class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[27]"/> more out of date. Nevertheless a full statement up to certain dates may be found in the works of the scholars mentioned above and others such as Hommel, Jastrow, Jensen, Budge, Zimmern, Flinders Petrie, etc.; in the proceedings and transactions of the various American, English, French, and German Exploration Societies; in the most recent commentaries and works on the History and Religion of Israel.

What is specially known in Germany as Archæology, viz., the study of manners and customs, has been brought up to date in two standard German works by Nowack and Benzinger, respectively.

We may briefly refer here to the rapid development in recent times of the science of Comparative Religion, to which amongst others, Prof. C. H. Toy, of Harvard, has rendered important services. A marked feature has been the tendency to emphasize the legends and ritual of savage tribes, and their survivals in the literature and services of more advanced religions. Attempts are made to ascertain from such data how religions in general, and any given religion in particular, have developed; and thus lay down principles by which to interpret the available information in any special case. In reference to this branch of learning Prof. Morris Jastrow of the University of Pennsylvania writes thus[9]: "J. G. Frazer's great work more particularly, The Golden Bough, marks an epoch in the study of religious rites."

V.—PROGRESS IN PHILOLOGY, ETC.

Many important additions have recently been made to the student's apparatus for the linguistic and textual study of the Old Testament. Numerous grammars, reading-books and lexicons of Assyrian and other Semitic languages have been published. In Hebrew itself a standard grammar has been provided by the translation of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth editions Gesenius revised by Kautzsch. Dr. Solomon Mandelkern has published a new Concordance to the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament. A new standard edition of Gesenius Lexicon by Profs. Brown, Driver, and Briggs is being issued by the Clarendon Press.

Biblical Hebrew has also had light thrown on it by the discovery of the original Hebrew text of large portions of Ecclesiasticus. It was indeed maintained by Margoliouth that the documents discovered were a retranslation into Hebrew from Greek and other versions; but, after much controversy, the verdict of scholarship is in favor of the originality of the Hebrew text in these documents.

As regards the Septuagint: Prof. Swete has edited a small edition in three volumes with the readings of the most important manuscripts, together with a fourth volume containing the Introduction. A large edition which will give the same text[10] "with an ample apparatus criticus intended to provide material for a critical determination of the text," is being prepared. Messrs. Hatch and Redpath have compiled a new Concordance to the Septuagint; but a modern grammar and lexicon are still "felt wants."

VI.—RECENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.

The progress of Biblical knowledge has necessitated the publication of new series of commentaries. In English there is the International Critical Commentary;[11] and some of the later volumes of the Cambridge Bible, e. g., Prof. Driver's Daniel, are rather first-class commentaries for scholars than elementary works for general readers. In German there are Prof. Nowack's Handkommentar zum Alten Testament;[12] Prof. Karl Marti's Kurzer Handkommentar zum Alten Testament,[13] and the Old Testament sections of Profs. Strack and Zöckler's Kurzgefaszter Kommentar.[14] Later on reference will be made to some volumes of these series.

In addition to the above works, there are others specially intended to show how criticism has divided up the books of the Old Testament into the various older documents from which they are believed to have been compiled. This analysis is shown in the German translation edited by Kautzsch by means of initials in the margin; Dr. Haupt's Sacred Books of the Old Testament (Hebrew text) and Polychrome Bible,[15] by means of colored backgrounds on which the text is printed; and in the Oxford Society of Historical Theology; The Hexateuch[16] by means of parallel columns. The introduction to the last named work is the most complete popular statement of the grounds for the modern theory of the Pentateuch. Technical details and a formal contrast of the arguments for and against this theory may be found in the discussion between Profs. W. R. Harper and W. H. Green in Hebraica, 1888-90. Numerous Introductions to the Old Testament have expounded the current critical views, notably for English and American readers the successive editions of Prof. Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament.

Naturally these various works represent not merely the position of criticism and exegesis twenty years ago, but also the progress made since then. As regards the Historical Books critics have chiefly been engaged in the application of modern methods and principles which are now very generally accepted. Development has taken place in three directions. First, much labor has been given to the more exact distribution of the contents of the Hexateuch between the main documents used by its compilers, e. g., Prof. B. W. Bacon's analysis of Exodus. Secondly, attempts have been made to divide up these main documents into still older documents from which they have been compiled. Steuernagel, for instance, regards Deuteronomy as a mosaic of paragraphs and clauses from earlier codes, and finds a criterion between different sources in the use, respectively, of the singular or the plural form of address. So far his views have not met with much acceptance.[17] Thirdly, the theory has been very widely advocated that the historical books of Judges-I Kings are partly compiled from the documents used by the editors of the Hexateuch.