THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 
 IN THE MAKING
 
 HEBREW SCRIPTURES 
 
 IN 11 E MAKING 
 
 BY 
 
 MAX L. MARGOLIS 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 
 1922
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
 
 1/35 
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 ISRAEL FRIEDLAENDER 
 
 SCHOLAR TEACHER MARTYR 
 
 5000935
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 9 
 
 I. THE PROBLEM 11 
 
 II. THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 20 
 
 III. THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 36 
 
 IV. Torah, WORD, AND WISDOM 54 
 
 V. THE THREE SHELVES 70 
 
 VI. THREE, NOT FOUR 83 
 
 VII. THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 97 
 
 VIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT 121 
 
 INDEX, , . 127
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 The Pre-Mosaic Period 
 
 B.C.E. 
 
 2200 
 Abraham. 
 
 Hammurapi, 
 
 king of Babylon. 
 
 1440 Moses. 
 
 The Mosaic Period 
 
 
 Joshua. 
 
 The Period of the Conquest 
 
 
 The Philistine Invasion 
 1060 Eli at Shiloh. 
 1040 Samuel. 
 
 Destruction of Shiloh. 
 
 The Rise of the Monarchy 
 
 1 020 Saul. 
 
 looo David. Jerusalem taken from the Jebusite. Plans laid for 
 
 Centralization. 
 960 Solomon. The Temple built. Zadok. 
 
 The Period of the Divided Kingdom 
 
 930 Jeroboam I secedes. Decentralization. 
 
 873 Ahab in Israel and Jehoshaphat in Judah. Elijah. 
 837 Joash. 
 
 798 Amaziah. 
 
 784 Jeroboam II. 790 Uzziah Amos. Hosea. 
 
 734 Ahaz. 
 
 712 Fall of Samaria. 
 
 719 Hezekiah. 
 691 Manasseh. 
 637 Amon. 
 
 The Kingdom of Judah 
 
 Isaiah. Micah. 
 
 636 Josiah. Hilkiah. Jeremiah. 
 
 621 The Book found in the Temple. 
 
 596 Jehoiachin. First Deportation. Ezekiel.
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 B.C.E. 
 
 596 Zedekiah. 
 
 586 Fall of Jerusalem. 
 
 The Babylonian Exile 
 561 Jehoiachin released from prison. 
 
 538 Edict of Cyrus. Jeshua and Zerubbabel. The Great Un- 
 known Prophet. 
 
 The Persian Period 
 
 515 The Temple completed. Haggai. Zechariah. Malachi. 
 445 Nehemiah. Ezra. Sanba Hat in Samaria. 
 
 444 The Torah read by Ezra. The 'Scribes'. 
 431 Nehemiah's second visit to Jerusalem. 
 
 The Samaritans secede. 
 
 The Grecian Period 
 
 331 Alexander the Great. Jaddua. 
 
 320 Beginning of the Dominion of the Ptolemies. 
 
 3 1 2 Beginning of the Era of the Seleucidae. 
 
 300 Simon I, high priest. 
 
 200 Simon II, high priest. 
 
 197 The Syrian Dominion begins. 
 
 175 Antiochus Epiphanes. Onias deposed. Jason. Menelaus. 
 
 1 68 The Syrian Persecution. The Maccabean Uprising. 
 
 The Maccabean Period 
 
 165 Judah the Maccabee. The Temple redcdicated. 
 142 Simon high priest and prince. 
 103 Alexander Jannai. Rise of the Pharisees. 
 63 Pompey takes Jerusalem. 
 
 The Roman Period 
 37 Herod the Great. 
 
 C.E. Hillel and Shammai. 
 
 14 Tiberius emperor. 
 
 Gamaliel I. 
 70 Destruction of Jerusalem. The Temple burnt down. 
 
 Josephus. 
 
 90 Eleazar son of Azariah. 
 
 1 1 7 Hadrian emperor. 
 
 132 The Revolt of Bar-Kokeba. Akiba. 
 190 The Mishna of R. Judah the Prince.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PROBLEM 
 
 The Hebrew Scriptures are divided into 
 The Three .. " . 
 
 _ three parts. Each, as may be seen in 
 
 any Hebrew edition or translation based 
 on the Hebrew, such as the New Translation pub- 
 lished by the Jewish Publication Society of America 
 (1917), is preceded by a separate title-page: 
 
 Torah miD the Law (or Pentateuch, Five Books 
 of Moses) ; 
 
 Nebiim D'N'33' the Prophets (in front of Joshua) ; 
 
 Ketubim D^31J"D the Writings (in front of 
 Psalms) . The whole is then spoken of as Torah, Ne- 
 biim, Ketubim ( "l"3D by abbreviation). 
 
 _ The five books of the Torah are Gen- 
 
 esis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deu- 
 teronomy. The framework of history, within which 
 the Torah proper or Law is enclosed, narrates the life 
 of Moses,and the fortunes of the people he guided.from 
 his call to his death ; it is preceded by an introduction 
 largely contained in the first book and dealing with 
 the beginnings of mankind and of the nation through 
 the patriarchal period. Leviticus is wholly given to 
 legal matters ; and so is a great part of Deuteronomy ; 
 laws are found also in Exodus and Numbers ; they are 
 not altogether wanting in Genesis.
 
 12 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 _ The Prophets are sub-divided into two 
 
 parts : Former Prophets and Latter Proph- 
 Prophets ~, c , ,, , , 
 
 ets. 1 he first part, composed ot tour books 
 
 Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings contains the history 
 of the people from the conquest under Joshua, through 
 the heroic age of the Judges with its incipient attempts 
 at unification of the tribes, to the founding of the 
 monarchy under Saul and David narrated circumstan- 
 tially in Samuel, and its progress under Solomon, then 
 during the period of the divided kingdom to the de- 
 struction of Samaria(722 before the common era), and 
 lastly during the continued existence of the kingdom 
 of Judah to the fall of Jerusalem (586 B. c. E.) or rather 
 to the release of Jehoiachin from prison (562 B. c. E.), 
 all of which forms the contents of the Book of Kings. 
 First and Second Samuel are counted as one book ; so 
 also First and Second Kings. 
 
 The second part consists of three 
 Latter Prophets , , .. . , . , 
 
 larger prophetical works, mainly 
 
 embodying addresses, but, as in the case of Jeremiah 
 particularly, also biographical matter concerning the 
 prophets; and one book which is a collection of twelve 
 small prophetic writings (hence the name Minor 
 Prophets, i. e. minor in size). The three larger books 
 are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel; the twelve smaller con- 
 stituting the fourth: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, 
 Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Hag- 
 gai, Zechariah, Malachi.
 
 THE PROBLEM 13 
 
 j_ . . The third section or Ketubim (the Writ- 
 ings)consists of the Book of Psalms, Proverbs, 
 Job (these three are marked off in the Hebrew by a 
 peculiar system of musical notation known as the 
 poetic accentuation) ; the five Scrolls (Megillot) in the 
 order in which they are read in the synagogue: Song 
 of Songs (Passover), Ruth (Festival of Weeks), Lamen- 
 tations (Fast of Ab), Ecclesiastes (Festival of Taber- 
 nacles), Esther (Purim) ; then follow Daniel (the re- 
 puted writings of a visionary in the times of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar and Belshazzar), Ezra-Nehemiah (counted as 
 one book, giving the history of the restoration of the 
 Jewish community in the Persian period), and lastly 
 First and Second Chronicles (also counted as one book; 
 an historical work extending from Adam to the res- 
 toration under Cyrus, 538 B. c. E.). 
 
 -,, ~ The order of the books within each 
 
 The Order of .... . . f . 
 
 ,. T, , division as given above is that 01 the 
 
 the Books ,. ..... - , TT , 
 
 earliest printed editions of the Hebrew 
 
 text (Soncino, 1488; Naples, 1491-93; Brescia, 1492- 
 94). This order has been followed in all subsequent 
 editions. In the manuscript copies which antecede 
 the age of printing, the order of the books of the Torah 
 and of the former Prophets is universally the same as 
 in the printed editions. On the other hand, in the 
 books of the Latter Prophets and of the Writings 
 there are notable variations of order. These differences 
 seem to be due to the fact that anciently the Eastern 
 (or Babylonian) Jews arranged these books in one man-
 
 14 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 ner,while the Western (or Palestinian) Jews adopted an- 
 other sequence. So far as we are able to ascertain our 
 printed editions follow the Eastern (Babylonian) 
 order. In an ancient source cited in the Talmud (Baba 
 Batra 14b) the books which follow the Book of Kings 
 are arranged in this order : 
 
 Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Twelve; 
 
 Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of 
 Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra- 
 Nehemiah, Chronicles. 
 
 Observe how in the talmudic order the three writ- 
 ings ascribed to Solomon Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song 
 of Songs are joined together instead of being separat- 
 ed as in our editions. While there are other minor 
 variations of order in the manuscripts, there is a 
 prominent characteristic in all of them which merits 
 attention. In none of them is a book shifted from one 
 of the three divisions into another. The fact would 
 seem to be established that the division into three 
 parts is ancient and universal. 
 
 If we turn to the Church translations of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures, the Anglican for example, the threefold 
 
 ._ A division would seem at the first 
 
 The System of , , 
 
 mi. f u TN- glance nowhere to be apparent. 
 Threefold Division * , , , , . ^ u . . . , 
 . _,_, _, The whole of what Christians de- 
 
 in the Church . , in- 
 
 nominate the Old Testament is one 
 
 undivided part. Moreover Ruth occupies a place 
 between Judges and Samuel, Lamentations follows 
 Jeremiah, and Daniel comes after Ezekiel ; Chronicles,
 
 THE PROBLEM 15 
 
 Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther are attached to the Book 
 of Kings; the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew ed- 
 itions are found at the end of the collection, and the 
 remaining books of the third section are placed in the 
 middle. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, there is 
 revealed a principle of threefold division. The parts 
 are: 
 
 Historical Books (Genesis- Esther) ; 
 
 Poetical Books (Job, Psalms, and the Solomonic 
 Writings) ; 
 
 Prophetical Books. 
 
 This arrangement meets us in the oldest manu- 
 scripts of the Greek Translation. It is worth noting 
 that the placing of the Prophets third in order has a 
 parallel in the Additional Prayer on New Year's Day 
 where the ten scriptural citations are made up of three 
 each from Torah, Ketubim, and Prophets, with the 
 tenth once more from the Torah. 
 
 T . The division of the Scriptures 
 
 It was known in 
 
 A t- c* j /- m to three sections was known in 
 
 the Second Century - , _,, 
 
 B> c E the second century B. c. E. The 
 
 Greek translator of the Book of 
 Sirach (chapter VI)speaks, in the preface, of the great 
 and many things that were delivered to Israel 'by the 
 law and the prophets and the others that followed 
 upon them* ; of his grandfather.the author of the book, 
 as a student of 'the law, and the prophets, and the 
 other books of our fathers'; then again, speaking of 
 the translated Scriptures, he refers to them as 'the
 
 16 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 law, and the prophets, and the rest of the books'. The 
 nondescript terms by which the third division is alluded 
 to correspond to the name 'Writings' (Ketubim) by 
 which it is designated in the Mishna. 
 
 The tripartite division so general- 
 The collection . , *, , . . , , * . 
 
 ly vouched for is remarkable if it be 
 anciently one , , , , 
 
 . remembered that for a long time the 
 in thought only ... . . , 
 
 collection existed m thought only. 
 
 The five books of the Torah had always formed a unit 
 or a single scroll, with a blank space of four lines be- 
 tween contiguous books; in public reading only such 
 a scroll might be used, although for the purpose of fol- 
 lowing the reader or for private study single volumes 
 for each book ('one fifth', homesh or hummasJi) were 
 permitted. In an ancient source in the Talmud (Baba 
 Batra 13b) the teachers are divided in their opinion 
 as to whether the three parts of the Scriptures may be 
 
 joined together. According to 
 The Rabbis slow ' , ,. ., .... .,. ( . 
 
 Rabbi Meir (130-160 of the corn- 
 to permit the , . . , . . , , . 
 _ . . .. , mon era) it is lawful to combine 
 Combination of , , . r , c . 
 
 . , the whole of the Scriptures in 
 
 Scriptural Books . ,. 
 
 . TT , one volume; his contemporary 
 
 in a Single Volume _ , , 
 
 R. Judah demands three 
 
 volumes, one for each of the three parts; the 
 other scholars go still farther and require a 
 single volume for each separate book of the 
 Prophets or of the Writings. Rabbi Judah adduces in 
 support of his opinion a precedent when a certain 
 Boethus, by the authority of Eleazar ben Azariah (90-
 
 THE PROBLEM 17 
 
 1 30) , had the eight books of the prophets in one volume ; 
 but Rabbi Meir cites another precedent for bringing 
 together all the Scriptures in one scroll, with proper 
 blanks between the single books. The latter opinion 
 prevails. It is presupposed in the Mishna, which rules 
 that a volume of Scriptures in the possession of part- 
 ners may not be divided upon the dissolution of part- 
 nership, and is laid down as law in the later Codes. 
 Nevertheless, Maimonides, according to the testimony 
 of his son Abraham, deprecated the union of all of the 
 Scriptures in a single codex (i. e. in book form, consist- 
 ing of leaves) . The point is that in turning the leaves 
 of the second or the third part, they would come to 
 rest upon the first, which would constitute a degra- 
 dation. According to the rabbis, it is permissible to lay 
 one scroll of the Torah on the top of another, or a 
 single book of the Torah upon another, or either upon 
 the Prophets, but not the reverse; one may not wind 
 the Prophets in a wrapper belonging to the Scroll of 
 the Torah. The Torah clearly possesses a higher 
 degree of holiness than the other two parts of the 
 Scriptures. The Mishna permits the community to 
 sell its market-place, where the people hold worship on 
 fast-days, in order to buy a synagogue; similarly a 
 synagogue may be exchanged for an ark, an ark for 
 wrappers, wrappers for the two latter divisions of the 
 Scriptures, and the Scriptures for the Torah; the re- 
 verse process is forbidden (Megillah 4. 1).
 
 18 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 -P..- , -. All of which is evidence that the 
 
 Different Degrees _ , . 
 
 , ... Torah was not only regarded as 
 
 of Sanctity , ., . ' 
 
 endowed with a higher degree of 
 
 sanctity than the Prophets and Writings, but also 
 physically kept apart; and that in earliest times the 
 books of the Prophets and Writings circulated each in 
 a single volume, though some of them might be united. 
 We saw how the twelve Minor Prophets count as one 
 book among the eight Prophets; their union was due 
 
 . solely to the small size of the 
 Sirach witnesses to . , , 
 
 XL TT r XL constituent books ; and we know 
 the Union of the ' , , r 
 
 ._,. _, . that the union had been ef- 
 
 Minor Prophets r , . , . r c . 
 
 ~ fected in the times of Sirach 
 
 in one Book. ,.,__ , . . 
 
 (175 before the common era). 
 
 In his Hymn of the Fathers (chapters 44-49) he praises 
 the heroes of the nation in chronological order; he 
 mentions the prophets by name, each one in his age; 
 but 'the twelve prophets' are grouped together in this 
 appellation namelessly. It is clear therefore that the 
 twelve little books formed one volume designated by 
 a collective title. 
 
 The writer of Daniel cites an utterance 
 
 'The Books r T . , , , . < . D , , /n 
 
 of Jeremiah as found in the Books (9. 
 
 2). 'The Books', in Greek biblia (plural of biblion, a 
 book), is at the basis of the English word 'Bible'. The 
 term accordingly meant originally not a single book, 
 but a collection, not necessarily united in one volume. 
 Naturally Daniel's 'Bible' was of smaller compass than 
 ours; it certainly lacked his own book. The collection
 
 THE PROBLEM 19 
 
 of Scriptures was still 'in the making*. The process 
 was not yet consummated; it had, of course, begun. 
 
 _. _, What was this process? To this 
 
 The Process of . , ,. . , 
 
 . , ., , . question there is a traditional and 
 Scripture Making ... , 
 
 an untraditional answer.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 
 
 The traditional answer is contained in a statement 
 which the Talmud cites from a source older than itself 
 (Baba Batra 14b, 15a). 'Moses wrote his own book and 
 the section concerning Balaam (Numbers 22.2-25.9) 
 and Job. Joshua wrote his own book and (the last) 
 eight verses of the Torah. Samuel wrote his own book 
 and Judges and Ruth. David wrote the Book of Psalms, 
 incorporating the productions of ten elders: Adam 
 (139), Melchizedek (110), Abraham (89), Moses (90), 
 Heman (88), Jeduthun (39, 62, 77), Asaph (50, 73-83), 
 and the three sons of Korah (42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87). 
 Jeremiah wrote his own book and the Book of Kings 
 and Lamentations. Hezekiah and his company wrote 
 Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Koheleth. 
 The Men of the Great Synagogue wrote Ezekiel, the 
 Twelve, Daniel, and Esther. Ezra wrote his own book 
 and the genealogies of the Book of Chronicles, includ- 
 ing his own'. 
 
 To understand aright the purport of this account 
 
 it must at once be conceded that the 
 The Meaning , , ., . , 
 
 , , , , term wrote cannot possibly have 
 
 of 'wrote' . 
 
 been used with the same meaning 
 
 throughout. Certainly in the case of Hezekiah and his 
 company, who 'wrote' Proverbs, and of the Men of the
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 21 
 
 Great Synagogue, who 'wrote' the Twelve, the intend- 
 ed meaning is that the books mentioned were completed 
 and edited by these two bodies. The title to chapters 25 
 and following in the Book of Proverbs reads: 'These 
 also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hez- 
 ekiah king of Judah copied out.' The collection of 
 Solomonic proverbs was accordingly 'completed' in the 
 days of Hezekiah, and the book then received its final 
 form. So it is with the Twelve. The three concluding 
 writings are those of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, 
 who are reckoned among the men of the Great Syna- 
 gogue. The volume naturally became complete only 
 with their inclusion. On the other hand, we have no 
 right to carry this meaning into all the other instances. 
 Certainly with reference to all those who wrote their 
 own books, the meaning can be only that they actually 
 'wrote' them, that is, were the authors of them. 
 
 If Hezekiah, according to Proverbs 25.1, was in- 
 strumental in giving final form to one Solomonic writ- 
 ing, the further step was taken to include in the activ- 
 ity of this king and his company also the other two 
 writings which are ascribed to Solomon. Isaiah was 
 naturally counted among 'the men of Hezekiah'; he 
 
 _. ~ wrote his own book. Similarly it goes 
 The Company of . , . . ,-, 
 
 ,, . . . with Daniel and Esther enumerated 
 
 Hezekiah . , .. , 
 
 ., , . ~ among the writings written by the 
 
 and the Great & . . c y , 
 
 men of the Great Synagogue; for 
 
 Daniel and Mordecai were of them. 
 But peculiarly enough, Ezra is singled out from the
 
 22 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 body to which he belonged. It is also by no means 
 obvious why the book of Ezekiel is included in the list 
 of writings issued by the Great Synagogue. Much has 
 been written on this body, and its very existence has 
 been called into question. Here may we fitly deal only 
 with the understanding of itintheMishnaand Talmud. 
 The teachers apparently mean by it the successive 
 spiritual leaders of the restored Jewish community in 
 the Persian period. Simon the Just is spoken of as 
 among the last af that body. It is a mooted question 
 whether Simon I, a grandson of Alexander's contem- 
 porary Jaddua, is meant, or Simon II, whose son Onias 
 was deposed by Antiochus Epiphanes, just before the 
 Maccabean uprising. But whether the one or the 
 other, it is clear that the activity of that body of di- 
 rectors of the inner life of the community extended 
 throughout the entire Persian period and beyond it 
 into the times of Greek dominion. It is evidently the 
 intent of the account to mark the time of Ezra as the 
 period in which the collection of Holy Scriptures was 
 completed. 
 
 The salient point in the traditional account is that 
 the process of Scripture making is described as one of 
 
 _, _. consecutive addition. On the whole 
 
 The Process one . , . . 
 
 , ~ ,. a rational spirit pervades the state- 
 
 of Consecutive ~, , *\ , 
 
 ...... ment. The last eight verses of the 
 
 Addition , , . , , , , . 
 
 Torah, narrating the death of Mo- 
 ses, are ascribed to Joshua. Contrast the view of later 
 teachers who contend that Moses wrote at dictation
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 23 
 
 the account of his own death and burial. Neverthe- 
 less we are dealing with a construction built on 
 specific data, supplied by the Scriptures themselves, 
 which are generalized. Since certain psalms in the 
 Psalter are assigned in their headings to David, the 
 whole of the Psalter, including anonymous produc- 
 tions, is practically attributed to David. The accepted 
 titles of the books, like Joshua, Samuel, are taken to 
 mean writings by these men instead of, as might be 
 maintained, writings concerning them. Naturally 
 summary titles, like Judges and Kings, could not be 
 taken to designate authorship; since Samuel connects 
 with Judges and Ruth deals with an event 'in the days 
 when the Judges judged', the three are ascribed to one 
 author; because the last chapter of Kings is re- 
 peated at the end of Jeremiah, the prophet becomes 
 plausibly the author of both. II Chronicles 35.25 
 suggested that he also wrote Lamentations. Because 
 the scene of Job's life is set in patriarchal surroundings 
 similar to those in Genesis, the book is ascribed to 
 Moses, and in the Syriac translation of the Scriptures 
 it is put immediately after Deuteronomy. But in 
 placing the completion of the Scriptures in the time 
 of Ezra and his associates of the Great Synagogue there 
 is an implied conviction, explicity expressed elsewhere 
 (Sotah 48b) , that with the death of the last prophets, 
 Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the Holy Spirit was 
 withdrawn from Israel. Hence the Scriptures, as a 
 body of inspired writings, are conterminous with the
 
 24 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 long period setting in with the first and concluding 
 with the last prophet. 
 
 _ ,. , Incidentally there results a defi- 
 
 The Imphed . . ,. . ' , c . , 
 
 TV ^ i . f nition of the Holy Scriptures. We 
 Definition of . , .. , . . 
 
 _ . . meet with it also in the writings 01 
 
 Scriptures , , . . T , TM, c 
 
 ... . the historian Josephus. The Scrip- 
 
 met with in , . J ' r . . 
 
 tures are to him the works of an un- 
 broken line of prophets, beginning 
 with Moses and ending in the reign of Artaxerxes 
 (the biblical Ahasuerus). By the grace of divine 
 inspiration, these men obtained a knowledge of the 
 most ancient events, just as they set forth clearly 
 those of their own time exactly as they occurred. 'We 
 possess not (as do the Greeks) a vast number of books 
 disagreeing and conflicting with one another. We 
 have but two and twenty, containing the history of 
 all time; books that are justly deemed trustworthy'. 
 Josephus apparently combined Ruth with Judges, 
 and Lamentations with Jeremiah; thus the number 
 was reduced by two. He specifies the five books of 
 Moses, four writings of hymns to God and practical 
 precepts to men (apparently Psalms, Song of Songs, 
 Proverbs, Koheleth), and thirteen historical works 
 (the remaining books). The historian unquestionably 
 reproduced the opinions currently held by the people. 
 
 Somewhat older is the statement in 
 II Maccabees , , , 
 
 the second prefatory letter loosely 
 
 attached to II Maccabees (chapter VI). It purports 
 to be derived from the writings and memoirs of Ne-
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 25 
 
 hemiah in which it was narrated 'how he, founding a 
 library, gathered together the books about the kings 
 and prophets, and the writings of David, and the 
 letters of kings concerning the holy gifts.' 'In like 
 manner', the writers continue, 'also Judah gathered 
 together for us all those writings that had been scat- 
 tered by reason of the war, and they remain with us.' 
 The second statement persumably rests upon fact. 
 During the religious persecution which led to the Mac- 
 cabean uprising, when the scrolls of the Torah were 
 rent in pieces and burnt, and any person was put to 
 death with whom a 'book of the covenant' was found 
 (I Maccabees 1. 56, 57), the sacred books, whether 
 in the Temple or in the Synagogues, had been spirited 
 away and kept in hiding; some may have perished; 
 at the first moment of the restoration Judah collected 
 from every nook and corner all that was left. The 
 first statement may and may not be a reflex of data 
 furnished in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. There 
 the rescripts of the Persian kings concerning gifts to 
 the Temple are reproduced; there mention is made 
 of songs of praise and thanksgiving by Levitical sing- 
 ers according to the command of David (Nehemiah 
 12.24), and one of them, a cento made up of Psalms 
 105, 96, and 106, is actually pronounced Davidic 
 (I Chronicles 16. 7-36); there also we find the circum- 
 stantial account of the reading of the Book of the Torah 
 (Nehemiah 8-10), with which may have been coupled 
 the notion that the 'books about the kings and
 
 26 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 prophets', that is, the second section of the Scriptures, 
 were then also collected. The whole therefore amounts 
 to the conception that the three parts of the Scriptures 
 were constituted a 'Library', a collection, in the times 
 of Nehemiah, whom the rabbis include among the 
 Men of the Great Synagogue. 
 
 While in the main this traditional conception, in 
 Talmud, in Josephus, in II Maccabees, may have been 
 built up from data in the Scriptures themselves, 
 whether correctly interpreted or not, there is a residue 
 which is not quite reducible to scriptural testimony. 
 Naturally the Scriptures are silent about the date of 
 their own completion. But as the process of Scripture 
 making, according to tradition itself, covered a long 
 period, we may expect the Scriptures to furnish in- 
 
 ,. , , formation concerning certain of 
 
 The Testimony of . . . & . . . 
 
 .,_,., its parts or single writings. We 
 
 the Scriptures . , s 
 
 have seen (chapter 1) how the 
 
 author of Daniel cites Jeremiah from a collection cal- 
 led 'the Books'. He may be alluding to a 'Bible' just 
 short of his own book, or merely to a body of prophetic 
 writings. But whether that body was similar in com- 
 pass to ours, whether in particuliar it was inclusive 
 of the historical works, we have no means of ascer- 
 taining. All that we can say is that 'the Books' included 
 Jeremiah and had other writings besides. It is signi- 
 ficant, however, that this is the only instance of a pro- 
 phetic word found in the Scriptures which is cited 
 from 'Books'. In other cases, as for example when the
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 27 
 
 concluding verse of the third chapter of Micah is 
 cited in Jeremiah 26. 18, it is reasonable to suppose 
 that the quotations were derived from books, but 
 the express remark is wanting. The author of Chron- 
 icles makes reference to written 
 The Chronicler , ., , . ^ , . , . 
 
 sources tor the history ot the kings 
 
 from David to Manasseh, composed by prophets 
 (Samuel, Nathan, Gad, Abijah, Iddo, Shemaiah, Jehu, 
 Isaiah, and nameless seers). Some of these are said 
 to have formed part of the book of the kings of Judah 
 and Israel, and the latter is mentioned elsewhere with- 
 out further specification as to prophetic authorship. 
 It cannot be maintained exactly that our books of 
 Samuel and Kings are meant. Nevertheless, there is 
 a strong presumption that those books formed the 
 main body of an historical work which he excerpted. 
 He may, of course, have had at his disposal also in- 
 dependent works by prophetic writers. This much is 
 certain that here we meet already with the notion of 
 the unbroken succession of prophet-historians. 
 
 There are references in the Scriptures to other 
 
 historical works, as for instance in our 
 The Book , , . , . . , , 
 
 , _. Book of Kings to chronicles or annals 
 
 of the kings of Israel and Judah, but these 
 and similar works have perished, except to the extent 
 that material from them was imbedded in the script- 
 ural histories which have survived. Hoewver, these 
 notices of lost writings are helpful to an understanding 
 of the very process at work in the making of the Script-
 
 & 
 
 28 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 ures. Equally instructive is the report in Jeremiah 36 
 
 , concerning the manner in which, after an 
 Jeremiah 
 
 activity extending over twenty-three years, 
 
 the prophet set about to commit to writing his ad- 
 dresses ; his amanuensis Baruch wrote at the prophet's 
 dictation ; likewise to him was assigned the task of re- 
 writing the roll, after it was burnt by king Jehoiakim, 
 with many additions. We may be quite certain that 
 the revised and amplified copy entered into the make- 
 up of our Book of Jeremiah, but whether the prophet 
 himself or Baruch or someone else gave final form to 
 the scriptural book cannot be stated positively, 
 
 _. _, In dealing with references to the 
 
 The Testimony . 
 
 ,. Torah in the two other parts of 
 
 concerning the . . A 
 
 the Scriptures we must confine our- 
 
 Torah . ... 
 selves to those instances in which 
 
 the whole of it or any part of its contents is spoken of 
 as 'written'. Thus the Chronicler attests as Mosaic 
 a Book of the Torah, in which were found prescriptions 
 concerning the daily offerings and the offerings on sab- 
 baths, new moons, and festivals upon the altar of the 
 burnt-offering (I Chronicles 16.40; II Chronicles 23. 
 18; 3 1.3), or the second Passover for such as on account 
 of uncleanness were not able to offer it in season (II 
 Chronicles 30.16); and if, on the supposition that 
 Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah was originally a unit, we 
 add the direct quotation in Nehemiah 13.2, 3 (from 
 Deuteronomy 23.4, 6), the Chronicler's Torah cannot 
 have been different in compass from our own. Daniel's
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 29 
 
 Torah had in it a 'curse' and an 'oath' pronounced 
 upon disobedience (Daniel 9.11), such as both Levit- 
 icus (26) and Deuteronomy (28) contain. 
 
 Similarly the Book of the Law of Moses, which Ezra 
 in the year 444 B. c. E. brought forward in solemn as- 
 sembly and to which the people bound themselves in 
 
 a document signed by Nehemiah and 
 The Torah , , . , , 
 
 , _, other notables, was none other than the 
 
 Pentateuch. The event occurred in the 
 seventh month, according to the circumstantial report 
 in chapters 8-10 of Nehemiah. On the first day of the 
 month, Ezra, standing upon a platform which had been 
 erected in one of the open squares of Jerusalem, with 
 fellow-priests on either side, opened the Book in the 
 sight of the people. As he opened it, the people stood 
 up, and the reader, as has been the wont ever since, 
 blessed God, the Giver of the Law, while the people 
 raised their hands in thanks to Heaven and answered : 
 Amen, Amen. In the hearing of the people, men, 
 women, and children, Ezra read from early morning 
 until midday. The Levites made the rounds among 
 the standing people, and repeated to them the words 
 read. The reading, we are told, was done distinctly, 
 with the observation of the proper stops, and possibly 
 with accompanying interpretation in Hebrew, of 
 course, which was then still the language of the people 
 with the full intention that the sense might be grasp- 
 ed by the audience and the reading understood. The 
 impression upon the hearers was that of gloom; the
 
 80 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 people wept as they listened to the word of God hitherto 
 imperfectly heeded and to the threats of national 
 calamity which indeed had become a reality ; but at the 
 encouraging words of Nehemiah and Ezra and the 
 teaching Levites the mood soon passed away, and in 
 joyful exaltation over the Law which was theirs to hold 
 and to cherish the people dispersed to their homes. 
 On the second day the reading was continued, this 
 time in the privacy of Ezra's home and before a select 
 gathering of heads of families and priests and Levites, 
 and the portion read concerned the celebration of the 
 Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast was observed in the 
 manner prescribed in Leviticus 23.40, 42. Day by day 
 the Law was read to the people. On the twenty-fourth 
 day of the month a fast was observed, and the reading 
 from the Torah occupied one fourth of the day. In the 
 document of ratification certain provisions are specified 
 as 'written' in the Torah and others are unmistakably 
 derived from it; the range covers practically the four 
 books of the Pentateuch in which there is legislation. 
 Other regulations, like the offering of the wood, and 
 modifications in the amount of the poll-tax or disposi- 
 tion of the tithe from the Levitical tithe, show that the 
 era of adapting the ancient Torah to new conditions 
 had begun. 
 
 _ ,, Ezra was a 'scribe', a'ready scribe'. 
 
 Ezra the Scribe _,, . ' ,*! 
 
 I hat does not signify a copyist with 
 
 good penmanship, but rather a 'bookish man', a man 
 of the Book, well versed in the sacred writings, a
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 31 
 
 scholar and student of the law, the first of a long line 
 of teachers who succeeded him. Nor did Ezra, as is 
 mistakenly held, in the name and by authority of the 
 king of Persia, impose the law upon the Jews, who were 
 not at all willing to receive it. The Torah required for 
 
 the Jew no sanction at the hands of a 
 The Powers c . . . , . . . 
 
 , foreign ruler; it carried its authority 
 
 conferred . , . ., j / 
 
 _ with it. What Ezra sought and ob- 
 
 tained from the king was the right of 
 internal autonomy for the re-constituted community; 
 and internal autonomy expressed itself first and fore- 
 most in a native judiciary competent to sentence 
 malefactors and to execute judgment, whether it be 
 unto death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of 
 goods, or to imprisonment (Ezra 7.25, 26). 
 
 , _, Earlier still, in the eighteenth year 
 
 Josiah s Book of ,.. T . ,/, \^ n , 
 
 * _, of king Josiah (621 B. c. E.) the Book 
 
 the Covenant f , **; , , , ' . . 
 
 of the Torah, also called the Book of 
 
 the Covenant, apparently long lost, had been discov- 
 ered in the Temple, read to the people,and made the 
 law of the realm. The account is found in chapters 
 . 22 and 23 of the Second Book of Kings and substan- 
 tiated by allusions in the Book of Jeremiah, notably the 
 eleventh chapter, where the prophet is described as an 
 'itinerant preacher' of the promulgated book. Upon 
 the basis of the recovered book immediate measures 
 were taken to re-constitute the religious affairs in the 
 kingdom. Thus idolatrous appurtenances which had 
 been introduced by former kings, like altars to the sun
 
 32 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 and moon, pillars and poles, horses and chariots ded- 
 icated to the sun, were destroyed, and various idol- 
 atrous practices, like making children pass through the 
 fire, were forbidden. The ordinances concerning all 
 these articles of worship or rites are found in Deute- 
 ronomy, but also in Exodus and Leviticus. The out- 
 standing feature of what may be termed the Act of 
 621 was the destruction of the 'high places', or country 
 sanctuaries, and the centralization of sacrificial wor- 
 ship in the Temple of Jerusalem. That squares, of 
 course, with the law in Deuteronomy. It is its most 
 characteristic injunction. Nevertheless, as the plain 
 sense of II Kings 23.9 indicates, one of the provisions 
 of Deuteronomy (18.6-8), touching the admission of 
 the priests of the high places to ministrations in the 
 Temple, was found impracticable. Here, as in the case 
 of Ezra, the process of adjusting the Torah to the con- 
 ditions of the time had set in. 
 
 The important point, however, is that the author 
 of the account is quite explicit about the antiquity of 
 A f '*-i7 ^ e recovere d book. It was none other 
 than the Torah of Moses (23.25), not 
 merely in the sense that it embodied teachings of Mo- 
 ses, but that it was the very book written by the Law- 
 giver. Or, as the expression runs in 17.37, it was the 
 Torah written by the Lord at the time of the exodus, 
 which naturally means: written by the Lord through 
 the hand of Moses, or: written by Moses at the dicta- 
 tion of the Lord. David had it and enjoined his son to
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 33 
 
 keep all that is 'written' therein (I Kings 2.3). It was 
 in the hands of Amaziah, who refrained from putting 
 to death the children of his father's assassins, 'as it is 
 written in the book of the Torah of Moses which the 
 Lord commanded', and a full verse is cited from Deu- 
 teronomy 24. 16: 'The fathers shall not be put to 
 death for the children, nor the children be put to death 
 for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death 
 for his own sin' (II Kings 14.6). Apparently it is the 
 narrator's opinion that at some point in the subsequent 
 period the book was lost. There is sufficient indication 
 that he believed this loss to have occurred after Hez- 
 ekiah's reign. That accords with the opinion of cer- 
 tain of the rabbis (Sanhedrinl03b) that Amon, Josiah's 
 father, committed the Torah to the flames, on which 
 occasion, according to Rashi, a single copy was rescued 
 and hidden under a layer in the walls of the Temple. 
 Of Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, the rabbis assert that 
 he had the Torah sealed up. 
 
 _, . References to the Mosaic Torah 
 
 References to the . , , f , . , 
 
 _, . . T . as a written book are found in the 
 
 Torah in Joshua D , c T , ~, f 
 
 Book of Joshua. The successor of 
 
 Moses, on his assumption of office, is charged to study 
 'this' Book of the Torah day and night, in order to do 
 according to all that is 'written' therein (1.8). After 
 the destruction of Ai, Joshua erects an altar on mount 
 Ebal, in obedience to the order of Moses not an oral 
 charge, but 'as it is written in the Book of the Torah of 
 Moses' (8.31). He furthermore writes there on stones
 
 34 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 a copy of the Torah of Moses, and then reads in the 
 hearing of the people, men, women, and children, the 
 words of the Torah, the Blessing and the Curse, 'ac- 
 cording to all that is written in the Book of the Torah' 
 (8.32-34). It is clear that the injunctions in Deuteron- 
 omy 27 are meant. It is impossible, however, to say 
 how much besides Deuteronomy, according to the 
 mind of the writer, there was in the Torah. Medieval 
 Jewish sholars, like Saadya, would have it that only 
 an epitome of the legal portions of the Torah was 
 written on the stones an epitome, of course, of the 
 whole Torah. In the last chapter of Joshua (verse 26) 
 reference is made to the Book of the Torah of God; 
 Joshua is said to have appended thereto the enactment 
 by which the people bound themselves to worship the 
 Lord solely. But what this Book of the Torah was like 
 is not indicated. 
 
 In the Torah itself it is said of 
 The Testimony ,, , T j. 
 
 . ., _ , Moses that he wrote at the Lord s 
 
 of the Torah , x , , , . , 
 
 ., ,, command the record of the attack 
 concerning itself f . , , ,_, , <*<A\ , f 
 of Amalek (Exodus 17.14) and of 
 
 the journeyings through the wilderness (Numbers 33. 
 2). He furthermore wrote the 'Words of the Lord' 
 making up the 'Book of the Covenant' (Exodus 24.4,7). 
 He is also ordered to write down the contents of the 
 covenant of Exodus 34. 10-26 (the matter is largely 
 contained in 23. 10-19). On the other hand, the Ten 
 Words upon the tables of stone, both the first and the 
 last, were written by God (Exodus 24. 12; 32.16; 24.
 
 THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 35 
 
 28; Deuteronomy 10. 2, 4). In Deuteronomy 31. 22,24 
 Moses is said to have written the 'Song' (Deuteronomy 
 32) and 'the words of this Torah in a book, until they 
 were finished'. The expression 'this Torah' occurs 
 again and again in Deuteronomy, so, for example, in 
 31.11 (following upon the statement in verse 9 that 
 Moses wrote 'this Torah' and consigned it to the keep- 
 ing of the priests) where Moses commands that every 
 seven years, on the Feast of Tabernacles, 'this Torah' 
 be read before the whole people. Naturally the ex- 
 pression may refer to Deuteronomy, but just as 
 well to the whole Pentateuch. The Mishna (Sotah 
 7.8) decrees that the reading every seven years shall 
 be confined to portions of Deuteronomy. The Jewish 
 commentators are agreed, however, that 'this Torah' 
 which Moses wrote and turned over to the priests was 
 the entire Pentateuch from beginning to end.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 
 
 Towards the close of the eleventh century of the 
 common era a Jewish commentator of Cordova, Moses 
 
 ru ru- MJII I Dn Chiquitilla, suggested that the 
 Ibn ChiquitiUa j u ir r lu n i c T u 
 
 .. o second half of the Book of Isaiah, 
 
 on the Second , . . . , , . A 
 
 TT * e. T t. beginning with chapter 40, was 
 Half of Isaiah . s , 
 
 the work or a prophet near the end 
 
 of the Babylonian exile. The break with tradition is 
 remarkable considering that at so early a date as the 
 second century B. C. E. the belief was current that 
 Isaiah son of Amoz, the contemporary of King Hez- 
 ekiah, wrote the whole book. Thus Sirach (48.24,25) 
 relates of him that 'by a spirit of might he saw what 
 should come to pass at the latter end, and comforted 
 them that mourned for Zion; he declared the things 
 that should be to the end of time, and the hidden things 
 
 or ever they came'. The same 
 He also assigns ,. , , , 
 
 , _. medieval scholar pronounces 
 
 several Psalms to ,-, . . ~ . n 1 n , 
 
 _. Psalms 42, 47, 106 to have 
 
 the Times of the , , . , , , . , 
 
 been penned in Babylon, and the 
 
 two concluding verses of Psalm 51 
 were, according to him, added by one of the saints in 
 the Babylonian captivity. 
 
 In the twelfth century Abraham 
 Ibn Ezra on T , r , 
 
 A . _ , Ibn Ezra, far-famed as a grammarian 
 
 the Pentateuch , , . c . ^ , 
 
 and expounder of the Scriptures, al-
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 37 
 
 though repudiating the notion of a bold compatriot 
 that the list of the Edomite kings 'before there reigned 
 any king over the children of Israel' (Genesis 30.31) 
 was composed in the times of Jehoshaphat, gives ex- 
 pression in veiled language to the thought that certain 
 passages of the Torah appear to have been written long 
 after Moses. The points seized upon by him are the 
 well-known anachronisms, references to conditions 
 which developed in aftertimes and the treatment of 
 events contemporaneous with Moses in a manner 
 indicating that the writer looks upon them as things 
 of the remote past. The break with tradition is clear 
 enough to him; it is a truth to be spoken of in myste- 
 rious tones; 'the prudent doth keep silence'. A century 
 later the commentator Moses son of Nahmanof Gerona, 
 was shocked by Ibn Ezra's untraditional views, and 
 denounced him as 'a talebearer that goeth about with 
 open rebuke and hidden love.' 
 
 Ibn Ezra's critical comments were taken up in the 
 
 _, . seventeenth century by the philosopher Spi- 
 
 Spinoza j u ui u j .uu , 
 
 noza, and carried probably beyond the intent 
 
 of the Spanish commentator. To Spinoza Ibn Ezra's 
 strictures prove conclusively that the Pentateuch was 
 written 'not by Moses but by someone who lived long 
 after him'. Moses, he conjectures, may have com- 
 mitted to writing certain narratives and laws. Still 
 he would base himself on such evidence as is incon- 
 testable. On the whole Spinoza favors the view that 
 Ezra compiled the Pentateuch out of divers sources
 
 38 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 which he transcribed and excerpted. The compiler for- 
 bore to remove duplications or to straighten out con- 
 tradictions in detail. Spinoza has been called the father 
 of modern biblical criticism. In one point he transcends 
 his successors. He looks upon the Torah and the his- 
 torical books which follow, from Joshua to Kings, as 
 one great historical work concerning the antiquities 
 of the Jewish people from the first beginnings to the 
 destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B. c. E. And the author 
 of this history was Ezra. 
 
 In order to offset the attack upon the Mosaic author- 
 ship of the Pentateuch on the part of the 'freethinkers', 
 . Jean Astruc, a physician of Montpellier, wrote 
 
 his 'Conjectures on the original memoirs of 
 which it appears that Moses made use in composing 
 the book of Genesis' (printed 1753). His starting-point is 
 the observation, long noted and variously explained, 
 that through entire chapters or large portions of chap- 
 ters the name of the Deity appears consecutively 
 either as 'God' (Elohim) or as 'the Lord' (Jhwh). 
 Thus at the opening of Genesis 'God' is employed 
 throughout in chapter 1 and the first three verses of 
 chapter 2, while from there to the end of chapter 4 
 (with the exception of 4.25 and in the interlocution 
 between the serpent and the woman, 3. 1, 5) we find 
 either the composite 'the Lord God' or simply 'the 
 Lord'. The novel explanation proposed by Astruc is 
 that the change of appellation is the mark of divers 
 writers. The means is thus afforded for recognizing
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 89 
 
 the constituent writings, originally independent and 
 disparate, but largely parallel in subject-matter. 
 Astruc realizes that his theory constitutes a general 
 solution of all the duplications, contradictions, and 
 disorders in arrangement which hitherto have baffled 
 the ingenuity of commentators. In confining himself 
 to Genesis and the first two chapters of Exodus Astruc 
 has no difficulty in persuading himself that Moses 
 derived his knowledge of history from the dawn of 
 creation to his own birth from writings by those that 
 preceded him; these he placed in parallel columns; but 
 at a subsequent period they were copied in consecutive 
 form or worked into one another. 
 
 _. _. When once the process was 
 
 The Theory carried . , . x , L i_ i r 
 
 ' _, , carried into the other books of 
 into the other Books , _, , 
 
 , .. _, the Pentateuch and the same 
 
 of the Pentateuch , f ., . 
 
 phenomenon of compilation was 
 
 observed in the narratives dealing with the times of 
 Moses himself, it followed that the compiler must have 
 been someone other than Moses. The successive steps 
 by which the hypothesis was worked outinits entirety 
 need not detain us here.Suffice it to say that by the labors 
 of a galaxy of biblical scholars,chiefly of Protestant Ger- 
 many and Holland in the nineteenth century, with 
 support from other, including Jewish, quarters, the 
 analysis was perfected and the constituent 'documents' 
 or independent writings were believed to have been 
 neatly separated. The sum of the findings of the school 
 were set forth with much acumen and, one is almost
 
 40 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 tempted to say, with great eloquence not quite fifty 
 years ago by Wellhausen. The new opinion operates 
 
 with internal evidence as furnished by 
 Wellhausen ., , r ,. . 
 
 the change of divine names, repetitions, 
 
 contradictions, incongruities of sequence, and differ- 
 ences of vocabulary and turns of speech. As a result 
 three main strata are made to emerge into view. 
 There is in the first place a body of narrative, itself 
 composite, characterized by the consummate art of 
 story-telling, the vividness of the pictures, the richness 
 in lineaments of detail, their fullness of color and life 
 (one need think only of the Joseph story which is the 
 delight of children) ; into it was worked a code of laws, 
 the Book of the Covenant of Exodus 21-23, and the 
 Decalogue (Ten Commandments) of Exodus 20. 
 Secondly there is the Code of Deuteronomy with its 
 narrative introductions and postscripts; and, lastly, 
 the Priests' Code to which belong the whole of Levit- 
 icus and substantial parts of Exodus and Numbers, 
 together with scattered portions, now larger now smal- 
 ler, in the remaining books; whatever of narrative it 
 contains serving merely as the framework, dry and 
 pedantic, characterized by attention to genealogies, 
 lists of names, and dates. 
 
 External evidence supplied by 
 The Dating of the . , . *. K , ,. 
 
 ._. , the progress or the nation s his- 
 
 Documents , , . ., , . 
 
 tory as revealed in the prophetic 
 
 literature is then called into service to place these 
 three 'documents' into proper chronological sequence.
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 41 
 
 The Code of Deuteronomy (chapters 12-26 of Deut- 
 eronomy) is identified with the Book of the Torah 
 found in the eighteenth year of Josiah. The story of 
 its loss and discovery is pronounced a fiction pure and 
 simple. It had not been written until then. Its pur- 
 pose was to embody the programme of the party of 
 reformers by whom the king had been won over. Its 
 cardinal demand of restricting sacrificial worship to 
 the Temple at Jerusalem and of doing away with the 
 country sanctuaries was something new, wholly un- 
 heard of in the past. By royal decree the Code was 
 
 made the law of the realm. This 
 The Code of _ . , , 
 
 _ , official act imparted sanction to 
 
 Deuteronomy from , n r> i 
 
 . r> r i? tne sma " Book purporting to come 
 
 021 15. Vs 1. f ., e ^i , i 
 
 from the pen of the ancient law- 
 giver. This volume was the first of its kind, the cell out 
 of which the whole organism of the Holy Scriptures in 
 due course of time developed. 
 
 Back of Deuteronomy, a 
 The Narrative Document .. 
 
 ,. ,. century earlier, the compo- 
 
 a Century earlier , , /. 
 
 nent parts of the great his- 
 torical work of which the Book of the Covenant in 
 Exodus is a part, had been written down. That Code, 
 which is only loosely connected with the body of nar- 
 rative, is supposed to have been largely a compilation 
 of private initiative which was never promulgated 
 officially. It embodied ancient customary law as it 
 had arisen in successive generations and presupposes 
 in its every part the settled conditions of the centuries
 
 42 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 after the conquest. It sanctions a plurality of sanct- 
 uaries in accordance with the ancient custom antedating 
 Josiah and Deuteronomy. The whole work is synchron- 
 ous with the riseof the great prophets in theeighth cent- 
 ury . It moves along with them , but it does not register the 
 finished product of their aims and strivings. Deutero- 
 nomy is the precipitate of the prophetic movement 
 and puts the seal upon it ; the older work Code and 
 narrative forms its background. Naturally the latter 
 is truer to the past from which it has not cut itself 
 quite loose. 
 
 mi. T > r* On the lines from Deuteronomy 
 
 The Priests Code 
 
 ,. . . and past the prophet kzekiel, ac- 
 
 a Century later , " r w^ 
 
 cording to Wellhausen, moves the 
 
 body of priestly legislation. The two earlier writings 
 project themselves into Mosaic times, but the disguise 
 say the critics is transparent enough. The Priests' 
 Code, on the other hand, consistently maintains its 
 assumed role and never for a moment betrays the times 
 in which it was actually composed. But if we probe 
 deeper we shall find that the things which in the Code 
 of Deuteronomy are put forward as a programme still 
 to be realized are here treated as unquestioned real- 
 ities. The native kingship has disappeared ; under the 
 foreign overlord there is room but for a 'prince'; the 
 high priest is making ready to take over the headship 
 of the religious community which has been constructed 
 upon the ruins of the defunct nation. Ezra probably 
 introduced the entire Pentateuch, or his Book of the
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 43 
 
 Torah may have consisted merely of the Priests' Code. 
 In the latter case the final 'redaction' of the complete 
 Pentateuch would date from times subsequent to 
 Ezra. At any rate the enactment of 444 bases itself 
 squarely upon the Priests' Code which from that year 
 on becomes the norm of Jewish life. It was the second 
 step in the formation of officially accepted, author- 
 itative Scriptures. 
 
 The book of Joshua, it is said, was 
 The Historical - , , , . 
 
 D at first an intergal part of what the 
 
 critics therefore designate as the 
 Hexateuch (sixfold book). The same three strands ob- 
 servable in the Pentateuch run through the sixth book. 
 Its contents, dealing with the conquest and distribu- 
 tion of the land, form the necessary conclusion to the 
 Pentateuch; there we have the preparation and the 
 laws for the government of the land, here the execution. 
 The historical books which follow Joshua (Judges, 
 Samuel, Kings) are likewise composite; but it is not 
 possible to identify their constituent sources with 
 those discovered in the Pentateuch. Still the compiler 
 must have belonged to the same school which made 
 those additions which we find in front and after the 
 Deuteronomic Code. He is called the Deuteronomist. 
 He was a man impregnated with the ideas of the Deu- 
 teronomic legislation, and these furnished the angle 
 from which the past was condemned, solely because 
 it failed to live up to regulations to which it was a 
 stranger. From the pen of this compiler come those
 
 44 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 moralizing portions whose theme is the contrast be- 
 tween what should have been and what actually was. 
 But withal the compiler was content with supplying 
 the corrective to the representation of the history of 
 the nation in the older documents excerpted by him; 
 he refrained from recasting it completely. It was re- 
 served for the Chronicler to make good this omission. 
 His undertaking was not the first of its kind ; it had had 
 predecessors. The history of the nation from David 
 to the fall of the state was now remodeled in full accord 
 with the legislation of the Priests' Code. The compiler 
 cuts short practically the entire history of the Northern 
 Kingdom. Judah alone enters within his purview; 
 David is glorified ; the pious kings are depicted as most 
 zealous observers of the Torah that is the Torah as 
 the compiler knew it; in the foreground of interest 
 stands the Temple with its priests and Levites, its 
 sacrifices and song ritual. The compiler carried the 
 history beyond the fall of the state by incorporating 
 the memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah, and the list of 
 high priests includes Jaddua, the priest who met 
 Alexander the Great at the gates of Jerusalem. Chron- 
 icles-Ezra-Nehemiah thus reveals itself as a work of 
 the Grecian period. Its position in the third division 
 of the Scriptures (chapter I) shows that the second 
 division containing the historical books had been 
 closed.
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 45 
 
 _. p . . The same division has in it also the 
 
 four strictly prophetic books. We may 
 
 Collection . / 
 
 take them up in the order prescribed in 
 
 the Talmud (chapter I) : Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and 
 the Twelve. The Book of Jeremiah is very much like 
 in its make-up to the Book of Kings.with which indeed 
 the Talmud couples it as belonging to the same author 
 (chapter II). It is largely biographical and appears 
 to have been compiled by Baruch, who must have used 
 the material of prophetic addresses which he himself 
 wrote down at the prophet's dictation (as above). 
 Ezekiel is practically as the prophet himself left it. 
 Isaiah is no less a collection than the Twelve. Not only 
 is the second half of the book the work of an anonymous 
 prophet living at or after the termination of the 
 Babylonian exile, but even in the first part there is 
 matter which does not belong to the genuine Isaiah. 
 
 _ ,. , .,. There is a radical school which op- 
 
 Radical Views . . , , 
 
 crates quite recklessly with the pro- 
 phetic books as they stand in the Scriptures. Accord- 
 ing to the view of these scholars, a very small propor- 
 tion in the volumes of the prophets antecedent to the 
 fall of the state (pre-exilic prophets) may be ascribed 
 to the men whose names the books bear. By far the 
 greater amount is late accretion, dating from post- 
 exilic times, nay, largely from the Maccabean period. 
 In this connection a general theory is propounded both 
 by writers who have a claim to originality and by men
 
 46 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 who are adepts at popularizing 
 Literary Ownership. . , 
 
 the heavy work done by others. 
 Interpolations T . . ., ,, . , , 
 
 It is that the ancients had no 
 
 conception of literary ownership. Every reader felt 
 free to annotate a book old or recent, to introduce ad- 
 ditions (interpolations), to strike out parts, and in 
 general to publish the book anew under the old title, 
 but in a greatly modified form. As one writer puts it, 
 a gaping blank in the roll or even in a column was an 
 invitation to supplementers to'enrich'the contents with 
 elaborations of their own. At length the prophetic 
 division was closed. As Daniel was not placed among 
 the prophets (chapter I) , the sealing of the second part 
 of the Scriptures must have occurred before the Book 
 of Daniel gained currency and was given scriptural 
 rank. Obviously there is a lapse of time between the 
 writing of a book and its acceptance or recognition. 
 Aproximately therefore the closing took place in the 
 Maccabean period ; with the closing process went hand 
 in hand that of interpolation which marked the finish- 
 ing touches applied to a literature all ready, when orig- 
 inal products were no longer forthcoming and imit- 
 ators plied their trade. 
 _. _.. , The writings of the entire third division 
 
 are pronounced to be products of the post- 
 Division ... . , ., . . f . . ,. 
 
 exilic period, that is trom the concluding 
 
 decades of the Persian dominion clear almost to the 
 Roman. Over against the moderate position that 
 certain Psalms are post-exilic and possibly even Mac-
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 47 
 
 cabean, the exaggerated statement is made that none 
 of the Psalms is of pre-exilic date. By an erroneous 
 construction put upon a notice in the Mishna which 
 we reserve for discussion below (chapter VI) the con- 
 tention is made (and repeated without further exam- 
 ination by popularizing authors) that the third divi- 
 sion was not closed until two decades after the fall of 
 the second Temple. 
 
 Thus, roughly speaking, the process of the making 
 
 The Entire Process of th ? Scri P tures . as a body of 
 sacred writings invested with 
 
 authority and generally recognized as such, passed 
 through three stages each separated from the other by 
 an interval of two or three centuries; the Torah was 
 completed about 400 B. c. E., the Prophets about 100 
 B. c. E., and the Ketubim about 100 c. E. The be- 
 ginnings of the process must be placed in 621 B. c. E. 
 when Deuteronomy was promulgated. 
 
 In the light of the critical position as outlined in this 
 chapter it will, however, be understood that the critics 
 by no means make of the Torah the earliest written book. 
 It was simply the earliest to be recognized, accepted, 
 and elevated to scriptural rank. The prophetic writ- 
 ings in their genuine pre-exilic parts have been com- 
 
 HM- mitted to writing at an earlier period, 
 
 The Place of , , , , . , 
 
 .. , . but they circulated only as private vol- 
 the Torah . y . r j- 1 
 
 umes m the possession of disciples or 
 
 admiring followers. In the language of the critical 
 school, 'the prophets antedate the Torah and both
 
 48 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 the Psalter', or 'the Law came in between'. According- 
 ly, the Torah is an interloper in the spiritual progress 
 initiated by the prophets and still alive in the piety 
 of the psalmists; the form of religious polity and life 
 created by it constitutes 'an immense retrogression'. 
 
 _ , There is a more moderate school, 
 
 t which, while at one with the methods of 
 the Critical . . . .. , . . c . 
 
 _,. modern criticism as applied to the Scrip- 
 
 tures, refuses to accept the conclusions 
 in their entire range. Thus it evinces a tendency to 
 raise the date of the biblical books ; in particular it con- 
 siders the Priests' Code to have antedated Deute- 
 ronomy. But the critical theory was wholly rejected 
 by the orthodox wing without, however, influencing 
 the great mass of students who are taught to look 
 upon the opponents of the critical results as reaction- 
 aries. Catholic scholars carried the discussion 
 into their own circles, and at length official action by 
 the Church became imperative. In 1907 a Papal 
 Commission brought in a report declaring Moses to 
 have been the author of the Pentateuch in the sense 
 that he conceived the work in detail but left the ex- 
 ecution of the undertaking to collaborators whose 
 finished product he approved ; he also made use of older 
 sources, whether written documents or oral traditions, 
 wherever necessary; it is also conceded that additions 
 and slight alterations crept in during its further course 
 of transmission.
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 49 
 
 But even in Protestant circles 
 Present-Day Status , , , , .. . , 
 
 * ~ ... . there has been a shifting of po- 
 
 of Criticism . . , .. , 
 
 sitions. Much greater stress is now 
 
 laid on the stage of oral transmission which preceded 
 the written documents; their process of development 
 is shown to have been a protracted one, so that in their 
 beginnings they mount up quite close to the times and 
 conditions of which they tell. By using to advantage 
 our more extented knowledge of the ancient Orient it 
 is possible to show how whole circles of ideas which 
 used to be placed in post-exilic times belong to the very 
 earliest epochs in the life of the nation. At no time 
 was Palestine isolated from contact with the great 
 world beyond, and the Mosaic times, nay even the age 
 of the patriarchs, reveal themselves as periods when 
 East and West left their cultural deposits in the soil on 
 which Abraham and Moses trod. We cannot now, as 
 was at one time the vogue, discuss seriously whether 
 the art of writing was known in the Mosaic times. We 
 know of the code of laws promulgated by a 
 Babylonian king (Hammurapi) nearly eight centuries 
 earlier. Moreover, the whole of the resolution of the 
 Pentateuch into its documents as developed by the 
 critical school has within recent years suffered a set- 
 back, and at this moment this as many another 
 question in the criticism of the Scriptures may be said 
 to have been re-opened.
 
 60 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 -,. The nineteenth century witnessed 
 
 The Attitude of , , , T . , 
 
 T v. c Vi i tne nse * t" e newer Jewish learning 
 I e wisn. v-iCiiOicirs .... . . . , 
 
 which is characterized by explora- 
 tions in the whole range of Jewish antiquity along 
 historical and critical times. Zunz, who with Rapo- 
 port opened the new era, began and concluded his 
 literary career with short studies in the scriptural 
 field. The Book of Ezekiel was to him a work produced 
 in times subsequent to Ezra; the third book of the 
 Torah, Leviticus, he considered to be of a still later 
 period, and the earliest evidence of the existence of the 
 complete Pentateuch he placed some three centuries 
 after Josiah. These extravagant notions, the proof for 
 which was presented in a summary, almost laconic, 
 manner were repudiated by Geiger. Much as Geiger 
 had broken with the authority of the Torah in prac- 
 tice, he maintained the priority of Leviticus as com- 
 pared with Deuteronomy, although he conceded late, 
 post-exilic accretions in the third book of the Torah. 
 Yet Kalisch in England was moving in the line of the 
 'advanced' position quite ahead of Wellhausen; but 
 Kalisch stood somewhat aside from the main current 
 of the Jewish learning of his age. In Italy, Luzzatto, 
 the foremost Jewish student of the Scriptures in the 
 nineteenth century, would not so much as admit that 
 the second half of Isaiah was not from the pen of Isaiah 
 the contemporary of Hezekiah. Graetz, the historian 
 of the Jewish people, had no scruples about placing 
 Koheleth in the time of Herod and several Psalms in
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 51 
 
 Maccabean and even post-Maccabean times. Kroch- 
 mal likewise had conceded the Maccabean date of 
 certain Psalms and developed the idea that Koheleth 
 was the last written book, its concluding verses being 
 the collector's epilogue to the entire body of Scriptures. 
 The pentateuchal question, which Krochmal had not 
 treated at all, was disposed of by Graetz in a few pages 
 and later on in a brief essay. He resolutely brushed 
 aside the dominant Protestant theory as developed 
 by Wellhausen. According to Graetz, the first four 
 books were in existence under king Ahaz, the various 
 legislative parts having been publicly promulgated 
 under Joash and Uzziah. The Book found in the 
 Temple was Deuteronomy, thus completing the Pen- 
 tateuch. The trend of the labors of the whole of the 
 'historical school', as Schechter so well recognized, was 
 to steer clear of the Scriptures and to concentrate 
 instead upon a study of the post-biblical literature and 
 history and to exalt the free spoken word as it kept 
 touch with the religious needs of each age above the 
 written word. Schechter himself pleaded for a renewed 
 study of the Scriptures on the part of Jewish scholars, 
 from the point of view of a 'Jewish liberalism'. It 
 cannot be said that there is to-day a corporate expres- 
 sion of Jewish liberal opinion on the critical questions 
 presented by the Scriptures. Yet it must not be forgotten 
 that, as the author of the 'Guide for the Perplexed of 
 our Times' rightly points out, each age has its methods 
 of dealing with questions affecting the Scriptures. 'To
 
 52 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 say with the ancients that David penned prophetically 
 Psalm 137 ('By the rivers of Babylon') will not produce 
 in modern minds the same emotions of hope and trust 
 and faith; but the same effect will be produced when 
 our younger generation is made to see the depth of 
 affection for country, nation,and God which animated 
 that Levitical singer as he was carried away captive 
 to a foreign land and vowed that he would not forget 
 the ancient home.' 
 
 Tradition, or that which passes for 
 Tradition and . , TT ,. . , . , , , 
 
 _ . A . . it, and Untradition, which goes by the 
 
 Criticism ..... ... 
 
 name ot criticism, are quite tar apart 
 
 in their results. But in one respect they seem to be at 
 one. Both know by whom and when every book of the 
 Scriptures, nay, every chapter and verse and every 
 infinitesimal bit of the sacred text, was written ; they 
 know also the sequence of the writings in the process 
 of public recognition. Tradition may be shown to rest 
 upon scriptural data, perhaps imperfectly understood, 
 and therefore to constitute a mere opinion ; Untradition 
 operates with evidence likewise derived from the 
 Scriptures, possibly more successfully apprehended, 
 and tends to be hardened into a tradition of the critical 
 school unquestioned by its followers. True criticism 
 will bend before no opinion whether ancient or modern ; 
 it recognizes no master but that tradition which when 
 all is said and done is found to be based not on opinion, 
 but on fact. There is no other approach to antiquity 
 except through tradition. The road is beset with
 
 THE UNTRADITIONAL VIEW 53 
 
 difficulties which no earnest student can afford to 
 minimize, and the injection of a measure of 'learned 
 ignorance' will at least save us from that dogmatic 
 assurance which clings to traditionalists and untra- 
 ditionalists alike. The data are scanty and not always 
 unambiguous; a point here and a point there may be 
 firmly held, but the connecting line must needs be 
 drawn by our own hand. 
 
 A HT x A clear insight will show that the 
 
 A Newer Method ,. 
 
 . 4 , lines do not always run straight; 
 
 of Approach , , , , 
 
 they waver and break and go to and 
 
 fro and up and down ; there is much intertwining and 
 interlacing. Indeed the process of Scripture making 
 will reveal itself not as one of consecutive addition of 
 a second category after the first was well established 
 and of a third when the second had been joined on to 
 the first, but rather as one of consecutive enlargement 
 within the three parts, all of which co-existed from the 
 very beginning, and each of which, whatever its com- 
 pass for the time being, remained identical in its 
 character throughout the whole of the formative 
 period.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 
 
 TheTripartition e tri P art | tion of ^ly Writ as 
 . . , traditionally given has been traced to 
 
 the second century B.C.E. (chapter I). 
 But it mounts up much higher. When Ezekiel (7.26) 
 describes the consternation of the people as the end, 
 the national catastrophe, approaches, he represents 
 them as seeking in vain a Vision' at the hands of the 
 prophet, the priests at a loss to furnish torah , and the 
 elders unable to offer counsel. Jeremiah's antagonists 
 meet his predictions of evil defiantly with the as- 
 surance that there will be torah forthcoming from the 
 priest, and the 'word' from the prophet, and 'counsel* 
 from the wise man (Jeremiah 18.18). 
 
 _ . , , Accordingly, the people, in their per- 
 
 Triple Source , . . V i . . 
 , P . . plexity, whether in national or in pri- 
 
 vate affairs, have at their disposal a 
 triple means of lifting the veil, of obtaining enlighten- 
 ment, of ascertaining the will and purpose of the Deity ; 
 hence, a triple source of revelation. Jehoshaphat, on 
 the eve of the campaign against the Arameans at Ra- 
 moth (I Kings 22.5), or the expedition against Moab 
 (II Kings 3.11) ; Josiah, when confronted with the con- 
 sequences of the long disobedience of the Law of Moses 
 now recovered (22.13) ; Zedekiah, battling against the
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 55 
 
 invading foe and uncertain as to the efficacy of Egyp- 
 tian succor (Jeremiah 21. 2; 37. 7); Rebekah, wishing 
 to know what the struggle of her sons within her por- 
 tends (Genesis 25.22); any person on an errand like 
 Saul's (I Samuel 9.9), or litigants unable to compose 
 their differences (Exodus 18.15) they all are eager to 
 'seek' or 'inquire of God through the instrumentality 
 of his agents, whether prophets or priests. Both were 
 to be found in or near the sanctuaries; thither the 
 people resorted on sabbaths and new moons (II Kings 
 4.23) and fast-days (Jeremiah 36.6), and there they 
 asked to be instructed in the ways of the Lord and His 
 righteous ordinances (Isaiah 58.2). 
 T . lor ah is used preeminently of the priest's 
 instruction. Naturally the priests would be con- 
 sidered experts in ritual matters pertaining to the 
 distinction between holy and common, clean and un- 
 clean (Leviticus 11.10; Ezekiel 44.23). The prophet 
 
 OM. TJM. i H* u Haggai asks of the priests a de- 
 The Ritual Torah ... ,*_,. .. , , 
 
 cision in a matter of this kind ; he 
 
 asks of themtorah. 'If one bear hallowed flesh in the 
 skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, 
 or pottage or wine, or oil, or any food, shall it become 
 holy?' The answer is: No. 'If one that is unclean by a 
 dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean?' 
 Yes, the priests reply (Haggai 2.11-13). The subjects 
 fall within the province of the great body of legislation 
 in Leviticus with its larger and smaller sections each 
 designated at the head or at the bottom as a tor ah:
 
 66 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 This is the torah of (i.e. dealing with) the burnt-offer- 
 ing, or the sin-offering; this is the torah of the animals 
 that may be eaten and may not be eaten ; of the woman 
 giving birth to a child ; of the leper ; and so on. 
 
 But the priest is also judge (Eze- 
 Legal Decrees , . , .. (MX r TT ^ . 
 
 Kiel 44.24); the Deuteronomic legis- 
 lation makes provision for local courts and for the 
 highest court of appeals at the central sanctuary, with 
 the priests as the predominating element (Deutero- 
 nomy!7.8-13; II Chronicles 19.5-11). The legal decree, 
 or 'judgment', is called torah', the sum of the legislation 
 in chapters 21 and 22 of Exodus is designated as 
 'judgments' (21.1; 24.3). To the priest the husband 
 takes his wife suspected of infidelity (Numbers 5.15) ; 
 in the presence of the priest men and women poured 
 
 T A. out their soul before God (I Samuel 1. 
 In Matters of . . , ,. , .. 
 
 ~ . 15); it was for him to hold persons to 
 
 Conscience '. , . . ,. f , 
 
 their vows and to their plighted word 
 
 (Deuteronomy 23.24; see Numbers 30.2-17), and he 
 received confessions (Leviticus 5.5; Numbers 5.7). 
 He was accounted the messenger of the Lord: at his 
 mouth the people sought torah, and he turned away 
 many from sin (Malachi 2.6, 7). 
 
 Ministering at the sanctuary, blessing the people, 
 and teaching torah constituted the priest's activity 
 
 (Deuteronomy 10.8; 33.10). 
 
 Torah Comprehensive :. i. //* o\ i r i_ 
 . . __ . Jeremiah (2.8) speaks of the 
 
 priests as 'those that handle 
 the Torah'; and Hosea (4.6) upbraids those of his day
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 57 
 
 as derelict in their duty of communicating the 
 knowledge of God to the people. Into the priest's keeping 
 was placed the sum of instruction for any and every 
 emergency in the life of the nation and in that of the 
 individual, the whole of the Torah of God, just as it 
 was he who, in possession of the Light and Truth 
 (Urim and Thummim), was consulted in all weighty 
 matters of state by Saul and David (I Samuel 14.36; 
 23.2 and elsewhere), and their trials and afflictions 
 were cheerfully borne by the ephod-clad minister of 
 God (I Kings 2.26). 
 
 Just as the Torah was the priest's, so 
 The 'Vision' . J , . . , . , ,, * . ' 
 
 ,_... , , the vision or the word was the proph- 
 or 'Word D , , . ., A 
 
 et s. Prophecy and priesthood might be 
 
 united in one and the same person, as in the case of 
 Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and for that matter Moses, who 
 officiated at the ordination of Aaron and his sons 
 (Leviticus 8). In early times the two functions were 
 probably indistinguishable. Yet a differentiation set 
 in when each reached its full growth. In the main the 
 priest was concerned with the ordinary business of life 
 which is much the same at all times and partakes of 
 
 _. . routine, and he was hedged in by 
 
 Priest and , TU j it -Ji 
 
 _, . precedent. The prophet dealt more with 
 
 Prophet . ..u 
 
 emergencies, with unique situations, and 
 
 his message is rooted in all the attendant circumstances 
 of his day, forceful to the extent that it is impulsive. 
 Soberness marks the priest. The prophet walks in a 
 trance during which he receives his Visions'
 
 68 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 and 'auditions'; his realm is the subconscious, and 
 his enthusiasm borders on the pathological. The hand 
 of God rests heavy on him (Isaiah 8.11 ; Ezekiel 3.14) ; 
 the spirit carries him hither and thither (I Kings 18. 
 12; Ezekiel 3.14 and elsewhere); he is powerless to 
 resist the inward impulse, shut up in his bones like a 
 consuming fire (Jeremiah 20.9) ; he loves solitude (15. 
 17) and affects the bizarre; he not only speaks the 
 word, but acts it out (Isaiah 20.2; Jeremiah 27.2; 
 Ezekiel 24.24) ; he is accounted a madman (Hosea 9. 
 7). He is always in conflict with the present order of 
 things ; compromise, half-way measures are not to his 
 liking; in his one-sided accentuation of the ideal con- 
 sists his greatness. Opposition he condemns as stub- 
 bornness; the nation if it is to be saved must retrace 
 its steps, 'return', that is, repent, and the heart of 
 stone must be converted into a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 
 11.19), become receptive instead of obdurate. Like 
 the priests, the prophets sometimes live in conventic- 
 les, surrounded by younger disciples, 'sons of the 
 prophets' (I Kings 20.35) ; but they form no hereditary 
 caste; and the true prophet, like Amos, refuses to be 
 identified with guild-members; he is an individualist. 
 
 ~ -,. Prophets and priests look 
 
 Conflict between . , ,; , 
 
 _ . , ._, . . askance at each other ; the priest 
 
 Prophets and Pnests , 
 
 would regulate prophecy and as- 
 sume jurisdiction over the prophet; witness the en- 
 counter between Amos and Amaziah the priest of 
 Bethel, and Jeremiah and Pashhur the priest of Jeru-
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 59 
 
 salem (Amos 6.10; Jeremiah 20, 1). The priest has on 
 his side the constituted authorities and the Torah. 
 The prophet speaks out with courage (Micah 3.8) and 
 over against the priestly Torah in which ritual matters 
 are intermixed with moral injunctions he proclaims 
 as all-sufficient the prophetic sum of moral duty. To 
 that he of a set purpose applies the sacerdotal term 
 Torah (Isaiah 1.10; Jeremiah 6.19). To the prophet's 
 mind the divine Law could not concern itself with the 
 sacrificial worship; the duties which it inculcated 
 dealt rather with social justice and might be summed 
 up most briefly in 'doing justice, loving mercy, and 
 walking humbly with God' not showily, by the dis- 
 play of calves and rams and rivers of oil, such as the 
 priests commanded, and the exaggerated piety of 
 surrendering one's first-born (Micah 6.6-8). In short, 
 the prophet accused the priests of falsifying the Torah 
 of God (Jeremiah 7.31) ; at best they could only main- 
 tain that the objectionable laws were given by the 
 Deity for the express purpose of destroying the wicked 
 people (Ezekiel 20.25, 26). A new covenant would 
 supersede the old covenant of the exodus, when the 
 Torah would be written in the people's heart and the 
 knowledge of the Lord be taught no more, for all will 
 know Him (Jeremiah 31. 33, 34). 
 
 - . , , Not only did prophets and 
 
 Conflicts between . / 
 
 r i. j T>_ L priests often oppose each 
 
 Prophets and Prophets , , , 
 
 other ; but prophets and proph- 
 ets likewise clashed. Micah inveighs against those
 
 60 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 easy-going preachers who talk of wine and strong drink 
 and delude the people by their optimistic messages of 
 peace. Jeremiah and Ezekiel are constantly at odds 
 with these 'false' prophets. A classic example is af- 
 forded by the encounter between Jeremiah and Han- 
 aniah (Jeremiah 28). They categorically contradict 
 each other and each accuses the other of tampering 
 with the truth. To Hananiah's mind Jeremiah was 
 the 'false prophet'. But history confirmed Jeremiah 
 to have been in the right. 
 
 _ . There were also differences be- 
 
 Between Priests . , ,, 
 
 . _. . tween priests and priests. When 
 
 and Priests . 
 
 there was no king in Israel, and 
 
 every man did that which was right (see Deuteronomy 
 12.8) in his own eyes', a Levitical priesthood, tracing 
 its ancestry to Moses, maintained itself in Dan in 
 rivalry with Shiloh, and this Danite sanctuary was 
 equipped with a molten image wrought by the gold- 
 smith (Judges 17 and 18). The 'royal sanctuary' at 
 Bethel similarly possessed a golden calf, \ i. e. the image 
 of a young bull, the symbol of Joseph's strength (I 
 Kings 12.28; Hosea 8.5, 6; Deuteronomy 33.17). The 
 priesthood of Shiloh, of whom Eli was a worthy repre- 
 sentative, was set aside by Solomon, who raised up the 
 branch of Zadok to minister at the new Temple at 
 Jerusalem (I Samuel 2.35; I Kings 2.27). The Elide 
 Abiathar had sided with Adonijah, while Zadok sup- 
 ported the claims of Solomon and was abetted by the 
 prophet Nathan (I Kings 1.7, 45). The Elides, thrust
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 61 
 
 out from the Temple in the capital, attached them- 
 selves to the 'high places' in the country towns, and 
 when these were abolished, they were degraded to the 
 ranks of lower service in the central sanctuary (I Sam- 
 uel 2.36; Ezekiel 44.10-14). Thus priests who favored 
 image worship opposed those who proscribed images ; 
 Levites holding to a plurality of sanctuaries were in 
 conflict with the centralizing priests-Levites belonging 
 to the Zadokite family. In the rebellion of Korah 
 against Aaron (Numbers 16) and in Aaron's own par- 
 ticipation in the worship of the golden calf (Exodus 
 32) we have echoes of struggles which ascend into 
 Mosaic times. 
 
 And, lastly, 'counsel' was sought at the hands of the 
 
 ... wise man, or of the wise woman. The gift 
 
 Wisdom , . , . , . , , , . 
 
 of wisdom might be found in man or woman, 
 
 just as we find prophetesses of acknowledged author- 
 ity by the side of prophets. As 'king' in Hebrew de- 
 noted originally the 'counsellor', and the scriptural 
 'judge', like his Carthaginian counterpart, was the 
 highest magistrate, there were at times women judges 
 and queens regnant. (It is characteristic that the 
 Scriptures know of no 'priestesses', such as the Phoe- 
 nicians, for example, had.) Now counsel or wisdom 
 might be sought by the individual in his daily affairs 
 when a specially complicated or knotty question 
 presented itself, or by the nation and its representa- 
 tives in a grave crisis. Men of low station would turn 
 to tried friends of their own or of their families, and
 
 62 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 kings and dignitaries of state surrounded themselves 
 with competent advisers. 
 
 Wisdom, like our science of which 
 The Precursor . . A , . , ..^ 
 
 , . it is the precursor, is built upon ex- 
 
 of Science . , , 
 
 penence, upon shrewd observation; 
 
 naturally it was looked for in persons of ripe years, in 
 the 'elders'. The young are the inexperienced, heed- 
 less of peril, thoughtless of consequences; the elders 
 know beforehand what the issue will be and are fore- 
 warned by their vision ahead. They are able to cite 
 precedent ; the accumulated wisdom of generations is 
 in their possession ; they have their lore, 'which wise 
 men have told from their fathers, and have not hid it* 
 (Job 15.18). 'For we are but of yesterday, and know 
 nothing' ; it is therefore fitting that one should 'inquire' 
 of the former generation, so as to possess oneself of 
 'that which the fathers have searched out' (8.8, 9). 
 
 This traditional lore takes on the form of wordly- 
 wise maxims, pithy, sententious, replete with wit and 
 humor, indulging in genial banter or bitter sarcasm, 
 with a bent for detecting likenesses or contrasts, with 
 the entire realm of human and animal action to choose 
 
 . from. It is the 'mashal', at once proverb, 
 The Mashal , , , ., . , , c 
 
 parable, fable, and ballad, figurative 
 
 speech and dark saying, riddle-like and enigmatic, 
 didactic poem and speculative discourse, simple in 
 its beginnings so as to be comprised within the com- 
 pass of a sentence or two, yet at the height of its per- 
 fection making up so complex a dramatic work as Job.
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 63 
 
 The 'mashal', particularly the short one, travelled 
 from mouth to mouth, from nation to nation; it was 
 
 international. Furthermore, the 
 International , , ., , , . 
 
 j TTj.M' 4 mashal , whether it pertains to the 
 and Utilitarian f .,..,, e 
 
 government of an individual or of a 
 
 nation, whether it teaches the rules of husbandry 
 (Isaiah 28.29)or the conduct of warfare (36.5 ; Proverbs 
 20. 18), has a touch of the practical, its morality 
 is utilitarian it pays to be honest, thoughtful /kind 
 and its outlook upon life is tinctured with scepticism. 
 The sententious remark of the wise woman of Tekoa, 
 Tor we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the 
 ground, which cannot be gathered up again' (II Samuel 
 14.14), has in it embryonically the philosophy of Ko- 
 heleth who with the shrug of a shoulder wonders: 
 'Who knoweth whether the spirit of man goeth upward 
 and the spirit of the beast goeth downward to the 
 earth?' (Ecclesiastes 3.21). 
 
 -. T . ~ Wisdom arrogated to itself an 
 
 Wisdom Competes . ... , 
 
 ... _ . inerrancy not unlike that of 
 
 with Prophecy u * XT , *t i c 
 
 prophecy. Now the counsel of 
 
 Ahithophel, which he counselled in those days, was as 
 if a man inquired of the word of God' (I I Samuel 16.23). 
 It welled up from the depths of the 'heart', which is 
 the Hebrew for 'mind', exactly as the prophetic word 
 came from the 'heart', filling it like a burning fire. Like 
 the enthusiasm of the prophet, the flashes of wisdom, 
 no less than the skill and talent of the artist craftsman 
 (Exodus 31.3), proceeded from the 'spirit': 'surely it
 
 64 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty that 
 giveth them understanding' (Job 32.8). The wise man 
 has a religion of his own; somewhat like the 
 philosophers who speak of 'world-soul' or 'supreme 
 intelligence', he operates with 'Almighty' and 'God' 
 universal appellations which antedate the Mosaic 
 revelation and 'Elohim* means just as much to 
 Koheleth as 'Deus' does to Spinoza. Wisdom 
 _. _. . __.. , is more than a body of rules for 
 the regulation of human conduct. 
 There is a higher Wisdom which is tantamount to the 
 formula of the universe, the secret of which God 
 has reserved for Himself ; it had pre-mundane existence, 
 it was the first of God's works, 'from everlasting, from 
 the beginning, or ever the earth was' (Proverbs 8.22- 
 30). 
 
 _ But wisdom competes not 
 
 Wisdom also Competes . . , , , 
 
 *u 4.1. T> 11 u OI "y Wltn prophecy (see Ec- 
 with the Priest's Torah , . . %. ,,. ' . 
 
 clesiasticus 24.33) ; it also as- 
 sumes for its teaching the priestly term torah (Proverbs 
 3.1 and frequently). It has its own set of 'command- 
 ments' ; it would have them, like the words of the Torah 
 (Deuteronomy 6.6, 8, 9), written upon tablets bound 
 on the neck and resting against the heart. 
 
 HM- ^t. j. The challenge of the wise men 
 
 The Challenge Met . , , . 
 
 was met by prophet and priest. 
 
 Masters of the literary art as the prophets were, they 
 showed themselves on occasion adepts in the lore of the 
 wise whose very language they imitated (Isaiah 29.24),
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 65 
 
 and the 'ballad-mongers'of Jerusalem were to them an 
 object of scorn (28.14). The Lawgiver pointedly 
 makes claim that the Torah is the sum of Israel's 
 'wisdom and understanding' ; as such it is self-sufficient, 
 there is nothing to add and nothing to diminish (Deu- 
 teronomy 4.2, 6). 
 
 On the other hand, Hebrew wisdom 
 Rationalism , , , . , , , 
 
 ~. , , was far from being the product of one- 
 
 Side-tracked ., , .. ,. lir fT ,, ~ . 
 sided rationalism. With the Greeks 
 
 rationalism developed into ruthless logic and pure 
 science. Religion was subordinated to philosophy, 
 and the Olympian gods were ruled out of existence by 
 the dialectics of the 'sophists', the teachers of wisdom. 
 There was just a tendency towards secularism in Is- 
 rael, but it was nipped in the bud by prophecy. 'Lean 
 not unto thine own understanding' (Proverbs 3.5). 
 That precludes scientific investigation. 'The begin- 
 ning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord'. That means 
 that philosophy is the handmaid of religion. This 
 check upon self-sufficient wisdom, however, must not 
 be conceived as introduced at a late date. Hebrew 
 wisdom, as it went hand in hand with prophecy, was 
 impregnated with the religious spirit which provided 
 the corrective where there was any inclination to un- 
 bounded rationalism. 
 
 An offshoot of the 'mashal' was the 
 The Song , ,, . , . 
 
 song . The inarticulate expressions of joy 
 
 over the harvest (Isaiah 9. 2), the shouts of the vintners 
 in the vineyards (16.10), the acclaim of a new king (I
 
 66 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 Kings 1.40) or of a returning hero (Judges 11.25), all 
 these formed themselves into songs accompanied by 
 music and dancing. There were songs at banquets, 
 when wine was freely imbibed (Isaiah 5.12; 24. 8, 9), 
 among the young men as they gathered together 
 (Lamentations 5.14), among the maidens in their 
 dances (Jeremiah 31.12; see Exodus 15. 20, 21), or 
 when the daughter went forth from her father's house 
 to follow her newly wedded husband (Genesis 31.27); 
 and there were professional singers of both sexes (II 
 Samuel 19.36; Ecclesiastes 2.8). The gifted singer, the 
 minstrel, the poet, as he moved his hearers, was him- 
 self moved by the touch of the divine afflatus, he was 
 inspired, 'the spirit of the Lord spoke by him, and His 
 word was upon his tongue' (II Samuel 23.2). As it 
 goes with the operations of the spirit, no set of emo- 
 tions is released but it affects the whole of the inner 
 man. Music and prophecy go together (I Samuel 10. 
 5) ; as the minstrel plays, the hand of God comes upon 
 Elisha (II Kings 3.15); Ezekiel complains that the 
 people ignore his stern admonitions and have an ear 
 only for his pleasing voice and minstrelsy (Ezekiel 
 33.32). 
 
 There were songs having for their subject 
 Ballads , . ,. . , , . . 
 
 the exploits of the heroes of the nation in 
 
 the Wars of the Lord, when 'the sun stood still, and the 
 moon stayed, until the nation had avenged them- 
 selves of their enemies' (Joshua 10.13) ; when 'the stars 
 in their courses fought, and from heaven the Lord
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 67 
 
 wrought acts of victory' (Judges 5.11, 13, 20). There 
 were ballad-singers, reciters of 'mashals' (Numbers 21. 
 27), who in mock pity taunted the defeated foe. 
 Story-telling in Israel was not suffered to remain an 
 idle pursuit for the purpose of entertainment. In the 
 mouth of a gifted bard it assumed a didactic tone, it 
 was designed to teach a lesson, it' was tor ah and 
 mashal, 'sententious sayings concerning days of old, 
 which the fathers told, that the generation to come 
 might know, even the children that should be born, 
 who should arise and tell them to their children, that 
 they might put their confidence in God, and not for- 
 get the works of God' (Psalm 78.1-7). Thus the 
 prophets, after the wont of preachers, wove the stories 
 of the past into their discourses in order to drive home 
 a lesson, to contrast with the idealized past the ignoble 
 present. The prophetic literature abounds in examples, 
 and the oldest of the 'writing' prophets, Hosea for 
 example, introduces in measured lines many a saw 
 from the hoary past. Song everywhere precedes 
 prose; midway stands the long oration, masterly in its 
 lofty diction and stately periods, whose theme is 
 exhortation and in which the remembrance of incid- 
 ents in antiquity leads to the peroration with its 
 persuasive appeal to the immediate audience: 'And 
 now, Israel, what doth the Lord require of thee?' At 
 the home, at the shrines, the children were wont to 
 ask questions: 'What is this? what mean ye by this 
 service?'; and the answers given dilated circumstan-
 
 68 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 tially upon the wondrous deeds of the Lord from the 
 beginnings, when He made Israel His own at the time 
 when He delivered the fathers from the land of Egypt, 
 from the house of bondage, through the succeeding 
 generations, when He sent them a deliverer in all their 
 troubles. There were cycles of prose narrative which 
 naturally increased with each period. 
 
 _. . , T The 'song of loves', the epi- 
 
 The Song of Loves ^, . K , 
 
 thalamium on the occasion of 
 
 the nuptials of a king most probably Ahab to a 
 Tyrian princess, which we read now as Psalm 45, was 
 certainly not the only one of its kind. The prophet 
 Isaiah prefaces his stern discourse of chapter 5 with a 
 'song of loves' touching the vineyard of 'my well- 
 beloved' ; how he cared for it, how he planted it with 
 the choicest vine, and in the end it brought forth wild 
 grapes. It is a 'mashal', and the prophet supplies the 
 meaning. 'For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the 
 house of Israel.' 
 
 The rigorism of the prophets destroyed 
 Psalmody . , . r , . T , 
 
 the expressions of natural joy. Israel was 
 
 not to rejoice like the nations(Hosea 9.1). A sombre 
 tone had been struck, and lyric poetry exhausted 
 itself in psalmody. Songs were heard in the night 
 when a feast was hallowed, or in the procession of 
 pilgrims as they ascended the Temple mount (Isaiah 
 30.29). At the sanctuary the worshippers would join 
 in a shout of jubilation; as time went on it developed 
 into hymns of adoration (hallel, tehillah} with the
 
 TORAH, WORD, AND WISDOM 69 
 
 recurrent refrain: Praise ye the Lord (Hallelujah). 
 The prophets, if needs be, know how to introduce into 
 their discourses hymns of praise, songs glorifying the 
 strong arm of the Lord as it wrought salvation in 
 primeval days (compare Isaiah 51. 9, 10 with Psalm 
 74.12-17). 
 
 T . _. The 'dirge' was a species of song. It was 
 
 a song of woe over the departed, when 
 grief was expressed in such short exclamations as 'Ah 
 my brother', 'Ah sister', 'Ah lord, ah his glory.' In 
 course of time it assumed the form of skilfully elabo- 
 rated poetic lamentations,such as David's laments over 
 Saul and Jonathan (II Samuel 1.19-27) or Abner (3. 
 33, 34), which required the services of professionals, 
 men and women singers (II Chronicles 35.25), 'skilful 
 of wailing' (Amos 5.16), especially of 'mourning women* 
 who were also called 'wise women' (Jeremiah 9. 16). 
 Thus the lamentation, or elegy, is not only linked to 
 the song, threnody to psalmody, but also to wisdom. 
 The prophets, again, frequently have occasion to use 
 it; it becomes in their hands a 'mashal' (Isaiah 14.3; 
 Micah 2.4).
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE THREE SHELVES 
 
 _., Torah. Prophecy, and multiform 
 
 Difficulty of ,. , ' , ., 
 
 > .L. -r , Wisdom thus co-existed as manifes- 
 Dating a Book . .. . , .. ... c 
 
 tations of the nation s spiritual hfe,cros- 
 
 *u u c 
 sing and re-crossing each the path of 
 
 the other, and their very rivalry was productive of 
 giving and taking. There is no reason to believe that 
 the course which the written form took was in any 
 wise different. Tradition places itself squarely upon 
 this position. The writings of the third division of 
 Scriptures are made contemporaneous with those of 
 the second and even with the first. Job, the Psalter, 
 Koheleth were written in the times of Moses, David, 
 Isaiah (chapter II). There is great difficulty in dating 
 these books with anything like accuracy. We shall 
 probably not accept the traditional dates. But when 
 left to ourselves, we have so little to go upon. When 
 was Job written? The moderns are quite divided in 
 their answers : in the seventh century close upon the fall 
 of the Northern Kingdom ; in the sixth before or during 
 the Babylonian exile; in the fifth after the exile im- 
 mediately before the appearance of the Priests' Code. 
 
 The poet makes allusion quite 
 The historical . , , 
 
 ~ . generally to the movements ot 
 Allusions too General . , . . , 
 
 nations away from their homes
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 71 
 
 (12.23) ; but such dislocations were as old as the his- 
 tory of theOrient.and there is no evidence that the fate 
 of Israel or of Judah was before the author's mind. No 
 less vague are the references to a land given into the 
 hand of wicked magistrates or governors (9.24), or to 
 strangers overrunning a land and disturbing its wonted 
 mode of life (15.19). Job curses the day of his birth 
 (3.3) and so does Jeremiah (20.14); but who will tell 
 which of the two,if either,is dependent upon the other? 
 
 HM- T. 1-1 Nor does the problem with which the 
 
 The Problem, , , , , %. . ., .. f . 
 _ , book deals shed light on the time of its 
 
 Universal . . , . 
 
 composition. It is the ever-recurring 
 
 question of the 'prosperity of the wicked' and the 
 'sufferings of the righteous' as compatible with divine 
 retribution and the just government of the world. It 
 touches a universal experience of mankind and may 
 have arisen at any time. All that can be said is that it 
 belongs to the sphere of wisdom. It was propounded 
 among the wise men of Edom as well as among the 
 teachers of wisdom in Israel. It recurs in Koheleth. 
 The prophets were agitated by it: Malachi, Ezekiel, 
 Habakkuk, Jeremiah. The great nameless prophet of 
 the exile constructed the ideal figure of the Suffering 
 Servant. In the Torah the question of deferred pun- 
 ishment and the share of children in the sins of the 
 fathers is touched upon. The poet understood too 
 well that his theme belonged to all ages, and he wisely 
 refrained from dealing with it in terms of his own place 
 and time. He has no answer to a question which he
 
 72 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING _ 
 
 was neither the first nor the last to raise. It is insoluble. 
 He recognizes it as such whether in titanic defiance 
 he exaggerates the self-sufficiency of the human con- 
 science, or in seeming meekness he is overpowered by 
 the divine Omniscience. A subtle irony pervades his 
 resignation, which is not quite of the pious kind. The 
 higher Wisdom is known to God alone ; to men He 
 imparted a little wisdom: the fear of the Lord and 
 turning away from evil! 
 
 divided like the Torah into 
 
 Th P It 
 
 five books, reveals itself as a combination 
 
 of smaller bodies of psalms or hymns and testifies to a 
 process of successive enlargement. Thus we find a 
 'Korahitic' group in the second book, the 'Songs of the 
 Ascents' in the fifth, the Hallelujah psalms. The 
 subscription at the end of the third book (Psalm 72. 
 20), 'the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended', 
 was apparently taken over from some smaller collec- 
 tion, for 'Davidic' psalms are found later on. Just 
 when the first collection was made escapes our knowl- 
 edge. We do not know when and by whom the head- 
 ings were appended, with their specifications of 
 authorship and musical directions of which the mean- 
 ing is largely obscure. Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses ; 
 73 psalms to David, two to Solomon, and 26 to various 
 temple singers or guilds of such, all dating, according 
 to the Chronicler, from the times of David who is 
 credited by him with the institution and regulation of 
 the song liturgy of the Temple.
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 78 
 
 _ David was known anciently 
 
 The Temple Service , . ir . . . ( , c 
 
 as a skilful musician (I Samuel 
 
 16.18) and a lyric poet (II Samuel 1. 17; 3.33; Amos 6. 
 15). At the sanctuaries, vocal and instrumental music 
 accompanied the service (Amos 5.23). At an early date 
 the song service in the Temple at Jerusalem must have 
 been organized. The singers were often themselves 
 poets, or else they obtained poems from other writers 
 and sometimes adapted existing productions to their 
 own needs. The Temple was the centre of piety, of 
 worship. All that was highest in the spiritual life of 
 the community gravitated round the sacred edifice. 
 There men poured out their soul before God ; thither 
 they carried their tribulations, their doubts, their 
 searchings of heart ; from thence they took home re- 
 newed trust, forgiveness, redemption. How those 
 saints loved the house of God, how their souls longed 
 for the Temple courts where there were throngs of like- 
 minded, how they sang for joy unto the 'living God' ! 
 Abroad their faith might falter and their foot well-nigh 
 slip; within, as they entered into the sanctuary, they 
 found their highest good in being near unto God. 
 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and beside Thee 
 I desire none upon earth. My flesh and my heart 
 faileth ; but God is the rock of my heart and my por- 
 tion for ever' (Psalm 73.25, 26). 
 
 TMiis i*_ * TV A- It is in the essence of so lofty a 
 
 Difficulty of Dating . . .. , .. ./ 
 
 ,. -r, / piety that, though its manifes- 
 
 the Psalms ./ . ... & , , 
 
 tation is conditioned by circum-
 
 74 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 stances of place and time, it lifts itself so far out of touch 
 with life's affairs as to transcend both, and great diffic- 
 ulty will always attach to dating a psalm purely from 
 its contents. It seems reasonable to suppose that 
 Psalm 137 was not penned before the Babylonian 
 captivity. Psalm 79 and several others in which ref- 
 erence is made to the defiling of the Temple and the 
 martyrdom of the saints might date from the events 
 which led to the Maccabean uprising; but an earlier 
 occurrence may fit the veiled allusions just as well. It 
 is pointed out that the clash between the saints and 
 their worldly opponents which runs through the whole 
 Psalter became acute during the persecution under 
 Antiochus Epiphanes. It is then that the 'saints' 
 (hasidim) organized themselves as a religious party. 
 But it stands to reason that the conflict was long in 
 preparation and that for centuries, even before the 
 exile, 'separatists' and 'liberals' fought for ascendancy. 
 Alcimus and Menelaus and Jason had their prototypes 
 in the opponents of Ezra and Nehemiah who were 
 eager to make peace with the Samaritans, in Manasseh 
 and Ahab and Jeroboam who coquetted with foreign 
 cultures, in all those who would fuse Mosaism and 
 Canaanism; justas Judah the Maccabee and his saints- 
 warriors were the spiritual descendants of Ezra and 
 Josiah and Hezekiah, of Isaiah and Hosea, of Elijah 
 and Samuel, of the zealot-priest Phinehas and Moses, 
 God's 'saintly man'. 
 
 It is a preposterous contention that no psalm dates
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 75 
 
 from pre-exilic times. Psalms were written and psalms 
 were assembled in collections from the earliest days. 
 The third chapter of Habakkuk is a psalm; so is the 
 twelfth chapter of Isaiah and the song of Exodus 15. 
 
 Hymns of praise, similar in character 
 Psalms outside , . . 
 
 __ ,, to the psalms, are introduced into 
 
 the Psalter -T . ' ~ 
 
 the prophetic discourses. Conversely 
 
 the spirit of the prophets and of the Torah dominates 
 the piety of the psalmists. Saints the world over are 
 apt to consider themselves superior to the Law which 
 
 it is the essence of saintliness to 
 The Spirit of the , ~, 
 
 _ , transcend. They are naturally more 
 
 Prophets and the , ... , . , 
 
 _ , ^ . closely akin to the prophets with 
 
 Torah Dominates ... j. , . , .... 
 
 _ ,. their disdain ot external ritualism. 
 
 the Psalter , , , . , .. , . 
 
 1 o the psalmist who realizes that sin 
 
 is inborn and purity an effort of the regenerated will 
 echo of the prophet-lawgiver (Genesis 8.21 ; Deutero- 
 nomy 10. 16; Leviticus 26.41)as well as of Jeremiah and 
 Ezekiel there comes the certainty that the 'sacrifices 
 of God (that is, pleasing to Him) are a broken spirit, a 
 broken and contrite heart' (Psalm 51.19). But imme- 
 diately the corrective follows in conformity with priest- 
 ly legislation and prayer is made for the restoration of 
 the walls of Jerusalem when 'bullocks will be offered 
 upon the altar' (verses 20 and 21). Psalm 1 defines the 
 saint as a student of the Torah, which is his whole 
 concern, in which he meditates day and night. The 
 entire Psalm 119 is a song of praise of the Torah, 
 to which the saint clings with all his being, loving it,
 
 76 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 cherishing it fondly, prizing it above gold and silver 
 and all wealth, rejoicing in it as the source of truth, of 
 'wondrous things' which the illuminated eye may 
 behold. 
 
 v u i *u I* 1 tne Book of Koheleth we meet with 
 Koheleth . 
 
 descriptions of despotic rulers, corrupt and 
 
 covetous governors, of officials subject to higher 
 officials all too general for ascertaining the author's 
 date. The parable of the youth passing his childhood 
 in poverty and prison and then supplanting upon the 
 throne an old and foolish king and receiving the 
 homage of a host of flatterers the 'worship of the 
 rising Sun' is again too indefinite to confine the 
 identification to any one example in history. The 
 author is revealed as a well-informed teacher of 'wis- 
 dom', who 'pondered, and sought out, and set in 
 order many mashals'. He was much wiser than his 
 commentators ; he indulged in paradoxes and assumed 
 the free and easy manner of seeing two sides to a 
 question ; he veiled his unorthodoxy by acting as his own 
 interpolator. The fine irony of his conclusion 'fear 
 God, and keep His commandments; for this is all that 
 is left to man' puts him into a category with the 
 poet-philosopher to whom we are indebted for the 
 book of Job. 
 
 The strongest point in any at- 
 The Evidence . 
 
 _ tempt at placing Koheleth is the 
 
 from Language ., , * , < T r*u r> i 
 
 evidence from language. I f the Book 
 
 of Koheleth be of old Solomonic origin, then there is
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 77 
 
 no history of the Hebrew language.' Tradition, how- 
 ever, does not ascend quite that high; it brings the 
 'writing' down to the age of Hezekiah. Now what do 
 we actually know about the fortunes of the Hebrew 
 language? We are barely able to distinguish two 
 periods: a golden and a silver period. In the latter 
 certain grammatical forms, syntactical constructions, 
 and words, especially particles, approach the state of 
 the language of the Mishna. But, as students of 
 language know, it often takes centuries for a new coin- 
 age, at first employed sparingly, to pass into general 
 use. We must not on the basis of one word or turn of 
 speech pronounce upon the date of a writing. The 
 literature is too scanty. Cumulative evidence alone 
 leads to results which may be said to have convincing 
 power. Moreover, subject-matter has always much 
 to do with style. Prayers cannot be composed in the 
 style of legal enactments, and a philosophical 
 treatise must perforce take on diction foreign to both. 
 Koheleth may have been written in the Grecian 
 or in the late Persian period, but conceivably also at 
 an earlier point; the writer would simply have been 
 forced to create the appropriate style when he needed 
 it. He really could not write his book in the language 
 of Isaiah or Deuteronomy. 
 
 n . . There is one book in the third division, 
 
 Daniel, the date of which we may establish 
 
 with accuracy by the aid of the historical perspective, 
 
 which is brought down to the stirring events in which
 
 78 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 it was published. It opens up a novel genre of litera- 
 ture of which in the sequel there arose numerous im- 
 itations (chapter VI). It is an apocalyptic writing, a 
 book of revelations or visions, in which events of the 
 distant future are outlined in all their detail far ahead. 
 The end is neatly calculated in definite terms of years, 
 up to which end the visions are sealed up, to be opened 
 only when the finale of the drama supervenes. What- 
 ever older materials the writer may have used, partic- 
 ularly in the first part of the book, he certainly wrote 
 in full view of the persecution under Antiochus Epi- 
 phanes. Although sympathizing with the martyrs who 
 suffered death, the author of Daniel made it his defin- 
 ite object to discountenance the resort to arms under 
 the leadership of the priest of Modein and his sons 
 in the firm belief that the kingdom of saints was at 
 hand, coming down with the clouds of heaven, with 
 no human effort whatsoever. 
 
 mt. HM-. i r* It is an altogether erroneous 
 
 The Third Group . . . . . ., 
 
 _. ,. . . supposition that all of the writings 
 
 Distinct in . , ... . ...... 
 
 . . comprised within the third division 
 
 Subject-matter , . 
 
 must have been composed after 
 
 the second or prophetic collection had been closed. 
 The books of the third division rather form a group 
 distinct in subject-matter from the two which pre- 
 cede it in the editions. Its nucleus is made up of the 
 the Books of Wisdom Wisdom in all its many 
 ramifications. Job and the two Solomonic writings, 
 Proverbs and Koheleth, clearly belong to the 'mashal*
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 79 
 
 class. But so is also the lyric poetry of the Psalter, 
 the Song of Songs, and Lamentations an emanation of 
 
 . TTT- T the spirit of wisdom (chapter 
 
 The Wisdom Books 17N *.*_ 
 
 ,. . ,. , . IV). Moreover, there are 
 
 (including Lyric , ' . , , . , 
 
 TV x , ir 1 didactic psalms which call 
 
 Poetry) the Nucleus . , , , , , , 
 
 themselves mashals (Psalms 
 
 49 and 78) ; others (like Psalms 73 and 88) deal with 
 the problem treated in the Book of Job. The Book of 
 Lamentations is lyric poetry of the elegiac kind ; the 
 third chapter in addition has points of contact with 
 Job. The Song of Songs is a collection of erotic idylls 
 of the pastoral kind ; songs which were wont to be sung 
 at weddings when bridegroom and bride played king 
 and queen. These poems had for their theme the eternal 
 attraction of man and maid, the passion which is 
 'strong as death, cruel as the grave, whose flashes are 
 a very flame of the Lord,' unquenchable, unextinguish- 
 able, the love which no purchase price can buy. The 
 naive simplicity with which things natural are named 
 might shock the rigorist prude (chapter VI) ; to the 
 mind of the collector of the Scriptures the Song of 
 Songs approved itself, as it did in the sequel when it 
 was read in the synagogue at the vernal season when 
 'the winter is past and the rain is over and gone', as a 
 'mashal', a symbol of the divine love for Israel and of 
 the longing with which Israel awaits the day when God 
 will speed the redemption.
 
 80 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 rjoi ui' M Tne visionary Daniel, to the 
 
 Daniel likewise . , J . ' 
 
 a I* t w.j, mmd of tne collector, differed from 
 a Book of Wisdom A , . . , . 
 
 Amos and Ezekiel and Zechanah. 
 
 He was quite right in his feeling that this man was no 
 prophet. Ezekiel makes reference to the Daniel he 
 knew as a 'wise man' (Ezekiel 28.3); and as such the 
 Daniel of our book is described (1.17,20; 2.21; 5.11), 
 a man in whom is the spirit of God, in whom is found 
 light and understanding and surpassing wisdom (5.14). 
 It is therefore essentially as a book of wisdom that 
 Daniel was put in the third division. 
 
 -, The Book of Chronicles was 
 
 Books connected , , 
 
 iu *u T i* looked upon by the collector as a 
 with the Psalter c . -f . , 
 
 fitting Preface to the Psalter. It 
 
 deals like no other book with the organizations of the 
 singer guilds and the institution of Levitical song wor- 
 ship, both of which the Chronicler assigns to David. 
 The present conclusion of Chronicles breaks off in the 
 middle of the third verse of the opening chapter of 
 Ezra. Originally therefore Ezra-Nehemiah was a part 
 of Chronicles ; the author carried the history down to 
 the times of Alexander the Great and showed how the 
 Davidic institutions were re-introduced at the time of 
 the restoration. The whole was broken up at a later 
 date, when Chronicles was put at the end of the col- 
 lection and the Scriptures concluded significantly with 
 the phrase 'let him go up'. With Chronicles the col- 
 lector joined Esther, which narrates an event of the 
 period with which portions of Ezra deal. With the
 
 THE THREE SHELVES 81 
 
 Psalter went probably also the little volume of Ruth, 
 for the reason that it concludes with a genealogy of 
 David. For one thing the placing of Ruth in the third 
 group shows an act of deliberation. Had the collector 
 been influenced by considerations relative to the time 
 of its composition about which he was as little in- 
 formed as we are to-day he would have put it higher 
 up among the historical books of the second division, 
 uncritically holding, as does the talmudic tradition, 
 that Samuel, or some such writer near the times with 
 which it deals, was its author. 
 
 The Three Shelves Thus ' the a PP enda S es to the 
 Psalter notwithstanding, the third 
 
 division is shown to form a homogeneous group of 
 Wisdom books. That body of writings, now smaller 
 now larger, kept pace with the growth of the other two 
 divisions. It went by the loose term 'Writings', 'other 
 books', books indeed different in subject-matter from 
 Torah and Prophets. The three divisions of Scriptures 
 from the very first beginnings, when priests wrote 
 down on rolls their torahs, and prophets gathered 
 their addresses together 'that they might be for a time 
 to come for ever and ever' (Isaiah 30.8) or had their 
 disciples relate the 'great things' that they had done 
 (II Kings 8.4), and 'wise men' had their words com- 
 mitted to writing (Proverbs 22.17, 20) and their 
 'mashals' assembled in collections (Ecclesiastes 12.11), 
 until the very end when the whole body of Holy Writ 
 was closed, maintained themselves as co-existing
 
 82 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 groups, distinct in subject-matter. They did not, of 
 course,all come to an end simultaneouly, and the third 
 group may have been longest in closing. The impor- 
 tant point is that no matter at what cross-section in the 
 literary and religious history of the nation we place 
 ourselves, there was a tripartite body of Scriptures. 
 To speak the language of our modern libraries, each set 
 of writings had its own shelf, each single writing its 
 shelf mark, and as a new book was written and deemed 
 worthy of acceptance, it was entered as an accession 
 and received its place in accordance with its subject- 
 matter or literary character: the books of the Torah 
 by themselves, the books of and about the Prophets 
 by themselves, and the Books of Wisdom by them- 
 selves.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 
 
 Exclusion, rather than inclusion, marked the closing 
 of the collection. The Scriptures were meant to consist 
 of the three parts ; there was to be no fourth part. The 
 rabbis render Proverbs 22: 20: 'Have I not written 
 
 _, ,.. unto thee treble things?' and they add: 
 Treble Things , , , * . 
 
 treble, but not quadruple. By refusing 
 
 to create a fourth order of a dignity comparable let us 
 say with thatof the third, so as to admit whatever writ- 
 ings stood without, the makers of the collection in- 
 dicated that nothing could be added to it, that it was 
 closed. The rabbis give expression to this thought in 
 a variety of ways over and above the remark just cited. 
 Koheleth closes with the epigram which has passed 
 into a proverb: 'Of making many books there is no 
 end' (12.12). The preceding clause the rabbis make 
 to read in literal rendition: 'And of more than these 
 
 , _. , (that is, the words of the wise that are 
 
 Of more than ' . . . 
 
 . , , composed in collections), my son, 
 
 beware.' By a play upon the Hebrew 
 mehemmah (=than these) they deliver themselves 
 of the dictum : 'He who admits to his house more than 
 the twenty-four books (5 of the Torah, 8 of the Proph- 
 ets, 1 1 of the Writings) , admits confusion (Hebrew 
 mehumah).'
 
 84 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 Books which may , Then again upo ? th f basi ? of the 
 
 . . - closing sentence : and much study 
 
 or may not be read . . , , a , ' 
 
 is a weariness of the flesh , which 
 
 after their wont they handle rather freely, they draw 
 the line between writings which may be perused casu- 
 ally, read as one reads a letter, and those which, like 
 the books of the acknowledged Scriptures, are objects 
 of painstaking study. They know of still another class 
 of books which it is forbidden to read at all, even pri- 
 vately. Those are the writings which stand entirely 
 outside, not merely outside the collection of Holy 
 Writ, but even beyond the pale of Judaism, like the 
 literary productions of the Judeo-Christians ; any Jew 
 who reads them excommunicates himself, forfeits his 
 share in the world to come. 
 
 Both the near-scriptural writings, which one may 
 read though only casually and privately, and the 
 others which may not be read at all are described as 
 
 _ ... 'writings which do not defile the 
 
 Defiling the Hands , , , b , .. < ., ., , . . 
 hands , while all the Holy Script- 
 ures defile the hands' ; that is to say, after handling any 
 of the books in the body of the twenty-four Scriptures 
 one must wash his hands. It is certainly a peculiar 
 injunction, but its strangeness disappears when we 
 remember that the high priest on the Day of Atone- 
 ment washed his body with water, not only when he put 
 on the holy garments of the day, but also when he put 
 them off. The transition from the holy to the common 
 is marked by an ablution. As the rabbis themselves
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 85 
 
 explain it, the bones of an unclean animal do not defile 
 through contact with them, but the bones of a high 
 priest do. 
 
 The near-scriptural books are further defined as 
 those which, like Ben Sira, 'were written from that 
 
 time onwards'. A line is apparently 
 From that time , . . f ., J 
 
 , , drawn somewhere in the age of the 
 
 onwards ., ... 
 
 scribes when inspiration ceased. 
 
 Josephus expresses himself similarly when he says 
 that 'from the time of Artaxerxes (the biblical Ahasu- 
 erus) to our own days there have been written many 
 historical books covering each period, but they are not 
 deemed to possess the same degree of trustworthiness 
 or authority which inheres in those which preceded 
 them, for the reason that the accurate tradition of the 
 prophets was unavailable'. 
 
 When the rabbis refer to attempts at excluding a 
 
 _ scriptural book, removing it from 
 
 Secreting Books ., ., , . , ' . . , , . , 
 
 the collection (as in the case of the 
 
 Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes for obvious reasons, 
 or of Proverbs on account of the secular, un-prophetic 
 character of the 'mashals', or of a prophetic book like 
 that of Ezekiel because of the contradictions between 
 it and the Pentateuch), the expression employed is: 
 'they (that is, the authorities) sought to secrete (store 
 away, hide, ganaz) this or that book.' In the synagogue 
 chests only the volumes of the Scriptures might be 
 kept; anything that was un-scriptural wandered into 
 the store-room (Genizah).
 
 86 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 ,. To understand aright the Genizah and its 
 
 Gemzah __, 
 
 contents, one must recall the reverence in 
 
 which not only the Scriptures were had, but anything, 
 a book of prayers for example, in which the divine name 
 occurred. Any loose pages or fragments with Hebrew 
 writing would be gathered up by the beadle and de- 
 posited in the store-room, where they might be safe 
 from profanation, but not of course from worms, but 
 then the destruction might go on of itself. An heret- 
 ical book would be burnt outright. Near-scriptural 
 books, unfit for public reading, were withdrawn by 
 placing them in the Genizah. So it is that in the famous 
 Cairo Genizah, of biblical books (and for that matter 
 of works of the post-biblical literature which in medi- 
 eval times were to be found in such synagogues as 
 also served as 'houses of study'), only fragments were 
 found, while of a book like Ben Sira almost two thirds 
 have been recovered ; the remaining leaves may have 
 been stolen previously, or, which is more probable, 
 had succumbed to destruction. Accordingly, storing 
 away was a method of withdrawing a writing from 
 circulation and especially from public reading; by this 
 act it was indicated that it was apocryphal, just as 
 keeping it in public view, like the Scroll in the ark, 
 made a volume canonical. 
 
 _. , The term Canon is Christian, 
 
 The terms 'Canon , , c .., , . , 
 
 . , the word Semitic (caneh in Hebrew 
 and Apocrypha 
 
 means a measuring-rod; hence 
 
 measure, standard), the thing itself, as we have seen,
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 87 
 
 Jewish. So does the term 'apocryphal', literally 'hid- 
 den', which is employed in the Church, express the 
 Jewish notions just outlined. To the Church 'canon- 
 ical' means 'inspired', at once corresponding to and 
 containing the rule of faith; it is designated as 'open', 
 'public', while the counterpart 'apocryphal' is spoken 
 of as 'private', and apocryphal literature signifies 
 books which may be perused for private edification. 
 And the Church distinguishes another body of writ- 
 ings which are condemned as heretical ; there is spu- 
 rious Scripture which affects the diction and style of 
 the authentic, but the former is as different from the 
 latter as the counterfeit from the real and true. 
 
 Reference was made above 
 Attempts at excluding __, 
 
 T, , , . . to an attempt to throw out 
 
 Books already in . . , , ^ , , , ~ 
 
 ... certain books of the Canon, 
 
 the Canon . , . , c c c 
 
 particularly the Song of Songs 
 
 and Ecclesiastes, to transfer them from the body of 
 publicly read Scriptures to the outside, to assign to 
 .them at best near-scriptural rank which would thus 
 place them on a level with Ben Sira and make of them 
 books fit for private reading only. According to tra- 
 dition, the two houses or schools of Shammai and Hillel 
 were divided in their opinion. At the time of Akiba, 
 who regarded it as unthinkable that the dispute should 
 have turned upon the Song which, he declared, was 
 the most holy book in the third division, the rabbis 
 were not quite certain as to which of the two books 
 was contested. But whether the one or the other or
 
 88 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 both, the teachers, with a view to the form in which 
 the notion of 'apocryphal' was expressed in the schools 
 (see above), credited the Shammaites with a lenient 
 attitude and the Hillelites with the stricter one, which 
 is the reverse of the usual procedure. But, as a matter 
 of fact, if 'defiling the hands' and the opposite are 
 translated into 'canonical' and 'apocryphal', the school 
 of Shammai which held that Ecclesiastes 'does not 
 defile the hands' was true to its general rigorism, and 
 the retention not, of course, the inclusion ; that had 
 happened of Koheleth in the collection of Holy Writ 
 we owe to the followers of the mild Hillel. 
 
 ^ ~ . That brings us down to the years 
 
 Defining what is . ,. , 6 , e 
 
 . _, immediately preceding and follow- 
 
 not Scripture . . /% , 
 
 mg the destruction of Jerusalem in 
 
 the year 70 of the common era. It was then that 
 Pharisaism made ready to take over the sole leader- 
 ship of the nation. The war with Rome had strength- 
 ened the 'separatist' tendencies still further; the 
 dangers from the nascent sect out of which the Church 
 emerged were becoming acute. A stricter view was 
 taken of the Canon, and though, thanks to the spirit 
 of Hillel still alive in his disciples, it was left as it had 
 been for over two centuries, that body of near- 
 scriptural writings which had hovered on the border- 
 land and which might have constituted a fourth di- 
 vision, was resolutely pushed aside and put without. 
 The dispute about one or the other book of the Canon 
 arose because just then the teachers were busy defining
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 89 
 
 what is not Scripture, and while on the subject of 
 excluding Ben Sira and the other 'apocryphal' writings 
 an attempt could be made to extend the exclusion to 
 a 'canonical' book. The book of Job seems likewise to 
 have been scrutinized; for 'in that day' the question 
 was discussed whether Job served God from motives 
 of love or from motives of fear. The concise formu- 
 lation of the dictum 'Ben Sira and all the books 
 written from that time onward do not defile the hands' 
 gives it the appearance of an official resolution such 
 as was carried, we are told, at the memorable session 
 at Jabneh about 90 of the common era, when Gamaliel 
 was deposed and Eleazar ben Azariah made head 
 of the school. 
 
 The excluded writings, however, 
 
 Fate of the , 4 , . ' 
 
 T> i j TTT J .. continued to be read privately; 
 
 Excluded Writings ..,. , D c . *I , : 
 
 citations from Ben Sira abound in 
 
 the talmudic-midrashic literature, and when the tea- 
 chers forget themselves they include the apocryphal 
 book among the 'Writings' ; copies of it were still cur- 
 rent in the tenth century and those that have been 
 recovered from the Genizah are found to have marginal 
 directions to the reader, that is, the public reader, to 
 'read so and so', exactly as is the case with the canon- 
 ical Scriptures. In later, and possibly still earlier, 
 times several apocryphal writings, like Wisdom of 
 Solomon and Susanna, were transcribed from the Syr- 
 iac and read with avidity by Jewish scholars. Even the 
 heretical books continued to be read until the times of
 
 90 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 Akiba.when in the Hadrianic war the Judeo-Christian 
 sect which stood aloof in the national uprising was 
 definitively thrust out and their literature, by which 
 many a teacher was fascinated, condemned, exactly 
 as were their cures in the name of the Nazarene. 
 
 The closing of the Canon by the excluding act 
 which segregated the Apocrypha was the work of 
 
 _,. Pharisaism triumphant. The one book 
 
 Pharisaism . . ~ rTY ., , 
 
 T . .in the Canon which was after the heart 
 
 of the Pharisee was Daniel; there the 
 doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which consti- 
 tuted one of the points on which Pharisees and Sad- 
 ducees divided, was enunciated. Indeed the whole 
 spirit of the book with its opposition to all human 
 effort to bring about liberation from the foreign yoke 
 and its insistence on the miraculous nature of redem- 
 ption squared with the tenor of Phraisaism. It was 
 the first manifesto of the nascent party whose rise 
 to power was gradual, coming after repeated struggles 
 with their opponents in which they were often worsted. 
 It shows how the canonical character of a book like 
 Koheleth had been long established, for its Sadducee 
 leanings are quite clear, if one may speak of Sadducee- 
 ism before there was a Sadducee party. The Pharisees 
 were the spiritual descendants of the scribes and priest- 
 prophets; the Canon as an inheritance from the past 
 was in the main an accomplished fact; as they broke 
 with the Hasmonean dynasty, they put the finishing 
 touches to the collection by narrowing down the com-
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 91 
 
 pass of the third division so as to exclude writings 
 which failed to come up to their standard. 
 
 In Alexandria, the translation of 
 The Compass of , c . . ' , . , 
 
 ,. * the Scriptures in Greek, begun with 
 
 the Scriptures ~ , 
 
 . . , , . the Torah, had grown apace, and by 
 
 in Alexandria * H 
 
 the time that Ben Sira was done 
 
 into Greek, about 130 before the common era, the Law 
 and the Prophets and the other Writings were read in 
 that language. Other books not admitted into the 
 Canon, were likewise translated. In the manuscripts 
 of the Greek translation, the very oldest of which 
 were copied by Christians for Christian use, the 
 apocryphal books are intermixed with the canonical. 
 This body of writings was taken over by the Church 
 from the Alexandrian Jews, but it may be doubted 
 whether the combination of the two classes in one 
 collection goes back to Jewish antecedents. In 
 Palestine the excluded writings, left to private care, 
 slowly but surely disappeared, and works which in the 
 fourth century of the common era were still to be read 
 in their original Hebrew or Aramaic vanished to 
 leave no trace behind, thus accomplishing the intent 
 of the act of 90. What knowledge we have of the 
 Apocrypha we owe to the Christian Church which 
 cherished them. ' "He (Judah the Maccabee) angered 
 many kings, and made Jacob glad with his acts, and 
 his memorial is blessed for ever." But Jacob would 
 have forgotten him, had not the books of the Mac- 
 cabees been preserved by the Church.'
 
 92 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 The Council of the Trent (1546) 
 The Canon of the , . , . , ' 
 
 r* j.i- 1- /M. accepted as canonical all the books 
 
 Catholic Church ^ . , . ,, T . 
 
 contained m the Latin version 
 
 known as Vulgate, that is, in addition to the twenty- 
 four books of the Hebrew Scriptures also Tobit and 
 Judith (between Nehemiah and Esther), the additions 
 to Esther, Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus 
 (Ben Sira ; after the Song of Songs) , Baruch including 
 the Epistle of Jeremiah (after Lamentations appended 
 to Jeremiah), Susanna and Bel and the Dragon (as an 
 appendix to Daniel ; in chapter 3 the Song of the Three 
 Holy Children Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah is 
 inserted), I and II Maccabees (at the close of the 
 Prophets). The Anglican Church retained these books 
 (together with III and IV Ezra and the Prayer of 
 Manasseh) as useful in the Church 'for example of life 
 and instruction of manner', but they are relegated to 
 an appendix or to a separate volume as near-Scripture. 
 
 , -, On the other hand, the Catho- 
 
 Uncanonical Books .. _,, ' . 
 
 he Church excludes from its canon 
 
 (of Old Testament Scriptures) a number of writings 
 extant in Greek or in translations from the Greek, 
 such as III Ezra (a fragmentary translation of Chron- 
 icles-Ezra-Nehemiah, according to certain scholars 
 older than the canonical translation of these books in 
 which Ezra figures as I Ezra and Nehemiah as II 
 Ezra), III Maccabees (which relates the persecution 
 of the Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy IV), IV Macca- 
 bees (a philosophical treatise illustrating the power of
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 98 
 
 reason to control the passions by the example of the 
 martyrdom of Eleazar and of the seven Maccabean 
 brothers), The Book of Jubilees (an exposition of 
 Genesis and the first twelve chapters of Exodus with 
 the years counted in cycles of fifty years each), The 
 Apocalypse (Revelation) of Baruch of which the Epistle 
 of Baruch to the Ten Tribes is a separate excerpt 
 (containing revelations alleged to have been received 
 by Jeremiah's disciple and companion before and 
 after the destruction of Jerusalem), Psalm 151 (the 
 supernumerary psalm appended to the Greek trans- 
 lation), The Psalter of Solomon (18 psalms deploring 
 the fate of the Jews during the Roman occupation of 
 Jerusalem by Pompey and enunciating the hope in the 
 advent of the Messiah), The Prayer of Manasseh 
 (with reference to II Chronicles 33. 12, 18), IV Ezra 
 (visions and prophecies of Ezra concerning the advent 
 of the Messiah, the day of judgment, and the 
 destruction of the Roman empire), The Book of the 
 Secrets of Enoch, The Assumption of Moses (treats 
 of events under the Hasmoneans and Herod), The 
 Ascension of Isaiah (martyrdom of the prophet) , The 
 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Testament 
 of Job, The Sibylline Oracles (put in the mouth of the 
 heathen 'Sibyl'), the Epistle of Aristeas (an exaltation 
 of the Jewish Law incident to the narrative concerning 
 the origin of the Greek translation of the Pentateuch), 
 and others. Within recent years discovery has been 
 made of the Odes of Solomon and (in the Hebrew
 
 94 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 original recovered from the Cairo Genizah) of a sec- 
 tarian work published by Dr. Schechter, in which the 
 Book of Jubilees and the Testament of Levi are refer- 
 red to or cited and the doctrine developed of a Messiah 
 from the seed of Aaron. 
 
 It is quite possible that some of these writings, 
 
 though not all, were composed 
 Character of the Books . . ,, . ' , ^ A 
 
 A .j ^ i-r t. originally in Hebrew orAra- 
 
 outside the Hebrew . , J ... 
 
 . . maic; the present condition of 
 
 Scnptures , -7 , ... , 
 
 the texts shows handling by 
 
 Christians; and in some cases it becomes difficult to 
 establish whether the author was a Jew or a Christian. 
 This much is clear that 'many books without end' 
 existed by the side of the collection of Scriptures 
 recognized by the Pharisees. Their range was a wide 
 one, comprising history, philosophy, poetry, lyric and 
 didactic, but above all apocalypse, that new genre 
 which is represented in the Canon by Daniel. It is 
 evident that the Pharisaic teachers knew them all as 
 modern productions. It is true, Ben Sira antedated 
 Daniel ; but the sage was unwise enough to publish 
 his work under his own name. It is a lofty book 
 throughout; it is like Proverbs, Koheleth, and the 
 Psalter all rolled up into one; but his indifference to 
 individual immortality 'The life of man is numbered 
 by days; but the days of Israel are innumerable' (37. 
 25) pardoned in Koheleth who impersonated a son 
 of David, made him unacceptable to the Pharisees; 
 nor could they tolerate his assumption of the prophetic
 
 THREE, NOT FOUR 95 
 
 gift (24.33) despite his 'orthodoxy' in identifying 
 Wisdom with the Torah of Moses (verse 25). 
 _, _. Pharisaism had its birth in the break 
 
 _ with the Hasmonean dynasty, and a 
 
 writing glorifying that dynasty was 
 evidently the work of their opponents which was suf- 
 ficient to condemn it. Daniel suited Pharisaism as no 
 other book might ; moreover it dealt with later history 
 in the form of ancient visions. The line appears to have 
 been drawn between Ezra and the Maccabean revolt : 
 classicity lay behind that line. 
 
 As for the writings ascribed to so many ancient 
 worthies, Adam, Enoch, Moses, Ezra the so-called 
 
 _. Pseudepigrapha (writings with fic- 
 
 Pseudepigrapha ... . VT. % :. , , . 
 
 titious titles) which were all late 
 
 products, the contents and the spirit of most of them 
 was recognized to be moving farther and farther away 
 from the lines of official Judaism. Moreover, these 
 writings lost themselves in thoughts which ultimately 
 led those who cherished them out of Judaism into the 
 rising Church. At Jabneh, in the year 90 of the com- 
 mon era, the fate of Ben Sira and a few other books 
 might hang in the balance; as for the bulk of that 
 literature, a substantial part of which was composed 
 in Greek and was therefore unknown in Palestine, 
 while many of these books had their origin in sects and 
 points of view diametrically at variance with the 
 Pharisaic, they were 'extraneous writings' which con- 
 demned themselves by their character, though many
 
 96 THE SCRIPTUBES IN THE MAKING 
 
 . of the teachers were enmeshed 
 The Decision against . , . ., ., 
 
 ,, _.. . . m their toils, until at length 
 
 a Fourth Division .... . ' . 
 
 Akiba spoke the word which 
 
 cast that entire body of literature beyond the pale of 
 Judaism. Of forming a fifth part of Scriputres with 
 the inclusion of the many 'Revelations' and 'Secrets' 
 and 'Assumptions' and 'Ascensions' there never was 
 any thought. The Pharisaic teachers may have 
 thought of making of Ben Sira and a few others a 
 fourth part, an appendix so to speak; they hesitated 
 just for a moment; but the decision was quickly 
 reached: Three, not Four.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 
 
 It is quite possible that the corn- 
 Ezra's Part ., f /, t> i r T^- -r 
 A t- T. t. piler of the Book of Kings, if we may 
 intheTorah ... , c . ' , . 
 
 modify somewhat bpmoza s conjec- 
 ture (chapter III), attached his work to the earlier 
 historical books, including the Five Books of Moses. 
 Thus the great historical work, brought down to the 
 period of the exile, would have contained a complete 
 and consecutive narrative of the fortunes of the nation 
 from its very beginnings. What was the guiding prin- 
 ciple in the construction of the whole is quite clear. 
 It was not to be a history in the strict sense of the 
 word. The last compiler as well as his predecessors 
 had access to historical sources, annals of the kings, 
 contemporary narratives or such as were not far re- 
 moved from the times dealt with, tales based on oral 
 traditions, poems, and the like. But the rich material 
 was handled in a free and sovereign manner; it was 
 excerpted only so far as suited the purpose of the 
 compilers, which was merely to provide the framework 
 for the things that really mattered from their point of 
 view. A writer who devotes just seven verses (II 
 Kings 14. 23 29) to the forty-one years of the reign 
 of Jeroboam II, disposes in half a verse of his 
 achievements as a restorer of the Israelitish territory
 
 98 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 to its Davidic extent, in another verse refers the 
 reader to the annals of the kings of Israel for the 
 details and for the rest of the king's mighty deeds 
 in warfare, and fills up the remainder with reflec- 
 tions and chronological notices, finding an opportunity 
 for introducing a contemporary prophet, is not an 
 historian. If we bear in mind that six chapters 
 (I Kings 1719, 21; II Kings 1, 2) are given to the 
 prophet Elijah, at least eight chapters (II Kings 2 9) 
 to the prophet Elisha, an entire chapter (I Kings 13) to 
 an anonymous prophet, we shall not err in saying that 
 his chief concern is with the prophets. The entire work 
 from Genesis to the end is intended to illustrate the 
 guidance of the nation by prophets and inspired lead- 
 ers. The name applied to the first half of the second 
 division, 'Former Prophets' (chapter I), is indeed an 
 apt appellation ; and the first division might be included 
 therein as the biography of the first prophet. If Ezra 
 had at all any part in the making of the Torah, it 
 simply amounted to this: he detached the five books 
 at the head from the sequel. By this act the Torah 
 was placed on that pedestal of eminence which it has 
 occupied ever since. 
 
 That Ezra's Torah contained the 
 The Samaritans 
 
 whole Pentateuch ought to be beyond 
 
 debate. Nor can it be maintaned that it was a recent 
 literary production. Had Ezra and his associates been 
 those who put the finishing hand to it, the Samaritans, 
 whose secession dates from the time of Nehemiah (not
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 99 
 
 a century later, as Josephus would have it), would 
 never have received it; it is indeed their only Scrip- 
 ture. There is a trace in their literature that they once 
 possessed Joshua. If the other books were never in their 
 possession, as seems to be the case, it does not prove 
 that no other collection was then in existence. The 
 other books were to them Judaic and contained as- 
 persions on the Northern Kingdom whose successors 
 they believed themselves to be. The Judeans were 
 willing to acknowledge the rebukes of the prophets 
 who had not spared them; the prophetic threats 
 had certainly been fulfilled. The prophets, even those 
 of Judah, had included Israel alike with Judah in their 
 promises of the future; they were pan-Israelites. But 
 the Samaritans adhered to their narrower provincial 
 and sectarian attitude. It is significant that the Torah 
 by a slight alteration (Deuteronomy 27.4; the Sam- 
 aritans substitute 'Gerizim' for 'Ebal') could be made 
 acceptable to the seceders. In other words, even if 
 one should grant that the Torah was a J udaic product 
 in all likelihood such was not the case its injunc- 
 tions are couched in terms so general as to place it 
 above the two contending parties. 
 
 _, .p, The Book found and promulgated 
 
 The Book Found . . . f T . , . ., * , 
 . ,, _, in the reign of Josiah is identified 
 
 in the Temple , J , , ,,,. .. 
 
 even by Graetz (chapter III) with 
 
 Deuteronomy. But it need not have been any other 
 than the same Torah which Ezra placed before the 
 people for their ratification. The Book was really
 
 100 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 found; it had actually been lost. In the narrative of 
 the twenty-second chapter of II Kings, the find is 
 brought into connection with the restoration of the 
 Temple edifice. The writer clearly conveys the impres- 
 sion that the discovery was made during the progress of 
 the repairs, when much rubbish was removed and 
 ancient layers were uncovered; in other words, that 
 the book was found secreted not in an open place in 
 one of the chambers, but in some spot in the Temple 
 walls. A most plausible explanation, a slight improve- 
 ment upon the traditional one (chapter II), would be 
 that Manasseh had the Temple copy consigned to its 
 stone entombment on the occasion of alterations in the 
 edifice. We possess a parallel in the case of Gamaliel 
 the Elder. Shortly before the destruction of the Hero- 
 dian Temple (which was far from completed when 
 the soldiers of Titus set fire to it), he is said to have 
 immured beneath a layer a copy of a translation of 
 the Book of Job. In either instance the obvious aim 
 was to withdraw the offensive volume from public use. 
 Both Gamaliel and Manasseh shrank from off-hand 
 destruction; the book might be left to destroy itself. 
 But by the act of sequestration each plainly indicated 
 the disfavor in which he held it, Gamaliel 
 because he discountenanced written translations, 
 Manasseh for the reason that he had set aside the 
 Torah in the form presented by the Temple copy. It 
 was an early case of genizah (chapter VI) , tantamount 
 to rejecting the Code and declaring it ineffective in 
 the realm.
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 101 
 
 Manasseh plainly overturned 
 Hezekiah s Religious ^, ... I-/TT ,-i 
 
 the religious policy of Hezekiah. 
 Policy Overturned by ~ r , ? i r T j u 
 __ (Jt the lew pious kings of Judah 
 
 JVlfln3.SS6il . i t 
 
 three are singled out as per- 
 fect: David, Hezekiah, and Josiah (Sirach49.4). Hez- 
 ekiah is said to have removed the high places and to 
 have broken down the sacred pillars and posts (II 
 Kings 18.4). The reformation proved abortive and 
 Josiah was compelled to re-introduce these measures 
 on even a vaster scale, because in the interim Manasseh 
 and Amon had restored the conditions which had 
 prevailed before Hezekiah, and probably with much 
 exaggeration. The Anglican Reformation of the six- 
 teenth century offers an analogy. The short reign of 
 Mary the Catholic was sufficient to undo the reform- 
 ing steps taken by her predecessors, and when Eliza- 
 beth ascended the throne these had to be largely 
 retraced. The interval of time between Hezekiah and 
 Josiah was a much longer one more than half a 
 century. In England the Scriptures in the vernacular 
 marked the progress of the reformation, and during 
 Mary's reign the public use of them in the churches 
 was forbidden. In Palestine, in those far-off days, it 
 was the Torah of Moses in the form of the Book found 
 by the priest Hilkiah that had its turns. Manasseh 
 had repudiated it and well-nigh succeeded in destroy- 
 ing it. Josiah, in restoring it as the law of the realm, 
 put the crown of achievement upon the undertaking 
 of Hezekiah.
 
 102 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 T 1.1 f u It is not altogether true that 
 Josiah's Torah . , . , 6 . 
 
 the abuses which these kings re- 
 moved are dealt with exclusively in Deuteron- 
 omy. Thus the putting down of the worship of Baal 
 and other gods, including sun, moon, and heavenly 
 constellations, squares with the Second Commandment 
 (Exodus 20.3; compare also 34.14); the pillars which 
 were broken down are proscribed in Leviticus 26.1; 
 the 'sodomites' are alluded to in the same book (18. 
 22), similarly the Molech worship by causing children 
 to pass through the fire (20.2-5) and divining by a 
 ghost or familiar spirit (19.31; 20.6, 27); the word 
 gillulim for 'idols' occurs in Leviticus 26.30. Certainly 
 the celebration of the Passover is enjoined in all the 
 codes of the Torah. 
 
 The law of the single Sanctuary, to 
 The Law of the , . , . . , . , ' ' 
 
 be sure, is characteristic of the Code 
 
 ^^ of Deuteronomy. In chapter 12 the 
 people are commanded to destroy all the (sacred) places 
 of the Canaanites together with their altars, pillars, 
 poles, and images; they are not to have a plurality of 
 sanctuaries for the worship of the Lord (high places ; 
 the word so frequent in the historical books is never- 
 theless avoided, though Leviticus 26.30 has it), but one 
 ceYftral place where alone sacrifices may be offered. 
 This law is to become effective after the period of the 
 conquest, when the land shall have been pacified and 
 distributed. Provision is made for the killing of cattle 
 for ordinary, not sacrificial, purposes anywhere in the
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 103 
 
 land, the meat to be consumed by the unclean and the 
 clean; only the blood must be poured out upon the 
 ground. The lawgiver clearly repeals the Law of 
 Leviticus 17 which was designed solely for the con- 
 ditions of camp life,when all animals might be brought 
 to the Tabernacle and offered as peace-offerings. 
 Naturally this mode of procedure would be unworkable 
 in the settled conditions of life across the Jordan. It 
 seems also that in the plains of Moab, when the tribes 
 of Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh 
 had occupied the rich cattle lands of Jazer and Gilead 
 east of the Jordan, there developed great laxity, every 
 man doing 'whatsoever was right in his own eyes'. 
 It was therefore perfectly possible that the Torah of 
 Josiah contained beside Deuteronomy other books of 
 the Pentateuch; in fact the Deuteronomic law is 
 unintelligible without that in Leviticus 17, and this 
 chapter is linked to the whole of Leviticus and to those 
 parts of Exodus and Numbers in which the Taber- 
 nacle is mentioned. If the Book found in the Temple 
 had Deuteronomy in it, it must also have had the 
 three preceding books, including the very portions 
 which are assigned by the modern school to the Priests' 
 Code. 
 
 But the law of Deuteronomy 12 cannot very well be 
 
 brought into consonance with Exodus 
 Exodus 20.21 _ _; , , . , . ,, . , , ,. ,, 
 20.21, which is the introduction to the 
 
 Book of the Covenant containing the 'Words' and 
 'Ordinances' of chapters 21, 22, 23 (see 24. 3-8). 'An
 
 104 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 altar of earth (the succeeding verse allows the choice 
 of unhewn stones as material for the construction of 
 the altar) thou shalt make unto Me, and shalt sacrifice 
 thereon thy burnt-offerings, and thy peace-offerings, 
 thy sheep, and thine oxen ; in every place where I cause 
 My name to be mentioned I will come to thee and 
 bless thee.' The blessing follows the sacrifice as a sign 
 that it has been accepted, and is invoked by the priests 
 ('so shall they put My name upon the children of 
 Israel, and I will bless them', Numbers 6.27). 
 
 ,_ . A , .^ Contrast Deuteronomy 12. 13, 
 Contrasted with . , , ir , ' 
 
 _. Take heed to thyself that thou offer 
 
 Deuteronomy . 
 
 not thy burnt-offerings in every place 
 
 that thou seest; but in the place 
 which the Lord shall choose in one of thy tribes, there 
 shalt thou offer thy burnt-offerings.' These words are 
 taken to be a pointed protest against the law of Exod- 
 us. In a manner they ignore the qualification in the 
 other law. It is not every place that a man may see 
 fit to consecrate, but only such places as have been 
 hallowed through a manifestation of the Deity where- 
 by He causes His name to be mentioned, like Bethel 
 where God appeared unto the patriarch Jacob when he 
 fled from Esau (Genesis 35.1; 28.13), Penuel where 
 Jacob wrestled with an angel and saw God face to face 
 (32.25-32), Gilgal where the Lord announced to 
 Joshua that He had rolled away the reproach of Egypt 
 from off Israel (Joshua 5.9), and so on.
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 105 
 
 _, . Now, it is maintained that 
 
 Both may have been , ,. 
 
 i_ m ,_ these two contradictory laws 
 in Josiah s Torah , , , . J . . 
 
 could not have been found in the 
 
 Book of Josiah. As a matter of fact they co-exist quite 
 peaceably in our Pentateuch. The so-called compiler 
 found no difficulty in reconciling them. He and the 
 generations that followed him took note of the fact 
 that the law in Exodus does not speak of altars in the 
 plural, but of an altar in the singular, which may be 
 erected now in this place now in that, now in Shiloh 
 now in Jerusalem, not at one and the same time, but 
 successively. That was certainly the understanding 
 of Jeremiah (7.12), who names Shiloh as the place 
 where the Lord caused His name to dwell 'at the first', 
 of Asaph who sees in the destruction of Shiloh in the 
 Philistine wars an act of the provoked Deity, who 
 'forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent which He 
 had made to dwell among men ; He abhorred the tent 
 of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim; but 
 chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which He 
 loved; and He built His sanctuary like the heights, 
 like the earth which He hath founded for ever; He 
 chose David also His servant, to be shepherd over 
 Jacob His people, and Israel His inheritance' (Psalm 
 78.60, 67-71). Thus both Shiloh, where Hannah 
 poured out her soul and dedicated her son Samuel to 
 the ministry of the Lord, whither men went up to 
 worship and to sacrifice from year to year, and Jeru- 
 salem, which David conquered from the Jebusite
 
 106 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 and made the capital of Israel and Judah united, were, 
 each in its time, acknowledged as lawful sanctuaries. 
 The Torah of a set purpose is general in its phrase- 
 ology, and the law of Deuteronomy as well as that of 
 Exodus might be cited at Shiloh by Eli or at Jerusalem 
 by Zadok or Hezekiah. It was reserved for the Sam- 
 aritans to re-write the passage in Exodus so as to read : 
 'In the place where I have caused My name to be 
 mentioned'. 
 
 But we will grant that the two 
 They must have ~ , ,. TTT , , 
 
 Codes disagree. We contend, how- 
 been there ...u * u j *u D i < T t, 
 
 ever, that had the Book of Josiah 
 
 been confined to the Deuteronomic Code alone, as is 
 generally maintained, it would have met with instant 
 opposition of a nature to preclude acceptance. The 
 priests of the country sanctuaries might have pointed 
 to the Exodus legislation. It was obviously imperative 
 to mark the rival code as repealed. This could be 
 accomplished only by having the two codes in one and 
 the same book. Both were allowed to stand as Mosa- 
 ic; only the Exodus Code was dated from the begin- 
 ning of the wanderings, it was given at Sinai (Horeb), 
 while the Deuteronomic Code was the final legislation 
 set forth in the plains of Moab (see Deuteronomy 28. 
 69) .Where they differed, the Second Law was manifestly 
 in force. A body of narrative became necessary to 
 indicate that there was a sequence in time. Hence the 
 two Codes must have been encased in a framework
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 107 
 
 of history, which, of course, means that Josiah's Book 
 resembled our Pentateuch. 
 
 We shall go even farther. It is uni- 
 Both Codes . , , 
 
 -. versally recognized that Deuteronomy 
 
 Co-existed , _ , , ' . . 
 
 12.13 points a finger, so to speak, at 
 
 Exodus 20.24. Now Wellhausen has remarked that 
 the latter passage 'looks almost like a protest against 
 the equipment of the Temple of Solomon.' His op- 
 ponent Hoffmann concedes the possibility that after 
 the secession under Jeroboam I, when in the North the 
 Jerusalem Temple ceased to be considered as the 
 central sanctuary, plural sanctuaries or altars were 
 regarded as lawful. It may therefore be argued as 
 plausible that the Exodus passage is a pointed protest 
 against Deuteronomy 12.13. Not because it knows no 
 better, because that was the undisputed wont, does 
 the Exodus law pronounce for plural sanctuaries; 
 rather, because it is well aware of the contending 
 doctrine of the single sanctuary, does it set itself 
 deliberately against it. Neither the opposition to 
 plural sanctuaries nor the advocacy of them was some- 
 thing sprung upon the nation of a sudden ; each had 
 its history, its starting-point and culmination. When 
 Jeremiah, with Deuteronomy before him, in a mood 
 of despair, points out the futility of the 'pen of the 
 scribes' (8.8; see 3.10), he is confronting a contesting 
 opinion which just as ardently emphasizes its utility; 
 or when he gives utterance to the thought that the Mo- 
 saic legislation did not concern itself with the sacrificial
 
 108 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 cult (7.22), he is opposed by teachers who, on the 
 contrary, maintain that it was an intergal part of the 
 ancient law. Similarly, the Exodus Code and the 
 Deuteronomic Law must be understood as rivals facing 
 each other and disputing each the authority of the 
 other. 
 
 _ _ The Torah of Josiah most probably had 
 
 Hosea 8.12 , , , . J 
 
 them both, just as we have them to-day. 
 
 But at some period in the background they must have 
 existed by the side of each other as indepedent versions 
 of the Mosaic Torah. From Joshua 24.26 and I Sam- 
 uel 10.25 we know that the ancient shrines had their 
 archives. In each there must have been a copy of the 
 Torah, here shorter and there longer, alike in subject- 
 matter, but with differences in detail according to the 
 attitude of the local priesthood. 'Though I write for 
 him', Hosea makes the Lord say (8.12), 'never so many 
 Torahs (this is probably the sense of the passage), 
 they are accounted as a stranger's', as those of one no 
 one will in any wise heed. Hosea confronts a people 
 steeped in sin, 'swearing and lying, and killing and 
 stealing, and committing adultery', breaking all the 
 commandments, as we should say, yet scrupulous in 
 presenting their sin-offerings at the behest of their 
 priests. There are altars enough in the land, there is 
 no dearth of sumptuous sanctuaries; but 'Ephraim 
 hath multiplied altars to sin.' 
 
 _ _, Humanity has not changed much 
 
 Hosea s Torah . ., 2i. 
 
 since those days: with punctiliousness
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 109 
 
 in outward, ritual observances there may be found 
 acquiescence in all the wrongs of the social order and 
 a deadened conscience in regard to the things that re- 
 ally matter, 'truth, and mercy, and knowledge of God.' 
 Hosea, like Jeremiah, recognizes the futility of a writ- 
 ten Law which has not sunk into the heart. He in- 
 veighs against the exaggerated value put upon 
 'Temple piety.' But it is preposterous to maintain that 
 the written Torah or torahs, to which the prophet 
 refers as existing, contained nothing but moral duties. 
 The Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, in which the 
 absence of all concern for sacrificial worship and the 
 like stands out in marked contrast to the rest of the 
 Torah, the modern school would have us believe, dates 
 from a period later than Hosea's; the Deuteronomic 
 Code, in which ritual prescriptions are certainly not 
 wanting, was a compromise between prophets and 
 priests; yet Hosea had behind him a written Torah 
 with just the moral commandments in it which so 
 singularly characterize the 'later' Decalogue! No, we 
 say, Hosea's Torah could not have been different in 
 scope and contents and origin from the Codes now 
 imbedded in the Pentateuch. 
 
 For it is neither all ritual nor all mo- 
 The Codes ,. . , ., 
 
 _ T ,, , rality that meets us in any ot them. 
 
 Half-moral ~ .. . .,, ., 
 
 -._. ,, ., , Ouite in consonance with the three 
 Half-ritual , . ., . .. , ,., , . , 
 
 strands of the spiritual life of the na- 
 tion, both in their concurrency and in their interlacing 
 (chapter IV) , no part entering into the make-up of the
 
 110 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 Torah, however priestly in origin, could escape the 
 influences from the other two spheres acting as a check 
 self-imposed. Both the Exodus Code and the Deute- 
 ronomic were intended for the people at large, men, 
 women, and children. 'These are the ordinances which 
 thou shalt set before them' (Exodus 21.1). The 'words' 
 and the 'ordinances' are told to the people, and they 
 with one voice signify their acceptance. Then the 
 Book of the Covenant is written and read to the people, 
 and the people once more declare their acceptance 
 (24.3-7). The Deuteronomic Code is a farewell ora- 
 tion addressed to the people, it is the 'Torah which 
 Moses set before the children of Israel' (Deuteronomy 
 4.44). The chief concern of both is to deal with mat- 
 ters that relate to the people directly, the body of civil 
 and criminal law ('ordinances') and moral injunctions 
 ('words'). Altars, sacrifices, dues to the sanctuaries 
 or the priesthood are merely touched upon casually. 
 But these things are there, while detailed instructions 
 concerning them are reserved for those whom they 
 concern. The Deuteronomic Code treats of these 
 matters even somewhat more fully than the parallel 
 Code, for the reason that the lawgiver must needs 
 show the bearing upon them of the institution of the 
 single sanctuary. Thus the disposal of tithes and first- 
 lings and first fruits is considered (Deuteronomy 14. 
 22 15.23), exactly as in connection with the central- 
 ized sanctuary the cycle of the pilgrimage festivals 
 (16.1 17), the supreme court of appeals (17.8 13),
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TOR AH HI 
 
 the cities of refuge (19.1 13) are dealt with. But 
 in regard to leprosy, a cross-reference, so to speak, to 
 the Priests' Torah is indulged in (24.8), and in 
 chapter 14 the torah concerning the animals that may 
 and may not be eaten is excerpted from Leviticus 1 1 , 
 where, however, a much fuller treatment is accorded 
 the subject. 
 
 --. The important point is that ritual 
 
 No Hostility ,, ^ . ... 
 
 . . matters are not ignored. What is still 
 
 more important is that no hostile at- 
 titude is taken to them, as some of the uncompromising 
 prophets might expect the lawgiver to adopt. For he 
 is priest-prophet. He believes in the whole of the 
 religious life,in an organized piety which leaves nothing 
 undone: the Temple and the sacrificial worship are 
 there and they require to be regulated, that in no wise 
 may idolatry creep in; but so is also a civic life gov- 
 erned by 'righteous ordinances' and the deeper human- 
 ity which rests not upon law courts and institutions 
 but upon those eternal Shalts and Shalt-nots which 
 none but God can dictate. 
 
 And the Priests' Code, which is 
 The Priests' Code , , A , , . , r ,, 
 
 ~ . . ,, for Aaron and his sons , for the 
 
 Contains the . , . . , , 
 
 ,, .... priesthood, circumstantially deal- 
 
 Morahties . ... ' 
 
 ing as it must with all that they 
 
 are charged to do, with all their punctilious duties in 
 and about the sanctuary, is just as strongly permeated 
 with what we may call the moralities. The two highest 
 commandments, the love of God and the love of one's
 
 112 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 neighbor, are distributed among the two codes of the 
 Torah, the Deuteronomic and the Levitical (Deute- 
 ronomy 6.5; Leviticus 19.18). The nineteenth chapter 
 of Leviticus is a fair specimen of what the Torah has 
 been from its very beginnings and what it has meant 
 to the religion which is founded upon it. It refuses to 
 distinguish between ritual and moral. Honoring father 
 and mother and keeping the sabbaths, putting away 
 idols and images and refraining from eating sacred 
 meat on the third day after the victim has been offered, 
 charitable dealings with the poor and respect for the 
 property and feelings of great and small, the statutes 
 concerning diverse seeds or intercourse with a bond- 
 maid designated for another man, treating the fruits 
 of a newly planted tree as forbidden during the first 
 three years, injunctions against the practice of divi- 
 nation or rounding the corners of head and beard or 
 making incisions in the body; the prohibition of har- 
 lotry, the discountenancing of familiar spirits; the 
 commands to honor the aged and to love the stranger; 
 the insistence on just measures all these things 
 are there with no attempt at classification. Side by 
 side with the chapters dealing with the regulations of 
 the priesthood and their physical qualifications or with 
 the cycle of holy seasons, and close upon the ruling of 
 how a person cursing the Name shall be punished, we 
 have in the twenty-fifth chapter of this 'priestly'book 
 the agrarian laws and the institution of the year of the 
 jubilee, when 'liberty shall be proclaimed throughout
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 113 
 
 the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,' that which 
 has been called 'utopian', and which therefore was not 
 some customary law inherited, but the outflow of a 
 great legislative mind wishing to create an 'ideal 
 republic'. 
 
 OM_ m , ,, The Torah of which Hosea 
 
 The Torah of Moses . ... . . . . 
 
 knew could not but have been 
 
 likewise half-ritual, half-moral, half-legalistic and half- 
 idealistic. And that Torah was God's, written by Him. 
 Which of course is the meaning of the designation 
 of the Torah as Mosaic. This is indeed the point upon 
 which the narrative framework both in Exodus and in 
 Deuteronomy is quite unanimous and which there- 
 fore must rest on a common tradition such as was 
 universally accepted in most ancient times. We may 
 put it in the following fashion. Men were wont to 
 speak of God's Law given to or by the hand of Moses. 
 How came it to be given to Moses and not to the people 
 direct? And the uniform answer was: After the deliver- 
 ance from Egypt, the Lord summoned the people to 
 His desert mount; there He revealed Himself to them; 
 there in the presence of the whole concourse He ad- 
 dressed Moses, so that the people learned to believe 
 in him as the true prophet, that is, spokesman of the 
 Deity ; there they heard the Voice piercing the darkness 
 and thundering forth the Ten Commandments, the 
 groundwork of the Law (according the rabbis, only 
 the first two Commandments were heard by the people) ; 
 but awed by the manifestation of the Divine Glory,
 
 114 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 they withdrew and delegated Moses to ascend the 
 mount and receive for their instruction the whole of 
 the Torah and the Commandments which God had 
 with Him in writing (Exodus 19.9,19; 20.18-21 ; 24.12; 
 Deuteronomy 5.19-28). 
 
 ,., We have no reason to discredit 
 
 What it was like .. 4 ... _,, ., . 
 
 this tradition. There was a Mosaic 
 
 Torah which was code and constitution, with regula- 
 tions for national and individual conduct, with instruc- 
 tions to the priests concerning their duties, all encased 
 in a framework narrating the events when the whole or 
 portions thereof 'came down* and a prefatory history 
 of the patriarchs who were the first teachers of the 'way 
 of the Lord'. Copies of that Torah were executed and 
 kept in all the shrines, each a version or excerpt as 
 conditions of time and place warranted, with such 
 variations as all texts are subject to in the course of 
 transmission and with other modifications intended 
 to keep pace with the development of the national life. 
 Pluralists and advocates of the single sanctuary alike 
 made their contributions ; both believed that they were 
 acting in the spirit of Moses and both might cite tra- 
 dition in support of their contention. It is quite possible 
 that the lawgiver at one time conceded plurality of 
 sanctuaries and at another counseled the establish- 
 ment of the single sanctuary. His single thought was 
 to safeguard the worship of the One God, the God of 
 the fathers. He may have felt, and the pluralists with 
 him, that the struggle with the Canaanitic culture and
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 115 
 
 religion necessitated the transformation of every in- 
 digenous shrine into a sanctuary of the Lord. Thus, 
 the lawgiver reasoned, the idolatrous equipment and 
 mode of worship which, as the sequel only too well 
 proved, had a fascinaton for Israel, might be uprooted. 
 Or again he foresaw the futility of this measure and 
 made provision for centralizing the worship in one 
 place so soon as that was feasible. He certainly thought 
 that the transition period would be a short one, when 
 complete pacification would ensue. But when the time 
 came under David and political centralization seemed 
 to pave the way for religious unity, when the Temple 
 had been erected on the site of a Jebusite threshing- 
 floor, the North seceded and in defiance of Jerusalem 
 pursued its policy of decentralization,and even in Judah 
 the time was not quite ripe for the execution of the 
 last will of Moses until well-nigh the end. 
 
 ,.._.. , The great zealot-prophet 
 
 Special Dispensation _.,.. , ,. ,, r . . 
 
 Elijah, according to the script- 
 ural account, betook himself to the mountain of God, 
 the place of the primeval revelation, and there poured 
 out his soul before the Lord, grieving over the destruc- 
 tion of the 'altars' of the Lord in the time of Ahab and 
 Jezebel. He met the prophets of Baal on mount 
 Carmel and there restored the altar of the Lord which 
 had been broken down. According to the rabbis, he 
 acted by virtue of a 'special dispensation.' We need 
 not take that literally. In the sense in which the rab- 
 bis understood it, it means merely an attempt at
 
 116 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 harmonizing the prophet's conduct with the Deute- 
 ronomiclaw which forbids altars beside the one in 
 Jerusalem. But it is supremely true if we take it in a 
 higher sense. It was a time of 'halting between two 
 opinions'. The popular religion was an intermixture 
 of Canaanism and Mosaism. It was not a question of 
 merely purifying the sanctuaries of the Lord, of putting 
 down this or that idolatorus service. The question 
 at issue was: the Lord or Baal. Baalism threatened 
 to submerge the very name of the Lord. And the 
 prophet rightly placed himself upon the position of 
 the North, the attitude of those who, while true to the 
 Lord, could not entertain the notion of centralization 
 which at that time would simply have meant leaving 
 the Lord in possession of the central altar and suffering 
 all the others to remain in the hands of Baal and all 
 that Baal worship connoted. Indeed, it was a 'special 
 dispensation', justified in the circumstances of the peri- 
 od and the situation in which the adherents of Mosaism 
 found themselves in the North, with Phoenicia as next- 
 door neighbor and a Phoenician princess the consort 
 of the king of Israel. 
 
 _... The Codes or narratives of the 
 
 Differences ,-, .. 
 
 n ^ j Pentateuch may present differen- 
 
 O veremphasized ... 
 
 ces which the Torah of Moses must 
 
 have assumed in the course of its application to the 
 historical situations. These differences were not dis- 
 covered yesterday. For ages the students of the Torah 
 have been kept busy explaining them. There is not a
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 117 
 
 difficulty or incongruity, which modern students trace 
 to the manner in which independent 'documents' 
 were welded together, that is not noticed by the Jewish 
 commentators of medieval times. They meet these 
 difficulties in their way, which may or may not be 
 ours. For one thing it must be borne in mind that 
 there is a proneness to overemphasize the disagree- 
 ments. These naturally attract attention first of all. 
 
 _. , ,, Scholars who have occasion to 
 
 The Analogy of the . x r 
 
 IT %**! compare manuscripts ot an an- 
 
 Lower' Criticism . f, , , , ., . 
 
 cient book are first struck by their 
 
 differences, which are called variants, and that manu- 
 script which is richest in such variants is studied in 
 preference to others. Yet a closer examination will 
 bring to light the fact that the most of them represent 
 idiosyncracies of certain scribes, and that so soon as 
 we understand their rationale some are quite ir- 
 rational or succeed in 'explaining' them, they cease 
 to be variations. This business is called textual, or 
 'the lower', criticism. But a textual critic of the right 
 sort is not astonished at all when different copies of 
 one and the same text yield different readings. That 
 is the inevitable fate of any text circulating in a num- 
 ber of copies and again and again multiplied by 
 transcription. The writing hand was not like the setter 
 of movable type. The printing-press stereotypes a 
 compositor's error ; it is the same in all the thousands 
 of copies struck off. The writing hand obviously is led 
 into all sorts of by-ways. The astonishing thing is
 
 118 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 that manuscripts, which have hundreds of variants, 
 should at all agree in the main, and agree they must 
 or we should not call them copies of the same book. 
 'The real text', says the critic Bentley, 'does not now 
 (since the originals have been so long lost) lie in any 
 manuscript or edition, but is dispersed in them all.' 
 We may well carry this wise principle over from 
 
 the domain of the 'lower' to that of 
 Applied to the , ,,. ...... ,. , , , .^, 
 
 'TT h ' higher criticism, which deals with 
 
 the manner in which a 'compiler' 
 brought together originally independent, but parallel 
 works. If these were different, why should they not 
 show disagreements? The astonishing thing is that 
 they may still be called 'parallel', that they agree at 
 all. If the two creation stories at the opening of Gen- 
 esis were independent accounts, they cannot help 
 diverging in the sequence of the acts of creation or in 
 other details. But the striking point is that they both 
 teach that God is Creator and man a creature of 
 God, that both start with the same premisses of a 
 primeval slimy watery mass, both deal with the rela- 
 tion between animals and man, both accord to man in 
 the first world period the fruit of trees, and not meat 
 as food. It is an exaggerated position held by some 
 moderns that certain patriarchal stories in Genesis are 
 based upon the notion that the Israelites never went 
 down to Egypt. What these narratives mean to bring 
 out is the title to the land, which the fathers traversed 
 and took possession of long before the children migra-
 
 THE HIGHER UNITY OF THE TORAH 119 
 
 ted into it. Not only in the Pentateuch, but all through 
 the Scriptures the exodus from Egypt is a basic event 
 with which the whole of the beginnings of the national 
 life is brought into connection. And so it is with the 
 Codes. Modifications, differences may be noted; but 
 when all of these have been taken into account, there 
 is a residue common to one Code with the other, and 
 the agreement covers not only essentials, but extends 
 to the very language. The presumption is therefore 
 forced upon us that we are dealing with a body of law 
 and tradition antedating the divergences of the dis- 
 parate versions and ascending to the Mosaic age. 
 Whether the Pentateuch as we have it is the Mosaic 
 Torah may be a matter for debate. That it has the 
 Mosaic Torah, which is neither in this strand nor in the 
 other but 'dispersed in them all', must be the conclu- 
 sion of sound criticism. 
 
 The Torah may be a composite 
 The Higher Unity , T . , , .. . .. 
 
 . work. It lacks unity of the me- 
 
 or the Torah , . . T , , . 
 
 chamcal sort. It has unity, never- 
 theless, and that in a much higher sense. We have 
 observed how it keeps itself above the contending par- 
 ties. It takes sides neither with Judah nor with Joseph. 
 North and South might own it, pluralists and the 
 proponents of centralization, ritualists and moralists, 
 Ezra and Sanballat. The Torah when viewed as a 
 whole transmits to the last generation the piety of the 
 patriarchs and even of the righteous that preceded 
 them; whatsoever of faith and fear of God there was
 
 120 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 in the world before the Mosaic epoch is treasured up 
 for a memorial and for imitation. It sums up all the 
 movements in the religious life of the nation, 
 imposing a lasting peace upon them all. No 
 extreme views are permitted to prevail; with the 
 iconoclasm of the one-sided moralist it fuses the con- 
 servatism of those teachers and leaders who stood out 
 for a piety that with all its inwardness takes shape 
 in tangible forms and institutions. The community of 
 the children of God must needs be a visible one; and 
 so long as such societies exist, they will have a 
 priesthood no matter what the garb may be. In the 
 Torah the sternest and gentlest of the prophets might 
 recognize their very best thought, expressed in a 
 diction which by its very simplicity and charm by far 
 surpasses the measured lines of the prophets, just as 
 the lawgiver keeps himself disengaged from the im- 
 mediate situation and rising above time focuses him- 
 self upon eternity. 'And now, Israel, what doth the 
 Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy 
 God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to 
 serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all 
 thy soul ; to keep for thy good the commandments of 
 the Lord, and His statutes, which I command thee 
 this day?' In this sum all the strife of contest is hushed, 
 for the highest has been attained, that which for ever 
 made the Torah for Israel 'life and length of days' and 
 constitutes that unity of purpose which dominates 
 every part of it.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 -nL TN j. T The unity which the Torah 
 
 The Dominant Position , . , J - . , , 
 
 - , , , achieved as a finished product 
 
 of the Torah , , . - ^ H f 
 
 secured for the first part of 
 
 the Scriptures also its unique position. It stands in the 
 consciousness of the Jew as mirrored in the pronounce- 
 ments of the rabbis, quite apart from the rest. Fre- 
 quently, Prophets and Writings are subsumed under the 
 name Kabbalah, Tradition, their function consisting 
 in carrying on the eternal principles of the Torah. 
 Poets and prophets were their best interpreters. The 
 Torah just as often stands for the Scriptures in their 
 entirety. It is not always easy to tell whether Torah 
 is used in the wider or narrower sense. It really mat- 
 ters little, as a denial of the authority of the Torah 
 involves a repudiation of the rest. 
 
 This authority rests, accord- 
 'Torah from Heaven' . ., , T . , ,, 
 
 mg to the Mishna, upon the 
 
 dogma of its divine origin. 'He who holds that there 
 is no Torah from Heaven forfeits his share in the 
 world to come'. It is pointedly directed against 
 certain tendencies of the period, which taught the 
 provisional character of the Mosaic dispensation and 
 its ultimate abrogation. The anathema of the Mish- 
 na was then extended to such as maintained that 'all
 
 122 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 of the Torah is from Heaven except this or that verse 
 which was not spoken by the Holy One, blessed be He, 
 but Moses added it of his own accord.' Here we have 
 
 _, _ the doctrine of Verbal inspira- 
 
 The Doctrine of A . , ,. . . . ,, 
 
 IT t i T jj tion , according to which Moses 
 Verbal Inspiration , , , 
 
 acted merely as a copyist writing 
 
 at dictation' ; it implies a levelling of the lighter and 
 the heavier matters; according to Maimonides, the 
 genealogy of the sons of Ham (Genesis 10.6) or the 
 name of the concubine of Eliphaz (36.12) stands on a 
 footing of equality with the First Commandment 
 (Exodus 20.2) and the Shema' (Deuteronomy 6.4). 
 At the same time it has a countervailing effect : it draws 
 the attention away from the human agent to the 
 directive source which is in God. The Torah of Moses 
 it is, but the appellation serves as a mark of iden- 
 tification ; we know the books which constitute it. 
 What matters far more is that it is the Torah of God. 
 
 _ Eminent as the position of the 
 
 Torah linked to ,,..,, . 
 
 ,, ._ . Torah is, it has by no means lost 
 
 the Prophets ' , ,, * , .. 
 
 contact with that category of the 
 
 nation's mental activity which from the very begin- 
 ning made it the combination of priestly teaching and 
 prophetic persuasiveness. The revelation on mount 
 Sinai is glorified ; for there a whole people, and be it 
 only for a moment of supreme exaltation, saw God. 
 Moses is elevated far above the other prophets. The 
 Torah itself leads the way. 'My servant Moses is not 
 so: with him do I speak mouth to mouth (as a man
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 123 
 
 speaketh to his friend, Exodus 33.11), not in dark 
 speeches (by means of visions, or 'mashals'), nor by 
 dreams' (Numbers 12.6-8). Yet the distinction is only 
 one of degree. He was simply the first among his peers 
 (Deuteronomy 18.15). 'By a prophet the Lord brought 
 Israel up out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he kept' 
 (Hosea 12.14). The prophets knew themselves as 
 admitted to the divine council (Jeremiah 23.18) ; Moses 
 was at home there, 'trusted in all of God's house'. 
 The meekest of all men was not jealous of his brother- 
 prophets. 'Would that all the Lord's people were 
 prophets!' Thus in a manner Torah and Prophets 
 are linked together and the three divisions are really 
 reduced to two. In the prayer of Ezra (9.11, 12), 
 a composite citation from Leviticus and Deuteronomy 
 with just an element from Ezekiel is introduced as that 
 which God commanded by the hand of His servants 
 the prophets. 
 
 What distinguishes all of the 
 The Holy Spirit , ... . * . e .. 
 
 prophets alike is the possession of the 
 
 Spirit, of the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 63.11 ; Nehemiah 9. 
 30). Or rather it is the Spirit that possesses them, 
 that uses their body as a vesture which it puts on. 
 The manner in which the Spirit operates is ultimately 
 a mystery, the act of Revelation a miracle, which 
 neither place nor conditions of time can explain, just 
 as the intellectual and temperamental endowment, 
 which fits the prophet for his vocation, remains a 
 free gift of Heaven. There were evil spirits
 
 124 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 abroad likewise, just as we speak of evil influences; 
 impure spirits (Hosea 5.4) as well as pure. 'Holy' was 
 the spirit, because it emanated from God. God alone 
 is Holy; all else is holy in a derivative sense because 
 of its association with God. The Temple is God's 
 'holy house', the hill upon which the Temple was 
 situated His 'holy mount', Jerusalem His 'holy city', 
 Palestine the 'holy land', and Israel God's 'holy 
 people'. The 'holy Spirit* is simply the 'Spirit of God', 
 and the words which become articulate on the proph- 
 et's lip when the Spirit takes hold on him are God's 
 'holy words' (Jeremiah 23.9). 
 
 Here we have the origin of the ap- 
 Holy Scriptures . <u , _ . ; , f 
 pellation Holy Scriptures . Holy 
 
 Scripture was at first the single message written down ; 
 then a book containing a number of these messages; 
 then any historical book about the acts and utterances 
 of these spokesmen of God ; then the books of Wisdom 
 and of lyric poetry, not merely because they dealt, or, 
 by interpretation, were connected with themes and 
 things divine, but for the reason that these likewise 
 were manifestations of the Spirit. Thus the entire 
 collection assumed a unity and became Holy Script- 
 ures, that is, the depository of the sum of Divine 
 Revelation. 
 
 Thus it is the Spirit as organ of Revelation that 
 dominates the collection and imparts to it its name. 
 
 _. _ , The dower of the Spirit is the out- 
 
 The Dower of .. , <., c T 
 
 *t- o ' A standing feature in the genius of Isra- 
 
 tne Spirit 1^-1 
 
 el. There were inspired men among
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 125 
 
 other nations; Baal had his prophets as well as the 
 Lord. What is common to them all is but the manner 
 and the belief that they were the spokesmen of the 
 Deity. But that which makes the prophets and the 
 singers of Israel incomparable lies in the uniqueness 
 of the things they said rather than in the mode in 
 which they said it. They were indeed the instrument 
 in the hand of God to cause to be ingrained in the 
 people out of which they sprung and in which their 
 whole being was rooted, the consciousness that the 
 earth must be hallowed by bringing down Heaven to 
 rest upon it. Even the primeval chaos was breathed 
 upon by the spirit of God ; the same Spirit was infused 
 into man, the crown of creation, and no part of human 
 kind was left without a touch of the Divine. But the 
 fulness of the outpouring of the Spirit was given to 
 Israel; from the first it guided patriarchs and elders, 
 lawgivers and seers, wise teachers and sweet singers, 
 and from step to step it directed scribes and compilers, 
 even as at the last it operated through the collector as he 
 elected the one writing and rejected the other. It was 
 
 _. . in conformity with the divine plan 
 
 The Divine Plan . . _.. , \ , , M , K 
 
 that Elijah should prevail and not 
 
 Ahab, Josiah and not Manasseh, Jeremiah and not 
 Hananiah, Ezra and not Sanballat, the separatists and 
 not the friends of 'fusion', the Pietists and not the 
 worldly, the Pharisees and not the Sadducees; yet in 
 a manner that nothing valuable was lost, that in the 
 victorious movements the echoes of the vanquished
 
 126 THE SCRIPTURES IN THE MAKING 
 
 still reverberate, that the Word of God is one in its 
 very compositeness, that the broad stream of living 
 waters carries down with it the many confluents. 
 
 _, , ,. They asked Wisdom : What shall 
 
 The Author of the . , J .. 
 
 . be done with the sinner? It 
 
 answered: Evil pursueth sinners 
 (Proverbs 13.12). Equally uncompromising was the 
 reply of stern prophecy: The soul that sinneth shall 
 die (Ezekiel 18.20). The Torah answered: Let him 
 offer a guilt-offering, and he will be forgiven. They 
 asked the Holy One, blessed be He, and He said : Let 
 him repent, and he will be forgiven'. The verdict of 
 God who is the Author of them all is reiterated in the 
 pages of Torah, Prophets, and Writings alike. It is 
 this hopeful message of restoration to divine mercy 
 for the individual and the nation that has stamped this 
 collection with a character all its own and witnesses to 
 the Spirit which emanating from the Holy God dwelt in 
 Israel from Moses to Ezra and from Ezra to Judah the 
 Maccabee, through that long and classic period when the 
 volumes making up Holy Writ were written, revised, 
 and assembled. There are many covers to books; but 
 the covers of the collection of writings constituting 
 the Hebrew Scriptures are the walls of the Synagogue, 
 within which these products of by-gone days are en- 
 shrined as a living testimony to that which is Israel's 
 glory, the gift of the Holy Spirit.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abijah, 27 
 
 Abraham, author of Psalm 89, 20 
 
 Adam, 13; author of Psalm 139, 20 
 
 Ahaz seals up the Torah, 33 
 
 Alexander the Great, 22 
 
 Amaziah, king, and the Torah, 33 
 
 Amon commits the Torah to the 
 flames, 33 
 
 Amos, book of, 12 
 
 Anachronisms in the Torah pointed 
 out by Ibn Ezra, 37 
 
 Antiochus Epiphanes deposes Onias, 
 22 
 
 Apocrypha and Apocryphal, meaning of 
 terms, 86; fate of excluded writings, 
 89; list of Apocrypha, 92; character 
 of, 94 
 
 Asaph, psalms by, 20 
 
 Astruc, Jean, suggests a new theory con- 
 cerning the composition of Genesis, 
 38 
 
 Autonomy, internal, obtained by Ezra, 
 31 
 
 Balaam, section concerning, written by 
 
 Moses, 21 
 
 Baruch, Jeremiah's amanuensis, 28 
 Belshazzar, 13 
 Bentley, 118 
 Bible, English word for, derived from 
 
 the Greek biblia, 18 
 'Book of the Covenant', 34; its place 
 
 in the pentateuchal 'documents', 40; 
 
 supposedly a compilation of private 
 
 initiative, 41 
 'Books, the', in Daniel, 18 
 
 Canon and canonical, the terms, 86; 
 
 rabbinic expressions for, 83-85; Gen- 
 izah, 86 ; attempts at excluding canon- 
 ical books, 87; closing of the Can- 
 on the work of Pharisaism Triumph- 
 ant, 90; C. of the Catholic Church, 92 
 
 Catholic scholars and the Pentateuch, 
 48 
 
 Centralization of sacrificial worship and 
 Josiah, 32; conceived as a new de- 
 mand at that time, 41 
 
 Chiquitilla, Moses Ibn, on the Second 
 Isaiah and exilic psalms, 36 
 
 Chronicles, I and II, counted as one 
 book, 13,14; their place in the Church 
 Bible, 14; written by Ezra, 20; sources, 
 27 ; the Chronicler's Torah, 28 ; Chron- 
 ides-Ezra-Nehemiah originally a 
 unit, 28; the method and point of 
 view of the compiler, 44; time of, 44 
 
 Codes co-existing, 107 
 
 Collection of the Scriptures completed, 
 according to Talmud, in the time of 
 Ezra, 22; or Nehemiah, 26 
 
 Critical theory, opponents of, 48; mod- 
 erate view, 48; present-day status, 
 49; higher and lower criticism, 
 117118 
 
 Cyrus, restoration under, 13 
 
 Daniel, book of, 13, 14; its place in the 
 Church Bible, 14; cites Jeremiah, 18; 
 Daniel's "Bible", 18; 'written 1 by the 
 Men of the Great Synagogue, 20; 
 characterization and date, 78; a 
 wisdom book, 80; Daniel, one of the 
 Men of the Great Synagogue, 21; 
 Daniel's Torah, 28 
 
 David, founder of the monarchy, 12;
 
 128 
 
 INDEX 
 
 author of the Book of Psalms, 26; 
 
 enjoins his son to keep the Torah, 32; 
 
 Davidic Psalter in the Church. 25 
 Deuteronomist, the, 43 
 Deuteronomy, 1 1 ; one of its provisions 
 
 found impracticable by Josiah, 32; 
 
 a verse from it cited in II Kings, 33; 
 
 Code of, 40; identified with the Book 
 
 found by Josiah, 41 ; D. and Exodus, 
 
 103 
 
 Dictation, Moses writes at, 22 
 Differences in the Torah overempha- 
 sized, 116 
 'Documents', the constituent, of the 
 
 Pentateuch, 39; their dating, 4043 
 
 Ecclesiastes. book of, 13, 14 
 
 Esther, book of, 13 , 14; its place in the 
 Church Bible, 15; 'written' by the 
 Men of the Great Synagogue, 20 
 
 Exodus, 11, may have been part of 
 Josiah's Torah, 105, 106 
 
 Ezekiel, book of, 12, 14; 'written' by 
 the Men of the Great Synagogue, 20 
 
 Ezra 'wrote' Ezra-Nehemiah and Chron- 
 icles, 20; his time marks, for the 
 Talmud, the completion of the Scrip- 
 tures, 22; his Torah, 29; according 
 to Spinoza, E. compiled the Penta- 
 teuch, 37, 38; Wellhausen's view, 
 42 
 
 Ezra-Nehemiah counted as one book, 
 13, 14; its place in the Church Bible, 
 75 
 
 Fast of Ab, Lamentations read on, 13 
 'Freethinkers' and the Mosaic author- 
 ship of the Pentateuch, 38 
 
 Gad, 27 
 
 Geiger for the priority of Leviticus to 
 
 Deuteronomy, 50 
 Genesis. 11 
 
 Genizah, 86 
 
 Graetz's unorthodox opinion on time 
 
 of Koheleth and Psalms, 50; his viewi 
 
 on the Pentateuch, 51 
 
 Habakkuk. book of, 12 
 
 Haggai, book of, 12; Haggai, one of the 
 
 men of the Great Synagogue, 21 
 Heman, psalm by, 20 
 Hexateuch, 43 
 Hezekiah and his company, 20; the 
 
 Torah lost after the reign of, 33 
 'High places' destroyed by Josiah, 32 
 Historical books, composition of, 43 
 Homesh, or Hummash, 16 
 Hosea, book of, 12 
 
 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, on the authorship 
 of the Torah. 37 
 
 Iddo, 27 
 
 Inspiration, verbal, 122 
 
 Interpolations, 46 
 
 Isaiah, book of, 12, 14; 'written', ac- 
 cording to Talmud, by Hezekiah and 
 his company, 20 
 
 Jaddua, high priest in the times of 
 Alexander the Great, 22, 44 
 
 Jeduthun, psalms by, 20 
 
 Jehoiachin, released from prison, 12 
 
 Jehu (the prophet), 27 
 
 Jeremiah, book of, 12, 14; what he 
 wrote, according to Talmud, 20; how 
 his addresses were committed to writ- 
 ing, 28; 'itinerant preacher' of the 
 newly found Torah, 31 
 
 Jerusalem, fall of, 12 
 
 Job, book of, 13, 14; authorship as- 
 cribed to Moses, 23; placed in Syriac 
 Bible after Deuteronomy, 23; dif- 
 ficulty of dating it, 70; the problem 
 universal, 71 
 
 Joel, book of. 12
 
 INDEX 
 
 129 
 
 Jonah, book of, 12 
 
 Josephus, on the Canon of Scriptures, 
 24 
 
 Joshua, book of, begins the second di- 
 vision, 11, 12; authorship of, 21 
 
 Joshua, the conquest under, 12 
 
 Josiah, his book of the Torah, 31; the 
 restoration of religious affairs of the 
 kingdom by, 31 
 
 Judah, Kingdom of, 12 
 
 Judah the Maccabee collects sacred 
 books, 25 
 
 Judges, book of, 12; written by Samuel, 
 according to Talmud, 21 
 
 Judges, the age of the, 12 
 
 Kabbalah, as a rabbinic name for Proph- 
 ets and Writings, 121 
 
 Kalisch moving in the line of the 'ad- 
 vanced' position ahead of Wellhausen, 
 50 
 
 Ketubim, name of the third part of the 
 Scriptures, 11; contents of, 13; order 
 of, 13; place in the Church Bible, 
 15 
 
 Kingdom, the divided, 12 
 
 Kings, 12; I and II counted as one 
 book, 12; 'written' by Jeremiah, ac- 
 cording to Talmud, 20 
 
 Koheleth.'written', according toTalmud, 
 by Hezekiah and his company, 20; 
 scant historical allusions in, 76; his 
 own interpolator, 26; his language, 
 77 
 
 Korah, psalms by the three sons of, 20 
 
 Krochmal concedes Maccabean psalms, 
 51 
 
 Lamentations, book of, 13, 14; its place 
 in the Church Bible, 14; 'written' by 
 Jeremiah, according to Talmud, 20; 
 combined with Jeremiah in Josephus, 
 24 
 
 Levites assisting Ezra at the reading of 
 
 the Torah, 29 
 Leviticus, 11 
 Literary ownership, 46 
 Luzzatto strictly orthodox, 50 
 
 Maccabean period and the closing of 
 the prophetic Canon, 45 
 
 Maccabean uprising, 22, 25 
 
 Maimonides on uniting the Scriptures 
 in a codex, 17 
 
 Malachi, book of, 12; one of the Men 
 of the Great Synagogue, 21 
 
 'Mashal 1 , 62 
 
 Megillot; see Scrolls. 
 
 Melchizedek, author of Psalm HO, 20 
 
 Micah, book of, 12; a verse from, cited 
 in Jer.. 27 
 
 Monarchy, founding of the, 12 
 
 Mordecai, one of the Men of the Great 
 Synagogue, 21 
 
 Moses, life of, narrated in the Penta- 
 teuch, 1 1 ; books ascribed, by Talmud, 
 to, 20; author of Psalm 90. 20 
 
 Moses, son of Nahman.on Ibn Ezra's 
 strictures on the Mosaic authorship 
 of the Torah, 37 
 
 Nahum, book of, 12 
 
 Nathan, 27 
 
 Nebiim, name of the second part of th 
 Scriptures, 11 
 
 Nebuchadnezzar, 13 
 
 Nehemiah, founder of a library, 25 ; one 
 of the Men of the Great Synagogue, 
 26; signer of a document obligating 
 the people to the Torah, 29 
 
 Number of sacred books in Josephus. 
 24 
 
 Numbers, 11 
 
 Obadiah, book of, 12 
 
 Onias, son of Simon II, deposed, 22
 
 130 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Order of the books. 13; among Easter- 
 ners, 13; among Westerners, 14; 
 Talmudic order, 14 
 
 Papal commission on the Pentateuch, 
 98 
 
 Parts, the three, of the Scriptures, 11; 
 division ancient and universal, 14; 
 in the Church, 14; in the Greek 
 translations, 15; in the additional 
 prayer on New Year's day.15; implied 
 by the Greek translation of Sirach, 
 15; whether they may be joined to- 
 gether, 16; like three shelves, 81 
 
 Passover, Song of Songs read on, 13 
 
 Pentateuch; see Torah 
 
 Persian kings, rescripts of, 25 
 
 Plurality of sanctuaries, 42 
 
 Poetic accentuation, 13 
 
 Priests and the Torah, 55 57; conflict 
 with prophets, 58; with priests, 60; 
 meet the challenge of the wise men, 
 64 
 
 Priests' code, 40; character and date of 
 compilation, 42; contains the mo- 
 ralities, 111 
 
 Prophet-historians, unbroken succession 
 of, 27 
 
 Prophets, their function, 57; character- 
 ization of, 58; and priests, 58; the 
 prophetic Torah, 59; conflicts with 
 prophets, 59; 'false' prophets, 60; 
 meet the challenge of wisdom, 65 
 
 Prophets; see Nebiim. Prophets, former, 
 12; order, 13; latter, 12; order, 13; 
 Minor, 12; place in the Church Bible, 
 15; counted as one book already in 
 the time of Sirach, 18; criticism on 
 the prophetic books, 45; radical views 
 on, 45 
 
 Proverbs, book of, 13,14; 'written', ac- 
 cording to Talmud, by Hezekiah and 
 his company, 20; title to chapters 25 
 
 and following, 21 
 
 Psalms, books of, first of the Ketubira, 
 11, 13, 14; Maccabean psalms, 46 
 
 Psalter, groups of, 72; connection with 
 the Temple service, 73; difficulty of 
 dating the Psalms, 74; psalms out- 
 side the Psalter, 75; dominated by 
 Torah and Prophets, 75; books con- 
 nected with the Psalter in the third 
 division, 80 
 
 Pseudepigrapha, 95 ; list of, 92 94 
 
 Purim, Esther read on, 13 
 
 Rashi on hiding the Torah, 33 
 
 Ratification of the Torah, document 
 of, 30 
 
 Reading of the Torah by Ezra, 29 
 
 Restoration under Cyrus, 13 
 
 Ruth, book of, 12; place of. 13,14; its 
 place in the Church Bible, 14; writ- 
 ten by Samuel, according to Talmud, 
 21; combined with Judges, in Jose- 
 phus, 24 
 
 Saadya on the Torah written on stone 
 by Joshua, 34 
 
 Samaria, destruction of, 12 
 
 Samuel, 12; I and II counted as one 
 book, 12; Samuel wrote it according 
 to Talmud, 21; source for Chron., 27 
 
 Saul, founder of the monarchy, 12 
 
 Schechter on the 'historical school' and 
 the Scriptures, 51 
 
 'Scribe', meaning of, 30 
 
 Scriptures, collection of, anciently in 
 thought only, 16; process of Scripture 
 making, 18; the traditional view, 21 
 ff.; its salient point, 22; Scriptural 
 data, 23 ; the Holy Scriptures defined, 
 24, 88, 124; Author of, 126; compass 
 of, 91 
 
 Scrolls, the five, 13 
 
 Shemaiah. 27
 
 INDEX 
 
 131 
 
 Simon the Just, among the last of the 
 Men of the Great Synagogue, 22 
 
 Sirach, book of, 15; counts the Minor 
 Prophets as one book, 18; considers 
 book of Isaiah the work of one man, 
 36 
 
 Solomon, 12 
 
 Solomonic writings, 14, IS 
 
 Song, offshoot of the 'mashal', 65; bal- 
 lads, 67; the 'song of loves', 68; 
 psalmody, 68; the 'dirge', 69 
 
 Song of Songs, place of, 13, 14; 'writ- 
 ten', according to Talmud, by Hez- 
 ekiah and his company, 20 
 
 Spinoza on the authorship of the Torah, 
 39; called the father of modern bibli- 
 cal criticism, 38 
 
 Spirit, the Holy, withdrawn from Israel 
 after the death of Haggai, Zechariah, 
 and Malachi, 23; in the possession of 
 the prophets, 123; the dower of the 
 Spirit, 124 
 
 Synagogue, Men of the Great, and 
 their 'writings', 20; successive 
 leaders in the Persian period, 22; 
 continuing into the Greek period, 22 
 
 Tabernacles, festival of, when Ecclesi- 
 astes is read, 13; kept by Ezra, 30 
 
 Ten Words, the, written by God Him- 
 self, 34 
 
 Third division, date of its closing, 47; 
 made up of Wisdom books, 79 
 
 Torah, name of the first part of the 
 Scriptures, 11; its several books, 11; 
 a unit forming a single scroll, 16; 
 single volumes, 16; possesses a higher 
 degree of holiness than the rest of the 
 Scriptures, 17; physically kept 
 apart, 18; authorship of the 
 last eight verses of, 21; references to 
 
 a written 'Torah' in the other parti 
 of the Scriptures, 28 ; adapting to new 
 conditions, 30, 32; The Torah 
 of Josiah, 3133; 99, 102103; 
 references to the T. in Joshua, 33; 
 its testimony concerning itself, 34; 
 place of the Torah according to crit- 
 icism, 47; Ezra's part in the Torah, 
 98; the Samaritans and the T., 99; 
 Hosea's Torah, 108; character of the 
 codes, 110; no hostility to ritual. 111; 
 the Torah of Moses, 113; what it was 
 like, 114; its higher unity, 119; its 
 dominant position, 121; 'Torah from 
 heaven', 121; T. linked to the Proph- 
 ets, 122 
 
 Torah, ritual, 55; judicial, 56; in mat- 
 ters of conscience, 56; comprehensive 
 in its meaning, 57 
 Tradition and Criticism, 52 
 Tripartition ancient, 54 
 Triple source of Revelation, 54 
 Twelve, the, 'written' by the Men of 
 the Great Synagogue, 20 
 
 Weeks, Festival of, Ruth read on, 13 
 Wellhausen, on the Pentateuch, 40 
 Wisdom, secular, 61 ; precursor of science, 
 62; international and utilitarian, 63; 
 competes with prophecy, 63; the 
 higher Wisdom, 64; competes with the 
 priests' Torah, 64; influenced by 
 priests and prophets, side-tracks 
 rationalism, 65 
 
 'Write', meaning of, in Talmud, 20 
 'Writings'; see Ketubim 
 
 Zechariah, book of, 12; one of the Men 
 
 of the Great Synagogue, 21 
 Zephaniah, book of, 12 
 Zunz, critical notions of, 50
 
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