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THE EVOLUTION OF OLD TESTAMENT RELIGION




    THE EVOLUTION OF OLD
    TESTAMENT RELIGION

    BY
    W. E. ORCHARD, B.D.

    LONDON
    JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14, FLEET STREET
    1908




    TO
    My Wife




PREFACE


The substance of this book was originally delivered as a Course of
Lectures to a week-night congregation. The Lecture form has been
retained, and this accounts for the repetition of the leading ideas,
while the practical interests of Church life account for the insistence
on the religious value and lesson. It is hoped that this, which might
be irritating to the professional student, may be helpful to the
ordinary reader who is repelled by the technicality of critical works,
and often fails to discern the devout spirit by which such works are
inspired, or to discover what religious interest is served by them.

Where everything is borrowed from other writers, and no claim to
originality is made, detailed acknowledgment would be impossible, but
the resolve to attempt some such course in place of the usual form of a
week-night service was formed in the Hebrew class-room of Westminster
College, Cambridge, while listening to the Lectures on Old Testament
Theology and Messianic Prophecy, delivered by the Rev. Professor Dr.
Skinner (now Principal), in which accurate scholarship was combined
with a deep insight into the present religious importance of these
subjects. Grateful acknowledgment is also due to the Rev. J.R. Coates,
B.A., who kindly read through the proofs and made many valuable
suggestions.

                    W. E. ORCHARD.

    ENFIELD, _August, 1908_.




CONTENTS


    LECTURE                                         PAGE

          INTRODUCTION                               vii

       I. THE SEMITIC RACES                           19

      II. THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF THE HEBREWS       31

     III. MOSAISM                                     55

      IV. THE INFLUENCE OF CANAAN                     83

       V. PROPHETISM--EARLY STAGES                   107

      VI. THE RELIGION OF THE LITERARY PROPHETS      135

     VII. THE EFFECT OF THE EXILE                    169

    VIII. THE WORK OF THE PRIESTS                    195

      IX. THE RELIGION OF THE PSALMISTS              215

       X. THE RELIGION OF THE WISE                   241

      XI. MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS                     265




INTRODUCTION


It is a matter of common knowledge that within the last few decades a
tremendous change has come over our estimate of the value of the Old
Testament, and that this change is of the gravest importance for our
understanding of religion. But what the exact nature of the change
is, and what we are to deduce from it, is a matter of debate, for the
facts are only known to professional students and to a few others who
may have been led to interest themselves in the subject. With some,
for instance, the idea prevails that the Old Testament has been so
discredited by modern research that its religious significance is now
practically worthless. Others believe that the results arrived at are
untrue, and regard them as the outcome of wicked attacks made upon the
veracity of the Word of God by men whose scholarship is a cloak for
their sinister designs or a mask of their incapacity to comprehend its
spiritual message. There is perhaps a middle course open to some who
have found a message of God to their souls in the Old Testament, and
who, on hearing that the authorship of this book has been questioned
or the historicity of that passage assailed, are unmoved, because
they believe that it does not matter who wrote the Pentateuch or the
Psalms so long as through these documents they hear the voice of the
living Word of God. Here then is a subject on which there exists a
distressing confusion, and, moreover, a subject in which ignorance
plays no small part. Save with a few devout souls who have made a long
and continuous study of the Scriptures, it may be doubted whether there
is any widespread knowledge of the actual message of the Old Testament,
even among Christian people. There are certainly many people willing to
defend the authority of the Bible who spend very little time in reading
it. The favourite Psalms and the evangelical passages of Isaiah are
probably well known, and beyond this there is but the knowledge gained
in early days, from which stand out in the memory the personalities
of Samson and Saul, David and Goliath, and Daniel in the lion's den,
together with the impressive stories of the Flood, the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah, the crossing of the