Dr. Williams on Daniel.

23

crepancies which exist among them in this and other respects show how uncertain is the ground on which they stand. De Wette, in his fourth edition, gave up his earlier doubts, and has admitted the genuineness of the whole; and Hävernick has subjected the reasons of the objectors to a scrutiny which has left none of them standing.* In fact, to those who are not infected with Dr. Williams's love for a vicious circle, there is not one of them that will have the least weight. As he has not chosen to state any of them, we do not feel called on to dwell longer on the subject.

As may be expected, the book of Daniel does not escape Dr. Williams's destructive criticism.' His objections against it, however, are of the weakest. He says:

and

'Not only Macedonian words, such as symphonia and psanterion, but the texture of the Chaldaic, with such late forms as 1, the pronominal and having passed into, and not only minute descriptions of Antiochus's reign, but the stoppage of such description at the precise date, 169 B.C., remove all philological and critical doubt as to the age of the book.' (p. 76.)

After the copious answers which have been given to such of these cavils as are not peculiar to Dr. Williams by Hengstenberg and others, it is really provoking to find them coolly restated in this way as if they were of acknowledged validity. Confining ourselves to Dr. Williams, we ask, How does he know that it was impossible for such words as symphonia and psanterion to be in use in Babylon in the days of Nebuchadnezzar ? For aught he can tell the name may have travelled with the instrument from Greece long before. As respects the texture of the Chaldaic' of Daniel, it happens to be exactly the same as that of the Chaldaic of Ezra, and, therefore, so far a proof for, and not against, the authenticity of the book. What Dr. Williams intends by the instances he has given we do not understand; not one of them has any relevancy that we can see., which is the regular form of the demonstrative pronoun, does not occur in Daniel at all, except in the feminine; is the regular form of the suffix of the second personal pronoun masculine, with the preposition prefixed; occurs only once (Dan. vi. 7), and is obviously a curt form of which Daniel elsewhere uses, and which is not a later form. As to the pronominal passing into, the process, as it happens (if there was any process), was just the reverse, the in later forms passing into D. Blundering Einleitung, ii. 2, p. 411 ff.

*

Fro 13, in Esra et posterioribus paraphrastis etiam est ), DIM, &c.'-Buxtorf, Gram. Chald. et Syr. p. 39.

like this in a Hebrew professor is really shameful. As respects the chronological objections in the above extract, they rest, of course, on the mere assumption that Daniel's book is a history of past, and not a prediction of future events. Into this question we cannot further enter here, but must refer our readers to the works of Hengstenberg, Hävernick, Auberlen, and others.*

Passing over what Dr. Williams has said of the New Testament books as of little importance, we proceed to the next department of our examination of his paper.

III. From what we have already advanced, our readers will see that our impression of Dr. Williams's scholarship is not very exalted. We are now entering on a department where we shall have still further occasion to show that for this impression we have only too good cause. We cannot stop to examine every specimen of his exegetical powers which he has given us here; nor indeed shall we do more than simply glance at the greater part of them.

Dr. Williams applauds Bunsen's translation of by The Eternal; he says that Hebrew idiom convinced even Jerome the true meaning [of Ps. ii. 12] was worship purely,' and not Kiss the Son, a statement which is not true as respects Jerome,† and which pronounces in favour of a rendering which no Hebraist of any note has deemed tolerable; he prefers the reading 'like a lion,' in Ps. xxii. 17, in place of they pierced,' but gives us no hint how we are to make sense of such a collocation of words as 'like a lion my hands and my feet;' he thinks, however, the whole passage would be improved by changing dogs' in the first

Hengstenberg, Beiträge zur Einleit, ins A. T. Bd. I. Die Authentie des Daniel, &c.; Hävernick, Commentar ueb. d. Buch Daniel; Auberlen, Der Pr. Daniel und Die Offenbarung Johannis, &c. Basel, 1854. The first and third of these works have appeared in English.

+ Dr. Williams quotes as from Jerome the following words: Cavillatur. quod posuerim. Adorate pure, ne violentus viderer interpres et Jud. locum darem.' This sentence Dr. Williams has in a great measure made for Jerome; it is only partially in Jerome's own words. The latter expressly says that he prefers the rendering Adore the Son,' and had so given it in his Commentaries, where he could explain his reasons; but in his translation of the Psalter he had introduced' worship purely' because the word is ambiguous, and he did not wish, by seeming to put a Christian sense on the passage, to expose himself to the calumny of the Jews; ne violentus viderer interpres et Judaicæ calumniæ locum darem.'-Ep. cont. Ruffinum, c. 19. Not a word about Hebrew idiom here!

Rosenmüller, Gesenius, De Wette, Winer, Maurer, Hengstenberg, Lee, Ewald, Olshausen, &c., all reject it. The last named, though predisposed to favour such a rendering, says of it peremptorily, 'Dazu fehlt es an Belegen,' there is no authority for it. (Kurzgef, Exeg. Hdbuch, zum A. T. 14th part in loc.) And yet these men, we take it, knew and know something of Hebrew idiom.

Are the Prophecies predictive?

25 clause into 'like lions' by a morally certain emendation ;'* he asserts that the words translated 'mighty God' (Is. ix. 6), perhaps mean onlyStrong and Mighty One,' without telling us how it comes to pass that el should here alone in all Hebrew books be translated One.' Let these suffice as specimens of Dr. Williams's competency, as tried by his own criterion, to meddle with such questions as he has here undertaken to discuss. We pass on to advert for a little to his views of Old Testament prophecy.

What these are it is not easy with precision to ascertain. This much is certain, that he rejects all prediction from his concept of prophecy, and that he denies the existence of all direct Messianic prophecy in any sense. He faintly excepts from this sweeping condemnation some passages that may be doubtful, one perhaps ‘in Zechariah and one in Isaiah, capable of being made directly ‘Messianic, and a chapter possibly in Deuteronomy, foreshadowing 'the final fall of Jerusalem;' but he tells us that these few 'cases . . . . tend to melt, if they are not already melted, in the 'crucible of searching inquiry.' What, then, remains? Williams answers thus :

Dr.

'Great is Baron Bunsen's merit in accepting frankly the belief of scholars, and yet not despairing of Hebrew prophecy as a witness to the kingdom of God. The way of doing so left open to him, was to show, pervading the prophets, those deep truths which lie at the heart of Christianity, and to trace the growth of such ideas, the belief in a righteous God, and the nearness of man to God, the power of prayer, and the victory of self-sacrificing patience, ever expanding in men's hearts, until the fulness of the time came, and the ideal of the Divine thought was fulfilled in the Son of Man.' (p. 70.)

Now, on these statements we would observe-1st, that, pending the melting process, which he tells us is going on, we hold Dr. Williams to the admission that a few passages in the Old Testament are of a directly predictive character. This, as indeed he seems to feel, is an admission fatal to his whole position in

We should like to see the .כלבים for כלביאים By reading,' says he

face of Ewald or Rödiger, when told that the Vice-Principal of an English college and a professor of Hebrew had proposed such an emendation., Why, there is no such word as in the language. There is a noun, but as it happens to be used only for the female animal, the plural would, in all probability, not end in D, but in ; but even this does not occur, the word being used only in the singular. Suppose it were proposed to emend a Latin classic by reading such a plural as ferri from ferrum, or tellura from tellus, what would be thought of the scholarship of the proposer? And then to propose to amend the sacred text on the ground of 'moral certainty,' in the face of all authority, from MSS. versions and quotations! What would Tischendorf say to this?

reference to ancient prophecy. It will not do for him to say that 'it avails little' that such passages are found; it does not avail little on the contrary, it is of such avail, that it invalidates his entire argument against the predictive character of the prophetic parts of the Old Testament. For that argument rests on the position that the power of predicting future events is a natural impossibility; a position which is, of course, overturned by one instance of prediction as decidedly as by a thousand. Admit the existence of one direct prediction in Scripture, and so far as natural possibility is concerned, you admit what will cover any multitude of such predictions. What has been done once is no natural impossibility, and may be repeated indefinitely. Until, then, Dr. Williams can come forward and assure us that the melting process which is to reduce these predictions is completed, we must hold these few passages as fatal to the induction he would have us to make.

2. When Dr. Williams applauds Bunsen for showing that those deep truths which lie at the heart of Christianity pervade the prophets, he seems to us to admit in principle all that the most zealous advocate of the evangelical character of the prophecies would contend for. For ourselves, we ask nothing more than this; let us find these truths pervading the prophets, and we are content; we ask no deeper or more essential connexion between the Old and New Testaments. The question, however, still remains, what are the truths that lie at the heart of Christianity? and here Dr. Williams and evangelical Christians will be widely at variance. But if Dr. Williams thinks it a great merit in Bunsen that he finds his notion of Christianity pervading the prophets, he fully justifies the principle on which orthodox inquirers proceed when they seek to find in these writers a sympathy with, and a pre-intimation of, Christianity as they find it in the New Testament.

When Dr. Williams says, 'We must not distort the prophets 'to prove the Divine Word incarnate, and then from the incarnation reason back to the sense of prophecy,' he lays down a canon of interpretation which is quite sound. It is one, however, which applies as much to those who deny the incarnation. and atonement of our Saviour, and find only moral truths in the New Testament, as to those who believe in these facts, and the system of truth that stands connected with them. In neither case is it lawful to distort the prophets to prove a New Testament doctrine, and then reason back from that doctrine to the sense of the prophets. We must further remark, that, whatever specimens of this circular method of ratiocination may be found in the

Messianic Passages.

27

writings of Dr. Williams and his school, it is a method wholly discountenanced and abjured by those whom he aims here at censuring. Errors they may fall into, a favourite object they may pursue beyond legitimate bounds, fanciful and untenable explanations of passages they may sometimes give; but they are unjustly charged as a class, if charged with following any such process as Dr. Williams here condemns. Their recognised procedure is this. Perceiving that the Old Testament is pervaded with the idea of a great deliverer and king, who is to reign over and to bless the world, they set themselves, under the guidance of certain criteria beforehand established, to determine what parts of the ancient Scriptures refer directly to Him; and having determined this, they seek by the application of a sound exegesis to ascertain what these passages declare concerning Him. They thus obtain certain criteria by which the pretensions of any one aspiring to be this promised deliverer and prince may be judged; and finding that all these are fully satisfied in Jesus who appeared claiming to be the Messiah, they obtain a preliminary proof that it is of Him that the ancient Scriptures speak in these passages. When, further, they find Him and his Apostles asserting that the prophets gave testimony concerning Him, and grounding his claims, as submitted to the Jews, on that, they perceive that they can be Christians only through the admission of this; and hence they conclude that what they believe as Christians must be in harmony with what the ancient prophets attested concerning Christ. They are thus led to revise their readings of the prophecies of the old covenant, and to interpret them in the light of New Testament revelation, not for the purpose of forcing on them a meaning they will not bear, but, as with a more perfect key, that fits into all the wards, to open every recess and drawer of that ancient cabinet, so as to draw out its hidden treasures. Such is the process by which all sound interpreters seek to explore the full meaning of the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament; what there is in it that is illegitimate or contrary to a sound inductive method, we cannot perceive.

3. That some of the Messianic prophecies should be found to rest on, or spring out of, actual historical phenomena in the age of the prophets, and that all of them should set forth great permanent truths of a moral and spiritual kind, can form no objection to their being also regarded as predictive. The latter could hardly but be the case where the object of prediction was the establishment of a perfect system of religious truth; indeed, we cannot see how otherwise the advent of the kingdom of God