in his college days he threw away the pair of new shoes which some unknown friend had set at his door. It is shown in his letter to Lord Chesterfield; in the pride with which he brought out his great Dictionary" I deliver it to the world," he said in his Preface, "with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well;" in his assertion that "the chief glory of every nation arises," not from its kings, its nobles, its statesmen, its warriors, but from the class to which he himself belonged-" its authors." It is shown from the beginning to the end of his interview with the king, in his never failing for one moment even before Majesty in the respect which he owed to himself. It is shown in that "blunt dignity which there was about him on every occasion;" in that fact which was found so remarkable by one who had seen no small variety of men, that however meagre might be his surroundings in his home, "no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence." It is shown in the timid care with which his society was shunned by "great lords and great ladies "—a class which does not "love to have their mouths stopped." It is shown in the proud way in which he always acted up to his own noble words: "He that lives well cannot be despised." GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL. GENESIS AND SOME OF ITS CRITICS. IT T has been remarked that if any of the modern adepts in the destructive criticism of the Pentateuch should happen, after shuffling off this mortal coil, to find themselves in that region, not to be named in the presence of advanced theologians, in which the rich man of the parable is reported to have lifted up his eyes in torment, and if they should have the grace to ask father Abraham to send a missionary to the upper world to remedy the evil they had done, the patriarch would not be able to reply, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them." He would have to say,"They had Moses and the prophets, but you have discredited them, and with them have discredited Christ." Perhaps in these circumstances he might think it well to send back some of the petitioners to report their experiences. In default of such an apparition from the other world, my reviewer, Dr. Driver,* and I may be pardoned for arriving at different conclusions respecting the labours of those advanced critics whom he so vehemently defends. More especially is this likely when we approach the consideration of the subject from two points so diverse as those of literary criticism and the observation of nature. Here I may frankly admit that, if the editor or writer of Genesis was a mere literary forger of comparatively recent date, the reviewer is much more likely than I to understand his ways. On the other hand, if he was as ancient as he professes to be, and more familiar with nature than with books, it is likely that his statements in regard to the world around him or its origin may be better comprehended by a naturalist than by a theologian. I honestly believe that a knowledge of * CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, March 1889. nature and scientific habits of thought may in many cases avail more in the interpretation of the Old Testament than mere literary and linguistic skill, though there is no necessity to despise the latter. In any case I am quite prepared to accept the questions raised by my reviewer as grounds of discussion of the antiquity, unity, and genuineness of the early chapters of Genesis, though these questions are after all much less important than many others which are open to inquiry in connection with this ancient book, and which relate to the truths which it teaches. I had much rather regard the subject as affecting our ideas of creation as revealed to early man, than as a mere battle over the character of the sacred books themselves. I would first disclaim with the greatest sincerity the charge of "superciliousness and contempt " brought against me. A reference to my book might have shown that the expression "reduced to waste paper" had reference to theories of the route of the Exodus based on the reports of unscientific travellers and deductions therefrom, and that the "bookworms and pedants" referred to were not the learned men whom the reviewer names, but those who are weak enough to trust implicitly to their authority and to blazon abroad their dicta as incontrovertible. At the same time I think it right to express with the utmost decision my strong conviction, arrived at by original work, that such processes as those to which the reviewer refers, as establishing "the composite structure of the Pentateuch," in the sense in which he uses the expression, and the conclusion that the second chapter of Genesis is contradictory" to the first, are unscientific and unreliable. 66 It is true I am called by my reviewer an "outsider," a term which may be of good or of bad import according to the company in which one is found (Psalm i. 1, 2). The accusation, however, is unfair. Even geologists have souls to be saved, and are interested in the integrity of the only revelation on which they can rely; and this applies to Genesis as well as to the New Testament, since it is patent to all men that the Jesus of the Gospels commits himself to the genuineness and divine authority of Moses and the prophets. Farther, any man who for fifty years has daily studied the Bible with the aid of its original languages, and has during all this time read with care every new treatise which seemed worthy of attention, need not be sneered at by the advocates of a criticism which is of yesterday, and, if it shares the fate of its predecessors, may perish to-morrow, while the word of the Lord endureth for ever. I do not complain of the scanty courtesy of my reviewer. It is precisely what I would expect from the advocate of the men he defends, and what I have experienced too often to be surprised at it. The fact that a Sadducean School may be careful not to identify itself too closely, either with the doctrine of Moses or of Christ, does not render it any the less contemptuous in its dealing with those "outsiders" who claim the protestant right of judging for themselves, or the scientific right of applying the results of the study of God's works to the explanation of His revealed word. My present purpose will, however, be best served by taking up, with all due deference to the eminent authorities relied on, some of the illustrations which the reviewer has given me; and first his allusion to that simple and pleasant word "grass," as it appears in the statement as to the creation of plants in our English version of Genesis i. 11. In this I may say he is only a follower of a less cautious critic in the Academy,* who makes my treatment of this verse the occasion of a jest rather more clever than that of my present reviewer. In the Authorized Version of the verse above referred to, we read the divine command:- "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth." This is the fiat; the following verse gives the result in very similar terms, though with a few slight variations which are not without interest. Before treating of these words, I would first postulate that the author or editor of the noble compositions contained in Genesis i and i., whatever his means of information, whether by direct revelation, vision or otherwise, and still more if with some we regard him as enlightened only by his own genius and penetration, must be credited at least with reason and common sense, and with that ordinary knowledge of nature which comes to men by observation, and which primitive men, judging from the discoveries they made and the works they have left, must have possessed in an eminent degree. It is necessary to insist on this, because my reviewer and those he defends sometimes attribute nothing short of absolute mental imbecility to the, to them, unknown writer of these venerable records. It is further to be observed that the writer is describing the first introduction of vegetation, and this at a time when, according to his own showing in the following verses, the climatic and even astronomical conditions of the earth were different from what they now are; but that though this vegetation must have been quite different in detail from that of the modern world, and probably did not include any species now extant, he has to describe it, whatever its aspect as appearing to him, in the terms furnished by the common speech of his time. Even to modern science the vegetation which he indicates in a few plain words is as yet known almost exclusively by the beds of structureless carbon which resulted from its interment in the earth's crust, and by inference from the forms and structures of a somewhat later flora growing under somewhat different conditions. The task set before our ancient writer was thus probably much more difficult * September 1, 1888. than he could himself comprehend-certainly much more so than is imagined by the reviewer. He uses three Hebrew words, the first of which, deshé, translated grass, is the one in question. That this term cannot in this place mean grass in our ordinary sense of that word appears from the context, since, of the two classes of plants mentioned immediately after it, one, viz., herbs producing seed, includes the grasses, and we can scarcely imagine that the knowledge of grass possessed by this old writer was limited to what he could learn from an Oxford lawn mowed so often that it can never go to seed. It is to be observed, moreover, that the verb used along with deshé is derived from the same root, so that if we translate the noun by grass we might read, as some have done, "grass itself with grass; or, if we prefer to regard the noun as more general, we might read the words with others, "vegetate vegetation." The latter of these extreme views would import that there are only two kinds of vegetation referred to, herbs and woody plants, and that deshé is a general and preliminary term covering both. In this case, however, the impropriety of translating it grass would be still more apparent. The first of these views is probably to be preferred, and was that adopted by Rosenmuller, one of my earliest teachers in biblical matters.* He explains the passage as including three classes of plants :-“ (1) Tenera herba sine semine saltem conspicuo; (2) Qua semen profert majorque est; (3) Arbores, sub quibus arbusta continentur." His view may seem antiquated to my reviewer, but it still commends itself to my judgment, though we now know more than was known in Rosenmuller's time as to the nature of the event portrayed. But let us inquire as to the biblical use of the word; and, in the first place, some light is thrown upon this by the expression "Tadshe deshé," where, as already stated, the verb to produce, or bring forth, is allied to the noun. This would seem to indicate that the general sense of springing or sprouting implied in the verb should also be extended to the noun. Dasha is an uncommon verb, occurring, so far as I have noticed, only in one other place, in the Book of Joel, which is remarkable for its vivid and simple delineations of nature, and where, from the connection in which the prophet uses the word, he would almost seem to refer to the verse in Genesis:— "For the pastures of the wilderness do spring, His prediction is certainly much intensified in force if we suppose such a reference. In Gen. i. 12, the verb yatza is used, its significance being to go out, or produce. In the Revised Version the first "Scholia in Gen.," where also the alternative view of regarding deshé and eseb as pleonastic is stated. |