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Gift of

SAMUEL R. BETTS

1930

MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

By GEORGE ADAM SMITH
D.D., LL.D.
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A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON
NEW YORK

MODERN CRITICISM
AND THE PREACHING OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT
Eight Lectures on the Lyman Beecher
Foundation, Tale University
BY
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
UNITED FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND GLASGOW COLLEGE

THIRD EDITION

NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
3 & 5 West 18th Street, near 5th Avenue
MCM1I

Copyright, igoiy by
A. C. Armstrong & Son

UNIVERSITY PRESS . JOHN WILSON
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. a.

TO
THE REV. TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D.
PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY, 1886-1899
THE REV. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D.
DEAN OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL, 1895-I9OI
AND
THE REV. CHARLES RAY PALMER, D.D.
ONE OF THE FELLOWS OF THE UNIVERSITY
THIS VOLUME OF LECTURES
DELIVERED WHILE THEY WERE IN OFFICE
IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

PREFACE
The Eight Lectures in this volume — or at
least as much of each as it was possible
to read within the time allotted — were
delivered before Yale University in 1899.
I have thought it best to leave them as
Lectures : that is, in the style of spoken
discourse. With one exception they are
printed as they were prepared for delivery.
but I have worked into four of them — 11.,
in., iv. and vi. — some materials from books
which have appeared since they were spoken :
Canon Driver's Essay on Hebrew Authority
in Authority and Archeology, Sacred and
Profane, edited by Mr. Hogarth ; Professor
Budde's Lectures on the Religion of Israel
before the Exile; and Professor Charles'
Jowett Lectures, entitled A Critical History
of the Doctrine of a Future Life. Lecture
vn. on the Preaching of the Prophets to

viii PREFACE
their own Times has been wholly rewritten
in order to introduce a detailed account
(of which only a brief summary could be
spoken) of the Influence of the Prophets
upon the Social Ethics of Christendom.
In the Introduction and in Lectures i.,
in., iv. and vn. there are some paragraphs
from an address on The Preaching of the
Old Testament to the Age, delivered in
1892, and now out of print.
The objects of the Lectures are, in the
main, three: a statement of the Christian
right of criticism ; an account of the modern
critical movement so far as the Old Testa
ment is concerned ; and an appreciation of
its effects upon the Old Testament as
history and as the record of a Divine
Revelation. Obviously eight Lectures can
not provide an exhaustive treatment of these
themes ; but the Lectures contain, I trust,
enough to serve their purely practical aim,
and to exhibit to students and preachers
the religious effects of the critical inter
pretation of the larger half of the Scriptures

PREFACE ix
of the Church. In the Fourth Lecture the
line of argument is intended for believers
in the Christian doctrine of Revelation.
I have always felt that for those who
believe in the Incarnation the fact of a
Divine Revelation through the religion of
early Israel, as critically interpreted, ought
not to be unintelligible. If we recognise
that God was in Christ revealing Himself
to men and accomplishing their redemption,
it cannot be difficult for us to understand
how at first, under the form of a tribal
deity — the only conception of the Divine
nature of which at the time the Semitic
mind was capable — He gradually made
known His true character and saving
grace. In connection with the subject of Lecture
v., ' The Spirit of Christ in the Old Testa
ment,' I desire to acknowledge my indebted
ness to the late Principal Patrick Fairbairn's
The Typology of Scripture (2 vols., 6th
edition, Edinburgh 1876). It is a work
distinguished not less by sagacious criticism
b

x PREFACE
of the older theories of typology than by
original insight into the ethical virtue of the
institutions of Israel. Although constructed
upon lines not followed by the critical in
terpretation of the Old Testament, it not
seldom anticipates methods and ideas which
have only recently passed into acceptance.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

CONTENTS

PAGE
PREFACE  vii
INTRODUCTION,  I

LECTURE I
THE LIBERTY AND DUTY OF OLD TESTAMENT
CRITICISM AS PROVED FROM THE NEW TESTA
MENT  5
LECTURE II
THE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF MODERN
CRITICISM,  29
1. The General Course of Modern Criticism, . 3 1
11. The Criticism of the Old Testament mainly
Historical,  46
ill. Criticism and Archaeology,  56
LECTURE III
THE HISTORICAL BASIS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, . 73
LECTURE IV
THE PROOF OF A DIVINE REVELATION IN THE
OLD TESTAMENT,  I IO

CONTENTS

LECTURE V
PAGE
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, . 145
1. From the Earliest Times to David, . . . 148
11. The Prophets  158
LECTURE VI
THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY IN THE OLD TESTA
MENT  177
I. The Old Testament Data,  178
11. The Historical Explanation,  191
ni. The Use to Our Own Day,  209
LECTURE VII
THE PREACHING OF THE PROPHETS TO THEIR
OWN TIMES : WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR
INFLUENCE UPON THE SOCIAL ETHICS OF
CHRISTENDOM,  215
1. The Influence of the Prophets on the
Christian Church and Civilization, . . 216
11. The Political and Social Preaching of the
Prophets,  265
m. Other Features of the Prophets' Preaching, 274
LECTURE VIII
THE CHRISTIAN PREACHER AND THE BOOKS OF
WISDOM,  283

INTRODUCTION
To follow the long succession of men who have
filled this lectureship, and to attempt — in re
sponse to your call — some addition to their
numerous illustrations of the genius and office
of the preacher, involves an adventure which can
be justified only by one or other of the following
considerations. First, that of so wide a field as that of the
Christian pulpit, there is some portion which,
though not altogether neglected by my prede
cessors, has received from none of them a parti
cular or exclusive treatment. Or secondly, that,
in some department of the subject the materials
have passed through those furnaces of criticism
which our generation has so zealously fired, and
have there undergone changes that render im
perative some new appreciation of them for the
purposes of practical religion.
I believe that for the subject I have chosen,
not only one but both of these reasons are
urgent. None of my predecessors has attempted
a full exposition of the material which the
Old Testament offers to the Christian preacher.

2 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
This fact alone might have determined the sub
ject of the following course ; but at the same
time, as every one is aware, there is no part of
the preacher's field or material which has been
the object of more industrious research or of
more unsparing criticism than the several Books
of the Old Testament, and the national history
of which they form the record. For over a cen
tury every relevant science, every temper of
faith, and, one might add, almost every school
of philosophy, have shot across this narrow field
their opposing lights : under which there has been
an expenditure of individual labour and ingenuity
greater than has been devoted to any other litera
ture of the ancient world, or to any other period
in the history of religion. No memory or institu
tion of Israel, no chapter or verse of her sacred
texts has escaped this strenuous revision: nor,
with the exception of the New Testament, is there
any field on which such revision could have raised
questions of more moment for the practical re
ligion with which the duty of the preacher is
identified. Beyond the problems of integrity
and authenticity, in the narrower sense of these
terms ; beyond the greater question how much
actual history has been left to us in the Old
Testament by the processes of criticism, there
remains the most important interest of all : Can
we still receive the Old Testament as the record
of a genuine revelation from God ? But indeed

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 3
your own experience more than any words of
mine will have convinced you of the practical
value, at this time, of some attempt to appreciate
the effects of criticism upon the inspiration
and material for preaching which the Christian
Church has always drawn from the larger half of
her canonical Scriptures.
Before we begin, it is well that we should
impress ourselves with the sacredness of the
task which we propose. This is no common
ground we are to be treading. It is not some
outlying province of the Kingdom of God, some
questionable frontier of our fatherland, which we
are called to debate ; but (if I inay continue the
figure) it is that country of which our Redeemer
was Himself a native ; whose character He
defined in absolute contrast to the rest of the
world ; whose history He interpreted as the
Divine preparation for His own Advent ; whose
laws He fulfilled as the expression of the
everlasting righteousness of God ; and much of
whose language He perpetuated in the wider
Kingdom He came to found.
In short, it is with Christ's Bible we have
to do ; the larger part of the Scriptures be
queathed to His Church ; and we have to do
with this not simply in its historical interest but
in its religious value for living men.
The Old Testament, one cannot too often re
member, lies not under but behind the New. It

4 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
is not the quarry of the excavator or archaeologist
— a mere foundation packed away out of sight
beneath the more glorious structure which has
been reared upon it. Far rather — if I may borrow
a metaphor from the political geography of the
day — far rather is the Old Testament the
' Hinterland ' of the New : part of the same
continent of truth, without whose ampler areas
and wider watersheds the rivers which grew to
their fulness in the new dispensation could never
have gained one-tenth of their volume or their
influence. And upon that vast Hinterland the
Gentile Church of Christ, passing to it across
the New Testament, has settled and been at
home for centuries ; has found in it her school
and her sanctuary ; has met with her God, has
breathed the air of His righteousness and heard
His words, as powerful as when they were first
uttered, to move men to repentance and faith in
God and the hope of an endless life.
It is upon all this — Christ's Bible and the
Church's Bible, Christ's Fatherland and the
Church's Fatherland — that we are called to
estimate the effect of one of the most thorough
intellectual processes of our time.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 5

LECTURE I
THE LIBERTY AND DUTY OF OLD TESTAMENT
CRITICISM AS PROVED FROM THE
NEW TESTAMENT
Few realise that the Church of Christ possesses
a higher warrant for her Canon of the Old Testa
ment than she does for her Canon of the New.
The New Testament Scriptures were selected
and defined, no man exactly knows how, except
that it was the Church herself which did the
work. The formal decrees of Councils1 appear
to have been only confirmatory of the common
use and practice of the Church under the
guidance of her Lord's Spirit. This practice
had risen gradually and with differences in
different parts of Christendom. The Church
was the recipient of a number of writings, some
anonymous, but the most bearing the name of
an apostle or of a disciple of the apostles. From
these a selection was slowly effected, partly by
the spiritual taste and insight of the various
1 The Canon was discussed and defined by the great Coun
cils of the fourth century. The Third Council of Carthage,
397 A.D., recognised our present New Testament.

6 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
congregations, partly on the strength of tradition,
and partly by the opinions and discussions of
the doctors of the Church.1 That is to say, the
New Testament Canon was a result of criticism
in the widest sense of the word.
But what the Church thus once achieved, the
Church may at any time revise. As a matter of
fact she has never renounced her liberty to do
so, and it has not been heretics alone who have
disputed the rights of certain books to belong
to the New Testament. To mention but a few
instances, Gregory and Zwingli both rejected the
Apocalypse, and Luther the Epistle of St. James.
Augustine testifies that all the authorities of his
time were not agreed as to the Canon,2 and even
Calvin appears to leave the question still open.3
These are enough to recall to us, that what
was the decision of the Church's criticism at the
beginning is not beyond the Church's criticism
now, unless indeed we have ceased to believe in
that education of the Spirit which Christ promised
to His people, and refuse to employ the finer
1 The most summary evidence of the gradual criticism and
selection which led to the formation of the New Testament Canon
is found in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. (325 a.d.), bk. iii. 25 : where
the undisputed books are distinguished from the disputed and the
spurious. Among the still disputed books, Eusebius places James,
Jude, 2nd Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse.
He himself appears to question the Apocalypse.
2 De Doctrina Christiana.
8 Antidote to the Council of Trent: 4th Session. Cf. Institut.
iv. 9, § 14.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 7
instruments of criticism which God's providence
has put into their hands to-day.
So it was with the growth of the Canon of the
New Testament, and what I wish to emphasise is
that — with one important exception — the Canon
of the Old Testament came to us in no other
way. We are ignorant of vast stretches of its
history; but we know enough to be sure that the
theory of its origin which lately prevailed among
Protestants, and which ascribed the Canon of the
Old Testament to a single decision of the Jewish
Church in the days of her inspiration, is not a
theory supported by facts. The growth of the
Old Testament as a Canon was very gradual.1
Virtually it began in the reign of King Josiah
in 621 b.c, with the acceptance by all Judah
of the Book of Deuteronomy as the divine law
of their life, and its first stage was completed by
the similar adoption of the whole Law, or first
five Books of the Old Testament, under Nehemiah
in 445 b.c. When the other two divisions were
added is somewhat uncertain : the Prophets2 pro
bably before 200 b.c, and the Hagiographa 3 f rom
1 The text-book in English on the subject is that by Professor
Ryle of Queen's College, Cambridge, The Canon of the Old
Testament. See also the article by Professor Budde in The
Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. i.
2 That is, according to the division of the Hebrew Bible,
Joshua, Judges, Books of Samuel and Kings ; Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve Prophets.
8 The Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations,
Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

8 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
a century to two centuries later. The strict
definition of the third division was not complete
by the time of Christ, nor was the selection of
the whole twenty-two (or twenty-four) Books
effected either before or after that time by a
miraculous decree from Heaven, or by any
decision of a Jewish Council. The only decision
of the kind which is known to history is that
said to have been made by a Synod of Jamnia
in 90 a.d., and this Synod appears to have
provided merely a few puerile reasons for con
firming the canonicity of certain Books, which
had already for nearly two centuries enjoyed
the reverence of the people. In contrast to this
tardy and partial influence of a Council, it is
very probable that what secured to the Prophets
and the Hagiographa their canonical rank, was
their inherent worth and vitality as tested by
popular use. True, it may have been necessary
that, before the authority of some of these Books
was recognised, they should be proved to be
ancient, and should wear, like the Law, the
name of some great Prophet in Israel; and it
is also true that this notion may have led to
errors about their date and authorship, which we
are only now able to correct. But it was not
the famous names they wore which buoyed these
Books upon the reverence of the Church ; for
other writings, which we know, wear the same
names, but have not therefore been lifted into

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 9
the Canon. Nor was the alleged antiquity of
the Books indispensable or conclusive. The
early collections of Israel's songs have not sur
vived; while the Maccabean Psalms must have
been received into the Canon at a date at which
their recent origin was still remembered. But
the Maccabean Psalms were associated with a
great deliverance of His people by God ; and
all the rest of the literature, which was really
ancient, had won the proof of its divinity
either by the vindication of its predictions by
history, or by the power it evinced of living
and giving life from age to age. Without such
effects and testimonies in the experience of the
nation, no name, whether it really belonged to a
book or had been thrust upon it, no ascription of
antiquity and no official decree could have availed
to bestow canonical rank. Not learned discussion
by scribes and doctors, whose reasons, so far as
they have come down to us, are all afterthoughts
and mostly foolish ones, but proof beneath the
strain of time, persecution, and the needs of each
new age — these were what proved the truth of a
Book,enforced its indispensableness to the spiritual
life of God's people, or to their national discipline,
and declared the will of Providence regarding it.
In short, we see the same processes at work for
the formation of the Canon of the Old Testament
as we do for that of the New.
Yet, as I have said, the Old Testament Canon

to MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
is accredited in addition by an authority, of
which the New Testament is devoid. This is the
authority of Jesus Christ Himself. In the days
of our Lord, the Scriptures of the Jewish Church
were practically the same which form our Old
Testament, arranged as they still are in the
Jewish Bible in the three divisions of Law,
Prophets, and Hagiographa, beginning with
Genesis and ending with Chronicles. The New
Testament writers take for granted that there is
a well-known and definite body of Scriptures,
which is quoted by Christ Himself as the Law,
the Prophets, and the Psalms.1 We do not indeed
know the exact contents of that third division,
to which Christ gave the name of its most con
spicuous member. On the one hand, the Book
of Daniel — with the exception of certain Psalms,
the latest Book of all — is frequently acknow
ledged by New Testament writers; and Christ
Himself seems to testify to the limits of the
Hebrew Canon, exactly as they now lie in Genesis
and Chronicles.2 But, on the other hand, neither
our Lord nor the Apostles make any quotation
from Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Canticles or
Ecclesiastes, the three last of which Books were
not yet recognised by all the Jewish schools.
This possible deduction, however, is insignifi
cant, and we do not exaggerate if we say that the
1 Luke xxiv. 44.
2 Matt, xxiii. 35, compared with Gen. iv. and 2 Chron. xxiv. 21.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT ii
Bible of the Jews in our Lord's time was practi
cally our old Testament. For us its supreme
sanction is that which it received from Christ
Himself. It was the Bible of His education and
the Bible of His ministry. He took for granted
its fundamental doctrines about creation, about
man and about righteousness ; about God's
Providence of the world and His purposes of
grace through Israel. He accepted its history as
the preparation for Himself, and taught His dis
ciples to find Him in it. He used it to justify His
mission and to illuminate the mystery of His
Cross. He drew from it many of the examples
and most of the categories of His gospel. He
re-enforced the essence of its law and restored
many of its ideals. But above all, He fed His
own soul with its contents, and in the great crises
of His life sustained Himself upon it as upon
the living and sovereign Word of God. These
are the highest external proofs — if indeed we
can call them external — for the abiding validity
of the Old Testament in the life and doctrine
of Christ's Church. What was indispensable to
the Redeemer must always be indispensable to
the redeemed.
But while we look to Christ as the chief
Authority for our Old Testament, we must never
forget that He was also its first Critic. He came
to a people, who lived under a strict and literal
enforcement of the Law; and whose religious

12 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
leaders at the time aggravated the strictness and
complexity of the Law by a mass of tradi
tional precepts. Not only did Jesus reject
these traditions. He equally rejected some
parts of the Law itself, and directed His own
conduct in sovereign indifference to many other
parts. This statement is not contradicted by the
well-known verses : Think not that I came to
destroy the Law or the Prophets ; T came not to
destroy but to fulfil. For verily T say unto you,
Till Heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one
tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law till all
be accomplished} If, as most critics allow, the
second of these verses be a genuine utterance of
our Lord, its words must be interpreted by His
own definition of what the Law was. Christ
effected that definition in various ways. Upon
more than one occasion He extracted the ideal
or essential part of the Law and defined it as
the whole : Whatsoever ye wish that men should
do to you, so also do ye to them, for this is the Law
and the Prophets ; 2 and again : Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy soul,
and thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself. On
these two commandments hangeth all the law?
Sometimes He took special precepts of the Law,
like the sixth and seventh Commandments, and
enforced a fulfilment of them far beyond their
1 Matt. v. 17, 18. 2 Matt. vii. 12.
8 Matt. xxii. 40.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 13
literal meaning.1 Or He took the rigorous
precept, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,
or the statement which is not found in the Old
Testament in so many words, but which ex
presses the temper of much of the Law: Thou
shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy?
and He reversed them. Or He took the law of
divorce and declared it to have been temporary,
granted to a rude age of the nation's develop
ment and now to be abrogated.3 Or He ascribed
the character of transitoriness to the whole of
the Old Testament: the law and the prophets were
till John; from that time the kingdom of heaven is
preached} That is to say, a new dispensation
had opened, in which the older revelation enjoyed
no longer the same rank or significance.
Jesus, it is true, rendered obedience to many
of the formal statutes. He paid the Temple-
tax,5 and commanded the Leper whom He cured
to show himself to the priest and offer the gift
which Moses commanded* But these and other
details He enforced on the ground not of principle
but of expediency, and in order to prevent
needless scandals in the way of others.7 The
expediency was due to the circumstances of
His own time, and with these would pass away.
1 Matt. v. 21 ff. anger ; 27 ff. lust. 2 Matt. v. 38 ff., 43 ff.
8 Matt. v. 31 ff., and elsewhere.
4 Matt. xi. 12 ff. ; Luke xvi. 16.
B Matt. xvii. 24-27. 6 Matt. viii. 1-4,
1 Matt. xvii. 27.

14 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
To many other observances of the Law, Christ
showed, by His neglect of them, or by His
positive transgression, a high superiority. He
touched the Leper and did not feel Himself
unclean ; 1 He reckoned all foods as lawful ; 2
He broke away from the literal observance of
the Sabbath Law.3 He left no commands about
sacrifice, the temple-worship, or circumcision, but
on the contrary, by the institution of the New
Covenant, He abrogated for ever these sacraments
of the Old.
Thus, as Professor Denney remarks,4 Christ
'presents a positive new standard of life, from
which legalism has disappeared, a standard of
love exhibited either in His own example or in
that of His heavenly Father by which all men
are to be judged. . . . All these modes of con
ceiving the standard of disciple-life, though not
annulling the Law but fulfilling it, are neverthe
less indifferent to it, either as a historic document
or as a national institution.' 5
Let us now pass to the Apostles. From the
first the Apostles employed the Old Testament
in all their preaching, whether apologetic or
practical. Even those of them who emphasise
i Matt. viii. 1-4. " Mark vii. 15; Luke xi. 37 ; cf. x. 7.
8 Matt. xii. 1-12; Luke xiii. 10-17; xiv. 1-6; John v. 1-17.
4 Messrs. Clark's Bible Dictionary, art. 'Law in the New
Testament.' 6 On the whole subject see especially Robert Mackintosh,
Christ and the Jewish Law. London, 1886.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 15
the exhaustion of the old dispensation are ready,
like the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
to draw from its Scriptures declarations of the
character and will of God, examples of faith, and
directions both for conduct and worship. Paul
affirms that, while the Gentile has not been left
without a revelation of God, it has been the glory
of the Jew to possess a definite and authoritative
expression of God's will in the Scriptures. To
the Jew have been intrusted the oracles of God; J
which reveal His character,2 and the purposes
of His Providence both with regard to Israel 3
and other nations, as well as His statutes for
man's daily life. Paul even includes the cere
monial Law4 within this divine endowment of
his people. Moreover, the Scriptures of the
Jews are prophetic, the history and the institu
tions recorded in them are typical, of the new
dispensation itself.6 In every way the Old
Testament is of significance to the Church of
Christ. Whatsoever things were written afore
time, were written for our learning, that zve
through patience and comfort of the Scriptures
might have hope? Now all these things hap
pened unto Israel by way of figure ; and they
' 1 Rom. iii. 2.
s Rom. iii. 4 (Ps. li. 4) ; Rom. ix. 15, 17, 20 (Exod. xxxiii. 19;
Isa. xiv. 9, 10) ; Rom. xi. 34 (Isa. xl. 13) ; 1 Cor. ii. 16, etc.
8 Rom. iv. 3 (Gen. xv. 6), 17 (Gen. xvii. 5) ; ix.-xi., etc.
4 Aarpeia, Rom. ix. 4. 6 1 Cor. x. 1 ff., etc.
8 Rom. xv. 4.

1 6 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
are written for our admonition, upon whom the
ends of the world are come}
But we must go further and notice that these
opinions of the abiding validity of the Old Testa
ment were held by the Apostles along with a very
strict belief in the inspiration of its text.2 In the
inspiration of the letter of the Old Testament
the Apostles sometimes appear to have as ex
plicit a confidence as the Jewish doctors of their
time. Not only is it God's Spirit who, according
to them, speaks by the mouths of prophets and
psalmists, but every word which they quote —
however detached from its context and however
much in their application of it they may change
its meaning from that which it plainly bears in
the original — is in their belief a word of God.
At first sight this apostolic testimony seems
to exclude modern criticism from every right or
claim to apply its methods to the Old Testament.
A little observation, however, will show us that
the very opposite is the case ; and that the treat
ment of the Old Testament by the Apostles, so far
from silencing critical questions, raises these in a
somewhat more aggravated form than the Old
Testament by itself does. For, in the first place,
let me remind you, the apostolic writings nowhere
define the limits of the Old Testament Canon.
1 I Cor. x. n.
2 Compare Reuss, History ofthe Canon ofthe Holy Scriptures,
trans, by Hunter, pp. 12 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 17
On the contrary, their employment of what the
Church now regards as extra-canonical writings,1
and their appeal to questionable traditions as if
these were of equal validity with writings which
we regard as canonical, seems to indicate that
the Apostles fixed no such hard lines round the
Scriptures as the Jewish, and some parts of the
Christian, Church afterwards fixed. Again, -let
us take a still more significant fact. For the
most part the writers of the New Testament,
whether in the Gospels or the discourses of the
Book of Acts or the Epistles, draw their Old
Testament citations from the Greek version or
' Septuagint.' Not only does that version contain
a number of Books which the Hebrew Canon
excludes ; 2 but in the Books which it has in
common with the latter we can see that the
Hebrew text, from which the translation was
made, sometimes varied substantially from the
canonical Hebrew text ; and even where the text
has been the same, the Greek version often gives
a different meaning from that of the original.
And although in some of these differences
between the Hebrew and the Greek, the latter

1 1 Cor. ii. 9 ; Heb. xi. 37 ; Jude 9, 14 f., where the Book of
Enoch is directly quoted. For other New Testament passages
which it has influenced, see Encyc. Biblica, i. p. 225, § 32.
2 Which fact, taken along with the Apostles' use of apocry
phal writings as ' Scripture ' or as true history, seems to imply
that the Apostles accepted the wider Canon of the Hellenist
Jews rather than the Hebrew one. But this is not certain.
B

18 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
has the sounder reading and enables us to correct
the former, yet in other cases it is clear either
that the translators' reading of the text was
wrong or that they were mistaken in their ren
dering of it into Greek. Of these discrepancies
between the Greek and the Hebrew there are
instances among the citations made from the Old
Testament by New Testament writers. Paul
himself, while proving his acquaintance with the
Hebrew original,1 quotes from the Greek even
where this differs from the Hebrew. In one pas
sage the Greek enables him to quote some words
of Hosea in an opposite sense from that in which
the Prophet employed them.2 And in general,
indifference is shown about the exact words of
the citations. They are quoted loosely, as if
from memory; different passages are mingled
and even at one point,3 under the Scriptural
formula, as it is written, an apocryphal writing
is fused with one from the Book of Isaiah.
Nor is that all, for when we pass from the quota
tion of the Old Testament text by the Apostles
to their interpretation of it, we find much more
that raises questions. In his exegesis of the
Old Testament, Paul, upon several occasions,
follows the allegorising methods of the Jewish
1 E.g. I Cor. xv. 54, quoting from Isa. xxv. 8 : the lxx. in
which passage makes Death triumph. Paul follows the Hebrew
sense, while adopting a slightly different reading.
2 I Cor. xv. 55.
0 i Cor. ii. 9.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 19
schools of his time ; l in one instance he calls
the literal meaning of an Old Testament passage
impossible and substitutes for it a metaphorical
application of his own, although there can be no
doubt that the literal meaning was that of the
original author.2
We have now before us the essential facts in
the use of the Old Testament by Christ and His
Apostles. What conclusions may we draw from
them ?
The first is that of the abiding value of the
Old Testament for the life and doctrine of the
Christian Church. That which was used by
the Redeemer Himself for the sustenance of His
own soul can never pass out of the use of His
redeemed. That from which He proved the
divinity of His mission, and the age-long pre
paration for His coming, must always have a
principal place in His Church's argument for
Him. Not less than His Apostles will His
Church see revealed in the Old Testament the
character of God; while some of His attributes —
1 2 Cor. iii. 13 ff. ; Gal. iv. 22 ff.
2 Deut. xxv. 4 forbids the muzzling of the ox which treads
out the corn. In I Cor. ix. 9 Paul denies that this can be the
intention of the Holy Spirit. ' Doth God' he says, ' take care for
oxen ? Or doth He say it altogether for our sakes ? ' The latter,
he asserts, in spite of the fact that one of the most beautiful traits
of the Book of Deuteronomy is the tenderness with which it makes
provision for animals. Professor Findlay's attempt to prove
that Paul is merely extracting the moral essence of the Deutero-
nomic injunction, fails to explain the very definite language of the
verse (Expositor's Greek Testament, ii. p. 848).

20 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
such as His Creative Power and His Providence —
are there illustrated to an extent for which the
brief space of the New Testament leaves no room.
Not less than the Apostles will the Church con
tinue to find faith and every virtue exemplified
in the heroes of Israel.
But along with this warrant of the permanent
religious value of the Old Testament, Christ and
His Apostles have nowhere bound the Church
either to obedience to all its laws, or to belief
in all its teaching. On the contrary, our Lord
Himself has set us the example of a great Dis
crimination. He came not only to do the Law,
but to judge the Law, and while there are parts
of it which He renounced by simply leaving them
silently behind Him, there are other parts upon
which He turned with spoken condemnation.
He did not allegorise or spiritualise them as has
always been the manner of some of His followers,
bound to the letter of Scripture and seeking to
escape the consequences of their bondage by
thus compromising with the truth ; but He strictly
condemned them. And this Discrimination of
our Lord between what was binding in the Law
and what was not, has for us consequences not
merely moral but intellectual as well. For the
judgement, which both He and His Apostles often
emphasised, that in Old Testament laws and
institutions, ideals and tempers, there is very
much which was rudimentary and therefore of

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 21
transient worth and obligation, opens up the
whole question of the development of revelation
and justifies what is so large a part of modern
criticism, — the effort, namely, to fix the historical
order of the Old Testament writings and to
define the stages by which the primitive reve
lation of God to men was carried onward
and upward to its summit in Christ Himself.
Besides, Christ's attitude to the Law reminds
us that similar opposition exists within the
Old Testament itself, between the ethical teach
ing of the Prophets and the priestly concep
tions of religion. The determination of these
two conflicting tendencies in the development
of Israel's faith is another of the offices of
Criticism. But the Apostles go further. Although unable
to free themselves from the strict views of inspira
tion which the Jewish schools enforced and which
seem to preclude all liberty of criticism, their
practical use of the Old Testament only serves
to suggest how clamant the need of criticism is —
and that in every department of criticism which
the modern Church has developed. Is it the
question of the Canon ? The New Testament
writers bequeath that question to the Church ;
making it by their quotations from extra-canon
ical writings a more difficult one than it is with
the Jewish doctors themselves. Is it the question
of the Text ? Their use of the Septuagint raises

22 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
that question in every possible detail. Is it the
question of the interpretation of the Text ?
Some of their interpretations, as we have seen,
are a direct challenge to our sense of truth to
discover what the Old Testament writers actually
intended, apart from the meanings, which tem
porary and often false fashions of exegesis put
upon their words.
In short, the New Testament treatment of the
Old not only bequeaths to the Church the liberty
of Criticism, but along many lines the need and
obligation of Criticism : not only delivers us
once for all from bondage to the doctrine of
the literal inspiration and equal divinity of all
parts of the Old Testament, but prompts every
line of research and discussion along which the
modern criticism of the Old Testament has been
conducted. The task, therefore, of the following
Lectures is a double one : to inquire, first, whether
this criticism has been true to the liberty which
the New Testament sanctions, and serviceable in
solving the problems which the New Testament
raises ; and second, whether, in this loyalty and
in this service, modern criticism has conserved or
has imperilled that permanent religious value of
the Old Testament which Christ and His Apostles
so fully enforced. In other words, we have to
examine how far the freedom and thoroughness
of Criticism during this century have affected our
belief in the Old Testament as the revelation of

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 23
God, the prophecy of Jesus Christ, and the
example and proof of faith.

Before we begin this inquiry some preliminary
recollections are necessary. The Christian
Church has twice over forgotten the liberty
wherewith Christ has made her free ; and in two
directions has attempted to enforce the literal
acceptance of the Old Testament, with results,
in both cases, disastrous to the interests of re
ligion. We are all aware that at various periods in
the history of Christendom a spirit arose amongst
its leaders not very different from that which
moved so large a party in the primitive Church,
and even some of the Apostles themselves, to
insist upon the letter of the Law of Moses as
binding upon all Christians. In later ages the
representatives of this spirit did not propose,
as those Jewish Christians did, to enforce circum
cision, sacrifice and other items of the Mosaic
ritual; but in the same temper of literal obedience
to the Old Testament they effected what was
even worse. They revived many of the rigours
of the Law, and quoted the most cruel tempers
of the old dispensation, as the sanction of their
own bigotries and persecutions. No branch of
the Church has been innocent of this disloyalty
to her Lord. If the tyrants and inquisitors of

24 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the Roman Church, in the days of its imperial
power, have claimed the relentlessness of the old
law as authority for their unspeakable cruelties
to those whom they deemed heretics, our own
Puritan fathers, on both sides of the Atlantic,
have not hesitated to defend their intolerance of
opinions which differed from their own, their
purchase and holding of slaves, their harshness
to criminals, and their torture and murder of
witches by an appeal to the laws and customs of
Israel. One is not sure whether the evil is even
yet dead. A mitigated but very pregnant expres
sion of it has just been uncovered in a letter by
John Henry Newman of date 1875. Speaking of
the cruelties of the Inquisition he says :
'As to Dr. Ward in the Dublin Review, his point
(I think) was not the question of cruelty, but whether
persecution, such as in Spain, was unjust; and with
the capital punishment prescribed in the Mosaic Law
for idolatry, blasphemy, and witchcraft and St. Paul's
transferring of the sword to Christian magistrates, it
seems difficult to call persecution (so-called) unjust.
I suppose in like manner he would not deny, but
condemn the craft and cruelty and the wholesale
character of St. Bartholomew's massacre ; but still would
argue in the abstract in defence of the magistrate's
bearing of the sword and of the Church's sanctioning
of its use in the aspect of justice, as Moses, Joshua,
and Samuel might use it against heretics, rebels, and
cruel and crafty enemies.' 1

1 Contemporary Review, Sept. 1899, p. 362 : A letter from
John Henry Newman to J. R. Mozley, of date April 4, 1875.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 25
The spirit, then, lives, though the flesh be
weak ! Taking this remarkable document along
with the utterances of Protestant divines of forty
years ago in the Southern States in defence of
slavery, we may partly understand why — not the
Old Testament, as Professor Goldwin Smith has
ignorantly judged but — the literal enforcement
of the Old Testament, in disloyalty to Christ,
should be called ' a millstone about the neck of
Christianity.' From the first generation of the
, Church to the last but one, the theory of the
equal and lasting divinity of the Jewish Scriptures
has been fertile in casuistry, bigotry and cruel
oppression of every kind.
But while all that is now mainly a matter of
historical interest, we have suffered in our own
generation, and to a high degree still suffer, from
the enforcement of the same spirit, operating
in another direction. The advocates and agents
of Biblical Criticism have often been charged
with the creation of sceptics, and we may
fully admit that where criticism has been con
ducted in a purely empirical spirit and with
out loyalty to Christ, it has shaken the belief
of some in the fundamentals of religion, dis
tracted others from the zealous service of God,
and benumbed the preaching of Christ's gospel.
Yet any one who has had practical dealings
with the doubt and religious bewilderment of
his day can testify that those who have been

26 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
led into unbelief by modern criticism are not
for one moment to be compared in number
with those who have fallen from faith over the
edge of the opposite extreme. The dogma of
a verbal inspiration, the dogma of the equal
divinity of all parts of Scripture, the refusal to
see any development either from the ethnic
religions to the religion of Israel, or any develop
ment within the religion of Israel itself — all these
have had a disastrous influence upon the religious
thought and action of our time. They have not
only produced confusion in some of the holiest
minds among us. They have not only paralysed
the intellects of those who have adopted them,
as every mechanical conception of the truth must
do. But they have been the provocation to
immense numbers of honest hearts to cast off re
ligion altogether. Men have been trained in the
belief that the holiest elements of our creed, nay
the assurance of the existence and love of God
Himself, are bound up with the literal acceptance
of the whole Bible, of which the Old Testament
forms by much the greater part; so that when
ever their minds awoke to the irreconcileable
discrepancies of the Old Testament text, or their
consciences to the narrow and violent temper
of its customs, and they could no longer believe
in it, as the equal and consistent message of God
to men, their whole faith in Him, suspended
from their earliest years upon this impossible

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 27
view of it, was in danger of failing them, and
in innumerable cases did fail them for the rest
of their lives.
Like every man who has read a little and
thought a little, I was aware of this great and
tragic commonplace of our day. But during the
last year I have come across so many instances
of it — each the story of a human soul — that it
has become vivid and burning in my mind. It
has been my privilege to go carefully through
the correspondence of one, who probably more
than any of our contemporaries, was consulted
by persons of the religious experience which I
have described. Many address him from the
silence and loneliness of those far margins
of our world where men have not yet largely
settled, and the few who come have leisure
and detachment enough to think freshly upon
the old ways in which they have been trained ;
but others are residents of the centres of
civilisation, and their words are heavy with
what I feel to be the greatest pathos of our
life — the hunger of souls starving unconsciously
within reach of the food they need. One and
all tell how the literal acceptance of the Bible
— the faith which finds in it nothing erroneous,
nothing defective, and (outside of the sacrifices
and Temple) nothing temporary — is what has
driven them from religion. Henry Drummond
was not a Biblical scholar ; he was not an

28 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
authority on the Old Testament. But the large
trust which his personality and his writings so
magically produced, moved men and women to
address to him all kinds of questions. It is
astonishing how many of these had to do with
the Old Testament : with its discrepancies, its
rigorous laws, its pitiless tempers, its open treat
ment of sexual questions, the atrocities which are
narrated by its histories and sanctioned by its
laws. Unable upon the lines of the teaching of
their youth to reconcile these with a belief in
the goodness of God, the writers had abandoned,
or were about to abandon, the latter ; yet they
eagerly sought an explanation which would save
them from such a disaster.
I know no sadder tragedy than this innumer
ably repeated one, nor any service which it were
better worth doing than the attempt to help
men out of its perplexities. I firmly believe
that such an attempt must lie along the lines
indicated by Christ and His Apostles, and
followed by the textual and historical criticism
which takes its charter from Christ Himself.
And if I am right, then we shall find in the
task on which we have entered with this lecture,
interests and responsibilities which are not merely
scholastic or historical, but thoroughly evangelical
— concerned with faith, and the assistance of souls
in darkness, and the equipment of the Church of
Christ for her ministry of God's Word.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 29

LECTURE II
THE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF MODERN
CRITICISM
We have seen that the treatment of the Old
Testament by the New leaves us with a double
result. In the first place, our Lord and His
Apostles use the Hebrew Scriptures, and commit
them to us as the living Word of God : the
Revelation of His Nature and Providence, in
cluding in the latter His choice of Israel to be
His ' Servant ' to the world, His preparation for
the advent of Christ, and His purposes of grace
to all mankind. But in the second place, our
Lord makes a great discrimination in His judge
ment of the Law and its ethical tempers, and
teaches us to read the Old Testament as the
record of a progressive revelation ; while the
Apostles bequeath to the Church unsolved all
other problems of criticism, whether textual or
historical. We must clearly recognise that our
Lord did not count the whole of the Old Testa
ment as equally Divine; that He set us an
example of liberty in judging the facts which

30 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
it presents to us; and that the Criticism with
which we have to deal — whether it be the Lower
Criticism or the Higher — is not the product of
the modern mind, looking at the Old Testament
alone, but that some of the problems arise in
Christ's own treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures,
and that others leave the hands of His Apostles
in an even more acute form than that in which
they issue from the Old Testament itself.
Starting, then, from these our chief authorities,
the task of the following lectures is a double
one. We have to inquire : first, how far Modern
Criticism, in the use of the liberty which Christ
exemplified, has succeeded in solving the pro
blems bequeathed to the Church ; and second,
whether in solving them Modern Criticism tends
to impair or to fortify our belief that the Old
Testament contains a real revelation of God.
For us preachers the latter is the cardinal
question ; but the former is preliminary and in
dispensable to it. In this lecture I propose to
give an account of the general course of Biblical
Criticism during the last century. The best way
of doing this will be by the examination of
certain charges which have recently been made
against the general methods of Criticism. In
discussing these, I fear that I must describe a
number of things which have been often de
scribed, and are well known to many of you;
but the ignorance of them, which is still shown

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 31
in some quarters, makes their repetition, however
trite, an inevitable duty.
The charges made against modern criticism
may be summed up under three heads.
First, that the modern criticism of the Old
Testament is a movement of recent growth, and
that its results are, therefore, precarious.
Second, that Old Testament criticism proceeds
only on linguistic and literary evidence, which,
being estimated by modern tastes and standards,
must be largely subjective and uncertain.
Third, that critics ignore the evidence of
archaeology, geography and the allied sciences ;
and that this is hostile to their conclusions.

I. The General Course of Modern Criticism.
Many of the opponents of Old Testament
criticism have represented the movement as if
it were but the growth of yesterday, with results
so hastily and arbitrarily reached that they are
certain to be reversed by the discoveries and
debates of to-morrow — like Jonah's gourd, the
son of a night, in a night they shall perish ! If
this were so we might at once abandon the task
we have set ourselves. It would not be worth
our attention to examine the effect of a move
ment so sudden and precarious upon the Church's
age-long attitude to the greater part of her sacred
writings. But the science of Old Testament

32 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
criticism is not the thing of yesterday which
its assailants pretend. Even within its modern
development — which is all we have got to do
with just now — it covers a period of more than
two hundred years. It has achieved a career,
that is to say, as long as those of many of the
historical and physical sciences. Nor, within
the last century at least, has it been served by a
less constant succession of able experts ; while
its methods have been equally without dogmatic
bias, and so far as their materials go, as trust
worthy and exact. Consequently the progress
of the science has resembled that of every other
intellectual movement of our time which has
issued in generally accepted results. It has been
slow, gradual and severely contested. It has
suffered from digressions, pedantries, extrava
gancies. It has been forced to abandon some
positions which it had previously occupied with
confidence : and upon innumerable details it
still exhibits among its supporters difference of
opinion. But with few or no preconceptions, it
has started from facts easily ascertained within
the sacred text itself; each step forward which it
has taken has been planted on other facts in the
same field or upon reasonable inferences from
these. It has suffered from, and has benefited
by, the personal jealousies and ambitions of its
agents, who have left few fresh proposals or dis
coveries undisputed : and it has issued in a large

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 33
and increasing agreement upon certain main lines
of conclusion.
Let us look for a little at the details.1 The
modern criticism of the Old Testament may be
said to have begun in 1680. In that year a
French priest called Simon drew attention to
the fact that within the Book of Genesis the
same event is often described in different words.
He emphasised especially the two accounts of
the Creation, which lie side by side in the
opening chapters, and the two accounts of the
Flood which are fused together in chapters vi-ix.
For these Simon suggested different authors,
whose writings Moses had put together. Such
was the beginning of the criticism of the Pen
tateuch. You will observe not only how simple
it is and how easily verified, but that also, so far
from its motive being a prejudice against the
Mosaic authorship of the first Book of the Bible,
it took this for granted. Notice particularly
that it starts from the fact of two accounts of
the same events. It is on the presence of many
such ' doublets ' in the Hexateuch and historical
books that the modern criticism of the Old
Testament is based.
Seventy years after Simon another Frenchman,
1 The English reader will find full accounts of these in Cheyne's
Founders of Old Testament Criticism, or in a more summary form
so far as Hexateuchal criticism is concerned in the introductions
to Addis's Documents of the Hexateuch : Nutt, London, vol. i.
1892, vol. ii. 1898. C

34 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Astruc, published his Conjectures on the Original
Memoirs of which it appears Moses made use in
composing the Book of Genesis?- That is the full
title of his work, and it also proves how in
dependent was the literary criticism of Genesis
of any desire to deny the Mosaic, or ancient
origin of the Book. After dividing the two
narratives of the Creation as Simon had done,
Astruc pointed out that each of them had a
distinguishing mark. The first, Genesis i.-ii. 4a
always speaks of the Creator as Elohim, the
Hebrew term for God; the second, Genesis ii.
4<5-iii. calls Him Jahweh or Jahweh-Elohim, the
name of Israel's national deity. Again we
have a simple fact which any reader can test for
himself. Had this difference between the Divine Names
stood by itself, its discovery would have led to
nothing but confusion; because the texts have
often been copied, and, as any one may see
from a comparison of the most ancient versions
with the Hebrew, the copying scribes sometimes
substituted the one Divine Name for the other.
Besides, there were occasions in the course of
the narrative, which usually employs the national
name Jahweh, to substitute for this the more
general title Elohim, as for instance when the
writer is treating of the essential character of
God or is introducing the statements of persons
1 Brussels, 1753 : x- and 525 PaSes izmo.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 35
who were not Israelites and who did not know
God as Jahweh. The distinction, therefore, be
tween the Divine Names is too precarious to
determine a distinction of authorship. But
shortly before 1780 Eichhorn, a German Hebraist,
who had arrived independently at Astruc's con
clusion, confirmed and corrected its results by
another discovery. He showed that the difference
in the name of the Deity was accompanied by
several other linguistic variations. The passages
which use Elohim speak of Him as creating the
world, and talk of the beasts of the earth; the
passages which usually employ the name Jahweh
speak of Him as making or forming the world,
and talk of the beasts of the field. These are but
two instances out of many : Eichhorn had struck
a line of differences too numerous and too dis
tinctive to prove fallacious. This, however, was
not final : a few years later, in 1798, Ilgen, an
other German, observed that within those parts
of Genesis in which Elohim was used there are
also double accounts of the same event, which can
be distinguished from each other by differences
of style and vocabulary. Ilgen is therefore called
the discoverer of the Second Elohist.
Now it was natural that since the main dis
tinction among these documents lay in the name
of the Deity used by each, that distinction should
not at first have been explored beyond the sixth
chapter of Exodus where God reveals Himself

36 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
under the name Jahweh, for up to this point there
is an obvious reason why the Elohist documents
should refrain from using the name Jahweh. But
another and independent line of criticism had
already been started which was carrying the dis
crimination of the documents farther on. One
of the representatives of this — perhaps the
originator — was a Roman Catholic priest, a
Scotsman, called Geddes.1 That remarkable
man did not work on the lines laid down by
the critics I have mentioned. Where they,
struck by the different names for Deity, dis
tinguished two or three documents, Geddes,
confused by the presence of a large variety of
differences and discrepancies, which he did not
stop to classify, rushed to the conclusion that
these were proofs of a great number of in
dependent sources. This Fragmentary Hy
pothesis, as it was called, was taken up in
Germany by Vater. So far as it affirmed the
presence of many documents it did not at the
time contribute to the progress of criticism in
that direction,2 but because the boldness of its
authors did not confine it to Genesis and the
first six chapters of Exodus it opened the way
1 See his Life, etc., by John Mason Good ; London, 1863. His
O. T. work is entitled The Holy Bible . . . faithfully translated
from corrected texts of the originals, with various Readings, Notes,
and Critical Remarks ; two vols., London, 1792-97. Critical Re
marks on the Hebrew Scriptures: vol. i., Pentateuch, 1800.
2 Yet the justness of much of the reasoning connected with this
hypothesis has been proved by more recent scholars ; see below.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 37
to the analysis of the rest of the Pentateuch and
even of Joshua.1
From 1805 onwards De Wette demonstrated
the singularity of Deuteronomy both as regards
its doctrine and its style; a singularity so con
spicuous even to the tyro in Hebrew that the
absence of an earlier discovery of it now seems
astonishing. Not only the favourite phrases and
formulas, the favourite interests and ideals, of
this Book, but its treatment of the same events,
and its laws for the same matters are so different
from those of preceding parts of the Pentateuch,2
as to prove beyond all doubt difference of author
ship and date. Here, then, is a fourth document.
Next, Bleek, who had been partly anticipated by
Geddes, proved that the Book of Joshua forms
an indispensable supplement to the Pentateuch
by carrying on the history and enforcing the
legislation of the latter — not on one line but to
different degrees on all the lines, sometimes con
flicting, of the four documents. Then from the
beginning of Genesis to the end of Joshua the
attempt was made to disentangle these docu
ments by Ewald. And ultimately — to pass over
several intermediate confirmations of the main
1 For Geddes's share in extending the process to Joshua,
see article 'Joshua' by the present writer in Hastings's Bible
Dictionary. 2 For details I must refer the reader to the introduction to
Driver's Commentary ; Moore's article in the Encyclopcedia Bib.
lica ; and Ryle's in Hastings's Bible Dictionary.

38 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
lines of analysis — Hupfeld x arrived independently
at Ilgen's conclusions about the two Elohists,
and established them upon a sounder basis. He
took, for instance, the well-known double accounts
of the origin of the names Bethel and Israel.
One of these (Gen. xxxv. 9-15) relates that
Elohim appeared to Jacob as he came out of
Padan-aram, and that, therefore, Jacob called the
name of the place Beth-el or house of God; but
the other (Gen. xxviii. 10-22) relates that God
appeared to Jacob at the same place on his
departure for Padan-aram, and that it was at
this earlier time that the place was named
Bethel : in conformity with which God, when He
appears to Jacob in Padan-aram, calls Himself
the God of Bethel (Gen. xxxi. 13). Again, ac
cording to Genesis xxxii. 23-33, the name Israel
was first given to Jacob when he wrestled with
the Unknown on the banks of Jabbok; and it
was then said : thou shalt no more be called Jacob?
But in Genesis xxxv. 9-15 the origin of the name
Israel is dated at Bethel on Jacob's return from
Padan-aram. These are only two of several
variations, not only of style but of substance,
which prove the presence in the story of Jacob
1 In The Sources of Genesis (Die Quellen d. Genesis), 1850.
2 It is not quite certain whether this narrative is from the
Elohist or the Jahwist. The divine name is Elohim, but there
are other parts in the style which lead many to attribute it to the
Jahwist. See below on the acknowledged impossibility of always
discriminating between the Jahwist and Elohist.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 39
of two documents both using the name Elohim.
Hupfeld made an even more important observa
tion. He remarked that these two Elohist docu
ments are not so closely related to each other as
one of them is to the Jahwist. This one, which
he calls the Second Elohist, differs from the
Jahwist generally only in details — though also in
certain conceptions of the Deity — and is so inter
woven with the latter that the two are often
indistinguishable and were evidently combined
before being attached either to the First Elohist
or to the Deuteronomic writer. The First
Elohist, on the other hand, has a character all
its own. Of the bulk of the Hexateuch it supplies
by far the greater part ; of the plan which runs
through the Hexateuch1 it is the upholding
frame. Hence it has been called the Grundschrift
or Basal Document ; but because it contains the
larger part of the legislation, and that part is
distinguished from the rest by an elaboration of
laws concerning the priesthood and ritual, it is
now more usually called the Priestly, while the
name Elohist is reserved for Hupfeld's Second
Elohist. Before the middle of the century, then, the
main lines of the analysis of the Hexateuch were
laid down, and all the effect of subsequent criti
cism has been to confirm and develop them.
The evidence that there are four main documents
1 This is more true of Genesis to Deuteronomy than of Joshua.

40 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
has been revised and the conclusion corroborated
by a large number of independent scholars in
several countries and schools of Christendom.
Kuenen and others in Holland ; Graf, Well
hausen, Noldeke, Dillmann, Kautzsch, Stade,
Budde, Holzinger and others in Germany ; West-
phal and others in France; Robertson Smith,
Cheyne, Driver, Addis, Bennett, Ball, Ryle, Estlin
Carpenter and Harford-Battersby in Great Britain ;
Briggs and Bacon in America, have all made
detailed analyses of the whole or of parts of the
Hexateuch; and their conclusions have been
adopted, or independently verified, by others who
have not published detailed analyses but have
studied and written on the subjects contained in
the Hexateuch : as for instance a large band of
contributors to Hastings's Bible Dictionary x and
to the Encyclopaedia Biblica. It cannot be of
chance nor by arbitrariness that among so large
a majority of experts, working independently
of each other, and in face of continual criticism
from scholars on the other side, there should
result an agreement of opinion so strong, so
surely growing, and so widely based on the
phenomena of the sacred text itself. Every
position asserted has in turn been contested :
in every case the evidence has been several
times analysed ; and one by one conservative
scholars like Delitzsch, who had at first resisted
1 See especially the article ' Hexateuch ' by F. H. Woods.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 41
the conclusions, have in the end expressed their
adherence to them. From the nature of the
materials much uncertainty, of course, must pre
vail. Purely philological evidence, where it alone
is available, is often ambiguous : but as we shall
see in the next section of this Lecture, the philo
logical is only one department of the evidence.
Difference of style or of language is in most
cases accompanied by difference of substance,
and the judgements which arise on the latter
cannot be due to modern literary tastes or
standards. We have seen J that the theory of the composi
tion of the Hexateuch from four documents had
one rival, the theory of composition from many
fragments. There was also another theory, that
of expansion; or the enlargement of a small
kernel of tradition by successive additions and
revisions from later stages of the national memory
and religious development. Both of these theories
have received some justification from the more
recent elaboration of the documentary theory.
For within each of the four documents further
examination has discovered certain smaller varia
tions of language, but still more of substance,
which make it probable that the documents con
tain later additions in the style characteristic of
each, and that thus they represent not the work
of the same author so much as that of the same
1 Above, p. 36.

42 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
school of tradition and religious conception.1
Then, as there are four documents, and as it is
evident that two of them, the Jahwist and Elohist,
were combined before the others were added, this
implies more than one editor, whose additions
and modifications are to be expected and, where
possible, distinguished. Of the presence of such
minor distinctions, the present state of the text
affords many clear signs; and that the process
of revising and adding continued a very long
time is proved by a comparison of the Hebrew
with the oldest versions into other languages.
Here the work of the critic is necessarily ex
tremely delicate, and the results are often un-
1 To go into the details of this more delicate and therefore pre
carious criticism of recent years is impossible in the limits of a
single lecture. But some particulars may be given in a note. For
fuller details the English reader may be referred to the article
' Hexateuch ' in Hastings's Bible Dictionary; and, so far as Deuter
onomy is concerned, to Driver's introduction to his Commentary
and to the forthcoming edition by the present writer of the text and
translation of that book in Haupt's Sacred Books ofthe Old Testa
ment. In the Jahwist document the stories of early humanity and
the growth of civilisation contain some discrepancies which betray
different sources. — In Deuteronomy there haslong been adivision
of opinion as to how much, if any, of the prefatory introductions,
1-1 1, belong to the same author as that of the legal codes ; and
within the latter parallel and slightly differing laws are found on
the same subject. In the year 1894 the analysis of Deuteronomy
took a new direction on the publication of Stark's and Steuerna-
gel's investigations into the use of the singular and plural forms of
address in that Book. In some passages Israel is addressed as
thou, in some as you. The data are extremely puzzling because
the text is often uncertain where those pronouns occur, and be
cause the Hebrew idiom permits the same writer or speaker to pass
from the one to the other. But where the change coincides with

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 43
certain. But the uncertainties do not involve
more than the fringes of the four main documents
and their principal constituents. Upon these, by
facts which are obvious to every student, by
methods that are thorough and exact, through
much debate and jealous revision, there has
gradually been produced among critics a most
remarkable unanimity.
So much for the analysis of the first six Books
of the Old Testament. The Historical Books
stand next in order. Some of them, for example
the Books of Kings, explicitly assert that they
have been composed from several sources ; all of
them present on the surface the same features as
other changes in the style or religious conception, there is mani
festly a strong reason for supposing a difference of author. Not
only is such coincidence frequent in Deuteronomy both in the
hortatory sections and the laws, but while both the passages in
the singular address and those in the plural have terms and con
ceptions in common, they have some consistently different term
for the same event or object, and each in addition has a list of
words peculiar to itself and a list of favourite interests different
from that of the other. It seems to me, therefore, that the
case for two sources in Deuteronomy, thus distinguished, is, if
not proved, very probable ; and that it will supplant the older
distinction between the hortatory and legal sections on which
critics were always divided. But Stark and Steuernagel, while
striking on a true distinction, have not corrected their analysis
of it in Deuteronomy by comparison with its appearance in the
contemporary Jeremiah and other writers. The same objection
seems to me to be valid against Mitchell's simpler analysis in
the American Journal of Biblical Literature for 1899. — In the
Priestly Legislation, Lev. i. 17-26 has long been regarded by
critics as distinct in character and style from the rest of the code.
(See Driver, Introd. to Lit. of Old Testament, 49 ff.) : and in the
latter many obviously later additions appear.

44 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the Hexateuch: that is to say, not only differ
ences of style but the presence of double accounts
of the same event. In the Books of Samuel this
latter feature is present to a still greater degree
than in the narratives of the Hexateuch ; but it
is not so possible to discern in the Books of
Samuel all the main documents which run
through the history from beginning to end.
What is clear is, that the historical Books
contain many records and traditions, some of
them treating the same events with differences
both of style and substance.1 Equally evident
is the hand of the editor or editors who compiled
them, and who not only added various statistics
and recurrent formulas designed to frame them
into a continuous history, but placed the whole
of that history under a certain moral judgement,
to which expression is given in language distinct
from that of the materials he employed.2 And
again, as in the case of the Hexateuch, these
conclusions have been reached only as the result
of long research and debate by many critics, who,
differing in details, have gradually approached
unanimity upon the main lines just indicated.
The analysis of the prophetical and of the
poetical Books presents us with greater diffi
culties. The process is not so old nor quite so
1 Eg. the accounts of the institution of the Kingdom, of the
meeting of Saul and David, and of the end of Saul.
2 See further below, pp. 65 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 45
thorough as in the case of the Hexateuch, and
upon some of the results there is a still wider
divergence of opinion. Within the last ten years
the dissection of several prophetical books has been
carried to an extent which represents rather the in
genuity of a few critics than the settled consensus
of the majority. But, excepting these latest pro
posals as still under judgement, we observe the
same tendency in criticism as we have already
noted: the steady approximation to the belief
that many of the larger books of prophecy are
compilations from several sources. For this the
evidence is partly that of language and style —
it has become very clear that many terms and
grammatical forms were not in use till towards
the Exile — but the most cogent proofs are drawn
from the expression of opposite religious tempers.
Both in the larger and smaller prophecies there
are obvious interpolations. Generations sub
sequent to the original prophet made qualifica
tions of, or additions to, his oracles, in order to
adapt them to the changed circumstances or
altered tempers of the people, and so to per
petuate their religious significance. To this
subject we shall return in a later Lecture.
The critical analysis of the Old Testament is
therefore not only a movement of considerable
age, and pursued by a long and varied succession
of experts; but by rational methods and upon

46 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
intelligible evidence, derived from the sacred
text, it has produced certain large results on
which the vast majority of critics are more and
more approaching to unanimity. There is, there
fore, no ground either for those who attack the
science of Old Testament criticism as hasty
and its conclusions as raw; or for those who
predict a reaction from the conclusions as
certain as the reaction which arose in New
Testament criticism against the theories of
the extreme Tubingen school. The Tubingen
theories were largely deductions from the prin
ciples of a certain philosophy of history. But
the proofs of Old Testament criticism are not
a priori : the argument is inductive and the facts
are furnished by the Old Testament itself.1
II. The Criticism of the Old Testament
mainly Historical.
The criticism of the Old Testament, however,
is not merely literary ; and here we have to meet
the second charge which its opponents have
preferred against it.2 In their recent writings
Professors Sayce and Hommel have, with con-
1 It is indeed striking that the attempt to prove the late date of
the Levitical legislation from principles ofthe Hegelian philoso
phy, which Vatke made in 1833, should have been ignored in the
history of criticism; and that that late date should not have been
accepted till Graf and others proved it by inductive evidence in
1866 and following years.
8 See above, p. 31,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 47
siderable persistence, represented the Higher
Criticism as if it were only the analysis of the
text of the Old Testament into different docu
ments upon the evidence of language and style.
And they assert that the evidence alleged cannot
but be precarious, because estimated by scholars
with very different tastes and standards from
those of the people among whom the Old Testa
ment arose. Nothing could be further from the
truth. Look at what we have already seen with
regard to the discrimination of the documents.
We have seen that this depends not only upon
differences of vocabulary, phrase and idiom, but
still more upon differences of fact and substance
in narratives which relate the same events.
Take the different stories of the origin of the
name of Bethel.1 It is impossible to believe that
these came from the same hand. Or take the
Book of Joshua. Throughout its chapters there
are visible two differing accounts of the conquest
of Western Palestine by the Israelites. One of
them represents the conquest and division of
the land to have been thorough and effected in
one generation by the whole people acting to
gether; the other represents it as the work of
the tribes acting separately, and as being far from
complete. Here are differences of fact, which
are not dependent for their distinction upon
differences of phrase and idiom; yet are corro-
1 See above, p. 38.

48 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
borated by these, for the parts of the Book which
represent the Conquest as complete under Joshua
are composed in the language of the Deuterono-
mic and Priestly writers,1 while those who report it
to have been incomplete are written in the style of
the Jahwist.2 But that is not all. I have already
said that a linguistic analysis is often unable to
distinguish between the Jahwist and the Elohist,
and this is especially the case in the Book of
Joshua. All the more striking therefore are
certain differences of fact in this double docu
ment. For instance, in the story of the crossing
of the Jordan, as told in Joshua iii. and iv., there
are two accounts of the monument set up to
commemorate the passage. One of them builds
it at Gilgal on the west bank with stones taken
from the river-bed by the people;8 the other
builds it in the bed of the river with twelve
stones set there by Joshua.4 Similarly, in chap
ter vi. two stories have been interwoven, but
are still distinguishable : one which relates how
Israel marched round Jericho on seven successive
days, the first six they marched in silence, but
on the seventh they shouted at the word of
1 E.g. x. 28-43, xi- z> 3» 6, 9-12, 14-23, xii. xiii. 2-12, 14,
xxi. 43-45, xxii. 1-1 5, xxiii. — Deuteronomic : and xiv. 1-5, xv.
(except 13-19 and 63), xvi. 4-8, xvii. la, 3-7, 9 (partly), 10,
xviii. na, 12-28, xix. 1-46, 48, 51 — Priestly.
2 xv. 63, xvi. 10, xvii. n-18, with which agrees the account of
a partial conquest in Judges i.
8 iv. 1-8, 20. 4 iv. 9.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 49
Joshua and the walls fell ; 1 and another which
relates that a portion of the armed men marched
round the city seven times on the same day,
having in their midst the ark, and that on the
seventh round the people shouted at the signal
of the trumpets and the walls fell.2 Similarly
in chapter viii. we find two accounts of the
ambush against Ai, according to one of which
the ambush consisted of 30,000 men and was
despatched to its position by Joshua either from
Gilgal or soon after the main army left Gilgal;
while according to the other the ambush con
sisted of 5000 men and was not detached from
the army till the latter had arrived in the neigh
bourhood of Ai.3 The existence of all these
* doublets ' is not, I repeat, proved by differences
of vocabulary or of style, for we are generally
unable to say which is from the Jahwist and
which from the Elohist ; it is proved by difference
of facts in the substance of the narrative.
Hitherto I have dealt only with the proofs
of the presence of different documents in the
1 Verses 3, 73, 10, n (partly), 14, 15a, and it came to pass . . .
manner, 15^, 20, and the people shouted.
2 Verses 4 (partly), 5, yb, 8, 9, parts of 13 and 15, 16a, 20b.
Cf. especially verses 16 and 20 : in the latter the people shout
both before and after the trumpets, though verse 16 enjoins on
them not to shout till the trumpets give the signal. Wellhausen
was the first to point out the distinction.
8 The first account can be traced in verses 3-9 ; the second in
verses 10-14. For the analysis of the two accounts through the
rest of the chapter, see Bennett's 'Joshua 'in Haupt's Sacred
Books ofthe Old Testament. D

50 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Hexateuch. But now let us look at the problem
of the dates of these documents. Here again
the evidence for the critical solution is not alto
gether that of language and style. On the con
trary, historical evidence has been predominant
at every step of the argument : and in particular
has decided almost by itself the principal change
of opinion which criticism has made on this
subject. At first the Jahwist-Elohist and the
Deuteronomic documents were assigned, on ac
count of their historical allusions, to a date after
the beginning of the Monarchy; but the Priestly
Document, which has many archaic features
and which betrays no allusion to the later
history, was considered the earliest of the four.
It was the introduction of other phenomena,
historical in character, which forced critics to
abandon this opinion and to seek for the Priestly
Document a much later date. The change came
about upon two lines of reasoning. The first
was this. When the collections of laws which the
documents contain were compared, it was seen
that they exhibited different stages of what was
fundamentally the same legislation ; the simplest
of these stages is found in the Jahwist-Elohist,1
the next in Deuteronomy,2 the most complex
and elaborate in the Priestly Writing.3 Or, as this
way of putting the matter does scant justice
1 Ex. xx.-xxii., xxxiv., 14-26. 2 Deut. xii.-xxvi.
8 Ex. xxv.-xxxi,, Levit., Num. i.-xix.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 51
to the differences, we may say that while the
legislation in the Jahwist-Elohist is suited to a
purely agricultural people, the Deuteronomic
meets the necessities of a community more highly
organised and equipped, with foreign relations
and subject to religious temptations to which in
the days of the early kings Israel was not exposed ;
while, besides, there is in Deuteronomy's modi
fication of the Jahwist-Elohist laws evidence of
the influence of the eighth-century prophets.
The Priestly Legislation on the other hand
cannot be understood in many of its provisions
except in the light of the Exile, and of the greater
influence which the priesthood assumed in Israel
after the return from Babylon. On the subjects
of sacrifice, the priesthood, the gifts due to the
priests and kindred matters, there is an almost
perfectly consistent increase of elaboration and
rigour from the laws of the Jahwist-Elohist,
through those of Deuteronomy to those of the
Priestly Legislation.1 I am not now defending
the conclusion to which most critics adhere, that
therefore the Jahwist-Elohist is the earliest of
the Documents, and the Priestly the latest,
Deuteronomy coming in between: I am only
showing that critics reached that conclusion on
historical evidence. Again, critics remarked the
1 For details see Driver's Commentary on Deuteronomy,
chaps, xii.-xxvi. ; or the present writer's notes to the same
chapters in Haupt's Sacred Books of the Old Testament.

52 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
fact that the early history of Israel exhibited
no traces of the influence or existence of any of
the three legal codes, but that, on the contrary,
the religious leaders of Israel from Gideon to
Elisha behaved as if there were no such laws in
existence as those (at least) of Deuteronomy and
the Priestly code. Again I have no room to go
into the detailed proof,1 and my purpose is simply
to point out the character of the evidence of
which it consists.
On both these lines of proof for the date of
the documents, the evidence, therefore, is his
torical and is supplied by the Old Testament
itself. It is, of course, supported by philological
evidence. The language and the style of the
Jahwist-Elohist are earlier than that of Deutero
nomy; and both the ordinary vocabulary and
the lists of proper names in the Priestly Writing
exhibit many traces of a late date.2 But all this
is only corroboratory of a conclusion reached
independently and upon the evidence of the
sacred history itself. Let me repeat, this prin
cipal conclusion of modern criticism, — that the
written Law of Israel, in the three forms in which
we possess it, cannot have been the work of
Moses or of the Mosaic, or immediately post-
Mosaic, age, but must be assigned to a much
1 See the introductions to Driver's Commentary on Deutero
nomy, and to Addis's Documents of the Hexateuch.
2 G. B. Gray, Studies in Hebrew Proper Names: London, 1896.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 53
later date, — has been reached not by the methods
of literary analysis, but on lines of historical evi
dence furnished by the earlier chronicles of Israel
themselves. Let us now take a similar instance from the
prophets. The opponents of criticism have often
alleged that the conclusion, by which Isaiah xl.
and following chapters are taken from Isaiah
himself and assigned to a prophet on the eve
of the Return from Exile, is due to a dogmatic
prejudice against the capacity of Isaiah himself
to predict events so far beyond his own time, and
is supported mainly upon grounds of language
and style. Neither of these allegations is correct.
What has compelled critics to date Isaiah xl. and
following chapters from the close of the Baby
lonian Captivity has been the historical evidence
furnished by the chapters themselves. These
chapters nowhere claim to be by Isaiah, and do
not present a single reflection of his time. But
they plainly set forth, as having already taken
place, certain events which happened from a
century to a century and a half after Isaiah had
passed away : the Babylonian Exile and Cap
tivity, the ruin of Jerusalem and the devastation
of the Holy Land. Israel is addressed as having
exhausted the time of her penalty, and is ex
horted to leave Babylon, because the door of her
deliverance is immediately to open, and as if her
return to the Holy Land depended now upon

54 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
herself. Cyrus is named as her deliverer, and is
described as already called upon his career and
blessed with victory by Jahweh. Nor is all this
predicted as if from the standpoint of a previous
century ; but it is taken for granted as the very
basis of the prophet's argument. Cyrus him
self is not merely represented to be above the
horizon and upon the flowing tide of victory, as
a prophet might possibly realise him to be before
he actually appeared. But he and his victories
are appealed to as the unmistakeable proof that
former prophecies of Israel's deliverance from
Babylon are at last being fulfilled. Would it
have been possible for the prophet to make such
an appeal, either to Israel or to the heathen, un
less Cyrus had been within the ken of them both ?
Unless Cyrus and his early victories were already
historical facts, the whole argument in Isaiah xl.—
xlviii. is unintelligible. You observe, then, that
all this criticism which assigns these chapters to
the eve of the Return from Exile is historical,
and is independent of the literary analysis of
the text, which, however, greatly corroborates it.
Moreover, except for the date of Cyrus, which
is determined by the cuneiform inscriptions, the
historical evidence in question is drawn entirely
from the Bible itself.
Let us take from the historical books one other
example of the same method. There is no Book
in the Old Testament, whose place in the Canon

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 55
and whose value as a record of historical fact have
been rendered more precarious by criticism than
the Books of Chronicles. These two books,
which are really one, include the same period,
whose history is related in the Books of Samuel
and of Kings. They treat many of the same
episodes and of the same personalities. But they
treat these with a great difference. For the
details I must refer you to the article by
Professor Francis Brown in Hastings's Bible
Dictionary} For our present purpose it is
sufficient to point out that, when the parallel
narratives in Samuel-Kings and in Chronicles
are compared, it is found that the Chronicler
has increased the numbers of the troops en
gaged in the campaigns described, of the men
slain, and of the slaves, the cattle and the
objects of value taken captive or brought as
tribute to the victors; that he has enhanced
the characters of some of the leading person
alities, like David and Solomon ; and that he
has imputed to the period of the Monarchy the
establishment and elaboration of all the ritual
and the law enforced by the Priestly Document.
This comparison with Samuel-Kings makes it
at once evident that we cannot accept the
Chronicler as an authority for the pre-exilic
history of Israel, but must consider his Book
1 See also the article in the Encyc. Biblica ; and Robertson
Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, pp. 140 ff.

56 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
as a homiletic treatment of that history from
the standpoint of generations after the Exile,
when the Priestly Legislation had so long been
in force that it was impossible to imagine any
part of Israel's history as without it.1
These are such fundamental and such obvious
instances of the results of modern criticism upon
the Old Testament that I am almost ashamed
to bring them before you. But the repetition
of them is rendered necessary, not only by the
common opinion of a large portion of the Church,
but by the assertions of scholars I have named
and of a number of other writers, that modern
criticism is mainly dependent upon the preca
rious methods of literary analysis. How amply
the instances quoted disprove this, and how fully
they discover the main conclusions of critics to
be based upon historical evidence derived from
the Old Testament itself, I do not require further
to demonstrate. III. Criticism and Archaeology.
Hitherto we have looked only at the evidence
which criticism finds within the sacred records of
Israel. But our century has been one not only of
Biblical research, but of the discovery and exami
nation of the^histories and religions of the peoples
who surrounded Palestine and who were one
l Cf. Robertson Smith, op. cit., p. 140.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 57
with ancient Israel in blood, custom and mental
equipment. Sixty or seventy years ago almost
our sole record for the history of the world, of
which the kingdom of Israel formed a small
province, was the Old Testament. But now —
in Babylonia, Egypt and Phoenicia ; in Bashan,
Moab, Edom and Sinai ; in Central and Southern
Arabia — there have been unearthed and de
ciphered a vast multitude of monuments which
not only afford us the most ample material for
testing the chronology of the Old Testament,
and defining the exact nature of many of the
historical events in it, but which have uncovered
to us the civilisation and religion of the tribes
who were Israel's neighbours and Israel's kinsmen
according to the flesh. With all this evidence we
can compare, in Arabia and Syria, the still current
life of tribes of the same race in the same natural
environment. It will be obvious how all this
archaeology and ethnology must enable criticism
to attack the chief of the problems bequeathed
by the New Testament : the problem of tracing
throughout the Old Testament a progressive re
velation. That, however, forms the subject of
another lecture; and I will now consider only
the general attitude of recent criticism to all the
historical and archaeological evidence which has
been gathered from fields outside the Old Testa
ment. Of recent years the conclusions of the Higher

58 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Criticism have been attacked in the name of
archaeology, and by none with more persistence
than the two eminent scholars I have named:
Professor Sayce and Professor Hommel. They
have asserted that ' archaeology is on the side of
tradition and not of the critics,' 1 upon the cardinal
question of the Old Testament : the dates and
composition of the Hexateuch. And, as proof of
this, they have alleged what they call ' the re
luctance of the critics to accept the discoveries
of the archaeologists.' Let us inquire what
grounds there are for these charges.
Criticism, as we have seen, has discovered four
main documents in the Hexateuch, which it has
assigned to various dates from the ninth or eighth
to the sixth or fifth centuries before Christ.
Professor Sayce's argument appears to be that
this conclusion is largely due to the critics' belief
that the art of writing was not practised in Israel
till about David's time, or the end of the eleventh
century before Christ, and that till then legisla
tion and tradition were only oral. In disproof
of such a belief Professor Sayce appeals to the
so-called Tell el Amarna letters. These clay
tablets, which date from about 1400 B.C., or more
than a century before the commonly received
date of the Exodus, represent a frequent and
detailed correspondence between the court ot
Egypt on the one hand and its representatives
* Sayce, Cont. Rev., vol. lxx., 1896, p. 730.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 59
in Palestine and the rulers of the kingdoms of
Mesopotamia on the other. The writing is in
the cuneiform character, and the language that
of Babylonia. The tablets, therefore, prove that
some of the culture of Babylonia, perhaps even
including its literature, had spread across the
whole of Western Asia, at least a century before
the Exodus. From this Professor Sayce infers
that the Israelites, when in the land of Goshen
and upon their wanderings through the Desert,
must have known how to read and write, must
have been acquainted with Babylonian literature,
and must have been able to appreciate and make
use of Babylonian documents, the translation of
some of which he thinks can be identified in
portions of the Book of Genesis.
Now, in the first place, it is necessary to note
that the Tell el Amarna letters are only the docu
ments of high Egyptian or Mesopotamian officials,
and of chiefs of settled tribes in Palestine ; and
that to argue from their habits to those of a
semi-nomadic race, such as Israel were still in
Goshen and the Desert, is not very safe.1 But
1 As has often been pointed out, the tribes which live to-day on
the borders of Egypt and Canaan, half-settled and half-nomadic,
do not, for all their contact with the civilised and half-civilised
populations of these lands, learn to read and write. Reading and
writing are arts, of which the Bedawee tribes do not see the need,
and frequently despise. From the culture and habits of corre
spondence of the court of Egypt and its representatives in Canaan,
it is very little less difficult to infer that the Israelite shepherds
could write, than to employ the existence of the postal system

60 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
suppose we admit that the chiefs of Israel were
in official contact with the Egyptian authorities
during Israel's residence in Goshen, and that they
did learn from their employment in the building
operations of Pharaoh the arts of reading and
writing which were so highly developed in Egypt.
Suppose that we grant (and I for one am not
inclined to deny this) that there were leaders in
Israel at the time of the Exodus who could write,
or have writings made for them, just as Abd-hiba
of Jerusalem and other petty chieftains of Palestine
did. We have not, therefore, proved that the docu
ments which compose the Pentateuch were written
in the time of Moses. We have not secured one
iota of evidence to counterbalance the proofs,
derived from the history of Israel itself, that the
Pentateuchal legislation was not in existence in
the time of the Judges or of the earlier Kings.
Few critics have committed themselves to the
absolute negative, that early Israel did not know
how to write ; nor do any of the arguments for
the late date of the Hexateuch rest upon a reason
which, even if it were probable, is so impossible
to prove.
The other discoveries of archaeologists which
have to do with the Pentateuch are the Baby
lonian tablets — with stories of the Creation and
and telegraph in the Turkish Empire and the dominions of the
Khedive to illustrate the culture of the nomads in the deserts
which lie on their borders.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 61
Flood, or with annals which cover the events
described in Genesis xiv. — and the Egyptian
monuments which depict the conditions of life
reflected in the story of Joseph. We have not
now to consider how far the evidence furnished
by all these proves the historical value of the
Pentateuch. That question will come up in next
Lecture. Our present inquiry is, how far the
Babylonian and Egyptian monuments affect the
conclusions of critics with regard to the dates of
the Pentateuchal documents.
The Babylonian stories of the Creation and
Flood were probably in existence by a very
early date.1 At the Oriental Congress in Paris
in 1897 it was announced that Father Scheil had
discovered on a tablet from Sippara of date
about 2250 b.c. a recension of the Babylonian
story of the Flood. This has evidently been
copied from a still older tablet, for here and
there the scribe has inserted the word ' lacuna.'
The story of the Flood may, therefore, be carried
back as far as 3000 b.c. But however early be
its date or the dates of the various versions of
the Creation-Epos, it is evident that they can
1 In the British Museum we find them on tablets from the
Royal Library at Nineveh of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.
See the newly issued Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Collec
tions (1900), pp. 36 ff. For translations see Records of the Past,
new series, vol. i. 122 ff., by Prof. Sayce ; Gunkel's Schbpfung «.
Chaos, pp. 401 ff. by Zimmern ; and Authority and Archceology,
ed. by D. G. Hogarth (London, 1899), pp. 10 ff.

62 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
have no bearing on the question of the dates of
the Hebrew documents, — whether the Jahwist-
Elohist or the Priestly, — which contain accounts
of the Creation and Flood founded on the Baby
lonian. We are ignorant of the time at which
the Hebrews received these stories ; while in their
Biblical form they exhibit so many differences
from the Babylonian as to make it probable
that the materials were used by the writers of
the Pentateuchal documents only after long
tradition within a Hebrew atmosphere.
Nor in the light which the monuments throw
upon Genesis xiv. is there any evidence as to
when that chapter was written. We are still with
out the proof that its accounts of Babylonian
campaigns are confirmed by Babylonian annals
dealing with the same events; and even if we
had this proof, there would remain the possi
bility, for which there is some evidence, that
Genesis xiv. is a Hebrew fragment from the
Exile based on Babylonian materials. In any
case this chapter cannot be used in the discussion
of the critical conclusions as to the date of the
four main constituents of the Hexateuch, for it
lies outside them all.1
Again, the portrait of Egyptian life presented
by the story of Joseph in the Jahwist-Elohist
1 Full statements and discussions of the Babylonian evidence
as to the names, etc., in Gen. xiv. will be found in Driver's
Authority and Archaeology, pp. 39 ff., and in article ' Chedorlaomer '
in the Encyclopedia Biblica. See below, p. 100.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 63
document has been appealed to, as proof that
the writer lived at a time when Israel, from their
long residence in Goshen, were still familiar with
Egypt. But the life, which the story of Joseph
portrays, was the life of Egypt not only in
Joseph's time. In the same moulds it persisted
for centuries after the Exodus, and under the
Monarchy Israel had many opportunities of be
coming acquainted with it. So that the vivid and
accurate descriptions of Egypt, which surround
the figure of Pharaoh's Hebrew vizier, are no
conclusive proof of the ancient origin of the
document which tells the story. On the contrary,
the only Egyptian data in that story to which
archaeologists can attach an approximate age,
appear to offer some confirmation of the late
period to which critics have assigned the
Jahwist-Elohist document. The Egyptian names
Zaphenath-Pa'aneah, Potipherah, and Asenath
belong to types of names which do not appear,
or are not frequent, on the Egyptian monu
ments till some centuries after the Exodus.1
1 The type to which Zaphenath-Pa'aneah belongs occurs first
under the Twentieth Dynasty in the thirteenth century B.C., and
is frequent only under the Twenty-second in the tenth century.
The type to which Potipherah belongs appears in one instance
under the Eighteenth Dynasty, though not then attached to a
native Egyptian, and otherwise occurs first under the Twenty-
second Dynasty, but is notfrequenttill the Twenty-sixth, 664-525
B.C. The type to which Asenath belongs has a few early in
stances, but is frequent only under the Twenty-first Dynasty, in
the eleventh century and later.

64 MODERN. CRITICISM AND THE
From these facts, reached in complete indepen
dence of criticism, the Egyptologists ' Steindorff,
Brugsch, and Ebers all agree in inferring that
the names in question did not originate before
the Ninth Century b.c' 1 But if this be so,
the only archaeological evidence which proves
anything with regard to the dates of the
Hexateuchal documents points in the same
direction as the critical arguments which assign
the Jahwist-Elohist to the ninth or the eighth
century. Before we leave the Hexateuch let me call your
attention to the fact that the critical theory of
its compilation from several sources receives one
strong confirmation from the archaeological side.
Professor Sayce himself admits that such a
compilation is ' fully in accordance with the
teachings of Oriental archaeology,' which has
shown us that the ancient writings of the neigh
bours and kinsfolk of Israel were also of a com
posite character. Let me quote his own words :
' The composite character of the Pentateuch,
therefore, is only what a study of similar con
temporaneous literature brought to light by
modern research would lead us to expect.' 2 And
it is remarkable that Professor Sayce, who has
so strenuously assailed the conclusions of critics
with regard to the Pentateuch, should admit that
1 Driver, article 'Joseph' in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, ii. 775.
2 Monuments, pp. 31, 34 ; cf. History ofthe Hebrews, p. 129.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 65
the Book of Joshua, the supplement and appendix
of the Pentateuch, is a composite document with
conflicting accounts of the conquest and settle
ment of Canaan.1
Beyond the Hexateuch there is little necessity
to follow the critics in their attitude to archae
ology. The critics cannot be charged with
neglecting the long series of Assyrian annals
which bear upon the history of the Kings of
Israel and Judah, from Omri to Zedekiah. I
need only point out how far these annals confirm
the critical estimate of the Books of Kings.
The earliest Hebrews named on the Assyrian
monuments are Omri and Ahab; from them
onwards we have among others the names of
Ben-hadad, Ahab's Syrian contemporary, of
Jehu, Hazael, Pekah, Ahaz and Hezekiah.
Pestilences and eclipses are recorded, the
tremors of which vibrate through the early
prophetical books. We have an account of the
invasion of Palestine by Tiglath Peleser, when
he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and
the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea across
Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles ; the overthrow of
Samaria by Sargon ; Sennacherib's invasion of
Syria, his appearances before Jerusalem, the
tribute he exacted, and his disappearance north
wards. But criticism has never doubted those
1 History of the Hebrews, ch. iv. ; see above in this Lecture,
pp. 47 f. E

66 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
names or these facts. It has recognised that
the Books of Kings were compiled from true
and in many cases contemporaneous annals.
What critics have judged to be late and pro
bably of less historic value has been certain
narratives, for which archaeology has no evidence
to offer, as well as the framework, in which
the editor has bound the whole history and
supplied, out of a general scheme, a chrono
logy, and, from the standpoint of a later age,
a religious sentence on each monarch's reign.1
Now, remarkably enough, archaeology has con
firmed this judgement of criticism on the Books
of Kings, so far as regards the chronology. For
while testifying to the reality of Omri, Ahab,
Jehu, and some of their successors, as well as of
the leading events of the history, it has shown
from the contemporary Assyrian data that the
chronology, approximately correct so far as the
distance of one man or event from another is
concerned, has been placed by the editor from
one dozen to twenty years too early — obviously
in order to fit it into the general system, adopted
by the Hebrew editors, of reckoning the years
from the Exodus to the fall of the first Temple
and the Return from Exile.2
1 For this chronology see next Lecture. The moral and
religious judgements of each reign are from the standpoint of
Deuteronomy, which, as we have seen, did not come into force
in Israel till 621 B.C. under King Josiah.
2 See Kampfhausen, Chronologie der hebraischen Konige, 1883;
Robertson Smith, Prophets, pp. 144 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 67
So much for archaeology and its relations to
criticism. ' The fact is,' as Professor Driver says,1
' the antagonism which some writers have sought
to establish between criticism and archaeology
is wholly factitious and unreal. Criticism and
archaeology deal with antiquity from different
points of view, and mutually supplement one
another. Each in turn supplies what the other
lacks; and it is only by an entire misunder
standing of the scope and limits of both that
they can be brought into antagonism with one
another. What is called " the witness of the
monuments " is often strangely misunderstood.
The monuments witness to nothing which any
reasonable critic has ever doubted. ... A great
deal of the illustration afforded by the monu
ments relates to facts of language, to ideas,
institutions, and localities ; but these as a rule
are of a permanent nature; and until they can
be proved to be limited to a particular age their
occurrence, or mention, in a given narrative is
not evidence that it possesses the value of con
temporary testimony.'
The alleged refutation of criticism by archaeo
logy may therefore be dismissed, and we pass to
another which has been drawn from the sphere of
geography. It is often maintained that the
accuracy of the topographical data on the Book
of Genesis is proof of the truthfulness of the
1 Authority and Archaeology, p. 150 f.

68 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
narratives in which they appear. ' But,' as I have
said elsewhere,1 ' that a story accurately reflects
geography does not necessarily mean that it is a
real transcript of history — else were the Book of
Judith the truest man ever wrote instead of being,
what it is, a pretty piece of fiction. Many legends
are wonderful photographs of scenery, and there
fore let us at once admit that while we may have
other reasons for the historical truth of the patri
archal narratives, we cannot prove this on ,-the
ground that their itineraries and place-names are
correct.' On the other hand, for the same reason —
that the topography of Palestine changed so
little during the course of the history of Israel —
it will be obvious that geography cannot be of
much use in the support of the critical conclusions
as to the dates of the documents. The only cases
in which it can afford any evidence of these, are
where documents, judged by critics to be late on
other grounds, contain geographical names, or
applications of geographical names, which are
themselves of a late origin. For instance, the
mountains of Moab are called in the Priestly
Document, which recent critics date after the
Exile, the mountains of the Abarim. Abarim
means ' the men or things oh the other side,' and
there is some evidence that before the Exile the
name was applied to the whole mountain-range
1 Historical Geography ofthe Holy Land, p. 108.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 69
east of Jordan.1 But the post-Exilic writer limited
it to the mountains of Moab, because in his day
these were the only part of the eastern range
which was opposite the shrunken territory of
his people. Again, it appears that the name
Euphrates occurs first in the writings of Jere
miah ; 2 in the historical and prophetical books
before his time we hear only of ' the River.' 3
Now look at the documents of the Hexateuch.
In the Jahwist and Elohist, which critics date
before Jeremiah, the stream is called ' the River ' ;
in Deuteronomy (from Jeremiah's time) and in the
Priestly Writing4 (from the time of the Exile) it
is called Euphrates. Such is the kind of small
symptoms, which geography supplies, of the
truth of the critical conclusions as to the date
of the Hexateuchal documents. With regard to
the literary analysis of these documents, the
geographical evidence, though still not large, is
quite as decisive. The same localities are called
in the different documents by different names,
1 Jer. xxii. 20, R. V. ; Ezek. xxxix. 1 1 (reading with Hitzig and
others 'Abarim' for ' Oberim '). See further article ' Abarim '
by the present writer in the Encyclopaedia Biblica.
2 Jeremiah xiii. 4-7.
8 2 Sam. viii. 3 (Kethibh), x. 16 ; 1 Kings iv. 21, 24 (Heb. v. 1,
4), xiv. 15; Isa. vii. 20; and even Jer. ii. 18, and Micah vii. 12.
4 ' The River,' Gen. xxxi. 21 (J. E.) ; Exod. xxiii. 31 ; Num.
xxii. 5; Josh. xxiv. 2 f. (all E.). 'The great River, the River
Euphrates,' Gen. xv. 18 (D.) (Red, according to Ball); Deut. i.
7 ; Josh. i. 4 (D.) ; cf. Deut. xi. 24 ; ' Euphrates,' Gen. ii. 14
(P.) ; cf. Jer. xlvi. 2, 6, 10, li. 63 ; 2 Kings xxiii. 29, xxiv. 7 ; the
gloss to 2 Sam. viii. 3 ; and in Chronicles and Apocrypha.

70 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
and this with a remarkable consistence to which
there are but one or two exceptions.1
The geographical evidence, then, so far as
it goes, does not contradict but supports the
critical analysis of the documents and the critical
conclusions as to their dates.

We have now examined the various charges
made against the modern criticism of the Old
Testament and have found them baseless. That
criticism does not depend mainly on linguistic
analysis, but still more on historical evidence
furnished by the Old Testament itself : the con-
1 E.g. for instance in the Jahwist and Priestly Documents the
mountain of the Law is always Sinai, but in the Elohist and
Deuteronomist always Horeb, as it is also in a narrative of
i Kings, ch. xix., which is from the northern kingdom like
the Elohist ; and in Mai. iv. 2, in which prophet the influence of
Deuteronomy is often felt. Notice that Deuteronomy xxxiii. 2,
in which Sinai occurs, is assigned on other grounds to the Jahwist.
Again, the mountain which Moses ascended in Moab is called
Pisgah by the Elohist (Num. xxi. 20, xxiii. 14), and by the Deu
teronomist (Deut. iii. 17, 27, iv. 49, xxxiv. 1 (?), Josh. xii. 3).
Once perhaps the Priestly Writer uses the name (Josh. xiii. 20),
but this instance may be Deuteronomic. The Priestly Writer
names it Nebo. Again, the glen beneath Pisgah, in which Israel
camped, before descending into the valley of the Jordan, is
called the glen that is in the field of Moab by the Elohist (Num.
xxi. 20), but in the Deuteronomist the glen that is opposite Beth.
peor (Deut. iii. 29, iv. 46, xxxiv. 6). The Elohist calls the site
of Israel's camp before crossing the Jordan the field ox territory of
Moab (Num. xxi. 20), but the Priestly Writer always speaks of
it as 'Cos. plains or steppes of Moab. Again, the Elohist gives one
list of stations on Israel's route through Moab (Num. xxi. 13-20),
the Priestly Writer gives another (Num. xxxiii. 44-49).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 71
elusions are not refuted, but to a remarkable
extent corroborated, by the evidence of archae
ology and geography. We have examined the
methods and the general course of criticism.
We have seen how thoroughly tested and how
firmly based are its main results. But in truth
no general account of the critical movement can
do justice to its argument. In the case of the
Hexateuch we must take the text itself and
prove the critical analysis verse by verse. If
we do so, we shall often indeed be puzzled by
details, for which there is no complete explana
tion on any theory whatsoever. But gradually
the characteristic phraseology, favourite interests,
religious conceptions and historical traditions of
four main documents will fall apart, all the more
distinct that they often present the same sub
jects or events in different ways; and we shall
be convinced that we are in touch, not with
phantasms of modern scholarship, but with an
cient realities — the original constituents of our
curiously composite Scriptures. Discrepancies,
fatal to the traditional theory, will explain them
selves : the history, instead of being full of con
tradictions, will fall into the lines of a reasonable
development, and the Divine education of Israel
become more apparent than ever. The other
subject of criticism — the exact dates of the
different documents, in the form in which we
have them — may not be so clear to us : we will

72 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
sympathise with the difference of opinion about
these that exists among critics themselves; and
we will even keep in mind what some critics
forget, that having fastened the present form of
a document to an approximate date, we have
not therefore prejudiced the question of the
earlier origin of some of its contents.
Reviewing the whole of this Lecture, we
may say that Modern Criticism has won its
war against the Traditional Theories. It only
remains to fix the amount of the indemnity.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 73

LECTURE III
THE HISTORICAL BASIS IN THE OLD
TESTAMENT
In last Lecture I said that the battle of modern
criticism with the traditional theories of the Old
Testament had been fought and won; and that
it only remains to discuss the indemnity. What
do the results of criticism cost ? To this question
we must now address ourselves.
We have admitted the liberty and duty of
criticism. We have found its methods reasonable
and carefully wrought. We have seen that its
main conclusions rest upon literary and historical
facts furnished by the Old Testament itself, and
are supported by the evidences of archaeology
and geography, so far as these go : that, in short,
they are as solid as the results can be of a science
at work upon so remote a period of history.
We have now to ask, what does criticism leave
to us in the Old Testament: how much true
history and how much Divine Revelation ? Of
these two questions the chief, of course, is the
latter, but as the answer to it partly depends on

74 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the answer to the former we must take that first :
how much true history has criticism left to us in
the Old Testament ?
Though this is actually the less important of
the two questions (for Revelation is not coincident
with actual history1), I suspect that it is the one
which the preacher or teacher of to-day finds the
more urgent and embarrassing. He remembers
how through the Old Testament our fathers
pursued their expositions and homilies, un
hampered by any doubt of the events or per
sonalities which they encountered. To them
men behaved and spoke exactly as the sacred
text describes. And hence, he will say, sprang
not only the dramatic power of the best preaching
from the Old Testament, but the greater part of
its spiritual influence. Let us put aside in the
meantime the cardinal facts of Israel's national
history, whether what we call miraculous or not,
for on these the greatest Christian preachers did
not linger, and let us take the inimitable por
traiture which the Old Testament contains.
From the time of the author of the Epistle to
the Hebrews onwards to the generation before our
own, it has been among the personal characters
of Israel's history that the greatest preachers in
the English language have found much of their
richest material and strongest inspiration. Men
of such various schools as Sterne — for the author
1 See below, p. 89, and in Lecture viii. on Job.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 75
of Tristram Shandy was also among the pro
phets — Butler, Foster, Maurice, Kingsley, New
man, Robertson of Brighton, Candlish, Arnot,
Spurgeon, and Beecher, have all used the Old
Testament chiefly for its characters. Who does
not remember how searching Butler is upon
Balaam, and how impressive Newman is upon
Saul ! Some of Sterne's sermons, which he
characteristically offers to his fashionable sub
scribers as a few reflections on the present state
of society — and, by the way, Sterne's sermons
are worth reading for their unconventional style
and frequent fitness of phrase — are clever ex
posures of the weaknesses of that human nature
which patriarchs, prophets and kings shared
with ourselves. Robertson of Brighton, whose
strong moral sense and power of analysis found
full scope in the Old Testament, was busy with
its dramas of character to trace the endlessness
of sin and to illustrate how the Divine forgiveness
does not necessarily remove the earthly conse
quences of human crime. So with a host of
other men. It was, I say, not the miracles of
Old Testament history nor the national events,
upon which the preaching of our fathers fed and
grew strong, but the personal elements; the
development of character, the moral struggles,
checks, catastrophes and recoveries, in which so
many Books of the Old Testament are so very
rich.

76 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
' But we,' the modern preacher may say ; ' how
are we to imitate our predecessors ? The strong,
confident preaching you describe was all achieved
before the influence of modern criticism had
reached the pulpit. With perhaps some slight
exceptions in the case of Maurice, who felt the
issues raised by Colenso but was not greatly
affected by them, none of the preachers you
have named can be examples to us in the altered
conditions of Old Testament study. We know
that doubt has been cast by criticism upon large
portions of the history to which these moral
dramas have been assigned by the Old Testa
ment records. We have heard that some of the
stories are as legendary as those of Prometheus
and Hercules, and that many of the characters
portrayed are but the personifications of the
genius and temper of the tribes of which they
are represented as the ancestors.' It is not too
much to say that such considerations have led
to a kind of panic among preachers; and that
some have abandoned incontinently whole pro
vinces of their subject, in which in days gone
by the Christian pulpit found many of its noblest
themes and strongest motives.
In this somewhat disorderly retreat from the
great sources of our art, the first thing to rally
our minds is to remember how small a portion,
after all, of the Old Testament has been affected.
I shall be careful in the following estimate to go

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 77
not merely to the limit of my own opinion of
what actual history has been left to us, but as far
as the majority of advanced critics have ventured
within the last ten years; because it is needful
that the possible worst should be clearly defined.
Even then the amount of the history and narra
tive, which criticism has rendered uncertain, is
by no means so great as is usually feared.
Let us leave the Pentateuch till afterwards, and
begin now from the settlement in Canaan. There
are few critics who doubt the authenticity of
Deborah's song, and none who refuse to take it
as a reliable account of the events which it cele
brates. So will the main facts of Gideon's
career, for the account of which more than one
story has been used ; - the story of Abimelech ; 2
the occupation of Laish by Dan,3 and part of the
tragedy in Benjamin.4 Except some eccentric and
unfollowed critics, no one doubts that with the
time of Samuel we at last enter real and indubit
able history. This very great man's influence on
Israel ; his genius in swaying the new prophetic
movement, so strange to the sober traditions of
his own office, in selecting Saul and in launching
the large but sluggish powers of the son of Kish
upon so powerful a movement, are not only facts,
but facts of obvious value to the preacher. It
is quite true (as I said in last Lecture) that the
1 Judg. vi-ix. 2 Judg. ix.
3 Judg. xviii. 4 Judg. xix-xxi.

78 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Books of Samuel and Kings are composed of
narratives of very various worth. Some are
plainly of an age long subsequent to the events
they describe; there has been time for later
conceptions to mingle with the facts on which
they are based. But others are contemporary,
or nearly contemporary, documents, and in select
ing these, as any modern translation or commen
tary will enable him to do,1 and in employing
them, the preacher may be as sure that he is
dealing with facts as his predecessors of a less
critical age. Nay more, he will find that criticism
has brought him a certain amount of relief from
difficulties which embarrassed his fathers in their
study and presentation of the sacred history.
That relief is of two kinds, both of which I may
illustrate from the story of David.
We who have reached middle life can remem
ber what time and anxiety the pastors of our
boyhood used to expend upon the double and
sometimes contradictory stories of David's life ;
for instance, the two very different accounts of
his first introduction to Saul. Their attempts
to reconcile these involved — even when one
thought that they succeeded — so much intricate
explanation as to distract them from the clear
1 Like Kautzsch's German translation, for instance, or those
in English, edited by Haupt in the Sacred Books ofthe Old Testa
ment; or the volumes of the International Critical Commentary,
by Professor H. P. Smith on Samuel, and by Professor Francis
Brown on Kings (the latter not yet published).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 79
presentation of the moral issues, which it was
their first duty as preachers to present and enforce
to their people. But they did not succeed. The
stories are irreconcileable. What an advantage,
then, has the preacher of to-day who can frankly
say : ' These are two different traditions of the
same event,' and confine himself to the rich ma
terial and moral issues of the one or the other !
Or take an instance where the relief afforded
by criticism to the preacher is of a moral rather
than of an intellectual kind. The character of
David was one of the most complex ever pos
sessed by man. His temper was not only
ambitious and cruel. It was disfigured by some
of the most ferocious traits which are charac
teristic of his race ; for ferocity the Semites have
always been notorious. But in the large heart of
David there also stirred emotions of an opposite
quality : the feeling for greatness in others, even
when they hunted him as did Saul, whom he
spared, and on whom, though Saul had been his
persecutor and implacable foe, he wrote the
greatest of all elegies ; 1 his generosity and quick
ness to forgive, as in Saul's case and Shimei's ;
his noble penitence when his sin was brought
home to him ; the carriage of his soul in the days
of disaster; his chivalry towards the captains
who brought him water from the well of Beth
lehem at the risk of their lives. Criticism finds no
1 See Lecture V. on ' The Spirit of Christ in the Old Testament.'

80 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
objection to many of the priceless narratives which
have rendered such virtues immortal. Moreover,
it has cleared the old age of David from a blot
by which, if you adhere, with tradition, to the
truth of every part of his biography, all these
victories of his character are robbed of their
splendour.1 You remember the second chapter of
First Kings, and David's charge to Solomon, when
the days drew nigh that he should die : how he,
a dying man, commanded his son not to let the
hoar head of Joab, his lifelong comrade and lieu
tenant, go down to the grave in peace ; and, in
spite of the oath by which he had generously for
given Shimei, to slay that spiteful and cowardly per
son. Behold there is with thee Shimei son of Gera,
the Benjamite of Bahurim, who cursed me with a
grievous curse in the day when I went to Maha-
naim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan and
I sware to him by Jahweh, saying, I will not put
thee to death with the sword. Now therefore hold
him not guiltless, for thou art a wise man : and
thou wilt know what thou oughtest to do with
him — thou shalt bring his hoar head down to
the grave with blood. And David slept with his
fathers, and was buried in the city of David.
These are horrible words to be the last of such
a life : horrible words clothing a horrible spirit.
But this is just one of the passages in David's
1 I Kings ii. esp. 2-9: cf. Cheyne, Aids to Devout Study of
Criticism, 63 ff .

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 81
biography, which, upon linguistic and other
grounds, criticism has taught us to doubt. It
is a late passage; it betrays the temper as
well as the dialect of a legal school in Israel,
which enforced the extermination of the enemies
of the pious.1 We have much reason, therefore,
to let it go, and letting it go we remove, from
the most interesting of Old Testament stories
of character, a termination which saddens every
charm and blights every promise revealed by its
previous progress.
These instances must suffice for the reigns of
Saul, David and Solomon, as recounted in the
Books of Samuel and Kings.2 I have already
shown that criticism accepts the official annals
of their successors, but that personal narratives
have mingled with these, and that the religious
judgement passed on each reign has been entered
by an editor writing from the later standpoint of
Deuteronomy.3 Among the personal narratives
which thus mingle with the official annals, the
greatest are those of Elijah and Elisha.
The story of Elijah (i Kings xvii. -xix., xxi.,
1 Verses 2-4 are plainly, from their language, by a Deutero
nomic Redactor, therefore later than the seventh century. The
king, as pictured in verses 5-9, is quite incompatible with the
picture of him given in the previous chapter ; and the author of
the rest of the chapter, verses 13-46, could not have known of
verses 5-9, for he gives other grounds for the slaughter of Joab.
2 The late and less trustworthy accounts in Chronicles have
already been treated. See Lecture 11., pp. 55 f.
» See pp. 65 f. F

82 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
and 2 Kings i., ii.), cannot be much later than a
century after Elijah himself.1 If some of the
colossal elements of this prophet's fame be
of posthumous growth, they not only prove
how immense the man and his work must
have been, but they reveal one of its chief
qualities and they do not disguise the rest.
The God of Elijah appears in overwhelming
physical manifestations — as the Lord of drought
and famine, of the cloud, the rain and the
fire. He calls his prophet from the solitudes
of nature and His hand makes His servant
run and leap before the King's chariot across
the whole length of Esdraelon. Such elements
in the prophet's sympathy are conspicuous in
other Semitic religions and are those on which
the popular imagination would most naturally
fasten. But they do not submerge other and
higher religious interests. Elijah's jealousy for
his God is not accounted for by explaining the
contest of his time as one between the nearly
equal religions of two Semitic tribes. Elijah's
zeal is inexplicable unless it was inspired by a
conviction of the unique character of Jahweh;
his intolerance of foreign deities must have had
ethical reasons. Such a conclusion is not only
1 For the Northern Kingdom from which it sprang — (notice
especially how Elijah goes to seek Jahweh not where the Judaean
Amos hears his voice in Jerusalem, but at Horeb) — came to an end
in 721, and was in dire trouble by 735. Elijah flourished c. 860.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 83
in line with the general development of Israel's
religion J and supported by all we know of the
rival Semitic faiths, but sustained by the story
itself. According to this, Elijah enforced the
claims of Jahweh in independence of the nation ;
not only against the deities of Phoenicia but
against Ahab and Israel themselves. He pre
dicted the employment of a foreign nation by
Jahweh to punish His own people. Finally, he
defended the rights of the common man against
the avarice of the king. The religious interest of
the narrative is of supreme significance. It is
the emphasis, by one who felt all the physical
wonder and force of the deity, of the indis
pensable ethical in religion. The former was
common to all the Semitic religions ; the latter
was the character of Israel's God alone. No
one therefore can doubt the historical reality of
Elijah or the quality of that service which
stamped him as the greatest prophet since
Moses. Elijah was great enough to combine
the physical and ethical significance of the
Godhead. But he is represented as arriving
only gradually at the full meaning of his mes
sage, and learning, through doubt and pain,
that the ethical is the greater.2 From this,
too, we may infer the essentially historical
value of his story : it is further supported by
the saying attributed to him, How long will
1 See next Lecture. 2 Chap. xix.

84 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
ye limp between two opinions, and his sarcasms
upon the Phoenician myths of Baal.1 We would
be foolish, indeed, to doubt the originality of
these. For the rest, there is not a single feature
in the story which can be identified as late, or
which does not reflect, in some way, the re
ligious conditions of Elijah's time.
No school of criticism denies the reality of
Elisha, or of his services to Israel in the
disastrous days of the border wars with the
Arameans and their raids up to the very walls
of the capital. It was his ceaseless vigilance
upon the enemy, his unbroken hope for his
people through their worst defeats, which won
for the aged prophet from his king the high
name of the Chariot of Israel and the Horsemen
thereof? But it would be equally impossible to
prove the historical reality of the series of
curious marvels attributed to Elisha from sources
outside the annals of the Kings of Israel.
These, however, are practically of no importance
to the Christian preacher.
Such instances must suffice for the period of
Israel's history from Samuel to the eve of the
great prophets of the eighth century. From
this onwards, the student of Scripture traverses
1 xviii. 27.
2 2 Kings xiii. 14. Some critics have suggested that the name
is a mere imitation of that already bestowed upon Elijah; but
Elisha's services were such that more probably it was original in
his case.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 85
ground still more certain. The exceptions are
trifling so long as we keep to the Books of
Kings and the Prophets. Consider how all else
lies before us unquestioned by criticism. Un
questioned ? I should rather say fortified, ex
plored, illuminated, made habitable for modern
men. The labours of the prophets, the doom
and fall of Northern Israel, the carriage of Jeru
salem through her awful crisis upon the solitary
faith of Isaiah ; his victory ; the reaction under
Manasseh, and the recrudescence of heathen
ism ; the discovery of Deuteronomy and the
reforms of Josiah ; 2 the confidence of the people
in an external righteousness and their disillusion
ment by Josiah's tragic death at Megiddo; the
second reaction to heathenism under Jehoiakim ;
the story of Judah's decline and fall; the story
of the Exile and of the Return ; 2 the brilliant
hopes and their disappointment; the struggle,
with foreign tyrants and native traitors, for the
nation's purity and loyalty to God; the growth
of legalism and of the sweet personal piety
which grew behind the Law like a garden of
lilies within a hedge of thorns; the story of
the Diaspora and of contact with alien systems
of culture and religion; the story of righteous
1 On the exact amount of these consult a good commentary
on Kings.
2 On the exact nature of this and the questions which still
divide critics, see Book of the Twelve Prophets, vol. ii. chap. xvi.

86 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
suffering in meditation upon its meaning; the
rise of speculation and of the schools of teachers,
who applied the fear of Jahweh and the wisdom
which springs from it to the everyday life of
men. No historical criticism can take away
these fields from the preacher of to-day. Across
them he may move with all the confidence and
boldness of the fathers — nay, with more fresh
ness, more insight, more agility, for the text is
clearer, the discrepancies explained, the allusions
better understood, and all the old life re-
quickened out of which those prophets and
reformers, those psalmists and wise men, with
all their literature, originally sprang.
Before we go back to the Hexateuch there
are two questions about the historical character
of portions of the literature which we have been
surveying that demand some special notice —
the authorship of the Psalms and the character
of the Book of Jonah.
On the former of these this is not the place
to go into details. But I may say summarily,
that while it is impossible to conceive of so
mobile and vibrant a heart as David's, so bold
and musical a skill, as never stirred to the
praise of his nation's God in an age when the
secular and the religious were one; and while
the King's fame as the father of sacred min
strelsy appears inexplicable unless he actually
composed some hymns ; yet recent criticism has

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 87
tended to confirm the impossibility of proving
any given psalm in our Psalter to have been by
David.1 'The Psalter is the hymn-book of
the second Temple ' at least five hundred years
after David passed away. No reliance can be
placed upon the titles which its editors have
prefixed to individual psalms.2 And although
it is possible, and I think on the whole certain,
that the Psalter contains pre-Exilic elements —
for it is hardly conceivable that lyrical expres
sions of the teaching of the great prophets
were not preserved in Israel — yet, like all other
religious poetry, that of Israel suffered such
changes in its tradition and in its adaptation to
use in public worship, that we cannot with any
certainty trace its various constituents to their
personal origins.
But if such conclusions be inevitable, does the
religious value of the Psalter suffer from them?
I venture, from practical experience, to think that
it does not. The criticism of the Psalms may
rob the preacher of the right to use many of the
1 See RobertsonSmith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church?v\i.
2 Some of them, like that of the 52nd, are so plainly unsuit
able to the verses below them as to throw discredit on the rest;
and as a matter of fact we know, from the titles given to the con
cluding Psalms in the Greek version but not found in the Hebrew,
that the manufacture of titles was a process always going on, even
after the Hebrew Canon closed, and based on pure conjecture.
For a discussion of the whole subject see Robertson Smith, op.
cit.; Cheyne, The Origin of the Psalter ; Driver's Introduction?
chap. vii. ; and on the other side Robertson's Poetry and Religion
of the Psalms: Edinburgh, 1898.

88 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
incidents and personal experiences which have
lent picturesqueness to his preaching. But, after
all, much of this is the mere confectionery of the
pulpit, fit only to spoil the appetite of the hearers
for the sincere milk of the word. No denial of
Psalms to David or to Moses can diminish their
spiritual value as authentic expressions ofthe
human spirit on every level and under every
shadow of the Church's experience. The detach
ment of the Psalms from this or that famous
figure in Israel's history will only leave us the
more free to appreciate their essential and un
mitigated humanity, under the influence of God's
Spirit. This is true even of such a Psalm as
the Fifty-first. There is every reason to believe
the Psalm to be Exilic.1 Further, it is not the
acknowledgment by a single individual of an
extraordinary and revolting crime against some
fellow-creature, but the confession, on behalf
of the whole Church, of her inherent sinfulness
before God, and of her neglect of her mission to
the world.2 I do not ask you to accept this view
1 The last two verses plainly fix the composition of the Psalm
in the days before sacrifices had been resumed on the Temple
altar and the walls of Jerusalem were still unbuilt. For the proof
that these verses are from the same author as those which precede
them see Cheyne, Origin of the Psalter ; Robertson Smith, The
Old Testament in the Jewish Church, pp. 440 ft. ; and compare
The Book of the Twelve Prophets, pp. 276 ff.
2 Verse 4, ' Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done
this evil in Thy sight' could hardly be said by David of his crime
against his fellow-man and woman (cf . also verse 3). It is suitable
to the lips of the Exilic Church, who were suffering in Babylon

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 89
of the authorship and meaning of the Psalm. I
only desire you to perceive that it does not lessen
the religious value of the Psalm to the preacher
or to his people.
The Book of Jonah raises a larger question than
those of its own interpretation, but this is an
swered for us by Christ Himself. I said above that
Revelation is not coincident with actual history.
Christ has shown this by His parables ; and the
only view of the story of Jonah, which does justice
to its teaching and explains its place in a Book
of prophetic discourses, is that which treats it not
as real history but as a sermon, in the form of
a parable, upon the great evangelical truth, that
God has granted to the Gentiles also repentance
unto life. This I have elsewhere sufficiently
proved and illustrated.1
There still remains the most difficult part of
our present task — the Hexateuch. We all know
that, from the time of the Epistle to the Hebrews
to the present day, the strong preaching from
the Old Testament, of which I have spoken, has
understood the narratives of the Pentateuch as
actual history. How has criticism affected our
materials here ?
not because of their sins against that Empire, but because of their
sins against God. For the use of verse 5 by the Church, and not
by an individual, cf. Isaiah Ixiii. 16 and John viii. 33 ff. For the
meaning of bloodguiltiness in verse 14a see its contrast in 13, 14^
and 15, the Church's duty of declaring God to sinners; and cf.
Ezekiel iii. 18 ff.
1 Book ofthe Twelve Prophets, vol. ii., chaps, xxxiv.-xxxviii.

90 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
I propose to take the Book of Genesis, and
to examine first the part which opens with the
Creation and Fall of Man in the second chapter
and closes in the eleventh just before the call of
Abraham. Here it is obvious that we do not have a tran
script of actual history, in the narrower sense
of that word. This need scarcely be argued, but
we may take two points in illustration of it. The
Book of Genesis, by a careful chronology, carries
the human family back by named generations to
the creation of the first man, in 4219 B.C., or —
according to the Greek version which makes
the ages of the Patriarchs much greater at the
birth of their sons than the Hebrew does — to
5408. But recent discoveries, in Babylonia and
Egypt — the first of which we owe to American
and the second to British labours — prove that in
both of these great river-valleys man lived and
had already developed considerable culture at a
date long anterior to that assigned to his creation
by the Book of Genesis.1 Again, the Book of
1 The antiquity of human civilisation may not be so great as
some Assyriologists calculate, but on the very lowest reckoning it
preceded both of the Biblical dates for the Creation. An inscrip
tion of the Babylonian King Nabonidus, c. 550 B.C., states that
he restored the temple of Naram-Sin, built 3200 years previously,
which would fix the date of NarSm-Sin at 3750 B.C., and this is
generally accepted by Assyriologists, who have not only found in
scriptions of Sargon I., father of Nar&m-Sin, but inscriptions of his
predecessors who, from the more primitive character of their writ
ings, must have reigned about 500 years earlier, or say 4200, and
who had even then reached a stage of civilisation requiring many

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 91
Genesis fixes the building of the Tower of Babel
in 2564 b.c, or, if we take the Greek data, in 3166,
and asserts that till then the whole earth was
of one language and of one speech. Yet we have
discovered inscriptions in three languages, of
different families, Sumerian, Babylonian and
Egyptian, which are all earlier than either of
these dates.1 Clearly then, on this ground of
chronology alone, we cannot regard the early
chapters of Genesis as actual history.
In support of this conclusion, archaeology pro
vides us with further evidence. In Babylonian
literature there are traditions of the origin of
man, of Paradise and of the Flood, which bear,
even in their details, a remarkable resemblance
to the account of the same subjects in Genesis
i.-ix. Critics are now generally agreed that the
traditions reached Israel at an early age, and that,
previous centuries for its development. The ' 3200 years,' how
ever, of Nabonidus' inscription is a suspiciously ' round ' number.
It is a multiple of forty, a. usual Semitic reckoning for a genera
tion ; eighty forties. If we take it as eighty generations and adopt
the juster calculation of thirty-three years for a generation, this
would give us instead of 3200 years only 2640; which would fix
Naram-Sin's date, instead of at 3750, at 3190 B.C. Now, no Baby
lonian sovereigns have yet been discovered between 2900 and the
relics of Naram-Sin. The later date for him is therefore not im
probable. But even if we accept it, the beginnings of civilisation
in Mesopotamia can hardly be placed after either of the Biblical
dates of the Creation. — The inscription of Nabonidus is in the
British Museum, No. 91, 109; see Guide to the Bab. and Assyr.
Room, pp. 171 f. and PI. xxx. Further see The Babyl. Expedition
ofthe Univ. of Pennsylvania (1893, etc.), ed. by Hilprecht.
1 See more fully Driver, Authority etc., p. 34.

92 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
along with other elements of Babylonian legend
and mythology, they underwent considerable
modification and gradually became, when perhaps
all memory of their true origin was lost, part of
the folk-lore of Canaan. The process probably
extended through many centuries before the
authors of these chapters of Genesis used them
for a higher purpose. But this absence of his
tory from the chapters, this fact that their frame
work is woven from the raw material of myth
and legend, cannot discredit the profound moral
and religious truths with which they are charged,
any more than the cosmogony of his time, which
Milton employs, impairs by one whit our spiritual
indebtedness to Paradise Lost.
Nor (it is hardly necessary to add) does the
legendary character of these stories altogether
destroy their historical value. Anthropologists
are of opinion that many of the legends and
superstitions of a people spring from recollec
tions of tribes who preceded them in the occupa
tion of the land, and who either disappeared in
some great catastrophe, or, before dying out,
struggled for a time furtively and mysteriously
in wilder parts of their ancient domain. Such
recollections of early races appear to underlie
the genealogies and primitive civilisations de
scribed in the first eleven chapters of Genesis;
and they are still more apparent in the rest of
the Hexateuch: in Israel's traditions of the

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 93
aboriginal tribes of Canaan and of the earliest
adventures of the families of Jacob.
Whatever may have been the historical and
literary origins of the narratives in Genesis of
primaeval man, their ethical value to the preacher
is beyond all question. Look at the grandness
of the conception which dominates and employs
them. The Epic of Humanity in which they are
arranged begins with a vision of creation. It
traces the Divine purpose from the making of
man. It follows man from the dawn of the
moral sense through the elementary conflict of
passion with conscience, the growth of knowledge,
the necessity of labour, the beginnings of crime,
the rise of civilisation, the separation of the
peoples, the emergence at last of a chosen
people — chosen, be it observed, not for their own
salvation or their own glory but, as the epic
affirms, in order that in them all families of
mankind may be blessed.
Nor is this great epic only thus colossal in
conception. In insight it is equally profound.
I need not speak of the absence of national
narrowness from its account of the origin of the
race. Man is treated as man ; the great human
experiences of temptation and guilt, of desire
and labour and death, are brought before us with
a simplicity which too often hides from us the
depth and volume of their truth. Take the prose
poem of the Fall of Man in Paradise. It is usual

94 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
to call the morality of early Israel a purely tribal
morality like that of all their Semitic kinsfolk.
But the nation which produced this story almost
certainly before 700 B.C., had already within it
minds far advanced beyond the stage of a tribal
morality.1 The man who composed the third
chapter of Genesis was not. the simple scribe of
some early traditions at which, in our superior
wisdom, we can smile as at a story for children.
He was the acute and faithful reader of his own
heart, and, from whatever source you believe his
inspiration to have been derived, you cannot
gainsay the essential truthfulness of his account.
He had grasped the relation of God to the indi
vidual, he was expert in the heart's experience of
temptation : the mysterious connection between
knowledge and the boldness to sin ; the workings
of conscience; the relation of guilt, if not to
death, yet to the terror and curse of death.
After all the centuries of man's acquaintance
with himself, after all the analyses of philosophy
and ethics, we have hardly reached deeper than
this ancient examination of the mysteries and
complications of the human heart.
But go a little further in this epic and you
discover traces of a remarkable conception of
history. Evil is followed out of the individual
heart to its effects on the family, on the state
and on civilisation. The Fall of the Man in the
1 See below, next Lecture, pp. 133 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 95
garden is not the only Fall in the Book of Genesis,
and every one of the others is traced to a similar
source : the increase of knowledge and of power
unaccompanied by reverence ; the opening of the
eyes to the desirable things of life which gradually
come within reach of us all as the apple came
within the reach of Eve. We have this presented
to us in the form of several laborious cycles of
progress, each ending in a colossal catastrophe.
One of them relates the increase of mankind
in numbers, their progress in intellectual and
national power, their stagnancy in hate and the
desire for vengeance.1 Another tells us how
men multiplied, how the pride and beauty of the
race wedded with the sons of God, and wicked
ness became so great that God resolved to
destroy man from the face of the earth.2 Another
describes the rise of architecture. Men settle in
Shinar, they build cities, their art and their power
increase, but their pride and impiety also, till
God comes down and confounds the colossal and
irreverent ambition of their works.3 All three
stories contain much legendary material from
several different sources. Their authors have
also been unable to throw off that fear of God,
which is cast out only by the perfect love taught
by Christ, and under which Pagan races have
ever imagined the Deity to be jealous of the
intellectual and material achievements of His
1 Gen. iv. 2 Gen. vi. ff. 3 Gen. xi.

96 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
creatures. Yet in all the greater relief that they
lie beneath so sombre a heaven, the noble and
permanent lessons of the inspired author stand
forth: that human genius and human wealth, if
not accompanied by faith and obedience to God,
mean the development of a fatal pride, whose
end is the destruction of many individuals and
the retardation of all human progress. Has this
no inspiration for the modern preacher ? Does
it not present a truth conspicuously absent from
some theories of evolution which inspire so much
of the hopefulness and the pride of modern man ?
— the truth, namely, that no evolution is stable
which neglects the moral factor, or seeks to shake
itself free from the eternal duties of obedience
and of faith. Take the story which ends in the
Song of Lamech in the fourth chapter. Cain has
gone forth from the presence of God to the Land
of Nod. From this first emigrant spring the
civilisations. His eldest son founds a city. A
later descendant, Lamech, has two wives, Adah
and Zillah, names which probably mean Light
and Shadow, and from them are born Jabal, the
father of all who dwell in tents; Jubal, the
father of such as handle harp and pipe; and
Tubal-Qain, the wielder or forger of all instru
ments of copper and iron. And these three,
the father of the Pastoral Life, the Maker of
Music, and the Forger of Weapons, have a sister
Na'amah, gracious or beautiful, whom later Jewish
legend calls the mother of singing.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 97
Now, how does the Song of Lamech greet all
this progress of the equipment and adorning
of human life? With an outburst of praise to
God, the giver ? With some apostrophe to man's
power and skill? With thankful notes for the
peace of the pastoral life defended by weapons
from its foes ? With none of these ; but with a
savage exultation in the fresh power of venge
ance which all the novel instruments have placed
in their inventors' hands.
Then said Lamech to his wives Adah and Zillah,
Hearken to my voice,
Give ear to my saying :
T have slain a man for the hurt done me,
And a young man for the wound of me.
If seven times Qain be avenged,
Lamech shall be seventy times seven.
How weird is this : how terrible ! The first
results of civilisation are to equip hatred and
render revenge more deadly. And all the more
weird is the little fragment, that out of those
far-off days it seems to mock us with some
grotesque reflection of our own time. Civilisa
tion finding its apotheosis in enormous arma
ments ; wealth and prosperity leading people
to an arrogant clamour for war.1
These instances, from that part of the Old
1 On Gen. i.-xi., see Ryle, Early Narratives of Genesis; Marcus
Dods, Genesis (Expos. Bible) ; Budde, Urgeschichte-. Against the
above view of Lantech's song, see Cheyne, ' Cainites,' Encyc. Bibl.
G

98 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Testament in which we can be least sure that
we are treading historical ground, are surely
enough to show you how independent of
historical certainty (in the narrower sense of
the term) are the materials and inspiration
which the preacher may draw for his own
times from the ancient Scriptures of his Church.
Let us take the rest of Genesis in illustration
of the same truth. With the close of the
eleventh chapter we pass from humanity in
general to the call of one family and the career of
its individual heroes, whose characters have been
so largely the source of the confident preaching
I have described. After the criticism of the past
century, how does it stand with the historical
quality of the narratives from Abraham to
Joseph? And if that quality be impaired, what
is their value for the preacher?
As we saw in last Lecture, the documents in
which the narratives are presented to us are of
various dates, from the ninth or eighth to the
sixth or fifth centuries before Christ. The
earliest of them, the Jahwist and Elohist, to
which the bulk of the narratives belong, may
be approximately assigned to the eighth century,
and of the same age are the earliest prophetic
references to the Patriarchs ; 1 they agree with,
l Hosea's to Jacob, xii. 3-5 (Heb. 2-4), 12, 13 (Heb. 11, 12).
Cf. the references by Amos to the conquest of Palestine and dis
possession of the Amorite by Israel on their coming forth from
Egypt (ii. 9, ix. 7, and by Hosea ii. 15 and xi. 1).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 99
and are probably drawn from, the Jahwist-
Elohist. But this means that the literature
upon which we are dependent for our know
ledge of the history of the Hebrews from
Abraham to Joseph, is of a date from nine to
eleven hundred years later than the personages
and events which it describes.
Nor can archaeology furnish us with con
temporary evidence of the Patriarchs and their
careers. Archaeology has indeed restored much
of the life to which they belonged. It has shown
us that in the time of Abraham, whom the docu
ments assert to have come out of Mesopotamia
into Palestine, there was constant traffic between
these countries. The city, to which the early
home of his family is assigned, has been identi
fied and explored. Ur of the Chaldees lies on
the borders of Arabia and Babylonia.1 The
settlement there of a nomadic Arabian tribe,
such as the earliest records of Israel prove
them to have been in genius and temperament;
their contact for a time with civilisation; their
half-weaning from the desert, and subsequent
migration northwards along the Euphrates to
1 Ur is the modern Mukayyar on the S. bank of the Euphrates,
nearly 90 miles (as the crow flies) from the present junction of that
river with the Tigris. Harran lay about 550 miles to the NW.
of Ur, about 80 miles N. of the Euphrates at Tiphsah or
Thapsacus, the ancient 'passage' towards Canaan; and between
the Euphrates and the Habur (mod. Khabur), probably the ' two
rivers ' of the name Aram-Naharaim, given by Gen. xxiv. 10 as
the region in which Harran lay.

too MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Harran and then south into Canaan, are all
illustrated not only by archaeology but by the
drift of Arabian tribes upon Mesopotamia and
Syria within historical times. These last also
make possible the wanderings of such a half-
settled family as Abraham's upon the desert
borders of Southern Palestine and Egypt. The
four Mesopotamian kings, of whose invasion of
Canaan and pursuit by Abraham we are told
in Genesis xiv., ' were really contemporaries ;
and at least three of them ruled over the
countries which they are said in Genesis xiv.
to have ruled ' ; and their invasion of Palestine
was 'in the abstract, within the military possi
bilities of the age.' 1 The existence of the names
Jacob and Joseph has been discovered in
Palestine at an earlier age than the Exodus; 2
the name ' Israel,' as of a people, in touch with
Egypt, has been deciphered upon a stel6 of the
Pharaoh under whom the Exodus probably took
place.3 And not only does the story of Joseph
reflect the social customs, the economic processes,
and the official etiquette of the kingdom of the
Pharaohs ; 4 but the settlement of a semi-nomad
tribe in Goshen,5 at first in favour with the court of
1 Driver, Authority and Archaeology, p. 44.
2 In the lists of cities conquered in Palestine by Thothmes III.
of the fifteenth century, cf. W. M. Miiller, Asien u. Europa,
162 ff.
8 Merenptah ; cf. Steindorff, ZA TW, xvi. 330 f.
4 See above, pp. 62 ff.
6 This name is apparently identical with Kesem, the twentieth

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 101
Egypt and then, on the succession of another dyn
asty, oppressed and enslaved, has also been proved
to be perfectly possible in the history of Egypt
between the eighteenth and fourteenth centuries.
But, just as we have seen, that in all this
archaeological evidence there is nothing to prove
the early date of the documents which contain
the stories of the Patriarchs, but on the contrary
even a little which strengthens the critical theory
of their late date,1 so now we must admit that
while archaeology has richly illustrated the possi
bility of the main outlines of the Book of Genesis
from Abraham to Joseph, it has not one whit
of proof to offer for the personal existence or
characters of the Patriarchs themselves. Where
formerly the figures of the ' Father of the Faith
ful' and his caravans moved solemnly in high out
line through an almost empty world, we see (by
the aid of the monuments) embassies, armies and
long lines of traders crossing, by paths still used,
the narrow bridge which Palestine forms between
the two great centres of early civilisation; the
constant drift of desert tribes upon the fertile
land, and within the latter the frequent villages
and their busy fields, the mountain-keeps with
their Egyptian garrisons, and the cities on their
mounds walled with broad bulwarks of brick
and stone. But amidst all that crowded life we
nome of Lower Egypt. But see Griffith's ' Goshen,' Hastings's
Bible Dictionary. x See above, pp. 62 ff.

102 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
peer in vain for any trace of the fathers of the
Hebrews; we listen in vain for any mention of
their names. This is the whole change archaeology
has wrought : it has given us a background and
an atmosphere for the stories of Genesis; it is
unable to recall or to certify their heroes.
With, therefore, nothing more from archaeology
than the sense of the possibility of the main
events of these stories, we return to the stories
themselves ; and here we meet with not a little
that confirms the scepticism engendered by their
late date. We perceive, first, that many of the
personal names are names of tribes as well;
second, that the characters described in the in
dividuals are the characters developed in history
by the corresponding tribes; and third, that
the transactions between individuals, who bear
tribal names, may often be most naturally ex
plained as transactions between tribes. It is
hardly necessary to give instances of the first
of these facts : the recollection of the sons of
Noah, of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob is
enough. But take a few illustrations of the
second and third. The characters of Ishmael,
of Jacob and of Esau were the characters of
the historical tribes Ishmael, Israel and Edom.
Jacob is the essential Israel; in economy,
shepherds settling down to agriculture; in
religion, worshippers of Jahweh by descent and
covenant, meeting Him at certain famous

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 103
shrines, but carrying about with them domestic
gods, as we see even in the family of David ;
in temperament and genius, astute, persistent,
unbroken by disappointment or hope deferred,
capable of excelling their neighbours in the
Semitic craft and fraud, but capable too of
vision and of struggling with the Unseen. Esau,
on the other hand, is the essential Edomite, as
we see him in Scripture, as we realise him on
his proudly isolated territory, as we touch him to
the last in Antipater and the Herods 1 — a hunter,
a man of the field or wild uncultivated lands, a
man with gods but no religiousness ;2 profane,
impulsive, careless, easily wearied. Similarly,
Ishmael with his hand against every man, Moab
with his drunken and incestuous origin, and
Reuben with his unchastity, are reflections of the
qualities which the tribes called by the same
names appear to have developed in history. Or
take the transactions imputed to individuals
with tribal names. When Jacob marries the
daughters of the Aramean Laban, and after a
long and cruel struggle, which proves that son
and father-in-law cannot share the same lands,
fixes a boundary with Laban that neither shall
pass, ' they plainly represent two peoples ' 3 at one
1 See Book of the Twelve Prophets, vol. ii. chap. xiv.
2 Cf. the curious absence of any influence from the Edomite
religion on Israel in the midst of constant influences from the
religions of all the other neighbours of Israel.
8 Driver, Hastings's Bible Dictionary, ii. 535*

104 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
time related, as philology and ethnology alike
prove the Bible to be right in stating, but later
in history divided — and this on the very line
on which Jacob and Laban are said to have
set up their landmark. Similarly, when Judah
is represented as going down from his brethren 1
to Adullam and begetting children by a Canaanite
woman, we are not compelled to read that as the
story of a scandalous adventure by the son of
Jacob. We may much more naturally interpret
the tale as an account of the irregular marriages
which members of the tribe of Judah, situated
within historical times on the Central Range of
Palestine, contracted with the Canaanites on the
Shephelah below them.
The numerous facts, of which these are
sufficient instances, prove that we have in the
stories of the Hebrew Patriarchs just what their
late date would lead us to expect : efforts to
account for the geographical distribution of neigh
bouring nations, for their affinities, contrasts,
and mutual antipathies, and in particular for the
composite character of Israel. Perhaps such
efforts become most transparent in the derivations
offered for geographical names, and the origins
claimed for customs and institutions extant in
the writers' own day. Finally, this view is
confirmed by the undoubtedly late features
which can be recognised in the stories, and by
1 Genesis xxxviii.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 105
the different accounts of the same subject in
the different documents according to the char
acteristic spirit of each. The Blessing of his
sons attributed to Jacob in Genesis xlix. not
only describes the geographical disposition of
the Twelve Tribes after their settlement in
Palestine; but, in verses 22-26, reflects the ex
periences of Northern Israel during the Aramean
wars of the ninth century; another edition of
the same Blessing is attributed to Moses in
Deuteronomy xxxiii. In the Jahwist, or Judaean
Document, Judah is the chief of his brethren ;
but in the Elohist, Reuben.1 On the whole, the
religious atmosphere of the Jahwist and Elohist
stories throughout Genesis is that of the early
kingdom of Israel.2 The Patriarchs sacrifice in
many places, like Elijah and Elisha, but chiefly
at the shrines to which in the eighth century, as
Amos and Hosea tell us, the Israelites resorted :
Beer-sheba, Bethel, Gilgal by Shechem — the
terebinth of M or eh — and Mizpeh of Gilead. In the
eighth century there was yet no Deuteronomic
veto on sacrifice at places other than the one,
where Jahweh should set His name. The Priestly
Writers, on the other hand, with their strict views
1 For this and other differences in the combined narratives in
Genesis xxxvii. see the analysis by Addis, Documents of the
Hexateuch, i. 70 ff.
2 See Robertson Smith's trenchant review of Renan's History of
Israel, vol. i., in the English Historical Review, vol. iii. (18
pp. 128 f.

106 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
of the confinement of ritual to the central sanc
tuary, never make any allusion to the licence of
sacrifice which the Jahwist and Elohist impute to
the Patriarchs, and do not localise the appear
ances of the Deity to Abraham or to Jacob at
any of the shrines famous in the eighth century.1
Surely this clinches the proof that the stories
of the Patriarchs have reached us, as told by
later generations, who reflected upon them their
own conditions, experiences and beliefs.
It is extremely probable, however, though
impossible of proof, that the stories of the
Patriarchs, Thus replete with the circumstances
and conceptions of a later age, have at the heart
of them historical elementsT* The oldest literary
portions of the documents are songs and poems,
some of which, although (as we have seen in the
case of Genesis xlix.) they also bear late marks,
may have grown round a contemporary kernel,
while a few others may be altogether from the
age to which they are assigned. A more signifi
cant symptom is the presence in the names,
characters and deeds of the Patriarchs of much .
which cannot be interpreted racially, but which
is distinctly individual. It is always possible, of
course, to regard this as the addition of an age, in
which the tribal meaning of the stories had been
forgotten, and they were conceived as purely
1 See the Priestly Document as separately set forth in Addis's
Documents ofthe Hexateuch, vol. ii. pp. 207 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 107
personal narratives. But it is equally just to
take some of the individual elements to have
existed in the tradition from the beginning, and
to this we are further moved by two considera
tions : first, that it is impossible to attach any
tribal quality to some of the names, like Abraham ;
and second, that a great religious advance such as
Abraham is said to have made has always an
individual character and experience as its start
ing-point. With critics there has been a distinct
reaction of late in favour of admitting the per
sonal reality of Abraham ; x no one has ever
doubted that of Moses ; while Joshua's person
ality rests to-day on surer grounds than in the
earlier stages of criticism.2 With regard to the
more difficult cases of Jacob and Joseph, the
sane and expert arguments of Canon Driver in
his articles in Hastings's Bible Dictionary will be
felt to be conclusive by all who have not in
continently abandoned the task of tracing Israel's
history behind the Exodus.
Such is the case for the narratives of the
Patriarchs. On the present evidence, it is impos
sible to be sure of more than that they contain
a substratum of actual personal history. But
who wants to be sure of more ? Who needs to
be sure of more? If there be a preacher who
1 Cf. Cornill, Geschichte des israelit. Prophetismus.
2 See article 'Joshua' by the present writer in Hastings's
Bible Dictionary, ii. 786 f.

108 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
thinks that the priceless value of these narratives
to his work depends on the belief that they are
all literal history, let him hold that belief if he
can, and confidently use them. Or if he cannot
believe that Genesis is literal history, and yet
thinks it must needs be, in order to be used as
God's Word, let him seek his texts elsewhere:
his field is wide and inexhaustible.
Than these extremes there is, however, a
nobler way: and the honest student who is
ready to accept the evidence and example of
Scripture itself will surely find this. 'He will see
that the sacred writers aimed at something higher
than the bare reproduction of primitive history
— in itself an impossible task; that, possessed
by the experience of God and the human
heart, which subsequent ages of the Divine
education had delivered to them, they read all
that into the traditions of the remote past ; and
so achieved the creation of types of character
essentially historical, not only in this, that they
portray with wonderful fidelity the tempers,
aspirations and experiences of Israel and her
neighbours, but because they discover human
nature, as it is in every race of mankind, and
clearly tell of the reality of God, as they them
selves had been inspired by His Spirit to find
Him. To the sacred authors of these stories we
cannot refuse a licence of dramatic and ethical
expansion which we, more consciously, permit

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 109
in our own preaching, and which every powerful
preacher of the traditional school has fearlessly
employed. As preachers, we cannot refuse to
follow the narratives of Genesis till we refuse to
follow the parables of Jesus.1 If criticism, with
the help of archaeology, has failed to establish the
literal truth of these stories as personal biogra
phies, it has on the other hand displayed their
utter fidelity to the characters of the peoples
they reflect, and to the facts of the world and
the Divine guidance in which these peoples de
veloped. The power of the Patriarchal narra
tives on the heart, the imagination, the faith of
men can never die : it is immortal with truth
fulness to the realities of human nature and
of God's education of mankind. '
1 See below, on Job, in Lecture vm.

no MODERN CRITICISM AND THE

LECTURE IV
THE PROOF OF A DIVINE REVELATION IN THE
OLD TESTAMENT
We have now reached the most important of the
questions with which these Lectures have to deal.
Does the criticism — whose historical results are
estimated in last Lecture — leave to us unimpaired
our belief in the Old Testament as the record
of a Divine Revelation? It is true that, if this
question had to be answered in the negative, there
would still remain in the Hebrew Scriptures
matter of extraordinary value to him who seeks
to lead his fellow-men to the knowledge of God.
Some contain parts of the argument which we
call Natural Theology; others illustrate how
belief in God is consonant with experience and
indispensable to conduct; others test the former
of these conclusions amid the apparently hostile
facts of life: while all exemplify the truth that
whatsoever religious beliefs be shaken, faith in
God and His goodness are the invariable starting-
point and inevitable return of the far-travelling

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT in
hearts of men.1 Yet precious as such human
argument and experience by itself would be, it is
all of less interest to us than the question whether
Israel's knowledge of God was due to the au
thentic, personal action of God Himself. This is
the testimony of the writers of the Old Testa
ment, and it is confirmed by our Lord. Here,
then, we touch the very crisis of our inquiry.
Before we examine what effect modern criti
cism has had on the answer to the question of
Revelation, we must see whether we understand
the statement of the question, or in other words
what are the exact claims to Divine inspiration
which the Old Testament makes for itself. These
have been strangely misunderstood both by their
assailants and by most of their defenders.
In the first place the Hebrew Scriptures — in
contrast to the timidity of many of their apolo-
1 ' As Scripture nowhere contemplates men as ignorant of the
existence of God, it nowhere depicts the rise or dawn of the idea
of His existence in men's minds. . . . The Hebrew came down
from his thought of God upon the world, he did not rise from the
world up to his thought of God. . . . His contemplation of nature
and providence and the life of man was never of the nature of a
search after God whom he did not know, but always of the nature
of a. recognition of God whom he knew. . . . The singer of
Ps. xix. only saw repeated on the heavens what he already carried
in his own heart.' . . . Isa. xl. 25 ff. ' teaches nothing new or un
known, it recalls what is known, reburnishing the consciousness of
it, in order to sustain the faith and the hopes of the people. There
is, however, in one or two passages an approximation to some of
the arguments of Natural Theology,' e.g. Ps. xciv. 5 ff. — Dr.
A, B. Davidson, article ' God ' (in Old Testament), Hastings's
Bible Dictionary, ii. 196.

ii2 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
gists — emphasise the origin of human valour and
justice, skill, art, and wisdom — all common virtue
and common knowledge x — as by the inspiration
of Almighty God. This is irrespective ofthe use
of these qualities in the service of Israel. The
earth is Jahweh 's and the fulness thereof ; the spirit
of man is the candle of Jahweh. By Him kings
reign and princes decree justice. Have we not all
one Father, hath not one God created ust Of
course men have imaginations and thoughts
which are not God's thoughts. But courage,
wisdom, justice, wherever found, are of His Spirit.
Even upon civilisations alien to Israel and doomed
to destruction, like those of Egypt and Phoenicia,
Isaiah pours his regrets and his hopes,2 as if
their powers were divine and might yet serve the
purpose of Jahweh. But the writers of the Old
Testament give even more practical proof of this
generous belief by their adoption from sources
beyond Israel of cosmogonies, traditions, legends
and even conceptions of Deity. In our present
inquiry, therefore, we need not encumber our-
1 See especially Isaiah xxviii. 6, 23-29, and Robertson Smith's
remarks in Old Test, and Jew. Church 2, p. 340 : ' According to
Isaiah xxviii. 23 ff. the rules of good husbandry are a " judge
ment " taught to the ploughmen by Jehovah, and part of Jehovah's
Torah (verse 26). The piety of Israel recognised every sound and
wholesome ordinance of daily and social life as a direct gift of Je
hovah's wisdom. Accordingly Jehovah's law contains, not only
institutes of direct revelation in our limited sense of that word, but
old consuetudinary usages, which had become sacred by being
taken up into the God-giyen polity of Israel and worked into har
mony with the very present reality of His redeeming sovereignty.'
2 Isa. xix. and xxiii.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 113
selves with the question of the inspiration of
other literatures than that of Israel. Whatsoever
things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of
good report, are of God. His providence, too,
is universal. Are ye not as the children of the
Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel ? saith
Jahweh. Have I not brought up Israel out of the
land of Egypt and the Philistines from Kaphtor
and the Syrians from Kir?
But, in the second place, the Hebrew writers
claim for Israel a special choice and providence
by God in order that He may make known to
them, as He directly does to no other people of
mankind, Himself : that is to say not in His meta
physical substance, for of this there is no defini
tion in the Old Testament, but in His character
and in His ethical purposes for all mankind. In
contrast to some modern theories, which regard
Revelation as the communication by supernatural
means of many kinds of truth — which, as we have
just seen, Israel did not hesitate to borrow from
the traditions of other peoples — Revelation by
the Hebrew writers is limited to the Revelation
of God Himself : and that not of the fact of His
existence, which the Old Testament takes for
granted, but of His ethical character and will for
men. This Revelation they represent as unique
to Israel, and with equal emphasis assert that
it has not been discovered by human efforts
unaided, but that God Himself has * taken
H

ri4 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the initiative,' 1 and made Himself known to
Israel. In the light of these two aspects of Old
Testament doctrine of the Knowledge of God,
our question as to its Revelation is not therefore
primarily one as to its origins, but one as to
its contents. Are these unique ? Do we have
in the Old Testament a true knowledge of the
character and ethical purpose of God which we
do not find original to any race except Israel ?
But then, secondly, is this knowledge all ex
plicable as impressions of God received through
the people's physical environment, or by their
merely intellectual inferences from the facts of
their history, or by their remarkable combina
tion of the conceptions of God which they
received from nations with whom they came
into contact ? 2 Or, while all these may have
been used, does the evidence justify the claim
of Israel that God in His Love and Holiness
drew near to this people and impressed Him
self personally upon them through the events
of their history and through the consciousness
of their great men ?
I think it can be shown that criticism, so far
from throwing doubts either upon the uniqueness
1 A. B. Davidson, op. cit., p. 197.
2 It is one of the great services of Budde's Religion of Israel
before the Exile to show how much Israel benefited religiously
during that period from her contact with other Semitic peoples.
See especially p. 71 (but cf. below, p. 132 of this Lecture).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 115
of Israel's true knowledge of God, or upon the
personal influence of God as producing this,
certainly proves the former, and leaves us with
the latter as its most natural and scientific
explanation. Or to put this otherwise — the
most advanced modern criticism provides grounds
for the proof of a Divine Revelation in the
Old Testament at least more firm than those
on which the older apologetic used to rely.1
Modern research has achieved this service for
us, first by changing the whole arena upon which
the question of the uniqueness of Israel's religion
1 It would be very easy to prove the compatibility of belief
in Revelation in the Old Testament with the results of modern
criticism by simply citing the personal dicta of some of the most
eminent critics. There is an idea abroad among Christians that
the whole critical school are hostile to belief in Revelation. For
this some critics, who avoid the question of Revelation even when
their discoveries lead them to the verge of it, are partly to blame ;
but it would be readily dispelled by the explicit confessions of
such a belief by other critics, and these among the most able and
advanced. Kuenen in his collected Essays approaches the
question of Revelation in the Old Testament, yet never addresses
himself to it. I stated this in a review of the German translation
of the Essays (Kuenen's Gesammelte Abhaendlungen, 1894) in the
Expositor (July-Dec. 1895), an<I the translator, Professor Budde,
a pupil of Kuenen, and one of the most eminent of German critics,
wrote me that the observation was right, but that as for himself
his belief in ' a genuine revelation of God in the Old Testament
remains rock-fast.' That belief has been shared and stated by a
number of advanced critics. The late Professor Robertson Smith
affirmed again and again his belief in the Divine Origin of the
Old Testament, and in the last of his Burnett Lectures (unfortun
ately unpublished), proved ' the uniqueness of Hebrew prophecy
and the impossibility of accounting for it by natural or historical
reasons ' (from an MS. report of the last Burnett Lecture). Cf. also
The Old Testament in the Jewish Church 2, p. 297.

n6 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
has to be fought out. Fifty years ago the apologist
for the Old Testament could determine the char
acter of its religion only by comparison with those
of the nations of classical antiquity. But there
was always something unsatisfactory, something
impossible, in this comparison. The Greeks and
the Romans were Aryans, Israel was Semitic ;
there did not appear to be any ground common
to them all from which you could start the con
trast of their respective developments. The older
apologetic for the Old Testament was, therefore,
more or less unreal. But this has been changed
by the researches of the past fifty years. The
discovery of the monuments of Babylonia, Syria
and Arabia, the study of the pre-Mohammedan
literature of the Arabs, the observation of current
life in the Arabian deserts, have disclosed to us
the ritual, the institutions, the conceptions of God
and the world, which prevailed in the race from
which Israel sprang. We are able to contrast
the religion of Israel with those of peoples who
were of the same stock, who inhabited similar
geographical conditions, who were modified by
the same political forces, who exhibited the same
genius and temperament, and who exercised
strong religious influences upon Israel at various
periods in her history.
At first it appeared as if this recovery of the
Semitic race as a whole were to result in the
proof of a physical origin for the religion of Israel.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 117
From their native deserts the race seem to have
derived a capacity for detachment from the things
of sense, and a capacity of vision. In what we
may call the religious temperament, and in the
qualities required for the propagation of religion :
the powers of intuition, of introspection, of self-
denial, of patience under hope deferred, of zeal
even to the pitch of fanaticism, the Semite in
history has been supreme. Under the fascina
tion of the unfolding of the complete picture of
the race, derived from so many periods and areas,
it was asserted that (the religion of Israel was
simply the flower of the natural religiousness of
the Semitic peoples/
Others went further. Besides deriving the
religious temper of the Hebrew from his racial
origin, they essayed to trace his religious creed to
the same source. The hypothesis naturally started
from the fact that the three great forms of mono
theism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all
sprung from Semitic peoples. Does this prove,
in the Semites, or in the history of the world they
inhabited, a native tendency to such a form of
faith ? In saying that religion is a quality of the
Semitic temper, are we able to narrow our terms
and assert that monotheism was a necessary
notion of the Semitic mind ? You can see of
what importance the question is at the point
which we have reached. On the answer to it
depends the answer to our question about a real

n8 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
revelation in the Old Testament. It requires,
therefore, a detailed examination.
The thesis, that monotheism was native to the
Semitic mind, has been chiefly maintained by
Renan. More than forty years ago he asserted
that ' monotheism summed up and explained all
the characteristics of the race.' The origin of
this he found in the desert, the birthplace and,
to a large extent, the home of the Semites.
' Nature,' he says, ' plays a small part in the
Semitic religion, because she plays a small part
in the Semitic world.' ' The desert is monotheist :
sublime in its immense uniformity it has revealed
to man the idea of the infinite; but not the sense
of that life incessantly creative which a more
fertile nature has inspired in other races.' And
from this ' austere, grandiose influence ' he deduces,
upon the lines of natural development, all the
contents of Israel's monotheism.1
I do not propose to spend much time in proving
to you, in contradiction of these statements, that
all Semitic tribes were originally polytheists, for
we have more important matters in hand than the
proof of so certain a fact. Since Renan formed
his confident opinions, a large number of monu
ments have been discovered, not only in Babylonia
1 See ' De la part des peuples S^mitiques ' in the Journal
Asiatique, 1859: VHistoire Glnirale des Langues Stmitiques, 1863
(third edition), pp. 5 ff. ; and the more modified statements in the
Histoire du Peuple d' Israel, i. pp. 8 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 119
and Phoenicia (whose nations he always asserted
to be exceptions to the Semitic rule), but in the
territories of the Arameans, Moabites, Edomites,
and even in Central Arabia, which bear witness
that polytheism was the religion of every one of
these tribes. Sinai and Mecca, from which two
of the great monotheisms took their rise, were
both of them desert sanctuaries, and both of
them were pantheons. We do not see anything
different when we shift our gaze from Mecca and
Sinai to Jerusalem. Palestine repeats the re
ligious record of Hauran, Moab and Arabia. As
was to be expected where nature is lavish, agri
culture the staple, and men drink wine; where
the land is broken up into well-defined provinces,
and cities multiply, and the political side of
religion is developed with its differentiation of
many deities — where, in fact, on the seaboard
of the Mediterranean we find physical and poli
tical conditions similar to those of Greece — the
polytheism of the Semite becomes luxurious and
rank. Baalim abound everywhere : Baalim of
the underground waters, and Baalim of the waters
above; Baalim of the mountains and Baalim of
the plains ; Baalim of the sun and Baalim of the
stars ; Baalim of the cities and Baalim of the
tribes. Every nation has its own god, and
believes in the reality of the gods of its neigh
bours. Every power in nature is worshipped,
till altars rise on every high hill and under every

120 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
green tree, with a mythology .which is not only
almost as elaborate as the Greek, but many of the
grossest forms of which the Semitic peoples of
Canaan are justly supposed to have conveyed in
early times to the Hellenic world.
Such was the race to whose natural tendencies
and geographical environment Renan traced the
origins of Israel's monotheism. They were poly
theists, and nowhere did their polytheism become
more rank than in the very province in which
Israel's monotheism culminated. >
Before, however, we can dismiss Renan's asser
tions, we have to ask whether Semitic polytheism
contains anything which points either to a primi
tive monotheism or to an ultimate monotheism.
Do we find in it any recollections of a habit of
regarding the Deity apart from the various gods,
or can we trace in the Semitic world, outside
Israel, Christianity and Islam, any signs of a
development towards monotheism?
Of the former of these the evidence is extremely
meagre. Virtually it consists only in the posses
sion by all Semitic peoples of a common word
for God, 'el, which proves that the Semites were
able to form the abstract conception of Deity,
but does not prove that outside Israel any of
them had ever regarded a single deity as univer
sally sovereign, or comprising in Himself the
functions and attributes of the various local
gods, On the other hand, Professor Robertson

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 121
Smith has shown how the basis of all Semitic
faiths, as we find them in history, appears to be
the physical kinship of gods and men. According
to that notion each tribe of men was descended
from a divine father, whose blood flowed in their
veins, and who was lord and ruler of the tribe
alone.1 There are no clearer facts about Semitic /
religion than these two : that every tribe had !
its own god, and that between a tribe and its (
god there existed a congenital solidarity, so to f
speak, which could never be dissolved, nor have 1
substituted for it a solidarity between the tribe \
and any other deity. This does not look like '<
a religion which has descended from a primitive
monotheism. Turning to our second question — was there in
the Semitic form of religion any tendency towards |
monotheism ? We cannot deny that in the singu- I
lar relation between each tribe and its deity there j
lay what we may call a great opportunity for !
monotheism. To have one God singled out for '
the tribe as supreme ; to believe that no other
was his equal within a certain territory and for a
certain number of men — this surely gave room
and time for a purer faith to develop. It meant
a habit and direction of the mind which might
be employed in the interests of unity. But in
itself it was no more than this ; and we can see
that unless there were present in that space, from
1 Religion ofthe Semites, p. 31.

122 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
which the supremacy (if not the reality) of other
gods was excluded, and at work upon that habit
of worshipping one as the governor of life, some
influence superior to limits of space and capable
of employing that habit for a spiritual end, the
opportunity would be lost and the habit rendered
barren. Such an influence, not only capable of sustain
ing the habit of worshipping one god within the
territory of the tribe, amid all temptations to
divide his worship with that of others, but strong
enough to extend this habit wherever the tribe
travelled or the thoughts of the tribe travelled,
might be one of three kinds — intellectual,
political, or moral.
Of the intellectual forces which make for
monotheism, the two most powerful are the
ability, by comparing several gods, to form an
abstract conception of the deity common to them
all ; and the conclusion from the observation of
the course of nature, that this is a harmonious
and consistent whole, derivable from a single
cause. Both of these powers are found among
the Semites; but, outside the influence of Israel,
neither of them led to monotheism. Of the
former we have a proof in the possession, already
noticed, by all the Semites of a common name
for God — 'el. But 'el, if ever used as a proper
name, appears to have been regarded as that
merely of one other god, in addition to the

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 123
national and local deities. Again, some of the
Semites developed a cosmogony, but outside the
Old Testament this appears never to have been
accompanied by, or to have led to, monotheism.
Gods in the plural and of both sexes assisted at
every stage of it.
Of more probable influence for monotheism
than these intellectual tendencies were the
political forces of the Semitic world. In the
growth of a single tribe to power over its neigh
bours there lay the possibility of its deity being
raised to a higher rank than all their deities.
Did experiences of this kind never develop that
opportunity to monotheism which we have found
inherent in the characteristic form of Semitic
religion ? The answer is that minor conquests
within the Semitic world, so far from always
extending the conqueror's notion of the power
of his god, constantly brought him under the
temptation of adding to his worship of the latter
the worship of the gods of the land which
he had taken and occupied. An instance of
this is found in the history of Israel, who,
after the settlement of Canaan, frequently fell
under the fascination of the local Baalim, with
their supposed patronage of the fertility of the
soil. No general conquest by one tribe of all
the others took place before the great advance
of the Assyrian Empire in the eighth century
before Christ. This discredited, as we see from

124 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the prophecies of Isaiah, a number of the local
and tribal deities in the Semitic world, who did
not, enable their worshippers to resist it. It
helped to shatter, as Robertson Smith has pointed
out, the tribal limits of religion, and so far was
undeniably a new opportunity for the develop
ment of monotheism. Yet, in the long-run, the
Assyrian conquests only substituted among the
Semites a small number of new gods for the crowd
of discredited deities ; and by divorcing religion
from the local interests and everyday life of the
tribesmen and throwing it back into association
with the forces of nature, those conquests did
religion more harm than good.1
This brings us to the last of the possible forces
which make for monotheism — the ethical. In
the fragmentary condition of the monuments and
traditions, upon which we depend for our know
ledge of the pagan Semitic religions, it is diffi
cult for us to appreciate the ethical contents of
the latter. This, however, is certain. The fact
that the gods were tribal brought religion into
touch with the practical conduct of life, with the
discharge of justice, and with public emergencies.
But there the ethical virtue of it appears to have
ceased. The duty of the god, the help he could
afford, were identified with the selfish interests
of the tribe. Not justice nor mercy was the
supreme care of the deity, but the victory and
1 See Robertson Smith, Religion ofthe Semites, pp. 35, 65.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 125
prosperity of his people. On the one hand,
there can have been no idea of humanity as a
whole ; on the other, little sense of the value of
the individual in himself.1 The awe and sanction
of religion kept a man in his place as part of the
tribal organism ; but ethically it did not develop
his individuality beyond his public duties of
courage, and devotion to the interests of the tribe.
The god, who (as several scholars have pointed
out) was simply the glorified sheikh of the tribe,
had a moral interest only in the fulfilment of
the individual's social obligations and due per
formance of the ritual, but had no concern
with his spiritual character. In short, it may
be said, reversing the well-known words about
Jahweh, that the Semitic god saw as man seeth ;
he looked not upon the heart. Wellhausen says
of the heathen Arabs, even after some influences
of Judaism and Christianity had come upon them,
that religion did not work with any energy upon
the thinking or doing of the individual. No doubt
the individual was affected by the fear of God.
But even in the days when, under foreign influ
ence, the heathen Arabs had slightly anticipated
Mohammed in the conception of one God, He
affected them only in one way. The highest
moral name they gave Him was El-Waz', the
Restrainer.2 That is to say, the thought of God
1 This is very apparent from the early religion of Israel.
2 Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentumes, p. 191.

126 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
kept them from sin, but was powerless to inspire
them to new ideals of virtue. For the rest, the
Deity moved above the individual, an inscrutable
yet easily irritated Fate : God that was force and
not character.
This has been a somewhat long survey, but
your attention will not have been wasted if it
has led you to understand that, while there existed
in the fundamental form of Semitic religion and
at various crises in Semitic history certain oppor
tunities for the development of monotheism, and
also some influences which make for monotheism,
yet outside Israel those influences were not power
ful enough to make use of the opportunities.
How, then, was it that monotheism appeared
in Israel alone of all ancient Semitic nations ?
How was this member of the race alone able
to take advantage of opportunities which all the
others shared with her ; and in a physical environ
ment, very fertile in polytheism, not merely to rise
above this to a stage of religion subordinate only
to the Christianity of Christ, but to exhibit
throughout her whole history a religious progress
which Christ affirmed to be the gradual prepara
tion for Himself ?
To this unique exception in the history of
Semitic religion it is my firm belief that only
one cause can be assigned, and that is, that in
the religion of Israel, as recorded in the Old
Testament, there was an authentic revelation of

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 127
the One True God : of which thesis the rest of
this Lecture is offered as a proof on the lines of
modern criticism. And as the proof is most
difficult with regard to the earlier stages of
Israel's history in which we see their religion
not yet far removed from the ordinary Semitic
levels, I propose to limit the inquiry to the period
before the greatest prophets. If we can prove
the possibility of revelation among the religious
conditions which then existed, the pure mono
theism of the prophets which followed, and the
culmination of the whole process in Christ, will
complete and vindicate our argument.
There is no necessity to prove in detail the
Semitic origins of the Hebrews and their religion.1
The traditions of the people affirm not only these
but the close kinship of Israel to certain tribes of
the race which still clung to the ancestral desert,
or had not drifted beyond its borders : Ishmael,
Ammon, Moab and Edom. Israel were at first
a loose confederacy of clans descended from a
common ancestor, and cursed with the incoherency
of all Semitic society. They came out of the
desert into Palestine, and through the formative
period of their history not only were affected
by the neighbourhood of the desert to their
territory ; but portions of them interrnarried with
1 I have given detailed proofs in the first of the Jowett Lectures
on the Religion of Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries,
which I hope soon to publish.

128 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
desert tribes or continued in close alliance with
these. Their fathers had been nomads ; and
the characters of their typical men, as for instance
Jacob, are essentially, in their good and bad
elements, the characters of the desert herdsmen.
Tt is in their religion, however, that their
Semitic origin is most apparent. The god of
early Israel was a tribal god ; and His relation
to His people is described in the same way as
Israel's neighbours describe the relation of their
gods to themselves. Israel looked to Jahweh as
the Moabites looked to Chemosh, for leadership
in war, for decisions upon justice — including the
detection of criminals and lost property and the
settlement of questions of inheritance — and for
direction as to the ritual of worship. They
prayed to him to let them see their desire on
their enemies, ascribed their victories to His
love for them, their defeats to His anger, and
they devoted to Him in slaughter their prisoners
of war, and the animals they captured from
their foes ; all exactly as their Moabite neighbours
are reported, in very much the same language,1
to have done to Chemosh, the god of Moab.
Moreover, they regarded the power of Jahweh as
limited to their own territory, and His worship
as invalid beyond it.2 Though, like all Semites,
they felt their duty to one God as the supreme
Lord of themselves, they did not deny the reality
1 The Moabite Stone. a r Sam. xxvi. 19.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 129
of other gods.1 Again, like other Semites, early
Israel associated their God with certain physical
forces. The manifestations of Jahweh took place
in the rain, the thunderstorm, the lightning and
the fire ; His voice was heard in the stir of
the trees before the wind.2 Again, the ritual of
Israel is full of exact analogies to the ritual
of Semitic sanctuaries from Cyprus to Southern
Arabia. The sacrifice of certain animals at certain
seasons of the year ; the smearing of lintels and
other objects with blood ; the anointing of pillars
in honour of the Deity ; the presence of human
sacrifices with as much infrequency and sense of
the awful crisis that demands them as elsewhere
in the Semitic world ; the worship of images by
Jacob's family, by David, and at the sanctuaries
of the Northern Kingdom ; the discovery of the
Deity's will through dreams, in ecstasy or by
lot; the attestation of the Divine word by
physical signs accompanying it ; circumcision ;
1 Not even by the Second Commandment, which is not a
declaration of monotheism, but only the obligation to have
Jahweh, of all the gods, as their sole god. It is difficult to say
when the sense of the reality of other gods died out in Israel.
It is confessed by David : it is implicit in the absence of all
missionary effort in pre-prophetic times, and the remembrance of
it lingers even in so monotheistic a Book as Deuteronomy ; one
of the verses in which, iv. 17, is a curious compromise between
the belief in the reality of the heathen gods and that in the divine
sovereignty of Jahweh. Not till Jeremiah and the second Isaiah
do we find language used of the idols which expresses unam
biguously the writer's belief in their nothingness.
2 Genesis iii, 8 ; 2 Sam. v. 23 ff.
I

130 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the law of blood-revenge and its mitigation by
the rights of sanctuary ; the sacrifice of spoil of
war to the Deity : all these things have not only
for the most part the same names as in other
Semitic languages, but — except for a higher
moral character which, however, only sometimes
distinguishes them — they are the same as among
other Semites, in intention and details of execu
tion. And finally (as we shall see in another
Lecture, so that we need not go into detail upon
the subject now), early Israel had as little re
ligious interest as other Semites in a future life.
Except in the case of one or two heroes 1 this
was not connected with the Deity : if men
inquired of it they did so not by religion but
by magic and necromancy. The reason of such
a separation between religion and the future life
was precisely that which accounts for it elsewhere
in the Semitic world. The unit of religion was
the living tribe : they were the interest and care
of the Deity; with whom the individual had no
part or portion except in his place as a living
member of the tribe.
It is plain, then, that to whatever heights the
religion of Israel afterwards rose, it remained
before the age of the great prophets not only
similar to, but in all respects above-mentioned
identical with, the general Semitic religion ; which
was not a monotheism,, but a polytheism with an
1 Enoch and Elijah.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 131
opportunity for rnonotheism at the heart of it
— each tribe being attached to one god, as to
their particular Lord and Father.
Our next question is whether any of the forces
which could take advantage of this opportunity
for monotheism 1 were present in Israel to a
greater degree than we have found them among
the other Semites.
To begin with the political, — we find that up to
the eighth century the history of Israel was largely
one of conquest. In the belief of the people
this history had been started by the victories of
their God over one of the great empires of the
world. Jahweh had brought His people out of
Egypt, divided the sea, led them through the
desert and dispossessed the nations of Canaan
before them. These experiences must have lifted
Israel's ideas of Jahweh very much above the
level of the respect entertained for their deities
by nations who remembered nothing of their
own history -except as transacted within the
narrow bounds of their territories. We have
more than one proof that the faltering faith of
early Israel in the power of Jahweh was wont to
refresh itself by the memory of those great
events. This, however, as we have seen, did
not cure even the leaders of the people of their
belief in the reality of other gods; and indeed
the settlement in Canaan, so far from extending,
1 See above, p. 122.

132 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
in their regard, Jahweh of Sinai's power over that
land, brought them under the fascination of its
native gods, the patrons of its agriculture. With
such experiences others conspired, especially
when, under Solomon and Ahab, Israel entered
into commerce with foreign peoples and con
cluded political alliances ; for such relations in
volved the erection of shrines to alien gods
side by side with the altars of Jahweh. It is
certain, then, that without the presence of other
influences, Israel's political history would have
been powerless to produce her monotheism.1
Nor can we describe these influences as in
tellectual. Early Israel does not seem to have
had more of the power of sustained speculation
than her Semitic neighbours. As we have seen,
there is little argument in the Old Testament
for the being, and none for the unity, of God.
The cosmogony of the first chapter of Genesis
belongs to the youngest of the- Pentateuchal
documents, and is of date subsequent to that at
which the ethical foundations of monotheism
1 Professor Budde has acutely remarked in his recent lectures
on The Religion of Israel before the Exile, (p. 71), that the con
tact with other gods did not altogether mean religious loss for
Israel. They probably learned in Canaan to associate the more
beneficent forces of nature with the Deity, as they saw them
exemplified in the native gods, and they transferred the attributes
of these to Him. This is true, but the transference would not
have taken place, or at least would not have been unaccompanied
by the grosser features of those gods, unless from other sources
Israel had been convinced of the higher ethical character of
Jahweh.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 133
were already laid by the prophets. The eighth
chapter of the Book of Proverbs, sometimes
called ' the only metaphysic in the Bible,' is
probably of a still later origin. And whatever
the date of the Book of Job may be, its argu
ments on God are not those of the head, but
those of the heart and conscience.
We turn, therefore, to Israel's ethical attain
ments before the eighth century, and here, in
the opinion of all critics, we at last find proofs
of the distinction of her religion from that of
other Semites, and the sources of the mono
theism which culminated in her prophetical
writings. By the beginning of the pre-prophetic period
the Jahwist and Elohist documents x were
extant in Israel. We have already seen the
high conceptions which govern the Jahwist's
account of the origin and early civilisation of
man. In the stories of Jacob and Joseph we
are presented with portraits of character which
display great powers of ethical reflection, and
in the story of Joseph reveal the purest and
most tender of moral ideals. The responsibility
of the individual to God in matters deeper than
those of a tribal morality is taken for granted.
How can I do this great wickedness and sin against
Jahweh ? says Joseph in answer to the chief
1 With the exception of some later strata, which I shall avoid
in the following ethical estimate of the documents.

134 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
temptation of his life ; x and again he explains
the motive of his treatment of his brethren in
the words, for I fear God? Throughout, these
early documents God's care of the individual is
beautifully illustrated.
Now it may be, as some critics hold, that
these documents, in the form in which we possess
them, were composed after the teaching of the
eighth-century prophets had begun to work in
Israel. Yet even allowing this, we must assign
to the processes of ethical reflection which
blossomed in them a considerably earlier date.
The possibility is confirmed by those stories of
David which cannot be much later than David's
own time. In those we have already found 3
the records of a character whose essentially
Semitic features do not show more real to
nature than the higher qualities which dramati
cally mingle with them. This lofty ethic appears
in connection with the national God. David's
sin is discovered to him by a prophet of
Jahweh : it is before Jahweh that the guilty king
repents and humbles himself. A century and a
half later we have confirmatory evidence of the
morale of Israel's religious leaders. Micaiah
ben Imlah breaks from the racial idea, that the
tribal God must necessarily give his tribe the
victory, and at the risk of martyrdom proclaims
1 Gen. xxxix. 9.
2 Gen. xiii. 18. 8 See Lecture III., pp. 79 ft.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 135
from Jahweh Ahab's defeat.1 As we saw in last
Lecture,2 the zeal of Elijah for Jahweh is inex
plicable except on the belief that Jahweh's
character is absolutely different from that of
other deities. The prophet's intolerance of the
latter must have had ethical reasons ; and this
view is confirmed by the manner in which
Elijah enforces Jahweh's claims, not only against
the Phoenician deities but, in the teeth of Ahab
and Israel themselves ; predicts the employment
of a foreign nation by Jahweh to punish Israel;
and champions against the injustice of the king
the rights of the subject in the case of Naboth
and his vineyard. We see, then, that before the
eighth century the ethics of Israel had already
burst the bonds of a tribal morality within
which other Semitic religions were still confined.
This is what we should have expected from the
appearance of so largely developed an ethical
monotheism in the prophets of the eighth cen
tury. It would be unscientific to wholly doubt
their testimony that the principles they enforce
were not new in Israel. A religion such as theirs
is no isolated creation.
We have now to ask, what were the sources
of those ethical features in the religion of early
Israel, which so largely prepared the way for
the monotheism of the prophets and helped to
1 1 Kings xxii.
2 Pp. 82 f.

136 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
render the creed of Israel so conspicuous an
exception in the religion of the Semites ?
Among modern critics there is virtual unani
mity in carrying back the origin of Israel's
ethical distinction to the time of Moses, and in
regarding him as its instrument. Kuenen, for
instance, who is so careful to claim the prophets
as the creators of ethical monotheism, admits that,
though Jahweh of early Israel and Chemosh of
Moab (for example) were branches of the same
stock, ' sons of the same house,' there must have
been in the Jahweh religion from the very begin
ning the germs of that development which it
afterwards achieved in such marvellous distinction
from all the other faiths from whose level it
had started. But though the origins of Israel's
distinction are thus generally assigned to the
Mosaic period, there is some difference of opinion
as to what was their exact cause. Israel in the
time of Moses enjoyed the same motives to
ethical development as we have seen existing
in other Semitic tribes. The close association
of the deity with the tribal morals and public
justice presented many opportunities of reflection
on his character, which the honest and able
minds among his accredited representatives can
scarcely have failed to employ, with the result
of raising the tribal conception of the divine
commands, and the ethical ideal generally. How
did Israel alone succeed in taking advantage of

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 137
such opportunities? It is not enough to answer
that her intellect must have been quicker and
more reflective than that of other Semites ; nor,
as we have seen, that Israel's political history,
which so powerfully assisted her religious de
velopment, was itself the cause of that.
A more probable origin for the ethical superi
ority of Israel has been sought in another
direction. Historians of the world's faiths have
learned to distinguish between nature religions'
and historical religions ; between those which
represent the original connection of a deity
with his worshippers as physical, and those
which describe the deity as drawing near to
his people and becoming known to them through
events in their history. The faith of Israel
was of the latter kind. The people's memory
traced their relations with Jahweh to what' their
earliest historians call a covenant between Him
and them. Their prophets appeal to what has
evidently been a long-established belief among
the people, that Jahweh had not always been
the god of Israel, but that He found them at a
crisis in their history, and offered His help in
return for their obedience. He had chosen
them, and they had taken Him as their lord
and god. The true metaphor for this relation
was not paternal but conjugal : it rested on a
contract. In Israel's belief in this transaction
some historians of her early religion find the

138 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
germs of her rapid ethical development.1 It does
not seem to me, however, to exhaust the secret
of which we are in search. For Israel alone did
not recognise reciprocal duties between them
selves and their God ; other peoples, however
physical they conceived the origin of their
relations with their deities to be, interpreted
these relations as involving mutual responsi
bilities between each god and his nation. Their
histories gave them also opportunities of reflect
ing on the meaning of their god's anger with
them as experienced in their defeats and the
devastation of their lands. Nevertheless, they
were not thereby inspired to the ethical develop
ment which we see in Israel. Or look within
Israel. The popular religion which the prophets
1 Professor Budde has given a very able and reasonable state
ment of this hypothesis in the first of his American Lectures on
The Religion of Israel up to the Exile. 'Israel accepted Jahve's
offer to be its god ; and relying on his promise through Moses to
deliver it found he kept his word and felt that it owed him
gratitude and fidelity in return for the boon.' ' He was unknown
to it before. It knew, however, this much from experience, that
he was a great and powerful god who could help if he would. It
could adopt his worship only with fear and dread, always in doubt
whether it had fathomed the depths of his nature, whether its
actions found favour with Jahve and would be regarded as
sufficient proof of fidelity. Whenever things went badly with the
people, it was far from thinking that Jahve had not power to
help. On the contrary, its conscience awaked each time to the
questions : " Wherein have I deserved the displeasure of Jahve ?
What must I do to ensure his favour?" Thus arose a really
living force whose operation tended to the ethical development of
Israel's religion. . . . The germ of this whole development took
place at Sinai. . . .'

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 139
attacked, itself contained the idea of a con
tract between the nation and Jahweh, and was
conscious that His fulfilment of that contract
demanded obedience and gratitude from His
people.1 Yet the popular religion of Israel did
not therefore become ethical: on the contrary,
the prophet's charge against it was that it was
devoid of morality, and was inspired only by
formal and superstitious notions of what Jahweh
required of the people.
Hence the prophets who combat the popular
religion of Israel declare that the people must
form new notions of the terms on which Jahweh
made His covenant, or, which comes to the same
thing, that they must form new notions of Jahweh
Himself. The prophets constantly complain of
the people's ignorance, and urge them to know
Jahweh Himself. If we believe the prophets, as
everybody does believe them, when they say that
Israel's relation to her God was based not on
physical connection with Him, but upon a his
torical covenant, we ought not to refuse their
further testimony that this covenanting Deity
had from the first revealed His moral attributes.
This is confirmed by all we can gather from
the genuine records of Israel's history before
the prophets. Although we are uncertain
whether any written law has reached us from
1 This is plain from the account which Amos gives of the
zeal of the popular religion in his day.

140 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Moses himself, we cannot but believe, on the
evidence at our disposal, in the existence in
Israel from his time onwards of what was a
more powerful factor of ethical development
than any written code could have been : a con
sciousness of the character of the Deity such as
no other Semitic people possessed. In other
words, the covenant itself was not the factor
which told in early Israel's ethical develop
ment, but knowledge of the God behind the
covenant, and appreciation of His moral attri
butes. It is true that early Israel's view of the Divine
character is limited and disturbed by those
ancestral conceptions of Deity which were
common to themselves and their Semitic kins
folk. The first beginnings of the higher faith
had to express themselves in the language,
through the symbols, and even in the intellectual
conceptions, with which the men to whom they
came were already familiar in connection with
religion. The development, therefore, of what
ever new ethical principles or influences met
Israel in the time of Moses could only be
gradual. And thus the Jahweh of early
Israel shared much of the same character, and
was believed to reveal Himself in many of the
same forms which the other Semites associated
with their gods. Yet from the first Israel must
have seen in Jahweh attributes of a higher kind

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 141
than any of their neighbours attributed to the
Divine character.
We must observe, too, this remarkable fact:
that the rapid moral growth of early Israel never
runs away from the character of the national
God. Other ancient nations achieved ethical
progress at the expense of their religion. Their
gods were left behind and laughed at as the
conscience of the worshippers developed. But
Jahweh was never found wanting by Israel,
and never discredited by any new conception
of truth or by any strange experience in their
history. Every fresh moral ideal is confessed
by the people as the impression of His character
and will; and for each new problem raised by
their contact with the world their faith in Him is
found sufficient.

Such are the facts of the early religion of
Israel which the critical x study of it, in com
parison with other Semitic religions, presents in
answer to our question about the Old Testament
as the record of a Divine Revelation. Are they
sufficient to prove the claims of Israel, that God
Himself spoke directly to this people in the
events of their national history from the begin-
1 That is, based only on such parts of the Old Testament as
are admitted by the textual and historical criticism of the Old
Testament to be evidence of the pre-prophetic religion of Israel.

1 42 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
ning, and by the mouths of their leaders from
Moses to Elijah ? We have seen how thoroughly
Semitic the religion of early Israel was in frame
and fibre ; and not less how in it alone of all
Semitic faiths there dwelt an ethical spirit —
the only promise in all that Semitic world of a
true monotheism, and a promise which was ac
tually fulfilled by the great Hebrew prophets.
We have seen how all attempts to account for
this religious uniqueness of Israel by their
physical or historical conditions have failed,
because these conditions were equally shared
by Israel's Semitic kinsfolk. We have seen
that the gradual ethical development, which
thus differentiated Israel from her neighbours,
appears to have begun with the introduction
to the nation of Jahweh as their God ; and
that every stage of its progress was achieved
in connection with some impression of His
character. It seems to me that there are here the lines
of an apologetic, for a Divine Revelation through
early Israel, more sure and clear than any which
the traditional interpretation of the Old Testa
ment ever attempted to lay down. That is all
I seek to prove. There are those who refuse
altogether to believe in the possibility of the
Christian idea of Revelation ; and with them
other arguments must be employed. But if we
are Christians, and hold that man's education
in the knowledge of God is not exclusively a

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 143
human process, that the Mind which our minds,
and the Heart which our hearts, seek behind the
phenomena of nature and history, cannot be less
urgent or forward than our own in the desire and
effort to meet, then we cannot doubt that the
history of early Israel, as critically interpreted,
was an authentic and a unique stage in the
process of Revelation — that Israel were receiving
through their national God real impressions of
the character and mind of the Deity.
Obviously this could not flash upon them all at
once. The Revelation of the Unity of God and
of His perfect Holiness, as we know it, would
have been no real revelation to a people on the
level of Israel from the fourteenth to the ninth
centuries before Christ. It would have hovered
in the air, out of reach of their primitive con
ceptions and undeveloped conscience : impalpable,
impossible. Had one dreamed it, there was no
language capable of its tradition. The character
of God had to be proved upon the only floor
on which men then expected to see the interest
of the Deity in morals: that is to say, within
the narrow limits of the tribal life and through
the tribal institutions. The will of God, in
order to be understood, had to be expressed,
not merely in the spoken dialect of the people,
but in the dearer language of religious symbol
and sacrament, already consecrated by the use
of many generations. The mind of God had
to make its way to the mind of man through

144 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
older intellectual conceptions of the Deity,
which, as we have seen, ching about the people's
notions of Jahweh for centuries after Moses.
But just because of its adoption of the practical
realities and religious symbols of the life on
which it descended, the new Spirit secured a
habitation in the mind of the people and the
means of tradition and development. Among
all the errors and limitations which the past had
bequeathed, the impressions of the righteous char
acter of God worked as a leaven. They elevated
gradually the great body of unwritten custom
and legislation which Israel had derived from
their Semitic fathers ; they moulded the nation
in discipline and taught them gratitude and
loyalty to their Head ; they proved themselves
active beyond the tribal territory and life; they
helped the mind of Israel to rise to every
problem which its widening horizon presented.
But the divinity of the process is vindicated
beyond itself. It carried Israel through the
crises of the eighth century, when every god of
their neighbours was discredited, but Jahweh
by the moral character, slowly revealed as His
through the previous ages, was trusted by His
people as the wielder of the world's forces.
It produced the monotheism of the Prophets.
And finally Christ confirmed it as .the gradual
preparation by God for the full revelation of
Himself in the life and death of His Son.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 145

LECTURE V
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
The older theologies approached our present
subject in a way different from that which I ask
you to follow. Of Christ in the Old Testament
they have mainly treated under the heads of
Typology and Messianic Prophecy. These are
departments of Biblical Doctrine for which we
have the warrant of the New Testament. As
usually treated, however, they are either too
wide or too narrow for the illustration of the
Spirit of Christ under the Old Covenant.
Too wide — for to the preacher, as the history
of the Christian pulpit has painfully proved, their
vagueness has been a constant temptation to
overdo them. In their elastic range, and the
ambiguous quality of many of their details, the
spoiled children of the pulpit have taken a larger
licence than even among the predictions and
apocalypse of the New Testament. Venturing
beyond the furthest hint of the Apostolic
writers, preachers have spun their allegories of
Christ out of every plausible character and trans
action in Old Testament history and poetry; or

146 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
have assiduously polished each rite and institution
of the Jewish Law in the attempt to make it a
mirror of our Lord and His Sacrifice. It would
not be unjust to call those mere flatterers of their
Lord, who, without moral insight or real devotion,
have heaped upon Him indiscriminately all the
titles of Old Testament History, and symbolised
every detail of Jewish worship as if it were the
ingenuity of their efforts and the quantity of
their results which were well-pleasing to Him, or
capable of convincing the doubter of His Divinity.
The fancy, that to discover some type or predic
tion of Christ where nobody else had seen one
before was to honour Christ and confound His
enemies, has been the besetting sin both of
mediaeval and of Protestant styles of exegesis ;
and nothing has been more guilty of rendering
sermons on the Old Testament artificial and un
real. How different is the liberal and patient
temper of Calvin ! He examines every alleged
type and prediction. He says this is ' too
forced ' ; that ' too fine.' ' In these things we
require not cleverness but quid solidum,' some
thing reliable, something sane. And therefore,
when he does admit a type or prophecy of Christ,
he makes us sure of it. We know that he seeks
to learn what God means rather than to find what
his own ingenuity can prove. He is jealous to
serve his Lord with truth.1
1 The same spirit, struggling with far heavier difficulties, is seen

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 147
But if Typology and Messianic Prophecy are
in some directions too vague to show us Christ
aright in the Old Testament, in others they are
too narrow. There are many passages which
breathe His Spirit, and which have never been
included among ' the types ' or Messianic pre
dictions. I do not suppose, for instance, that
under one or other of these heads either the
Song of Deborah or the Elegy upon Saul and
Jonathan was ever gathered by a theologian ;
and indeed Matthew Henry, on the ground that
the Elegy does not name the Name of God, calls
it ' a humane composure,' a piece of non-religious
literature. I hope to show that both of those
early poems breathe the Spirit of Christ, and
that this Spirit is shared by many other passages,
which no system of Typology or Prophecy has
ventured to include.
Again, every one, who is familiar with the
efforts of Christian preaching to illustrate or
explain the Sacrifice of Christ from the Old
Testament, is aware how the emphasis of the
argument is almost always laid upon the animal
sacrifices of the Levitical legislation, and how
the human sacrifices of Old Testament history —
the sufferings of the righteous and the vicarious
strife and agony of the heroes of Israel — are
in Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 429 a.d.), the greatest Old Testa
ment exegete among the early fathers : cf. the just title accorded
him in Sieffert's work, Theod. Mopsuestenus Vet. Test, sobrie
interpretandi Vindex (1827). See below, Lecture vn.

148 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
either forgotten or used only for the peroration.
An equal error has been made in the Old Testa
ment argument for our Lord's Divinity: the
proofs have been sought in strained interpreta
tions of the essentially human attributes and
offices of the Messianic King, instead of in those
affections and struggles for the salvation of
men which the Old Testament imputes to God
Himself. The following Lecture is the attempt to place
the whole subject of the prophecy of Christ in
the Old Testament and the presence of His
Spirit in the history of Israel upon historical and
ethical lines, in place of those so largely followed
by theologians and preachers in treating of Typo
logy, Messianic Prophecy and the Argument
from the Old Testament for our Lord's Divinity
and His Sacrifice.
I. From the Earliest Times to David.
We will most suitably start upon our task from
the point which was reached in the close of last
Lecture. We saw that the main factor in the*
development of the religion of Israel was the
impression upon the people, through the events
of their history and the consciousness of their
greatest men, of the character of God. This it
was which separated the people from the heathen
around them, quickened within them a new moral

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 149
sense, sifted and qualified the mass of custom and
unwritten law which they had inherited as children
of the great Semitic family, and finally produced
both prophecy and the legal codes, in which the
principles of prophecy and the hereditary practice
of the nation were together precipitated.
But we must not suppose that this revelation
of the character of God was confined to His
righteousness, or was even predominantly that
of His righteousness. That is one of the most
widespread fallacies about the Old Testament.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, who is almost as brilliant
an instance of the method of writing history by
intuition as Renan himself, never made more
manifest the perils of such a method than when
he defined the essence of Israel's religion as a
tendency or force, not ourselves, which makes
for righteousness. More patient workers in the
field have fallen into the same error. Nothing is
more certain about the object of Israel's faith
than first, that it was a Person ; and second, that
the character of this Person was by no means only
or predominantly righteousness. Jahweh is as
effectively a God of grace as He is a God of
justice ; and although our meagre information
requires us to speak with caution of the earliest
period of Israel's religion, it is sufficiently well-
established that during that period His grace
was (to say the least) as manifest to His people's
hearts, and as operative in their lives, as His

ISO MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Justice : for the full expression of which we
have to wait till the prophets. In this con
nection criticism has done- no disservice to the
Christian preacher by removing from the pre-
prophetic stage of the religion the vast bulk of
the Law ; for it has thereby left him the more
free to appreciate throughout these long cen
turies the love and faithfulness of Israel's God.
Our information, as I have said, is meagre, but
it is enough. We cannot doubt the servitude
of Israel in Egypt, nor their deliverance under
Moses, in obedience as they believed to the
impulse of Jahweh ; nor their sojourn in the
Desert, when, as water is spilled upon the sand,
so Israel's distinctive character might have
passed from them, and except for the patience
and watchfulness of their God they might have
sunk back into the nomadic life from which their
fathers had sprung. No one doubts their arrival
in a land, where again their unity might have
been dissipated amidst the geographical con
ditions, but a national career and destiny became
possible by their trust that Jahweh, in spite of
their frequent unfaithfulness to Him, continued to
preserve and to lead them. The notes of grace
— of Divine redemption and guidance — were
thus in the religion of Israel from the very first.
We may not have many, or any, authentic
expressions of this from the period itself; but
after it, in a number of the most ancient frag-

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 151
ments of the Old Testament, the remembrance
appears. In Deborah's song Jahweh's people are
his lovers} The good-will of Jahweh to help His
nation against their foes comes as an inspiration
to Gideon.2 In the movement of ecstatic prophecy
which broke out in Israel under Samuel, we see
the power of the sense of the ' Ruah ' or Spirit
of Jahweh, — His personal energy — granted to
His people to inspire them to victory over their
Philistine oppressors. The movement is the
passion of a people for their God, who affects
them not only by His righteousness, the full force
of which they obviously did not yet comprehend,
but by His redemption of them from servitude,
His patience with their disloyalties, His faith
fulness to them in face of their foes. It is the
early Jahwist (or Elohist) who gives the proclama
tion to Moses : Jahweh, Jahweh a compassionate
and gracious God slow to anger and plenteous in
mercy and truth? Such words may be a more
explicit sense of the Divine Law than the Mosaic
Age in Israel had achieved ; but in any case
the germs of the higher consciousness of God,
which, as Kuenen admits, were present in the
Mosaic Age, were germs of the consciousness
not of His justice merely but still more of His
1 Judges v. 31a. E. Meier, Winter and Budde reckon this
verse to be a later addition to the Song of Deborah: 'in the
style of the Psalms ' (Budde) ; but, in my opinion, on insufficient
grounds. 2 Judges vi. 11 ff. 3 Ex. xxxiv. 6.

152 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
mercy and faithfulness. The long poem in the
thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy, which is
probably not later than the eighth century, and
which so accurately represents the passage of
early Israel from the nomadic life of the desert
to the agriculture of Canaan,1 as beautifully
ascribes it to Jahweh's fatherly providence of
the nation when
In a wilderness land He found him,
In the waste and the howling desert ;
He encompassed him, yea kept His eye upon him
As the apple of His eye, so He watched him.
As an eagle which stirreth his nest,
And fluttereth over his young,
And spreadeth his wings to catch them,
And beareth them up on his pinions,
Jahwth alone was his leader,
And never a strange God was with him.
The prophets of the eighth century are full of
wonder at Jahweh's love for Israel and His choice
of them to be His people ; at His long patience
with them and constant forgiveness of their
rebellion and sin. The elements of this wonder
cannot be wholly from the prophetic age; the
same sense, however dim, must have stirred
Israel from the first.
So at least we seem to see in the very early
Song of Deborah. The attraction of such a God,
1 See Historical Geography ofthe Holy Land, pp. 85-90.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT iS3
and the loyalty which His loyalty calls forth, are
there represented as the factors of the national
unity. These dozen desert tribes, cursed with
the incoherence of Semitic life, were brought
together and kept together by their common
trust in their Deity. When, after the settle
ment in Palestine, ampng the diverse oppor
tunities which the broken geography of the land
so remarkably affords, they were tempted to
separate from their common interests upon
widely divergent lines of culture,1 it was, as the
Book of Judges testifies, not by a return to the
Law that they were united but by the recollec
tion of their debt to Jahweh. In Deborah's as
in Gideon's case, memory was the nurse to faith,
and the conviction of His unfaltering desire to
help them rallied the people against their foreign
tyrants. The opening verse of Deborah's Song
gives us the whole secret of the national inspira
tion in a tribute of glory to Jahweh :
For that the leaders took the lead in Israel,
For that the people offered themselves willingly?
Praise ye Jahweh !
In the end of the Song which thus grandly
opens, we are repelled by the savage exultation
of a woman over the treacherous murder of a
defeated foe. And rightly ; for Christ has given
1 Judges iv. 155—17.
2 The exact meaning of these two lines is obscure ; but their
intention is plain.

iS4 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
us the right to judge. But do we pay as much
attention to the virtues which are manifest in
the Song? Nowhere do we find a more scathing
exposure of those who prefer the material ambi
tions of life, however legitimate, to the call of
national need in the name of the religious
ideal ; 1 and nowhere is self-sacrifice more finely
celebrated. Zebulun was a people that jeoparded their lives
to the death,
And Naphtali on the high places of the field?
Whatever views we have of war — and we
are those who themselves owe their religious
liberty to the virtues of the battlefield — let us
remember what war did for Israel. By war, says
Jahweh elsewhere, / took you? and we may
extend the meaning of these words beyond the
mere fact that so He helped them to freedom, to
the moral assurance that by the call to fight He
redeemed them from selfishness, from servitude
to material aims, from schism and disloyalty to
Himself. The battlefield was the Golgotha of
early Israel. It was there that Zebulun and
Naphtali laid down their Hves for the brethren ;
and there that the Spirit of Christ which was
in Israel from the beginning won its earliest
triumphs. When we hear a Psalmist sing (in
a Psalm for which there are more reasons for
1 Judges iv. 15^-17. 2 Verse 18. 8 Deut. iv. 34.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 155
a pre-exilic date than for any other in the
Psalter) —
By thee do I break through a fence,
And by my God do I leap over a wall —
He maketh my feet like hinds' feet
He teacheth my hands to war,
So that a steel bar is broken by my arms.
Thou hast enlarged my steps under me
So that my ancles swerve not x —
we ought to remember the issues at stake in
Israel's wars, and the virtues which these evoked.
In the next verse the Psalmist gives the secret
of it all : Thy gentleness hath made me great?
The heroism, the self-sacrifice, the loyalty to the
nation and to Jahweh were the warrior's devotion
to the tender and faithful character of his God.
The poem next earliest to Deborah's Song,
David's Dirge upon Saul and Jonathan, is another
illustration of the same Spirit. It is all the more
valuable to our present purpose that it is one of
the few specimens of the popular poetry of early
Israel. The Dirge is not religious in the narrower
sense of the term. It is without the name of
God : it says no word of the service of the dead,
whom it praises, to the religion of their nation.
And above all, it does not commit their spirits to
God, nor express any hope of a future life.3 On
these grounds the great Puritan commentator,
1 Psalm xviii. 29, 33, 34. 2 Verse 35.
8 This will be dealt with in the next Lecture.

156 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Matthew Henry — a man of firm belief in the
inspiration of the Bible and of rare insight into
its meaning — has called the Dirge, as I have
already said, ' a humane composure,' an extract
from a, book of popular ballads withthe author
ship of which the Holy Spirit has had nothing to
do. But Christ has said, Not every one that saith
unto me, Lord, Lord; and again, By their fruits
shall ye know them. Judged by that standard,
the absence of the Divine Name from this poem
will not prevent us from appreciating its truly
Christian spirit. The Dirge is by a man upon
his dead enemy and his dead friend. But for the
former there is no word save of generosity and
admiration. Saul had relentlessly hunted David,
and upon more than one occasion had attempted
his life. Latterly he had been a bad king
to Israel, and his death, with the defeat it
brought upon the nation, had been due to his
own errors. David is not only silent upon these,
but remembers nothing of _ the persecutions to
which Saul had subjected him. That the poem
is animated, not merely by a poet's heart for
the virtues of a great man, but by the spirit of
personal forgiveness for very cruel wrongs, is
proved by the whole attitude of David to the
living Saul and his house. David spared his
hunter's life, and showed kindness to his children.
Criticism has no doubt to cast upon the story,
according to which the service of David's youth

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 157
had been the attempt to win the king from his
evil moods by skilful playing on the harp. Here
was the secret of David's attitude to Saul through
the persecution which he suffered from him. The
life of his tormentor, which he spared when he
had the power to take it, and which he praised
when the king by his own error lay dead on
Gilboa, had once been intrusted to him by Jahweh
to redeem from the powers of evil for the service
of God and the people. But this is the Spirit of
Christ. Though the Dirge upon Saul finds no
place in any theologian's system of ' types,' it is
yet one of the most beautiful anticipations which
the Old Testament has to offer us of Christ's
teaching: But I say unto you, Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
you, and pray for them that despitefully use you
and persecute you.
These instances from the early history of Israel
are enough to prove to you and me, as preachers
ofthe Gospel, that, accepting the results of modern
criticism, we shall yet be sure of finding across
that whole stretch of the Old Testament — upon
which its effects have been most feared, and where
we must confess the life to be very rude, the
ethics to be primitive, and monotheism itself to
be undeveloped — the presence of Divine Grace,
of the Spirit of Christ, and of the virtues of for-
givingness and self-sacrifice which these call forth
in men.

158 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
II. The Prophets.
The teaching of the Eighth-Century Prophets
foreshadows the gospel of Jesus upon its great
texts of Forgiveness ; Repentance ; the Kingdom
of Heaven is at hand ; and the coming of the
Perfect King or Messiah.
Upon the two first of these themes Hosea has
all the essence of the evangel; which indeed
quotes his great saying : I will have mercy and
not sacrifice. Through terrible personal suffering
inflicted by one whom he loved, Hosea was led
to understand how men's sins cost God more
pain than anger.1 From that moment the Gospel
of Divine Forgiveness was assured. And just
because she, whom the prophet was himself
moved to forgive and redeem, was an individual,
we may believe that, while the nation still con
tinued with Hosea to be the unit of religion, he
planted in Israel's faith the seeds which Jeremiah
developed of the confidence that God too in
forgiveness deals with the single souls of men.
Upon Repentance Hosea's teaching is startlingly
evangelical. The care with which he follows
every symptom of it in his people ; 2 the ethical
sternness with which he repels their easy optimism
regarding it ; 3 the labour he takes to distinguish
its true character from the sorrow of this world,4
1 Chaps, i.-iii. 2 v. 15, vii. 1, xi. 7 ff., xii. 6, xiii. 7, xiv. 1.
8 Ch. v. 15-vi. 6. i Ibid, and vii. 14.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 159
and founds it on a new Knowledge of God and
of His love,1 in short, on a real change of mind
— all 'this anticipates in a wonderful way the
Metanoia of the Gospels and Epistles.2
Unlike his younger contemporary, Amos cannot
be called an evangelical prophet: it is Law rather
than Love in the Divine Nature on which he
dwells ; yet he too had his part in the evangelical
preparation. That passage, which least of all
Old Testament literature looks like Gospel,
the first and second chapters of Amos, is a real
intimation that the Kingdom is at hand. It is the
proclamation of the truth that all men are morally
equal, and that to the righteousness of Jahweh
not only Israel, but every one of her heathen
neighbours, is responsible. Such is the necessary
ethical basis for the preaching of repentance and
forgiveness to the Gentiles. The missionary
spirit of Israel will take centuries yet to awaken ;
but this is its womb : this sense, for the first time
expressed in the Old Testament, of the moral
equality of all men before God.
In Isaiah's prophecies we meet with the first
of those descriptions of the coming King which
Christian theology regards as direct predictions
of Christ. The Greek version of the very difficult
prophecy of Immanuel is quoted by St. Matthew
1 iv. 6, vi. 6, xi. 3-4, xiii. 4.
2 A full exposition of Hosea's teaching on forgiveness and
Repentance will be found in The Book of the Twelve Prophets,
i. chaps, xxi. -xxiii.

160 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
as the statement of the Birth of Jesus from the
Virgin:1 Behold the Virgin shall be with child,
and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call
his name Emmanuel. The Hebrew original 2 is
indefinite, and means some marriageable woman.
Isaiah meant no more than that some one should
be born whose character and hopes should be proof
that God was with His people. Whether the
promised Unborn was an individual, or a future
generation of Israel, it is difficult to make out ; but
probably the latter is what Isaiah intends. This
would not impair the legitimacy of Matthew's
reference of the prophecy to Jesus, to whom
prophetic descriptions of the people of Jahweh
are equally transferred with the predictions of
their coming King.3 Against the authenticity
of other Messianic passages, of the Prince with
the Four Names and the Ideal Ruler, strong
reasons have been adduced4; but these cannot
be regarded as conclusive. The premises of
the passages — the firm hold which the Davidic
dynasty had secured in Judah, the memory of
David himself as an ideal king, the need in
the time of King Ahaz for a monarch strong,
just and loyal to Jahweh — were all present
in Isaiah's day. The tasks assigned by the
1 Matt. i. 22, 23.
2 Isaiah vii. 14.
3 Cf. Matthew's application (ii. 15) to Jesus of Hosea's descrip
tion of Israel's call out of Egypt (xi. 1).
* Isaiah ix. 6 f. ; xi. 1-5.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 161
passages to the victorious Prince and righteous
Judge are exactly those on which the whole
ministry of Isaiah was bent, while they are not
such as were necessary in the Exilic Age to which
the passages have been relegated by some critics.1
In any case the application of these prophecies
to Jesus Christ must be made with discrimina
tion. They have been too hastily used as
predictions of the Godhead of the Messiah. But
not even do the names in Chapter ix. 6 f. imply
Deity; while all the functions attributed to the
Promised King are human. Isaiah's Messiah
is an earthly monarch, of the stock of David,
and with offices that are political, both military
and judicial. He is not the mediator of spiritual
gifts to his people : forgiveness, a new knowledge
of God, and the like. It is only in this, that he
saves the people of God from destruction and
reigns over them with justice and in the fear of
God, that he can be regarded as a type of Jesus
Christ.2 1 Against the authenticity of Isaiah ix. 6 f. and xi. 1-5, see
Hackmann, Die Zukunftserwartung des Jesaia, 1893; Cheyne,
Introduction to the Book of Isaiah, 1895 ; and for the historical
theory which relegates all predictions of the Messiah to the Exilic
Age, cf. Marti, Geschichte der Israel. Religion, p. 190 ; and Paul
Volz, Die vorexil. Prophetic u. der Messias, 1897. On the other
hand, Driver, Kirkpatrick, Duhm, Skinner, Budde and a majority
of critics leave the passages in question with Isaiah. For the
arguments on both sides, and the conclusion that those for the
authenticity are the stronger, see the present writer's article on
' Isaiah ' in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, ii. pp. 487 ff.
2 So the present writer in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, ii. 491.
L

162 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
In the belief that chapters xl.-lxvi. of the Book
of Isaiah were from himself, Isaiah has been
called by Christians the Evangelical Prophet.
These chapters, however, we now know to be by
the great evangelist of the Exile.1 To a gospel
for the spiritual life of the individual, Hosea
makes a far closer approach than his greater
contemporary ; yet even in the genuine work of
Isaiah we find the elements of the doctrines
of Grace. Jahweh forgives sins, even the most
heinous and defiling.2 His love and pity never
fail His people's penitence.3 He is their well-
beloved, and constantly cares for them.4 It is His
passion for them which is the spring and assur
ance of all their deliverance.5 Of these truths
Isaiah became himself convinced through his in
dividual experience of pardon and of cleansing.6
Isaiah, however, was too much engaged with
the fate of his nation to become the preacher
of that personal religion, of which the proofs
were given him in his inaugural vision. Even
in the following century, in the great Law
book which codifies the teaching of the eighth
century prophets, the unit of religion is still
Israel as a whole. Deuteronomy is the most
perfect example the world has seen of a sys
tem of national religion, but it addresses itself
1 See above, pp. 53 f. 2 Isa. i. 18.
8 Isa. xiv. 32 ; xxxvi.-xxxvii. 4 Isa. v. 1 ff.
6 Isa. ix. 7, etc. 6 Isa. vi. 5 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 163
to the nation. The individual is treated only
as a member of the nation, and there is no
promise for humanity beyond, nor conscience of
Israel's ' missionary ' duty except to the strangers
who settle in the land. Yet the high monotheism
of the Book, along with its tenderness and
humanity ; its enforcement (in dependence on
Hosea) of the love of God, based on a true
knowledge of His character, and its care for the
education of the young, secure for Deuteronomy
a place in the evangelical preparation. Its
influence on the domestic and personal religion
of Israel in all ages has never been exceeded by
that of any other Book in the Canon. Our Lord
not only quoted from it the expression of the
essence of the Law,1 but sustained upon its words
His own soul in the conflict with Temptation.2
There are few books in the Old Testament, the
regular exposition of which will more profit a
Christian preacher and his people.
This brings us to Jeremiah, who, beyond every
other in the old dispensation, was the forerunner
of Jesus Christ: and that both in his teaching
and in his personal experience.3
Jeremiah began his career as a prophet about
627, before the discovery of Deuteronomy in the
1 Matt. xxii. 37 f . ; Mark xii. 29 f. ; Luke x. 27.
2 Matt. iv. 4 and 7 ; Luke iv. 4, 8 ; cf. Deut. viii. 3 ; vi. 13, 16;
x. 20. 8 He was expected by the Jews of our Lord's day to return
to earth : cf. Matt. xvi. 14, some say . . . Jeremias.

164 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Temple, and he watched the progress of the re
forms which it inspired under the reign of Josiah.
With many of these he must have sympathised ;
and he frequently quotes from the letter of the
Book. But besides his hostility to the formal
obedience which his contemporaries showed to the
Law, Jeremiah's ideal of religion was in advance
of that of Deuteronomy. His monotheism was
more free of the older conceptions of the Deity :
to him at last the idols are vanities or nothing
nesses, empty of reality: in Deuteronomy they
are still subordinate deities whom Jahweh has
assigned to all the nations under heaven} We
have evidence also of another attitude than that
of the Deuteronomist to sacrifices and burnt-
offerings. Jahweh, according to Jeremiah, gave
no commands to the fathers of Israel concerning
these; His commands were ethical only.2 We
have here a more explicit repetition of Hosea's
text quoted by Christ: I will have mercy and
not sacrifice. Hence it does not surprise us that
before the end of his ministry Jeremiah pro
claimed a New Covenant (the Deuteronomic
being the old), in which there is no word of
ritual or sacrifice, but man's communion with
God, and God's forgiveness of man, depend on
the inward knowledge, and acceptance, of God's
ethical revelation. This is the Covenant which
Christ said was sealed in His blood.3
1 Deut. iv. 19. 2 Jer. vii. 22. 8 Luke xxii. 20.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 165
It is, however, in his experience of the relation
of the individual to God and to the community,
that this greatest of the prophets becomes likest
to Christ. The experience came to Jeremiah
from the earliest moments of his career; but
it was developed by antipathy to the people's
formal fulfilment of the Deuteronomic ideals
of national religion ; it was confirmed by the
collapse of these with the death of Josiah ; and
it was slowly articulated in the gradual decay
of the nation and in the cruelties which the
lonely prophet suffered under Jehoiakim and
Zedekiah. The community, which Isaiah had
described as inviolable, upon its historical site
of Zion and in its political form as the king
dom of the house of David, was about to be
broken up. The individual was being left to his
own resources : there was a call to each man
to save himself. The monarchy, the nation, the
ritual, the Temple, were certain of destruction :
Jeremiah could promise to his disciples only their
bare lives.1 And to a man like Jeremiah, such
leadings of Providence were enforced by a number
of religious considerations. As almost none be
fore him had felt, Jeremiah knew how God can
single out the individual and deal with him apart
from his family, his citizenship, or his priesthood :
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and
before thou camest forth of the womb I consecrated
1 Jer. xiv. 5 ; cf. xxi. 9 ; xxxviii. 2 ; xxxix. 18.

166 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE

•} By temper the man was solitary, intro
spective, greatly concerned about himself. His
nation, too, deserved nothing of him; they had
betrayed his God, they refused to listen to his
word, and they cast him off. What a conspiracy
of temptation was here to break away from the
community, to assert a purely individual religion,
to save one's own soul out of so manifestly
doomed a dispensation ! Jeremiah tells us how he
felt the strain. At one time he prayed for some
far-off caravanserai of wayfaring men, where he
could be separate from his own people and no
longer responsible for their life.2 At another, his
countrymen put him in prison lest he should
desert to the Babylonians ; 3 and at another the
Babylonians offered him a place among them
selves.4 But God kept Jeremiah to a more
excellent way, and he had scarcely found his
position before God as an individual, independent
of every rite and relation, or realised his opportuni
ties as an individual, when there descended upon
him a sense of his oneness with his people far more
stringent than ever prophet had felt it before — a
sympathy with their sufferings which breaks out
in the most pathetic cries in all literature ; and
a conscience of their sins, which astounds and
perplexes him beyond the power of articulate
expression. Jahweh, thou hast beguiled me and
1 Jer. i. 5. 2 Jer. ix. 2.
8 Jer. xxxvii. 13 ff. 4 Jer. xl. 4 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 167
/ am beguiled : thou art stronger than I. }Vhy
is my pain perpetual and my wound incurable ?
Art thou altogether become to me as a liar, and as
waters that fail? x His perplexity is his personal
experience of the sufferings of the righteous
through the wrongdoing of the wicked. Only let
me put before Thee certain questions of justice :
Why is the way of the wicked fortunate, and how
are they happy who deal treacherously ? Thou
plantest them : they take root and flourish and
bring forth fruit. Thou art familiar in their
mouths, but very far from their reins. Yet Thou,
O Jahweh, knowest me: Thou seest me and triest
my heart towards Thyself? It is a darker, a more
bewildered heart in Gethsemane : though it says
Thy will be done in its own way, Thou hast right,
O Jahweh? it does not understand the meaning
of its burden and its cross.
A later generation, however, awoke to the
virtue of Jeremiah's pain. Whether the figure of
the Suffering Servant in the fifty-third of Isaiah
be intended by the writer as an individual (as it
seems to me we ought to conclude),4 or (in the
opinion of most modern critics) as a personifica
tion of the righteous and suffering remnant of
Israel, there is no doubt that the vision is partly
inspired by the nation's appreciation of the
1 Jer. xx. 7; xv. 18. 2 xii. 1-3. 8 xii. 1.
4 Both from the grammar and by the fact that Jeremiah's in
dividual experience is reflected in it.

168 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
meaning of Jeremiah's life. They had awakened
to this through their own experience. God's
doom had fallen on a generation not more guilty
than their fathers ; it had covered the righteous
as well as the sinners. Innocent children had
been born into it, and a whole generation had
grown up in exile under a curse which they
had not earned.
Our fathers have sinned and are not,
And we have borne their iniquities?
It was out of this actual experience of the
reality of vicarious suffering as part of life
and of the providence of God, that the great
evangelical truths of the fifty-third of Isaiah
were developed. The Exile had brought Israel
face to face with the heathen world, and while
they received chastisement from their tyrants
they were conscious of their religious superiority
to these. In their despair before the world, there
gradually awoke the sense of a capacity to serve
it; there was aroused a new appreciation of
an old call. Israel was Jahweh's Servant and
Messenger to mankind. His exile was the
punishment of his refusal of this mission.2
But it was also a new opportunity for obedi
ence ; and in so far as those upon whom the
exile had fallen were, as individuals, innocent,
could it not be said that the pains of the Exile
1 Lam. v. 7.
2 Which thought is developed by the later Book of Jonah.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 169
fulfilled some higher religious end than the pun
ishment of Israel, and were themselves part of
Israel's work for the world ? Israel had been
blind and deaf,1 and therefore Jahweh had given
him to the spoilers. But now my Servant is
wise: he understands his mission and the mean
ing of his sufferings, and (so the pregnant phrase
implies) shall succeed.2 Thus in the meeting of
the old memory of a call to the service of
Jahweh, and the fresh experience of the suffer
ings of the righteous, there was born that con
ception of One sent from God, righteous and
blameless ; misunderstood by the world and
deemed to be lying under God's displeasure;
by whose sufferings sinful men are redeemed,
and by whose stripes they are healed.
Side by side with these beliefs in the efficacy
of vicarious suffering, which were derived by
Israel from her experience of life, there grew
up a reconstruction of the ritual and the priest
hood, in which the ideas of atonement and
cleansing for sin replaced to a large degree those
more peaceful and joyous feelings of communion
with God which- govern the conception of sacri
fice in Israel's earlier codes. The fifty-third of
Isaiah speaks of the human Servant of Jahweh
as bearing the sins of the people, efficaciously
removing them, and so giving his life a guilt-
offering for many. This guilt-offering was the
1 Isaiah xiii. 19. 2 Isaiah Iii. 13.

170 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
central rite of the new system of ritual: in which
sin was said to be borne and expiated by the
death of beasts representative of those who
offered them.
It has been argued by some 1 that there is no
idea of substitution in the animal sacrifices of
the Levitical Law, but that their offering is
simply an act of penitence. The argument is
far from conclusive, and its authors have to
admit, both that the human conscience has else
where (though not universally) associated substi
tution with animal sacrifice, and that there are
at least echoes of this in the Jewish system.
Nevertheless, there is a truth underlying the
opinion. The idea of vicarious suffering and
substitution of the innocent for the guilty,
whereby the guilty are redeemed from their sin,
is to be traced not to those animal sacrifices of
the Levitical ritual, but rather to the nobler
source of human vicariousness and its virtue,
as learned by Israel from their own experience,
and idealised in the Suffering Servant of Jah
weh, whose prototypes are Jeremiah and the
righteous remnant. In such human instances
we get the ethical truth of vicariousness : red with
the blood of real life. In the animal sacrifices the
expression of the idea is largely mechanical.
Unfortunately, both in Jewish and in Christian
theology, it has been the sacrificial animals and not
1 E.g. Schultz, Old Testament Theology.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 171
the human Servant, Law and not Prophecy, which
have governed the conceptions of atonement for
sin. Symbol and ritual were among ancient
people the best vehicle for the tradition of ideas,
and therefore we can understand why, till our
Lord's time, the truths we are treating should
find their favourite popular expression in the
forms of animal sacrifice, and why Christ Him
self should associate His supreme Self-Sacrifice
with the Paschal Lamb. But even the author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who dwells more
than any other New Testament writer upon the
Levitical antitypes of Christ, shows their in
sufficiency, and precedes his exposition of them
by majestic emphasis on the humanity of Christ
— as distinct from an official priesthood — and by
illustration of this from those human aspects of
vicarious service in the Old Testament which
fill his opening chapters. This example, unfor
tunately for Christianity, has been misunderstood
— not by the greatest theologians but by the
smaller ones, and by generation after generation
of popular preachers. It is because Christian
divines have dwelt too much on the Old Testa
ment system of sacrifices and too little upon the
figures of Jeremiah, the suffering remnant and
the Servant of the Lord: too much upon the
animal types of the Cross and too little upon
the human forerunners of Christ : that their
explanations of the vicarious character of the

172 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
passion and death of the Redeemer have so
often been mechanical and repulsive. Certainly
in our day, when animal sacrifices have so long
ceased to speak to the imagination and con
science of men, it is the direst blunder a preacher
may commit to dwell upon them except for the
barest of exegetical purposes. If we are to
get our fellows to believe in the redemptive
virtue of Christ's Cross, it will be by proving
to them that vicarious suffering and its ethical
virtue are no arbitrary enactments of God, but
natural to life and inevitable wherever sin and
holiness, guilt and love, encounter and contend.
'Non est dolor nisi de amore amisso, quanto
profundior erat amor tanto altius tangit dolor.' 1
And in this we shall succeed most readily by
proving, as we can do from the history which
we have been traversing, that the figure of a
Sufferer, holy and undefiled, by whose stripes we
are healed, by whose bearing of our iniquities
we are justified, was desired and confidently
expected by men, not because Heaven had
arbitrarily proclaimed it, but out of their own
experiences of life and death, the very elements
of which provided them with their marvellous
picture of Him.
The Levitical system, however, was not wholly
animal or mechanical. The head and centre of
it was human, the Great or High Priest who first
1 Hugo St. Victor, on Gen. vi. 6.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 173
appears in Hebrew history with the Return from
the Exile. In the visions of Zechariah,1 he car
ries the guilt of the whole people before God and
receives their pardon ; in the Levitical Law he
enters within the veil as their representative on
the Day of Atonement.2 At first of equal rank
with the native governor of Israel,3 the High
Priest assumed gradually much of the civil and
judicial power, till he became King as well as
Priest, and thus besides gathering upon his person
the virtue of the sacrificial system, represented
also the political Messiah of the earlier prophets.
It is unnecessary to follow in detail the influence
of this Figure upon the theology of the New
Testament and the constitution of the Christian
Church. We shall see in a later Lecture, how a
merely official and unhistorical interpretation of
the double office was employed to defend the
temporal government of the Popes.4 How in
finitely different is the human and ethical High
Priesthood claimed for Jesus by the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews ! Here there is nothing
official, nothing of a secular sovereignty. Jesus,
though the Son of God and natural head of
mankind, enters upon His priesthood through
the voluntary assumption of human nature and
fellowship with all its suffering and temptation.
The name of His great office is borrowed from
1 Ch. iii. 2 Levit. xvi.
8 So in Haggai and Zechariah. * See Lecture vn.

174 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the Law ; but its character and virtue are drawn
from the prophet's picture of the suffering servant
of the Lord.
But the Spirit of Christ in the Old Testament
is not exhausted even in its greatest human
figures ; whether the Messiah of the earlier pro
phets, the Suffering Servant of the later, or the
High Priest of the Levitical system. We must
seek another line than these supply for the full
prophecy of the Incarnation. Parallel to that
prospect of the blessed future, which finds its goal
in the appearance of a human Saviour now reign
ing over His people and now suffering with them
and bearing their sins, there runs through all the
Prophets another line of vision the end of which
is the appearance of God Himself and Alone —
either undertaking His people's deliverance from
their enemies or reigning over them in visible
majesty. The human Messiah, whom the earlier
prophecies of Isaiah predict, disappears from the
later and God is all in all.1 In Jeremiah, Jahweh
Himself is His people's Righteousness? that is
their full and manifest vindication in history.
In the prophecy which most critics assign to
some disciple of Isaiah Jahweh will be for us in
majesty. For Jahweh is our Judge, our Lawgiver,
our King : He will save us? At each great crisis
in Israel's history, the Eternal will appear, as for
1 See article ' Isaiah ' in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, vol. ii.
2 Jer. xxxiii. 16. 8 Isa. xxxiii. 21, 22.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 175
instance He is pictured in an exilic or post-exilic
vision1 treading the wine-press of battle, and
the blood of His people's foes stains all His rai
ment. With such theophanies we may take the
very numerous passages of the Old Testament
which attribute to the Deity effort and passion
of the most violent kind, describe Him in the
similitude of a man of war, Israel's champion and
protagonist, and do not even hesitate, as in one
instance,2 to picture Him as a woman in travail.
All these anthropomorphisms, as they are called,
are not to be interpreted as the mere effort of
their writers' art to make the unseen vivid to the
imagination of a rude people. We are to see
in them the expression of what all the Prophets
felt to be the essence of the Divine : the truth
that God makes His people's salvation His own
concern and effort, and accomplishes this not in
power only but in pain and self-sacrifice. The
sins and sorrows of men are not only set in the
light of His countenance, but He bears them
upon His heart.3 His righteousness is not only
regnant but militant. He rises and comes down,
entering His people's war with their enemies on
a level of struggle equal with themselves. His
love is not only complacent but sympathetic,
passionate, self-sacrificing: in all their affliction
1 Isa. Ixiii. 1-6. 2 Isa. xiii. 13, 14.
8 Isa. xl.-lxvi. uses the same verb JaB to bear, meaning to bear
with pain and difficulty of God and of the Servant of God,

176 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
He is afflicted. He pleads for their loyalty;
reasons with them in their sins ; travails for their
new birth and their growth in holiness; and
is longsuffering with their sinfulness and their
ignorance.1 It is very evident, therefore, that the essence
of the truth about God's love and the perfection
of that love in suffering, which Christ manifested
and which is the glory of the Christian doctrine
of the Incarnation, was already conceived and
expressed by the Prophets.
The Spirit of Christ in the Old Testament is
not confined to its human heroes and ideals : the
length and the breadth, fee height and the depth
of it belong to the Old Testament's revelation
of God Himself.
1 The substance of this passage will be found in an article by
the present writer on 'The Messianic Prophecies ' in a little volume
of aids to Bible teachers, published by Messrs. Collins of Glasgow.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 177

LECTURE VI
THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY IN THE OLD
TESTAMENT
We now turn to as fascinating, and at first sight
as perplexing, an aspect of our subject as we
have yet encountered : the attitude of Israel and
their Scriptures to a future life.
Every one knows, at least in outline, what that
attitude is. For the most part the writers of
the Old Testament display towards the future
of the individual beyond the grave a steady
indifference; which is the more striking that it
persists among lavish and brilliant hopes for the
earthly future of the nation. The references to
a personal immortality in the presence of God
are exceptional. In the historical Books they are
limited to two heroes of the nation; in the pro
phets they do not occur; in the Psalms and the
Book of Job they consist of a few cries of con
fidence that the believer in God can never be
separated from Him. Otherwise, the life be
yond the grave is pictured as a cheerless, dusty,
underground reflection of the mere surface of
M

178 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
human existence, but without God or hope ; from
the ultimate certainty of which the believer
seeks a respite by prayers for a long earthly life,
and the fulness of God's favour so long as this
lasts. Such is the impression which the Old Testa
ment makes upon those who search it for a
gospel of immortality. It is our first duty to
discover, by an examination of the details,
whether this impression is a just one. If we
prove it so, we have next to inquire what are
the historical reasons for so singular an attitude
towards the life to come. And finally we must
determine the practical value of Israel's faith in
this matter to the preacher of to-day.
I. The Old Testament Data.
In the historical portions of the Pentateuch —
which it is not necessary to separate into their
various strata, for towards this subject their atti
tude is remarkably alike — death is as busy as
elsewhere in the world, and men are as busy
caring for their dead. When Sarah dies Abraham
buys a sepulchre of the sons of Heth, and in
time is himself buried there with Isaac his son.
Jacob loses Rachel by the way, and by the way
lays her to rest as thou comest to Ephrath. His
own body is embalmed in Egypt and buried
in Macpelah. Joseph's body is embalmed and
carried by Israel all over the wilderness that it

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 179
too may lie in the Promised Land. Aaron and
Moses come to the end of their long years and
are laid, the one in a known, the other in an
unknown, sepulchre. These are the great per
sonalities, yet neither for all their greatness do
they project themselves beyond death, nor for
all their closeness here to God do they crave
from Him another life, nor in spite of the affec
tion and reverence which surround them to the
last, and the scrupulous care which is taken for
their proper burial, is there any hope expressed
of their continued existence. Abraham, when
God promises to be his great reward, is anxious
only for an heir of his own body ; J and when his
wife dies is busy only to procure her a grave in
the soil promised to his descendants.2 A living
seed and a land for them to dwell in — that is all
that Abraham's story contains of gospel for the
future. Similarly, the last words imputed to
Jacob are fraught with hope only for the tribes
which have sprung from him, and for their settle
ment in Canaan : Lo, I am dying, but God will be
with you and bring you back to the land of your
fathers? For himself there is the prospect of
Sheol ; he is eager that he be not brought down
there in grief. The inference is that the state in
which a man enters Sheol is his state for ever-
1 Gen. xv. 1 ff.
2 Gen. xxiii. ; see especially verse 8 : to bury my dead out of my
sight. 8 Gen. xlviii. 21 ; cf. xlix.

180 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
more.1 For Joseph the last hope is a grave with
his people in Canaan,2 and for Moses a prospect
of Canaan on the eve of the nation's occupation.3
Even though God Himself prepares a sepulchre
for the body of the friend who spake with Him
face to face,4 nothing is said of a future for Moses
with God. All men, small and great, loved or
hated, come under the curse upon their first
parents : dust thou art, and itnto dust thou shalt
return? There is but one exception, the mysteri
ous story of Enoch,6 which, however, describes
not life after death, but a translation without
death to the presence of God.7
1 Gen. xxxvii. 35; xiii. 38; xliv. 31. 2 Gen. I. 24-26.
8 Deut. xxxii. 52. * Ex. xxxiii. 11.
6 Gen. iii. 19. 6 Gen. v. 23 f.
7 I have said above that it is not necessary in this review of
the historical portions of the Pentateuch to distinguish between
the strata from different periods, for the testimony of all is alike.
Here, however, are the exact references. It is the Jahwist and
Elohist who give us the confinement of Abraham's hopes to
descendants from his own body (Gen. xv. iff.); the death of
Rachel (xxxv. 19) ; Jacob's dread of Sheol (xxxvii. 35, xiii. 38,
xliv. 31), and his hopes for his descendants (xlviii. 21 ; cf. xlix.) ;
the burial of Jacob (1. 1 ff.), and Joseph's last charge (1. 24) ; the
death of Moses: the time draws near that thou must die (Deut.
xxxi. 14) : thou shalt sleep with thy fathers (ver. 16) : this is the
land, to thy seed will I give it, but thou shalt not pass over thither.
So Moses died (xxxiv. 4, 5) ; Joshua's death and Joseph's burial
(Josh. xxiv. 29 f.).
The Deuteronomists add few details relevant to our subject :
Moses must not enter Canaan (Deut. iii 23 ff., iv. 22) ; his death
and burial (xxxiv. 5 f.) (it is doubtful whether Jahweh is described
as Himself burying his servant : see Dillmann and Driver on the
passage). The Priestly Writers give us the story of Enoch (Gen.
v. 23, 24) ; of Macpelah (xxiii.) ; the death of Abraham (xxv. 7f.) ;
of Ishmael (ver. 17); of Isaac (xxxv. 29) ; of Jacob (xlix. 33) ; his

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 181
So, too, in the historical books which follow
the Hexateuch. Soldiers on the battlefield, kings
in the midtime of their career, the innocent
child, the only son of his mother, the friend
whose love was wonderful passing the love of
women, the righteous man, the faithful prophet,
the martyr — they are mourned and bewept, but
never a word of hope is spoken regarding them.
As in the Pentateuch, there are traces of a
popular belief in an underground abode of the
dead, where these preserve the characters they
bore in life and whence they may be summoned
to speak to the living. But that world is outside
of religion ; the traffickers with it are wizards
and necromancers, whom the servants of Jahweh
seek to drive from the land.1 There is again
as in the Pentateuch, a single hero, who escapes
this subterranean fate by escaping death, and is
translated to Heaven :2 but Elijah in his fiery
chariot is no revelation of a future with God for
the common man. Some women receive their
dead raised to life again. There are stories of
prophets who bring back the breath to the bodies
burial (1. 12, 13). Nadab and Abihu die before Jahweh (Lev.x. 2);
death of Aaron on the top of the mountain (Num. xx. 22 ff.) ;
death of Moses (Deut. xxxii. 48 ff.) (with the reason why Moses
died in Moab before the entry into Canaan), xxxiv. lb, 2, ya, 8.
It is the Priestly Writer who uses the phrases gathered to his
people (Gen. xxv. 7 f. 17, xxxv. 29, xlix. 33) ; to the men of his
people (Num. xx. 24) ; to thy people (Deut. xxxii. 50).
1 I Sam. xxviii. 7 ff.
2 2 Kings ii. 11,

182 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
of those who have expired.1 But even the faith
that Jahweh's love and omnipotence can work
such miracles provokes no single expression of
hope that He will redeem the dead to eternal
life in His presence.
The darkness is nowhere more impressive
than over the Dirge of David upon Saul. The
verses of this noble elegy throb with the joy of
life : the flash of the sword, the glint of gold, the
sheen of scarlet, and the beauty and strength
of men. They praise the services of the dead
to the country and nation. They are inspired,
as we have seen,2 with the feeling for greatness
and the spirit of generous forgiveness. But
none of these light one spark of the life to
come. The poetry, the reverence, the love of
the elegy are perfect; but it breathes no hope.
We recognise, of course, that the soul has her
hours sacred to grief; when even God in His
great patience stands aside and leaves the broken
heart alone with its dead. Yet this can hardly
be the explanation of the absence from David's
song of the name of God and of every hint of
another life; for nowhere else in all the story
thaCsurrounds the song do we find any promise,
or even instinct, of immortality for man. When
Abigail says to David : May the life of my lord
be bound up in the bundle of life with Jahweh
God, it is of this life she is talking, for she has
1 I Kings xvii. 17 ff. ; 2 Kings iv. 32 ff. 2 Above, pp. 155 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 183
just said, Should a man rise up to hunt thee and
seek thy life, and she immediately adds, but the
lives of thine enemies may He sling them out as
from the middle of a sling} Life was here, for
Jahweh was here. When men died they were
gathered to their fathers? It is a sweet phrase ;
but it had no religious hope till Christ put this
into it.3 Sheol was the abode of the dead, not
of God, and as in the Pentateuch, so in these
historical books, men went down into Sheol with
such sorrow or blood, as fell upon the end of their
lives, irremovable from them.4
Before we pass from the historical books, one bit
of evidence for belief in the continued existence
of the dead must be noted. It has been thought
by critics that Scripture contains proofs of the
existence, in the earlier history of Israel, of the
worship of the dead. Both in the Elohist's
story of Jacob, and in the life of David, mention
is made of certain Teraphim or images of gods,
and these are elsewhere described in connection
with oracles.6 They were probably family gods ; 6
the inference that they were the ancestors of the
1 1 Sam. xxv. 29.
2 And, as in David's case, to the child that preceded him
(2 Sam. xii. 23).
8 Cf. Ps. xlix. 2 with Matt. xxii. 32 ; Mark xii. 27 ; Lukexx. 38.
4 Gen. xxxvii. 35, xiii. 38; 2 Sam. xii. 23.
5 Jud. xvii. 5, xviii. 14 ; Hos. iii. 4 : cf. Zech. x. 2 ; Ezek.
xxi. 21.
6 Cf. Laban's statement (Gen. xxxi. 30), and Micah's (Jud.
xviii. 24).

1 84 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
family is not unnatural, and is supported by
traces of a habit of sacrificing to the dead which
appear in mourning customs forbidden to Israel
by the later law as alien to the religion of Jahweh.1
The evidence is not conclusive, though sufficient
for more than probability.2 But in any case it
points to a popular belief in the continued
existence of souls after death. These were
1 Deut. xiv. I ; xxvi. 14; Lev. xxi. 5.
2 See Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Isr., i. 467 ; Schwally, Leben
nach dem Tode, 35 ff. in support of the proof of an ancestor cult.
For reasonable doubts of it cf. Davidson, art. ' God,' Hastings's
Bible Dictionary, ii. 200 f. ; and for a full argument against it,
Frey, Tod, Seelenglaube und Seelenkult im Alten Israel, 1898. It
seems to me, in spite of what Professors Davidson and Frey ad
duce, that whether the teraphim were understood to be the images
of ancestors or not, the practice of the worship of ancestors in
Israel is proved by the laws in Deut. xiv. 1 and xxvi. 14, taken
along with the fact that sacrifices to the dead survived in historical
times in other ancient religions, and also among the Semites : cf.
Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 217. The shade of
Samuel is called a god (1 Sam. xxviii. 13). The same preposition
is used in Deuteronomy between such sacrifices and the dead,
as between the legal sacrifices and Jahweh. Those are to the dead ;
these are to Jahweh. When among the Adwanin Moab in 1891,
I questioned them concerning their sacrifices. It was hard for
an ear unaccustomed to the Bedawee pronunciation to catch
many details. But this was clear. They distinguished certain
spring sacrifices, which they make within their camps as minshan
el-mawat ' for the sake of the dead,' from those in Mecca at the
Great Bairam, which they described as minshan Allah, 'for the
sake of God.' — The whole question has been fully argued by
Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life,
1899, pp. 20 ff. While I cannot agree with all his inferences
from the texts he cites (eg. Ex. xxi. 2-6; 1 Sam. xxviii. 13, 16)
his argument as a whole appears to me to be successful for the
existence of ancestor-worship in Israel. -7- Other instances of
sacrifices to the dead, in Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. 241, 450.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 185
called by the later literature RepMim, probably
' the flaccid ones,' but earlier names for them,
when they spoke through a necromancer, are
'obhdth; x and yiddeonim, perhaps ' knowing ones,' 2
and are proofs of a belief in their knowledge of,
and their influence upon, human life.3 Still it is
to be noted that they are not represented in any
association with the Deity, and that the religion
of Jahweh from a very early time regarded traffic
with the dead as incompatible with loyalty to
Jahweh Himself.
When we pass to the prophets we find no
relief from the prevailing silence as to Jahweh's
relation to the dead. The prophets have sovereign
beliefs in God's faithfulness and omnipotence, and
sovereign hopes for the future of Israel upon earth ;
but one and all ignore the fate of the individual
man. Some of them have left us the stories of
their personal origins, they have emphasised their
individual relations to the Deity; but not one
1 According to 1 Sam. xxviii. 7, the necromancer was called
the possessor of an 'Sbh : according to Lev. xx. 27 the 'obh was
in the necromancer.
* In Lev. xx. 27 parallel to '6bh and in the man or woman who
mediated between the spirit and the inquirer. Cf. 1 Sam. xxviii.
3.9- 8 Dr. A. B. Davidson thinks that the name Rephaim ' and the
fact that the 'obs twittered and muttered and spoke low out of the
ground (Isa. viii. 19, xxix. 4) indicate that they were regarded
as anything but powerful " gods " ' (Hastings's Bible Dictionary,
ii. 201). Still they had superhuman knowledge; and at least
the whole prevalence of this necromancy proves a popular belief
in the real existence of the dead.

186 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
has betrayed his feelings about his death or
bequeathed any hope which strengthened him in
face of it. The great passages on resurrection
and the Divine conquest of death which we read
in Hosea ] and in Ezekiel,2 describe the revival of
the nation from disaster and exile. In one very
late prophecy3 there is a cry that the national
recovery from exile shall not be enough ; those,
who have died before it comes, must rise from
their graves to share it. But obviously this is
not the hope of a life with God beyond the grave.
Another cry,4 which rises with this, is of confidence
that God will abolish death. But that confidence
sinks again, and the brightest picture of the
subject which later prophets leave us is of this
life : a Jerusalem from which premature and
violent death has been banished, and the city is
full of men and women who have reached a
quiet old age.6
Turning now to the Psalms, we must put aside,
as we have done in the case of the Prophets, all
expressions of immortality which are manifest
metaphors of the revival of the nation, and
merely affirm its reconstruction and perpetuity
upon earth. After these have been disposed of,
there remain very few Psalms which illuminate the
destiny of the individual beyond the grave; nor
is any of them a reasoned confidence in a future
1 Hos. vi. i f., xiii. 14. 2 Ezek. xxxvii,
" Isaiah xxvi. 19. * xxv. 8. 6 Zech. viii. 4.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 187
for him with God. At the best they are but
cries flung out in revolt from the thought of a
future without Him, or in passionate confidence
that in death He cannot desert the soul He has
favoured with His grace. Some critics have
denied an individual reference to the Sixteenth
Psalm, and have interpreted its verses of Israel
as a whole ; and this is not an impossible inter
pretation. Yet it seems to me that the ninth
and tenth verses are most naturally understood
of the individual, or at least of his generation ;
it was the living generation and not the nation,
actual or ideal, who feared Sheol.1 And the indi
vidual character of the confidence of the Seventy-
third Psalm is still more clear:
Nevertheless I am continually with Thee ;
Thou hast holden me with Thy right hand
Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but Thee ?
And there is none upon earth I desire besides Thee.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart,
And my portion for ever?
Yet such faith did not always succeed in break
ing away from the prospect of that fate for
1 The reference of the Psalm to individuals is further con
firmed if we read thy pious ones (or leal or loving ones) as some
codd. do instead of the singular.
2 Ps. lxxiii. 23-26.

188 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
individuals which we have already seen accepted
by the earlier books, and which is now described
with more explicitness. In Psalms, if not of the
individual yet of the living generation of Jahweh's
people, before whom death looms inevitable, there
are cries that the suppliants may be allowed to
continue the praise of God in the land of the
living :
For in death there is no remembrance of Thee :
In the grave who shall give Thee thanks?
The dead praise not Jahweh,
Neither any that go down into silence}
Another Psalmist describes himself, or his own
generation, as the temporary guest of God, who
must soon depart from His house and go away:
Hear my prayer, 0 Jahweh,
And give ear unto my cry ;
Hold not Thy peace at my tears :
For I am but a guest with Thee,
And a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
0 spare me, that I may recover brightness,
Before I go hence, and be no more?
This is not a prayer for immortality, but for a
little more patience from God, a little more
warming of the hands at the fire of this life
before the door opens and the guest is dismissed
into the night. From such depression caused by
the shortness of life other Psalms recover hope ;
1 Ps. vi. 5, cxv. 17 ; cf. xxx. 9, lxxxviii. 11.
2 Ps. xxxix. 12 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 189
but they do not recover by taking hold of the
hope of eternity. The Ninetieth, for instance,
which of all others most pathetically illustrates
the transitoriness of man's existence upon earth,
gives him no expectation of another, but asks for
gladness through the days that remain, some little
recompense for the evil of the past, some re
flection of God's beauty, and the establishment
of the work of His servants' hands. Even Job,
when every other door of righteousness is closed
to him, bursts for only a few moments into the
possibility of another life, of the vision of God
and the experience of His justice beyond the
grave; 1 but then, as if the thought were strange
and too daring, he falls back from it upon other
lines of search, and the Book closes with the
manifestation of God's power on this earth, and
the recovery of His servant to an earthly pro
sperity. The rest of the literature gives us no
relief. The wisdom of the Book of Proverbs is
for this life alone ; and Ecclesiastes, which ends
with a funeral, finds the only profit man can have
in the enjoyment, under the fear of God, of the
fleeting opportunities of life while they last ; for
they are soon gone, and all things, youth and love,
knowledge and effort, are vanity — that is, not
worthless while they last, but lasting so little —
a breath, a pulse which soon expires. In the
very late Book of Daniel,2 we find, however, one
1 Job xix. 25 ff. 2 Circa 165 B. C.

190 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
explicit prediction of the resurrection of many
of them who sleep in the dust of the earth, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting
contempt, and they that be wise shall shine as the
brightness of the firmament ,- and they that turn
many to righteousness as the stars for ever and
ever} This prediction stands in very definite con
trast to all that we have elsewhere found. We
may recognise in it a more confident develop
ment of the faith, which has already broken
forth in some Psalms, of the impossibility that
God should relinquish to the grave those who
have trusted in Him. But we must remember
that there had come in, between - them and its
particular notes of resurrection and judgement,
certain popular views and imaginations of the
future beyond the grave which do not receive
any other expression in the Old Testament.
These, then, are the essential lines in the atti
tude of the Old Testament writers to the life
beyond the grave. They reveal the existence of
a popular belief in a state after death, which the
earlier religion, apparently taking it for granted,
left alone as outside its interests; but which the
later faced and fought, and to some extent rose
above, in the strength of faith in the God of Israel.
Our next duty is to inquire what were the his
torical reasons for this popular belief in the state
of the dead, as well as for the various phases of
1 Dan. xii. 2, 3.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 191
the attitude which the religion of Israel assumed
towards it. I believe that, instead of being chilled
by the whole subject as so many are, a preacher
will find it, when historically explained, one of
the most fruitful sources of material and inspira
tion which the Old Testament has to offer him.
II. The Historical Explanation.
We are all probably acquainted with the
curious reason which used to be offered for the
silence of the earlier Hebrew writings with regard
to another life. By Warburton, in his Divine
Legation of Moses} it was imputed to a design on
the part of the great lawgiver to withdraw the
mind of his people from the overpowering effect
of the elaborate visions of the other world which
they had encountered on the monuments of Egypt.
No nation has developed ' other-worldliness ' more
than have the builders of the Pyramids and vast
mausoleums of Memphis, Abydos and Thebes.
According to Warburton, Moses intended to
purge the mind of Israel of all the morbid
influences of this ' other-worldliness,' and so he
carefully excluded from his legislation every hint
of the life to come. The explanation is ingeni
ous, but it is artificial. It is also inadequate in
light of the critical reconstruction of the history.
And there is another and more natural reason for
the phenomenon which it seeks to explain.
1 i738-!74i-

192 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
We find this in one of the characteristics of the
race to which Israel belonged. The Semites,
or, to be accurate, those nomadic Semites with
whom Israel was more closely connected, have
never been conspicuous for their interest in, or
their imagination of, a future life. The Arabs,
whom early Israel so largely resembled, x remem
ber their dead ; and as they pass their graves will
call upon them by name and pour libations of
water on the sandy mounds ;2 as we have seen,3
they also sacrifice to them. Yet this is all. They
have not, and never seem to have had, either
dogma of another life, or any vision of such, un
less their beliefs in subterranean jitis or spirits
spring from their imagination of the dead in the
grave. In Arabic poetry before Mohammed's
time the few sparks of the hope of immortality
are, according to Wellhausen, due to Jewish or
Christian influence.4 When Mohammed himself,
borrowing from the same sources, preached the
resurrection, his countrymen mocked it as in
credible ; and even now, after twelve centuries
of the prevalence of his religion in the Arabian
Peninsula, the Arabs, by the witness of several
1 See above, p. 127.
2 Wellhausen, Reste arab. Heidentumes, p. 161 ; Doughty,
Arabia Deserta, i. p. 241, 448. I have heard my Bedawee guides
in Moab and south of Engedi hail by name the occupants of un
titled graves which we passed on our way : ' Ya Ahmed I ' ' Ya
Dhiab.' Conder (Heth and Moab, new ed. p. 318) states that the
Adwan remember nine generations of ancestors.
8 P. 184, note 2. * Reste arab. Heidentumes, p. 164.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 193
travellers,1 have not formed any clear notion of a
future world.
The reasons for all this are not far to seek.
One of them may be the notorious incapacity of
the Semite, when uninfluenced by foreign civilisa
tions, for sustained speculation. Others are un
doubtedly found in the migratory habits of the
desert life. The shifting camps, the easily obli
terated graves, the want of written monuments
and records, impress the imagination rather with
the transiency than with the permanence of man.2
It takes the long occupation of one site, the
building of cities, the raising of monuments, the
capacity for history, to sustain the memory of the
dead and to hand on the tradition of another life.
In the poetry of the Bible, the tent, easily folded
and carried away, is the type of man's transient
life; but eternity is figured in the city which
hath foundations. Even Job's daring hope of his
vindication in a life to come is uttered along
with the passionate cry for the inscription of his
cause on some monument or book. O that my
words were now written ! 0 that they were recorded
in a book : that they were graven with an iron pen
and lead in the rock for ever 1 3
1 E.g. Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. pp. 240 f ., 445 f.
2 ' In the border Semitic countries is a long superstition of the
grave ; here (i.e. at Hayil in Central Arabia) is but the simple
nomad guise, without other last loving care or adornment' —
Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. p. 618.
8 xix. 23 f. N

194 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
When Semites settled down and built them
selves cities, and in consequence sepulchres,1 they
either developed or, as is probable in Babylonia,
partly borrowed from the race which preceded
them, a certain imagination of life in the grave.
The pictures of man's future home which are
characteristic of Babylonian literature are con
ceived in the likeness of one of the caves or
underground structures in. which the dead were
laid for burial.
The house of darkness . . .
The house men enter, but cannot depart from.
The road men go but cannot return.
The house from whose dwellers the light is with
drawn.
The place where dust is their food, their nourish
ment clay.
The light they behold not ; in darkness they
dwell.
They are clothed like birds, all fluttering wings.
On the door and the gateposts the dust lieth deep?
This was the universal resort of men and their
everlasting home. The exceptions to the hopeless,
passionless fate which it contains are few. So
far as Babylonian records have been deciphered,
they amount to one or two — as many as Enoch
1 See p. 193, note 2.
2 From the Assyrian Descent of Ishtar to Hades (German
trans, by Jeremias, Die Bab. Assyr. Vorstellungen vom Leben
nach dem Tode, p. n ; Eng. in Records ofthe Past, i. 145.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 195
and Elijah in the early history of Israel — who
were taken to the abode of the gods and enjoyed
immortal life in their presence.1 For the common
man the underworld is inevitable, with its dust,
its joyless existence, its silence broken only by
the peeping and chirping of ghosts — a concep
tion derived, as all who have explored Eastern
sepulchres must admit, from the noises of the
bats which throng the sepulchres. The Babyloni
ans called the realm of the dead Aralu ; it lay
beneath a great mountain of the same name.
Some scholars assert that it was also known
to the Babylonians as Sheol ; 2 others, however,
doubt this.3 Aralu had divine guardians, but
lay outside the jurisdiction of the gods of the
upper world.4 It was entered only through the
gates of the grave.6
Whether the Hebrews borrowed their concep
tion of Sheol from that of the Babylonians, or
whether both came from a common source, is
uncertain. The latter is the more probable
theory.6 It is, as we have seen, in the later
writings that the Hebrew conception of Sheol
1 Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia, etc. 576 f.
2 Jastrow, op. cit. pp. 558 ff. ; American Journal of 'Semitic Lan
guages, xiv. ; Jeremias, op. cit. p. 109.
3 Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 22 ff., and Zimmem,
quoted by Charles, op. cit. p. 34, n. 2.
4 Jastrow, p. 582.
6 Ibid. p. 586.
6 There are slight differences in the two conceptions. The
confirmation of the evidence that the name Sheol occurs in
Babylonian would, however, strongly support the first theory.

196 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
becomes most developed ; and though original to
early Israel, the conception may have been elab
orated through Israel's Babylonian connections in
the seventh and subsequent centuries. In the
Book of Job, Sheol is behind bars where men rest
in the dust, and spread their couch in the darkness}
There the wicked cease from troubling;
And there the weary be at rest.
The prisoners are at ease together,
They hear not the voice of the driver,
The small and the great are there ;
And the slave is free from his master?
When, then, the nomad Semite became civil
ised, this is all that his inscribed sepulchres and
monuments, keeping the dead in remembrance,
brought to him. Of immortality in the true
sense of the word — with God and in full enjoy
ment of life — the Hebrew had no inherent con
ception. Even nature appears to have made to
him no such suggestions of resurrection as in
Babylonia inspired hope for a heroic individual
or two,3 but were not extended to the common
man. The want of hope among the Semites must
not, however, be altogether charged upon their
physical environment : the main cause was the
conception of the individual which prevailed in
Semitic religion. To the ancient Semite, as we
1 xvii. 12-16. 2 iii. 17-19.
8 Epic of Ishtar ; see Jeremias, op. cit. p. 1 19, n. 2.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 197
saw in last Lecture, God did not deal with the
individual, but with the tribe as a whole. It
was the tribal existence which the divine honour
was obliged to maintain : so long as that was
preserved on earth, the fate of the individual,
after he fulfilled his length of days, mattered
little. In Old Testament language, the leaves or
the branches might perish, if only the stock and
stump remained. In another sense than that in
which Christ used the words, the gods of the
ancient Semites were not the gods of the dead,
but of the living. The necessities of a life of
almost constant warfare confirmed the tribes
men in these beliefs, and the dead were forgotten
in the stress of defending the living. There
was no time to brood on the past, and even in
the sacred duty of blood-revenge, which other
wise might have been supposed to preserve the
memory of the fallen, the responsibility was
mainly felt to the tribe whose blood had been
spilt, and it crowded out the memory of the
individuals for whom the vengeance was piously
performed. The same ideas prevailed in early Israel. Up to
Jeremiah's time the religious unit was almost ex
clusively the nation, and the religious problem —
not as in Christianity the salvation of the indivi
dual — was the perpetuation upon earth of a people
of Jahweh, to serve, praise and bear witness for
Him. You remember how we saw that the great

198 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
ideas of redemption and providence came into
the theology of Israel by the redemption of the
nation from Egyptian servitude, and by the guid
ance of the nation through the wilderness. The
idea that God cared for and dealt directly with
individuals could not, of course, be utterly absent,
and we see it illustrated in a great many of the
early narratives of Israel.1 But it is significant
that some even of those apparent individuals
are, as we learned, personifications of tribes and
clans ; and at least even the most personal of
them all are represented as departing this life
with hopes, not for themselves, but for the future
of their families. It is not otherwise when we
come to the prophets. In spite of their own
individual experiences of religion, in spite of
Hosea's sense of love for the outcast wife, and
Isaiah's assurance of his own cleansing and call
by God, the interest of the prophets in the fate
of the nation as a whole is too overwhelming to
allow them to develop the elements of their con
sciousness of a personal relation to the Deity.
As Isaiah puts it, the great problem of religion,
the one end upon which he and his fellows see
concentrated the omnipotence and righteousness
of Jahweh, is the preservation of a Remnant of
Israel; for if Israel utterly perish, none will be
left on earth to represent Jahweh, and the know
ledge of the true God must disappear. To save
1 Above, pp. 106 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 199
and to purify the Remnant is the whole interest
and warfare of religion, to which not only must all
others be postponed, but beside the crisis and
the glory of which they lose their reality. The
future of the nation on which the early prophets
dwell with such power and beauty is — till we
reach the faint beginnings of apocalypse in
Zephaniah — reached along the lines of history
and upon the surface of this earth. The early
prophets do not think of another world, but
of this one, as the scene of Israel's ceaseless
life with Jahweh — this world better indeed,
freed from war, famine, storm, and lust, but
still this world — and they do not always promise
that the death of individuals shall be absent
from it. With such national hopes drawing
them on, the prophets do not stop to think —
at least, they do not stop to speak — of what
becomes of individual Israelites. If one genera
tion fall, God will raise another to take its
place. The indifference of the prophet to the indi
vidual is, however, not the most interesting
thing : from the Psalms we learn that the
individual himself appears to have acquiesced
in it. Between his feet and the golden future
of his people there lay his own grave : the black,
inevitable door to Sheol. Jahweh would con
tinue to guide the nation, but at that point
Jahweh ceased to guide him. He fell to the

200 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
dead, and Jahweh and Israel left him behind.
Thus, while to us death means to go to God, to
the Israelite death was to leave God. God was
with Israel and in Israel : but with the dead
Jahweh had as little to do as had the Babylonian
gods of the upper world.
We have already seen some proofs that even
the pious adherent of Jahweh accepted this
view,1 and from the Psalms they might be multi
plied. Their date is quite uncertain ; if, as is
probable, they are late, their testimony is all
the more remarkable. They prove that at the
very heart of Israel's religion there were pious
men who cried out against death as the dissolu
tion of their communion with Jahweh, but who
regarded that dissolution as the inevitable end
and prayed only for a reprieve till their years
should be full :
Sheol cannot praise Thee.
Death cannot celebrate Thee.
They that are gone down unto the pit cannot
hope for Thy truth?
I am a guest with Thee,
And a sojourner as all my fathers were.
0 spare me, that I may recover brightness,
Before I go hence, and be no more?
But to these acceptances of the popular belief,
which are acceptances of despair, and which we
1 See above, p. 88. 2 Hezekiah's Psalm; Isa. xxxviii. 18.
8 Ps. xxxix. 12, 13.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 201
can hardly read without a shudder, individuals
(or generations) in Israel sometimes added others
that are full of inspiration to ourselves. The
Ninetieth Psalm is, even in the Old Testament,
the most pathetic description of the drift of the
generations of men into darkness. Jahweh,
Israel's dwelling-place in all generations, alone
is eternal. Thou turnest man into crumbling,
And sayest : Return, ye children of men.
Thou carriest them off as with a flood.
They become like a dream.
In the morning they are like grass which
groweth up;
In the morning it flour is heth and groweth up,
In the evening it is cut down and withereth.
For we are consumed by Thine anger,
And by Thy wrath are we troubled.
The reason for this death is the same as that
to which the Jahwist assigns it in his story of
the origins of man.
Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.
Who knoweth the power of Thine anger,
Or Thy wrath as befitteth the fear of Thee ?
Against the universal fate which men expect,
thus explained and confirmed as it is by the
stern ethical principles of Jahweh's religion,
the Psalmist fortifies himself and his generation,

202 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
not by the hope of a life to come, not by a
gospel which explicitly gets rid of death as well
as sin ; but by his faith that Jahweh is the
home of all the living generations of His people :
by beseeching Him to turn their hearts to the
value of the days which they are still to have
with Him ; by a prayer that what remains of
these days for himself and his contemporaries
may be filled with gladness, according to the
days wherein they have been afflicted ; and that
whatsoever their hands have found to do may
be confirmed by Him.
What a noble resolution to turn from the con
templation of death to work and worship ! To
us it is inexpressibly precious as the proof that
Israel's faith, before any hope of a future life
broke upon it, had by its native ethical principles
and experience of God, conquered the paralysing
influences of that intellectual conception of death,
which it had inherited as a part of the Semitic
race. The time came, however, when, as we have
seen, even so bright and so ethical a faith as
that of the Ninetieth Psalm was insufficient, and
the individual, who found no victory and no glad
ness in this life, dared to hope for something
beyond. When exactly such a hope emerged
we cannot determine; but our ignorance of the
date is of little moment beside the fact that we
know how the change was caused. As we saw

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 203
in last Lecture/'there began to brighten, about
the end of the seventh century, the vision of the
religious worth of the individual. The reasons
for this were many and complex. The nation
was breaking up, and the individual was being
bidden to think of himself. New ethical con
victions of personal responsibility were born ;
both Jeremiah and Ezekiel give expression to
them. But more than all there was the spiritual
originality, the independent experience, the
unique relation to God, of Jeremiah himself. I
cannot but think that his example did more
than anything else to develop in Israel the
consciousness of the spiritual duties and rights
of the individual. At least it must have con
tributed powerful aid to the other tendencies I
have mentioned ; and we find it expressed in
Jeremiah's conception of the New Covenant. In
the time of the Exile, when the political and
religious institutions of Israel disappeared, the
greater stress was laid upon personal qualities as
the means and highest possibilities of religion :
Thus saith the High and Lofty One who inhabiteth
eternity, whose name is Holy. I dwell in the high
and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite
and a humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble,
and to revive the heart of the contrite ones? The
precious fruit of so much sorrow was not lost
when the nation and its ritual were restored.
1 Pp. 165 ff. 2 Isa. Ivii. 15.

204 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
It is the witness of all historians of the post-
exilic period, that within the strong nationalism
and legalism of the Jews there flourished the
most beautiful personal piety; souls feeling,
as Jeremiah felt it, their individual relation to
God. It would appear to be from such convictions
of the individual's relation to God that the few
hopes of immortality spring which emerge in
the Old Testament. They start from a revolt
of the individual believer in God either against
the horrible conditions of Sheol, the expectation
of which he had intellectually inherited; or
against the injustice, which God's providence of
this life does not redress, and so forces the con
science to appeal to His judgement hereafter.
We have seen how, even when he had no hope,
the pious Israelite shrank from the future which
gaped for him in Sheol. It was the utter anti
thesis of his experience here : it was silence, it
was powerlessness, it was devoid of the presence
of God. But God loved him, and had made him
His own : and God was omnipotent and eternal.
God could not have been to the pious what He
had been, and made them what they were only
to abandon them in death.
I have set Jahweh always before me.
Because He is at my right hand I shall not be
moved,
Therefore my heart is glad,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 205
And my . . } rejoiceth.
Even my flesh dwelleth in safety,
For Thou wilt not abandon my life to Sheol,
Neither wilt thou suffer thy pious ones to see the
pit.
Thou wilt make me to know the path of life:
In Thy presence is fulness of joy,
At Thy right hand are pleasures evermore?
The other two instances of hope for the in
dividual after death spring from more purely
ethical reasons. The writer of the Seventy-third
Psalm found his faith going when he observed
the prosperity of the wicked.
As for me, my feet were almost gone,
My steps had well nigh slipped?
He heard how many of God's people, led away
by the security and arrogance of sinners, doubted
if God knew, and felt as if their own righteous
ness were in vain.4 From such a confession the
Psalmist himself had been saved by fears of
disloyalty to the generation of God's children.
1 The meaning is uncertain.
2 Ps. xvi. 8-1 1. As remarked above, this Psalm cannot be
fairly interpreted of the revival of the earthly Israel from disaster
and exile. It is death, Sheol, the grave, which the writer fears
either for himself or for the living generation of Israel. Of course,
it is possible to read the words of the hope by which he rises
superior to death, as if they merely meant a deliverance for a
time from impending death. But it is more natural to take them
as the assurance of immortality in spite of death. And at least
they contain the feelings by which such a survival of actual
death became sure to individual Israelites.
8 Verse 3. 4 Verses 4-14.

206 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
But the pressure of his doubts was too great
for him until he entered into the mysteries of
God and considered the latter end of the wicked}
Probably by the mysteries, literally, the holy
things, of God? he means the ultimate deeds
of God in the full character of His holiness.
The certain end of the wicked is destruction,
and the conscience of the Psalmist tells him he
should have known this, instead of being un
reasonably embittered.3 For himself, here and
afterwards, in life as in death, the presence,
the counsel, the power of God are sure. Flesh
and heart may fail : God is the strength of my
heart and my portion for ever. The Psalmist
does not tell us how he shall rise, or that he
shall rise at all. But the promises of all future
doctrines of immortality and resurrection are
here — in the faithfulness and power of the Deity,
to whom His follower has committed himself.
That it is the next life, to which he looks for
the action of these divine attributes, is clear
from the despair of his vision of this one, no
less than from the terms in which his new hope
is expressed.
1 Verse 17.
2 ?N~" Wlpft ! some take the expression to imply esoteric
doctrines of iife and judgement after death which were coming
into expression in Israel at the time the Psalm was written.
But the above seems, from the parallelism of the verse and its
context, to be the more natural rendering.
8 Verses 18-22.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 207
In the case of Job the hope of a personal life
after death a is the demand of the man's con
science. He is dying unvindicated : here God
will not appear to him nor examine his plea.
Therefore he knows he shall see God after death.
The individual consciousness for and in itself :
innocence in her own strength; the ethical
necessities of an unfinished cause — all demand
a life to come.
Our survey has made it clear that whatever
hopes of immortality arose in Israel, arose by
development from the native principles of Israel's
religion. The development may have been as
sisted by the influence of foreign faiths with
which the nation came into contact, but of such
we know little or nothing. Whatever were the
climates which helped to ripen the germs, the
germs were Israel's own. Stage by stage we
discern a change of attitude on the part of
Israel's faith to that view of the state of the
dead which the nation received from their an
cestors and their kinsfolk. The change appears
to be coincident with the general ethical progress
of the religion. So long as the interest of the
Deity was supposed to be confined to the national
interests, the future state was ignored as outside
Jahweh's providence. But when the religion of
Israel burst its merely national embodiment, and
just in proportion as the- individual realised his
1 Job xix. 25-27.

208 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
own spiritual life and direct relation to God,
Sheol had to be faced, and was faced. So fixed
on the mental horizon of Israel had this gloomy
prospect become, that many pious Israelites knew
to pray for no more than a respite from it. These
may be the earlier revolts against Sheol, and
those others may be later which, as we have
seen, expressed convictions of the impossibility
of so dark a fate for the believer in Jahweh, and
uttered hopes of his redemption from it. But
the question of date is extremely difficult; and
we must be content to note that the few late
hopes of immortality in the Old Testament broke
away, when they did, on the strength of a de
veloped consciousness of the individual's union
with Jahweh, and on those ethical principles
of Jahweh's religion, which as the wrongs and
tyrannies of this life accumulated, had no appeal
except to a future judgement.
To follow these hopes further, to trace their
essential identity through that new scenery of the
next life which was developed in the apocryphal
literature, and to find that what gives them their
strength in the Old Testament — the permanence
of individual character, the need of a future
judgement, the faithfulness and omnipotence of
God — is what also inspires the New Testament
gospel of immortality : all this would be instruc
tive, but it would carry us beyond our proper
limits.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 209
III. The Use to Our Own Day.
But you may say that all this is a matter of
ancient history and its interest only scientific:
' What use is it to us preachers dealing with the
religion of to-day ? '
I do not forget that these lectures are primarily
intended for preachers. It is because I believe
in the practical value to such of the history of
the Old Testament hope of immortality that I
have traced this history through so much detail.
Nay more : I believe that the practical value
does not begin where at last the individual's
assurance in his future with God breaks away
from the visions of Sheol ; but that as pastors
and teachers you will find in every previous
and inferior stage of the development something
parallel to, something illustrative of, something
charged with consolation for, the experience of
the men and women of your own generation.
In the first place, we shall scarcely find to-day
any parish or congregation of educated people, in
which are not some almost as devoid of hope for
the future as the most despairing Psalmist in the
Psalter. In the thinking of civilised men there
has been for years a steady ebb from the shores
of another life. The causes of this are very dis
cernible. There was bound to be a reaction from
the excessive ' other-worldliness ' of the first half
of the century : men had grown sick of its glare.
o

210 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Their hearts easily yielded to new tendencies,
drawing with irresistible force the conscience and
the reverence of men upon the present and visible
environment of their lives. Science claimed
our wonder and expectation for the opening
secrets of the material universe ; and not only
the individual's future, but his present, which
is the one measure and warrant of his future,
shrank to nothing before the vastness of forces
which rolled on their way indifferent to him and
his fate. For a time the great social movements
of the age seemed to come to the rescue of the
individual, with a gospel of duties and hopes
above the material course of nature. Yet the
duties were in a present, among whose crowds
he felt his littleness still; and the hopes, like
those of early Israel, were for a future which
his race, but not he, would share. With such
tendencies religion herself largely conspired,
emphasising with the absorption of a novice the
wonder and sacredness of this life, and turn
ing with the zeal of a penitent to those duties
of to-day which she had too long neglected.
Such influences were felt, and expressed in
literature, long ago ; now they have penetrated
humanity. Common men and women encounter
them, not upon the heights, where even the
darkest mists sometimes break and roll past, but
amid the never-settling dust of life, and with
hearts which petty trouble has worn bare of all

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 211
capacity for hope and vision. Such are the
drifted souls to whom we have to preach. They
are largely unconscious of their exile, but some
have God, all have love. When their experience
of Him falls beneath the imminence of their own
death, or when their love proves her weakness
in the death of others, then they are stung by
the sense of their hopelessness: far out to sea,
not by their own wilfulness but on the intellectual
tides of the age, whose progress they had either
never observed, or had only rejoiced in the stir
and the motion of it. When you find such men
and women, you will understand that the Psalms
of Israel are not, like the fossils of our great
museums, proofs of the stages which our life
has passed through and left behind, but are the
eternal cries of the human heart. And you will
tell your people that such Psalms have been left
in God's Word, for proof of how His Spirit —
which is elsewhere described as making interces
sion for us with groanings that cannot be uttered
— sympathises with those frequent, perhaps in
evitable, experiences of humanity, and presents
them to God Himself ; that they are here
preserved in order that all such forwandered
souls may see that they have not lost the road,
but that others of God's own people passed
through these very shades ; and lo ! the end
was not only a far-off sight of the Father,
but the end of the agony and strife, to which

212 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
they contributed their portion, was Christ
Himself. But again, the Old Testament hope of a
national immortality, of a widening and ever
more glorious future for the race, which absorbed
the individual and gave him power to forget
his own fate, has its counterpart in our day in
the strong enthusiasm and unselfish service
which the idea of ' a corporate immortality '
has roused in numbers of the best men and
women, irrespective of their own salvation. Such
a belief is not incompatible — as we see both
from the Old Testament forms of it and in
many of its modern representatives— with a
strong and "even a personal faith in God. But
to-day it probably attracts most of its votaries,
not because it is His promise, but by the grand,
confident notes of progress on the visible world,
which, by the help of science, it reiterates, as
well as by the unselfish and heroic tones in
which the devotion of individuals to it is capable
of being pitched. Not only have some of the
finest poems of the century been inspired by
faith in the glorious future of the race and the
subordination to it of the individual, but many
men and women of high character and full sur
render to the service of their kind have been
content to find in such a future all their aims
and reward, without any expectation of a per
sonal immortality. Life and labour in such

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 213
a faith have not unplausibly been celebrated as
more heroic than that of the Christian, who has
worn out his strength for others, or has suffered
martyrdom, in the hope of everlasting life for
himself with God.
Nevertheless we cannot allow, what many
assert, that the belief in a 'corporate immor
tality ' is an advance upon that which it has
recently seemed to displace. On the contrary
the belief is one which has been already tried
and found wanting. As our survey of the Old
Testament has shown us, it is not a hope with
which human hearts remained satisfied, even
when it was presented to them with all the
sanctions of an ethical religion, and was loyally
accepted by pious men. We cannot wonder, if
the moral worth and charm of ' corporate immor
tality ' should from time to time revive their sway
over the best and even the most religious of
human minds. Yet wherever religion assumes
its highest form in the relation of the individual
man to God, his Father and Lord, there, as the
experience of Israel proves to us, the assurance
of personal immortality must sooner or later
emerge. And there will conspire with it the
strongest instincts of the love of the individual
for those who are dearest to him.
Yet while this is true, it is well for us all
sometimes to pitch our religious life in terms
which do not include the hope of a future.

214 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Most of the crises of religious experience may
be achieved, as some of the grandest Psalms
fulfil their music, without the echo of one of
the far-off bells of heaven. A man may pass
through the evangelical experiences of con
version, regeneration and redemption, without
thinking any more of the future than the little
child thinks, but only sure and glad that his
Father is with him. The Old Testament is
of use in reminding us that the hope of im
mortality is one of the secondary and inferential
elements of religious experience. Has not Christ
Himself summed up the teaching of the Ninetieth
Psalm ? Work while it is called to-day, for the
night cometh in which no man can work.
The great thing is to be sure of our individual
relation to God. In teaching man that life is
in Him and in nothing else, and that the term
of our days here has been given us to find Him,
the Old Testament has done more for the assur
ance of immortality than if it had explored the
life awaiting us, or had endowed us with strong
intellectual conceptions of its reality.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 215

LECTURE VII
THE PROPHETS AS PREACHERS TO THEIR OWN
TIMES: WITH THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE
SOCIAL ETHICS OF CHRISTENDOM
In the previous Lectures of this course we have
had occasion to consider several elements in the
teaching of the Prophets ; but there are others, as
relevant to our present task, which we have hardly
touched. Of these the principal are the qualities
of patriotism which the Prophets illustrate, their
travail for their own people and their judge
ments upon them, their conception of national
religion, with the place which they find in that
for the individual, and their doctrine of social
and civic duties — in a word, the ministry of the
Prophets to their own times. But this cannot be
adequately treated without an account of the
growth in the Christian Church of the historical
interpretation of the Prophets (as distinguished
from the dogmatic and allegorical), and of what
has always been the immediate consequence of
that interpretation, the influence of the Prophets
upon the social ethics of Christendom. In other

2i6 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
words, it is impossible to do justice to the preach
ing of the Prophets to their own time without
some appreciation of their message to all times
and of its results in Christian civilisation. I
hope to attempt this in a manner which shall be
no digression from, but a real contribution to,
our practical aim in these studies as preachers
to our own generation. But besides the civic
elements in prophecy there are others, which we
have not yet examined. We ought to realise the
conception by the Prophets of what we call Law
both in nature and in history; andtheir attitude
to miracle. Nor would a course of lectures upon
the preacher's use of the Old Testament be com
plete without some impressions of the general
style and genius of those great exemplars of
his art.
All these things I propose to take in this
Lecture; the influence of the Prophets on the
Christian Church in the first part ; the qualities of
their patriotic ministry in the second part; and
in the third the other features of their preaching.
I. The Influence of the Prophets on the Christian
Church and Civilisation.
It is pertinent to our purpose to remind our
selves once more that there is no part of the
Old Testament upon which Modern Criticism has
been so constructive as within the prophetical
writings. I do not forget that Criticism has

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 217
already removed from many of the Prophets
large portions of the Books which bear their
names; nor that we have entered upon a more
thorough analysis of these Books,1 which may
issue in further subtractions of the same kind.2
But whether a Book be authentic, in the technical
meaning of the word, is of small interest com
pared with its authenticity as vision, as truth
and as the revelation of God. To vindicate the
authorship of this or that chapter by the man
whose name it bears is but a poor service com
pared with the proof that it rises from real life,
that it is the message of a true prophet to living
men, and that it deals with the essential problems
of human society.3 In all these high respects
the constructive character of Modern Criticism
may be fearlessly asserted. The great principle,
that a prophet, however far his visions may roam,
always starts from the facts of his own day and
speaks first to his contemporaries, was revived 4
by Criticism in time for the results of Archae-
1 See above, pp. 44 f.
2 No doubt critical ambition has in certain directions of this
analysis gone too far for certainty ; and we must not anticipate
the final consensus of criticism by the acceptance ofthe ingenious
but often arbitrary adventures of individual critics.
8 Even so uncompromising an opponent of Criticism as the
late Mr. D. L. Moody came to see this. He said to me, and I
believe wrote also to a friend, that ' it is not the authorship of the
Books of the Bible that matters, but the contents.'
1 The first exegete who had any real instinct of this principle
was Theodore of Mopsuestia. For his teaching and other in
stances of the revival of this principle see below, pp. 227 ff.

218 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
ology to be used in its illustration ; and nowhere
has Archaeology done more for the history of
Israel, or Criticism more fully employed archaeo
logical evidence than throughout the prophetic
period. The Hebrew Prophets were contempo
raneous with the Empires of Assyria, Babylonia
and Persia; and the monuments of these Empires
confirm and illustrate the history which the
Prophets reflect. The whole world of thought
and action from which the prophetical literature
springs, and upon which it reacts, is almost as
clear and vivid to our eyes as the world of
Shakespeare and his dramas.
The consequence of this exegetical principle
and of its illustration by Archaeology has been
a decided revival of the use of the Prophets by
the Christian pulpit. Thirty years ago in Great
Britain some observers of our literature and
politics alleged a considerable decrease in the
influence of the Old Testament.1 Quotations
from it, and allusions to its characters and events
were said to be growing less frequent in the
speeches and writings of public men. In the
pulpit of the same period the uses of the Old
Testament were confined to the dogmatic, the
apologetic, and the individually ethical. Prophecy
1 I suppose that John Bright was at that time the one states
man of the highest rank whose style of speaking showed any
influence of the Old Testament ; ind Mr. Gladstone and Lord
Shaftesbury the only two others who seriously studied it.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 219
was employed for the illustration of dogma, the
proof of the Divinity of Christ, and the example
of personal religion ; but except for the enforce
ment of Sabbath observance — which, besides, was
based on the Law and not on the Prophets —
the use made of the social and civic teaching of
the Old Testament was very infrequent. The
noble examples of the preaching of social duties
which were afforded by Kingsley and Maurice l
bore little fruit, largely I believe because they
were not sustained upon a thorough historical
criticism of the Prophets.2 The real recovery of
the historical preaching of the Old Testament
may be said to have started from the publication
of Dean Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church,
and Stanley, while he owed much to his own
vision of the Holy Land and to his superb gift of
historical painting, was in his views of the re
ligious development of Israel a pupil of Ewald.
I need hardly remind you of how the combination
of a historical and a practical treatment of the
1 See below, at the close of this section.
2 Now that we have this we can admire still more than their
contemporaries did, the moral sympathy and intuition which
enable both these preachers, and especially Maurice (Prophets and
Kings ofthe Old Testament), to grasp so firmly the essence of the
Prophets' messages to their own day, and to apply it so powerfully
to the nineteenth century. Nor need we hesitate to give some
of the same praise to Pusey, who, although his interest as a com
mentator is mainly in the dogmatic and predictive value of the
Prophets (Minor Prophets), knew, as his University Sermons
prove, how to enforce from the pulpit, with great power, their
ethical teaching.

220 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Old Testament has progressed in England, upon
that reconstruction of Israel's history which suc
ceeded Ewald's,1 under the powerful leadership
of the Old Testament scholars of Oxford and
Cambridge ; or how it has spread through the
Nonconformist ministry upon the impulse of
teachers who are equally loyal to the principles
of historical criticism. Let me give but one
instance of the combination of the methods of
modern criticism with fervid and practical preach
ing from the Prophets — one proof of how false it
is to suppose that the adoption of critical results
impairs a preacher's power in applying the Old
Testament to his own generation. Dr. Farrar
accepts the legitimacy of the critical methods,
he accepts not a few of their results ; 2 yet his
preaching has always been warmly ethical and
directly applied to the social problems and vices
of our day.
In my own country and Church the similar
revival of ethical preaching from the Old Testa
ment was due in the first place to the teaching
of Professor A. B. Davidson, in its powerful
union of spiritual insight with fidelity to the
historical situations of Israel, and sympathy with
them ; and in the second place to the long trial
of his pupil, Professor William Robertson Smith,
1 See above, Lecture ii., Section I.
2 Lives and Times of the Minor Prophets, pp. 19, 20 ; The
Second Book of 'Kings and Daniel (Expositor's Bible), passim.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 221
for the critical opinions which he published in
the Encyclopaedia Britannica}
The official result was Professor Smith's re
moval from his chair, by what many of us still
think to have been an arbitrary use of eccle
siastical power on the part of a majority of the
Free Church General Assembly of 1881. But
the critical principles for which he fought were
never condemned, and his trial — carried from one
Church Court to another and debated in almost
every Free Church Presbytery in the country —
turned out to have been the education of large
numbers of men in the meaning of criticism and
its effects upon Scripture. Professor Smith ap
pealed from the Church Courts to the people in
two series of lectures : one of which, upon The
Prophets of Israel, was published at a time
auspicious to its subject for another reason. In
Scottish preaching the broad influence of Thomas
Chalmers had almost disappeared ; 2 social sub
jects were infrequently treated by the pulpit,
and the Gospel was preached with but little
1 Ninth ed., articles ' Angels,' ' Bible,' ' Chronicles,' ' Deutero
nomy,' etc.
2 There were of course several notable services to social ethics
rendered by Scottish ministers: Dr. Begg's, on behalf of farm-
servants ; Dr. Guthrie's, for city children ; and Dr. Blaikie's
work, Better Days for Working People. But these and other
social efforts were for the most part pursued outside the pulpit.
One still useful series of sermons on the Old Testament are those
of William Arnot on the Book of Proverbs, Laws from Heaven
for Life on Earth.

222 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
reference to the social and economic duties of
Christians. Then came Socialism upon us, with
all its trumpets sounding; and although this
movement has converted but few to its dogmas,
it has assisted to rouse the civic conscience in
the Church, and to awaken everywhere a new
interest in social questions. Coincident with the
beginnings of this interest was the publication
of The Prophets of Israel ; and from the co
incidence we may venture to date a revival of
the Prophets in the Scottish pulpit. Every
department of religious activity felt its effects.
Sermons became more ethical; the studies of
Bible-classes in the Old Testament, instead of
being confined to the historical Books, were
extended to the prophetical ; and a considerable
body of popular literature has appeared, which
expounds the teaching of the Prophets and in
many cases applies it to modern life.1 The
effect, then, in Britain of the modern criticism of
the Prophets may be reckoned as constructive
and practical in the highest degree.
1 I am unaware how far this latter phenomenon has appeared
in other lands. But in Holland there was the work of J. J. P.
Valeton, jun., Amos en Hosea, 1894, which contains this passage :
' These prophecies have a word of God, as for all times, so
especially for our own. Before all it is relevant to " the social
question " of our day, to the relation of religion and morality. . . .
Often it has been hard for me to refrain from expressly pointing
out the agreement between Then and To-day.' And in Germany
there was Cornill's Frankfort lectures to educated laymen, Der
Israelitische Prophetismus (1894). Both of these are by advanced
critics of the first rank.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 223
I have thus begun with our own times, because
they are naturally of most religious interest to
us. But I now ask you to go back with me
upon that survey which I promised of the influ
ence of the Old Testament, and in particular
of the Prophets, upon the social ethics of Chris
tendom from the earliest times to the age before
our own. We shall see how strangely diverse the
character of that influence has been. The candid
student, who carefully traces its effects upon
European civilisation, is still left to question
whether the cruelties and superstitions which
were sanctioned by an appeal to Hebrew example,
or the legislation and struggles for reform which
were inspired by the Law and the Prophets, have
been the more conspicuous and influential. Yet
of this there can be no doubt, that where a his
torical criticism of the Old Testament, however
imperfect, was cultivated, there the immediate
effect upon Christian preaching from the Old
Testament was sound and practical to a very
high degree.
Even before the establishment of Christianity
as the religion of the Roman Empire the political
influence of the Old Testament began to be
pervasive and conspicuous. No one can examine
early Christian inscriptions without being struck
by the fact that the quotations from Scripture
which they contain are almost all drawn from the
Books of the Old Testament, but are often modi-

224 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
fied so as to give them a Christian significance.1
The application of the Old Testament to domestic
life must have been nearly universal in early
Christianity. The sense of the Divine protec
tion of the home, and the influence of those
examples of family virtue which the Hebrew
Scriptures record, are frequently expressed ; nor
can such teaching as that of Deuteronomy and
the Proverbs have failed to permeate the private
life of the Church. Besides these there were the
more formal and public results. Excluded from
the society of the world in which she existed,
the primitive Church had to legislate not only
for the worship, but for the social life and dis
cipline of her members. In her circumstances,
she could organise only upon a theocratic basis,
and such was found already developed and de
tailed within her Old Testament Canon. It is
easy to perceive how, in the government of the
Church — especially in her hierarchy and in her
judgement of heretics — there came to be sanc
tioned, by appeal to the letter of the Hebrew
Scriptures,2 principles and tempers which were
1 I was very much impressed by this when reading the early
Christian inscriptions still extant on the hard basalt of Hauran
and other regions east of the Jordan ; and the impression was
confirmed by a study of Le Bas and Waddington's collection of
Greek inscriptions. On lintels of houses and tombstones the lxx.
version is frequently quoted, with the substitution of Xpio-rSs for
Kbptos or ©E(5s (cf. Historical Geography ofthe Holy Land, p. 634).
2 Especially in the Apostolic Constitutions, and by Cyprian.
Cf. Diestel, Gesch. des Alten Testaments in der Christlichen

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 225
hostile to Christ's teaching, and which in their
subsequent development have engendered the
rankest tyranny and superstition. On this I
dwelt sufficiently in the first Lecture.
While these evils were aggravated through the
adoption of Christianity by the Imperial power,
we perceive from this event onwards another
effect of the Old Testament of a more wholesome
quality. The influence of the Jewish codes upon
the legislation and public morals of the Empire
from Constantine to Justinian has never been
critically treated ; but this is certain, that ' the
laws of Moses were received as the divine original
of justice' j1 and that it was their example which
braced Roman legislators to put down the bestial
sins, and to treat all sexual vice with more
severity than the Imperial authorities had pre
viously attempted.2
Following the example of the Apostles, the
preachers of the early Church, whether in argu
ment or homily, made continual use of the Old
Testament. The prevailing method of inter-
Kirche, pp. 141 ff . ; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxviii., end of
first paragraph.
1 Gibbon, ch. xliv. : vol. v. p. 322 in Smith's edition.
2 Ibid. 322 ff. Diestel (Gesch. des A. T., 151 f.) mentions the
Lex Dei: sive Mosaicarum et Romanarum legum collatio, by
Licinius Rufinus, towards the end of the fifth century. It is a
list of parallels between the Mosaic and Roman Laws : it is im
portant in so far as it proves the high value which was accorded
to the Mosaic Law in that period, but it ' does not prove a direct
influence ' of that law on the Imperial legislation.
F

226 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
pretation was the allegorical. This arbitrary
and dangerous habit arose very naturally in the
ordinary employment of the Bible for purposes
of edification ; and it was confirmed, partly by
the Church's efforts to explain away the moral
and other difficulties of Old Testament history,
and partly by the exigencies of her polemic
against the Jews. In hostility to the applica
tion of Prophecy to Christ, Jewish writers insisted
upon the literal sense of the prophetic word, and
confined its significance to the history of Israel.
The Church replied by allegorising as much of
the Word as it could. Individual morals were,
of course, directly enforced from Hebrew ex
amples ; x but the early fathers were interested
in the Old Testament mainly for its types and
predictions of Christ. The allegorical became
the orthodox exegesis, and was at last reduced
to a theory by Origen,2 and elaborated into
a system by the school which he founded.
The effort to distinguish the primary sense
of the text was indeed not wholly abandoned;
but the healthy instinct which led to it was
too bare of knowledge and of insight to ren
der the result consistent or fertile. When the
heretics began to outdo the orthodox in alle
gorical exposition, the latter awoke to the dan
gers of the habit they had fostered and loudly
1 E.g. by Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians.
2 185-254 A. p,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 227
proclaimed the need of sobriety and reason in
the pursuit of it. But the historical sense of
the age was small, and till the close of the
fourth century no exegete succeeded in finding
his feet upon a sound historical basis. Thus
allegory, prompted now by dogmatic audacity
and now by apologetic fearfulness, exercised,
with almost no restraint, its confusing and
evaporating influence upon the preaching of
the Christian pulpit.
To the school of Antioch belongs the fame
of training the Church in sounder principles of
exegesis, and, as their immediate consequence,
in a more practical application of the Old
Testament to the life of the day. Theodore,
afterwards of Mopsuestia, was the greatest repre
sentative ofthe former; John, surnamed Chrysos
tom, the most illustrious example of the latter.1
Both were pupils of Diodorus of Tarsus, who,
though his works have perished and his fame has
disappeared behind that of his successors, must
have been — by the characteristics these possessed
in common and probably derived from him, as well
as by the few reports of his principles which have
reached us — a teacher of unusual originality and
impressiveness.2 Theodore of Mopsuestia has
been justly styled, ' Veteris Testamenti sobrie
1 Theodore, c. 350-429 : Chrysostom, 347-407.
2 Caten. Niceph. i. 524, according to which he declared that
he much preferred the historical, to the allegorical, exegesis.

228 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
interpretandi vindex';1 he may even be hailed
as the father of historical exegesis. He did not
use the Hebrew original, and had to work with
the Greek versions ; but he was the first to break
with any power from the speculative methods
which the school of Origen had fastened upon
the Church's interpretation of Scripture ; and the
first to follow with some consistency the lines
of a historical interpretation. To Theodore the
prophecies and types of the Old Testament had,
besides their references to the future, a prior
value in themselves and for the age to which
they were delivered. Considering the traditions
which encumbered his generation and the know
ledge of ancient history at his disposal, Theodore's
vision of the intrinsic worth and contemporary
reference of the prophetical writings was only
less wonderful than the courage with which he
asserted the consequences of this principle in
his criticism of the Psalms and other Scriptures.2
1 By Sieffert in the title of his work Theodorus Mopsuestenus,
1827. See also, Theod. v. Mops. u. Junilius Africanus, by Kihn,
1880. 2 The only Old Testament work of Theodore's which is extant
is that on The Twelve Prophets : A. Mai, Nova Patr. Bibl. vii.
1854; Migne, Patrologia Gmca, vol. lxvi. His historical expla
nations of the Old Testament do not of course preclude typical
references to the New. Old and New are part of the same
economy of Divine grace. We hear from others that he denied
value to the titles of the Psalms ; thathe referred the Messianic
Psalms to Hezekiah and Zerubbabel, leaving only three with a
reference to Jesus Christ ; that he denied prophetic inspiration
to Job and the Solomonic literature ; and rejected Chronicles
with Ezra and Nehemiah.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 229
His pupils, especially Theodoret, afterwards
Bishop of Kyros,1 carried on the example of
their master.
Chrysostom began to write probably as early
as Theodore. His first work on the Old Testa
ment was, like that of the latter, exegetical: a
'Hermeneia' or 'Interpretation' of the Prophet
Isaiah,2 but he never finished it. Drawn by his
superb gifts to the pulpit, he delivered to the
Church the rest of his Old Testament studies
in the form of Homilies, of which six, still ex
tant, expand and apply his views — already given
in the ' Interpretation ' — of the first verse of
Isaiah's vision and of the Seraphs.3
1 Theodoret, d. 457. His works were edited in four folio
volumes in 1642 by Sirmond. The first two volumes contain
those on the Old Testament : vol. i. 'Ep&T^<reis or Quaestiones to
the Octateuch, Kings and Chronicles, with a 'Ep/i-qveta or Inter
pretation of the Psalms and Canticles ; vol. ii. Interpretations
of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the Twelve Prophets, and an
epitome of his Interpretation of Isaiah. An adequate sketch of
his teaching on the Old Testament is given by Diestel, Gesch. des
A. T. in der Christl. Kirche, pp. 133 ff. ¦ 'Dass Typus und
" Wahrheit " oft noch neben einander, nicht in einander stehen,
und dem 7) [lev lirropia eSiSa'-ei/ ein ij/j-els Se fiavddvoftev gegenii-
bertritt; dass die Schrift des A. T.'s so zu verstehen ist wie sie
den Juden selbst hat niitzen konnen (cf. interrog. 52 in Genesim).'
2 Vol. vi. of the standard edition of his works by de Montfau-
con (Paris 1835). The editor quotes with approval Tillemont's
opinion that this unfinished work was not later than 377 A.D.
3 Ibid.: besides there are Homilies and Sermons from Chry
sostom on Genesis and on David and Saul (vol. iv.) ; on the
Psalms (vol. v.), on several Old Testament texts, and two on
' the Obscurity of the Prophetic Writings,' with others, and a.
' Hermeneia ' of Daniel (all of these in vol. vi.), and on the
Books of the Maccabees (vol. ii.).

230 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
The introduction to his ' Hermeneia ' of Isaiah
defines the principles of the new exegesis. The
ministry of the Prophets to their own generation
has never been more finely described — as a
ministry not only of judgement but of love and
fellow-suffering. ' Now of all the prophets and
saints this was the spirit : in disposition towards
them over whom they were set they excelled
the tender affection of fathers, and by a long
way outdid the sovereignty of nature ... for
there is no qualification for office so important
as a soul that loves wisdom and knows how to
suffer with others.' 1 It is the picture of the
Prophets by one who was himself a prophet ; we
will not marvel that the man who so intuitively
understood his great forerunners was impelled to
leave his study for the imitation of them among
his own people. Chrysostom's homilies on the
Old Testament are not a little engaged with
argument against the Jews, and in defence of
predictions of Christ; to that extent they are
less direct than his magnificent preaching on
the Gospels and Epistles. But from the first he
endeavours to keep allegorising in a secondary
place. He reckons historical explanation to be
1 Kal Trdyrotv 5e rav irpo(pT]Twv KaX twv ayiaiy tolovtov to sBos '
¦traripav tpiKoaropylav rp irepl rolls dpxofievovs dire'/cpui/zav SiaSetrti,
Kal t^v rrjs (pvtrews rvpayviSa 4k ttoWov rov irepiovros vtrepr\K6v-
Tiffav . . . Kal yap ovSef otirius emTi)5eioy els &pxvs o!ipeaiv
los if/vx^l <pi\6(ro<j>os Kal avvaXytiv iirioTaixivr) (vi. 2, ed. Mont-
faucon).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 231
' the more true ' ; 1 and, thus discerning the ethical
essence of the Prophets, he scourges the vices and
consoles the sufferings of Antioch with the words
of Isaiah to Jerusalem. The school of Antioch
' is another proof of the principle we have found
instanced in our own time, that the revival of a
true historical criticism means a revival of the
practical use of the Old Testament in the Chris<-
tian pulpit. Recognise that the fundamental
meaning of the prophecies must be that which
they bore to the living generation to whom they
were first addressed ; 2 and you are at once
inspired by their message to the men of your
own time.
In the Western Church the influence of Origen
continued to prevail; and the interpretation of
the Bible was not enfranchised from the alle
gorising methods of the Alexandrian school.
Ambrose and Augustine3 appear to have con
fined their exegetical work upon the Old Testa
ment to the Pentateuch, some of the historical
Books, the Psalms, Job, and scattered passages ;
upon the Prophets we have from them nothing
elaborate. Properly, therefore, they fall outside
the intention of this review ; yet a few sentences
1 Ibid. p. 17 on Isa. i. 22, 'E-ytij 5e -oire raim\v aTip.i(a tV
ttfiyria-i-v, i-e. the allegorical, Kal tt)v eripav d*i7jfle<rTe'pai> eival (ptilii-
2 See the extract from Theodoret above, p. 229, n. I.
3 Besides these Hilary of Poitiers wrote on the Psalms and
Canticles. See Diestel, Geschichte des A. T. in d. Christl. Kirche,
p. 78.

232 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
may be devoted to the general style of Augustine's
exegesis.1 As an interpreter, Augustine was
above all the mystic and allegorist. It is true
that the restlessness and ingenuity of his mind
were constantly dissatisfied with a method of
exposition so cheap and so easily abused, and
that his inherited inclination to allegory was be
sides frequently arrested by difficulties in the text
and history of Scripture which this method was
unable to solve. He aimed to write a commen
tary on Genesis ad litteram : ' that is to say, not
according to allegorical significations but accord-
ding to the inherent quality of the transactions
as they happened ' ; 2 and he expressly affirmed
that the spiritual sense of a passage ought to
be drawn from it 'only provided that the his
torical truth has first been conserved ' ; 3 and
1 Augustine's works on the Old Testament are these (given
along with the volume of the Benedictine edition of his works in
which each occurs) : — vol. i. De Genesi contra Manichaeos libri
II. ; vol. iii. De Genesi ad Litteram imperfectus Liber (only some
fifteen pages) ; De Genesi ad Litteram Libri xii. (he explains
the title in his Retract, ii. 24, thus : id est non secundum alle-
goricas significationes sed secundum rerum gestarum proprieta-
tem ; the work extends only to the expulsion from Eden ) ;
Locutionum libri vii. Genesis to Judges : Questionum in Hepta-
teuchum lib. vii. ; Annotationum in Job lib. i.; vol. iv. Enarra-
tiones in Psalmos ; vol. v. many sermons on Old Testament
passages ; and vol. viii. the sections of the De Civitate Dei,
discussed below, p. 252. The Enarrationes in Psalmos are
translated in six volumes of the Oxford Library of the Fathers
(1847-57)- 2 Retract, ii. 24 : see previous note.
8 De Civitate Dei, xvii. 3: 'audeant sensum intelligentiae
spiritalis exsculpere, servata primitus duntaxat historiae veritate.J

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 233
again, ' if any Scripture is to be investigated,
let us inquire in what manner a thing has been
said, apart from the allegorical signification.' J
These are sound directions, but Augustine had
neither the knowledge nor the temperament to
carry them out. He was ignorant of Hebrew ; 2
therefore incapable of a grammatical exegesis,
and dependent on the philological fancies of
others. The difficulties, which his subtle mind
detected in the allegorising of his predecessors,
the same mind solved with fresh and more
plausible imaginations. It is true that he did
not always go astray — though the credit of this
was his own rather than that of his methods. In
so elastic a system of exegesis, so magnificent
a genius for religion could not fail frequently to
reach the truth : so fruitful a spirit was certain
nearly always to be edifying. In a misty atmo
sphere like that of allegory the small man is
lost altogether, while the large man often looms
the larger and moves majestically. Therefore,
however dim be his light, the motions of Augus
tine are generally worth following. Especially
in his exposition of the Psalms, amid not a little
to amuse and much to weary, we find almost
more that is suggestive and practical. Again
1 De Genesi ad Litteram, i. 2 : ' quaeramus quomodo dictum
est, praeter allegoricam significationem.'
2 Confess, xi. 5 : De Sermone in Monte, i. 23. The version
which Augustine used was the old Latin version known to us as
the Itala: De Doctr. Christiana, ii. 14.

234 MODERN CRITICISM AND .THE
and again Augustine discovers the essence of
a Psalm; or if this be missed, he leaves us
with scattered sentences of glorious insight and
inspiration. Jerome,1 who adorns a rank as high
as Origen's in the history of the textual criticism
of the Old Testament, did not, in spite of his
occasional use of better methods, escape from
the orthodox routine of a subjective and alle
gorical exegesis. His principal service was to
recall the Church to the original of the greater
half of her Scriptures, and to present her with
a Latin version of the Old Testament based on
the Hebrew text. Jerome does not himself fall
within a review of the Church's preaching from
the Prophets ; but for the next thousand years
he guided with Augustine the influence, for good
and evil, of the Old Testament upon the Christian
pulpit. It was not, however, in preaching that during
this millennium the influence of the Old Testa
ment was most effective; but on ecclesiastical
constitutions and in the defence of dogma. Of
the first of these the growth of the Canon Law
and of the claims of the Papacy are the most strik
ing instances ; of the second, the writings of the
scholastic theologians. The Canon Law almost
everywhere borrows from the Hebrew theocracy :
the Papal throne and its defenders appeal to the
rights of the Levitical hierarchy, and to the High
1 Died 420.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 235
Priest's assumption of the temporal power. The
commentaries of Thomas Aquinas1 on some of
the Prophets,2 while often clearly, though coldly,
suggestive of truth,3 attempt to discover predic
tions of the great facts of the Evangel and of
all the chief dogmas of the Church in the most
irrelevant passages.4 Bernard of Clairvaux's
eighty-six sermons on the Song of Solomon are
representative of the furor typologicus of the
time. Yet as Diestel rightly reminds us,5 a great
deal of the practical preaching of the Middle
Ages reflects directly the examples of Hebrew
history, and the plain ethical sense of the pro
phetic writings. And we must not forget how
the Psalms, in the musical Latin to which the
Vulgate had set them, were as a stream of
living water through all those thousand years,
refreshing personal piety and the public wor
ship of the Church. But apart from such ex
ceptions, the principal purposes to which the
Christian Church put the Old Testament, between
the disappearance of the great theologians of the
fifth century and the eve of the Reformation,
1 Died 1274.
2 See vol. i. of the second Venetian edition (1775) of his works,
comprising commentaries to Job, the first fifty-one Psalms and
the Song of Songs ; and vol ii. commentaries to Isaiah, Jeremiah
and Lamentations.
8 Eg. on Jer. vii. and xxxi.
i E.g. on Isaiah liii. the phrase, a root out of a dry ground,
which he takes as a prediction of the virgin birth of Christ.
5 Page 225.

236 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
were purposes typological, ecclesiastical and
dogmatic. For her ethics during the greater
part of that period the Church deserted the
Prophets for the moralists of Greece and Rome.1
From the twelfth to the fifteenth century
better means of understanding the Hebrew text
were gradually acquired by the Church, and for
the most part from the works of Jews or Jewish
proselytes. With the increase of such instru
ments for criticism, there arose bolder attempts
at sound methods of exegesis ; and by necessary
consequence the practical use of the Old Testa
ment exhibited many signs of improvement.2
It is now that we meet with the first real suc
cessor of Chrysostom in the homiletic exposition
of the Prophets. Savonarola,3 besides reviving
a pure Gospel, was a preacher of civic righteous
ness, and he became so by his sermons upon
Micah and other Prophetical Books.4 Of twenty-

1 For a practical instance of this see below, p. 254, on Dante's
De Monorchia.
2 The two names of this period which stand forth before a
crowd of others in the respects above mentioned are that of the
celebrated Nikolaus of Lyra (d. 1340) whose influence was very
great on exegesis both before and after the Reformation : cf. the
saying: * SiLyranonlyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset '; and that
of Reuchlin, whose Rudimenta Linguae Hebraae was not published
till the beginning of the sixteenth century : 1506.
8 1452-1498.
4 Works, in six volumes, 1633-40 ; Prediche di F. Girolamo
Savonarola : edizione integra . . . per cura di Giuseppe Baccini :
Florence 1889. These are the sermons preached in 1496. A
short life of Savonarola and appendices are given.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 237
nine sermons preached by him at Florence
between Easter and Advent 1496, and taken
down by Ser Lorenzo Violi, only two are from
New Testament texts, and one of these, on the
Ascension, is largely occupied by an exposition
of the story of Balaam. Five expound the Book
of Ruth, and thirteen the prophecies of Micah.
The others are from texts in 2 Chronicles, in
five Psalms, in Isaiah vi., and in Ecclesiastes vii.
In all of these sermons the current politics of
that year are dealt with ; and the teaching of
the Old Testament is applied to the dangers
and vices of the citizens of Florence.
After the Reformation the linguistic aids to
the interpretation of the Old Testament rapidly
multiplied, and with them the practice of a
grammatical and historical exegesis became pre
dominant. Many of the leading Reformers were
as fully acquainted with Hebrew as the improved
culture of their time permitted, and though still
hampered by the traditional allegorising, they
boldly stated, and frequently exemplified, the
duty of holding to the simple sense of Scripture.
' I have grounded my preaching,' said Luther,
' on the literal word.' 1 To him, as to Melanchthon
1 Table Talk, ch. i. His frequently expressed opinions in this
regard are summed up in ch. lix. ; ' Allegories and Spiritual Sig
nifications, when they are directed upon Faith and seldom used,
then they are good and laudable, but when they are drawn upon
the life and conversation, then they are dangerous and I am an
enemy unto them. ... St. Jerome and Origen (God forgive it

238 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
and Zwingli, allegory was permissible only as
' rhetoric' and 'ornament,' the means of attracting
common and uneducated minds. As his career
advanced he more fully dispensed with it : ' I
have shaken it off, and my best art is to render
Scripture in the simple sense.' There are also
real flashes of historical insight in his critical
pronouncements, that it does not matter much
' if Moses did not himself write the Pentateuch ' ;
that many of the Prophetical Books, for example
Isaiah, Jeremiah and Hosea, contain additions,
and have received their present forms from later
writers ; and that the Book of Job is not history
but a poem or drama. Apart from the value
of these particular utterances the Church owes
to Luther the greatest example yet offered to
her of the Christian liberty of a discriminating
judgement on the Old Testament.1 Yet through-
them) holp thereunto that Allegories were held in such esteem. . . .
Now I have shaken it off and my best art is Tradere Scripturam
simplici sensu, that is to deliver the Scripture in the simple sense :
the same doth the deed : therein is life, strength, doctrine and
Art ; in the other is nothing but foolishness, let it lustre and shine
how it will. St. Austin gave a rule: Quod Figura et Allegoria
nihil probet sed Historia, Verba et Grammatica, i.e. that Figure
and Allegories prove nothing at all, but Historie, Words and
Grammar ' (Capt. Henrie Bell's translation). Besides his Trans
lation (1534) Luther's work on the Old Testament consisted of
sermons and expositions in Latin and German on Genesis,
Exodus and Deuteronomy ; Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos,
Obadiah, Micah, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zechariah, Malachi,
Daniel, many Psalms, Canticles and Ecclesiastes (all apparently
between 1523 and 1546).
1 See Lecture I.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 239
out Luther was the preacher rather than the
interpreter. His exposition, like his criticism,
of Scripture, if not dominated, was constantly
interrupted, by his personality with its rude
human vigour and its marvellous experience of
Divine grace.. Sometimes it is the native Luther
who thus breaks out, as in the almost truculent
sentences upon the Prophets, the Epistle of
James and the Apocalypse; but far oftener it
is the ' new Luther,' the man who has passed
through the struggles in the Erfurt cloister, and
has been saved by faith. Thus, though he
violates 'the simple sense' of many passages,
and overlooks small but not insignificant points
in others, he carries our hearts with him to lofty
and far-reaching views of God's purposes of
salvation as they lie spread out across both
Testaments. Kostlin, his principal biographer
in our time, has thus justly characterised Luther's
exposition : ' The whole delivery of Luther's
teaching preserves that quality of fresh life
which we have pointed out in connection with
his first writings. . . . The fundamental doctrine
of salvation, as it always moved himself, so in
his utterances it constantly presses into the
foreground and the centre; this is an essential
peculiarity of his exposition of Scripture and of
his sermons. In the former he knows how to
soar on every occasion to the highest points of
view, and to spread spirit and life across ap-

240 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
parently barren sections of his course. In the
treatment of such scriptures as have no im
mediate original connection with those funda
mental doctrines, as also in the definition within
a text of those details, which, in contrast to
its leading thoughts, have only a subordinate
importance, the claims of historical and linguistic
accuracy do not always come to their rights.'1
The soundest exegete of the time was John
Calvin : considering his means and opportunities,
we may call him the greatest expositor of all
time. ' To real exegetic skill he unites the full
freedom of a Theodore of Mopsuestia with the
profundity of a Luther.' 2 Calvin's knowledge of
Hebrew ; 3 his command not only of the historic
circumstance but of the mental atmosphere4 of
the different periods, from which the Old Testa-
1 Herzog's Real-Encyclopadie, second ed. ix. 72.
2 Diestel, op. cit. p. 269.
8 Calvin himself makes no assertion of his knowledge of
Hebrew ; and Simon, the early critic of the Pentateuch (see
above, p. 33), denied that he knew enough for practical purposes.
But the fact has been admitted even by his enemies — he at least
is a Reformer to whom Roman controversialists allow an adequate
acquaintance with the original languages of Scripture. Compare
too the tributes of Diestel and Tholuck to his linguistic endow
ments. But indeed his mastery of Hebrew, though never dis
played, is felt throughout all his commentaries on the Old
Testament. Beza, his biographer, after saying that Calvin was
a friend of Grynasus and Capito, adds ' seseque Hebraicis Uteris
dedit.' See for the details Calvin Hibraisant, by Professor
Antoine J. Baumgartner of Geneva (Paris 1889), a very interest
ing inquiry as to where and how Calvin learned his Hebrew.
4 Cf. his admission of the exilic atmosphere of Isaiah lv.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 241
ment arose; his fairness even to the confession
of errors in Scripture, combined with his healthy
indifference as to their presence;1 his single-
hearted aim to give the original meaning of the
sacred authors; his appreciation of the essence
of prophecy, not as prediction, but ' as the
message of God to men,' ' the interpreting and
administering of revelation ' ; 2 his contempt for
allegory; 3 his independence of tradition, and
stout refusal to find proofs for doctrine in ir
relevant texts ; 4 his sobriety and sense of propor
tion — all these sincere qualities are at the
command of a profound religious insight, and
of a spirit desirous to know only what God has
1 On Matthew xxvii. 9 : ' Quo modo Hieremiae nomen obrep-
serit, me nescire fateor, nee anxie laboro ; certe Hieremiae nomen
errore positum esse pro Zacharia, res ipsa ostendit.' ' In what
way the name of Jeremiah has stolen in here, I confess I do not
know, nor do I trouble myself about it ; that the name of Jeremiah
has been by error substituted for that of Zechariah, the thing itself
clearly shows' On Acts vii. 16 — Stephen's statement that
Jacob's and other patriarchs' bodies were carried to Shechem to
be buried in a sepulchre which Abraham bought of the sons of
Emmor (father or son ?) of Sychem — Calvin remarks, ' in nomine
Abrahae erratum palam esse. Quare hie locus corrigendus est.'
' As every one can see, an error has been made in the name of
Abraham. Wherefore this passage has to be corrected.'
2 So he defines it on 1 Cor. xii. 9; xiv. 6.
8 On 1 Cor. ix. 8 : ' Some hairbrained spirits take occasion
from this to turn everything into allegories. Thus they change
dogs into men, trees into angels, and all Scripture into a laughing
stock.' 4 See above, p. 146, his criticism of alleged Messianic prophe
cies. Calvin's exegesis is curiously independent of his somewhat
rigorous doctrine of Scripture. Q

242 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
willed to say.1 Among Calvin's expositions
many moderns give preference to those on the
Psalms; to me it seems as if his interpretations
of the Prophets were still greater: in so far as
with the latter he finds more solid ground in
date and circumstance for his original gifts of
historical exegesis. But on every Book of the
Old Testament Calvin is a commentator whom
neither the modern exegete nor the modern
preacher can afford to neglect.
May I remind you in a sentence that I am
not now giving the full doctrine of Scripture
which the Reformers held, but that my purpose
is only to show how far founded upon grammar
and history and how far true to ' the simple
sense' their exegesis was.2 Once more we
see the practical effect of such methods. The
great exegetes of the Reformation, and their im-
1 Calvin's claim for himself is not exaggerated (Epistle Dedi
catory to his Commentary on The Twelve Prophets) : ' If God
has endued me with any aptness for the interpretation of Scrip
ture, I am fully persuaded that I have faithfully and carefully
endeavoured to exclude from it all barren refinements — however
plausible and fitted to please the ear — and to preserve genuine
simplicity, adapted solidly to edify the children of God, who
being not content with the shell wish to penetrate to the kernel '
(Owen's translation, Edm. 1846).
2 For a statement of the Reformers' doctrine of Scripture, and
a discrimination between it on the one hand and the views of
mediaeval theologians and modern evangelicals and certain Broad
churchmen on the other, see an article by Professor T. M. Lindsay
in the Expositor, fourth series, vol. x. (July-December 1894)
pp. 241 ff. on 'Professor W. Robertson Smith's Doctrine of
Scripture.'

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 243
mediate followers,1 guided a Church for whose use
translations of the Bible were being made into
the various vernaculars and everywhere multi
plied by the art of printing. The more scientific
exegesis had given the Bible to the people ; and
the result was the practical influence of the Old
Testament upon the pulpit, the school and the
state to an extent beyond what was reached
by any previous age. Luther had unfortunately
described the political activity of the Prophets
as ' so much hay, straw and wood among the
genuine silver and gold' of their work — as if
thier political messages could be separated from
their religion ! Partly because of the sounder
example of Calvin in the historical exegesis
which he illustrated, and partly because of a
wider use of the Bible in public worship, the
influence of the Old Testament in Switzerland
and other regions of the Reformed Church, as
distinguished from the Lutheran, was more
ethical than it came to be among the Luther
ans themselves. Yet almost everywhere the
Prophets began to speak to the new generations.
From the time of the Reformation to our own
there never has been a city of Protestant
Europe which has been stirred to higher ideals
of justice and purity, without the rewaking of
those ancient voices which declared to Jacob his
sin and to Israel his transgression. Once more
1 For a full list of these see Diestel, op. cit. 269 ff.

244 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the revival of a sounder criticism was followed
by the revival of a more practical preaching. The
fidelity which sought to discover what the Pro
phets actually meant to the men of their own
time was rewarded by the inspiration of their
message to the men of all times.
It is unnecessary to give full illustration of this
within the English-speaking Churches. Suffice
it to remember the earlier Puritans like Henry
Smith with his ' Scriptures for Magistrates ' from
the eighty-second Psalm, and his ' Memento for
Magistrates ' from the forty-fifth ; 1 and the later
Puritans, like Goodwin, whose sermons to the
House of Commons on public occasions were
nearly always upon Old Testament texts; or
like Cromwell, whose addresses to his parliaments
so often started, or were enforced, from the same
sources.2 1 The Sermons of Mr. Henry Smith gathered into one volume,
with an introduction by Thomas Fuller, and dedicated to William
Cicill, Lord Burleigh, Treasurer of England, 1657. Smith was
' commonly called the silver-tongued preacher, and that was but
one metall below St. Chrysostom himself (Fuller). How prac
tical his preaching from the Old Testament was (and the same
might be illustrated from other Puritan preachers) may be seen
from the ' one instance of many of the great prevalency he had
with his auditory ' which Fuller gives. ' He preached a sermon
on Sarah's nursing oi Isaac, and thereupon grounded the general
doctrine, that it was the duty of all mothers to nurse their own
children, allowing dispensation to such who were unsufficienced
by weakness, want of milk, or any avouchable impediment. He
prest the application without respect of persons high or- low,
rich or poor, one with another.'
2 Carlyle, Cromwell' s Letters and Speeches, vol. iv.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 245
The rise and elaboration of the Federal idea
of Revelation,1 led in Great Britain to a de
tailed extension of the political uses of the
Old Testament in preaching which lasted even
into the nineteenth century. In Scotland es
pecially this was inspired, not only by the in
stitutions of the Law, but by the patriotism,
national romance and passion of the historical
and prophetical Books. To-day the proudest
memories of the Scottish people are associated
with the struggles and heroisms of Old Testament
history. It was not merely that for two centuries
the prevailing theology in Scotland conceived of
God's relation to man under the form of a cove
nant ; but as in Israel's case the covenant was un
derstood as national and it comprised every public
interest. The Scottish preachers, who in times
of persecution taught their suffering nation to see
herself in the Trampled Vine, the Desolate City
and the Remnant of God's pity and promise, in
times of peace enforced upon every department
of her life the whole righteousness of ancient
Israel. Nor did they always preach that legalism,
which being falsely imputed to Scotland has
moved some 2 to call her in scorn ' the Judaea
of the West.' It is true that they were some-
1 Originating with the fathers of the Reformation, but re
duced to a system by Coccejus — Summa doctrina de foedere Dei
et testamento explicata, J. Coccejo, 1648 — and other seventeenth-
century theologians.
2 Eg. Heine.

246 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
times dogmatically national. Even the greatest
theologians of the seventeenth century were apt
to confine the covenant to the visible Church, and
in the spirit of Deuteronomy to include within
its obligations none that extended beyond the
limits of their own nation. The late Dr. Walker,
in his admirable work on The Theology and
Theologians of Scotland} says that ' the seven
teenth century divines were greatly hampered by
what I may call their Judaic theory of the
world's conversion. Our modern idea of the
visible Church, as a kingdom of faith pushing out
in bold aggressions on every side . . . aiming at
nothing less than the spiritual subjugation of the
world to the faith and obedience of the gospel,
was very faintly realised in that earlier period of
our history. What our fathers rather thought of
was a sort of expansion of nationalism after the
Jewish fashion, in which, when God has elect
ones among a people to be gathered in, He
takes the nation into external covenant with
Himself, and within the order, and under the
ordinances of a visible Church as His " office-
house of grace," — not excluding the aid extrinsic
of the sword of the magistrate. ..." To have
the doctrine of the covenant preached to a
nation," says Rutherford, " and Christ offered to
them is to be the planted vineyard of the Lord.
The field is the field of the visible kingdom of
1 First Edition, Edinburgh, 1872, p. 58 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 247
Christ because the world of all natural men is
not the Lord's field, where He soweth His wheat,
but the visible Church is only such a field." '
Thus in modern Scotland fervent Christian men
were so infected by formal Judaism as to fall into
the error, for which the prophet Jonah (as the type
of Israel) is rebuked and punished in the Book
which bears his name. It was Thomas Boston
and the so-called ' marrow-men ' who came to the
rescue of Scotland from so narrow and nationalist
an interpretation of the covenant of grace. ' Bos
ton and the marrow-men,' continues Dr. Walker,
' first of all among our divines entered freely into
the missionary spirit of the Bible ; were able to
see that Calvinistic doctrine ' — that is especially
in the covenanting principles which it borrowed
from the Old Testament — ' was not inconsistent
with world-conquering aspirations and efforts.'
Within the religious life of the nation, the
legalism of the covenanting theology yielded to
more spiritual forces. Most of the preachers of
the Covenant, like the Prophets of Israel, kept
before their people the Person of their King
rather than the letter of His Law. It was not
legal obedience they demanded, but those chival
rous affections which are as the fire to cleanse
national life and to enkindle in a people the
ardours of sacrifice and service — ' zeal for the
glory of God,' ' love to the Lord Jesus Christ,'
' the sole King and Head of the Church ' — and

248 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the faith that He is identified with the poor and
the oppressed. Of the Scottish people in that
heroic age the saying is true in which the heathen
seer described the people of Israel :
The Lord his God is with him,
And the noise of a King is among them}
This period was not without its able exegetes,
independent of tradition and with a conscience to
interpret Scripture upon such scientific methods
as were at the disposal of their time.2 But
either they were not consistent in carrying
out these methods, or they were more or less
destitute of sympathy with the religious mean
ing of what they treated, and sometimes subject
to intellectual tempers almost as dogmatic as
the traditional views which they abjured. The
period also produced philosophic critics, who
anticipated not only many of the principles,
but some of the conclusions of modern criti
cism.3 And to this period belongs the fame
— often unjustly ignored by the more scientific
age which has eclipsed it — of solid contribu
tions to the philology of the Old Testament,4
1 Numbers xxiii. 21.
2 One has only to recall Grotius.
8 Like Hobbes, Collins and Spinoza. Simon too started the
analysis of the Pentateuch before the end of the seventeenth
century, and was followed by Astruc in the eighteenth (see
above Lecture II.). All through the period there were Critica
Sacra issued by various scholars.
4 Like the works of Erpenius, Golius, Buxtorf, De Dieu,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 249
and of the origins of the modern sciences of
sacred chronology and archaeology.1 The prac
tical preaching of the period did not remain un
influenced by such essays. The study of the
original languages of Scripture, as well as of
Syriac, was pursued by many of the ordinary
ministers of all the Protestant Churches in
Great Britain ; while a few of the better-known
names are still associated with the reputation of
high proficiency in Oriental learning. My own
countrymen, whether harassed by the persecu
tions of the seventeenth century or absorbed
by the reconstruction of their Church and her
theological controversies in the beginning of the
eighteenth, found time to produce works both
on the Hebrew language and on the exegesis
of the Old Testament. They used alike the
leisure of exile and the occasions of their parish
ministry to the furtherance of a scholarship
which more than once received the praise of
Schultens and others in the grammar and lexicography of the
Oriental languages.
1 In chronology Scaliger's, Lightfoot's and Ussher's are the
foremost names : in archaeology, among & crowd of works
the most famous are Samuel Boch art's Phalegand Canaan 1646,
and Hierozoicon 1663; Reland's Palaestina 1714, and other
treatises ; with the Travels of Maundrell 1697, Pococke 1737, and
Hasselquist 1749 ff. Or in another department Goodwin, Moses
and Aaron 1610 ; Cunaus, De Republica Hebraeorum, libr. iii. ed.
Elz. 1632 ; Selden in De Jure Naturali et Gentium and Uxor
Ebraica, besides De Diis Syriis and De Synedriis et Praefecturis
Juridicis Ebraeorum ; J. Spencer, De Legibus Hebraeorum, etc,
1685; and Eisenmenger, Neuentdeckten Judenthume 1702-1711.

250 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the great Continental Hebraists.1 To the high
zeal and industry with which men like John
Livingstone, Brown of Wamphray, Jamieson and
Thomas Boston repeated the examples of learn
ing afforded them by the first Reformers we owe
the fact that a knowledge of both Greek and He
brew has ever been required from candidates for
the Scottish ministry. Nor did the Pilgrim Fathers
fail to carry across the Atlantic the scholarly
ideals of the early Puritans. The first schools
of divinity in New England provided courses of
study in the originals of both Testaments, besides
an introduction to Syriac ; 2 and a succession of
competent teachers of Hebrew appeared down to
the middle of the seventeenth century.8
1 The Theology and Theologians of Scotland, chiefly of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by James Walker, D.D.,
Carnwath, Edinburgh 1872; Lecture i. John Livingstone,
banished under Charles IL, corrected the proofs for an edition
of the Syriac New Testament ; and revised the Latin text of the
Old Testament, intending to print the Latin and Hebrew in
parallel columns. His fellow-exile, Brown of Wamphray, had
equal scholarship. Jamieson published Spicilegia, or notes on
the connections between Bible history and the history of Greek
and Latin authors. Above all Thomas Boston, who mastered
Hebrew after he went to Ettrick, prepared a work on Hebrew
accentuation, of a specimen of which Schultens and Grenobius
said : ' On the supposition that the rest of this book is equal to
this sketch it will, on the whole, be the best book that has been
written on this subject.' To this period also belongs the series of
commentaries edited by Dickson, including Hutchison on the
Minor Prophets, Durham on the Song of Solomon, and Dickson
himself on the Psalms.
2 New England's First Fruits, London 1643.
8 Zeitschrift fiir A. T. Wissenschaft, viii. (1888) 1 ff . ; ' A.T.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 251
In spite of the insight and erudition which
distinguished the Old Testament scholarship and
preaching of this period, these did not succeed
in establishing the exegesis of Scripture upon
sound principles, nor give to the Church a
clear view of the development of revelation
within Israel. We now perceive that their real
value consisted in the indispensable prepara
tion they provided for that modern criticism,
which in the end of the eighteenth and through
out the nineteenth century has arranged the Old
Testament upon historical lines and enabled the
Church to trace the real history of Israel's re
ligious development. The course of that criti
cism we have already followed in the Second
Lecture, while its influence upon preaching has
been appreciated in the beginning of this one.
We have been tracing the practical effects of
a historical exegesis of the Old Testament on the
preaching of the Christian Church. But our
survey cannot be closed without a brief notice
— all that our space permits — of the influence of
the Old Testament upon the great succession
of Christian treatises and arguments on govern
ment which forms an almost complete history
of the political ideal from Constantine to the
Studien in America,' by Prof. G. Moore of Andover. Cotton
Mather records that even women studied Hebrew (Magnolia, iii.
23). Moore mentions besides Jonathan Edwards' History of
Redemption, a ms. work by the great theologian on the Messianic
prophecies of the Old Testament.

252 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
period before the French Revolution. Augus
tine's De Civitate Dei; Dante's De Monarchia; the
political tracts of Luther and other Reformers;
the political prefaces to Calvin's Commentaries
and the chapter on Civil Government in his Insti
tutes; the arguings of Knox with the statesmen
of Queen Mary ; Buchanan's De Jure Regniapud
Scotos; his royal pupil's Jus Liberae Monarchiae
and other lectures from the throne to a murmur
ing people; the Royal Defence of Salmasius;
Milton's answer to it in the Defence of the People
of England ; Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex — the
list might be greatly extended but is sufficiently
representative. In only a few of these do we
find any real attempt to distinguish between
what was permanently valid in Old Testa
ment laws and institutions and what was of
transient authority — with such success as we shall
presently observe. In all the others, on both
sides of the great controversy which runs through
them, the eagerness of the disputants to claim
every plausible precedent and sanction for their
respective opinions is too warm to allow of
historical discrimination. And therefore it is
that in this series of works we feel most acutely
what I have already said is conspicuous through
the whole history of the Old Testament in the
Christian Church — namely, the strangely varied
character of the influence which the Hebrew
Scriptures have exerted upon Christian ethics.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 253
In the De Civitate Dei l Augustine distinguishes
between the ideal and the actual in the kingdom
of Israel. In fact, he says, it was a ' civitas
terrena,' only in essence a ' civitas Dei.' How
ever imperfectly Israel carried out the principles
of the theocracy revealed to them, these principles
remain a political standard and inspiration for
all time, a perpetual pattern to the Christian
State. The distinction is sound but vague :
and Augustine had not the historic insight to
apply it in detail. His allegorising interpreta
tion only increased the vagueness of the distinc
tion; and he left it to the mediaeval Church with
outlines so elastic as to permit the champions
of the divine authority of the Papacy and of the
Empire to find within the Old Testament ex
ample and sanction for even the most arrogant
of their claims. Augustine himself was in the
habit of appealing to the Old Testament in de
fence of rigorous measures by the State against
heretics. The precedent he set was consistently
followed by the Roman Inquisition.2
1 Books xv-xvii.
2 Diestel (Gesch. der A. T. 152 f.) says that 'the whole con
ception by Charlemagne of the idea of the State shows many
theocratic elements'; and refers to S. Rettberg, Kirchengeschichte
Deutschlands. On p. 1 53 Diestel says : ' the Decalogue occurs in
the laws of the Frisians.' It has been my duty for geographical
purposes to go through the so-called Assizes of Jerusalem, the
collection of legal works from the kingdoms of Jerusalem and
Cyprus in the thirteenth century (ed. by Le Comte Beugnot in
2 vols, of the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, Paris 184T f.).

254 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
In De Monarchia Dante draws his proofs for
a temporal power, universal in its sway, chiefly
from the moralists of Greece and Rome. His
claim for the Empire's independence of the
Church, and for the derivation of its authority
direct from God, is based on the character and
history of the Roman people and on the pro
vidence of God in committing to them the
government of the world. But he clinches his
argument with the facts that the Son of God
consented to be born into the Empire, and, by
His submission to Pilate, as the executioner of
His death for man's salvation, ' confirmed the
jurisdiction of the Roman Empire over all man
kind.' Dante quotes the Scriptures of the Old
Testament far less frequently than the Pagan
philosophies; and then chiefly by way of meta
phor and parable. When he deals with them
logically, it is never to claim for his thesis any
sanction from their theocratic principles, but only
to answer the arguments which the supporters of
the supremacy of the Church have drawn from
the precedence of Levi before Judah, or from the
crowning and deposition of Saul by Samuel.1
In this we meet with a contrast which we shall
It is remarkable how this precipitate of feudalism in the East is
devoid of religious argument and appeal. Almost the only
imitation of legal tempers or processes, borrowed so lavishly by
the Canon Law from the Old Testament, is the rigorous treat
ment of heretics. — Livre de Jean d'Ibelin, chap. exc.
1 Book iii. chaps. 5 and 6.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 255
often see exemplified : between the defenders
of the secular power who find their arguments
in the New Testament, and the champions of
the supremacy or independence of the spiritual
power who chiefly appeal to the Old.
Before we pass from the Mediaeval Church
we ought to note the influence of one great
doctrine of the Prophets upon the political
ideals of the age. In the Eleventh Chapter
of the Book of Isaiah and elsewhere the gifts
of the Spirit of God are predominantly the
qualities of just monarchs and wise counsel
lors. The Spirit was the Author of the Intel
lect, and more especially of the governing and
political intellect : tlte spirit of Jahweh, a spirit
of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel
and might, a spirit of knowledge and of the fear
of Jahweh : in other words, ripeness but also
sharpness of mind ; moral decision and heroic
energy ; piety in its two forms of knowing the
will of God and feeling the constraint to per
form it. We could not have a more concise
summary of the strong elements of a ruling
mind ; J and there is perhaps no passage in the
Old Testament, which impressed itself more on
the political and intellectual symbolism of the
Mediaeval Church. Using it to interpret Christ's
1 See the present writer's Isaiah i-xxxix. in the Expositor's
Bible, pp. 179-188, from which the above paragraph is mainly
drawn.

256 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
promise of the Paraclete as the Spirit of Truth,
the Church regarded the Holy Spirit, in the
words of Gregory of Tours, as ' the God of the
intellect more than of the heart.' On the painted
glass of many European cathedrals the Dove is
seen descending upon the heads of the doctors
and councils of the Church or hovering over the
figures of the sciences. Isaiah's description of
the Lord's Anointed was employed at the corona
tion of kings and the fencing of tribunals of
justice. It is evidently the model of the royal
hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. In a Greek minia
ture of the tenth century the Sacred Dove hovers
over King David, who displays the prayer : Give
the King Thy judgements, 0 God, and Thy right
eousness to the King's son ; while there stand on
either side of him the figures of Wisdom and
Prophecy.1 Henry the Third's order of knight
hood, ' Du Saint Esprit,' was restricted to politi
cal men, and particularly to magistrates.2
From what has been said above of the dif
ference between the Lutheran and Reformed
Churches in their use of the Old Testament, it
will be clear that fewer political ideas were
taken from it by the former than by the
latter. Luther uttered some sound sentences on
the local and temporary authority of the Mosaic
Law. ' We must and do reject and contemn
1 Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng. trans, i. 432.
2 Cf. the Story of St. Dunstan related in Didron, op. cit. i. 426.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 257
those, that so highly boast of the rights and
proceedings in Moses' Laws (Judicialia) in
temporal affairs, for we have our Imperial and
Countrie Laws under which we live and whereto
we are sworn. . . . Moses' Laws bound and
obliged only the Jews in that place which God
made choice of. . . . Therefore let us recommend
and leave Moses to his Laws, excepting only the
Moralia, which God hath planted in Nature, as
the Ten Commandments, which concern God's
true worshipping and service, and a civil life.' *
This is sound, but when Luther proceeds to
depreciate the political teaching of the Prophets 2
as so much ' straw, hay and wood,' we feel an
evil example, and are grateful to the founders
of the Reformed Church that they did not propa
gate it. In his appeal to the Christian Nobility
of the German Nation, Luther attacks the claims
of the Papacy and Roman priesthood, which, as
we have seen, were largely supported on Old
Testament texts and instances. He has to prove
the priesthood of all believers, and he does so
naturally from the New Testament. Like Dante
in the De Monarchia, he uses the Old Testament 3
to rebut the claim of the Church that the
Emperor because crowned by the Pope must be
subject to the latter. The exodus of Israel from
1 Table Talk, chap, xii., first paragraph, Capt. Henrie Bell's
translation, 1652. 2 See above, p. 243.
8 For example, from the cases of Samuel and Saul, and
Nathan and David : An den Christlichen Adel Deutscher Nation.
R

258 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Egypt and her redemption from Babylon were
to all the Reformers a type of the enfranchise
ment of the Church from the power of Rome.1
In these cases the rights of the Church are the
rights of the common people in face of their
tyrants. Calvin's Institutes are dedicated, with a pre
fatory address, to Francis King of the French;
his commentary on Isaiah to Edward vi. of
England; that on Jeremiah to the Elector
Frederick; and that on the Minor Prophets
to King Gustavus of Sweden. In these Pre
faces Calvin points out that the monarch must
labour for the word of God as essential to
the welfare of his realm. He illustrates from
the Old Testament that kings are the nursing
fathers of the Church ; and that the Church of
the majority, as in France, is not necessarily the
real Church of God : the true prophets were
often opposed to the priesthood in Israel, to the
kings, and to the bulk of the nation. It is
the prophetical writings which are most worth
the study of rulers : these should take as their
example the few kings of Israel who were on
the side of the prophets. Calvin treats of Civil
Government in the last chapter of the Institutes.
From both Testaments, but chiefly from the Old,
1 Cf. Luther's tractate on The Babylonian Captivity of the
Church, and Aurifaber's preface to the Table Talk, near the
beginning.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 259
he proves its lawfulness and its distinction from
the spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ. In God's
providence all forms of government have been
established, and it is impossible to say which
is the best. Calvin himself prefers the aristo
cratic ' with curbs ' ; and notes that what God
established in Israel was ' an aristocracy border
ing on popular government.' To be successful
a civil government must make piety and right
eousness its first care : this is proved from Old
Testament precepts, and principally from the
Prophets. Can magistrates then shed blood ?
They must restrain crime and avenge the suffer
ings of the righteous : in certain cases they ought
to go to war ; and they have the right to levy
taxes. With regard to laws Calvin is with
Luther: the views of those ' who deny that any
commonwealth is rightly framed which neglects
the law of Moses ' are ' stupid and false.' The
judicial and ceremonial laws of the Old Testa
ment were of passing authority. Only the moral
law of God is binding on us : wherever national
laws are framed after this rule, they should not
be condemned by us. That Christians may
appeal to magistrates and laws is proved from
Paul's example and from some of his precepts.
The righteousness of going to law in certain cases
is argued in a most Christian and reasonable
manner, very properly from the New Testament
rather than from the Old, for it was in the

260 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
former that the advocates of non-resistance in
Calvin's time claimed to find the sanction for
their opinion. From the Old Testament1 Calvin
curiously seeks to prove that tyrants are ap
pointed of God, and that it is a Christian duty
to obey them — except when they order us to do
what God has expressly forbidden.
Calvin emphasised from the Old Testament
the duty of the civil magistrate to cut off the
wicked. Unfortunately the Protestant Church
too much imitated that of Rome in extending
her vengeance to heretics and unbelievers ; and
upon both sides of the Atlantic appealed to the
practice of the rulers of Israel in defence of their
excommunication from civil rights of persons
who differed from orthodox opinions, and in
defence of the murder of witches.
In Great Britain, after the Reformation, the
political influence of the Old Testament chiefly
appears in the constant controversies between
the Divine Right of Kings and the Rights of the
People. The Scottish contributions to this argu
ment are well represented by Knox's debate with
Secretary Lethington and other statesmen of
Queen Mary, by Buchanan's Dejure Regni apud
Scotos, and by Rutherford's Lex Rex. Knox, in
his arraignment of Queen Mary, had argued on
the ground that the Law of Moses was binding
on Christians. Where it decreed that idolaters
1 I Sam. viii. 11-17, and Jer. xxvii. 5-8, 12.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 261
should be put to death, Christians ought to apply
it to those who institute or practise the mass.
By accepting his Scriptural premises — they were
unfortunately the common belief of the age —
Lethington gave himself into Knox's hands.
But Knox employed the Law of Moses less than
he did the history of Israel. Here he found
numerous precedents for the arraignment of
sovereigns by God's prophets and for their pun
ishment by the people. To statements by Calvin
and others, that the Old Testament contained
proofs of the lawfulness of even tyrannical govern
ments and of the people's duty of obedience to
them, Knox answered that Calvin had been
arguing against the anarchical Anabaptists and
he quoted instances of the overthrow of Jewish
kings by the people because of idolatry. Knox's
principal resource was thus Old Testament his
tory; that of his opponents, on the contrary,
was found among the New Testament precepts
of obedience to an authority so tyrannical as
that of the Roman Emperors. The same con
trast appears in the use of Scripture in the
dialogue De Jure Regni apud Scotos, between
George Buchanan and his royalist opponent.
The latter pleads Paul's commands to Christians
to honour and pray for tyrants like Tiberius,
Caligula, Claudius, Nero.1 Buchanan has no
difficulty in answering him upon New Testament
1 § lxii.

262 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
principles; but it is from the history of Israel
that he proves that kings ought to be punished
for evil-doing by the authority which created
them. In Israel that authority was God, in
Scotland the people.1
The same contrast is again visible in the
English forms of the controversy. Take a judi
cious advocate for the divinity of monarchy like
Hooker,2 or some preposterous ones like that
redoubtable royal lecturer James the First, and
like Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha, or the
Natural Power of Kings. The persistence, with
which they all seek to explain away their
opponents' reasons from the Old Testament,
proves that it was upon this part of Scripture
that the champions of democracy still chiefly
sharpened their weapons. In the first of his
Two Treatises of Government John Locke has
little difficulty in disposing of Filmer's ingenious
arguments from Adam and the Kings of Israel ;
in doing so he exhibits the most reasonable
treatment of Old Testament history — taking for
granted its reality throughout — which the litera
ture of Christendom had yet produced.
The contrast, which all those illustrated, might
also be traced, if there were space, in the contro
versy between Salmasius and Milton, or in Ruther
ford's Lex Rex; and even through the divines of
the Stuart and Hanoverian houses. Everywhere
1 § lxii. 2 Eighth Book of the Ecclesiastical Polity.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 263
the advocates of the Divine Right of Kings relied
upon New Testament texts — as Pilate's words
to Christ, I have power to crucify or release thee;
Paul's, the powers that be are ordained of God ;
Peter's, the King as supreme. Whereas the
Scriptures, which, after the fashion of the times,
popular champions like Milton and Rutherford
preferred against them were chiefly drawn from
the Old Testament ; from the elections of Saul and
David, their rebukes by Samuel and Nathan, the
subjection of the king to the covenant, the part
played by the people in the coronation and
deposition of the kings, as well as from many
passages of the Prophets. When we read such
arguments, and remember that the Book from
which they were drawn was in the hands and
hearts of the common people, we appreciate how
much of the liberty, which the period secured for
us, is due to the Old Testament.
It is obvious that the distinction between the
Old and New Testaments which this controversy
emphasised, is no artificial one. The political
circumstances of the two dispensations were
entirely different. Through Old Testament his
tory we follow the growth, the opportunities, the
judgement of a nation. The purpose of God is
a people ; religious discipline and experience,
religious duty and hope, are almost entirely
identified with national rights and responsibi
lities, and the struggle for national liberty and

264 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
national righteousness. But in the New Testa
ment we do not deal with a nation at all. It
is an exceptional state of affairs ; in which
religion neither is associated with popular
struggles, nor assumes the responsibilities of
government, but the sole political duty of the
believer is reverence to the powers that be: the
guardians of the Providential Peace in which
the Church of Christ was to spread across the
world. This is a state of affairs hot so sym
pathetic with modern history as the other was;
and therefore it is that in this province of
religion the Hebrew Prophets have been felt
by the moderns to stand nearer to them than
the Apostles do. The Apostles were sojourners
and pilgrims: the Prophets were citizens and
patriots. It is a heavenly country to which the
former look forward : the latter, as we have seen,1
without any promise of the life to come, labour
for the establishment of the kingdom of God
within the conditions of their own national
history. And for the same reason is it that the
Old Testament — though of course upon a plane
of public life different from that on which our
forefathers applied it — must always have a func
tion to discharge supplementary to the more
glorious office of the Gospels and Epistles. As
Maurice puts it, we must count ' paramount the
duty of vindicating the Old Testament as the
1 Above, pp. 185 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 265
great witness for liberty . . . the witness of
the sacredness of this earth.' 1
We have already seen how the historical
interpretation ofthe Prophets with which Modern
Criticism provides us, renders more effective this
practical application of them to the social ethics
of our time.
II. The Political and Social Preaching of
the Prophets.
The rapid survey, which we have just made,
of the influence of the Prophets upon the social
ethics of Christendom, has shown us that the
chief example to ourselves of their preaching
to their own times lies in what may be called
the double ethic of their patriotism : their faith in
the essential sacredness of their national history
and their conscience of their people's sins and
duties. The Prophets' treatment of their national
history is instructive from more than one point
of view. The facts which they quote from
Israel's past are in agreement, so far as they go,
with the witness of the historical Books ; only
the writers of the latter record a very great deal
more, both of individual and national experience,
than the Prophets deem necessary in order to
exhibit the Divine meaning of that history. For
1 Life, ii., p. 490 ; cf. 4, 52, 454, etc.

266 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
instance, none of the eighth or the seventh
century prophets lay stress upon the physical
miracles which the historians of the early history
of Israel record. They confine themselves to the
political and ethical facts : the covenant between
Jahweh and Israel, the redemption from Egypt,
the guidance to Canaan, the overthrow of the
heathen, the growth of ethical institutions and
the inspiration of strong personalities.1 I do
not say that the Prophets were ignorant of what
we call the miracles of the early history, or that
they denied them. They had the stories of these
before them,2 and they believed the stories. But
in preaching to their own generation they almost
wholly confined themselves to the indubitable
outlines of the early history and to its political
and ethical significance. Now in such a selection
by the first representatives of his office the
preacher of to-day will find an example of the
discrimination which he may show in the em
ployment, for practical purposes, of the origin
and the making of Israel. But what we are now
concerned with is not so much the exact amount
of the prophetic testimony to the early history
of Israel as the fact that what the Prophets select
from it for preaching to their own times, is just
the kind of national memory and tradition by
1 So, for instance, in Amos ii. 9-1 1 ; cf. Hos. ii. 8, 14 ff. (Eng.)
xi. 1 ff. ; Isa. v. 1 ff. ; Jer. ii.
2 E.g. Amos iv. 11 ; Hosea xii. 3 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 267
which every nation may prove the sacredness of
its own career. To Amos nationality is what it
was more explicitly to Cromwell and to Mazzini,
a divine fact. Have I not brought Israel out of
the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor
and Aram from Kir?1 All nations are by the
calling and providence of Almighty God. What
the Prophets saw in Israel's making is what every
people with the Prophets' faith may see in their
own past. ' The Bible of every nation is its
history.' 2 ' What are all our histories but God
manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken and
tumbled down and trampled upon everything
that He had not planted ? . . We are a people
that have had a stamp upon them from God . .
whose appearances and providences among us
are not to be outmatched by any story.' 3
As with the past of a nation, so with its future.
Israel were the first of peoples to develop the
sense of a spiritual mission to the world ; and they
did so not in the day of their strength, but in that
of their weakness and servitude. Their Exile
brought them into touch with many oppressed
nationalities; and like their symbol, Jonah, on
the helpless ship with the heathen sailors, they
were made to feel their common humanity with
1 Amos ix. 7. " Carlyle.
8 Cromwell, Letters and Speeches, by Thomas Carlyle, Speech
IV. Cromwell called the Old Testament the ' recapitulation of
Providence,' meaning God's providence not only of Israel but
of all nations.

268 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the Gentiles whom they had despised. It was in
this fellowship of suffering that, for the first time,
they conceived their full mission to the ends of the
earth : I Jahweh have called thee in righteous?iess,
and will hold thine hand and will mould thee, and
give thee for a covenant of the peoples and for a
light to the nations : to open the blind eyes, to bring
out the prisoners from the prison, and them that
sit in darkness out of the house of bondage} The
most comforting of all the promises uttered in
connection with this world-wide mission is one
whose tender words, though justly claimed for
himself by every broken individual who turns
to God, were principally intended for the weak
and flickering nationalities threatened with ex
tinction by the strong empires of antiquity.2
Behold my Servant . . . I have put my Spirit upon
him . . . he shall bring forth justice to the nations.
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the dimly
burning flax shall he not quench ; he shall bring
forth justice according to truth. He shall not fail
nor be abashed till he have set justice on the-earth ;
and the isles shall wait for his teaching? To
every modern people who have been conscious
of their nationality as a Divine fact, and of their
gifts and opportunities as a Divine call, this
vision, granted first to Israel, has never failed.

1 Isa. xiii. 6 f.
2 See A. B. Davidson, Expositor, 2nd Series, viii. pp. 364 ff.
3 Ibid. vv. 1-4,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 269
Nor has it been less sure because, like the exiled
Israel, a nation has grown weak and contemptible.
While Italy was still divided and subject to
many tyrannies, the despised of Europe and the
mockery of her own past, her prophet, who almost
alone believed in her restoration, dared to add
to it a prophecy of her mission to the world.
National religion, then, according to the Pro
phets of Israel, is the recognition of God's
hand in the nation's history ; the acceptance of
great ethical institutions and personalities as
from His hand ; the instinct and effort of moral
progress; the sense of a mission to the world;
the acknowledgment of the Divine calling of
other nations ; and sympathy in particular with
such as are weak and oppressed. Such an
ideal of religion the Prophets urged against
two popular heresies : a non-ethical confidence
in the national and established ritual ; and a
base * other-worldliness ' which sought in necro
mancy knowledge of the future and counsel for
the present. To both of these the Prophets
were inexorably hostile. For both were pagan.
Both were founded on false ideas of God.
And both withdrew the emphasis of religion
from conduct and the national life. / will have
mercy and not sacrifice} Though ye offer me your
burnt offerings and your meat offerings I will not
accept them ; take thou away from me the noise of
1 Hos. vi. 6.

270 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
thy songs, I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
But let justice roll down as waters, and righteous
ness as a perennial stream} And when they shall
say unto you : seek unto them that have familiar
spirits, that chirp and mutter; should not a people
seek unto their God? On behalf of the living
should they appeal to the dead? To the Torah
and the Testimony 1 2 — the Living Word which
concerns itself with living men.
On those curiously sympathetic tendencies the
Prophets' preaching has been justified by Chris
tian experience. The rational and ethical ele
ments of religion have always been imperilled
by those errors: whose affinity has been proved
not less by their similar effects than by their
not infrequent alliance in the same persons or
schools of religion.
The second quality of the Prophets' ideal of
national religion is their strong conscience of
their people's sins and civic duties. This is
the harder and the more misunderstood half
of patriotism. The ears of every people are
open to the celebration of its history as divine,
and even the baser hearts among it may be
flattered by the idea of its mission to the
world. But the true test of national religion is
sensitiveness to the national sins. This was the
test between the false and the true prophet in
Israel; it is our test as preachers to our
1 Amos v. 22-24. 2 Isa. viii. 19, 20.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 271
own day. Is our office servile to the pride and
material interests of our nation? Or do we feel
with trembling that the ethical element in
patriotism is, in the strong tumult of all the
others, the most easily neglected, and therefore
the most in need of emphasis by a people's
prophets. For its sake and God's the true
patriot must sometimes run counter to the
currents of popular enthusiasm, and be willing
to incur the charges of treason to the com
monwealth, and of cowardice in face of the
national destiny. We have nothing to dread
from that fear of kings which once made so
many prophets false ; but we have all the more
to watch that we do not become flatterers of
the common people. If we are to defend their
rights, we must be brave to declare their sins;
the offices of the Prophet and of the Dema
gogue are absolutely irreconcileable. To most
preachers, however, such temptations as I de
scribe arise not from the nation as a whole,
but from the religious section of it to which
they belong. There is danger that a man
grow silent upon social ethics out .of regard
either to the ecclesiastical policy of his denomi
nation, or to its financial interests. In all these
forms the temptation to become a popular or
fashionable preacher — whether the fashion be
one of religious temper or of political opinion —
is so subtle, and so many succumb to it, that,

272 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
as we value the honour of our calling and are
jealous of our loyalty to God, we ought persist
ently to steep ourselves in the just and stern
spirit of our great forerunners.
To go into detail upon the subjects of the civic
preaching of the Prophets would amount to an
exposition of the larger part of the Books of
Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah and Jeremiah. Let
these four general statements suffice. First, the
careers of the Prophets were contemporaneous
with the development of Hebrew society from an
agricultural to a commercial condition, and with
the rise of the City. The social evils, therefore,
with which the Prophets deal, are those still
urgent among ourselves.1 Second, the Prophets,
while inculcating, from God's treatment of the
nation, tenderness and pity in the nation's treat
ment of their poor and enslaved, dwell with still
greater emphasis upon the need of justice and
equity. We enjoy a legal freedom and justice
far beyond those of the Oriental society which
the Prophets addressed ; but no man can deny
the frequent want of honour and equity among
us in such. social relations as are outside of the
laws. Third, the Prophets, when enforcing reli
gious observances and institutions, do so most
frequently for social ends, or with regard to the
interests of the poorer classes of the community.2
1 See The Book of the Twelve Prophets, i. ch. iii.
2 Eg. The Sabbath : Amos viii. 5 ; Isa. lviii., cf. vv. 6 and 7
with 13 and 14.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 273
¦ And fourth, there is the emancipation of the
individual from a merely national religion : the
soul awaking to feel its solitary relation to God
and its independence of the community only to
discover a new duty and loyalty to the latter,
that extends to the sharing of their sorrows and
bearing of their sins — all the higher sense of in
dividuality resulting in a truer altruism as we
have already seen instanced in Jeremiah.1 There
could not be preaching more relevant to the
conditions and temptations of our own life.2
All these features except the last might be illus
trated from the works of almost every Prophet, and
they are equally conspicuous in the codification
of prophetic teaching, which we find in Deuter
onomy. In this great system of national religion
the domestic and the civic duties are enforced
in no legal spirit ; but with the high morality
and full tenderness of the prophetic temper.
There are few of the rites and institutions of a
nation — the Sabbath, Sacrifice, Prophecy, the
1 Above, pp. 165 ff.
2 There is a fine passage by the great philanthropist Lord
Shaftesbury on the civic teaching of Jeremiah (Life by Hodder,
iii. 454) : ' If for political and public purposes there can be in the
Bible one book more valuable than another to throw light on the
days we live, it is Jeremiah. He was not always "looking to
the sun," but he was looking to the earth, entreating, preaching,
warning, threatening, promising ; and he was in consequence
regarded as a bore and a blunderer. Yet if he had been attended
to, Jerusalem might have survived for many centuries ; and cer
tainly she would have been spared the indescribable sufferings of
soul and body that followed her destruction by Nebuchadnezzar.'
S

274 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
sustenance of the Priesthood, Justice, the Mon
archy, War, Agriculture, Trade, and Money —
which are not defined by Deuteronomy with
special regard for the poor among thy brethren : the
widow, the orphan, the slave and the stranger within
thy gates. And the sum of the whole is not love
to God alone, but love to God and man. Hear, 0
Israel, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart and all thy soul and all thy strength,
and thy neighbour as thyself.
III. Other Features of the Preaching of the
Prophets.
Passing now from the civic to other features
of the Prophets' preaching to their own times, we
must not omit to notice one, which is not only
historically remarkable in the religious leaders of
a Semitic people, but of some practical interest
to ourselves. I mean the attitude of the Pro
phets to what we call miracles.
When St. Paul defined the contrast between
the Greek and the Jewish minds in the words :
the Jews require a sign : and the Greeks seek after
wisdom} he struck a characteristic of the whole
race to which the Jews belong. The Semites
have always been notorious for unwillingness to
receive moral truth upon its own evidence and
without the attestation of some physical wonder —
not necessarily of a kind akin to the truth which
1 I Cor. i. 22.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 275
it was supposed to confirm. Wellhausen has
remarked this quality in the early stories of
Pagan Arabs;1 and to this day ' miracles,' so far
from being a difficulty to catechumens of the
Christian religion in Damascus or Cairo, are
regarded by them as indispensable concomitants
of the Divine Word. We all know that it was not
otherwise in Israel. The Old Testament contains
a number of stories according to which the Word
of God was accompanied with signs following,
and these signs were not always like the bene
ficent miracles of our Lord, consonant in character
to the message with which they were associated.2
It was a recognised thing in Israel that when a
prophet arose he should give the people a sign
or wonder. And Christ Himself describes this
attitude of the nation's mind in the words (not
without reproach), Except ye see signs and
wonders, ye will not believe?
All the more striking, therefore, is the absence
from the teaching of the Prophets ofthe eighth and
seventh centuries of all miracles in the technical
sense of the word, and of all appeal to miracle.4
This absence is complete except for the single
and very ambiguous offer by Isaiah of a sign to
1 Reste arab. Heidentumes, p. 131.
2 E.g. the signs which Moses gave on his first mission to
Pharaoh in presence of the King.
3 John iv. 48.
4 I speak now of the discourses of the Prophets and not of
the narratives appended to them.

276 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the obdurate Ahaz.1 Now such a silence on
' miracles ' was not due to the Prophets' disbelief.
The Prophets shared the faith of their time in
the possibility of miracles, and in the stories of
their ancient history which recorded ' miracles.'
The true explanation is given in the Book, which
is a summary of the prophetic doctrine on the
rites and institutions of Israel. The thirteenth
chapter of Deuteronomy takes for granted the
power to give signs and wonders on the part of
z.ny prophet or dreamer of dreams. But it denies
that signs and wonders, however real, can attest
the prophet's message as the word of God. This
message must be judged by its own character.
If it tempts to idolatry, its prophet is a false
prophet and must be put to death, notwithstand
ing whatever miracles he may have worked. God
can have permitted these, only to test LTis
people's loyalty. This is the explanation of the
abstinence from appeal to miracle which dis
tinguishes the great writing prophets. They will
have their message travel in the greatness of its
own strength : prove itself Divine on the credit
of the high religion and morality which are its
substance, and be vindicated by the historical
events which it brings to pass. Does it reveal
the will of God ? Jahweh God does nothing, but
He first revealeth His secret to His servants the
prophets.2 Does the prophet's message of God
1 Isaiah vii. 2 Amos iii. 7.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 277
agree with God's revelation of Himself in history?
Two men cannot come together except by pre
vious appointment : 1 the harmony of the pro
phetic word with the divine deed is the proof of
a purpose common to both. Does the word pro
duce and mould that which it predicts? Then it
is divine : it shall not return unto me void, but it
shall accomplish that which I please and it shall
prosper in the thing whereto I sent it? It is thus
never to 'miracle,' in the narrow sense of that
term, that the Prophet appeals as the proof of
his message, but to history. Political facts now
within his people's ken, or shortly to come to
pass — by these he is content to be judged.3 He
asserts his power of prediction : he makes pre
dictions which are fulfilled. Yet he does so not
through any magic vision of the future, but by
inference from the religious principles with which
God has inspired him, and by application of these
to the political circumstances and probabilities of
his own time. This I have elsewhere illustrated
in detail by a review of Isaiah's predictions
concerning the deliverance of Jerusalem.4
1 Amos v. 3. On this whole passage see Book ofthe Twelve
Prophets, i. pp. 82, 89 f.
'' Isaiah lv. II.
3 As for example, Isaiah when asserting the inviolableness of
Jerusalem : or the great Prophet of the Exile when he proves
the divine origin of earlier predictions of the end of the Exile
by their fulfilment in the victorious progress of Cyrus against
Babylon. 4 Isaiah i-xxxix. ch. xxiv.

278 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
To me this independence of ' signs and wonders,'
when we place it in contrast to the jiniversal
custom of Semitic soothsayers and the common
expectancy of all Israel, is but another proof of
the divinity of the Prophets' teaching. Miracles,
as Christ Himself has shown us, may be given to
attest a Divine Revelation, but they are not nec
essary to the highest faith; and in the case of
the Prophets their absence is a stronger seal, than
their presence would have been, of the Divine
origin of prophecy.
We have seen 1 that, in appealing to the pres
ence of God in the history of their people, the
prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries
selected as its evidences not so much the record
of physical marvels which it contained, as the
clear lines of religious guidance, political growth
and moral inspiration. In the same fashion they
treated the history of their own times ; and saw
the Divine not so evidently in its exceptions and
catastrophes of natural order, as in its gradual
development through political events and ethical
issues to the manifest judgements of God. To
them Jahweh is a God of law and order : and
they delight, as Isaiah does, to reveal Him in
the great commonplaces of experience and to
illustrate the regularity of His methods in history
by the regularity of His methods in nature.2
Thus, whether in the ethical or in the physical
1 Above, pp. 265 f. 2 See especially Isaiah xxviii. throughout.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 279
sphere, we find their conception of Him to be
that of Mishpat ; according to Isaiah He is El
Mishpat, the God who works by principle and
law. And it is this, their instinct and conviction
of seeing the Divine in process rather than in
interruption, in law rather than in 'miracle,' in
method rather than in catastrophe, which makes
them appear so modern and which undoubtedly
engages for them the intellectual as well as the
moral sympathies of the present day.
But it is time to pass from the doctrines
of those preachers who are our own greatest
standards and examples, and to consider the
living aids which they contribute to the style
and the temper of preaching. Schleiermacher
is the only great preacher of the century who
would have nothing to do with the Old Testa
ment, judging it to stand to Christianity in
the same relation as Paganism does. ' For our
ethics,' he says, * the Old Testament is entirely
superfluous.' We perceive the historical in
justice of such a view ; but Dr. John Ker has
also remarked its evil effect upon Schleier
macher himself as a preacher. ' One cannot
but see that Schleiermacher's style has suffered
from his neglect of the Old Testament.' How
much of force and charm, of passion and of
poetry, have all other great preachers derived
from the Hebrew Scriptures ! An old German
writer has said that ' Holy Writ should be our

280 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
grammar and our dictionary, out of which all
the moods of Christian speech should grow.'
The advice is sound, if we fulfil it not in the
pedantry of the letter 1 but in the spirit : not in
the servile and barren repetition of Bible texts
whether in preaching or praying ; but in the
imitation of those tempers and affections which
mould the style of the sacred writers, and of that
labour which they put forth upon their art.
What may our preaching not learn from the
Prophets as to conciseness :. as to the worth of
phrase; as to concreteness in our teaching; as to
the use of the circumstance and events of our or
dinary life ; as to the use of nature and history ; as
to the duty of calling things by their right names ;
as to the effort to bring grace and music into what
we say ; as to the urgency which is upon all living
truth and the passion to win men which is the
heart of preaching. What preacher, who is a
student of the Old Testament, can fail to be
infected by the courage of the Prophets, and by
their downright realism 2 — a courage and realism
1 As for instance Mohammedans base the sciences of Gram
mar, Rhetoric, Logic and Poetry wholly upon the Koran.
2 ' Truth is what this people first require, and therefore the
revelation of the Lord will in the first instance be the revealing
of the truth. Men who will strip pretence off the reality of things ;
men who will call things by their right names ; honest satirists
and epigrammatists — these are the bearers of God's revelation.
For it is one of the means of Divine salvation to call things by
their right names, and even in God's revelation epigrams have
their place.' — On Isaiah xxx. : p. 226 of Isaiah i-xxxix. (Exposi
tor's Bible).

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 281
which are frequently disguised in our English
version : but the careful student of the original
discovers them, and they thrill him to the heart.
Do not believe that the end of an accurate
study of the Hebrew language is simply fami
liarity with a number of grammatical forms more
or less obscure. Painstaking students are other
wise rewarded. It is they who lay their hands
on the prophet's heart and feel it beat ; it is
they who across the ages see the very features
of his face as he calls ; it is they into whom his
style and his music pass.
But the ultimate fountain of the prophetic
preaching is the passion to win men. This is
the secret both of the pathos and the splendours
of its style. To the Prophets preaching was no
mere display, but a sore battle with the hard
hearts of their contemporaries, in which the
messenger of the Lord worked with the pity of
his weakness upon him, at a supreme cost to him
self and conscious that he must summon to his
desperate task every resource of feeling and of
art. Go and tell this people : Hear ye indeed but
understand not: and see ye indeed but perceive not.
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we
are not saved. Is there no balm in Gilead and no
physician there ? Why then is not the health of
the daughter of my people recovered? Then I
said, I will not make mention of Him nor speak
any more in His Name. Yet it is in mine heart

282 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I weary
myself to hold it in but cannot stay. Comfort ye,
comfort ye my people, saith your God: speak upon
the heart of Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her
warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is par
doned. 'The Voice said, Cry ; and I said, ' What
shall I cry ? All flesh is grass and all the goodli-
ness thereof is as the flowers of the field' The
grass may wither, the flower fade, but the Word
of our God shall stand for ever.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 283

LECTURE VIII
THE CHRISTIAN PREACHER AND THE BOOKS
OF WISDOM
WE have now reached the last department of
our survey, that group of writings which are
known as the Books of Wisdom — Job, Proverbs
and Ecclesiastes. Here as elsewhere in the Old
Testament, the Christian preacher has questions
of historical criticism to encounter. But either
the answers, which modern critics offer to these
questions, are now generally accepted by the
common sense of Christians, — as for instance
the ideal interpretation of the Book of Job and
the date of Ecclesiastes. Or else the questions
themselves, where still unanswered, have little
relevance to the practical use of the writings —
as for example the integrity of the two Books
just named. In the literature of Hebrew Wis
dom, the difficulties of the preacher arise rather
from problems that are religious. The pres
ence in these Scriptures of doubt and specu
lation, of revolt against views of Providence
presented in other Scriptures; of indifference
to those national aspects of Israel's religion, in

284 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
which the essence of Prophecy lies; and of an
ethical teaching which is apparently utilitarian
• — such are the problems which beset a Chris
tian's use of the Books of Wisdom. We shall
best approach the solution through a study of
the school of religious teachers out of which
the Books took their rise.
We have already seen that in the Providence
of God a large part of the development of Israel's
religion was achieved through the conflict and
mutual reaction of two religious schools or
tempers — the Prophetic and the Priestly. Now
besides these two, which between them represent
the growth of the national religion up to the
Exile, there was a third class or guild, that of
the Wise Men, definite enough, as early as
Jeremiah's time, to be named along with the
Priests and the Prophets.1 Before the Exile
they are not mentioned so frequently as the
latter, and Jeremiah appears to speak of them
with impatience, and as if they were hostile
to the prophetic word.2 Yet they worshipped
Jahweh, and are described as claiming to have
his Torah or Revelation with themselves. They
are not charged with idolatry, nor with magic
and soothsaying. The opinion is therefore pro
bable, that they were men of influence who took
no part in the strife between the Prophets and
the rest of Israel, but who found their interests
1 Jer. xviii. 18. 2 Ibid. viii. 8; ix. 22; xviii. 18.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 285
and activities in the sphere of practical morals.1
By more than one modern they have been called
the Humanists of Israel. Such men could bide
their time. Whatever their attitude to the Pro
phets had originally been, as the teaching of the
latter survived the conflicts of the generations
to whom it first appeared, and as its principles
became an accepted part of the national religion,
the Wise Men would assimilate from it those
elements — and they were not few — which were
most in harmony with their own religious temper :
such as the main doctrines of monotheism, the
ethical reasonableness of God's judgements, the
immutableness of His laws both in nature and
history. When the succession of the Prophets
came to an end ; that is to say, when Israel
ceased to enjoy the political freedom and respon
sibility which were the indispensable occasion of
the Prophet, and developed into a vehicle of
religious truth through the centuries, then the
Wise Men came to their kingdom. Their
didactic temper, their instinct for handing down
the experience of the past to the rising genera
tion, found its opportunity. But they could not
remain mere teachers and traditionalists. The
body of religious experience and doctrine, which
they accumulated, of itself raised questions, in
face especially of the defeat and suffering which
Israel's faith encountered from her Babylonian
1 Cf. Wildeboer, Lit. des A. T., p. 367.

286 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
and Persian lords. And as time went on there
shot across it new lights from alien religions,
with which the Jews in their great Diaspora
came into contact. Breezes, not always the
healthiest, blew upon Judaism from abroad.
Doubt, question, research and even revolt
became inevitable. The Wisdom of Israel grew
speculative and even defiant, as well as didactic
and traditional.
We cannot state the development of Hebrew
Wisdom in a form less vague; we are without
the data for an exact history. It is possible to
give the stages of the growth of the Law of
Israel; it is not possible to give those of the
growth of Israel's Wisdom. The mass of it
seems to be post-exilic. Ecclesiastes is undoubt
edly late,1 the Prologue to the Proverbs cannot
be much earlier, and the Book of Job may spring
from any date between the Exile and 300 b. c.
Yet the last-named is at least founded on a pre-
exilic tradition,2 it is possible that several of the
collections of the Book of Proverbs were com
plete before the Exile, and very probable that
they contain sayings from the earlier life of the
people.8 1 The language appears the latest of all the Old Testament
while the political conditions which it reflects are those of the end
of the Persian, or beginning of the Greek, Period. Ecclesiastes
is now generally referred to the third century B. C.
2 Ezek. xiv. 14.
8 See A. B. Davidson, ' Proverbs ' in Encyclopaedia Britannica,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 287
The character of the teaching of the Wise
may be more clearly defined in comparison and
in contrast with that of the Prophets. I said that
the Wise, whatever may have been their original
attitude to the Prophets, assimilated in time the
elements of the prophetic monotheism. But it
is possible to say more than this, for in truth
the origins of every tendency which Hebrew
Wisdom developed after the Exile are to be
found in Hebrew Prophecy before the Exile.
Does the Book of Proverbs count knowledge as
the essence of virtue ? Even in Hosea the
Prophets had been laying emphasis upon the
duty of knowing God in His character and pur
poses for men ; 1 and knowledge forms one of the
bases of the doctrine of Deuteronomy. Do the
authors of the Book of Proverbs enjoin and
practise the systematic teaching of the young?
The authors of Deuteronomy had already shown
them the example. Moreover, some of the Pro
phets, as for instance Isaiah in the close of
Chapter xxviii., discourse in the very style
of the Wise Men ; that is, by parable and epi
gram, with shrewd and gnomic phrases; and seek
to illustrate the wisdom of Providence by the
wisdom of the Divine processes in nature. In
ninth ed. ; but on the other side Toy's Introduction to Proverbs
in the International Scientific Commentary.
1 This prophetic preparation for the Wise Men's theory of
knowledge has been overlooked by Professor Toy ; see his Intro
duction to Proverbs, p. xvi.

288 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
almost every prophet there is a sense of the unity of
the Reason which pervades all things ; it becomes
more and more articulate from Amos, through
Isaiah, though the writer who added to the Book
of Amos the famous apostrophes to the creative
power of Jahweh,1 and through Jeremiah, to the
great Prophet of the Exile. These, and no Greeks,
were the teachers of him who wrote the great
psalm of Wisdom in the Eighth of Proverbs.
Even for the processes of speculation and of
doubt which they carried to such daring degrees,
the Wise found precedents in the experience of
some of the most constructive of the Prophets.
Job's challenges to the Almighty are partly
anticipated by the bold questions of Jeremiah ;
and in Habakkuk we perceive the beginnings of
that scepticism of faith with its solution in patient
endurance of wrong and loyalty to God — Watch
for the Vision for it shall come and shall not tarry,
now the just man shall live by his faithfulness —
which we feel at the heart not only of Job, but
of Ecclesiastes.2 In their interests and in their
doctrines the Wise were the Prophets' heirs.
And yet though they thus inherit from the
Prophets many sympathies and even doctrines,
the Wise Men differ from the Prophets in the
style, temper and standpoint of their genius.
The gift of the Prophet is vision, but the genius
1 Book of the Twelve Prophets, i. pp. 201 ff. ; ii. p. 8, n. 5.
2 Ibid. pp. 136, 140 ff.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 289
of the Wise Man is experience born of insight
and observation. Both insist upon Law and
declare what must be. But while the Prophets
for the most part look forward and tell the people
what shall come to pass because God has such a
character and such a purpose, the Wise Men
look back and tell what shall come to pass
because under God it has always been. Both in
sist upon righteousness. But while the Prophets
look forward to those ideals of justice and
mercy which have never yet been fulfilled on
earth, the Wise Men feel beneath them the
great commonplaces of moral reward and retri
bution, which actually work themselves out in
the experience of men. And so (as a rule)
while the Prophet is passionate, the Wise Man
is shrewd. While the Prophet calls to swift
warfare for God, the Wise Man speaks of the
slow discipline of life, with its results in wisdom,
counsel and ' cunning.' There are, of course,
exceptions. Many of the Prophets, as we have
seen, illustrate the results of wisdom in the
ordinary politics of their day, and sometimes
employ the Wise Men's style of writing. Two at
least of the Wise Men, the poet who composed
the eighth chapter of Proverbs, and the religious
genius who gave us the Book of Job, have all the
Prophet's gift of vision. But in the main the two
classes are distinct — as distinct as the temper of
hope is from the temper of experience.

290 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Again, the scope of their respective interests
was not the same. The Prophets have set to
them the task of winning Israel's faith for the unity
of God ; but for the Wise that faith is won, and
they take it for granted. The Prophets have
to combat idolatry; but by the Wise the idols
are ignored as if they had never existed. It
is an agony to the Prophets to establish the
righteousness and wisdom of God; with the
Wise Men these are an axiom. A great deal
of this difference must have been a difference
of epoch, and of the historical tasks lying re
spectively to their minds. The passion of the
Prophets arose from their being watchmen and
even martyrs for truth not yet accepted by the
conscience of the people ; the more quiet temper
and methods of the Wise were due to the fact
that the common sense of Israel acknowledged
the principles from which they worked. The
one class are a body of men wrestling with
their contemporaries ; the other a body of teachers
directing their younger disciples. About the
former is all the eagerness of the dawn; the
latter have on them something of the placidity of
the afternoon. Nay, round one at least of the
Wise Men the twilight has already fallen; and
Ecclesiastes gropes among deeper shadows than
those from which the morning star of prophecy
at first arose. Yet to this distinction also there
is an exception, for Job contends with his con-

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 291
temporaries as valiantly as Jeremiah. With him
the Spirit of prophecy beats, and breaks away
from the conventional religion of Israel as power
fully as with Amos or Isaiah. It was a right
instinct, therefore, which led the early Church to
count Job among the Prophets.
Again, the Prophets, as we have seen,1 were
intensely national. You remember what patriots
Isaiah and Jeremiah were ; how in particular
they loved their own Jerusalem; and how clear
to us her aspect shines in many of their visions.
We see her walls, her public places, her house
tops. We are admitted to the intrigues of her
political parties, her throne-chamber, her Temple.
We can trace the march of foreign foes through
the land, see the trails of fire and smoke they
leave behind them, and hear them speaking
across the walls of the capital with its timid
defenders. And these are but instances of the
particular and national temper of the Prophets.
Throughout it is God's love for Israel and Israel's
destiny in the world on which they delight to
dwell. But all this patriotism and noise of
running* history are absent from the Books of
Wisdom. It is probable indeed that the secular
sorrows of Israel are reflected in the sufferings
of Job.2 But neither there nor in the Book of
Proverbs is Israel or Judah or Jerusalem once
1 Lecture vn.
2 Davidson's Introduction to Job, Cambridge Bible, p. xix. t

292 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
mentioned. The author of Ecclesiastes takes
Solomon, King in Jerusalem, only as a type
of the particular aspect of Wisdom, which he
illustrates. Except in the titles of the Book
of Proverbs no monarch is named, no country
and no city. Politics are indeed discussed : the
wilful ways of kings and the fickleness of the
crowd. The Wise Man speaks everywhere from
the midst of the people. There are descriptions
of the life and scandals of a great city: its
drunkards, its scorners, its simple youths and
public temptresses : more vivid than in any pro
phet. But all is human and universal. Those
streets so full of temptations; those corners
with their scoffers and sots ; those gamblers and
wantons ; those oppressed poor whose oppression
is their poverty — they are not only Jerusalem.
To-day they are Vienna, and Paris and London
and New York. Into his description of Job's
disease the poet may have wrung the sufferings
of Israel ; but what the patriarch deplores is the
human commonness of his fate, and it is by the
strength of a man's conscience that he throws
out his challenges in the face of the Almighty.
Thus the preacher may work through the Books
of Wisdom, finding only the immutable elements
of human experience in sin and sorrow, the brev
ity of life and the certainty of death, the inevi-
tableness of doubt and the conflict of faith with
stern facts.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 293
In dealing with the separate Books and their
value to the Christian preacher, I have time only
to make a few general statements concerning Job
and Ecclesiastes, and then to give a summary of
the teaching of the Book of Proverbs.
There are three practical uses of the Book of
Job which must be remembered in connection
with the purpose of these lectures. (1) The Book
is the supreme instance of the neglected truth that
Revelation is not confined to literal history. (2) It
is an illustration of the uses of religious doubt and
revolt. And (3) it is a fine discipline for pastors
in the treatment of hearts racked by experience,
and by the inevitable conflict of faith with the
facts of life.
(1) The Book of Job is anonymous. The
name of the hero, the fame of his piety, and per
haps also the nature of his trials, are founded on
tradition ; 1 but since Luther the growing and now
accepted opinion of Protestant scholars2 is that
the Book is not literal history — ' Job spake not
in that sort as in the Book is written, for it is not
easy [? possible] in tribulation and temptation
to speak after that manner'3 — but is the ideal
1 Ezek. xiv. 14.
2 See any good introduction to the Book of Job, e.g. Professor
Davidson's in the Cambridge Bible for Schools. The opinion that
Job was not an actual man but ' a parable ' was held by early
Jewish scholars. See the tradition of this in the Talmud, ' Baba
Bathra,' 15.
8 Luther, Table Talk, chap, xxxi., Captain Henrie Bell's
translation.

294 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
presentation, by one of the greatest poets whom
the world has ever known, of the experience
of innocent suffering, of the conflict of its con
science with orthodox religious explanations, of
the doubts and defiance which it excites, and
of their only possible solution in personal trust
and submission to God — ' he had by himself such
cogitations: it fell out and happened so indeed
as is written.' 1 There is no Book of the Old
Testament in which the ' minor authenticities ' 2
are of such little account in comparison with
the magnificent genuineness of the experience
which the Book contains. Is it silent about
its author ? It holds itself almost equally aloof
from all questions of its foundation on the facts
of any single life. It deals with the perennial
problem of Israel's faith, the suffering of the
righteous. It exposes, explodes and dissipates
the obdurate superstition (which even Christ
had to combat3), that suffering and adversity
always mean punishment, and that such an
explanation of them is the only means of vin
dicating God's righteousness. If for this the
Book provides no substitute in a positive, ex
plicit doctrine of suffering, it at least clears the
ground for such a doctrine, as that appeared even
under the Old Testament,4 and was consummated
in the Cross of Christ. Meanwhile it supplies
1 Ibid. 2 Compare above, p. 172.
8 Luke xiii. 2; cf. John vii. * Isaiah xl-lv., Prov. iii. 11, 12.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 295
in the most divine, because the most gentle and
natural manner, new inspiration to patience,
loyalty and hope, with the constant proof that
suffering endured in these tempers lifts the mind
to a stronger and more original hold upon God
Himself. No man can deny that this is, in the
truest sense of the word, a revelation, with its
own indispensable function in the preparation
for Christ. And it is presented in the form of a
drama of religious experience, which, though in
revolt against the orthodox dogmas of the day,
is yet absolutely fair to these by drawing the
characters of their representatives so as to bring
out all the good that is in them ; and which
in itself is wonderfully vivid, sincere and real.
Before such divine doctrine and true human
experience, questions about the ' literal ' history
of the Book are felt to be impertinences ; and
we acknowledge the truth — so significant for the
interpretation of other Scriptures 1 — that Reve
lation is not coincident with the bare letter of
actual facts, but may be conveyed to us, in its
highest substance, through the ideal presentation
of these by an inspired artist or poet.
(2) It has been a trouble to some that pro
cesses and results, so full of the doubt and
contradiction of principles affirmed by other
Scriptures, should ever have been regarded as
of equal divinity with these, and admitted into
1 See above, p. 74, 89, 107 f.

296 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the Canon of the Jewish or of the Christian
Church. Let me only point out that no narrow
theories of inspiration can account for this —
men are able to hold such theories only by ig
noring it1 — but to an open mind it is the proof
of guidance in the growth and selection of
the Scriptures by a Spirit with standards and
sympathies very much wider than the standards
or sympathies of any single school of religious
belief. In the Old Testament Books of specu
lative and experimental Wisdom we see the same
condescendence on the part of God as we see in
the rudimentary stages of the history.2 His
Spirit sympathises with His children's rude and
painful struggles after light ; with their discon
tent with the earlier achievements of religion,
and with their revolts against ancient dogmas.
Moreover, it rewards the rebel by the gift of new
aspects of truth, and by guidance to firmer and
more original faith in God. Therefore, so far
from these passages of argument and of doubt,
which the Scripture contains, being less evan
gelical than the prophecy and history, they also
are proofs of Grace : the seeking and the saving
of them that have wandered or are lost. Let me
1 It is too little noticed that the advocates of a verbal inspira
tion of Scripture (or of kindred theories) have to reckon not only
with the discrepancies of fact in the Old Testament, but with the
presence in it of opposite religious tempers ; and of the contradic
tion by some Books of the teaching in others.
2 See above, p. 143 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 297
quote to you the fine words of one who has done
more than any other teacher of our day for the
spiritual understanding of the Book of Job : —
' The revealing Spirit was in a certain sense an
indwelling Spirit, uniting Himself intimately with
all the highest affections and noblest aspirations
of the men whose mind he illuminated. And
these men were not persons, who stood as mere
objective instruments to be addressed; they were
of the people. Every feeling of the people, every
movement of life at its lowest stratum, sent its
impulse up to them ; every hope or fear was
reflected in their heart : and with all these move
ments and reflected emotions . . . the Spirit of
Revelation, which was not a Spirit of knowledge
merely but of life, sympathised and, if the word
can be used, coalesced. The people of Israel as
the Church of God lived a profound life; in its
outstanding men that life was at its profoundest
and broadest; and as at the first the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters that
covered the earth, so He moved upon that un
quiet sea of the Church's mind, agitated with
emotions, with presentiments, with fears, with
speculations, and out of them all brought more
perfect forms of truth.' 1
(3) The third lesson for the practical preacher,
which I have promised to show in the Book
of Job, concerns his attitude towards religious
1 A. B. Davidson.

298 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
doubt and revolt when these shall draw to
him for counsel. The speeches of Job's friends
ought to be studied by every man who pro
poses to make the guidance and consolation
of his fellow-men, in their religious interests,
the duty of his life. For these speeches are,
every one of them, lessons both in how, and how
not, to discharge that delicate and responsible
office. The writer of the Book of Job is thor
oughly fair to the traditional views of which it
is his aim to show the insufficiency. He re
presents them by men of honesty, and even
at first of courtesy, who take up their task
in the sincere desire to help Job out of all
his troubles. In particular we have much
to learn from the approach of Eliphaz the
Temanite to his afflicted friend. But the
author shows how all the three comforters of
Job misunderstand the heart; how little they
have fathomed human experience; how easily
worn out are their love and patience; how
they prefer to vindicate their own views of
God to saving the soul of their brother; and
how above all they commit the sin of not per
ceiving that God Himself may be working
directly on that brother's heart, and purposes
to teach them more than they can ever teach
him. Love was what he looked for and trust:
but they gave him argument which for a time

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 299
only drove him the further from God. You re
member what he says :
To him that is ready to faint kindness is due
from his friend,
Even to him that is forsaking the fear of the
Almighty}
There is doubt about the true reading ; but
none can mistake the meaning. And yet how
ignored this great verse has been ! How different
were the history of religion if men had kept
it in mind ! How much sweeter and swifter
would the progress of Christianity have proved !
The physicians of religious perplexity have too
often been Job's comforters ; and the souls in
doubt, who should have been gathered to the
heart of the Church with as much pity and care as
the penitent or the mourner, have been scorned
or cursed, or banished or even put to death.
But it must be evident to every reader that,
freely as the Wise Men speculated, they never
regarded speculation as an end in itself, or even
as a means by itself. They held it impossible
to separate thinking from the practice of life,
and in a remarkable degree foreshadowed the
statement of Christ : if any man will do His
will he shall know of the doctrine. Practical life
was not only their starting-point. It was the
return and refuge of all their thought. If they
1 vi. 14.

3oo MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
were baffled in their search for knowledge that
did not paralyse their wills. Duty was plain.
The difference between right and wrong was plain.
God Himself was past doubt in His character
of Lawgiver and Judge. Let us hear the conclusion
of the whole matter: fear God and keep His com
mandments, for this is the duty of every man}
But that brings us to the Book in which the
practical and didactic Wisdom of the Old Testa
ment is most fully set forth.
The Book of Proverbs.
Mr. Ruskin tells us that in the Bible of his
boyhood he preserved till old age the list of
chapters which his mother gave him to commit
to memory. ' With this list thus learned, she
established my soul in life. And truly, though
I have picked up the elements of a little further
knowledge in mathematics and meteorology and
the like in after life, and owe not a little to the
teaching of many people, this maternal installa
tion of my mind in that property of chapters, I
count very confidently the most precious and
on the whole the one essential part of all my
education.'2 In the inventory of a property so splendidly
appraised we find four chapters of the Book
of Proverbs — the second, third, eighth and
1 Ecclesiastes xii. 13. 2 Praeterita, i. 57.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 301
twelfth. And I suppose that to the generation
of Ruskin's father and to his own generation,
the Book of Proverbs proved a necessary part
of a religious education. That they are cast in
the oldest and most simple form of tradition —
for, as the Easterns say, some are born and
some die, and the old tell the young what they
know; that they are addressed from a serene
age to youth which has not lost its faith or
its absoluteness ; that they say nothing of the
intricacies or the qualifications of middle man
hood ; that they echo almost no accents and re
flect few lights of any particular period of history;
that their instances are drawn from the essential
human experiences and their humour and wit
are those of the common people — it is this
which has given the Proverbs of Israel their
wide popularity and caused their employment in
the education of so many races.
But of late years the Book of Proverbs appears
to have become neglected in the education of the
young. It may be that in the more spiritual
temper which religion has assumed in our time
and in our quickened, because better informed,
love of the historical and prophetical Scriptures —
the one with its romance, the other with its lofty
ideals — there has been a tendency to revolt
against the alleged Utilitarianism of the Proverbs ;
just as there has been a revolt against the
legalism of other Scriptures which used to play

302 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
a greater part in education than they now do,
I had believed this feeling to be more an instinct
than an articulate conviction, till the other day,
when the leading English weekly gave to it a
very definite expression. The article I speak of
described the temper of the Book of Proverbs
to be one which not only does not commend itself
to the mind of youth ; but which it is our duty
to keep away from the young, as a prudential
and a sordid temper, laying stress upon the con
sequences of character rather than upon its
essential Tightness and beauty, enforcing virtue
more because of the rewards she can bestow
than for her own authority. This charge may be
confidently met by two assertions. In the first
place it is impossible to teach the folly of evil
without pointing to its consequences; and
secondly, the Book of Proverbs does not limit
itself to this primary stage of morality but, as
we shall presently see, enforces Virtue for her
own sake, paints Wisdom with an essential worth
and beauty, and appeals quite as much to the
generous affections and enthusiasm of youth as
to their prudence and common sense.
The Book consists of eight unequal parts — a
Prologue on the whole subject of Wisdom : one
continuous and rhythmical address occupying
the first nine chapters; then from Chapters x.
to xxix. four collections, great and small, of
proverbs proper, popular sayings lying loose,

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 303
for the most part, without arrangement as to
subject or style; then in Chapter xxx. a number
of enigmatic or numerical proverbs in a more
or less artificial form ; then the warning of a
mother to her son against women and wine ; and
finally the incomparable eulogy of the Virtuous
Woman, in which virtuous is to be taken in its
older and nobler sense of strength and bravery ;
but strength and bravery exercised within the
home. Now with regard to the collections of Pro
verbs proper, the bulk of the Book, it has been
one great drawback to their use that for the most
part they were not gathered by their ancient
editors into groups corresponding to their subjects.
The first duty of the reader or teacher who
would feel the full volume of their wisdom, and
all its various shrewdness, is to make such a
grouping for himself.1 Education, Friendship,
Marriage, Religion ; God the Maker of all;
Morality and Religion as one ; God's interest in
1 An admirable arrangement of the Proverbs under their
proper subjects has been made by Professor Foster Kent of Brown
University, Rhode Island : The Wise Men of Ancient Israel and
their Proverbs, New York, etc., 1895 (a capital handbook); but
every teacher, who wishes to grasp the Book, should first make
such an arrangement for himself, and then test and correct it by
Professor Kent's. Besides Professor Toy's (of Harvard) Com
mentary on Proverbs in the International Critical Commentary,
the teacher or student will find useful the late Rev. W. Arnot's
Laws from Heaven for Life on Earth, and Dr. Horton's volume
in the Expositor's Bible. See, too, Dr. Davidson's art. ' Pro
verbs,' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth ed.

304 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
the little things of conduct ; God as the searcher
of hearts, and the rewarder of virtue ; God and
the King; God and the Poor; Equality of all
men before God ; or Sin : its deceitfulness and its
ruin of the character, of the joy and of the free
dom of life; or such subjects as the giving and
taking of reproof, sins of the tongue; idleness,
anger, poverty and riches, the value of substance
in life, sorrow and comfort — gather the Proverbs
under these and other heads, and for the first
time you will appreciate the resource, the sanity,
the humour, the occasional brilliance, the frequent
grotesqueness of the popular wisdom of Israel.
If before I pass to the sublimer teaching of
the Prologue I may select for illustration one of
the more persistent lessons of this scattered
wisdom, I will choose that upon the giving
and taking of reproof. Both the Prologue and
the Proverbs themselves insist with a very em
phatic frequency upon this difficult and painful
duty. Almost to weariness they reiterate that in
education and morality mere abstract teaching of
the truth is not enough ; and that personal dis
cipline, criticism and even sore and humbling
blame are necessary, not only for the young from
the old, but for all men and women from their
friends and contemporaries. You will find the
words rebuke, reproof, discipline and correction in
every few verses of the strenuous and unsparing
doctrine of the Wise.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 305
Now it may be objected that criticism so
persistent and articulate defeats its own ends;
and that we live under the more powerful
Example of One who came not to judge the
world but that the world through Him might be
saved. In the things to which Christ cleared
our dim eyes ; in the wonderful patience of our
God to which we waken every morning ; in His
fatherly trust of our foolish and wayward souls ;
in the sunshine, the fresh air, the sweet love and
confidence of our fellow-men His children, all
that goodness of God which by a thousand
gentle touches leads us to repentance ; or again
in the compassionate holiness of Christ's own life,
the infinite obligations and ideals of our man
hood which His character and service of men
unfold ; or again in the holy lives about us which
possess themselves silently in His Patience and
reflect His Purity and Unselfishness — in all these
we feel a divine judgement of our souls, beside
which the criticisms even of the best and wisest
of men sound petty and irrelevant.
Yet on the other hand we cannot shut out
the noisy facts of the world we dwell in ; and
while we refuse to accept them as substitutes for
that silent judgement of the Divine Love, which
is the only sufficient rebuke and discipline of our
souls, we must see that we use them, inevitable
as they are, for its instruments and contributories.
We live in a world that will not spare any man
u

306 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
its criticisms. Some of them may be ignorant
and cruel (Twill deal with these in a little), but
in many others we know that our consciences
will not permit us to hear anything but an
honest, and often a kindly, statement of what
we really are or thoroughly deserve.
Our own age has been very hungry for abstract
and impersonal truth ; but by an exaggeration
of the liberty and the rights of men, of which it
is so proud, there has never been an age more
impatient of personal criticism. And yet per
sonal criticism, involving as it must strokes
painful and humbling, is absolutely necessary
for us all, not only from those whom we revere,
or from those whom we love, but from those
whom we dislike, or whom we know to dislike
us. The only successful teaching of youth is
that into which the element of personal criticism
bravely enters, and is loyally accepted by its
subject. Nor is there any friendship healthy
which does not permit of the same strenuous
duty among its obligations. In their trials and
misfortunes, still more in their errors and faults,
men are constantly tempted to turn to their
weakest friends for a sympathy which is often
insincere and generally undeserved. Happy
rather is the man who is strong enough and true
enough to choose his friends not for their agree-
ableness or their sympathy, but for their honesty
and severe ideals.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 307
Better is open rebuke than love that is masked.
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise,
But the companion of fools shall be broken
for it}
Yet even when criticism is stupid, irrelevant
and cruel, it is, according to the Proverbs of
Israel, a healthy and a stimulating discipline.
Stripes that wound cleanse away evil, and strokes,
things without sense and with only pain in them,
the innermost parts of the belly?
We all know how often a stinging judgement
of us totally misses the mark for which it was
intended; charging us with a fault of which we
know we are innocent. Yet it at least opens
our close and sleepy hearts; it lets in the
air ; it compels us to examine. We may resent
unjust criticism, but no wise man fails to profit
by it. Did such criticism only drive us to
prayer; did it only force us in self-defence to
carry our hearts before the judgement of God :
a resort to which we are not very prone and
often require to be driven : surely it would do
us good. But unjust criticism will effect more
for us than this. Rising as it often does from
the purely conventional standards of society, or
from a formal and pragmatical conception of
religion — under which we ourselves may have
fallen — it compels us to question and explore,
and so lifts us to fresh views of morality and
1 xxvii. 5; xiii. 20, 2 xx. 30.

308 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
new understanding of God. In this same litera
ture of Israel's wisdom we can see how Job
himself was, by the unjust criticism of his friends,
stung to revolt against the formulas of the
popular religion, and thereby rose to new
research, with its end in larger views of truth,
and a more original hold upon God.
So much for the Proverbs of Reproof. A
teacher or preacher who has made the classifica
tion advised above, will find materials as sound
and various under any of the other titles
suggested. But it is time now to turn from these scattered
couplets to the great poem with which the Book
of Proverbs opens, Chapters i. to ix. This is
remarkable not only for its very beautiful per
sonification of Wisdom, but for the fact that it
contains in Chapter viii. almost the only meta-
physic to which the poetry of the Wise attained.
And first I think you shall feel from it how
very unjust is that charge of utilitarianism of
which I spoke. For from the outset we learn
that the Wisdom which the Wise inculcate is
not the slow, prudent thrift of life, gathered by
petty experiences, more or less sordid and selfish :
but is the reverent and whole-hearted acceptance
of great principles, such as capture the heart, stir
us to enthusiasm, and lift us above ourselves.
In contrast to the prophets who won their truth
by vision, the wise men got theirs by experience.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 309
Yet do not understand by this that they would
counsel their disciples to wait for their own
experience — to gather wisdom merely by trying
life as it came to them. They would have them
begin with wisdom from the first, get hold of
her principles, submit to her discipline, and then
test her in all their daily fortunes and duties.
We often hear the phrase : ' Experience teaches
fools ' : but not so often its counterpart, the
strength of the wise is their wisdom. Addressing
those who stand on the borders of manhood,
wistfully looking forward to that experience of
life from which in their time most men have
foolishly fancied that Wisdom is to be gained,
the Wise Poet passionately reiterates that there
is a Wisdom which comes before experience and
without which experience itself is too often only
the belated and melancholy recognition of what
might have been. To the young and the simple
he cries : I have something to give which life by
itself can never give ; but of which if you take
it now you will find experience to be daily the
stronger proof and richer reward. The beginning
of wisdom, he says, is to get wisdom} Principles
are absolutely necessary for all who begin the
work of life: principles which we accept, accord
ing to this Poet, partly on their own authority
and partly upon their illustration in the lives
we love and honour the most. Before all ex-
1 iv. 7.

310 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
perience are Conscience and the Fear of God;
obedience to those who are wiser and reverence
for the accumulated wisdom of the nation. The
Wise Men found their principles, as Mazzini put
it, in the agreement of conscience and history:
the harmony of the moral sense in a man himself
with the best experience of his race. Hence on
reverence, on meekness, on the native instinct for
truth ; as on the self-evidencing character of truth
and its beauty, the poem insists again and again.
But this is all in a direction the very opposite of
utilitarianism. The pursuit of Wisdom is another subject of
the Poem : which regards it as a mutual and
responsive process — we seeking Wisdom, but
Wisdom also seeking us.
By an age like our own, which has so much
lost both the faculty of attention and of pro
longed meditation — and which demands from its
most voluminous teachers that its mental food
shall be broken up for it and given under headlines
and in paragraphs — by such an age the instruc
tion of this Poem may well be taken to heart.
I know no teachers who lay more stress upon
the cultivation of the mental power of attention :
that sure and expert grip of the mind without
which both reason and faith are impossible and
memory itself becomes a confused and inarticulate
pain. They urge them to lay hold on wisdom, to
purchase understanding, to hearken, to listen, to

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 311
fasten — so that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom
and apply thine heart to understanding. Yea if
thou seek her as silver and search for her as for
hid treasures then shalt thou understand the fear of
Jahweh and find the knowledge of God} These
powers of attention and concentration the poem
allies with purity of heart, illustrating the dis
tractions and dissipation of impure or covetous
thoughts. On the whole subject of the moral
habits and the intellect, or the connection between
purity of heart and the enthusiasm for hard work,
there is no teaching in all literature more sane
and more bracing.
But to such strenuous endeavours the Poem
tells us there is a liberal response from the very
heart of the universe. Wisdom is not conceived
after the fashion in which others have dreamt of
her, as a slumbering deity difficult to rouse ; or as
a jealous one awake only to guard her secrets from
men and to baffle them in their pursuit of her —
the path to her presence strewn with the bones
of those who have sought her in vain. She is
human and near and kind : a Woman clothed
with beauty, visible to every eye and with de
sire for all in whom the love of her beauty has
been wakened : pitiful, solicitous, urgent, liberal,
redemptive :
I love them that love me
And they that seek me early shall find me?
1 ii. 2-4. 2 viii. 17-

312 MODERN CRITICISM AND THE
Like the highest wisdom of all the great races,
this also is represented as popular. Though the
fellow of God and the artificer of the Universe,
her home is in the habitable parts of the earth,
and her delights with the children of men. Like
Socrates and like Jesus she is a street-preacher,
a frequenter of markets and the assemblies of
civic life :
Wisdom crieth aloud in the street.
She uttereth her voice in the broad places.
She crieth in the chief place of concourse
At the entering in of the gates.
In the city she uttereth her words}
But she is popular and public only for a higher
end. In the secret of the Universe beats the
desire to save men, and the Wisdom of God is at
the heart of it redemptive :
Unto you, O men, I call,
A nd my voice is to the sons of men.
0 ye simple, understand wisdom,
And ye fools, be of an understanding heart.
For whoso findeth me findeth life,
And he that misseth me wrongeth himself?
Wisdom descending from God's right hand to
plead with the man on the street ; the final
passion and glory of all the forces and faculties
of the Universe, to win the common and the
simple from sin ! It is again the Spirit of Christ
that we feel. 1 i. 20 f. 2 viii. 4 f., 35 f.

PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 313
And hence we have those alternative pictures
of Wisdom and Sensuality, whose realism is so
striking. Why are both thus set side by side, as
women of beauty and attraction, urgent enter
tainers of mankind, but with the intention that
the Wisdom of the higher life shall be "made to
appear as popular, pervasive and persistent as
ever the cunning of the lower has proved itself
to be ; that our hearts shall be driven to feel as
hunted and haunted by temptations to a life of
virtue and wisdom, as they ever were by the
temptations of the flesh and the world ?
That is a vision, which the preacher of to
day must heartily welcome : when the oppor
tunities to vice are on every side so open, so
attractive, in many cases so apparently secure ;
when on the other hand our unpurged eyes feel
righteousness to be so abstract and so arduous.
The vision of Wisdom would show us that this
is not true. Righteousness is not abstract nor
unreal ; not hard to find in the crowd about us,
nor in her beginnings beyond the reach of any,
however thronged or trampled by the world.
Everywhere her gates are open, her presence
manifest, her joys obvious and solid. She dwells
with men. There is not an arena on which we are
called to live, but is brilliant with the incarnate
examples of righteousness and purity. She
dwells with God, and was with Him when the
world was made. The forces of the Universe are

314 MODERN CRITICISM
on the side of the will that chooses virtue : and
to the ignorant and the wandered, if they have
but one spark of desire for what is pure and
honest and lovely, the heart of God Himself
comes forth with the desire to teach, to lift,
to restore.
This is the Spirit of Christ in Hebrew Wisdom,
and with it we may suitably close our study of
Wisdom's Books.

I N DE'X

Abarim, 69 ».
Addis, Documents of the Hexa
teuch, 33, 40, 52 n., 105 «.,
106 n.
Alexandria, School of, 226, 231.
Allegorising interpretation of the
Old Testament by the Christian
Church, Lecture vil. passim.
Ambrose, 231.
America, criticism of the Hexa
teuch, 40; Semitic scholarship
in the seventeenth and eigh
teenth centuries, 250.
Anthropomorphisms in the Old
Testament, 175.
Antioch, School of, 227, 231.
Apostolic Constitutions, 224 n.
Aquinas, Thomas, 235.
Arabs, pre-Mohammedan litera
ture of, 116, 125.
Archaeology and modern criticism,
31, 56 ff. ; archaeology and the
Pentateuch, 58, 90 ff., 99 ff. ;
and the Prophets, 65, 217 f.
Arnold, Matthew, 149.
Arnot, William, 75; Laws from
Heaven for Life on Earth, 221
«., 303 n.
Assizes of Jerusalem, 253 n.
Astruc, Conjectures, etc., 34, 248 n.
Augustine, 6, 231 ff. ; works of,
232 «., 233 «. ; De Civitate Dei,
252 f.

Authority and Archaeology, 61 «.,
67.
Baalim, worship of, 119 f.
Babel, Tower of, 91.
Babylonia, discoveries in, 90 ; lit
erature, 91; monuments, 116,
1 18 ; tablets, 60.
Babyl. Expedition of the Univ. of
Pennsylvania, 91 n.
Bacon, Professor, 40.
Ball, 40.
Baumgartner, Professor, 240 n.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 75.
Beersheba, 105.
Begg, Dr. James, 221 «.
Bell, Capt. Henrie, 257 «., 293 n.
Bennett, Prof., 40, 49 n.
Bernard of Clairvaux, 235.
Bethel, 47, 105 ; origin of name, 38-
Bethpeor, 70 n.
Beugnot, Le Comte, 253 «.
Beza, 240 n.
Bible Dictionary, Hastings', 37 «.,
40, 42, 55, 64 »., 103 «., 107,
ill, 161 n., 174 «., 184 «., 185,
etc.
Blaikie, Dr. W. G, 221 n.
Bleek, 37.
Bochart, Samuel, 249 «.
Book of the Twelve Prophets (Ex
positor's Bible), 85, 88 f., 103
n., 1 59 ».

316

INDEX

Boston, Thomas, 250.
Briggs, Professor, 40.
Bright, John, 218 n.
British Museum, Guide to ihe
Babylonian and Assyrian Col
lections, 61 n., 90 f. n.
Brown, Professor Francis, 55.
 of Wamphray, 250.
Brugsch, 64.
Buchanan, George, 252, 260 f.
Budde, Professor, 7 «., 40, 114
«., 115 «., 132 «., 138 «., 151
n., 161 ra. ; Biblische Urgeschichte,
97 «¦
Butler, Bishop, 75.
Buxtorf, 248 n.
Calvin, 6; as exegete, 146;
240 ff. ; political use of Old
Testament, 252, 258 ff.
Candlish, Dr. Robert, 75.
Canon of the New Testament, 5 ff.
 of the Old Testament, the
history of its formation, 7 ff. ; in
Christ's day, 10; the testimony
of the Apostles, 16 f.
Carlyle, Thomas, 267 ; Cromwell's
Letters and Speeches, 2^ n.
Chalmers, Thomas, 221.
Charles, Prof., Critical History of
the Doctrine of the Future Life,
184 n. See also Preface.
Chedorlaomer, 62 «., 100.
Cheyne, Canon, 40, 80 n. ;
Founders of Old Testament
Criticism, 33 n. ; Origin of
the Psalter, 87 »., 88 n. ; In
troduction to the Book of Isaiah,
161 n.
Christianity, Semitic source of,
117.
Chronicles, Books of, their char
acter, 55 f.

Chronology, Babylonian, 90 f. n. ;
Biblical, 66, 90 f.
Chrysostom, 227 ff.
Clement of Rome, Ep. to the
Corinthians, 226 n.
Coccejus, 245 n.
Colenso, Bishop, 76.
Collins, 248 n.
Cornill, Der Israelitische Prophet-
ismus, 107 ti., 222 n.
Council of Carthage, 5.
Councils of the Church, 5, 8.
Covenant, the Idea of, 137 ff.,
245 ff.
Creation, dates of, 90.
Cunaus, 249 n.
Cyprian, 224 n.
Dante, De Monarchia, 236 «.,
252, 254.
David, his history, 78 ff. ; and the
Psalms, 86 ff. ; his character,
155 ff . ; his Dirge upon Saul,
155 ff., 182 f. See also 256.
Davidson, Professor A. B., 1 1 1 «,,
114 n., 184 «., 185 «., 220,
268 «., 286, 291 «., 293 «.,
297 «•, 3°3 «¦
Deborah, Song of, 142 ff.
De Dieu, 248 «.
Delitzsch, 40.
De Montfaucon, 229 »., 230 n.
Denney, Professor, 14.
Deuteronomists, the, 37, 42 n. •
their view of the conquest of
Palestine, 47 f. ; their date,
50 f., 58 ff., 69 f.; their
references to death, 180 n. 7.
Deuteronomy, 7 ; its use by our
Lord, II, 163; its place in the
evangelical preparation, 162 f. ;
its religion purely national, ib. ;
its civic teaching, 273 f. ; its

INDEX

3i7

influence on the Books of
Wisdom, 287.
De Wette, 37.
Dickson (on the Psalms), 250 n.
Didron, 256 n.
Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Tes
tamentes in der Christlichen
Kirche, 224 «., 225 «., 229 «.,
231 »., 235, 240, 243, 253 n.
Dillmann, 40, 180 n.
Diodorus of Tarsus, 227.
Dods, Marcus, Genesis (Exposi
tor's Bible), 97 «.
' Doublets ' in the Old Testament
histories, 33, 35, 38, 44, 47 ff.,
78.
Doubt and speculation in the Old
Testament, 283, 295 f.
Doughty, Arabia Deserta, 184 ».,
192 «., 193 n.
Driver, Canon, 37 »., 40, 43 n.,
51 »., 52 »., 62 «., 64 «., 67,
87 «., 91 «., 100 »., 103 «., 107 ra.,
161 n., 180 ra.
Drummond, Prof. Henry, 27 f.
Duhm, Professor, 161 n.
Ebers, 64.
Edom, 103.
Edwards, Jonathan, 251 n.
Egyptian discoveries, 61 ff., 90 f.,
100.
Eichhorn, 35.
Eisenmenger, 249 n.
Elohist Writers, the, 35, 38. See
under Jahwist.
Encyclopaedia Biblica, 7 «., 17, 37>
40, 55 «., 62 «., 69 «., etc.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 286 ra.,
3°3 »•
Epic of Ishtar, 196 n.
Erpenius, 248 n.
Estlin Carpenter, 40.

Euphrates, 69, 99.
Eusebius, 6 «.
Ewald, 37, 220.
Expositor, 1 1 5 «., 242 «., 268 n.
Farrar, Dean, 220, 220 n.
Federal Theology, 245 ff.
Filmer, Sir Robert, Patriarcha,
262.
Findlay, Professor, Expositor's
Greek Testament, 19 n.
Foster, John, 75.
• Fragmentary Hypothesis,' 36.
Free Church of Scotland (General
Assembly of 1881), 221.
Frey, 184 n.
Future Life, attitude of Old Tes
tament writers to, Lecture v.,
Sections 1. and II. The uses
of their doctrine to our own
day, Section in.

Geddes, Father, 36 f.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 225 n.
Gilgal, 105.
Gladstone, W. E., 218 n.
Goldwin Smith, Professor, 25.
Golius, 248 ».
Goodwin (Moses and Aaron), 249
n.
 , Puritan preacher, 244.
Goshen, 100.
Graf, 40, 46 n.
Gray, G. B., 52 ra.
Gregory, 6.
Grotius, 248 n.
Guide to the Bab. and Assyrian
Room (British Museum), 61 «.,
91 n.
Gunkel, Schdpfung und Chaos,
61 «.
Guthrie, Dr., 221 ra.

3i8

INDEX

Hackmann, Zukunftserwartung
des Jesaia, l6l ra.
Harford-Battersby, 40.
Harran, position of, 99 n.
Hasselquist, 249 ra.
Haupt, Sacred Books of the Old
Testament, 42, 49 »., 51 «., 78 «.
Hebrew Proper Names, 52 ra.
Heine, 245 «.
Henry, Matthew, 147, 156,
Herzog, Real-Encyclopadie, 240 n.
Hexateuch, composition of, chaps.
11. and 111.
High Priest, the, 172 ff.
Hilary of Poitiers, 231 ra.
Hilprecht, 91 ra.
Histoire du Peuple d' Israel, 118 ra.
Histoire Generate des Langues
SSmitiques (Renan), 118 ».
Historical Review, 105 «.
Historical Geography of the Holy
Land, 68, 152, 224 u.
Historical Books of Old Testa
ment, composition of, 43 f.
Hitzig, 69 n.
Hobbes, 248 ra.
Holzinger, 40.
Hommel, Professor, 46, 58.
Hooker, 262.
Horeb, 70 ra.
Horton, Dr., 203 ra.
Hugo St. Victor, 172.
Hupfeld, Sources of Genesis, 38.
Hutchison (on Minor Prophets),
250 n.
Ilgen, 35.
Immortality, the Hope of, in the
Old Testament, Lecture v. ;
the belief in, to-day, 209 ff. ;
' corporate immortality,' 212 ff.
Incarnation, true prophecy of,
174 f.

Inquisition, 24, 253.
Islam, Semitic source of, 1 16.
Israel. For a sketch of the early
history of the religion: its
Semitic origins, its contrast
with other Semitic religions,
its ethical uniqueness, and the
factors of this, see Lecture iv.
For the development of the
Ideas of Grace, Service, Sacri
fice, see Lecture v. ; national
character, 102 f.
Jahwist and Elohist Writers,
the, 34, 39; their view of the
conquest of Palestine, 48 ; their
date, 50 f, 58 f., 62 f., 69 f.,
105 ; their references to death
and Sheol, 180 ra. 7.
James I., 252, 262.
Jamieson, 250.
Jamnia, Synod of, 8.
Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia,
195 n.
Jeremias, Die Bab. Assyr. vom
Leben nach dem Tode, 194 ff.
Jerome, 234.
Job, the Book of, Lecture vm. ;
its attitude to a future life, 193,
207.
Joshua, composition of Book of,
47-
Judaism, Semitic source of, 1 16.
Kautzsch, 40, 78 n.
Kent, Professor Foster, 303 «.
Ker, Dr. John, 279.
Kingsley, Charles, 75, 219.
Kirkpatrick, Professor, 161 ra.
Knox, 252, 260 f.
Kostlin, 239.
Kuenen, 40, 136, 151; Gesammelte
Abhiindlungen, 1 15 ra.

INDEX

3J9

Lamech, Song of, 96 f.
Le Bas and Waddington, 224 ra.
Licinius Rufinus, Lex Dei, 225 ra.
Lightfoot, 249 ra.
Lindsay, Prof. T. M., 242 «.
Livingstone, John, 250.
Locke, John, 262.
Luther, 6, 237, 243; Table
Talk, 237 n. ; political use of
Old Testament, 252, 257 f.,
293 ra.
Mackintosh, Robert, Christ
and the Jewish Law, 14 ra.
Mai, A., Nova Patro. Bibl.,
228 ra.
Marti, Geschichte der Israel. Re
ligion, 161 ra.
Mather, Cotton, 251 ra.
Maundrell, 249 ra.
Maurice, F. D., 75, 219, 264.
Mazzini, 267, 303.
Meier, E., 151 ra.
Melanchthon, 237.
Merenptah, 100 n.
Messiah, the, 159 ff., 174 f.
Messianic Prophecy, 146 f.
Migne, Patrologia Graca, 228 ra.
\Milton, 252, 262.
Mitchell, Prof., 42 ra.
Mizpeh, 105.
Moab, 70 ra.
Mohammed (on resurrection), 192.
Monotheism among the Semites,
117 ff.; rise of, 131 ff., 143.
Moody, D. L., 217 «.
Moore, Professor G., 37, 40 ;
on American Old Testament
Scholarship in Zeitschrift fiir A.
T. Wissenschaft, 250 «., 251.
Moreh, terebinth of, 105.
Miiller, W. M., Asien und
Europa, 100 ra.

Nebo, 70 ra.
Nehemiah, 7.
New England's First Fruits,
250 ra.
Newman, John Henry, 75 ; a
letter on punishment of heretics,
24.
Nikolaus of Lyra, 236 ra.
Noldeke, 40.

Old Testament Criticism, history
of, 33 ff-
Oriental Congress (Paris 1897),
61.
Origen, 226 ff., 231, 237 ra.
Patriarchal narratives: aichso-
logical evidence, 99 ff.
Pentateuch, composition of, 33
ff. ; date of its constituent docu
ments, 50 ff. ; and archaeology,
58 ff., 68 ff. ; historical basis
in, 90 ff. ; attitude to a future
life, 178 ff. ; Luther on its
authorship, 238.
Persecutions by the Church, 23 f.
Pilgrim Fathers, scholarship of,
250.
Pisgah, 70 ra.
Pococke, 249 ra.
Poetical Books of Old Testament,
composition of, 44.
Polytheism among the Semites,
119 ff.; in Israel, 129 ra.
Priestly Writers, the, 39; their
view of the conquest of Pales
tine, 47 f. ; their date, 50 ff.,
58 ff., 69 f.; their references to
death, 180 ra. 7.
Prophetical Books of Old Testa
ment, composition of, 44 ; effects
of modern criticism upon, 45,

320

INDEX

53; archaeology and criticism,
65, 217 ff.
Prophets, the, their preaching to
their own times, with its influ
ence on the social ethics of
Christendom, Lecture viii.
  , their testimony to
Israel's earlier history, 137,
265 ff. ; the Spirit of Christ in
them, 158 ff . ; their attitude
to a future life, 185 f., 197 ff.,
202 ff. ; their revival in the
modern pulpit, 218 ff. ; their
ministry defined by Chrysostom,
230; neglected by the Medi
aeval Church, 235 f. ; the Re
formers' use of them, 237 ff. ;
the use of them in the seven
teenth and eighteenth centuries,
244 ff . ; their influence on the
political ideals of Christendom,
252 ff. ; contrasted with the
Apostles, 263 f. ; their double
patriotism, 265 ff. ; four features
of their civic teaching, 272 f . ;
their attitude to miracles, 274
ff. ; their predictions, 277 ; their
style, 279, and inspiration, 281 ;
their influence on the Wise
Men, 285, 287; contrasted with
the Wise Men, 288 ff.
Psalms, their titles, dates and
historic circumstance, 86 f. ;
their attitude to a future life,
186 ff., 199 ff., 204 ff. ; Macca
bean Psalms, 9.
Records ofthe Past, 61 ra., 194.
Reland, 249 «.
Renan, 105 n., 118, 120, 149.
Reproof and criticism, its uses
according to Proverbs, 304 ff.
Reuchlin, 236 «.

Reuss, 6.
Revelation, its meaning, m f. ;
A. B. Davidson on, 11 1 «.,
297 ; not coincident with history,
74, 89, 92, 108 f., 293 ff.; its
conditions, 140, 143 f. See also
Preface.
 in the Old Testament;
its proof, Lecture iv. ; the Old
Testament teaching about it,
III ff. ; the only explanation of
the ethical uniqueness of Israel 's
religion, 126 f. ; assured by
modern criticism, 115 ff. ; con
sistent with the tribal character
of early Israel's God, 143 f.
See also Lecture I.: 2, 11, 15,
19.
Robertson, Professor James,
Poetry and Religion of the
Psalms, 87 ra.
 of Brighton, 75.
Ruskin, John, Praeterita, 300.
Rutherford, Samuel, 252, 260,
262.
Ryle, Professor, 37 «., 40 ; Canon
of the Old Testament, 7 ra. ;
Early Narratives of Genesis,
97 ra.
Sacrifice, Old Testament doc
trine of, 169 ff. ; Levitical
sacrifices, 170; their relation
to Christ, 171 f. See also
under Vicarious.
Sacrifices to the dead, 183 ff.
 , places of, in the eighth cen
tury, 105.
Salmasius, 252, 262.
Savonarola, 236.
Sayce, Professor, 46, 58 f., 64 f.
Scahger, 249 ra.
Scheil, Father, 61.

INDEX

321

Schleiermacher, 279.
Schultens, 249 ».
Schultz, Old Testament Theology,
170 ra.
Schwally, Leben nach dem Tode,
184 ra.
Selden, 249 ra.
Semitic Race, the, their religious
qualities, 116 f . ; Renan's as
sertion that they are naturally
monotheists, 118; their poly
theism, 1 18 f . ; the opportunity
for monotheism in their religion,
121 f. ; influences aiding this,
122 ff. ; Israel's exceptional
monotheism, 126 ; Israel's
Semitic character, 127 ff. ; their
attitude to a future life, 192 ff. ;
its reasons, 193 f. ; their de
mand for physical signs in
attestation of moral truth, 274 f.
 Scholarship in the eighteenth
century, 248 ff.
'Septuagint,' 17 f.
Shaftesbury, Lord, 218 «., 273 ra.
Sheol, 177 ; in the Pentateuch,
179 f. ; in the historical Books,
183; in Babylonian literature,
194 f. ; in the Psalms, 199 ff.
Sieffert, 147 «., 228 ra.
' Signs and wonders,' 274 ff.
Simon (the critic of the Penta
teuch), 33, 240 «., 248 ra.
Sinai, 70 n.
Skinner, Professor, 161 «.
Smith, Henry, 244.
 , Professor H. P., 78 ».
 , W. Robertson, 40 ; on
Renan, 105 n. ; Old Testament
and the JeAvish Church, 55 «.,
56 «., 87 «., 88 «., 112 «., 115
ra. ; Religion of the Semites, 121,
124, 184 ra. ; Prophets of Israel,

221 ; articles in Encyclopedia
Britannica, 221 ; his trial and
its results, 221.
Social ethics of Christendom as
affected by the Prophets,
Lecture VII.
 Teaching of the Old Testa
ment, Lecture vn. passim ;
with Jeremiah, 166; in Proverbs,
302 ff.
Spencer, J., 249 ra.
Spinoza, 248 n.
Spirit, the Old Testament doctrine
of the Divine, in ff., 255 f.
 of Christ in the Old Testa
ment, Lecture v.
Spurgeon, 75.
St. Paul on the Old Testament,
15 ff.
Stade, 40 ; Geschichte des Volkes
Isr., 184 ra.
Stanley, Dean, Lectures on the
Jewish Church, 219.
Stark, 42 ra.
Steindorff, 64, 100 ra.
Sterne, 74, 75.
Steuernagel, 42 ra.
Suffering and effort imputed to
God, 174 f.
Sufferings of the Righteous. See
' Vicarious suffering.'
Tell-el-Amarna letters, 58.
Teraphim, 183 f.
Textual Criticism of the Old
Testament : its problems in
creased by Old Testament
quotations in New Testament,
17, 21 f., 29.
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 147 «.,
217 ra. ; his critical theories,
227 f.
Theodoret of Kyros, his works on

322

INDEX

the Old Testament, and critical
theories, 229.
Tholuck, 240 n.
Tillemont, 229 ra.
Toy, Professor, on Proverbs, 287,
3°3 »•
Tubingen School of critics, 46.
Typology, 145 ff.
Ur of the Chaldees, position of,
99.
Ussher, 249 ra.
Valeton, J. J. P., Amos en
Hosea, 222 ra.
Vater, 36.
Vatke, 46 «.
Vicarious suffering in the Old
Testament: with Jeremiah, 167 ;
Isaiah lii.-liii., 167 ff. ; the
truth of it, the fruit of ex
perience, 168 f. ; the Suffering
Servant of Jahweh and Christ,
171.
Volz, Paul, Vorexil - Prophetic
und der Messias, 161 «.

Walker, Dr. James, Theology
and Theologians of Scotland,
246 f.
Warburton, Divine Legation of
Moses, 191.
Wellhausen, 40, 49 ra. ; Reste
arab. Heidentumes, 125, 192,
275-
Westphal, 40.
Wildeboer, 285.
Winter, 151 ra.
Wisdom, the Hebrew, and the
Christian Preacher, Lecture
viii. ; the figure of Wisdom in
Proverbs and her character,
308 ff.
 , Books of, 283 ff. ; their
practical uses, 293 ff.
Wise Men, the, their history in
Israel, 284 ff. ; what they owed
to the Prophets, 287 f. ; con
trasted with the Prophets, 289 ff.
Woods, F. H., 40.
Zimmern, 61 ra.
Zwingli, 6, 238.

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES

Genesis, Book of, 10, 90 ff.
Gen. i. — iii- 33 ; i.-xi. 97 ra. ; ii. 14,
69 ra. ; iii. 129 ra. ; iii. 19, 180 ra. ;
iv. 10 «., 95 ra. ; v. 23, 24, 180 ra. ;
vi. ff., 33, 95 ra. ; vi. 6, 172 ra. ;
xi. 95 ra. ; xiv. 61 f., 100; xv.
1 ff., 179 «., 180 ra. ; xv. 18,
69 ra. ; xv. 4, 6, 15 ra. ; xvii. 5,
15 n. ; xxiii. 180 n. ; xxiii. 8,
179 ra. ; xxiv. 10, 99; xxv. 7,
17, 180 «., 181 ra. ; xxviii. 10-
22, 38; xxxi. 13, 38; xxxi. 21,
69 ra. ; xxxi. 30, 183 ra. ; xxxii.
23-33. 3§ ; xxxv. 9-15, 38 ;
xxxv. 19, 180 ra. ; xxxv. 29,
180 «., 181 ra. ; xxxvii. 105 ra. ;
xxxvii. 35, 180 «., 183 ra. ;
xxxviii. 104 ra. ; xxxix. 9, 134 ;
xiii. 38, 180 «., 183 ra. ; xliii.
18, 134; xliv. 31, 180 ra. ; xlviii.
21, 179 «., 180 ra. ; xlix. 105,
179 «., 180 «., 181 ra. ; 1. 12,
13, 181 ra. ; 1. 24, 180 ra. ;
1. 24-26, 180 ra. ; li. 180 ra.
Exod. xx.-xxii. 50 ra. ; xxi. 2-6,
184 ra. ; xxiii. 31, 69 ra. ; xxv.-
xxxi. 50 ra. ; xxxiii. 11, 180 ra. ;
xxxiii. 19, 15 ra. ; xxxiv. 6, 151 ;
xxxiv. 14-26, 50 ra.
Lev. 50 ra. ; x. 2, 181 «. ; xx. 27,
185 ra. ; xxi. 5, 184 n.
Num. i.-xix. 50 ra. ; xx. 22 ff.,
181 ra. ; xx. 24, 181 «. ; xxi.

13-20, 70 n. ; xxi. 20, 70 ra. ;
xxii. 5, 69 ra. ; xxiii. 14, 70 ra. ;
xxiii. 21, 248 ; xxxiii. 44-49,
70 ra.
Deuteronomy 7, 10, Lect. 11.; 163,
273-
Deut. i. 7, 69 ra. ; iii. 17, 27,
70 ra. ; iii. 23, 180 ra. ; iii. 29,
70 ra. ; iv. 17, 129 «., 164 ra. ;
iv. 22, 180 ra. ; iv. 34, 154;
iv. 46, 70 ra. ; iv. 49, 70 ra. ;
vi. 13, 16, 163 ra. ; viii. 3, 163 ra. ;
x. 20, 163 ra. ; xi. 24, 69 ra. ;
xii.-xxvi, 50 ra. ; xiv., 184 ra. ;
xxv. 4, 19 ra. ; xxvi. 14, 184 n. ;
xxxi. 14, 16, 180 ra. ; xxxii. 48,
181 ra. ; xxxii. 50, 181 ra. ;
xxxii. 52, 180 ra. ; xxxiii., 105;
xxxiii. 2, 70 ra. ; xxxiv., 181 ra. ;
xxxiv. 1, 70 ra. ; xxxiv. 4, 5,
180 ». ; xxxiv. 6, 70 ra.
Joshua, Book of, 7 ra., 37.
Josh. i. 4, 69 ra. ; iii., iv., vi., viii.,
48 ; xii. 3, 70 ra. ; xiii. 20, 70 ra. ;
xxiv. 2, 69 ra. ; xxiv. 29 f., 180 «.
Judges, Book of, 7 ra.
Judg. v. 15^-18, 153, 154; v.
31a, 151 ; vi.-ix., 77 ra. ; vi.
11, 151 ; ix., 77 ra. ; xvii. 5,
183 «.; xix.-xxi., 77 ».; xviii.,
77 ra. ; xviii. 14, 183 ra.
Ruth, 7 ra.
Samuel, Books of, 7 «., 44

324 INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES

I Sam. xxv. 29, 183 ra. ; xxvi. 19,
128 ra. ; xxviii. 3, 9, 185 «. ;
xxviii. 7 ff., 181 ra. ; xxviii. 7,
185 ra. ; xxviii. 13, 16, 184 ra.
2 Sam. v. 23, 129 ra. ; viii. 3,
69 «.; x. 16, 69 ra. ; xii. 23,
183 ra.
Kings, Books of, 7 «., 43.
1 Kings ii. 2-9, 80; iv. 21, 24,
69 ra. ; xvii.-xix., 81; xvii. 17,
182 ra. ; xviii. 27, 84 n. ; xix.,
70 «., 83 ra ; xxi., 81 ; xxii.,
135; xxiii. 29; xxiv. 7, 69 ra.
2 Kings i. ii., 82; ii. 11, 181 ra. ;
iv. 32 ff., 182 ra. ; xiii. 14, 84 n.
Chronicles, Books of, 7 «., 55.
2 Chron. xxiv. 21, 10 ra.
Ezra, Book of, 7 «., 10.
Nehemiah, Book of, 7 »., 10.
Esther, 7 «., 10.
Job, Book of, 7 «., 133, ch. viii.
Job iii. 17-19, 196; xvii. 12-16,
196; xix. 23, 193; xix. 25 ff.,
189 ; xix. 25-27, 207.
Psalms, Book of, 7 «., 86 ff.
Ps. vi. 5, 188 ra. ; xvi. 8-1 1, 205;
xviii. 29, 33, 34, 35, 155 ;
xix. in; xxx. 9, 188; xxxix.
12, 188; xxxix. 12, 13, 200;
li., 88 f. ; Ii. 4, 15 ra. ; lxxiii.,
187; lxxiii., 205 f . ; lxxxviii. 11,
188 ; xc, 189, 200 ff., 214 ;
xciv., 5 ff., m ; cxv. 17, 188.
Proverbs, Book of, 7 ra. ; Lect.
VIII.
Prov. iii. II, 12, 294 ra. ; viii.,
133-
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 7 ra., 10;
Lect. viii.
Canticles, 7 «., 10.
Isaiah, 7 ra. ; i. 18, 162 ra. ; v. 1 ff.,
162 «., 266; vii. 276; vii. 14,
160 ra. ; vii. 20, 69 ra. ; ix. 7,

162 ra. ; xi. 1-5, 160 »., 161 ra. ;
vi. 1 ff., 162 ra. ; viii. 19, 20,
185 «., 270 ; ix. 6 {., 160 «.,
161 ra. ; xiv. 32, 162 ra. ; xix.
112; xxiii. 112; xxiv.-xxvii.
186 ra. ; xxv. 8, 18 ra. ; xxviii.
278; xxviii. 287; xxviii. 6, 23-
29, 112 ; xxix. 4, 185 ra. ; xxxiii.
21, 22, 174 ra. ; xxxvi., 162 ra. ;
xxxvii., 162 ra. ; xxxviii. 18,
200 ; xl.-xlviii., 53 f. ; xl.-lv.,
294 ra. ; xl.-lxvi., 175 ra. ; xl.
25 ff., Ill ; xiii. 13-17, 175 «• ;
xl. 13, 15 ra. ; xiii. 6, 268 ;
xiii. 19, 169 ra. ; Ixiii. 1-7,
175 ra. ; xiv. 9, io, 15 ra. ; Iii.
13, 169 ra. ; Iv. 11, 277; Ivii.
15, 203 ; lviii. 272 ; Ixiii. 16,
89 ra.
Jeremiah, 7 ra. ; i. 5, 166 ra. ; ii.,
266 ; ii. 18, 69 ra. ; vii. 22,
164 ra. ; viii. 8, 284 ra. ; ix. 2,
166 ra. ; ix. 22, 284 ra. ; xii. 1-3,
167 ; xiii. 4-7, 69 ra. ; xv. 18,
167 ; xviii. 18, 284 ra. ; xx. 7,
167; xxii. 20 (R. V.), 69 ra. ;
xxxiii. 16, 174 ra. ; xxxvii. 13
ff., 166 ra. ; xxxviii. 2, 164 ra. ;
xl. 4 ff., 166 ra. ; xiv. 164 ra. ;
xlvi. 2, 6, 10, 69 n. ; li. 63,
69 n.
Lamentations, 7 «., 10; v. 7,
168.
Ezekiel, 7 ra. ; iii. 18 ff., 89 ra. ;
xiv. 14, 286 «., 293 ». ; xxi. 21,
183 ra. ; xxxvii. 186 ». ; xxxix,
11, 69 ».
Daniel, 7 ra. , 10 ; xii. 2, 3, 189.
Hosea, Book of, 18; i.-iii. 158;
ii. 8, 14 ff., 266; ii. 15 and
xi. 1, 98 ra. ; iii. 4, 183 ra. ; iv.
6, 159 ra. ; v. 15-vi. 6, 158 «.;
vi., 269 ; vi. 1 f., 186 «. ; vi. 6,

INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES 325

159 ra. ; vu. 1, 14, 158 ra. ; xi.
1, 160 »., 266; xi. 3-4, 159 ra. ;
xi. 7 ff., 158 ra. ; xii. 3-5, 98 ».,
266; xii. 6, 158 ra. ; xii. 12, 13,
98 ra. ; xiii. 4, 1 59 ra. ; xiii. 7,
158 ra. ; xiii. 14, 186 ra. ; xiv.
158 ra.
Amos ii. 9, 98 ra. ; ii. 9-1 1, 266;
iii. 7, 276; iv. 21, 266; v. 3,
277 ; v. 22-24, 270; viii. 5, 272 ;
ix. 7, 98 «., 267.
Jonah, Book of, 86, 89.
Micah vii., 69 ra.
Haggai, 173.
Zechariah iii. 173 ; viii. 4, 186 «.,
x. 2, 183 ra.
Malachi iii. 20, 70 ra.
Matthew i. 22, 23, 160 ra. ; ii.
15, 160 «.; iv. 4, 7, 163 ra. ;
v. 17, 18, 12 «. ; v. 21 ff., 13
ra. ; v. 31 ff., 13 ra. ; v. 38, 43,
13 ra. ; vii. 12, 12 ra. ; xi. 12 ff.,
13 ra. ; viii. 1-4, 13 «., 14 ra. ;
xi. 12 ff., 13 ra. ; xii. 1-2, 14 ra. ;
xvi. 13, 163 ra. ; xvii. 24-27, 13
ra. ; xxii. 32, 183 ra. ; xxii. 40,
12 ra. ; xxiii. 35, 10 ra. ; xxiv.
27, 13 ra. ; xxvii. 9, 241.

Mark vii. 19, 14 ».; xii. 27,
183 ra.
Luke iv. 48, 163 ra. ; x. 7, 14 ra. ;
xi. 37, 14 ra. ; xiii. 2, 294 «.,
10-17, '4 »• ; xiv. 1-6, 14 ra.;
xvi. 16, 13 ra. ; xx. 38, 183 ra. ;
xxiv. 44, io ra.
John iv. 48, 275; v. 1-17, 14 ra. ;
vii. 294 ra. ; viii. 33 ff., 89 ra.
Acts, Book of, 17 ; viii. 16, 241.
Romans iii. 2, 15 ra. ; iii. 4, 15 ra. ;
iv. 3, 17, I5«.; ix. 4, 15, 17, 20,
15 ra., ix.-xi., 15 ra. ; xi. 34,
15 ra.; xv. 4, 15 ra.
1 Cor. i. 22, 274 ; ii. 9, 17 ra. ; ii.
9, 18 ra. ; ii. 16, 15 ra. ; ix. 8,
241; ix. 9, 18 ra. ; x. 11, 16 ra. ;
xii. 9, 241 ; xiv. 6, 241 ; xv. 54,
55, 18 «.
2 Cor. iii. 13 ff., 19 ».
Gal. iv. 22 ff., 19 ra.
Hebrews, Epistle to, 6 »., 15, 173 ;
xi. 37, 17 ra.
James, 6.
2 Peter, 6 «.
2 John, 6 ra.
3 John, 6 ra.
Jude, 6 n. ; ix. 14, 17 ra.

By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.
The
Historical Geography
of the Holy Land
Seventh Edition. With Scripture Index and SJx Colored
Maps, specially prepared. 8vo, cloth, 730 pages, $4.50

#. . . No one work has ever before embodied all this variety of material
to illustrate the whole subject. His geographical statements are pen-pictures.
We are made to see the scene. No important problem is untouched. With
out question it will take its place at once as a standard work, indispensable to
the thoroughgoing student of the Bible. — Sunday-School Times.
. . . An exhaustive collection of material lay outside the plan of the author.
His intention is rather to show how the history of the land is conditioned by
its physical structure. It is thus the idea of Karl Ritter which rules the treat
ment and presentation. Very comprehensive sections are concerned, not with
the history, but with the nature of the land. . . . The author pays special
attention to the military operations. One could sometimes imagine that an
officer is writing, who, above all, regards the land from the point of view of the
military strategist. In this connection especially the history of Israel in its
chief crises in Old Testament times receives striking illumination. Large pas
sages are frequently quoted from the Old Testament in order to explain them
by the exhibition of their geographical background. In addition the author
has a special gift of vivid representation. He makes the history transact itself
before the eye of the reader in dramatic form. One sees, everywhere, that the
landscapes which he describes stand before his own eyes. Thus the book is
an extremely valuable means of aid to the understanding of the history, espe
cially of the Old Testament. — Prof. Schurer, of Kiel, in the Theol. Liiera-
tur-Zeitung: The book is too rich to summarize. . . . The language is particularly well
chosen. Few pages are without some telling phrase happily constructed to
attract attention and hold the memory, and we often feel that the wealth of
imagery would be excessive for prose were it not that it is chosen with such
appropriateness and scientific truth. . . . To the reader much of the pleasure
of perusing the volume comes from its luxurious typography, and the exquisite
series of orographical maps prepared by Mr. Bartholomew from the work of
the Survey. These maps alone are more suggestive and enlightening than
many treatises, and they are destined, we trust, to enliven many a sermon, and
turn the monotony of the records of Israelitish wars into a thrilling romance. —
Speaker.

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON
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By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, P.P., LL.D.
The Book of Isaiah
In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.50 each.
Volume I. Chapters I. — XXXIX.
Volume II. Chapters XL. — LXVI.
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Prof. George Adam Smith has such a mastery of the scholarship of his
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It would be difficult to say how highly we appreciate the work, or how
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Mr. Smith gives us models of expositions ; expositions for cultivated con
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The Book of the Twelve Prophets
COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR
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In Dr. Smith's volumes we have much more than a popular exposition of
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... If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it is not because
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Few interpreters of the Old Testament to-day rank higher than George
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