OF BABYLONIAN CONCEPTIONS ON JEWISH THOUGHT. 311 



There is an element of folk lore, of oral tradition, insufficiently 

 checked by writing. The imagination has been at work." 



Canon Driver says that, " Tw^o principles will solve Old 

 Testament diiiiculties : (1) that in many parts of the books we 

 have before us traditions in which the original representation 

 has been insensibly modified, and sometimes coloured by the 

 associations of the age in which the author recording it lived : 

 (2) that often ancient historians merely develop at length in 

 the style and manner of the nanator what was handed down 

 only as a compendious report." Canon Driver also contradicts 

 what apparently Professor Sayce assumed that the belief of the 

 Higher Critics that the Mosaic law (or, to be quite correct, the 

 legislation of P. as a whole) was posterior to the prophets was 

 based on the denial that writing was used for literary purposes in 

 the age of Moses. The Tel-el-Amarna tablets, and the code of 

 Hammurabi, show that it was so used before this age. And 

 Canon Driver adds that critics do not deny that Moses might have 

 left materials behind him, but that the existing Pentateuch is 

 his work. 



He also tells us that the age and authorship of the books of 

 the Old Testament can only be determined — so far as this is 

 possible — by the internal evidence supplied by the books them- 

 selves, no external evidence worthy of credit existing. As 

 regards the date of the P. portion of Genesis, this writer says : 

 " Though the elements which it embodies originated themselves 

 at a much earlier age, it is itself the latest of the sources of 

 which the Hexateuch is composed, and belongs approximately 

 to the period of the Babylonian captivity." He adds, " the 

 priest's code embodies some elements with which the earlier 

 pre-exilic literature is in harmony, and which it pre-supposes : 

 and other elements with which the same literature is in conflict, 

 and the existence of which it even seems to preclude," and he 

 concludes that the chief ceremonial institutions of Israel are 

 of great antiquity : but that the laws respecting them were 

 gradually developed and elaborated and in the shape in which 

 they are formulated in the Priest's code belong to the exile or 

 post-exilic period — and w^ere not therefore manufactured during 

 the exile, but based upon pre-existing Temple usage." 



An interesting article appeared in the Nineteenth Century 

 Magazine of December, 1911, by Eev. E. McClure, in which he 

 gives us information regarding a recent find in Elephantine, 

 Upper Egypt, of certain Aramaic papyri dating from a period 

 between 494 B.C. and 404 B.C. Among them is an epistle 

 addressed by the Jewish colony then existing at Elephantine, to 



