Literary Study of the Bible

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 divi-

sions 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

ivPREFACE

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 appre-

ciation 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 analy-

sis must, in the nature of things, divide students into hostile camps,

PREFACEv

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 liter-

ary 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

viPREFACE

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 what-

ever sources they may have come, carrying forward the previous

movement of the poem to a natural dramatic climax, and in liter-

ary 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 composi-

tion, 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.

PREFACEvii

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. Then the first six verses of chapter seven voice the woe

of the guilty city. Then the Man of Wisdom speaks, and the dis-

puted verses change the tone to convey the happy confidence of

one on whose side the divine intervention is to take place:

But as for me, I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of

my salvation: my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, 0 mine

enemy: when I fall, I shall arise, etc.

The sequence of verses follows quite naturally the dramatic form

indicated by the title, and no break in the text is required. I have

no objection in the abstract to the hypothesis of defects in textual

transmission; but in judging of any alleged example it is reason-

able to give to indications of literary form a weight not inferior to

that of suggestions drawn from subject matter.

Besides this historic analysis other obvious lines of literary treat-

ment are omitted from this book. I have scarcely touched such

poetic criticism as was admirably illustrated by the digest of

Hebrew imagery which Mr. Montefiore contributed some time

since to the Jewish Quarterly Review. I have little or nothing

to say about the style of biblical writers, although I welcome Pro-

fessor Cook's introduction of the Bible as a model in the teaching

of Rhetoric. I have even felt compelled to drop the survey of

subject matter which was at first a part of my plan. The more I

have studied the Bible from a literary standpoint, and considered

also the conditions for making such a standpoint generally acces-

sible, the more one single aspect of the subject has come into

prominence — the treatment of literary morphology: how to dis-

tinguish one literary composition from another, to say exactly

where each begins and ends; to recognise Epic, Lyric, and other

forms as they appear in their biblical dress, as well as to distin-

guish literary forms special to the Sacred writers. Hence the

book is "An account of the leading Forms of Literature repre-

sented in the Sacred Writings." The whole works up to what I

viiiPREFACE

have called a " Literary Index of the Bible." This ranges from

Genesis to Revelation, including the apocryphal books of Wisdom

and Ecclesiasticus; it marks off exactly each separate composition

(or integral parts of the longer compositions), indicates the liter-

ary form of each, and, where suitable (as in the case of an essay

or sonnet), suggests an appropriate title. My idea is that a stu-

dent might mark these divisions and titles in the margin of his

Revised Version, and so do for his Bible what the printer would

do for all other literature. I believe it is almost impossible to

overestimate the difference made to our power of appreciation when

the literary form of what we are reading is indicated to the eye,

instead of our having to collect it laboriously from what we read.

The underlying axiom of my work is that a clear grasp of the outer

literary form is an essential guide to the inner matter and spirit.

I am of course not so sanguine as to suppose that the arrange-

ment of the Sacred Writings in this Index — involving, as it must,

critical questions in relation to every book of the Bible — will be

accepted. I desire nothing better than to set every student to

make such an arrangement for himself, getting help from every

source that is open to him and so to tide over the period before

public opinion permits the Bible to be issued with such aids to

intelligent reading from the printed page as are taken for granted

in all other literature.

I have spoken so far from the point of view of the general or

the religious reader. But a consideration of a different kind has

had weight with me in the production of this book: the place in

liberal education of the Bible treated as literature. It has come

by now to be generally recognised that the Classics of Greece and

Rome stand to us in the position of an ancestral literature, — the

inspiration of our great masters, and bond of common associations

between our poets and their readers. But does not such a posi-

tion belong equally to the literature of the Bible? if our intellect

and imagination have been formed by the Greeks, have we not in

similar fashion drawn our moral and emotional training from

PREFACEix

Hebrew thought? Whence then the neglect of the Bible in our

higher schools and colleges? It is one of the curiosities of our

civilisation that we are content to go for our liberal education to

literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves:

literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis

of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human

level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social

problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of

intoxication; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law

to the remotest corner of the universe, we go at school for literary

impulse to the poetry that dramatises the burden of hopeless fate.

Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace, our first

poetic lessons are in an Iliad that cannot be appreciated without a

bloodthirsty joy in killing. We seek to form a character in which

delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are

training our taste in literatures which, if published as English

books, would be seized by the police. I recall these paradoxes,

not to make objection, but to suggest the reasonableness of the

claim that the one side of our liberal education should have

another side to balance it. Prudish fears may be unwise, but

there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely

good that our youth, during the formative period, should have

displayed to them, in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek

literature — in lyrics which Pindar cannot surpass, in rhetoric as

forcible as that of Demosthenes, or contemplative prose not in-

ferior to Plato's — a people dominated by an utter passion for

righteousness, a people whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of

universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of all moral

evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid, and speech as musical,

as when Sappho sang of love or AEschylus thundered his deep

notes of destiny. When it is added that the familiarity of the

English Bible renders all this possible without the demand upon

the time-table that would be involved in the learning of another

language, it seems clear that our school and college curricula will

not have shaken off their medieval narrowness and renaissance

xPREFACE

paganism until Classical and Biblical literatures stand side by side

as sources of our highest culture.

My obligations will be obvious to the main representative works

of Biblical Criticism, more especially to the works of Cheyne,

Briggs, George Adam Smith, and the late Professor Milligan; to

the lectures of President Harper; above all to Canon Driver's

Introduction to Old Testament Literature, which has placed the

best results of modern investigation within easy reach of the ordi-

nary reader. I have made copious citations from the Revised

Version of the Bible and Apocrypha, for the use of which I am

under obligations to the University Presses of Oxford and Cam-

bridge. I am indebted for assistance of various kinds to personal

friends, amongst whom I ought to mention my brother, Dr. Moulton,

of the LeysSchool, and—here as always—Mr. Joseph Jacobs,

who has become to his large circle of friends a universal referee

for all departments of study. I have other obligations in my

memory, which it is not so easy to specify; obligations to public

institutions and private individuals whose encouragement has

assisted me at every step. For the last four years I have been

lecturing on Biblical literature in churches of various denomina-

tions, in theological schools and universities, and in popular lecture

rooms; my audiences in England and America have included

clergy and laity, Christian and Jewish, not without a representa-

tion of that other public which never reads the Bible and hears

with surprise its most notable passages. Though I have taken

pains to inquire, I have never found examples of the difficulties

which it was feared by some the handling of this topic on the

lecture platform might create. On the contrary, my experience

has uniformly confirmed what I have called above the foundation