The Literature of the Old Testament Part 3

CHAPTER VIII

JOSHUA

In all the sources of the Pentateuch the possession of Canaan is the goal toward which the whole history moves, from the call of Abraham to the last exhortations of Moses in the plains of Moab, and they must all have narrated, however briefly, the occupation of the country. The history of the conquest and division of Canaan is the subject of the Book of Joshua. The author has evidently derived his material from diverse sources, and it is reasonable to expect to find among them the continuation of the chief sources of the Pentateuch. This expectation is verified; it is not difficult to recognize in some places the sequel of the preceding narratives, and other pa.s.sages which on internal grounds may confidently be ascribed to one or the other of them. But the attempt to a.n.a.lyze the book discovers at once the fact that the problem is different from that in Genesis to Numbers. The author of the Pentateuch had two chief narrative sources, a history compiled probably in the first half of the seventh century and in any case pre-Deuteronomic, which from its two princ.i.p.al strands is commonly designated by the symbol JE, and the history of the religious inst.i.tutions (P), probably of the fifth century. The author of Joshua had for his sources, besides the continuation of P, a history of the conquest by a writer belonging to what is not inaptly called the deuteronomist school of historians, whose thought and style are moulded by those of Deuteronomy. In cc. 1-12 the author of Joshua follows this source almost exclusively, only here and there introducing a pa.s.sage from the post-exilic narrative (e.g. Jos. v.

10-12); in cc. 13-24, on the other hand, the allotment of the tribal territories and the a.s.signment of cities in these territories to the levites and the priests, are chiefly from the later work. Inasmuch as the style of the deuteronomist and of the priestly writers is characteristically different, the rough a.n.a.lysis is here comparatively easy, nor is it ordinarily difficult to recognize the brief pa.s.sages which are incorporated from the older sources; but, as in the Pentateuch, the discrimination of the original contents of the priestly source from subsequent expansions and from the hand of the author of Joshua himself is frequently very uncertain. Here also additions were made by editors at a still later time, some of which are not found in the Greek version.

A different and much more difficult problem is presented by Jos. 1-12, the problem, namely, of the sources of the deuteronomist history. The duplication of the narrative is very plain in the story of Jericho (Jos. 6). One account told how the Israelites marched around the city once each day for seven days in ominous silence; on the seventh day, at Joshua's command, they broke out in the war-cry, and rus.h.i.+ng upon the city from every side, took it by storm, and put every living thing in it to the sword, sparing only Rahab the harlot and her household.

In the parallel narrative a religious procession, the priests bearing the ark in the midst, compa.s.sed the city seven times; on the last circuit the priests blew a fanfare on their ram's horns, at which the walls fell flat to the ground, and the Israelites, after bringing Rahab to a place of safety, burnt the city with fire. Editors or scribes who were particularly edified by the horn-blowing start it prematurely in vs. 8 f., 13, and have tried to improve on the story in other places. The second version shows the same inclination to glorify the divine interventions by giving them a magical form which has been remarked in E's account of the deliverance at the Red Sea, while the simpler story of the unexpected a.s.sault--to which there is a close parallel in a Roman hand-book of military stratagems--resembles in its naturalness J's account of the crossing of the sea.

Both sources tell of the rescue of Rahab, and thus presuppose some such story as we find in Jos. 2, where, again, duplication is evident.

The interdict on the spoils of Jericho (vi. 17, J), is the antecedent to the story of Achan, whose appropriation of a part of the spoil is the cause of the repulse at Ai (c. 7), and thus the clues can be followed backward and forward. The chief source in c. 8 (the taking of Ai) and c. 9 (ruse of the Gibeonites) also is J, with which the parallel account of E is combined; additions by later hands are recognizable, the most remarkable being viii. 30-35 (cf. Deut. xxvii.

1-8, 12). In the history of the two campaigns by which the allied kings of the south and of the north respectively were annihilated (Jos. 10 and 11) both sources appear. A considerable part of these chapters, however, is the work of the deuteronomist author, especially the summary of the conquests, cc. x. 28-43; xi. 10-23. Chapter 12, which for completeness goes over the conquests east of the Jordan also, is dependent on Deut. 3; Jos. xiii. 2-6 (the territories remaining to be conquered) is of the same sort and probably by the same hand.

It seems, therefore, that both J and E related the crossing of the Jordan, the taking of Jericho and the operations against Ai, and, further, the wars with the confederate kings. In these narratives Israel, from its standing camp at Gilgal, invades the country as one great army under the command of Joshua; the deuteronomist author represents them as exterminating the native population root and branch, "they left not a soul alive." There are, however, scattered here and there through the text, fragments of a very different story (xiii. 13; xv. 13-19, 63; xvii. 11-13, 14-18; xix. 47), most of which are also found continuously in Judg. 1. According to this account, the Israelite tribes invaded the country separately or in small groups; their success varied in different regions, but everywhere the walled cities remained in the possession of their old inhabitants; in some quarters the Israelites became subject to the Canaanites, in others they in time reduced them to subjection. This account may not embody a historical tradition--it could perfectly well have arisen by inference from the actual situation at the beginning of the kingdom--but it is at least in a broad sense historical. The case ill.u.s.trates in an instructive way the fact that the oldest literary sources of the history which we can recover had themselves diverse and sometimes contradictory sources in tradition.

In the Pentateuch it is well established that J and E had been combined by a historian of the prophetic period (JE), though there is evidence that the separate works continued to circulate. In Joshua, also, it is probable that the deuteronomist historian used the composite JE, and that the harmonizing of these sources and some of the religious improvement which runs along with it is the work of his predecessor who combined the two sources. It seems that P also had E independently, and it is certain that later editors of the deuteronomist school added their contributions.

The allotment of the tribal territories, the designation of asylum cities, and the setting apart of cities for the levites and priests, comes chiefly, as was said above, from a priestly source. How much of it was in the older history of P (Book of Origins) is doubtful. One, at least, of the earlier narratives told of the division of the land by lot, and P, who followed this representation, may have connected with it some sort of domesday book; but it was probably not so detailed as that which we now read.

The a.s.signment of forty-eight cities to the priests and levites, including the most important places in the country, is an extravagance even for the sacerdotal imagination, comparable to Ezekiel's part.i.tion of the land in parallel strips. It is the counterpart of Num. x.x.xv. 1-8, in a late supplement to the priestly laws, and directly contradicts the older principle (Num. xviii. 21-24) that neither priests nor levites shall have any landed property. Thus in Joshua, as in the Pentateuch, the priestly element is neither of one sort nor of one age: and again the evidence of the Greek version shows that additions and changes continued to be made in the text till the neighbourhood of 200 B.C.

There is no evidence that the author of our Book of Joshua was the same as the author of the present Pentateuch; various indications point rather to the contrary. Nor can the author of the deuteronomist history of the conquest be certainly identified with any one of the hands engaged in the compilation and enlargement of the Book of Deuteronomy; all that can be affirmed is that he was of the same spirit, and that literary dependence upon Deuteronomy, and sometimes on younger parts of it, is visible in many places in Joshua.

The Book of Joshua closes with a farewell address by Joshua to the tribes of Israel a.s.sembled at Shechem, in which, after a brief resume of G.o.d's dealing with their fathers from the calling of Abraham, the exodus, and their own more recent experiences down to the present, he exhorts them to put away the G.o.ds which their fathers served "beyond the river" (in Mesopotamia), and wors.h.i.+p Jehovah alone. Thereupon the people solemnly pledge themselves to serve him only and hearken to his words (Jos. 24). There is no question that this discourse is derived from E; a counterpart to it from the hand of the author of the deuteronomist Joshua stands in c. 23, and corresponds to the address of Moses in Deut. x.x.xi. 1-8. The sequel of Jos. xxiv. 28 is found in Judg. ii. 6-9. The restoration at a late time, of the old fragment Judg. i. 1-36, and the division of the books at this point, led to the repet.i.tion of the verses in Jos. xxiv. 29 ff. The importance of this fact is the proof it gives that E narrated the history of the generations following the death of Joshua as an apostasy from the religion of Jehovah such as the dying leader had warned the people against (Jos. xxiv. 19), and thus determined the treatment of the whole period which we now find in the Book of Judges. The last injunctions of Joshua in the deuteronomist history (Jos. xxiii. 14-16) exhibit the same conception of the subsequent history; in Judg. ii.

11-iii. 6, both E and the deuteronomist author are represented.

CHAPTER IX

JUDGES

The Book of Judges falls into three parts, namely, (1) Judg. i. 1-ii.

5, which intrudes, as has already been observed, between the close of Joshua and its immediate sequel in Judges ii. 6 ff.; (2) Judg. ii.

6-xvi. 31, stories of a succession of champions and deliverers of Israel in the centuries preceding the establishment of the kingdom; (3) Judg. 17-18; 19-21, two additional stories laid in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bibles the story of Ruth, which also is said to have occurred in the days of the Judges, follows.

The introduction, Judg. ii. 6-iii. 6, gives a summary of the whole period: as soon as Joshua and his generation had pa.s.sed away, the Israelites fell away from the religion of Jehovah, and wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds of Canaan; indignant at this defection, he allowed them to be overrun and subdued by their enemies; when in their distress they turned to their own G.o.d for help, he raised them up champions who delivered them; but their amendment was brief, they presently relapsed into heathenism; and so it went on from bad to worse. In correspondence with this general scheme each epoch in the history is opened in some such way as this: The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of Jehovah; he delivered them into the power of such and such a tyrant or nation; when they cried unto him, he raised up so and so as a deliverer. Thereupon follows the story of the deliverance (see iii. 7-11; iii. 12-15; iv. 1 ff.). Sometimes, as in vi. 1-10, x. 6-18, these preambles are expanded, but the purport remains the same.

Another feature of the book is the systematic chronology in which the frequency of the numbers twenty, forty, and eighty (forty years being in the Old Testament equivalent to a generation) at once strikes the attention; see iii. 11, 30; iv. 3; v. 31; viii. 28; xiii. 1; xv. 20 (xvi. 31). In several other instances the figures vary a little on either side of twenty (eighteen, twenty-two, etc.). The duration of the oppression is given in the introduction of the story; the period of peace and prosperity which succeeded the deliverance, at the end; see, e.g., iv. 3; v. 31. In the same way the life of Moses is divided into three parts of forty years each; Eli judged Israel forty years; David and Solomon each reigned forty years. It can hardly be doubted that this chronology is artificial, and that the key to it is found in 1 Kings vi. 1, which reckons four hundred and eighty years (i.e.

twelve generations) from the exodus to the building of Solomon's temple; but the actual figures in Judges and Samuel do not foot up to this sum, and there are some gaps in the series, namely, the years of Joshua after the conquest, the rule of Samuel, and that of Saul. The symmetry of the scheme has been broken by intrusions or accidental omissions in the later history of the book.

The author of the part of the Book of Judges we are now considering (ii. 6-xvi. 31) sees in the history of these centuries a series of "oppressions" by the native kings or by neighbouring peoples which the Israelites brought upon themselves by neglecting their own G.o.d and wors.h.i.+pping the deities of the Canaanites, the Baals and Astartes.

This is making history ill.u.s.trate and enforce the prophetic teaching of Hosea in the eighth century and Jeremiah in the seventh.

About the oppressions the author of Judges had clearly no information independent of what he extracted from the stories of the deliverances in his sources. In accordance with his theory of national sin and national disaster he converted what are in the stories themselves local conflicts, involving particular tribes or regions, into oppressions and deliverances of all Israel; where the story tells of raids by the Midianites, for example, the introduction gives them the Amalekites and the Eastern Bedouins for allies, and extends the devastation these wrought across the whole country to the neighbourhood of Gaza. The exaggeration of the evils and the emphasizing of the moral, as in other cases, invited later editors to amplifications in the same spirit. Of the heroes who delivered Israel from its oppressors the author made a succession of dictators ("judges"), who differed from the kings after them chiefly in that their office was not hereditary, and to most of them he gives in his chronology a long reign.

The setting of the history is thus unmistakably a product of the so-called deuteronomist school of the sixth century which we have already recognized in Joshua, and shall learn more of in Kings. The stories themselves have, however, not been recast or extensively retouched by deuteronomist hands; only at the beginning and the end, where they had to be fitted into the frame, are such retouches common.

The author's source was a collection of stories of struggles in different parts of the land, both east and west of the Jordan, with the older settled populations or with invaders, and the exploits of the leaders and champions of the Israelite tribes in these struggles.

It included Ehud's a.s.sa.s.sination of the king of Moab, the defeat of Sisera and the Canaanite kings of the great Plain by Barak and Deborah, the rout and pursuit of the Midianite invaders by Gideon, and Jephthah's victory over the Ammonites in Gilead. The history of Abimelech's kingdom of Shechem--sequel to the story of Gideon--which is not accompanied by the author's moralizing comments, and the stories of Samson, which have no more than a chronological introduction and close, evidently belong to the same cycle of heroic legends; as do also the stories of Micah's idol and the migration of the Danites (cc. 17-18), and the older form of the story of the levite and his concubine and the sanguinary vengeance on Benjamin in cc.

19-21. The two last-named stories were not comprised in the deuteronomist Judges, whose doctrine they could not well be made to exemplify. On the other hand we shall see that this work included Eli and Samuel among the judges, and came to its natural conclusion with the establishment of the kingdom, as it began with the death of Joshua.

In several of the stories we recognize not merely such additions and improvements as are commonly made to popular tales in the retelling, but evidences of the combination of two versions of the same exploit or accounts of other doings of the same hero. This is particularly plain in the story of Gideon, where in Judg. vii. 24 f. (vs. 23 is a harmonistic note), viii. 1-3, the business of the chiefs of Midian is effectually finished, while in viii. 4 ff. it is all still to be done.

The phenomenon is entirely similar to those which we have had repeated occasion to observe in the Pentateuch and Joshua and is to be explained in the same way. The two versions of the story had been united before the time of the author of the deuteronomist Judges, for in the joints of the narrative no trace of his peculiar motives or style occur.

The stories recount the exploits of local or tribal heroes, and doubtless represent the traditions of the regions or tribes concerned; with the union of the tribes under the kingdom, however, these traditions became the common property of the nation, and more than one writer made collections of them. As in the patriarchal legends, two strands may be distinguished, which have such affinities with the Judaean and the Israelite histories in the Hexateuch respectively that they are naturally regarded as the continuations of J and E. To J may be probably attributed the story of Ehud (disregarding the introduction and conclusion), say Judg. iii. 16-28; in the story of Gideon, viii. 4-60 (with small exceptions), and a part of cc. 6-7; part of the history of Abimelech; and the adventures of Samson. A good specimen of the other narrator is the beginning of the story of Abimelech, with the fable of Jotham, Judg. ix. 1-25.

Here, again, additions have been made at various stages of the transmission: to the sources independently, by the author who first combined them, by the deuteronomist author, and in some places by editors at a much later time. These hands cannot always be certainly discriminated, but the main outlines of the literary history are clear enough. A peculiar problem is presented by the so-called Minor Judges, of whom nothing is told but the length of their rule and the sultanly size of their families (Judg. x. 1-5; xii. 8-15). They seem to be brought in only for the sake of the chronology, the difficulties of which they do not diminish.

Except the curt notices that, the Israelites having again offended their G.o.d, he gave them into the power of the Philistines for forty years, and that Samson judged Israel for twenty years, it has already been remarked that the stories of Samson have no such introduction and conclusion as those which precede. The statement about the duration of Samson's judges.h.i.+p occurs both at the end of Judg. 15, and at the end of c. 16, and it has been inferred from this that whoever put this formal close in xv. 20 left out the adventure with Delilah and Samson's tragic end (c. 16).

The stories of Micah and the migration of the Danites (Judg. 17-18) and of the levite and his concubine and the decimation of Benjamin (cc. 19-21) were not included in the deuteronomist book; but there is no reason to doubt that they are of the same age as the other stories in Judges, nor that they were found in one or more of the literary collections of these stories. In cc. 17-18 the character of the narrative in the main suggests the same source with the stories of Samson (J), but there are some duplications and inconsistencies which may be regarded as fragments of a closely parallel account of not greatly inferior age. In cc. 19-21, again, the original story seems to be from J (with perhaps traces of another version in c. 19), but in the following account of the vengeance taken by all Israel on the Benjamites, the older narrative has been united with a second, which in its point of view, its language, and its unimaginable exaggerations, is evidently akin to parts of the Books of Chronicles, or to the youngest additions to the Pentateuch such as the vengeance on the Midianites (Num. 31), and doubtless belongs to the most recent stratum of the Old Testament.

Judges i. 1-ii. 5, as has been pointed out above, is foreign to the connection in which it stands, and can only have been introduced there by a late compiler or editor. It is a remnant of the most historical, and presumably the oldest, account of the establishment of the tribes in western Palestine. That, in completer form, it had originally a place in the Judaean history (J) is unquestioned, and in that work it may have been closely followed by stories of exploits such as those of Ehud, Barak, Gideon. Inasmuch as it contradicted the theory of the complete conquest and extermination of the Canaanites, it was left out of the works which described the conquest in that way, but sc.r.a.ps of it were subsequently introduced in Joshua, and finally the whole restored in its present position. It is easily seen that the recurring apostasies into Canaanite heathenism, as well as such stories as those of Deborah and Barak and of Abimelech, a.s.sume that the Canaanites had not been killed off to the last man, but, on the contrary, were very much alive; and, in fact, the authors of Judg. ii. 20-iii. 4 feel the necessity of explaining why G.o.d had allowed these heathen to survive.

The historical value of the stories in Judges is very great. However large the element of legendary embellishment may be in them, they give us a picture of the social and religious conditions in the period preceding the founding of the kingdom which has an altogether different reality from the narratives of the exodus and the wanderings.

The trustworthiness of this picture is confirmed by one contemporary monument of prime significance, the triumphal ode in Judg. 5, commonly called the Song of Deborah, celebrating the victory of the Israelite tribes over Sisera and his hosts and the death of the fleeing king by the hand of a Bedouin woman in whose tent he sought refuge. The text in the middle of the poem has suffered greatly, but the beginning and end are better preserved and display not only a developed poetic art but poetic inspiration of the highest kind. To the historian it has an even greater interest for the light which it throws on the times: the independence of the tribes on both sides of the Jordan, the subjection of those along the Great Plain to the Canaanite kings with their walled cities and their formidable chariotry, the summons to the struggle in the name of religion and the varying response, the victory of Jehovah over his foes. It should not be overlooked that Judah is ignored; it was not counted among the tribes of Israel.

The moralizing improvement of the history in the Book of Judges is not carried beyond the story of Jephthah, but neither at that point nor after the stories of Samson is there anything to indicate that the author is done. The introduction in Judg. ii. 11-iii. 6, a pa.s.sage in which both the deuteronomist historian and a predecessor in the same way of thinking have had a hand, seems to require a correspondingly solemn conclusion, and the example of Deuteronomy and Joshua suggests that this would take the form of a hortatory address such as Moses and Joshua deliver as their testament to the people. Exactly such a discourse is found in 1 Sam. 12, where the aged Samuel, on the point of laying down his office as judge, reminds the people's conscience of the chief crises of the times of the judges in terms reminiscent of the introduction to the Book of Judges and to the several oppressions, upbraids them for their sin in desiring a king, and closes with admonitions for the future. Here Samuel appears as a judge, the last in the succession; as a judge he is represented also in 1 Sam. 7, where he delivers his people from the Philistines in the great victory at Ebenezer through the efficacy of his sacrifice and prayers--a Gideon or a Jephthah went about the business in a more secular fas.h.i.+on! Eli also is said to have judged Israel forty years. At some stage in the history of the sources of Judges and Samuel, therefore, Eli and Samuel were enumerated among the judges, and the close of the period was marked by the address of Samuel which we now read in 1 Sam.

12. The contents and form of this address have their parallels in the writings of the sixth century or the latter part of the seventh, and to that time it is doubtless to be ascribed.

CHAPTER X

SAMUEL

A different division is adopted in the present books of Judges and Samuel, in which the stories of Eli and of Samuel are not made the close of the period of the judges but the prelude to the history of the kingdom. The Greek Bible divides this history into four books of the Kingdoms, or rather of the Reigns of the Kings; the Hebrew, into two, Samuel and Kings; the modern translations employ the latter names but adopt the subdivisions of the Greek, thus making two books of Samuel and two of Kings. First Samuel shows how the conquest and occupation of central Palestine by the Philistines led to the establishment of a national kingdom under Saul, a Benjamite; narrates the rise of his rival, the Judaean David, and the feud between them, down to the disastrous battle with the Philistines at Mt. Gilboa in which Saul and his gallant sons fell. Second Samuel is the history of David's reign and the tragedy of his house, the conclusion of which, the intrigue which raised Solomon to the throne and the death of the aged king, is treated as the prelude to Solomon's reign and carried over into 1 Kings; one recension of the Greek Bible, however, joins these chapters (1 Kings 1-2) to the preceding book. The two Books of Kings recount the reign of Solomon; the division of the kingdom after his death into two, on the old line, Israel and Judah; the parallel history of the two kingdoms to the end of Israel in 721 B.C.; and the rest of the history of Judah to its fall in 586.

In the account of how Saul became king there are two contradictory representations. One of these, which agrees with 1 Sam. 12 in treating the desire of the people for a king as the wanton repudiation of Jehovah their king and of Samuel their divinely appointed judge, is contained in cc. 8; x. 17-27; 12. The other, according to which G.o.d, seeing the distress the people were in because of the Philistines, of his own motion resolves to give them a king to deliver them from their oppressors, is in 1 Sam. ix. 1-x. 16; 11. In c. 9 Samuel appears as a seer with a neighbourhood reputation of being able to tell where people's stray a.s.ses have gone, not as the prophet and judge, the first man of his time.

These strands can be followed in both directions beyond the chapters named: 1 Sam. xiii. 1-xiv. 66 belongs to the second, which we may call the national version of the matter; c. 15 attaches itself to the other, say theocratic, representation, though it is of a somewhat different texture. On the other side, vii. 3-17 plainly goes with c.

8; while iv. 1^b-vii. 2 are akin to the national version, showing how grievous the situation was and how urgent the need of a king. Chapters 1-3 have a twofold motive; they tell of the wonderful childhood of a great man, and they explain the disasters of Eli's house. The latter has reference to cc. 4-6; the former, a favourite theme of popular tales, is an appropriate introduction to Samuel the prophet.

Of the two accounts of the origin of the kingdom, it takes no great critical discernment to see that what we have called the national version is the older and more historical; the other, which condemns the monarchy as a kind of apostasy, takes the standpoint of Hosea. The picture of the monarch in 1 Sam. 12 is drawn from sorry experience.

Even in the older narrative not all is of one piece. Chapter 9, in which Saul is a young man in his father's house, does not tally with c. 14, where he has a grown-up son. The author of this narrative made it up from traditions of diverse origin, some of them more strictly historical, others embellished with legendary traits. In its main features, however, it gives us a trustworthy account of the establishment of the kingdom. In c. 13, the breach with Samuel, vs.

7^b-15^a (with x. 8 which prepares for it), are not part of the original narrative; c. 15 gives another account of the origin of this breach, which was evidently a standing feature of tradition. In the remaining chapters of 1 Samuel the central interest is the relations of David to Saul. Here also there are not only two main literary sources but evidence of variant traditions underlying the oldest narrative, and of the additions by later editors, sometimes of their conception, sometimes taken from old and good sources.