METHODS OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 



Ill 



" The Mosaic age, therefore," says Professor Sayce, " instead of 

 being an illiterate one, was an age of high literary activity and 

 education throughout the civilized East. Not only was there a 

 widespread literary culture in both Egypt and Babylonia which had 

 its roots in a remote past, but this culture was shared by Mesopo- 

 tamia and Asia Minor, and more especially by Syria and Palestine." 



Literary and Documental Evidence from Crete. 



ISTot only that. Thanks to recent wonderful discoveries in 

 Crete we now know that long before the age of Moses there was 

 an advanced literary culture in what was to be in after days the 

 great world, and that the Egyptian and Babylonian characters were 

 not the only writings there — Crete had three, if not four, wholly 

 different svstems of writinc^. From one end of the civilized 

 world to the other, in those remote ages, hundreds of years 

 before the time of Moses, men and women were reading and 

 writing and corresponding with one another : schools abounded 

 and great libraries were formed in an age which the " Higher 

 Critics " only a few years ago dogmatically declared was almost 

 wholly illiterate. 



Egyptian Scribes : Moses. 



This assumption, then, that the Pentateuch was too advanced 

 for Moses is wholly dispersed by recent archaeological discovery. 

 Not only could Moses have written the Pentateuch, but it would 

 have been little short of a miracle if he had not been a scribe. 

 The scribe in Egypt was the most honoured personage next to 

 the king. In every room of the great museum at Cairo, and 

 from every Egyptian dynasty, beautiful life-like statues of 

 scribes stare you in the face. Moses had been brought up in 

 all the learning of Pharaoh's Court : he was a law giver, and the 

 elders and overseers of his brother Israelites in the land of 

 Goshen would themselves have been required to know how to 

 read and write. Egypt, where the Israelites dwelt so long, and 

 from which they fled, was a land of writing and literature ; more 

 so still was the Canaan which they invaded. In Palestine these 

 literary cultures met together : the culture and writing of 

 Egypt, the culture and writing of Babylonia, the culture and 

 writing of the Philistines from Crete. The assumption on which 

 more than half the attack on the Five Books of the Pentateuch 

 rests is absolutely arbitrary and unhisfcorical. 



Dean Wace on the Tessellated Pavement Theory. 



No one will ever be able to tell us exactly who wrote the whole 

 of the first five books in the Old Testament : there is no claim in 



