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and comprehensiveness. The mechanical prayer-wheel system, by which semi-daily mathematically measured sections are turned off without the slightest regard to sense, is a fatal obstacle to their intelligent comprehension. They should be treated with some of that freedom and realisation of their living sense which characterise the Jewish and the early Christian use.

PART IV

ARCHEOLOGY AND THE BIBLE

IN

CHAPTER X

A REVIEW OF RESULTS

N a former chapter I have spoken of archæological discoveries as one of the great factors in the development of Biblical Criticism within the last half-century. In this and the succeeding chapters I propose to treat (1) the general results of archæological research, and (2) some special applications of archæology to the solution of Bible problems.

There is an inclination on the part of some to set archæology over against Higher Criticism, as though it were a separate discipline, and not only separate from, but also opposed to the Higher Criticism. In reality Higher Criticism includes in itself the use of archæology. Given a text determined by the Lower Criticism, it is the business of Higher Criticism to interpret that text upon its literary side; to determine, that is, questions of date, authorship, method of composition, and the like. To determine these questions it draws upon all accessible material, and consequently upon archæological material.

But it is true that there has been a tendency on the part of Old Testament students to develop, not Higher Criticism, but close criticism of the Old Testament to an extreme degree, depending unduly on subjective data, that is, on the impression made upon the mind of the critic by the style, the thought, the doctrine, and the like. While the study of style and the study of the development of thought are necessary parts of the historical and literary criticism of any work, and while there is a science of the study of these, so that it is quite possible to say that such and such a thing

could not have been written in such and such a period, because its style and language belong clearly to such and such another period, or because its conceptions in regard to certain matters are such as do not appear before or after such and such a period, nevertheless, it is also true that there is a large subjective element in this discipline, and it is necessary to check the results obtained through it by data of a more objective character.

Comparing the present position of Old Testament criticism with the criticism of the Roman, Greek, Indian, and Persian literary remains, we find that there has been a reaction in those fields against the use of such subjective evidence alone and an inclination to return, in regard to questions of date and of authorship, to a more conservative position, as a result largely of archæological discoveries. It is not so long since the divisive theory of the Homeric poems was quite generally accepted by critical scholars, the Iliad and Odyssey being divided into a great number of smaller poems, which were supposed to have been worked together at a later time. Almost as a corollary of this belief in the composite and late authorship of these poems, their testimony both as to historical incidents and also in regard to the conditions of life and the civilisation of the period which they professed to represent was rejected as incorrect. There was even an inclination to resolve the Homeric poems as a whole into sun myths. Discoveries at Hissarlik, Mycenæ, Tiryns, the Argive Heræum, Cnossos, and elsewhere have shown us that the historical conditions of the Greek world at the time supposed to be represented by the poems of Homer corresponded in general to the representations of the Homeric poems. We have ascertained that some at least of the descriptions of ancient cities in the Homeric poems are historically correct and rest upon contemporary information or personal knowledge, and that certain incidents, such as the destruction of Troy, are historical. The argument against the early composition and continued transmission of the poems on the ground that the art of writing was not known

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