"[146] And Daniel spake of the books of Moses as well known
when he says, "_Therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that
is written in the law of Moses the servant of God._"[147] The shortest
book in the Old Testament--the prophecy of Obadiah, consisting only of
twenty sentences--contains twenty-five allusions to the preceding
histories and laws. The last of the prophets shuts up the volume with a
command to "_Remember the law of Moses._" In fact, just as the epistles
prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the gospels; so do the
prophets prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the law of
Moses. They were acknowledged not merely by one generation of the Jewish
people, but by the nation during the whole period of its national
existence; and they are of such a character, that they must then, and
now, be taken as one whole--all accepted, or all rejected together.

The reader of the Old Testament will speedily find that these writings
are not merely a connected history of the nation, of great general
interest, like Bancroft's or Macaulay's, but of no such special interest
to any individual as to force him, by a sense of self-interest, or the
danger of loss of liberty or property, to correct their errors. On the
contrary, every farmer in Palestine was deeply concerned in the truth
and accuracy of the Bible; for it contained not only the general
boundaries of the country, and of the particular tribes, like the survey
of the Maine boundary, or of Mason and Dixon's line, but it delineated
particular estates, also, and was, in fact, the report of the
Surveyor-General, deposited in the county court for reference, in case
of any litigation about sale or inheritance of property.[148] The
genealogies of the tribes and families were also preserved in these
writings; and on the authenticity and correctness of these records, the
inheritance of every farm in the land depended; for as no lease ran more
than fifty years, every farm returned to the heirs of the original
settler at the year of jubilee.[149] Thus every Jewish farmer had a
direct interest in these sacred records; and it would be just as hard to
forge records for the county courts of Ohio, and pass them off upon the
citizens as genuine, and plead them in the courts as valid, as to impose
at first, or falsify afterward, the records of the commonwealth of
Israel.

This will appear more clearly when we consider that they contained also
the laws of