"What sort of value," asks Mr. Huxley, "as an illustration of God's methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened?" Such an admonition, he says, is "morally about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away." Let us apply this maxim to some of Mr. Huxley's homilies:—

"Surely," he says in one of his "Lay Sermons," "our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them. We should fear being banished for our neglect to that limbo where the great Florentine tells us are those who during this life wept when they might be joyful." [Footnote: Lay Sermons and Addresses, p. 92.] This limbo of Dante's is not, I dare say, an "admitted reality" in Mr. Huxley's physical geography. "What sort of value," therefore, has his reference to it? Is he merely raising the cry of bogy? He certainly does intend what he says as a dissuasive from a certain course of erroneous conduct. I venture to insist that he has a real meaning, and that, although the limbo is a myth, the condition which he intends to illustrate by his allusion to it is a reality.

Once more: "I do not suppose that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature says,—

'A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more,'

would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and a central placentation." [Footnote: Ibid. p. 91.]

Does Mr. Huxley believe that Peter Bell was a historical person? If he was not, how, in the name of biological theology, could his dead soul have been roused by any information whatever? Yet these sentences of his have a real and valuable meaning. It is evident that Mr. Huxley does understand the uses of allegory and fable for purposes of illustration; that he can employ characters and situations which are not historical, but purely imaginary, to illustrate the realities which he is trying to present,—speaking of them all the while just as if they were historical persons or places, and trusting his readers to interpret him aright. Such a use of language is common in all literature. To affirm that our Lord could not resort to it without dishonesty is to deny to him the ordinary instruments of speech.

"We may conclude, then," with Professor Ladd, "that the reference to Jonah does not cover the question whether the prophet's alleged sojourn in the sea monster is an historical verity; and that it is no less uncritical than invidious to make the holding of any particular theory of the Book of Jonah a test of allegiance to the teachings of the Master." [Footnote: The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, i. 67. ]

It is evident enough, as Professor Cheyne has said, that the symbolic meaning of the book was the most important part of it in the New Testament times. But other and more obvious meanings are conveyed by the narrative. Indeed, there is scarcely another book in the Old Testament whose meaning is so clear, whose message is so divine. Apologue though it is, it is full of the very truth of God. There is not one of the minor prophecies that has more of the real gospel in it. To the people who first received it, how full of admonition and reproof it must have been! That great city Nineveh—a city which was, in its day, as Dr. Geikie says, "as intensely abhorred by the Jews as Carthage was by Rome, or France under the elder Napoleon was by Germany"—was a city dear to God! He had sent his own prophet to warn it of its danger; and his prophet, instead of being stoned or torn asunder, as the prophets of God had often been by their own people, had been heard and his message heeded. The Ninevites had turned to God, and God had forgiven them! God was no less ready to forgive and save Nineveh than Jerusalem. What a wonderful disclosure of the love of the universal Father! What a telling blow, even in those old days, at the "middle wall of partition" by which the Jew fenced out the Gentile from his sympathy!

And then the gentle rebuke of Jonah's petulant narrowness! How true is the touch that describes Jonah as angry because God had forgiven the Ninevites! His credit as a prophet was gone. I suppose that he was afraid also, like many theologians of more modern times, that if threatened penalty were remitted solely on the ground of the repentance of the sinners, the foundations of the divine government would be undermined. How marvelously does the infinite pity and clemency of God shine out through all this story, as contrasted with the petty consistency and the grudging compassion of man; and how clearly do we hear in this beautiful narrative the very message of the gospel: "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord."

May I say, in closing, that the treatment which the Book of Jonah has received, alike from skeptics and from defenders of the faith, illustrates, in a striking way, the kind of controversy which is raised by the attempt to maintain the infallibility of the Bible. The crux of all the critics, orthodox and heterodox, is the story about the fish. The orthodox have assumed that the narrative without the miracle was meaningless, and the heterodox have taken them at their word. In their dispute over the question whether Jonah did really compose that psalm in the belly of the fish, with his head festooned with seaweed, they have almost wholly overlooked the great lessons of fidelity to duty, of the universal divine fatherhood, and the universal human brotherhood, which the story so beautifully enforces. How easy it is for saints as well as scoffers, in their dealing with the messages of God to men, to tithe the mint, anise, and cummin of the literal sense, and neglect the weightier matters of judgment, mercy, and truth which they are intended to convey!



CHAPTER VI.

THE LATER HEBREW HISTORIES.



After the Book of the Law had been revised by Ezra, and the Book of the Prophets had been compiled by Nehemiah, there still remained a body of sacred writings, not Mosaic in their origin and not from the hands of any recognized prophet, but still of value in the eyes of the Jews. We cannot tell the time at which the work of collecting these Scriptures was begun; possibly it was going on while the Books of the Prophets were being compiled. This third collection was called from the first by the Jews, "Ketubim," meaning simply writings; the Greeks afterward called it by a name which has been anglicized, and which has become the common designation of these writings among us, "The Hagiographa," or the Holy Writings. The adjective holy was not a part of the Jewish title; it would have overstated, somewhat, their first estimate of this part of their Bible. For while the degree of sacredness attached to these books gradually increased, they were always held as quite inferior to the other two groups of Scriptures. For convenience the list of books in this collection may be here repeated:—

The Psalms. The Proverbs. Job. The Song of Solomon. Ruth. Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Esther. Daniel. Ezra. Nehemiah. 1 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles.

The arrangement is topical; first, three poetical books, The Psalms, The Proverbs, and Job; then five so-called Megilloth, or Rolls, read in the later synagogues on certain great feast days,—The Song of Songs at the Passover, Ruth at Pentecost, Lamentations on the anniversary of the burning of the temple, Ecclesiastes at the Feast of Tabernacles, and Esther at the Feast of Purim; lastly, the historical and quasi-historical books, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles.

Of Ruth I have already spoken in its proper historical connection, taking it with the Book of Judges.

In treating of the remaining books I shall not follow the order of the Hebrew Bible, which I have given above, but shall rather reverse it, treating first of the historical books, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles, also of Esther and Daniel; then, in a subsequent chapter, of the poetical books, the Lamentations, the books attributed to Solomon,— Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon's Song,—and finally of Job and the Psalms.

The histories which, under the title of the "Earlier Prophets," are contained in the middle group of the Hebrew Scriptures, have been studied in a former chapter. In this later group of writings we find certain other historical works which cover the same ground. In the words of Mr. Horton:—

"Taking historical excerpts from the first six books of the Bible, and then going on in a continuous narrative from the beginning of Judges to the end of the Second Book of Kings, we have a story—true, a story with many gaps in it, still a connected story—from the earliest times to the captivity of Judah. Then, starting from the First Book of Chronicles and reading on to the end of Nehemiah, we have, in a very compressed form, though enlarged in some parts, a complete record from Adam to the return from the Captivity; at the end of this long sweep of narrative comes the Book of Esther, which is a brief appendix containing a historical episode of the Captivity. Taking these two distinct histories, we have two lines of narrative, an older and a later, which run together up to the Captivity; the older, though covering a shorter time, is much the larger and fuller; the later, very thin in most parts, becomes very full in its account of the Temple-worship and Temple-kingship at Jerusalem, and then continues the story alone up to the end of the Captivity, and the reestablishment of the Temple-worship after the return." [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, pp. 159, 160.]

The older history, contained in Samuel and Kings, breaks off abruptly in the time of the Captivity; we know that it must have been written during the Exile, and could not have been written earlier than about 550 B.C. The later history, in Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, begins with Adam, and goes on, by one or two genealogical tables, for almost two centuries after the Captivity. In 1 Chronicles iii. 19, the genealogy of Zerubbabel, who came back with the captives, is carried on for at least six generations. Counting thirty years for a generation, the table extends the time of the writing of this record to at least one hundred and eighty years after the return of the exiles. This occurred in 538 B.C., and the book must therefore have been written as late as 350 B.C., or very nearly two centuries after the earlier history was finished.

There are conclusive reasons for believing that the four books now under consideration, the two books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, were originally but one book. In the Hebrew Canon the Chronicles is now but one book; and in the old Hebrew collections Ezra and Nehemiah were but one book. It was in the Septuagint that they were first separated. Thus we have the four certainly reduced to two. And it is not difficult, on an inspection of the documents, to reduce the two to one. If you will open your Bible at the last verses of Second Chronicles, beginning with the twenty-second verse of the last chapter, and, fixing your eyes on this passage, will ask some one to read to you the first three verses of the Book of Ezra, you will see how these two books were formerly one; and how the manuscript was torn in two in the wrong place; so that the Book of Chronicles actually ends in the middle of a sentence. The period at the end of this book ought to be expunged.

The explanatfon of this curious phenomenon is not difficult. The last group of sacred writings, what the Jews call the Ketubim, was kept open for additions to a very late day. After this history was written (Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah) the question arose whether it should be admitted into the canon. The first answer to this question evidently was: "We do not need the first part of the history,—the Book of Chronicles,—for we have the substance of it already in the Books of Samuel and Kings and in the earlier writings; but we do need the last part of it, 'Ezra-Nehemiah,' for this carries the history on beyond the Captivity, and gives the account of the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of the city and the temple." So they tore the book in two, and put the last part of it into the growing collection of "Ketubim," or "Writings." The careless division of the manuscript, not at the beginning of a paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence, made it necessary, of course, for the scribe to copy at the beginning of the Ezra-roll the words belonging to it which had been torn off; but they were not erased from the first part, and have been left there, as the old historians say, "unto this day."

By and by there were requests that this first part—the Chronicles—be admitted to the Ketubim. The priests and the Levites of the temple would be sure to urge this request, for the Chronicles is the one book of the Old Testament in which their order is glorified; and at length the request was granted; the Chronicles were added to the collection, and as they went in last they follow Ezra-Nehemiah, although they belong, chronologically, before it. They stand to-day at the end of the Hebrew Bible, and thus testify, by their position, respecting the lateness of the date at which they were admitted to the canon. Thus the Hebrew Bible ends with an incomplete sentence.

What this later history may have been called before it was torn in two we have no means of knowing; but the Jews called the last part of it (which stands first in their collection) by the name of Ezra, and the first part of it (which is last in their canon) they named, "Events of the Times," or "Annals." In the Septuagint this book of the Chronicles was called "Paraleipomena," "Leavings," "Things Left Over," "Supplements." Jerome first gave it the name of "Chronicles," by which we know it.

The name of the author of this book is unknown. The strong probabilities are that he was a Levite, connected with the temple service in Jerusalem. The Levites had charge of the public religious services of the temple, especially of its music; and the fullness with which this writer expatiates upon all this part of the ritual shows that it was very dear to his heart. [Footnote: See 1 Chron. vi. 31-48; xv. 16-24; xvi 4-42; xxv.2 Chron. v. 12, 13; vii. 6; viii. 14; xx. 19-21; xxiii. 13; xxix. 25-30; xxxi 2; zxxiv. 12; xxxv. 15.] Everything relating to the Levitical priesthood and its services is dwelt upon in this book with emphasis and elaboration; as the histories of Samuel and the Kings are written from the prophetical standpoint, this is most evidently written from the priestly point of view.

In these books of the Chronicles the author constantly points out the sources of his information. He tells us that he quotes from the "Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel," from the "Acts of the Kings of Israel," and from "The Story of the Book of the Kings." The identity of these books is a disputed question. It is supposed by some critics that he refers to the Books of Kings in our Bible; others maintain that he draws from another and much larger book of a similar name which has been lost. The latter theory is generally maintained by the more conservative critics; and it is easier to vindicate the author's trustworthiness on this supposition; yet even so there are serious difficulties in the case; for it is hard to believe that he could have written these annals without having had before him the earlier record, and between the two are many discrepancies. The main facts of the history are substantially the same in the two narratives; but in minor matters the disagreements and contradictions are numerous. It is part of the purpose of this study to look difficulties of this kind fairly in the face; it is treason to the spirit of all truth to refuse to do so. Let us examine, then, a few of these discrepancies between the earlier and later history.

In 2 Samuel viii. 4, we are told that in David's victory over Hadadezer king of Zobah, he took from the latter "a thousand and seven hundred horsemen." In 1 Chronicles xviii. 4, he is said to have taken "a thousand chariots and seven thousand horsemen." In 2 Samuel xxiv. 9, David's census is said to have returned 800,000 warriors for Israel, and 500,000 for Judah. In 1 Chronicles xxi. 5, the number is stated as 1,100,000 for Israel, and 470,000 for Judah. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 24, David is said to have paid Araunah for his threshing-floor fifty shekels of silver, estimated at about thirty dollars of our money; in 1 Chronicles xxi. 25, he is said to have given him "six hundred shekels of gold by weight," amounting to a little more than thirty-four hundred dollars. In 2 Chronicles xiv. i, we read that Asa reigned in the stead of his father Abijah, and that in his days the land was quiet ten years. Again in the 10th and the 19th verses of the following chapter we learn that from the fifteenth to the thirty-fifth year of Asa there was no war in the land. In 1 Kings xv. 32, we are explicitly told that "there was war between Asa and Baasha king of Israel all their days." In 1 Chronicles xx. the story of the taking of Rabbah seems to be abridged from 2 Samuel xi., xii.; but the abridgment is curiously done, so that the part taken by David in the siege and capture of the city is not brought out; and the whole narrative of David's relation to Uriah and Bathsheba, with the rebuke of Nathan and the death of David's child, is not alluded to. The relation of the two narratives at this point is significant; it deserves careful study. One more curious difference is found in the two accounts of the numbering of Israel. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 1, we read, "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah." In 1 Chronicles xxi., we read, "And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel." The numbering in both narratives is assumed to be a grievous sin; and the penalty of this sin, which was David's, was visited upon the people in the form of a pestilence, which slew seventy thousand of them. I observe that the commentators try to reconcile these statements by saying that God permitted Satan to tempt David. I wonder if that explanation affords to any mind a shade of relief. But the older record utterly forbids such a gloss. "The anger of the Lord against Israel" prompted the Lord to "move David against them," and the Lord said, "Go, number Judah and Israel!" It was not a permission; it was a direct instigation. Then because David did what the Lord moved him to do, "the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel," which destroyed seventy thousand men. We are not concerned to reconcile these two accounts, for neither of them can be true. Let us not suppose that we can be required, by any theory of inspiration, to blaspheme God by accusing him of any such monstrous iniquity. Let no man open his mouth in this day to declare that the Judge of all the earth instigated David to do a presumptuous deed, and then slew seventy thousand of David's subjects for the sin of their ruler. Such a view of God might have been held without censure three thousand years ago; it cannot be held without sin by men who have the New Testament in their hands. This narrative belongs to that class of crude and defective teachings which Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, points out and sets aside. We may, nay we must apply to the morality of this transaction the principle of judgment which Jesus gives us in that discourse, and say: "Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time that God sometimes instigates a ruler to do wrong, and then punishes his people for the wrong done by the ruler which he himself has instigated; but I say unto you that 'God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man;' moreover the ruler shall not bear the sin of the subject, nor the subject the sin of the ruler; for every man shall give account of himself unto God." It is by the higher standard that Christ has given us in the New Testament that we must judge all these narratives of the Old Testament, and when we find in these old writings statements which represent God as perfidious and unjust, we are not to try to "harmonize" them with other statements; we are simply to set them aside as the views of a dark age.

Such blurred and distorted ideas about God and his truth we do certainly find here and there in these old writings; the treasure which they have preserved for us is in earthen vessels; the human element, which is a necessary part of a written revelation, all the while displays itself. It is human to err; and the men who wrote the Bible were human. We may have a theory that God must have guarded them from every form of error, but the Bible itself has no such theory; and we must try to make our theories of inspiration fit the facts of the Bible as we find them lying upon its pages.

The second portion of this history, the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, presents fewer of these difficulties than the Book of Chronicles. It is a fragmentary, but to all appearance a veracious record of the events which took place after the first return of the exiles to Jerusalem. The first caravan returned in the first year of King Cyrus; and the history extends to the last part of the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus,— covering a period of more than a hundred years. The documents on which it is based were largely official; and there is no doubt that considerable portions of the first book came from the pen of Ezra himself, and that the second book was made up in part from writings left by Nehemiah. The language of the second book is Hebrew; that of the first is partly Hebrew and partly Chaldee or Aramaic. We read in the fourth chapter of Ezra that a certain letter was written to King Artaxerxes, and it is said that "the writing of the letter was written in the Syrian character." The margin of the revised version says "Aramaic." We find this letter in our Hebrew Bibles in the Aramaic language. And the writer, after copying the letter in Aramaic, goes right on with the history in Aramaic; from the twelfth verse of the fourth chapter to the eighteenth verse of the sixth chapter the language is all Aramaic; then the historian drops back into Hebrew again, and goes on to the twelfth verse of the seventh chapter, when he returns to Aramaic to record the letter of Artaxerxes, which extends to the twenty- seventh verse. The rest of the book is Hebrew. With the exception of some short sections of the Book of Daniel, this is the only portion of our Old Testament that was not written originally in the Hebrew tongue.

The contents of these two books may be briefly summarized. The first book tells us how the Persian king Cyrus, in the first year of his reign, issued a proclamation to the Jews dwelling in his kingdom, permitting and encouraging them to return to their own country and to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The conquest of the Babylonians by the Persians had placed the captive Jews in vastly improved circumstances. Between the faith of the Persians and that of the Jews there was close affinity. The Persians were monotheists; and "Cyrus," as Rawlinson says, "evidently identified Jehovah with Ormazd, and, accepting as a divine command the prophecy of Isaiah, undertook to rebuild their temple for a people who, like his own, allowed no image of God to defile the sanctuary.... The foundation was then laid for that friendly intimacy between the two peoples of which we have abundant evidence in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther." The words of the decree of Cyrus, with which the Book of Ezra opens, show how he regarded the God of the Jews: "Whosoever there is among you of all his people, his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord, the God of Israel, (he is God,) which is in Jerusalem." The parenthetical clause is a clear confession of the faith of Cyrus that Jehovah was only another name for Ormazd; that there is but one God.

In consequence of this decree, a caravan of nearly fifty thousand persons, led by Zerubbabel, carrying with them liberal free-will offerings of those who remained in Babylon for the building of the temple, went back to Jerusalem, and in the second year began the erection of the second temple. With this pious design certain Samaritans interfered, finally procuring an injunction from the successor of Cyrus by which the building of the temple was interrupted for several years. On the accession of Darius, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stirred up the people to resume the work, and at length succeeded in getting from the great king complete authority to proceed with it. In the sixth year of his reign the second temple was completed, and dedicated with great rejoicing. This closes the first section of the Book of Ezra. The rest of the book is occupied with the story of Ezra himself, who is said to have been "a ready scribe in the law of Moses," and who, "in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, king of Persia," led a second caravan of exiles home to Jerusalem, with great store of silver and gold and wheat and wine and oil for the resumption of the ritual worship of the Lord's house. The story of this return of the exiles is minutely told; and the remainder of this book is devoted to a recital of the matter of the mixed marriages between the Jewish men and the women of the surrounding tribes, which caused Ezra great distress, and which he succeeded in annulling, so that these "strange women," as they are called, were all put away. To our eyes this seems a piece of doubtful morality, but we must consider the changed standards of our time, and remember that these men might have done with the purest conscientiousness some things which we could not do at all.

The Book of Nehemiah is in part a recital by Nehemiah himself of the circumstances of his coming to Jerusalem, which seems to have taken place about thirteen years after the coming of Ezra. He was the cupbearer of Artaxerxes the king; he had heard of the distress and poverty of his people at Jerusalem, and in the fervid patriotism of his nature he begged the privilege of going up to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls. Permission was gained, and the first part of the book contains a stirring account of the experiences of Nehemiah in building the walls of Jerusalem. After this work was finished, Nehemiah undertook a census of the restored city, but he found, as he says, "the book of the genealogy of them that came up at the first,"—the list of families which appears in Ezra,—and this he copies. It may be instructive to take these two lists—the one in Ezra ii. and the one in Nehemiah vii.—and compare them. After this we have an account of a great congregation which assembled "in the broad place that was before the water gate," when Ezra the scribe stood upon "a pulpit of wood" from early morning until midday, and read to the assembled multitude from the book of the law. "And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people (for he was above all the people); and when he opened it all the people stood up, and Ezra blessed Jehovah the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with the lifting up of their hands; and they bowed their heads, and worshiped Jehovah, with their faces to the ground." Other scribes stood by, apparently to take turns in the reading; and it is said that "they read in the book, in the law of the Lord distinctly [or, 'with an interpretation,' Marg.], and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading." From this it has been inferred that the people had already become, in their sojourn in the East, more familiar with Aramaic than with their own tongue, and that they were unable to understand the Hebrew without some words of interpretation. It is doubtful, however, whether all this meaning can be read into this passage. At any rate, we have here, undoubtedly, the history of the inauguration of the reading of the law as one of the regular acts of public worship. And this must have been about 440 B.C.

The narrative of the first complete and formal observance of the Feast of Tabernacles since the days of Joshua; the narrative of the solemn league and covenant by which the people bound themselves to keep the law; the narrative of the dedication of the wall of the city, and the account of various reforms which Nehemiah prosecuted, with certain lists of priests and Levites, fill up the remainder of the book.

Taking it all in all it is a very valuable record; no historical book of the Old Testament gives greater evidence of veracity; none excels it in human interest. The pathetic tale of the return of this people from their long exile, of the rebuilding of their city and their temple, and of the heroic and self-denying labors of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, the governors, and Haggai and Zechariah, the prophets, and Ezra the scribe, with all their coadjutors, is full of significance to all those who trace in the history of the people of Israel, more clearly than anywhere else, the increasing purpose of God which runs through all the ages.

That portions of the first book were written by Ezra, and of the second book by Nehemiah, is not doubted; but both books were revised somewhat by later hands; additions were undoubtedly made after the death of Nehemiah; for one, at least, of the genealogies shows us a certain Jaddua as high priest, and tells us that he was the great grandson of the man who was high priest when Nehemiah came to Jerusalem. It is not probable that Nehemiah lived to see this Jaddua in the high priest's office. It is probable that the last revision of the Bible was made some time after 400 B.C.

I have now to speak, in the conclusion of this chapter, of two other books of this last group, concerning which there has always been much misconception, the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel. Esther stands in our Bibles immediately after Ezra-Nehemiah, while Daniel is included among the prophets. But in the Hebrew Bibles both books are found in the group which was last collected and least valued.

I have styled these historical books; are they truly historical? That they are founded upon fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps, safer to regard them both rather as historical fictions than as veritable histories. The reason for this judgment may appear as we go on with the study.

The Book of Esther may be briefly summarized. The scene is laid in Shushan the palace, better known as Susa, one of the royal residences of the kings of Persia. The story opens with a great feast, lasting one hundred and eighty days, given by the King Ahasuerus to all the nabobs of the realm. It is assumed that this king was Xerxes the Great, but the identification is by no means conclusive. At the close of this monumental debauch, the king, in his drunken pride, calls in his queen Vashti to show her beauty to the inebriated courtiers. She refuses, and the refusal ought to be remembered to her honor; but this book does not so regard it. The sympathy of the book is with the bibulous monarch, and not with his chaste and modest spouse. The king is very wroth, and after taking much learned advice from his counselors, puts away his queen for this act of insubordination, and proceeds to look for another. His choice falls upon a Jewish maiden, a daughter of the Exile, who has been brought up by her cousin Mordecai. Esther, at Mordecai's command, at first conceals her Jewish descent from the king. An opportunity soon comes for Mordecai to reveal to Esther a plot against the king's life; and the circumstance is recorded in the chronicles of the realm.

Soon after this a certain Haman is made Grand Vizier of the kingdom, and Mordecai the Jew refuses to do obeisance to him; in consequence of which Haman secures from the king an edict ordering the assassination of all the Jews in the kingdom. His wrath against Mordecai being still further inflamed, he erects a gallows fifty cubits high, with the purpose of hanging thereon the testy Israelite. The intervention of Esther puts an end to these malicious schemes. At the risk of her life she presents herself before the king, and gains his favor; then, while Haman's purpose halts, the king is reminded, when the annals of his kingdom are read to him on a wakeful night, of the frustration of the plot against his person by Mordecai, and learning that no recompense has been made to him, suddenly determines to elevate and honor him; and the consequence is, that Haman himself, his purposes being disclosed by the queen, is hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai, and Mordecai is elevated to Hainan's place. The decree of an Eastern king cannot be annulled, and the massacre of the Jews still remains a legal requirement; yet Esther and Mordecai are permitted to send royal orders to all parts of the realm authorizing the Jews upon the day of the appointed massacre to stand for their lives, and to kill as many as they can of their enemies. Thus encouraged, and supported also by the king's officials in every province, who are now the creatures of Mordecai, the Jews turn upon their enemies, and slay in one day seventy-five thousand of them,—five hundred in the palace of Shushan,—among whom are the ten sons of Haman. On the evening of this bloody day, the king says to Esther the queen: "The Jews have slain five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what then have they done in the rest of the king's provinces? [From this sample of their ferocity you can judge how much blood must have been shed throughout the kingdom.] Now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee; or what is thy request further? and it shall be done." It might be supposed that this fair Jewish princess would be satisfied with this banquet of blood, but she is not; she wants more. "Then said Esther, if it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews which are in Shushan to do to-morrow also, according unto this day's decree, and let Haman's ten sons be hanged upon the gallows." The request is granted; the next day three hundred more Persians are butchered in Shushan the palace; and the dead bodies of the ten sons of Haman, weltering in their gore, are lifted up and hanged upon the gallows, and all to please Queen Esther! If a single Jew loses his life in this outbreak, the writer forgets to mention it. It is idle to say that this is represented as a defensive act on the part of the Jews; the impression is given that the Persians, by the menacing action of their own officials under Mordecai's authority, were completely cowed, and were simply slaughtered in their tracks by the infuriated Jews.

As a memorial of this feast of blood, the Jewish festival of Purim was instituted, which is kept to this day; and the Book of Esther is read at this feast, in dramatic fashion, with passionate responses by the congregation.

Is this history? There is every reason to hope that it is not. That some deliverance of the Jews from their enemies in Persia may be commemorated by the feast of Purim is possible; that precisely such a fiendish outbreak of fanatical cruelty as this ever occurred, we may safely and charitably doubt. The fact that the story was told, and that it gained great popularity among the Jews, and by some of those in later ages came to be regarded as one of the most sacred books of their canon is, however, a revelation to us of the extent to which the most baleful and horrible passions may be cherished in the name of religion. It is precisely for this purpose, perhaps, that the book has been preserved in our canon. If any one wishes to see the perfect antithesis of the precepts and the spirit of the gospel of Christ, let him read the Book of Esther. Frederick Bleek is entirely justified in his statement that "a spirit of revenge and persecution prevails in the book, and that no other book of the Old Testament is so far removed as this is from the spirit of the gospel." [Footnote: Introduction to the Old Testament, i. 450.] For it is not merely true that these atrocities are here recited; they are clearly indorsed. There is not a word said in deprecation of the beastliness of the king or the vindictiveness of the hero and the heroine. It is clear, as Bleek says, "that the author finds a peculiar satisfaction in the characters and mode of acting of his Jewish compatriots, Esther and Mordecai; and that the disposition shown by them appears to him as the right one, and one worthy of their nation." "Esther the beautiful queen," whose praises have been sung by many of our poets, possesses, indeed, some admirable qualities; her courage is illustrious; her patriotism is beautiful; but her bloodthirstiness is terrible.

As to the time when this book was written, or who wrote it, I am not curious. Probably it was written long after the Exile, but by some one who was somewhat familiar with the manners of Oriental courts. The name of God is not once mentioned in the book; and it seems like blasphemy to intimate that the Spirit of God could have had anything to do with its composition. It is absolutely sickening to read the commentaries, which assume that it was dictated by the Holy Ghost, and which labor to justify and palliate its frightful narrative. One learns, with a sense of relief, that the Jews themselves long disputed its admission to their canon; that the school of Schammai would not accept it, and that several of the wisest and best of the early fathers of the Christian church, Athanasius and Melito of Sardis among the rest, denied it a place in sacred Scripture. Dr. Martin Luther is orthodox enough for me, and he, more than once, expressed the hearty wish that the book had perished. That, indeed, we need not desire; let it remain as a dark background on which the Christian morality may stand forth resplendent; as a striking example of the kind of ideas which Christians ought not to entertain, and of the kind of feelings which they ought not to cherish.

The Book of Daniel brings us into a very different atmosphere. Esther is absolutely barren of religious ideas or suggestions; Daniel is full of the spirit of faith and prayer. Whether the character of Daniel, as here presented, is a sketch from life or a work of the imagination, it is a noble personality. The self-control, the fidelity to conscience, the heroic purposes which are here attributed to him, make up a picture which has always attracted the admiration of generous hearts.

"As in the story of the Three Children," says Dean Stanley, "so in that of the Den of Lions, the element which has lived on with immortal vigor is that which tells how, 'when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks to God, as he did aforetime.' How often have these words confirmed the solitary protest, not only in the Flavian amphitheatre, but in the ordinary yet not more easy task of maintaining the right of conscience against arbitrary power or invidious insult! How many an independent patriot or unpopular reformer has been nerved by them to resist the unreasonable commands of king or priest! How many a little boy at school has been strengthened by them for the effort, when he has knelt down by his bedside for the first time to say his prayers in the presence of indifferent or scoffing companions.... Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the court of Darius, are the likenesses of 'the small transfigured band whom the world cannot tame,' who, by faith in the Unseen, have in every age 'stopped the mouths of lions, and quenched the violence of fire.' This was the example to those on whom, in all ages, in spirit if not in letter, 'the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire passed upon them;' but it was 'as it were a moist, whistling wind, and the form of the fourth, who walked with them in the midst of the fire, was like a Son of God.'" [Footnote: History of the Jewish Church, pp. 41, 42.]

Was Daniel a historical person? The question has been much disputed, but I think that we may safely answer it in the affirmative. It is true that in all these writings of the later period of Israel Daniel is mentioned but twice, both times in the Book of Ezekiel (xiv. 14; xxviii. 3). The first of these allusions is a declaration that a few righteous men cannot save a wicked city, when the decree of destruction against it has been issued; "though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord God." The other is in a prophecy against the King of Tyre, in which he is represented as saying to himself that he is wiser than Daniel; that there is no secret that can be hidden from him. Whether these casual uses of the name of Daniel for purposes of illustration can be regarded as establishing his historical character may be questioned. And it is a singular fact that we have not in Ezra, or Nehemiah, or Haggai, or Zechariah, or Malachi, any reference to the existence of Daniel. Nevertheless, it is hardly to be supposed that such a character was wholly fictitious; we may well suppose that he existed, and that the narratives of his great fidelity and piety are at any rate founded upon fact.

The first six chapters of the book are not ascribed to Daniel as their author; he is spoken of in the third person, and sometimes in a way that a good man would not be likely to speak about himself. The remainder of the book claims to be written by him. The question is whether this claim is to be taken as an assertion of historical fact, or as a device of literary workmanship. Ecclesiastes was undoubtedly written long after the Exile, yet it purports to have been composed by King Solomon. The author puts his words into the mouth of Solomon, to gain attention for them. It is not fair to call this a fraud; it was a perfectly legitimate literary device. It is entirely possible that this may be the case with the author of this book. Daniel was a person whose name was well-known among his contemporaries, and the author makes him his mouthpiece. There may have been a special reason why the author should have desired to send out these narratives and visions under the name of a hero of antiquity, a reason which we shall presently discover.

The Book of Daniel is not what is commonly called a prophecy; it is rather an apocalypse. It belongs to a class of literature which sprang up in the last days of the Jewish nationality, after the old prophets had disappeared; it is designed to comfort the people with hopes of future restoration of the national power; its method is that of vision and symbolic representation. Daniel is the only book of this kind in the Old Testament; the New Testament canon closes, as you know, with a similar book. I shall not undertake to interpret to you these visions of the Book of Daniel; they are confessedly obscure and mysterious. But there is one portion of the book, the eleventh chapter, which is admitted to be a minute and realistic description of the coalitions and the conflicts between the Graeco-Syrian and the Graeco-Egyptian kings, events which took place about the middle of the second century before Christ. These personages are not named, but they are vividly described, and the intrigues and vicissitudes of that portion of Jewish history in which they are the chief actors are fully told. Moreover the recital is put in the future tense; "There shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be richer than they all; and when he is waxed strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece." If, now, the Book of Daniel was written in the early days of the Exile, this was a very circumstantial prediction of what happened in the second century,—a prediction uttered three hundred years before the event. And respecting these predictions, if such they are, we must say this, that we have no others like them. The other prophets never undertake to tell the particulars of what is coming to pass; they give out, in terms very large and general, the nature of the events which are to come. No such carefully elaborated programme as this is found in any other predictive utterance.

But there are those—and they include the vast majority of the leading Christian scholars of the present day—who say that these words were not written in the early days of the Exile; that they must have been written about the middle of the second century; that they were therefore an account of what was going on, by an onlooker, couched in these phrases of vision and prophecy. The people of Israel were passing through a terrible ordeal; they needed to be heartened and nerved for resistance and endurance. Their heroic leader, Judas Maccabeus, was urging them on to prodigies of valor in their conflict with the vile Antiochus; such a ringing manifesto as this, put forth in the progress of the conflict, might have a powerful influence in reinforcing their patriotism and confirming their faith. It might also have appeared at some stage of the conflict when it would have been imprudent and perhaps impossible to secure currency for the book if the reference to existing rulers had been explicit; such a device as the author adopted may have been perfectly understood by the readers; although slightly veiled in the form of its deliverance, it was, perhaps, for this very reason, all the better fitted for its purpose.

It might, then, have been written when the Ptolemies and the Seleucidae were wasting the fields of Palestine with their conflicts. But was it written then? How do we know that it was not a circumstantial prediction made three hundred years before? We do not know, with absolute certainty, when it was written; but there are strong reasons for believing that the later date is the true date.

1. The book is not in the Hebrew collection of the Prophets. That collection was made at least a hundred years after the time at which Daniel is here said to have lived; if so great a prophecy had been existing then, it is strange that it should not have been gathered with the other prophets into Nehemiah's collection. It is found, instead, among the Ketubim,—the later and supplementary writings of the Hebrew Bible.

2. It is strange also, as I have intimated, that no mention of Daniel or of his book is found in the histories of the Exile and the return, or in any of the prophecies uttered in Israel after the return. That there should be no allusion in any of these books to so distinguished a personage can hardly be explained.

3. Jesus, the son of Sirach, one of the writers of the Apocrypha, who lived about 200 B.C., gives a full catalogue of all the great worthies of Israel; he has a list of the prophets; he names all the other prophets; he does not name Daniel.

4. The nature of this prediction, if it be a prediction, is unaccountable. Daniel is said to have lived in the Babylonian period, and looked forward from that day. His people were in exile, but there is not a vision of his that has any reference to their return from the captivity, to the rebuilding of the temple, or to any of the events of their history belonging to the two centuries following. It is strange that if, standing at that point of time, he was inspired to predict the future of the Jewish people, he should not have had some message respecting those great events in their history which were to happen within the next century. Instead of this, his visions, so far as his own people are concerned, overleap three centuries and land in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes. Here they begin at once to be very specific; they tell all the particulars of this period, but beyond this period they give no particulars at all; the vision of the Messianic triumph which follows is vague and general like the rest of the prophecies. These circumstances strongly support the theory of the later date.

5. Words appear in this writing which almost certainly fix it at a later date than the Babylonian period. There are certainly nine undoubted Persian words in this book; there are no Persian words in Ezekiel, who lived at the time when Daniel is placed at the Babylonian court, nor in Haggai, Zechariah, or Malachi. There are several Greek words, names of musical instruments, and it is almost certain that no Greek words were in use in Babylonia at that early day. This philological argument may seem very dubious and far-fetched, but it is really one of the most conclusive tests of the date of a document. There is no witness so competent as the written word. Let me give you a homely illustration. Suppose you find in some late history of the United States a quoted letter said to have been written by President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, respecting a certain political contest. The letter contains the following paragraph:—

"On receiving this intelligence, I called up the Secretary of State by telephone, and asked him how he explained the defeat. He told me that, in his opinion, boodle was at the bottom of it. I determined to make an investigation, and after wiring to the member of Congress in that district, I ordered my servant to engage me a section in a Pullman car, and started the same night for the scene of the contest."

Now of course you know that this paragraph could not have been written by President Taylor, nor during the period of his administration. The telephone was not then in existence; there were no Pullman cars; the words "boodle" and "wire," in the sense here used, had never been heard. In precisely the same way the trained philologist can often determine with great certainty the date of a writing. He knows the biography of words or word-forms; and he may know that some of the words or the word- forms contained in a certain writing were not yet in the language at the date when it is said to have been written. It is by evidence of this nature that the critics fix the date of the Book of Daniel at a period long after the close of the Babylonian empire.

This verdict reduces, somewhat, the element of the marvelous contained in the book; it does not in any wise reduce the moral and spiritual value of it. The age of the Maccabees, when this book appeared, was one of the great ages of Jewish history. Judas Maccabeus is one of the first of the Israelitish heroes; and the struggle, in which he was the leader, against the dissolute Syrian Greeks brought out some of the strongest qualities of the Hebrew character. The genuine humility, the fervid consecration, the dauntless faith of the Jews of this generation put to shame the conduct of their countrymen in many ages more celebrated. And it cannot be doubted that this book was both the effect and the cause of this lofty national purpose. "Rarely," says Ewald, "does it happen that a book appears as this did, in the very crisis of the times, and in a form most suited to such an age, artificially reserved, close and severe, and yet shedding so clear a light through obscurity, and so marvelously captivating. It was natural that it should soon achieve a success entirely corresponding to its inner truth and glory. And so, for the last time in the literature of the Old Testament, we have in this book an example of a work which, having sprung from the deepest necessities of the noblest impulses of the age, can render to that age the purest service; and which, by the development of events immediately after, receives with such power the stamp of Divine witness that it subsequently attains imperishable sanctity." [Footnote: Quoted by Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, iii. p. 336.]



CHAPTER VII.

THE POETICAL BOOKS.



The poetical books of the Old Testament now invite our attention,—"The Lamentations," "Proverbs," "Ecclesiastes," "The Song of Solomon," "Job," and "The Psalms." Ecclesiastes is not in poetical form, but it is a prose poem; the movement of the language is often lyrical, and the thought is all expressed in poetic phrases. The other books are all poetical in form as well as in fact.

LAMENTATIONS, called in the Hebrew Bible by the quaint title "Ah How," the first two words of the book, and in the Greek Bible "Threnoi," signifying mourning, is placed in the middle of the latest group of the Hebrew writings. In the English Bible it follows the prophecy of Jeremiah. It is called in our version "The Lamentations of Jeremiah." This title preserves the ancient tradition, and there is no reason to doubt that the tradition embodies the truth. "In favor of this opinion," says Bleek, "we may note the agreement of the songs with Jeremiah's prophecies in their whole character and spirit, in their purport, and in the tone of disposition shown in them, as well as in the language.... As regards the occasion and substance of these songs, the two first and the two last relate to the misery which had been sent on the Jewish people, and particularly on Jerusalem; the middle one, however, chiefly refers to the personal sufferings of the author." [Footnote: Vol. ii. p. 102. ]

These five parts are not the five chapters of a book; they are five distinct poems, each complete in itself, though they are all connected in meaning. You notice the regularity of the structure, which is even exhibited to some extent in the Old Version. The first and second, the fourth and fifth, have each twenty-two verses or stanzas; the third one has sixty-six stanzas. All but the last are acrostical poems. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet; each of these letters, in regular order, begins a verse in four of these songs; in the third lamentation there are three verses for each letter.

The time at which these elegies were written was undoubtedly the year of the capture of Jerusalem by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, 586 B.C. The Chaldean army had been investing the city for more than a year; the walls were finally broken down, and the Chaldeans rushed in; as they gained entrance on one side, the wretched King Zedekiah escaped on the other with a few followers and fled down the Jericho road; he was pursued and overtaken, his sons and princes were slain before his face, then his own eyes were put out, and he was led away in chains to Babylon, where he afterward died in captivity. After a few months' work of this sort, a portion of the Chaldeans under Nebuzar-adan returned to the dismantled and pillaged city and utterly destroyed both the city and the temple. It is supposed that Jeremiah, who was allowed to remain in the city during this bloody interval, wrote these elegies in the midst of the desolation and fear then impending. "Never," says Dean Milman, "was ruined city lamented in language so exquisitely pathetic. Jerusalem is, as it were, personified and bewailed with the passionate sorrow of private and domestic attachment; while the more general pictures of the famine, common misery of every rank and age and sex, all the desolation, the carnage, the violation, the dragging away into captivity, the remembrance of former glories, of the gorgeous ceremonies, and of the glad festivals, the awful sense of the Divine wrath, heightening the present calamities, are successively drawn with all the life and reality of an eye-witness." [Footnote: History of the Jews, i. 446.] The ethical and spiritual qualities of the book are pure and high; the writer does not fail to enforce the truth that it is because "Jerusalem hath grievously sinned" that "she is become an unclean thing." And in the midst of all this calamity there is no rebellion against God; it is only the cry of a desolate but trusting soul to a just and faithful Ruler.

THE PROVERBS, in the Hebrew Bible, is called "Mishle," or sometimes "Mishle Shelomoh." The first word signifies Parables or Proverbs or Sayings; the second word is the supposed name of the author, Solomon. By the later Jews it is sometimes called "Sepher Chokmah,"—the Book of Wisdom,—the same title as that which is borne by one of the apocryphal books.

Here, doubtless, we have again, in the name of the author, what Delitzsch calls a common denominator. On this subject the words of William Aldis Wright, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary," express a conservative judgment:—

"The superscriptions which are affixed to several portions of the Book of Proverbs in i. 1, x. 1, xxv. 1, attribute the authorship of those portions to Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. With the exception of the last two chapters, which are distinctly assigned to other authors, it is probable that the statement of the superscriptions is in the main correct, and that the majority of the proverbs contained in the book were uttered or collected by Solomon. It was natural and quite in accordance with the practice of other nations that the Hebrews should connect Solomon's name with a collection of maxims and precepts which form a part of their literature to which he is known to have contributed most largely (1 Kings, iv. 32). In the same way the Greeks attributed most of their sayings to Pythagoras; the Arabs to Lokman, Abu Obeid, Al Mofaddel, Meidani, and Samakhshari; the Persians to Ferid Attar; and the northern people to Odin.

"But there can be no question that the Hebrews were much more justified in assigning the Proverbs to Solomon than the nations which have just been enumerated were in attributing the collections of national maxims to the traditional authors above mentioned." [Footnote: Art. "Book of Proverbs."]

This is, undoubtedly, as much as can be truly said respecting the Solomonian authorship of these sayings. Professor Davidson, writing at a later day, is more guarded.

"In the book which now exists we find gathered together the most precious fruits of the wisdom of Israel during many hundreds of years, and undoubtedly the later centuries were richer, or at all events fuller, in their contributions than the earlier. The tradition, however, which connects Solomon with the direction of mind known as 'The Wisdom' cannot be reasonably set aside.... Making allowances for the exaggerations of later times, we should leave history and tradition altogether unexplained if we disallowed the claim of Solomon to have exercised a creative influence upon the wisdom in Israel." [Footnote: Art. "Proverbs," Encyc. Brit.]

The book is divided into several sections:

1. A general introduction, explaining the character and aim of the book, which occupies the first six verses.

2. A connected discourse upon wisdom, not in the form of maxims, but rather in the manner of a connected essay, fills the first nine chapters.

3. The next thirteen chapters (x.-xxii. 16) contain three hundred and seventy-four miscellaneous proverbs, each consisting of two phrases, the second of which is generally antithetical to the first, as "A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is a heaviness to his mother." There is only one exception (xix. 7), where the couplet is a triplet. Probably one phrase has been lost. The heading of this section is "The Proverbs of Solomon;" the section ends with the twenty-second chapter.

4. From xxii. 17 to xxiv. 22 is a more connected discussion, though in the proverbial form, of the principles of conduct. This is introduced by a brief exhortation to listen to "the words of the wise."

5. At xxiv. 23, begins another short section which extends through the chapter, under this title: "These also are sayings of the wise."

6. The next five chapters (xxv.-xxix.) have for their caption this sentence: "These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied out."

7. Chapter xxx. is said to contain "The words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, the oracle." The author is wholly unknown.

8. Chapter xxxi. 1-9, contains "The words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him." He too stands here upon the sacred page but the shadow of a name.

9. The book closes with an acrostical poem—-twenty-two verses beginning with the Hebrew letters in the order of the alphabet—upon "The Virtuous Woman." The word "virtue" here is used in the Roman sense; it signifies rather the vigorous woman, the capable woman.

Of these sections it seems probable that the one here numbered 6 is the oldest, and that it contains the largest proportion of Solomonian sayings. Professor Davidson thinks that it cannot have taken its present form earlier than the eighth century.

The character of the teaching of the book is not uniform, but on the whole it is best described as prudential rather than prophetic. It embodies what we are in the habit of calling "good common sense." There is an occasional maxim whose application to our own time may be doubted, and now and then one whose morality has been superseded by the higher standards of the New Testament; but, after making all due deductions, we shall doubtless agree that it is a precious legacy of practical counsel, and shall consent to these words of Professor Conant:—

"The gnomic poetry of the most enlightened of other nations will not bear comparison with it in the depth and certainty of its foundation principles, or in the comprehensiveness and moral grandeur of its conceptions of human duty and responsibility." [Footnote: Smith's Bible Dictionary, iii. 2616. ]

Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher, bears in the Hebrew collection the name, "Koheleth," which means the assembler of the people, and therefore, probably, the man who addresses the assembly. Ecclesiastes is the Greek name of the book in the Septuagint; we have simply copied the Greek word in English letters.

The first verse is, "The words of Koheleth (the Preacher), the son of David, King in Jerusalem." The only son of David who was ever king in Jerusalem was Solomon; was Solomon the author of this book? This is the apparent claim; the question is whether we have not here, as in the case of Daniel, a book put forth pseudonymously; whether the author does not personate Solomon, and speak his message through Solomon's lips. That this is the fact modern scholars almost unanimously maintain. Their reasons for their opinion may be briefly stated:

1. In the conclusion of the book the author speaks in his own person, laying aside the thin disguise which he has been wearing. In several other passages the literary veil becomes transparent. Thus (i. 12), "I Koheleth was king over Israel in Jerusalem." This sounds like the voice of one looking backward and trying to put himself in Solomon's place. Again, in this and the following chapter, he says of himself: "I have gotten me great wisdom above all that were before me in Jerusalem;" "I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem," etc.,—"all of which," says Bleek, "does not appear very natural as coming from the son of David, who first captured Jerusalem." Nobody had been before him in Jerusalem except his father David.

2. The state of society as described in the book, and particularly the reference to rulers, agree better with the theory that it was written during the Persian period, after the Captivity, when the satraps of the Persian king were ruling with vacillating arbitrariness and fitful violence.

3. The religious condition of the people as here depicted, and the religious ideas of the book represent the period following the Captivity, and do not represent the golden age of Israel.

4. More important and indeed perfectly decisive is the fact that the book is full of Chaldaisms, and that the Hebrew is the later Hebrew, of the days of Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Esther. It could not have been written by Solomon, any more than the "Idylls of the King" could have been written by Edmund Spenser. There are those, of course, who maintain that the book was written by Solomon; just as there are those who still maintain that the sun revolves around the earth. The reason for this opinion is found in the first sentence of the book itself. The book announces its own author, it is said; and to question the truth of this claim is to deny the veracity of Scripture. On this question we may call, from the array of conservative writers who have given us Smith's "Bible Dictionary," such a witness as Professor Plumptre:—

"The hypothesis that every such statement in a canonical book must be received as literally true is, in fact, an assumption that inspired writers were debarred from forms of composition which were open, without blame, to others. In the literature of every other nation the form of personated authorship, when there is no animus decipiendi, has been recognized as a legitimate channel for the expression of opinions, or the quasi-dramatic representation of character. Why should we venture on the assertion that if adopted by the writers of the Old Testament it would make them guilty of falsehood?...There is nothing that need startle us in the thought that an inspired writer might use a liberty which has been granted without hesitation to the teachers of mankind in every age and country." [Footnote: Art. "Ecclesiastes," vol. i. p. 645.]

That such is the character of the book and that it appeared some time during the Persian age are well-ascertained results of scholarship.

The doctrine of the book is not so easily summarized. It is a hard book to interpret. Dr. Ginsberg gives a striking resume of the different theories of its teaching which have been promulgated. There is no room here to enter upon the great question. Let it suffice to say that we seem to have in these words the soliloquy of a soul struggling with the problem of evil, sometimes borne down by a dismal skepticism, sometimes asserting his faith in the enduring righteousness. The writer's problem is the one to which Mr. Mallock has given an epigrammatic statement: "Is life worth living?" He greatly doubts, yet he strongly hopes. Much of the time it appears to him that the best thing a man can do is to enjoy the present good and let the world wag. But the outcome of all this struggle is the conviction that there is a life beyond this life and a tribunal at which all wrongs will be righted, and that to fear God and keep his commandments is the whole duty of man. There are thus many passages in the book which express a bitter skepticism; to winnow the wheat from the chaff and to find out what we ought to think about life is a serious undertaking. It is only the wise and skillful interpreter who can steer his bark along these tortuous channels of reflection, and not run aground. Yet, properly interpreted, the book is sound for substance of doctrine, and the experience which it delineates, though sad and depressing, is full of instruction for us. Dean Stanley's words about it are as true as they are eloquent; they will throw some light on the path which lies just before us:—

"As the Book of Job is couched in the form of a dramatic argument between the patriarch and his friends, as the Song of Songs is a dramatic dialogue between the Lover and the Loved One, so the Book of Ecclesiastes is a drama of a still more tragic kind. It is an interchange of voices, higher and lower, mournful and joyful, within a single human soul. It is like the struggle between the two principles in the Epistle to the Romans. It is like the question and answer of 'The Two Voices' of our modern poet.... Every speculation and thought of the human heart is heard and expressed and recognized in turn. The conflicts, which in other parts of the Bible are confined to a single verse or a single chapter, are here expanded into a whole book." And after quoting a few of the darker and more cynical utterances, this clear-sighted teacher goes on: "Their cry is indeed full of doubt and despair and perplexity; it is such as we often hear from the melancholy, skeptical, inquiring spirits of our own age; such as we often refuse to hear and regard as unworthy even a good man's thought or care, but the admission of such a cry into the Book of Ecclesiastes shows that it is not beneath the notice of the Bible, not beneath the notice of God." [Footnote: History of the Jewish Church, ii. 283, 284.]

"THE SONG OF SONGS" is another of the books ascribed to Solomon. It may have been written in Solomon's time; that it was composed by Solomon himself is not probable.

It has generally been regarded as an allegorical poem; the Jews interpreted it as setting forth the love of Jehovah for Israel; the Christian interpreters have made it the representation of the love of Christ for his Church. These are the two principal theories, but it might be instructive to let Archdeacon Farrar recite to us a short list of the explanations which have been given of the book in the course of the ages:—

"It represents, say the commentators, the love of God for the congregation of Israel; it relates the history of the Jews from the Exodus to the Messiah; it is a consolation to afflicted Israel; it is an occult history; it represents the union of the divine soul with the earthly body, or of the material with the active intellect; it is the conversation of Solomon and Wisdom; it describes the love of Christ to his Church; it is historico-prophetic; it is Solomon's thanksgiving for a happy reign; it is a love-song unworthy of any place in the canon; it treats of man's reconciliation to God; it is a prophecy of the Church from the Crucifixion till after the Reformation; it is an anticipation of the Apocalypse; it is the seven days' epithalamium on the marriage of Solomon with the daughter of Pharaoh; it is a magazine for direction and consolation under every condition; it treats in hieroglyphics of the sepulchre of the Saviour, his death, and the Old Testament saints; it refers to Hezekiah and the Ten Tribes; it is written in glorification of the Virgin Mary. Such were the impossible and diverging interpretations of what many regarded as the very Word of God. A few only, till the beginning of this century, saw the truth,—which is so obvious to all who go to the Bible with the humble desire to know what it says, and not to interpret it into their own baseless fancies,—that it is the exquisite celebration of a pure love in humble life; of a love which no splendor can dazzle and no flattery seduce."

These last sentences of Canon Farrar give the probable clew to the interpretation of the book. It is a dramatic poem, celebrating the story of a beautiful peasant girl, a native of the northern village of Shunem, who was carried away by Solomon's officers and confined in his harem at Jerusalem. But in the midst of all this splendor her heart is true to the peasant lover whom she has left behind, nor can any blandishments of the king disturb her constancy; her honor remains unstained, and she is carried home at length, heart-whole and happy, by the swain who has come to Jerusalem for her rescue. This is the beautiful story. The phrases in which it is told are, indeed, too explicit for Occidental ears; the color and the heat of the tropics is in the poetry, but it is perfectly pure; it celebrates the triumph of maiden modesty and innocence. "The song breathes at the same time," says Ewald, "such deep modesty and chaste innocence of heart, such determined defiance of the over- refinement and degeneracy of the court-life, such stinging scorn of the growing corruption of life in great cities and palaces, that no clearer or stronger testimony can be found of the healthy vigor which, in this century, still characterized the nation at large, than the combination of art and simplicity in the Canticles." [Footnote: History of Israel, iv. 43.]

The Book of Job has been the subject of a great amount of critical study. The earliest Jewish tradition is that it was written by Moses; this tradition is preserved in the Talmud, which afterward states that it was composed by an Israelite who returned to Palestine from the Babylonian Captivity. It is almost certain that the first of these traditions is baseless. The theory that it was written after the Captivity is held by many scholars, but it is beset with serious difficulties.

The book contains no allusion whatever to the Levitical law, nor to any of the religious rites and ceremonies of the Jews. The inference has therefore been drawn that it must have been written before the giving of the law, probably in the period between Abraham and Moses. It seems inconceivable that a devout Hebrew should have treated all the great questions discussed in this book without any reference to the religious institutions of his own people. It is equally difficult to understand how the divine interposition for the punishment of the wicked and the rewarding of the righteous could have been so fully considered without a glance at the lessons of the Exodus, if the Exodus had taken place before the book was written. But these arguments for an early origin are quite neutralized by the doctrine of the book. The view of divine providence set forth in it is very unlike that contained in the Pentateuch. It is not necessary to say that there is any contradiction between these two views; but the subject is approached from a very different direction, and the whole tone of the book indicates a state of religious thought quite different from that which existed among the Hebrews before the Exodus. "If we are to believe that Moses wrote it," says a late critic, "then we must believe that he held these views as an esoteric philosophy, and omitted from the religion which he gave to his people the truths which had been revealed to him in the desert. The book itself must have been suppressed until long after his day. The ignorant Israelites could not have been trained under the discipline of the Law if they had had at the same time the fiery, cynical, half-skeptical, and enigmatical commentary which the Book of Job furnishes. There is nothing abnormal or contrary to the conception of an inspired revelation in the development of truth by wider views and deeper analysis through successive sacred writers. But it is repulsive to conceive an inspired teacher as first gaining the wider view, and then deliberately hiding it, to utter the truth in cruder and more partial forms." [Footnote: Raymond's The Book of Job, p. 18.] The fact that neither the person nor the Book of Job is mentioned in the historical books of the Jews, and that the first reference to him is in the Book of Ezekiel, would indicate that the date of the book must have been much later than the time of Moses. This argument could not be pressed, however, for we have noted already the silence of the earlier historical books concerning the Mosaic law.

The dilemma of the critics may be summed up as follows:—

1. The absence of allusion to the history of the Exodus and to the Mosaic system shows that it must have been written before the Exodus. 2. The absence of all reference to the book in the Hebrew history, and more especially the doctrinal character of the book, shows that it could not have been written before the age of Solomon. The latter conclusion is held much more firmly than the former; and the silence respecting the history and the Law is explained on the theory that the book is a historical drama, the scene of which is laid in the period before Moses, and the historic unities of which have been perfectly observed by the writer. The people of this drama lived before the Exodus and the giving of the Law, and their conversations do not, therefore, refer to any of the events which have happened since. The locality of the drama is the "Land of Uz," and the geographers agree that the descriptions of the book apply to the region known in the classical geographies as "Arabia Deserta," southeast of Palestine. It is admitted that the scenery and costume of the book are not Jewish; and they agree more perfectly with what is known of that country than with any other. That Job was a real personage, and that the drama is founded upon historical tradition cannot be doubted. It is probable that it was written after the time of Josiah.

I need not rehearse the story. Job is overtaken by great losses and sufferings; in the midst of his calamities three friends draw near to condole with him, and also to administer to him a little wholesome reproof and admonition. Their theory is that suffering such as he is enduring is a sign of the divine displeasure; that Job must have been a great sinner, or he could not be such a sufferer. This argument Job indignantly repels. He does not claim to be perfect, but he knows that he has been an upright man, and he knows that bad men round about him are prospering, while he is scourged and overwhelmed with trouble; he sees this happening all over the earth,—the good afflicted, the evil exalted; and he knows, therefore, that the doctrine of his miserable comforters cannot be true. Sin does bring suffering, that he admits; but that all suffering is the result of sin he denies. He cannot understand it; his heart is bitter when he reflects upon it; and the insistence of his visitors awakes in him a fierce indignation, and leads him to charge God with injustice and cruelty. They are shocked and scandalized at his almost blasphemous outcries against God; but he maintains his righteousness, and drives his critics and censors from the field. Finally Jehovah himself is represented as answering Job out of the whirlwind, in one of the most sublime passages in all literature,— silencing the arguments of his friends, sweeping away all the reasonings which have preceded, explaining nothing, but only affirming his own infinite power and wisdom. Before this august manifestation Job bows with submission; the mystery of evil is not explained; he is only convinced that it cannot be explained, and is content to be silent and wait. The teaching of the book is well summarized in these words of Dr. Raymond:—

"The current notion that calamity is always the punishment of crime and prosperity always the reward of piety is not true. Neither is it true that the distress of a righteous man is an indication of God's anger. There are other purposes in the Divine mind of which we know nothing. For instance, a good man may be afflicted, by permission of God, and through the agency of Satan, to prove the genuine character of his goodness. But whether this or some other reason, involved in the administration of the universe, underlies the dispensation of temporal blessings and afflictions, one thing is certain: the plans of God are not, will not be, cannot be revealed; and the resignation of faith, not of fatalism, is the only wisdom of man." [Footnote: The Book of Job, p. 49.]

I have reserved for the last the most precious of all the Hebrew writings, the Book of Psalms. The Hebrews called it "Tehillim," praise- book or hymn-book, and the title exactly describes it; in the form in which we have it, it was a hymn-book prepared for the service of the later temple.

If the question "Who wrote the Psalms?" were to be propounded in any meeting of Sunday-school teachers, nine tenths of them would unhesitatingly answer, "David." If the same question were put to an assembly of modern Biblical scholars some would answer that David wrote very few and perhaps not any of the psalms; that they were written during the Maccabean dynasty, only one or two hundred years before Christ. Both these views are extreme. We may believe that David did write several of the psalms, but it is more than probable that the great majority of them are from other writers.

Seventy-three psalms of the book seem to be ascribed to David in their titles. "A Psalm of David," "Maschil of David," "Michtam of David," or something similar is written over seventy-three different psalms. Concerning these titles there has been much discussion. It has been maintained that they are found in the ancient Hebrew text as constituent parts of the Psalms, and are therefore entitled to full credit. But this theory does not seem to be held by the majority of modern scholars. "The variations of the inscriptions," says a late conservative writer, "in the Septuagint and the other versions sufficiently prove that they were not regarded as fixed portions of the canon, and that they were open to conjectural emendations." [Footnote: Speaker's Commentary, iv. 151.] Dr. Moll, the learned author of the monograph on the Psalms in Lange's "Commentary," says in his introduction: "The assumption that all the inscriptions originated with the authors of the Psalms, and are therefore inseparable from the text, cannot be consistently maintained. It can at most be held only of a few.... There is now a disposition to admit that some of them may have originated with the authors themselves."

The probability is that most of these inscriptions were added by editors and transcribers of the Psalms. You open your hymn-book, and find over one hymn the name of Watts, and over another the name of Wesley, and over another the name of Montgomery. Who inserted these names? Not the authors, of course, but the editor or compiler of the collection. Compilers in these days are careful and accurate, but they do make mistakes, and you find the same hymn ascribed to different authors in different books, while hymns that are anonymous in one book are credited in another, rightly or wrongly, to the name of some author. The men who collected the hymn-book of the Jews made similar mistakes, and the old copies do not agree in all their titles.

But while the inscriptions over the psalms do not, generally, belong to the psalms themselves, and are not in all cases accurate, most of them were, no doubt, suffixed to the psalms at a very early day. "On the whole," says Dr. Moll, "an opinion favorable to the antiquity and value of these superscriptions has again been wrought out, which ascribes them for the most part to tradition, and indeed a very ancient one."