is, that they obtained it from the renegade Jewish priest Manasseh, who lived, according to Josephus, in the time of Alexander the Great, and, according to Professor Ryle, in the time of Nehemiah. Such a view has been maintained by some well-known critics, but is neither the natural supposition for a believing student of Scripture, nor that which is generally taken by ordinary uncritical people. In Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, in an article very hostile to the Samaritan various readings, the directly opposite statement is made, that "the popular notion," and "the opinion" of J. Morinus, Walton, Capellus, Kennicott, Michaelis, Eichhorn, Bauer, Jahn, Bertholt, Steudel, Mazade, Stuart, Davidson, and others, is that the Samaritan Pentateuch "came into the hands of the Samaritans as an inheritance from the ten tribes whom they succeeded."

That this should ever have been doubted by men believing the Old Testament to be the Word of God is strange; but it is quite intelligible that thehigher criticism" should ignore that which, if true, is, as Dr. Wilson. says, "a controlling fact," absolutely fatal to it.

The proof of it is to be found in the Book of Kings (2 Kings xvii.). Strangely enough, what is there said is treated in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible as the basis of a separate hypothesis on the subject, whereas it only proves the truth of the "popular notion" and the opinion of the critics. already enumerated, that the Pentateuch came into the hands of the Samaritans as an inheritance from the ten tribes. Two hundred and seventy-five years, or thereabouts, before Nehemiah's time, the ten tribes had been carried away captive by the King of Assyria, and Samaria peopled by Gentiles from various nations. These Gentile inhabitants were infested by lions, sent, as they thought, by Him whom they regarded as the God of the country, for their neglect and ignorance of His worship. "Then the king of Assyria commanded, saying, Carry thither one of the priests whom ye brought from thence "-therefore, not an inhabitant of Judah, but of the land of Israel" and let them go and dwell there, and let him teach them the manner of the God of the land. Then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel, and taught them how they should fear the Lord" (2 Kings xvii. 27, 28).

This was in the beginning of the reign of Hezekiah over Judah, when, according to the "higher criticism," Jeremiah, or some one else, was forging the Book of the Law, or some part of it, to be hidden and found in the days of Josiah. Of course, therefore, if these critics are right, the Israelitish priest could not take the Book of the Law to the Samaritans; and if he did do so, they are wrong. But that he did do so, and that the book he took them was no new book, but the book which the ten tribes possessed before they were carried away captive, is made certain by what follows: "Unto this day they do after the former manners; they fear not the Lord, neither do they after their statutes, or after their ordinances, or after the law and commandments which the Lord commanded the children of Jacob, whom He named Israel." But perhaps these were only traditional commandments, taught by word of

NO. II.-VOL. II. THE THINKER.

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mouth, and not from a book. There is not even that escape for the critics. In the command to the Israelites, recorded in this passage in order to explain what the priest taught these Gentile inhabitants of Samaria, afterwards called the Samaritans, the Israelites are told of "the statutes, and the ordinances, and the law, and the commandments which He wrote for you." The ten tribes had had the written Book of the Law, and had disobeyed it; it was brought to the Samaritans, and they disobeyed it too. "So these nations feared the Lord, and served their graven images, both their children, and their children's children: as did their fathers, so do they unto this day." The Israelitish priest, carried captive by the king of Assyria, was sent back by him to bring these Gentiles into obedience to the Book of the Law (according to the "higher criticism," non-existent or being just forged), which the ten tribes had long known, and been sent into captivity for disobeying. If this is true, the whole fabric of the "higher criticism" falls to the ground, because the Book of the Law existed before the time when it is the fundamental assertion of this system that it began to be forged; and since the book existed among the ten tribes long before, the idea of its being forged in Hezekiah's reign, purposely hidden, and then fraudulently brought to light as a new discovery in Josiah's reign is a baseless imagination. The ten tribes had what we call the Samaritan Pentateuch before they were carried away captive, and, if so, we cannot doubt that the Jews had also what we call the Hebrew Pentateuch. The two texts must therefore have parted company not later than the time of Rehoboam and Jeroboam, which, as Dr. Wilson says, is "a controlling fact" in the controversy. Whether the ten tribes, or the Samaritans after them, made alterations; or whether, on the contrary, the Jews, as Jerome thought, did so, has nothing to do with the question. The passage in Kings proves the existence of the Pentateuch among the ten tribes, and that fact, I venture to think with Dr. Wilson, is decisive of the whole controversy. It is not necessary to the ordinary belief, but it is fatal to the "higher criticism."

A REPLY TO MR. MOULTON'S 66 ZOROASTER AND ISRAEL."

BY REV. PROFESSOR T. K. CHEYNE, D.D.

MR. MOULTON will perhaps be anxious to know how his learned and interesting articles entitled "Zoroaster and Israel" (THINKER, May and July, 1892) have struck me. I should have preferred to speak on this subject before beginning my annual exile to a land where books are not; but since May no continuation of his criticisms on my Bampton Lectures has appeared, and so I have waited till it has become practically necessary to reply to him at a disadvantage, if I would reply at all. I am most thankful for any assistance in the work of self-criticism, though English critics, in general, through their unprogressiveness, make it rather difficult for me to learn from them. They appear to have approached the Bampton Lectures with pre-conceived ideas

as to what the book is likely to mean, and so, I may venture to hold, have fallen into very serious errors. Their excuse is threefold: 1st, the continued prevalence of theological prejudice; 2nd, the novelty of the constructive critical treatment of the Old Testament in this country; and 3rd, the drawbacks of the lecture form imposed upon me by the conditions of the Bampton foundation. That Mr. Moulton has done his best to resist the influence of theological prejudice, I fully believe. But that a serious prejudice of this sort exists in his mind, I infer from the sentence in which he says (or seems to say) that the believer in " a unique revelation to the Hebrew people" may with some reason be "troubled" if the Psalter belongs "in the mass to post-Exilic times." That he is not very familiar with constructive Old Testament criticism seems to me probable from the sceptical tone in which he speaks of my own criticism, which, though of course not without an individual element, is not, as my friend Prof. Sanday asserts, "isolated," but is to a large extent a synthesis of the work of the last half century. That the lecture form has been a hindrance to Mr. Moulton in his study of the book may be inferred from the stress he lays on certain omissions, which, so far as they really exist, it would have been my aim to avoid in a purely didactic treatise.

In criticizing any book it is of prime necessity that the critic should understand its object and its method. The main object of my own work was to expound the religious ideas of the Psalter. Now, in order to do this with profit, it was needful to show that the Psalter belonged as a whole to a particular period, and the profit to the student would be the greatest if it should turn out that it belonged to the period when there was a fully developed Jewish Church. It is doubtless not easy to be at once a critic of the literary form of the Scriptures, and an historical expositor of their ideas, and it would be open to a controversialist to affirm that I had altogether failed. But there is another point in which a perfectly friendly critic might be severe upon me, and declare that I had delivered myself, bound hand and foot, into the hand of my enemies (among whom Mr. Moulton must, I fear, to some extent be reckoned). Believing that there were many devout readers of the Psalms who were under the impression that some passages at least in the Psalter testified to a germinant belief in the happiness of the righteous after death, and being myself of opinion that this view of their meaning could not be altogether disproved, I devoted myself to showing that upon the critical hypothesis at which I had arrived at the end of Lecture VI., it was all the easier to believe that some Jewish believers had arrived at this degree of spiritual insight, because they were, both in Persia and to some extent in Palestine, in contact with a religion which may, without any serious error, be called Zoroastrianism. This illusion of mine has been almost dispelled. I still hesitate a little to receive the evidence of facts, but the extraordinary treatment which my discussion of this part of my subject has received (though no one has equalled the author of the Impregnable Rock in, doubtless, unconscious unfairness) seems to me to show that what was

meant in the purest charity was utterly needless, because traditional orthodoxy had almost killed any simply devout love for the Psalms. I thankfully admit that Mr. Moulton is not so bound by traditional orthodoxy as to refuse the title of prophet to Zarathushtra (THINKER, May, pp. 401, 402), and that he is willing to admit that it is at any rate conceivable that "the Psalms [may] show traces of Zoroastrianism" (ibid., p. 407). Still, there must be some reason for his failure to apprehend the reason for my laying so much stress on the possibility of the influence of Mazda-worship on some of the psalmists, and for his missing the mark so far as to pen these

sentences:

"Of course, the only advantage the Bampton Lectures can gain here is the proof that Zoroastrian influences may have reached the post-Exilic Jewish Church. That they did so reach them, and that doctrines found in the Psalter require such an explanation, is a very different thing" (THINKER, May, pp. 402, 403).

With regard to Mr. Moulton's interesting exposition of points connected with Iranian matters, I have only to say that I prefer to leave the discussion of them to Dr. Mills, who is not, indeed, responsible for any inferences. which I have made from facts, but whose general position (tested so far as I have been able, in my ignorance of Zend, to test it by comparison with that of other scholars) I imagine myself to have adopted. I have not said that any Jewish psalmists read the Gâthas; I have but assumed that the vitality of that Mazda-worship which is attested by the inscriptions and by classical writers like Theopompus was owing to those spiritual elements which are by us most easily studied in the Gâthas. And what I have said (B. L., pp. 433-4) of the legitimacy of using the Avesta, in spite of the manifold differences of interpreters, has not, I venture to think, been overthrown by anything which has been adduced by Mr. Moulton. In fact, the controversy which he has attempted to raise seems to me quite needless; for he "cheerfully makes the admission that the obscurities of the Gâthas do not generally affect their theology to any serious extent." If I have the requisite leisure, I should like few things better than to try to sum up what may really have been gained for the subject of "Zoroaster and Israel" through Mr. Moulton's discussion, when it has been completed. But I doubt whether, in the dark season, it would be prudent for me with my physical disadvantage to undertake it. At present Mr. Moulton seems to me to have introduced matters into the discussion which might very well have been dispensed with.

The influence of Zoroastrianism upon Judaism is, I submit, undeniable. The only question is as to the period in which it began to be definitely felt. In an historical treatment of Jewish religion, designed not for general readers, but for unprejudiced critical students, the possible influence of Mazda-worship on some of the psalmists would be but briefly referred to in the text, fuller treatment of it being reserved for an excursus. But even apart from the Psalter, I apprehend that the possibility

of Zoroastrian influence on the Old Testament cannot be wholly ignored, and know that I have done something for students who desire to begin the study of this subject. Mr. Moulton has qualifications as a Zend scholar for performing the task which are wanting to me, but he cannot deny me the credit of being the first theologian in recent times to re-examine the subject which in Vatke's day could be but most inadequately treated. But if Mr. Moulton will pardon me for saying so, he will have to put aside his prejudices against advanced Biblical criticism, in order properly to accomplish the work in which I have been a humble pioneer.

A few points have in conclusion to be mentioned, in which, as it seems to me, Mr. Moulton's criticism of myself has been at fault. Thus, on p. 406 he accuses me of treating inscriptions in a "cavalierly fashion." As the first of our more recent English Hebraists to utilize the cuneiform inscriptions, I might pardonably think Mr. Moulton rather disrespectful, were it not that I have learned in the past year that a generous respect for seniors is not prevalent among the young critics of the day. Certainly I do "wave aside" a large part of Professor Sayce's theories respecting Ebedtob's letters from Jerusalem, which have made such a noise in some English and American popular religious newspapers. I do most profoundly regret that my old and respected friend should so often of late years have checked the progress of sound critical views of the Old Testament by his (as I must believe) hasty utterances. Mr. Moulton will do well to be cautious in making such remarks for the future, which to one who is acquainted with the real state of historical research can but appear absurd. As to the Cyruscylinder, I am more willing to be instructed. I do not myself see that a faithful worshipper of Ahura Mazda was precluded from acting as the inscription states Cyrus to have done; tolerance seems to me to flow naturally from Mazdeism, though I do not forget that its later history makes it possible to deny this. In a work of such large compass as the Bampton Lectures I could not discuss this point, nor can I discuss it now. If I erred about Cyrus, it was at any rate in good company (see E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i. 608).

On p. 407 Mr. Moulton states a conviction which he thinks to be opposed to my own. He is, however, mistaken. The parallels from Zoroastrian religious phraseology adduced by me serve only for illustrations, not for proofs. My language respecting Ps. xlix. 15 may, I admit, be open to misconception. But I certainly meant that only in very broad conceptions is Mazdean influence to be assumed as probable, or at least possible, in certain psalms; granting the existence of similar conceptions, similar phraseology need not surprise. The question asked by Mr. Moulton with regard to Ps. xvii. 3-5 is, I think, very much out of place. The threefold division of sins in that passage surely is Zoroastrian in spirit, nor is it fair to say that there is any "disguising" on my part, as B. L., p. 392, will show. Mr. Moulton's criticism of my suggestion on Isa. xxvi. 19 causes me no perturbation; "lights" (, elsewhere only 2 Kings iv. 39 in sense of