XI. OF SAMUEL THE SEER, Last of the GREAT JUDGES XII. OF SAUL THE BENJAMITE, KING OF BENJAMIN OF JEROBOAM, FIRST KING of the NORTHERN XVI. OF ELIJAH THE TISHBITE, Champion of the SUPPLEMENT TO THE HISTORY OF THE I. The death of Jeroboam II, King of Israel, and the accession of Azariah (Uzziah) in Judah. The (Compiled from the note-books of his disciples.) Booklet I. Events and Prophecies in the Reign of Appendix I, Late additions to Booklet I. Booklet III. Jeremiah's warnings to Zedekiah and Booklet VI. Prophecies of the Return of the Appendix II. Non-Jeremianic passages found in THE PRAISE OF WISDOM (Proverbs 1, 2 - ix, 18) . APPENDIX D. EASILY OBTAINABLE WORKS OF LEADING AUTHORI- MAP I. THE CIVILIZED WORLD IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM B.C. INTRODUCTION The Need for a Thorough Rearrangement of the Text of the Old Testament, and How the Necessary Apparatus for So-doing was Obtained. THE LITERATURE OF A NATION can be fully estimated only in the light of its history. Conversely, it is only from the literature of any given period that the historian learns the social and political conditions, the conflicting aims and opinions of the people, which vivify and explain the movements stated baldly in their annals, for every author is the product of his age, and consciously or unconsciously reflects it. Now, if these annals are lost, and the literature has been tampered with by editors, however well-meaning, to accord with their personal convictions; if poetry has been mistaken for prose, and much of it presented in fragments assigned to a period or author regardless of evident date or inherent probability; if overzealous copyists have worked into the text explanatory marginal notes or have otherwise marred the integrity of the original manuscripts, only a miracle could bring order out of the resultant confusion, restore the true sequence of events, and show convincingly the germs and growth of whatever noble ideals or invaluable truths the nation had evolved. Such was the condition of classic Hebrew Literature at the opening of the nineteenth century. Then, wonderfully, miracles came to pass. Two powerful organizations were then aiming to exploit the East for their own aggrandizement, the English East India Company, and the armies of France under Napoleon in Egypt. But the most astonishing and permanent gain of each resulted from the interest of an obscure employé in a casual find. The first came from India. A clerk in the offices of the East India Company found in its lumber-rooms, among its unconsidered spoils of war, a mass of well-ordered manuscript written in an unknown tongue. He brought it to the attention of Sir William Jones, recently appointed Head of the Supreme Court of Caicutta, and already famed for his linguistic attainments, especially for his profound knowledge of Persian. Sir William announced in 1785 that these MSS. were part of the Sacred Books of the ancient Hindus written in Sanskrit, hitherto unknown to Europeans, and evidently the mother-tongue from which the principal modern languages of Hindustan were derived; moreover, that its grammar and vocabulary were closely akin, not only to those of Old Persian, but also to those of Greek, Latin and the Teutonic languages; and he inferred that all the peoples who spoke those languages were originally of the same stock. Sir William died in 1794, but not before he had shown that Arabic and its congeners, though also highly inflected languages, differed radically from the above-mentioned Indo-European tongues. Following these suggestions and tracing modern languages to their several sources, Jakob Grimm, of the University of Göttingen, published in 1820 his famous "Law of Phonetic Change in Languages", a change inevitable in time. The first great triumph of the application of this law was the recovery of the Avestan language, older than any Old Persian before known, in which Zoroaster and his disciples had written the principles of their noble religion. Upon the basis of these discoveries, Franz Boppe, of Mainz, published, between 1829 and 1833, the four volumes of his "Analytical and Comparative Study of the Grammars of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the Teutonic Languages", following it up in 1837 with "A Comparison of Slavic, Gothic and German." Meanwhile, H. F. W. Gesenius, Professor of Theology in the University of Halle, had published his exhaustive "Dictionary of Hebrew and Chaldaic" and a "History of the Hebrew Tongue". Thus was built up a splendid apparatus for the thorough analysis and emendation of all the then known texts in ancient languages. Napoleon opened the way for the second astonishing discovery. All literatures show at various periods the influence of their contemporaries. English literature affords a striking example. Leaving out of account its general tendency, due to the blending of many races in the forming of the nation and to the centuries of Christian teaching by the Monastic Orders, the impulse for every new departure since Chaucer's time has come from Italy, France, Spain, France again, Germany and Norway; yet in every case the persistence of English characteristics and the philosophical trend of English thought have moulded the new influence into conformity with English ideals. So was it with Hebrew literature. As we now know, it successively absorbed elements from the literatures of Egypt, Assyria and Persia; but the sources of these elements were unsuspected by either Jews or Christians. Native and assimilated ideas were alike attributed to direct divine inspiration of the Children of Israel alone. Nor until late in the nineteenth century was any literature older than the Hebrew known. Greek legends, indeed, traced the Pythagorean philosophy to Egypt, and the earliest laws of the Greeks and their knowledge of music to Crete; but even Herodotus (450 B.C.), who closely observed the physical characteristics and present conditions of the eastern lands he visited, and gave detailed accounts of the laws, customs and religions of their peoples, said nothing of their literatures. Now Napolean was a man of insatiable curiosity, intent always upon fathoming a subject to its depths. He landed in Egypt in 1798, Bible and Herodotus in hand, and accompanied by a body of savants whose business it should be to reveal the truth about Egypt to the world. They did indeed tear away the veil which had so long enshrouded her and reveal her manifold superficial charms, even the daily life and occupations of her working-classes and the sports of her Pharaohs in past millenniums, pictured for any one to see upon her temple-walls. But they found no means of either verifying or disproving the legends concerning her rulers. There were no writings or even numbers that the savants could understand; and Napoleon left Egypt in 1802, disappointed in his archæological investigations as well as in his martial aims. But in 1799, a young lieutenant of engineers named Broussard, who knew something of Greek, had found on the Rosetta branch of the Nile a block of basalt on which were inscribed many lines of Greek in an almost perfect condition, many other lines, slightly defaced, in an unknown cursive writing, and fourteen regularly arranged lines of those birds and serpents and lions and arms and legs, &c., so liberally distributed about the figures of men and gods upon the temple-walls. He suspected that the unknown characters might be a transcription of the Greek, and made known his find to the French authorities in Alexandria; |