THE UNITY OP GENESIS. 



their brethren, with whom they were not to contend, because 

 Mount Seir had been given to Esau for a possession 

 (Deuteronomy ii, 4). 



With the arrival of Jacob's family in Egypt, we reach the 

 country in which Moses lived, where he had been educated in 

 particularly favourable circumstances, and in the wisdom of 

 which he had been instructed. He had no difficulty in his inter- 

 course with the Egyptians and his own countrymen, and I do 

 not hesitate to say that he was the only author who could have 

 written the history of Joseph such as we have it. That history 

 is a running narrative of remarkable simplicity and beauty, con- 

 taining some of the most striking pages of the Old Testament. 

 It seems to me incredible that a sense of literary beauty did not 

 prevent the critics from cutting it up into a considerable number 

 of fragments written at several hundred years' interval. I shall 

 not quote here sentences of which the first words are of the 

 Elohist, the next of the Jahvist a hundred years earlier, and the 

 end of the Elohist as;ain. Let us take the two visits of the sons 

 of Jacob. The first is said to be of the Elohist, the late writer 

 of the seventh century, the second journey with the pathetic 

 speech of Judah belongs to the Jahvist, a hundred years earlier. 

 Yet it pre-supposes the first, it even alludes to it. Now, when 

 the narrative of the second visit was written, what about the 

 first ? It certainly must have been described somewhere and 

 the description has entirely disappeared. The second visit can- 

 not be understood without the first, which is its introduction, 

 and we are told that it was written a hundred years later. How 

 strange are these two narratives : the Jahvist has no beginning, 

 and the Elohist is a mere introduction followed by nothing ! It 

 is not possible to escape this extraordinary deduction, if it is 

 contended that the narratives are inventions of two authors. 



Moses alone could write the history of Joseph, and while he 

 was in Egypt himself. There could not be any record of Joseph's 

 left except with the Hebrews. Joseph had been a minister of 

 foreign rulers, whose memory was detested by the Egyptians, 

 who did what they could to wipe out the remembrance of the 

 invaders. If Joseph had been an Egyptian, his biography would 

 have been engraved on the walls of his tomb. But there was 

 no rock tomb for him ; he was embalmed in Egypt, he probably 

 was put in a coffin, his body was preserved by his countrymen, 

 but the account of his life, of his deeds, of his extraordinary 

 exaltation from the rank of a slave to the second position in the 

 kingdom, all that would be tradition preserved only by the 

 Hebrews. And this tradition was undoubtedly very vivid, since 



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