The critics who deny to Moses the authorship of the Pentateuch have a puzzle on hand when they attempt, as they sometimes do, to tell us something that Moses [95] actually did. In the March number of the Biblical World, Professor Harper has a long editorial on the subject, in which he sails round and round, like a bird that knows not where or when to alight; but at last he comes down with the following statement:

      But, it is asked, how much of this did Moses himself actually accomplish? We answer: (1) He formulated the Decalogue, and under inspiration from heaven impressed upon it ideas which never had before been formulated; namely, the sin of idolatry and the sin which exists in wrong purpose or intent. (2) He formulated the covenant code (Ex. 21-23), the constitution of the hexateuchal legislation, a code which contains in germ every enactment of the Hexateuch. (3) He, without doubt, passed judgment on the many early stories handed down by tradition, selecting those in connection with which great truths should be taught, purifying them from the dross which the ages had connected with them, and handing them down for the people, and through the people, until that later time when they assumed their present literary form. (4) He furnished the foundation upon which should be built not merely (a) the Mosaic system of legislation, but (b) the monarchical system which was later developed, and (c) the prophetic system of which he was at the same time the beginning and the highest representative.

      I should like to know how Professor Harper knows all this. Outside the statements of the Pentateuch, and of the later books of the Bible, he has not a word of authority on the subject, and the bulk of these statements he unceremoniously rejects. Not only so, but in the words which I have just quoted from him he misrepresents his only source of information. He says, first, that Moses "formulated the Decalogue," when the only authority on which any man can now affirm that Moses ever saw the Decalogue, declares that he received it from God, written on tables of stone, already formulated. Second, he says in the same sentence, that Moses impressed on the Decalogue "ideas which had never [96] before been formulated," when, if this only authority can be believed, he impressed nothing at all on the Decalogue, but preserved it as God gave it to him. In the third place, he says that Moses "formulated the covenant code (Ex. 21-23)," when the only possible source of information declares that this also was given by direct revelation from God, and that all he did was to write it in a book, read it to the people, and ratify it as law by the sprinkling of blood. Fourth, he says that Moses, "without doubt," passed judgment on many early stories which had been handed down by tradition, referring, evidently, to such stories as make up the Book of Genesis. But how does he know that Moses ever heard of these stories? He denies that Moses wrote them; he affirms that they were written about seven hundred years after the death of Moses; then, what gives him the right to say that Moses ever had anything to do with them? Why all this trimming between belief and unbelief? If the record respecting Moses in the Pentateuch is not to be believed, then it is far more sensible to unite with the radicals in pronouncing Moses a mythical character, than to pretend that we know something about him in the same breath in which we reject our only source of information. This last is what Professor Harper, and those whom he has taken as guides in criticism, are constantly doing. It is the work of a trimmer, and not that of a critic.

[SEBC 95-97]