THE UNITY OF GENESIS. 



333 



On the other hand, we have the ever recurring testimony of 

 the Old Testament that these books have an author, Moses ; but 

 this testimony is so completely thrust aside that now the Mosaic 

 authorship of the Pentateuch is called an hypothesis. The 

 position of the question has been reversed, the critics do not 

 consider themselves as having to bear the onus probandi, as 

 having to establish by solid proofs that Moses cannot be the 

 author of the Pentateuch ; on the contrary, it is the duty of 

 those who hold fast to the traditional view, to prove that Moses 

 existed and wrote. 



I am not o-oino- to challenge the Higher Criticism and the 

 value of its conclusions for the whole of Pentateuch. I shall 

 confine myself to Genesis, and what I shall now endeavour to 

 show is that the reconstruction of the book from fragments 

 separated by more than six centuries and coming from various 

 countries implies total disregard of the nature and purpose of 

 the book, I should even say ignorance of the distinct reason for 

 which it has been written. 



In the solemn prayer of Solomon, on the day when the ark 

 was brought to the temple, the king says (i Kings viii, 53) : 

 " Thou didst separate them from among all the peoples of the 

 earth to be Thine inheritance, as Thou spakest by the hand of 

 Moses Thy servant, when Thou broughtest our fathers out of 

 Egypt " 



This is the mission of Moses, to which he remained 

 faithful up to the day when he ascended Mount Pisgah. He 

 has to teach the people that they have been chosen " to observe, 

 to do all the Lord's commandments, and if they hearken 

 diligently unto the voice of the Lord ; the Lord will set them on 

 high above the nations of the earth" (Deuteronomy xxviii, 1): 

 " This is the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to 

 make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside 

 the covenant which He made with them in Horeb " (id. xxix, 1). 

 But then this covenant was not something new. It had been 

 made long before with the fathers of the Israelites. At the 

 time of the persecution, it is said that " God heard their 

 groanings, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, 

 with Isaac and with Jacob. And God saw the children of 

 Israel, and God took knowledge of them " (Exodus ii, 24). When 

 Moses is chosen for the glorious task of bringing the Israelites 

 out of Egypt, when the oppressed people first turn a deaf ear 

 to his voice, the Lord repeats to him : " 1 appeared unto Abraham, 

 unto Isaac and unto Jacob as God Almighty . . . and I have 

 also established My covenant with them, to give them the land 



