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proximately the date of the oldest books of the Bible. In other words, he traces the volume as a whole book to within sight of its latest writer-farther than this it could not be traced, because it did not exist in its integrity-and from this point, taking each sacred author as an independent authority, he climbs, step by step, by means of their testimony, up the stair of evidence to the days of the Exodus and the writing of the Pentateuch.

Paley's argument from quotations and allusions must forever be conclusive.* Any quotation from a book is proof unanswerable that that book was extant at the time the quotation was made. Well, by means of direct quotations from, or clear allusions to, or direct mention of, the Pentateuch, in the several books of the Qld Testament, our author follows the Books of Moses back to the days of Joshua, who mentions them as writings well understood and of acknowledged authority among the people at that time. With the testimony of Joshua he closes the evidence from sacred authors, and concludes as follows:

It may be taken for granted that Moses was the great legislator of the Hebrews, since the proof is so strong that it may be said to have hardly ever been questioned. All the writings of the Jews, and their oldest traditions, agree that Moses was their lawgiver; and the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans held the same view. Manetho, an Egyptian priest of Sebennytus, a man of great erudition, who wrote in Greek, about B. C. 300, the Egyptian History from their sacred writings, states that the Israelites left Egypt in the reign of Amenophis, and that their leader, a priest of Heliopolis, by name Osarsiphus-whose name was changed to Moses after he went over to the Israelites-gave them laws, for the most part contrary to the customs of Egypt, enjoining upon them not to worship the gods, nor to abstain from those animals held sacred in Egypt, but to sacrifice and slaughter them all. King Amenophis (Amunoph) is placed by Wilkinson at B. C. 1498-1478. Manetho's History of the Dynasties has been remarkably confirmed by the monuments of Egypt. Strabo, the great Greek geographer, (about B. C. 65,) in speaking of the Jews, remarks: "Moses, one of the Egyptian priests, possessing a part of Lower Egypt, left there, being disgusted with the existing institutions, and many, honoring the Divinity, left with him. For he said and taught that the Egyptians have not just conceptions of the Divine nature in representing it by beasts and cattle; nor have the Lybians; nor have the Greeks, who represent it by human forms. For that only is God which embraces us all, both land and sea."

The Roman satirist Juvenal (about A.D. 100) speaks of "the

"Evidences of Christianity," p. 134.

law, all which Moses delivered in the sacred volume." "Moses," says Tacitus, "gave the Jewish nation new rites, contrary to those of other men."--P. 71.

Having thus established the antiquity and integrity of these books, the question as to their genuineness next arises. In this field Dr. Harman's scythe cuts a broad swath. His intimate acquaintance with the state of ancient learning in all the countries which enter into this question, and his knowledge of the manners, customs, and languages of the peoples concerned, enable him largely to reproduce the state of society which existed in the days of the Exodus. He is not writing a work on the evidences of Christianity, and hence his book is not polemical in tone. He is preparing the way for the study or the holy Scriptures, and therefore contents himself with the task of removing causes of misapprehension, and with restoring, as far as may be, the ancient settings and surroundings of the Bible. He does not aim at dovetailing propositions into syllogisms for the purpose of forcing conclusions. He rather assigns to himself the task of collecting the materials out of which arguments are constructed. His arrangement of these materials is rather in the form of pictures of ancient society than in the shape of demonstrations of formal propositions. Reading his work, before we know it we feel at home among the patriarchs, and the meaning of lawgiver, psalmist, and prophet dawns upon us we know not how. The best possible explanation of an author's meaning is a knowledge of the cir cumstances under which the book was written. Thus (on page 67) he hedges in the Pentateuch :

As a preliminary to the discussion of the genuineness of the Pentateuch, there arises the question of the antiquity of the art of alphabetical writing among the Hebrews: for if it can be shown that the art was well-known among that people in the Mosaic age, the probability that their great lawgiver wrote his laws will be very great.

Writing in hieroglyphics, which preceded alphabetical writing, was known and practiced in Egypt at a very remote period. The sacred books of Thoth, the Egyptian Mercury or Hermes, were written, in part at least, as early as the time of Suphis, (Cheops,) to whom the books were attributed. This Memphitic king, according to Wilkinson, reigned about B. C. 2450. Numerous commentaries were written on these sacred books of Thoth. "Papyri are of the most remote Pharaonic periods, and the same mode of

writing on them is shown from the sculptures to have been common in the age of Suphis, or Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid." "Every thing was done in writing." They had decimal as well as duodecimal calculation, and the reckoning by units, tens, hundreds, and thousands, before the pyramids were built. Alphabetical writing came into use several centuries later. "From the Palestinians the people near the Mediterranean Sea received their alphabet. The sounds of the alphabet itself, as it is known to us, suit well the general lingual characteristics of the Semities. It corresponds to their peculiarity, for it expresses their inclination to gutturals, and the variety of their hissing or aspirated sounds. We can, therefore, assert with high probability that its inventor was a Semitic." That the Israelites possessed alphabetical writing when they went down into Egypt is quite evident, otherwise they would have adopted the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians. The Phoenicians, who lived on the borders of Canaan, and whose language was nearly the same as the Hebrew, possessed writing at a very remote period. They attributed the invention of their alphabet to Taut, their world-god. The sacred writings of the Phoenicians, in which their cosmogony, the history of their gods and heroes, natural events, and astronomical, astrological, and psychological doctrines were contained, were called Taut-writings. Antiquity mentions seven such writings.

The existence of alphabetical writing among the Hebrews at the time of the Exodus being thus established, he proceeds to draw a picture of the arts and sciences in general in Egypt in the Mosaic age, to show that the statements of the Pentateuch respecting the arts employed by the Israelites in building the tabernacle, in making its utensils, and in adorning the priests, together with the allusions made to gold and.other ornaments, are natural and credible, unless one can suppose that the Israelites, although dwelling in close proximity to the Egyptians for centuries, never learned any of their arts, and that no Egyptian artist ever appeared among them.

These collateral considerations create a strong presuinption both that Moses wrote laws for the Jews and that the Pentateuch contains those, laws. And now our author turns to the evidences of genuineness to be found in the books themselves. Having argued the unity of the Pentateuch from the one plan which pervades it all, showing it to be the work of one mind, he next proceeds to demonstrate its antiquity from the archaisms which it contains. I do not recollect ever to have seen so thorough and exhaustive a presentation of this class of evidence as is found in this book. Indeed, the chap

ters upon this subject I regard as the gems of the whole volume. They give evidence of an amount of learning, labor, and patience which few men possess, and furnish an argument for the antiquity and genuineness of the Pentateuch which few minds can resist.

Language is a long-lived thing, but it has its youth, maturity, and decrepitude, like men and nations. The seasons in its life-time may be centuries, but they mark different stages of its development or decline. A language that had well-nigh perished may sometimes be revived and perpetuated for centuries, but its youth or maturity can never be restored when once it has been passed. Though the English tongue should become universal, and should continue to be spoken to the end of time, it would never again be characterized by the language of Spenser and Chaucer. A language may reach a second childhood, like an individual, but the second will be very unlike the first. Because language is thus ceaselessly progressive, the style, the idioms, the grammar, and the very words of any composition will go far toward determining the age in which it was written. A document found to-day written in English containing many obsolete words and forms of expression, together with antiquated spelling and strange grammatical forms, but containing no word or syllable that was not pure Anglo-Saxon, would unquestionably be assigned to a period prior to the Norman Conquest, and subsequent to the Anglo-Saxon ascendency in England. The ages of stone and of bronze do not more clearly mark successive stages in a people's civilization than do the peculiarities of the language in which a book is written determine the age to which it belongs. Dr. Harman, with consummate skill, has collected and arranged the archaisms of the Pentateuch for the double purpose of establishing the antiquity of the Books of Moses and the unity of their authorship. We think he conclusively shows, not only that the books must have been written in the infancy of the Hebrew language, but that the same peculiarities run through all five of the books, and are not found in any other Hebrew books of great antiquity, thus showing these books to have been written by one and the same author.

The genuineness of these books being thus clearly indicated, our author next turns to examine the objections which have

been offered against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Of the document hypothesis of the origin of the Pentateuch, he disposes as follows:

Respecting the document hypothesis, we may remark, first of all, that there is very little agreement, as we have already seen, among the opponents of the genuineness of the Pentateuch in regard to the number of the original documents, when they were composed, by whom and from what sources, and when the final revision of the whole was made. This want of unity in view is a strong proof that their theories rest upon no solid basis of facts. One feature, however, stands out prominently in nearly all their theories: they deprive Moses, as much as possible, of all connection with the composition of the Pentateuch.

The different names for the Divine Being-Elohim, God, Jehovah, (properly Jahveh,) and Jehovah Elohim (LORD GOD, Eng. Ver.)-found in different portions of the Book of Genesis, furnish the original ground for the decomposition of the Mosaic writings. In the other books of the Pentateuch (with the exception of the first few chapters of Exodus) the use of the divine names furnishes no support at all for the document hypothesis. But it must be borne in mind that the hypothesis that one document or more entered into the composition of the Book of Genesis and into the first two chapters of Exodus, by no means militates against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. That the traditions of the Hebrew people would be written down during their sojourn in Egypt, where they came in contact with a people who were accustomed to write the annals of their kings, and to compose works on science and religion, is highly probable. Joseph, who married the daughter of Poti-pheral, priest of On, might have compiled the annals of the Hebrews and the traditions respecting the deluge and the antediluvian world. But those annals might have been very defective, and have contained no account, or a very imperfect one, of the work of creation, the order of which none but God could know. The original document lying before Moses-for we can scarcely believe it at all probable that the Hebrews had two different documents which related the history of the world from the creation to the time of Moses-may have been used by him in the composition of Gene sis. In this way we might find in Genesis a narrator, (the Elohist,) and an editor or reviser, the Jehovist, (Moses.) How far this is probably true must be determined from the phenomena exhibited. in the book.-P. 88.

After patiently exposing the absurdity of Bishop Colenso's strictures, one by one, he finally takes leave of him with this remark: "There is one peculiarity of Colenso which must be noticed. Whenever any, subject admits of different views or explanations, the one which creates a difficulty or absurdity is

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