AND THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM. 



271 



on the same day I sought an interview with my teacher, in the 

 course of which the word escaped me : ' Then is the Fifth Book 

 of Moses what is commonly called a forgery ? ' The answer 

 was : * For God's sake ( Um Gottes willen). That is no doubt about 

 the truth ; but one must not quite say so (Das wird wohl 

 wahrsein, aber so etwas darf man nicht sagen).* This saying, and 

 especially his ' For God's sake,' rings in my ears to the present 

 day, and is therefore, though with a deeper meaning, prefixed 

 as a motto to this treatise. For I have never comprehended 

 why, in such serious matters, what is true should not be spoken 

 out." Accordingly he has spoken out, in this vigorous treatise, 

 what he was taught by his old teacher — an eminent liberal 

 theologian — was the practical result of German criticism of the 

 Pentateuch, and that result is that the traditional account of 

 Jewish history is * ' a great deception . " The treatise was published 

 in 1920, and in the course of that year ten thousand copies of it 

 had been printed. Its full title is " Critical Considerations on 

 the Old Testament Accounts of Israel's Invasion of Canaan, the 

 Divine Revelation of Sinai and the Work of the Prophets." It 

 will be seen that it is the work of a man who wishes to look 

 facts in the face. He accepts the conclusions of German criticism 

 respecting the Pentateuch, and he feels that the practical result 

 of them is that the narratives in the Pentateuch are fictitious — 

 in fact forgeries ; that they attribute to Moses what Moses 

 neither said nor did, and that consequently the whole story of 

 the entry of Israel into Canaan is untrustworthy ; and he proceeds 

 to expose, without scruple, what he regards as its impossibilities 

 and fictions. Starting from his point of view, it is a very powerful 

 indictment, and must be felt, I think, to be a not unnatural 

 result of the criticism he accepts. Conservative critics in 

 England, who have said that this is the practical issue of such 

 criticism, have been treated as unintelligent and brutal. But 

 we now have an eminent German critic proclaiming loudly 

 that this is the real outcome of it all, and denouncing the 

 accepted traditions of Jewish history, " for God's sake," as a great 

 delusion. 



But this " outspoken " declaration has had one good result. 

 It has, of course, compelled an acceptance of the challenge by 

 one of the representatives of criticism, and happily this repre- 

 sentative has been found in Dr. Konig of Bonn. This eminent 

 scholar's answer is already in its third edition, and it amounts, 



