Numbers, with a certain number of additions derived from the circumstances in which Moses spoke.

From chaps. xxvii to xxx we find the final act, which was to be the sanction of the law and commandments, the renewal of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which he made with them in Horeb. This covenant will lapse if the people do not hearken to the voice of the Lord; then all kinds of curses shall come upon them and overtake them. And here, again, Moses repeats with greater force and warmth what he has said to them many times: that it is for them a question of to be or not to be.

Of all the words of this law it is distinctly said that Moses wrote them to the end and committed his book to the care of the Levites. Then he tells Joshua to assemble once more the eldest and the officers, that he may speak to them the words of a song, and the people listened to it as well as Hoshea, son of Nun.

But this is not the last act of his life. Like Jacob, he blesses all his sons individually, and for him his twelve sons are the twelve tribes of Israel. When Jacob made an end of charging his sons he gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up the ghost. When Moses had finished his blessing to the people he went up from the plain of Moab unto Mount Nebo, and Israel saw him no more; they did not even find his body.

It seems probable that this blessing was put in writing by one of his hearers, and that the last chapter relating his death and burial, which cannot be due to him, may have been written by Joshua or some one who had much to do with Moses. As for the last verses of this chapter, I attribute them to the writer whom I have called the collector, who arranged all the tablets of Moses and made books of them. I have said that I consider this collector as being Ezra. Having come to the end of his work, he concludes; he sums up what the career of Moses has been. And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face in all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt and in all the mighty hand and in all the great terror which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel."

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We have adduced several reasons showing that Deuteronomy was necessary to the sons of Israel who were going to settle in Canaan, but we might add one which had a great force: I mean the feelings that filled Moses' soul. Israel was about to

enter into the land that had been promised them, Moses himself was not to enter it; he knew that the crowning point of his career was refused to him, and that he would only see this good land from a mountain top. Israel would be henceforth left to itself. They would have no longer the guide they had followed for forty years. It is easy to understand what anxiety must have haunted him. It is true that Joshua would be his successor, but would he be strong enough, would he have enough authority to keep the people in the way which had been traced for it, in the worship of Yahveh? For if Israel abandoned this worship it would perish; and thus, what one might almost call the child of Moses, to which he was passionately attached, which he had snatched from the oppression of the Egyptians, would march to certain ruin. After having taught for years a law of which he felt the value and the observation of which was a vital question for Israel, when he was about to abandon this people and leave it to itself, Moses could not do otherwise than remind it in the pathetic terms that its very existence depended on the observation of Yahveh's commandments. He had to leave this remembrance to the Israelites, to whom he had devoted himself all his life. It was the last duty which he felt bound to fulfil. One might justly be astonished if his life had not ended by such a farewell. Deuteronomy is the word of a dying man.

Deuteronomy is the fitting close to the career of Moses. We have seen to what a degree it is in harmony with what Moses was, with the circumstances of the time. We have recognized from the first why the book was written, to whom it was addressed, and what kind of influence it was to exert over the hearers. It satisfies entirely to the principles of our method, and we have no hesitation in declaring that Deuteronomy is the last of the Mosaic books, and that Moses was its author.

DISCUSSION.

The CHAIRMAN (Rev. A. H. Finn), in opening the discussion, regretted that, as he had not seen the paper until he entered the room, he would not be able to give the considered estimate of it which it merited. He thought all present would acknowledge that they were indebted to Prof. Naville for an able and thought-provoking examination of the subject, showing how well the characteristics of Deuteronomy agreed with the circumstances of the speaker, the occasion and the hearers. Yet he was afraid that it would not

avail to convince opponents, who would maintain that the author, the occasion and the circumstances were altogether different.

He felt it was almost an impertinence to criticize so great an authority as Prof. Naville, yet he was constrained to demur to the theory that the book was originally written in cuneiform or incised on clay tablets. To be intelligible to the people the discourses must have been delivered in the Hebrew tongue, and therefore written down in the Hebrew character.

Also he objected to describing the book as a "repetition" of the Law. Some of the laws delivered at Sinai and of those in Leviticus and Numbers were repeated, but by no means all, while there were various new laws to suit the changed circumstances. The idea of repetition really arose from a blunder in the Septuagint. The translators into Greek had confused a Hebrew word meaning "copy" with a similar word meaning "second," and so had turned the injunction that the king on his accession was to write "a copy of this Law" into one that he was to write "this Second Law" (Tò δευτερονόμιον τοῦτο).

He had himself independently come to the conclusion that, as is forcibly urged in the paper, the repetitions, digressions and unsystematic arrangement of the laws in Deuteronomy form a very strong argument against its being a carefully written composition, а reformulation of an older legislation," and in favour of its being a record of orally delivered addresses.

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He concluded by moving a hearty vote of thanks to Prof. Naville, coupled with an equally hearty vote of thanks to the reader of the paper.

Dr. M. GASTER, speaking from a Jewish standpoint, said :I welcome with pleasure this new contribution of Prof. Naville towards the elucidation of the problems connected with the origin and antiquity of the Pentateuch. Whilst agreeing in the main with the conclusions arrived at and the new historical method employed by Prof. Naville, there are certain points in which a difference of opinion is, I submit, decidedly called for. Thus, for example, there is the theory still so persistently held by Prof. Naville of the tablets with the cuneiform script, upon which various sections of the Bible have been separately written down and then mixed together in some earthenware jar and then some time or other taken

out haphazard, translated into Hebrew, and then put together without any definite rule. This is an impossible operation, leaving aside the fact that no references can be found in the Pentateuch to any such script, for when the Tables of Stone are mentioned the letters are described as having been "engraven on the stone. There is, further, the far greater impossibility from a purely linguistic point of view of accepting a translation into the Hebrew tongue. Even should such a translation have taken place some time before Ezra, it could not have assumed the distinct archaic character which the language of the Pentateuch possesses in comparison with the other books of the Old Testament. Moreover, what kind of Bible could it have been which, according to Prof. Naville himself, had been discovered by the High Priest in the foundations of the Temple at the time of the restoration, if not a complete book from which the scribe was able to read the contents to the king and the assembled princes? Surely, at that time the Pentateuch must have already assumed the present form of a scroll, and did not consist of detached cuneiform tablets. This idea must be dismissed; it is neither possible nor helpful, and only adds a new difficulty to the many which are surrounding the history of the Pentateuch.

Prof. Naville is on much stronger ground when he discusses the form and contents of the book itself, and here I am sure everyone will be willing to follow, with the exception of his suggestion that glosses have been added by the supposed" collector" of the cuneiform tablets. Once we admit a "collector" with whom the choice is left to adopt and reject to add glosses, we are only one step removed from the higher critics, who are also guided by the same principle, with the only difference that they suggest many editors and various sources, but otherwise agree in the principle that the work is the result of editorial manipulation. Too much has been imported into the supposed activity of Ezra. The Jewish tradition knows only of Ezra as the man who merely transcribed the text from the old Hebrew alphabet into the new Aramaic one, out of which grew the square characters. The significance and importance of this transliteration must be sought in the determination of breaking definitely with the Samaritans and of driving a wedge between those who worshipped in the temple on Mount Garizim and those who were to worship in a temple not yet built, but which was to be built in Jerusalem.

Prof: Naville is perfectly correct in his statement that the Manasseh who married a daughter of Sanballat and joined his father-inlaw, not wishing to repudiate his wife, was wrongly dated by Josephus. The curious fact remains, however, that a careful search by me in the Samaritan Chronicles has not revealed any trace of Manasseh. To the Samaritans evidently the advent of Manasseh seemed to be a matter of very little consequence, and he can therefore not be credited with bringing over the Law from Jerusalem which henceforth was to become the Divine Law of the Samaritans. For these speculations there seems to be no basis; the Law was undoubtedly in the hands of the Samaritans from the time of their ancestors, the northern tribes of Israel, and a continued examination of the Samaritan recension will more and more justify the assumption that the text which they possess, though altered, smoothed and modified in details, and also to a large extent corrupted by the carelessness of scribes, is essentially the Law which they had held together with the rest of the tribes, and points to a more ancient text common to them and the authors of the Greek version. It is not here the place to dilate more on this point, since in a work on a Samaritan apocryphon, which is now in the press, I venture to hope that I have been able to prove the existence of midrashic and legendary interpretations of the text of the Pentateuch in the possession of the Samaritans as far back as the second century B.C. As most of these legends rest upon a peculiar agadic interpretation of the text and even on peculiar letters and forms, it is evident that the text thus treated must have been considered sacred down to its most minute details and of great antiquity and authority. This in itself is sufficient proof of the high antiquity of the Samaritan text in its actual recension. All these points go to strengthen the results achieved so far by Prof. Naville, to whom Biblical science owes a great debt of gratitude.

Mr. SIDNEY COLLETT said: -I am sure we must all feel indebted to Prof. Naville for his lecture on Deuteronomy, especially as its aim is to prove the Mosaic authorship of that book.

There are, however, one or two points to which I desire to draw attention.

In the second paragraph on page 211 the lecturer says:"When Moses was living in the house of Jethro, his father-in-law, he had no idea of the mission which would be given to him." This, however,