The Higher Criticism in general. Higher Criticism does not mean criticism in any invidious sense, any more than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was an unfavorable or destructive examination. It is merely a dispassionate investigation of the authorship, date and purpose of Scripture books, in the light of their composition, style and internal characteristics. As the Lower Criticism is a text-critique, the Higher Criticism is a structure-critique. A bright Frenchman described a literary critic as one who rips open the doll to get at the sawdust there is in it. This can be done with a sceptical and hostile spirit, and there can be little doubt that some of the higher critics of the Old Testament have begun their studies with prepossessions against the super-natural, which have vitiated all their conclusions. These presuppositions are ofter unconscious, but none the less influential. When Bishop Colenso examined the Pentateuch and Joshua, he disclaimed any intention of assailing the miraculous narratives as such; as if he had said: “My dear little fish, you need not fear me; I do not wish to catch you; I only intend to drain the pond in which you live.” To many scholars the waters at present seem very low in the Hexateuch and indeed throughout the whole Old Testament.

Shakespeare made over and incorporated many old Chronicles of Plutarch and Holinshed, and many Italian tales and early tragedies of other writers; but Pericles and Titus Andronicus still pass current under the name of Shakespeare. We speak even now of “Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar,” although of its twenty-seven editions the last fourteen have been published since his death, and more of it has been written by other editors than Gesenius ever wrote himself. We speak of “Webster’s Dictionary,” though there are in the “Unabridged” thousands of words and definitions that Webster never saw. Francis Brown: “A modern writer masters older records and writes a wholly new book. Not so with eastern historians. The latest comer, as Renan says, ‘absorbs his predecessors without assimilating them, so that the most recent has in its belly the fragments of the previous works in a raw state.’ The Diatessaron of Tatian is a parallel to the composite structure of the O. T. books. One passage yields the following: Mat. 21:12a; John 2:14a; Mat. 21:12b; John 2:14b, 15; Mat. 21:12c, 13; John 2:16; Mark 11:16; John 2:17–22; all succeeding each other without a break.” Gore, Lux Mundi, 353—“There is nothing materially untruthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing the whole legislation to Moses acting under the divine command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution of the collection of Psalms to David, and of Proverbs to Solomon.”

The opponents of the Higher Criticism have much to say in reply. Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, holds that the early chapters of Genesis were copied from Babylonian sources, but he insists upon a Mosaic or pre-Mosaic date for the copying. Hilprecht however declares that the monotheistic faith of Israel could never have proceeded “from the Babylonian mountain of gods—that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.” Bissell, Genesis Printed in Colors, Introd., iv—“It is improbable that so many documentary histories existed so early, or if existing that the compiler should have attempted to combine them. Strange that the earlier should be J and should use the word ‘Jehovah,’ while the later P should use the word ‘Elohim,’ when ‘Jehovah’ would have far better suited the Priests’ Code.… xiii—The Babylonian tablets contain in a continuous narrative the more prominent facts of both the alleged Elohistic and Jehovistic sections of Genesis, and present them mainly in the Biblical order. Several hundred years before Moses what the critics call two were already one. It is absurd to say that the unity was due to a redactor at the period of the exile, 444 b.c. He who believes that God revealed himself to primitive man as one God, will see in the Akkadian story a polytheistic corruption of the original monotheistic account.” We must not estimate the antiquity of a pair of boots by the last patch which the cobbler has added; nor must we estimate the antiquity of a Scripture book by the glosses and explanations added by later editors. As the London Spectator remarks on the Homeric problem: “It is as impossible that a first-rate poem or work of art should be produced without a great master-mind which first conceives the whole, as that a fine living bull should be developed out of beef-sausages.” As we shall proceed to show, however, these utterances overestimate the unity of the Pentateuch and ignore some striking evidences of its gradual growth and composite structure.