reign, or where they merely sharpen our lower human longing for retribution or revenge.

In circumstances such as these, when the Psalter, in its preponderant greatness and in its occasional weakness, is often in our memories, and when its words are often on our lips, a short survey of some results of recent scholarship in regard to it may not be out of place, or lacking in actuality and interest. Like every other great book, the Psalter is not injured by learning and study. On the contrary, to study it increases its fascination, and opens the eyes to many an additional beauty. It does not, or at least it need not, make us care for the Psalms any the less, that we seek to find out their place in the religious history of Israel or their relation to the religious literature of other ancient races and peoples.

The estimates of scholars concerning the dates of the Psalms have curiously varied. That no reliance can be placed upon the superscriptions is now generally admitted. But this mistrust takes us a very little way. The critical movement of the 19th century began by allowing that at least a few of the seventy-three or seventy-four psalms which the Hebrew text ascribes to David were really composed by him. That, for instance, was the position of Ewald. Gradually the tendency increased to allot all the Psalms to the exilic and post-exilic periods. In England this view was taught by Cheyne and Robertson Smith; and in Germany it became, for a time, with the dominance of Wellhausen and his school, extremely prevalent. Few psalms were even allowed to have been composed during the 'Babylonian captivity'; almost all were held to be the product of the Second Temple. Wellhausen declared that the real question was, not how many psalms were written after the exile, but whether any psalms were written before it. A familiar description of the Psalter as the song-book of the Second Temple became interpreted to mean that they were composed for that Temple, or during its existence, which is obviously a very different thing. That a few psalms were of Maccabean origin had long been accepted by various scholars; and, many years before Wellhausen, a theory was learnedly maintained by Olshausen that not merely a few, but a very considerable number of the

Psalms must be ascribed to the Maccabean era. It is this theory which was pushed to its furthest consequences by Duhm. According to him, hardly a single psalm is anterior to Alexander the Great, while a very large number date from the Maccabean revolt and from the Hasmonean princes and kings. Thus the upper limit for the Psalter would be about 300 B.C., the lower limit about 80 B.C.! We have, indeed, moved far from the times of David.

Duhm's commentary first appeared in 1899. In the works of the best critics and commentators which have been published in the present century, the tide has slowly turned. Baethgen, Gunkel, Staerk and Kittel, four of the best and most recent German commentators, all incline to more conservative and moderate opinions. They even go so far as to concede, with the late Prof. Driver, the possibility that a very few of the psalms may even go back to David himself.* Pre-exilic psalms are now freely admitted. Kittel would, perhaps, claim fewer psalms for the pre-exilic period than the distinguished American scholar, Briggs; but in Kittel's commentary (1912), no less than in that of Briggs (1906), the dogmatic views of Wellhausen are entirely rejected.

With this change as regards the date has gone another change touching the important question of the meaning in the Psalter of the personal pronoun 'I.' It was not, indeed, a new opinion of the critics of the last century that the 'I' was not an individual, but a personification, signifying either the community as a whole, or the true Israel, the party to which the writer belonged. Yet, though an old opinion, it was only in the last century that it both became widely prevalent and was defended by elaborate and learned arguments. Wellhausen and his school adopted it with conviction; and an essay by Smend, published in 1888, seemed to many to settle the question. In its extremest form, the result of the theory was undoubtedly to depreciate, at least to some extent, the religious value of the Psalter. Cheyne and Robertson Smith adopted it, though with many qualifications and reserves. It is by no means out of date even now, and,

* Possible Davidic psalms, according to Kittel, are xxiv, 7-10; xxix, iii, iv, xviii, 8–16; xix, 1-6; viii, and, perhaps, 'some others.'

within carefully drawn limits, it will probably be always admitted to contain its own contribution to truth. The last word, which will also be the word of moderation and reconcilement, may very likely-in this as in many other matters-have been forestalled by Prof. Driver, though it will, perhaps, be presented in a somewhat less tentative and hesitating form.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a violent reaction against the theory of personification has set in. Though an excellent scholar like Baethgen still adheres to it, authorities like Gunkel, Staerk and Kittel reject it more or less entirely. They call it a last remnant of the old, vicious, allegorising tendency. And, though Duhm differs from these three writers as to dates, he is entirely at one with them here; he asserts with characteristic vehemence the view that the 'I' is always an individual. As Smend, in 1888, wrote his much-quoted essay, 'ueber das Ich der Psalmen,' to show that the 'I' is always a personification of the nation, the community, or the pious in Israel, so Balla, in 1912, wrote a long dissertation with the same title to prove that the 'I' is always an individual.

Yet with each swing of the pendulum our knowledge has been enriched. The labours of Smend and others of the same school will not have been in vain. If we allow that the 'I' of the Psalter often means the individual, we shall also have to concede that occasionally it does not, and that in many psalms the writer speaks in a representative character, saying what is not only true of himself and of his own feelings, desires and aspirations, but what is intended to apply also to his party, his fellow-believers or fellow-sufferers, and even to his community as a whole.

*

So, too, as regards dates. We shall hardly accept the exaggerations of Duhm, yet we shall probably refuse to acquiesce in Davidic authorship for any existing psalm of our present collection; and, while we shall admit that some psalms are pretty certainly pre-exilic, we shall still assign the greater portion of the Psalter to the Persian and the Greek periods. In other words,

* Cf. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 390, 391 (9th Ed.).

scholarship will, we think, be somewhat less generous with pre-exilic psalms than Driver, Briggs and Kirkpatrick, but a good deal less dogmatic and assured about putting all psalms after Nebuchadnezzar than Cheyne, Wellhausen and Duhm.

So far as the period before the exile is concerned, it must be admitted that the researches and arguments of a scholar like Gunkel have put the question upon a new and better footing. The Psalms are a form of Hebrew poetry; and poetry among the Hebrews is as old as the nation itself. Again, there are in the Old Testament psalms, or psalmic fragments, outside the Psalter; and some of these are unquestionably pre-exilic. There is evidence that psalms of various kinds must have formed a portion of public and private worship, and must have been integrally connected with cult and religion, long before the destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C. There are passages in the Psalms themselves (such as some of the allusions to 'kings') which have never been satisfactorily explained upon a post-exilic or Maccabean hypothesis. Lastly, the study of comparative religion has an important word to say. From Egypt, and still more from Babylonia, we have now revealed to us a number of songs and psalms (praises, petitions, penitential hymns, etc.), many of which were written long before David, and which present astonishing parallels, in language and in thought, to the psalms of our existing Psalter. (Babylonian psalms, by the way, use the first person singular, and the 'I' is, apparently, always an individual.) If, then, pious Egyptians and Babylonians of comparatively very early times could write thus, why not Hebrews in the ninth or eighth century B.C.?

To such arguments it must be replied that we have not to deal with possible psalms, but with actual psalms. Doubtless there were Hebrew hymns and songs of all kinds written long before the sixth century B.C. But the question still remains whether any of the hundred and fifty Psalms which form our existing Psalter were composed before that era. The fact that David may have written hymns does not prove that any of David's hymns have been preserved. We must determine that point mainly by our estimate of the religious ideas of the psalms in our actual Psalter, and by judging how far such ideas

are conceivable on David's lips and in David's age; or how far they are the product of, and the response to, teaching which was given many years after his death. It does not follow, because a certain religious idea, in its Babylonian dress and form, can be found in (say) the eleventh century B.C., that it therefore existed and was expressed in an Israelitish dress and form at the same date or even two centuries later.

Moreover, another important point has to be considered-the editing of the Psalter. We know that the views of the ancient Jews about editing differed radically from our own. If we discover an ancient manuscript— document or poem-our object is to publish it exactly as it was originally written. The ancient Jewish editors, generally speaking, thought very differently. Their great object was to 'publish' something which was edifying and acceptable to their own age. Again, the less sacred the document, the less venerable the author, the more justifiable it was to change his wording. When the parts of the Pentateuch had been joined together to form the present Book, when all its laws were regarded as the veritable words of Moses, dictated to him by God, its text was scrupulously preserved without alteration or addition. But how different was the fate of some even of the prophetical books! What a conglomerate, for instance, are the sixty-six chapters of Isaiah! How difficult and delicate a matter it is to disentangle the editors' words from the words of the many original writers whose combined and often mangled utterances now form the substance of the books we know!

The story of the Psalter's gradual evolution is complicated and disputed; it cannot be discussed here. But we may suspect that the various compilers and editors, through whose busy hands our hundred and fifty Psalms have passed, left their mark upon many of them. Prof. Briggs is, perhaps, more sure than he ought to be (I speak with hesitation, for the labour and the time that he has given to the Psalter are enormous) as to the number and character of the various glosses which the Psalms contain. That there are many of these glosses and adaptations is, however, unquestionable, though we may not always be able to detect them with accuracy, and we may sometimes imagine them where they do not