Page:02.BCOT.KD.HistoricalBooks.A.vol.2.EarlyProphets.djvu/24

 handed down by contemporaries of the events. In the book of Joshua it is almost universally admitted, that at all events the geographical portions have been taken from public documents. — For further remarks upon this subject, see the introductions to the different books. The employment of written sources, from living auditors or eye-witnesses of the events, in all the prophetic books of history, is evident as a general fact from the contents of the books, from the abundance of genuine historical details which they contain although many of them extend over very long periods of time; from the exactness of the geographical data connected with the different accounts, and the many genealogical as well as chronological particulars; and, in fact, from the clearness and certainty of the descriptions given of circumstances and occurrences which are often very complicated in their character. But this is still more obvious from the style in which the different books are written, where the gradual development of the language, and the changes which occurred in the course of centuries, are unmistakeably apparent. For whilst the books of Kings, which date from the time of the captivity, contain many words, forms, and phrases that indicate that corruption of the Hebrew through Aramaean idioms, which commenced with the invasions of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians and Chaldeans, there are no certain traces of the decline of the language to be found in the books of Samuel and Judges, but the style throughout is the pure style of the age of David and Solomon; whilst in the book of Joshua, as a whole, we still find the old forms of the Mosaic times, although the actual archaisms of the Pentateuch have already disappeared. This difference in the words employed in the different books cannot be satisfactorily explained from the simple fact, that the sources used, and from which extracts were made, were written in different ages. To quote but one example, since the fuller discussion of this point belongs to the introduction to the separate books, this is perfectly obvious from the use of the word TWXOpA, in connection with Solomon’s governors, in 1Ki. 10:15; since the author of our books of Kings cannot possibly have taken this word from his original sources for the history of Solomon’s reign, as it was not till the time of the Chaldean and Persian dominion that this foreign word was adopted into the Hebrew language. The peculiarities in the language of the difference prophetic books of history do furnish decisive evidence, however, against the hypothesis propounded by Spinoza, and lately revived by Stähelin and