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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME

John Elliott Fund

THE BRITISH ACADEMY
The
Text of the Old Testament
By
Edouard Naville
D.C.L., LL.D., D.Litt, F.S.A.
Professor at the University of Geneva
Foreign Associate of the Institute of France

The Schweich Lectures
1915

London
Published for the British Academy
Py Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press
Amen Corner, E.C.
1916

PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PREFACE
The three lectures printed here and which were delivered in
December, 1915, are a further development of the following ideas
which I put forward in my book Archaeology of the Old Testament.
The books of the Old Testament are not in their original form.
The earliest of them were written in Babylonian cuneiform, the
later ones in Aramaic. Their present form was given them when
the rabbis turned the books into the vernacular of Jerusalem,
to which a new script, the square Hebrew, derived from Aramaic,
was adapted. The Judaic dialect, written with that alphabet, is
what we call Hebrew.
I do not wonder that, as Professor van Hoonacker says, these
ideas have at present little success with the Biblical scholars,
especially with the Higher Critics, who see their system attacked
by an opponent who is by no means a Semitic scholar. My
answer is that I have endeavoured to revert to sound historical
principles. I have tried to test by history not only the commonly
received opinions about the hooks of the Old Testament, but also
the leading statements of the critics, their reconstruction of the
literature of the Old Testament.
This has determined the plan of these lectures. I could grasp
my subject only in the second, because, when I had to speak of the
language in which the books of the Old Testament were composed,
I had to begin by indicating which books I meant. For we stand
before two conflicting conceptions. Either these books are those
we know from tradition based on what they say, on their very
words ; or they are the books of the critics who have cut them
in pieces, who assign to them totally different dates from those oh'
tradition, and totally different authors from those whose names they
bear. I had to explain why I could not accept the critical view, and
why I should only consider the books such as they appear, taking the
plain meaning of what they say. The systems of Higher Criticism
do not seem to me in accordance with the principles of sound
history, because in most cases its theories are not established by

iy PREFACE
real historical arguments, they rest on interpretations of certain
difficulties, on explanations of a rather subjective character, but
not on proved facts. These are the reasons which dictated my
choice, and I was obliged to state them at the outset, but they could
be only adumbrated in the short compass of a lecture.
Archaeology (and I mean by that word the work of the pick and
the spade, the excavations made in various countries) has thrown
a great amount of light on whole periods of antiquity, and has
opened to us vast fields which before were absolutely unknown.
In this respect, Egypt and Mesopotamia have been particularly
fruitful. The great number of inscriptions and papyri discovered
in these countries have enabled us to form a more correct idea of
what the people were among whom arose the authors of the books of
the Old Testament, and especially of the language in which they
wrote. The Hebrews were Mesopotamians. Their forefather Abraham
left Haran, a Mesopotamian city, and settled in Canaan. We
know now that in both countries the literary language was the same,
it was Babylonian cuneiform, it was so in Palestine in the time of
Moses and later on also, as the excavations have shown. The
conclusion then which forces itself upon our mind is that the early
books of the Hebrews, the books of Moses, were written in Babylonian
cuneiform. This conclusion has been put forward before me by Colonel Conder,1
resting on arguments somewhat different from mine ; but I believe
I may claim the paternity of the following : it happened in Palestine
as in Mesopotamia, that the people went over from Babylonian
cuneiform to Aramaic by a kind of literary evolution chiefly occa
sioned by the invention of the Aramaic alphabet, a far more practical
script for common use than cuneiform, which could be written only
on wet clay. Aramaic, like Greek in the Hellenistic period, became
more and more popular, it was more and more written and spoken,
and therefore all the papyri and ostraca found at Elephantine are in
Aramaic ; the proper names only are in Hebrew.
The prophets wrote in Aramaic language with the Aramaic script.
The Canaanite alphabet was not used for the sacred writings of the
Hebrews, I mean here the true Jews, the inhabitants of Jerusalem
1 It is only while I was writing this Preface that 1 at last succeeded in getting
and reading Col. Conder' a book.

PREFACE v
and Judah, who belonged to the Southern kingdom, and not the
ten tribes whose capital was Samaria and who adopted the Phoenician
script under the influence of their half Phoenician princes, the
worshippers of the Phoenician god Baal. This inference of the
Canaanite alphabet being that of Samaria and not of Judah seems to
me strongly supported by Sir Arthur Evans's discovery of the Cretan
origin of that alphabet. As this discovery is very recent, I could not
make use of it before, and one can now well understand why this
alphabet, being imported by foreign tradesmen, could not be used by
Isaiah or Jeremiah for writing down God's words. On the contrary
the Samaritans, who had hostile feelings towards the Jews and their
religion, would the more readily adopt that script, as it separated
completely their books from those of the Hebrews.
The present language of the books, the Hebrew of the Bible,
is the vernacular idiom of Jerusalem, which became a literary
language when the Hebrews put it in writing and invented the
square Hebrew. I do not know whether any one has put forward
this idea before me, and I agree that it is somewhat startling and
that it clashes with generally received opinions. At the end of
my lectures, the Rev. Dr. Gaster argued that each of these books
had its particular style and its particular words, and that this variety
seemed to go against that characteristic and the date of Hebrew.
Dr. Gaster's argument would have its full force if the change had
been the other way, if these books had passed from the vernacular to
the book language in its literary form. But here it is just the
reverse. Instead of the literary Aramaic the rabbis turned the
sacred writings into the language of the people, that which was
heard at Jerusalem and spoken by all classes of the population, just
as later on the authors of the books of the New Testament used also
for their writings the popular language.
A change in that direction would, in my opinion, exactly produce
the variety of style which may be noticed in the books. We cannot
suppose that they were all translated by the same man ; there may
be also a difference of date. Individual men are like the leaves of
a tree, there are not two of them perfectly alike, not even in their
way of speaking which reflects their individuality, and which is not
bound by the rules of literary language. Some have their favourite
words, or they use more frequently certain turns of speech. In
French the proverbial expression parlcr comme un livre (to speak like

vi PREFACE
a book) means to have lost the liberty of colloquial speech. There
fore, leaving the literary language for that of everyday life seems to
me to introduce into the writing a variety which before was, if not
unknown, at least very limited.
The change was merely dialectical, and it did not affect in the
least the beauty of the style of the original. The people's language
may sometimes rise to a high degree of beauty, it may produce very
strong emotional effects, because it is the simple utterance of the
heart's feelings, without any artificial and conventional ornament.
The total absence of any studied eloquence gives to the writings of
the Old Testament a character of genuineness and sincerity which
adds to their tone of authority, while at the same time it appeals to
our innermost feelings. For instance, can anything he more touching
or move us more strongly than the pleading of Judah before Joseph
in favour of his brother Benjamin ; and this language is certainly
the people's language which might even come out of the mouth of
a child. Here also, as regards style, I do not see why the passage
from the literary language to the vernacular should have debased in
the least the tone of the writings, which went through it.
I have no doubt I shall be strongly assailed by the critics, and
I cannot attempt to forestall their attacks. This is one of the
reasons why I have kept to these lectures their original form and
character. I did not make a book out of them, for that would have
compelled me to enter into many discussions, and to argue at great
length upon several points.1 This, I could not do, having to encom
pass the whole subject into the space of three lectures. Several
times I could only state my ideas, without supporting them by
argument, though I have endeavoured to quote as often as I could
the facts or the texts on which I relied, and to mention what I put
forward as a conjecture.
In closing this preface, my last words must be to express to the
British Academy my sincere thanks for having asked me to deliver
these lectures, and thus having done me the honour of setting forth
my ideas before a select audience of eminent scholars and hearers
interested in questions concerning the Old Testament.
1 For instance, I should have been obliged to say why 1 still adhere to Sir Arthur
Evans's view on the Cretan origin of the Semitic alphabet, in opposition to
Mr. Gardiner's lately published paper on the Egyptian origin of the same
alphabet.

CONTENTS

LECTURE I
The Text according to Higher Criticism . . Page 1
Changes brought in our views in regard to ancient history by archaeology :
Prehistoric times, Aegean civilization, in Egypt the Tel el Amarna tablets and
the Elephantine papyri, 1 ; Israel's influence on mankind is due to its books, 2 ;
method to be applied in studying the books of the O.T., 2 ; Higher Criticism
has to be faced at the outset, 3 ; the methods and results of H.C. described by
Dr. Briggs, 3-5; its origin, the Father of H.C, 5-6; H.C. consists of two
parts, a destructive and a constructive one, the destructive part is predominant,
G-8 ; the constructive side, 8-10; example of a reconstructed text, 10-11;
lines of evidence upon which H.C. relies, its results to be tested according to
its principles, 11 ; the Priestly Code, 12-15 ; J. and E., 15-17 ; the Redactor,
18 ; Deuteronomy, 19-20 ; the Moses who is an authority is not the Moses
of the critics, 21 ; the first chapters of Genesis according to tradition, 22-4 ;
the plan of the following lectures, 24.

LECTURE II
Babylonian Cuneiform and the Canaanite Script . Page 25
Part I. The Babylonian Cuneiform (pp. 25-44).
Moses the writer of the Pentateuch, generally supposed to have written it in
Hebrew, with the Canaanite alphabet, 25-6 ; the origin of the people of Israel,
Abram departing from Haran, 26-7 ; Mesopotamia, its history down to Abra
ham's time, 28-9 ; the date of Abraham, the reign of Hammurabi, 30-1 ; Abram
left a country with a Semitic book-language written in cuneiform, he took his
tablets with him, 32-3 ; found in Canaan a people speaking a Semitic dialect, 33 ;
difference between literary and spoken language, 33-5 ; the literary language
of Palestine was Babylonian cuneiform, the Tel el Amarna tablets, 3G-8 ;
Moses wrote Babylonian cuneiform, 39-40 ; Joshua writing the Law on plastered
stones, 41 ; objections against the idea that the Pentateuch was written in
cuneiform, 42 ; the method of studying the books of Moses has to be altered, 43 ;
the books of Moses are not original documents, 44.
Part II. The Canaanite Script (pp. 45-50).
The general opinion that the books of the O.T. were written with the Canaanite
script is a hypothesis, 45 ; Sir Arthur Evans's discovery of the Minoan origin of
the Phoenician script, 46-7 ; this script penetrated Palestine from the North,
perhaps under Solomon, 48 ; Phoenician influence clearly shown by the ostraca
found in the palace at Samaria, 48 ; the inscription of Mesha, 49 ; the inscrip
tion of Shiloah, 49-50. These monuments prove nothing as to the language
and script of the books of the O.T., 50.

viii CONTENTS
LECTURE III
Aramaic and Hebrew ...... Page 51
Part I. Aramaic (pp. 51-65).
Isaiah mentions five cities in Egypt will speak the language of Canaan, 51 ; the
Elephantine papyri entirely written in Aramaic, 51-2 ; the language of Canaan
was Aramaic, 52 ; several dialects spoken in Canaan, 52-3 ; Jewish was the
dialect of Jerusalem, 53-5 ; Hebrew settlements in Egypt go further back than
Isaiah's time, 56 ; the Hebrews brought from Canaan their religion and their
language, 56-7 ; Aramaic is a modification of cuneiform, 57-8 ; the prophets
wrote in Aramaic, 59 ; no language called 'Hebrew' in the O.T., 59-61 ; the
name of God, JAHU, is Aramaic, 61-2 ; this name is not unspeakable, 63 ;
Aramaic spread in Palestine, 64-5.
Part II. Ezra (pp. 65-74).
Ezra the scribe, 65-7 ; turns the Law into Aramaic, 67-8 ; how he had the
writings of Moses in his hands, 68 ; arrival of Ezra at Jerusalem, 69 ; his
second journey to Jerusalem with Nehemiah, 70 ; proclamation of the Law, 70-1 ;
the prayer of the Levites contains all the components of the Pentateuch, 71-2 ;
Ezra the second legislator of Israel, 73 ; the Septuagint, 74.
Part III. The Hebrew op the Bible (pp. 75-8).
Change of script, 75 ; the language of Jerusalem written with the new script
becomes ' Hebrew ', 76-7 ; conclusions, 77-8.

INDEX  Page 79

LECTURE I
THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM
Since the rise of archaeology, our views with regard to ancient
history^, especially as to the origin of the nations of antiquity, have
undergone a considerable change. Fifty years ago a Frenchman,
Boucher de Perthes, in his researches on the alluvial deposits of the
river Somme, was the first to draw attention to the flint instruments
therein, and thus to lift a corner of the veil which had covered for
many centuries prehistoric industry, the knowledge of which has
since disclosed to us what was the origin of civilization.
Later, that enthusiastic admirer of Homer, the German Schlie-
mann, by his excavations first at Troy and afterwards at Mycenae, laid
bare to the astonished learned world the remains of the people whose
great deeds, sung by the poet, were thus seen to be no mere creations
of his imagination. A numerous band of scientific explorers of nearly
all nations has considerably widened the field opened by Schliemann,
so that we can now trace in the Eastern Mediterranean the Aegean
civilization, which was absolutely unknown in our school days.
And this art, this civilization which was first discovered in Mycenae,
where did it spring from ? Sir Arthur Evans and his Italian and
American followers have shown us where we are to look for its
origin. Crete, the island of Minos and Daedalus, has been one of the
first teachers of Europe and of our ancestors.
In this magnificent series of discoveries, has Israel had no part ?
Has the Holy Land contributed nothing to this abundant booty ? In
Palestine^ the excavations have yielded interesting remains, but none
of those great discoveries have been made which change the line
hitherto followed by research. The history of the people of Israel,
not that of Abraham's family, but of Israel as a nation, begins in
Egypt. Now, curiously enough, the two chief discoveries, those of
the Tel el Amarna tablets and the Elephantine papyri, the signifi
cance of which I should like to bring out in these lectures, were both
made in Egypt.
People will say that these discoveries have a literal'}' rather than an
B

2 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
archaeological character. No doubt, the questions they raise chiefly
concern language. But if we consider what Israel has been, thepart this
nation has played in the world in the past, its influence even at the pre
sent day, in a word, its history from the day when Abraham left Meso
potamia, we shall find that it is entirely based on religion or belief, and
that this religion, as well as the events which have marked the nation's
career, are contained in the books of the Old Testament. It is not
by its conquests, by its outward power, by its great monuments, by
its art, by its refined civilization, that Israel has acted so powerfully
on mankind : it is merely by the contents of its books. Its whole
history is to be reconstructed from them, so that any question affect
ing those books may modify in certain respects the conception of its
history. Therefore we have to study these books in every way. Certainty,
philological and textual criticism must be applied to them. In many
cases their answers will be of primary importance. But they are not
all. We have to consult the books themselves, to replace them
in the circumstances and in the country in which they were written.
For whom were they written, what was their plan and purpose ?
Where did the authors of them derive their information ? This
I should call internal evidence, but we must not neglect what comes in
from outside. We previously mentioned the extraordinary changes
brought about by archaeological research. This branch of learning
is not our only help : anthropology, biology, natural science, botany,
zoology, folklore, and very often what we see and hear at the present
day, may lead us to tbe true interpretation of the ancient writings, and
to a better understanding of the past.
These seem to me the sound principles on which real history is to
be. based. I should like to see students of antiquity revert to true, and,
I may say, sound history', such as it has been admirably brought for
ward in other subjects than the Old Testament by a French writer,
Fustel de Coulanges, whose book La Cite Antique is in my opinion
the type of what historical research should be. I am happy to say he
has now made disciples in France, and this school is becoming every
day more prominent.
But when we come to study the history of Israel and the literature
of the Old Testament^ we find ourselves confronted with two quite
contrary conceptions. One of them rests on a tradition of many cen
turies, and on the written word found in the books themselves. The
other is that of the Higher Criticism, which has completely swept
away tradition, and has raised a construction^ or rather constructions
of various forms, but with a common assumption as basis, viz. that

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 3
the names and dates given to the books of the Old Testament are not
reliable, that with a few exceptions they are all erroneous, and that
they must be replaced by authors discovered by the critics.
Thus we have at the outset to face Higher Criticism. We cannot
treat in this lecture the whole question, which fills many books.
Nor are we going to take the apologetic side in favour of tradition.
We should like by a few examples to judge the Higher Criticism on
its own merits, to weigh it impartially, to appraise its value, and to
measure it with the same measure it has meted out to its opponents.
In this summary and very fragmentary description of the results of
the Higher Criticism, I shall take as my guide one of the most eminent
exponents of it in the English language, the late Dr. Briggs, a scholar
who in all his discussions and arguments shows great respect for
Holy Writ, but who at the same time is a convinced disciple of the
Higher Critical School. He is sometimes liable to be carried away
by his admiration, I should even say by his enthusiasm for the sub
ject he has to defend, to strike up a paean of victory. Not only will
its undisputed rule soon be finally established, not only will its oppo
nents soon be spoken of as men of the past like the slave-owners, but,
in Dr. Briggs's own words ' : ' those who will insist upon opposing
Higher Criticism with traditional views do not realize the perils of
the situation. They seem to be so infatuated with inherited opinions
that they are ready to risk the authority of the Bible upon their inter
pretation, . . . they would force critics to choose between truth and
scholarly research on the one side, and tradition on the other. But
there are many far better scholars who . . . will not be deterred
from criticism themselves, or allow others to be deterred by those
reactionary alarmists. The issue is plain, the result is not doubtful :
the obstructionists will give way in this matter. Holy Scripture will
vindicate itself against those who, like the friends of Job, have not
spoken right concerning God in presuming to defend Him.'
The issue is plain, says Dr. Briggs. Higher Criticism alone will
vindicate Scripture against the infatuated defenders of tradition. The
result is not doubtful, but it has turned out to be just the contrary of
what Dr. Briggs expected. I have no hesitation in saying that, apart
from the religious point of view, nothing has shaken, I may even say
shattered, the confidence of many in the authority of Scripture so
completely as Higher Criticism. Readers of the numerous books
which appear every year, especially in Germany, on the ancient
1 The Study of Holy Scripture, p. 273. In this quotation I have left out the
words which have a purely religious bearing. B 2

4 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
history of the East, or on any subject connected with the Old Testa
ment, will easily see what remains of this authority.
Let us now apply our criticism to the work of the Higher Critics
and see what we are to think of their results, which they assert to be
established beyond discussion. Let us judge them with the judge
ment with which they judge others, taking heed not to use expressions
which they have not used themselves.
The following is their description of the books of the Old Testa
ment : ' There are but few biblical writings which can be regarded
as the product of one mind, as an organic whole. And few of these
have remained without interpolations which may be easily detected.
None of the historical books of the Old Testament can be assigned
here. The only prophetic writings which are certainly the products
of one author at one time are Joel, Jonah, Zephaniah, Haggai, and
Malachi.' 1 Certainly a very small number, five out of thirty-nine,
one of which, Malachi, is often called pseudonymous.
'There are a large number of the biblical books that are anony
mous : the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles,
Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Jonah, Ruth, many of the Psalms,
Lamentations.' 2 If we look at this list, we see that some of these
books, like portions of the Pentateuch, Joshua, aud a great number
of Psalms, are not anonymous, but what Dr. Briggs calls pseudony
mous, among which he quotes Ecclesiastes and Daniel. Whatever
name is applied to these books, 'it may be regarded as the certain
result of the science of Higher Criticism that Moses did not write the
Pentateuch or Job, Ezra did not write the Chronicles, Ezra, or
Nehemiah. Jeremiah did not write the Kings or Lamentations,
David did not write the Psalter, but only a few of the Psalms.
Solomon did not write the Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, and only
a portion of Proverbs. Isaiah did not write half of the book that bears
his name. The great mass of the Old Testament was written by
authors whose names and connexion with their writings are lost in
oblivion.' 3
Thus the whole literature of the Old Testament is a collection of
books, the great majority of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.
On this magnificent construction which, the more you study it, the
more it excites your admiration, you see inscribed in golden letters
the names of those who have been its builders, and you repeat those
names with veneration. We must however undeceive you, say the
Higher Critics, those names are for the most part a mere fallacy, many
1 B"ggs, loc. cit., p. 309. 2 Briggs, loc. cit., p. 319.
' Briggs, loc. cit., p. 287.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 5
of these men had nothing to do with the construction, which was the
work of a great number of builders about whose names, work, and
date we know absolutely nothing.
Allow me to look at the theory in the light of an argument
which is too often left entirely aside : I mean common sense. You
may admit that a work like the Nibelungen is anonymous. Gene
rally the authors of popular songs, except those of very recent date,
are unknown. For a long time Homer has been considered by the
followers of Wolff as an aggregate of songs of a great many poets, of
none of whom the origin or name could be quoted. This idea, very
popular in the various fields of antiquity, is more and more attacked
by the school I was speaking of ; nevertheless its cogency can well be
understood in reference to a single work of a special character.
But here we have to do with a whole literature with — who knows ? —
perhaps thirty or more authors, who have been writing during eight
or nine centuries, some of them on the same book at an interval of
several centuries, a book which had received a conventional name.
And during all this time, for all these books, a rule has been rigidly
observed, viz. that no trace should remain of the name and residence
of their authors and the circumstances under which they wrote, and
not the faintest record left concerning these writers. Can you quote
another instance of a literature of a similar kind, and can you
imagine such an intense literary activity remaining absolutely hidden
under the most various circumstances, alike in the Northern and
Southern kingdoms, in Babylon or in the troubled Maccabaean times ?
Higher Criticism is a system, a theory, and we are now going to
apply to it the test of what we call sound historical criticism, we shall
put to the proof the solidity of some of its arguments, the strength
of its constructions. We shall not oppose one hypothesis to another,
but merely use the same process the Higher Critics have applied to
the Old Testament : we shall dissect the books they present to us and
use their microscope. Naturally we cannot deal with the whole ground
covered by their researches: we shall select only one corner -of their
extensive field, that on which Higher Criticism began its destructive
work, that on which it has brought to bear most completely its most
characteristic methods — I mean the Pentateuch.
Higher Criticism originated with Astruc, a French physician, who
in 1753 was the first to present to the learned world his discovery
that the use of the divine names, Elohim and Jehovah, or, as it is
now pronounced, Jahveh, divided the book of Genesis into two great
memoirs and nine lesser ones. After Astruc, a German scholar,
Eichhorn, came to similar conclusions. He was the first to call his

6 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
method of research Higher Criticism, different from Lower Criticism,
which deals with the text of the Scriptures. Higher Criticism builds
on Lower Criticism as its foundation.
Eichhorn is quite independent of Astruc. He says himself that
Astruc, a celebrated medical man, has done what until then no
professional critic had ventured to do, viz. divide the whole of Genesis
into fragments. These are his words : ' I also have begun the same
inquiry, but in order that my own point of view may in no wise
deviate, I have not taken Astruc as my guide and companion.' '
Dr. Briggs calls Eichhorn ' a true and manly scholar, the father of
the Higher Criticism '. ' He carried his methods into the entire Old
Testament with the hand of a master and laid the foundation of
views that have been maintained ever since with increasing determi
nation. He did not always grasp the truth, ... he could not tran
scend the limits of his age.' 2 Whoever reads Eichhorn will see how
widely the Higher Critics of the present day have diverged from the
man whom they adopt as their father. It is impossible not to call
their view of tradition the opposite of that of Eichhorn. He main
tains with energy, for instance, that the four legislative books of
the Pentateuch are due to Moses, an idea which Dr. Briggs calls
unscholarly and absurd, and we may judge of what he would think of
the hypotheses of the present day by what he says of one of them
which has many supporters, the attribution to Ezra of the author
ship of the Priestly Code, which contains nearly the whole of the
ceremonial laws. Speaking of the legislative books, he says : ' To
consider Ezra as the author of a part or the whole of these books, one
must either ignore their spirit, their contents and their history, or
one must decide only to ridicule the world or human intellect.' 3
These are the words of the father of Higher Criticism.
Higher Criticism consists of two different parts, a negative and
a positive, a destructive element and a constructive one. There is
no doubt that the destructive part has been the dominant one, the
most complete. It pretends to have swept away tradition nearly
entirely, and new scholars are constantly endeavouring to wipe off
the scanty remains of it which have been left.
' Tradition is the bastard of history,' says Dr. Briggs, and should
he resorted to only when we have no history.4 Thus all legitimacy
is denied to tradition ; it is only a makeshift to which we have to
resort when there is nothing better. In this case tradition must be
put aside, for we have at hand history such as it has been constructed
1 Kinl. ins Alte Testament, ii. 247. 2 Briggs, loc. cit., pp. 280-1.
3 Eichhorn, loc. cit., p. 229. * Briggs, loc. cit., p. 479.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 7
by the critics. If this is the principle of the school, it is natural that
its primary work should have consisted in the destruction of tradition,
and here we have not to do with oral tradition, with recollections
transmitted from father to son, sometimes through several genera
tions. We have before us written statements, books which for
centuries have been attributed to certain authors, and some of which,
for instance, three of the books of the Pentateuch, have the signature
of their authors. Now, Higher Criticism maintains that none of the
signatures are genuine, that in most cases these writings belong to
quite a different time, that there are very few books, even among the
prophets, which are throughout the work of the men who are said to
be the authors ; in a word, the whole history of the Old Testament
has to be recast and made afresh, since a few books only can be called
genuine, that is, due to the men whose name they bear.
I have no hesitation in saying that to establish, even to prove that,
though a book bears the name of an author and has been attributed
to him, it is not his work, is an easy achievement. Take an author
who has produced a good deal, who has lived long, and who has
written under various circumstances; the changes which he has seen
or experienced in his own person, the events of which he was a witness,
the diversity of his environment, all this may have influenced his mind,
his opinions, his convictions, his style, so that probably it will not be
difficult to find disagreements or even contradictions in his writings.
Add to these the turn of mind of the critic, his special point of view,
his literary taste, and in many cases some preconceived notions which
determine his interpretation of the text, and he will triumphantly
assert that this passage is spurious and that book not genuine.
Now supposing it has been established by arguments which the
critic considers as sufficient that a book, assumed to be by some
famous author, has been wrongly attributed to him and must be
struck out of the list of his works, the scholar is still only half way
in his research, and by far the easier half. What is far more difficult
is the second part of his task : it is to show why the book has been
attributed to this author, by whom his name was first fastened to it,
under what circumstances and for what reason. How is it that his
name has always been connected with that work ? What will you
put in the place of the tradition which you have brushed away ? You
will probably have some suggestions to make, you have your own ideas
about it, but that is not enough. If you wish, as you pretend to do,
to replace tradition by history, you must bring something else than
your explanations. Evidence is required, not mere surmise or con
jecture derived from preconceived notions.

8 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Here, over and over again, the critic is found wanting. Here he
presents us with what I should call his romance. Tradition can be
upset only by solid proofs, because tradition is not, as Dr. Briggs
says, the bastard of history, it very often is history, the only history
we have, which may have been modified and disfigured in the course
of time, but which has to be accepted until it is proved to be
erroneous. Higher Critics have devoted most of their efforts to the destructive
work, the wiping away of tradition in regard to the authorship of most
of the books of the Old Testament, and in this respect only have they
succeeded in obtaining a sort of general agreement. For instance, in
the Pentateuch, or, as it is now called, the Hexateuch since Joshua is
added to it, Moses is completely banished as a writer. He is not the
author of any of the books that bear his signature, and still less of
those that are anonymous, like Genesis.
The destructive side of Higher Criticism is so prominent that it
is doubtful whether it would admit any other inference. Higher
Criticism has no right to prejudice the result of a research made con
scientiously and based on sound principles. Nevertheless, supposing
that, studying the history of Joseph in the light of the Egyptian
monuments, a scholar should come to the conclusion that this
history must have been written in Egypt, by a man who, like Moses,
knew Egypt thoroughly well, who was acquainted with the Hebrews
staying there as well as with the court, supposing, I say, this con
clusion is well established, it will not be called Higher Criticism
because, instead of being destructive of tradition, it has proved its
historical character.
Let us now look at the constructive side of Higher Criticism. Let
us review some of the books and some of the authors it has called
into existence, adopting exactly its principles and methods, and in
this research sitting at the feet of its masters.
Higher Criticism began with Genesis, with the idea that the use of
the two different names of God, Jehovah or rather Jahveh, which
the Greeks translate Kvpios and we 'the Lord', and Elohim, ©eo?
'God', implied different authors, and that the book had to be divided
on that principle. Following Astruc, Eichhorn recognized in Genesis
two documents, the Elohist, using the name of Elohim for God, and
the Jahvist whom he called Jehovist, always using the name of Jahveh.
But he admitted three and possibly five inserted texts which could not
be included in either of these two documents. The most important are
chaps, ii and iii, the creation of man, which uses Jahveh Elohim, the
Lord God ; chap, xiv, the expedition of the kings of Mesopotamia

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 9
which to him is extraneous matter unconnected with the book ;
chap, xxxvi, the genealogy of Esau's family. The two insertions
which he considers as doubtful are chaps, xxxiii and xxxiv, the
episode of Dinah, and xlix, the blessing of Jacob to his sons. These
five pieces excepted, the whole book consists of the two documents,
which can be easily separated and distinguished.
Eichhorn's disciples have gone a great deal further. If we take
the generally accepted system of Socin and Kautzsch, out of which
has been made the Genesis in colour or ' rainbow Genesis ', we see
that the book consists of 264 fragments pieced together. These
fragments are selected here and there from the work of six different
authors, with the addition of glosses of later time. A first document,
called J1, is said to be an earlier source of the Jahvist ; very few
fragments are attributed to it : the genealogy of Cain's family, the
history of the tower of Babel, and Jacob's blessing to his sons. The
Jahvist or Judaic document, called J, is supposed to come from the
Southern kingdom ; its date is generally considered to be the ninth
century. A hundred years later arose the Elohistic or Ephraimitic
document called E, coming from the Northern kingdom, and written
in the eighth century. A fourth document is called J E, certain
scholars call it Prophetical Narrative, in which the Judaic and
Ephraimitic documents are so intimately fused that they cannot be
separated by literary analysis. A very important document is the
Priestly Code P, which came from Babylon in the fifth century.
Wellhausen gives as its date the year 444. It is not very prominent
in Genesis, but much more in the following books. The whole of
Leviticus is derived from it. Chap, xiv of Genesis is a document
apart, which is considered as unconnected with the following. Lastly
comes the redactor, who pieced all these fragments together and
made a book out of them, adding here and there a good deal out of
his own wisdom. Altogether, seven different authors, four of whom,
the Judaic, the Ephraimitic, the Prophetic, and the Priestly Code,
are the most important. The redactor must have completed his
" work in the fourth century, after the Priestly Code and before the
translation of the Septuagint, which was begun in 280, and very
probably with the Law.
These seven documents are not all which are admitted by the critics
to have been the constitutive elements of the Hexateuch. If we turn
to the last book, Joshua, such as it is shown to us in the polychrome
Bible, we see that their number has increased. There are two Jahvists
and also two Elohists, for each of them an earlier and a later one,
beginning a century after. In the same way there are two Priestly

10 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Codes, the first about 500 b.c, the second from 440-409, and two
J E. Besides, there is a class of documents which do not appear
in Genesis : the Deuteronomistic writers, writing in the spirit of
Deuteronomy, a book which came to light in 621 under the reign
of Josiah.
I revert to Genesis, and I shall leave aside literary arguments, such
as the question whether the history of Joseph could have been written
as it is described by the Higher Critics. I only wish to refer to one
example, in which you will agree with me that ordinary common sense
and elementary literary taste must revolt against what is presented
to us as the last word of critical science : I mean the beautiful
chapter xlviii, where the visit of Joseph to his father is described,
when the dying patriarch, whose eyes are dim for age, blesses his
two grandsons.
In reading this chapter, you have probably admired the simplicity
and beauty of the scene : the old man, speaking with the infirmity
of age, sometimes repeating himself, or reverting to a recollection of
the past, to the burial of his beloved wife Rachel, whose son is before
him. Certainly the author of this chapter could only be an eminent
literary artist, capable of impressing his readers by his simplicity and
the complete absence of any artificial ornament.
But mark this : if you believe in the existence of this one author
(I shall use Dr. Briggs's words), you are a scholastic and a tradi
tionalist, and if you call this author Moses, you are decidedly un
scholarly. Higher Criticism alone will tell you the truth and teach
you how this chapter was written. It consists of twelve fragments
of four different authors ranging from the ninth to the fourth century.
I cannot go over the whole chapter ; I shall only take a few verses,
beginning with the eighth : 'And Israel beheld Joseph's sons.' These
five words are of the Jahvist, written in the ninth century. Why ?
Because the episode in which Jacob wrestles during a whole night
with a man and receives the name of Israel is said to be Jahvist by
the present scholars, contrary to Eichhorn's opinion. After these five
words, we go down a century later with the end of the sentence ' and
said : Who are these ? And Joseph said unto his father : They are
my sons, whom Elohim hath given me here'. These words are of
the Elohist writer, since it is Elohim who gave Joseph his sons.
After that we go back to the Jahvist: 'And he said: Bring them,
I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them ; Now the eyes of Israel
were dim for age, so that he could not see.' Jahvist, because of the
name of Israel. The Elohist again : ' And he brought them near unto
him, and he kissed them and embraced them. And Israel said unto

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 11
Joseph : I had not thought to see thy face, and lo, Elohim hath let
me see thy seed also.' There is an error here in the Elohist, he calls
Jacob 'Israel'; one cannot admit that, it is against the theory.
Therefore Israel in this sentence is a correction of the redactor in the
fourth century.
I wish I could have gone through the whole chapter, or other
chapters like xv. I believe these few verses, however, will be sufficient
to show what kind of composition has been invented by Higher
Criticism, and I dare say you will agree with me that (to employ
again Dr. Briggs's words) in this case absurdity is not on the side of
tradition. The learned divine teaches us that the Higher Criticism has the
following line of evidence upon which it relies for its conclusions.1
'The writing must be in accordance with its supposed historical
position as to time, place, and circumstances.' Let us now test,
according to this principle, some of the books of the six authors
who have been fused together in Genesis. But before this, there is
a preliminary question. Every book must have an author. Is there
any evidence of the existence of these authors, I mean any evidence
such as would satisfy a lawyer ? Can you tell us anything about
them, their names, the places where they were born, the tribes to
which they belonged, the events in which they took part, how many
books they wrote, and for whom ; if they had a definite purpose in
writing, or a fixed plan ? To all these questions you have absolutely
no answer. You have not the slightest historical evidence about
these writers.
You will protest that you have sufficient evidence in the books
themselves, in certain words, repetitions, statements, which do not
agree, lack of congruence, in all those literary discrepancies which
you submit to a kind of microscopic analysis, from which you draw
inferences which you call history. But these inferences are only
interpretations of these various difficulties, certainly not established
historical facts. The proof of it is that critics disagree as to these
authors, as to their number and dates. We have seen that where
Kautzsch and Socin suppose one Elohist and one Jahvist, Dr. Haupt
supposes two succeeding each other in different centuries. Others,
I believe, bring forward even more. If once it be admitted that such
literary circumstances justify the assumption of the existence of a
separate author, there is no reason why their number should not vary
according to every critic's interpretation of the text.
1 The Higher Criticism of the Hcxateuch, p. 2.

12 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
According to Professor Skinner, the two main sources of the Penta
teuch are the Priestly Code and the Jahvistic document. The Priestly
Code, according to the learned Cambridge professor, is ' more obviously
than J and E the production of a school, in this case a school of
juristic writers whose main task was to systematize the mass of ritual
regulations which had accumulated in the hands of the Jerusalem
priesthood, and to develop a theory of religion which grew out of
them. . . . That religion expresses the spirit of the Priestly School : the
exclusive emphasis on the formal or institutional aspect of religion,
which is the natural proclivity of a sacerdotal caste, appears in a very
pronounced fashion, . . . every practice to which a religious value is
attached is referred to a direct command of God. In the deeper
problems of religion, on the other hand, such as the origin of evil,
the writer evinces no interest ; and of personal piety — the disposition
of the heart towards God — his narrative hardly furnishes us an illustra
tion. . . . The style reflects the qualities of the legal mind, in its
stereotyped terminology, its aim at precise and exhaustive statement,
its monotonous repetitions. ... It is necessary to read the whole
work consecutively in order to realize the full effect of the laboured
diffuseness, the dry lucidity, and prosaic monotony of this charac
teristic product of the Priestly School of writers. On the other
hand, the style is markedly deficient in the higher elements of
literature.'1 The date of the school is post-exilian, it is between
444 and 432.
Does not that sound like the description of a well-known school of
writers whose names are familiar, and whose authorship of certain
works is well established ? But there is nothing of the kind, there is
absolutely no evidence of the existence of that school, it is a complete
creation of the critics. The only basis on which it rests is the grouping
of certain parts of the Pentateuch, and the interpretation given to these
fragments, viz. the institution of theocracy among the post-exilian
Jews. But there is more. To the Code belongs the Cosmogony
(Gen. i-ii), the list of patriarchs from Adam to Noah, and other
genealogies. In this case there is one of the breaks now frequently
made in Astruc's and Eichhorn's theory of the Elohist and the
Jahvist. The first chapter of Genesis is completely Elohistic, never
theless it is now attributed to the Priestly Code.
We have here an example of a kind of criticism found in a con
siderable number of German historical and philological works and to
which I do not know what name to give. I might perhaps call it
1 Skinner, Genesis, pp. lvii-lxiii.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM' 13
the 'interpretation system'. The principle of the system is this : the
texts are not to be taken in their obvious and clear sense ; they have
a hidden meaning or hidden purpose which is revealed by the critic,
and which is the interpretation he gives of the text in accordance
with his own ideas. In order to support this interpretation, it is
necessary to imagine a fact or suppose the existence of a man or
school, of which there is no historical evidence and which cannot be
established by real arguments. Nevertheless, this new creation is
so completely identified with history, its historical value is so well
recognized, that the critic takes it as a solid basis, so that the contrary
opinion, derived from the plain meaning of the text, becomes for him
a hypothesis. Take a book of laws like Leviticus. It ends with these words :
' These are the commandments which the Lord commanded Moses
for the children of Israel in Mount Sinai.' This is clear enough.
These commandments have been dictated to Moses, and constantly
we find this expression recurring : ' And the Lord spake unto Moses,
saying : Command the children of Israel,' or something similar.
Whatever explanation you give of these words, ' The Lord spake unto
Moses * or ' The Lord commanded him ', there is no doubt that Moses
is regarded as the man who is spoken to or who receives the command.
The plain sense of these words is that those laws date from the time
of Moses, and were enacted by him.
But this, although it is an often repeated, written statement, would
be tradition, and not the new form of history, which is embodied in
the system of the critics. Bringing together this book with other
fragments of the Pentateuch, and cutting out of its five books all the
fragments which have a juristic character, where the ritual is said to
be a command of God, and then adding to it a few historical frag
ments in which ' the writer's imagination is of the mechanical type '
in spite of occasional 'impressive dignity', this is how a group of
a well-marked character is formed, which can have for its author only
a sacerdotal school, the aim of which is to enforce on the post-exilian
Jews the institution of theocracy. The name of Moses, so often
repeated, is only inserted to give authority to these laws. There is
no historical evidence whatever as to the existence of such a school :
it and the description of it are entirely derived from the construction
put on this group of texts. And yet we are told that its existence
and action cannot be doubted, and that it is so certain, that the idea
that Moses could be the author of the laws is now a mere supposition—
the Mosaic hypothesis, as it is called.
We have seen that one of the main principles of Higher Criticism

14 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
is that a writing must be in accordance with its supposed historical
position as to time and circumstances. Let us see how the theory
about the Priestly Code agrees with this principle.
The laws of the Priestly Code are chiefly ceremonial, ritualistic ;
one may suppose, therefore, that they are destined to regulate the
worship of the people to whom they are addressed. These were the
Jews who had returned from the Exile, and who had rebuilt or were
rebuilding their temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. But what do
we find in the Priestly Code ? No mention of the temple, or even of
Jerusalem ; it is not even supposed that a temple would ever be
built. The whole Code centres on the Ark of the Covenant and the
Tabernacle, which had both disappeared, for there was no Ark in the
rebuilt Temple. So that the rules which are to bind the Jews apply
to a form of worship totally different.
The sacerdotal school is said to wish to enforce upon the Jews
certain religious institutions and certain rites. How can that result
be obtained by a detailed description of the Ark of the Covenant and
of the Tabernacle, both movable things which could be carried away
when the people changed their camps ? And the description is not
imaginary, produced by the author's fancy, it is strictly in conformity
with what might be expected from Egyptian industry, and with the
materials found in the desert. What interest would this description,
even made with an accurate archaeological knowledge, have for the
post-exilian Jews ?
One can- understand that if these laws existed from a great
antiquity, when Solomon built his temple he did not enact new ones,
that he endeavoured to carry out the worship as well as he could
according to the ordinances given by Moses. But if these laws did
not exist, if they had to be written out afresh, can we imagine a sacer
dotal legislator reviving a state of things absolutely different from the
present and which had disappeared long ago ? It seems that the Jews,
hearing or reading this code, far from submitting to it, would much
rather have turned away, saying that it might have been good for their
forefathers, but certainly not for them. Therefore we cannot admit
that the Priestly Code fulfils one of the principal requisites of Higher
Criticism : its historical position is certainly not in accordance with
the circumstances of the time when it is supposed to have made its
appearance. We might add other things which seem to be grave inconsistencies.
What has the creation of the world to do with ceremonial laws ? with
genealogies, or the historical fragments which are attributed to
the Priestly Code in Genesis ? The book must have had a plan. If

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 15
it was historical, it is certainly curious that it should stop with Joshua,
and that it should take no interest in the subsequent history of the
nation for seven or eight centuries. If on the contrary it is strictly
legal, written to enforce religious laws on the post-exilian Jews in
the new temple, how is it that it takes no account of Deuteronomy ?
There was, we are told, a religious reform carried out in the temple
in the year 621 in the name of Moses; there, for the first time, the
critics add, the unity of the sanctuary was prescribed, and the post-
exilian reformers, instead of drawing from this temple reform the
religious prescriptions which they wished to enforce, went back to
the Ark and the Tabernacle. Surely, this again is far from being in
harmony with the circumstances of the time.
Time does not allow me to go through each of the component books
of Genesis and to point out how far they fulfil the conditions which
Higher Criticism has laid down as necessary to real history. I can
only take one or two examples, studying each of them from one
point of view.
J and E, the Judaic author of the ninth century and the
Ephraimistic author of the eighth, are the two main sources for the
history of Joseph, that is from the time of his arrival into Egypt until
that of his father, for we have seen that the last chapters are cut up
into small fragments. These two authors in Genesis must have written
concerning Joseph two parallel and very similar narratives. They are
both also the authors of other parts of the Pentateuch. Like all the
creations of Higher Criticism, they are absolutely unknown and name
less, which is rather extraordinary considering what they have done.
They have both fallen into complete oblivion. However, some of
their contemporaries are known, and their works have been preserved
under their name. The eighth century, time of E the Elohist, is that
of several prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah himself; we know their
works, their names, and in the case of some of them, their parentage
and various circumstances of their lives. How is it that the man who
wrote, not only the life of one of the heroes of the Hebrews, Joseph,
but, according to the Higher Critics, was the first to put in writing
the Ten Commandments, the foundation of the moral law,— how is it
that as a person he has entirely disappeared ? For we cannot admit
that he wrote only the fragments which are pieced together with those
of J and others. From the time when he wrote to that of the redactor,
who cut fragments out of his work in order to compose Genesis, for
about four hundred years, his work must have existed as an independent
production, and I can hardly think it was anonymous. What became
of it after the redactor had made use of it ? The same questions may

16 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
be asked about the Jahvist, who also had prophets, like Joel, as his
contemporaries. Concerning those two authors who wrote so much about events
which occurred in Egypt many centuries before, I should like to
repeat a question I have asked elsewhere. Where did they get the
information they give us of that country ? Had two men, living one
in Judah in the ninth century and one in the Northern kingdom in
the eighth, the necessary material for writing the history of Joseph
which they have left us ?
I have no hesitation in saying in the most emphatic way that it is
not possible. Joseph rose to the high position he occupied during
the reign of the last Hyksos kings, the dynasty of Shepherds who
were an abomination unto the Egyptians. Very soon after Joseph's
death the foreigners were driven out, and the native dynasty was
restored. Egyptian inscriptions teach us what was done to wipe
away the traces of the aliens. And certainly no remembrance was kept
of one of their ministers who could not be popular, owing to the way he
treated the landowners during the famine. Besides, Joseph was not
a king, he was a subject. All the information which we have about
great men in Egypt comes from their tombs, from the painted or
sculptured inscriptions which decorate the walls of them, or from
stelae deposited in them, or from statues which were often dedicated
in temples. On these stelae and statues, in honour of the person for
whom they are engraved or whom they represent, there are sometimes
a few details about the events in which he took part, but in the greater
part of the inscription he is made to indulge in a boastful eulogy of
his own person, of his qualities and of his great deeds, and to repeat
over and over again the favours which he received from the king. We
can be quite sure that such a statue of Joseph was never dedicated to
him in an Egyptian temple, and moreover that he had no sculptured
tomb enclosing a funerary stele where the deeds of his life were
inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs. We know that he was mummified
in Egyptian fashion, but he took an oath of the children of Israel that
they should carry up his bones from Egypt ; that does not sound like
his wishing to have a rock-cut tomb.
The only recollection of Joseph would be that which survived in
the memory of his countrymen in Egypt. He must have been then-
great man, greater even than Abraham, for he was the cause of their
coming to Egypt; he had disposed the king favourably towards
their ancestor, the part of the country where they could graze their
cattle had been allotted to them, they had prospered and increased in
number, even under the native dynasty which had come to the throne.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 17
Joseph must certainly have been their hero, and the tradition about
his life could not fail to have been very vivid among his countrymen
in Egypt.
But what could an inhabitant of Juda in the ninth century, or one
of the Northern Kingdom in the eighth, know of Joseph, except the
main outlines of his life which may have been preserved by a tradition
through six and more centuries ? He might have known that Joseph,
a Hebrew of their nation, who had been sold as a slave, had risen to
a marvellous position, that he had become the second man in the
kingdom, that he had caused all his family to stay in Egypt, from
which country they had been brought out after a dreadful persecu
tion. But the thoroughly Egyptian details which are characteristic
of the narrative, the Egyptian names and words, the acquaintance with
the customs and certain features of the country, such as Joseph dying
at the age of 110 years, which according to Egyptian ideas was the limit
of old age, all this, which oral tradition does not and cannot preserve,
he could not have, even if he had gone to Egypt, where he would have
found no record of Joseph.
Jlere again, testing the writing of the Jahvist and the Elohist by
the principles of Higher Criticism, we find that its historical posi
tion is by no means in accordance with circumstances, since the
author could not possibly have the information such as is contained
in the books.
I shall only add here that, judging the Egyptian part of Genesis
in the light of the Egyptian monuments, it seems clear that this
narrative can only have been written in Egypt, by a man like Moses,
who was a Hebrew, and who had access to the court of Pharaoh.
Moses has written not only the Egyptian part, but the whole of
Genesis, as it is maintained by tradition. There are several Mosaic
touches which reveal the man who wrote in Egypt and who had
Egypt before his eyes. I have no time to dwell, as I have done else
where,1 on these striking pieces of evidence of the Mosaic authorship
of Genesis. You will agree with me that this kind of argument is
not to be repudiated, nevertheless this is the way it is judged by an
eminent critic of Germany, Professor Koenig : ' It is unmethodical
to scatter by the way such isolated passages throughout an investiga
tion, in order to arouse suspicion against a great conviction, the new
theory as to the Pentateuch.' 2
Let us now apply the principles of Higher Criticism to one more
of the supposed constituents of Genesis, one of the most important,
1 Archaeology of the Old Testament, pp. 65 and if.
2 The Expositor, 1914, September, p. 211.
C

18 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
the redactor who put in their place the 264 fragments he had chosen
and gave a frame to the whole composition. Genesis has a very
definite plan, which is admirably worked out from beginning to end.
Could the redactor, with these disjointed fragments, taken from
books having each its own purpose and tendency, write a work, the
plan of which is so clearly marked, and was this plan in harmony
with the circumstances in which the author is supposed to have pro
duced his work ?
Professor Skinner states that it is an error to confuse unity of plan
with unity of authorship;1 'The view generally held,' says the
learned professor, ' reconciles the assumption of a diversity of sources
with the indisputable fact of a clearly designed arrangement of the
material, . . . the whole converges steadily on the line of descent from
which Israel sprang, and which determined its providential position
among the nations of the world.' We agree with this last sentence.
In our opinion, Genesis is not properly a historical book, it is the
collection of the titles of nobility of Israel ; from beginning to end it
shows that Israel is a people set apart, with whom God has made
a covenant, who has received the promise that they shall inherit the
land of Canaan and would be like the stars of heaven. The special
mission of Israel is to be worshippers of Jahveh, to whom they must
remain faithful.
This is certainly a glorious past and a glorious future, according to
Higher Criticism, but who is it who says so ? Who is the man who
speaks in God's name and who vouches for the fulfilment of God's
promise ? From whom has he received the authority to hold such
language? The redactor is a man absolutely unknown, living in the
time when, after the return from captivity, the Israelites could hardly
be said to be independent, and were constantly struggling against
foreign invaders or oppressors. He may have lived in Palestine or
taken refuge, with a great number of his countrymen, on the banks
of the Nile. A book like Genesis is destined to have some influence
on its readers or hearers. But when these men compared the
magnificent promises made to Abraham and the present condition of
their country, those promises must have appeared to them a cruel
irony and a record of baffled hopes. They were much more likely to
turn a deaf ear to his words, than to feel encouraged to hope against
the most gloomy appearances.
Besides, this redactor was not a prophet, he was not speaking as
a man inspired by the spirit of God, he was a mere recorder, and if
he had been asked how he knew anything about Abraham, he could
1 Genesis, Introd., p. xxxii.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 19
only have answered that he had consulted an author who wrote part of
his biography, about the same time when Joel the prophet lived, and
another who lived a hundred years later. This is certainly not the
necessary authority to write a book like Genesis, which is the first
charter of the covenant of God with His people. Certainly as regards
time and author, both were as little appropriate as possible to the
composition of a book like Genesis. So that once more we see the
requirements of Higher Criticism are not found in one of its creations.
We shall take only one more example, from the Pentateuch also,
but not from Genesis : Deuteronomy. As for this book, the critics are
nearly unanimous in stating that it is the copy of the law which is
said to have been found in the time of Josiah by Hilkiah the high
priest, when great repairs were being made in the temple. Hilkiah
gave it to Shaphan, the scribe of the king, who read it to the sove
reign, and the king was so strongly impressed by what he heard that
he immediately caused a great reform to be made on the lines of
Deuteronomy. The critics differ as to the date when this book was written. Those
who are respectful of Holy Writ, like Dr. Driver or Westphal, assign
it to the end of the reign of Manasseh, when some priest, grieved
at the sight of the reigning idolatry, wrote the book, the words of
which he put into the mouth of Moses, and hid it in the temple with
the hope that some day it might be found and that some good might
come out of it. Those who are hostile to Scripture do not hesitate to
call it a forgery, which they attribute to the priests who intended, with
the aid of the king, to produce a strong reaction in their favour.
The respectful critics protest strongly against the word 'forgery',
and this is natural, because this word alone destroys their contention
that Higher Criticism is the best and only way of vindicating the
authority of Scripture. Dr. Briggs says that no reputable critic
ventures to write of any of our canonical books as forgeries.1 I am
afraid, as to the word, that I am obliged to say the hostile critics are
right. The book begins thus : ' These be the words which Moses
spake unto all Israel beyond Jordan, . . . beyond Jordan, in the land
of Moab, began Moses to declare the law, saying : The Lord our
God spake unto us.' Moses addresses the Israelites in the first
person : ' I command you, . . . the Lord said unto me, ... I sent
messengers.' Occasionally, as in chap, xxvii and the following, he
is introduced in the third person, but then his words are reported as
directly addressed to the people : 2 ' I am an hundred and twenty years
old this day, . . . and the Lord hath said unto me : Thou shalt not go
1 Briggs, loc. cit., p. 319. a Deut xxxi. 2.
c2

20 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
over this Jordan, the Lord thy God he will go over before thee.'
And not only that, but it is said that when Moses had made an end
of writing the words of the law in a book until they were finished,1
he commanded the Levites : ' Take this book of the law and put it
by the side of the ark of the covenant.' These words may have been
written by the same man who wrote the chapter speaking of the death
of Moses, but anyhow they say that not only did Moses speak these
words, this law as it is said in the first chapter, but that he also put
this law in writing himself. Now, I ask, what clearer attestation
could one imagine of Moses being its author ?
I am therefore quite at loss to understand these words of Dr. Driver : 2
' Though it may appear paradoxical to say so, Deuteronomy does not
claim to be written by Moses. The writer who introduces Moses in
the third person is the real author of the book, it is pseudonymous
and falls into the same category as the speeches in the historical books,
which are characteristic of ancient historians generally.'
Do not let us play with words. The dictionary defines a forgery
in this way : 3 the making of a thing in imitation of another thing,
with a view to deceiving, as the forgery of a bond. The French
dictionary, as explanation of the word ' faux ' quotes this sentence of
Voltaire : ' Ceux qui font courir leurs ouvrages sous le nom d'autrui
sont reellement coupables du crime de faux.' In the English defini
tion, of which I quote only half, the important words, indicating
what is characteristic of the forgery, that which distinguishes it from
another imitation, are these: ' with a view to deceive * .
What the author of Deuteronomy does, is to use the name of Moses
in order to give to his laws an authority which they would not other
wise have. The people would not submit to these laws unless they
thought that Moses had proclaimed them, unless they had been
deceived as to the name of the real author. I do not see how that
cannot be called a forgery : writing a book under a false name.
I am ready to credit the author of Deuteronomy with the most
laudable intentions. He certainly did it to ensure the success of
these laws, which were to put an end to the idolatry which prevailed
under Manasseh. He wished to restore the worship of the Lord in
the nation, and in the temple which had been dishonoured by the
graven image of Asherah. But his efforts were none the less based
on deceit, and it cannot be admitted that the end justifies the means.
Dr. Driver takes great pains to clear the author from any dis-
1 Deut. xxxi. 24.
2 Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, 3rd ed,, p. 83.
3 Webster's Dictionary, sub voce ' forgery '.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 21
honest motive. ' He was doing nothing inconsistent with the
literary usages of his age and people.' Dr. Driver goes so far as to
call Deuteronomy ' a prophetic reformulation, and adaptation to new
needs of an older legislation '.* But if this legislation is reproduced
correctly, if the author gives us a faithful account of laws which
existed before, if you trust him in this respect, why do you not believe
him when he affirms that Moses is the author of these laws ? Why
do you reject this statement when you adopt all the others ? He does
not say so only once, it is not a mention which may have slipped
unintentionally into the text. Over and over again, more than
a dozen times, he says that the words are those of Moses, so that
there is a deliberate intention to impress his readers with the fact that
these laws were given by Moses. It seems to me that you are con
fronted with this dilemma : either Deuteronomy is Mosaic, or it is
a forgery. I see no other alternative.
If the name of Moses has been ascribed to Deuteronomy merely to
give the book an authority, it is difficult to see how this result could
be attained. The Moses who is an authority, who appeals to the
people, is the lawgiver who is known by the traditional view of the
Pentateuch, he is the man whom the Lord knew face to face, who
had brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and who, near Mount Sinai
and later on in the plain of Moab, near the Jordan, had given them
a code of laws in which some changes might occur owing to change
of circumstances, but which were nevertheless the commandments
which Jahveh had dictated to him.
This is not the Moses of the critics. Who was Moses for the
people at Jerusalem at the time of Josiah ? How could they know
him ? He had never written a word. His legislative work did not
exist, since the oldest of the laws under his name are of the time of
Josiah, and the bulk of the others is post-exilian, of the year 444 ?
Even the highest moral law, the Decalogue, has been put down by an
Ephraimitic writer of the eighth century, perhaps not a century before
Deuteronomy ; was it known at Jerusalem ? As for his biography,
what his life had been, there was no record of it before a narrative
of the Judaic writer of the ninth century. If we take the critical
view, what is left of the Moses, the commanding lawgiver whose
voice re-echoed the words the Lord spake to him face to face, and
whose name was enough to give a law an authority which nobody
would have dared to dispute ? Does not the Moses of tradition alone
appeal even to us as the man of God, of whom we can say that
' there hath not risen a prophet since in Israel like unto him ' ?
1 Driver, loc. cit., p. 85.

22 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Have we not here a confirmation of what I said at the beginning ?
The work of Higher Criticism is pre-eminently destructive. The
Moses of tradition exists no more. Compare with him the man
who has been put in his place, and whose appearance is very different
according to the person who portrays him. The same may be said
of the Pentateuch, it has fallen to pieces, when we contrast this
majestic temple with the numerous constructions which have been
raised with its fragments. Higher Critics agree only on the destruc
tion of tradition ; as for the reconstructive work, the ideas and
systems are most divergent, the most extreme and extraordinary
views are constantly being put forward, and, like the name of Moses
for the laws of Deuteronomy, the name of Higher Criticism alone
gives these new systems an authority which they would not otherwise
have. At the outset, in our study of the Old Testament literature, we
were faced by Higher Criticism, and we endeavoured to measure it
by its own measure, and test its strength by its own methods and
principles. Before closing, I should like to revert again to the first
chapters of Genesis, and to put side by side the theory of Higher
Criticism and pure tradition.
The origin of Higher Criticism, you remember, is the remark of
Astruc and after him of Eichhorn x that for the name of God some of
the chapters used Elohim and some Jahveh, implying the hand of two
different authors. Eichhorn worked out his principle with consistency
and traced the two documents through the whole of Genesis and the two
first chapters of Exodus ; from there to the end the Mosaic books were
the work of a single man. In Genesis, he noticed a few exceptions
which he called insertions or additions of other documents, the most
important of which is chap. ii. 4 to iii. 24, the creation of Adam and
Eve and the fall, where God is called Jahveh Elohim. As to chap, i,
for Eichhorn there can be no doubt that it is the work of the Elohist
since everywhere God is called Elohim.
His followers, though pretending to attach great value to the diffe
rences in the names of God for the distinction of various authors
have been unfaithful to the conclusions of the Father of Higher
Criticism. Chap, i, the creation of heaven and earth, is not Elohistic
it is part of the Priestly Code, the post-exilian book of the year 444.
Chap. ii. 4 to iii. 24 is undoubtedly the work of the Jahvist, but here
there is a flaw either in the document or in the theory : where we
should find Jahveh alone, we find Jahveh Elohim. That does not
mean that there is a fault in the theory, Elohim has been inserted
1 Eichhorn, loc. cit., ii, pp. 300, 348.

THE TEXT ACCORDING TO HIGHER CRITICISM 23
there by the redactor, the man who compiled Genesis out of the frag
ments he had collected.
This is the kind of evidence which is often offered us by Higher
Criticism. I must say that I do not know of any more contemptible
argument in historical research : a document does not agree with
a system or theory, therefore the document must be corrupt or inter
polated ! And in this case the interpolation does not occur once, but
about twenty times. Curiously, when God is mentioned under one
name alone, as in the words of the serpent, he is called Elohim, and
Jahveh alone is not once found in this Jahvistic document. There
fore, to preserve to it its Jahvistic character, it was necessary to
suppose the corrective insertion of the redactor. This is the inter
pretation of Higher Criticism for the first three chapters of Genesis :
the creation of heaven and earth is a post-exilian composition of the
year 444 ; the creation of Adam and Eve and the history of the fall
were written by a Judaic author in the ninth century, with corrections
ma*de by the redactor.
Let us now turn to tradition, without any conjectural addition or
correction of any kind. These three chapters are part of Genesis, the
first book of the Law. They are written by Moses, like the whole of
the Pentateuch. In the beginning, Elohim created the heaven and the
earth. Elohim, God, is not only the creator, he is the omnipotent
father. ' Who are these ? ' says old Jacob to his son Joseph, who has
come to see him, and Joseph says unto his father : ' They are my
sons, whom Elohim hath given me here.' Of Sarah it is said ' that
she bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the same time which
Elohim had spoken to him '-1
But Moses knows very well that in His dealings with men, when
He speaks or commands, God is called Jahveh, for instance, 'Jahveh
visited Sarah as He had said'2 and therefore, when Moses describes
the creation of man, the action of God towards Adam and Eve and
the language of God to them, he will call God Jahveh, because he,
Moses, has been expressly taught by God himself the meaning of that
name, but this Jahveh is not different from Elohim the creator of the
heaven and the earth, there is only one God, and therefore, in order
to state it decisively, when he describes the creation of man, he calls
God by His two names, Jahveh Elohim. This double name is neces
sary, without it the narrative of the creation of man would not be
complete. You see that these two words contain a magnificent truth which is
the corner-stone, not only of Genesis, but of the Old Testament, and
1 Genesis xxi. 2. '' Genesis xxi. 1 .

24 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
which the system of Higher Criticism either ignores or destroys.
From the moment when man stood up in this vast creation which
had been prepared for him, and over which he was to have dominion,
when he first awoke in this garden where had grown every tree that
is pleasant to the eye and good for food, from the first instant of his
existence, he had one God, Jahveh Elohim, and Jahveh Elohim the
Lord God alone.
And in the man whose hand wrote at that place these two momentous
words, do you not recognize the lawgiver who will later come down
from Sinai, holding in his hands a stone table on which were inscribed
these words of God : ' I am Jahveh thy God, thou shalt have none
other gods before me ' ; or who, later on, when he was going to part
from the people he had been guiding in the desert during forty years,
cries in their ears : ' Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.' 1
I hope I have presented here tradition in all its simplicity, reading
merely what is written, without any addition or conjecture of
my own.
Here I must bring to a close what we have to say about the results
achieved by Higher Criticism. Our next lecture will turn on what
the Higher Critics have not done, on a question which they never
asked, viz. What is the original form of the text of the Old Testa
ment? Is the text of the Hebrew Bible, such as we have it, an
original, or has it passed through one or more transformations ? At
present the critics admit that the script, the square Hebrew, is of
recent date, about the Christian era, transcribed from an older
alphabet, but as for the language, they do not go beyond the
Massoretic version. Is the language of the Hebrew Bible that in
which the anonymous writers like the Elohist or the Jahvist or the
Priestly Code, or among the known authors Amos and Isaiah, wrote
their books ? This very grave question we propose to inquire into,
and for this we cannot do better than use the methods and borrow the
principles of Higher Criticism. We shall again consult Dr. Briggs : 2
' The older interpreters, who did not understand the position of the
Hebrew language in the development of the Shemitic family, .' . . lived
almost in another world. The modern Hebrew scholars are working
in far more extended relations, and upon vastly deeper principles.'
This we intend to do : we shall study the position of Hebrew among
the other Semitic languages : we shall extend our field of research
beyond the Massoretic version of the Bible, and in this our hopes and
our expectations are those of the eminent American divine : ' We
should not be surprised at new and almost revolutionary results.'
1 Deut. vi. 4. 2 Briggs, loc. cit., p. 475.

LECTURE II
BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM AND THE CANAANITE
SCRIPT
The first author whom we find in the Old Testament is Moses.
Tradition attributes to him the whole of Pentateuch, and this tradi
tion is not merely a recollection transmitted orally from father to son
through many generations, it is a written statement found in several
of his books ; we may call it his signature. This signature does not
exist in Genesis, the only book among the five which deals with
events earlier than Moses, and of which he had not been a witness.
Genesis alone may be considered as anonymous, though it is hardly
possible to suppose that any one but Moses could have written it.
In Exodus, Moses speaks of himself in the third person, but he
generally repeats what God had said to him, and the laws he had pro
claimed to the Israelites at God's command. In this respect it differs
very little from Numbers. Leviticus ends with these words : ' These
are the commandments which the Lord commanded Moses for the
children of Israel in Mount Sinai.' This is the statement which the
critics repudiate in the most emphatic way, since they attribute the
whole of the book to the Priestly Code, a document of the year 444.
The book of Numbers also ends with these words : ' These are the
commandments and the judgments which the Lord commanded by
the hand of Moses unto the children of Israel in the plain of Moab,
by the Jordan at Jericho.' Thus, though these two Books of Law
are divided into two parts, the law given on Sinai and that of Moab,
the Mosaic origin of both parts is asserted in the same way.
As for Deuteronomy, at the beginning it is said : ' These are the
words which Moses spake unto all Israel beyond Jordan in the wilder
ness.' Moses often speaks in the first person, the whole book has
a rhetorical turn, it is the last speech of Moses in which he repeats
a part of the law ; as Eichhorn says, it is ' a short exposition of the
whole Mosaic constitution, concerning all the parts of the state,
except what belonged to the priests. It is the last review of the laws
by the lawgiver himself, ... it is the last voice of the father and the

26 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
leader of the people, . . . every page bears evidence of a book written
on the verge of the grave V At the end of the Law, it is said that
Moses had written it and handed it over to the Levites to be put by
the side of the Ark of the Covenant. Then follows his song and his
blessing, which it is possible that he did not put down in writing
himself. The last chapter, relating his death, he certainly did not
write. Nevertheless the book itself is said repeatedly to be his work
and his words, but the critics are nearly unanimous in giving as its
date the eighteenth year of Josiah, 621 b. C.
The generally received opinion is that the books of Moses, what
ever be their date, were written in the language now called Hebrew,
but not in the square Hebrew characters of the Bible. Square Hebrew,
which is derived from the Aramaic alphabet, is of a very recent date,
nobody denies this fact. It did not assume the appearance under
which we know it long before the Christian era, and even then it
was without vowels. The vowel points added to it by the Massora
do not go further back than the fifth century.
It has always been admitted that, before square Hebrew, the books
of Scripture were written with the Canaanite or Phoenician alphabet,
to which the name 'old Hebrew' was given, a name which, as we
shall see, now seems to be erroneous. As to Scripture being written
with that alphabet, we look in vain for a proof of it. It is a mere
hypothesis, the value of which we will now test. In order to do so,
we must go back to the origin of the people of Israel.
This is what we read in Genesis (xi. 31) :
' Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's
son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they
went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of
Canaan ; and they came unto Haran and dwelt there . . . and Terah
died in Haran.
' (xii) Now the Lord said unto Abram : Get thee out of thy country,
and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land
that I will shew thee, and I will make of thee a great nation, . . . and
Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their
substance that they had gathered, and the souls they had gotten in
Haran, and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into
the land of Canaan they came.'
Many centuries afterwards, when Stephen was speaking before his
judges, he thus recalled God's command to Abram: 'The God of
glory appeared unto our father Abram when he was in Mesopotamia,
before he dwelt in Haran, and said unto him : Get thee out of thy
1 Einleitung ins Alte Testament, ii, p. 365.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 27
land, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall
shew thee' (Acts vii. 3). If, therefore, we interpret these passages in
the true Biblical sense, it was a religious motive, it was religion, or, as
it is expressed, not by the abstract word ' religion ', but in a concrete
form, the only one which could be understood in that remote time,
it was God's command which induced Abram to leave the country of
his father. His worship was not that of his environment : he may
perhaps have been persecuted or ill-treated in some way.
A book, the original of which is lost and which is generally assigned
to the close of the Maccabaean age, to the latter half of the second
century B.C., the book of Judith, speaks of the ancestors of the Jews
as worshippers of the God of Heaven and as having been driven out
by the Chaldeans to Mesopotamia, where they received the command
of God to go to Canaan. In this passage the character of the
Abrahamites as being a persecuted religious sect is well marked.
Josephus quotes several authors who, he says, have written about
Abraham x : Berosus and Hecataeus, to whom Abraham was a man
of considerable wisdom and remarkable intelligence, who tried to
reform the religious belief and worship of the Chaldeans, so much so
that they revolted against him and drove him out of the country.
Nicolas the Damascene speaks of Abraham as a king of Damascus
who conquered Chaldaea and settled afterwards at Canaan. These
are vagaries devoid of historical value, but it is interesting to contrast
such accretions of later time with the text, with those pregnant words
of Genesis which tell us merely what is strictly necessary. Abram
goes to Canaan obeying God's command ; that was enough to show
the religious character which dominated his life and foreordained him
to his religious mission.
It is most important that we should replace him in his environ
ment, in his time and in his country. In this respect we have now
some very valuable information derived from the researches of several
Assyriologists, among whom I shall name two of the most eminent :
Mr. King in England and M. Thureau-Dangin in France.
As far back as we can go in the history of Mesopotamia, we find
the country divided between two races : in the north Semites, the
Akkadians, further south the Sumerians, who extended as far as the
Persian Gulf. Akkad or Agade was an important city, the site of
which has not been identified.2 It was probably in the neighbour
hood of Sippar, the city of the famous temple of the sun-god. The

1 Antiq. Jud. I, chap. vii.
2 King, Histonj of Sumcr and Akkad, p. 37.

28 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Akkadian was the Semitic speech of the whole of Babylonia, the
country of Akkad.1
The Sumerians, a non-Semitic race, occupied the lower plains of
the Tigris and Euphrates : they were much more civilized than the
Akkadians. ' That Babylonian civilization and culture originated with
the Sumerians is no longer in dispute.'2 Perhaps their most impor
tant achievement was the invention of cuneiform writing, for this in
time was adopted as a common script throughout the East ; especi
ally it became the script of the Babylonians and Assyrians, that with
which they wrote their own language.3
Of the two, the most warlike were certainly the Akkadians, who
already in the first half of the third millenium had powerful kings.
Sargon of Agade conquered the whole of Babylonia and went as far
as the Persian Gulf.4 In his time, in consequence of commercial
relations, a considerable immigration took place from Akkad and the
north towards the Sumerian cities of the south. Sargon conquered
the land of the Amurru, the Western land, which means Syria and
Palestine. The Amurru, according to Mr. King, the Western
Semites, were Semitic emigrants who had come from the north
west.6 Sargon's conquests in Babylonia did not last. About two hundred
years afterwards, in the city of Ur, the most southern in the land of
Sumer, which at that time was on the coast of the Persian Gulf,
there arose a powerful dynasty, the mightiest of whose princes was
Dungi. The dynasty of Ur represents a very definite Sumerian
reaction against the Semites ; 6 the king sacked Babylon, but the
Elamite conquerors put an end to the dynasty of Ur. Their
successors were the kings of Isin, a city the site of which has not
been identified. These kings claimed the title of kings of Sumer and
Akkad. The 225 years during which their dynasty lasted seem to
have been a period of trouble and confusion, the country was invaded
by the Amurru, the Western Semites, who succeeded in establishing
a dynasty of their own in Babylon. The seat of power now passed
to the north, to the city of Babylon. After the first wave of immi
gration which resulted in the establishment of her first dynasty, the
racial character of Babylonia became dominantly Semitic.7
In the list of conquered countries is Amurru or the Western land.
Mr. King thinks that it is possible that the first Semitic influence
1 King, loc. cit., p. 52. 2 Id., loc. cit., p. 6.
s Id., loc. cit. , p. 348. * Id ., loc. cit. , pp. 238 and ff.
6 Id., loc. cit. , p. 55. 6 Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 190.
7 King, loc. cit., p. 320.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 29
reached the Euphrates through Syria, and it was to Syria that the
stream of Semitic influence, impregnated with Semitic culture, now
returned. Evidently, in Syria and Palestine the predominant influ
ence, even under the old kings of Akkad, and still more under the
first Babylonian dynasty, was already Semitic. These princes were
even considered as being Amurru themselves, South Syrian Arabs, or
Palestinians; the first of them may have been parallel to the last
kings of the dynasty of Isin. In his seventeenth year, however, King
Sin-Muballit conquered Isin,1 which had been occupied by the king of
Larsa, and put an end to the dynasty. His son and successor was
the famous Hammurabi or Ammurapi, as his name is now read, whom
the Assyriologists generally admit to have been the Amraphel of the
fourteenth chapter of Genesis. Abraham would thus be contem
porary with Hammurabi, whose reign must have begun about 1940.
This gives us an approximate date for Abraham.
The city from which Terah departed was Ur, or, as it is called,
Ur of the Chaldees. It was an important city from which, as we
have seen, a mighty dynasty arose : it also had a celebrated temple of
the moon-god. We do not know the motives which induced Terah
to leave Ur : it is not said distinctly, as for Abraham, that he received
a religious command. Terah belonged probably to one of these families
of Semitic immigrants who had settled in Sumer at the time of Sargon
of Agade. Perhaps he was not a worshipper of the moon-god, or he
may have left Ur because of the great troubles through which the city
passed at the end of the dynasty of Isin, when it was conquered and
probably destroyed by the Elamites.
We do not know where the city of Haran was situated ; it seems
probable that it was in the north, where the way to Canaan was not
so long and difficult as in the south. There Haran dwelt with his
son Abram and his nephew Lot, and there he remained to the end of
his life, for he may have been still living when Abram received the
command ' Get thee out of thy father's house'. He departed for the
country of the Amurru, where he would find a population, a consider
able part of which was of the same race as himself, and which had
been for centuries completely under Babylonian influence. Sargon I
had already introduced the Babylonian language and cuneiform writing,
so that, as Professor Lehmann-Haupt says, ' from the latest date of
2600 until about 1950, Phoenicia and Palestine were under the con
tinuous dominion of the East, where Babylonian culture was the ruling
element in all respects'.2 Babylonian culture did not disappear in
1 King, loc. cit. p. 314. 2 Lehmann-Haupt, Israel, pp. 13, 15.

30 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Palestine with the dominion of Babylon, it lasted through the time
when Palestine was under Egyptian rule ; the language remained the
same, and it became in many respects the culture of the Israelites
when they were the occupants and the rulers of the country.
The date of Abraham is given in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis,
which relates the campaign of four Mesopotamian kings against five
Palestinian princes. The views of the critics are most divergent both
as to the date and the historical value of this chapter. Extreme
critics like Noeldeke consider it as having a purely fictitious character,
and being of a very late origin. Gunkel thinks it belongs to an age
in which, in spite of a certain historical erudition, the historical sense
of Judaism had sunk almost to zero. To Professor Skinner chap, xiv
is ' an isolated boulder in the stratification of the Pentateuch . . . but
not in itself an evidence of high antiquity'.1 According to the learned
Cambridge professor, ' some of the names like Arioch having been
identified from a cuneiform tablet of the fourth or third century B.C.,
there is here a positive proof that the period with which the story
deals was a theme of poetic and legendary treatment in the age to
which criticism is disposed approximately to assign the composition
of Genesis xiv.' 2 This would be even later than the Priestly Code,
with which certain critics like Gautier find in this chapter some
analogy.3 The late Dr. Driver considered it as one of the oldest
parts of Genesis. An American Assyriologist, Dr. Haupt, has recently
put forward quite a new idea which I shall quote in his own words.4
'The purpose of this chapter is an encouragement to rebel against
foreign yoke. Just as Abraham with his 318 followers could rescue
the booty from the mighty king of the Elamites, so Zerubbabel and
his followers could set the great king of Persia at defiance. This
chapter must have been written in the beginning of the year 519.'
In his book on Israel, Dr. Lehmann-Haupt, the eminent German
Assyriologist, says that this chapter contains not only valuable historical
information, but gives us a correct picture of an important epoch of
old oriental history, a description which not only can bear out the
control of cuneiform inscriptions, but even adds materially to them.5
Chedorlaomer is a thoroughly Elamitic name, and at that time the
power of Elam extended over Western Asia and over his neighbours
who are mentioned here, viz. the king of Ellasar (Larsa) called Arioch,
the servant of the moon, another pronunciation of Rimsin, Amraphel,
1 Skinner, Genesis, p. 256. 2 Skinner, Genesis, p. 275.
3 Introduction a fAncien Testament, i, p. 98.
1 Orientalistische Literaturzeitung , 1915, p. 71.
5 Lehmann-Haupt, loc. cit , p. 8.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 31
a transcription of Hammurapi, king of S (linear, a well-known name of
Babylon, and Tideal, who is a sovereign, not of Goiim, the nations,
but of Gutium, another small kingdom north-east of Babylonia.
Thus these names, in Dr. Lehmann-Haupt's opinion, are absolutely
historical. As to their connexion with Abram, the greatest part of
this episode is legend, and nothing but legend. On this point we
cannot agree with Dr. Lehmann-Haupt. The important point, how
ever, is that chap, xiv gives us the date of Abram, whether he is
considered as a legendary figure placed in that epoch, or whether he
is a historical person.
As to when the chapter was written, this lecture will show that
there is no reason to assign it to another author than the writer of
the whole biography of Abraham, especially having regard to its
intimate connexion with the following chapter, on which I have dwelt
elsewhere.1 Abram leaves Babylonia, a country of advanced literary culture,
where a Semitic language was spoken and a cuneiform script
employed. Mesopotamia is the country of cuneiform tablets, tablets
made of wet clay on which the characters were impressed with a stilus.
Thousands of these tablets have come down to us in Sumerian and in
the Semitic Akkadian, which, with the dominion of Babylon, entirely
superseded the Sumerian. The Semitic Babylonian extended over
the whole of Western Asia. Already, the old Babylonian ruler Sargon
of Agade, when he conquered the West, as he says, caused it to
speak one language,2 and at that remote time the Babylonian language
spread over Phoenicia and Palestine.
I cannot describe here the enormous cuneiform literature which has
been preserved. Libraries, archives, have been discovered, in which
all kinds of documents had been collected, not only political and
legal, but many dealing even with grammar, language, and natural
science. Among these collections, all that relates to religion, mytho
logy, and magic forms an important part. A considerable number of
religious tablets have been preserved. Tablets of baked clay, like the
potsherds, are a very lasting material, and very good for valuable
documents which have to be protected against destruction. Besides,
a clay tablet was something very handy, very convenient for letters
which had to be transported a long way : it was not very liable to
injury when carried about on a journey.
Thus it is absolutely certain that Abram, departing from Haran in
1 The Unity of Genesis. Transactions of the Victoria Institute, vol. xlvii,
p. 352.
2 Lehmann-Haupt, loc. cit., p. 13.

32 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
the beginning of Hammurabi's reign or at the end of his father's,
left a country already highly civilized, with a Semitic book-language,
Babylonian, which was the dominant language of Western Asia, and
which was written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
Without going to the length of Josephus, who states that Abraham
tried to bring about a reform among his countrymen, and on the
strength of the passage of Genesis confirmed by the book of Judith,
we can well say that it was his religion, his belief different from that
of his surroundings, which obliged him to leave the country. Now,
considering the character of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and their
customs, it is certainly no far-fetched hypothesis to suppose that
a group of men, who had their special creed, might have also their
religious books which referred to that creed, and which could only be
clay tablets, written in cuneiform like all the other religious books of
the country.
A sect migrating to a foreign land in order to be able to practise
its own worship in peace, generally takes its own books, which are its
most valuable treasures, and from which it would not part. This has
happened at all times, and does even in ours. I need not quote quite
recent examples from America.
Abram took his tablets when he left for Canaan, and of these
tablets we may well admit that they contained what we have in
Genesis, from the creation of the world down to Abram's father,
Terah. This conjecture seems to me supported by two facts. Some
of them, like the narrative of the flood, have a decidedly Babylonian
character, and they also contain the genealogy of Abraham. We
know what great value Orientals attach to genealogies, which are
the beginning of history. History originated from genealogies and
biographies. There may have been more tablets, the writer of Genesis
may have made a choice between them and rejected those which had
no place in the very definite plan of his first book.
The primaeval history of mankind down to Abraham was trans
mitted to the Israelites through Abraham himself, who brought it
when he came to settle in Canaan, in the form of cuneiform tablets.
This assertion, of which I do not deny the conjectural character, is
quite in keeping with what we know for certain of the time, of the
land, of its inhabitants and their language ; it does not clash with the
information which recent discoveries have brought us, and I main
tain, in spite of the sneers of the critics, that this conjecture rests on
a more solid base than their Jahvists, Elohists, redactor, Priestly Code,
and all the authors whom their imagination has called into existence.
I will even go a step further ; it is possible that a man like Abraham,

A.BYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 33
powerful sheikh as we should call him to-day, had in his retinue
lan who could write, whose duty was to keep records of his master's
lings with his neighbours, who had to superintend all concerning
master's great wealth, like Eliezer his servant, the elder of his
ise 'that ruled over all he had'. A man who had so completely
master's confidence that Abraham thought of making him his
r, might put down in writing on clay tablets the principal events of
master's life, which would be handed down to his descendants, such
for instance, Abram's journey to Egypt, his victory over the Meso-
;amian kings when he delivered Lot. This man might have been
rusted with all that referred to the biography of his master. This
perhaps the way in which the record of Abraham's life was pre-
ved and transmitted to his family, so that finally it reached Moses
Egypt.Abraham left a country where a Semitic language was spoken and
came to another where the people were mostly Semites and spoke
anguage of the same family. Let us quote our authority in the
t lecture, Dr. Briggs : ' Whether Abraham adopted the language
the Canaanites or brought the Hebrew with him from the East h
important, for the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian are nearer the
:brew and Phoenician than they are to the other Semitic languages.
these languages, as now they are presented to us, differ less than
; Roman languages, the daughters of Latin, in their earlier stages,
the time of Abraham their differences could scarcely have been
ire than dialectic' *
This statement has a theoretical, I may even say scholastic colour ;
reflects the principle of the old philology, which considered each
tion as having its own language and script, within its own political
lits. No difference was made between what is spoken and what is
itten. But now we have another idea about language ; anthropo-
y, which is more and more studied, compels us to look closer at
at may be seen among living men, at the present day. And we
d that, in civilized nations, we have to make a difference between
! literary and the spoken language. The literary, the written
guage, is in the first place the language of religion and law, and of
books ; it follows more or less the rules called grammar, in which
:re is a certain conventional element. This language covers
mmber of dialects which are the language of the people, generally
written, and used in ordinary life.
[t is still the case at the present day, when one might suppose that
iooIs, compulsory education, and military service should have
1 Briggs, Gen. Introd., p. 52.
D

84 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
levelled down such linguistic inequalities. Take for instance the
German language, which is spoken over a very large area, inhabited
by nations of a different origin, and under different political rulers.
German prose, literary German, has existed only since Luther trans
lated the Bible into a Saxon dialect. From that time, this prose has
become classical ; it was used by the great writers at the end of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the creators
of German literature. It is taught in schools, used in the pulpit, in
political councils, and in all writings, from the newspapers to the
most scientific and learned compositions. It has completely estab
lished its dominion in German-speaking nations.
Nevertheless it has not destroyed the local dialects, the language of
the people, the unwritten idiom which in certain countries is as vivid
as ever. Dialects are very much more studied now than they used
to be. Previously they were rather despised ; the French name of
' patois ' implies a language which is more or less contemptible because
it is not that of the well educated. Now they are treated with more
respect. They are to philology what the prehistoric remains of
antiquity are to archaeology, because they are earlier than the written
language. As to German dialects, one of the most interesting countries to
study is Switzerland. If you travel in German-speaking Switzerland,
you will find that each canton or sometimes part of a canton has its
own dialect, in which the words, their form and their pronunciation,
differ from the written German so much that an educated person
coming from the north of Germany does not always understand them.
The dialect is not the same at Berne as at Basle or Zurich, but the
people coming from these cantons understand each other. Every
body speaks the dialect, even in our time, whether he be a peasant or,
as the old Bernese say, a ' Ratsherr ', a member of the council. At
the same time everybody knows more or less the literary German.
German only is taught at school and supposed to be the sole language
employed in political councils, even letters are written in German
because there is no regular orthography for the Swiss dialects. And
yet German has not driven out the native dialects, which are as living
as ever. A clergyman from Zurich said to me lately : ' German is
still looked upon by our people as the Sunday coat.'
These dialects are unwritten, they have no real literature, they have
songs, even poetry, which the friends of folklore gather with precious
care. Lately novelists have written a few novels in these dialects,
like those composed in Plattdeutsch in Germany, but the original
character of the ' patois ' consists in its being unwritten. Supposing

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 35
therefore that because the Bible used at. Berne is in German, we were
to conclude that the language of the Bible is the idiom spoken by the
people, we should make a very great mistake, which has often been
made when dealing with the languages of antiquity.
Now let us revert to Abraham's time. Babylonian with its cunei
form script was the literary language of the whole of Western Asia.
At Babylon, in Mesopotamia, the people must have spoken a Semitic
dialect closely related to the written language. It is quite possible
that there was more than one dialect in this region with its many
large and important cities, generally independent, and several of which
played the part of the ruling power. Certainly the popular language
was not the same throughout the whole region where Babylonian
cuneiform was the written language, from Tyre to Susa, in the moun
tains of Syria and along the great rivers.
Take even a part of that region, Palestine, which became the king
dom of the Israelites, a mountainous country with cities which before
the conquest were never united under a central power. These cities
would occasionally form a coalition in order to fight an Egyptian
conqueror, but afterwards, when the danger was over, this tempo
rary confederacy would dissolve at once. One can fancy that the
linguistic conditions were similar to those of the primitive peoples of
the present day. Travellers and missionaries tell us that in Africa,
among the Bantu for instance, each tribe has its own dialect. They
understand each other because these tribal languages belong to the
same family, but their idiom is not the same.
We can well imagine that such may have been the case with
Abraham. Coming from Haran, speaking the Semitic dialect of the
place, he would understand the people where he settled and converse
with them in their own idiom, just as in Switzerland men from Basle
and Zurich easily converse together, but in the next generation this
difference would disappear.
Judging the question from the anthropological point of view, we
should say that Canaan in Abraham's time was a country where
several Semitic idioms were spoken. The difference between them
and those of Mesopotamia could, to employ again Dr. Briggs's
words, ' scarcely have been more than dialectic' We have no indi
cation whatever as to the language of the inhabitants of Canaan, but,
considering that it was a country with a great number of cities more
or less independent, it seems probable that, as would be the case at
the present day, there were several dialects. Which of these early
idioms became Hebrew we do not know.
The name Hebrew as that of the language spoken by the Israelites
d2

36 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
at any time is never met with in the Old Testament, and Dr. Briggs's
contention that the Biblical Hebrew was brought by Abraham from
Mesopotamia or found by him in Canaan seems absolutely^ groundless,
and still more the assertion that the Hebrew language ' had already
a considerable development prior to the entrance of Abraham into the
Holy Land'. This seems pure imagination. All we can say is that
the inhabitants of both the countries in which Abraham lived spoke
a Semitic dialect.
The idea which is still predominant in a great many books, that
Hebrew was the language of Canaan, and that whoever went into
Canaan found there people speaking and writing it with its own
script — this idea is the contrary of what we learn from anthropology ;
besides, it would be absolutely impossible to say what were the
boundaries of that language, where it began and where it ended, and
how its limits were marked.
Canaan, whatever the number of its dialects, had a literary
language, which had been imported into the country when it was
occupied by the Mesopotamian Semites, and which was the same
as in Mesopotamia, viz. : Babylonian cuneiform, and that we know
neither by tradition nor by any literary or historical statement, but
because we have the documents themselves, which we owe to a
wonderful discovery made in Egypt.
In the year 1888, fellaheen working at a place now called Tel el
Amarna, which was known to have been the capital of a king who
tried to make a religious revolution in Egypt, came upon a box or a
jar of the same kind as those found in Mesopotamia, containing
about 300 clay tablets written in cuneiform characters. These
tablets are now divided between the museums of Berlin, Cairo, and
London. They proved to be part of the archives of the kings
Amenophis III and IV and their correspondence with the kings of
Asia, and also with the governors of the cities of Palestine under
Egyptian dominion.
The kings from whom the Egyptian sovereign receives letters are
kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, a country situated in the corner of
the Euphrates, and Alasia, which may be Cyprus or a part of the coast.
The other letters are from Canaanite princes or governors of cities.
Some seem to be mere vassals like Aziru of the land of Amurru, the
Amorites who occupied a great part of the land, others are certainly
governors who had been appointed by Thothmes III, the great
conqueror. The letters show that Egyptian dominion is already
unsteady, the governors in their reports to the king often speak of
strangers who threaten them. They often also complain of their

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 37
neighbours who, like themselves subjects of the king, invade and
pillage their territory. They ask for help. Several of these governors
write from places which are not yet identified and may have been as
far away as North Syria. But some of them are Ribaddi of Gebal
(Byblos), Ammunira of Beirut, Zimrida of Zidon, Abi-milki of Tyre,
Surata of Akko, Japahi of Gezer, Jitia of Ashkelon, another Zimrida
of Lachish, and we have several important letters from Abd-hiba of
Jerusalem. These letters are all written in Babylonian cuneiform, and since
there are here and there Phoenician or Hebrew glosses, some critics
have pretended that it was not the language of the country. On the
contrary, it is exactly what one might expect. An administrative
report written in a legal and sometimes conventional style will
always bear traces of the native idiom. If written in French it will
not be exactly the same, whether its author is in Paris, Brussels,
Geneva, or Bordeaux. These Phoenician and Hebrew glosses are
the best proof that these tablets were written in the country itself,
they are in the literary language of the authors, the glosses are in the
popular language. A letter like these is written either in the language
of the subject or that of the master. It certainly was not the language
of the Egyptian sovereign ; he did not understand Babylonian, since
the king of Mitanni sends him a ' targumanu ', a dragoman ; it can
only be that of the princes or officers whose letters were addressed to
the king of Egypt.
Babylonian has sometimes been called the diplomatic language, the
French of Western Asia. This idea seems to me perfectly absurd.
A diplomatic language is used by reason of an agreement between
civilized nations, it is an object of study, and the appertain ment
of a few. What reason could the governor of a city in Palestine,
appointed by the king of Egypt, have for writing to him in any other
language than his own, or that of his king ? We are certain that it
is not that of the king, it can then only be that of the subject.
An important point to notice is that at that time there was no
Phoenician language and script; Tyre and Zidon were not the powerful
cities having the command of the sea, as they afterwards became ;
they were still what we should call provincial cities of Palestine, under
the rule of Pharaoh. If there had been a Phoenician script, Zimrida
and Abimilki would certainly have used it.
The tablets of Tel el Amarna belong to the eighteenth dynasty, to
the time when the Israelites were in Egypt. But another find, still
more important, has been made at Boghaz Keui in Asia Minor, the
capital of the Hittites. Among the great number of tablets, all in

38 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
cuneiform characters, is the treaty of Rameses II with the king of
the Hittites, Hattusil, and a series of letters and edicts concerning the
Amurru, the Amorites. Most of the documents from Boghaz Keui
are later than the Tel el Amarna find. They are of the time of
Moses, since Rameses II was the first persecutor of the Israelites.
Cuneiform tablets have also been found in Palestine, generally legal
documents which had to be preserved. Two such contracts have been
discovered at Gezer ; they date from the middle of the seventh century.
These contracts have a local origin, they are written in a language
which must have been the local language of the city. At Taanach
eight tablets or fragments have been found, and I must repeat here
a quotation, which I have made already elsewhere, from the excavator,
Dr. Sellin. After having said that, from 1500 to 1350, Babylonian
writing was the only one used at the courts of the princes of Palestine,
the learned author adds : ' Even supposing that this writing was used
only by the rulers and their officials, and that the people could not
read and write, this fact is certain : in the already extensive excava
tions which have been carried on in Palestine no document has ever
been found in any except in Babylonian writing. As for the
Phoenician or old Hebrew writing, it cannot be asserted with certainty
that it existed before the ninth century.' 1
Thus, Abraham left a country where the written language and
script was Babylonian cuneiform. If he took with him his religious
books or his genealogy, they were clay tablets written in cuneiform,
and he came to a country where princes and officials, governors of
cities, all that we should call the educated and ruling class, used no
other script and language. We have no reason to suppose that his
family did not preserve them ; one does not see why he should have
made a change and where this change should have originated. It is
possible that the dialect he spoke when coming from Mesopotamia
differed somewhat from that of his neighbours at Mamre, but as is
the case now among emigrants, in the next generation this difference
would have been effaced. Anyhow, the written language was the
same. In Egypt, the Hebrews who were settled in a separate part of the
country preserved their native language, the Semitic dialect they
brought from Canaan, like the Jewish colonists who later on settled
at Elephantine a»id in other cities of Egypt. We have no informa
tion at all about their life in Egypt, except that they must have
prospered and increased considerably. One may even imagine that
they became so attached to Egypt and the Egyptian soil, that persecu-
1 Tell Taanak, Nachlese, p. 35.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 39
tion was necessary to remind them that their own country, the country
which was given to them as an inheritance, and in which they were to
fulfil their mission, was Canaan.
And now we come to the great lawgiver and writer, Moses. I need
not recall the circumstances of his birth and education. The important
points are these : he was a Semite, he was one of the Israelites settled
in Egypt, he had intercourse with them ; at the same time he had
been brought up like the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and he was
instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, so that he was con
versant, not only with the ideas and traditions of his countrymen,
but also with the learning of the Egyptians and the customs which
prevailed at the court of Pharaoh, to which he had access.
Moses could write, there seems to be no doubt about it, the Penta
teuch states it repeatedly. Could he write Egyptian hieroglyphs?
That we do not know, indeed it is of no importance in relation as to
his mission as leader of his countrymen. He was the intermediary
agent between the king and his countrymen. We cannot admit as
historical all that Josephus says of him, of his high position in the
kingdom which excited the jealousy of the Egyptians. History does
not know anything of an expedition of the Ethiopians against the
Egyptians which endangered the kingdom, the invaders going as far
as Memphis, where Moses was put at the head of an Egyptian army
and crushed the Ethiopians, penetrating into their country, making
peace with them and receiving as his wife the princess Tharbis. This
is mere myth, as is very often the case when Josephus enlarges on
Scripture. Do not let us go outside of the text of the Pentateuch. This
teaches us distinctly that Moses knew the written language of his
countrymen. This language, for Abraham and his descendants, as
we know from the Babylonian inscriptions of Mesopotamia and the
tablets of Tel el Amarna, could only be Babylonian cuneiform, the
one language which Sargon of Agade had introduced into Western
Asia many centuries before, the literary and religious language written
in cuneiform on clay tablets.
Even supposing that the Israelites who settled in Egypt were not
very literary, that they did not care much about writing, that their
written language was not often made use of, that they had even
forgotten it completely, which is not likely, Moses could have learnt
it at the court of Pharaoh. We have seen that the king had an active
correspondence with the sovereigns of Mesopotamia and with the
governors of the Palestinian cities ; in that respect Boghaz Keui is
still richer than Tel el Amarna. For that purpose he was obliged to

40 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
have interpreters who could translate the letters coming from abroad,
but since he occasionally answered in Babylonian, it was necessary for
him to have men who could write Babylonian cuneiform on tablets,
men like the dragomans of the embassies. So that Moses, if he had
not learnt it among his countrymen, had plenty of opportunities of
doing so at the court where he was educated ; and besides, if he was
to he the intermediate agent between the king and his countrymen,
or even if from his youth he had some idea of what his mission would
he, he would understand the importance of being a man who could
write, of being what the old Egyptians called a writer, a man of
education. Moses wrote Babylonian cuneiform, for at that time, in Western
Asia, there was no other literary language. He would not have
written in Egyptian, the language of the oppressors ; besides, Baby
lonian cuneiform was the language of his fathers, of his ancestors
in Mesopotamia. That country had been their first home. 'An
Aramean ready to perish was my father', says the author of
Deuteronomy (xxvi. 5). Even Josephus says that the Hebrews were
Mesopotamians. Babylonian cuneiform was the language of laws. Moses could not
ignore completely the code of Hammurabi, that magnificent collection
of laws from which he seems to have borrowed some of his own.
These laws were said to have been dictated to the king by the god
Shamash, and there was not the same objection to the language of
these laws that there was to the language and writing of the Egyptians.
If Abraham had religious books they were in that language and
writing, and we can understand Moses following the tradition of his
people. Moses wrote his books in Babylonian cuneiform. Cuneiform is
not properly a writing, it does not consist in the drawing of a sign,
it is an impression made with a stilus, and the number and directions
of these impressions constitute the sign. Cuneiform can be imitated
on stone, it can be engraved, but the stilus cannot act on anything
except wet clay or some material of the same kind. It cannot be
impressed on papyrus or skin, it cannot be written with ink. There
fore a cuneiform book must necessarily be made of one or several
clay tablets, which will either be merely dried or generally baked.
Fire made them a lasting thing, very appropriate for valuable docu
ments which had to be preserved. They could be transported with
much greater safety than a papyrus roll.
It has been objected to me that certain passages go distinctly
against the idea of the writing being cuneiform. Let me say at first

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 41
that I find a striking confirmation of it in the book of Deuteronomy
(xxvii. 2). ' And it shall be, on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan
unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, that thou shalt set
thee up great stones, and plaister them with plaister ; and thou shalt
write upon them all the words of this law when thou art passed over. ' 1
Commenting upon this passage, Dr. Driver says : 2 ' The letters were
not to be carved in the stone (as is usually the case in ancient inscrip
tions) but to be inscribed with some suitable pigment, upon a prepared
surface coated with lime or gypsum. This practice was Egyptian.'
Dr. Driver is quite right, this practice was Egyptian ; we find for
instance in some of the tombs of the kings a thick coat of plaster
over the walls, but it was not in order to paint the hieroglyphs, but
to engrave them in hollow. It is exactly so in the case of the stones
to be erected in Mount Ebal. The reason why this command is
given 'thou shalt plaister them with plaister' is merely to enable
Moses to impress upon it his cuneiform writing. The stones had to
be unhewn, therefore they presented no flat surface ; this would not
be an obstacle to an inscription either painted or written with ink.
But the plaister, a coating either of lime or gypsum, or merely of
mud, was a very good surface for a cuneiform inscription, in which
it would easily be impressed before the coating was dry.
Joshua, who carried out the command of Moses, erected in fact
a stele inscribed with the law. A stele, which in this case would
have been large, required a stone appropriate for engraving. It is
doubtful whether such a stone would have been easily found on the
spot. Therefore Joshua makes one, on which he could write exactly
as on the small clay tablets, so that, as he is told, he could ' write
upon the stones all the words of the law very plainly ' (<ra(pS)s o-<f>68pa).
This word ' plainly ' probably meant ' in large characters '. The same
must be understood of the command ' and thou shalt write them upon
the door posts of thy house and upon thy gates'.3 The houses built
in raw bricks were and still are covered with a coating either of plaster
or of mud, and if the door-posts were of stone, the cuneiform could
be engraved without difficulty.
These passages, especially the first, do not militate in the least
against the idea that the script was cuneiform, but supposing what is
said about the door-post and the gates were considered as going against
it, we must remember that the text we have is not the original; it is
written in square Hebrew, cuneiform and clay tablets no longer
existing, and if the command was to be binding on the contemporaries
1 I always use the Revised Version.
2 OnDeut xxvii. 2. The Polychrome Bible, Joshua, p. 67. 5 Deut. vi. 9.

42 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
of the rabbis who adopted that writing, at that time the law could
only be written or painted on the door-posts in square Hebrew, it
could not be done otherwise.
There is one passage of which I really do not understand how it could
be opposed to me. It is these words in Deuteronomy : xi. 18 ' there
fore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul ;
and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be
for frontlets between your eyes.' Could the reference conceivably
be to clay tablets ? says my opponent, Mr. Wiener. The reference is
certainly not to clay tablets, no more than to any other writing or
material. Can we imagine that the Israelites are commanded to
wear, bound to their hand, a piece of skin or papyrus on which a few
words of the law are written, and another between their eyes ? Nor
can we suppose that these few words were tattooed on their hands or
their foreheads. We must remember that the ancients, who had not,
like the Greeks, a philosophical language, were obliged to use figures ;
they had to express abstract ideas by something falling under their
senses. Here we have certainly figurative language. The LXX do
not employ the same figures, they say : ' You shall throw the words
into your hearts . . . and you shall bind them as a sign which will be
unmoved before your eyes.' These expressions are of the same kind
as this, which decidedly cannot be taken in a literal sense : ' Let
thine heart keep my commandments : . . . write them upon the table
of thine heart' (Prov. iii. 3).
The books of Moses were impressed on clay tablets in Babylonian
cuneiform, the written language of Western Asia in his time. This
idea has been put forward before me by Colonel Conder and Professor
Sayce. It rests, as we have seen, not on literary arguments, not on
inference made from the contents of the books, not on the supposed
existence of authors which are pure literary creations, but on contem
porary documents, on clay tablets coming from Mesopotamia and
Palestine, before Moses and of his time, documents which we can
read ourselves.
Some critics will say it is of no importance whether cuneiform was
used in the time of Moses, since Moses did not write a single line of
the Pentateuch, the oldest source of which is the Jahvist in the ninth
century. I have shown in another place that Genesis and all the
parts of Exodus concerning Egypt could not have been written by
any one but Moses. I dwelt also on that point in my first lecture,
in which I endeavoured to prove that the hypothesis of the various
authors whose work was put together by a redactor has no true
historical basis.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 43
Since Moses wrote on cuneiform tablets, we have to alter com
pletely our methods of studying his writings. We have to do away
with our present definition of a book. A book is something which
unfolds itself from beginning to end with a plan settled beforehand.
It is quite different with Moses, who is not a professional writer.
He takes his tablets when he feels inclined or inspired to do so, he
may be either a poet, or a lawgiver, or an historian, according to
circumstances. Even when he writes Genesis, which has an historical
character more than his other books, he is not obliged to follow the
chronological order. He may write the history of Joseph before the
narrative of the Creation. He is not bound by a strict plan, nor by
the cut-and-dried rules of the present day ; he can give his tablets
the proportions he chooses, they may be unequal in length, as is the
case in Genesis. Nor are they linked together as the chapters of
a written or printed book. A cuneiform book is a collection of
tablets, but such a collection as is the case in Genesis may have been
made for a definite purpose, with a plan which the author keeps in
view. It is not the plan of a writer, but more that of a lecturer who
has in his mind an exact outline of what he has to teach or to prove.
He may begin a lecture with a brief summary of what he said in the
former, or he will revert to a fact mentioned before, on which he has
to dwell for further developments ; or, if he is reading a piece of
literature, he may read over again the last sentence where he stopped.
This is the cause of the apparent inconsistencies which we find in
Genesis, of the necessary repetitions -which have been interpreted as
showing the hand of different writers.
It is quite possible that Moses set apart the tablets which form the
book of Genesis, which are all written with a definite purpose.
Nevertheless we do not know who divided his writings into five
books. The rabbinical tradition, which to a certain degree is sup
ported by Scripture, points to Ezra. I see no reason to discard it.
We said that it is quite possible that Abraham brought with him
from Babylonia his religious books, his tablets which contained the
history of the world and his pedigree down to his father Terah. There
may have been more tablets than those preserved in Genesis ; Moses
had possibly to make a choice and to leave aside all that did not
refer to the leading idea of Genesis, the setting apart of Israel for
his mission in the world.
If the beginning of Genesis consists of the tablets brought by
Abraham, it seems nevertheless evident that Moses rewrote them.
There are already in the two first some Mosaic touches, some details
which indicate the man living in Egypt, who- wrote from there and

44 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
who sometimes inserts into his narrative details which reveal the
writer who has Egypt before his eyes. Time does not allow me to
quote any of them.
Curiously, the father of Higher Criticism, Eichhorn, in his studies
on the Pentateuch, has come to a conclusion which has some
analogy with ours.1 Speaking of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers,
he says : ' Their appearance leads to the idea that those books, or at
least a part of them, consist of detached essays contemporaneous with
the wanderings of the Hebrews in the desert; these essays are
linked together by the collector through inserted narratives. Every
where one sees that these essays are separated, . . . nevertheless in
these separate books one recognizes a kind of systematic order.' If
instead of 'separate or detached essays' we put 'tablets', Eichhorn's
description gives a fairly accurate idea of the composition of these
books. The most important consequence to be drawn from the fact that
Moses wrote in Babylonian cuneiform is that these books are not
original documents. In their present form they are not in the lan
guage nor in the script in which they were written. They have passed
through two changes which we shall describe in the next lecture.
Philological and literary criticism, on which rests the reconstruction
of the Old Testament, has been exercised upon translations or
adaptations of documents written in another idiom. Each tablet
cannot be a mosaic of authors living at an interval of several
centuries. All inferences drawn from particularities in the language,
from grammar, from words or syntax, even the differences between
Elohim and Jahveh, all these props of the system are withdrawn,
and it must fall to the ground.
This is the clearest proof of the weakness of the whole construc
tion. If the facts on which the system rests were really historical,
they would be strong enough to withstand the test of the language.
If the existence of various authors and books were well established,
they would stand, no matter in what form they have come down to
us. If they were real history, their outward garb, the language in
which they are related to us, would be secondary, and would have no
bearing upon their firmness. Here we have only restored to these
books the form which they originally had, and that is enough to
bring down the whole system, which falls to pieces because its base
has been cut away.
I said (p. 42) that Colonel Conder had been the first to put forward
the idea that Moses wrote in Babylonian cuneiform. A French
1 Einleitung ins Altc Testament, ii, p. 356.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 45
orientalist, M. Philippe Berger, had also maintained that the Decalogue
had been written in that way. It seems certain that not only Moses,
but Joshua and later writers used the same language and script.
I cannot bring here the arguments which seem to establish that
cuneiform was occasionally used much later by prophets like Isaiah.
This is also the opinion of Dr. Jeremias, a German scholar.
Let us now consider the universally adopted opinion as to the script
in which the Old Testament was written. The Hebrews, down to the
exile to Babylon and later on, had the same alphabet as the Phoenicians.
This script, often called Old Hebrew, is that in which most of the books
of the Old Testament have been written. At a date which cannot be
fixed exactly, but which is certainly not earlier than Ezra, the Jews
adopted a script which was derived, not from the so-called Old Hebrew
or from Phoenician, but from Aramaic : it is the square Hebrew, the
Hebrew of the Bible of the present day. We have absolutely no
historical information whatever as to the motives which induced the
Jews to change their script. Still less do we know when the writings
of the Old Testament were transcribed from the so-called Old Hebrew
or rather Canaanite into the square Hebrew. It seems probable that
this change was due to the rabbis, some time about the Christian era.
Thus everybody admits that there has been a change in the script,
but nobody seems to pay any attention to it, and it goes without
saying that the present text in square Hebrew is the exact reproduc
tion of the Canaanite, the only difference being in the form of the
letters. Now since we do not know a Canaanite inscription older
than that of Mesha in the ninth century, its date contributes to show
that the writings of the Old Testament are not so old as they pretend
to be. We must admit, however, of the existence of a Phoenician
alphabet at the time of Solomon, when Hiram, the king of Tyre,
corresponded with him, but it did not exist at the time of the tablets
of Tel el Amarna, so that we may fix its limits to about 1000 or
900 B.C.
It has always been considered as an indisputable fact that before
the square Hebrew the writings of the Old Testament were in
Canaanite script. But, looking at this axiom in the light of new
discoveries, it appears to be a mere hypothesis or a conjecture of
which there is no historical proof whatever. A distinguished Hebrew
scholar, who was in this place in the month of January, Professor
van Hoonacker, writes to me : ' Too many facts seem to me to prove
that the language called Hebrew or Jewish, such as it is represented
in the Biblical writings, bears the marks of a history of many centuries.'
I should be very thankful to the learned professor to give me these

46 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
proofs of his assertion. We have no literary documents coming from
Palestine in Canaanite alphabet, except the inscription of Mesha and
that cf Shiloah which can hardly be called literary, and the Samaritan
Pentateuch, a document of a special character to which we shall revert
in the next lecture.
Professor van Hoonacker's contention, which does not separate
language from script, and the generally admitted opinion, would
mean that already in David's time, and perhaps before this king, the
Canaanite alphabet prevailed in the whole of Palestine, and had
entirely superseded the Babylonian cuneiform, of which we have
remains, while we have no trace whatever of the Canaanite. This
idea, the conjectural character of which I still maintain, has been
upset quite recently by a great discovery due to the eminent English
scholar whom I may well call the father of Cretan archaeology,
Sir Arthur Evans. The discovery is this : the origin of the Canaanite
alphabet is not Semitic, this alphabet conies from the West, from
Crete. Let us quote Sir Arthur's words : x
'The diffusion of late Minoan settlements along the south-eastern
shore of the Mediterranean best explains the appearance of the
pre-Hellenic forms in the Anatolian alphabets, while in Cyprus it
unquestionably brought about the early introduction of a highly
developed linear syllabary.
' But Cyprus was not the furthest goal of this colonizing enterprise
from the Aegean sides. It was perhaps the dtpopprj for that further
advance to the extreme south-east Mediterranean angle which was to
attach the name of Palestine to a large tract of the Canaanite littoral.
It must at any rate be regarded as a remarkable coincidence that the
close of the same period is marked in Canaan itself by the appearance
of a system of linear script, wholly unconnected with the Semitic
cuneiform, but presenting many points of correspondence with the
Minoan alphabet, in other words the Phoenician alphabet.
' The participation of a large Cretan contingent in the Philistine
conquests of Southern Canaan is well ascertained.'
Sir Arthur gives a great importance to this Philistine conquest,
which must have taken place about 1200 B.C., especially to the city
of Gaza, ' Minoan Gaza '.
' As for the Phoenician alphabet, the attempts to trace it to an old
Semite source like the cuneiform or still more to Egyptian hieroglyphs
ended in failure. ... In view of the preponderating influence of the
Aegean civilisation on the coast of Canaan and the actual settlement
there of the Philistine tribes, the derivation has to be considered of
the Phoenician letters from a Minoan source.' 2
1 Scripta Minoa, p. 77. 2 Evans, loc. cit., p. 86.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 47
The comparison between the Phoenician and Minoan scripts shows
particularly striking points of similarity, and we may say that the
question of the origin of the Phoenician alphabet is solved.
Sir Arthur Evans thinks that the Philistine settlements may have
extended considerably further north, at least to the neighbourhood of
Carmel ; some Aegean element may have intruded in Phoenicia itself.
Here we shall venture to suggest to Sir Arthur Evans that if the
Minoan settlements began with Cyprus, their extension must have
reached at first the opposite coast, especially the places having good
harbours like Tyre and Zidon, rather than the Philistine coast which
had only poor anchorages, and, following Sir Arthur's history of the
Minoan settlements, I should say with Mr. Hall that the origin of
the Phoenician alphabet is to be found in the Cilician-Syrian coast-
land.1 We can even draw from Sir Arthur Evans's discoveries this
important inference, which I believe is stated now for the first time,
viz. that Tyre and Zidon became powerful cities of navigators and
merchants after they had received a colony of Minoans, these active
seafarers and tradesmen who at one time must have ruled over a great
part of the Eastern Mediterranean. If we contrast the conditions of
these two cities at the time of the Tel el Amarna tablets with the
reign of Hiram, we see that the change must have taken place
about the same time as the conquest of the southern coast by the
Philistines. In the Old Testament the name of Phoenicians does not occur ; it
is used by the LXX as a synonym for Canaanite. Both names are
geographical, but they mean also 'tradesmen'. The Canaanite alphabet
was particularly appropriate to trade purposes, it could be written on
any material, soft like papyrus, or hard like potsherds. For the
inhabitants of Palestine it was a foreign alphabet coming from the
coast, and since it appeared with the Philistines it would have been
unknown in the time of Abraham, and certainly it did not prevail
sufficiently to induce the writers to use it for their religious books.
I should say that it penetrated Palestine from the north, from
Phoenicia. If we read the description of the construction of Solomon's
temple, we read that the king was obliged to apply to Hiram, the king
of Tyre, to whom he sent a great number of workmen who were to
learn from the Zidonians how to hew timber. The Israelites seem
to have been completely ignorant of the art of construction. They
had to be taught by the Zidonians how to hew and fashion timber
and even great stones ; the metal work was also done or supervised
1 Aegean Archaeology, p. 224.

48 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
by men of Tyre. Now, if we consider the enormous levies of men
who were sent to Lebanon, working under the directions of Zidonians
who were their instructors, it is natural to think that the Zidonians
taught them also their alphabet. The accounts, probably on potsherds,
of Hiram's servants hired by Solomon, whom Solomon had to pay,
must have been made in Phoenician script. One cannot conceive
industry in general, and such an enormous work as the building of
the temple, being carried out without writing, and since the Phoenicians
were the directing element, they brought their script, which probably
the numerous officers sent to Lebanon to superintend work had learnt
themselves. This seems to be the first record of the introduction of
Phoenician influence and culture into Israel, but we have no con
temporary monument of this epoch. It is quite possible that the king
himself favoured the introduction of the Phoenician script for com-
mercial purposes and for ordinary life. One can hardly think that he
used it for religious books.
About one hundred years later we find Phoenician influence pre
dominant in Samaria. In fact, the court of Samaria was a Phoenician
court ; Jezebel, the queen of Ahab who stirred up her husband to do
that which was evil in the sight of the Lord (1 Kings xxi. 25), was
the daughter of Ethbaal, the king of the Zidonians. She did a great
deal to develop the worship of the Phoenician god Baal, which seems
to have been introduced by Omri, Ahab's father. Among the four
hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of
the Asherah who ate at Jezebel's table, there were certainly a great
number of Phoenicians, as well as among the officers and servants of
the palace. Therefore the ostraca potsherds found by Mr. Reisner at
Samaria, in what is supposed to have been Omri's palace, which are
mostly notes concerning the royal cellar and its contents, are written
with the Phoenician alphabet.
Omri was a conqueror, and he established his dominion over Moab.
Moab was a small kingdom situated on the east of the Dead Sea,
and speaking a Semitic dialect which, as we know from Nehemiah,
was not the same as that of Jerusalem. On the site of Dibon,
Moab's capital, hrs been found the stone of Mesha, the longest, the
most ancient inscription in Phoenician character. It begins thus : 1
'I am Mesha, son of Chemoshmelekh (or Chemoshgad), king of Moab,
the Dibonite. My father was king over Moab thirty years, and
I became king after my father.' After saying that he built a sanc
tuary to Chemosh as a token of thankfulness for the victories the god
1 Bennett, The Moabite Stone, p. 49 ; Dussaud, Les Monuments Palestiniens et
Judn'iques du Musee du Louvre, p. 5.

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM & CANAANITE SCRIPT 49
granted him, he goes on : ' Omri king of Israel, he oppressed Moab
many days because Chemosh was angry with his land. And his son
succeeded him, and he also said : I will oppress Moab. In my days
he said thus. But I saw my desire upon him and upon his house,
and Israel perished utterly for ever. Now Omri annexed the land of
Medeba, and Israel occupied it his days and half his son's days,
forty years, and restored it Chemosh in my days.'
This inscription shows that during forty years Moab and particu
larly one of its cities, Medeba, was held and oppressed by Omri and
Ahab. It is the first act of war which the king mentions. It is natural
to think that during the long period when the two Jewish-Phoenician
kings, Omri and Ahab, ruled over Moab, they introduced the writing
they used, the Phoenician. The Moabite dialect probably had no script
of its own, and therefore when Mesha wishes to commemorate on a stele
the deliverance of his kingdom, he does it in his own dialect, but he
uses the script which has been taught to his people by his masters.
We recognize here the influence of Samaria, which is Phoenician,
and this stone certainly does not prove anything as to the religious
books of the Hebrews.
The last monument which is considered as proving the existence
of the Canaanite script in the whole of Canaan is the inscription of
Shiloah, found at Jerusalem near the mouth of the rock-aqueduct
made by Hezekiah, which runs from the spring of Gihon to the pool
of Shiloah. It consists of six lines more or less damaged. It is an
inscription of workmen who relate, as it is often done now when
a long tunnel is pierced from both ends, where and how they met ]
. . . ' when yet there were three cubits to dig (they heard) the cry of
one calling out to his fellow ... on the day of the excavation they
hewed this mine each to meet his fellow, pick to pick, and the waters
flowed from the source to the pool.' This inscription seems to show
that this rather complicated work, the digging of a canal of the
length of a third of a mile, was done by Phoenician workmen.
One of the most remarkable sides of Phoenician civilization is the
hydraulic constructions, not only their harbours, but the aqueducts
and cisterns, which brought water into the cities. Some of them have
been preserved, such as the wells of Ras el Ayin, which provided
Tyre with water, or the cisterns and aqueducts of Carthage.2 They
were masters of this art in which they preceded the Romans. It
seems natural that, having a work of this kind to execute, which
1 Dussaud, loc. cit., p. 23 ; Smith's illustrated Bible Diet., Shiloah.
2 Perrot, Histoire de I' Art, vol. iii, p. 354 : Les villes et leurs travaux hydrau-
liques. e

50 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
required skilled professional men, Hezekiah should have called for
Phoenician workmen, just as Solomon had done for the building of
the temple, and as Zerubbabel and Nehemiah did also ; and the men
engraved the inscription in their own script.
These three monuments, the ostraca of Samaria, the stone of
Mesha, and the Shiloah inscription, are the three crushing arguments
which I am supposed to have left unnoticed, and which were to
destroy my so-called hypothesis of the Babylonian cuneiform as
completely as Mesha boasts of having done to Ahab.
In these documents I see absolutely nothing which may lead us to
think that the religious books of the Hebrews were ever written with
that script. I find there only a foreign alphabet, the Phoenician,
which originated beyond the sea, which came from the west, and
which was used by the priests of Baal, if they had books, for their
profane worship. Can one imagine that the script of the worshippers
of Baal would have been chosen by any priest or prophet to reproduce
the Law, part of which was said to have been written by the finger of
God ? Far from being convinced that even when Isaiah wrote ' upon
a great tablet with the pen of a man' (viii. 1) he drew upon it the
characters of the stone of Mesha, it seems to me that we have to
drop the name of 'Old Hebrew' for that alphabet and call it only
Canaanite, Phoenician, or even Samaritan. I am still waiting for
the facts which will prove conclusively that, previous to the Captivity,
the authors of the Holy Writ recorded the words of God with the
letters of the Phoenicians.
In the next lecture we shall see how the books written in Baby
lonian cuneiform and the later ones assumed their present form.

LECTURE III
ARAMAIC AND HEBREW
In the chapter entitled the burden of Egypt, where Isaiah describes
a state of the country which in many respects seems to point to the
time when it was divided between princes called here the princes of
Zoan and Noph, before the twenty-sixth dynasty united it again under
its sceptre, the prophet says this (xix. 18) : ' In that day there shall
be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan,
and swear to the Lord of hosts.'
In antiquity a language has no other name than that of the nation
which uses it, or of the country where it prevails. For instance, in
the inscription on the Cross, Latin is called 'Poopa'Cari the language
of the Romans, which at Jerusalem was probably not very pure Latin.
The 'language of Canaan ' means a language spoken and written all
over the country. We know now that this language spoken in the
cities of Egypt was Aramaic. It is not thus called, because, if it had
been, it would have signified to the people at that time the language
spoken by the Arameans, and not in Canaan.
The second discovery, made also in Egypt and which has shed a light
on the subject under study as completely unexpected as the tablets of
Tel el Amarna, is the papyri from Elephantine. Professor van Hoon-
acker made here a complete description of these documents in three
admirable lectures, which render it unnecessary for me to give any
further account, either of the discovery of the papyri, or of their con
tents. I only wish to add that they date from the twenty-seventh year
of Darius I (494 B.C.) or, according to others, from the second year
of Xerxes (483 B.C.) to the fifth year of Amyrtaeus, who in 405 b.c
delivered Egypt from the Persian yoke. They cover therefore a period of
from eighty to a hundred years, and they come from a colony of Jewish
settlers at Elephantine, who had to protect Egypt against invaders
from the south, but who were not merely a garrison of soldiers. The
documents which this colony has left us are of various kinds : letters,
either of a private or public character, the most important of which is
the one addressed to Bagoas, the governor of Judah, asking that the
temple which had been erected there by their fathers, and destroyed
by the Egyptians, might be reconstructed; also legal deeds, even
e 2

52 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
literary fragments of the story of Ahiqar; an Aramaic translation of
the great inscription of Darius at Behistun ; besides a great number
of ostraca potsherds which have inscriptions relating to everyday
life. These texts, although emanating from Jews, are exclusively
Aramaic. Professor Sachau, the editor of the largest collection of
them, says: 'I have searched with the keenest interest every bit,
every fragment from Elephantine in the hope of finding something
Hebrew, but in vain. The Jewish colony had Hebrew names, but
everything written was in Aramaic'
The historical school which I am trying to follow lays down as one
of its main principles reliance on texts as they stand ; not on the
interpretation given to them by such or such a scholar, whatever be
his eminence, but on their plain meaning. Here we have one which
is very clear. Isaiah says that there will be five cities in Egypt speak
ing the language of Canaan. We have discovered one of these five
cities, with its Jewish inhabitants, and we have before us the writings
which they have left ; not only their legal or literary language, but even
ostraca, giving inscriptions of the same kind as we should trace on
a scrap of paper. In all this literature every word is Aramaic, there
is no Hebrew at all. The conclusion to be derived from the passage
in Isaiah is that the language of Canaan was Aramaic. Evidently
the Jews had brought it with them when they came over from Canaan ;
they had brought over, not the dialect spoken in a certain locality,
not even that of the capital, Jerusalem, but the language which was
used in the whole country, as Babylonian cuneiform had been before.
We saw in the last lecture that when Abraham came into Canaan
he brought the Semitic dialect which he spoke, and that he found
there as written language Babylonian cuneiform, a language which
was used throughout the whole of Palestine, as we know, not from
any conjecture or from any historical statement, but from the monu
ments themselves. Canaan had several dialects which persisted during
many centuries, and we have traces of them in the Old Testament.
They may have undergone some modifications in the course of time,
but the differences in the spoken, unwritten languages of various
localities were never wiped away. I need not remind you of the
famous shibboleth (Judges xii. 6) which, showing the difference of
dialect between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, betrayed the
latter and was the cause of their death.
In the book of Nehemiah we read : ' In those days also saw I Jews
that had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab, and
their children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod ('A^cotlo-tl) and

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 53
could not speak in the Jewish language ('IovSa'io-ri) but according to
the language of each people' (xiii. 23). Ashdod was a city of the
Philistines, Amnion and Moab were on the east of the Jordan, so
that, according to this passage, east and west of Judaea languages
were spoken which were not Jewish. Moab, we have seen, was the
Country of the stone of Mesha, written in Phoenician script. From
this passage we see that the inscription of the king of Moab was not
Jewish, it was the vernacular of Moab, and therefore was not the
language of the religious books of the Jews. As for Jewish, the
passage from Nehemiah clearly indicates it as being the language or
the dialect spoken at Jerusalem.
Even at the time of our Lord, the whole population of Palestine
did not speak as the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The maid in the
court says to Peter the apostle: 'Thou also wast with Jesus the
Galilaean. ... Of a truth thou art one of them, for thy speech
betrayeth thee' (Matt. xxvi. 70, 73). Evidently a Galilaean was
recognized at once by his way of speaking; the difference consisted
probably, as in the dialects of the present day, in the form of the
words and in the accent.
But the best proof that Jewish was the dialect of Jerusalem is in
the narrative of the mission of Rabshakeh to King Hezekiah (2 Kings
xviii. 26, Isaiah xxxvi. 11). The Assyrian general, standing 'by the
conduit of the upper pool in the high way of the fuller's field',
probably a place where a great many people could congregate,
delivered his insulting message. ' Then said Eliakim . . . and Shebna
and Joah unto Rabshakeh : Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in
the Aramean language, for we understand it, and speak not unto us
in the Jews' language in the ears of the people that are on the wall.'
Rabshakeh disregarded their request completely, he ' stood and cried
with a loud voice in the Jews' language . . .' coarse and rude words.
He speaks in the language of the people because he wishes to influence
them ; he employs their popular dialect, and not Aramaic, the language
of the educated, as he would do if he had to address the king, who
knew it as well as his officers.
Professor van Hoonacker, arguing against this interpretation of the
passage, says : ' These words (of the officers) indicate clearly that the
people congregated on the wall did not understand Aramaic. Is there
any reason to suppose that on the wall there were merely people of the
lower classes, who spoke and understood only the "patois" of Jeru
salem, and had no knowledge of the literary language then in use ?
From the narrative in the second book of Kings, one must conclude
that at the time of Hezekiah, about 700 b. c, Aramaic had not spread

54 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
into Judaea, even among the cultivated classes, . . . the literary lan
guage of Isaiah . . . was Jewish, the language of Canaan (xix. 18)
which Rabshakeh thought necessary to learn. ... If Aramaic had
been the literary language of the time, everybody would have under
stood it.' 1
I beg Professor van Hoonacker's pardon, but it seems to me that
his arguments about the people at Jerusalem are what I should call
university arguments. Language, according to the old ideas, is the
property of one nation, or one people ; it has its fixed limits, and no
difference is made between what the people speak and what they
write, or what in our time they are taught in the schools. Let us
look again at what takes place at the present day, and allow me to
revert to my own country, which is still a very good example of what
has taken place in all lands and times.
Take one of the German-speaking cantons like Berne, for instance,
the seat of the Federal Government. The religious, literary, and legal
language is German. All the books and newspapers are written in
German. The discussions of the councils, the laws, the sentences of
the courts of law, all are in German with occasional expressions
borrowed from the popular dialect. This dialect is as vivid as ever,
even among the upper classes, and it is by far the language best
understood, because it is the popular language, and the first lessons
given to the children are in this language. You would never talk
otherwise to a labourer in the field. At the same time he knows
enough of German to read his Bible and to understand his
clergyman. Or take a large factory at Zurich : the engineers and the directors
speak German, all their correspondence is in German, but if they have
an explanation to give to the workmen, it will be in the popular dialect
which the men speak amongst themselves. And this takes place
after years of compulsory education directed against the use of those
popular dialects. You can quite imagine, fifty years ago, a peasant in
the upper valleys of the Oberland or a labourer in a village not under
standing German, but only his dialect. Even now the popular dialect
is understood far better, especially if you do not address a man individu
ally, and the more so if you have to shout something from a distance.
Now change the names of the narrative of Isaiah. Take two
countries which would be in a somewhat similar condition towards
each other as Assyria and Jerusalem, Germany and Berne. Supposing
the officer stands below the walls of Berne and wishes to be under
stood by all the men standing on them ; he wants the people to rebel
1 Une commuuuute Judco-Arame'enne, Preface, p. vii.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 55
against their chiefs and to listen to his proposals. Precisely because
he wants to draw the people on his side, so that they may disregard
the orders of their chiefs, he will be obliged to speak in the popular
dialect, and the officers, afraid of the effect it may produce upon the
defenders of the city, will shout to him: 'Speak to us in German
(Deutsch) because we know it, and not in Bernese (Barner Diitsch).'
The same illustration might be taken from the mountainous regions
of Italy, from Germany, from Russia, from Spain — I hear also from
England — from all countries where civilization and schools have not
eradicated the popular language, and that is the case nearly every
where. In all these places the man who wishes to be understood by
the mass of the people, especially from a distance, will use the popular
language ; this does not mean that the language of the upper classes,
the literary language, is for these people a sealed book, as Professor
van Hoonacker maintains that it was at Jerusalem.
This seems to me the right explanation of the passage, an explana
tion derived from living men, from what we still see at the present
day, and which a fortiori was much more prevalent in antiquity.
To the ancients, the name of a language was that of the people who
spoke it. Jewish, Jehudith, could only mean the language of the
people of Judah, at the time of Hezekiah, and still more when
Nehemiah was living among the 'IovSaloi who had returned from
Babylon. Jehudith, interpreted literally, means the local language
of Judah, and consequently of its capital, Jerusalem ; and when Pro
fessor van Hoonacker tells us that Jewish was a literary language
which Isaiah means when he speaks of the language of Canaan, the
eminent scholar will allow me to say that this assumption is purely
hypothetical, and that we have no proof whatever that Jewish, Jehu
dith, was spoken throughout the whole of Canaan.
Indeed, the passage of Isaiah seems to me to show exactly the con
trary. If Jewish had been the language of the whole country, Isaiah,
living at Jerusalem and addressing the people of Judah, would have
said : ' In that day there shall be five cities in the land of Egypt that
speak Jewish,' and he would not have made a distinction between the
language of Jerusalem and that of the cities of Egypt. Therefore
this leads again to the conclusion to which we came before : that
since the Jews in Egypt spoke and wrote Aramaic, and it is told us
by Isaiah that they spoke the language of Canaan, Aramaic must be
the language spoken and written in the land of Canaan, the written,
literary language of religion, of laws, extending over the whole country,
where at the same time might be found parallel to it popular dialects.
The Elephantine papyri are of the epoch of the Persian rule, but it

56 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
was not at that time only that the Hebrews had settled in Egypt.
The prophets make frequent allusions to this fact. Already Hosea,
who lived in the time of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, speaks
of a permanent establishment of the Jews at Memphis (ix. 6) : ' For
lo, they are gone away from destruction, yet Egypt shall gather them
up, Memphis shall bury them.' In the remarkable letter to Bagoas
about their temple, the Jews of Elephantine say : ' Already in the
time of the kings of Egypt, our fathers had built the temple in the
fortress of Yeb. And when Cambyses entered Egypt he saw this
temple.' Cambyses, the Persian ruler, is the first of the kings of the
twenty-seventh dynasty, who were all Persians. They put an end to
the twenty-sixth dynasty of the Sa'ites, thoroughly Egyptian, and
some of whom were powerful princes ; the second Neco wished to go
through Palestine, and Josiah, in trying to oppose him, was killed at
Megiddo. Josiah 's time is that of Jeremiah, who, during his life,
attempted without success to prevent the Jews from going to Egypt,
and who was once carried away thither himself. So that there can
be no doubt that there were Jewish settlements in Egypt in his time.
Hosea is earlier than Jeremiah, since he died during the reign of
Hezekiah. He already speaks of the settlement of Memphis, and
Isaiah of the five cities speaking the language of Canaan, so that we
may safely assert that already in the eighth century, perhaps even
earlier, the Hebrews were migrating into Egypt and settling there,
perhaps for fear of the Assyrians.
Those who formed the colony of Elephantine, and who built a
temple there, may have been among the mercenaries whom Psamme-
tichus II led to war against the Ethiopians. They were settled on
the southern border of the country to protect it from the attacks of
the Ethiopians, who not long before had conquered Egypt, so that
some of the kings, like Tirhakah, had been Ethiopians.
The Hebrews settled in Egypt broughtwith them their own language,
as they did also their form of worship and their God. It is hardly
possible that they learnt Aramaic in Egypt. If they had forgotten their
own language and adopted that of the country they inhabited, it would
have been Egyptian and not Aramaic, the language of the country
with which Egypt was at war. Nor can Aramaic be considered as
a kind of diplomatic or official language used in the correspondence
with the kings of Persia, since at Elephantine the usual pieces of
writing, the familiar letters, the most trivial notices, for which they
used potsherds as we do scraps of paper, were written in Aramaic.
Hebrew was not their language, as we saw from Professor Sachau's
quotation.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 57
In antiquity and in many cases even in our times, religion and
language go together, change of religion implies change in the idiom.
For instance, it was with the Mohammedan conquest, which established
Islamism in Egypt, that Arabic became the usual language of the
country. At Elephantine, we see, on the contrary, that the Hebrews
remain faithful to their worship, they keep the ceremonies and ritual
which they had brought from their own country. They obey the com
mandments of the Law. We see absolutely no reason why there
should have been a change in idiom and cult. The change to
Aramaic could only have been since Cambyses had invaded Egypt.
But he did not remain long in the country, and even if the' successors
put Persian governors in the cities and over the provinces, that would
no more change the language of the inhabitants of the country than it
does at the present day. So that we can come to no other conclu
sion except that Aramaic was the language of Canaan, whence the
Hebrews came.
When we were considering the early times, for instance those of
Abraham and Moses, we saw that the Tel el Amarna tablets repre
sented the country as having one or several spoken dialects and
one written literary language, Babylonian cuneiform, which was the
literary language of the whole of Western Asia. It happened in
Palestine the same as in Mesopotamia, in parts of Syria and Asia
Minor, script and language became Aramaic and superseded Baby
lonian cuneiform, which did not disappear. Cuneiform was still used
for documents which had to be preserved, like contracts or certain
religious books, and in large inscriptions like that of Behistun, which
is of the time of Darius.
The reason of the change is obvious : Cuneiform cannot be written
on anything except wet clay ; it cannot be written on soft material
like papyrus, paper, skin, vellum, because it is not a scripture properly
speaking, it is an impression ; there is no drawing of the character, it
is the pressing of the stilus in certain directions and in various lengths
that gives it its shape, for which no ink or colour is necessary. It
can be imitated by engraving on stone, inscriptions may be made in
repousse work, like the so-called bronze gates of Balawat. Cunei
form therefore was not sufficient for the requirements of everyday
life, it was absolutely necessary to have another script, which was
Aramaic We find Aramaic written in countries where there was cuneiform.
Aramaic was no more the property of the inhabitants of one definite
country, than Babylonian had been before. Therefore we must not
consider it as being introduced by conquest, but rather as an evolu-

58 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
tion of the language and script which was necessitated by the special
nature of cuneiform, an insufficient and unpractical kind of script.
The people who had used cuneiform adopted Aramaic quite naturally,
as a useful and necessary instrument.
Who was it who first wrote Aramaic ? Where did it originate ?
We cannot say. Probably among some tribe or people of Mesopotamia.
From there it spread over the nations which used cuneiform and
spoke Aramaic dialects. For we must not consider the Arameans as
being a definite people with political boundaries. They form an ethnic
group, the first residence of which was probably Mesopotamia. The
Hebrews called themselves Arameans ; this name is applied to them
in the Elephantine papyri. There are several Arams : Aram Naha-
raim, Paddan Aram, Aram Zobeh and Aram Bethrehob, and others.
Aram is the name of Syria, the kingdom of Ben Hadad, whose capital
was Damascus. In the eighth century, when the Hebrews were bring
ing Aramaic into Egypt, local princes wrote in North Syria in the
Amanus, long Aramaic inscriptions which have lately been discovered.
In Assyria, where cuneiform was still prevalent for all official in
scriptions, especially for records of the campaigns and victories of the
kings, we find curious instances of Aramaic. We have Assyrian clay
tablets with dockets written on the sides. These tablets are gene
rally contracts ; the dockets give the names of the people concerned,
and also a short summary of what the tablet contains. This shows
clearly that the people who made the contract could not read the
cuneiform ; therefore the summary of it was in the language and
script they used every day. One of the most ancient is of the time of
Sennacherib, at the beginning of the seventh century. Bronze weights
in the form of lions have Assyrian and Aramaic inscriptions. The
Assyrian gives the date and name of the king; it is the official part,
the royal mark, which in our time would be impressed by a controller
of the measures and weights. The quantity, the weight expressed, is
given in Aramaic, naturally the shopkeeper or the purchaser cared for
that only, and therefore it had to be in the popular language.
But what is most telling as a proof of Aramaic being contempo
raneous and even simultaneous with cuneiform is a piece of sculpture
found at Kuyunjik by Layard.1 It represents scribes writing down
the number of the heads of slaughtered enemies. They have in their
hands a roll, either of skin or of papyrus, and they write with a pen
or reed. This shows that they do not write cuneiform. They do not
hold clay tablets, but a roll of flexible material, and their instrument
is not a stilus. The natural inference to be drawn from this is that
1 Layard, JS'iniveh and its Remains, in 12th ed., p. 357.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 59
they write Aramaic, as the scribes of the tablets which are of about
the same time. We know also that the Assyrian kings employed for
their archives Aramaic as well as Assyrian scribes, and the king Esar-
haddon prays his god Shamash for the welfare of his Assyrian and
Aramaic writers.1
If, as seems to me established by the Elephantine papyri, the
written language of the Hebrews, the language of Canaan, was
Aramaic, we have to derive from it a very weighty conclusion, which
may well be called revolutionary, using Dr. Briggs's expression, viz.
that the writings of the prophets were in the literary language of the
country, in Aramaic. This conclusion I expressed two years ago
with some hesitation ; but, giving to the facts revealed to us by the
papyri their proper value, and after Sir Arthur Evans's discovery,
I am able to state it to-day with greater assurance. I know this
idea, as Professor van Hoonacker says, will have very little success
among Biblical scholars ; others, like Professor Koenig, will call it
moving in a circle of errors. But you will allow me to observe
that this conclusion rests mainly on the Elephantine papyri, viz. on
documents which everybody may see and study. I make no theories,
I do not invent a host of absolutely unkuown authors, I merely start
from this fact, which seems to me in accordance with elementary
common sense, that colonies settling abroad speak the language which
they have brought from their own country, and do not adopt in their
new home a new idiom which is unknown in the country where they
settle, and which one does not see how they could learn.
The generally received opinion, even of those who admit that
a certain degree of Aramaic influence might have been exerted owing
to the intercourse between Israel and Damascus, is that the prophets
Hosea and Amos spoke to the Israelites before the exile in Hebrew.
They would have felt an antipathy againstthe language of the hereditary
enemy.2 Leaving aside this explanation given by Dr. Schiffer, to
the best of my knowledge it is the unanimous opinion of Biblical
scholars that the language written as well as spoken by the prophets
was Hebrew.
Now, I shall begin by asking my learned opponents : What is
Hebrew? Where do you find it? In the Old Testament there is
no language of that name, and in Isaiah we find only two languages :
Jehudith (Jewish) which is clearly from its name and from what we
read in Nehemiah the idiom of Judah and chiefly of its capital,
Jerusalem, and the other the language of Canaan. To say that these
1 Schiffer, Die Aramaeer, p. 40. 2 Ibid., p. 27.

60 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
two names are absolutely synonymous, that the idiom of Jerusalem
was used throughout the whole country, and that all the writers before
the Exile wrote in that language, is a mere hypothesis the proof of
which I seek in vain. While, on the contrary, the papyri of Elephan
tine show us that the language of Canaan was not Jehudith, but
Aramaic. Another question which I have to ask is this : This Hebrew which
is supposed to have spread over the whole of Canaan, what was its
script ? Aramaic is out of the question from your point of view ; as
for Canaanite or Phoenician, we saw, according to the latest dis
coveries, that it was a foreign importation from the West, from the
coast, introduced into Palestine from Phoenicia and, having become
the script of Samaria, became that of the Samaritan dialect. This
again is proved by monuments, the ostraca found in the palace of
Omri. Can we suppose the prophets, the worshippers of Jahveh, the
men of Jerusalem and Judaea, using for their writings the script of
the hated Samaritans ? and in this case may we not argue of the
antagonism between Jews and Samaritans, which is clearly enough
expressed by the question of the Samaritan woman to Jesus : (John
iv. 9) ' How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me which
am a Samaritan woman ? ' even admitting that the following words
are not in all the manuscripts : ' For Jews have no dealings with
Samaritans.' Here also we may, in my opinion, use an argument which is
somewhat dangerous, and which has often been misused : viz. the total
absence of any Jewish text of the Old Testament in the Canaanite
writing. I say intentionally Jewish text, because we have in that
writing the Samaritan Pentateuch. Therefore it cannot be argued
that, owing to the climate or to other circumstances, all texts written
in Canaanite have disappeared. Here is one, a long one, a religious
text of the utmost importance, the base of the creed and worship
of a city and its dependence, and it has survived in that Canaanite
script. Can we suppose that the Jews valued their law less than the
Samaritans did theirs, that they did not take as good care to preserve
it ? On the contrary, we hear only of the utmost reverence of the
Jews for their religious books, of the jealous care, more like worship,
which they felt for them, so that it cannot be supposed that they
allowed them to be lost.
An eminent Samaritan scholar, the Rev. Dr. Gaster, tells us that
he has come to the definite conclusion that we have in the Samaritan
Pentateuch the Pentateuch of the Ten Tribes. Now, considering the
difference between the worship of Samaria and that of Jerusalem,

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 61
and the antagonistic feeling which existed between the two, it is
natural to suppose that the Samaritans wished to have a book
of the Law which would be their own, and which was not that of
Jerusalem. Therefore, in addition to the dogmatic differences in
their Pentateuch, they must have written their law in the script
which we know to have been that of Samaria, the script of their own
city. This distinguished it clearly from the Pentateuch of Jerusalem,
and the fact that the Samaritan Pentateuch was written in Phoenician
seems to me a proof that the Jerusalem Pentateuch was not in that
script. If, as it is generally admitted, the prophets and all the writers of
the Old Testament, the oldest of whom is the Jahvist of the ninth
century, wrote in the Phoenician script, what was the reason of
their changing it for the square Hebrew? To my knowledge, nobody
ever explained why the rabbis should have given up their old
writing, the original alphabet of their books, for one derived from
Aramaic, while the Samaritans had strictly preserved the old
characters. Here we find a strange omission on the part of the critics ; they
do not stop at this question of the script, of the alphabet, they do
not inquire into the formation of the text. They always quote
the Massoretic text in square Hebrew with its quite late vowel
system, as if it were an original. They are obliged to admit the
change, since nobody believes the square Hebrew to be old, but they
presuppose that the new text reproduces exactly the old one, and
that there is no other alteration than that of the letters.
Now, putting the Phoenician alphabet in its proper place, giving it
its true character, a foreign script imported from the West and which
became that of Samaria, we find that in Palestine there was no other
writing than Aramaic; Aramaic was the only written language of
the Hebrews. As for Jehudith, the vernacular dialect of Jerusalem,
it had no script of its own, it was unwritten until what used to be
called ' the change ' took place ; until the rabbis adopted the square
Hebrew, not in order to replace another, but to put in writing the
language of Jerusalem, the Jehudith, which had been unwritten
till then. The work of the rabbis was not a change, it was a
creation. What seems to me a very important confirmation of the Hebrew
religious books being in Aramaic is the fact that the name
of God is Aramaic. The Jews from Elephantine have taught us
that the name of God was JAHU or JAHO. The H in the middle
of the word being weak, one can understand the name becoming

62 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
IAO, 10, especially in the transcriptions in foreign languages. This
was certainly the name of God used in Canaan ; one cannot conceive
these men settling in Egypt adopting another name for God than
that with which they were familiar. The proof of it is in the proper
names found with the name of God : in their complete form, when
the name of God is at the end, it is JAHU : Jeshaiahu, Isaiah ;
Jehiskiahu, Hezekiah ; Uzziahu, Uzziah ; Jeremiahu, Jeremiah ;
Hilkiahu, Hilkiah; Joshiahu, Josiah; I might quote many others.
Generally, in the pronunciation, these names are shortened, the end
vowel falls off, and these names become Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nehemiah,
Hilkiah. But if we take those where the name of God is at the beginning,
there we find it complete. There are a great number of examples :
Jehoshua, Jaho is my helper ; and, not as the dictionaries give it,
Jahveh is my helper ; Jehonathan, Jonathan, Jaho gave him ; and
in the same way we have Jehoram, Jehojakin, Jehohanan, Jehojada,
and many of the same kind. Grammarians and lexicographers have
taken great pains to explain how from JAHVEH could be made
JAHO. But all these explanations, given with a great amount
of philological learning, are quite useless. There is no transformation
from JAHVEH, JAHO is the name of God, and there is no proper
name found with JAHVEH complete.
As to the origin of the name, such as it is given in Exod. iii. 14, we
have here a very curious instance of what we call popular etymology.
The name of God is derived from the verb 'to be'; the Hebrew word
'to be' does not lead to the word 'Jahveh', and therefore the lexico
graphers like Koenig say that here is employed a rare form of the
verb ' to be ', which is old and poetical. God says : ' I am that
I am', and Professor van Hoonacker very aptly says that when
Moses delivered this message to the Hebrews, he employed the third
person, and afterwards when men will utter this name, they will say
' he is he who is '. Now the third person present of the verb 'to be '
(he is) in Aramaic is exactly the tetragrammaton, which is perhaps
to be read JAHVEH, though it is not quite certain. The forms
are absolutely correct and regular, we need not speak of artificial or
conventional forms, we have only to turn to Aramaic.
This seems to me conclusive, for we cannot admit that the
Hebrews would have called their national God by a name derived
from a foreign dialect.
It is to be observed that this name is not unspeakable. It is not,
as it was later on in the synagogue, forbidden to pronounce it — ¦
a prohibition which, we are told, was the reason for changing the

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 63
vowel points of the word, so that it might always be read ' Adonai ',
the Lord. If it had been criminal to say that word, it would not
have been written in a letter sent to a stranger who had no respect
for such religious prohibitions.
Various explanations have been given of the interdiction to pro
nounce the name JAHVEH. I do not pretend to solve this difficult
problem, but you will allow me to suggest an explanation which
I bring forward only as an hypothesis. Josephus, in his narrative
parallel to that of the Bible, relates that when Moses received the
command to return to Egypt, God revealed to him his name, which
until then was unknown to men, and ' of which ', says he, ' I have no
right to speak.' Josephus, we know, stayed some time in Alexandria,
he seems to have been well informed in Egyptian matters ; he even
wrote a book against an Egyptian, Apion. I believe Josephus follows
here the Greek version of a verse of Leviticus, xxiv. 16, where the
Hebrew reads : ' He that blasphemeth the Lord, he shall surely be
put to death'; while in the LXX we find: 'He that names the name
of the Lord, let him surely die.'
Certain critics assert that the version of the LXX is due to the
synagogue of Alexandria. If it is so, it is not impossible that the
synagogue reflects here Egyptian influence. The Egyptians attach
great importance to names: to know the name of some genius or
deity, or to speak that name, is the surest means of obtaining from
him the favour required. Even if the deceased has to pass a door,
he has to tell it its name. The knowledge of the name gives a
certain power over the person or the object that bears that name ;
and we know of a myth where the goddess Isis plays a wicked trick
upon her father Ra, causing him to be bitten by a serpent, in order
that he may be compelled to reveal to her his mysterious name,
so that she may rule over him by her enchantments. Overcome by
his sufferings, the old god yields to his daughter and transfers to her
his heart, which contains his mysterious name.
Far be it from me to suppose that the Alexandrian synagogue ever
held such debased doctrines. Nevertheless I think it possible that
the Egyptian conception of the name may have influenced to a certain
degree the Alexandrian rabbis, and have induced them to introduce
that prohibition which is not found in the Old Testament except in
the translation of the LXX. As I said, this explanation is a mere
suggestion, which I do not pretend to give as an established fact.
When did the authors of the Old Testament begin to write in
Aramaic instead of cuneiform ? This question is difficult to answer,
for we have no definite clue. Babylonian cuneiform having origi-

61 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
nated in Mesopotamia and having spread from there over the whole
of Western Asia as far as the Mediterranean, it is natural to think
that the change of script and also of dialect took place in Mesopo
tamia. We cannot give a precise date to that change, which probably
was gradual and did not take place at once throughout the whole of
Asia. It may even have been quicker and more marked in countries
which were not so well accustomed to cuneiform writing and where
clay was not so abundant and not so much used as in Mesopotamia.
We know that it was so in North Syria and in the region of the
Amanus, in the eighth century. The inscriptions of Panammu are at
present the oldest Aramaic documents known, but it seems likely
that it must have spread west of Mesopotamia earlier, because it was
the language and script most convenient for ordinary life.
About the books of the Old Testament following those of Moses
I can only speak conjecturally. I should say that those which were
historical and had more the character of official documents (like
a great many tablets found in Mesopotamia), such as Joshua, Judges,
and the two books of Samuel, were written on tablets in cuneiform,
but that later on, especially in the case of books like the prophets,
Aramaic prevailed, though occasionally cuneiform might still be used,
either by the prophets themselves when they had something particu
larly solemn to write, or in contracts like those found in the excava
tions at Taanach or at Gezer.
Considering the numerous relations which Solomon had with foreign
nations, one can imagine that it was in his time that Aramaic began
to spread in Palestine ; perhaps, at first, not in speech, but in writing.
Nevertheless in his day the Law, the books of Moses, were still in
cuneiform, and I cannot but maintain what I already set forth
years ago, viz. that Solomon, when he built his temple, followed the
example of the Assyrians and Egyptians, and put in the foundations
or somewhere in the wall a cuneiform copy of the Law, or rather of
Deuteronomy, because it was the best means of establishing for ever
that Jerusalem and its temple was the locality designated by these
words : ' the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all
your tribes to put His name there ' (xii. 5), and which was to be His
habitation. If Solomon followed the Assyrians, the document might
have been a clay cylinder put under the wall, or if he followed the
Egyptians, it might have been put under a slab of the pavement.
Anyhow, one understands its being found during the repairs made
by Josiah to the building.
What indicates that it was written in cuneiform seems to me to be
that Hilkiah, the high priest, after the discovery hands the book to

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 65
the secretary of the king, Shaphan, who reads it out at once and
carries it to the king, to whom he reads it again. Why does Hilkiah,
the high priest, not read it himself ? Because he probably could not
read cuneiform, while the secretary of state, Shaphan, who had to
read the letters and treaties which came from Assyria, and also the
legal documents written in cuneiform in the country itself (as we
know from excavations), could read cuneiform easily.
Some pedantic objections have been made to this explanation of
the narrative. Hilkiah says : ' I have found the book of the law in
the house of the Lord.' Therefore, Hilkiah was not ignorant of cunei
form, since he found out that the document was the Law. But one can
easily imagine that cuneiform was not absolutely unknown to Hilkiah ;
especially if he could read in the first line of Deuteronomy the name
of Moses, he would at once conclude that it was the Law, but he was
not able to read it out straight off, as did Shaphan. Besides, it is not
impossible that the tablet had an Aramaic docket like the contracts.
Another criticism of the same kind is that the text does not say :
' and Shaphan read it to him.' But Shaphan did not come alone to
Hilkiah ; the book of Chronicles gives the names of two other officers
who were with him, and one can fancy Shaphan, very much
interested in the discovery, beginning at once to read before the
people who were present, without addressing especially the one or the
other, as would be the case afterwards when he read the book to
the king. I dare say you will agree with me as to the value of such
objections. Scripture gives us the name of the man who, I believe, put the law
and the cuneiform books into Aramaic, viz. : Ezra. Next to Moses,
he is described as the man who was most occupied with the Law ;
' he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which the Lord, the God
of Israel, had given': . . . and he 'had set his heart to seek the law of
the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgements '
(Ezra vii. 6, 10). He was the second lawgiver of the Israelites, for
the Old Testament knows only those two ; there is no mention what
ever made of the various authors of Jahvist, Elohist, and Priestly Code,
and others who have been called into existence by the critics, and who
are said to have written the laws, but to have concealed their names
under that of Moses.
These texts seem very plain, and I see no reason to reject them, or
to give them special interpretations which entirely distort their sense.
Ezra came to Jerusalem at the time of the second return from
captivity, nearly sixty years after the dedication of the temple in the
year 516, so that it is absolutely certain that he was born in Mesopo-
F

66 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
tamia. Ezra was a ready scribe. This could only mean a man who
was able to write the language of the country, Aramaic, and who knew
also cuneiform, which was still in use ; who could understand a cunei
form contract and write an Aramaic docket giving its summary, as the
scribes were accustomed to do at that time.
He was ' a ready scribe in the law of Moses which the Lord God of
Israel had given '. Like the Father of Higher Criticism, I discard at
once this interpretation which may be found in several books, viz. :
he was a ready scribe who wrote under the name of Moses laws which
the Lord God of Israel was said to have given him ; and I stick to the
plain sense : he was a ready scribe in the law, which was that of
Moses, and, as the king Artaxerxes calls him, the priest, the scribe,
even the scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and
of his statutes to Israel, or the priest, the scribe of the law of the
God of Heaven. (Ezra vii. 11 and 12.)
We have seen in a former passage that to Ezra the law of God was the
law of Moses, which the Lord the God of Israel had given, but it was
not so only for him. Long before he came to Jerusalem, Zerubbabel,
when he first arrived, before he began the foundations of the temple,
he and the priests built an altar to the God of Israel, to offer burnt-
offerings thereon, ' as it is written in the law of Moses the man of
God.' l The first act they did after their return was in confor
mity with the law of Moses. Later on, when with the protection
of Darius the Jews ' kept the dedication of the house of God with
joy ',2 they offered sacrifices and ' they set the priests in their
divisions and the Levites in their courses for the service of God,
which is at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book of Moses'.
Therefore, even in the ceremonial laws, they followed the book
of Moses.
Sixty years afterwards appeared Ezra, why and how ? Let us
listen for an instant to Higher Criticism and quote the words of one
of its representatives, Eduard Meyer, one of the masters of the
historical school of Germany. 'The rich and influential Jews of
Babylon succeeded in securing the authority of the King of Persia in
order to execute the religious demands which one of them, the priest
Ezra, the writer of the book of the laws of the God of heaven, had
formulated as an inspiration given to Moses ; by this book of laws we
mean the second part of Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, the first part
of Numbers, the Priestly Code . . . and thus they could enforce these
laws on the renitent Jews of Jerusalem and the neighbouring country
1 Ezra iii. 2. s Ezra vi. 18.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 67
of Judaea, who were occupied with quite different interests.' 1 I will
not attempt to refute this interpretation of the texts, but only quote
a sentence by the same author, found a little further, in which he
gives us his judgement on the two books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
'These two books were originally the end of a religious historical
work written about 240 b.c, and the first part of which consists of
the so-called book of Chronicles. The author seizes every occasion to
let loose his religious fancy and has no insight whatever into the real
events and their inner connexion.' 2 You remember that, according
to Dr. Briggs, the chief merit of Higher Criticism is to vindicate the
authority of Scripture.
According to the texts on which we shall rely,3 as long that it is
not proved that they are erroneous, Ezra was a ready scribe in the
law of Moses; he must have been considered as such not only by
his countrymen, but even by the Persians, by the king himself and his
seven counsellors who sent him ' to inquire concerning Judah and
Jerusalem, according to the law of God which is in thine hand '.
At the same time ' Ezra had set his heart to seek the law of the
Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgements'.
He did not study the Law only for himself, he was a teacher, he
wished to instruct his countrymen in the law of God. We must
notice that what Ezra and Nehemiah consider as most important, as
really binding on their countrymen, is what they call the Law, the law
of Moses. They occasionally mention the prophets, but they do not
give them the same authority ; the prophets' task is to bring back
the people to the law of Moses, but not to initiate new command
ments and statutes.
Now, if he wished to teach the law of Moses to his people, it was
necessary that this law should be in the religious language, in the
literary language of the time. Therefore I cannot help thinking that
he began with turning the cuneiform tablets into Aramaic. That is
in perfect conformity with the circumstances of that epoch and those
in which Ezra lived. He was born in a country where the literary
language was Aramaic, he wrote Aramaic himself, he was a scribe,
a learned man, who, like all the scribes who had to write contracts,
was obliged to know cuneiform as well as Aramaic. This work was
of the same kind as that of many scribes of Babylon and did not
present great difficulties.
I believe therefore that it is to Ezra that must be attributed the
turning of the old Mosaic cuneiform writings into Aramaic, which
1 Ed. Meyer, Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine, p. 1.
2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 Ezra vii. 6, 14.
F 2

68 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
was the script and idiom of that time; besides, there was no other.
He would not have turned it into Canaanite ; the so-called old
Hebrew ; it was the script and dialect of Samaria, we know this
from the excavations, and Ezra would not have adopted the script and
language of Jerusalem's greatest enemies, who tried repeatedly, not
only to hamper, but to prevent altogether the reconstruction of the
temple. It would have been treason for him to adopt the same
Pentateuch as the Samaritans perhaps already had at that time. As
for turning it into Jehudith, Jewish, the language of Jerusalem, it
was not possible, since it had no script, the square Hebrew had not
yet been invented.
How did Ezra come to have these writings of Moses ' in his hand ' ?
Here, as in the case of Abraham, I am going to venture on a conjecture
which I base upon the customs of the Assyrian conquerors. We see
that all the vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar
had brought forth out of Jerusalem, were restored by Cyrus to the
Jews who went back with Zerubbabel. The vessels were known and
had been set apart among the booty brought by the Assyrian con
queror from his various wars. But another custom of the Assyrian
kings, which has proved most precious to us, was to have vast libraries
in which were gathered thousands of documents 'dealing with every
branch of learning and science known to the wise men of their day'.1
We have recovered a great part of the library of Assurbanipal at
Kuyunjik, a quarter of Nineveh. Another, larger still, was at
Nippur, with which was connected a school, in the ruins of which
have been found the tablets on which were the first lessons in writing.
In the library itself, the contents of which are not yet completely
unearthed, there are a considerable number of mathematical, astro
nomical, medical, historical, and legislative tablets, and also many
religious texts, omens and incantations, mythological and astrological
texts, hymns, and prayers, besides a considerable number of letters
and contracts of a business and administrative character. At
Kuyunjik were found ' hundreds of hymns and psalms, pravers and
oracles, in their poetical expression and depth of religious feeling
often not inferior to the best Hebrew poetry'.2 There also were
historical records and chronological lists, and all the documents
concerning the wars, the tributes, the administration of provinces,
and the like. It is not an extravagant hypothesis to suppose that
the cuneiform tablets of the law of Moses, found when Jerusalem
was captured, probably in the temple, were carried away with the
1 Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, p. 121.
2 Hilprecht, loc. cit., p. 122.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 69
vessels to Babylon, where they were deposited in one of these
libraries, and that Ezra, having received the education of a scribe
in one of these schools, had an opportunity of seeing these tablets
and of making a study of them. I do not deny that what I suggest
here is a mere conjecture, but undoubtedly it is in accordance with
the customs of Babylonia, and with what we know of Ezra, of his
being a scribe, and therefore having received the teaching which was
given to such men.
It is interesting to notice that the two lawgivers of Israel, Moses
and Ezra, were both men who had received a thorough education in
the country in which they were born ; Moses was instructed in all
the wisdom of the Egyptians, and Ezra was a ready Mesopotamian
scribe. It seems probable that when Ezra turned the law of Moses into
Aramaic, he divided it into five books. Before that it was only called
the Law, and as it was on tablets one may suppose that it was one
of these works consisting of a whole series like those found at Nippur.1
Ezra may also have arranged these tablets in order, putting each
of them in its proper place, so as to make a running and continuous
text, which, having been turned into Aramaic, was on a roll of skin.
When he arrived at Jerusalem, Ezra found that 'the priests who
had been set in the divisions and also Levites in their courses for the
service of God, as it is written in the book of Moses ' had broken the
commandments; they had not separated themselves from the people
of the land, and as he says (ix. 2) ' they have taken of their daughters
for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy seed have mingled
themselves with the peoples of the land, yea the hand of the princes
and rulers hath been chief in this trespass'. Ezra describes the
shock which he received on hearing from the princes, so that ' he sat
astonied until the evening oblation'. We have in his book his
prayer, in which he made confession, weeping and casting himself
down before the house of God.
This seems to have produced such a great impression upon the
people, that they gathered in great numbers around him, they con
fessed that they had trespassed against their God, and they declared
themselves ready to make a covenant ' with our God to put away all
the wives and such that are born of them . . . and let it be done
according to the law'. Therefore these people recognized that they
had trespassed against the law; they evidently acknowledged the
authority of that law, and submitted to it so completely that they
agreed to separate themselves from the strange women.
1 Hilprecht, loc. cit., p. 530.
F 3

70 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Is it likely that they would have done it so readily, if the Law had
been something new to them, if Ezra had not revived in them the
feeling of respect for a commandment which they knew, but which
they had disregarded ? For one can imagine that during the sixty
years between the dedication of the temple and the arrival of Ezra,
some of the commandments may have been forgotten or neglected,
and when Ezra suddenly recalled them, it produced an effect of the
same kind as when the Law was discovered under Josiah.
If, according to Eduard Meyer, Ezra had brought them a law of his
own invention, which he had concocted with the well-to-do Jews of
Babylon, would the Jews of Jerusalem have submitted at once, would
they so easily have dismissed their wives ? For where would Ezra
have found the authority to enforce the law upon them ? The letter
of the king of Persia does not enact a new law or commandment,
it only says this : ' What is commanded by the God of heaven,
let it be done exactly for the house of the God of heaven.' Ezra
does not pretend to bring to the Jews the words of God ; he does not
come forward as a God-sent legislator or even as a prophet ; he does
not say, like Isaiah or Ezekiel: 'Thus saith the Lord'; he always
speaks of the law of Moses, and this law of Moses must have
appealed to the feelings of his countrymen. Otherwise there would
probably have been opposition to what he commanded, and he would
not have so quickly secured the obedience of his countrymen.
Did Ezra remain in Jerusalem, or did he return to Babylon ?
We cannot tell, we do not hear of him again till Nehemiah also came
to Jerusalem, and the law was solemnly proclaimed : ' They spake
unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which
the Lord had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the
law before the congregation' (Neh. viii. 1-5). Therefore Ezra was well
known as a man who had a thorough knowledge of the law and had
it in his possession. 'Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood,
which they had made for the purpose ; . . . and he opened the book in
the sight of all the people ; . . . and when he had opened it all the
people stood up.' Therefore they all wished to hear that law of
Moses which the Lord had commanded to Israel.
Here there is an important point to note : The Levites ' caused the
people to understand . . . and they read in the book in the law of
God distinctly '. Here the margin says : ' With an interpretation,
and they gave the sense so that they understood the reading' or
' caused them to understand '. This seems to show clearly that the
Law was not written in the language spoken by the hearers. The Law
was in Aramaic, and the idiom of the people was Jewish, the dialect

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW

71

of Judah and Jerusalem, which, as we know from Nehemiah also,
was not the idiom of regions so little distant as Ashdod, Amnion, and
Moab. The Levites did what an English clergyman would do in
a country parish in Yorkshire or Norfolk, if he were explaining the
Bible in the dialect of the peasants.
But what is particularly striking is that we have here a proof that
the law of Moses which they had, and out of which they read during
several days, was the whole of the Pentateuch. We find it summed
up in the prayer of the Levites. We recognize, gathered and put in
their proper places, all the components which the critics have assigned
to different authors and to different dates. This prayer begins with
an abridged history of the people of Israel, but the longest and most
detailed part is that which is related in the Pentateuch.

(ix. 6) 'Thou art the Lord,
even thou alone, thou hast made
heaven, the heaven of heavens
with all their host, the earth and
all things that are thereon, the
seas and all that is in them, and
thou preservest them all, and the
host of heaven worshippeth thee.'
' Thou art the Lord the God,'
Jahveh Elohim.

The fact of God being the
creator, we know from the first
chapter of Genesis, that is the
Priestly Code. There is no men
tion of man's creation except in
the few words of the following
verse. You remember the two names
of God, which are at the begin
ning of the narrative of the crea
tion of Adam, and where Elohim
is said to have been added by the
redactor (p. 23). Here these two
names sum up chap, ii.-iii. 24.

It is not of Adam that they have to speak, they go over at once to
Abram :

'Thou didst choose Abram and
broughtest him forth out of Ur of
the Chaldees' . . .
' and gavest him the name of
Abraham ' . . .
'thou madest a covenant with
him ' . . .
' to give him the land of the
Canaanite, the Hittite and other
nations' . . .

This is Jahvist.
Priestly Code.
Jahvist. Redactor of Genesis.

72 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
I cannot make here a complete analysis of this prayer. All the
documents of the critics are found in it. We have already recog
nized three, here are three more :
' In their rebellion they ap- Numbers xiv. 4. ' And they
pointed a captain to return to said to one another : Let us make
their bondage.' a captain and let us return into
Egypt.' This is J E, the docu
ment where J and E cannot well
be separated.
' Yea, when they had made These last are the very words
them a molten calf and said : of Exodus (xxxii. 1—8) : ' These be
This is thy god that brought thee thy gods, O Israel, which brought
out of Egypt.' thee up out of the land of Egypt.'
This is due to the Elohist, the
writer of the Northern Kingdom
in the eighth century^.
At the end of the narrative drawn from the Pentateuch we find
Deuteronomy :
' Moreover, thou gavest king- In Deuteronomy ii. 24. ' I have
doms and peoples ... so that given into thine hand Sihon the
they possessed the land of Sihon Amorite, king of Heshbon, and
. . . even the land of the king of his land.'
Heshbon . . .'
And this passage, which is most striking :
Nehemiah : ' Yea, forty years Deuteronomy viii. 4 : ' Thy
didst thou sustain them in the raiment waxed not old upon thee,
wilderness, and they lacked no- neither did thy feet swell these
thing, their clothes waxed not forty years.'
old and their feet swelled not.'
I cannot carry this analysis further. Nearly every sentence of this
prayer, as far as verse 24, can be traced to one of the so-called docu
ments of the Pentateuch, and, according to the opinions of the critics,
some of these documents did not yet exist in Nehemiah's time. One
of them is the Priestly Code, which the prayer quotes in other sentences
than those I have mentioned, for instance in what is said of the sabbath,
where it clearly alludes to Leviticus. If this book is what the critics
contend, it could not have been written at the time of Nehemiah. Its
authors, the priestly school described by Professor Skinner x as ' a school
of juristic writers whose main task was to systematize the mass of
' Genesis, p. lvii.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 73
ritual regulations which had accumulated in the hands of the Jerusalem
priesthood, and to develop a theory of religion which grew out of
them ', was certainly not yet founded at Jerusalem, where there was
hardly a settled government, and where the temple had not even
been completely reconstructed. And the redactor of Genesis, who is
supposed to have made a book from 264 fragments, probably was not
yet born.
The prayer goes on describing the conquest of Canaan from the
book of Joshua, and afterwards it sums up what we call the religious
history of the Israelites to the day of the festival, mentioning the
prophets, but not one single name, not even that of David, and this
part of the prayer is shorter and much less precise than that which is
derived from the Pentateuch. It deals with generalities and not with
definite facts, such as the giving of the Law by the hand of Moses.
Evidently,to Nehemiah as to Ezra, the Law is the basis of their faith,
it is the foundation on which rests their existence, and both they
and the people regard this law as written by one man.
According to rabbinical tradition, Ezra settled the canon of Scrip
ture, restored, corrected, and edited the whole sacred volume. This
seems quite in keeping with what we know of him, as being a Jew,
a Mesopotamian scribe, and being engaged in the same kind of work
as such men. For compiling the sacred volume, the first thing he had
to do was to turn into Aramaic the cuneiform tablets of Moses and
the early writers. Aramaic spread more and more in Palestine and
became also a spoken language, without superseding entirely the
Jehudith, the dialect of Jerusalem and Judaea. The sacred books
must all have been in Aramaic. Our Lord quotes the twenty-second
psalm in that idiom, and certainly the other ones used in the temple
were in the same language. I cannot help thinking that, if the
Psalms were in Aramaic, it must have been the same with Isaiah, the
prophets, and generally the books which, with the Law, were read in the
synagogues. In this sense Ezra would have been the second legislator of
Israel. The law originated with Moses, it was revived by Ezra's
action after a temporary disappearance, when God's people were
again in Jerusalem. Scripture mentions only these two men with
a legislative capacity; there are no other lawgivers, and I see no
reason to divide their work between several composers for whose
existence nothing vouches except the conjectures of the critics.
Since the books of the temple and of the synagogue were in
Aramaic, the translation of the LXX was made from an Aramaic
text, and this is confirmed by what we read in Josephus. He relates

74 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
that Demetrius of Phaleron, the librarian of Ptolemy Philadelphia,
advised the king, in order to enrich and complete his library, to have
the books of the Jews translated, which were well worthy of being
placed in the king's collection of volumes of all kinds. He says that
these books were written with the characters and in the language of
the Jews. This is clear : The language of the Jews in Egypt, we
know it from the Elephantine papyri, was Aramaic. This sentence
alone is sufficient to prove that the translators worked on Aramaic texts.1
But this is not all. The librarian says that ' the characters are similar
to those of the Syrians, and their language sounded alike ', this points
decidedly to Aramaic, ' but that it was of a peculiar kind (ISioTpoirov).'
These last words are not in all manuscripts, some read ' but have
certain peculiarities', which can only refer to the books mentioned
just before, and of which it is said that they would be very difficult
to translate. This shows, not as some of the translators have under
stood, that these books were in a language distinct from the Syrian,
but that their tone was peculiar and unknown. It is certain that the
books of the Hebrews must have sounded very strange to Greek ears,
and a great many points must have embarrassed the translators, for
instance, the names of God, and particularly that of Jahveh, which,
following the Alexandrian synagogue, they rendered by 'the Lord'.
We cannot consider as historical the narrative of Josephus, who,
copying Aristaeus, tells us of the seventy-two old men, sent by
Eleazar from Jerusalem, who translated the books of the Law. It is
quite probable that the whole sacred book was not translated at once.
The translators who worked under the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus
may have begun with the Law, and it seems probable, as M. Theodore
Reinach supposes, that it was under the influence and for the benefit
of the Jewish congregation at Alexandria that Ezra's Aramaic version
was turned into Greek.
The consequence is that the LXX is older than the Massoretic text,
as is evident from passages where they differ from the Hebrew
text, especially where there are geographical names, as in the book of
Joshua. And this opens up a prospect that some day Egypt may
again bring unexpected help to the study of Scripture. Among the
numerous papyri which have been discovered, there are fragments of
the LXX. It is not unreasonable to hope that some day a fortunate
excavator may bring to light a complete copy of the LXX.
We have now only one more step to take. How did Ezra's
Aramaic version become the Hebrew of the Bible, written in the
square Hebrew ? 1 Josephus, Ant. Jud. XII, ii. 1.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 75
All Hebrew scholars agree that the square Hebrew is of a recent
date. Koenig says it appears first in the year 176 b. c, but the general
opinion places it later. It is completely formed in the inscriptions
of Jerusalem and its surroundings, which are about the time of the
Christian era, but then it is found only in inscriptions, and they may
be earlier than manuscripts.
Many years ago an eminent French scholar, le Marquis de Vogue,
established that the square Hebrew was a derivation, not from the
Canaanite or Phoenician, but from Aramaic, and this has now been
universally adopted. The text of the Old Testament was therefore
constituted in this way, according to the critics : It was written in
Hebrew, the original language of the Jews, the language of Canaan,
the oldest written specimen of which is the Song of Deborah in the
Book of Judges. The alphabet used for these books down to the
Christian era was the Canaanite or Phoenician, to which for this
reason the name of Old Hebrew has been given. At a date which is
approximately the Christian era, the script was changed, the so-called
Old Hebrew was abandoned and a new alphabet was adopted, which
was derived, not from that which had been used for about ten centuries,
but from Aramaic, the script of a foreign language then spreading
more and more in Palestine.
Nobody denies the change of script which is considered as some
thing quite secondary, and as having taken place naturally, without
affecting the language of the books. It is rather surprising that this
adoption of a new script should have been treated as an indifferent
matter, and that no one should have inquired why this change took
place, what was the reason of it, and why the rabbis, who were the
authors of a new script for their books, did not adopt a modification
of their own alphabet, which had been used from early times and
for centuries, instead of having recourse to that of an alien tongue.
The views as to the history of the Old Testament, to which we
have been led by the most recent discoveries, offer us a ready explana
tion of this change and of its character. We have maintained that
the Hebrews, being Arameans, had a literary and linguistic life,
intimately connected with that of the Mesopotamians. They were
an Aramean people speaking their own dialect and having Babylonian
cuneiform as a literary and written language. This we have learnt
from the discovery of the tablets of Tel el Amarna and Boghaz Keui.
In Palestine, as in Mesopotamia, Babylonian cuneiform became
Aramaic language and script, Aramaic was the literary language of
Canaan, a language which was used also in ordinary life. This
language of Canaan was revealed to us by the Elephantine papyri.

76 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Parallel with the literary language (with Aramaic), Jewish (Jehudith)
was still the spoken and unwritten dialect, the 'patois 'of Jerusalem,
for Jewish was not written in Canaanite characters. This alphabet
came from the northern coast, from Phoenicia, and was adopted by
the Samaritans, as we know from the ostraca found at Samaria and
from the Samaritan Pentateuch. After the return from the captivity
the Jews had neither language nor script of their own for their sacred
books, which were part of the Aramaic literature.
The return from captivity is the birth of Judaism. Those who
returned were only the remnants of Judah and Benjamin, part of the
Southern Kingdom. From that time the whole life of the nation is
concentrated in Jerusalem. The old kingdom of David and Solomon
is no more. Israel has become Judah, the name of Jews supersedes
that of Israelites, they still speak Jehudith, it is their dialect, though
Ezra reads to them the Law in Aramaic.
From that time also Jerusalem assumed greater importance, the
more so since the ten tribes never joined Judah again, and we notice
the tendency of its inhabitants, which comes out so strongly in the
New Testament, to consider themselves as the elect, those who had
Abraham for their father, and who felt an undisguised contempt for
the Gentiles. Their national existence was intimately connected with
their worship, and with the strictest observance of their law. But
such as it came out of Ezra's hand, this law, their sacred books,
had no national Jewish garb, it was only a part of the Aramaic
literature. It was necessary to separate the books of Moses and the prophets
from foreign writings, so that they should become exclusively Jewish.
The hated Samaritans had that privilege, they could not be confused
with the Jews or with the other neighbours, since they had their
Pentateuch written in their own script and in their own dialect, which
differed but little from that of the Jews. 1 believe the rabbis did the
same as the Samaritans. They had their own dialect, the dialect of
Jerusalem, the Jehudith, which was probably very old and had
changed but little in the course of time, as is very often the case
with popular idioms. It may have been very similar to that which
was spoken by the people on the wall in Hezekiah's time. Of this
spoken dialect, they made a literary language by adapting to it
a script, the square Hebrew ; the new alphabet was derived from
Aramaic, to which they were accustomed. It did not differ much
from it, but sufficiently to be distinguished. When they turned
their books into Jehudith, or, as we may call it now, Hebrew,
the difference was merely dialectical, as one may judge in reading

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW 77
the papyri of Elephantine, which any one knowing Hebrew will
understand.
The change from the Aramaic script to the square Hebrew is not
a mere alteration of the script without any importance ; it is the
giving to Hebrew its existence as an individual language ; it is
making a literary language out of a popular dialect ; and in fact,
the rabbinical literature rose and grew from the moment when the
square Hebrew was invented. The script was not perfect from the
beginning, for a long time the rabbis improved it, and it was complete
only with the adoption of the vowel points several centuries after
wards. Jewish, the spoken dialect of Jerusalem, written in square
Hebrew, is the Hebrew of the Bible. Therefore a new script was
necessary, and we understand why the new alphabet was derived
from Aramaic. The so-called change was made for very grave and
serious motives, it was not a mere literary fancy or a graphic simpli
fication, which are the only reasons at present attributed to it.
And now, having taken the final step and reached the present form
of the Old Testament, I may be allowed to revert to my starting-point
and to state again the principles by which I have been guided. I said
I would follow strictly the method of the critics, such as it has been
described by Dr. Briggs in the following words : x ' The older inter
preters, who did not understand the position of the Hebrew language
in the development of the Shemitic family, . . . lived almost in another
world. The modern Hebrew scholars are working in far more
extended relations, and upon vastly deeper principles.' I believe
I have not deviated from these principles. Studying the ' position '
and nature of the Hebrew language, I have come to the conclusion
that Hebrew was Jewish, the spoken dialect of Jerusalem, put in
writing by the rabbis about the time of the Christian era. I have
' worked in more extended relations ', I have consulted archaeology ;
the tablets of Tel el Amarna have shown me that the early books of the
Hebrews must have been written in Babylonian cuneiform ; the papyri
of Elephantine that Aramaic had followed cuneiform ; and Sir Arthur
Evans's discoveries that the Canaanite script was of a foreign origin,
having come from Crete and having been first used on the coast.
I believe I may say that these conclusions fulfil in a certain measure
the learned divine's expectation : ' We should not be surprised at
new and almost revolutionary results.' Some of these results are new,
I have to thank for them the work of the excavators, and for many
they will be revolutionary, because they challenge this idea which up
to the present has been considered as undisputed and unassailable :
1 Briggs, loc. cit., p. 475.

78 THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
That the books of the Old Testament are in the language used by
their authors, and were written in the Old Hebrew script.
On the other hand, my hearers will bear witness that I have not
departed from the text of Scripture. In reference to the composition
and writing of the Law, I have onlyr dealt with the two men who are
spoken of in that respect, that is to say, Moses and Ezra. I have
invented no Jahvist and Elohist authors, no school of juristic writers,
no advisers of Zerubbabel encouraging him to rebel. I have
endeavoured not to draw any inference which I could not base,
either on documents brought to light in the great discoveries which
are the foundations of my conclusions, or on a text of Scripture ; and
I have made a point always of insisting on the conjectural character
of an idea for which I had not that kind of support. It seems to me
that in such grave researches, touching such important subjects, what
has first to be required from the writer is sincerity. I have always laid
down as a rule to follow the lead of conscience, and this emboldens
me to face the objections or attacks which I expect from the critics,
and perhaps their contempt. I shall deem myself fortunate if these
lectures have induced some of my hearers to look more closely into
the Old Testament, and to appreciate more fully its magnificent
construction and its majestic beauty.

INDEX

Abd-hiba, 37.
Abi-milki of Tyre, 37.
Abram, Abraham, 16, 18, 23, 26, 27,
29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39,40,
47, 52, 57, 68, 76.
Adam, 22, 23.
Aegean civilization, 1.
Ahab, 48, 49, 50.
Ahiqar, 52.
Akkad, Agade, city, 27, 28.
— country, 28.
Akkadian language, 28, 31.
Akkadians, 27.
Alasia, country, 36.
Alexandria, 63, 74.
— synagogue at, 74.
Amanus, Mount, 58, 64.
Amenophis HI, king, 36.
IV, king, 36.
Ammon, land of, 52, 53.
Ammunira of Beirut, 37.
Amos, prophet, 15, 24, 59.
Amraphel. See Hammurabi.
Amurru, 28, 29, 36.
Amyrtaeus, king, 51.
Anonymous books, 4.
Arabic language, 57.
Arabs, 29.
Aram, 58.
Aramaic language, 51, 52, 53, 56-61,
63-7, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77.
— script, 26, 45, 60, 75, 77.
— writers, 59.
Arameans, 40, 51, 58, 75.
Arioch, king, 30.
Ark of the Covenant, 14, 15, 20, 26.
Artaxerxes, king, 66.
Ashdod, 52, 53.
Asherah idol, 20, 48.
Assurbanipal, king, 68.
Assyria, 36, 58.
Assyrian languages 33.
— writers, 59.
Assyrians, 28, 64.
Assyriologists, 27.
Astruc, 5, 6, 22.
Aziru, 36.
Baal, 48, 50.
Babel, tower of, 9.
Babylon, 9, 28, 30, 35, 36, 67, 69.

Babylonia, 31, 43, 45.
Babylonian cuneiform, 31, 32, 35, 36-
40, 42, 44, 46, 52, 57, 63, 75, 77.
Babylonians, 28, 29.
Bagoas, 51, 56.
Balawat, bronze gates of, 57.
Bantu, nation, 35.
Ben Hadad, king, 58.
Benjamin, tribe of, 76.
Berger, Philippe, 45.
Berne, Bernese, 54, 55.
Berosus, 27.
Boghaz-Keui, 37, 39, 75.
Boucher de Perthes, 1.
Briggs, Dr., 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 19, 24, 33,
35, 36, 59, 67, 77.
Cain, 9.
Cambyses, king, 56, 57.
Canaan, land of, 18, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36,
38, 39, 73.
— language of, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59,
75.
Canaanite alphabet, Old Hebrew Phoe
nician, 26, 38, 45, 46-50, 53, 60, 61,
68, 75-8.
Canaanites, 33.
Carthage, 49.
Chaldeans, 27.
Chedorlaomer, king, 30.
Chemosh, god, 48, 49.
Chronicles, book of, 4, 65, 67.
Cilician-Syrian coast, 47.
Components of the Pentateuch in
Nehemiah's prayer, 71-2.
Conder, Col., 42,44.
Cosmogony, 12.
Creation, the, 14, 23, 43.
Crete, 1, 46, 77.
Cyprus, 46, 47.
Cyrus, king, 68.
Damascus, 27, 58, 59.
Daniel, book of, 4.
Darius I, king, 51, 52, 57, GG.
David, king, 46, 73, 76.
Deborah, Song of, 75.
Decalogue, Ten Commandments, 15,
21, 45.
Demetrius of Phaleron, 74.
Deuteronomy, 10, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22,
26, 40, 41, 42, 64, 65.

80

INDEX

Dialects, 34.
French, 37.
Semitic, 35, 36, 38, 52.
Swiss, 34, 35, 54.
Dinah, 9.
Dockets, Aramaic, 58, 65.
Dragoman, 37, 40.
Driver, Dr., 19, 20, 21, 30, 41.
Dungi, king, 28.
Ebal, Mount, 41.
Ecclesiastes, 4.
Egypt, 1, 8, 15, 16, 17, 33, 36-9, 42,
43, 44, 51, 55, 56, 57, 75.
Egyptian language, 40.
Egyptians, 30, 39, 40, 69.
Eichhorn, J. G., 5, 6, 10, 22, 26, 44,
66.
Elamites, 28, 29, 30.
Eleazar, 74.
Elephantine, 38, 56, 57, 61.
— papyri, 1^51, 55, 58, 59, 60, 74, 75,
77.
Eliezer, 33.
Ellasar (Larsa), city, 29, 30.
Elohim, 22, 23, 24, 44.
Elohist, Ephraimitic writer, 8-12, 15,
17, 21, 22, 24, 78.
Ephraimites, 52.
Esarhaddon, king, 59.
Esau, 9.
Esther, book of, 4.
Ethbaal, king, 48.
Ethiopians, 39, 56.
Evans, Sir Arthur, 1, 46, 47, 59, 77.
Eve, 22, 23.
Exodus, book of, 22, 26, 42, 44, 66.
Ezekiel, 70.
Ezra, 4, 6, 43, 45, 65-74, 76, 78.
— book of, 4.
Forgery, 19, 20.
F'ustel de Coulanges, 2.
Galilaean, 53.
Gaster, Dr., 60.
Gautier, Prof., 30.
Genealogies, 32.
Genesis, 5, 6, 8-11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19,
22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 42, 43, 73.
German language, 34, 35, 54, 55.
Gezer, city, 38, 64.
Gihon, spring of, 49.
Gileadites, 52.
Gunkel, 30.
Gutium, city, 31.
Haggai, 4.
Hall, Mr., 47.
Hammurapi, Hammurabi, Ammuraphi,
Amraphel, king, 29, 31, 32, 40.

Haran, city of, 26, 29, 31, 35.
Hattusil, king, 38.
Haupt, Dr., 11, 30.
Hebrew language, 26, 33, 35, 36, 37,
45, 52, 59, 75, 76, 77-
— old. See Sanskrit alphabet.
— square, 24, 26, 41, 42, 45, 61, 75.
Hebrews, 38, 44, 45, 49, 50, 56-9, 74,
75, 77.
Hecataeus, 27.
Hexateuch, 8, 9.
Hezekiah, king, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56,76.
Higher Criticism, 2-6, 8, 10, 11, 13,
15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 44, 66,
67.
Hilkiah, 19, 64, 65.
Hiram, king, 45, 47.
Hittites, 37, 38.
Homer, 1, 5.
Hosea, 15, 56, 59.
Hyksos kings, 16.
Interpretation system, 13.
Isaiah, 4, 15, 24, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55,
56, 59, 70, 73.
Isin, city, 28, 29.
Isis, goddess, 63.
Islamism, 57.
Israel, 2, 10, 11, 18.
J1, 9.
Jacob, 9, 10, 23.
Jahu, Jaho, 61.
— improper names, 62.
Jahveh, 18, 21-4, 44, 60, 62, 63, 74.
Jahvist Judaic writer, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15,
16,17,21,23,24,42,78.
Japahi of Gezer, 37.
JE,9. Jeremiah, 4, 56.
Jeremias, Dr., 45.
Jerusalem, 12, 21, 37, 49, 52, 59, 60,
C6, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77.
— temple of, 14, 64, 68.
Jewish language, Jehudith, 45, 53, 54,
55, 59, 60, 61, 68, 70, 73, 76, 77.
— settlers, 51, 52.
Jews, 12, 14, 38, 45, 52, 66, 68, 70,
74, 76.
Jezebel, 48.
Jitia of Ashkelon, 37.
Job, book of, 4.
Joel, 4, 16, 19.
Jonah, book of, 4.
Joseph, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 23, 43.
Josephus, 27, 32, 38, 40, 63, 73, 74.
Joshua, 15, 41, 73.
— book of, 4, 8, 64.
Josiah, king, 10, 19, 21, 26, 56, 64.
Judaea, 53, 54, 67, 73.

INDEX

81

Judah, tribe or land of, 51, 55, 59, 67,
71,76. '>>>',
Judaism, 76.
Judges, book of, 4, 64, 75.
Judith, book of, 27, 32.
King, Mr. , 27, 28.
Kings, books of, 4. 53.
Koenig, Prof., 17, 59, 62, 75.
Kuyunjik, 58.
— Kbrary at, 68.
Lamentations, book of, 4.
Lehmann-Haupt, Prof., 29, 30, 31.
Levites, 26, 69, 70, 71.
Leviticus, 13, 26, 44, 63, 66, 72.
Lot, 26, 29, 33.
Malachi, 4.
Manasseh, king, 19, 20.
Massora, 26.
Massoretic version, 24, 74,
Medeba, city, 49.
Megiddo, 56.
Memphis, Nopb, 39, 51, 56.
Mesha, king, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53.
Mesopotamia, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35, 36,
39, 40, 42, 57, 58, 64, 65, 75.
Mesopotamians, 30, 40, 69, 75.
Meyer, Prof. Eduard, 66, 70.
Minoan alphabet, 46, 47.
— Gaza, 46.
— settlements, 46, 47.
Minoans, 47.
Mitanni, land of, 36, 37.
Moab, land of, 19, 21, 26, 48, 49,52, 53.
Mohammedan conquest, 57.
Moses, 4, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33, 39,40,42,43,
44, 57, 62-73, 76, 78.
Mycenae, 1.
Nebuchadnezzar, 14, 68.
Neco, king, 56.
Nehemiah, 50, 53, 59, 67, 70, 72.
— book of, 4, 67, 71.
Nibelungen, 5.
Nicolas the Damascene, 27.
Nippur, library at, 68, 69.
Noeldeke, 30.
Noph. See Memphis.
Numbers, book of, 26, 44, 66.
Omri, king, 48, 49, 60.
Panammu, 64.
Patriarchs, 12.
Pentateuch, 4, 6, 12, 13, 1.5, 17, 21,
22, 23, 26, 30, 39, 42, 44, 71, 73.
— in Nehemiah's prayer, 71, 72.
— Samaritan, 46, 60, 61, 76.
Peter tbe Apostle, 53.

Pharaoh, 17, 39.
Philistines, 46, 47.
Phoenicia, 31 , 47, 77.
Phoenician alphabet. See Canaanite.
— language, 33, 37.
Phoenicians, 29, 45, 47, 49, 50.
Priestly Code, 6, 9, 12, 14, 22, 24, 26,
30. 66, 72.
Priestly school, 12, 14.
Prophetical Narrative, 9.
Prophets, 59, 64.
Proverbs, book of, 4.
Psalms, 4, 73.
Psammetichus II, 56.
Pseudonymous books, 4, 20.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, 74.
Ra, god, 63.
Rabbis, 42, 61 , 75.
Rabshakeh, 53.
Rameses II, 38.
Redactor, the, 9, 15, 18, 23, 73.
Reinach, Theodore, 74.
Reisner, Mr., 48
Ribaddi of Gebal, 37.
Rimsin, king, 30.
'PcOjuaiVri, 51.
Romans, 49.
Ruth, book of, 4.
Sachau, Prof., 52, 56.
Samaria, 48, 49, 60, 68.
Samaritan Pentateuch. See Pentateuch.
— ostraca, 48, 50, 60, 76.
Samaritans, 60, 61, 76.
Samuel, books of, 4, 64.
Sarai', Sarah, 23, 26.
Sargon, king, 28, 29, 31, 39.
Sayce, Prof. , 42.
Schiffer, Dr., 59.
Schliemann, 1.
Sellin, Dr., 38.
Semites, 27, 28, 29, 33, 36, 39.
Sennacherib, king, 58.
Septuagint, the, 9, 42, 47, 63, 73, 74.
Shamash, god, 40, 59.
Shaphan, 19, 65.
Shibboleth, 52.
Shiloah, inscription of, 46, 49, 50.
Shinear, land of, 31.
Sinai, mount, 13, 21, 24, 26.
Sin-Muballit, king, 29.
Sippar, city of, 27.
Skinner, Prof., 12, 18, 30, 72.
Socin and Kautzsch, 9, 11.
Solomon, 4, 14, 45, 47, 48, 50, 64, 76.
Song of Songs, 4.
Stephen, 26.
Sumer, land of, 28.
Sumerian language, 31.
Sumerians, 27, 28.

82

INDEX

Surata of Akko, 37.
Susa, 35.
Switzerland, 34.
Taanach, city, 38, 64.
Tabernacle, 14, 15.
Tel el Amarna, tablets of, 1, 36, 37,
38, 39, 45, 47, 51, 57, 75, 77.
Terah, 26, 29, 32, 43.
Tetragrammaton, the, 62.
Tharbis, princess, 39.
ThothmesIII, 36.
Thureau-Dangin, M., 27.
Tideal, king, 31.
Tirhakah, king, 56.
Tradition, 2, 6, 8.
Tyre, city of, 35, 37, 45, 47, 48, 49.
Ur of the Chaldees, city, 26, 28, 29.
van Hoonacker, Prof., 45, 46, 51, 53,
54, 55, 59.

Vogue', Marquis de, 75.
Voltaire, 20.

Wellhauseu, 9.
Westphal, A., 19.
Wiener, Mr., 42.
Wolff, 5.

Xerxes, 51.
Yeb, fortress of, 56.
Zephaniah, 4.
Zerubbabel, 30, 50, 66, 68, 78.
Zidon, 37, 47.
Zidonians, 47, 48.
Zimrida of Lachish, 37.
— of Zidon, 37.
Zoan, 51.

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