There is a great difference between a book which is written by a particular individual and is dispensed by him among the people, and a book which makes a people itself. One cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people. — PASCAL, Thoughts

THE FORMATIVE CENTURIES

HE seven centuries during which the literature of the Hebrew people was gradually unfolding from elemental to rounded form and content correspond roughly to the period of their independent existence as a state. The great epoch to which their prophets and historians looked back as a beginning was that of their deliverance, as unorganized tribes and families, from a life of bondage in Egypt, about 1320 years before Christ. The influence of that event colored all their songs and stories with the sense of intimate dependence on their deliverer Jehovah, and with the presage of a high destiny and purpose. This continued, its meanings wrought out with increasing clearness and force, through a turbulent period of tribal anarchy under the Judges, in which days "there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judg. xvii, 6; xviii, 1; xix, I; xxi, 25); through the organization of a kingdom under Saul, and its vigorous unity under David and Solomon; through the varied fortunes of the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel, with their exposure to contentions within and invasions military and religious from without; until the time was ripe for the people to undergo a momentous ordeal, the ordeal of deportation and exile and dispersion. At the time of this event, that of the Chaldean captivity from 586 to 538 B.C., the Israelite people had in possession a noble store of literature, accessible to all classes, from which they could derive hope and guidance for the unknown experiences yet to come. All the period thus covered was, as regards their racial and religious idea, a germinal and preparatory period; which therefore we may call the Formative Centuries.

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These centuries were formative as well for the nation as for the literature. Beginning with a primitive aggregation of tribes and clans, so untrained to organization that a whole generation of wilderness education has to be undergone before they are fit to colonize their allotted land, their corporate life has to grow through various advancing stages of civilization, nomadic, pastoral, agricultural, — before they reach the organized and urban state in which they can be fully aware of their national idea and principle, and of their religious trend. They are finding themselves, pupils as it were, in the school of Jehovah. And during these centuries their peculiar formative idea must make itself good in the face of peoples stronger and more civilized than they, proving thus its fitness to survive and overcome. It must by varied experience and discovery prove its intrinsic fitness to be the law of sterling manhood, among the speculations and idolatries and superstitions of the earth.

CHAPTER I

SEMINA LITTERARUM

[Till the end of the reign of David, cir. 970 B.C.]

FA PEOPLE whose unique mission it was to bring forth

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a Bible for the most enlightened races of the world we need to know more than is implied in a census of extant literary production. We need to know something of its native fitness for this mission; of its endowments of mind, temperament, character; of its distinctive gifts of insight and expression; and of that more comprehensive spiritual energy which we may name its genius. It is among such elements as these that we are to trace the vital germs of its literature, the Semina Litterarum.

I. THE HEBREW MIND

The Bible is essentially a Hebrew book. It bears throughout the characteristic impress of the Hebrew mind. The Old Testament was written mostly in the Hebrew language; and the different ages in which its various works were composed represent the language from its time of classical purity, when it was the people's vernacular, to the time when it was becoming a book language, and its place as a people's tongue was being taken by the closely allied Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek, and availed itself, especially in the more doctrinal portions, of Greek ways of thinking, at a time when the Greek mind. was dominant in the culture and philosophy of the world. The New Testament writers read their Old Testament, too, in a Greek version.

This transition from Hebrew to Greek, however, while it enlarged and enriched the thinking of the later writers, did not determine it. The Hebrew genius prevails throughout its peculiar raciål coloring; its inherited ideas of life; its fidelity to conscience and morals; its religious interpretations of history and experience; its prophetic sense of manhood's mission and destiny. This is as true of the New Testament as of the Old; for the New Testament is but the perpetuation and maturing of ideals that had long germinated in Hebrew minds. As our Lord Jesus himself said to the woman of Samaria, "Salvation"—that is, the health of manhood-" is of the Jews" (John iv, 22). And the germinal principles of this were determined from the beginning of their history.

NOTES. 1. The Language of the Old Testament. "All the Old Testament books are written in Hebrew, with the exception of parts of Daniel and Ezra, namely, Dan. ii, 4-vii, 28; Ezra iv, 8-vi, 18, vii, 12-26, which are in Aramaic, a language closely allied to the Hebrew and at least as old. There is also a single Aramaic verse in the Book of Jeremiah, where it appears suddenly and perplexingly in the midst of a Hebrew paragraph (Jer. x, 11); and two Aramaic words in Genesis xxxi, 47, on the occasion when Laban the Aramean gives to the pile of stones set up for a testimony between himself and Jacob the name of Jegar-Sahadutha, which is merely the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew Gale-ed, 'heap of witness.'" 1

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Aramaic, as a vehicle

2. From Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek. for profound religious thought, was poor and inexpressive and halting compared with the richness and variety of the Greek. Though capable, no doubt, of development, it did not develop, unless to a very slight extent. Greek had ready a wealth of religious and philosophic terminology, equal to the expression of the most exalted and far-reaching conceptions, and had already carried speculation to its furthest bounds. No other existing language could offer equal facilities to a doctrine that desired to be known, and a literature that claimed to have a message for all mankind. Aramaic yielded place to Greek, and for the world at large, for just and liberal thought, the change was fraught with inestimable gain."2

1 Geden," Introduction to the Hebrew Bible,” pp. 3, 4.

2 Ibid. p. 167.