Chapter IV · RELATIVE FREETHOUGHT IN ISRAEL

§ 1

As to the original similarity of Hebraic and other Canaanite religions cp. E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. §§ 309–11 (i, 372–76); Kuenen, i, 223; Wellhausen, Israel, p. 440; Winckler, Gesch. Israels, passim; Réville, Prolég. de l’hist. des relig. 1881, p. 85. “Before being monotheistic, Israel was simply monolatrous, and even that only in its religious élite” (Réville). “Their [the Canaanites’] worship was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had a higher organization” (Menzies, Hist. of Rel. p. 179; cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 85–89). On the side of the traditional view, Mr. Lang, while sharply challenging most of the propositions of the higher critics, affirms that “we know that Israel had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that, at an early age, the conception was contaminated and anthropomorphized; and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption, while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction” (Making of Religion, p. 295). If “we know” this, the discussion is at an end. But Mr. Lang’s sole documentary basis for the assertion is just the fabricated record, reluctantly abandoned by theological scholars as such. When this is challenged, Mr. Lang falls back on the position that such low races as the Australians and Fuegians have a “moral Supreme Being,” and that therefore Israel “must” have had one (p. 309). It will be found, however, that the ethic of these races is perfectly primitive, on Mr. Lang’s own showing, and that his estimate is a misinterpretation. As to their Supreme Beings, it might suffice to compare Mr. Lang’s Making of Religion, chs. ix, xii, with his earlier Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 168, 335; ii, 6, etc.; but, as we have seen (above, p. 93), the Supreme Being of the Australians eludes the closest search in a number of tribes; and the “moral” factor is equally intangible. Mr. Lang in his later reasoning has merely added the ambiguous and misleading epithet “Supreme,” stressing it indefinitely, to the ordinary God-idea of the lower races. (Cp. Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, ed. 1882, p. 155; and K. O. Müller, Introd. to Sci. Mythol. Eng. tr. p. 184.)

There being thus no highly imagined “moral Eternal” in the religion of primitive man, the Hebrews were originally in the ordinary position. Their early practice of human sacrifice is implied in the legend of Abraham and Isaac, and in the story of Jephthah. (Cp. Micah vi, 7, and Kuenen on the passage, i, 237.) In their reputed earliest prophetic books we find them addicted to divination (Hosea iv, 12; Micah v, 12. Cp. the prohibition in Lev. xx, 6; also 2 Kings xxiii, 24, and Isa. iii, 2; as to the use of the ephod, teraphim, and urim and thummim, see Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, Eng. tr. i, 97–100) and to polytheism. (Amos v, 26, viii, 14; Hosea i, 13, 17, etc. Cp. Jud. viii, 27; 1 Sam. vii, 3.) These things Mr. Lang seems to admit (p. 309, note), despite his previous claim; but he builds (p. 332) on the fact that the Hebrews showed little concern about a future state—that “early Israel, having, so far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal”—whereas later Greeks and Romans, like Egyptians, were much concerned about life after death. Mr. Lang’s own general theory would really require that all peoples at a certain stage should act like the Israelites; but he suspends it in the interest of the orthodox view as to the early Hebrews. At the same time he omits to explain why the Hebrews failed to adopt the future-state creed when they were “contaminated”—a proposition hardly reconcilable, on any view, with the sentence just quoted. The solution, however, is simple. Israel was not at all “singular” in the matter. The early (Homeric) Greeks and Romans (cp. as to Hades the Iliad, passim; Odyssey, bk. xi, passim; Tiele, Outlines, p. 209, as to the myth of Persephone; and Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, 1865, pp. 452–55, as to the early Romans), like the early Vedic Aryans (Tiele, Outlines, p. 117; Müller, Anthropol. Relig. p. 269), and the early Babylonians and Assyrians (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 181–82; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 364) took little thought of a future state.

“Homer knows no influence of the Psyche on the realm of the visible, and also no cult implying it.... A later poet, who made the last addition to the Odyssey, first introduced Hermes the ‘leader of souls’ [perhaps taken from a popular belief in some part of Hellas].... Underneath, in the gloomy shades, the souls waver, unconscious or at the best in a glimmering half-consciousness, endowed with faint voices, feeble, indifferent.... To speak, as do many old and recent scholars, of the ‘immortal life’ of such souls, is erroneous. They live rather as the spectre of the living in a mirror.... If the Psyche outlives her visible mate (the body), she is powerless without him.... Thus is the Homeric world free from ghosts (for after the burning of the body the Psyche appears no more even in dream).... The living has peace from the dead.... No dæmonic power is at work apart from or against the Gods; and the night gives to the disembodied spirits no freedom” (Rohde, Psyche, 4te Aufl. 1907, pp. 9–11).

This minimization of the normal primitive belief in spirits is one of the reasons for seeing in the Homeric poems the outcome of a period of loosened belief. It is not to be supposed that the pre-Homeric Greeks, like the easterns with whom the Greeks met in Ionia, had not the usual ghost-lore of savages and barbarians; and it may be that for all the early civilizations under notice the explanation is that primitive ghost-cults were abandoned by migrating and conquering races, who rejected the ghost-cults of the races whom they conquered, though they ostensibly accepted their Gods. In any case they made little religious account of a future state for themselves.

This attitude has again been erroneously regarded (e.g., Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 35) as peculiar to the Greeks. Mr. Lang’s assumption may, in fact, be overthrown by the single case of the Phoenicians, who showed no more concern about a future life than did the Hebrews (see Canon Rawlinson’s History of Phoenicia, 1889, pp. 351–52), but who are not pretended to have given themselves up much to “developing, undisturbed, the belief in a righteous Eternal.” The truth seems to be that in all the early progressive and combative civilizations the main concern was as to the continuance of this life. On that head the Hebrews were as solicitous as any (cp. Kuenen, i, 65); and they habitually practised divination on that score. Further, they attached the very highest importance to the continuance of the individual in his offspring. The idea of a future state is first found highly developed in the long-lived cults of the long-civilized but unprogressive Egyptians; and the Babylonians were developing in the same direction. Yet the Hebrews took it up (see the evidence in Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. ii, p. 179) just when, according to Mr. Lang, their cult was “rescued, in a great degree, from corruption”; and, generally speaking, it was in the stage of maximum monotheism that they reached the maximum of irrationality. For the rest, belief in “immortality” is found highly developed in a sociologically “degenerate” and unprogressive people such as the Tasmanians (Müller, Anthrop. Rel. p. 433), who are yet primitively pure on Mr. Lang’s hypothesis; and is normal among negroes and Australian blackfellows.

As to David, compare 1 Sam. xvi, 18, with xvii, 33, 42. Daoud (= Dodo = Dumzi = Tammuz = Adonis) was a Semitic deity (Sayce, Hib. Lec. pp. 52–57, and art. “The Names of the First Three Kings of Israel,” in Modern Review, Jan. 1884), whom David resembles as an inventor of the lyre (Amos, vi, 5; cp. Hitzig, Die Psalmen, 2 Theil, 1836, p. 3). But Saul and Solomon also were God-names (Sayce, as cited), as was Samuel (id. pp. 54, 181; cp. Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr. p. 120); and when we note these data, and further the plain fact that Samson is a solar myth, being a personage Evemerized from Samas, the Sun-God, we are prepared to find further traces of Evemeristic redaction in the Hebrew books. To say nothing of other figures in the Book of Judges, we find that Jacob and Joseph were old Canaanitish deities (Sayce, Lectures, p. 51; Records of the Past, New Series, v, 48; Hugo Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 57–77); and that Moses, as might be expected, was a name for more than one Semitic God (Sayce, pp. 46–47), and in particular stood for a Sun-God. Abraham and Isaac in turn appear to be ancient deities (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 374, § 309; Winckler, Gesch. Israels, ii, 20–49). Miriam was probably in similar case (cp. Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 165–66). On an analysis of the Joshua myth as redacted, further, we may surmise another reduction of an ancient cult to the form of history, perhaps obscuring the true original of the worship of Mary and Jesus.

It seems probable, finally, that such figures as Elijah, who ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, and Elisha, the “bald head” and miracle-worker, are similar constructions of personages out of Sun-God lore. In such material lies part of the refutation of the thesis of Renan (Hist, des langues sémit. 2e édit. pp. 7, 485) that the Semites were natural monotheists, devoid of mythology. [Renan is followed in whole or in part by Nöldeke, Sketches from Eastern Hist. Eng. tr. p. 6; Soury, Relig. of Israel, Eng. tr. pp. 2, 10; Spiegel, Erânische Alterthumskunde, i, 389; also Roscher, Draper, Peschel, and Bluntschli, as cited by Goldziher, Mythology Among the Hebrews, Eng. tr. p. 4, note. On the other side compare Goldziher, ch. i; Steinthal’s Prometheus and Samson, Eng. tr. (with Goldziher), pp. 391, 428, etc., and his Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und den Römern, 1863, pp. 15–17; Kuenen, Rel. of Israel, i, 225; Smith, Rel. of the Semites, p. 49; Ewald, Hist. of Israel, Eng. tr. 4th ed. i, 38–40; Müller, Chips, i, 345 sq.; Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 402 sq.; Nat. Rel. p. 314.] Renan’s view seems to be generally connected with the assumption that life in a “desert” makes a race for ever unimaginative or unitary in its thought. The Arabian Nights might be supposed a sufficient proof to the contrary. The historic truth seems to be that, stage for stage, the ancient Semites were as mythological as any other race; but that (to say nothing of the Babylonians and Assyrians) the mythologies of the Hebrews and of the Arabs were alike suppressed as far as possible in their monotheistic stage. Compare Renan’s own admissions, pp. 27, 110, 475, and Hist. du peuple d’Israël, i, 49–50.

Even the epithet translated “Holy” (Kadosh) had originally no high moral significance. It simply meant “set apart,” “not common” (cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i, 43; Wellhausen, Israel, in Prolegomena vol. p. 499); and the special substantive (Kadesh and Kedeshah) was actually the name for the most degraded ministrants of both sexes in the licentious worship (see Deut. xxiii, 17, 18, and marg. Rev. Vers. Cp. 1 Kings xiv, 25; xv, 12; 2 Kings xxiii, 7). On the question of early Hebrew ethics it is somewhat misleading to cite Wellhausen (so Lang, Making of Religion, p. 304) as saying (Israel, p. 437) that religion inspired law and morals in Israel with exceptional purity. In the context Wellhausen has said that the starting-point of Israel was normal; and he writes in the Prolegomena (p. 302) that “good and evil in Hebrew mean primarily nothing more than salutary and hurtful: the application of the words to virtue and sin is a secondary one, these being regarded as serviceable or hurtful in their effects.”

§ 2

2. These utterances, so subversive of the priestly system, are yet held to have been preserved through the ages—through the Assyrian conquest, through the Babylonian Captivity, through the later period of priestly reconstruction—by the priestly system itself. In the state of things pictured under Ezra and Nehemiah, only the zealous adherents of the priestly law can at the outset have had any letters, any literature; it must have been they, then, who treasured the anti-priestly and anti-ritual writings of the prophets—unless, indeed, the latter were preserved by the Jews remaining at Babylon.

“His [Amos’s] language, with three or four insignificant exceptions, is pure, his style classical and refined. His literary power is shown in the regularity of structure which often characterizes his periods ... as well as in the ease with which he evidently writes.... Anything of the nature of roughness or rusticity is wholly absent from his writings” (Driver, Introd. to Lit. of Old Test. ch. vi, § 3, p. 297, ed. 1891). Isaiah, again, is in his own narrow field one of the most gifted and skilful writers of all antiquity. The difficulty is thus nearly as great as that of the proposition that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch is a thousand years older than that of the latest prophetical books, whose language is substantially the same. (Cp. Andrews Norton, The Pentateuch, ed. 1863, pp. 47–48; Renan, Hist. des langues sémit. 2e édit. p. 118.)

5. Even on the clerical side, among the less conservative critics, it is already conceded that there are late “insertions” in Amos. Some of these insertions are among, or analogous to, the very passages relied on by Kuenen to prove the lofty monotheism of Amos. If these passages, however, suggest a late date, no less do the others disparaging sacrifices. The same critics find interpolations and additions in Hosea. But they offer no proof of the antiquity of what they retain.

The principal passages in Amos given up as insertions by Dr. Cheyne, the most perspicacious of the English Hebraists, are: iv, 13; v, 8–9; ix, 5–6; and ix, 8–15. See his introduction to 1895 ed. of Prof. Robertson Smith’s Prophets of Israel, p. xv; and his art. on Amos in the Encyclopædia Biblica. Compare Kuenen, i, 46, 48. Dr. Cheyne regards as insertions in Hosea the following: i, 10–ii, 1; “and David their King” in iii, 5; viii, 14; and xiv, 1–9 (as cited, pp. xviii–xix). Obviously these admissions entail others.

The principle is in effect recognized by Dr. Cheyne when he writes: “Just as we infer from the reference to Cyrus in xliv, 28; xlv, 1, that the prophecy containing it proceeds from the age of the conqueror, so we may infer from the fraternal feeling towards Egypt and Assyria (Syria) in xix, 23–25, that the epilogue was written when hopes of the union and fusion of Israelitish and non-Israelitish elements first became natural for the Jews—i.e., in the early Jewish period” (Introd. to the Book of Isaiah, 1895, pp. 109–10).

7. From the scientific point of view, finally, the element of historical prediction in the prophets is one of the strongest grounds for presuming that they are in reality late documents. In regard to similar predictions in the gospels (Mt. xxiv, 15; Mk. xiii, 2; Lk. xxi, 20), rational criticism decides that they were written after the event. No other course can consistently be taken as to early Hebrew predictions of captivity and restoration; and the adherence of many Biblical scholars at this point to the traditional view is psychologically on a par with their former refusal to accept a rational estimate of the Pentateuchal narrative.

On some points, such as the flagrant pseudo-prediction in Isaiah xix, 18, all reasonable critics surrender. Thus “König sees rightly that xix, 18, can refer only to Jewish colonies in Egypt, and refrains from the arbitrary supposition that Isaiah was supernaturally informed of the future establishment of such colonies” (Cheyne, Introd. to Smith’s Prophets of Israel, p. xxxiii). But in other cases Dr. Cheyne’s own earlier positions appear to involve such an “arbitrary supposition,” as do Kuenen’s; and Smith explicitly posited it as to the prophets in general. And even as to Isaiah xix, 18, whereas Hitzig, as Havet later, rightly brings the date down to the actual historic time of the establishment of the temple at Heliopolis by Onias (Josephus, Ant. xiii, 3, 1; Wars, vii, 10, 2), about 160 B.C., Dr. Cheyne (Introd. to Isaiah, p. 108) compromises by dating it about 275 B.C.

The lateness of the bulk of the prophetical writings has been ably argued by Ernest Havet (Le Christianisme et ses Origines, vol. iv, 1878, ch. vi; and in the posthumous vol., La Modernité des Prophètes, 1891), who supports his case by many cogent reasonings. For instance, besides the argument as to Isaiah xix, 18, above noted: (1) The frequent prediction of the ruin of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Isa. ch. xxiii; Jer. xxv, 22; Ezek. xxvi, 7; ch. xxvii), false as to him (a fact which might be construed as a proof of the fallibility of the prophets and the candour of their transcribers), is to be understood in the light of other post-predictions as referring to the actual capture of the city by Alexander. (2) Hosea’s prediction of the fall of Judah as well as of Israel, and of their being united, places the passage after the Exile, and may even be held to bring it down to the period of the Asmoneans. So with many other details: the whole argument deserves careful study. M. Havet’s views were, of course, scouted by the conservative specialists, as their predecessors scouted the entire hypothesis of Graf, now taken in its essentials as the basis of sound Biblical criticism. M. Scherer somewhat unintelligently objected to him (Études sur la litt. contemp. vii, 268) that he was not a Hebraist. There is no question of philology involved. It was non-Hebraists who first pointed out the practical incredibility of the central Pentateuchal narrative, on the truth of which Kuenen himself long stood with other Hebraists. (Cp. Wellhausen, Proleg. pp. 39, 347; also his (4th) ed. of Bleek’s Einleit. in das alte Test. 1878, p. 154; and Kuenen, Hexateuch, Eng. tr. pp. xv, 43.) Colenso’s argument, in the gist of which he was long preceded by lay freethinkers, was one of simple common sense. The weak side of M. Havet’s case is his undertaking to bring the prophets bodily down to the Maccabean period. This is claiming too much. But his negative argument is not affected by the reply (Darmesteter, Les Prophètes d’Israël, 1895, pp. 128–31) to his constructive theory.

[Since the above was written, two French critics, MM. Dujardin and Maurice Vernes, have sought vigorously to reconstruct the history of the prophetic books upon new lines. I have been unable to acquiesce in their views at essential points, but would refer the reader to the lucid and interesting survey of the problem in Mr. T. Whittaker’s Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets (Black, 1911), ch. vi.]

It is true that where hardly any documentary datum is intrinsically sure, it is difficult to prove a negative for one more than for another. The historical narratives being systematically tampered with by one writer after another, and even presumptively late writings being interpolated by still later scribes, we can never have demonstrative proof as to the original date of any one prophet. Thus it is arguable that fragments of utterance from eighth-century prophets may have survived orally and been made the nucleus of later documents. This view would be reconcilable with the fact that the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah are all introduced with some modification of the formula that they prophesied “in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” Jeroboam’s name being added in the cases of Hosea and Amos. But that detail is also reconcilable with absolute fabrication. To say nothing of sheer bad faith in a community whose moral code said nothing against fraud save in the form of judicial perjury, the Hebrew literature is profoundly compromised by the simple fact that the religious development of the people made the prestige of antiquity more essential there for the purposes of propaganda than in almost any other society known to us. Hence an all-pervading principle of literary dissimulation; and what freethinking there was had in general to wear the guise of the very force of unreasoning traditionalism to which it was inwardly most opposed. Only thus could new thought find a hearing and secure its preservation at the hands of the tribe of formalists. Even the pessimist Koheleth, wearied with groping science, yet believing nothing of the doctrine of immortality, must needs follow precedent and pose as the fabulous King Solomon, son of the half-mythic David.

§ 3

It is true that some such ideas were current in Egypt many centuries before the period under notice—a fact which alone discounts the ethical originality claimed for the Hebrew prophets. E.g., the following passage from the papyrus of Ani, belonging to the Nineteenth Dynasty, not later than 1288 B.C.: “That which is detestable in the sanctuary of God is noisy feasts; if thou implore him with a loving heart of which all the words are mysterious, he will do thy matters, he hears thy words, he accepts thine offerings” (Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, by Flinders Petrie, 1898, p. 160). The word rendered “mysterious” here may mean “magical” or “liturgical,” or may merely prescribe privacy or silence; and this last is the construction put upon it by Renouf (Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 102) and Erman (Handbook of Eg. Relig. Eng. tr. p. 84). The same doctrine is put in a hymn to Thoth (id.). But in any case we must look for later culture-contacts as the source of the later Hebrew radicalism under notice, though Egyptian sources are not to be wholly set aside. See Kuenen, i, 395; and Brugsch, as there cited; but cp. Wellhausen, Israel, p. 440.

That the Sabbath was an Akkado-Babylonian and Assyrian institution is now well established (G. Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, 1875, p. 20; Jastrow, Relig. of Bab. and Assyria, p. 377; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 76, and in Variorum Teacher’s Bible, ed. 1885, Aids, p. 71). It was before the fact was ascertained that Kuenen wrote of the Sabbath (i, 245) as peculiar to Israel. The Hebrews may have had it before the Exile; but it was clearly not then a great institution; and the mention of Sabbaths in Amos (viii, 5) and Isaiah (i, 13) is one of the reasons for doubting the antiquity of those books. The custom of synagogue meetings on the Sabbath is post-exilic, and may have arisen either in Babylon itself (so Wellhausen, Israel, p. 492) or in imitation of Parsee practice (so Tiele, cited by Kuenen, iii, 35). Compare E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii (1901), § 131. The same alternative arises with regard to the belief in angels, usually regarded as certainly Persian in origin (cp. Kuenen, iii, 37; Tiele, Outlines, p. 90; and Sack, Die altjüdische Religion, 1889, p. 133). This also could have been Babylonian (Sayce, in Var. Bible, as cited, p. 71); even the demon Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit, usually taken as Persian, being of Babylonian derivation (id.). Cp. Darmesteter’s introd. to Zendavesta, 2nd ed. ch. v. On the other hand, the conception of Satan, the Adversary, as seen in 1 Chr. xxi, 1; Zech. iii, 1, 2, seems to come from the Persian Ahriman, though the Satan of Job has not Ahriman’s status. Such a modification would come of the wish to insist on the supremacy of the good God. And this quasi-monotheistic view, again, we are led to regard, in the case of the prophets, as a possible Babylonian derivation, or at least as a result of the contact of Yahwists with Babylonian culture. To a foreign influence, finally, must be definitely attributed the later Priestly Code, over-ruling Deuteronomy, lowering the Levites, setting up a high priest, calling the dues into the sanctuary, resting on the Torah the cultus which before was rested on the patriarchs, and providing cities and land for the Aaronidae and the Levites (Wellhausen, Prolegomena, pp. 123, 127, 147, 149, 347; Israel, pp. 495, 497)—the latter an arrangement impossible in mountainous Palestine, as regards the land-measurements (id. Proleg. p. 159, following Gramberg and Graf), and clearly deriving from some such country as Babylonia or Persia. As to the high-priest principle in Babylon and Assyria, see Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 59–61; Jastrow, as cited, p. 658.

Of the general effect of such contacts we have clear traces in two of the most remarkable of the later books of the Old Testament, Job and Ecclesiastes, both of which clearly belong to a late period in religious development. The majority of the critics still confidently describe Job as an original Hebrew work, mainly on the ground, apparently, that it shows no clear marks of translation, though its names and its local colour are all non-Jewish. In any case it represents, for its time, a cosmopolitan culture, and contains the work of more than one hand, the prologue and epilogue being probably older than the rest; while much of the dialogue is obviously late interpolation.

Compare Cheyne, Job and Solomon, 1887, p. 72; Bradley, Lectures on Job, p. 171; Bleek-Wellhausen, Einleitung, § 268 (291), ed. 1878, p. 542; Driver, Introd. pp. 405–8; Cornill, Einleit. in das alte Test. 2te. Aufl. 1892, §§ 38, 42; Sharpe, Hist. of the Hebrew Nation, 4th ed. p. 282 sq.; Dillon, Skeptics of the Old Test. 1895, pp. 36–39. Renan’s dating of the book six or seven centuries before Ecclesiastes (L’Ecclésiaste, p. 26; Job, pp. xv–xliii) is oddly uncritical. It must clearly be dated after Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Dillon, as cited); and Cornill even ascribes it to the fourth or third century B.C. Dr. Cheyne notes that in the skeptical passages the name Yahweh is very seldom used (only once or twice, as in xii, 9; xxviii, 28); and Dr. Driver admits that the whole book not only abounds in Aramaic words, but has a good many “explicable only from the Arabic.” Other details in the book suggest the possible culture-influence of the Himyarite Arabs, who had reached a high civilization before 500 B.C. Dr. Driver’s remark that “the thoughts are thoroughly Hebraic” burkes the entire problem as to the manifest innovation the book makes in Hebrew thought and literary method alike. Sharpe (p. 287) is equally arbitrary. Cp. Renan, Job, 1859, pp. xxv, where the newness of the whole treatment is admitted.

Dr. Dillon (pp. 43–59), following Bickell, has pointed out more or less convincingly the many interpolations made in the book after, and even before, the making of the Septuagint translation, which originally lacked 400 lines of the matter in the present Hebrew version. The discovery of the Saidic version of the LXX text of Job decides the main fact. (See Professor Bickell’s Das Buch Job, 1894.) “It is quite possible even now to point out, by the help of a few disjointed fragments still preserved, the position, and to divine the sense, of certain spiteful and defiant passages, which, in the interest of ‘religion and morals,’ were remorselessly suppressed; to indicate others which were split up and transposed; and to distinguish many prolix discourses, feeble or powerful word-pictures, and trite commonplaces, which were deliberately inserted later on, for the sole purpose of toning down the most audacious piece of rationalistic philosophy which has ever yet been clothed in the music of sublime verse” (Dillon, pp. 45–46).

“Besides the four hundred verses which must be excluded on the ground that they are wanting in the Septuagint version, and were therefore added to the text at a comparatively recent period, the long-winded discourse of Elihu must be struck out, most [? much] of which was composed before the book was first translated into Greek.... In the prologue in prose ... Elihu is not once alluded to; and in the epilogue, where all the [other] debaters are named and censured, he ... is absolutely ignored.... Elihu’s style is toto cœlo different from that of the other parts of the poem; ... while his doctrinal peculiarities, particularly his mention of interceding angels, while they coincide with those of the New Testament, are absolutely unknown to Job and his friends.... The confusion introduced into the text by this insertion is bewildering in the extreme; and yet the result is but a typical specimen of the ... tangle which was produced by the systematic endeavour of later and pious editors to reduce the poem to the proper level of orthodoxy” (id. pp. 55–57). Again: “Ch. xxiv, 5–8, 10–24, and ch. xxx, 3–7, take the place of Job’s blasphemous complaint about the unjust government of the world.”

It need hardly be added here that not only the Authorized but the Revised Version is false in the text “I know that my redeemer liveth,” etc. (xix, 25–27), that being a perversion dating from Jerome. The probable meaning is given in Dr. Dillon’s version:—

But I know that my avenger liveth;

Though it be at the end upon my dust,

My witness will avenge these things,

And a curse alight upon mine enemies.

The original expressed a complete disbelief in a future life (ch. xiv). Compare Dr. Dillon’s rhythmic version of the restored text.

What marks off the book of Job from all other Hebrew literature is its dramatic and reflective handling of the ethical problem of theism, which the prophets either evade or dismiss by declamation against Jewish sins. Not that it is solved in Job, where the rôle of Satan is an inconclusive resort to the Persian dualistic solution, and where the deity is finally made to answer Job’s freethinking by sheer literary thunder, much less ratiocinative though far more artistic than the theistic speeches of the friends. But at least the writer or writers of Job’s speeches consciously grasped the issue; and the writer of the epilogue evidently felt that the least Yahweh could do was to compensate a man whom he had allowed to be wantonly persecuted. The various efforts of ancient thought to solve the same problem will be found to constitute the motive power in many later heterodox systems, theistic and atheistic.

On the other hand, foreign influences would chronically tend to promote doubt, especially where the foreigner was not a mere successful votary exalting his own God, but a sympathetic thinker questioning all the Godisms alike. This consideration is a reason the more for surmising a partly foreign source for the book of Job, where, as in the passage cited from Zephaniah, there is no thought of one deity being less potent than another, but rather an impeachment of divine rule in terms of a conceptual monotheism. In any case, the book stands for more than Jewish reverie; and where it is finally turned to an irrelevant and commonplace reaffirmation of the goodness of deity, a certain number of sincerer thinkers in all likelihood fell back on an “agnostic” solution of the eternal problem.

Grätz even puts it as late as the time of Herod the Great. But compare Dillon, p. 129; Tyler, Ecclesiastes, 1874, p. 31; Plumptre’s Ecclesiastes, 1881, introd. p. 34; Renan, L’Ecclésiaste, 1882, pp. 54–59; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, iii, 82; Driver, Introduction, pp. 446–47; Bleek-Wellhausen, Einleitung, p. 527. Dr. Cheyne and some others still put the date before 332 B.C. Here again we are dealing with a confused and corrupted text. The German Prof. Bickell has framed an ingenious and highly plausible theory to the effect that the present incoherence of the text is mainly due to a misplacing of the leaves of the copy from which the current transcript was made. See it set forth by Dillon, pp. 92–97; cp. Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 273 sq. There has, further, been some tampering. The epilogue, in particular, is clearly the addition of a later hand—“one of the most timid and shuffling apologies ever penned” (Dillon, p. 118, note).

“To me, Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic meditations” (Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 250). “Koheleth’s pessimistic theory, which has its roots in secularism, is utterly incompatible with the spirit of Judaism.... It is grounded upon the rejection of the Messianic expectations, and absolute disbelief in the solemn promises of Jahveh himself.... It would be idle to deny that he had far more in common with the ‘impious’ than with the orthodox” (Dillon, pp. 119–20).