RELATIONS OF OLD TESTAMENT SCIENCE 561 



ing solutions be achieved. The history of this work, especially of 

 the Hexateuch criticism, taken at a bird's-eye view, where individuals, 

 with their weaknesses and their limitations vanish, affords a truly 

 classical example of methodical procedure. Notice the possibilities, 

 the application of fundamentally differing, yes, of antagonistic, critical 

 methods, and the repeated tests for the same results. And throughout 

 all this, Old Testament science worked without precursors; indeed, it 

 offered incentive to all other fields of literature, and served them as 

 prototype. The final and complete victory was won by an attack 

 along the whole line. Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen were 

 successful by combining the internal criticism of men like Reuss and 

 Vatke with the formal criticism of such as Astruc and Hupfeld. 

 Everything essential now stands so fast that the dilettante attacks 

 from outsiders who come up from the right and from the left give no 

 cause for fear. Nowadays the realistic criticism, essentially founded 

 upon facts of the religious history of Israel, holds the foreground, 

 while the battle chiefly rages about the prophets. Here now and 

 then the same bold sallies of discovery are undertaken as formerly 

 in the investigation of the historical books. It may be questioned 

 whether we shall here ever attain to equally positive results in details; 

 the large outlines we already see with sufficient clearness. 



The advance from the abstract analysis of former times, which 

 produced only negative results, to the living synthesis, the insight 

 into the political and religious conditions of every writing, makes it 

 now also possible to produce, instead of the old-fashioned introduc- 

 tion to the Old Testament, a history of Old Testament literature, pro- 

 ceeding in chronological order and showing the organic development 

 of the spirit of Israel. The work which Eduard Reuss planned a 

 half-century ago, and carried out in a genial experiment a quarter- 

 century ago, we, with our better equipment, should not now hesitate 

 to take in hand anew. Such a genuine history of literature would 

 of necessity demand to be incorporated into the whole history of 

 the people, and therewith we ourselves enter the ranks of the histo- 

 rians. In fact, the task rests upon us, and upon no one else, of writing 

 the history of that nation, in itself petty, but for the development of 

 humanity extraordinarily important, of old Israel during the one and 

 a quarter millenniums of its pre-Christian existence. The unusual 

 difficulty of clearing up the sources makes our department as good as 

 inaccessible to a student of ancient history who has not been trained 

 in our school. This was sufficiently evinced in the past generation by 

 such examples as M. Duncker and L. Ranke; and the present, espe- 

 cially the Assyriological, school of historians seems to rival them in 

 proving the same thing. On the one side the attack is made by the 

 exponents of tradition, who apply everything discovered from the 

 monuments to the biblical department in order to prop up the old 



