240 VERY EEV. THE DEAX OF CANTEEBUEY^ OX POSITION AXD 



hypothesis thus stated, he uumeihately proceeds to the following 

 significant ohservations : But nearly all that we have further to 

 say about the substance, the origin and the date of these entities 

 is in perpetual flux. The naive confidence with which the 

 School of Wellhausen " — in England, let us say, as well as in 

 Germany — "'assigned them to definite historical periods of 

 Israel, and then regarded them as new j)roducts of those periods, 

 has no doubt received a heavy blow through the hterary and 

 historical mode of treatment of Gunkel and others. And 

 men such as Kittel, Merx, Konig, Eerdmans, Grossman, and so 

 on, have, hke oiu'selves, successfully maintained of late, that the 

 materials of all these sources are for the most part indefinitely 

 older than the conceptions of the sources themselves, and that 

 consequently even a younger document may, in some circimi- 

 stances, have preserved historical and legislative trachtions better 

 than an older one." 



These are the words of an eminent German Professor, pub- 

 hshed in an important German journal in Eebruary of this 

 year, while the Professors and Scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, 

 especially the younger ones, are still talking of the " assured 

 results " of Old Testament criticism. 



After puzzhng over such an exhibition of incessant flux," 

 it is refreshing to turn to the articles already referred to in the 

 Bihliothcca Sacra for January and April, by "A Layman," in which 

 the whole theory is challenged on the broad ground of its total 

 inconsistency with Oriental habits. He describes with much 

 learning the examples aftorded by other sacred hteratures in 

 the East, and then proceeds (p. 214) — 



" It must now be clear that twentieth-centiuy methods of 

 procedure, such as are in use among the scholars of the West, 

 are no criterion whatever by which to test those employed in 

 another era by scholars of the East, and that the first thing to 

 be done is to get an Oriental \dew point. This is simply 

 imperative if any rehable results are to be obtained in the 

 study of ancient documents, especially of such documents 

 as those embodied in the Pentateuch. To assimie that 

 this work can be the outcome of the parasitical methods 

 now in vogue in many quarters, is to be guilty of a most 

 remarkable lack of historical, not to say hterary. perspective. 

 To do so ignores, in a manner that has long excited my own 

 wonder, the plain characteristics of all Oriental peoples, incluchng 

 even those of the modern Jews. Excitable and cajDricious they 

 may be, and in some things unstable or fickle, but when it 

 comes to the fundamentals of their national hfe, they are as 



