But we must from these rather desultory introductory remarks return to Mr. Newman's History, through certain parts of which we propose to accompany him minutely. The earlier part of the Old Testament narrative he passes over with scarcely a remark. The few observations he does make are all founded on the assumption-(for he does not even attempt to prove it)that the whole history of the Hebrew people, down to the days of Samuel, is a series of legends, from which no clear and connected narrative can be gathered, and to which no more credence is due than to the fables of Homer and Hesiod. In his preface he alludes to the new lights thrown on Roman and Grecian history by Grote and Niebuhr, and speaks of the absurdity of treating of sacred history, any more than profane, without making use of modern historical discoveries. This sounds plausible enough; but Grote and Niebuhr did not content themselves with asserting that many of the earliest records of Greece and Rome were fabulous; they undertook to prove it; and all writers on the subject would now consider it necessary not only to refer continually to these and other great authorities, but to recapitulate their arguments, at least in part, in support of opinions but recently established. But Mr. Newman neither refers to nor quotes the arguments of others, nor yet does he bring forward any of his own simple assertions and obscure hints are here his only weapons.

After dismissing thus summarily the early Jewish history, and tracing, on his own plan, the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan, and their emigration from Egypt, (which he does not dispute,) he at once chooses as the starting point of his connected history, the election of Saul as king of Israel. Why this starting point has been chosen it is not easy to see, since he has evidently as little reliance on the subsequent portions of Scripture as on those which precede the reign of Saul: the only difference he makes is to condemn the earlier records in the mass, the later ones in detail.

He observes on the election of Saul, then, that "it is highly doubtful whether Saul was chosen either by the Lord or by Samuel." The Israelites, he supposes, fixed on the young man for his stature and beauty, (1 Sam. ix. 2, 5;) and Samuel, after

The fallacy of reference," as it has been called, is very apt to lead inexperienced readers astray for a string of learned names may often be introduced from the titles of works which are in fact wholly foreign to the question. Hence, as we have observed above, a certain degree of recapitulation is necessary where the subject discussed is little understood, and the works alluded to not generally known. Mr. Newman, however, has contented himself with an occasional reference to Ewald and other critical writers, on trivial points of scholarship and geography, quite irrelevant to the main question.

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opposing their choice at first, reconciled himself to necessity, and declared that their king was chosen by God. Mr. Newman does not, however, seem to think the worse of Samuel for the pious fraud implied in this wholly gratuitous supposition.

He objects (chap. xiii. p. 46) to the expression "young man," as applied to Saul at the time of his election, when, two years afterwards, his son is spoken of as grown up. In this remark he forgets the very loose way of designating age among the ancients. The Romans spoke of a man of forty as "adolescens." Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are described as "children" at an age when they were considered fit to be made rulers over part of Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom. David is called "a youth" at forty, which circumstance Mr. Newman also brings forward as an objection, instead of viewing it as an explanation of the previous passage. At the age of forty, Saul might well be the father of a son capable of bearing arms.

In the fourteenth chapter he derides the history of Jonathan's exploit with his armour-bearer in the garrison of the Philistines at Gibeah, (1 Sam. xiv.) alleging that they could not have slain twenty men between them. This objection is frivolous; for it is expressly stated that the Philistines were seized with a panic, (probably imagining that Jonathan was followed by his army,) and turned their arms against each other. Under the same circumstances a larger number of men has sometimes been slain by one or two individuals. In one of the battles between the French and Russians, for example, a Cossack is recorded to have slain twenty men single-handed with his spear, and was only checked in his career by being at last knocked on the head by one of the enemy. Many similar exploits are recorded both in ancient and modern history.

Mr. Newman considers the whole history of Saul and the Amalekites as a fiction. The accounts of the tribes of Amalek, he says, are from their earliest origin "full of contradictions," and many legends were invented to justify the hatred" entertained by the Jews towards them,-which hatred he assumes to be causeless.* As a confirmation of these assertions he goes back to the history of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, and objects to the "contradiction," contained in Exodus xvii., in the account of their being near perishing with thirst in Rephidim, and saved by "the miraculous fountain," and then shortly after attacked by the Amalekites, who voluntarily marched into this thirsty desert to meet them.

Is it not more likely that the Israelites should have been harassed by depredating tribes, such as exist at this very day in the very same country, than that they should have taken a gratuitous antipathy to the tribe of Amalek, and then invented fables to justify it?

Now, besides that the time is not specified, so that the first of these events might very possibly have taken place in the summer and the last in the winter-besides the circumstance that the Amalekites, habituated to the desert, were more likely to know where springs of water were to be found than the wandering strangers-waiving both these considerations, what is more natural than that a troop of marauders, armed, mounted, unencumbered, and able to carry skins of water enough to serve their small numbers, should march safely through a desert in which a mixed multitude, including the infirm, women, children, and numerous flocks and herds, would perish with thirst? In our own days, it appears to be a very common occurrence in the same countries, for a caravan to be distressed for water at the very time when a band of hostile Arabs can attack it with ease. The possession of a newly discovered well is also one of the commonest subjects of dispute among wandering tribes and Archdeacon Blunt, in his treatise on the Veracity of the Books of Moses, suggests that the miraculous fountain may have thus actually been the cause of the Amalekitish invasion.

Mr. Newman proceeds to notice Samuel's rejection of Saul for sparing the Amalekite king and spoil. He blames this rejection for its cruelty. It shews Samuel, he says, "in a darker and harsher light" than we should have expected. He speaks of Saul's offence, as if it had been one merely personal to Samuel, even if it were to be considered as one at all. Here, again, the sin against the divine Head, temporal as well as spiritual, of the Jews, is overlooked. Saul was presuming to offer up to God what God had commanded him to destroy. A grosser act of disobedience to an earthly despotic monarch could scarcely be conceived; what it must be towards God, all must feel who acknowledge a God to whom we owe allegiance.

Objection is next made to Samuel's address to the Israelites (in the earlier part of the Scripture narrative) on their choice of a king, as "too forcible and eloquent for an old man."

There are so many eloquent speeches of old men, both in ancient and modern history, on record, that it is difficult to conceive how this objection could have had any force with a person of ordinary reading. The defence which Sophocles, when accused of incapability to manage his own affairs, made before the Athenian tribunal, by reading his own recently composed tragedy of Edipus Coloneus, was at least as great a feat for an old man of ninety, as Samuel's speech. But it is wonderful how many circumstances which are considered insurmountable difficulties in the study of Jewish history, are viewed as perfectly natural when the scene of action is changed from Palestine to Greece.

Mr. Newman next observes, (p. 50,) that Samuel committed

Mr. Newman's Objections regarding David.

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what is politically called treason in deposing Saul and electing David. It is true that many things are treason in one government which are not so in another. And it must never be forgotten, that under the Jewish theocracy the kings were mere delegates, and that Samuel, as the oracle of the Most High, had as full right to appoint and depose them as the prime minister of an earthly monarch to give and withdraw appointments to subordinate offices.

The account of David's slaying Goliath with a sling is next disputed, because he was afterwards celebrated for excellence as a swordsman! As reasonably might it be urged that the accounts of our ancestors' skill as archers must be false, because their descendants are now renowned for the use of fire-arms.

David's slaying two hundred Philistines (1 Sam. xviii.) is also objected to by Mr. Newman. He seems to think that David must have slain them single-handed; whereas it is mentioned expressly that he had his men with him! The same objection is made to a similar exploit related later.

In a note he speaks of the "Jehovistic but unmoral spirit" of the book of Chronicles. This expression seems to be adopted from the German Neologians, by whom it is freely used, together with the kindred term Eloistic, to insinuate that the worship of Jehovah was the form or phase of the Jewish religion maintained by the authors of such books as Joshua, Chronicles, &c., and that Jehovah was regarded by them merely as the tutelar deity of their nation, in opposition to the claims of Baal or the Egyptian Ox-god. To represent the worship of the true God as in no respect more pure or spiritual than that of false deities, and to separate from it the idea of superior virtue and morality, is the continual aim of the writers whom Mr. Newman has unhappily chosen as his authorities, or rather oracles.

The next objection he proceeds to consider is one which must have presented itself as a difficulty (though not as an argument against the truth of Scripture) to many minds less disposed to cavil than Mr. Newman's-the expiation by David of Saul's slaughter of the Gibeonites. It is plain that no particular mode of giving satisfaction to the Gibeonites was dictated by the oracles of God. Some satisfaction was required for the cruel treachery committed by Saul; such, too, as should exhibit a terrible example to future tyrants, and become at the same time a vindication of national truth, and the protection of the most defenceless and degraded portion of the community. Nor must it be forgotten that the Mosaic dispensation was one totally different in its character from that of the New Testament; that it has been declared by an infallible authority to have been imperfect, rudimental, and carnal, and that it con

tained provisions and permissions due to the "hardness of man's heart," which were intended to be only temporary, and have been since entirely abrogated. Let it be observed, also, that the transaction to which we are especially referring is one of those in which the awful and mysterious idea of atonement for sin-"expiation made, not by the principal offender, or not by him alone" was presented to the mind of the ancient Church. The form in which the idea was clothed on that occasion, may have been more suitable than we can in our circumstances conceive, to enable men's spiritual faculties to apprehend it as a reality.

Mr. Newman next proceeds to the "superstitious belief" that David was punished for numbering the people. It is certainly not very clear what fault he had committed in so doing; though most probably either the spirit or the purpose of the action were blameable. That it was something which set public opinion at defiance, or invaded the laws of the country, is proved by the horror of the deed shewn by so reckless and unscrupu

lous a soldier as Joab.

Mr. Newman alludes shortly after to a difficulty which is caused rather by the headings to our chapters than by the text itself; namely, David's treatment of the cities of Rabbah and Ammon, whose inhabitants he "put under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln." (2 Sam. xii. 31.) Now we know that it was the practice of some ancient nations to compel a captive and defeated army to pass under a yoke or arch constructed of weapons, as was done by the Samnite general to the Roman army. So that, if the Ammonites had been said to have "passed under the sword and spear," the meaning of the passage would have been evident. The use of agricultural and servile instruments instead of arms was probably a sign of still greater humiliation. Some commentators are of opinion that this expression implied setting them to servile offices, and that "passing through brick-kilns" denoted that they were compelled to work at brickmaking, as the Israelites had done in Egypt. In any case, Mr. Newman's supposition, that a new and cruel mode of torture was implied, is wholly unwarranted, either by the context or by known ancient customs. It would appear that he was chiefly guided in his conjecture by the heading of the chapter, which does speak of David's torturing the citizens of Ammon. But the headings of chapters have not been generally considered as good authority; except, indeed, by a writer of a very different school, whose coincidence with Mr. Newman is in this case very curious, Dr. Hook; who, in his "Church Dictionary," refers us for mention by name of the "seven Deacons” to Acts vi., the word "Deacons" being only found in the heading to the chapter!