and Hebrew words. One of them acted as precentor, and the others responded with a dreadful noise. When the new comer later conversed with them, he learned that these Israelites knew nothing of the destruction, nay, nothing of the existence of the second temple, having immigrated into these distant regions before the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile.

The editor of the Neuesten Post further states that he has received simultaneously with a letter, bearing date November 21, of last year, also the photograph of the said chief rabbi, and that he has been promised an extensive and detailed account. We request our contemporary to publish the name of his correspondent, that accurate enquiries might be made into his veracity.-Israelit.

The Samaritan Pentateuch.-We copy the following extract from a letter addressed from Jerusalem to the editor of the Occident:-"I send you also for friendship's sake, a few leaves of our literary labours; namely, I made a journey to the ancient Sichem in the spring of 1860, in the company of a German, Professor Levisohn, belonging to the house of Israel, in the Russian service, in order to see the old Sepher Torah, which was written by Abishua, the great grandson of Aaron. We were two weeks in the house of the Samaritan priest, Amram, who is with his congregation the custodian of this sacred book, which was twice unrolled before our eyes. The name of the holy scribe, together with the indication of the place and time of its production, is contained in a kind of acrostic which is found in the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy) commencing with the Decalogue, and extends through two or three 'Amudim' from top to bottom. The writing is small, so that there are on an average in every Amud' seventy-two lines, and the whole number of Amudim' is about one hundred and ten. The material is what we call parchment, although much older than this name. In many places it is torn, sewed together, patched, etc., similar to the people described in the eighteenth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, and its high antiquity is clearly indicated in the pages and the writing. The appearance is black and dark, and the blackness of the letters runs in many places into the colour of the material, or rather has almost disappeared. Upon the whole, about the half is yet legible. I need not tell you that the language is Hebrew, and the writing the ancient Hebrew characters. But there are, when compared with our received text, very many and important variations which I have all copied. The leaves which I transmit you with this, are a facsimile copied by myself, from a very ancient MS., for there exists many (say about one hundred) copies of the above named 'Sepher Torah;" this itself is exhibited, not unrolled, only a few times every year, while two others are used for public reading on Sabbath, etc. There are altogether in Sichem three of these scrolls, to wit, the original of Abishua and two more recent ones; there are found, however, as said already, about one hundred copies in the form used before the invention of the art of printing."

THE

JOURNAL

OF

SACRED LITERATURE

AND

BIBLICAL RECORD.

wwwww.

No. VI.-JULY, 1863.

CANON STANLEY'S LECTURES ON THE JEWISH CHURCH." MANY histories of the Jews have been written from the days of Josephus to those of Dean Milman and Dr. Ewald, and we could imagine a superficial observer asking what need we have of another. To such a question we should simply have to answer that it does not apply to the work of Canon Stanley, which is as he takes care to say, not a history, but lectures upon a history. It is true that the work follows a chronological order, and involves the statement of many historic facts, but it is rather a book from which a history may be inferred, than a history. Chapters in the national life of the Jews doubtless form the text of the commentary here given to us, but these chapters are only given us in their broad outlines and some noticeable features. Whether the record has been always accurately interpreted, or its lessons truly represented, is the proper task of the candid critic, whose office is to subject to criticism the very criticisms of an author. Dr. Stanley wishes us to remember, not only that he does not write a consecutive history, and yet aims to present the main characters and events of the sacred narrative in a form as nearly historical as the facts of the case will admit, but also that his intention has been to make his

a Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. Part I. Abraham to Samuel. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. With Maps and Plans. 8vo, pp. 568. London: John Murray. 1863.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. III., NO. VI.

S

lectures strictly "ecclesiastical." It is the history of the Jewish Church, he says, of which his office invited him to speak. We are then to expect that special prominence will be given to the church life of the nation, its movements, its experiences, and its institutions. All this is very good, as an author has a right to limit and define his own plan, and we only name these points to shew what it is that Canon Stanley really professes to do or to undertake.

There are one or two other matters in the preface which should be noticed, as it seems to us, if only to shew what the author's avowed opinions thereupon actually are. He recognizes then the great importance of the historical element in the Jewish Scriptures, and he protests against the elimination of that element from the sacred narrative. We honour and applaud the recognition, distinct and unmistakeable, that the records contain so much true and important history, and the resolution to hold up that history as such, and as one of the great chapters in the world's annals. Some modern writers especially have rendered very valuable service in the same direction, and it is a sign of actual progress that it is so. The old allegorizing tendency still lingers in the popular mind, and a thousand pulpits are every Sunday vocal with those who "spiritualize," as they call it, the facts of Scripture history. This spiritualizing, or finding a double sense in every narrative of the Bible, is a very alluring and a very easy process, but it is fraught with mischief. We know that Esop's fables are not true, and we can enjoy the "moral" by which their lessons are summed up. We know that the parables of our blessed Lord are not records of actual occurrences, and we can profit by the lessons of wisdom which they indicate or embody. We equally know that the narratives of Scripture are historical, and we ought to stop there rather than treat them like myths and allegories. The Swedenborgian school, and many who repudiate it, seem to look on all sacred history as a panorama, in which every character and every occurrence has a hidden meaning known only to the initiated, or the enlightened. There is another school, and one perhaps more widely spread, which, without affirming the primarily typical character of the whole record, treats it as such. Others again make the "sound an echo to the sense," and, without any regard to the context, or to the primary meaning of a sentence, adapt it and apply it as they think proper. Others, again, treat the Old Testament narratives and characters as prophetical. All these, it seems to us, are in error and do harm, and we say as much of every man who, without the warrant of Holy Scripture, makes a record either typical or prophetical. Far be it from us

to condemn the use of common sense in reading sacred history; let historians and divines go down, if they can, to the hidden springs and causes of actions and occurrences; let them expound the lessons which every Scripture record teaches; let analogies and parallels be pointed out; and let everything else be done which can fairly be done for purposes of doctrine and instruction in righteousness; but let it never be forgotten that the Bible history is really a history. Sober-minded commentators may find moral and spiritual lessons in every page of Scripture, without doing violence to common sense. They who from one point of view interpret the Bible as they would any other book, may from another point of view be compelled to treat it as alone in literature, like the famed Phoenix among birds. We thoroughly sympathize with the language of Dr. Stanley when he says, "That earliest of Christian heresies-Docetism, or 'phantom worship'-the reluctance to recognize in sacred subjects their identity with our own flesh and blood, has at different periods of the Christian Church affected the view entertained of the whole Bible. The same tendency which led Philo and Origen, Augustine and Gregory the Great to see in the plainest statements of the Jewish history a series of mystical allegories, in our own time has as completely closed its real contents to a large part both of religious and irreligious readers, as if it had been a collection of fables. Many who would be scandalized at ignorance of the battles of Salamis or Camnæ, know and care nothing for the battles of Beth-horon and Megiddo." There are few, we trust, remaining among us, to whom the two following sentences are applicable: "To search the Jewish records, as we would search those of other nations, is regarded as dangerous. Even to speak of any portion of the Bible as 'a history,' has been described, even by able and pious men, as an outrage upon religion." It is but fair to Dr. Stanley to quote one other sentence before we proceed. "In protesting against this elimination of the historical element from the sacred narrative, I shall not be understood as wishing to efface the distinction which good taste, no less than reverence, will always endeavour to preserve between the Jewish and other histories." He observes, too, that he has endeavoured to trace the connexion between the Old Testament and the New, the Jewish and the Christian Church, the identity of purpose-the constant gravitation towards the greatest of all events-which, under any hypothesis, must furnish the main interest of the history of Israel.

There is yet another avowal contained in the preface, to which attention should be turned, as it is frequently illustrated in the course of the book. "Discussions of chronology, statistics,

and physical science; of the critical state of the different texts, and the authorship of the different portions of the narrative; of the precise limits to be drawn between natural and supernatural, providential and miraculous, unless in passages where the existing documents and the existing localities force the consideration upon us, I have usually left unnoticed. The only exception has been in favour of illustrations from geography." With regard to the rule and its observance we may say a word, and another with regard to the exception. The reasons for the rule are two, --a wish not to introduce distinctions which to the sacred writers were alien and unknown; and because they were superfluous and inappropriate within the limits of the plan laid down for the work. We doubt whether these reasons are of equal weight. Dr. Stanley more than rehearses, he comments upon and illustrates the sacred record, and is he just either to himself or to his readers, when he declines critically to investigate the perplexities and difficulties which he meets with? To us it seems that he has often placed himself in a false position by his rule; it has either harassed his movements, or it has been ill observed. It has harassed his movements when he has been conscious of critical difficulties, and has yet felt that he ought not to discuss them because his plan forbade it. The consequence has been, that he has had to ignore some highly interesting questions, or to get beyond them as best he might. Then the rule has been ill observed, because some things have been taken for granted when elucidation would have enabled the author at least to state his reasons for his conclusions. hardly know what to say in reference to the frequent passages in which a difficulty is started, and passed over, with the simple intimation that there is such a difficulty. One would have supposed that the Regius Professor of History would have eagerly embraced every such opportunity in his prelections before a body of young men, mostly candidates for holy orders, to tell them more, to tell them his own conclusions, and the reasons for those conclusions. Among the cases which occur, we remember that of the exodus. The lecturer says, "It is difficult to conceive the migration of a whole nation under such circumstances." He observes that Laborde, "with every desire of maintaining the letter of the narrative," reduces the numbers from six hundred thousand to six hundred armed men; while Ewald defends the correctness of the original numbers, illustrating the event by the sudden retreat of four hundred thousand Tartars, under cover of a single night, from the confines of Russia to their native deserts, as late as the close of the last century. Then comes what we must own appears to us a very unfortunate and

We