THE OLD TESTAMENT AS A NATIONAL LITERATURE
For the religious apprehension of Jews and Christians the Old
Testament is a body of Sacred Scriptures, containing the Word of God
as revealed to the chosen people. The revelation was made "at sundry
times and in divers manners" through many centuries, that is to say,
it has a historical character, an adaptation to the needs or
accommodation to the capacities of men, and, from the Christian point
of view, makes a progressive disclosure of the divine purpose and plan
of salvation. To understand this economy of revelation, or this
pedagogic of religion, it is necessary to distinguish the times, and
to determine the nature, authorship, and age of the several books or
parts of books. The critical questions which lie at the threshold of
every historical inquiry arise, therefore, in the study of the Old
Testament, and much learning and acumen have been expended upon them,
especially in modern times, by scholars of all shades of theological
opinion. That there should be wide divergence in their conclusions on
many points is not surprising, in view of the difficulty of many of
the questions and the insufficiency of the data available for a
solution; the same thing is true in other ancient literatures.
A more radical difference exists in the Old Testament, however,
because, for many scholars, Catholic and Protestant, the deliverances
of the church, or the consent of tradition, or the testimony of the
New Testament, or the concurrence of all these, outweighs, in such a
matter as the unity and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the
internal evidence of the books themselves, and makes it their task to
show that the evidence which seems to contradict this attribution is,
when properly interpreted, compatible with it; while others hold that
no external authority and no theory of inspiration can be allowed to
countervail the cumulative weight of internal evidence.
Apart from its religious value and authority for the synagogue and the
church, the Old Testament contains the remains of a national
literature which richly rewards study for its own sake. While its
masterpieces may be read with pleasure and profit without regard to
the age and circumstances in which they were written, they will be
better appreciated as well as better understood in the light of their
own times and in their place in the literature as a whole. In this
literature are also the sources for the political history of the
Hebrew people and for the history of its civilization and religion.
The critical ordering and appraisal of these sources is fundamental
to any solid historical construction and, indeed, to any historical
understanding of the Old Testament.
In the present volume the results of this critical inquiry are
concisely set forth, with primary reference to the history of the
literature and the development of religion, rather than to the sources
for the political history, a complete investigation of which would
require a somewhat different method. The questions are approached in
the same way in which we should deal with similar questions in any
other literature; critical problems, whether in sacred texts or
profane, can be solved only by the application of the established
methods of historical criticism.
All that survives of Hebrew literature prior to the age of Alexander
is preserved in the Jewish Bible. It is not until the beginning of the
third century B.C. that we come upon books written by Jews in Hebrew
or in Greek which are not included in the canon. It is, doubtless,
only a small part of a rich and varied literature that has thus been
rescued across the centuries; much the larger part of what was written
in the days of the national kingdoms, for example, must have perished
in the catastrophes which befell Israel in the eighth century and
Judah in the beginning of the sixth. What was saved was preserved for
its intrinsic religious value or its association with great names of
religious leaders and teachers, not out of a merely literary or
patriotic interest. Nor were these losses confined to the older
literature. Of the history of Judah under the Persian kings, for
example, there must once have been completer records than the dubious
scraps we have in Ezra. Of secular poetry, which there is every reason
to think flourished no less than hymnody, we should have had no
specimens, had not an anthology of love songs somehow got the name of
Solomon, and by a mystical interpretation been converted to religion.
The remains of this literature are scattered unequally over a period
of a thousand years or more. The youngest writings in the canon date
from the second century B.C. (Daniel, Maccabean Psalms), being later
than Sirach, and contemporary with some of the visions of Enoch. All
that is preserved of the earliest writings has been transmitted to us
by later authors, who incorporated in their works longer or shorter
passages extracted from their predecessors.
The books of the Old Testament differ widely in matter and
form--history and story; legislation, civil and ritual, moral and
ceremonial; prophecy and apocalypse; lyric, didactic, and dramatic
poetry. The literary quality of the best in all these kinds is very
high. The Song of Deborah (Judg. 5), notwithstanding the imperfect
state of the text, is one of the greatest of triumphal odes; parts of
Job attain the height of the sublime; some of the Psalms are worthy of
a foremost place among religious lyrics; many oracles of the prophets
are as noteworthy for the perfection of the expression as for the
elevation of the thought; the laws are often formulated with admirable
precision; in the art of narration the older historians are
unsurpassed in ancient literature. These qualities appear even more
conspicuous in comparison with the remains of Egyptian or of
Babylonian and Assyrian writings. It is only among the Greeks that we
find anything to match the finest productions of the Hebrew genius. It
need hardly be said that the Old Testament is not all on this high
level of excellence--what literature is? But, taken as a whole, the
level is surprisingly high, and even in the decadence classical models
are sometimes imitated with no small degree of success.