Yet if the Pentateuch was not the inspired work of Moses, this belief must have been utterly wrong after all—a mere idle and empty superstition. How then came the race thus widely dispersed to believe it, to accept it as a veritable witness of the past, and to accept a code of law entirely based upon it ? Trace the line of descent upward from the days of the Ptolemies, and we try in vain to find the period or conceive the circumstances which ad mitted the rise and growth of such a prodigious error. Is it conceivable that the men of the resto ration could he mistaken in the fact of the captivity from which they had just emerged, or could be de ceived in the fact that their ancient Scriptures were in the hands of their fathers before them ? Could the men of the captivity be mistaken in believing in the Jerusalem which had been captured, with its temple and services and ritual, or in the kingdom which had been overthrown and the fertile land which had been laid waste? Could the generations who lived during the troubled times of the kings be mistaken in the fact of a kindred people with whom they were at strife claiming the same descent as themselves and acknowledging the same law of Moses, or as to the events which led to the fatal disruption of the grand empire of Solomon and David ? Could the men of Solomon's days be mis taken as to the erection of the temple and all the graphic details of sacrifice and service laid clown in the law of Moses ? Could the men of David's days be mistaken as to the bringing back of the ark from the land of the Philistines, or the men who instituted the monarchy under Saul be mis taken in believing in the government of the Judges which preceded it ? Could the men who found themselves settled amid the warlike Ca naanitish nations be mistaken in believing in the conquest of the land and the crossing of Jordan ; or the men who crossed Jordan as to the reality of the wanderings in the wilderness and the solemn insti tution of the law amid the awful solemnities of Sinai ? That any one generation should have be lieved in a definite and immediate past which never had an existence save in a kind of religious romance, and should have submitted to a law which was in vented in their own days, under the conviction that they had themselves been educated in it from their earliest infancy, is the most incredible proposition ever submitted for human acceptance. If the Pen tateuch be authoritative, and the events recorded in it historically true, then from this beginning every thing follows in its order, each event springing con sistently out of the event preceding it, and each generation inheriting the belief and the fortunes of the generation before it. If the Pentateuch be an imposture, and the events it records unhistorical, then the whole Jewish history is a confused heap of irreconcilable contradictions.
To take the facts of the books subsequent to the Pentateuch, and reduce them to anything like con sistency, on the supposition that the Pentateuch itself is mythical, framing a connected and credible story out of them, is a task which baffles all human ingenuity. The only alternative appears to be to make a clean sweep of the history altogether ; but this is no sooner proposed to the mind than both the past and the present lift up their protest against it. The past forbids it, because at many points the history of the Jew has come into contact with the history of the other great nations of antiquity, and to destroy the one would involve the destruction of the other likewise ; for modern research has con clusively proved the harmony of sacred history with profane in a very considerable number of instances. The Mosaic authorship is expressly affirmed by Hecatxus, Manetho, Lysimachus, Tacitus, Juveual, and Longinus. In regard to the Pentateuch itself, the Mosaic cosmogony, the scriptural account of the deluge, and the dispersion of mankind at Babel, receive confirmation from Berosus the Chaldman ; the ethnological list in Genesis is strongly corro borated by the Babylonian monuments ; the account of the exodus, by the distorted narrative of Ai anetho the Egyptian. Coming to later times, the Jewish conquest of Canaan is confirmed by an ancient Phoenician inscription noticed by three old writers ; David's conquest of Syria by two heathen writers of repute ; the history of his relations with Hiram king of Tyre, by Herodotus, Dius, and Menander. Similar points of contact occur all down the history, till, in the period of the captivity, we emerge from the darkness of pre-historic times to the period of authentic history (see Rawlinson's Bampton Lec tures, and Ancient Monarchies). If the Jewish
history be all fabulous, what becomes of the pro fane? and how is it that the ancient Babylonian monuments, now yielding their precious stores of information to the diligence of modem inquiry, cor roborate in so many points the statements of the sacred books. The two branches of history, the sacred and the profane, are so interwoven, that the denial of the one must involve likewise the denial of the other. Say that the past history of the Jew before the times of the Ptolemies is a myth alto gether, and the history of the Egyptian, the Baby lonian, and the Assyrian must become at least equally apocryphal. Acknowledge the history to be true, and the truth of the history involves the divine authority of the Pentateuch which records it.
But the witness of the present is not less decisive against the theory which would refuse credit to the ancient Jewish history altogether, than is the testi mony of the past. For if the history be taken away, how is the existence of the Jew at the time of the Ptolemies to be explained, with his strange isolation, his intensely national peculiarities, his venerated Scriptures, and his grand traditions of the past ? Did the race spring into being in a day, and produce self-developed its own history and religion ? Still more, how is the Jew of the nine teenth century to be accounted for ? How comes he to exist ? Whence is derived his distinctive nationality ? How is it that all his undying pecu liarities survive the waves of time and change that have rolled over the world ? How is it that he still lives, as closely reflecting even now the spirit and character of the Pentateuchal law as the plastic wax bears the image of the stamp which is impressed upon it. Truly the effort to get rid of the super natural in the past, by destroying the historic authority of the Pentateuch, only succeeds in trans ferring the miracle into the present ; for what less than miraculous becomes the existence of the Jew when the past is denied out of which alone he can have been produced ? But the argument is at least equally strong when we trace the line of proof upward from the time of the Ptolemies, in regard to the existence of the Jewish Scriptures, as in regard to the facts of Jew. ish history. The still extant Septuagint proves the existence of the a T. Scriptures in their completed form at this date, and that they were universally received by the Jewish race as the authoritative and divinely-inspired compositions of the authors to whom they are ascribed. The Pentateuch, for instance, was implicitly received as being the work of Moses, and as supplying the divinely-ordained platform on which the whole superstructure of Jewish polity and religion had been reared, and as the authoritative record of it. To cast a doubt on its genuineness and sacred authority would have been esteemed blasphemy. The case is strengthened by the position held by the Pentateuch as the most ancient of their writings, and aF unclerlyine. so to speak, all the rest. For they were accepted not only as existing from former times, but as the first of a long series of sacred books, united by a regular historical sequence with each other, and all of them received from the tradition of the preceding times. The supposition, therefore, that the Pentateuch is unhistorical does not end with the destruction of the sacred authority of the Mosaic books, but de stroys the authority of all the rest of the 0. T. Scriptures likewise ; for all these without exception are founded on the authority of the Pentateuch and the historic reality of the events recorded in it. If this is denied, either the later books must be considered part of the same imposture as that which produced the Pentateuch in its connected form ; or their authors must have knowingly endorsed and availed themselves of this imposture ; or, lastly, they must ignorantly have received human and imaginary compositions as veritable and divinely inspired history. Either of these three alternatives is equally fatal to the sacred character of the post Mosaic books of the 0. T. canon. Hence it fol lows that the blow which destroys the authority of the Pentateuch must be equally fatal to the entire canon of the 0. T.