Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/654

636 closed, the third part of the canon was open to receive additions, recommended either by their religious and his torical value, or by bearing an ancient and venerable name. And this was the more natural because the Hagiographa had not the same place in the synagogue service as was accorded to the Law and the Prophets.

The time and manner in which the collection was absolutely closed is obscure. The threefold division of the sacred writings is referred to in the prologue to the Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) about 130 B.C., but Jewish tradition indicates that the full canonicity of several books, especially of Ecclesiastes, was not free from doubt till the time of the famous R. Akiba, who perished in the great national struggle of the Jews with the Emperor Hadrian (Mishna, Jadaim, 3; JSdaiot, 5). The oldest list of canonical books, given by Josephus (c. Apion., i. 8), is of somewhat earlier date. Josephus seems to have had quite our present canon; but he took Ruth along with Judges, and viewed Lamentations as part of the book of Jeremiah, thus counting twenty-two books instead of the twenty-four of the Talmudic enumeration and of the present Hebrew Bible. There is other evidence that only twenty-two books were reckoned by the Jews of the first Christian century ; and it appears that this number was accommodated to that of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Even in the time of Jerome, Ruth and Lamentations were not uniformly reckoned apart. The expansion of the Talmudic twenty- four to the thirty-nine Old Testament books of the English version is effected by reckoning the minor prophets one by one, by separating Ezra from Nehemiah, and by subdividing the long books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. In this reckoning, and in the very different order of the books, we follow in the main the Alexandrian Greek and Vulgate Latin versions. But the Alexandrian differed from the Hebrew canon in more important points. The line of distinction between inspired and human writings was not so sharply drawn ; and the Greek Bible not only admitted additions to several of the Hagiographa, but contained other apocryphal books, of some of which Greek was the original tongue, while others were translations of Hebrew or Aramaic writings. See. In turning now to a literary and critical survey of the Old Testament books, we shall find it convenient to depart from the division of the Hebrew canon, in favour of a classification suggested by the order of the books followed in the English version and in most other translations. The Old Testament literature is made up of historical, poetico- didactic, and prophetic writings, and under these three heads we will arrange what remains to be said on the subject.

Historical Books.—These form two parallel series of sacred history. The books from Genesis to Kings give a continuous story (with some episodical additions) from the creation to the fall of the kingdom of Judah. The book of Chronicles covers the same ground on a narrower plan, contracting the early history into genealogical lists, and occupying itself almost entirely with the kingdom of Judah, and especially with matters connected with the temple and its worship. The narrative of the chronicler is continued in the books or rather book of Ezra and Nehemiah, which incorporates original memoirs of these two reformers, but otherwise is so exactly in the style of the Chronicles that critics are practically agreed in ascribing the whole to a single author, probably a Levite, who, as we have already seen, cannot have written before the close of the Persian empire. The questions that are raised as to the work of the chronicler belong less to the general history of Biblical literature than to special introduction. We pass on, therefore, to the larger and more important series. The Pentateuch and the so-called earlier prophets form together a single continuous narrative. It is plain, however, that the whole work is not the uniform production of one pen, but that in some way a variety of records of different ages and styles have been combined to form a single narrative Accordingly. Jewish tradition bears that Moses wrote tho Pentateuch, Joshua the book named after him, Samuel tho book of Judges, and so forth. As all Hebrew history is anonymous, a sure proof that people had not yet learned to lay weight on questions of authorship, it is not probable that this tradition rests on any surer ground than con jecture; and, of course, a scribe who saw in the sacred books the whole outcome of Israel s history would naturally leap to the conclusion that the father of the Law was the author of the Pentateuch, and that the other leaders of Israel s history could not but be the writers of a great part of the Scriptures. A more careful view of the books them selves shows that the actual state of the case is not so simple. In the first place, the limits of the individual books are certainly not the limits of authorship. The Pentateuch as a law-book is complete without Joshua, but as a history it is so planned that the latter book is its necessary complement. (Of., for example, Exod. xvi. 35, Josh. v. 12; Gen. 1. 24, 25; Exod. xiii. 19; Josh. xxiv. 32.) In truth, an author who wrote after the occupation of Canaan could never have designed a history which should relate all God s promises to Israel and say nothing of their fulfilment. But in its present shape the Pentateuch is certainly subsequent to the occupation, for it uses geo graphical names which arose after that time (Hebron, Dan), refers to the conquest as already accomplished (Deut. ii. 12, cf. Num. xv, 32; Gem, xii. 6), and even presupposes the existence of a kingship in Israel (Gen, xxxvi. 31), And with this it agrees, that though there are marked differences of style and language within the book of Joshua, each style finds its counterpart in some section of the Pentateuch. In the subsequent books we find quite similar phenomena. The last chapters of Judges cannot be separated from the book of Samuel, and the earlier chapters of Kings are obviously one with the foregoing narrative ; while all three books contain passages strikingly akin to parts of the Pentateuch and Joshua (cf., for example, the book of Deuteronomy with Josh, xxiii., 1 Sam. xii., 1 Kings viii.) Such phenomena not only prove the futility of any attempt to base a theory of authorship on the present division into books, but suggest that the history as we have it is not one narrative carried on from age to age by successive addi tions, but a fusion of several narratives which partly covered the same ground and were combined into unity by an editor. This view is supported by the fact, that even as it now stands the history sometimes gives more than one account of the same event, and that the Pentateuch often gives several laws on the same subject. Of the latter we have already had one example, but for our present argu ment the main point is not diversity of enactment, which may often be only apparent, but the existence within the Pentateuch of distinct groups of laws partly taking up the same topics. Thus the legislation of Exod. xx.-xxiii. is partly repeated in ch. xxxiv., and on the passover and feast of unleavened bread we have at least six laws, which if not really discordant, are at least so divergent in form and conception that they cannot be all from the same pen. (Exod. xii. 1-28, xiii. 3-10, xxiii. 15, xxxiv. 18; Lev. xxiii. 5-14, Deut. xvi.) Of historical duplicates the most celebrated are the twofold history of the creation and the flood, to which we must recur presently. The same kind of thing is found in the later books; for example, in the account of the way in which Saul became king, where it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that 1 Sam. xi. 1-11 should attach directly to ch. x. 16 (cf. x. 7). But the extent to which the historical boots are 