METHODS OP BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 



107 



put together in their present shape ; or may only have furnished 

 the basis for our present narratives. 



Professor Orr on the Priestly Code. 



Professor Orr deals in a like reasonable and candid manner 

 with the Priestly Code and the Priestly Writing, to which how- 

 ever, I can only refer you very briefly : 



" We have sought," he says, " to show on both moral and 

 historical grounds, and, by positive proof to the contrary, that the 

 theory of a post-Exilian origin of the Levitical Code cannot be 

 upheld. Its main stronghold is the argument from silence ; but 

 that silence is neither so complete as is alleged, nor are the 

 inferences drawn from it warranted. By a similar argument, if 

 Deuteronomy were left out of account, it might be proved that the 

 Book of the Covenant also, as a written Code, was not known before 

 the Exile. Yet Deuteronomy shows how erroneous would be such 

 an inference. . . . The theory that the Priestly Code took its 

 shape in the hands of the priests about the ninth century B.C., or 

 between that and the time of Deuteronomy, but only as a quasi- 

 private document, a programme struggling for recognition, and very 

 imperfectly attaining it, and receiving changes and additions as far 

 down as the Exile, is wholly unsatisfactory. It encounters all the 

 difficulties of the older theory, arising from the supposed silence of 

 the history and alleged conflict with Deuteronomy, and has none of 

 its compensating advantages. For the law presents in no sense the 

 aspect of a private priestly programme, struggling, without success, 

 for recognition and acceptance. It rests on very definite principles 

 and ideas, gives itself out in all seriousness as a Code of wilderness 

 legislation (why, it may be asked, should ninth-century priests 

 throw their ' programme ' into this form *?) and presents not the 

 slightest trace of hesitation or doubt in its demands ... It is 

 involved in what has been said that we come back to the older 

 position of a substantially Mosaic origin of the laws. It is not 

 necessarily implied in this that Moses wrote all these laws, or any 

 one of them with his own pen ; or that they were all written down 

 at one time ; or that they underwent no subsequent changes in 

 drafting or development ; or that the collection of them was not a 

 more or less gradual process ; or that there may not have been 

 smaller collections, such as that lying at the base of the Law of 

 Holiness (Leviticus xvii-xxvi), in circulation and use prior to the final 

 collection, or codification, as we now have it . . . However this 

 may be, there appears no good ground for assuming that the 

 general codification was not completed at a very early date, possibly 

 before the relapse in the time of the Judges, and probably not later 

 than the early days of the monarchy. There is nothing we can discover 



