《The Pulpit Commentaries – Joshua (Vol. 1)》(Joseph S. Exell)
Contents and the Editors
One of the largest and best-selling homiletical commentary sets of its kind. Directed by editors Joseph Exell and Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones, The Pulpit Commentary drew from over 100 authors over a 30 year span to assemble this conservative and trustworthy homiletical commentary set. A favorite of pastors for nearly 100 years, The Pulpit Commentary offers you ideas and insight on "How to Preach It" throughout the entire Bible.
This in-depth commentary brings together three key elements for better preaching:
· Exposition-with thorough verse-by-verse commentary of every verse in the Bible.
· Homiletics-with the "framework" or the "big picture" of the text.
· Homilies-with four to six sermons sample sermons from various authors.
In addition, this set also adds detailed information on biblical customs as well as historical and geographical information, and translations of key Hebrew and Greek words to help you add spice to your sermon.
All in all, The Pulpit Commentary has over 22,000 pages and 95,000 entries from a total of 23 volumes. The go-to commentary for any preacher or teacher of God's Word.
About the Editors
Rev. Joseph S. Exell, M.A., served as the Editor of Clerical World, The Homiletical Quarterly and the Monthly Interpreter. Exell was also the editor for several large commentary sets like The Men of the Bible, The Pulpit Commentary, Preacher's Homiletic Library and The Biblical Illustrator.
Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones was born in London on January 14, 1836. He was educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge where he received his B.A. in 1864. He was ordered deacon in 1865 and ordained as a priest is the following year. He was professor of English literature and lecturer in Hebrew at St. David's College, Lampeter, Wales from 1865-1870. He was rector of St. Mary-de-Crypt with All Saints and St. Owen, Gloucester from 1870-1877 and principal of Gloucester Theological College 1875-1877. He became vicar and rural dean of St. Pancras, London 1877-1886, and honorary canon since 1875. He was select preacher at Cambridge in 1883,1887,1901, and 1905, and at Oxford in 1892 and 1903. In 1906 he was elected professor of ancient history in the Royal Academy. In theology he is a moderate evangelical. He also edited The Pulpit Commentary (48 vols., London, 1880-97) in collaboration with Rev. J. S. Exell, to which he himself contributed the section on Luke, 2 vols., 1889, and edited and translated the Didache 1885. He passed away in 1917 after authoring numerous individual titles.
00 Introduction
Introduction.
§ 1. ORIGIN AND DATE OF THE BOOK OF JOSHUA.
EXCEPT perhaps, the Book of Daniel, there are no parts of Holy Scripture concerning the date and authorship of which so lively a controversy has raged as the first six books of the Old Testament. To mention all the various theories that have been advanced would be impossible. We will give a brief sketch of some of the most noticeable, and then proceed to examine more in detail the arguments which have been advanced to support them.
2. Keil and others regard it as a treatise of somewhat later date than the time of Joshua, composed about twenty-five or thirty years after his death.
3. Ewald's theory is a very elaborate one. He regards the book as a composition of the Deuteronomist in the time of Manasseh. This conclusion he bases on the very slight foundation that there is an allusion in Deuteronomy 28:68 to the condition of Judea in the time of Manasseh, or even later. This argument, again, rests upon the assumption that prophecy is impossible, a postulate which many will be indisposed to grant. But his method is, as he states, "scientific," which seems to mean that he takes everything for granted which is necessary to establish his theory. The many indications of earlier origin and authorship he quietly disposes of by assuming that they were portions of some earlier work, imbedded precisely as they stood in the mass of fiction which the writer of later times has evolved from his own moral consciousness. Not only so, but scientific criticism, he believes, can disintegrate these fragments with unfailing accuracy, and assign them to their proper owner. There are thus, he holds,
(1) a few fragments of contemporary works inserted verbatim in the midst of the mass of later history or tradition. These consist
(a) of a book quoted by name in Numbers 21:14, "The Book of the Wars of Jahveh," or Jehovah;
(b) the Biography of Moses; and
(c) the Book of Covenants, from which all the legal or quasi-legal matter is derived; written, as he says, in an age of confusion, when men tried to secure themselves by covenants with their neighbours. Then
(2) about the time of David comes the great Book of Origins. Lastly
4. Ewald has found various imitators, among whom the principal is Knobel. Adopting De Wette's view of the discrepancies in the text of the Pentateuch and Joshua, and Ewald's general method of explaining it, Knobel nevertheless proposes a different arrangement of the original materials from which the supposed mosaic of the Pentateuch and Joshua is made up. Knobel, like Ewald, also finds it possible to assign each of the various extracts of which the Pentateuch and Joshua are made up to their respective authors. But he has not only discovered by his analysis different authors to Ewald, but he assigns different portions to them. Ewala's system he pronounces "so complicated and obscure a fabric," so devoid of all tenable hypotheses, that it fails to convince; while he complains that critics like Hengstenberg and Havernick and Keil, because they do not accept his methods, convert a scientific inquiry into a theological controversy." Therefore he plays the part of Tycho Brahe to Ewald's Ptolemy, and invents a theory which renders a few of the latter's epicycles unnecessary. Thus there is
(1) an Elohistic document, clear, orderly, and historical, free from the marvellous occurrences in which the later works abound, which constitutes the groundwork of the whole narrative. Then follows
(2) a Book of Laws or first Jehovistic source. Then
(3) the Book of Wars, or second Jehovistic source. Then we have
(4) the Jehovist himself. Lastly
(5) the Deuteronomist arrears, to whom all Deuteronomy, with the exception of certain specified portions, and all the parts of Joshua which refer to Deuteronomy belong.
5. Noldeke subjects Knobel to a similar simplifying process to that which Knobel subjects Ewald. According to Noldeke, there are two sources;
(1) an outline history (Elohistic), and
(2) a history filling up that outline; composed
(a) by the second Elohist, and
(b) by the Jehovist.
Lastly, we have two editors. The first combined these into a consistent whole. The second added Deuteronomy and remodelled Joshua, bringing it into accordance with his fictitious additions to the Mosaic narrative.
6. Bleek feels himself compelled to still further reduce the number of histories, and thereby approaches nearer to a consistent and rational explanation of the facts. Documents existed, he believes, at an earlier period. But the first author, whom he calls the first Elohist, appeared at the time of Saul, and his history contains the greater part of Joshua. In the time of David appeared the Jehovist, who revised and rewrote, with the aid of earlier documents then existing, the greater portion of the Elohist. Lastly, at the time of Manasseh, or thereabouts, arose the Deuteronomist, who reduced the book into its present shape.
Such is an abstract of some of the chief theories which have been put forward regarding the authorship of Joshua. It is needless to say that the opponents of the authenticity and single authorship claim for their methods the exclusive title of scientific investigation. Ewald, with lofty infallibility, places Hengstenberg, Keil, Delitzsch, Kurz "outside of all science." But those who adopt his method, and venture only to question its application, fare scarcely more favourably at his hands. Thus, when he commences his researches, he examines what has been before written in the direction in which his predilections lead him. He finds that Ilgen takes a step on the right road, but always loses it again. "There was," he complains, "much perversity of attempt and aim mingled with" the otherwise praiseworthy attempts of these early investigators. They "were too easily satisfied with hunting out mere contradictions in the books and resolving everything into fragments," and were "unable to distinguish a real incongruity from a merely apparent discrepancy". Nor do his successors in the investigation please him any more than the pioneers who preceded him. Hupfeld and Knobel, we learn from a note to a later addition, are "unsatisfactory and perverse." We have already seen what Knobel's opinion of Ewald is. It may, therefore, not be entirely unscientific if we venture to suspend our judgment, and examine the facts anew, with the desire to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
The industry and research which has been expended upon the task of establishing these theories is beyond all praise. Knobel, especially, has devoted the most minute attention to the words and phrases of the Hebrew Scriptures. But the objection is made, not to the utmost possible minuteness of study of the phrases of Holy Writ, but to the method pursued by the observers. In minuteness of observation the German critics have been anticipated and surpassed by the Rabbis, in whose hands this minute observation yields results in precisely the opposite direction. It is not mere minute observation, but the use that is made of it, which is required. And this so called "scientific" criticism is carried on by methods diametrically opposite to all which science has hitherto recognised. For if there be one principle better established in science than another, it is that in scientific processes nothing must be taken for granted but the most self-evident truths.
It must be confessed that these "scientific" theories, if not sound, are extremely ingenious. It is very difficult to reply conclusively to a critic who has a theory ready made to meet every emergency. Thus, if the author of the Book of Joshua displays an accurate and minute acquaintance with his subject, he is quoting an early and authentic document. If he states anything which is not at first sight easily reconcileable with what he has stated elsewhere, he has taken it out of another less early and less authentic one. If he quotes the Book of Deuteronomy, which according to all the laws of literary criticism proves it to have been in existence when he wrote, he was himself the author of it, and was engaged in the task of mingling its contents with real and veracious history. If a 'Book of the Wars of Jahveh' is quoted, as in Numbers 21:14, 15, it is an older document. If a 'Book of the Law of Jahveh,' he wrote it himself. This is not to inquire, it is to make inquiry impossible. It is to substitute dogma, the dogma of the destructive school, in the place of the dogma they have so persistently decried, which assumes that the books of Scripture, as a rule, were written by the persons whose names they bore. Is the one dogma one whir more scientific than the other?
The authenticity of the Book of Deuteronomy is a question on which we are of course precluded from entering. But the question of the hand the Deuteronomist had in the compilation of the Book of Joshua is one which falls within our limits. There is not the slightest evidence in the book itself to lead to the conclusion that it was a production of the time of Manasseh, a conclusion which the opponents of the genuineness of Deuteronomy have based upon the very slender foundation of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28:68. If, as is assumed, the Deuteronomist embodied the references to his own work into the Book of Joshua, in order to facilitate the reception of his pretended laws of Moses, the question forces itself irresistibly upon us, Why did he not introduce more of them? Why did he confine his extracts from the 'Book of the Laws of Jahveh' to the passage at the end of Joshua 8., and a few exhortations to "be strong and of good courage," and the like, which is all we find elsewhere? These extracts are not enough for his purpose, were he introducing them for the purpose of gaining acceptance for the precepts he was desirous of enforcing.
We proceed briefly to notice some objections to the narrative of Joshua which meet us in the pages of Ewald, Dr. Davidson, and others. Ewald supposes Joshua to be the "ideal king" of the times of the Deuteronomist ('History of Israel,' 1:116). Now there is not one single trace of the kingly idea throughout the Book of Joshua. The severe simplicity of his life, the remarkable absence of anything like kingly claims, is one of the most striking features of the book. As well could we suppose the characters of Brutus or Cincinnatus to have been ideals of civic virtue called up to animate dying Roman patriotism in the days of Elagabalus, as to suppose that the writer of the Book of Joshua had the Oriental type of king before his eyes, such as existed in Judaea and the neighbourhood in the reign of Manasseh.
Next, Ewald remarks on the archaic character of Joshua 17:14-18, which he describes as "rough and hard as a stone." Yet Knobel, who was no mean Hebraist, assigns the passage to the "first Jehovist." And if Ewald's view be right, the passage may easily be explained on the hypothesis that we have here the ipsissima verba of Joshua himself.
In the pages of Dr. Davidson's well-known work other objections will be found. They are open to the same reproach that we have already brought against the other productions of his school, namely, their unduly dogmatic tone.