i88 7 ] KENAN S &quot; HISTOIRE D ISRAEL &quot; 619 



scholars, it seems inconceivable, on his own premisses, that 

 M. Renan should be able to dispense himself from the 

 task of critical analysis. Yet even in these cases we 

 find nothing but a rechauffe of the compound narrative, 

 affecting a spurious appearance of criticism by the 

 mechanical rejection of supernatural detail. Even more 

 disappointing is the treatment of the episode of Abimelech 

 perhaps the most instructive portion of the whole Book 

 of Judges where M. Renan misses every point, even the 

 obvious one that up to this date Shechem was a purely 

 Canaanite city, and that the short-lived sovereignty of 

 Abimelech was built not on Hebrew but on Canaanite 

 support. 1 



The last point in M. Renan s narrative on which some 

 remark may here be made, is his strong prejudice against 

 David, in whom he can see nothing more than a clever and 

 successful bandit. Until recently the true founder of the 

 Hebrew state has been judged less as a king than as a 

 Psalmist, and from this point of view it was natural that 

 two diametrically opposite views should be taken of his 

 character. The Church has consecrated him as a saint : 

 the deistic reaction, unjustly but from its own standpoint 

 not at all unnaturally, has stigmatised him as a hypocrite. 

 M. Renan, who does not believe that David wrote Psalms, 

 or that in him the king was sunk in the liturgical dilettante 

 of the Book of Chronicles, ought, one imagines, to have 

 been able to take an independent view of a character 

 which, religion apart, is one of the most remarkable in 

 Semitic history. But his love of startling antithesis 

 prevails, and he sacrifices all attempt at historic justice 

 to a brilliant page contrasting &quot; the brigand of Adullam 

 and Ziklag &quot; with the ideal type of the Messiah, the 

 imaginary author of &quot; the sentiments full of resignation 



1 The evidence for this fundamental point is quite independent of 

 certain acknowledged difficulties in the text of Judges ix., for which 

 various solutions have been proposed, and which the present reviewer 

 has attempted to remove by transposing verses 28, 29, and making them 

 follow on verse 22. (Theologisch Tijdschrift, March 1886.) 



