not, nor inclined their ear, but walked every one in the stubbornness of their evil heart: therefore I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did them not.

This seems like an account of Jeremiah's preaching Deuteronomy in Jerusalem and the cities of Judah. The reference to the covenant commanded the fathers in the day that they were brought up out of the land of Egypt and to the curse upon him that hears not the words of this covenant seems to refer to Deuteronomy.

If the passage be rightly interpreted and authentic, Jeremiah entered into the reform of Josiah and became a preacher of Deuteronomy. To some, the thought that the prophet Jeremiah, with his insight into the inner conditions of true reform, took such part in this religious reform by royal authority is absurd. On the other hand it seems that Jeremiah might be glad to see the temptations connected with the local high places diminished by their destruction, and there is assuredly much in the book of Deuteronomy in its appeal to the love of God and remembrance of his past mercies that is in closest accord with the early preaching of Jeremiah.1 In the large amount of discourse and biographical material from Jeremiah there is almost no other clear reference to the Deuteronomic reform. Either the prophet's activity was rather small in this connection, or, when he caused his memoirs to be written, after Josiah's death, he did not care to retain much that concerned this period of his life. It is certain that in the later years of his ministry he fully understood the temporary character of a reform based on exhortation to obey the law.

We know almost nothing of Jeremiah's activity during the years from 621 till Josiah's death in 609. They were years of peace and prosperity such as Judah had not known for more than a century, and they were years in which the nation, at least outwardly, was observing a law which combined much that was best in the priestly and prophetic elements of its religion.

At the close of this period, the movements of the great nations once more began to affect the little Judean state. The Medes from the northeast of Assyria, and the Chaldeans on the south,

1 Even though the narrative of 11 1-8 may not have been written at Jeremiah's dictation, it may still contain an authentic tradition.

were renewing their attacks on Nineveh, whose territory had been so ravaged by the Scythians a few years before. This in itself could bring only satisfaction to the Hebrews; the foe that had so mercilessly oppressed is now about to receive the wages of cruel ambition.

The brief prophecy of Nahum shows how one prophet, who believed in the righteous vengeance of Jehovah, welcomed the prospect of Nineveh's fall. "I will break his yoke from off thee and will burst thy bonds in sunder," he cries. With a riot of lurid color, he paints the siege and downfall of Nineveh, as though already accomplished, that den of the lions and feeding place of the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, the lion's whelp, and none made them afraid. Within the city,

2

In the streets, the chariots are mad;
They rush to and fro in the squares.
Their appearance is as torches;

As lightnings they dart.

The besiegers are without the city;

They haste to its wall,

The mantlet is prepared.

The river gates are opened,

The palace crumbles.3

The prophet hears, with inner ear, the actual din of the siege and reports with words that echo it to-day.

Sound of whip and sound of rattling wheel,

And galloping horse, and bounding chariot.
Horseman mounting,

And flame of sword, and flash of spear.
Many slain; a mass of corpses;

And no end to the carcasses.

They stumble on the carcasses.*

Ironically Nahum calls upon the Assyrians to prepare for the siege :

Draw thee water for the siege; strengthen thy fortresses; go into the clay, and tread the mortar; make strong the brickkiln."

Then he triumphantly promises them :

1 Nahum 1 13.

22 11.

324,5

432-33.

53 14.

There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off; it shall devour thee like the canker-worm: make thyself many as the cankerworm; make thyself many as the locust."

Nahum was unexcelled as a word painter. It is possible to make this sweeping statement, though he has left us only a tract of five pages.

The first chapter has no definite references to Nineveh; it is a general song of praise to the avenging Jehovah. It shows some signs of having been designed originally as an alphabetic poem, the successive lines beginning with the letters of the alphabet in order. Though the text seems to be in much confusion, it is clear that it was an effective psalm. It probably began,

A requiting God is Jehovah;

He avengeth and is lord of wrath.
In wind and storm is his way,
And clouds are the dust of his feet.
He rebuketh the sea, and dries it,
And all rivers he makes run dry.

Whether this psalm was written by Nahum as a prelude to his more specific prophecy or was prefixed by some other hand as an appropriate introduction to his brief discourse, we cannot say. In any case, Nahum adds nothing to the body of prophetic truth and reaches only the lower levels of the common thought. With the sin and real needs of his people he does not deal. The approaching downfall of the cruel enemy, that had obliterated the northern nation and held the southern long in vassalage, as the act of a requiting God fills his vision.

In Egypt, the Pharaoh was anticipating the partition of the Assyrian domain, and so he marched across Palestine, on his way to the Euphrates to annex as much as he might be able. Josiah, who had assumed the rule over the old northern territory since the Assyrian domination had been relaxed, disputed the passage of the Egyptians and encountered them near where the great battle had been fought in Deborah's day. The Pharaoh was victorious, and Judah's noble king met his death.

13 15 2 Translation based on the revised text of Kittel, Bib. Heb.

CHAPTER XIV

NARRATIVE WRITING FROM THE TIME OF AMOS TO THE PUBLICATION OF DEUTERONOMY

(750 to 621 B.C.)

LITERARY analysis has undertaken to show that many parts of the great Judean History of Antiquity, discussed in Chapter V as the product of the ninth century B.C., could not have been written quite as early as that time. There is nothing inherently improbable in the view that this great narrative was revised and enlarged from time to time; indeed, our knowledge of the history of Old Testament literature and of other ancient literatures makes it highly probable that such was the case. Ancient historical narratives grew, not only by being brought down to date and extended backward, but by the insertion of kindred material as it came to light.

The purpose of the present volume does not make it desirable to follow the delicate and often uncertain analysis of the Judean history into the earlier and later strands. If called upon to name a date for the actual completion of the Judean history, it will be in the middle of the seventh century rather than in the ninth, yet the later work is merely supplementary, and it is better to think of the Judean history as the literary product of the ninth century, when it took shape and character.

Much the same may be said concerning the Ephraimite History of Antiquity. It had taken definite form before the middle of the eighth century and yet it too was largely supplemented during the next one hundred years. How this could have gone on after the downfall of Northern Israel it is difficult to see, except as we recall the probability that during the twenty years of anarchy preceding 721 B.C., many faithful worshippers of Jehovah took refuge in Judah.1 Literary analysis certainly seems to find satisfactory evi1 See Chapter IX, p. 138.

dence that the great Ephraimite history continued to grow for threequarters of a century after the fall of Samaria and the partial repopulation of its territory with heathen peoples. This growth was probably the work of those who took refuge in Judah before or after the fall of Samaria.

The revision of the two great histories was checked only by the compilation of the two into one. This seems to have occurred about the third quarter of the seventh century B.C., in the latter part of the reign of Manasseh or early part of that of Josiah, not long before the publication of Deuteronomy. Apparently the writer of Deuteronomy 5-11 had before him both this composite work and the separate Ephraimite history. The compilation generally made the Judean history the framework and inwove the Ephraimite material with this. Only the Judean history was available for the pre-Abramic period. With the promise of the land of Canaan to Abram the first material from the Ephraimite history appears. Here the method of the compiler was close interweaving of the two accounts. From the Judean history followed the story of the birth of Ishmael and flight of Hagar, the visit of the angels, promise of Isaac, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the incestuous origin of Moab and Ammon. Then, from the Ephraimite history was taken the story of Abraham's sojourn in Gerar with the taking of Sarah by king Abimelech the story so like that of the Egyptian sojourn recorded in the Judean history (Genesis 12 10-20). After this follows the Ephraimite account of the driving out of Hagar and Ishmael, evidently a variant account of that already taken from the Judean history. From the Ephraimite document comes also the principal narrative of the Beer-sheba covenant with Abimelech, although some elements from the Judean history appear here interwoven. The testing of Abraham in the matter of offering Isaac was next inserted from the Ephraimite story, and thus the compilation went forward, sometimes with the two accounts of some events closely interwoven; sometimes with an incident or series of incidents taken out of one history, with no interwoven material from the other; sometimes with a narrative which is evidently a doublet of one taken from the other history, but with a different setting and 1 See Cornill, Introduction Old Testament, p. 140.