In the Book of Judges.

In answering the charge of Robertson Smith that the whole Book of Judges is Levitically false (Part First, §7, 3), I have not only refuted, I think, every argument in support of that charge, but I have turned some of them into evidence to the contrary. There remain for notice in the present section only a few passages which clearly imply that the law was well known during the constant violation of some of its precepts in that period.  

1. We cite, first, Jehovah's quotation of his own former words. Speaking through the angel at Bochim, he declared: "I said I will never break my covenant with you: and ye shall make no covenant with the people of this land; ye shall break down their altars: but ye have not hearkened to my voice: why have ye done this? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your side, and their gods shall be a snare to you" (ii. 1-3). Here are three things which Jehovah declares that he had said to them before. But when had he said them? The first, "I will never break my covenant with you," is found in Lev. xxvi. 44; the second, "Ye shall make no covenant with the people of the land," is found in Ex. xxiii. 32, and also in Deut. vii. 2; and the third, "I will not drive them out before you," in Josh, xxiii. 13. The words employed assume that the people addressed had knowledge that Jehovah had said these things. They could doubtless remember having heard the utterance that is found in Joshua; but the passages in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy were uttered before any of the generation addressed by the angel were born. Their source of information, then, must have been the written documents; and from this we are safe in inferring that these three books came from Moses.  

There is just one way to evade the force of this evidence, and that is the one usual with our critics, to deny the reality of the angel's visit and rebuke. In the Polychrome Judges the account is relegated to an author or editor who wrote after the Babylonian exile (p. 3; cf. 46). What motive could have prompted a writer at this date to invent and add this story, is not stated even conjecturally; but the motive which prompts the modern scientific critic to invent this conjectural editor, and to charge him with inventing this story, is quite manifest. As the passage stands, it falsifies the theory of the late origin of the books which it refers to, and it must be gotten rid of at any cost of reason and common sense.  

In view of these quotations from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it may be well in passing to notice De Wette's reckless statement that "the book [Judges] contains no direct reference, or even allusion, to the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua" (quoted by Valpey French, Lex Mosaica, 127). Even G. F. Moore, editor of the Polychrome Judges, admits that the speech ascribed to the angel is "made up of reminiscences from Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua" (51).  

2. The Nazarite Vow. When the angel of Jehovah appeared to the wife of Manoah to announce the birth of Samson, he said to her, "No razor shall come upon his head: for the child shall be a Nazirite unto God from the womb" (xiii. 5). The woman understood this, and so did her husband when it was told to him. But how did they know what a Nazirite was? The word is not found in any earlier portion of the Scriptures, except in the sixth chapter of Numbers, where the law of the Nazirite vow is given. If that law had been given by Moses, all is explained; but, if not, there is no explanation of the fact that Manoah and his wife both knew at once what a Nazirite was. They evidently knew also the connection between being a Nazirite and not having a razor to come upon his head.  

We should naturally suppose that the critics would ascribe this account to some editor who lived after the date which they assign to the Book of Numbers, and thus prevent it from proving the early date of that book. But no, they unitedly ascribe it to J, as one of the traditions which had come down orally through several centuries. Robertson Smith tries to account for it by the custom of ancient peoples burning their hair as a sign of mourning, or as an offering to some god. But this is a palpable failure; for Samson never burnt his hair, but wore it until the treacherous Delilah nit it off; and even then there is no account of its being burned. Professor Briggs argues that Samson could not have been under the Nazirite vow of Numbers, because he handled the jaw-bone of an ass, whereas the Nazirite of Numbers was forbidden to touch anything unclean. But the professor strangely forgets that Samson was not very scrupulous about keeping the law, and even if he had been ever so scrupulous, when more than a thousand Philistines were rushing at him to kill him, and the jaw-bone of an ass was the only weapon in sight, he could not hesitate to use it. If Professor Briggs were a Chinaman, and about as well instructed in American customs as he is in the Scriptures, on reading in a newspaper that an American had drawn from his pocket a pistol and killed his assailant, he would exclaim, That can not be true; for in America it is unlawful for a man to carry a pistol in his pocket! Prof. G. F. Moore, in Polychrome Judges, says that the "stories of Samson," as he styles them, "more clearly than any other tales in the book, bear the marks of popular origin, and doubtless had been repeated by generations of Israelite story-tellers before they were first written down" (p. 82). They doubtless had been repeated in every Jewish household until the time that the hypothetical J is supposed to have lived; and the best way to account for this is that they were written in the Book of Judges so that they could not be forgotten. They have been repeated in every Jewish and every Christian household, to the great delight of the small boy, down to the present day, and they will be until the end of time; and they are so repeated just because they are in a book which is supposed to be truthful. But the question still remains, How did the story-tellers who first began to tell these stories in ancient Israel know anything about the Naririte vow, so as to put both Samson and his mother under its restrictions i If there is any other answer than that they knew it because it had been given by Moses and written in the Book of Numbers, none such worthy of a moment's consideration has yet been discovered by our erudite and industrious critics.(1) If they have not found it yet, when will they? And until they do, all the discredit which they can cast upon the story will never rob it of its proof that the law of the Nazirite was given by Moses, and that the book in which it is written was from his pen. (See Valpey French, Lex Mosaica, 157-160.)  

3. Peace-offerings. After the second battle of the other tribes against the tribe of Benjamin, the former offered burnt offerings and peace-offerings (xx. 26), and they did the same after the last battle (xxi. 4). This was while Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, was still alive (xx. 27), and consequently many persons were still alive who had lived with Moses. Now, the burnt offering is the only one in which the whole flesh of the animal was burned on the altar, while the peace-offering is the one of which none of the flesh was burned. The former had been known since the days of Cain and Abel; but the latter was a creation of the law of Moses. It is first mentioned and partly defined in the Book of Exodus (xxix. 28); it is more fully defined in Leviticus (iii. and vii.); and in Deuteronomy an addition is made to the portion given the priest. The flesh was partly eaten by the offerer and his friends, and partly by the officiating priest, while only the fat, the kidneys and the gall were offered to God on the altar. If the people of Israel actually offered peace-offerings on the two occasions just mentioned, then the law of Moses had already been given, and many who participated on these occasions had personal remembrance of the fact.  

The only way to evade the force of this evidence is the one which is the constant resort of the critics; that is, to deny the facts in the case. The account in Judges is ascribed to "the post-exilic editor or author." As this imaginary personage lived after the Babylonian exile, he had no means of knowing what occurred in the time of the Judges, and consequently lie made up his stories out of unfounded oral traditions. Thus again "historical criticism" makes out its case by the denial of history. Prof. G. F. Moore, in the International Critical Commentary on Judges, says, "In the whole description of the war there is hardly a semblance of reality" (p. 405), and again, "It is not history; it is not legend, but the theocratic ideal of a scribe who had never handled a more dangerous weapon than an imaginative pen" (431).(2)  

4. Micah's Levite Priest. We read in the seventeenth chapter of Judges that there was a man in the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Micah. Micah was a thief. He stole eleven hundred pieces of silver from his mother. If they were shekels, the whole amount was about $600. The old woman, no better than she ought to be, pronounced a curse on the thief; and after this Micah acknowledged that he had the money. He seems to have been so scared by the curse that he made confession and restored the stolen property. Then the old woman dedicated two hundred of the pieces to be made into two silver images to be worshiped as gods. The thief, with an inconsistency that is not without its parallel even in some so-called Christian lands, built a house for his gods, added some teraphim, or wooden images, consecrated one of his sons as a priest, and made him an ephod after the style of a high priest. The author of Judges apologizes for the toleration of such thievery and idolatry, by adding the remark that "there was no king in Israel in those days: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Perhaps, if there had been a king, Micah would not have been punished for stealing from his own mother, and if the king had been such as Jeroboam, who set up the golden calf at Bethel, the sin of idolatry would have been overlooked. The greatest folly in the whole affair is that it was Jehovah, who had forbidden the use of images, whom the thief was proposing to worship. But in this he was no greater fool than Jeroboam and all of his successors on the throne.  

In the course of time a young Levite visited Micah'a house. He was a descendant of Moses (xviii. 30) ; but he was a tramp; for when Micah asked him whence he came, he answered, "I aim a Levite of Bethlehem-Judah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place." Micah offers him the very place he was hunting for, by saying, "Dwell with me, and be unto me a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten pieces of silver, by the year, and a suit of apparel, and thy victuals." Like a fool and the lazy vagrant that he was, the Levite accepted the offer; and then Micah, like another fool, said, "Now I know that Jehovah will do me good, seeing I have a Levite for my priest." The Levite afterward turned out to be a greater rascal than Micah; for at the request of six hundred unscrupulous Danites who passed that way, he pretended to give au answer from Jehovah as to the success of the marauding expedition on which they had embarked, and then, at their suggestion, ho stole his master's gods and went away to be a priest for this new set of outlaws.  

This story is told by the author of Judges for the evident purpose of showing the recklessness and daring of some hypocrites in those lawless days; but it is valuable in showing the pre-existence of the very law which Micah, the Levite and the Danites were all trampling under their feet. How could Micah have known anything about the ephod, except from the Levitical law in which this robe of the priest is described? And how could he have thought that a Levite, renegade as he was, could be more acceptable to Jehovah as a priest than his own son, except by having learned from the same law that the Levites were next in official rank to the real priests, the sons of Aaron? These questions can not be answered by our modern scientific critics without again denying the facts of history. Driver, it is true, does not go this far; he says that "chapters xvii. and xviii. introduce to us an archaic state of Israelitish life;" but whether the account is true or not, he does not affirm. He also most strangely says that no "disapproval of what Micah had instituted appears to be entertained" (Int., 168)—as if an author, in giving an account of a transaction involving theft, idolatry and treachery, must be careful to express his disapproval of such rascality to free himself from the suspicion of approving it. Professor Moore (Com. on Judges, in loco) cites the name of a long list of rationalistic critics who hold that the ephod made of gold by Gideon (Judg. viii. 27) was an image, with the apparent purpose of intimating, though he does not affirm it, that Micah's was also an image; but the absurdity of this is sufficiently apparent from the fact that both Samuel in his childhood, and David, when dancing before the ark, wore ephods (I. Sam. ii. 18; II. Sam. vi. 14) and from the fact that throughout the whole of the Old Testament the word elsewhere means a priestly garment. True, Gideon's was made of the gold presented to him out of the spoil of the Midianites; but it was just as easy to make a garment by weaving threads of gold, as to make an imago of gold by melting and molding it; and the former would require less of the precious metal in proportion to the size of the article made. It was as easy, too, to worship the garment as the image. This is but a blind and staggering effort to get rid of the fact that the Levitical law, which prescribed the ephod as the distinguishing garment of the high priest was already in existence and well known in the days of Micah.  

As to the Levite, Professor Bennett, in Polychrome Judges (in loco), echoes the voice of many critics when he says:  

Levite must here denote his calling, not his extraction; he was a professional priest, though of the clan of Judah, just as the Ephraimite Samuel was brought up as a priest at Shiloh. The relation of the Levite priests to the old tribe of Levi is obscure.  

It must be; and why? No reason is given, but the real one is on the surface. The word "Levite" must mean the man's profession; for if it 'means that he belonged to the tribe of Levi, then the critical theory about the Levites and their appointed service breaks down. And how profound the remark that "the relation of the Levite priests to the old tribe of Levi is obscure"! Why not say the same about the relation of the Benjamites to the old tribe of Benjamin, of the Ephraimites to the old tribe of Ephraim? Does it not appear as if these scholars bade farewell to candor when they embarked upon the sea of critical conjecture and discovery?

1. "Kuenen says: "The Nazarite vow is regulated by law in the Pentateuch. But the practice itself is much older than this law, especially the Nazariteship for life, of which we have the first example in Samuel" (Rel. of Israel, I. 316). The first of these assertions can be made only by assuming that the law was given later than the time of Samuel; the second, only by denying the account of Samson; and in all there is a failure to account for the origin of the vow. A history of the religion of Israel which fails to account for this remarkable feature of it shows by the very fact that it is not derived from authentic sources. The real sources it rejects.

2. For the purpose of discrediting the account of this war, Driver asserts: "The figures are incredibly large: Deborah (v. 8) places the number of warriors in entire Israel at not more than 40,000" (Int., 168). He is aiming to follow Wellhausen, but he runs ahead of him, for Wellhausen puts it this way: "The Israelites were strangely helpless; it was as if neither shield nor spear could be found among their 40,000 fighting men." But both of these scholars Inexcusably pervert the meaning of Deborah's remark. She does not say or intimate that Israel had only 40,000 fighting men; but she simply raises the question whether there was a shield or spear among 40,000 in Israel. Her words are:  

"They chose new gods:  

Then was war in the gates:  

Was there a shield or a spear seen  

Among forty thousand in Israel?"  

One shield or spear to every 40,000 is her obvious meaning, and she has no thought of giving the whole number of warriors.