PENTATEUCH. 



173 



count of the origin of the Hexateuch, given by wit- 

 nesses who seem to be trustworthy, and confirmed by a 

 great body of testimonies and circumstances, with no 

 testimony whatever against it. The presumption is 

 that the account is true. This is not a merely tech- 

 nical presumption, but is of the nature of a very strong 

 probability. If any one seeks to overthrow the result 

 thus reached it ought to be not by conjectures, but by 

 impregnable proofs. We turn to see what are the 

 proofs offered in the case. 



The critics who deny that Moses wrote the Penta- 

 teuch are accustomed to claim much on the ground of 

 the superiority of their scientific methods. On the 

 strength of this superiority of method they claim for 

 themselves jargely the authority of experts. They 

 censure their opponents, and sometimes justly, for 

 arguing from the assumed meaning of passages in- 

 stead of the necessary meaning, for resorting to har- 

 monistic conjectures for the removal of difficulties, and 

 the like. Are their claims to scientific superiority so 

 well based that we must accord to them something on 

 this ground, and accept their opinions as the opinions 

 of experts? To decide this let us examine a few 

 specimens. We will take them just as they occur in 

 the article in the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 



" It was observed that Moses does not speak of him- 

 self in the first person, but that some other writer 

 speaks of him in the third a writer, too, who lived 

 long after. " But why should Moses be precluded 

 from speaking of himself in the third person, just as 

 Caesar and Josephus do ? And if it is another writer 

 that speaks of Moses in the third person, he could do 

 this as easily while Moses was living as "long after." 



"The expression of Gen. xii. 6, 'the Canaanite was 

 then in the land,' is spoken to readers who had long 

 forgotten that a different nation from Israel had once 

 occupied the Holy Land. " Not necessarily. A reader 

 of the times of Moses, or of any other time, might have 

 a curiosity to know with what peoples, if any, Abra- 

 ham and Jacob came into contact on reaching Pales- 

 tine. 



"Again, the 'Book of the wars of Jehovah ' (Num. 

 xxi. 14) cannot possibly be cited by Moses himself, as 

 it contains a record of his own deeds." But there is 

 nothing in the fact that a book mentions a man's deeds 

 to prevent that man's citing the book. 



" When Deut. xxxiv. 10 says that 'There arose not 

 a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses,' the writer is 

 necessarily one who looked back to Moses through a 

 long series of later prophets." But this language 

 would be very natural in the mouth of any old man 

 who, in his youth, had known Moses. The inference 

 that the writer must have looked back ''through a 

 long series " of prophets to Moses is gratuitous. 



Absolutely these instances are representative. At 

 this point any man of sense is competent to test the 

 claims of this alleged scientific method. Whoever 

 will take the trouble to look carefully at the instances 

 of simple use of Biblical passages, in the article in the 

 BRITANNICA and in the whole class of writings it rep- 

 resents, will thereafter find himself little disposed to 

 place confidence in this class of writers as experts. 

 No men are more in the habit than they of putting 

 upon statements or upon phenomena the interpreta- 

 tion that will serve their turn, and then arguing as if 

 this were the only possible interpretation. 



It is by processes precisely like these that the at- 

 tempt is made to invalidate the historicity of the Old 

 Testament writings, and thus their testimony in the 

 case in hand, lake a single instance for example. 

 According to Gen. xvi. 10, xxi. 5, Ishmael was four- 

 teen years old when Isaac was born. " But how does 

 this accord with xxi. 9 *eq., where Ishmael appears 

 not as a lad of seventeen but as a child at play (bnxa, 

 v. 9), who is laid on his mother's shoulder (v. 14), 

 and when thrown down by her in her despair (v. 15) is 

 quite unable to help himself? Similar inconsistencies 

 appear, etc. ' ' But the statement that Ishmael " made 



sport' 1 is not a statement that he was then " a child at 

 piay." The narrative does not say that he was laid 

 upon his mother's shoulder. When it is said that she 

 "cast him under one of the shrubs" that does not 

 imply that he was a baby and she had been carrying 

 him. According to the account he was ' ' quite unable 

 to help himself," not by reason of tender age, but by 

 reason of exhaustion. In all this there is no contra- 

 diction to what is elsewhere said concerning Ishmael. 



It is true that if we are to understand the Biblical 

 narratives as historical we must abandon the baby-story 

 interpretation sometimes given to some of them, and 

 we must interpret them lay putting together all the 

 known facts in each case and allowing the facts to limit 

 one another. For the lack of care in these particulars 

 the traditional understanding of the history is in some 

 points open to criticism. Most of the difficulties will 

 vanish if one merely put all the facts together, so as 

 to obtain a complete understanding of the matter con- 

 cerning which the difficulties arose, and most of the 

 remaining difficulties are of the sort that would doubt- 

 less vanish if we knew more about the matter. 



There is then nothing in the methods of these men 

 to justify us in accepting their conclusions on the 

 ground of their superior qualifications ; all we have 

 to do is to examine the evidence adduced to see what 

 conclusions it justifies. 



1. The simplest class of arguments for the late date 

 of the Hexateuch is made up of the instances in 

 which it is alleged that these writings mention or al- 

 lude to events later than the times of Moses and 

 Joshua. To understand the precise bearing of these 

 instances we need to glance at certain facts connected 

 with another name that of Phinehas, the grandson 

 of Aaron and grandnephew of Moses. Of Phinehas 

 it is recorded that he was already in public life, and 

 among the most prominent men of the nation, before 

 the death of Moses. See Num. xxv. 7, 11 ; Ps. cvi. 

 30 ; Num. xxxi. 6. Next to Joshua himself he was 

 the chief public man in Israel in the times of the 

 conquest. See Josh. xxii. 13, 30, 31, 32; xxiy. 33. 

 He was still high-priest in the time of the civil war 

 with Benjamin, Jud. xx. 28. It follows that this 

 war, the account of which is given Jud. xix.-xxi., 

 was one of the earlier events of the times of the 

 judges, instead of being the latest, as one might im- 

 agine from the place it occupies in the Book of Judges. 

 That this war was itself preceded by the expedition in 

 which the men of Dan captured Laish, in the north, 

 is evident from the comparison of Jud. xvii., xviii., 

 with Jud. xx. 1. 



According to Jud. xx. 28, and the later notices, 

 Phinehas was the successor of his father, Eleazar, in 

 the high-priesthood. In this position he was the 

 chief of the men to whom the custody of Moses' 

 book of the law had been committed. If anything 

 was done to the sacred writings of Moses and Joshua 

 under his direction, it was done in the spirit of Moses 

 and Joshua, within the lifetime of their personal asso- 

 ciates. With these facts in mind, notice that the 

 closing verses of the Book of Joshua bring the history 

 up to the time of the death of Eleazar, the high- 

 priest, and all that generation, that is up to the time 

 when Phinehas of the next generation was already an 

 old man. We shall presently find abundant proof that 

 the earlier books of the Hexateuch, as well as its latest 

 book, were either edited or annotated as late as the 

 later years of Phinehas, and the question will become 

 important whether there is any real evidence of redac- 

 tion later than this. The instances are numerous and 

 quite varied : we can notice only a few specimens in 

 addition to those already cited. 



The instances in which the proper name Dan is 

 mentioned belong, of course, to a date after Laish had 

 been captured and named Dan, Jud. xviii. 29, etc. ; 

 but this, as we have seen, was within the lifetime of 

 Phinehas. The instances are Josh. xix. 47: Deut. 

 xxxiv. 1 ; Gen. xiv. 14. The last may possibly be on 



