I ascribe much importance to the consideration of the difficulty of fixing, with any probability, on any later period in history, as admitting of the composition of the Pentateuch, than that to which the current opinion actually refers it; that is, if we allow general historical authority to the books, which relate the subsequent history of the Jews; for it is true, that without them we have no grounds on which to reason. The assignment to a date belonging to the period of the Judges, would, I apprehend, be attended with rather less difficulty, than any other, except that which I believe to be the true one. It would, however, be liable to the strong objections, that the times of the Judges were extremely disturbed and unsettled, and such as to make the conjecture a violent one, that they could either have given birth to the composition, or have admitted of the introduction of the institutions, to which, whenever received, it must have given rise; and still more, that they were too near to the time of the alleged ministry of Moses, to allow a fabricated account of events, which, if real, must have been matter of such recent notoriety, to obtain circulation or credence. If we advance from the time of the Judges, to that of the Kings of the twelve tribes, besides the passage in the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy,* which breathes such a vehement spirit of jealousy of regal government, we are met by the great difficulty, that the whole character and bearing of the Jewish institutions, as the law prescribes them, is thoroughly republican; and of course, when there was

*Verse 18 et seq.

The tone of the book of Judges, probably written after the establishment of the monarchy, is characteristically opposed to that of this passage. In the last chapters, the reader is repeatedly reminded, where the relation of any disorder or outrage occurs, that it took place in times when "there was no king in Israel," and accordingly " every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Judges xvii. 6; xviii. 1; xxi. 25.

a monarch, the time had passed for any such system to be devised. After the revolt of the ten tribes, and the consequent establishment of two independent monarchies, the state of things continued such as to cause the last consideration to have at least equal weight; and to this is to be thenceforward added the extreme improbability, that the northern kingdom would have received the law, or any of its institutions, from a people against whom they continued to cherish a bitter hostility.* All the evidence, then, which we have of its existence among them, appears to be substantially so much proof of its having existed among them before the separation. If, ascribing little importance, or giving a different explanation, to the testimony relating to the existence of the law in the northern kingdom, we should fix on the time during which the kingdom of Judah survived it, for the production of the books, our argument would still labor under the difficulty presented by their pervading and essential republican tone; and the possibility of such a theological system being devised at a period, when the nation had multiplied its relations with surrounding idolatrous states, will become more incredible. On the return from the captivity, we are told of the reading of the law of Moses to the people, by Ezra, and of many of them divorcing their wives, agreeably to the directions which they understood it to contain.† Their interpretation of its precepts may or not have been correct; but their obedience, in such a case, to

* The occurrence of alternate honorable notices of the ancestry of the tribes of Joseph and Judah respectively, is another objection to this scheme. Compare Gen. xlix. 8-12, with 22-26; Deut. xxxiii. 7, with 13-17. Numerous historical relations, reflecting honor now on one, now on the other of these tribes, will present themselves in the same view. It is difficult to imagine a citizen of either the northern, or the southern kingdom, making such records as we find, flattering to the national pride of the rival state.

its supposed injunction, leaves nothing to be desired in the way of evidence respecting the sense which they entertained of its authority. The time of Nehemiah approaches, within about a hundred and fifty years, to that when the Pentateuch was translated into Greek, as containing the record of the origin of the Jewish institutions.

At this period, we also become able to make observations on the text of the Pentateuch, which may be thought to have an important connexion with this argument. We find the readings of the Greek version to be different, in numerous instances, from those of the Hebrew original now in our hands, indicating, that, to some extent, diversities existed in different copies at the time when that version was made. Still more, we find an agreement between them in not a few readings, which from satisfactory considerations, we conclude to be deviations from the original text. Considering the amount of such deviations, the manner in which they pervade the whole texture of the volume, and the peculiar character of some of them, a strong probability may be thought to exist, that they could only have been produced as a consequence of repeated transcriptions; in other words, that a course of ages must have elapsed between the date of the original composition, and the date of those textual corruptions of it which we now discern. And, if we believe the Samaritan Pentateuch to have existed among the northern tribes before the separation of the kingdoms, or even from the time of Ezra, it affords us a still stronger argument of the same kind, since it resembles the Septuagint, not only in the exhibition of readings different from those of our Hebrew, but in the exhibition of interpolations and glosses, which must have found their way into the copies, at an earlier time than that to which any of

our now extant authorities reach, and which themselves must have been much posterior in their date to the original composition, since only a long course of time could have created a necessity for such illustrations.

I would retrace this evidence, at the same time bringing into view some passages in later Jewish books (attributed to successive ages), in which the Pentateuch has been understood to be referred to, as already in existence. The volume which three hundred years before Christ was translated into Greek as containing the ancient Jewish documents, (received by the nation as such, whether in Palestine, Egypt, or elsewhere,) could hardly have been fabricated between that time and the time of Nehemiah, a century and a half earlier; and when we read in his book of something "written in the Law,"* which we actually find in the volume in question, and of a reading "in the book of Moses," to which the same remark applies, and of a reading, "in the book of the Law of God," it seems an inadmissible hypothesis, that in this short interval Nehemiah's "book of the Law" had disappeared, and another succeeded to its place. With Nehemiah, Ezra was contemporary, (unless we will undertake to deny the historical credibility of these later books,) and he too speaks of "the book of Moses," and of writing contained in the Law of Moses, the man of God," § which composition there can be no doubt, whatever it was, was the same to which Nehemiah applied the like names. If we date the books of the Chronicles correctly, they were compiled about the same time,

* Neh. x. 34, 36. Compare x. 29-39, with e. g. Ex. xiii. 13, xxiii. 10, 19; Lev. xxv. 4; Num. xviii. 12; Deut. xiv. 22.

Neh. xiii. 1. Compare Deut. xxiii. 3.

Neh. viii. 8.

§ Ezra iii. 2; vi. 18.

*

and they too testify to the existence of a "Law of the book of Moses," of a "book of Moses," of a writing "in the Law of Moses," of a "book of the Law of the Lord," and of a writing "in the Law of the Lord," which it is difficult to imagine was different from that so named in Ezra and Nehemiah. In Ezra's time, as has been observed, we have the best evidence (if we admit the truth of the then recorded transactions) of the sacred authority attributed to the book; and the Chronicles, in the texts which I have cited, recognise the existence of the same book in the reigns of Josiah, Amaziah, Joash, Jehoshaphat, and David, antecedent in different ages to Nehemiah, the last preceding him by about five hundred years. The books of Kings I think will appear to have been written about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, a period, again, altogether too near to that of the composition of the books of Chronicles, for the name "Law of Moses," which they too speak off as a written law, to be transferred from one authoritative and necessarily notorious work, to another pretending to its authority. In addition to the recognition, in the historical books of Kings and Chronicles, of the existence of the book called the "book of the Law of Moses," and the "book of the Law of the Lord," throughout the period of the Kings, I have before urged the extreme difficulty (from the universal political spirit of the Pentateuch) of supposing it to be a forgery produced within that period; a period which covers the whole time between the composition of the books of Kings, and that of the book of Joshua, if, as I think we may hereafter see reason to allow, this latter book is to be referred to a

* 2 Chron. xxv. 4, (compare Deut. xxiv. 16.); xxxv. 12; xxiii. 18; xvii. 9; 1 Chron. xvi. 40.