CHAPTER 10.

THE CLAIMS OF MOSES TO THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH INVESTIGATED: FIRST FROM UNIVERSAL CONSENT.

It is admitted by all who have examined this subject, that the earliest accounts and traditions of all nations are either wholly fabulous, or are so intermingled with fable that it is most difficult, if not wholly impossible, to distinguish the true from the false. Of our own island we know almost nothing before the invasion of Cæsar: and France, Spain, Germany, with all the rest of northern Europe, are envelopped in equal obscurity until the second century before the Christian æra. Rome herself, the conqueror and mistress of the civilised world, has nothing to tell us, which merits our belief until the third century before Christ all the accounts of the 450 years preceding the Punic wars, are of so legendary a character that they convey no clear facts to the judgement, however they may furnish material for poetry to the imagination. Greece, also, the parent of European literature, becomes lost in darkness, anterior to the Trojan war; and even that celebrated campaign of Europe against Asia, has been so adorned by the poets, that beyond the simple fact of its having happened, we cannot rely on any of the details which have come down to us. With the exception of Homer alone, who was a poet and lived 900 years before Christ, we possess no literary works except fragments and a few songs earlier than the History of Herodotus written about 500 years only before the Christian era. But from what we know of Grecian letters, it is admitted by all that they owed their origin to Phoenicia, from whence civilization and learning—such as they were—are said to have been imported

Yet of the

into Europe about 1300 years before Christ. written records of Phoenicia, it may with truth be said that hardly a particle survives, beyond what has been preserved in the Grecian writers, Herodotus, Diodorus and others.

In harmony with this view is the fact that all the histories which we possess, to whatever nation they belong, become less credible in proportion to their antiquity; not that the writers have invented the facts which they relate, but that those facts, having come down to them by oral tradition only, have been so altered in the transmission from one mouth to another, that it becomes difficult to discern their first and original character. We may form some idea of this process, if we compare two separate narratives of the same fact, happening in our own times. It is rarely that such accounts tally, even in the features of that which they describe. It may, even, be doubted, whether a single isolated event, witnessed by two different persons, would convey exactly the same idea to the minds of both: but when the two come to relate what they have seen, to a third person, we can hardly expect that the descriptions will coincide in every respect with the original or with one another. What then will be likely to happen in the case of events which occurred three thousand years ago, and which have been handed down for a long time by no other than the uncertain mouth of tradition? We cannot be wrong in exacting the most scrupulous proof of a narrative which rests on such a basis: for though we may believe that he who has first written it, has faithfully told us what he heard from others, yet the picture, having been taken, not from the original, but from the last of a long succession of pictures, each copied from the other, we can no

"B, C. 1313. Cadmus, a Phoenician, the founder of Thebes in Boeotia, introduces letters into Greece." Synchronistical tables of ancient History, Oxf. fol. 1815, p. 7.

longer depend upon the likeness; for, whilst it has lost some of its features by the treacherous inexactitude of one painter, it has probably gained others which the glowing imagination of a second has added, until at last it assumes an appearance entirely different from that which the prototype presented. To those who are conversant with the discrepancies, on the one hand, and the obscurity, on the other, which all Ancient History presents, the value of a Contemporary Writer becomes more and more apparent, and intermediate narratives, based upon tradition alone, sink proportionably in estimation.

But these remarks apply with much greater force to Eastern than to European History; and for a reason which Mr Clinton has stated with much justice and perspicuity in his Fasti Hellenici, [volume II, p. 373, 3rd edit.]:

In the great monarchies of Asia, Oriental history has seldom been faithfully delivered by the Orientals themselves. In the ancient times, before the Greek kingdoms of Asia diffused knowledge and information, it is not likely that history would be undertaken by private individuals. The habits of the people, and the form of their governments, precluded all free inquiry and any impartial investigation of the truth. The written histories of past transactions would be contained in the archives of the state; and these royal records, drawn up under the direction of the reigning despot, would deliver just such a representation of facts as the government of the day thought fit to give; just so much of the truth as it suited their purpose to communicate. Of the authority of such materials for history we may judge, by comparing the account which has been transmitted to us from Ctesias of the rise of the Medes and the fall of Nineveh, with the very different account which Herodotus has left of the same transactions: the one utterly at variance with any thing possible, convicted of absurdity in every circumstance by the plain evidence of Scripture, the other confirmed by the same authority in all the particulars both of facts and dates. And yet Ctesias drew his narrative from royal archives; and in this part of his subject at least, had no temptation to wilful falsehood.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to investigate the grounds upon which the Jews have claimed for the authors

of their scriptural books the character of contemporary writers, and, to enter clearly into such an enquiry, it seems best to proceed seriatim through the several divisions of the Old Testament, beginning with the Five Books of the Pentateuch, said to have been written by Moses, who died about the year 1451 before Christ, just before the Israelites entered the land of Canaan.

The ascription of the authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses the Hebrew legislator, seems to rest upon the following arguments.

1. Those books have always been supposed to have been written by Moses; or, in other words, UNIVERSAL TRADITION asserts that Moses was the writer.

2. It is said, on the authority of the books themselves, especially of Deuteronomy, chap. xxi, 26, where Moses is described as saying

Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against them,

that these books, i. e. the Pentateuch, written by the hand of Moses, were placed by him, not long before his death, in the tabernacle, under the custody of the priests, where they were preserved, either in the original autograph, or in an authentic copy, for many hundred years, and so have descended to posterity. This is the argument to which the name of INTERNAL EVIDENCE has been affixed: and, in confirmation of this direct kind, have been cited certain texts of an indirect nature, implying that the same books were certainly written by some body who was situated like Moses. Thus, Genesis 1, 1, "on this side Jordan" is quoted to prove that the books must have been written in the wilderness, and, therefore, by Moses.

The first of these arguments is a question of fact, and must be determined, like all other facts, by positive evidence alone.

Tradition originally implied oral transmission, as opposed

era.

to written testimony, and was in use before the art of writing was known; but when we consider the great obscurity and even the glaring absurdities in which all History, previous to the introduction of letters, is involved, we cannot, I think, admit the validity of a tradition which mounts back through the period of fourteen hundred and fifty years, the interval between the death of Moses and the Christian But it seems difficult to say what is the meaning of the expression that tradition has always named Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. Our examination is not of the books of Moses alone, but of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament in its totality, of which I hold the Pentateuch to be merely a division or section, and not a separate work. Taken in this light, coupled with the fact that all the tradition is derived from the books themselves, surely such tradition cannot prove the antiquity of that book. For besides the tradition derived from the Old Testament, there is none other for a space of thirteen hundred years after the time of Moses. In other words no other book exists which mentions the Old Testament until thirteen hundred years from the time of Moses. But let us wave this point, and hear what evidence tradition"will afford. As the tongues which were the successive vehicles of this tradition, are now all silent, we can have no other mode of determining what they said, than by referring to what has come down to us in a written form: for tradition is a being of a very unsubstantial character, and soon expires, unless its words are perpetuated by being copied before their meaning evaporates: like the Common Law of England, and the unwritten laws of states in general, which, though termed unwritten, were nevertheless, at a very early period, taken down in writing, and so lost their original form; for assuredly no other process would have preserved the knowledge of them to posterity.

In the case of a simple fact like that which we are now considering, namely that Moses was the author of the