LECTURE III.

CHANGED VIEWS OF THE LAW

THE aims and processes of critical enquiry into the composition and meaning of ancient documents have always a twofold significance. It is the object of the student to discover, in the first place, the external facts about any literary work transmitted from antiquity. When was it first known to exist? How far back can it be traced? What witnesses testify to its recognition, and what is the value of their evidence? The answers to these questions may be more or less complete, or more or less imperfect; but they are sure to suggest further examination of the contents of the work, and a new set of internal facts may then be noted. Does it contain any record of its own composition? Is it possible to trace the materials which the writer employed, to determine their relative age, and fix the mode in which they were finally combined together? Not till this has been provisionally accomplished can the critic enter on the second part of his task, the historical reconstruction of the past. And this

is of necessity often based on broader foundations than the analysis of any particular book. It requires a wide survey of many and various groups of circumstance; and that view will be found to be the most probable which best combines the largest number of most important facts. In the Old Testament the most significant alterations wrought by these principles of investigation during the last century concern the five books of the Law, or the Pentateuch,1 and some of the books of the second great division of the ancient Hebrew collection, viz., the Prophets. In each case the processes of literary and historical research have led to a vast transformation in our ideas of their meaning and worth. Let us attempt to sketch this change, first, in our estimate of the Law.

I.

The prevailing conception of the Bible as the 'Word of God' commonly expressed itself in the belief that it was, in some sense, one book. The divine Author naturally imprinted on the product a certain unity of purpose and meaning. In other words, there was a definite relation between its parts. This was plainly higher and more penetrating than a mere sequence in time. Christianity was born in the midst of Judaism, and the Old Testament was closed before a line of the New was written. But the Old Testament was more than

1 The 'Five-fold book,' as it was called by Origen of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage.

the simple antecedent of the New. There was a vital connexion between the two. The earlier system not only prepared the way for the later, it implicitly contained it.

The nature of this connexion was a frequent theme of speculation among the early Christian believers. Their thoughts played around it with a singular mixture of fancy and reasoning. Even in the Gospels themselves there are traces of more than one answer to the questions which it suggested, and the apostolic correspondence is full of hints and allusions to themes which doubtless received ampler development from the preachers of the Church. The accepted methods of the time fully justified this treatment. The theologians of the Synagogue had practically worked out the idea that any verse of their Scriptures might be explained with the help of any other verse. Heedless of the context, they wrenched away a passage which perhaps contained the same number, or a similar turn of phrase, or some superficial parallel of thought, and applied the one to illustrate the other. They lived and taught in an imaginative atmosphere in which suggestions of likeness became realities; symbols were converted into truths; and some quaint and fanciful resemblance sufficed to establish an identity. This was not peculiar to the Rabbis of Israel. From other causes, and along different lines, the poems of Homer-the earliest literary deposit of Greek religion-and even the later odes of Pindar, were handled by the teachers of the great schools of the Empire in much the

same way. And the Jews of Alexandria, steeped in the culture of Greece, sought to show that Plato and Aristotle had borrowed from Moses, and by extravagant allegories converted the Pentateuch into a sort of mother of philosophies.1

The modern reader of the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians cannot easily bring himself into sympathy with the strange series of parallels by which the Law and the Gospel are compared with the two sons of Abraham, Ishmael child of the bondwoman Hagar, and Isaac child of the free woman Sarah, while Hagar, first identified with Mount Sinai, is then presented as the Jerusalem that now is, Sarah suggesting by contrast the Jerusalem which is above. The persons of Hebrew story, geographical realities, and spiritual symbols, all seem hopelessly confused. Still more strange appears the Apostle's adoption of the Rabbinic legend of the wandering rock that followed the Israelites in the wilderness to supply them with water, and his sudden identification of the rock with Christ.2 It is not then surprising that in 1 Peter 320-21 the deliverance of Noah and his family in the ark' through water' should have its counterpart in baptism; or that Paul should blend the figures of the pillar of cloud and the divided waters at the Exodus, and should describe the passage of the Red Sea as a 'baptism into Moses.'

It is of course in the Epistle to the Hebrews that

1 Cp. Farrar, History of Interpretation, 1886 (Bampton Lecture for 1885), Lect. II. 'Rabbinic Exegesis,' Lect. III. Alexandrian Exegesis.'

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this style of interpretation receives its completest exemplification. That little treatise has been aptly described as 'the first apology for Christianity." Its main object is to vindicate the displacement of the venerable Levitical worship with its central sanctuary, its priesthood, and its sacrifices, by a religion which appeared to have none of these things. In doing so, its first assumption is that the entire series of institutions grouped around the Mosaic tabernacle was essentially divine. They were, indeed, only the earthly counterparts of heavenly realities. According to a mode of thought familiar in ancient India, where the poets were believed to have 'seen' the Vedic hymns which existed eternally in the world of the uncreated and unborn,2 Moses had been permitted to behold the ideal forms of the sanctuary and its furniture; and God had laid on him the solemn charge

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See that thou make them after their pattern, which hath been showed thee in the mount.' 3 The historic institutions of Israel were thus only a 'copy and shadow of the celestial order; they belonged to space and time, to particular localities and persons. Under these conditions of sense and change they had inevitably the characters of derivation and impermanence; only the unseen is the truly real. It is the aim of the writer, therefore, to show that Christianity provides an enduring high-priesthood, a perpetual sanctuary, and a sacrifice which, being 'for ever' (1012), has an ideal or eternal value never

1 So Dr. A. B. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p.x.

2 See Lect. VIII. § ii.

3 Exod. 2540. 'Hebr. 8°.