CHAPTER XIII

BIBLICAL PROSE LITERATURE

THERE has been a great neglect of the study of Holy Scripture as literature, in the Synagogue and in the Church. Few scholars have ever given their attention to this subject. The scholars of the Jewish and Christian world were interested and absorbed in the study of Holy Scripture for religious, dogmatic, and ethical purposes. Even in the development of the discipline of the Higher Criticism, the literary forms were the last things to receive attention.

The literary forms have not shared to any great extent in the revival of biblical studies. And yet these are exactly the things that most need consideration in our day, when the literature of Holy Scripture is compared with the literatures of the other religions of the ancient world, and the question is so often raised why we should recognize the Christian Bible as the inspired word of God rather than the sacred books of other religions.

Bishop Lowth in England, and the poet Herder in Germany, toward the close of the last century, called the attention of the learned world to this neglected field, and invited to the study of the Sacred Scriptures as sacred literature. Little advance has been made, however, owing, doubtless, to the fact that the conflict has been raging about the history, the religion, and the doctrines of the Bible; and, on the field of the Higher Criticism, in questions of authenticity, integrity, and credibility of writings. The finer literary features have not entered into the field of discussion, to any extent, until quite recent times. De Wette, Ewald, and especially Reuss, made valuable contributions to this subject, but even these masters have given their strength to other topics.

The most obvious divisions of literature are poetry and prose. These are distinguished to the eye by different modes of writing, and to the ear by different modes of reading; but underneath all this is a difference of rhythmical movement. It is difficult to draw the line scientifically between poetry and prose even here, for "Prose has its rhythms, its tunes, and its tonecolors, like verse; and, while the extreme forms of prose and verse are sufficiently unlike each other, there are such near grades of intermediate forms, that they may be said to run into each other, and any line claiming to be distinctive must necessarily be more or less arbitrary."1 Hence rhetorical prose and works of the imagination in all languages approximate closely to poetry. The poetry of the Bible is written in the manuscripts, and is printed in the Hebrew and Greek texts, as well as in the versions, with few exceptions, exactly as if it were prose; and the Hebrew scribes, who divided the Old Testament Scriptures and pointed them with vowels and accents, dealt with the poetry as if it were prose, and even obscured the poetic form by their divisions of verse and section, so that in many cases it can be restored only by a careful study of the unpointed text and a neglect of the Massoretic sections.

The subject of Biblical Poetry is reserved for the following chapters. In this chapter the Prose Literature of the Bible will be considered. This is found in rich variety.

I. HISTORICAL PROSE

History constitutes a very large portion of the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament there are different kinds. of history: the priestly and the prophetic. The priestly is represented by Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and extends backwards into the priestly sections of the Pentateuch. It is characterized by the annalistic style, using older sources, such as genealogical tables, letters, official documents, and entering into the minute details of the Levitical system and the organization of the State, but destitute of imagination and of the

1 Lanier, Science of English Verse, N. Y., 1880, p. 57.

artistic sense. The prophetic is represented by three different strata of the books of Samuel and Kings, Joshua and Judges, and the Pentateuch. The earliest of these, the Ephraimitic, is characterized by a graphic realistic style, using ancient stories, traditions, poetic extracts, and entire poems. The Judaic writing is more artistic, giving fewer earlier documents but working over the material into an organic whole. It uses the imagination freely, and with fine æsthetic taste and tact.1 The Deuteronomic writers use the history merely for the great prophetic lessons they find wrapt up in it.

In the New Testament we have four biographical sketches of the noblest and most exalted person who has ever appeared in history, Jesus Christ, in their variety giving us memoirs in four distinct types.2

The Gospel of Mark is graphic, plastic, and realistic, based on the reports of the eye-witnesses, and is nearest to the person and life of our Lord. It uses no other written source than the original Logia of Matthew, which it cites rarely for special sayings of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew uses the Logia and Mark, and also oral tradition, in order to set forth Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews. The Gospel of Luke uses the Logia and Mark, and other written as well as oral sources to represent Jesus as the Saviour of sinners. The Gospel of John uses an original memoir of the apostle John, and sets the person and life of Jesus, as therein described by an intimate friend, in the additional light of the total experience of the apostolic Church, and sees Jesus in the halo of religious, philosophic reflection from the point of view of the Messiah, the enthroned Son of the Father.

The book of Acts presents the history of the planting and training of the Christian Church, using especially a Hebraic source for the story of Peter and the Church of Jerusalem, and the story of a companion of Paul in his missionary journeys, organizing the material into the second part of a work which began with the life of Jesus, and was possibly designed to be

1 Dillmann, Genesis, 4te. Aufl., Leipzig, 1882, pp. xi seq.; Nöldeke, Alttest. Literatur, Leipzig, 1868, pp. 15 seq.

2 Weiss, Leben Jesu, Berlin, 1882, I. p. 103.

followed by a third work giving the story of the Church in Rome, which the author did not live to write.1

All these forms of history and biography use the same variety of sources as histories in other ancient literature. Their historical material was not revealed to the authors by the Divine Spirit, but was gathered by their own industry as historians from existing material and sources of information. The most that we can claim for them is that they were inspired by God in their work, so that they were guided into truth and preserved from error as to all matters of religion, faith, and morals; but to what extent further in the details and external matters of their composition has to be determined by historical criticism. It is necessary also to consider to what extent their use of sources was limited by inspiration, or, in other words, what kinds of sources were unworthy of the use of inspired historians. There are those who would exclude the legend and the myth, which are found in all other ancient history. If the legend in itself implies what is false, it would certainly be unworthy of divine inspiration to use it; but if it is the poetical embellishment of bare facts, one does not readily see why it should be excluded from the sacred historians' sources any more than snatches of poetry, bare genealogical tables, and records often fragmentary and incomplete, such as are certainly found in the historical books. If the myth necessarily implies in itself polytheism or pantheism, or any of the elements of false religions, it would be unworthy of divine inspiration. It is true that the classic myths which lie at the basis of the history of Greece and Rome, with which all students are familiar, are essentially polytheistic; but not more so than the religions of these peoples and all their literature. It is also true that the myths of Assyria and Babylon as recorded on their monuments are essentially polytheistic. Many scholars have found such myths in the Pentateuch. But over against this there is the striking fact that stands out in the comparison of the biblical narratives of the creation and the flood with the Assyrian and Babylonian; namely, that the biblical are monotheistic, the Assyrian polytheistic. But is there

1 See Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller, 3d edit., 1898, pp. 27, 28.

not a monotheistic myth as well as a polytheistic? In other words, may not the literary form of the myth be appropriate to monotheistic, as well as to polytheistic, conceptions? May it not be an appropriate literary form for the true biblical religion as well as for the other ancient religions of the world?1

These questions cannot be answered a priori. They are questions of fact. The term "myth" has become so associated with polytheism in usage and in the common mind that it is difficult to use it in connection with the pure monotheism and supernatural revelation of the Bible without misconception. No one should use it unless he carefully makes the necessary discriminations. For the discrimination of the religion of the Bible from the other religions must ever be more important than their comparison and features of resemblance. There can be little objection to the term "legend," 2 which in its earliest and still prevalent use has a religious sense, and can cover without difficulty most if not all those elements in the biblical history which we are now considering. There is certainly a resemblance to the myth of other nations in the close and familiar association of the one God with the ancestors of our race and the patriarchs of Israel, however we may explain it. Whatever names we may give to these beautiful and sacred traditions which were transmitted in the families of God's people from generation to generation, and finally used by the sacred historians in their holy books; whatever names we may give them in distinction from the legends and myths of other nations, — none can fail to see that poetic embellishment, natural and exquisitely beautiful, artless and yet most artistic, which comes from the imagination of the common people of the most intelligent nations, in these sources that were used by divine inspiration in giving us ancient history in its most attractive form. Indeed, the imagination is in greater use in Hebrew history than in any other history, with all the Oriental wealth of colour in the prophetic historians.

1 Lenormant, Beginnings of History, N.Y., 1882, p. 187.

2 George P. Marsh, article “Legend," in Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia, 1876, II. p. 1714, and the Legenda Aurea, or Historia Lombardica, of Jacobus de Voragine of the thirteenth century.