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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
THE LITERATURE OF THE
OLD TESTAMENT
BY
GEORGE FOOT MOORE, M.A., D.D., LL.D.
LONDON
WILLIAMS & NORGATE
HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.
[Illustration:
HOME
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
OF
MODERN KNOWLEDGE
_Editors_:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.)
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY]
[Illustration:
THE
LITERATURE
OF THE
OLD TESTAMENT
BY
GEORGE FOOT MOORE
M.A., D.D., LL.D.
Professor in Harvard University; Editor of the
Harvard Theological Review; Author
of "Commentary on Judges," etc.
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE]
The following volumes of kindred interest have already been published
in the Home University Library:--
VOL. 56.--THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By PROF. B. W.
BACON, LL.D., D.D.Vol.
VOL. 68.--COMPARATIVE RELIGION. By PRINCIPAL J. ESTLIN
CARPENTER, D.Litt.
VOL. 15.--MOHAMMEDANISM. By PROF. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A.,
D.Litt.
VOL. 47.--BUDDHISM. By MRS. RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
VOL. 54.--ETHICS. By G. E. MOORE, M.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 7
II THE OLD TESTAMENT AS A NATIONAL
LITERATURE 25
III THE PENTATEUCH 29
IV CHARACTER OF THE SOURCES. GENESIS 33
V EXODUS, LEVITICUS, NUMBERS 47
VI DEUTERONOMY 58
VII AGE OF THE SOURCES. COMPOSITION OF THE
PENTATEUCH 65
VIII JOSHUA 73
IX JUDGES 81
X SAMUEL 91
XI KINGS 100
XII CHRONICLES 118
XIII EZRA AND NEHEMIAH 128
XIV STORY BOOKS: ESTHER, RUTH, JONAH 134
XV THE PROPHETS 144
XVI ISAIAH 147
XVII JEREMIAH 164
XVIII EZEKIEL 174
XIX DANIEL 180
XX MINOR PROPHETS 190
XXI PSALMS. LAMENTATIONS 218
XXII PROVERBS 231
XXIII JOB 235
XXIV ECCLESIASTES. SONG OF SONGS 243
BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
INDEX 253
THE LITERATURE
OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT
CHAPTER I
THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
The early Christians received the Sacred Books of the Jews as inspired
Scripture containing a divine revelation and clothed with divine
authority, and till well on in the first century of the Christian era
the name Scriptures was applied exclusively to these books. In time,
as they came to attach the same authority to the Epistles and Gospels,
and to call them, too, Scriptures (2 Pet. iii. 16), they distinguished
the Christian writings as the Scriptures of the new dispensation, or,
as they called it, the "new covenant," from the Scriptures of the "old
covenant" (2 Cor. iii. 6, 14), the Bible of the Jews. The Greek word
for covenant (_diathéké_) was rendered in the early Latin translation
by _testamentum_, and the two bodies of Scripture themselves were
called the Old Testament and the New Testament respectively.
The Scriptures of the Jews were written in Hebrew, the older language
of the people; but a few chapters in Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic,
which gradually replaced Hebrew as the vernacular of Palestine from
the fifth century B.C. The Sacred Books comprise the Law, that is, the
Five Books of Moses; the Prophets, under which name are included the
older historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) as well as what
we call the Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, i.e.
Minor Prophets); a third group, of less homogeneous character, had no
more distinctive name than the "Scriptures"; it included Ruth, Psalms,
Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel,
Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The Minor Prophets counted as
one book; and the division of Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, and
Chronicles each into two books was made later, and perhaps only in
Christian copies of the Bible. There are, consequently, according to
the Jewish enumeration twenty-four books in the Bible, while in the
English Old Testament, by subdivision, we count the same books as
thirty-nine.
The order of the books in the Pentateuch and "Former Prophets"
(Joshua-Kings) is fixed by the historical sequence, and therefore
constant; among the "Latter Prophets" Jeremiah was sometimes put
first, immediately following the end of Kings, with which it was so
closely connected. In the third group there was no such obvious
principle of arrangement, and consequently there were different
opinions about the proper order; that which is given above follows the
oldest deliverance on the subject, and puts them in what the rabbis
doubtless supposed to be a chronological series. So long as the books
were written on separate rolls of papyrus, the question of order was
theoretical rather than practical; and even when manuscripts were
written in codex form (on folded leaves stitched together like our
books), no uniformity was attained.
At the beginning of the Christian era, lessons from the Law were
regularly read in the synagogues on the sabbath (the Pentateuch being
so divided that it was read through consecutively once in three
years), and a second lesson was chosen from the Prophets. The title of
these books to be regarded as Sacred Scripture was thus established by
long-standing liturgical use, and was, indeed, beyond question. Nor
was there any question about the inspiration of most of the books in
the third group, the "Scriptures." There was a controversy, however,
over Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; some teachers of the
strictest school denied that either of them was inspired, while others
accepted only one of them. The question was voted on in a council of
rabbis held at Jamnia about the beginning of the second century of our
era, and the majority decided for the inspiration of both books. There
were also, even down to the third century, Jewish scholars who did
not acknowledge Esther as Sacred Scripture. On the other hand, some
were inclined to include among the Sacred Books the Proverbs of Ben
Sira, which stand in the English Bible among the Apocrypha under the
title Ecclesiasticus.
It is thus evident that, while there was agreement in general, there
was, down to the second century A.D., no authoritative list of the
"Scriptures," and that about some of the books there were conflicting
opinions among the learned of the most orthodox stamp. An interesting
confirmation of this is the fact that in the first half of that
century it was thought necessary to make a formal deliverance that the
"Gospel and other writings of the heretics" are not Sacred Scripture.
There are other indications that in that generation Jewish
Christianity had a dangerous attraction for some even in rabbinical
circles, and there was evidently ground for apprehension that the
inspiration which the Christians claimed for the Scriptures of the New
Covenant might impose upon well-meaning but uninstructed Jews. In the
same connection it was decided, further, that Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus)
was not Holy Scripture, and that no books written from his time on (about
200 B.C.) were inspired, in accordance with the theory, found also in
Josephus, that inspiration ceased in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah.
By such decisions, recognizing the inspiration of books that had been
challenged and excluding others for which inspiration had been
claimed, the canon of the Scriptures, that is, the authoritative list
of Sacred Books, was defined. The oldest catalogue we have, containing
the titles of all the books, dates probably from the latter part of
the second century, and is not concerned with the point of
canonicity--which it takes for granted--but with the proper order of
the Prophets and the Scriptures.
The Jews had for centuries been widely distributed through the lands
that had been included in the kingdoms of Alexander's successors.
There were large numbers in Babylonia and the neighbouring provinces
of the Parthian empire, and still more in the countries around the
eastern end of the Mediterranean, in Syria and Asia Minor, in Egypt
and Cyrene. In Alexandria the Jews had a whole quarter of the city to
themselves, and Philo estimates their numbers in Egypt in his time
(ca. A.D. 40) at a million.
In cities like Alexandria, where Greek was the common speech of a
population recruited from many races, the Jews soon exchanged their
mother tongue for the cosmopolitan language. The ancient Hebrew of
their Sacred Books was unintelligible, not only to the masses, but
even to most of the educated, who had learned in the schools of Greek
rhetoricians and philosophers rather than at the feet of the rabbis.
If the knowledge of the holy Law by which the distinctive Jewish life
was regulated was not to be lost altogether, the Scriptures must be
translated into Greek. The Pentateuch was doubtless translated
first--legend attributes the initiative to King Ptolemy Philadelphus
(285-246 B.C.); then other books, by different hands and at different
times and places. To some of the books, as to Daniel and Esther,
additions were made in the translation which were not accepted by the
Palestinian Jews.
Besides the books which were finally included in the Jewish canon,
there were various others, written in Hebrew or Aramaic after the
pattern of the several forms of Biblical literature. History, for
example, is represented by 1 Maccabees, relating the struggle of the
Jews in Palestine for religious liberty and national independence in
the second century B.C.; the Proverbs of Solomon have a counterpart in
the Proverbs of Ben Sira, already mentioned; the Psalter, in the
so-called Psalms of Solomon; the story of Judith may be compared with
Esther; the visions of Daniel have their parallel in popular
apocalypses bearing the names of Enoch, Noah, Ezra, Baruch, and other
ancient worthies. These writings were sooner or later translated into
Greek, and some of them attained a wide circulation. The
Greek-speaking Jews, also, produced a religious literature, in part
imitating the familiar Biblical forms, as in the Wisdom of Solomon
and 2 Maccabees, in part cast in Greek moulds, as when prophecy
disguised itself in Sibylline Oracles, or the supremacy of reason over
the emotions was made the subject of a discourse after the pattern of
a Stoic diatribe (4 Maccabees).
The influence of Greek culture on many of these writers was not
confined to language and literary form; they lived in an atmosphere of
Greek thought--the popular philosophy, in which Platonic and Stoic
elements were fused or confused--and a few had a more academic
acquaintance with the Greek thinkers. But, under all this, they were
Jews to the core, devoted to the religion of their fathers, of the
superiority of which they were the more convinced by the spectacle of
heathenism about them: Judaism was the only true religion, its
Scriptures the one divine revelation. The Law and the Prophets had the
same precedence as in the Palestinian synagogue. Of the other
Scriptures there was no authoritative and exclusive list, and among
books read solely for private edification it is not likely that a very
sharp line was drawn; but, on the whole, the practice of the
Greek-speaking Jews does not seem to have been materially different
from that of their countrymen in Palestine.
Outside of Palestine, Christianity was spread by Greek-speaking Jews
who had embraced the new Messianic faith, and their converts in the
fields of their missionary labours, both Jews and Gentiles, spoke
Greek, either as their mother tongue or as the language of common
intercourse. The church, therefore, took over the Jewish Scriptures in
the existing translations: the Christian Old Testament was from the
beginning the Greek Bible, not the Hebrew. They received also from the
Greek-speaking Jews the belief in the divine inspiration of the
translators, by virtue of which the same infallible authority attached
to the version of the Seventy which belonged to the Hebrew original.
In their desire to possess every word of God, they gathered up the
religious books which they found in the hands of the Jews, without
inquiring curiously whether the Jews included them in the narrower
category of Sacred Scriptures or not; and they discovered no reason in
the books themselves why Esther, for example, should be inspired and
Judith not; or why Ecclesiastes, with its scepticism about the destiny
of the soul, should be divinely revealed, and the Wisdom of Solomon,
with its eloquent defence of immortality, a purely human production;
or, again, why the Proverbs of Solomon were Scripture, and the
Proverbs of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) nothing but profane wisdom.
Controversies in the second century made the Christian apologists
aware that the Jews did not acknowledge the authority of some of the
books from which their opponents adduced proof-texts, and this
practical concern, rather than purely learned interest, led to the
drawing up of lists of books which were accepted by the Jews as Sacred
Scripture. The oldest of these lists which has come down to us was
made by Melito, Bishop of Sardes, about A.D. 170; it contains the
books of the Jewish canon enumerated above (p. 8), with the noteworthy
exception of Esther, about which, as we have seen, Jewish opinion was
divided. Christian catalogues of the Jewish Old Testament long show an
uncertainty about the right of this book to a place in the canon.
Meanwhile the church had, in its worship and in religious instruction,
established a use and tradition of its own. The Wisdom of Jesus, son
of Sirach, was appropriated for the moral instruction of youth and of
converts, as is shown by the title it bears in the Greek Bible,
Ecclesiasticus, that is, "The Church Book," and other writings not
included in the Jewish canon were highly esteemed in the church. About
A.D. 240, Julius Africanus, Bishop of Emmaus in Palestine, addressed a
critical letter to Origen on the story of Susanna and the Elders in
the Book of Daniel. This story, he said, was not found in the Hebrew
Daniel, and was not acknowledged by the Jews. He proved by internal
evidence that it was not translated from the Hebrew, the language in
which the Scriptures of the Old Testament were inspired, but
originally composed in Greek, and he raised various historical
objections to the tale: it ought not, therefore, to be quoted as
Sacred Scripture. In his answer, Origen, the greatest Biblical scholar
of his age, argued that if the story of Susanna was to be set aside on
the ground that it was not accepted by the Jews, other books, such as
Judith and Tobit, would have to be rejected also. He appeals to the
prescriptive usage of the church itself, which had always used these
books and read them with edification. This immemorial tradition was
authority enough for Christians; there was no reason why the church
should prune its Bible to please the Jews or adapt itself to their
opinions about what was and what was not inspired Scripture; he
reminds his correspondent of the law, "Thou shalt not remove the
ancient landmarks which those before thee have set."
This way of looking at the matter, as might be expected, prevailed in
the church. Lists of the books of the Jewish Bible were handed down,
and scholars were well aware that the Christian Old Testament
contained several books not received by the Jews. By the more critical
of the Greek Fathers these books are not cited with the same authority
for the establishment of doctrine as the books of the Hebrew Bible.
Thus, Athanasius, at the end of a list of the canonical Scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments (A.D. 365), adds: "There are, besides
these, other books, not, indeed, included in the canon, but
prescribed by the Fathers to be read by those who come to the church
and wish to be taught the doctrine of religion, namely, the Wisdom of
Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and the
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." But this learned reserve had no
effect on the liturgical or practical use of the church. The question
of the inspiration and authority of the supernumerary books of the Old
Testament was not decided by any council speaking in the name of the
catholic church; nor was it ever thus determined exactly what these
supernumerary books were, though several local synods made lists of
them.
The Latin Church received its Bible from the Greeks, and the Latin
translations of the Old Testament made from the Greek included, as a
matter of course, the books which the church accepted and the
synagogue rejected. About the beginning of the fifth century, Jerome
undertook a new Latin translation direct from the Hebrew. He lived for
many years at Bethlehem, and had learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers,
whose assistance he employed also in the work of translation. In some
of the prefaces to this translation (which was published in parts),
and in other places in his writings, Jerome gives a catalogue of the
books of the Hebrew Bible, corresponding to the contents of our
English Old Testament, and expressly excludes all others from the
class of canonical Scriptures: "Whatever is not included in this list
is to be classed as apocrypha. Therefore Wisdom (commonly entitled 'of
Solomon'), and the Book of Jesus son of Sirach, and Judith and Tobit
... are not in the canon." The word "apocrypha," literally "secret, or
esoteric, writings," had been used generally for the books of
heretical sects, or suspected of being such, and, more broadly, of
writings which the church repudiated as not only uninspired but
harmful, the reading of which it often forbade. It was, therefore, a
very radical word that Jerome uttered when he applied this name to
books which the church had always regarded as godly and edifying.
Jerome himself did not consistently maintain the position which would
make the Jewish Bible the canon of the Christian church. At the
request of certain bishops he translated Judith and Tobit, noting in
the prefaces that the Jews exclude these books from the canon and put
them among the apocrypha, but significantly adding in the one case
that he thinks it better to oppose the judgment of the Pharisees and
obey the commands of the bishops, in the other pleading not only the
demand of a bishop but the fact that the Nicene Council had included
Judith among the Sacred Books.[1] In another preface he describes
Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon as books which the church
reads "for the edification of the people, not for proving the
doctrines of the church"--a definition which accords with the attitude
of many of the Greek Fathers. Jerome thus halts between two opinions:
in relegating to the apocrypha everything that is not in the Hebrew
Bible he speaks as a critic; in recognizing the books found in the
Christian Old Testament, but not in the Hebrew, as useful and
edifying, though of inferior authority for doctrinal purposes, he,
like Origen, takes the ground of the practical churchman. The
mediating position is more clearly defined by Rufinus, who, after
giving a catalogue of the books of the Hebrew Bible, adds: "There are
other books, which older authors called not 'canonical' but
'ecclesiastical,' such as the Wisdom of Solomon, and the so-called
Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, named by the Latins Ecclesiasticus; to
the same class belong Tobit, Judith and the Books of the Maccabees."
[1] The Nicene Council made no formal deliverance on the subject of
the canon, and upon what Jerome's appeal to its authority rests is
unknown.
The great influence of Augustine was thrown wholly on the side of
ecclesiastical tradition; he even remonstrated with Jerome for
translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew and thus disturbing the
minds of the faithful, instead of revising the Old Latin version after
the Greek. In his treatise on Christian Doctrine (ii. 8; written in
A.D. 397) he includes among the canonical books of the Old Testament,
Judith, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of
Solomon; African provincial synods at Hippo (A.D. 393) and Carthage
(A.D. 397) pronounced themselves in the same sense.
The Syriac-speaking churches, whose Old Testament was translated from
the Hebrew, originally recognized those books only which were found in
the Jewish Bible; it appears, indeed, that the earliest Syriac version
did not extend to Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, but did include
Sirach. Under the influence of the Greek Church, those branches of the
Syrian Church which remained in communion with it gradually added to
their Bible translations of the other books from the Greek; but the
Nestorians, in whose schools Biblical criticism moved more freely than
in the Catholic Church, continued to reject them, or to accord them,
together with several of the books commonly reckoned canonical
(Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Job,
Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom), only qualified authority.
Throughout the Middle Ages learned authors repeated the conflicting
utterances of the Fathers concerning the canon, without being
disturbed by their inconsistency; in practice, the Old Testament
comprised all the books that were usually found in copies of the Greek
or Latin Bible, without regard to the fine distinctions of "canonical"
and "ecclesiastical." The immemorial usage of the church had more
weight than the opinions of scholars. With this concurred the fact
that from the fourth century on the Bible was copied in collective
codices, on folded sheets of parchment or vellum like our books, not
in separate rolls, and thus the canon of the Old Testament became, not
a mere list of Sacred Books, but a physical unity, in which the books
of the Jewish Bible were intermingled with those which the Jews did
not accept.
The question assumed a new significance at the Reformation. In
rejecting the authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the
prescriptive usage of the church and making the Scriptures the only
rule of faith and practice, the Reformers were under the necessity of
deciding what books were inspired Scripture, containing the Word of
God revealed to men, clothed with divine authority, demanding
unqualified faith, and a means of grace to believers. Obviously they
could not logically acknowledge books whose place in the Bible had no
other warrant than that the church had accepted them from very early
times; nothing short of the authority of the New Testament itself
would suffice, and they found in the New Testament no quotations from
these books. To the Jews, St. Paul said, were committed the oracles of
God; it was the Jewish Scriptures to which Jesus and the Apostles
appealed.
Naturally, therefore, Luther reverted to the position of Jerome: the
books found in the Hebrew Bible, and those only, were the Scriptures
of the Old Testament; whatever was more than these was to be reckoned
among the apocrypha. In the first complete printed edition of his
translation (1534), these books (Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, Sirach,
Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel,
the Prayer of Manasseh) stand between the Old Testament and the New,
with the title (after Jerome) "_Apocrypha_; that is, books that are
not equally esteemed with the Holy Scripture, but nevertheless are
profitable and good to read." The other Protestant versions, on the
Continent and in England, followed this example.
The attitude of Luther toward the Old Testament Apocrypha was
maintained by the Lutheran Churches, whose Confessions do not,
however, attempt a more exact definition of the value and authority of
the Apocrypha. The earlier Reformed (Calvinistic) Confessions take
substantially the same ground: the Ecclesiastical Books, or Apocrypha,
are useful, especially for moral instruction, but they have not the
same authority as the canonical books, and doctrines may not be
deduced from them alone. The Articles of the Church of England (1563;
English translation, 1571) agree on this point with the other Reformed
Confessions: after enumerating the canonical books "of whose authority
there was never any doubt in the Church," the Sixth Article continues:
"And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for
example of life, and instruction of manners; but yet it doth not apply
them to establish any doctrine." A list of such books follows,
comprising those commonly printed in the English Bible under the title
Apocrypha.
A more radical position was represented by the Synod of Dort (1618)
and by the Westminster Assembly (1643). The latter declares: "The
books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are
no part of the canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority
in the church of God, nor to be otherwise approved, or made use of,
than other human writings."
In opposition to the Protestant limitation of the canon of the Old
Testament to the books of the Hebrew Bible, the Roman Church defined
its attitude more sharply. In the Fourth Session of the Council of
Trent (1546) it framed a "Decree concerning the Canonical Scripture,"
in which the books set apart by the Protestants as Apocrypha are
included with the rest. The complete contents of the Old Testament in
the Catholic Bible as thus defined are as follows: The Five Books of
Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy;
Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four Books of Kings [Samuel, Kings], two Books
of Chronicles, 1 and 2 Esdras [Ezra, Nehemiah], Tobit, Judith, Esther,
Job, the Psalter of David, containing one hundred and fifty Psalms,
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah,
Jeremiah with Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, the Twelve Minor Prophets, two
Books of Maccabees, namely, the First and Second.... "If any man does
not accept as sacred and canonical these books, entire, with all their
parts, as they have customarily been read in the Catholic Church and
are contained in the ancient common Latin edition ... let him be
anathema!"
This decree not only affirms that all the books in question are Holy
and Canonical Scripture, but seems to put them all in one class, and
deliberately to exclude the ancient distinction between the books of
the Jewish Bible and the Ecclesiastical Books. Many of the Fathers
had, however, made such a distinction, and Catholic scholars, even
after Trent, thought it permissible to class the Ecclesiastical Books
(which Protestants call the Apocrypha) as "deuterocanonic," meaning
not thereby to imply that they are inferior in authority or
infallibility or dignity--for both classes owe their excellence to the
same Holy Spirit--but that they had attained recognition in the church
at a later time than the others. Individuals have sometimes gone
farther, and acknowledged a difference in authority: the
deuterocanonic books are useful for edification, but not for the proof
of doctrines--a position substantially the same as that of the Greek
Fathers and of moderate Protestants; but this is plainly against the
sense of the decree of Trent.