The reaction began a few years ago with the recognition of the
inadequacy of Astruc's document hypothesis, until then the creed of all
Bible critics. Astruc, a celebrated French physician, in 1753 advanced
the theory that the Pentateuch--the five books of Moses--consists of two
parallel documents, called respectively Yahvistic and Elohistic, from
the name applied to God in each. On this basis, German science after him
raised a superstructure. No date was deemed too late to be assigned to
the composition of the Pentateuch. If the historian Flavius Josephus had
not existed, and if Jesus had not spoken of "the Law" and "the
prophets," and of the things "which were written in the Law of Moses,
and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms," critics would have been
disposed to transfer the redaction of the Bible to some period of the
Christian era. So wide is the divergence of opinions on the subject
that two learned critics, Ewald and Hitzig, differ in the date assigned
to a certain biblical passage by no less than a thousand years!

Bible archaeology, Bible exegesis, and discussions of grammatical
niceties, were confounded with the history of biblical literature, and
naturally it was the latter that suffered by the lack of
differentiation. Orthodoxy assumed a purely divine origin for the Bible,
while sceptics treated the holy book with greater levity than they would
dare display in criticising a modern novel. The one party raised a hue
and cry when Moses was spoken of as the first author; the other
discovered "obscene, rude, even cannibalistic traits"[2] in the sublime
narratives of the Bible. It should be the task of coming generations,
successors by one remove of credulous Bible lovers, and immediate heirs
of thorough-going rationalists, to reconcile and fuse in a higher
conception of the Bible the two divergent theories of its purely divine
and its purely human origin. Unfortunately, it must be admitted that
Ernest Meier is right, when he says, in his "History of the National
Poetry of the Hebrews," that this task wholly belongs to the future; at
present it is an unsolved problem.

The aesthetic is the only proper point of view for a full recognition of
the value of biblical literature. It certainly does not rob the sacred
Scriptures, the perennial source of spiritual comfort, of their exalted
character and divine worth to assume that legend, myth, and history
have combined to produce the perfect harmony which is their imper