There is a great difference between a book which is written by a particular individual and is dispensed by him among the people, and a book which makes a people itself. One cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people. — PASCAL, Thoughts tal to rounded form and content correspond roughly to the period of their independent existence as a state. The great epoch to which their prophets and historians looked back as a beginning was that of their deliverance, as unorganized tribes and families, from a life of bondage in Egypt, about 1320 years before Christ. The influence of that event colored all their songs and stories with the sense of intimate dependence on their deliverer Jehovah, and with the presage of a high destiny and purpose. This continued, its meanings wrought out with increasing clearness and force, through a turbulent period of tribal anarchy under the Judges, in which days "there was no king in Israel : every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judg. xvii, 6; xviii, 1; xix, I; xxi, 25); through the organization of a kingdom under Saul, and its vigorous unity under David and Solomon; through the varied fortunes of the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel, with their exposure to contentions within and invasions military and religious from without; until the time was ripe for the people to undergo a momentous ordeal, the ordeal of deportation and exile and dispersion. At the time of this event, that of the Chaldean captivity from 586 to 538 B.C., the Israelite people had in possession a noble store of literature, accessible to all classes, from which they could derive hope and guidance for the unknown experiences yet to come. All the period thus covered was, as regards their racial and religious idea, a germinal and preparatory period; which therefore we may call the Formative Centuries. These centuries were formative as well for the nation as for the literature. Beginning with a primitive aggregation of tribes and clans, so untrained to organization that a whole generation of wilderness education has to be undergone before they are fit to colonize their allotted land, their corporate life has to grow through various advancing stages of civilization, -nomadic, pastoral, agricultural, before they reach the organized and urban state in which they can be fully aware of their national idea and principle, and of their religious trend. They are finding themselves, pupils as it were, in the school of Jehovah. And during these centuries their peculiar formative idea must make itself good in the face of peoples stronger and more civilized than they, proving thus its fitness to survive and overcome. It must by varied experience and discovery prove its intrinsic fitness to be the law of sterling manhood, among the speculations and idolatries and superstitions of the earth. CHAPTER I SEMINA LITTERARUM [Till the end of the reign of David, cir. 970 B.C.] FA PEOPLE whose unique mission it was to bring forth we need to know more than is implied in a census of ex- I. THE HEBREW MIND The Bible is essentially a Hebrew book. It bears throughout the characteristic impress of the Hebrew mind. The Old Testament was written mostly in the Hebrew language; and the different ages in which its various works were composed represent the language from its time of classical purity, when it was the people's vernacular, to the time when it was becoming a book language, and its place as a people's tongue was being taken by the closely allied Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek, and availed itself, especially in the more doctrinal portions, of Greek ways of thinking, at a time when the Greek mind was dominant in the culture and philosophy of the world. The New Testament writers read their Old Testament, too, in a Greek version. } |