332 



PROF. H. EDOUARD NAVILLE, D.C.L., LL.D., ON 



In this fragment, the word " Damnnesek " 



And behold, the word of the Lord . . . . 

 . . . shall be thine heir. 



And he brought him . . . 

 . . . shall thy seed be. 



And he believed in the Lord, and he 

 counted it to him for righteousness. 



And he said unto him . . . shall inherit it ? 



And he said unto him : Take me an 

 heifer . . . drove them away. 



And when the sun was going down . . . 

 ... is not yet full. 



And it came to pass . . . 

 the river Euphrates. 



The Kenite . . . and the Jebusite. 



Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bare him no 

 children. 



is a late gloss. 



Jahvist,Southern kingdom, 

 middle of ninth century. 



Elohist, Northern kingdom, 

 eighth century. 



Jahvist again, ninth cen- 

 tury. 



Eedactor, fourth century. 



Jahvist again, ninth cen- 

 tury. 



Eedactor. 



J ahvist. 



Redactor. 



Priestly Code, fifth cen- 

 tury. 



And she had a handmaid, an Egyptian. j Jahvist. 



Leaving aside chapter xiv, in the twenty-one verses of the xv 

 and the first verse of chapter xvi, we have no fewer than 

 eleven changes of author. We pass from the unknown native 

 place of J.E. to the Southern kingdom of the Jahvist, to the 

 Northern of the Elohist, to the Southern again, to the unknown 

 residence of the redactor, to the Northern kingdom again, to 

 Babylon, where the Priestly Code was made, and we end in the 

 Northern kingdom. The eleven various fragments correspond 

 to the following dates : we pass from an unknown date to the 

 ninth century, then to the eighth, to the ninth again, then to the 

 fourth, again we go up to the ninth, come down to the fourth, up 

 to the ninth, down to the fourth, then to the fifth and the ninth. 



This is a picture of a part of Genesis which is the result of 

 the labour of the most eminent critics. Moses does not appear 

 in it, but at least five different authors absolutely unknown, all 

 of them anonymous, without any one of the scholars who are 

 responsible for their discovery saying where they lived, under 

 what circumstances and for what purpose they wrote. They 

 are nothing but literary creations ; there is no clue whatever to 

 their existence, except in the imagination of the critics. 



