shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning." The ninth-"The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God." The tenth-"Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk."

In Deut. v. Moses speaks in the first person-"Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak," &c. He makes no reference to the Ritualism just cited from Exod. xxxiv., but gives at once (as he also does Ex. xx.) the ten commandments adopted, as such, by the Churches. The repetition of the whole story three times over by one writer is not easy to account for. The remarkable variations in Exod. xxxiv. can hardly fail to convince us of later amendments by a priestly hand.

The next point is the anachronisms. We are not called upon to strain our faith over the record of Moses' death. Even Dr. Delitzsch, who maintains there is not a word in the Pentateuch which may not have been indited by the pen of Moses, admits that the last few chapters of Deuteronomy are posthumous additions. In spite of this eminent scholar, whose learning justly deserves respect, there are many passages which, to the ignorant, are quite as impossible to think Mosaic. In Gen. xxxvi., e.g., it is written, "And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel." Now, as no king reigned over Israel till Saul, about 1060 B.C., and as Moses died about 1480 B.C., the event is referred to between 400 and 500 years before it happened. In Exod. xvi. 35, "And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited," &c. It was after forty years' wandering that they took Canaan. But this did not happen till about 1430 B.C., or long after the death of Moses. In Numb. xxxii., places are spoken of which did not exist in the time of Moses. Constant mention is made of Dan, which was only known as Laish till a much later date.

In Gen. xii. 8, there is an accurate description of Beth-el and Hai; Gen. xxxiii. 18, mention of Shalem, a city of Shechem; all of them in the land of Canaan, where Moses had never set foot. In Gen. xxxv. 20, it is related how Jacob set a pillar upon Rachel's grave; adding, “that is the pillar of Rachel's grave unto this day." No one would speak thus of a recent occurrence. Elsewhere the later distribution of the tribes is spoken of; minute details concerning the reign of Solomon, and many events and circumstances which happened during the monarchy are accurately known to the writer or writers of the Pentateuch.

Besides the objections of this kind, there is a class which may be termed arithmetical. These have been carefully examined by Bishop Colenso. A couple of instances will suffice to illustrate them. In 2 Chron. xxx. 16, XXXV. II, we have an account of the killing for the Passover: "And the priests sprinkled the blood from their hands, and the Levites flayed them." Upon this, Bishop Colenso comments as follows: "Hence, when they kept the second passover under Sinai (Num. ix. 5), where we must suppose that 150,000 lambs were killed at one time 'between the two evenings' (Ex. xii. 6) for the two millions of people, at which time, certainly, there were only three priests, Aaron, Eleazar, and Ithamar (Lev. viii. 2; Num. iii. 4); each priest must have had to sprinkle the blood of 50,000 lambs in about two hours, that is, at the rate of about four hundred lambs every minute for two hours together." Again, Exod. i. 5, we are told that when Jacob went into Egypt with his eleven sons (Joseph was in Egypt already) and their families, "all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls." The sojourn in Egypt is variously given at 145 and 430 years (Ex. xii. 40); and we are afterwards told that, the number of fighting men who left Egypt, exclusive of women and children, amounted to 600,000. The entire number therefore could not have been less than near about two millions.

The seventh verse states that "the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly and multiplied," &c. Bishop Patrick, availing himself of this statement, suggests that the Hebrew women might, "by the extraordinary blessing (1) of God, have brought forth six children at a time."

We are dealing here with the simple question of authorship. In Deut. xxxi. 9-24, it is distinctly stated that, "Moses wrote this law," the Torâh; "and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi," &c. What is the opinion of modern critics, of learned and believing critics— I will quote no others-upon this head? Speaking of the Pentateuch, Professor Robertson Smith says: "In its present form it was written after the time of Moses, nay, after that of Joshua. It is now no longer permissible to insist that the reference to the kingship of Israel over Edom, and similar things, are necessarily isolated phenomena. We cannot venture to assert that the composition of the Pentateuch out of older sources of various date took place before the time of the kings."1 Dr. Davidson writes: "There is little external evidence for the Mosaic authorship, and what little there is, does not stand the test of criticism. . . . The objections derived from internal structure are conclusive against the Mosaic authorship. Various contradictions are irreconcilable. The traces of a later date are convincing." 2

Ewald distributes the contents of the Pentateuch between four, if not five, authors. The oldest of the compositions he considers to be the "Book of the Covenant," and to this he allows no higher antiquity than the time of the Judges. "All discoverable traces show that though it cannot be earlier than the second half of the period of Judges, it certainly cannot be later. Next in age comes the "Book of Origins," which he assigns to the beginning

3 History of Israel, sect. II. C.

of Solomon's reign. The author is "one who had felt the influence of David's kingly spirit, and who was himself an actor in the best part of the most hopeful age of Israelite dominion." The third narrator belongs, he thinks, to the tenth or ninth century B.C., i.e., to the time of Elijah and Joel. The fourth gives "nothing but old matter newly worked up after the literary fashion demanded by the best prophecy and religion then in vogue." The fifth gives generally "word for word older books, or slightly modifies the accounts of others." He is a collector and a workerup. Ewald adds that at the time of the fifth writer "the literature of the primitive history had long swelled out to an extraordinary bulk." Many more authorities might be adduced to the same effect; but we must now inquire what internal evidence of revelation is to be found in the sacred Scriptures.

VOL. I.

C.

LETTER III.

REVELATION necessarily implies miraculous intervention; and as there is no à priori argument against an Author of nature, it is not admissible to deny revelation on the ground that the laws of nature are immutable. The credibility of miracles rests entirely on the balance of evidence. But there is a fitness in things: and most of us are disposed (however inconsistently) to make this fitness the standard of credibility. The miracle must bear a suitable relation to the occasion of it. A sense of this undoubtedly influences our judgment in respect of miracles belonging to religions not our own. Thus, for example, when we are told in the account of the Flood by the Persian Magi, that all the waters issued from the oven of an old woman, we naturally feel that the incongruity in some measure increases the difficulty of belief. But if we exercise criticism in this spirit, it would seem that not a few of the Hebrew miracles, which we have made essential to our religion, might, from a foreign point of view, be subject, for the same reason, to the same judgment. There may be some appropriateness in the dispersion of mankind consequent on the building of Babel; though it is strange that people, however primitive, should ever have thought to reach heaven by means of a tower; and certainly the progress of civilisation must have been greatly arrested by punishing men, who before spoke a universal language, with the "confusion of tongues." The divinely-wrought plagues of Egypt are mostly exaggerations of its natural plagues. But the budding of Aaron's rod savours strongly of the "plant