it unheard. The Lectures were delivered in Edinburgh and Glasgow during the first three months of the present year, and the average attendance on the course in the two cities was not less than eighteen hundred. The sustained interest with which this large audience followed the attempt to lay before them an outline of the problems, the methods, and the results of Old Testament Criticism is sufficient proof that they did not find modern Biblical Science the repulsive and unreal thing which it is often represented to be. The Lectures are printed mainly from shorthand reports taken in Glasgow, and as nearly as possible in the form in which they were delivered in Edinburgh after final revision. I have striven to make my exposition essentially popular in the legitimate sense of that word — that is, to present a continuous argument, resting PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION at every point on valid historical evidence, and so framed that it can be followed by the ordinary English reader who is familiar with the Bible and accustomed to consecutive thought. There are some critical processes which cannot be explained without constant use of the Hebrew Text ; but I have tried to make all the main parts of the discussion independent of reference to these. Of course it is not possible for any sound argument to adopt in every case the renderings of the English Version. In important passages I have indicated the necessary corrections ; but in general it is to be understood that, while I cite all texts by the English chapters and verses, I argue from the Hebrew. The appended notes are designed to complete and illus- trate the details of the argument, and to make the book inore useful to students by supplying hints for further study. I have made no attempt to give complete references to the modern literature of the subject. Indeed, as the Lectures have been written, delivered, and printed in three months, it was impossible for me to reconsult all the books which have influenced my views, and acknowledge my indebtedness to each. My effort has been to give a lucid view of the critical argument as it stands in my own miud, and to support it in every part from the text of Scripture or other original sources. It is of the first importance that the reader should realise that Biblical Criticism is not the invention of modern scholars, but the legitimate interpreta- tion of historical facts. I have tried, therefore, to keep the facts always in the foreground, and, when they are derived from ancient books not in every one's hands, I have either given full citations, or made careful reference to the oricrinal authorities. PREFACE TO THE FIESt EDITION xi The great value of historical criticism is that it makes the Old Testament more real to us. Christianity can never separate itself from its historical basis on the Eeligion of Israel ; the revelation of God in Christ cannot be divorced from the earlier revelation on which our Lord built. In aU true religion the new rests upon the old. No one, then, to whom Christianity is a reality can safely acquiesce in an unreal conception of the Old Testament history ; and in an age when all are interested in historical research, no apolo- getic can prevent thoughtful minds from drifting away from faith if the historical study of the Old Covenant is condemned by the Church and left in the hands of unbelievers. The current treatment of the Old Testament has produced a widespread uneasy suspicion that this history cannot bear to be tested like other ancient histories. The old method of explaining dif&culties and reconciling apparent contradictions would no longer be tolerated in dealing with other books, and men ask themselves whether our Christian faith, the most precious gift of truth which God has given us, can safely base its defence on arguments that bring no sense of reality to the mind. Yet the history of Israel, when rightly studied, is the most real and vivid of all histories, and the proofs of God's working among His people of old may still be made, what they were in time past, one of the strongest evidences of Christianity. It was no blind chance, and no mere human wisdom, that shaped the growth of Israel's religion, and finally stamped it in these forms, now so strange to us, which preserved the living seed of the Divine word till the fulness of the time when He was manifested who transformed the religion of Israel into a religion for all mankind. Xll PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The increasing influence of critical views among earnest students of the Bible is not to be explained on the Manichean theory that new views commend themselves to mankind in proportion as they ignore God. The living God is as present in the critical construction of the history as in that to which tradition has wedded us. Criticism is a reality and a force because it unfolds a living and consistent picture of the Old Dispensation; it is itself a living thing, which plants its foot upon realities, and, like Dante among the shades, proves its life by moving what it touches. "Cosi non soglion fare i piJ de' niorti." W. EOBEETSON SMITPL Aberdeen, ith April 1881. CONTENTS LEOTUEE I PAGE Criticism and the Theoloqy of the Kepormation , 1 LECTUEE II Christian Interpretation and Jewish Tradition , .21 LECTUEE III The Scribes . . ..... 42 LECTUEE IV The Septuagint . . . . . .73 LECTUEE V The Septuagint {continued) — The Composition op Biblical Books . . . . . . .108 LECTUEE VI The History op the Canon . . , . .149 LECTUEE VII The Psalter • . • ■ ■ .188 XIV CONTENTS LECTUEE VIII PAGE The Traditional Theoet of the Old Testament History . 226 LECTUEE IX The Law and the History of Israel before the Exile . 254 LECTUEE X The Peophets . . , . .278 LECTUEE XI The Pentateuch : The First Legislation . 309 LECTUEE XII 7 The Dedteronomio Code and the Levitical Law . .346 LECTUEE XIII The Nareativb of the Hesatedch . 388 Additional Notes — A. The Text of 1 Sam. xvii. . . . .431 B. Hebrew Fragments preserved in the Septuagint . 433 C. Sources of Psalm Ixxxvi. . . . .435 D. Maccabee Psalms in Books I.-III. of the Psalter . 437 E. The Fifty-first Psalm .... 440 F. The Development of the Eitual System between Ezekiel and Ezra ...... 442 Index of Passages discussed . . . .451 General Index . . . . . .453 LECTUEE I CRITICISM AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE EEFOEMATION I HAVE undertaken to deliver a course of lectures to you, not with a polemical purpose, but in answer to a request for information. I am not here to defend my private opinion on any disputed question, but to expound as well as I can the elements of a well-established department of historical study. Biblical criticism is a branch of historical science ; and I hope to convince you as we proceed that it is a legitimate and necessary science, which must continue to draw the attention of all who go deep into the Bible and the religion of the Bible, if there is any BibUcal science at all. It would be affectation to ignore the fact that ia saying so much I at once enter upon ground of controversy. The science of Biblical Criticism has not escaped the fate of every science which takes topics of general human interest for its subject matter, and advances theories destructive of current views upon things with which every one is familiar and in which every one has some practical concern. It would argue indifference rather than enlightenment, if the great mass of Bible-readers, to whom scientific poiats of view for the study of Scripture are wholly unfamiliar, could adjust themselves to a new line of investigation into the history of the Bible GOD S WORD AND lect. i without passing through a crisis of anxious thought not far removed from distress and alarm. The deepest practical convictions of our lives are seldom formulated with precision. They have been learned by ex- perience rather than by logic, and we are content if we can give them an expression accurate enough to meet our daily wants. And so when we have to bring these convictions to bear on some new question, the formula which has sufficed us hitherto is very apt to lead us astray. For in rough practical formulas, in the working rules, if I may so call them, of our daily spiritual Kfe, the essential is constantly mixed up with what is imimportant or even incorrect. We store our treasures of conviction in earthen vessels, and the broken pipkiu of an obsolete formula often acquires for us the value of the treasure which it enshrines. The persuasion that in the Bible God Himself speaks words of love and life to the soul is the essence of the Christian's conviction as to the truth and authority of Scripture. This persuasion is not, and cannot be, derived from external testimony. No tradition as to the worth of Scripture, no assurance transmitted from our fathers, or from any who in past time heard God's revealing voice, can make the revelation to which they bear witness a personal voice of God to us. The element of personal con- viction, which lifts faith out of the region of probable evidence into the sphere of diviae certaiaty, is given only by the Holy Spirit still bearing witness ia and with the Word. But then the Word to which this spiritual testimony applies is a written word, which has a history, which has to be read and explaiaed like other ancient books. How we read and explain the Bible depends in great measure on human teaching. The Bible itself is God's book, but the Bible as read and understood by any man or school of men is God's book plus a very large element of human interpretation. MANS INTERPRETATION In our ordinary Bible -reading these two things, the divine book and the human understanding of the book, are not kept sharply apart. We are aware that some passages are obscure, and we do not claim divine certitude for the interpretation that we put on them. But we are apt to forget that the influence of human and traditional interpretation goes much further than a few obscure passages. Our general views of the Bible history, our way of looking, not merely at passages, but at whole books, are coloured by things which we have learned from men, and which have no claim to rest on the self-evidencing divine Word. This we forget, and so, taking God's witness to His Word to be a witness to our whole con- ception of the Word, we claim divine authority for opinions which lie within the sphere of ordinary reason, and which can be proved or disproved by the ordinary laws of historical evidence. We assume that, because our reading of Scripture is sufficiently correct to allow us to find in it the God of redemption speaking words of grace to our soul, those who seek some other view of the historical aspects of Scripture are trying to eliminate the God of grace from His own book. A large part of Bible-readers never come through the mental discipline which is necessary to cure prejudices of this kind, or, in other words, are never forced by the neces- sities of their intellectual and spiritual life to distinguish between the accidental and the essential, the human con- jectures and the divine truth, which are wrapped up together in current interpretations of Scripture. But those who are called in providence to systematic and scholarly study of the Bible inevitably come face to face with facts which compel them to draw distinctions that, to a practical reader, may seem superfluous. Consider what systematic and scholarly study involves in contradistinction to the ordinary practical use of the Bible. VALUE AND ' DEFECTS Ordinary Bible-reading is eclectic and devotionaL A detached passage is taken up, and attention is concentrated on the immediate edification which can be derived from it. Very often the profit which the Bible -reader derives from his morning or evening portion lies mainly in a single word of divine love coming straight home to the heart. And in general the real fruit of such Bible-reading lies less in any addition to one's store of systematic knowledge than in the privilege of withdrawing for a moment from the thoughts and cares of the world, to enter into a pure and holy atmo- sphere, where the God of love and redemption reveals Himself to the heart, and where the simplest believer can place him- self by the side of the psalmist, the prophet, or the apostle, in that inner sanctuary where no sound is heard but the gracious accents of divine promise and the sweet response of assured and humble faith. Far be it from me to undervalue such use of Scripture. It is by this power of touching the heart and lifting the soiil into converse with heaven that the Bible approves itself the pure and perfect Word of God, a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path of every Chris- tian. But, on the other hand, a study which is exclusively practical and devotional is necessarily imperfect. There are many things in Scripture which do not lend themselves to an immediate practical purpose, and which in fact are as good as shut out from the circle of ordinary Bible-reading. I know that good people often try to hide this fact from themselves by hooking on some sort of lesson to passages which they do not understand, or which do not directly touch any spiritual chord. There is very respectable precedent for this course, which in fact is nothing else than the method of tropical exegesis that reigned supreme in the Old Catholic and Mediaeval Church. The ancient fathers laid down the prin- ciple that everything in Scripture which, taken in its natural sense, appears unedifying must be made edifying by some LEcr. I OF ORDINARY BIBLE-READING 5 method of typical or figurative application.^ In principle this is no longer admitted in the Protestant Churches (unless perhaps for the Song of Solomon), but in practice we still get over many difficulties by tacking on a lesson which is not really taken out of the difficult passage, but read into it from some other part of Scripture. People satisfy themselves in this way, but they do not solve the difficulty. Let us be frank with ourselves, and admit that there are many things in Scripture in which unsystematic and merely devotional reading finds no profit. Such parts of the Bible as the genealogies in Chronicles, the description of Solomon's temple, a considerable portion of Ezekiel, and not a few of the details of ritual in the Pentateuch, do not serve an immediate devo- tional purpose, and are really blank pages except to system- atical and critical study. And for a different reason the same thing is true of many passages of the prophetical and poetical books, where the language is so obscure, and the train of thought so difficult to grasp, that even the best scholars, with every help which philology can offer, will not venture to affirm that they possess a certain interpretation. Difficulties of this sort are not confined to a few corners of the Bible. They run through the whole volume, and force themselves on the attention of every one who desires to understand any book of the Bible as a whole. And so we are brought to this issue. We may, if we please, confine our study of Scripture to what is immediately edifying, skimming lightly over aU pages which do not serve a direct purpose of devotion, and ignoring every difficulty ^ According to Origen, Frincip. Bk. iv. p. 173, the literal sense of Scripture is often impossible, absurd, or immoral, — and this designedly, lest, cleaving to the letter alone, men should remain at a distance from the dogmata, and learn nothing worthy of God. Augustine in his hermeneutical treatise, De Doctrina Christiana (Bk. iii. c. 10), teaches that " Whatever has no proper bearing on the rule of life or the verity of faith must be recognised as figurative." A good example of the practical application of these principles will be found in the preface to Jerome's Commentary on Hosea. THE BIBLE AND which does not yield to the faculty of practical insight, the power of spiritual sympathy with the mind of the Spirit, which the thoughtful Christian necessarily acquires in the habitual exercise of bringing Scripture to bear on the daily needs of his own life. This use of Scripture is full of personal profit, and raises no intellectual difficulties. But it does not do justice to the whole Word of God. It is limited for every individual by the limitations of his own religious experience. Eeading the Bible in this way, a man comes to a very per- sonal appreciation of so much of God's truth as is in im- mediate contact with the range of his own life. But he is sure to miss many truths which belong to another range of experience, and to read into the inspired page things from his own experience which involve human error. No man's inner life is so large, so perfectly developed, in a word so normal, that it can be used as a measure of the fulness of the Bible. The Church, therefore, which aims at an all-sided and catholic view, cannot be content with so much of truth as has practically approved itself to one man, or any number of men, all fallible and imperfect. What she desires to obtain is the sum of all those views of divine truth which are embodied in the experience of the inspired writers. She must try to get the whole meaning of every prophet, psalmist, or apostle, — not by the rough-and-ready method of culling from a" chapter as many truths as at once commend them- selves to a Christian heart, but by taking up each piece of Biblical authorship as a whole, realising the position of the writer, and following out the progress of his thought in its minutest details. And in this process the Church, or the trained theologian labouring in the service of the Church, must not be discouraged by finding much that seems strange, foreign to current experience, or, at first sight, positively unedifying. It will not do to make our notions the measure of God's dealings with His people of old. The systematic LECT. I THE EEFOEMATION 7 student must first, and above all, do justice to his text. "When he has done this, the practical use will follow of itself. Up to the time of the Eeformation the only kind of theological study which was thought worthy of serious atten- tion was the study of dogma. People's daily spiritual life was supposed to be nourished, not by Scripture, but by the Sacraments. The experimental use of Scripture, so dear to Protestants, was not recognised as one of the main purposes for which God has given us the Bible. The use of the Bible was to furnish proof texts for the theologians of the Church, and the doctrines of the Church as expressed in the Creeds were the necessary and sufficient object of faith. The believer had indeed need of Christ as well as of a creed, but Christ was held forth to him, not in the Bible, but in the Mass. The Bible was the source of theological knowledge as to the mysterious doctrine of revelation, but the Sacraments were the means of grace. The Eeformation changed all this, and brought the Bible to the front as a living means of grace. How did it do so ? Not, as is sometimes superficially imagined, by placing the in- fallible Bible in room of the infallible Church, but by a change in the whole conception of faith, of the plan and purpose of revelation, and of the operation of the means of grace. Saving faith, says Luther, is not an intellectual assent to a system of doctrine superior to reason, but a personal trust on God in Christ, the appropriation of God's personal word and promise of redeeming love. God's grace is the mani- festation of His redeeming love, and the means of grace are the means which He adopts to bring His word of love to our ears and to our hearts. All means of grace, all sacraments, have value only in so far as they bring to us a personal Word, that Word which is contained in the gospel and incarnate in our Lord. The supreme value of the Bible does not lie in the fact that it is the ultimate source of theology. LUTHER S VIEW lbot. i but in the fact that it contains the whole message of God's love, that it is the personal message of that love to me, not doctrine but promise, not the display of God's metaphysical essence, but of His redeeming purpose ; in a word, of Him- self as my God. Pilled with this new light as to the mean- ing of Scripture, Luther displays profound contempt for the grubbing theologians who treated the Bible as a mere store- house of proof texts, dealing with it, as he says of Tetzel, " like a sow with a bag of oats." The Bible is a living thing. The Middle Ages had no eye for anything but doctrinal mysteries, and where these were lacking saw only, as Luther complained, bare dead histories "which had simply taken place and concerned men no more." Nay, say the Eeformers. This history is the story of God's dealings with his people of old. The heart of love which He opened to them, is stiU a heart of love to us. The great pre-eminence of the Bible history is that in it God speaks — speaks not in the language of doctrine but of personal grace, which we have a right to take home to us now, just as it was taken by His ancient people.-' In a word, the Bible is a book of Experimental Eeligion, in which the converse of God with His people is depicted in aU its stages up to the fuU and abiding manifestation of saving love in the person of Jesus Christ. God has no mess- age to the believing soul which the Bible does not set forth, and set forth not in bare formulas but in living and experi- mental form, by giving the actual history of the need which the message supplies, and by showing how holy men of old received the message as a light to their own darkness, a comfort and a stay to their own souls. And so, to appro- 1 See, in particular, the first part of the Freiheit eines Ghristenmenscken, and the preface to Luther's German Bible. On Tetzel see Freiheit des Sermons vom Ahlass [WerTce, ed. Irmischer, vol. xxvii. p. 13). Compare Calvin's Iiistitutio, Bk. iii. chap. 2—" The Word itself, however it be conveyed to us, is like a mirror in which faith beholds God." OP THE BIBLE priate the divine message for our wants, we need no help of ecclesiastical tradition, no authoritative Churchly exegesis. AU that we need is to put ourselves by the side of the psalmist, the prophet, or the apostle, to enter by spiritual sym- pathy into his experience, to feel our sin and need as he felt them, and to take home to us, as he took them, the gracious words of divine love. This it is which makes the Bible per- spicuous and precious to every one who is taught of the Spirit. The history of the Eeformation shows that these views fell upon the Church with all the force of a new discovery. It was nothing less than the resurrection of the living Word, buried for so many ages under the dust of a false interpreta- tion. Now we all acknowledge the debt which we owe to the Eeformers in this matter. We are agreed that to them we owe our open Bible ; but we do not always understand what this gift means. We are apt to think and speak as if the Eeformation had given us the Bible by removing arti- ficial restrictions on its translation and circulation among the laity. There is a measure of truth in this view. But, on the other hand, there were translations in the vulgar tongues long before Luther. The Bible was never wholly withdrawn from the laity, and the preaching of the Word was the characteristic office of the Friars, and the great source of that popular influence which they strained to the uttermost against the Eeformation. The real importance of Luther's work was not that he put the Bible into the hands of the laity, but that he vindicated for the Word a new use and a living interest which made it impossible that it should not be read by them. We are not disciples of the Eeformation merely because we have the Bible in our hands, and appeal to it as the supreme judge. Luther's opponents appealed to the Bible as confidently as he did. But they did not under- stand the Bible as he did. To them it was a book revealing abstract doctrines. To him it was the record of God's words 10 THE BIBLE AjSTD and deeds of love to the saints of old, and of the answer of their inmost heart to God. This conception changes the whole perspective of Biblical study, and, unless our studies are conformed to it, we are not the children of the Eeformation. The Bible, according to the Eeformation view, is a history — the history of the work of redemption from the fall of man to the ascension of the risen Saviour and the mission of the Spirit by which the Church still lives. But the history is not a mere chronicle of supernatural deeds and revelations. It is the inner history of the converse of God with man that gives the Bible its peculiar worth. The story of God's grace is expounded to us by psalmists, prophets, and apostles, as they realised it in their own lives. For the progress of Eevelation was not determined arbitrarily. No man can learn anything aright about God and His love, unless the new truth come home to his heart and grow into his life. What is still true of our appropriation of revealed truth was true also of its first communication. Inspired men were able to receive and set down new truths of revelation as a sure rule for our guidance, because these truths took hold of them with a personal grasp, and supplied heartfelt needs. Thus the record of revelation becomes, so to speak, the autobio- graphy of the Church — the story of a converse with God, in which the saints of old actually lived. Accordingly, the first business of the Eeformation theo- logian is not to crystallise Bible truths into doctrines, but to follow, in all its phases, the manifold inner history of the religious life which the Bible unfolds. It is his business to study every word of Scripture, not merely by grammar and logic, but in its relation to the Ufe of the writer, and the actual circumstances in which God's Word came to him. Only in this way can we hope to realise the whole rich personal meaning of the Word of grace. For God never spoke a word to any soul that was not exactly fitted to the occasion I'EOT. I THE REFORMATION 1 1 and the man. Separate it from this context, and it is no longer the same perfect Word. The great goodness of God to us, in His gift of the Bible, appears very specially in the copious materials which He has supplied for our assistance in this task of historical exegesis. There are large passages in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, which, taken apart from the rest of the book, would appear quite deficient in spiritual instruction. Crude ration- alism often proposes to throw these aside as mere lumber, forming no integral part of the record of revelation. And, on the other hand, a narrowly timid faith sometimes insists that such passages, even in their isolation, must be prized as highly as the Psalms or the Sermon on the Mount. Both these views are wrong, and both err in the same way, by forgetting that a Bible which shall enable us to follow the inner life of the course of Eevelation must contain, not only words of grace and answers of faith, but as much of the ordinary history, the everyday life, and the current thoughts of the people to whom Eevelation came, as will enable us to enter into their circum- stances, and receive the Word as they received it. From this point of view we can recognise the hand of a wise Providence in the circumstance that the Old Testament contains, in far larger proportion than the New, matter of historical and archseological interest, which does not serve a direct purpose of edification. For, in the study of the New Testament, we are assisted iu the work of historical interpretation by a large contemporary Literature of profane origin, whereas we have almost no contemporary helps for the study of Hebrew antiquity, beyond the books which were received into the Jewish Canon.^ ^ The Old Testament writers possessed Hebrew sources now lost, such as the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, the Book of Jashar, and the Annals of the Kings of Israel and Judah. (See below. Lectures V. and XI.) But Josephus,-and other profane historians, whose writings are still extant, had no 12 THE HUMAN SIDE lect. i The kind of Bible study which I have indicated is followed more or less instinctively by every intelligent reader. Every Christian takes home words of promise, of comfort, or of warning, by putting himself in the place of the first hearers of the Word, and uses the Bible devotionally by borrowing the answer spoken by the faith of apostles or psalmists. And the diligent reader soon learns that the profit of these exer- cises is proportioned to the accuracy with which he can com- pare his situations and needs with those underlying the text which he appropriates. But the systematic study of Scripture must rise above the merely instinctive use of sound principles. To get from the Bible all the instruction which it is capable of yielding, we must apprehend the true method of study in its full range and scope, obtain a clear grasp of the principles involved, and apply them systematically with the best help that scholarship supplies. Let us consider how this is to be done. In the Bible, God and man meet together, and hold such converse as is the abiding pattern and rule of all religious experience. In this simple fact lies the key to all those puzzles about the divine and human side of the Bible with which people are so much exercised. We hear many speak of the human side of the Bible as if there were something dangerous about it, as if it ought to be kept out of sight lest it tempt us to forget that the Bible is the Word of God. And there is a widespread feeling that, though the Bible no doubt authentic Hebrew sources for the canonical history, except those preserved in the Bible. It is only in quite recent times that the lack of contemporary books illustrative of the Old Testament period has been partly supplied by the discovery and decipherment of the monumental inscriptions of Palestine (the Moabite stone, the inscription of Siloam, the Phoenician inscriptions) and the cuneiform records of Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia. Valuable as these new sources are, they touch only individual parts of the Biblical record. The Egyptian monuments, again, from which so much was hoped, have hitherto given little help for Bible history. LECT. I OF THE BIBLE 13 has a liuman side, a safe and edifying exegesis must confine itself to the divine side. This point of view is a survival of the mediaeval exegesis which buried the true sense of Scrip- ture. Of course, as long as you hold that the whole worth of Eevelation lies in abstract doctrines, supernaturally communi- cated to the intellect and not to the heart, the idea that there is a human life in the Bible is purely disturbing. But if the Bible sets forth the personal converse of God with man, it is absolutely essential to look at the human side. The prophets and psalmists were not mere impassive channels through whose lips or pens God poured forth an abstract doctrine. He spoke not only through them, but to them and in them. They had an intelligent share in the Divine converse with them; and we can no more understand the Divine Word without taking them into account than we can understand a human conversation without taking account of both inter- locutors. To try to suppress the human side of the Bible, in the interests of the purity of the Divine Word, is as great a folly as to think that a father's talk with his child can be best reported by leaving out everything which the child said, thought, and felt. The first condition of a sound understanding of Scripture is to give fuU recognition to the human side, to master the whole situation and character and feelings of each human interlocutor who has a part in the drama of Eevelation. Nay, the whole hiidness of scholarly exegesis lies with this human side. All that earthly study and research can do for the reader of Scripture is to put him in the position of the man to whose heart God first spoke. What is more than this lies beyond our wisdom. It is only the Spirit of God that can make the Word a living word to our hearts, as it was a living word to him who first received it. This is the truth which the Westminster Confession expresses when it teaches, in harmony with all the Eeformed Symbols, that our full per- 14 THE HISTORICAL i-ect. i suasion and assnrance of the infallible truth and divine authority of Scripture is from the inwaid work of the Holy Spirit, bearing -witness by and -nith the "Word in our hearts. And here, as we at once perceive, the argument reaches a practical issue. We not only see that the principles of the Eeformation demand a systematic study of Scripture upon lines of research which were foreign to the Church before the Eeformation ; but we are able to fix the method by which such study must be carried on. It is our duty as Protestants to interpret Scripture historically. The Bible itself has a history. It was not written at one time, or by a single pen. It comprises a number of books and pieces given to the Church by many instrumentalities and at various times. It is otir business to separate these elements from one another, to examine them one by one, and to comprehend each piece in the sense which it had for the first writer, and in its rela- tion to the needs of God's people at the time when it was written. In proportion as we succeed in this task, the mind of the Eevealer in each of His many communications with mankind will beconae clear to us. We shall be able to follow His gracious converse with His people of old from point to poiat. Instead of appropriating at random so much of the Word as is at once perspicuous, or guessing darkly at the sense of things obscure, we shall learn to understand God's teaching in its natural connection. By this means we shall be saved from arbitrariness in our interpretations. For of this we may be assured, that there was nothing arbitrary in God's plan of revelation. He spoke to the prophets of old, as the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, " in many parts and in many ways." There was variety in the method of His revelation ; and each individual oracle, taken by itself, was partial and incomplete. But none of these things was vrithout its reason. The method of revelation was a method of education. God spake to Israel as one speaks to tender weanlings (Isa. xxviii. MOT. I STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 1 5 9), giving precept after precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little. He followed this course that each precept, as He gave it, might be understood, and lay a moral responsi- bility on those who received it (ver. 13) ; and if our study follows close in the lines of the divine teaching, we too, receiving the Word like little children, shall be in the right way to understand it in all its progress, and in all the mani- fold richness of its meaning. But to do so, I again repeat, we must put ourselves alongside of the first hearers. What was clear and plain enough to the obedient heart then is not necessarily clear and plain to us now, if we receive it in a different attitude. God's word was delivered in the language of men, and is not exempt from the necessary laws and limit- ations of human speech. Now it is a law of all speech, and especially of all speech upon personal matters, that the speaker must express himself to the understanding of his hearer, pre- supposing in him a certain preparation, a certain mental attitude, a certain degree of familiarity with and interest in the subject. When a third person strikes into a conversation, he cannot follow it unless, as the familiar phrase has it, he knows where they are. So it is with the Bible. And here historical study comes in. The mind of God is unchangeable. His purpose of love is invariable from first to last. The manifold variety of Scripture, the changing aspects of Bible truth, depend on no change in Him, but wholly on the vary- ing circumstances and needs of the men who received the Eevelation. It is with their life and feelings that we must get into sympathy, in order to understand what God spoke to them. We must read the Bible as the record of the history of grace, and as itself a part of the history. And this we must do with all patience, not weary though our study does not at each moment yield an immediate fruit of practical edification, if only it conducts us on the sure road to edifica- tion by carrying us along the actual path trodden by God's 16 OBJECTS AND METHOD lect. I people of old ; if, opening to us their needs, their hopes, their trials, even their errors and sins, it enables our ears to receive the same voice which they heard behind them, saying, " This is the way; walk ye in it" (Isa. xxx. 21). It is the glory of the Bible that it invites and satisfies such study, — that its manifold contents, the vast variety of its topics, the extra- ordinary diversities of its structure and style, constitute an inexhaustible mine of the richest historical interest, in which generation after generation can labour, always bringing forth some new thing, and with each new discovery coming closer to a full understanding of the supreme wisdom and love of Him who speaks in all Scripture. And now let us come to the point. In sketching the principles and aims of a truly Protestant study of Scripture I have not used the word criticism, but I have been describ- ing the thing. Historical criticism may be defined without special reference to the Bible, for it is applicable, and is daily applied without dispute, to every ancient literature and every ancient history. The critical study of ancient documents means nothing else than the careful sifting of their origin and meaning in the light of history. The first principle of criticism is that every book bears the stamp of the time and circumstances in which it was produced. An ancient book is, so to speak, a fragment of ancient life ; and to understand it aright we must treat it as a living thing, as a bit of the life of the author and his time, which we shall not fully imderstand without putting ourselves back into the age in which it was written. People talk much of destructive criticism, as if the critic's one delight were to prove that things which men have long believed are not true, and that books were not written by the authors whose names they bear. But the true critic has for his business, not to destroy, but to build up. The critic is an interpreter, but one who has a larger view of his task than the man of mere grammars LEOT. I OF SOUND CRITICISM 17 and dictionaries, — one who is not content to reproduce the words of his author, but strives to enter into sympathy with his thoughts, and to understand the thoughts as part of the life of the thinker and of his time. In this process the occasional destruction of some traditional opinion is a mere incident. Ancient books coming down to us from a period many centuries before the invention of printing have necessarily undergone many vicissitudes. Some of them are preserved only in imperfect copies made by an ignorant scribe of the dark ages. Others have been disfigured by editors, who mixed up foreign matter with the original text. Very often an important book fell altogether out of sight for a long time, and when it came to light again all knowledge of its origin was gone ; for old books did not generally have title-pages and prefaces. And, when such a nameless roll was again brought into notice, some half-infornied reader or transcriber was not unlikely to give it a new title of his own devising, which was handed down thereafter as if it had been original. Or again, the true meaning and purpose of a book often became obscure in the lapse of centuries, and led to false interpretations. Once more, antiquity has handed down to us many writings which are sheer forgeries, like some of the Apocryphal books, or the Sibylline oracles, or those famous Epistles of Phalaris which formed the subject of Bentley's great critical essay. In all such cases the historical critic must destroy the received view, in order to establish the truth. He must review doubtful titles, purge out interpola- tions, expose forgeries ; but he does so only to manifest the truth, and exhibit the genuine remains of antiquity in their real character. A book that is really old and really valuable has nothing to fear from the critic, whose labours can only put its worth in a clearer light, and establish its authority on a surer basis. 18 PROTESTANT AM) CRITICAL Lzcr. i In a word, it is the business of the critic to trace back the steps by wliich any ancient book has been transmitted to us, to find where it came from and who wrote it, to examine the occasion of its composition, and search out every link that connects it with the history of the ancient world and with the personal life of the author. This is exactly what Protestant principles direct us to do with the several parts of the Bible. TVe have to go back step by step, and retrace the history of the sacred volume up to the first origin of each separate writing which it contains. In doing this we must use every light that can be brought to bear on the subject. Every fact is welcome, whether it come from Jewish tradition, or from a comparison of old !MSS. and versions, or from an examination of the several books with one another and of each book in its own inner structure. It is not needful in starting to lay down any fixed rules of procedure. The ordinary laws of evidence and good sense must be our guides. For the transmission of the Bible is not due to a continued miracle, but to a watchful Providence ruling the ordinary means by which all ancient books have been handed down. And fina lly, when we have worked our way back through the long centuries which separate lis from the age of Ptcvelation, we must, as we have already seen, study each writing and make it speak for itself on the common principles of sound exegesis. There is no discordance between the religious and the scholarly methods of study. They lead to the same goal; and the more closely our study fulfils the demands of historical scholarship, the more fully will it correspond with our religious needs. I know what is said in answer to all this. We have no objection, say the opponents of Biblical criticism, to anv amount of historical study, but it is not legitimate historical study that has produced the current results of Biblical LECT. I METHODS IDENTICAL 19 criticism. These results, say they, are based on the rationalistic assumption that the supernatural is impossible, and that everything in the Bible which asserts the existence of a real personal communication of God with man is necessarily untrue. My answer to this objection is very simple. We have not got to results yet ; I am only laying down a method, and a method, as we have seen, which is in full accordance with, and imperatively prescribed by, the Eeformation doctrine of the Word of God. We are agreed, it appears, that the method is a true one. Let us go forward and apply it ; and if in the application you find me calling in a rationalistic principle, if you can show at any step in my argument that I assume the impossibility of the supernatural, or reject plain facts in the interests of rationalistic theories, I will frankly confess that I am in the wrong. But, on the other hand, you must remember that all truth is one, that the God who gave us the Bible has also given us faculties of reason and gifts of scholarship with which to study the Bible, and that the true meaning of Scripture is not to be measured by preconceived notions, but determined as the result of legitimate research. Only of this I am sure at the outset, that the Bible does speak to the heart of man in words that can only come from God — that no historical research can deprive me of this conviction, or make less precious the divine utterances that speak straight to the heart. For the language of these words is so clear that no readjustment of their historical setting can conceivably change the substance of them. Historical study may throw a new light on the circumstances in which they were first heard or written. In that there can only be gain. But the plain, central, heartfelt truths that speak for themselves and rest on their own inde- feasible worth will assuredly remain to us. No amount of change in the background of a picture can make white black or black white, though by restoring the right background 20 BIBLICAL STUDY where it has been destroyed the harmony and balance of the whole composition may be immeasurably improved. So it is with the Bible. The supreme truths which speak to every believing heart, the way of salvation which is the same in all ages, the clear voice of God's love so tender and personal and simple that a child can understand it — these are things which must abide with us, and prove themselves mighty from age to age apart from all scientific study. But those who love the truth will not shrink from any toil that can help us to a fuller insight into all its details and all its setting ; and those whose faith is firmly fixed on the things that cannot be moved will not doubt that every new advance in Biblical study must in the end make God's great scheme of grace appear in fuller beauty and glory. LEOTUEE 11 CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION AND JEWISH TRADITION At our last meeting, I endeavoured to convey to you a general conception of the methods and objects of Biblical criticism, and to show that the very same rules for the prosecution of this branch of Biblical study may be derived either from the general principles of historical science or from the theological principles of the Protestant Eeformation. We ended by see- ing that it was the duty of criticism to start with the Bible as it has been delivered to us, and as it now is in our hands, and to endeavour to trace back the history of its transmission, and of the vicissitudes through which it has passed, up to the time of the original authors, so that we may be able to take an historical view of the origin of each individual writing of the Old Testament, and of the meaning which it had to those who first received it and to him who first wrote it. Eor this purpose, in speaking to a general audience, it is necessary for me to begin with the English Bible. The Eng- lish Bible which we are accustomed to use gives us the Old Testament as it was understood by Protestant scholars at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is not necessary for our present purpose that I should dwell upon the minor differences which separate the Version of 1611 from other versions made about the same period or a little earlier. Speaking broadly, it is sufiScient to say that the Authorised 22 EXEGESIS OE THE Version represents in a very admirable manner the under- standing of the Old Testament which had been attained by Protestant scholarship at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We are now to look back and inquire what are the links connecting our English Bible with the original autographs of the sacred writers. The Protestant versions, of which our Bible is one, were products of the Eeformation. To a certain extent they were products of the controversy with the Church of Eome. In other words, there were at that time two main views current in Europe, and among the scholars of Europe, as to the proper way of dealing with the Bible — as to the canon of Scripture, the authentic text, and the method of interpretation. The Pre-Eeformation exegesis, with which the Protestants had to contend, was the natural descendant of the exegesis of the Old Catholic Church, as it was formed in opposition to the heretics, as far back in part as the second century after Christ. At the time of Luther, as we have already seen, there was no dispute between Protestants and Catholics as to the authority of Scripture ; both parties admitted that autho- rity to be supreme, but they were divided on the question of the true meaning of Scripture. According to the Old Church, on which the Catholic party rested, the Bible was not clear and intelligible by its own light like an ordinary book. It was taken for granted that the use of the Bible lies in those doctrines higher than reason, those noetic truths, as they were called, of a divine philosophy, which it contains. But the earliest fathers of the Catholic Church already saw quite clearly that the supposed abstract and noetic truths did not lie on the surface of Scripture. To an ordinary reader the Bible appears something quite different from a body of supernatural mysteries and abstract philosophic doctrines. This observation was made by the Catholic fathers, but it did not lead them, nor did it lead the Gnostic heretics, with LECT. II OLD CATHOLIC CHURCH 23 whom they were engaged in controversy, to anticipate the great discovery of the Eeformation, and to see that the real meaning of the Bible must be its natural meaning. On the contrary, the orthodox and the Gnostics alike continued to look in the Bible for mysteries concealed under the plain text of Scripture — mysteries which could only be reached by some form of allegorical interpretation. Of course, the allegorical exegesis yielded to every party exactly those principles which that party desired ; and so the controversy between the Gnostics and the Catholic Church could not be decided on the ground of the Bible alone, which both sides interpreted in an equally arbitrary manner. To tell the truth, it would have been ve^y difficult indeed for Christian theologians in those days to reach a sound and satisfactory exegesis, con- ducted upon principles which we could now accept. Very few theologians in the churches of the Gentiles possessed the linguistic knowledge necessary to understand the original text of the Old Testament. Hebrew scholars were few and far between, and the Doctors of the Church were habitually dependent upon the Alexandrian Greek translation, called the Septuagint or Version of the Seventy. To this transla- tion we shall have to advert at greater length by and by. At present it is enough to say that it was a version composed in Egypt and current among the Jews of Alexandria a con- siderable time before the Christian era, and that it spread contemporaneously with the preaching of the Gospel through all parts of Christendom where Greek was understood. In many parts of the Old Testament this translation was very obscure and really did not yield clear sense to any natural method of exegesis. But indeed, apart from the disadvantage of being thrown back upon the Septuagint, the Christians could not have hoped to understand the Old Testament better than their Jewish contemporaries. Even if they had set themselves to study the original text, they would have 24 EASTERN EXEGESIS lbct. ii required to take their whole knowledge of the Hebrew Bible from the Jews, who were the only masters that could then have instructed them in the language ; and in fact, while the Western churches were mainly dependent on the Septuagint, and struck out an independent line of interpretation on the basis of that version, the exegesis of the Oriental churches continued to be largely guided by the teaching of the Synagogue. In Syria and beyond the river Euphrates, the Bible was interpreted by Christian scholars who spoke Syriac — a language akin to Hebrew — upon the methods of the Jewish schools ; but by this time the Jews themselves had fallen into an abyss of artificial Eabbinical interpretation, from which little true light could be derived for the under- standing of Scripture. The influence of the Jewish interpret- ation which ruled in the East can be traced, not only in the old Syriac translation called the Peshito (or Peshitt^), but in the writings of later Syriac divines. In the Homilies of Aphraates, for example, which belong to the first half of the fourth century, we find clear evidence that the Biblical train- ing and exegetical methods of the author, who, living in the far East, was not a Greek scholar, were largely derived from the Jewish doctors ; and the operation of the same influences can be followed far down into the Middle Ages.^ Accordingly, in the absence of a satisfactory and scientific interpretation, the conflict of opinions between the orthodox and the heretics was decided on another principle. The apostles, it was said, had received the mysteries of divine truth from our Lord, and had committed them in plain and living words to the apostolic churches. This is a point to which the ancient fathers constantly recur. The written ^ See, especially, the Arabic catena on Genesis published by Professor Lagarde in his Materialien zur Kritik und Geschichte des Peivtateuchs (Leipzig, 1867) from a Carshunic MS. of the sixteenth century. This compilation of a Syriac scribe is full of Jewish traditions, and even in form, as the editor observes, is quite of the character of a Jewish Midrash. THE VULGA.TE 25 word, they say, is necessarily ambiguous and difficult, but the spoken word of the apostles was clear and transparent. In the apostolic churches, then, the sum of true doctrine has been handed down in an accurate form ; and the consent of the apostolic churches as to the mysteries of faith forms the rule of sound exegesis. Any interpretation of Scripture, say the fathers, is necessarily false if it differs from the ecclesiastical canon — that is, from the received doctrinal testimony of the great apostolic churches, such as Corinth, Eome, and Alexandria, in which the teaching of the apostles still lived as it had been handed down by oral tradition.^ Such were the principles of exegesis to which the Catholic Church adhered up to the time of the Eeformation. New elements were added from time to time to the body of ecclesiastical tradition, and in particular a very great change took place with regard to the received edition of the Old Testament. When the theory of the ecclesiastical canon was first formed, the churches of Europe read either the Greek translation of the Septuagint or a Latin text formed from the Septuagint ; but about the year 400 A.D., Jerome, a man of unusual learning for that age, who had studied under Jewish teachers, made a new version direct from the Hebrew, which was greatly assailed at the time as a dangerous innovation, but by and by came to be accepted in the Latin churches as the authentic and received edition of the Bible. When I say that Jerome's version was received by the Western churches, 1 On tte Begula Fidei, and its connection with the ambiguity of the allegorical interpretation, so keenly felt in controversy with heretics, compare Diestel, OeschicMe des alten Testaments in der Ohristlichen Kirehe, p. 38 (Irenseus, Tertullian), p. 85 (Augustine). The principle is clearly laid down by Origen : " Many think that they have the miad of Christ, and not a few differ from the opinions of the earlier Christians ; but the preaching of the Church, handed down in regular succession from the Apostles, still abides, and is present in the Church. Therefore, the only truth to be believed is that which in no point departs from ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition." {Princip., Praef.%2.) 26 THE VULGATE it is proper to observe that it was not received in all its purity, and that the text of this Vulgate or received version (the word vulgate means " currently received "), as it actually existed in the Middle Ages and at the time of the Eeforma- tion, was considerably modified by things which had been carried over from the older Latin translations taken from the Greek. Still, the Western Church supposed itself to receive the version of Jerome as the authoritative and vulgate version, and this new Vulgate replaced the old Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint translation made by the Jews in Egypt before the time of Christ. The Eeformers, who were well read in church history, sometimes met their opponents by pointing out that the ecclesiastical tradition on which the Catholics relied as the proper norm or rule of interpretation had itself undergone change in the course -of centuries, and they often appealed with success to the earliest fathers against those views of truth which were current in their own times. But Luther's fundamental conception of revelation made it impossible for the Protestants to submit their understanding of the Bible even to the earliest and purest form of the ecclesiastical canon. The ecclesiastical canon — the standard of doctrinal interpretation based on the supposed consent of the apostolic churches — had, as we have seen, been first invented in order to get over the ambiguities of the allegorical method of interpretation. When Luther taught the people that the Bible can be understood like any other book, that the true meaning of its words is the natural sense which appeals to ordiuary Christian intelligence, it was plain that for him this whole method of ecclesiastical tradition as the rule of exegesis no longer had any meaning or value. The Church of Eome, after the Eeformation began, took up a definite and formal battle-ground against Protestantism in the Decrees of the Council of Trent. The positions laid LEOT. II THE COUNCIL OP TRENT 27 down by the Doctors of Trent in opposition to the movement headed by Luther were these : — I. The supreme rule of faith and life is contained in the written books and the unwritten traditions of Christ and his Apostles, dictated by the Holy Spirit and handed down by continual succession in the Catholic Church. II. The canonical books are those books in all their parts which are read in the Catholic Church and contained in the Latin Vulgate version, the authenticity of which is accepted as sufficiently proved by its long use in the Catholic Church. III. The interpretation of Scripture must be conformed to the tenets of Holy Mother Church and the unanimous consent of the Fathers. The Eeformers traversed all these three positions ; for they denied the vaKdity of unwritten tradition ; they refused to admit the authority of the Vulgate, and appealed to the original text ; and finally, they denied the existence and stUl more the authority of the consent of the Fathers, and ad- mitted no principle for the interpretation of the Bible that would not be sound if applied to another book. They affirmed that the reader has a right to form his own private judgment on the sense of Scripture ; by which, of course, they did not mean that one man's judgment is as good as another's, but only that the sense of a controverted passage must be decided by argument and not by authority. The one rule of exposi- tion which they laid down as possessing authority for the Church was that in a disputed point of doctrine the sense of an obscure passage must be ruled by passages which are more plain. And this, as you will easily observe, is, strictly speak- ing, not a rule of interpretation but a principle of theology. It rather tells us which passage we are to choose for the proof or disproof of any doctrine than helps us to get the exact sense of a disputed text. All that it really means is 28 AUTHOKITY OF THE leot. ii this — " Form your doctrines from plain texts, and do not be led astray from the teaching of plain passages by a meaning which some one may extort from an obscure one." So far as the principle is exegetical, it simply means that an all-wise Author — for to the Eeformers God is the author of aU Scrip- ture — cannot contradict Himself. I need not say more upon the first and third positions of the Council of Trent; but the second position, as to the claims of the standard Vulgate edition, is a point which requires more attention. In making the Vulgate the standard edition, the Council of Trent implied two things : — (1) that the Vulgate contains all the canonical books in their true text ; and (2) that the translation, if not perfect, is exempt from errors affecting doctrine. The Eoman Catholics, of course, did not mean to assert that in every particular the Vulgate edition represents the exact text and meaning of the original writers. In justice to them, we must say that for their contention that was not necessary, because all along what they wished to get at was not the meaning of the original writers, but the body of doctrine which had the seal of the authority of the Church ; and therefore, from their point of view, the authenticity of the text of the Vulgate was sufficiently proved by the fact that the infallible Church had long used that text without finding any ground of complaint against it; and the authority of the translation, in like manner, was sufficiently supported by the fact that theo- logians had always been able to deduce from it the received doctrines of the Church. That, no doubt, was what they meant. Nevertheless, the two theses which they laid down were very curiously at variance with what Jerome, the author of the Vulgate version, had once and again said about the value of his own labours. They affirmed that the Vulgate contained all the canonical books and none else, and that it contained those books in the true text. Jerome, on the con- LATIN VULGATE 29 trary, in that prologue to part of his translation which is generally called the Prologus galeatus, regards aU hooks as apocryphal which he did not translate directly from the Hebrew ; and, following this rule, he excludes from the canon, that is, from the number of books that possess authority in matters of doctrine, the Book of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, and also the two books of the Macca- bees, although he had seen the first of these in Hebrew. The Council of Trent accepts all these books as canonical, and also certain additions to Daniel and Esther which are not found in the Hebrew text.^ The second position of the Doctors of Trent also reads cxiriously in the light of Jerome's own remarks. According to the Council of Trent, the whole translation of Jerome is accurate for all purposes of doctrine, but Jerome in his pre- faces makes a very different claim for himself What he says is this : " Tf you observe my version to vary from the ^ Prologus galeatus. — " TMs prologue may fit all the books which we have translated from the Hebrew. Books outside of these are apocryphal. There- fore the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, the book of Jesus son of Sirach, Judith, Tobit, and The Shepherd are not canonical. The first book of Maccabees I found in Hebrew, the second is Greek, as may be proved from its very idiom. " Praef. im, Jeremmm. — " We have passed by the book of Baruch, Jeremiah's amanuensis, which the Hebrews neither read nor possess." Praef. im, lAhrwrn Esther. — "The Book of Esther has unquestionably been vitiated by various translators. I have translated it word for word as it stands in the Hebrew archives. " Praef. m Danielem. — "The story of Susanna, the Song of the Three Children, and the fables of Bel and the Dragon are not found in the Hebrew Daniel ; but as they are current throughout the world we have added them at the end, marking them with an obelus, lest the ignorant should fancy us to have excised a great part of the volume. " Jerome adds an interesting account of arguments against the additions to Daniel, which he had heard from a Jewish doctor, leaving the decision to his readers. Of the Apocryphal books contained in the English Authorised version of 1611, three are not accepted as canonical by the Church of Rome, viz. First and Second Esdras (otherwise called Third and Fourth Esdras), and the Prayer of Manasseh. The canonicity of the additions to Esther and Daniel is rightly held by Bellarmin to be implied in the decree of Trent which accepts the books of the Old Testament, "cum omnibus suis partibus, prout in ecclesia catholica legi consueverunt." {Controv. I. Be Verbo Dei, Lib. i. capp. 7, 9.) 30 JEROME AND lect, ii Greek or Latin copies in your hands, ask the most trust- worthy Jew you can find, and see if he does not agree with me." -^ Once and again Jerome claims this, and only this, for his version, that it agrees with the best Jewish tradition ; in other words, Jerome sought to correct the current Bibles of his day according to the Hebrew text, as the Jews of his time received it, and to give an interpretation on a level with the best Jewish scholarship. He did this partly by the aid of earlier translations from the Hebrew into the Greek (Aquila, Theodotion, but especially Symmachus) made after the time of Christ, and more in accordance than the Septuagint with the later Eabbinical scholarship ; ^ and partly by the help of learned Jews. On one occasion, he tells us, he brought a famous Eabbi from Tiberias to instruct him. At another time he brought a Jewish scholar from Lydda ; and in particular he speaks of one called Bar Anina, a teacher who came to him by night for fear of his co-religionists, while the translator resided in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.* ' The quotation is from the Prologus galeatus. Compare the preface to Chronicles addressed to Domnio and Rogatianus. ^ The version of Aquila, a Jewish proselyte and disciple of the famous Rabbi Akiba, was made expressly in the interests of Jewish exegesis, and reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the received text of the second Christian century. Symmachus and Theodotion followed later, but still in the second century. The former, according to Eusebius and Jerome, was an Ebionite, one of the sect of Jewish Christians who still held to the observance of the law, like the opponents of Paul. It is uncertain whether Theodotion was an Ebionite (Jerome), or a proselyte (Irenseus). Aquila, says Jerome, sought to reproduce the Hebrew word for word ; Symmachus aimed at a clear expression of the sense ; while Theodotion rather sought to give a, revised edition not very divergent from the Greek of the Septuagint. These versions were arranged in parallel columns in the Hexapla of Origen, composed in the first half of the third century. The fragments of them which remain in Greek MSS. of the Septuagint, in the Patristic literature, or in the Syriac transla- tion of the fifth column of the Hexapla made by Paul of Telia, in Alexandria, 617 A.D., are collected in Dr. Field's edition, Origenis Sexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford, 1867-76). ^ Praef. in Librum Job. — "To understand this book I procured, at no small cost, a doctor from Lydda, who was deemed to hold the first place among the Hebrews." HIS TEACHERS 31 In their earlier controversies with the Eoman Catholics, the Protestants simply fell back upon these facts, quoting Jerome against the Council of Trent, as is done, for example, in the sixth of the Articles of the Church of England.^ They quoted Jerome, and therefore adopted his definition that all books which were not extant in Hebrew and admitted to the canon of the Jews in the day of Jerome are apocryphal and not to be cited in proof of a disputed doctrine. Beyond that they did not care to press the question of the canon. There were differences among themselves as to the value of the Apocrypha on the one hand, and as to the canonicity of Esther and some other books of the old canon upon the other. But it was enough for the Protestants in controversy with Eome to be able to refuse a proof text drawn from the Apocryphal books, upon the plain ground that the authority of these books was challenged even by many of the fathers. Thus Calvin, in his Antidote to the Council of Trent, is willing to leave the question of the canon open, contenting himself with the observation that the intrinsic qualities of the Apocryphal books display a manifest inferiority to the canonical writings.^ Praef. in Chron. ad D. et R. — "When your letters reached me, asking a Latin version of Chronicles, I got a doctor of Tiberias, in high esteem among the Hebrews, and with him collated everything, as the proverb goes, from the crown of the head to the tip of the nails. Thus confirmed, I have ventured to comply with your request. " Bar Anina is named in Epist. 84. Jerome never gained such a knowledge of Hebrew as gave him confidence to dispense with the aid of the Jews. 1 The passage quoted in Art. VI. is from Praef. in libros Salomonis. — "As the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical Scriptures, so let her read these two books [Ecclesiastious and the Wisdom of Solomon] for the edification of the laity, but not to confirm the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines." 2 "On their promiscuous acceptance of all books into the Canon, I will say no more than that herein they depart from the consensus of the early Church. For it is known what Jerome reports as the common judgment of the ancients. ... I am not aware, however, that the decree of Trent agrees with the third CEcumenical Council, which Augustine follows in his book He Doctrina Christiana. But as Augustine testifies that all were not agreed upon 32 HEBREW LEARNING lbct. ii On the question of the true interpretation of Scripture they had much more to say. The revival of letters in the fifteenth century had raised a keen interest in ancient lan- guages, and scholars who had mastered Greek as well as Latin were ambitious to add to their knowledge a third learned tongue, viz. the Hebrew. At first this ambition met with many difficulties. The original text of the Old Testament was preserved only among the scholars of the Synagogue. It was impossible to learn Hebrew except from Jewish teachers ; and orthodox Jews refused to teach men who were not of their own faith. Gradually, however, these obstacles were surmounted. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, Hebrew Bibles began to be printed, and some know- ledge of the Hebrew tongue became disseminated to a con- siderable extent ; and at length, in the year 1506, John Eeuchlin, the great supporter of Hebrew studies north of the Alps, put forth in Latin his Rudiments of the Hebrew lan- guage. This Latin work, which was something of the nature of both grammar and dictionary, was almost entirely taken from the Hebrew manuals of the famous Jewish scholar and lexicographer, Eabbi David Kimhi, who flourished about the year 1200 a.d. As soon as Christians were furnished in this way with text-books, the new learning spread rapidly. It ran over Europe just at the time when the Eeformation was spreading, and the Eeformers, always keenly alive to the best and most modern learning of their time, read the Old Testa- ment in the original Hebrew, and often found occasion to differ from Jerome's version. Observe, they agreed with Jerome in principle. They, like him, aimed only at render- ing the text as the best Hebrew scholars would do, and to them, as to him, the standard of scholarship was that of the the matter in his time, let this point be left open. But if arguments are to be drawn from the books themselves, there are many proofs, besides their idiom, that they ought to take a lower place than the fathers of Trent award to them," etc. Compare the statement, Institut. iv. 9, § 14. LECT. II OF THE REFORMERS 33 most learned Jews. But when Jerome wrote, there was no such thing in existence as a Hebrew grammar and dic- tionary ; there were no written commentaries to which a Christian scholar had access. The Eeformers had the text- book of Eeuchlin, the grammar and lexicon of Kimhi, the commentaries of many Eabbins of the Middle Ages, with other helps denied to Jerome, and therefore they knew that their new learning put them in a position to criticise his work. Often, indeed, they undervalued Jerome's labours, and this ultimately led to controversies between Protestants and Catholics, which were fruitful of instruction to both sides. But, on the whole, the Eeforming scholars did know Hebrew better than Jerome, and their versions, including our English Bible, approached much more nearly than his to the ideal common to both, — which was to give the sense of the Old Testament as it was understood by the best Jewish scholars. Of course, the Jewish authorities themselves some- times differed from one another. In such cases, the Pro- testants leant sometimes on one authority, sometimes on another. Luther was much influenced (through Nicolaus de Lyra) by the commentaries of E. Solomon of Troyes, gener- ally called Eashi, who died 1105 A.D. Our Bible is mainly guided by the grammar and lexicon of the later scholar, E. David Kimhi of Narbonne, who has already been men- tioned as the author of the most current text-books of the Hebrew language. But the point which I wish you to observe is that the Eeformers and their successors, up to the time when aU our Protestant versions were fixed, were in the hands of the Eabbins in all matters of Hebrew scholarship. Their object in the sixteenth century, like Jerome's in the fourth, was simply to give to the vulgar the fruit of the best Jewish learning, applied to the translation of the Scriptures received among the Jews. It may be asked why the Eeformers stopped here. But 3 34 SCHOLARSHIP OF THE lect. ii the answer is clear enough. They went as far as the scholar- ship of the age would carry them. All sound Hebrew learning then resided with the Jewish doctors, and so the Protestant scholars became their disciples. But it would be absurd to suppose that the men who refused to accept the authority of Christian tradition as to the number of books in the canon, the best text of the Old Testa- ment, or the principles upon which that text is to be trans- lated, adopted it as a principle of faith that the Jevnsh tradi- tion upon all these points is final. Luther again and again showed that he submitted to no such authority ; and if the Eeformers and their first successors practically accepted the results of Jewish scholarship upon all these questions, they did so merely because these results were in accordance with the best lights then attainable. It was left for a later gener- ation, which had lost the courage of the first Eeformers because it had lost much of their clear insight into divine things, to substitute an authoritative Jewish tradition for the authoritative tradition of the Catholic Church — to swear by the Jewish canon and the Massoretic text as the Eomanists swore by the Tridentine canon and the Vulgate text. The Eeformers had too much reverence for God's Word to subject it to the bondage of any tradition. They would gladly have accepted any further light of learning, carrying them back behind the time of Eabbinical Judaism to the first ages of the Old Testament writings. Scholarship moved onwards, and as research was carried farther it gradually became plain that it was possible for Biblical students, with the material still preserved to them, to get behind the Jewish Eabbins, upon whom our translators were still dependent, and to draw from the sacred stream at a point nearer its source. I have now to explain how this was seen to be the case. Prom the time when the Old Testament was written, JEWISH RABBINS 35 down to the sixteenth century, there was no continuous tradition of sound Hebrew learning except among the Jews. The little that Christians knew about the Old Testament at first hand had always come from the Eabbins. Among the Jews, on the contrary, there was a continuous scholarly tradi- tion. The knowledge of Hebrew and the most received ways of explaining the Old Testament were handed down from generation to generation along with the original text. I ask you to understand precisely what this means. Before the time of Christ, the Jews had already ceased to speak Hebrew. In the New Testament, no doubt, we read once and again of the Hebrew tongue as spoken and understood by the people of Palestine ; but the vernacular of the Palestinian Jews in the first century was a dialect as unlike to that of the Bible as German is to English — a different language, although a kindred one. This language is called Hebrew because it was spoken by the Hebrews, just as the Spanish Jews in Constantinople at the present day call their Spanish jargon Hebrew. It was a form of Western Aramaic, which the Jews had gradually substituted for the tongue of their ances- tors, after their return from captivity, when they found them- selves a small handful living in the midst of nations who spoke Aramaic, and with whom they had constant dealings. In those days Aramaic was the language of business and of government in the countries between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, just as English is in the Highlands of Scot- land, and so the Jews forgot their own tongue for it, as the Scottish Celts are now forgetting Gaelic for English. This process had already gone on to a great extent before the latest books of the Old Testament were completed.-^ Such writers ^ On the assumption that the Aramaic part of Daniel was written in Chaldiea by Daniel himself, the Biblical Aramaic used to be called Chaldee, and it was supposed that the Jews forgot their old tongue and learned that of Chaldsea during the Captivity. It is now known that this opinion is alto- pether false. The Aramaic dialect of the Jews in Palestine, of which the 36 SCHOLARSHIP OF THE lect. ii as the authors of Chronicles and Ecclesiastes still use the old language of Israel for literary purposes, but in a way which shows that their thoughts often ran not in Hebrew but in Aramaic. They use Aramaic words and idioms which would have puzzled Moses and David, and in some of the later Old Testament books, in Ezra and in Daniel, although not in those parts of the former book which are autobiographical and written by Ezra himself, there actually are inserted in the Hebrew long Aramaic passages. Before the time of Christ, people who were not scholars had ceased to under- stand Hebrew altogether;^ and in the synagogue, when the Bible was read, a Meturgeman, as he was called, that is, a " dragoman," or qualified translator, had to rise and give the sense of the passage in the vulgar dialect. The Pentateuch was read verse by verse, or in lessons from the Prophets three verses were read together, and then the Meturgeman rose, and did not read, but give orally in Aramaic the sense of the original.^ The old Hebrew, then, was by this time a so-called Chaldee parts of Ezra and Daniel are the oldest monuments, is not Babylonian, but Western in character, as appears unmistakably by compari- son with the Aramaic monuments of other districts west of the Euphrates. Peculiarities, for example, which used to be characterised as Hebraisms, reappear on the Palmyrene and Nabatsean inscriptions. The Jews, therefore, lost their Hebrew, and learned Aramaic in Palestine after the return. They certainly still spoke Hebrew in the time of Kehemiah, whose indignation against the contamination of the Jewish speech by the dialect of Ashdod (Neh. xiii. 24) is c[uite unintelligible on any other supposition. Compare for the whole subject Nbldeke's article, Semitic Languages, in the ninth edition of the JEncyclopcedia Britannica. ' See the evidence of this from the Eabbinical literature in Znnz's Gottes- dienstliche Vortrage der Jiidm, p. 7 (BerUn, 1832). Our Lord upon the cross quoted Ps. xxii. in a Targum. ^ Mishna, Megilla, iv. 4.— "He who reads in the Pentateuch must not read to the Meturgeman more than one verse, and in the prophets three verses. If each verse is a paragraph, they are read one by one. The reader may skip in the prophets, but not in the law. How long may he spend in searching for another passage ? So long as the Meturgeman goes on speaking. " The practice of oral translation into Aramaic led ultimately to the formation of written Targums or Aramaic paraphrases ; but these were long discouraged by the Scribes. JEWISH EABBINS 37 learned language, acquired not in common Kfe but from a teacher. In order to learn it, the young Jew had to go to school, but he had no grammar or lexicon, or other written help, to assist him. Everything was done by oral instruction, and by dint of sheer memory, without any scientific principle. In the first place, the pupil had to learn to read. In our Hebrew Bibles now, the pronunciation of each word is exactly represented. This is done by a double notation. The letters proper are the consonants, and the vowels are indicated by small marks placed above or below the line of the consonants. These small marks are a late invention. They did not exist in the time of Christ, or even four hundred years after the Christian era, at the time of Jerome.'^ Before this invention the proper pronunciation of each difficult word had to be acquired from a master. When a pupil had learned to read a phrase correctly, he was taught the meaning of the words, and by such exercises, combined with the practice of constantly speaking Hebrew, which was kept up in the Jewish schools, as the practice of speaking Latin used to be kept up ^ The structure of the Semitic languages makes it much easier to dispense with the vowels than an English reader might suppose. The chief difficulty lay with vowels, or still more with diphthongs, at the end of a word, and was met at a very early date by the use of weak consonants to indicate cognate vowel-sounds [e.g. "W=au, u ; Y = ai, i). Such vowel-consonants are found even on the stone of Mesha, and have been adopted in various measure, not only in Hebrew, but in Syriao and Arabic. But in all these languages the plan of marking every vowel-sound by points above or below the line came in comparatively late, was developed slowly, and never extended to all books. The testimonies of the Talmudists and of Jerome are quite express to show that at their time the true vocalisation of ambiguous words was known only by oral teaching. Jerome, for example, says that in Hab. iii. 5 the Hebrew has only D, B, and R, without any vowel, which maybe read either as dabar, " word," or deber, " plague." A supposed interest of orthodoxy long led good scholars like the Buxtorfs to fight for the antiquity and authority of the points. There is now no question on the subject ; for MSS. brought from Southern Russia and Arabia, containing a different notation for the vowels, prove that our present system is not only comparatively recent, but is the outcome of a gradual process, in which several methods were tried in different parts of the Jewish world. The rolls read in the synagogue are still un- pointed, a relic of the old condition of all MSS. Compare Lect. III. p. 58 sq. 38 SCHOLAKSHIP OF THE mct. ii in our grammar schools, the pupil gradually learned to under- stand the sacred texts and at the same time acquired a certain practical fluency in speaking or writing a degraded form of Hebrew, with many barbarous words and still more barbarous constructions, such as are certain to creep into any language which is dead in ordinary life and yet is daily used by teachers and learners, not as a mere philological exercise but as a vehicle of practical instruction in law, theology, and the like. The Jews themselves recognised the difference between this pedantic jargon and the language of their ancient books. The language of the Bible was called "the holy tongue," while the Hebrew spoken in the schools was called " the language of the wise." We have many volumes of the composition of these scholars, chiefly legal works, with some old midrashim, as they are called, or sermonising com- mentaries on Scripture. These books no doubt are Hebrew in a certain sense, but they are as unlike to the Biblical Hebrew as a lawyer's deed is to a page of Cicero. The men who wrote such a jargon could not have any delicate percep- tion for the niceties of the old classical language, especially as it is written in the most ancient books ; and when they came to a difficult passage they could only guess at the sense, unless they possessed an interpretation of the hard text, and the hard words it contained, handed down to them from some older scholar. Now let me ask you once more to realise precisely how these scribes, at and before the time of Christ, proceeded in dealing with the Bible. They had nothing before them but the bare consonantal text, so that the same words might often be read and interpreted in two different ways. A familiar example of this is given in Heb. xi. 21, where we read of Jacob leaning upon the top of his " staff ; " but when we turn to the Hebrew Bible, as it is now printed (Genesis xlvii. 31), we there find nothing about the " staff : " we find the " bed." LECT. II JEWISH RABBINS 39 Well, the Hebrew for "the bed" is "HaMmiTtaH," while the Hebrew for "the staff" is " HaMmaTteH." The con- sonants in these two words are the same; the vowels are different ; but the consonants only were written, and doubled consonants were written only once, so that all that appeared in MSS. was HMTH. Thus it was quite possible for one person to read the word as " bed," as the translators of our English Bible did, following the reading of the Hebrew scribes, and for the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, on the other hand, to understand it as a " staff," following the interpretation of the Greek Septuagint. Beyond the bare text, which in this way was often ambiguous, the scribes had no guide but oral teaching. They had no rules of grammar to go by ; the kind of Hebrew which they themselves wrote often admitted grammatical constructions which the old language forbade, and when they came to an obsolete word or idiom, they depended on their masters to give them the pronunciation and the sense. Now, beyond doubt, the Jewish scholars were most exact and re- tentive learners, and their teachers spared no pains to teach them all that they knew. We in the West have little idea of the precision with which an Eastern pupil even now can take up and remember the minutest details of a lesson, reproducing them years afterwards in the exact words of his master. But memory, even when cultivated as it is cultivated in the schools of the East, is at best fallible ; and even if we could suppose that the whole of the Bible had been taught word by word in the schools, in unbroken succession from the day on which each book was first written, it would still have required a continued miracle to preserve all these lessons perfectly, and without writing, through long generations. But in point of fact the traditional teaching of the Jews was neither complete, nor continuous from the first, nor uniform. It was not complete ; that is, there never was an authori- 40 TRADITIONAL EXEGESIS lect. ii tative interpretation of the whole Bible. It was not continuous ; that is, many interpretations, which attained general currency and authority, had not been received by unbroken tradition from the time when the passage was first written, or even from the time when Hebrew became a dead language, but were mere figments of the Eabbins devised out of their own heads. And finally, the Eabbinical tradition was not uniform ; that is, the interpretation and even the reading of individual texts was often a subject of controversy in the schools of the Scribes, and at different times we find different interpreta- tions in the ascendant. The proof of these propositions lies partly in the records of Jewish learning stUl preserved in the Eabbinical literature ; partly it lies in the translations and interpretations made at various times by Jewish scholars or under their guidance. So long as the transmission and interpretation of the Bible were left to the unregulated labours of individ\ial scholars or copyists, it is plain that individual theories and individual errors would have some influence on the work. The Bible had to be copied by the pen. Let us suppose then that the copyist, without any special instruction or guide, simply sat down to make a transcript, probably writing from dicta- tion, of a roll which he had bought or borrowed. In the first place, he was almost certain to make some slips, either of the pen or of the ear ; but besides this, in all probability the volume before him would contain slips of the previous copyist. Was he to copy these mistakes exactly as they stood, and so perpetuate the error, or would he not in very many cases think himself able to detect and correct the slips of his predecessor ? If he took the latter course, it was very possible for him to overrate his own capacity and introduce a new mistake. And so bit by bit, if there were no control, if each scribe acted independently, and without the assistance of a regular school, errors were sure to be multiplied, and the LECT. II OF THE JEWS 41 text would be certain to present many variations. Thus we know that even in recent times the Gaelic version of the Old Testament contains certain alterations upon the original text made in order to remove seeming contradictions. Much more were such changes to be anticipated in ancient times, when there was a far less developed sense of responsibility with regard to the exact verbal transcription of old texts. A uniform and scrupulous tradition, watching over the reading and the meaning of the text in all parts of the Jewish world, could only be transmitted by a regular school of learned doctors, or, as the Jewish records call them, Scribes, in Hebrew Sdpherlm or men of the book — men who were professionally occupied with the book of the law. We are all familiar with the Scribes, or professed Biblical scholars, as they appear in the New Testament. They were not merely, or primarily, verbal scholars, but, above all things, practical lawyers and theologians, who used their linguistic knowledge to support their own doctrines and principles. Their principles at that epoch, as we know, were those of the Pharisees ; in fact, the Pharisees were nothing else than the party of the Scribes, in opposition to the Sadducees or aristo- cratic party, whose heads were the higher priestly nobility. To the Pharisees, or party of the Scribes, belonged the great mass of Jewish scholars who were not closely associated with the higher ranks of the priesthood, together with many who, without being scholars, were eager to obey the law as the Scribes interpreted it. The Scribes were the men who had in their hands the transmission and interpretation of the Old Testament ; and our next task, in endeavouring to understand the steps by which the Old Testament has been handed down to us, must be to obtain a clear vision of their methods and objects, and of the work which they actually did upon the text of the Bible. This subject will occupy our attention in the next Lecture. LECTUEE III The subject with which we are to be occupied to-day is the part that was played by the Scribes in the preservation and transmission of the Old Testament. At the close of last Lecture we looked for a moment at the Scribes as they appear in the New Testament in association with the Pharisees. At that time, as one sees from the Gospels and the Acts, they constituted a party long established, and exercising a great and recognised influence in the Jewish state. In fact they can be traced back as far as the later times of the Old Testa- ment. Their father is Ezra, " the Scribe," as he is called -par excellence, who came from Babylon to Judaea with the law of God in his hand (Ezra vii. 14), and with a heart " prepared to study the law of the Lord, to do it, and to teach in Israel '" For the history of the period covered by this Lecture the best and most complete book is Schiirer, Gesch. des Jiidischen Vblkes im Zeitalter Jesu Chrisli, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1886, 1890 (also in an English translation), where a full account of the literature of the subject will be found. More popular and very useful is W. D. Morrison, The Jews under Boman Rule, in the ' ' Story of the Nations" Series (2d ed., London, 1891). "Wellhausen's monograph. Die Pharisder und die Sadducder (Greifswald, 1874), and the later chapters of Kuenen's Religion of Israel (Eng. trans., vol. iii., London, 1875), may also be specially recommended to the student ; and among works by Jewish authors, J. Derenbourg, Essai sur TMstoire . . . dela Palestine (Paris, 1867). The oldest and most important traditions about the early Scribes are found in the Mishnic treatise Aboth, which has been edited, with an English version and notes, by Dr. C. Taylor {Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, Cambridge, 1877), and with German notes by Prof. H. Strack (Leipzig, 1882). EZRA THE SCRIBE 43 statutes and judgments " (Ezra vii. 10). Ezra accomplished this task, not immediately, but with ultimate and complete success. He did so with the support of the Persian king, and with the active assistance of Nehemiah, who had been sent by Artaxerxes as governor of Jerusalem. At a great public meeting convened by Nehemiah, of which we read an account in chapters viii. to x. of the book which bears his name, the Law was openly read before the people at the Feast of Tabernacles, and, with confession and penitence, the Jews entered into a national covenant to make that law henceforth the rule of their lives. Now I do not ask at pre- sent what were the relations of the people to the Law before the time of Ezra. That question must come up afterwards ; but any one who reads with attention the narrative in the book of Nehemiah must be satisfied that this work of Ezra, and the covenant which the people took upon them to obey the Law, were of epoch-making importance for the Jewish community. It was not merely a covenant to amend certain abuses in detailed points of legal observance ; for the people in their confession very distinctly state that the Law had not been observed by their ancestors, their rulers, or their priests, up to that time (Neh. ix. 34) ; and in particular it is men- tioned that the Eeast of Tabernacles had never been observed with the ceremonial prescribed in the Law from the time that the Israelites occupied Canaan under Joshua (Neh. viii. 17). Accordingly this covenant must be regarded as a critical epoch in the history of the community of Israel. From that time forward, with the assistance and under the approval of the Persian king, the Law — that is, the Pentateuch or Torah, as we now have it, for there can be no doubt that the Law which was in Ezra's hands was practically identical with our present Hebrew Pentateuch — became the religious and muni- cipal code of Israel. Now the Pentateuch, viewed as a code, is such a book as imperatively calls for a class of trained 44 WORK OF THE SCRIBES lect. hi lawyers to be its interpreters. I do not ask at present whether, as most critics suppose, there are real contradictions between the laws given in different parts of the five books of Moses. At all events, it is a familiar fact that those who maintain that all the Pentateuchal laws can be reconciled, differ very much among themselves as to the precise method of reconciliation. In such an ambiguity of the Law it is manifest that the Scribes had an indispensable function as guides of the people to that interpretation which was in actual use in the practical administration of the code. Accord- ingly, by and by, in the time of the Chronicler (1 Chron. ii. 55), we find them organised in regular "families," or, as we should now say, " guilds," an institution quite in accordance with the whole spirit of the East, which forms a guild or trades- union of every class possessing special technical knowledge. We see, then, that before the close of the Old Testament Canon the Scribes not only existed, continuing the work of Ezra, but that they existed in the form of guilds or regular societies. What were their objects ? There can be no doubt that from the first the objects of the Scribes were not philo- logical and literary, but practical. Ezra's object was so. He came to make the Law the practical rule of Israel's life, and so it was still in later ages. The wisdom of the Scribes consisted of two parts, which in Jewish terminology were respectively called " Halacha " and " Haggada." " Halacha " was legal teaching, systematised legal precept ; while " Hag- gada " was doctrinal and practical admonition, mingled with parable and legend. But of these two parts the " Halacha," — that is, the system of rules applying the Pentateuchal law to every case of practice and every detail of life, — was always the chief thing. The difference between the learned theologian and the unlearned vulgar lay in knowledge of the Law. You remember what the Pharisees say in John vii. 49 — "This people, which knoweth not the law, are cursed." The Law LECT. Ill HALACHA AND HAGGADA 45 was the ideal of the Scribes. Their theory of the history of Israel was this : — In time past Israel had been chastised by God's wrath ; the cause of this chastisement was that the people had neglected the Law. Forgetting the Law, Israel had passed and was still passing through many tribulations, and was subjected to the yoke of a foreign power. What was the duty of the Jews in this condition of things ? Ac- cording to the Scribes, it was not to engage in any political scheme whatever for throwing off the foreign yoke, but to establish the Law in their own midst, — to apply themselves, not only to obey the whole Torah, particularly in its cere- monial precepts, but so to develop these precepts that they might embrace every minute detail of life. Then, when by this means Israel had become a law-obeying nation in the fullest sense of the word, Jehovah Himself, in His righteous- ness, would intervene, miraculously remove the scourge, and establish the glory of His law-fulfilling people. These were the principles of the Scribes and the Pharisees, the principles spoken of by Paul in writing to the Eomans, when he tells us that Israel followed after a law of righteousness without attaining to it ; that they, being ignorant of God's righteous- ness, and going about to establish their own, did not submit themselves to the righteousness of God (Eom. ix. 31, x. 3). All that the Scribes did for the transmission, preservation, and interpretation of the Old Testament, was guided by their legal aims. In the first instance, they were not scholars, not preachers, but " lawyers " (vojjliko!,), as they are often called in the New Testament. In their juridical decisions they were guided partly by study of the Pentateuch, but partly also by observation of the actual legal usages of their time, by those views of the Law which were practically acknowledged, for example, in the ceremonial of the temple and the priesthood. There was thus, in the wisdom of the Scribes, an element of use and wont, — an element of common law, which of course 46 THE SCRIBES AND existed in Jerusalem, as in every other living community, side by side with the codified written law ; and this element of common law, or use and wont, was the source of the theory of legal tradition familiar to all of us from allusions in the New Testament. According to this theory, Moses himself had delivered to Israel an oral law along with the written Torah. The oral law was as old as the Pentateuch, and had come down in authentic form through the prophets to Ezra. The conception of an oral law, as old and venerable as the written law, necessarily influenced the Scribes in all their interpretations of Scripture. It introduced into their hand- ling of Scripture an element of uncertainty and falsity, upon which Jesus Himself, as you will remember, put His finger, with that unfailing insight of His into the unsound parts of the religious state of His time. Through their theory of the traditional law the Scribes were led into many a departure from the spirit, and even from the letter of the written Word (Matt. xiL 1-8, xv. 1-20, xxiii.). To the Scribes, then, the whole law, written and oral, was of equal practical authority. What they really sought to preserve intact, and hand down as binding for Israel, was not so much the written text of the Pentateuch as their own rules, — partly derived from the Pentateuch, but partly, as we have seen, from other sources, — which they honestly believed to be equally an expression of the mind of the Eevealer, even in cases where they had no basis in Scripture, or only the basis of some very strained interpretation. Now, you can readily conceive that the traditional interpretation of the law could not be stationary. In fact, we know that it was not so. The subject has been gone into with great care by Jewish scholars, who are more interested than we are in the traditional law ; and they have been able to prove, from their own books and written records of the legal traditions, that the law underwent, from century to century, not a few changes. This was no THE ORAL LAW 47 more than natural So long as a nation has a national life, lives and develops new practical necessities, there must also from time to time be changes in the law and its application. In part, then, the growth of the traditional law was owing to changes and new necessities of the national life. It would doubtless, from this source alone, have grown and changed very much more, but for the fact that during the centuries between Ezra and Christ the Jews were almost continuously under foreign domination, so that they had not perfect free- dom of civil or even religious development. At the same time, they always retained a certain amount of municipal inde- pendence ; and so long as the municipal life remained active, the law necessarily underwent modifications from time to time. But there was another reason for continual changes in the traditional law. The party headed by the Scribes, which finally developed into the sect of the Pharisees, were so carried away with the idea that God's blessing on Israel and the removal of all national calamity depended on a punctilious observance of the minutest legal ordinances, that they deemed it necessary to make, as they put it, " a hedge round the Law" ^in other words, to fence in the life of the Israelite with new precepts of their own devising, at every point where the boundary line between the legal and the illegal appeared to be indistinctly marked. There was therefore a constant tendency to add new and more complicated precepts of conduct, and especially of ceremonial observance, to those already prescribed in the Pentateuch and in the oldest form of tradition, so that it might be impossible for a man, if he held by all traditional rules, to come even within sight of a possible breach of the Law. The legal system thus developed had not at first the weio-ht of an authoritative legislation ; for the Scribes and Pharisees were not the governing class in Judsea. The rulers of the nation in its internal matters were the priestly aristo- 48 THE SCRIBES AND THE lect. hi cracy, with the high priest at their head as a sort of hereditary prince over Israel. And in the decay of the Greek power in Syria, when the Jews were able for a time to assert their political independence, the Hasmonean or Maccabee priest- princes were the actual sovereigns of Judaea (142-37 B.C.) Nevertheless the great Eabbins of the party of Scribes were men whose legal ability gained for them a commanding position and iniiuence ; the mass of the Pharisees, by their claim of special sanctity and special legality, also acquired great weight with the common people ; and in consequence of this the authority of the party ultimately became so great that, as we learn from Josephus, the priestly aristocracy, who were the civil as well as the religious heads of the Jews, and who themselves were no more inclined than any other aristo- cracy to make changes that were not for their own personal profit, yet found themselves compelled by the pressure of public opinion to defer in almost every instance to the doctrines of the Scribes.^ The municipal and legal ad- 1 Josephus, Antiquities, xiii. 10, § 6. — "The Sadducees had only the well- to-do classes on their side. The populace would not follow them ; but the Pharisees had the multitude as auxiliaries." Ihid. xviii. 1, § 4 : "The Sad- ducees are the men of highest rank, hut they effect as good as nothing, for in affairs of government they are compelled against their will to follow the dicta of the Pharisees, as the masses would otherwise refuse to tolerate them." The best account of the relative position of the Scribes and the governing class at dififerent periods is given in Wellhausen's monograph on the Pharisees and Sadducees cited above. See also Eyle and James, Psalms of the Pharisees, commonly called the Psalms of Soloinon (Cambridge, 1891). On the position of the two parties in the Sanhedrin, Kuenen's essay Over de samenstelling van het Sanhedrin, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Amsterdam, 1866, is conclusive. On this topic; and on the whole meaning of the antithesis of the Pharisees and Sadducees, older scholars went astray by following too closely the unhistorical views of later Jewish tradition. When Judaism had ceased to have a national existence, and was merely a religious sect the schoolmen naturally became its heads ; and the tradition assumed that it had always been so, and that the whole history of the nation was made up of such theological and legal controversies as engrossed the attention of later times. (See Taylor's Sayings of the Fathers, Excursus III.). This view bears its condemnation on its face. Before the fall of the state the party of the Scribes was opposed, not to another theological sect, but to the aristocracy, which LECT. Ill PRIESTLY ARISTOCRACY 49 ministration took place by means of councils bearing the name of Synedria or Sanbedrin. There was a central council with judicial and administrative authority — the Great Sanhe- drin in Jerusalem — and there were local councils in provincial towns. These councils were mainly occupied by Sadducees, or men of the aristocratic party ; but ultimately the Scribes, as trained lawyers, gained a considerable proportion of seats in them ; and during the latter time of the Maccabees under Queen Salome, and still more after the fall of the Hasmonean dynasty, when it was the policy of Herod the Great to crush the old nobility and play off the Pharisees against them, the influence of the Scribes in the national councils of justice came greatly to outweigh that of the aristocratic Sadducees. In this way, as you will observe, the interpreters of the law gaiaed a very important place in the practical life of Israel ; and they continued active, developing and applying their peculiar system, until the overthrow of the city by Titus in the year a.d. 70. When the Temple was destroyed and the Jewish nationality crushed, a great part of the public ordin- ances decreed by the Scribes necessarily fell into desuetude ; but private and personal observances of ceremonial righteous- had its centre in the high priesthood, and pursued practical objects of political and social aggrandisement on very different lines from those of scholastic controversy. That the Sadducees are the party headed by the chief priests, and the Pharisees the party of the Scribes, is plain from the New Testament, especially from Acts v. 17. The higher priesthood was in spirit a very secular nobility, more interested in war and diplomacy than in the service of the Temple. The theological tenets of the Sadducees, as they appear in the New Testament and Josephus, had a purely political basis. They detested the doctrine of the Resurrection and the fatalism of the Pharisees, because these opinions were employed by their adversaries to thwart their political aims. The aristocracy suffered a great loss of position by the subjection to a foreign power of the nation which they had ruled in the early Hasmonean period, when the high priest was a great prince. But the Pharisees discouraged all rebellion. Israel's business was only to seek after the righteousness of the law. The redemption of the nation would follow in due time, without man's interference. The resurrection would compensate those who had suffered in this life, and the hope of this reward made it superfluous for them to seek a present deliverance. 4 50 THE WRITTEN LAW lect. in ness were still insisted upon, and in one sense the Scribes became more influential than ever ; for those parts of the law which could still be put in force were the only remaining expression of national spirit, and the doctors of the law were accepted as the natural leaders of aU loyal Jews. Now for the first time Judaism and Pharisaism became identical; for Pharisaism alone, with its strict code of ceremonial observ- ance, made it possible for the Jew to remain a Jew when the state had perished and the Temple lay in ruins. But at the same tinie the legal system ceased to be 'Subject to the play of those living forces which during the ages of national or municipal independence had continually modified its details. Further development became impossible, or was limited to a much narrower range ; and after the last desperate struggle of the Jews for liberty under Hadrian, 132 to 135 A.D., the Scribes, no longer able to find a practical outlet for their influence in the guidance of the state, devoted themselves to systematising and writing down the traditional law in the stage which it had then reached. This systematisation took shape in the collection which is called the Mishna, which was completed by Eabbi Judah the Holy about 200 a..d} 1 The word Mishna means " instruction," literally "repetition," "inculca- tion. " From the same root in Aramaic form the doctors of the Mishna bear the name of Tannd, teacher (repeater). After the close of the Mishna the collection and interpretation of tradition was carried on by a new succession of scholars whose contributions make up the Oemara ( ' ' decision, " " doctrine "), a vast and desultory commentary on the Mishna. There are two Gemaras, one Palestinian, the other Babylonian, and each of these rests on a new recension of the Mishnic text. The Palestinian Mishna was long supposed to be lost, but has recently been printed by Lowe from a Cambridge MS. (Cam- bridge, 1883). The name for a doctor of the Gemara is Am&ra, speaker. Mishna and Gemara together make up the Talmud. The Babylonian Gemara was not completed till the sixth century of our era. The whole Mishna was published, with a Latin translation and notes, by G. Surenhusius, in 6 vols, folio (Amsterdam, 1698-1703). There is a German translation by Rabe (1760-1763), and another printed in Hebrew letters by Jost (Berlin, 1832-1834). There is no complete English version, but eighteen treatises, still important for the daily life of the Jews, were translated by Raphall and De Sola (London, 1845). Another selection is given by Dr. LEOT. Ill AND THE HALACHA 51 I have directed your attention to the history of the tradi- tional law because its transmission is inseparably bound up with the transmission of the text of the Bible. As we have seen, the whole law, written and oral, was one in the estima- tion of the Scribes. The early versions and the early Jewish commentaries show us that the interpretation of the Penta- teuch was guided by legal much rather than by philological principles. The Bible was understood by the help of the Halacha quite as much as the Halacha was based upon the Bible ; and so, as the traditional law underwent many changes, these reacted upon the interpretation and even to a certain extent upon the reading of the text of the Pentateuch. Let me take an example of this from what we find in the Bible itself. In Neh. x. 32 [33] we read that the people made a law for themselves, charging themselves with a yearly poU- tax of one-third of a shekel for the service of the Temple. In the time of Christ this tribute of one-third of a shekel had been increased to half a shekel {didrachma ; Matt. xvii. 24) ; and the impost which in the time of Nehemiah was a tax voluntarily taken upon themselves by the people without any written warrant, was in this later time supposed to be based upon Exodus xxx. 12-16. This view of the matter, indeed, is already taken by the Chronicler ; for he speaks of a yearly Mosaic impost for the maintenance of the Temple (2 Chron. xxiv. 5, 6), and therefore even in his time the law of Exodus must have been held to be the basis of the poll-tax. Yet that tax was a new tax ; it was first devised in the time of Nehemiah ; and it is only an afterthought of the Scribes to base it upon the Pentateuch.^ This example illustrates one Barclay, the late Bishop of Jerusalem, in his work, The Talmud (London, 1878). See further the article Mishna, by Dr. Schiller-Szinessy, in the ninth edition of the Eneycloposdia Britannica. 1 For the purpose in hand it is not necessary to carry the argument further. But it may be observed that on the facts we must make a choice be- tween two alternatives. Either Exod. xxx. is simply the historical record of an 52 TALMTJDIC AND way in which the conception of the law changed in the hands of the Scribes. In other cases they actually took it upon themselves to alter Pentateuchal laws. For example, the tithes were transferred from the Levites to the priests, and the use of the liturgy prescribed in Deuteronomy xxvi. 12-15 on occasion of the tithing, which was not suitable after that change had been made, was abolished by John Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean prince and high priest.-^ These are but single examples out of many which might be adduced, but they are enough to show that so long as the development of the oral law was running its course, the written law was treated by the Scribes with a certain measure of freedom. Their real interest, I repeat, lay not in the sacred text itself, but in the practical system based upon it. That comes out very forcibly in repeated passages of the Eabbinical writings, in which the study of Scripture is spoken of almost contemptuously, as something far inferior to the study of the traditional legislative system. Now, people often think of the Jews as entirely absorbed, from the very first, in the exact grammatical study and literal preservation of the written Word. Had this been so, they could never have devised so many expositions which are impost once levied by Moses for a special purpose (and so it is taken in Exod. xxxviii. 21-31), in which case we see that it was not made the ground of a permanent ordinance till after the time of Nehemiah ; or, on the other hand, Exod. XXX. 11 sqq. is meant as a general ordinance for future ages, in which ease the passage cannot have been written till after Nehemiah's time. In support of the latter view see Kuenen, OnderzoeJc, 2d ed., I. i. § 15, note 30. The point will be touched on again in Lecture XII. 1 Mishna, Maaser Sheni, v. 15 (ed. Surenh., vol. i. p. 287), and Sota, ix. 10, with "Wagenseil's note in Surenh., iii. 296. This is the earlier and un- doubtedly the historical account, but the Gemara tries to establish the change on a better footing by ascribing it to Ezra, who thus punished the Levites for refusing to return from Babylon — an account which is in flat contradiction with Nehem. x. 37 [38]. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 172 sq. On the change in the law of redemption, introduced by Hillel, which is another example in point, see Derenbourg, Essai (Paris, 1867), p. 188. Compare also Zunz, OoUesdienstlicJie Vortrdge der Juden, pp. 11, 45 (Berlin, 1832). tECT. Ill MEDIEVAL EXEGESIS 53 plainly against the idiom of the Hebrew language, but which flowed naturally and easily from the legal positions then current. The early Scribes had neither the inclination nor the philological qualifications for exact scholarly study, and when they did lay weight upon some verbal nicety of the sacred Text, they did so in the interest of their legal theories, and upon principles to which we can assign no value. No doubt the Scribes and their successors in the Talmudic times (200 to 600 A.D.) must themselves have been often aware that the meanings which they forced upon texts, in order to carry out their legal system, were not natural and idiomatic render- ings. But this did not greatly trouble them, for it was to them an axiom that the oral and the written laws were one system, and therefore they were bound to harmonise the two at any sacrifice of the rules of language. The objections to such an arbitrary exegesis did not come to be strongly felt till long after the Talmudic period, when a new school of Jewish scholars arose, who had grammatical and scientific knowledge, mainly derived from the learning of the Arabs. When in the Middle Ages these Eabbins introduced a stricter system of grammatical interpretation, it came to be felt that the Talmudic way of dealing with Scripture was often forced and unnatural, and so it was found necessary to draw a sharp distinction between the traditional Talmudic interpretation of any text, which continued to have the value of an indis- putable legal authority, and the grammatical interpretation or P'shat, representing that exact and natural sense of the passage which more modern study had enabled men to deter- mine with sharpness and precision. The mediaeval Eabbins concentrated their attention on the plain grammatical sense of Scripture, and their best doctors, who were the masters of our Protestant translators, rose much above the Talmudical exegesis, although they never altogether shook off the false principle that a good sense must be got 54 THE SCRIBES AND THE lect. hi out of everything, and that if it cannot be got out of the text by the rules of grammar, these rules must give way. Even our own Bible, which rests almost entirely upon the better or grammatical school of Jewish interpretation, does, in some passages, show traces of the Tahnudical weakness of deter- mining to harmonise things, and get over difficulties, even at the expense of strict grammar ; but this false tendency was confined within narrow limits ; and, on the whole, the influ- ence of the Talmudists was almost completely conquered iu the Protestant versions, although it is still felt in the harmon- istic exegesis of the anti-critical school.-^ A much more serious question is raised by the considera- tion that although we are able to correct the interpretation of the ancient Scribes, we have the text of the Hebrew Old Testament as they gave it to us ; and we must therefore inquire whether they were in a position to hand down to us the best possible text. Let me illustrate the significance of this question, by referring to the history of the text of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament circulated in manuscript copies, and it is by a comparison of such old codices as still remain to us that scholars adjust the printed texts of their modern editions. The comparison shows that 1 The point in which the exegesis of the Mediaeval Jews (and of King James's translators) was most defective was that they always assumed it to be possible to interpret what lay before them, and would not recognise that many difficulties arise from corruption of the text. In a book of profane antiquity, a passage that cannot be construed grammatically is at once assumed to be corrupt, and a remedy is sought from MSS. or conjecture. The Jews, and until recently the great majority of Christian scholars, refused to admit this principle for the Hebrew Scriptures. The Septuagint proves the existence of corruptions in the Hebrew text, and often supplies the correction. But many corruptions are older than the Septuagint version, and can be dealt with only by conjectural emendation. The English reader may form a fair idea of the state of the Old Testament text, and of what has been done by modem scholarship to correct it, from the notes of Professors Cheyne and Driver in the Variorum Bible, 3d ed., 1889 (Eyre and Spottiswoode). Examples of the few cases where the Authorised Version has been misled by dogmatical or historical prepossessions will come before us in the course of these Lectures. LKCT. Ill TEXT OP THE BIBLE 5 5 the old copies often differ in their readings. Some of the variations are mere slips of the transcriber, which any Greek scholar can correct as readily as one corrects a slip made in writing a letter ; but others are more serious. Those of you who have not access to the Greek Testament, wiU find suf- ficient examples either in the small English New Testament published by Tischendorf in 1869, which gives the readings of three ancient MSS., or in that very convenient book, Eyre and Spottiswoode's Variorum Bible, which, on the whole, is the best edition of the English version for any one who wishes to look below the surface. Now if you consult such collec- tions of various readings as are given in these works, you win. find that, in various MSS., words, clauses, and sentences are inserted or omitted, and sometimes the insertions change the whole meaning of a passage. In one or two instances a complete paragraph appears in some copies, and is left out in others. The titles in particular offer great variations. The oldest MSS. do not prefix the name of Paul to the Epistle to the Hebrews, and they do not put the words " at Ephesus," into the first verse of the first chapter of Ephesians. Such changes as these show that the copyists of these times did not proceed exactly like law clerks copying a deed. They made additions from parallel passages, they wrote things upon the margin which afterwards got into the text ; and, when copying from a rubbed or blotted page, they sometimes had to make a guess at a word.- In these and other ways mistakes came in and were perpetuated ; and it takes the best scholar- ship, combined with an acuteness developed by long practice, to determine the true reading in each case, and to eliminate all corruptions. Of course, the old Christian scholars were quite aware that such variations existed among copies, and in later times they did their best to correct the text, and reduce it to uniformity ; and so we find that, while the oldest MSS. of the New Testa- 56 AGE OF THE CURRENT lbct. iii ment show great variations, the later MSS. present a very uniform text, so that from them alone we could not guess how great was the range of readings current in the early Church. Yet no one will affirm that the shape which the New Testa- ment ultimately took in the hands of the scholars of Antioch and Constantinople, is as near to the first hand of the Apostles as the text which a good modern editor is able to make by comparing the oldest copies. The mere fact that a particular form of the text got the upper hand, and became generally accepted in later times, does not prove it to be the best form of the text, i.e. the most exact transcript of the very words that were written by the apostles and evangelists. To the critical editor the variations of early copies are far more significant than the artificial uniformity of late manuscripts. Now as regards the Old Testament, we certainly find a great uniformity among copies. All MSS. of the Hebrew Bible represent one and the same text. There are slight variations, but these are, almost without exception, mere slips, such as might have been made even by a careful copyist, and do not affect the general state of the text. The text, there- fore, was already fixed by the beginning of the tenth century after Christ, which is the age of the oldest MS. of undisputed date. But a comparison of the ancient translations carries us much further back. We may say that the text of the Hebrew Old Testament which we now have is the same as lay before Jerome 400 years after Christ ; the same as underlies certain translations into Aramaic called Targums, which took shape in Babylonia about the third century after Christ ; indeed the same text as was received by the Jews early in the second century, when the Mishna was being formed, and when the Jewish proselyte Aquila made his translation into Greek. I do not affirm that there were no various readings in the copies of the second or even of the fourth century, but the variations were slight and easily controlled, and such as would have HEBREW TEXT 57 occurred in manuscripts carefully transcribed from one stand- ard copy.^ The Jews, in fact, from the time when their national life was finally extinguished, and their whole soul concentrated upon the preservation of the monuments of the past, devoted the most strict and punctilious attention to the exact trans- mission of the received text, down to the smallest peculiarity of spelling, and even to certain irregularities of writing. Let me explaia this last point. We find that when the standard manu- script had a letter too big, or a letter too small, the copies made from it imitated even this, so that letters of an unusual size appear in the same place in every Hebrew Bible. Nay, the scrupulousness of the transcribers went still further. In old MSS., when a copyist had omitted a letter, and when the error was detected, as the copy was revised, the reviser inserted the missing letter above the line, as we should now do with a caret. If, on the other hand, the reviser found that any super- fluous letter had been inserted, he cancelled it by pricking a dot above it. Wow, when such corrections occurred in the standard MS. from which our Hebrew Bibles are aU copied, the error and the correction were copied together, so that you wiLL find, even in printed Bibles (for the system has been carried into the printed text), letters suspended above the Line to show that they had been inserted with a cant, and letters " pointed " with a dot over them to show that they form no proper part of the text.^ It is plain that such a ^ In the last century great hopes were entertained of the results to be derived from a collation of Hebrew MSS. The collections of Kennicott (1776- 1780) and De Eossi (1784-1788) showed that all MSS. substantially represent one text, and, so far as the consonants are concerned, recent discoveries have not led to any new result. On the text that lay before the Talmudic doctors compare Strack, ProlegoTnetia Critica in Vetus TestaTnentum Sebraicium (Leipzig, 1873). On Aqnila see supra, p. 30, note 2 ; infra, p. 64. On the Targums see Schurer, i. 115, and infra, p. 64, note 1. ^ That all copies of the Hebrew text belong to a single recension, and come from a common source, was stated by Eosenmiiller in 1834 (see Stade's Zeitschrift, 1884, p. 303). In 1853 J. Olshausen, in his commentary on the 68 MASSORETS AND system of mechanical transmission could not have been carried out with precision if copying had been left to unin- structed persons. The work of preserving and transmitting the received text became the specialty of a guild of technic- ally trained scholars, called the Massorets, in Hebrew Bdale hammassoreth, or " possessors of tradition," that is, of tradition as to the proper way of writing and reading the Bible. The work of the Massorets extended over centuries, and they collected many orthographical rules and great lists of peculiarities of writing to be observed in passages where any error was to be feared, which are still preserved either as marginal notes and appendices to MSS. of the Bible, or in separate works. But, what was of more consequence, the scholars of the period after the close of the Talmud — that is, after the sixth Christian century, or thereby — devoted them- selves to preserving not only the exact writing of the received consonantal text, but the exact pronunciation and even the musical cadence proper to every word of the sacred text, according to the rules of the synagogal chanting. This was effected by means of a system of vowel points and musical accents, consisting of small dots and apices attached to the consonants of the Hebrew Bible. The idea of introducing Psalms, p. 17 sg., argued that there must have been, at least as far back as the first ages of Christianity, an official recension of the text, extremely similar to that of the Massorets, and that this text was not critical, but formed by slavishly copying a single MS. , which in many places was in very imper- fect condition. In his notes on Ps. Ixxx. 14, 16 (comp. also that on Ps. xxvii. 13), he applies this view to explain the so-called "extraordinary points." In 1863, independently of Olshausen, whose observations seem to have attracted little notice, Lagarde in his AnmerJcungen zur GfriecMschen Uehersetzung der Proverlien again maintained the origin of all Hebrew MSS. from one archetype, using the extraordinary points to prove his thesis. Olshausen had explained the extraordinary points from the assumption of a single archetype, but to him the evidence for the latter lay in comparison of the versions and in the observation that all our authorities agree even in the most palpable mistakes. The doctrine of the single archetype has been accepted by Noldeke (whose remarks in Hilgenfeld's Zeitsehrift, 1873, p. iii sgq., are worthy of notice), and by other scholars. I know of no attempt to refute the argu- ments on which it rests. MOT. Ill PUNCTUATORS 59 such vowel points, which were still unknown in the time of Jerome, appears to have been borrowed from the Syrian Christians, and was developed in different directions among the Palestinian and the Babylonian Jews. The Palestinian system ultimately prevailed and is followed in aU printed Bibles. The form of the pointed text which after ages received as authoritative was fixed in the tenth century by a certain Aaron, son of Moses, son of Asher, generally known as Ben Asher, whose ancestors for five previous generations were famous as NaMantm, or " punctuators." But even the first of this family, Asher " the elder," rested on the labours of earlier scholars. Some recent writers are disposed to think that the use of written vowel points and accents may have begun even in the sixth century — at all events the system must have been pretty fully worked out before 800 A.D.^ A remarkable feature in the work of the Massorets is that in certain cases they direct the reader to substitute another word for that which he finds written in the consonantal text. In such cases the vowel points attached to the word that is to be suppressed in reading are not its own vowels but those proper to the word to be substituted for it. The latter word is placed in the margin with the note 'P (i.e. Keri, " read thou," or KerS, " read "). The word in the text which is not to be uttered is called KetMh (" written "). These marginal readings are of various kinds ; in a great part of them the difference between text and margin turns upon points of a purely formal character, such as varieties of orthography, pronunciation, or grammatical form; others are designed to soften expressions which it was thought indecorous to read aloud ; while a small proportion of them make a change in the sense, and are either critical conjectures or readings 1 See as regards Ben Asher, Baer and Strack, Dikduke Hateamim (Leipzig, 1879), p. ix. sqq., and compare Z. D. M. G. JahresbericMiorWI^, p. 124; also, for the musical accents, Wickes's ^e5r-«io ^cc«mfeffi