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ceremonial law the sun and moon were for "seasons," in this sense. The sun, by its rising and setting, gave the seasons for daily worship; the moon by its appearance as new," the season for monthly worship; sun and moon together, by the full moons of spring and autumn, the seasons for the two great annual feasts of Passover and Tabernacles. This system was raised to a higher plane by the sanctification of the seventh; the seventh day was the Sabbath, the day of worship; the seventh month was pre-eminently the month of worship; it opened with the Feast of Trumpets, its tenth day was the great Day of Atonement; the seventh year was the Sabbatic year. And the week, whether of the day or of the year, was itself raised to a higher plane ;-the week of weeks in days from the morrow after the Sabbath of Unleavened Bread, was the Feast of Pentecost; the week of weeks in years terminated with the blowing of the trumpets of Jubilee after the High Priest had pronounced the solemn absolution of the people at the close of the Great Day of Atonement. This was the time of "the restitution of all things"; the nation was cleansed from its sins, the Hebrew slave regained his liberty, and the alienated inheritance returned to its former owner. But this period of a week of weeks of years is a "restitution of all things" in the calendar; to use an astronomical term, it is a lunisolar cycle. The Jewish calendar was then regulated by actual observation; the month began with the actual observation of the young crescent in the sky; the first month of the year, Abib, the month of green ears, was that when the barley was sufficiently ripe for offering. But it would occasionally happen that the sky would be cloudy at the beginning of a month; then some rule had to be followed; and the priests had only to ascertain what was done in the corresponding month of the corresponding year of the preceding Jubilee period, to know what they should ordain.

What connection has this with the date of the Priestly Code ? Just this. This system could only work as long as the Jews dwelt in the narrow compass of their own land, for the Jubilee cycle was not nearly accurate enough for use after they were scattered from Media in the north to Syene on the Nile in the south. But we know that they then had some means of arranging their calendar, for a number of commercial contracts have been found at Syene, bearing both Egyptian and Jewish dates. As we know the Egyptian calendar, the Jewish dates can be interpreted, and it appears that the

Jews were then able to predict the new moon. This they probably did by means of the luni-solar cycle for 19 years that gives us the Golden Number of the rules for finding Easter, in our book of Common Prayer. The present Jewish calendar is founded on this same Metonic cycle, as it is usually called. The dates of these contracts extend from the reign of Xerxes to that of Darius Nothus, so that the very period of the supposed origin of P is covered. It is clear that the Jubilee cycle was not, and could not have been, used for dating these papyri; and that once the 19-year cycle had been discovered, no new ceremonial system based on the 49-year cycle, which was only fitted for a small country, would have been invented amongst the Jews of the Dispersion.

Dr. THIRTLE remarked that when examining the claims of the Priestly Code, we are compelled to consider other aspects of analytical theory as it regards the Pentateuch. Then we find that the entire budget of critical speculation goes together-and thanks to the labours of scholars in many lands, it is all going together in another sense!

Mr. Harold Wiener, to whom we have just listened, has put criticism "off its feet" in regard to its prodigious inferences from the distribution of the Divine designations.

In the Pentateuch we have the priesthood and offerings; in the so-called "Code" the same features appear. The difference lies here, however: while the Pentateuch exhibits the institutions in relation to Moses, the law-giver of Israel, criticism represents them as coming on the scene after the time of the great prophets. The confusion is not one of documents merely, but of the objective content of history, as it relates to the ways of God in dealing with the Israelitish nation.

A short time ago, Rev. Iverach Munro read before the Institute. a paper on the Samaritan Pentateuch and its problems. We do well now to recall that the facts of that well-known recension of the Pentateuch supply an unanswerable case against the post-exilic date of the Priestly Code, and for that matter of any part of the early books of the Bible. The schismatic history of the Northern Kingdom of Israel demands the institutions that is, the material contentof the Priestly Code centuries before the exile. Without the aspect of schism, joined to that of rebellion, we cannot understand Israelitish history, either as regards the Ten Tribes or the Two.

PRIESTLY CODE

The Rev. F. E. SPENCER said: I desire to apply as briefly as may be the scientific inductive method to the books of the Chronicles, and, I believe with the good will of Chancellor Lias, to draw conclusions from this method which may supplement what has already been said.

As

The Chronicles divide into parts, of which the sources are either given, or may be inferred. I propose to offer an argument, which may be called an argument strictly from what is called source criticism. The sources of the Chronicles are fairly certain. They consist of ancient genealogies; lists extracted from the archives which began with David; speeches and histories derived from prophetic writings contemporary with the events; a Psalm sung at the bringing up of the ark; and other like things taken from old contemporary documents. The Chronicler selects these with a clear purpose, hands them on in a manner which clearly evidences, as Graf has proved, one hand, and adds reflections of his own. certain of these ancient documents are longer or shorter extracts, forty-five in number, from Samuel and Kings, we may clearly trace the hand and manner of the Chronicler in transcribing them, and arguing from this, and from treatment which is exactly on the same lines which we find in the other parts, we may infer that the way in which he has handled documents now inaccessible to us resembles his manner of treatment of Samuel and Kings. I think we are all along on completely safe ground. We are not forcing an hypothesis, but examining facts and explaining them. We have the advantage in this investigation of help from Girdlestone's Deuterographs, Davidson's very thorough researches, Graf's monograph, and Kittel's Critical Hebrew Bible. Davidson's researches are of peculiar value in this matter. They date from 1862. They are quite free from prejudice, without the slightest apologetic leaning, and have no hypothesis to serve. Davidson also, in the Chronicles, is comparatively free from that infusion of vinegar which vitiates his otherwise valuable Introduction for the ordinary reader. Graf, in 1866, is bent on a hypothesis, but is still scientifically valuable. To gather up then the result.

We find we have clear reason for attributing complete honesty to the Chronicler. Throughout he is compiling ancient sources. He did not invent David's speeches. He was not competent to do so. He only modernised them. I think the more reasonable account of

the Psalm, very expressly said to have been sung at the bringing up of the ark, is, that the Chronicler is correct to his source. It was so sung. And the constituent parts of it were, either before or after, taken up into the official Psalm-book in a different way, i.e., it was either adapted from existing Psalms, or taken up into Psalms 96 and 105 later.

The Chronicler all along modernises and explains every one of his ancient sources. Perhaps the most striking instance is when in I Chronicles xxix, 7, he calculates the offering of David's princes in darics, which were certainly not the Davidic currency. Nor did the Chronicler think so himself. We have the authority of Buhl for saying the word means darics, the Persian currency. It will not be necessary to labour the point that the Pentateuch discovers not a trace of this modernising and explaining. The Torah, on the contrary, is allowed on all hands to hand on traces of a much more ancient past in words and things. A large part of it is only applicable to a camp in the desert. In the Chronicles much is altered. But none of these alterations, modernisings, or explanations have invaded the Pentateuch text in any way, though there are traces of later editing here and there.

I hold, therefore, that it is a good and scientific inference that these facts point to the Pentateuch having come down to the Chronicler's time as a sacred deposit-far too sacred to be tampered with-from the ancient times, which its own witness professes.

If P was only recent in the Chronicler's time, or if P was only then coming into being, traces of the Chronicler's method and style, which was the method and style of his time, would infallibly have been found in it.

Mr. MARTIN L. ROUSE thought that no evidence of chronological custom should be based upon the Assouan papyri, since, to his mind, the genuineness of those documents was open to question.

Prof. LANGHORNE ORCHARD congratulated the Institute upon this important paper, read to them by a distinguished scholar who knew so well how to yoke learning with logic, and harness them both in the service of truth. They all hoped that he would be spared to give them yet other papers as valuable as this, for which they heartily thanked him.

The Meeting adjourned at 6.30 p.m.

552ND ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING,

HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE, ON MONDAY, MARCH 2ND, 1914, AT 4.30 P.M.

THE REV. CANON R. B. GIRDLESTONE, M.A., VICE-PRESIDENT, TOOK THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed, and the SECRETARY announced the election of Mr. George Avenell as an Associate of the Institute.

THE CHARACTER OF THE BIBLE INFERRED FROM IT'S VERSIONS. By the Rev. T. H. DARLOW, M.A., LITERARY SUPERINTENDENT OF THE BIBLE SOCIETY.

ORE than forty years ago Henry Rogers, the author of The Eclipse of Faith, published a volume of lectures which he entitled The Superhuman Origin of the Bible inferred from itself. The lecturer set out to show that Holy Scripture cannot be accounted for as the mere product of human faculties and forces. He argued with singular power" that the Bible is not such a book as man would have made, if he could; or could have made, if he would."

The present paper only attempts to illustrate and develop one minor aspect of a corresponding argument. For several years it has fallen to my lot to study the history of Bible translation. And I venture to believe that certain conclusions in regard to the character of the Bible may be inferred from its versions in so many varieties of human speech.

To begin with, let us recall one fact which is so obvious that it escapes attention. To nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of every thousand the Bible can only come in the shape of a translation. Even among the members of the Victoria Institute many would confess that they do not habitually read their daily portion of Scripture in Hebrew or Greek. And for the mass of mankind such reading of the original text is plainly impossible-and always will be. God's Book