Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 48:192 (Oct 1891)
Article: A Canonical Formula Introducing Certain Historical Books Of The Old Testament
Author: J. A. Paine

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 652

A Canonical Formula Introducing Certain Historical Books Of The Old Testament

Prof. J. A. Paine

MANY supposed biblical errors have been shown, within the last quarter of a century, to be unreal by discoveries in Oriental archaeology and geography, by the study of contemporary histories, and by progress of scholarship in comparative philology and the Semitic languages. So many have thus been removed that we may reasonably expect others to disappear as rapidly as ever the light breaks in and as soon as ever we are willing to accept its revelations.

It will be clear, I hope to all, that my object in this paper is modestly and reverently to try to clear up two such apparent “errors” in the Scriptures which no one, as yet, has been able to explain away; and I unhesitatingly presume to hold the theory that they were not in the original text—also this, so far from being sheer assumption upon which no mind can rest with certainty, seems to me to be not “theory” at all, but a patent unquestionable matter of fact in no way unlike others we are encountering all the time in biographical and historical compositions, where the author’s introduction of documentary matter is manifestly distinct, and is recognized as such by the reader instantly and without dispute.

The first of these alleged “errors” occurs in the opening words of Judges (1:1):—

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 653

“Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children of Israel asked of the Lord, saying, Who shall go up for us first against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” followed, as it is, by an account of the war upon and the slaughter of the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Anakim of Hebron, the inhabitants of Debir, the people of Zephath, Jerusalem as divided from Jebus, Bethel, and so on—the whole of Southern Palestine with the exception of a single ‘emeq. Here the “error” lies in two particulars.

One element of discrepancy is geographical. Already, during the campaign against the Five Kings, we have been told, in Joshua 10, how Joshua had smitten the kings of Jerusalem and of Hebron, had attacked Hebron and Debir, taken them, slain them at the edge of the sword,—that is to say, all the souls that were therein, and all the cities thereof; and besides these: —

“All the country of the Mountain, and of the Negeb, and of the Shephelah, and of the Springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon. And all these kings and t...