THE HISTORICAL METHOD OF INTERPRETATION.
God who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in times
past to the Fathers.—_Epistle to the Hebrews._
It belongs very closely to our subject to determine in what sense
the Hebrew Scriptures are to be interpreted, because, if the popular
interpretation is to be maintained at every point, Egyptology, and a
great deal more of what eventually must, and now ought to be, used in the
construction of religious thought, will continue for a time to be deemed
in popular opinion, and to be represented by its guides, as hostile to
religion. I would, then, submit that, if universal history is to be aided
at all by the Hebrew Scriptures, or if they are to be applied to any
historical purpose whatever, they must be interpreted according to the
received canons of historical criticism.
Those who deny this accept, in so doing—if they are logical and
consistent—one or other of two alternative consequences: either that all
contemporary and antecedent history is contained in the interpretation
they put upon the sacred records—that is, in what at present happens
to be the popular interpretation—so that nothing that is not contained
in, or deducible from, or in harmony with, that interpretation is to be
received as history; or else that history has nothing at all to do with
the documents, or the documents with history.
There are, however, other people, not less learned nor less desirous
of attaining to the truth, who are completely incapable of accepting
either of these two alternatives. They value the Holy Scriptures too
highly to treat them in this way. They believe that, though their
primary object was not historical, they contain much history of many
kinds, and of great value. History of events, of the human mind, of
conscience, of religion—much of the history, in one word, of man, or of
humanity; but, furthermore, they believe—and in this lies the gist of
the controversy—that what they contain on any one, and on all of these
subjects, is to be ascertained only by critical investigation. The single
historical question with them is, when the documents have been rightly
interpreted, what do they really contain?
They believe that the purpose, the character, and the contents of the
documents, alike, preclude the idea of fraud and deception. The thought
of the existence of any thing of the kind in them had its birth,
naturally and unavoidably, in the popular interpretation. A false and
ignorant interpretation was met by a false and ignorant attack. It could
not have been otherwise; for both belong to the same age. No one, then,
can be deceived by these documents, excepting those who interpret them
ignorantly and wrongly. It is a question of interpretation. A false
interpretation has surrounded them with difficulties, and in a great
measure destroyed with multitudes their utility and their credit. The
true interpretation will remove these difficulties; and where mischief
has been done, restore their credit and utility.
But there appears to some a preliminary question: that of the
right of interpretation. About this there, however, can be no real
question at all, even among those who support what we call the popular
interpretation. How can they deny to others the right they claim for
themselves, of adopting the interpretation that appears to them most in
accordance with truth and fact? The third, the twelfth, the sixteenth,
and all other centuries, had a right to interpret the document in the way
which at the time seemed true. The nineteenth century has the same right.
The men of other times interpreted it according to the combination of
knowledge, and of ignorance, that was in them. We must do the same.
Let us see, then, what is the difference between the popular, and the
historical methods of interpretation. Proximately we shall find it very
great; ultimately not much. But the point before us will not be fully
understood until it be seen in a distinct concrete instance. The popular
method goes on the assumption that the modes of thought, and the modes
of expression of early ages, and of other races of men, must be accepted
by us in the sense in which we must take anything addressed to ourselves
by a contemporary author. This, the historical method tells us, is an
impossibility. It has been rendered impossible by subsequent advances
in knowledge, in the generalization of ideas, and in language through a
larger use of general and abstract terms. The historical method says that
archaic modes of thought, and modes of expression, must be translated
into our modes of thought, and our modes of expression.
I will now give an instance that will include both. In those early
times men had not been trained, as we have been, by ages of culture,
to think abstractedly. They could only think, if we may so express it,
concretely. It was necessary that a palpable image of what was meant
should be before their minds. This was what made idolatry so attractive
to the people Moses led up out of Egypt. It was so to all the young
world, and is so still to all who are in the infancy of thought. And it
was so in a pre-eminent degree with those Moses had to deal with, for
they had been mentally degraded below even the level of the times, by
the hard slavery in which they had been kept for some generations. Even
among our own labouring class this inability to think abstractedly is
very conspicuous. Their want of intellectual training, their ignorance,
their life of toil, their poverty of language, particularly of abstract
and general forms of expression, are the cause of it. They can never
tell you what they themselves said, or what anybody else said, except
in a dramatic form. With them it is always ‘I said,’ and ‘he said;’ in
each case the very words being given. They cannot indicate the purport
of what was said by the general, or abstract, form of expression that
a man consented, or hesitated, or refused compliance, or remonstrated,
&c. General forms of thought and expression are beyond them. Nor will
they, for they cannot, tell you simply that a thing was done: instead of
this they must tell you every step of the process. That which is very
remarkable, in this nineteenth century, in one class, amongst ourselves,
was a law, a necessity, of thought among those with whom Moses had to
deal.
As a foundation, then, for the theocratic system he was about to
establish, he had to announce the idea, not perhaps altogether new to
some of those who had come out of Egypt, but one to which the thought of
Greece and Rome was never conducted, that God was the Creator. Suppose,
then, that he had contented himself, as we might, at this day, with
stating it in that abstract form. We may be absolutely certain that the
statement would have fallen dead on the ears of the people, to whom he
had to address himself. They could not have taken in the idea. No effect
whatever could thus have been produced upon them. He was therefore
obliged, not as a matter of choice, but of necessity, to present the idea
to them in the concrete. That is, to give them a series of pictures of
creation. This, he had to say, was the picture of things before creation
begun. This was what was done first. This was what was done next. And
so on throughout the whole. And this was what was said at each act of
creation. When the idea was presented to them in this concrete, dramatic
form, they could understand it, and take it in. It was the only mode of
thought, and the only mode of expression, that were possible then. When
translated into modern modes of thought, and modern modes of expression,
they simply mean God is the Creator. Nothing more. Those who would press
them further, do so because they are not acquainted with the difference
between archaic, rude, uncultured modes of thought and expression, and
those of minds that have received culture, and been benefited by the
slowly maturing fruits of ages of culture.
This method of historical criticism offers similar explanations of much
besides these first chapters of Genesis. It tells us that good, and true,
and God-fearing men, and who were moved by a holy spirit, which they
described as coming to them _ab extra_ (in which their metaphysics, if
erroneous, were honestly so) could hardly in those times have thought,
or expressed themselves otherwise than as they did; and that if, through
some realization of the Egyptian idea of the transmigration of souls,
they had returned to earth, and were now amongst us, with precisely the
same yearnings for justice, truth, and goodness they had been moved by in
those primitive days, they would not express themselves now as they did
then, but as we do. Their metaphysics would have become the same as ours.
But in either case there would be no difference in their meaning.
It is evident, by the way, that the historical method of interpretation
differs also, in the effect it has on the feelings and practice, from
the popular interpretation of the present day, and of former times. It
is evident, for instance, that it could not lead a man to denounce the
mythology and religion of Egypt, the aims of which were distinctly moral,
as the invention of devils. The old popular methods of interpretation,
also, naturally sanctioned the persecution of those who differ from us
in religion, as they did at the time of the Crusades; and of those who
differ from us only in interpretation, as in the case of the treatment
of the Vaudois; and in the still more shocking case of the creation and
maintenance of the Inquisition, one of the most dreadful episodes in
human history. The historical method, however, suggests nothing of the
kind. It can regard such extravagancies only as contradictions of the
meaning and purpose of religion.
But to go back to the contrast between the popular and the historical
methods of interpretation as applied to the particular instance I
selected, that of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. Some little
time back I met with the following illustration of the errors into which
we must fall, if we feel ourselves obliged to take them precisely in
the sense that would belong to their words, had they been addressed by
a living writer to ourselves. There happened to be an equestrian circus
exhibiting in the neighbouring town. The gardener who was in my service
at the time had rather an inquisitive mind; and the word equestrian,
which occurred in the posters that announced the performance, puzzled
him; and as he did not like to give his money without knowing what it was
for, he asked me what the word meant. I told him it meant an exhibition
in which horses bore a part, and that the word was derived from _equus_,
the Latin name for a horse.
‘No,’ he exclaimed, ‘that can’t be right.’
‘Yes,’ I rejoined, ‘it is so.’
‘No;’ he continued, ‘it is impossible; because we are told that when the
animals were created they were all brought to Adam, and that whatsoever
he called each, that was the name thereof. So horse must be the name of
the animal all over the world for ever. Being an animal, it can have only
one name: the name Adam gave it.’
Argument was useless. For him to have been persuaded of anything that
contradicted his literal interpretation would have been to abandon belief
in the authenticity of the book.
Here then we have the popular method actually at work. We see the whole
process. And the way in which it demonstrated to my gardener that _equus_
could not possibly be Latin for horse, is much the same as the way in
which some other conclusions have been arrived at, with which everybody
is familiar, but with which very few people are satisfied.
The attempt to get over the difficulties of the literal method, in the
instance that was just now before us, by abandoning it at one point
only, that of the meaning of the word ‘day,’ has three disadvantages.
First that of abandoning a principle while loudly and energetically
professing to maintain it. Secondly that of addressing itself to one
particular, and not to the whole of the subject. And, thirdly, that of
being, in itself, surpassingly preposterous. For who ever did doubt, or
could doubt, that in the place referred to, the word ‘day’ means, and was
intended to mean, the space of our twenty-four hours? Is not this the
meaning attributed to the word in the reference made to the first chapter
of Genesis in the Decalogue? And are we not told, in the body of the
narrative itself, with the most emphatic iteration, that the period of
time intended by the word is what is comprised in the evening and morning?
On the other hand the historical method of interpretation explains
satisfactorily, both why the work is divided into days, and why the
constituent parts of each day are spoken of. This was done, because to do
so was in conformity with archaic modes of thought and expression.
In this there is nothing forced or strained. Above all it is perfectly
true. It also explains everything.
* * * * *
The attempt to place all we know of the stratification of our earth, of
the series of changes that have been effected in the relations of the
sea and land, and in extinct Floras and Faunas, on the further side of
‘the beginning’ of the first verse of this first chapter of Genesis, is
equally portentous. Here again, all the difficulties of the narrative are
left wholly unexplained, and the student is referred to an arbitrary,
and contextually impossible, assumption, and told that it contains a
sufficient answer to every objection. This interpretation makes the
explicit statements of the subsequent account direct contradictions to
the (by the supposition) implicit meaning of the first verse. One cannot
but think that those who propound an interpretation of this kind have no
suspicion of the mischief they are doing. It is impossible that its worse
than hollowness could, in any case, escape detection one moment beyond
the time that a man, who has but a very small store of knowledge, begins
to think. And then, as all experience proves, the revulsion that ensues
against such teaching (and revulsions of this kind generally reach the
subject itself also, on behalf of which such teaching is advanced) is out
of all proportion to the gain—and what kind of gain is it?—temporarily
secured from ignorant and unthinking acquiescence.
Of course, the word ‘beginning,’ just like the word ‘day,’ and all the
rest of the narrative, was intended to be taken by the rude people to
whom the pictures of which the narrative is composed were submitted,
precisely in the sense in which it was always taken by them; that is to
say in the sense in which plain words are taken by plain people. And then
arises the question we have been considering, How is all this to be taken
by ourselves?
As our ideas rest on a different basis, that of scientific demonstration,
we can acknowledge, in respect of any particular, that we are ignorant,
either of the _modus operandi_, or of the time required for the
operation, or of both. But Moses could not do this: he could deal with
these matters only in conformity with the requirements of his purpose,
and with the facts of the times.