the prophecy [Ex 158 and Dt 32f.] contained in the second and fifth books of Moses’ (§ 134).
This question of the style of Holy Scripture is of great importance in its bearing upon the judg- ment we form regarding its perspicuity and its inspiration. From this point of view, the style of the Biblical writers has been discussed by the authors we now proceed toname. Flacius Illyricus, in his famous Clavis Scripture Sacre (1567, ete. ; ed. Basileensis, 1628 f.), vol. i. Preefatio, fol. 3a, writes: ‘ Objiciunt illi [7.e. pontificii] de sensu ac intelligentia litem esse. Eam illi volunt ex Patri- bus peti opportere. At contra Augustinus et Hilarius contendunt ex collatione Scripture loca aut dicta obscuriora esse illustranda.’ The other passages of his work which treat of style are 255 4200; 4335) (‘ Lapsus styli ex alio in aliud’) 489,, (‘De plenitudine styli’) 5084) (‘Stylus Paulinus’). These points, however, are much more fully dis- cussed by Glass in his important Philologia Sacra, which went through a number of editions from 1623 onwards. To these questions he devotes the whole of the third and fourth tractates of the first of the five books into which his work is divided (4th ed. 1668, pp. 186-246). He sets out with the following statement: ‘Inter rationes, quibus Bel- larminus Scripture Sacree obscuritatem probatam dare vult, occurrit etiam illa quam a styli seu modi dicendi in Scripturis usitati ambiguitate desumit,’ and he brings forward good arguments in refuta- tion of this charge against Holy Scripture. The same point of view has been since then considered by many scholars, and. is touched upon by Sanday in his admirable Bampton Lectures on Inspiration (1st ed. 1893, p. 403), and C. A. Briggs in his com- prehensive General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture (1899, p. 328). This highest point of view from which the question of the style of Scripture has to be considered, is not, however, the only one. It is a question which is not only an eminently religious one, but of importance as regards the history of culture. For it is an ex- tremely interesting inquiry how far the art of description by means of language was developed among the Hebrews and the writers of the NT. In what follows we shall endeavour to satisfy both interests, the religious and the secular.
ii. CHARACTERISTICS OF BIBLICAL STYLE DUE TO EARLINESS OF DATE OR TO THE SEMITIC IDIOSYNCRASY OF THE HEBREWS. — The most important of these phenomena, arranged according to their noteworthiness and frequency, are the following :—
1. We have only to proceed a short way in our reading of the first book of the Bible to be struck with the great frequency with which the word ‘and’ occurs. The opening sentence of Genesis is followed by the statement ‘And the earth was without form and void’ (t0hi@ wd-bohi). In like manner, the third sentence ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep’ is tacked on by ‘and,’ while the fourth runs ‘ And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep.’ And so in this same chapter there is a direct succession of some sixty sentences, all beginning with ‘and.’ This prefer- ence for the copulative conjunction may be observed no less in the frequent Polysyndeton which char- acterizes the style of Scripture, as, for instance, in ‘Shem and Ham and Japheth’ (Gn 98); or ‘Elam and Asshur and Arpachshad and Lud’ (10%); or ‘thou nor thy son nor thy daughter nor thy man- servant nor thy maidservant nor,’ ete. etc. (Dt 5); or ‘Thou shalt not kill, neither shalt thou commit adultery, neither shalt thou steal, neither,’ ete. ete. (5-71 65). Nay, this preference for ‘and’ went so far that we even find new books of the OT com- mencing with ‘and.’ This is the case not only with the five books of the Pentateuch, but also
STYLE OF SCRIPTURE
with Joshua, Judges, Ruth, ete. It cannot be inferred from this form of opening that these books once formed parts of a continuous work, for the Book of Esther begins with the same formula ‘And it came to pass,’ although its subject is an isolated episode. The correct view of this pheno- menon is that the expression ‘ And it came to pass’ was so much in use that one came to write it from forte of custom and almost unconsciously. On this same account, the fact that the Book of Ezekiel opens with ‘And it came to pass’ is no indication that something has dropped out before this for- mula, as is contended by Budde and others (see the controversy on this point between Budde and the present writer in Hapos. Times, xii. [1901] 39 ff., 370 ff., 525 ff., 566 f.; xiii. 41 ff., 95). The expression ‘And it came to pass’ had become as common as the phrase ‘ And it shall come to pass,’ with which circumstantial statements of time, etc., were in- troduced (ef. Is 2? ‘ And it shall come to pass in the last days that,’ ete.).
When we compare even so simple a writer as ‘the Father of History,’ this Hebrew fashion of connecting sentences is striking. After giving his own name and dividing mankind into the two categories of Hellenes and barbarians, Herodotus begins his narrative with the following sentences : ‘Now the learned among the Persians say that the Phcenicians were the authors of the discord (namely, between the Greeks and other peoples). For, atter they (the Phenicians) came from the sea that is called the Red Sea to this (the Medi- terranean) sea, and settled in the land which they still inhabit, they immediately devoted themselves to great enterprises by sea. But in the course of transporting Egyptian and Assyrian goods, they frequently visited Argos as well as the rest of the country.’ There is no need for proceeding further with the translation of Herodotus’ History, in order to show the striking contrast in structure and con- nexion presented by its opening sentences and those of the Bible. The numerous principal sentences which are co-ordinated in Gn 1", and the stereo- typed ‘and’ by which they are connected, have ceased, as a rule, to strike us, because from our earliest days we have been used to this character- istic of the Biblical narratives, and this fashion of writing, which is peculiar to Biblical history in the widest sense, was also very well calculated to im- press our minds. For this way of adding principal sentence to principal sentence, and of connecting them for the most part by ‘and,’ is the childish device which always meets us at the naive stage in the history of culture. We encounter it in the childhood of the individual, we find it amongst the uneducated masses of the people, and it shows itself at the primitive stages in the development of the human race. For instance, ‘The Homeric speech loves the co-ordinating of sentences’ (G. Curtius, Gr. Gram. § 519;; Hentze, Parataxe bet Homer, 1889), and it is very interesting to note how the number of conjunctions in the later He- brew and other Semitic languages underwent in- crease : for illustrations see Ed. Kénig, Historisch- Comparat. Syntax der heb. Sprache, §§ 377-3967).