224 EEV. JOHN TUCKWELL, M.R.A.S., ON ARCHAEOLOGY AND 



quarters, eighth and sixteenth parts of verses, belonging to 

 different sources, are combined in the most various ways. . . . 

 By the acuteness of scholars, contradictions and parallels are 

 discovered in chapters and verses of the most harmless and 

 harmonious appearance." The hypnotic influence which this 

 analysis has had over certain scholars is extraordinary, and even 

 Professor Orr can say concerning the Yaweh-Elohim theory, 

 This result also, whatever explanation may be offered, has stood 

 the test of time, and will not, we believe, be overturned." If 

 that be so, his case against the Higher Criticism is gone, and even 

 our Lord took up a fallacious position when He said of the 

 supposed Mosaic writings : " If ye believe not his writings, how 

 shall ye believe My words ? " for in all the letters used in the 

 analysis of those writings the letter " M " never once appears 

 for a single verse or word. All that Professor Orr will allow is 

 some quality which he describes as " Mosaicity." But it is not 

 a question of " time " but of evidence, and evidence has become 

 available now, which was not available when the foundations of 

 this analysis were laid by Jean Astruc w^ith his theory of 

 Elohistic and Jehovistic and nine minor documents. For 

 instance, we now know that the art of writing goes back to very 

 remote antiquity in the history of man, for even the cuneiform 

 characters of Babylonia were the offspring of an earlier picto- 

 graphic form of writing in use before the adoption of clay as a 

 writing material by the early inhabitants of the plain of Shinar. 

 Further, 



(i) By what seems like a perversity designed to provoke every 

 sense of the fitness of things in the order of Biblical truth, the 

 story of the Creation in Gen. i, so fundamental to the mono- 

 theism of the whole Bible, is affirmed to be among the latest pro- 

 ducts of Hebrew literature ! It is said to belong " approximately 

 to the period of the Babylonian captivity " and to be " later than 

 Ezekiel " (Driver). We are to suppose that the Hebrew religion 

 and nation existed for a thousand years before it possessed any 

 adequate cosmology ! Or again, it is said to have been derived 

 from a Babylonian original, and an eminent Assyriologist has 

 even attempted, by translating some of the Hebrew into Baby- 

 lonian, to reconstruct that supposed original ! But the two 

 languages are sufficiently near of kin to make such an effort 

 absolutely devoid of evidential value. Were the original Greek 

 of the New Testament to be lost, an accomplished German and 

 English scholar in five thousand years' time, finding the first 

 page of one of the Gospels in English, would have no difficulty in 

 turning the English into German and proving most conclusively 



