The Song of Solomon and the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

By Walter F. Adeney, M.A., Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Church History, New College, London. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Pp. viii. 346. Price, 78. 6d.

THE two poetical writings that are expounded in this volume require to be handled artistically and sympathetically. At the same time, owing to the influence of past interpretations, one at least of them requires to be treated with severe simplicity. Professor Adeney brings to his task a mind endowed with the literary touch, a fertile imagination, and above all, a determination to keep within the bounds of reason. The general reader, whose love for the O.T. has been at least hampered by the surface difficulties suggested by the Song of Solomon, will read with a feeling of glad release this exposition of the Song, and whether he agrees with it in all details or not, he will heave a sigh of satisfaction as the story of the poem is unravelled in language as exquisitely romantic as reasonably real. To his exposition of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Professor Adeney brings higher qualities. He seizes the cardinal points of the theology of the poem and expounds them in brief lectures that are pointed with modern ideas and made to teach present-day truth. He illustrates the ideas of the writer by allusions gathered from all departments of literature and art. Altogether this volume deserves

to take a high place in the useful series of the Expositor's Bible to which it belongs.

Of the 346 pages of which the volume consists, only 59 deal with the Song of Songs, whereas 287 are given to the Exposition of Lamentations. This is probably as it should be.

Several questions that rise almost instinctively to the lips of the average reader of the Song of Songs have to be answered in an Exposition. First comes the question: Are the hero and heroine of this dramatic poem lovers, or do they represent Christ and the Church? The reader will probably judge this book or any other on the Song by its answer to this question. Nor does Professor Adeney leave us in doubt. While allowing with the heartiest goodwill, to all whom it may benefit, the use of the Song as an illustration of the Love of Christ for the Church, he repudiates the notion that that is the teaching of the poem. He traces the allegorical interpretation from its first father Origen downwards, and shows that the authority for this method goes no further back than the time of the Fathers. Again the reader asks, Is this a Palestinian love-song? and if so, why is it included in the Canon of the O.T. ? It is an exquisite poem extolling true and faithful It presents in dramatic form a real or imaginary incident

love.

connected with the Royal Harem at Jerusalem. A peasant maiden has been seized by the myrmidons of the king to be added to the number of the monarch's wives. But this maiden has a peasant lover in her home in the north, and her heart turns fondly to him and is steeled against the overtures of the king, who makes love to her. She passes before her mind the deep true love of her rustic swain, and contrasts it with the studied love-making of the king, and her true heart prefers the simplicity of her peasant lover's methods to the gilded pride of the palace which the king offers her, and she rejects his advances. Professor Adeney suggests that the poem was written by a northern writer to rebuke the luxury and lasciviousness of the court of Jerusalem, and that the main purpose of the poem is to glorify pure love and monogamy over lust and polygamy.

To the question, Did gives a negative reply. not belong to him.

Solomon write this poem? Professor Adeney A good deal of the Solomon literature does At all events it is inconceivable that the polygamous Solomon should have written this exquisite glorification of pure love, unless indeed he had been converted to monogamous ideas, as some assert, but as none can prove. The ethical teaching of the poem entitles it to a place in the Canon.

When we turn to the Lamentations we find Professor Adeney at his best as a preacher to the present day. This book is a collection of five elegies treating of the desolation and hardships of the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Each elegy consists of twenty-two verses, according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The first four are arranged as acrostics, the

It is pro

third is a triple acrostic. The elegies are anonymous. bable that they were not written by Jeremiah, but we may assume that they are the work of one hand. Of the elegies the third is the best, both in regard to structure and teaching. But the same set of ideas runs through all the elegies. These are that the present suffering is the just retribution of sin; that the sin of the people may be laid at the door of priests and prophets; that God has become the enemy of the people; yet His mercies endure for ever, and His compassions fail not; that He has sent Nebuchadnezzar as His instrument to punish them, but He will not permit him to destroy them; that the mercy of God is vouchsafed in answer to the prayer of repentance; when the people repent they will be restored to their

land.

In his exposition of these ideas Professor Adeney is uniformly happy. Sometimes he rises to almost prophetic heights, e.g., in his passage on the prophets without vision, and on the problem of God and Evil, the answer to prayer, and the everlasting mercy of God.

This book is essentially one for the general reader. Professor Adeney gives the results and not the process of his own investigations. The two poems expounded in this volume are probably not very familiar to ordinary readers of the Old Testament, but it will not be Professor Adeney's blame if henceforth these poems are not made popular by this extremely lucid and readable exposition of them. Nothing can make them rank amongst the most important books of the Old Testament, but in their own place they have a lesson to teach, and that lesson is clearly set forth by the author of the volume. ALEX. TOMORY.

The Bible Doctrine of Man.

By John Laidlaw, D.D. New Edition, Revised and Re-arranged. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Post 8vo, 363 pp. Price, 78. 6d. THIS is a new edition, with many alterations, of the seventh series of the Cunningham Lectures, published in its first form about fifteen years ago. It then consisted of six lectures, which are here arranged as six divisions divided into sixteen chapters, to each of which is appended critical notes which could not be embodied in the work, and which, in the first edition, were relegated to one general appendix. While maintaining his original positions on the questions involved, and reproducing much of the original matter of the work, Professor Laidlaw claims that this is practically a new volume, much of the former book being actually re-written, and the whole in various ways recast.

The general aim of the volume is to set forth Scripture teaching as to the Nature of Man, and connect the Biblical psychology thus reached with the teaching of Scripture about sin and salvation. The claim of the author as to his own distinctive position on the subject, is that he has done justice to the supreme distinction given in Scripture to "spirit" as an element in man's constitution; and while rejecting as unscriptural the theory of Trichotomy, has shown that a trichotomous "mode of speech" pervades Scripture, and that this is charged with a special religious significance.

In what sense then, according to Dr Laidlaw's reading of it, have we a Biblical Psychology? Not in the sense of an independent science, for in its anthropology, as in its cosmogony, Scripture does not profess to teach science. Yet it reaches conclusions both as regards the origin of the world and the nature of man, which, while primarily and mainly religious, "justify themselves in the face of scientific discoveries as these are successively made" (p. 12).

What the volume seeks to make good is the position that “ a notion of man pervades both the Old and New Testaments, popularly expressed indeed, but uniform and consistent, though growing in its fulness with the growth of the Biblical revelation itself" (p. 14). Thus Biblical Psychology is bound up with Biblical Theology, and is not treated as an abstract system, but in close connection with a revelation which has a history and a development. Dr Laidlaw therefore begins by taking a brief glance at what the Bible teaches regarding the origin of man, and in doing so, he accepts the conclusion of criticism as to the two creation narratives, while "leaving the documentary hypothesis to time and criticism." This is an example of the author's attitude throughout the volume to many questions which come in his way, and on which he avoids coming to a conclusion. He gives them a word of recognition and even approval, but observes a caution in pronouncing even an obiter dictum regarding them, which is occasionally tantalising. Again and again you find him on the point of grappling with questions that have to be faced; but he leaves them, telling you that "in that direction there are theological territories to be possessed." For his purpose the essential point in the Scripture account of man's origin is that "the communication of life in man is described as a peculiar and direct act of God" (p. 35). In summarising the Bible view of man's constitution, which is his next task, Dr Laidlaw finds that, while asserting the unity of man's nature, it as strenuously asserts its duality, and recognises man as composed of two elements, the one of which is "earth-derived," the other "God-inbreathed"; and he chooses to describe them in these general terms because the antithesis of soul and body, flesh and spirit, "is, strictly speaking, not found at all in the Old Testament" (p. 61). And this leads him to the real crux of his subject, whether this duality of human nature, so strongly asserted in Scripture, must give way to a threefold division. With great fulness, he discusses the theory of Trichotomy, pointing out that "it held an important place in the theology of some of the Greek Christian fathers; but in consequence of its use by Apollinaris to underprop grave heresy as to the Person of Christ, it fell into disfavour, and may be said to have been discarded from the time of Augustine till its revival within quite a modern period" (p. 67). He goes on to show that, while many modern theologians, both British and German, have "recognised the trichotomic usage in Scripture," the attempt to base upon it a theory of the tripartite nature of man has been reserved for a very modern school of thought, that represented by Mr Heard and Dr Edward White, who have adopted it as a basis for the theory of Conditional Immortality. In their hands it is a thoroughgoing philosophy of man as "a tripartite hypostasis-a union of three,

not of two natures only," with which they try to unlock the main positions of Scripture as to man's original standing-the Fall, Regeneration, the Intermediate State, and the Future Glory. Its bearing on these theological doctrines is obvious. Man consisted at the first of "body, soul, and spirit," and the "soul," as the union point between "body" and "spirit," was created free to choose to which of these poles it would incline. Thus the theory would make the via media between the Augustinian and Pelagian views of the fall; for the fall was an inclination towards the "body," which has for its result the deadening of the "spirit." The theory also defines Regeneration, which is the quickening again of the dead "spirit"; and it underprops Conditional Immortality as the doctrine of the future life which goes with it; for eternal life belongs to the quickened "spirit," and annihilation is the fate of those to whom the pneuma has never been restored. "Since natural men have only the psyche, and since the pneuma is added or bestowed only in regeneration, immortal existence belongs only to those who are possessed of the pneuma” (p. 82). Apart from these theological inferences, Dr Laidlaw shows, with much force, that the theory rests upon the assumption—and it is a mere assumption—that "Scripture intends by these two terms, soul and spirit, two essentially distinct natures in man's inner being" (p. 83). This leads him to analyse the Bible use of "soul" and "spirit," with the result that he does not find in Scripture the sharp distinction between them which a theory of Trichotomy demands. "They are used throughout the Old Testament, and generally even in the New Testament, with no sharp distinction, but are rather freely interchanged and combined to express the whole inward nature" (p. 89). But in the Pauline writings he finds the distinction between soul and spirit as diverse "aspects of man's inner being," the "spirit" being in this Pauline usage the regenerate nature of man. Paul continually contrasts the "psychical" and the "spiritual." His language is therefore trichotomous, but this usage does not, in Dr Laidlaw's view, point to a tripartite theory of human nature, but rather "to the elevating influence of revelation upon language." Thus he steers a middle course between the upholders of Trichotomy as a theory of man's nature, and those who see in the use of the terms "soul" and "spirit" a meaningless parallelism. There can be little doubt that the reasoning by which he reaches this position is more congruous both to the facts of man's nature as we know them, and to the Scriptural analysis, than the theory which would make the pneuma a "separable constituent of man's being." For, as Dr Laidlaw is careful to show, the distinctive feature of the Biblical psychology is its doctrine of the pneuma in man. That doctrine undergoes a development in which three distinct stages are noted. First, the