Βεβλημένη τὸν " ἥλιον-- καὶ ἡ σελήνη ὑποκάτω τῶν ποδῶν αὐτῆς,
“These ancient trazts, fragments of an earlier whole, which lack their proper connexion in the present account, and indeed are scarcely intelligible, as they have been wrested from the thought- sequence of the original writer, reveal to the expert the presence of an earlier form of the story” (S. C. p. 6.)
CHAPTER Xi].—The procedure of the writer here is very much the same as inch. xi. (see above). The oracle of xii. is not an allegorising version of history, ποτ an exegetical construction of O.T. texts, nor a free composition of the author, but the Christianised reproduction of a Jewish source (possibly from the same period as the basis of xi. 1-13, or at least from the same βιβλαρίδιον), or at any rate a tradition, which described the birth of messiah in terms borrowed from such cosmological myths as that of the con- flict between the sun-god and the dragon of darkness and the deep. The psycho- logical origin of such a Jewish adapta- tion would be explainedif we presupposed a tradition similar to that of the later Talmud (Jer. Berach. fol. 5, 1) which described the messiah as born at Bethle- hem and swept away from his mother by a storm-wind, just after the fall of Jeru- salem. But this messiah is merely re- moved, not raised to heaven. And as we have no clear evidence that the stress of 68-70 A.D. excited such a messianic hope among the Pharisees, it is hazard- ous to use this (as ¢.g., Jiilicher and Wellhausen still do) to prove that the date of the source is the same as that of xi. 1f. The structure of the passage is equally ambiguous. 4 a presupposes something equivalent to ver. 7-9, while 13-16 is an expansion or variant of 6; and yet 13 is the natural sequel to 9 (12). These features have led to a variety of literary reconstructions. Spitta, ¢.g., takes ver. 6 as the Christian edi- torial anticipation of 13 f., and finds another Christian touch in ver. 11 (Wey- landin 1m and 179). J. Weiss puts 1-6 and 13-17 together, regarding 7-12 as an independent continuation of the third woe (editorial notes in 3, 11, and 17). Wellhausen (Analyse, 18 f) bisects the oracle into two parallel but incomplete variants (A=1-6, B=7-9, 13, 14), with 15-17 as an editorial conclusion. Others (e.g., Sch6n and Calmes) find a Christian