THE UNITY OF GENESIS. 



341 



written with a definite purpose. Nevertheless, we do not 

 know who divided his writings into five books. In this respect 

 the Jewish tradition points to Ezra, and I see no reason to 

 discard it. Ezra did more : he put these writings in book form 

 and in book language, if it had not been done before. 



Time does not allow us to speak here of the second discovery 

 of the utmost importance, which has been made also in Egypt. 

 The Jews who settled in Egypt during the last Pharaonic 

 dynasties and the Persian dominion, spoke and wrote Aramaic, 

 the book language and writing which succeeded to cuneiform. 

 Therefore the first change made in the language and form of 

 the books of Moses was to turn them into Aramaic before the 

 second change took place, which I believe to have been simul- 

 taneous with the invention by the Eabbis of the square Hebrew 

 alphabet, viz., turning the books into Hebrew, which was the 

 language of Jerusalem. These changes were not translations : 

 they were mere changes of dialects. 



I wish I could mention here some of the arguments which 

 seem to establish that before writing Hebrew the Jews wrote 

 Aramaic ; but, leaving this aside, I revert to the fact that 

 Moses w T rote in Babylonian cuneiform. The most serious con- 

 clusion derived from this fact, a conclusion the importance of 

 which cannot be undervalued, is that the oldest Hebrew 

 documents are not originals. In their present form they are 

 transcriptions from another idiom : translations, not from differ- 

 ent languages, but from different dialects, and changes of script. 

 Philological criticism, on which the reconstruction of the books of 

 the Old Testament rests for the most part, has been exercised 

 on translations. The texts to which the critics have applied their 

 microscopes, and which they dissect and cut up into small bits, 

 are not originals. They are in a later form, after having under- 

 gone one or two transformations. One can readily understand 

 what a blow the fact of the Pentateuch having been originally 

 written in cuneiform deals to the theory of Wellhausen. No 

 wonder that the High Critics are dead against it, and that the 

 attempt to combat them with evidence derived, not from a host 

 of supposed and anonymous authors, but from documents which 

 we can hold in our hands, like the Tel el Amarna tablets, or 

 the papyri of Elephantine, are called by them "extravagant 

 conjectures," or " moving in a circle of errors " (Koenig). 



We shall now briefly review the tablets which form the book 

 of Genesis, and we shall see how everything converges towards 

 this central idea, the choice of Israel as the chosen people with 

 whom God made a covenant. This is the golden thread which 



