THE STORY OF THE BIBLE

BY E. W. BARNES, Sc.D., F.R.S., CANON OF WESTMINSTER

T

HE collection of ancient books which we call the Bible is

of incomparable value and importance. It has done more for the moral and religious progress of mankind than any other literature. As a record of the most significant process in human civilisation, of clear thought and right feeling developing together for a thousand years, it is unique. Some books in it reach levels of artistic excellence which have never been surpassed. And, moreover, the translation into English which we know as the Authorised Version is the foremost classic in our language.

If we inquire why the Bible can be regarded as a single surpassingly great book, the answer must be that there is in it unity, no less than sincerity, beauty, and strength. It has really but one theme-man's search for God. Behind history and poetry, prophecy and drama, gospel and epistle, there lies an intense eagerness to understand God's ways, to realise His nature, to feel His presence. Yet, fortunately, the Bible is not a collection of theological treatises. It is as varied as the life of man, a mirror of human endurance and weakness, triumph and failure. Above all it is a living history of spiritual progress. For this reason, from end to end of the Bible, there are books and passages of supreme excellence. They were written by men passionately in earnest, inspired by a pure and lofty faith, and convinced that they bore a great message for mankind. Conse

quently the language of these men is clear and simple, their thought direct and vigorous. Like all great artists they are economical, sparing in their use of words. Their work has a quality which "finds" us, a something which we term inspiration. Coleridge, who loved the Bible and was more than ordinarily sensitive to its appeal, said of it: "In every generation and wherever the light of revelation has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, and states of mind have found in the Bible a correspondent for every movement towards the better felt in their own hearts."

A Book of Many Books

We must always remember that the Bible is not one book: it is many. In the Old Testament there is the best literature produced by the Hebrew race during well-nigh a thousand years. The New Testament, on the other hand, contains the literature, not of a nation, but of a movement. It is a collection of Greek works, written within less than a century, which describe the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the early development of the Christian Faith. But the connection between the Old and New Testaments is intimate. Each is a product of Hebrew religious genius. Of the writers in the New Testament, all seem to have been Jews, save possibly St. Luke, and his racial origin is doubtful. Moreover, to the historian, Christ is in the direct line of the great Hebrew prophets. St. Paul, though he became the Apostle to the Gentiles, thought as a Jew and not as a Greek. St. John used Greek ideas, but he was a spiritual descendant of Ezekiel. Christianity, in fact, was a natural outgrowth of Judaism.

To the student of history and of religious thought, the New Testament is the most important part of the Bible; yet, as literature, it is on the whole inferior to the earlier writings. By the time of Christ, the Greek language, as spoken by the Jews of the Levant, had lost its purity. Not even the sincerity and

enthusiasm of the New Testament writers could make it a perfect medium for literary art. Moreover, between words and thought a natural harmony exists only if the ideas which a people develop are expressed in their own tongue. When Jewish religious understanding was poured into a Greek mould, such harmony was marred. Throughout the New Testament there are passages which are astonishingly fine; but, speaking generally, we miss the sustained excellence of many Old Testament books. Wordsworth said truly that "the grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative imagination are the prophetical and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures." Because we describe such storehouses and show how they were built and filled, we shall of necessity give to the New Testament less consideration than its intrinsic importance merits. It would be foreign to our present purpose to discuss the Christian faith. We seek to show why the Bible is a classic of literature, permanently enjoyable and permanently helpful; why a distinguished agnostic like Huxley could call it "the Magna Charta of the poor and the oppressed."

Who were the people who made the Old Testament, and whence came their religious genius? The beginning of Egyptian history, so far as our present knowledge goes, can be placed about 5000 B.C. Two thousand years later there were in Babylonia and Egypt two empires, already highly civilised, wellorganised, and powerful. For some time a race called the Sumerians held the country of the Euphrates. They ceased to be dominant and their place was taken by Semites. To the Semitic stock the nomad tribes of desert Arabia belonged. Possibly there was some Semitic blood also among the people of

Egypt; but the differences which separate Babylonian and Egyptian art, letters, and thought point to fundamental differences of racial origin. Between the empires of the Euphrates and the Nile there lay the Arabian desert and a small stretch of fertile country near the Mediterranean, anciently called Canaan, which we now know as Palestine. The Canaanites, who inhabited the land, were also Semites; and at a remote date Babylonian influence over Canaan was dominant. Then there came a time when Egypt expanded her borders and conquered Canaan. Some famous letters discovered in 1887 at Tell-elAmarna belong approximately to the period 1400–1370 B.C.1 From them we learn that Canaan at that time had been an elaborately organised province, paying taxes to Egypt; but that all was falling into disorder because Egypt's power was waning. About the year 1230 B.C. "certain clans of a nomad race known as Hebrews, on whom some of the Pharaohs had imposed forced labour, broke away from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and returned to their nomadic life in the oases of the desert south of Palestine." These clans, whom we also know as the children of Israel, were Semites, closely akin in language and customs to the Canaanites and to many tribes of the Arabian desert. They were probably but small; it may even be that the men in them did not number more than a few thousands.2 They lived for a generation in the wilderness and then set out to conquer the fertile country of Canaan. Their task was made possible by the fact that Egyptian rule over Canaan was at an end. But, though

1 These letters, for the most part, are in the Assyrian language, and written in cuneiform characters. They were addressed to the Egyptian kings Amen-hotep III and IV; and were found in the tomb of a secretary to those monarchs. The tomb is near the Nile, about 180 miles south of Memphis.

2

It is always necessary to be cautious in accepting numbers given in ancient documents. Errors, due to carelessness of copyists and other causes, are very likely to arise. Professor Flinders Petrie has examined the census lists of the Israelite tribes given in the Book of Numbers, chapters 1 and 26. He makes the ingenious suggestion that alaf has two meanings, a "thousand" and "a group"; and therefore, when we have the figure 32,200, it originally meant 32 tents containing 200 people. He thus reaches the conclusion that the numbers of Israelites in the two lists are respectively 5,500 and 5,730.