tempt.ed him, not one should behold the promised la.nd except Caleb," while eh. xiv. 26--SS affirms "that except Caleb and Joshua, all those previously numbered from twenty years old and upwards should perish in the wilderness, and that their children only, after a forty years' journeying through the wilderness, should arriv~ at the land of Canaan," the first statement agreeing with oh. xiii. 30, where Caleb quiets the people who were agitated through the report of the spies, and the second 'With eh. xiv. 6, where Joshua and Caleb do this ('lntrod. to Old Tsstamsnt,'Vol. I. § 119). The ' Speaker's Commentary' agrees with this opinion so far as to regard it as "likely that a later and independent, but not inconsistent, account has been interwoven with the earlier ons," only it seems unable to determine whioh account was the original narrative, and which the interpolation ; in the Introduction to Numbers,§§ 4, 7, saying, "The passages introducing the name of Joshua would seem to be the inserted ones," and in the exposition of eh. xiv. 24 assigning this distinction to those in which the name of Caleb only is mentioned. But there doSB not appear to be any urgent necessity for adopting the theory of combined accounts, either in the exaggerated form of Blesk or in the modified form of the • Speaker's Commentary.' "The fa.et that Caleb only is mentioned in eh. xiii, 30, though, according to eh. xiv. 6, Joshua. also stood by his side, maybe explained on the simple ground that at first Caleb was the only ons to speak and maintain the possibility of conquering Canaan" (Keil). Another instance commonly adduced in support of the idea of commingled documents is found in chs. xvi and xvii., in which, according to Stahelin, De W stte, Blssk, and others of the rationalising school of criticism, the story belonging to the earliest narrative of the insurrection of Korah with his 250 Levites against the priestly power of Moses and Aaron has been mixed up with another tradition relating to the sedition of certain Rsubsnite princes against the civil authority of the law-giver in particular, eh. xvi 12-15, 2 '-34 being additions of th£. flUpplsmsntsr, But the hypothesis that there were originally two distinct rebellione and that the accounts of these have been incor- porated into one narrative, does not necessarily militate against the idea of the Mosaio authorship of the writing, since the original narrative may have been subsequently expanded by its first composer so as to include the two accounts in ons. Indeed if we suppose, what is not at all unlikely to have been the case, that the spirit of mutiny was abroad in the congre~tion, there might easily have been more than one distinct centre of insubordination ; and this hypothesis, that the Reubenite princes with their followers acted in confederation with the Lsvite Korah and his company (cf. Ewald, 'History of Israel,' Vol. II. p. 179), will be found to go far to explain the seeming dislocation of the narrative, in which a distinction appears to be kept up between the priestly and the princely rebels. Other spsoim~ns might be given of the so-called repetitions and contradictions that exist in Numbers, such as eh. xiii 16 compared with eh. xi. 28, eh. xiv. 45 compared with eh. xxi 3, and eh. xx:i. 13 with eh. x:xxiii. 45 fl'. ; but, besidss admitting of easy refutation, none of them are of such importance as to call for extended notice. 3. Once more, in common with the other portions of the Psntatsuch, the Book of NumbsrB is believed to exhibit traces of a later authorship than that of Mosss, in such like passages, e. g., as oh. xv. 32-36, which appears to intimate that at the time of its oompositi.on the children of Israel were no longer ill the wildsmsss; eh. JCC. 6, which suggests that they were then m Oanaan; eh. xxi. 14, 16, 17, 18, 27-30, in whioh the writer alludes to certain archaic songs with which his readers were familiar; eh. x:xiv. 7, which could not have been penned before the days of
,· THE BOOK OF NUMDERS.