imparted through life; and therefore in them all we can discover that inspiration which is more than instruction. It is a mistake to think, as men of the Puritan temperament have sometimes seemed to think, that all life comes through the intellect, and that we must understand before we can receive. A great deal comes through the sympathies, the emotions, the imagination, and through these the writer of fiction often addresses himself to us more effectively than either the historian, the philosopher, or the moralist. A single illustration taken from the Book of Judges will serve to demonstrate to the more conservative reader that there is some fiction in the Old Testament. It is the parable of the trees, and reads as follows: "The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive-tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said to the fig-tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon." 1 No one will doubt that this is fiction. And yet it would be quite as possible for God to make a tree that could talk as an ass that could talk, or a big fish that could swallow a man and a man that could live three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish. There is no question of possible or impossible with God. Our question always must be, not what God can do, but what it is reasonable to believe that he has done. We believe that this parable of the trees is fiction, because it has the qualities of fiction, because it is more reasonable to suppose that the author invented the story to serve as the vehicle of a moral, than to suppose that God created talking trees and brought them together in a quasi-political convention for that purpose. This parable, therefore, not only illustrates the truth that there is fiction in the Old Testament, but it indicates the method by which we are to determine what is fiction and what is history. All readers recognize that the parables in the Bible are fiction; many of them are less ready to recognize its folk-lore.2 By folk-lore I mean the 1 Judges ix. 8-15. 2 Mrs. L. S. Houghton has recently published in the N. Y. Evangelist an admirable series of Studies in the Old Testament which, doubtless, will be republished in book form. Two of them are devoted to "Folk Lore in the Old Testament." Folk lore she defines as 66 the narrative of events passed along from lip to lip down through the ages." As illustrations of such stories, of which the inspired writers have made use, she specifies Joshua's stories which mothers tell their children, and which pass from generation to generation, sometimes in later history printed, sometimes never reduced to print; all peoples have such folk-lore, and the Hebrew people had theirs. Such were some of the stories subsequently incorporated in the Book of Genesis; such some of the tales respecting Elisha; such, probably, the account of the boyhood exploits of King David; such, certainly, the story of Samson. Samson lived in the colonial days of Israel, when there was no king, and every man did what was right in his own eyes. His birth was heralded by an angelic messenger; he was consecrated to the life of a Nazarite from his cradle by his mother; he drank no wine, ate no grapes, suffered the locks of his hair to go uncut, and in his youth gave token of that extraordinary strength which has since rendered his name proverbial. We first meet this Hebrew unheroic hero on his way to Timnath. A Philistine maiden has captured his fancy by her beauty, and, despite the law, the protests of his parents, the mission to which he is called by God as deliverer of his people, to Timnath he will go. The Philistine maiden plays the coquette with him, cajoles him out of his secret, and tells to his Philistine guests the answer staying of the sun and moon, the story of Samson, certain of the Elijah and Elisha stories, certain of the narratives in Genesis which the element of folk lore enters into and modifies, and many other of the Biblical narratives. to the riddle which he has proposed. To pay his wager of thirty changes of raiment he goes alone across the country and takes the raiment from a Philistine city; but his pride is wounded by the deceit which has been practiced upon him, and when the Philistine coquette marries one of the guests who had come to his betrothal, he catches three hundred jackals,1 ties them together two by two by the tails, fastens a firebrand to each pair, and lets them loose in the harvest season to set fire to the Philistines' standing wheat. Then, when the Philistines, with singular injustice, visit their wrath on the bride and her father, putting her to death, Samson, with characteristic fickleness, smites them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. We next find him in the hands of more formidable foes. When the Philistines come up to avenge their wrongs on the nation which shelters Samson, and the Israelites deliver him 1 "Many interpreters, reflecting that the solitary habits of the fox would make it very difficult to catch such a number, and that Samson's great strength would be of no avail in such an undertaking, suppose that the author meant jackals, which roam in packs, and could easily, it is said, be caught by the hundred. That the Hebrew name may have included jackals as well as foxes is quite possible; the Arabs are said in some places to confound the jackal with the fox, and in the modern Egyptian dialect the classical name of the fox is given exclusively to the jackal. The decision of the question is of importance only to those who take the story as a veracious account of an actual occurrence. They should consider, however, whether the author would thank them for their attempts to make Samson's wonderful performance easy." Judges: in the International Critical Commentary, by George Foot Moore, p. 341. bound into their hands, he submits without opposition, only to break the cords which bind him, leap upon his would-be captors with a shout, and slay a thousand of them with his own hands, with no other weapon than the jaw-bone of an ass, and afterwards celebrates his exploit with a running couplet :- "With the jaw-bone of an ass, I assailed my assailants; Have I slain a thousand men.' Twenty years later we meet him in Gaza, a Philistine city, whither, still yielding himself a slave to his unbridled self-will and self-indulgent spirit, he has gone in pursuit of a Philistine woman. The Philistines close the gates and set a watch to catch him at the dawn. At midnight he goes out, takes the gates and posts upon his back and carries them off, in scornful disdain of their boasted strength. Such a man, weak in the conceit of his own strength, never learns life's lessons. He falls in with another Philistine woman, sets his heart upon her, and, with a folly for which there is no palliation, walks open-eyed into the trap the treacherous Delilah has set for him. She undertakes to get from him the secret of his superhuman strength. Three times he mocks her with lying answers; three times discovers her treachery, and, despite it all, at last 1 Judges xv. 16. There is a play upon the Hebrew word which means both ass and heap that cannot be imitated in the English; as though he had said, "With the jaw-bone of an ass, asses on asses, have I slain a thousand men." |