198 



EEV. J. IVERACH MUNEO^ ON 



" long time." Applying then the principles of Hebrew 

 grammar to the first part of this verse, you have the translation 

 " when by a protracted siege of a city thou art engaged in 

 capturing it in war, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by 

 forcing an axe against them, when {^2) thou canst eat of them, 



then (1) thou shalt not cut them down." The position of inb^l 



is very emphatic here. If we take as collective we must 



take the suffixes in the plural when translating. Then comes 

 the crux of the whole passage, which is, after all, so absurdly 

 simple. " For the (fruit) tree of the field (supply in that case, 

 viz., of a protracted siege) is the man " (the article is .g;eneric) — 

 What man ? — the well-known man " who goes before you in 

 siege-work." I never yet heard of an army that could do with- 

 out a commissariat department. In the case of a protracted 

 siege the fruit trees were sure to be useful and should not be 

 cut down. 



The whole passage confirms one's faith in the remarkable 

 fidelity of the Massoretes in the preservation of the old pro- 

 nunciation even when they did not understand it. Xeedless to 

 say, the whole edifice of inference from the supposed ignorance 

 on Elisha's part of this law vanishes. We require to re-examine 

 in this manner much of the hasty prejudiced work done in the 

 name of Higher Criticism. 



In pleading for a new name for such work — for the scientific 

 investigation that follows textual criticism or the scientific 

 settlement of the text of God's Word, I do not disparage the 

 worlv wliich former generations of scholars have done. Above 

 all, I would not for a moment disparage the work done by such 

 a scholar as the late Professor W. Eobertson Smith and the 

 splendid stand which he made for freedom of investigation. 

 That freedom is to be emphasized and must be held fast at all 

 hazards, for truth has notliing to fear. The tragedy of 

 Eobertson Smith's life, however, was that freedom to investigate 

 was confused with power to win truth. In the arrogance of 

 apparently encyclopaedic knowledge he identified truth with his 

 own defective views, which are now proved untrue. The out- 

 come of this has been that the sword of the Spirit, which is the 

 Word of God, has been by the acceptance of his defective views 

 torn out of the hands of the Church. The millions of our land 

 and all Christian lands who have severed connection with every 

 branch of the Christian Church, and the comparative dearth of 

 conversion within her borders, proclaim in our ears that without 

 the foundation of the truth of the Old Testament, which our 



