We will trace this order of historical composition in three stages. i. The Historical writing in this period would naturally begin with the events that were most vivid and stirring in the people's mind, and with the great personalities Events Near- through whom the nation had reached distincest at Hand tion. These events would belong to the times of Solomon and David and Saul, the three great leaders of the united kingdom. In all the stories relating to these, and especially in those relating to David, there is a zest and freshness of treatment, an intimacy of human feeling, a sense of the moving elements of personality, which betoken that the history was written while the memory of these great men was still an inspiring and molding power in the nation. We have seen how this personal influence and inwardness are reflected in the Davidic Psalms;1 in the annals that make up a large part of I Samuel and all of 2 Samuel it is still more so. The substance of the account is too near its events to have become staled with age or literary formalism. It is in connection with the reign of David that the Chronicler, who in a later century wrote an ecclesiastical history of Judah, begins to name the persons who wrote the annals from which he derived his facts. As authorities for this period (1 Chron. xxix, 29) he names Samuel the seer, Nathan the prophet, and Gad the seer. Samuel could not have contributed much to the biography of David, for he died while David was an outlaw fleeing from the fury of King Saul (1 Sam. xxv, 1); but for the life of Saul, and for the obscure period between the Judges and the Kings, Samuel might well have been a principal authority. It would seem, then, that these stories of the early and united kingdom drew least from floating tradition; nor did they, like the history of the reigns succeeding Solomon's, 1 See above, p. 82. base themselves on court and temple archives. Their source was personal reminiscence and interpretation, by men endowed with prophetic insight. For the annals of Solomon's reign there is a curious blending of historical styles, indicating, to my mind, the somewhat unpracticed historian. We have noted, on the one hand, the tone of childlike wonder in which the wisdom and wealth and splendor of Solomon are described;1 on the other, we note such a tendency to accumulate details and statistics of affairs of administration and building and trade as one sees on the inscribed monuments of the Assyrian and Chaldean monarchs. It is like a combination of earlier and later historical methods; when dependence on oral and folk tradition is passing into dependence on documentary sources, and when the ascendancy of the personal is passing. Heroes Going back along the stream of time, the next histories to be compiled would be the stories of the Judges, and of the times of hardship and heroism during which 2. The Ages of the Tribal the tribes were gaining a foothold in the land, becoming united in sentiment and worship, and advancing from anarchy to a degree of comity and tribal organization. In these histories the compilers would avail themselves of the folk tales that had gathered round the tribal heroes of old, and of legends that had accumulated at the local sanctuaries and sacred places. It was in these histories too, as we have seen, that fragments of ancient song and parable were incorporated as part of the historian's material. They go back to the times of the deliverance from Egypt; though in the earlier periods, as comprised in the books of Exodus and Numbers, the folk element shades off into a somewhat more legendary strain, of which we shall have later occasion to speak. The personal character portrayed in these histories of the Judges is such as is natural to a rude state of society. 1 See above, p. 79. It is character actuated by simple motives and passions; and in religion cherishing very primitive notions of service and worship. No attempt is made to set up these heroes as models, or to extenuate their faults. Most of the stories come from the central and northern tribes, who in their pioneer state were in close contact with the more settled and prosperous Canaanites. Their chief danger lay in the tendency to absorb heathen customs, and to lose the severer moral tone of the service of Jehovah. Their hope of survival and distinction as a race lay in their maintaining their covenant with Jehovah and being true to their heritage of ideas. All this is faithfully portrayed in the Book of Judges, the memorial of the rugged times before there was a king in Israel, when, as the account says, "every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judg. xvii, 6; xxi, 25). The staple of these stories of the Judges consists of tribal and family traditions, such stories as would be preserved for their heroic interest. Being of the type of folk tale, they retain to a high degree the coloring of contemporary accounts; though to the oral transmission a process of pruning and polishing supervened until they reached a stereotyped form suitable to be carried in memory. When the historians of our age found them, they added little if any literary shaping; they merely arranged them according to their ideas of chronology, and supplied a framework of causes and motives. This framework is a naïve and primitive formula of historic philosophy: given in the simple recurring statement that the Israelites did evil in the sight of Jehovah and were oppressed; and that when they cried to him he raised up champions who delivered them. The early chapters (i-iii) are predominantly of this epitome type. Then, for the body of the book, follow stories of the greater champions, Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, told not so much with reference to strict time succession as with reference to different sections and tribes. Hence it is difficult to construct from them a continuous history. The last four chapters are a kind of appendix giving two episodes of the days of anarchy. One relates the establishment of a sanctuary at Dan in the extreme north of Israel (xvii, xviii). The other gives the story of a certain outrage and feud which resulted in almost the entire extinction of the tribe of Benjamin, and the device, similar to the Roman rape of the Sabines, by which they were enabled to reinstate themselves (xix-xxi). The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, lie before us as a virtually continuous story; giving an account of the creation of the world and of man, of the origin and distribution of the various races of men; then, 3. Before the beginning with Abraham, of the Hebrew race down to the death of Moses. To this modern scholars add as a kind of appendix the Book of Joshua, calling the whole the Hexateuch this, however, for purposes rather of documentary criticism than of literature. The story of these primitive times, legendary passing gradually into historic, is told with the skill and moving interest of a people with a native genius for narrative, but also with the didactic feeling of a people to whom religion is the chief concern of life. It is in this way that the coloring and motivation of this primeval history differs from the heroic tales of the Judges and the personal portrayal of the Kings. It has a strain of deeper and more developed religious values; as if the stories were told not so much to give an account of primeval customs and family origins as to make an interpretation of the spiritual development of man. Accordingly there is no book of the Bible that has a richer religious and philosophical import even for modern thinking; though of course this is wrapped in a highly symbolic form. This feature of it becomes more marked as we get back toward the beginning of things: the stories of Eden, and Cain and Abel, and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, are like an exposition by narrative of the native spirit of manhood. The stories of the Hebrew patriarchs, succeeding these, are perfectly individualized portrayals, and yet there is much of the type about them, as if they were intended to give the various attributes of the composite character as it develops from the family and religious unit in Abraham.1 Into the Pentateuch story as it goes along is incorporated much of a statistical nature. For the history of the patriarchal times this deals with matters of family and race, in the form of genealogies and names connected with race distribution; in the Exodus and wilderness history, with the organization of the tribes, details of the tabernacle, itineraries, and the like. When the story comes to the giving of the law by Moses, not only is the account of it narrated, but the whole code of laws is appended, in several different collections, giving the impression of different strata of legislative development. Besides these collections, in the fifth book (Deuteronomy) much of the law is repeated in the form of public discourses purporting to have been given to the people by Moses just before his death. II Two Main Lines of Source Story. It was long held that this Pentateuchal history was written by Moses, and that it Iwas the oldest literature in the Bible. As soon as a more critical judgment is applied, however, it is seen that the history could have assumed its present form and maturity of interpretation only after Israel had reached a much more advanced condition of culture and civilization than they could have had in the primitive nomadic stage of Moses' 1 See "The Genius of a Race," pp. 31 ff. above. |