For worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters, as by a certain Fate great Acts and great Eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same Ages. — MILTON These people have a secret; they have discerned the way the world was going, and therefore they have prevailed.— MATTHEW ARNOLD A GUIDEBOOK TO THE BIBLICAL LITERATURE AFTER A PRELIMINARY SURVEY FTER a lifelong conversance with literature, in which field he did the world great service and nobly wore himself out, Sir Walter Scott, in his last illness, requested his son-in-law Lockhart to read to him. When asked from what book, he replied, "Need you ask? There is but one." And Lockhart read to him from the Bible. This tribute of a modern author to the venerable volume was not his alone. Nor did it express, as some would read it, either a sudden vivid conviction or a sick man's sense of last resort. It was the world's tribute, rendered long ago and reënforced by ages of ripened experience; expressing the general judgment that here, of all books, is the one supremely great, the one that none others can supplant or emulate, the one embodying the essential values of all the rest. This idea is implicit in the name that soon after its completion was given to it: The Bible, not a specific title at all, for it means simply The Book. The epithet Holy, which was quite generally added to the name, is of the same implication, expressing as it does its separateness from and superiority to all other books. ་་ -- The term The Bible, from the Greek ta biblia, meaning originally "the booklets," or "little books" (more strictly What's in little papers," for biblos was the Greek word for papyrus), recognizes the volume before us as a body of literature distributed in a collection of smaller works; the Name which it obviously is. These works, however, though diverse, are not fortuitous or miscellaneous but of a selected and classified character; wherefore the volume, as now made up, is often spoken of as a sacred canon or library. The name "bible" was not given to the collection until the selecting and amassing of the booklets, in both Old and New Testaments, was virtually or quite complete; and soon thereafter the word, originally a plural, was understood and construed as a singular. Thus out of the sense of diversity grew the sense of unity and comprehensiveness. The name crystallizes the book's history. Beginning with the most unpretending claims, making its way by its intrinsic worth, not compelling assent but winning it, the Bible has established itself by its broad and varied scope, its homogeneity, and its developed unity of theme, as the world's supreme classic. In such comprehensive scope it calls for appraisal to-day. The Bible is at once, and in equally true sense of all three distinctions: a literature, a library, and a book. NOTE. Its Designations. It was about the middle of the second century A.D. that the name Bible" was generally adopted; and the word seems to have changed from plural to singular in its transition from Greek to Latin. The name given in the Bible itself to the collection of sacred writings (comprising the Old Testament series) is s'pharim, books; see for instance, Dan. ix, 2: "I, Daniel, understood by the books," among which he specifies the prophecy of Jeremiah. The New Testament writers speak of the Old Testament books as hai graphai, the writings (Latin scripturæ); see, for instance, Acts xvii, 11: examining the scriptures (tas graphas) daily," where the body of Old Testament literature is meant. I The Bible as a Literature. As a gradually accumulated deposit of literary works the Bible coincides, in time and in progress of ideas, with the national history of a people of Semitic origin inhabiting the small land of Palestine, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, and called at successive stages of their history Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews. During this race's unique national experience this literature, as put into form by its poets, sages, historians, and prophets, embodied its sanest thinking and far-reaching ideals; was in fact the education and making of that peculiarly gifted people. The basis of this literature, its underlying tissue, is historic and prophetic. That is to say, nearly all the works preserved to us are pretty directly concerned with this people's national experience; not indeed in the mere annalistic or political sense, but as discerning its inner meanings, as related to the elemental claims of God and duty and destiny. This it is which gives the literature its hold on succeeding times and peoples; for of all ancient races the Hebrew race was preeminent for the depth, the clearness, and the intensity of its spiritual intuitions. Its numerous writers, whoever they were, had in large and like degree the poet's and prophet's endowment of such large discourse, Looking before and after; and this was their undying gift to humanity. The literature surviving to us in the Bible covers, in its composition, a period from about 1250 B.C.1 to about In its His- 100 A.D. In its literary development this long toric Setting period falls naturally into three stages, which in our present study are considered in three books. NOTE. The Starting Point. This period of about 1350 years is reckoned from the Song of Deborah, Judges v, perhaps the earliest literary piece which as a whole can be taken as contemporaneous with its event, to the completion of the Gospels, which may be put at about 100 A.D. The Song of Miriam at the Red Sea, Exod. xv, is in part as old as its event, and there are other early fragments which will be noted in their place; but the Song of Deborah makes a convenient starting point alike in history and in literature, from which we can reckon both backwards and forwards. 1 For the dates in Old Testament chronology I follow mostly those given in Kautszch's "Literature of the Old Testament." |