MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP. 243 



idea is very commonly held. But a little more familiarity with the 

 history of Biblical criticism would entirely dispel it. Astruc, it is 

 true, about the middle of the seventeenth century, propounded this 

 theory. But Hupfeld, in a most able, learned, and ingenious essay, 

 pubHshed in 1853, gave Astruc's theory its death blow. He showed 

 beyond dispute that a great part of the "Elohistic " portions of the 

 Pentateuch, as recognized in his day, displayed a far closer resem- 

 blance to the work of the " Jehovist" than to some of the portions 

 of the " Elohistic " narrative itself. So he insisted that there must 

 have been two Elohists, the writings of one of which displayed a 

 much closer affinity to that of the Jehovist than to the writings of 

 his brother Elohist. The latter Hupfeld supposed to have written 

 a brief and elementary outline of Hebrew history with no great 

 literary skill. This discovery was embodied in the critical scheme, 

 and from that time the use of Elohim and Jehovah practically 

 ceased to be distinctive of different authors. When Professor 

 Driver acknowledged that "J E," that is to say, the narrative of 

 the Jehovist and one of the Elohists as combined by a subsequent 

 editor, could not with certainty be divided into its component parts 

 (Introduction, p. 109), the theory in question may be said to have 

 been decently interred. Another point made by Mr. Tuckwell in 

 the same page may be allowed to receive additional illustration. 

 The criticism which assigns Genesis i to an unknown post-exilic 

 author carries its own refutation with it. Mosaism is unquestion- 

 ably, however it came into existence, one of the foremost religions 

 of the world. And Genesis i is an embodiment in the forefront of 

 the narrative of one of the most important of its tenets. In the 

 east and west alike great philosophers and the founders of great 

 religions placed man's source of weakness in the material organiza- 

 tion which formed a part of his composite personality. Plato, for 

 instance, contended that man's great duty was to separate himself 

 as far as- possible from the body, which was the source of all his 

 moral errors. Mosaism starts with the fundamental assumption 

 that this theory was untrue. " God saw everything that He had 

 made, and behold it was very good!" (Gen. i, 31). So that it 

 was not to the fact that he was encumbered with a body that man's 

 transgression was due, but to another fact, namely, that being 

 endowed from the first with freedom of the will, without which he 

 would have been a mere machine, he deliberately chose to have 



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