74 



THE REV. CHANCELLOR J. J. LIAS^ M.A., ON 



authors and to " P." And in the one exceptional case, the post- 

 exihc writers might have had the completed Pentateuch before 

 them, aind have been quoting it. All this tends to confirm the 

 traditional theory that " P," as well as the rest of the 

 Pentateuch, was written before any other books. 



Nor is this all. In spite of all this elaborate study of words 

 altogether absent from the earlier books, and of the numerous 

 involved, foreign, and sometimes quite unintelligible con- 

 structions, noted by Dr. Driver in the post-exilic books, he 

 never once drops a hint that none of these expressions appear 

 in " P."* Is this because he is so obsessed by the idea that " P " 

 is post-exilic, that it never occurs to him to notice any fact 

 which throws doubt on that theory ? It is at least fair to point 

 out that observers who can only see the particular side of the 

 case which they have elected to take are not thoroughly 

 qualified for their task. 



The fact, once more, that Ezra, unlike many other post-exilic 

 authors, never uses the well-known post-exilic abbreviation sh 

 for asher (" which "),t may be accounted for by the fact that he 

 was a " ready scribe," and was therefore more familiar with 

 Hebrew than most of the other writers of his period. The 

 occurrence of the definite article for the relative pronoun, 

 however, pronounced by Dr. Driver to be very unusual, and of 

 doubtful occurrence elsewhere, is a construction found only four 

 times in Chronicles and twice in Ezra. That it is absent from 

 " P " is, as usual, a fact not noted. Moreover Dr. Driver adds 

 that " Hardly a verse occurs written by the Chronicler himself 

 which does not present singularities of style, though they are 

 frequently of a kind which refuses to be tabulated." 

 Peculiarities of style then are admittedly a characteristic of the 

 post- exilic historians. Can it be a sound criticism which fails to 

 observe that no such eccentricities have ever been detected in 



a p » 2+ 



I have gone into a detailed examination of Dr. Driver's list in the 

 article already named. 



+ It occurs frequently in Judges, where it is obviously a provincialism. 

 The book was probably written by a northern Israelite. 



\ I find that I have neglected to remark on the fact that the post-exilic 

 writers have quite a different coinage from that of " P " and writers of 

 earlier date. The earlier writers (" P " included) know of nothing but 

 shekels. The post-exilic authors occasionally speak of darics (coins of 

 Darius). The Chronicler himself ventures on this point to introduce the 

 more modern word into his narrative of earlier days. There are two 

 such words used in Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. One of them, that 

 used in Chronicles, might mean the Greek drachma. 



