Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/66

56 But during the long time in which the traditions were transmitted orally, the growth of the nation's ideas produced a change in them without any fabrication or design, and it is probable that the traditions affected only to this extent were set forth in the earlier documents, long since lost, namely, the "Book of the Wars of Jahveh" and the "Jasar." There were, however, special temptations in the later history of Israel, in the contests between the Elohists and the Jahvists, to manipulate the earlier documents. When the compilers belonging to the two schools produced the two versions, intermixed and confused in the books we now have, they differed from all people in history if the contestants, for political and personal power, did not color the records to suit their own views.

Students who have devoted their lives to the study of the last compilation have been able to identify, by linguistic and historical exegesis, the fragments of the original traditions, the epic tales of the first documents, the theocratic deductions and the later sacerdotal visions, though the two versions appear on the same page and sometimes in the same paragraph. The results of this immense labor by the Hebraists of this generation have lately been presented by Renan in a popular form. His works, as well as those of other authors whose names will be mentioned in this address, I have used freely, though generally without exact quotation.

In addition to the linguistic and historical tests, other internal evidences, especially the antedating of conceptions several centuries (some instances of which will be mentioned), show that the books, as now presented, were written long after the periods referred to in them.

The main document on the primitive age is the Book of Genesis, regarded for the reasons mentioned, not as literally historical, but as the tradition, written at a respectable antiquity, of an age that really existed. In examining it the historical part is discovered, not by belief in the miraculous, but by the proper comprehension of the mythical.

Much can be learned from myths and legends of the times anterior to strict history. The Homeric epics are not history, yet they throw a flood of light upon Greek life a millennium before the Christian era. The ante-Islam tales and the Arthurian and Niebelungen romances of the middle ages are not true in fact, yet they are storehouses, preserving the social life of the days when they were composed and to a less though still useful degree of the time embraced by the still earlier traditions. The generalizations derived from the details of ancient texts are truths obtained by induction.

It is expedient to make a disclaimer before entering upon the necessary comparisons of religions. I absolutely repudiate any