{d) Differences of style and conception. — These, especially so far as they are connecte<l with special phraseolojry, will be treated more fully at a later stage of the inquiry. It will be sufficient for the present, in addition to what has been already said of the IJk. of Joshua, to point out two very striking examples. (1) Notice the very remarkable diU'er- ence in the whole tone and character of the two Creation stories, Gn 1-2^ and 2-"' etc. The first describes creation as taking place in a systematic order, reaching its climax in man created male and female, everything being made out of nothing by a separate _/(«< of almighty God. In the second, all other things belonging to the earth (the heavenly bodies are not mentioned) are made, after the existence of the first man, in the order best suited for his wants, ending in the creation of woman. Men at least are moulded out of another material, tlie first man out of the dust of the ground, the first woman out of a rib taken from her husband. J" walks and talks almost as a man with men. The first account is in form artificial and rhythmical, the second graphic and picturesque. (2) We may obsen-e the same kind of difi'erence in the concep- tion of Moses. According to Ex 15^ 4i«-" lie la indeed an able and practical leader, but a weak and timid speaker, who is alloMed to engage Aaron as his spokesman. In Dt he appears as the most fluent and eloquent speaker of tlie Hible.
It can hardly be denied that these facts taken together form an irresistible argument for the belief that the Hex. was compiled from a variety of sources. It has been sometimes suggested that Moses compiled Genesis, but actually wrote the last four books of the Pentateuch, 'this does not meet the facts of the case, because, as already seen, the .same phenomena which prove Genesis to be a compilation and not an original work appear abundantly in Exodus, and evidently enough in the other books of the Hexateuch. The com- pilation must therefore have taken place consider- ably after the time of Moses.
ii. Mkthod of Composition. — A. Three views at least are pos.sible, which we may call (1) con- glomeration or crystallization, (2) expansion, (3) stratification.
(1) The first would imply that a number ol fragments, handed down either in writing or by oral tradition, were collected together so as to form a literary whole. If the fragments were collected at one single time the process might aptly be called conglomeration. Crystallization
HEXATEUCH
IIEXATEUCH
3G3
becomes the more appropriate term if we suppose that the fragments were "inhered by degrees round some earlier nucleus. In fact it approaches more or less closely to (2).
(2) The second hypothesis is that a small original document, or a very delinite oral tradition, was expanded by frequent revision at subsequent periods.
(3) Stratification is intended to imply that certain more or less independent documents, dealing largely with the same series of events, were com- posed at dill'erent periods, or, at any rate, under dill'erent auspices, and were afterwards combined, 3) that our present Hex. contains these several ditlerent literary strata.
There is probably some degree of truth in all these hypotheses, but there are strong reasons for believing that the last most nearly exi)resse8 the truth, and with some modilications it is the accepted theory of the great body of modern critics. The necessary modifications are : (a) that each stratum, before its incorporation into the united work, was subject to more or less revision, and in some cases considerable expansion from time to time ; (6) that the combination of the several strata was itself a gradual process, some being already combined before others bad been produced ; (c) that the whole when combined was subject to editorial revision ; [d) that certain fragments remain which probably did not originally belong to any of these larger strata, but have been connected with them either by the original WTiters or by later revisers.
B. The main p'ounds for accepting this third hypothesis (stratification) are : (1) that the various literary pieces, with very few exceptions, will be found on examination to arranp:e themselves by lommon characteristics into comparatively few groups ; (2) that an original consecution of narra- ti"e may lie frequently traced between what in thcii present form are isolated fragments. This will be better understood by the following illus- tration. Let us suppose a problem of this kind : Given a patchwork quilt, explain the character of the original pieces out of which the bits of stuff com-
Eosing the guilt were cut. First, we notice that, owever well the colours may blend, however nice and complete the whole may look, many of the adjoining pieces do not actually agree in material, texture, pattern, colour, or the like. Ergo, they have been made up out of very different pieces of stuff. So far, we have only proved what may turn out to be the first hypothesis of those given above, a conglomeration of fragments. But suppose that we further discover that many of the bits, though now separated, are like one another in material, texture, etc., we may conjecture that these may have been cut out of one piece. But we shall prove this beyond reasonable doubt if we find that several bits when unpicked fit together, so that the patt«m of one is continued in the other ; and, moreover, that if all of like character are sorted out they form, say, four groups, each of which was evidently ome a single piece of stuff, though parts of each are found missing because, no doubt, they have not been recjuired to make the whole. But we make the analogy with the Hexateuch even closer, if we further suppose that in certain parts of the quUt the bits belonging to, say, two of these groups are so combined as to form a subsidiary pattern within the larger pattern of the whole quilt, and had evidently been sewn together before being connected with other parts of the quilt ; ami we may make it even closer still, if we suppose that, besides the more important bits of stuli, smaller embellishments, borderings, and the like, had been added so as to improve the general elfect of the whole.