It is Wellhausen who taught our American "critics" to affirm that the early prophets deny that God gave Israel a law of sacrifices: or, rather, it was he who taught this lesson to Robertson Smith, from whom our neighbors learned it. It may interest our readers to see how Mr. Baxter handles Wellhausen's attempt to make [135] good this position. The latter quotes Hos. 8:11 thus: "Ephraim has built for himself many altars to sin; the altars are there for him to sin. How many soever my instructions may be, they are counted those of a stranger;" and he says:

      This text has had the unmerited misfortune of having been forced to do service as a proof that Hosea knew of copious writings similar in contents to our Pentateuch. All that can be drawn from the contrast, "instead of following my instructions" (for that is the meaning of the passage), is that the prophet had never once dreamed of the possibility of cultus being made the subject of Jehovah's directions.

      Baxter replies to this in the following passage:

      Our author's treatment of this quotation from Hosea is conspicuous at once for extreme tenuity and for audacity. The prophet says, "I may write for him the manifold injunctions of the laws;" Wellhausen translates, "How many soever my instructions may be." And having thus emasculated the words, he criticizes them thus: "This text has had the unmerited misfortune of being forced to do service as a proof that Hosea knew of copious writings similar in contents to our Pentateuch." No doubt the text proves that Hosea knew of copious legal writings; but if you suppress all reference to the writing, it is no longer the same text. Wellhausen elides the only verb, the verb to write, which the clause contains, and then boasts that there is no reference in the clause to writing! That is not a game which it requires much cleverness to play at. We are tempted to ask if it be not his own literary failings that have led him to impute such awful "redactions" to the Jewish writers? Clearly, "redaction" did not end with the exile. The only "unmerited misfortune" which we know the above text to have experienced is to have had its meaning so shamefully suppressed by its professed exegete.

      Here, also, why does our author stop his quotation so soon? Had he quoted the very next verse, he would have let his readers see that Hosea makes God speak of "the sacrifices of mine offerings"--words which clearly imply a divine regulation of sacrifice; and he would have let his readers see also that the reason why the Lord accepteth them not, even though they bring [136] his own appointed sacrifices, is because of their iniquity and their sins.

      While it is perfectly clear to every reader of the prophets that they denounced in scathing terms the folly and wickedness of bringing sacrifices to the altar while continuing in flagrant sins against God's moral law, there was, perhaps, never a more perverse wresting of Scripture than the attempt, on the part of infidels like Wellhausen to prove that they condemned sacrifice itself and denied its divine appointment. But more of this hereafter.

[SEBC 135-137]