The Literary Study of the Bible Is a Common Meeting-Ground

THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE AN ACCOUNT OF THE LEADING FORMS OF LITERATURE REPRESENTED IN THE SACRED WRITINGS INTENDED FOR ENGLISH READERS By RICHARD G. MOULTON. PROFESSOR OF LITERATURE IN ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION LECTURER (CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON) BOSTON, U.S.A.: D. C. HEATH & CO. LONDON : ISBISTER & CO., LIMITED 1896 Public Domain: Scanned and edited by Ted Hildebrandt 3/2005 COPYRIGHT, 1895, By Richard G. Moulton ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL Norwood Press: J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith Boston, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE AN author falls naturally into an apologetic tone if he is pro- posing to add yet one more to the number of books on the Bible. Yet I believe the number is few of those to whom the Bible appeals as literature. In part, no doubt, this is clue to the forbidding form in which we allow the Bible to be presented to us. Let the reader imagine the poems of Wordsworth, the plays of Shake- speare, the essays of Bacon, and the histories of Motley to be bound together in a single volume; let him suppose the titles of the poems and essays cut out and the names of speakers and divisions of speeches removed, the whole divided up into sentences of a convenient length for parsing, and again into lessons contain- ing a larger or smaller number of these sentences. If the reader can carry his imagination through these processes he will have before him a fair parallel to the literary form in which the Bible has come to the modern reader; it is true that the purpose for which it has been split into chapters and verses is something higher than instruction in parsing, but the injury to literary form remains the same. Of course earnest students of Scripture get below the surface of isolated verses. Yet even in the case of deep students the literary element is in danger of being overpowered by other interests. The devout reader, following the Bible as the divine authority for his spiritual life, feels it a distraction to notice literary questions. And thereby he often impedes his own purpose: poring over a passage of Job to discover the message it has for him, and for- getting all the while the dramatic form of the book, as a result of which the speaker of the very passage he is studying is in the end iii iv PREFACE pronounced by God himself to have said the thing that is "not right." Another has been led by his studies to cast off the authority of the Bible, and he will not look for literary pleasure to that which has for him associations with a yoke from which he has been delivered. A third approaches Scripture with equal rever- ence and scholarship. Yet even for him there is a danger at the present moment, when the very bulk of the discussion tends to crowd out the thing discussed, and but one person is willing to read the Bible for every ten who are ready to read about it. Now for all these types of readers the literary study of the Bible is a common meeting-ground. One who recognises that God has been pleased to put his revelation of himself in the form of literature, must surely go on to see that literary form is a thing worthy of study. The agnostic will not deny that, if every particle of authority and supernatural character be taken from the Bible, it will remain one of the world's great literatures, second to none. And the most polemic of all investigators must admit that appreciation is the end, and polemics only the means. The term ‘literary study of the Bible’ describes a wide field of which the present work attempts to cover only a limited part. In particular, the term will include the most prominent of all types of Bible study, that which is now universally called the ‘Higher Criticism.’ There is no longer any need to speak of the splendid processes of modern Biblical Criticism, nor of the mag- nitude even of its undisputed results. I mention the Higher Criticism only to say that its province is distinct from that which I lay down for myself in this book. The Higher Criticism is mainly an historical analysis; I confine myself to literary investi- gation. By the literary treatment I understand the discussion of what we have in the books of Scripture; the historical analysis goes behind this to the further question how these books have reached their present form. I think the distinction of the two treatments is of considerable practical importance; since the historical analysis must, in the nature of things, divide students into hostile camps, PREFACE v while, as it appears to me, the literary appreciation of Scripture is a common ground upon which opposing schools may meet. The conservative thinker maintains that Deuteronomy is the personal composition of Moses; the opposite school regard the book as a pious fiction of the age of Josiah. But I do not see how either of these opinions, if true, or a third intermediate opinion, can pos- sibly affect the question with which I desire to interest the reader, — namely, the structure of Deuteronomy as it stands, whoever may be responsible for that structure. And yet the structural analysis of our Deuteronomy, and the connection of its successive parts, are by no means clearly understood by the ordinary reader of the Bible. The historical and the literary treatments are then distinct: yet sometimes they seem to clash. There are two points in particular as to which I find myself at variance with the accepted Higher Criticism. Historic analysis, investigating dates, sometimes finds itself obliged to discriminate between different parts of the same literary composition, and to assign to them different periods; hav- ing accomplished this upon sound evidence, it then often proceeds, no longer upon evidence, but by tacit assumption, by unconscious insinuations rather than by distinct statement, to treat the earlier parts of such a composition as ‘genuine’ or ‘original,’ while the portions of later date are made ‘interpolations,’ or ‘accretions,’ — in fact, are alluded to as something illegitimate. Thus, in the case of Job, few will hesitate to accept the theory that there is an earlier nucleus (to speak roughly) in the dialogue, while the speeches of Elihu and the Divine Intervention have come from another source. But nearly all commentators who hold this view seem to treat these later portions as if they were on a lower literary plane, and — so sensitive is taste to external considerations — they soon find them in a literary sense inferior. This whole attitude of mind seems to me unscientific: it is the intrusion of the modern conception of a fixed book and an individual author into a totally different literary age. The phenomena of floating poetry, with community of authorship and the perpetual revision that goes with oral tradition, are not only accepted but insisted upon by biblical scholars. But vi PREFACE in such floating literature our modern idea of 'originality' has no place; the earliest presentation has no advantage of authenticity over the latest; nor have the later versions necessarily any superi- ority to the earlier. Processes of floating poetry produced the Homeric poems, and in this case it is the last form, not the first, that makes our supreme Iliad. My contention is that, whatever may be the truth as to dates, all the sections of such a poem as Job are equally ‘genuine.’ And as a matter of literary analysis, I find the Speeches of Elihu and the Divine Intervention, from whatever sources they may have come, carrying forward the previous movement of the poem to a natural dramatic climax, and in literary effect as striking as any part of the book. My second objection to the characteristic methods of the Higher Criticism has to do with the divisions of the text. In analysing the contents of a book of Scripture many even of the best critics betray an almost exclusive preoccupation with subject matter, to the neglect of literary form; a powerful search-light is thrown upon minute historic allusions, while even broad indications of literary unity or diversity are passed by. I will take a typical example. In the latter part of our Book of Micah a group of verses (vii. 7–10) must strike even a casual reader by their buoyancy of tone, so sharply contrasting with what has gone before. Accordingly Wellhausen sees in this changed tone evidence of a new composition, product of an age long distant from the age of the prophet: "between v. 6 and v. 7 there yawns a century."1 What really yawns between the verses is simply a change of speakers. The latter part of Micah is admittedly dramatic, and a reader attentive to literary form cannot fail to note a distinct dramatic composition introduced by the title-verse (vi. 9): "The voice of the LORD crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom will fear thy name„" The latter part of the title --"and the man of wisdom will fear thy name "—prepares us to expect an addition in the ‘Man of Wisdom’ to the usual dramatis personae of prophetic dramas, which are confined to God, the Prophet, and the ruined Nation. All 1 Quoted in Driver's Introduction, in loc. PREFACE vii that follows the title-verse bears out the description. Verses 10–16 are the words of denunciation and threatening put into the mouth of God.

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