Two Light-Bringing Books

AN impression easily obtained from the current higher criticism is, that of all who have had to do with the Scripture documents the final redactor merits the scantiest regard. To the prevailing historic sense, so greedy for origins, he is almost necessarily a marplot, who will not let the primitive writings speak for themselves, but mixes them together in the most perplexing way, or confuses their utterance with glosses of his own ; and from this view it is but a step to regarding him as a bungler and dislocator, whose interference were better dispensed with. It is as if there had crept into Biblical study a kind of book-fancier’s craze for first editions; which latter, one suspects, are accounted all the more valuable for not revealing their inside, but remaining uncut. Of course this impression is not intended by the higher critics themselves; it is chargeable rather to the unchecked critical method, which in fact can see only one thing at a time, and which just at present is in the sway of the historic spirit, as heretofore that has in its turn been controlled by the dogmatic and the philological. The untoward fact remains, however, that for the time the general reader’s sense of Scripture as an ordered, digested, articulated whole is painfully eclipsed, — a result whose reductio ad absurdum may perhaps be expressed in the words of Renan, who, in his comic History of the People of Israel, describing the Oriental compilations, says : “ The last absorbs those that precede it, without assimilating them ; so much so that the most recent compilation always has in its stomach, so to speak, morsels of previous works quite raw.”

It is with a real sense of relief that one escapes from this feeling of dislocation and chaos to a view which, without laying aside the strictest scientific spirit, frankly approaches the Scripture record as it lies before us, in its final and presumably definitive edition, — a view which contemplates the finished evolution, in its larger meanings, as it reveals itself after it has worked out of the confusion of history and literature in the making. This common characteristic it is which unites the books we have here chosen for remark.

If Professor Moulton’s analysis of the literary forms of Scripture¹ holds, the men who were responsible for the final shape assumed by the Hebrew writings are worthy of greater respect than we have been inclined to accord them, —the respect due to trained men of letters. Nor were the writings themselves, those immensely potent factors in the life and uplifting of the world, the mere Grub Street hack-work that all this talk of Jehovists and Elohists and Priests’ codes would seem to make them. Let it be proved by careful study of their form that they have crystallized into an organic literary creation, part answering to part, and one constructive idea controlling word and plan alike, and we have a fact of great significance to import into our critical study. The final editor becomes increasingly identified with the original creator ; and the Bible is seen to have reached its acknowledged literary power by having an involution to balance its evolution ; it was made according to the dictates of the literary sense, like a book, rather than those of the business sense, like a directory.

This is the great service that Professor Moulton is rendering to Biblical interpretation : in one important department, the study of form, he has applied the literary sense to the investigation of the Hebrew literature. As one reads his book, and sees how much the study yields not only of interest, but of positive illumination, the wonder is that men could have let a field that lies at their doors remain so long uncultivated, while they were compassing land and sea to get means of elucidating Scripture. After all, “ the word is nigh thee.”

With some general principles and facts of Hebrew literature, scholars, and to some extent general readers, have long been familiar. That there is in the poetic parts of our Bible a verse system founded on the principle of parallelism ; that indications of an art sequence in verse, albeit to our sense more artificial than artistic, are to be found notably in the acrostic poems ; that in some poems set expressions recur like a refrain or response ; that — to broaden our view — some parts of the Bible have a certain epic power, others are rudimentally dramatic, others idyllic, others elegiac : such things as these are open to a mere casual observation. But they have heretofore been studied only far enough to produce the sense of crudeness rather than that of skill; the acrostic poems, for instance, have been regarded as the decadence of an art never highly developed, and the larger literary types, estimated by the Greek standard, have been named by accommodated terms, and under protest, as a kind of half-barbarous coincidence. So the Hebrew poetry has come to us as an incongruity : on the one side, word and imagery confessedly of the purest and sublimest; on the other, a form that seems either to have happened or to have run wild. May it not be, however, that these superficial forms, so crude in seeming, are merely the translatable evidences of a much more finished art, outposts of it as it were, and that if we could get the key to it there is a wealth of literary art represented in our Bible just suited to the genius of the Hebrew mind ? Professor Moulton seems to have proved abundantly that there is: parallelism, lower and higher ; stanza forms wrought up even to the fineness of the sonnet; elaborate arrangements of strophe, antistrophe, refrain, antiphon ; nor these poetic forms only, but an equally cultivated recognition of the sphere of prose, in its historical, oratorical, and epistolary forms, and of a spontaneous alternation of prose and verse to which certain kinds of Hebrew subject-matter naturally lend themselves. On the basis of a lucid classification of forms, tabulated on page 108, he subjects the various types of Scripture discourse to a detailed analysis, which then is condensed into valuable tables in the appendix. His results are so rich as to be hardly short of bewildering ; it will take time, doubtless, for general readers to get them verified in everyday sense. And not improbably he has in some cases yielded to the discoverer’s enthusiasm, and pushed his distinctions farther than was in the original author’s mind, erring on the side of minuteness, — a fault, if a fault, which the testing of time will correct. There is enough in half of what he has here given to throw an amazing new light and coloring over Scripture, if we will simply get out our Revised Version and let its articulations of thought and form reveal themselves.

This last remark, indeed, goes far to sum up Professor Moulton’s practical aim in his literary study of the Bible. It is the body rather than the spirit with which he is dealing; but while he attempts nothing of that subtle appreciation of word and figure which was so present to Matthew Arnold in his little work on Isaiah of Jerusalem, he is doing what is perhaps the best service toward clearing the approaches thereto. It is not so much through considerations of age, or authorship, or cleavage and documentary components of the books, as through a simple recognition of literary forms, prose or poetic, lyric or dramatic, that we can hear the Bible speaking for itself, in its natural and intended voice.

To approach a passage as poetry is to approach it in a mood poetically attuned, and to get from it the effect, not of matter of fact or of dogma, but of an exalted, impassioned truth or image. Joshua chanting to the sun and moon his intense desire to be avenged on his enemies produces a very different effect from Joshua issuing a command as a general to his troops. To approach a lyric poem with a recognition of its stanza form is to have a means of parting and combining its thoughts, of adjusting our sense to its natural arsis and thesis, and thereby getting its proposed impulse and power. Thus the appreciation of the form determines our mood toward it; and to a great degree this literary mood makes the Bible independent of a commentary. It becomes by so much like a book of our own day, which the spirit of the time makes plain and congenial to the common mind without need of explication.

A further means of making the Bible speak for itself in the familiar accents of a modern book Professor Moulton insists upon, — a means astonishingly effective for one so simple, —and that is a modern manner of printing-. No book has suffered so much from a printing truly atrocious as the Book which of all others should be most attractive. The text cut up, from beginning to end, into little prose bits, each about long enough for the text of a sermon, and probably so intended by the perpetrator; these bits carefully numbered and grouped into chapters, not according to the natural divisions of the subject, but in convenient sections for reading in public ; words in Italic print constantly appearing, not for emphasis, but requiring the exact reverse ; occasional paragraph marks disfiguring every page ; pages in double columns, and generally on the thinnest of paper and in eye-destroying fineness of print; add to this, in the case of reference Bibles, a text sown thick with letters and other marks of reference, — is not the indictment really formidable ? The Revised Version has done something toward the correction of this by employing paragraph divisions for the prose and parallelism for the poetic portions ; still, much remains to be done, and will remain, perhaps, so long as the public insists on having a whole body of literature crowded into a single volume. Meanwhile, as a practical exemplification of his literary views, Professor Moulton is engaged in editing a charming series of handy volumes,² in which the reader can judge for himself how much the simple expedient of modern attractive printing, the text being arranged in fitting prose or verse form, put in stanzas or couplets as needed, indented, divided, and numbered according to sense of subject or type of discourse, will do toward making the Bible its own lucid interpreter. The result fully justifies us in calling our author’s work light-bringing. If, in taking up one of these volumes, the familiar text seems at first strangely unfamiliar, the strangeness is all on the side of the attractive, the natural, the clear; it is like taking off a husk of austerity and ecclesiasticism, and finding that the Bible is a book for the fireside no less than for the pulpit. Nor do its dignity and sanctity suffer in the least thereby. One observation by way of criticism may here be made; the marks of the shop, the sedulous naming of sonnets and epigrams, essays and proverb clusters, seem unduly to cumber the text, which, as in the run of modern books, could be trusted to the printer’s resource to secure its sufficient rights ; and thus appeal is too insistently made to the technical literary student rather than to the general reader, for whom the Bible, as a book of universal literature, is presumably designed. It would be a pity, however, to let this infelicity crowd these little manuals back into the class of specialist books ; it is so greatly overborne by the substantial aid that the series, supported by the textbook of theory, is rendering to the cause of Biblical interpretation and criticism.

While the study of the literary forms of the Bible as evolved and finished supplies important aid and reassurance from one side, the present emergency of Biblical study calls also for something more fundamental. Far greater than the pain of perusing an unorganized literature is the pain of contemplating an unfinished, apparently unmotived history ; and especially if the history is one with which we have always felt our own destiny to be vitally connected. And in the exacting work of tracing connections of ancient books with the course of obscure events men so naturally become absorbed in the records of some ancient Stationers’ Hall, so subsist on dates and editions and allusions, that, to the ordinary reader, their work is swallowed up in the scoriæ of the publisher ; it fails of that light, that guidance, in which the history and the literature assume character and organism. All these things may be getting out indispensable material for a luminous interpretation to come ; but after all, critics and historians must from all their excursions of learning come back sooner or later to the truth that a phenomenon, historical or literary, can be really interpreted only in its own spirit, not in some other spirit scientifically applied from without. An important contribution to this spiritual, sympathetic interpretation of the history which, in its vast reaches for mankind, is “ the one phenomenon in all the world most deserving of study ” lies before us in the late Dr. Coyle’s volume of E. D. Rand lectures.³ The object of this volume is to trace the evolution of the Hebrew spirit, as a distinctive national energy, from its obscure beginnings in Moses and the patriarchs, through those Old Testament ages during which it makes a history of marked individuality and vitalizes a literature the most remarkable in the world ; then as it becomes embodied in a Man who, “ evidently through the quickening of that spirit, was fitted to stand at the centre and summit of the world’s development, and able to take and hold his place there, and to compel history henceforth to revolve around him ; ” then, still onward, as going forth from him this Hebrew spirit becomes a world-spirit, stamped with his individuality, and progressively conforming the world’s ongoings to itself. Such is its theme, great enough for an epic pen. And the treatment, although, covering so vast a ground, it has in the nature of the case to be compendious, is full of luminous insight and sanity. It reveals the spiritual vista which so attracts the higher critic and lends nobility to the obscure details of his research ; it traces with sympathetic hand the spiritual thread which guides the way through the nebulous ages of prophetic, legislative, didactic, and devotional literature. Thus it may be regarded as a serviceable guidebook for the times.

Such investigation as here comes to expression we may regard as a mark of the advancing and broadening spirit continually at work in the inquiries of our age. If it does not take, it at least foreshadows the step ahead which is to be taken when the critical evidence is all in and construction supervenes. The historical spirit has had its day of light and power ; but unless something is added, men’s interest in the past may easily grow beyond what is vital, and run to seed in antiquarianism. Meanwhile, a new kind of inquiry is taking possession of the thinking world, the sociological; and as soon as its search-light is turned upon ancient history, forthwith a new coloring, hitherto undreamed of, begins to suffuse the long-past interests, enterprises, institutions of man in society. The author of this book is a student, not of exegesis, but of sociology ; the book is the result of his endeavor to adjust the Hebrew history to that awakening consciousness which is gaining the floor for the immediate future, — the consciousness of men walking in the suffusion of a common spirit and working out a common destiny. So the old martyr’s prediction is verified anew; and as each new generation comes to view the world in a new light, the light breaking forth from the old record evinces its identity therewith.

A noteworthy feature of Dr. Coyle’s thought is that it occupies a plane higher than the higher criticism. Jt. moves on that table-land where the Biblical consciousness of the conservative and of the radical critic alike may see eye to eye. Questions of the relative order of prophetism and legalism, of the developmental stages in the history of codes, liturgies, historical records, and books of wisdom, become of quite secondary importance in the contemplation of an energy which was confessedly vital in some fitting way before history or literature was made ; they become mere questions of detail, not tests of faith. It is the same with our author’s attitude toward the schools and methods of the day. He postulates no supernaturalism to offend the rationalist, no leaps of pietistic faith to invalidate a scientist’s conclusions. To study the Hebrew spirit as a phenomenon of history is as legitimate a research as to study the scientific spirit or the romantic. It aims at a broad and self-justifying interpretation of facts ; which latter it presents with a bent, indeed, distinctly apologetic and irenic, with an almost too serene optimism, but with no invasion of the historical method. The facts are there: piety and faith may draw their own conclusion; so may science and rational philosophy.

For a book of this kind the author’s modest disclaimer of scholarly endowment, as put forth in the preface, is less disturbing than would to him appear. To be sure, oceans of reading, meditation, and verification are only too meagre for the details of so vast a research ; and traces of unseasoned assertion, of the lack of first-hand testing, may here and there be found. But it is doubtful if the most abysmal scholarship would have done so well. It is not to the lifelong resident in a picturesque region that we go for a description of it ; it is to one who, coming from elsewhere, has discovered it, and has not forgotten the rapture and surprise of his discovery. An expert is often the man least fitted to open a subject comprehensively. He has got along so far in it that his wonder at the whole is swallowed up in his interest in details ; we need the man in whom the wonder is still fresh, and for whom conversance with minutiæ has not obscured the perspective of the subject, to give the illuminating compendious view. The main question is, whether he has the real heart of the matter ; and of the answer to this question, in the case before us, there can be little uncertainty. More scholarship would, on the whole, while perhaps sharpening or correcting many a detail, but substantiate his main results the more. In truth, one feels, on laying down the book, that this course of thought might not inaptly stand as a kind of programme to which specializing scholarship might adjust its processes and results.