genuine, and even the very forgeries were made up chiefly of extracts from the fathers and canons of early councils, yet they gave rise to no claim, and never had the currency and force of law. And if, for a time, suspicion was not aroused, it was precisely because their pretensions were in conformity with the known constitutions of the Church. But between Deuteronomy and the Hebrews it was a very different question. For the laws were onerous, and of every day application, and could never have been imposed upon them without the due sanction of legitimate authority. Who, then, was the lawgiver? It is needless to repeat what we have already said about their one lawgiver. There never was any but Moses; and consequently none but Moses can be the speaker and lawgiver of Deuteronomy. § 6.-Deuteronomist's language archaic. All this is confirmed by the essential characteristics of the Deuteronomist's language. For these belong to the early stage of development visible in the other books of the Pentateuch. Differences there are between them, and remarkable ones. But none to establish the difference of authorship. For while the staple of the language is the same in both, the differences, as we shall see in the proper place, are merely accidental and due to the altered circumstances of the writer. No one has yet been able to point out in Deuteronomy a single phrase, or word, or grammatical form, or syntactical turn, that is the growth of an age later than the Mosaic. There appear, indeed, what some critics have pronounced to be later phenomena. But they are called so, not from the nature of the case, but because the scanty remains of Mosaic literature do not reproduce them elsewhere. The objection will be fully considered in its appropriate place. Here all that is needed is to show that the language in Deuteronomy stands on the same platform as the earlier Pentateuch, and in its archaic mould differs considerably from the rest of the Hebrew remains. In Deuteronomy stands invariably for the feminine (thirty-six times) as in the former books; which, however, do admit occasionally an exception. In both y stands equally for both genders, with the exception here on the side of Deuteronomy, once (xxii. 19). Such peculiarities, it must be remembered, are not to be found anywhere else, not even in the book of Joshua. The demonstrative pronoun, which occurs frequently in Deuteronomy, is admitted by Ewald (Gram. § 183a) to be exclusively characteristic of the Pentateuch. For in 1 Chron. xx. 8, it appears in a different form, without the article. In the third per. sing, pret. ' occurs in prose nowhere but in the Pentateuch, inclusive of Deut. xix. 4, &c. The rest of Hebrew literature is a stranger to the word ya, which, in Deut. xiv. 4, as well as in the preceding books, is interchanged with : to the word 71, which, in the Pentateuch, and in Deuteronomy specially (xvi. 16, שֶׁגֶר ;(1 .Deut. xvi) אָבִיב to ; זָכָר xx. 13) stands for (Ex. xiii. 12; Deut. vii. 13, (Gen. vii. 4, 23; Deut. xi. 6). xxviii. 4, 18, 51); Dip? The grammatical forms bear the same archaic stamp, such as the more frequent use of He locale in Deuteronomy and the other books, the old writing and the third per. plural termination 11, which, in the future, is so common in the Pentateuch, and, remarkably enough, appears twice in Deut. viii. 3, 16, as the most ancient ending for the preterite. It should be observed, in conclusion, that, when similarity of subject offers a fair term of comparison between the book of Deuteronomy and the others, the identity of authorship comes strikingly into view. We have a good example in the long chapters of Lev. xxvi. and Deut. xxviii. The warning tone is the same in both; and there is a sameness of word, phrase, imagery, idea, and general style so remarkable, that Colenso, with suicidal fatality, makes the Deuteronomist the interpolator of Leviticus,1 and Knobel, expressing only half the truth, will have him to be at least the imitator. It is the simple identity of authorship, however, which alone can satisfy all the conditions of the problem, and avoid all the arbitrary assumptions and illogical inferences, which form the groundwork and structure of the Separatist theory. DIVISION II. INDIRECT INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE FOUR FIRST BOOKS. PROCEEDING now to the extra-deuteronomical evidence furnished by the Pentateuch, we find it no less conclusive as to Mosaic authorship, whether in the legislative or in the narrative parts of the work. For, the whole being made up of law and history, it is well to follow out the division thus naturally suggested. It brings the proof to bear on Moses both as lawgiver and historian, and in this way leads to an exhaustive result. SECT. I.-Moses the Lawgiver of the Pentateuch. Even a careless reader of the Pentateuch cannot fail to perceive that, apart from the Decalogue, there is not a single law there given to Israel but what is expressly referred to Moses as its promulgator: and if he accord to 1 See Mosaic Orig. of the Pent. considered, pp. 203-207. it the smallest credit for veracity, he cannot but accept its testimony on a point where neither accident nor design could mar the main features of the case. The admission indeed is a necessity, were it but as the indispensable key to the history of Israel. For without Moses as the lawgiver, the strange history of that remarkable people is a myth, a riddle, and a fraud. To admit a Mosaic code without a written form, when writing was so easy, and lawlessness so rampant, and the future so threatening, and the example of Egypt's written law so encouraging, is to believe in an effect without a cause, or rather in one which every cause was arrayed against. And, finally, to grant a code written by Moses without recognising it in the Pentateuch, is like the Jews, to turn the eyes away from a present reality to dream of a Messiah that never had any existence. The laws of Moses there exist; they profess to be his; and, when cross-questioned on the subject, amply bear out the truth and validity of their claim. Our adversaries themselves are often struck by this, and admit, like Bleek, and Davidson,2 that some of them are so unmistakably cast in the Mosaic mould, that it would be grossly uncritical to ascribe them to anyone else than Moses. But their list falls sadly short in point of detail, as well as of generalisation, and logically should have been extended to the entire code. Not that every Mosaic law or institution is of itself so marked and characterised. As it would be too much to expect in any code that every single institution, or law, or even group of laws, should expressly bear the impress of the time or of the author, to require it in the legislation of Moses would be the extravagance of hypercritical absurdity. There is enough 1 Ib. p. 2 Ib. i. p. 109 ff. to stamp the whole as one uniform coinage, when, with much that has confessedly the genuine Mosaic ring, the groupings, and connections, and affinities, and analogies of the rest exhibit the homogeneousness of the entire compound. Without drawing on the credulity of the reader we may take it for granted, as the basis of our enquiry, that in its main facts the Exodus is a true story. No one denies that the Hebrews emigrated from Egypt, that they struck out for Canaan by the Sinaitic route, that they spent some time in the intervening desert, that Moses was leader and Aaron high-priest, and that a civil and religious code of some kind was then given to the nation. It will not be gainsaid, that a code which has this peculiar colouring deeply and extensively engrained in its provisions, must have arisen in these circumstances, and consequently must be Mosaic. For to suppose that such Mosaic tints were purposely added to induce an erroneous belief in the Mosaic origin of the law, is to ignore the glaring absurdity of a nation's accepting a manifest forgery as the original code, which it had known from the beginning; and also to destroy the foundations of all internal criticism. Law is not so plastic as history. The latter may wish to deceive, and can dress itself out at will. But law, intended for action, is too stubborn for imagination, and by no possibility can wear any other livery than the one befitting the time. Now the code of the Pentateuch has the traces of the Exodus deeply marked upon it. For it breathes the very air of the desert; it recalls without effort the reminiscences of Egypt just left; it looks forward to Canaan as a settlement yet to come; it supposes Aaron and his family still alive; and it grows up to perfection out of the casual incidents of the journey. |