356 



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



for these Hebrews Joseph must have been their great man, their 

 hero. He had brought them to Egypt, to him they owed the 

 position they had in Egypt, the favourable conditions in which 

 they were placed and which allowed them to multiply and to 

 become a nation. Joseph must have been a more popular figure 

 among them than Abraham himself. And the tradition, such as 

 it is recorded, is not one which is written down six or seven 

 hundred years after the events, in a kingdom rent in two, under 

 circumstances absolutely different. What interest could have 

 J oseph's life to the Elohist writing in the Northern kingdom, in 

 such troubled times as the seventh century ? 



Besides, this tradition is pictured with details so distinctly 

 Egyptian in the dreams, in the names, in the numbers, that it 

 cannot have been written anywhere else but in the country 

 itself. A tradition six hundred years old retains the main 

 lines of the events, but not the memory of small local details 

 quite different from the conditions of the country in which 

 the supposed writer lives. Moses wrote Joseph's life before he 

 left Egypt. This agrees perfectly with the narrative and its 

 character, and the hypothetical systems of the critics raise 

 difficulties absolutely insuperable in regard of what we know 

 about Egypt. 



Joseph died at the age of 110 years, which in Egyptian is the 

 limit of old age, and signifies as much as : much advanced in 

 years and full of days. His last words were to remind his 

 brethren that God would bring them to the land which he sware 

 to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath 

 of the children of Israel. Thus the first book of the Old Testa- 

 ment ends with what it was written for, the solemn affirmation 

 of the promise which had been sworn by God Himself. 



The unity of Genesis is a subject which raises questions of 

 such magnitude, that in a lecture like this I could only touch 

 them lightly. What I hope to have shown to my hearers, is 

 that criticism is not a High Court, the verdict of which is 

 decisive. Criticism, especially philological criticism, is only a 

 method of reaching the truth, a method which has often been 

 very beneficial, but which in other cases has led us far astray. 

 Let us study ancient documents like the books of the Old 

 Testament in the light of the circumstances and events which 

 they describe, of the people for whom they were written, of the 

 country from which they originated, and I have the conviction, 

 which I feel more strongly every day, that we shall find that 

 these old books are really the work of the man whose name has 

 been attached to them by a tradition of many centuries. 



