Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/656

638 his work in the mouth of Moses instead of giving it, with Ezekiel, a directly prophetic form, he did so not in pious fraud, but simply because his object was not to give a new law, but to expound and develop Mosaic principles in relation to new needs. And as ancient writers are not accustomed to distinguish historical data from historical deductions, he naturally presents his views in dramatic form in the mouth of Moses. If then the Deuteronomic legisla tion is not earlier than the prophetic period of the 8th and 7th centuries, and, accordingly, is subsequent to the elements of the Pentateuchal history which we have seen to be known to Hosea, it is plain that the chronology of the com position of the Pentateuch may be said to centre in the question whether the Levitico-Elohistic document, which embraces most of the laws in Leviticus with large parts of Exodi_s and Numbers, is earlier or later than Deuteronomy. The answer to this question turns almost wholly on archaeological inquiries, for there is, perhaps, no quite con clusive reference to the Elohistic record in the prophets before the Exile, or in Deuteronomy itself. And here arises the great dispute which divides critics, and makes our whole construction of the origin of the historical books uncertain. The Levitical laws give a graduated hierarchy of priests and Levites ; Deuteronomy regards all Levites as at least possible priests. Round this difference, and points allied to it, the whole discussion turns. We know, mainly from Ezek. xliv., that before the Exile the strict hierarchical law was not in force, apparently never had been in force. But can we suppose that the very idea of such a hierarchy is the latest point of liturgical development 1 If so, the Levitical element is the latest thing in the Pentateuch, or, in truth, in the historical series to which the Pentateuch belongs; or, on the opposite view, the hierarchic theory existed as a legal programme long before the Exile, though it was fully carried out only after Ezra. As all the more elaborate symbolic observances of the ritual law are bound up with the hierarchial ordinances, the solu tion of this problem has issues of the greatest importance for the theology as well as for the literary history of the Old Testament.

And now a single word on the way in which these various mirroring so many sides of the national life, and dating from so various ages, came to be fused into a single history, and yet retained so much of their own identity. The Semitic genius does not at all lie in the direction of organic structure. In architecture, in poetry, in history, the Hebrew adds part to part instead of developing a single notion. The temple was an aggregation of small cells, the longest Psalm is an acrostic, and so the longest Biblical history is a stratification and not an organism. This process was facilitated by the habit of anonymous writing, and the accompanying lack of all notion of anything like copyright. If a man copied a book it was his to add and modify as he pleased, and he was not in the least bound to distinguish the old from the new. If he had two books before him to which he attached equal worth, he took large extracts from both, and harmonized them by such additions or modifica tions as he felt to be necessary. But in default of a keen sense for organic unity very little harmony was sought in points of internal structure, though great skill was often shown, as in the book of Genesis, in throwing the whole material into a balanced scheme of external arrangement. On such principles minor narratives were fused together one after the other, and at length in exile a final redactor com pleted the great work, on the first part of which Ezra based his reformation, while the latter part was thrown into the second canon. The curious combination of the functions of copyist and author which is here presupposed did not wholly disappear till a pretty late date ; and where, as in the books of Samuel, we have two recensions of the text, one in the Hebrew and one in the Septuagint translation, the discrepancies are of such a kind that criticism of the text and analysis of its sources are separated by a scarcely perceptible line.

Poetical Books.—The origin of some leading peculiarities of Hebrew poetry has been recently referred by Assyriologists to Accadian models ; but however this may be, the key to the whole development of the poetical literature of Israel is found in the same psychological characteristics of the race which are impressed on the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the language. The Hebrew tongue is sensuous, mobile, passionate, almost incapable of expressing an abstract idea, or depicting a complex whole with repose and symmetry of parts, but fit to set forth with great subtilty individual phases of nature or feeling. It is the speech of a nation whose naturally quick perceptions minister to an emotional temperament and an imperious will, which subordinates knowledge to action and desire, and habitually contemplates the universe through the medium of personal feeling or practical purpose. To speak with the philosophers, the Hebrew character is one of predominant subjectivity, eager to reduce everything to a personal standard, swift to seize on all that touches the feelings or bears directly on practical wants, capable of intense effort and stubborn persistence where the motive to action is personal affection or desire, but indisposed to theoretical views, unfit for contemplation of things as they are in themselves apart from relation to the thinker. In the poetry of such a nation the leading current must necessarily be lyrical, for the lyric is the natural vehicle of intense and immediate personal feeling. The earliest Hebrew poems are brief, pregnant expressions of a single idea, full of the fire of passion, full, too, of keen insight into nature, in her power to awake or sustain human emotion ; but recording this insight not with the pictorial fulness of western art, but in swift, half-formed outlines, in metaphor piled on metaphor, without regard to any other principle of proportion or verisimilitude than the emotional harmony of each broken figure with the dominant feeling. Such a poetry could not but find its highest scope in the service of spiritual religion. The songs in Exod. xv. and Li Judg. v. prove the early origin of a theocratic poetry ; but in the proper period of Hebrew psalmody begins with David, and its history is practically the history of the Psalter, Here, as in the case of the historical books, we have to begin by questioning the tradition contained in the titles, which ascribe seventy-three Psalms to David, and besides him name as authors Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses, Heman, Ethan. Again the tendency is to refer as much as possible to familiar names. There is no reason to believe that any title is as old as the Psalm to which it is prefixed, and some titles are certainly wrong ; for example, the author of the elegy on Saul and Jonathan could not possibly have written Ps. Ixxxvi., which is a mere cento of reminiscences from other poems. On the other hand the titles are not purely arbitrary. They seem to supply useful hints as to the earlier collections from which our present Psalter was made up. The Korahite and Asaphite Psalms may probably have been derived from collections in the hands of these families of singers ; and the so-called &quot; Psalms of David &quot; were very likely from collections which really contained poems by David and other early singers. The assertion that no Psalm is certainly David s is hyper-sceptical, and few Da remains of ancient literature have an authorship so well attested as the 18th or even as the 7th Psalm. These, along with the indubitably Davidic poems in the book of Samuel, give a sufficiently clear image of a very unique genius, and make the ascription of several other poems to David extremely probable. So, too, a very strong argu ment claims Psalm ii. for Solomon, and in later times we have sure landmarks in the psalms of Habakkuk (Hab. iii.) 