272 THE VERY REV. H. WACE, D.D., ON THE OLD TESTAMENT 



on the whole, to a plea that criticism must now admit the 

 substantial historical truth of the narratives of the Pentateuch. 

 The first question raised, he says, is that of the trust- 

 worthiness of the narratives of the ancient history of Israel. 

 He begins by quoting a striking statement by Professor 

 Edward Meyer, " the leading representative of ancient history 

 at Berlin." This authority, who has no religious prejudice in 

 favour of the Scriptures, says, in his Histm-y of Antiquity (vol. i, 

 1, § 131 : ed. 1913) : " True historical literature exists in full 

 independence only among the Israelites and the Greeks. Among 

 the Israelites, who in this respect occupy a peculiar position 

 among the civilized races of the East, such literature arose at an 

 astonishingly early date, and commences with compositions of 

 the highest importance, namely, the purely historical narratives 

 in the books of Judges and Samuel." The narratives respecting 

 David are regarded by him as indisputably due to contemporaries, 

 " who must have been well informed respecting the characters 

 and motives of the actors, and they cannot have been written later 

 than the reign of Solomon." Looking backwards, he reckons as 

 *' genuinely historical " the narratives respecting Gideon and 

 Abimelech. We are thus on the sure ground of contemporary 

 history in the time of the Judges, and we may proceed \\dth 

 Konig to enquire whether we can go back farther without losing 

 trustworthy historical evidence. 



But if , as is generally admitted, even by such rationalistic writers 

 as Noldeke, Wellhausen, and Edward Meyer, the song of 

 Deborah is to be regarded as "a direct echo of an historical 

 event," it would be strange if the immediately antecedent 

 narratives were not similarly historical. AVe can hardly be 

 passing straight from myth or fiction to vivid history. Konig 

 lays great stress on the broad fact that, no withstanding the 

 supremacy of the figure of Moses in the history of Israel, the 

 vivid recognition of the period before Moses remained in the 

 national consciousness and literature. That alone, as he urges, 

 affords striking evidence of the historical sense of the Jewish 

 people. Delitzsch, of course, in attacking the trustworthiness 

 of the accounts of that early period, rests on the assump- 

 tion, which Konig allows, of the four constituent elements of 

 the Pentateuch, the Jehovistic, the Elohistic, the Deuteronomic, 

 and the Priest Code. But Konig urges that this " current 

 derivation " of the oldest of these elements from the ninth or 



