Full Text for Archeology - the Nemesis, part 1 (Text)

Qtnurnr~tu m4t~1ngiral jinut~ly Continuing LEHRE UND WEHRE MAGAZIN FUER E v.-LuTH. H OMILETIK T HEOLOGICAL Q UARTERLY-THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY Vol. I V February, 1933 No.2 CONTENTS P age GRAEBNER, THEO. : The Modernistic Christ 81 KROEGER. A. C.: Die Stellung der Frau in der christlichen Kirche . . ... . , 85 MAIER. W. A.: Archeology - the Nemesis ... 95 SIHLER, E. G.: Studies in Eusebius 102 KRETZMANN. P. E.: Luther und Zuelsdorf . 112 KRETZMANN. P. E.: Our Formula for Infant Baptism . 120 LAETSCH. THEO.: Divorce and Malicious De~rtion . ..... 127 KRETZMANN. P. E.: Die Hauptschriften Luthers in chro- nologischer Reihenfolge . ... . . 133 Dispositionen ueber die altkirchliche Epistelreihe . 135 Miscellanea .. ... .. .. . .... . . . .. .. . 141 Theological Observer. - Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches 145 Book Review. - Literatur.. .... ... 153 Ein Predlger mUM nleht allein Vlri p.127), the number of scholars who doubted the validity of the transliterations and translations ,vas not inconsiderable. Notable in the lattcr group were critical minds that in spite of their characteristic inclination to explore new avenues of depal'ture l'emained anchored on their old critical basis. The great N oeldeke, prince of Semitists, as late as 1871 declared that the results of As- syriology both in matters of linguistics and history wel'e characterized by "a highly suspicious air." The school of Wellhausen, with its dominant emphasis upon the history of religion, paid scant attention to archeology and dallied with it as a toy of sophisticated Semitism. A perusal of Julius Wellhausen's History of israel shows the pro- nounced indifference with which he regarded Assyriology. This neglect has proved fatal to many of the theories which have been set up as canons of criticism. Archeology has convincingly demonstrated its capacities as a nemesis of higher criticism. Scores of hasty judgments and other scores of intricate theories, spun out of critical fancy, now appear as entirely fallacious in the light of archeological research. And while it is a thankless task to enumerate ".) :'Diefe I5timme aus bem ~teiie unfexer fiibametifanifcl)en ~riii:Jer otingen hlit um f.o lieber, ba bet SUttifeI 3eigt, bat aud) bDtt im 0eift bet I5d)tift gclc9tt unb gearbeitet hlitb,ellen aud) in be3ug aUf Mefe fltaftifcl)e j}'tage. :'Die fitcl)licl)e SUtbelt cl)tiftricl)er j}'rauen fome gan3 nnb gat unter SUufficl)t unb £eltung bet Orfs= gemeinbe gefcl)el)en. :'Dies fclJ1ie&t feineshlegS aus, bat eine grii&exe fitcl)Iicl)e ~iit= .perfcl)aft burd) cine f~ftcmatifcl)e Otbnung bet SUrbcit fo(cl)er j}'taucnbmine ein: grii&ms .Bic! etteicl)en fann. ~. &. ~. 96 Archeology - the Nemesis. negatives and to collate errors, the cumulative force of the archeolog- ical rejection of higher critical extravagances must react very de- cidedly in emphasizing the truth of the Scriptures. Since higher criticism has particularly three methods of attack by which the authenticity and the veracity of the Biblical books are assailed: the arguments based on language, situation, and theology, I have selected the following typical instances in which higher critical dicta have been nullified or reversed by subsequent archeological data in the fields of philological research, historical investigation, and the comparative study of Semitic religions. ~When the demonstration is completed, I leave to the individual reader the personal verdict on the validity of the British critic's oft-endorsed statement: "The attempt to refute the conclusions of criticism by means of archeology has signally failed. . .. The archeological discoveries of recent years ... have revealed nothing which is in conflict with the generally accepted conclusions of critics." (Driver, Inh'oduction to the Literattcre of the Old Testament, p. XVIII.) For, while there are few "generally accepted conclusions of critics," it will be shown that one theory after another, defulitely accepted and endorsed by higher critical authorities, has receded before the modern advance of scientific Old Testa- I. Refuted Arguments from Literary Criticism. One of the fundamental premises of higher criticism IS the Sprachbeweis, the arguments from language, literary analysis, stylistic ]1eculiarities, syntactical developments, and the historical and etymo- logical background of individual words. There is a certain validity to the study of language development. In some very obtrusive respects the postexilic Hebrew differs from the Hebrew of Israel's golden age in the early monarchies. There are definite syntactical phenomena which are characteristic of the late language and, just as definitely, certain forms and expressions that are Pentateuchal. We can single out a number of terms that are restricted to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Ohronicles and correspondingly call attention to a series of word forms that are limited to a much earlier age. But higher criticism has drifted widely from these natural and inevitable marks of literary history. It is clai.med, on the strength of a long and definite list of words, that these individual terms could not be used by individual authors at the time which the Scrip- tural account presupposes. There are torms and constructions in Davidic psalms, it is claimed, which must be postexilic and are therefore prima-facie evidence that the poetry in question cannot be Davidic. There are marks of foreign influences, critics say, in l:eputedly early books which show that these writings must date from the later years of foreign contacts. There are documents in Archeology - the X emesis. 97 the Old Testament which by their very style repudiate the Scrip- tural claim for their originality. Now, some of these higher critical strictures have been repudiated by an examination of word occurrences in the Old Testament itself. The shortened form of the nota relationis which occurs in some of the later books cannot be a sign of later Hebrew because it is similarly found in a document which many critics claim to be the oldest original part of the Old Testament, the Song of Deborah, Judg.5. Similarly the integrity of Isaiah's prophecies is emphasized by the recurrence of demonstrably Isaianic terms in both the "First" Isaiah (1-39) and in the hypothetical "Second" Isaiah (40-66). Until the beginning of the last generation practically all the arguments against literary criticism were internal and idiomatic, drawn from Scriptural usage and occurrence. But with the rise of the archeolog- ical sciences external standards of judgment were afforded, and it is here that the very stones have cried out against some of the most ingenious and intricate theories which have been raised up on the basis of language to challenge the Scriptural veracity. Among the noteworthy reversals of higher critical opinion we n1a.y note the :fol- lowing typical instances, A. Critical Arguments Based on Word History. It is the claim of ~Iax ~Iueller (Encyclopedia Biblica, col. 3,687) in rE'gard to the title "I'h'UJ!. .... l," that "the Hebrews can have received it only after 1000 B. C." Hc asserts that the term was unknown in Egypt, in the way in which the E'arly Biblical writers know it, until that time. If this statement were true, it would of course wipe out with one stroke the entire Mosaic authorship of those Pentateuchal portions which employ the teTm. As a matter of fact, howe-ver, Mueller's contention was set aside by the archeological light on this title, its meaning, and its abundant use long before 1000 B. C. The occurrence of the tel'm in The Tale of Two B1'oihers shows its com- mon employment several centuries before the time permitted by critical analysis. It is now definitely recognized Oll all sides that the term "Pharaoh" is the Hebraized "Per'o" (Herodotus: "Pheron"). As early as the fourth dynasty, centuries before JI.£oses' time, several different hieroglyphics preceded the name of the Egyptian king as distinctive titles. Among these there was a drawing of a structure "representing the fagade of a building, perhaps a palace." Now Alexandre Moret (The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, p. 130) sum- marizes the meaning of this symbol: "An old term for the royal palace establishment and estate, Per'o, 'the great house,' and this gradually became the personal desig'nation. In the Memphite period this came to designate the king himself." Similar objections have been raised against the admissibility of :!'-2~~'s_ EgYlilian ~a~ Zaphn~-p~eah, as well as against the 7 98 Archeology - the Nemesis. name of his Egyptian wife, Asenath. It was argued that these names were unknown in Joseph's time. For instance, Kraal, thirty-five years ago, declared that names of this formation were not found until the XXII dynasty, and he used this as "an important aid for the dating of the Elohist source." Again, Oheync (Encyclopedia Biblica, col.5,379) originally held that this was an adaptation of Pianhi, a famous Egyptian ruler of the XXV dynasty, suggesting this as an indication of the late date of the Joseph narrative. Later, moved by his J erahmeel theory, he held Zaphnath as a corruption or alteration of Zarephath, making Joseph's entire name Zarephath-J erachmeel! Again archeological evidence has removed these objections. The best identification of Joseph's name is one suggested by Lieblcin, in whose Dictionnaire de Noms, p.55, the name is explained as "the one who supplies us the nourishment of life," on a splendid linguistic equation of the Greek and Hebrew, in concordance with .Joseph's situation and particularly in the closest harmony with the historical requirements. In the XIV dynasty three kings are directly men- tioned with the compound titles featuring the principal element in Joseph's name. In regard to Asenath and the critical attack upon the history of this word (d. Hastings, Bible Dictionary, col. 2, '(75), the iden- tification of Kyle (]J![ oses and the JJiOntLments, p. 38) shows that archeology is again decisive in removing the unwarranted contention that this name betrays late authorship. It has now been definitely established that the root snt is a woman's name, which appears from the early days of the XI dynasty on. In Hebrew, as frequently in the case of proper foreign names, the root is prefixed with a prosthetic aleph. To pass by other similar instances in which higher criticism has created a false historical background for individual Hebrew terms, we may take a concluding example from the last pages of Israel's history. Driver (op. cit., p.545) attacks the authenticity of the edict of Qy~~n Ezr.'l:_~' because of the Jewish phraseology and Jewish point of "View. The particular instance of this alleged ,Jewish pluaseology which he urged is the employment of the term "king of Persia." This, he claims, is non-historical, asserting: "Persia was absorbed and lost in the wider empire of which, by Cyrus's conquest of Babylon, the Achaemenidae became the heirs; hence after that elate they are in royal inscriptions called regularly not 'king of Persia' but (most commonly) 'the king.' . .. In the extant royal inscription, 'king of Persia' occurs only once, and that in combina- tion with other titles." In thus repeating the argument originally adYanced by Ewald and lending to it the appearance of archeological support, wllich Ewald could not offer, Driver again relieved himself of one of those premature critical contentions which have been proved Archeology - the Nemesis. 99 as false on the basis of subsequent archeological research. For in addition to the notable work of the late Robert Dick Wilson (Prince- ton Theological Review, 1905-6), in which the wide-spread occur- rence of the title "king of Persia" was accurately demonstrated, we now have complete evidence that this title was used in the royal inscriptions by these Achaemenidae. With the discovery of additional inscriptions since the time of Driver's indictment we have the situa- tion summarized in the contemporaneous ReaZenzyklopaedie fuer Keilschriftforsch~mg (I, 335): Oyrus conquered Babylon in 539. He took into account the kingdom of Babylon and called himself "king of Babylon and of the lands." Once, within a text, he is designated in an exceptional way as "king of Persia" (Parstc). (Yale Oriental Society, VII, Plate 8.) His successors, Oambyses and Darius I, re- tained this designation (i. e., "king of Persia"). Under this light, what becomes of the claim of Driver that the Achaemenidae after 539 are regularly not called "king of Persia" when archeological investigation has now shown us that this is the title which the suc- cessors of Cyrus regularly took? What verdict is to be pronounced upon his rejection of the pdiet of C:yrm .,. n we . _ .: that Cy,"us him· self uses the very name which Driver finds so objectionable in the Hebrew text? It must be apparent that the nemesis of archeology has once more pursued and overtaken the extravagant fictions of the Spmchbeweis. B. Critical Argument Based on Style. But Driver, as quoted above, finds not only the phrase "king of Persia" contrary to contemporary usage, he also brands the style of the edict of Oyrus as expressive of "a Jewish point of view." It is significant that Eduard Meyer took issue with this position in 1896, in his Die Entstrhung des JudenitL1ns. He asserted: "An unbiased historical investigAtion has led many to the conviction that the docu- ments of the Persian period must exactly resemble the traditional documents of the Book of Ezra." And then he uttered a prophecy which was destined to be fulfilled in a most remarkable manner: "If in the future a larger numbel· of Persian government edicts come to light, these objections will probably vanish entirely." Archeological investigation made this supposition of Eduard Meyer a startling reality. In the ruins of the frontier fortress at Elephantine in Egypt, papyri were recovered in 1904 among which, in addition to private papers, there were several official decrees of the Persian government and a number of official reports on the Jewish community at Elephantine. Here at last was an opportunity for the comparison of the official documents preserved in the Scripture and those originating directly in the Persian governmental circles. Meyer, definitely and sometimes radically critical, sums up the result of this comparison and says triumphantly: "These documents, resurrected 100 Archeology - the Nemesis. from the ruins, agree in style and vocabulary with the documents in the Book of Ezra in such detail that no doubt may be entertained any longer in regard to the authenticity of the latter." (Del' Papyrusfund von Elephantine, p.4.) Similarly another stylistic argument was advanced against the sunp"QI'"intimw ro-F the psalms. It was held that they could not be an ~';thentic and integraf part of the original record of the psalms, added by the author himself. Thomas Ohalmers ::Jiul'l'ay, in his Lectures on the Origin and GTowth of the Psalms, p. 102, says that the first reason why these titles are regarded by all scholars whose opinions carry weight as of editorial origin is that "it is contrary to all we know of Shemitic style for the author to add notes or superscriptions such as these to his poems or works." That objection might have had some appeal to skeptical minds in 1880, when Murray published his book; but in the half century that has intervened since then hundreds of Babylonian psalms have been uncovered, literary productions that were written centuries before David's time. They afford a very def- inite means of checking Murray's statement. And once again 2l'cheology l'cp'ldiates higher criticism. rnL~._"O_ L:-' --!-» Hnd Sume- rian psalms hfrve superscriptions exactly parallel in principle to those of the Hebrew psalms and containing some of the definite annotations (e. g., in regard to musical instruments, purpose, melody, etc.) found in the titles to the various Scriptural psalms. Thus, while higher criticism definitely insisted that the Psalter titles were sui geneTis and later additions. it is now found that they are part of the literary conventions in at least large portions of the Semitic world. C. Critical Arguments Based on Aramaisms. One of the commonest objections of literary criticism against the authenticity of many books of the Bible is the alleged presence of :tUamais!Qs, words that were taken over into the Hebrew from the cognate Aramaic. These were regal'Cled as definite marks of late authorship. It is commonly held that these Aramaisms crept in at a time when the Aramaic influence was strongest, i. e., in the exilic and postexilic periods, when the Hebrew was gradually crowded out by the ascendency of the northern speech. Oonsequently the claim is made that, whenever an Old Testament book contains these Aramaisms, it betrays its late, postexilic, origin. This use of Ara- maisms as age markers has been a standard part of the stock in trade' of modern criticism. It pervades commentaries like those of Briggs- and Gunkel; it is repeatedly employed by Driver and has been developed into book form, for example, by Kautzsch, Die Aramaismerl! irn Allen Testament. Until the horizon of ancient linguistics was widened by the scientific study of comparative languages which archeological research made possible, the only explanation to which conservative interpreters; Archeology - the Nemesis. 101 could take recourse was to show first that ATamaic is a very ancient language, its early occurrence being endorsed by the Aramaic of Laban in Gen. 31, 47. This, it was correctly inferred, must demon- stTate conclusively that Aramaic cannot be employed as an age marker since, with this evidencc of early occurrence, Aramaisms could have been adopted by the Hebrcws from the patriarchal times. But when the mounds of Babylonia and Assyria were uncovered and thousands of tablets in the related cuneiform were brought to light, it became possible to use these and other associated discoveries for a systematic and scientific comparison of the various Semitic languages. This collation showed that Old Testament words which were regarded as ATamaisms (chiefly because they weTe hapaxle- gomena in HebTew, while they occurred more frequently in Aramaic) were in reality often paTt of the common Semitic vocabulary, words which doubtless would have found repeated expTession in the HebTew had an extant liteTature in that language not been restricted to the relatively small portions preserved for us in the Old Testament Scrip- tures. By exhaustive comparisons of the Semitic languages and difllActf<, \V" - --- -,- --- ~,- -, -ccording to the la'.'.'3 of COCl30Cl!lllhl changes that exist among all Semitic nations not more than five or six roots can definitely be saiel to have been bonowed from the Ara- maic by the Hebrew. And such borrowing, the natural and inevitable procedure among neighboring nations (especially among those with such close racial and linguistic relations as existed between the Hebrews and the Arameans), can by no cogent reasons be made evi- dence of exilic authorship. On the contTary, Hermann Gunkel, who had previously made liberal use of the argument from alleged Ara- maisms, now warns: "The task of distinguishing Aramaic words which are to be found in the most ancient texts from those which were not introduced until later times is a problem for the future. In the mean time it is only with the greatest reservation that we should draw the conclusion of a late origin from Aramaisms." (Old Testa- ment Essays, 1927: "The Poetry of the Psalms," p. 119.) The discovery of Oappadocian cuneiform tablets dating from before 2000 B. O. show distinct Aramaizing tendencies and give evidence of the early existence of the ATamaic and its wide contacts. Bauer and Leander have thrown a bombshell into the critical camp by asserting that the oldest Hebrew showed Aramaic TootS. - An this again dem- onstrates that the higher critical dating of the Psalms and of other sections of the Scriptures which are assigned to a postexilic age be- cause of alleged Aramaisms must be sunendered. D. Critical Arguments Based on Word Forms. This attack of higher criticism is highly technical. It seizes, for example, certain words of particular form or ending and asserts that these peculiarities betray a literary age which contradicts the Biblical 102 Studies in Eusebius. authorship. In the case of Ecclesiastes, for example, the abstract ending uth is one of the main philological arguments against the Solomonic authorship, the critical contention alleging that this ending is late. But since these claims have been advanced, new archeological discoveries have enlarged the comparative Semitic vocabulary, and it has become evident that these abstract endings, branded as signs of late authorship, occur in the Assyrian or Baby- lonian of the Oode of Hammurabi and the Tel-el-Amarna letters, in the historical and omen inscriptions of Assyria, and in other records from the time of 2000 B. O. Even more thoroughly has tho similar theory involving nouns ending in on and an been scouted by the advances of Semitic lin- guistics. For the Babylonian, Assyrian, Arabic, and Aramaic can now be shown to have contained many words with these terminations. As the field of literary attacks on the Hebrew of the Old Testa- mcnt is surveyed from these various angles, one gains the conviction that in the coming years, as the conquest of Semitic philology in- creases, other assa,ults 0:£ the Spr(!;chbeweis will be destined to similar frustration and that indecd the othel' contentions from comparative history and comparative rcligion, on which the subsequent article will dwell, are doomed to the same end. W. A. MAIER. (To be conoluded.) Studies in ~usebius .... ~. (Ooncluded.) Melito, bishop of Sardis, in a lett or presented to Aurelius, called Christianity "the philosophy which llegan under Augustus." (Euse- bius, IV, 26.) The narrative about the persccution in Gaul under Marcus Aurelius, in V, is among the most important in the Oh.urch Histor'Y of the bishop of Oaesarea, untainted by the flattery of his later references to Constantine. This persecution occurred in 177 A. D., especially in Lugdunum and Vienne on the Rhone. The report given by the churehes there, sent to the churches in the provinces of Asia and Phrygia, is the longest citation in the whole histoTy of Eusebius, and it seems to have been composed in Greek. One is almost com- pelIed to infer that Greek was still the language in which Scripture was read in the services and perhaps also the language of the sermons. Irenaeus was trained in Asia Minor and wrote Greek. Socially even the Ohristians (Eusebius, V,l) had become marked men, being ex- cluded from the public baths and the market-place. The leaders of the Ohristians were fearless. The report quotes Rom. 8, 18 precisely: "I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to