VIEWS AND REVIEWS
THE EARLY RELIGION OF ISRAEL*
The author of the article upon David, in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, expressed therein his firm belief in a certain theory as to the authorship of the Psalms. When the volume P and the article on the Psalms themselves—by the same author—appeared, it was found that during the course of the publication of the volumes from the fourth to the sixteenth letter, his views had changed entirely, and he now was firmly convinced of the truth of a new theory as to the authorship of the Songs of David. Probably another opportunity to contribute to a later volume on the same subject would have proved that he had altered his firm views again. Meanwhile, placid old Jews in the basement of the schul continue to associate the true-hearted, if not impeccant monarch, with the intensely personal songs that bear his name.
Prof. Lewis B. Paton, of the Hartford Theological Seminary, presents in a new volume of the Modern Religious Problems Series an attractive account of the results of the investigations of recent scholarship into the early history of the Jews. He tells what the comparative religionists think of the religion of the Jews in the primitive period and in the patriarchal period. He summarizes the results of higher criticism on the Mosaic period and on the periods of the Canaan conquest and of the early monarchy. At the conclusion of his little treatise Israel is still the nation, not of montheism, but of monolatry—the worship, not of the one God, but of one god among many. The development of true montheism he leaves to be taken up in a later volume. I have called the account attractive, but one feels the interest to be much like that of a novel, or like that of Goethe's autobiog-
*The Early Religion of Israel. Lewis B. Paton. Pp. 115. $150 net. Houghton, Mifflin Co.
raphy, a judicious mixture of truth and fiction, of guess and fact. The faithful labors of many scholars in the reconstruction of biblical history are not to be minimized, but the results are so often unreal- istic, so often adhered to because they are new, rather than because they are true. Especially must one use with caution the fundamental principle of comparative religion and philology, that what occur- among several allied tribes or races, or among several written documents of various periods, must have characterized the original unit from which all sprung. The danger lies in the negative application of this law. Thus Dr. Paton assumes that "only laws that appear in two or more recensions can have stood in the original Book of the Covenant" (page 48). He concludes from this that the sixth, seventh and eighth commandments are results of a later development in Canaan of the ninth commandment. Another instance of this fallacious negative assumption is to be found in the following passage (page 76- 7)—the italics are mine:
"In similar fashion Sheol, the abode of the dead, was regarded as lying outside of Yahweh's authority. In the narrative of J it is not mentioned along with 'earth and heaven' as created by him, and nowhere in the Old Testament is its creation referred to. It also was a foreign land presided over by its own god, the spirits of the dead."
What Dr. Paton asserts may be very true, but logically speaking, he has been attempting to prove a universal negative.
Nevertheless, his narrative is valuable as a pophlar account of what has been accomplished in the realm of higher criticism. Everywhere are interesting explanations of this or that custom or observance—the Sabbath, the covering of the head, the origin of the Kenites, the holy "high places," and so on. Dr. Paton, among other things, reiterates the now old theory that the forbidden animals were originally "totems" of the Jews, and, ac-