THE BIBLE. 



295 



Graf the idea that the Deuteronomic hand is the 

 hand of the last editor of the whole history from 

 Genesis to Kings, or, at least, of the non-Leviti- 

 cal parts thereof. This conclusion is not strin- 

 gent, for a good deal may be said in favor of the 

 view that the Deuteronomic style, which is very 

 capable of imitation, was adopted by writers of 

 different periods. But even so it is difficult to 

 suppose that the legislative part of Deuteronomy 

 is as old as Moses. If the law of the kingdom 

 in Deuteronomy xvii. was known in the time of 

 the Judges, it is impossible to comprehend 

 Judges viii. 23, and, above all, 1 Samuel viii. 1. 

 That the law of high places given in this part of 

 the Pentateuch was not acknowledged till the 

 time of Josiah, and was not dreamed of by Sam- 

 uel and Elijah, we have already seen. The Deu- 

 teronomic law is fam liar to Jeremiah, the young- 

 er contemporary of Josiah, but is referred to by 

 no prophet of earlier date. And the whole the- 

 ological standpoint of the book agrees exactly 

 with the period of prophetic literature, and gives 

 the highest and most spiritual view of the law, 

 to which our Lord himself directly attaches his 

 teaching, and which cannot be placed at the be- 

 ginning of the theocratic development without 

 making the whole history unintelligible. Be- 

 yond doubt the book is, as already hinted, a pro- 

 phetic legislative programme ; and, if the author 

 put his work in the mouth of Muses instead of 

 giving it, with Ezekiel, a directly prophetic form, 

 he did so, not iu pious fraud, but simply because 

 his object was not to give a new law, but to ex- 

 pound and develop Mosaic principles in relation 

 to new needs. And, as ancient writers are not 

 accustomed to distinguish historical data from 

 historical deductions, he naturally presents his 

 views in dramatic form in the mouth of Moses. 

 If, then, the Deuteronomic legislation is not ear- 

 lier than the prophetic period of the eighth and 

 seventh centuries, and, accordingly, is subsequent 

 to the elements of the Pentateuchal history which 

 we have seen to be known to Hosea, it is plain that 

 the chronology of the composition of the Penta- 

 teuch may be said to centre in the question wheth- 

 er the Levitico-Elohistic document, which em- 

 braces most of the laws in Leviticus with large 

 parts of Exodus and Numbers, is earlier or later 

 than Deuteronomy. The answer to this question 

 turns almost wholly on archaeological inquiries, 

 for there is, perhaps, no quite conclusive reference 

 to the Elohistic record in the prophets before the 

 Exile, or in Deuteronomy itself. And here arises 

 the great dispute which divides critics, and makes 

 our whole construction of the origin of the his- 



torical books uncertain. The Levitical laws give 

 a graduated hierarchy of priests and Levites ; 

 Deuteronomy regards all Levites as at least pos- 

 sible priests. Round this difference, and points 

 allied to it, the whole discussion turns. We 

 know, mainly from Ezekiel xliv., that before the 

 Exile the strict hierarchical law was not in force, 

 apparently never had been in force. But can 

 we suppose that the very idea of such a hier- 

 archy is the latest point of liturgical develop- 

 ment ? If so, the Levitical element is the latest 

 thing in the Pentateuch, or, in truth, in the his- 

 torical series to which the Pentateuch belongs ; 

 or, en the opposite view, the hierarchic theory 

 existed as a legal programme long before the Ex- 

 ile, though it was fully carried out only after Ezra. 

 As all the more elaborate symbolic observances 

 of the ritual law are bound up with the hierar- 

 chical ordinances, the solution of this problem 

 has issues of the greatest importance for the 

 theology as well as for the literary histqry of the 

 Old Testament. 



And now a single word on the way in which 

 these various elements, mirroring so many sides 

 of the national life, and dating from so various 

 ages, came to be fused into a single history, and 

 yet retained so much of their own identity. The 

 Semitic genius does not at all lie in the direction 

 of organic structure. In architecture, in poetry, 

 in history, the Hebrew adds part to part instead 

 of developing a single notion. The temple was 

 an aggregation of small cells, the longest Psalm 

 is an acrostic, and so the longest Biblical history 

 is a stratification and not an organism. This 

 process was facilitated by the habit of anony- 

 mous writing, and the accompanying lack of all 

 notion of anything like copyright. If a man 

 copied a book it was his to add and modify as 

 1 he pleased, and he was not in the least bound to 

 distinguish the old from the new. If he had 

 two books before him to which he attached 

 equal worth, he took large extracts from both, 

 and harmonized them by such additions or modi- 

 fications as he felt to be necessary. But in 

 default of a keen sense for organic unity very 

 little harmony was sought in points of internal 

 structure, though great skill was often shown, as 

 in the book of Genesis, in throwing the whole 

 material into a balanced scheme of external ar- 

 rangement. On such principles minor narratives 

 were fused together one after the other, and at 

 length in exile a final redactwr completed the 

 great work, on the first part of w r hich Ezra ba^ed 

 his reformation, while the latter part was thrown 

 into the second canon. The curious combina- 



