_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as
necessarily true._
If the historians were simply the amanuenses of the Infinite Spirit, then
of course they could not have erred in anything they recorded. If they
were ordinary writers, trying to tell the story of their peoples' growth;
searching court archives, state annals, old parchments of forgotten
writers, consulting the traditions of town and village, using their
material in the best way their abilities enabled them to do; using all to
teach virtue and religion, for which alone they were specially qualified
of God; then all questions of historical accuracy are beside the mark.
Nothing in their inspiration guarantees their historical accuracy; their
philological learning in using ancient poetic language, or their critical
judgment in detecting exaggerations. Are we to wait anxiously upon the
latest Assyrian tablets or the freshest Egyptian mummy to confirm our
faith that God has spoken to the spirit of man? Are we to quake in our
shoes when a few ciphers are cut off from the roll of Israel's impossible
armies? If much that we read as literal history turns out legend and myth,
are we to find a painful alternative between a blind credulity and as
blind a skepticism? We follow this same re-reading of Roman and Grecian
story untroubled, and see the heroes of our childhood turn into races and
sun-myths without calling the Muse of History a fraud.
Has it been such comfort to us to read the doings of Samson as actual
history, slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, tying
fire-brands to the tails of three hundred foxes, etc., that we should
resent the translation of this impossible hero into the Semitic Hercules,
a solar myth? Or if, perchance, the historian accepted from remote
antiquity the accounts of great deeds and striking events, as they were
told at the camp fires of the Hebrew nomads, or in the merry makings of
the Palestinian villages, with an ever growing nimbus of the marvelous
gathering around them; and if thus impossible marvels are reported to us
soberly, are we to be compelled to accept them uncritically or reject the
Bible altogether? The Bible itself points us to the interpretation of such
legends We have some histories written by the actors in the scenes
narrated. Nehemiah and Ezra, leaders in the most important movement of
Hebrew history after the migration led by Moses, left accounts of their
work from their own pens. In such a crucial epoch as that of the
restoration of the Jews to their native land, after the dispersion in
Babylonia, we might expect to find miraculous interpositions on behalf of
the chosen people, if they are to be found anywhere. But no tale of
miracle adorns their simple pages. No other old Testament history, written
by the actors in its scenes, tells of miracles. Such stories are found in
the traditions written down long after the events narrated, by men who
knew nothing of the facts at first hand. Exceptions to this rule occur
alone in such startling events as the mysterious calamity that befell
Sennacherib; which strongly impressed the imagination of the people and
naturally gave rise to exaggerations that we can no longer resolve.
Perhaps Elisha's iron axe head did swim upon the water. I am prepared to
believe almost anything after our spiritualistic mediums, and their
exposers. Whether it did or did not concerns me no whit. I shrug my
shoulders and read on. I cannot make out the historical fact which was at
the basis of the Red Sea deliverance; nor do I care much to make out this
or any other Old Testament miracle. If I felt obliged to accept literally
these stories, or to lose my faith in the voice of God which speaks
through the men of the Bible I should care greatly. In the true view of
the Bible I am delivered from solicitude about these traditions, and am
under no constraint of credulity. Those who can believe the story of
Elisha and the bears, or of Elijah's ascension into heaven, may; those who
cannot, need not; and both alike should reverently read their Bibles, not
for these tales of wonder, but for the still small voice of the eternal
spirit sounding through holy lives and holier aspirations, until He came
whose life was the Word of God, the Wonderful.[28]