MOSAIC ORIGIN OF THE PENTATEUCH. 



35 



Dinah, the accounts of the Plagues, of the passage of the Ked 

 Sea, of the mission of the Spies, and of Korah's Kebellion — 

 and that traces of both style I and style II are said to be dis- 

 coverable in the volume chiefly characterized by style III, it 

 becomes much more probable that the variations are due to 

 one and the same writer whose style is coloured by the nature 

 of the thought he is expressing, than that they are due to the 

 more or less arbitrary piecing together of fragments from diflerent 

 works. 



(iii) It is, however, further urged that the passages dis- 

 tinguished by characteristics of style are also marked by 

 peculiarities of diction or historic representation, and that 

 these peculiarities confirm the analysis arrived at by con- 

 siderations of style. 



If all the passages in style I invariably showed one set of 

 peculiarities, and all the passages in style II a different set, 

 there would be great force in this argument, but it is not so. 

 Instead, we find that passages in style I have embedded in 

 them, here and there, peculiarities supposed to belong to 

 style II, and vice versa. A division by style alone would not 

 coincide with a division by peculiarities alone. 



The fact that marked peculiarities, whether verbal or historic, 

 are common to passages of varying style would tend to show 

 that all these passages come from the same author, and that 

 therefore variation of style is not a proof of difference of 

 authorship. 



Suppose a panel of wood (like that in the chapel of Trinity 

 College, Oxford) in which dark and light patches combine to 

 form the semblance of a picture. Suppose that someone 

 asserts : " This appearance of a picture is not natural but 

 artificial. Pieces of different woods, one kind dark and the 

 other light, have been fitted together to produce this appear- 

 ance. And, to prove that I am right, you will find that the 

 parts differ in texture as well as in colour. The dark parts 

 are rough, and the light parts are smooth.'' 



Now if on examination the dark parts turned out to be all 

 rough and the light parts all smooth, the presumption that 

 these were really different kinds of wood would be greatly 

 strengthened. But if it was found that the dark parts were 

 smooth in places, and the light parts rough in places, that would 

 show that differences of texture occur in the same wood, while 

 the fact that rough and smooth wood alike are partly light in 



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