                16 page printout, page 124 - 139
                           CHAPTER VII

               The Forgery of the Old Testament --
                  How We Detect the Forgery --
        The Priestly Forgers -- The Mistakes of Moses --
               The Mythical History of the Jews --
          The Truth About the Prophets -- Pious Fiction

                    HOW WE DETECT THE FORGERY

     THE Word of God a forgery! I can understand the bewilderment
of a religious reader, but let him consider coolly what the
statement means. It does not mean that God forged a book. It means
that men forged a book in God's name. That can be examined
dispassionately by anybody.

     But, you say, they were religious men, and the charge is an
insult. My dear friend, Protestant divines and preachers
unanimously accuse, not merely religious men, but ministers of the
Christian Gospel of hundreds of forgeries.

     You never heard of it? Why, they hold -- and quite rightly --
that almost all of the stories of saints and martyrs which are
treasured in the Roman Church are forgeries; and there are Roman
Catholic scholars who agree with them. They hold -- all the non-
Roman historians in the world hold -- that the documents on which
the power of Rome is essentially based are sheer forgeries. They
hold that from the sixth to the twelfth century Roman priests
poured upon Europe a flood of forgeries, very much to their own
profit.

     The simple question here is whether ancient Jewish priests had
done the same thing a thousand years before. But that is different,
you say. These supposed forgeries are not lives of saints and
decrees of councils, but the Word of God.

     Well then, what is a forgery? It is a deliberate falsification
or fabrication of documents or of the signature to them. A letter,
a poem (like "Ossian's" poems), an historical work (like some
"found" recently in Italy), a will, a bank-note, a postage stamp
even, may be forged.

     Now the far greater part of the more learned clerical
authorities on the Bible say that many books of the Old Testament
pretend to be written by men who did not write them: that many
books were deliberately written as history when the writers knew
that they were not history: and that the Old Testament as a whole,
as we have it, is a deliberate attempt to convey an historical
belief which the writers knew to be false.

     But these learned authorities do not like the word forgery. It
is crude. Let me give you a few illustrations, from easily
accessible and weighty works, of what they do say. It will at least
show you the elegance, the subtlety, the resources of diplomatic
language.

     The article "Israel" in the "Encyclopedia Biblica," a
Christian work, is written by Professor Guthe, a learned theologian
of Leipsic University. He says that the writers of the Old
Testament have a "mode of regarding the facts" in which we can see 

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"the workings of a primitive nature." He says that the poor
historian of the Jews has a hard job "to remove the materials of
his story out of the false light in which he finds them." He must
"constantly bear in mind the peculiarities of the narrative"; and
he frankly tells you that these are "their legendary character,
their conformity to a scheme, and their didactic purpose." Does it
not sound very much like an extremely polite description of what
plain men call a forgery?

     The article "David" is by another famous theologian, Professor
Marti. He says that "keen criticism is necessary to arrive at the
kernel of fact" in the familiar story of David; and that some very
learned theologians "deny that there is such a kernel of fact."
Most theologians, however, he says, believe that "the imaginative
element in the story of David is but the vesture which half
conceals, half discloses, certain facts treasured in popular
tradition." Nice language, isn't it?

     Dr. Cheyne, recently a very high dignitary of the Church of
England, writes on "Abraham." When he has done with the patriarch,
we have only a tissue of "legends purified both by abridgment and
expansion." After all, that is only what the Koran did, with
Mohammed.

     Professor Moore, of Andover Theological Seminary, writes the
article on "Historical Literature." He thinks that the early
historical writers of the Old Testament -- not in the time of
Moses, but centuries later, and not as we have their works now --
were honest collectors of stories, but that later books were put
together by the "mere literary process of conflation and
contamination." Hard words. The scribes, he says, "combined
different copies according to their own judgment and interests."
This gives us "a different religious point of view" -- in plain
English, a view of the facts which is not true -- but the scribes
merely acted "in a prophetic spirit." In the end another set of
writers recast the whole of these honest legends and dishonest
"contaminations," and added a vast amount of new matter (expressly
ascribing it to Moses) for which, Professor Moore says, they
probably had no sources -- except their imagination and
"interests." The result is our Old Testament.

     But the "Encyclopedia Biblica" is full of this from cover to
cover of its four large volumes. Let us try the "Encyclopedia
Britannica." Alas, it is just as bad. Professor Cook, of Cambridge
University, says (article "Jews"); "Written by Oriental people,
clothed in an Oriental dress, the Old Testament does not contain
objective records," but "subjective history for specific purposes."
One would like to hear a perjured witness in court defend himself
on the ground that his statements were sound subjective history for
a specific purpose. "Scholars are now almost unanimously agreed" on
these manipulations, he says. But they have really rendered you a
service. The Higher Criticism has "brought into relief the central
truths which really are vital." What truths, you ask? Why, that the
Old Testament gradually evolved from the tenth to the second
century, and in its present form is mainly a fifth century
compilation so distorting the facts that it has taken scholars a
hundred and fifty years to get them straight.


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     Enough of these Higher Critics, you say: you know that I could
quote a hundred of them. Well, let us take a learned Protestant
divine, the Reverend Professor Sayce, of Oxford University, who is
a vigorous opponent of Higher Critics. His chief work, "The Higher
Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments," published by the
Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, is the standard
criticism of the Higher Criticism. Let us hear him, by all means;
and I am going to take first a part of his work which will at the
same time enable you to judge at once whether there are forgeries
in the Old Testament and show you how we detect them.

     You know well the book of Daniel. Some scenes of that vivid
narrative, such as the famous feast of "Belshazzar the King, and
the writing on the wall, have passed into the art and letters of
the world. It expressly says throughout that it was written by
Daniel himself. "I Daniel" occurs in every chapter.

     Some time ago we recovered tablets of the great Persian king
Cyrus, and Professor Sayce gives us a translation of them; and he
compares them, as you may, with the words of Daniel: "In that night
was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain, and Darius the
Median took the kingdom." The tablets of Cyrus describe the taking
of Babylon, and are beyond the slightest suspicion. The Persians
had adopted the Babylonian custom of writing on clay, then baking
the brick or tablet, and such documents last forever. And these and
other authentic and contemporary documents of the age which Daniel
describes show:

     1.   That Belshazzar was not king of Babylon.
     2.   That the name of the last king was Nabonidos.
     3.   That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by
bloodshed.
     4.   That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it.
     5.   That Darius, who is said (xi 1) by Daniel to have been
the son of Ahasuerus (Xerxes), was really his father.
     6.   That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly
misspelled and quite strange to the writer.
     7.   That the writer describes the Chaldeans in a way that no
writer could have done before the time of Alexander the Great.

     You can read the rest of the critic of the Higher Critics. It
is now beyond question that the man who wrote Daniel, and pretended
to be alive in 539 B.C. (when Babylon fell), did not live until
three or four centuries later. The book is a tissue of errors, as
we find by authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian
names on the tablets.

     Now why did the writer do it, and what was his object? Quite
clearly he wanted to convince the Jews that Jahveh would
miraculously protect any Jews who refused to obey a sacrilegious
king. And this gives us the clue to the date. It was in the second
century B.C., when the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to
compel the Jews to break their law. A pious Jew, probably a priest,
then wrote this book: very clumsily, as in the course of three
centuries the facts and names had been forgotten. Now we have
recovered the real contemporary documents, and there is no room for
dispute.


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     Well, is that a forgery? Sayce concludes leniently that it is
"not historical in the modern sense of the word history"! Others
blandly tell us that it was "a work of edification," one of the
"hagiographs" (which means "holy writings"). You are asked to
remember "the nature of the Oriental mind," which is so very
different from the American. These superficial writers who talk of
forgery, you are told, do not know the Oriental mind.

     I know it well, and I know this: If you were to tell an
Oriental Mohammedan that the wonderful things said about the
Prophet in the Koran were "subjective history with a specific
purpose," he would, when be learned precisely what you meant, knock
you down. The Oriental loves stories, but he has as keen a sense as
any of the difference between stories and sacred history. Daniel
pretended to be history. Otherwise it would have had no effect. It
is a forgery.

     And Professor Sayce goes on to show that Ezra, Tobit and
Judith -- the latter are in the Catholic Bible -- are on the same
level. "The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions," he says,
"has finally destroyed all claim on the part of the Books of Tobit
and Judith to be considered as history" (p. 552). It does not much
matter that they are not in the Protestant canon. They are examples
of ancient Jewish forgeries. Professor Sayce shows the same for
familiar Bible stories like those of Susanna and Bel and the
Dragon. In fact, this remarkable book, which sets out to destroy
the Higher Critics, begins with decisive proof that Genesis is a
compilation of Babylonian legends (ascribed to Moses) and ends with
the exposures I have given!

     You see now how we detect forgeries. There are two chief ways:
the style of the documents and the testimony of other and
undisputed documents. The second method I have illustrated; and,
now that we have recovered such a mass of ancient literature, it
covers a great deal of the Old Testament.

     The first method, to judge a literary writing by its literary.
style, has been much ridiculed by pious people; and the ridicule is
ridiculous. On the orthodox theory the Old Testament was written at
different periods during more than a thousand years. Now there is
not a language known that does not change so much in the course of
centuries that even a child can see the difference at a glance. The
inexpert reader will find it almost impossible to read the earliest
English literature. Even as late as the eighteenth century, English
was written quite differently from the way in which we write it
today. Literary experts can tell at once whether a French, Italian,
German, or English book was written in the thirteenth (like Dante's
Italian), sixteenth, or nineteenth century.

     So we can with Hebrew, because even on the most advanced
theory the writing of the Old Testament covers seven hundred years.
And this is the simple method of the Higher Critics, which
preachers who do not know a word of Hebrew -- and could not even
themselves read the English of Chaucer -- ridicule. This method
confidently shows us fragments of different ages in the Old
Testament put together at a far later date. Further, we find 



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inconsistencies, contradictions, and duplications which cannot
otherwise be explained. Now, in addition, we have a very great deal
of history and archeology by which we can check the Old Testament.

                      THE PRIESTLY FORGERS

     What I mean when I say that the Old Testament was "forged"
will now be fairly clear. In the first place, whole books, like
Daniel, are what we call in modern English forgeries; and, if the
Jews of twenty-two hundred or even twenty-five hundred years ago
had known the real origin of them, they would have called them
forgeries. They were effective, and were intended to be effective,
only because the readers were induced to believe that the events
they described had actually happened. That Jahveh could be made to
do wonderful things in mere fiction would not have been a surprise
to any Oriental, or anybody else. So the fiction was represented as
fact, and the authorship was concealed under a spurious name.

     The Old Testament professes to be, and the orthodox believe it
to be, a collection of books which appeared at intervals, with
divine inspiration, during a thousand years of Jewish history. It
is supposed that Moses wrote, or caused to be written, the
Pentateuch (except the last few verses). It is believed that
Judges, Kings and Chronicles go back to the times they describe:
that the prophecies were added from the ninth century onward; and
so on. Now the critical theory is that not a single book of the Old
Testament, as we have it, is older than the ninth century, and that
in the fifth century all the older books and fragments were
combined together into the Old Testament as we have it, and were
drastically altered so as to yield a version of early Hebrew
history which is not true.

     It is believed that this was done by the Jewish priests; and
that fact, not prejudice, is the reason for the title of this
chapter. The object of this manipulation of the Hebrew writings
was, according to all scholars, to represent the Jewish priesthood
and its rights and customs to have been established in the days of
Moses. All the scholars to whom I refer admit this, and admit that
the representation is false. And so, not being either a priest or
a professor or other polite person, I speak of priestly forgers.

     It is the almost universal opinion of scholars that a priestly
group in Babylon, using some old material, fabricating new, and
perverting the entire history of the cult and the priesthood, made
a priestly code and ascribed it to Moses. Is that forgery? It is
equally the almost universal opinion that in Jerusalem they went on
to combine this code, again falsifying the historical facts, with
the older existing writings and made the Pentateuch nearly as we
hove it.

     As to Ezra, remember that he was not only a zealous priest but
"a ready scribe in the law of Moses" (Ezra vii 6). In fact, for
once I think we shall find much food for thought in an apocryphal
work (I Esdras xiv 22): "I [Ezra] shall write all that hath been
done in the world since the beginning and the things that were
written in thy law." He (and his associates) did. The old Hebrews,
admitting that he wrote the whole Pentateuch, used to say that he 


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had "revelation" to help him. The clerical professors say that he
had some mysterious fund of old materials, which he "worked up" and
made to serve his purpose. What do you think? Remember, this book
made the priesthood all-powerful for the first time in Judea.

                      THE MISTAKES OF MOSES

     Now let us examine the Pentateuch, or "Five Books" with which
the Old Testament opens. One smiles today at the vast amount of ink
that was spilt in the nineteenth century over the question whether
Moses wrote them. There is now no scholar who would entertain the
idea. The only foundation for any belief that Moses wrote or
dictated them is a statement in precisely those passages in Kings,
Chronicles and Ezra -- all very late books -- in which the forgers
produce them and say that Moses wrote them.

     But let us look at the first two pages from another point of
view. The first page of the Bible is in flat contradiction to what
every educated person now knows: and even the pious work of the
Rev. Professor Sayce, issued still by the Society for the Promotion
of Christian Knowledge (of a Fundamentalist shade), proves
emphatically that the early chapters of Genesis are modifications
of Babylonian legends.

     Attempts to "reconcile Genesis and science" never come now
from men who know science. The Hebrew text, which I know well,
having had a course of Hebrew at Louvain University, is not one
inch nearer to science than the English text. It is neither poetry
-- I have read it in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English -- nor
accurate statement.

     There is first a dark chaos, created by God. Why God created
matter in a chaotic state and then, in six days, put it in order,
is rather a puzzle to the believer. It would be just as easy for
the "creative word" to make an orderly as a chaotic universe.
Desperate apologists remind you how science (which they pretend not
to believe) put a nebula at the beginning; and one might (if one
did not know Hebrew) think of the chaos as a nebula. But a nebula
is light, not dark; and it most assuredly has no water in it. Let
us use our common sense. The Hebrew for the chaos is tohu vah bohu,
which is plainly a primitive people's corruption of the Babylonian
tiamat, the original chaos. To the learned Babylonian, the first
state of things was a watery waste, land and water mixed up
together, and the gods had first to separate them. The Hebrew
follows the Babylonian legend in all that it says.

     But this is really waste of time. Any man who thinks that the
teaching of science is in harmony with the Genesis order of
creation: (1) light, (2) division of water from the sky or
firmament, (3) division of land from water and creation of plants
(including fruit trees), (4) appearance of the sun and moon, (5)
production of birds from the water, (6) production of reptiles
(after birds) and mammals and man, ought to try politics instead of
theology. It is sheer nonsense. Moreover, the second chapter of
Genesis makes matters worse by putting first the creation of man,
then trees, then mammals, then woman.



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     It is frankly ridiculous to talk of science in such a
connection. The only agreement with science (and this is undone by
the second chapter) is that the grass was created before the
cattle, which eat it, and the cattle before the man, who eats them.
I say this quite deliberately after (for the hundredth time)
reading slowly the first chapter of Genesis. Seriously, does one
need inspiration to guess that?

     Next as to chronology. I have heard Fundamentalist leaders
scoff at the idea that the Bible puts creation about 4000 B.C. In
a debate with me Dr. Riley has said that he is quite prepared to
admit that, as science claims, the earth is more than a billion
years old. But if the reader cares to go through Genesis carefully,
and note the age of each patriarch at the time his first son was
born, he will find that the Old Testament does actually date
creation about 6000 years ago. I have done it. You try it.

     Then there is the lovely Garden of Eden -- quite plainly, we
now know, the Babylonian Edin or plain -- and the ghastly story of
the curse of the whole human race for the sin of two people. It is
a Babylonian story; and the Hindus, Egyptians, and others had the
same story. As to Noah and the Flood, I imagine that every
theologian in the world has thrown up the sponge on that wonderful
specimen of early man's idea of what a God might do. It is all in
the Babylonian tablets, even down to such details as the sending
out of the dove and the raven and the resting of the ark on a high
mountain.

     The story of Babel also is a childlike legend of which we have
traces in Babylonia. It is naive enough in the Old Testament. God
gets jealous of man's progress in civilization. Man has built a
city, which is clearly meant for Babylon (consult the admirable
Sayce), and a high tower, which means one of the lofty, stepped
temples of Babylonia. The whole story is a very primitive attempt
to explain how men came to speak different languages. We have today
actual specimens of the Cretan, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese
languages going back ages before the alleged date of Babel.

     I am not aware that any scholar, clerical or lay, of our time,
questions the Babylonian origin of the Genesis legends, and we need
not anticipate here by reproducing the ancient stories. We do not
suggest that the Jews adopted these legends during the Captivity.
They were probably well known in Canaan, and were, indeed, probably
the only available answers to the riddle of the universe, when the
Hebrews arrived there. It is probable, in fact, that they were
written in a Hebrew version centuries before the Captivity. But no
one can read the Babylonian originals, which we now have, and doubt
the ultimate source of the early chapters of Genesis.

     Properly educated clergymen admit this, and say that the
"inspiration" is seen in the change from Polytheism to Monotheism.
The very first line, "In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth," is said to rise high above all ancient literature. But
in the Babylonian legend itself it is one god, Marduk, who puts
chaos in order and creates the world; and Monotheism was
established in Egypt centuries before a line of the Old Testament
was written.


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                THE MYTHICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS

     In popular belief the story of Abraham is very simple. His
original name was Abram, and he lived in "Ur of the Chaldees"; but
God called him and changed his name to Ab-ra-ham, which is the
Hebrew for "the father of many peoples."

     Blessed are the ignorant, for they have no difficulties. The
word Abraham does not mean "the father of many peoples." No Hebrew
scholar can make it mean anything. It has "no meaning in Hebrew,"
Dean Cheyne says. Apparently a chief named Abram was treasured in
Hebrew tradition, but a later generation got confused over the name
-- there were then no vowels (or vowel points) in Hebrew -- and
spelt it Abraham. So the priestly forgers of a later date neatly
joined the two together by the above story. And one trace of their
handiwork is "Ur of the Chaldees." Abram may have come from Ur; but
it was not a "city of the Chaldees" until ages afterwards -- when
the legend was written.

     Abram means "high father" or "great father." Late in Jewish
history he began to be regarded as the ancestor of the people. But
most probably this grew out of a tradition about him, and now, say
Professor Sayce and Professor Sellin, these old traditions have
been gloriously vindicated and the Higher Critics shattered. New
archeological discoveries have given us confirmation of the names
of certain kings mentioned in the story of Abraham. The good news
spread through the religious world like a breath of spring.

     This is a good illustration of the reasons why critics of the
clergy and the religious press are inclined to call them dishonest.
They mislead the people. Of the entire story of Abram only the fact
that three or four kings mentioned are now known to have really
existed is confirmed. It would follow only that there was an
ancient legend about Abram: but of the whole supernatural story
about him there is not a tittle of confirmation.

     These supposed archeological discoveries "confirming" the
Bible are all of that nature. A few names of kings, or alliances,
or battles in many centuries are confirmed: a vast amount is
disproved (as we saw about Daniel). Honest common sense will see in
this only a confirmation of the view of the Old Testament which I
have given. Those who fabricated it in the fifth century included
some older writings which were based on tribal traditions; but what
was in those writings we rarely know.

     And this particular "triumph" is very modest. One of the royal
names discovered is King Khammurabi of Babylon. Obviously the same
name is Amraphel in the Abram story, religious writers say! It is
by no means obvious; and learned Assyriologists ridicule it.
Moreover, Khammurabi lived before 2000 B.C., and Professor Sellin
is very much puzzled about this. However, as all that he can offer
you in the end is "an ancient Canaanitish narrative which shows us
Abram as a valiant Khabiri chieftain who followed the fortunes of
the rulers of Jerusalem," perhaps you are not further interested.
The Hebrews, who came later to Canaan, appropriated the legend,
made this valiant Bedouin adventurer an ancestor of their race, and
the priests later decorated this scanty and bloody story with a
supernatural halo.

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     Joseph is the next outstanding historical figure; all that
lies between him and Abram is a totally unreliable "working up" of
ancient legend for priestly purposes. But Joseph retires with the
Khabiri chieftain into the very dim mists of ancient legend. You
remember how (Genesis xli 43), when Joseph was set high, the
Egyptian people called before him, "Bow the knee." It is now
certain that this is a fanciful rendering of a word which the
ancient translators did not understand. The word, we now know, is
a purely Babylonian title of honor! See the worthy Sayce. Strange,
isn't it, to find an Egyptian crowd talking Babylonian?

     And Sayce also warns his pious reader, though very delicately,
as beseems the subject, that the very popular story of Potiphar's
wife has so close a parallel in an Egyptian story which we have
found that it is "impossible not to see the connection." By the
way, be is quite wrong in saying "impossible," for the Rabbi Dr.
Jacob Horovitz in his recent attack on the Higher Critics ("Die
Josephserzahlung," 1921) says there is no connection. You shall, as
usual, please yourself. I ask only the use of common sense. Sayce
himself says repeatedly that these zealots are quite as bad as the
Higher Critics. "Hair-splitters," he calls both groups.

     This is no new find; but it takes a long time for the
discoveries to reach the body of the faithful. It was in 1852 that
scholars found the Orbiney Papyrus, now in the British Museum at
London. It is a story of two brothers who lived together. They were
working together in the field one day, and the elder, who was
married, sent the younger back to the house for some seed. The
wife, who confessed she had had her eye on him for some time, 
saw her opportunity. "Come," she said -- I am translating from
Rabbi Horovitz, "let us lie together for an hour, That will be
pleasant for you, and I will make fine clothes for you." The
blushing youth indignantly refused, and fled: which says much for
ancient Egyptian morals. So the wife, to protect herself, told
people he had tried to seduce her, and when her husband came home,
she accused the younger brother of saying to her: "Let down thy
hair, and let us lie together for an hour." And the elder slew the
younger. brother.

     Well, compare for yourself Genesis xxxix with this. Joseph
went to his master's house "to do his business," and, as there was
no one else there but the wife, "she caught him by his garment,
saying: Lie with me." He refused, and she turned the tables on him,
as in the novel.

     Do you see any connection? And remember the Babylonian title
and the fact that the very abundant remains of Egypt give us not
the least confirmation of the story of the Jews in Egypt. Then
remember how Genesis was put together seven hundred years later,
and ... May we not pass on?

     Exodus is in exactly the same position. Sayce in fact shows
that we now know that if the Hebrews had followed the route there
described they would have passed through Egyptian territory! It and
Numbers are a tissue of myths put together for a purpose centuries
later. I am, as I said, inclined to believe that some of the Hebrew
tribes at least entered the fringe of Egypt, and then wandered in 


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the desert to Palestine. But their story remained oral for
centuries; and the account in the Pentateuch is "a didactic novel."
And Deuteronomy and Leviticus are priestly forgeries.

     Did you ever notice in the Pentateuch, which is supposed to
have been written by Moses, such phrases as "the Canaanite dwelled
then in the land" (Genesis xii 6 and xiii 7) or "before there
reigned any king over the children of Israel" (xxxvi 31)? All such
sentences were clearly written ages after Moses: when there were
kings in Israel, and there were not Canaanites. Moreover, as
Professor Sellin says, "nearly every occurrence from the creation
of the world to the death of Moses is related to us twice, and in
some cases three times." This puts beyond the shadow of a doubt the
late and composite origin. Moses, we hope, did not see his visions
double.

     All this runs on in Joshua and the other "historical books."
The writer of Joshua (who never pretends to be Joshua) often says
that a thing goes on "unto this day" (ix 27 and xv 63). In xxiv 31
he intimates that he is writing at least after the death of the
eldest person who had known Joshua. There are the same doubles and
contradictions. In short, as I said, the Samaritans know not the
book; so it goes back to the fifth century, and we will waste no
time on its history. Nor will we linger over Judges, another
composite history with a purpose.

     Samuel and Kings have all the same faults. The plain truth is
that we cannot by independent authority prove a single statement of
any importance in the history of the Jews until their history is no
longer miraculous. It is a waste of time to try to get a "kernel of
facts," and it will be far better to show in some detail that even
the latest historical works, which ought to be most reliable, are
a series of forgeries including, in a changed form, ancient
traditions the original form of which we do not know,

     We read in I Chronicles (xxix 7) of money being paid or
valuated in darics, that is to say, coins of the Persian Darius;
so, obviously, this was written long after 520 (the first year of
Darius I). We read further (iii 19, etc.) that six generations had
elapsed since Zerubbabel, so the book must have been written about
400 B.C. We read in Nehemiah (xii 1-26) a list of names that go
back to the time of Alexander the Great (died 323). In a word,
Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are impudent forgeries of the fourth
century, using some ancient memoirs (perhaps -- there is no proof),
but giving a totally false version of the events.

     We have already seen this in the case of Ezra and Nehemiah.
Checked by the statements of the really contemporary prophets
Haggai and Zechariah, they are full of purposive misstatements.
Dean Cheyne says that "the redactors' own contributions are largely
inventions," and that this is especially true of what they say
about the return of the Jews from Babylon and the rebuilding of the
temple. Zechariah plainly shows that the exiles were still in
Babylonia when the temple was rebuilt; yet the author, or what is
politely called "the redactor," and impolitely called the forger,
of Ezra gives us a glowing description of 42,360 Jews, with 7,337
servants, two hundred singing men and women, and great troops of 


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horses and treasures of gold. Incidentally, as we saw in the first
chapter, only about 4,000 men had been deported. We are asked to
believe that in two generations they grew, on the fertile plains of
Babylon, to 42,360; and thousands never returned. And in those days
a population took several centuries to double!

     We have, in fine, seen the value of the "history" of Ezra, the
ready scribe, bringing forward the real "law of Moses." Even the
42,360 (the nucleus of his large audience, presumably) were
astonished at it. No serious scholar doubts that it was "redacted"
in Babylon by the priests. "Redaction" or "recension" is the
scholarly word for these things. In our own degenerate age a
"redactor" would be accused of forgery if he added one line to the
writings he was editing. We are asked not to give the name to
priests of ancient Judea who, for their own high profit, invented
(as far as we can tell) nine lines for every one they edited, and
"redacted" the one line until it became false.

     But what's in a name? The main point is that practically all
the experts assure you that in scores of material points the Old
Testament history has been discredited, and has only been confirmed
in a few unimportant incidental statements; and that the books are
a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions
dating centuries after the events.

                  THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROPHETS

     A prophet in old days was not a man who predicted, but a man
who refused to call a forgery a recension. They were men who spoke
out: as Jeremiah did about Hilkiah's pious fraud. They called a
whore a whore, and altogether made some edifying reading for the
children of British and American schools of the year 1929.

     I do not object to calling a spade a spade, having some
inclination that way myself, but the real modern interest in the
prophets is based upon the supposition that they made remarkable
predictions. These supposed predictions have been so thoroughly
annihilated so long ago that it were waste of time to linger with
them.

     We now know enough of the character of the Old Testament to
understand that a large number of the prophecies were written after
the event. The prophets were "redacted," like all the other
literature. Prophecies were forged during some hundreds of years.
In other cases, the prophet merely referred to the past; as, when
Isaiah wrote some remarkable descriptions of the "Servant of God,"
which were for ages regarded as predictions concerning Christ, and
are characterizations of Moses. In other cases the predictions were
shrewd forecasts, such as we make about the weather or a baseball
game; and the few cases in which the men were right have been
emphasized, and the scores of cases in which they were wrong
neglected. In other cases they are wrongly translated, as in the
famous "Behold a virgin will conceive"; for the Hebrew word is not
"virgin," but "girl," and conception by a girl was not miraculous
in ancient Judea.




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     No, the prophets, as distinguished from the priests, were men
who spoke out; which is the real meaning of the word. But they 
spoke out with especial picturesqueness. The nation was young and
poetic, and its ways were primitive. You remember how Saul was
moved by a spirit and behaved like a dancing dervish. It was common
all over that part of the ancient world; and not unknown in modern
seances. And the prophet regarded himself as a very superior
person, and was very dirty. From the prophets of Arabia,
apparently, he borrowed the habit of dressing in a mantle of goat's
hair and having mystic marks on his forehead.

     These men (and women) were seers, and people paid them for
advice. Now and again one rose to high notoriety and founded a
school: probably in the wild mountains. Such was Elijah. But, alas,
the moment we want to know all about him, the biblical experts
intimidate us. There is, we are told, "probably a basis of fact" in
the story of Elijah and Elisha, but we can't disentangle it as "the
interests of the prophetic order led to some unhistoric fictions
and exaggerations": not forgeries, of course. However, I am glad
for once. That bear-and-innocent-little-children story always made
me sick.

     We may pass over these crude beginnings of the new art of
prophecy and come to the great masters. Amos and Hosea were the
first; and, naturally enough, they are the crudest and most poetic.
A nation is most gifted with poetic imagery in its adolescence,
when the imagination is far more developed than the intellect. That
is why the Bible is "great literature"; at least a good deal of it
is. I am not here repeating a shibboleth. I have read most of the
finest poetry of many languages, and that is my opinion. It is
quite natural. These parts of the Old Testament -- large sections
of the prophecies and early psalms, for instance -- were written in
the youth of the Hebrew race and translated in the youth or
literary springtime of the English race.

     But Amos and Hosea are morally crude in the same proportion.
Amos, who seems to have been active about 750 B.C., was a shepherd.
Jahveh "calls" him, and be begins to fling fiery invectives at the
people, who find him his daily bread for that reason. His Jahveh is
a fiercely vindictive old deity, always planning fearful schemes of
punishment. The great sin is what the translators honestly call
"whoredom"; which hurts the feelings of the modern professors.
Judea, the one land (some think) which did not lie in darkness and
the shadow of death, seems to have been full of  whores, in spite
of polygamy and concubinage. And, figuratively, the great
collective sin of the nation is whoredom -- a courting of false
gods (whose existence is not denied). The Hebrews had to have
Monotheism drilled into them.

     Hosea, who was active in the northern kingdom about the same
time, or about 750 to 725, is a shade worse. The call of Jahveh to
him was, be says: "Take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children
of whoredom, for the land doth commit great whoredom." It seems
clear, and is generally believed, that he literally obeyed the
divine command, and learned to love the girl. But Israel's sins
fire him, and he pours it out volcanically. It is really funny to
reflect that pious people have read for centuries these scorching 


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

descriptions of the morals of Judea, yet have continued to believe
that the Hebrews alone "saw the light." We know that Egypt was then
as moral as Minnesota is today, and that in Babylon they drowned
people for adultery. Hosea ends, however, with a really fine bit of
poetry.

     To read the Bible intelligently, you must read the books in
their chronological order. You may not be able to pick out the
earlier fragments from the Pentateuch and historical books, and you
must remember that even such books as Amos and Hosea were
"redacted." But, taking the books as a whole, read first Amos, then
Hosea, then Isaiah, who seems to have been "called" about 740 B.C.

     Here, however, you strike a glaring instance of -- are we to
call it forgery, conflation, or what? The book of Isaiah, as we
have it, is (apart from later manipulations) the work of two
totally different writers, separated from each other by two
centuries. It would be foolish to think that a competent Hebrew
scholar cannot detect this. It is as easy as it would be to
separate the parts if somebody now made a joint work out of a
Massachusetts divine of the early eighteenth century and the Rev.
Straton or Dr. Riley. The style, diction, and whole personality are
strikingly different.

     The real Isaiah seems to have been a man of good social
position and education, and keenly interested in politics. He was
pro-Assyrian, and he was opposed by the pro-Egyptians at court. His
opponents won, and Judea cast off its allegiance to Assyria and
turned to Egypt. Very well, said Isaiah, this is what you may
expect; and he gave a very reasonable forecast (touched up later)
of the punishment of Judea by the Assyrians. This is the extent of
his predictions.

     Toward the close of the exile in Babylonia, some other Jew
continued, or imitated, the prophecy of Isaiah. He "predicted" the
exile; that is to say, he forged a prediction in the name of
Isaiah, for the text shows when he was writing. He predicts a
terrible destruction of Babylon itself (which was taken peacefully)
by the Medes (who did not take it); and Babylon was in Isaiah's
time not the enemy of Judea. It is quite clear that he wrote during
the Captivity, but before Cyrus appeared. His language and
religious ideas are quite different from those of Isaiah, but the
two have been pieced together in one book. The critics politely
call him Deutero-Isaiah, which means "Second Isaiah." Shall we call
him the forger of half of Isaiah (thirty or forty chapters of it,
including those most quoted)?

     Next you take the second "major" prophet, Jeremiah. He is
described as "one of the gentlest of men"; though, as we saw, he
told Hilkiah in very good Hebrew that his new book was "a lie."
However, Judea was still so wicked and perverse that the pessimism
of the prophets touches its deepest note in Jeremiah. Generally the
predictions of these prophets took the same general shape. The Jews
were going to be fearfully punished -- rebels generally were in
those days -- but the Lord would some day rehabilitate them. There
is still time for the fulfillment of the latter part. Jeremiah was
the son of a priest, and was "called" in the year 626.


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     We ought to have considered Micah before Jeremiah, as he is
supposed to have been a contemporary of Isaiah. But as his work is
really not worth considering (from our present point of view) and
is hopelessly adulterated, we pass on to the famous Ezekiel.

     The critics say that he is "far less attractive" than Jeremiah
-- who is the typical "dismal prophet" of all literature -- so we
may not be disposed to linger long in his valley of dry bones. He
was a priest, of the sterner type, and was probably deported to
Babylonia in 597. He spat the coldest fire that prophet ever
erupted: a man of incandescent zeal for religion as a system of
church-observances, but of fantastic imagery and poor diction.
Nothing but a blind zeal for the "Word of God" could enable any
modern person to be interested in him.

     The rest of the prophets are not worth noticing. Joel
("probably the name was prefixed by the redactor [forger] out of
his own head," says a learned divine), Malachi (a clumsy
misunderstanding of a name, says another divine), and Obadiah
("most probably a fictitious name," says Cheyne) are fifth or
fourth century forgeries. Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah are very
unimportant dervishes of the seventh century. Haggai and Zechariah
are genuine prophets of the sixth century, who, as we saw, prove
that Esdras is a liar, as Jeremiah said. The prophets need not
detain us further.

     With the prophets, however, we may consider the book of
Psalms. "The Psalms of David" they are called; and the writers of
them repeatedly represent that they were written by King David, as
in the close of Ps. lxxii. There is not a scholar in the world who
now believes that any of them were composed by David. Taking
advantage of the statement (which we now know to have been written
centuries later) that David was "a harpist," later Jewish writers
often attributed their songs to him. But internal evidence and the
language itself show that they are a collection of songs or chants
composed mainly five to seven hundred years after the time of
David. As late as the second century B.C. it was a much disputed
question amongst the Jews if David was really the author. Now
everybody in Tennessee is sure that he was.

     The "psaltery" was a stringed instrument used by the Jews, and
so any kind of song or hymn sung to it was called a psalm. Even the
light songs composed for wedding feasts, which were very giddy
occasions in the east, were sung to the psaltery; and we therefore
find that some of the "psalms" (such as xlv) were simply poems to
be sung at a royal marriage festival. The whole book is, in fact,
merely what we should now call an "anthology" of Jewish poetry.
Some psalms are taken word for word from Samuel. Others (such as
xx, xxi, Ixi, Ixiii, etc.) are actually addressed to the king, and
it was always quite absurd to suggest that the author of these was
David or Solomon. There is only one that could possibly be
considered as going back in parts to the time of David. Psalm civ
is taken bodily from the Egyptian liturgy.

     So we dismiss the second part of the Old Testament. The
prophets and psalms are interesting as characteristic literature of
a people that is just learning civilization from older nations. 


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Some of the psalms, in particular, are so crude and bloody in their
sentiments that the Church of England has lately debated in solemn
conferences whether it ought not to omit them from its services. Of
"inspiration" and "revelation" there is no question. They are
monotheistic; but Egypt had found Monotheism four or five centuries
before the earliest prophet or psalmist appeared, and Monotheism
was a truism when the bulk of them were written.

                          PIOUS FICTION

     We are now in a position to estimate the sincerity of the plea
of those who ask us to keep the Bible in our modern schools.
Sometimes they urge this because it is "great literature." Open
your Bible at page one and see how far you have to read -- how many
days you have to read -- before you come to a page that you would
honestly call great literature. It is, of course, splendidly
rendered, in fine poetic old English; but only certain parts of it,
chiefly in the Prophets and the Psalms, are really fit to help in
forming a literary taste, and those parts are for adults, not
children. This plea is not sincere.

     But it is usually said that the Bible is invaluable as a
unique record of the evolution of a people and its religion. We now
realize how insincere this is. The men who make the plea are
precisely those who reject the "inspiration" of the Bible -- or
they would not plead for it in this way -- and are aware of the
results of critical work. They know well that the order of the
books in the Bible is as far as possible from a chronological
order, and that the story of the religious evolution of the Jews
which the Old Testament in its present form tells is a priestly
forgery. The facts were quite different.

     Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest books that was ever
included in a sacred collection. The author is an Epicurean
philosopher. He believes in God, but is an Agnostic as to a future
life. Over and over again he expresses his skepticism, so that the
one verse which does profess belief in a future life is palpably
part of the retouching which (as we can trace) the book suffered
later at orthodox hands. The writer disdains the temple sacrifices
(v 1) and constantly urges his readers to eat and drink and be
merry while the sun shines. He was probably a Jew living in the new
Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria about 200 B.C. We will not call
him a forger, as his assumption of the name of Solomon would
deceive nobody.

     Proverbs is much earlier, probably going back to the fourth
century I when Greek influence began, but the "Wisdom of Solomon,"
or "Ecclesiasticus," is a work written in Greek in the first
century before Christ by (probably) another Alexandrian Jew. It has
significantly, no hope of a Messiah; but it has plenty of Greek
philosophy which was not born until five centuries after Solomon.

     But the most curious and entertaining book of the whole Bible
and one of the finest and most genuine pieces of literature in it,
is the Song of Solomon. I used to blush when, as young students for
the priesthood, we solemnly chanted its voluptuous verses about
ladies' thighs and breasts and bellies. We were told that it was 


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all a superb symbol of the union of Christ and his Church, or at
least the union of Jahveh and the synagogue. Even in the prudent
translation which we have in the Bible it is what we should call,
if it were not in the Bible, a most licentious piece of work.

     We are not at all sure that there is not a mythological
element in parts of it, which seem to celebrate the union of the
sun-god and moon-goddess (Shelamith). But as a whole it is plainly
a collection of Oriental marriage songs. In the east a marriage
festival lasts a  week, and songs about the charms of the bride and
the bridegroom's particular interest in her are features of the
celebration. Some of these songs may be quite old, but others
include Persian, and even Greek, words, so that the collection must
belong to about the fourth century. By that time the forged
historical works had made Solomon and all his glory and his wives
very popular amongst the Jews, and an aspiring author could not do
better than borrow his name. As far as we can recover traces of
Solomon through the mists of time -- a petty king living in a
third-rate Oriental mansion -- he was quite capable of writing this
(though not quite in such grand language) about a young lady's
"navel" and "belly" and so on. We bowdlerize 'Hamlet," where the
prince talks to Ophelia; and we read solemnly to our children from
the "Song": "He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts," etc.




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