•The Co THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON. CHICAGO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON. BOMBAY CALCUTTA THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO THE MODERN READER'S BIBLE THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE WITH THREE BOOKS OF THE APOCRYPHA PRESENTED IN MODERN LITERARY FORM EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES, BY RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A. (CAMB.), PH.D. (PENN.) PROFESSOR OF LITERARY THEORY AND INTERPRETATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1907 All rights reserved Bi 66,91575 NARVARD COLLEGE COPYRIGHT, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1907, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907. Reprinted December, 1907. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. PREFACE THE Bible is its own best interpreter. When however we approach the practical application of this sound principle, we are met by an obstacle of an unusual kind. We are all agreed to speak of the Bible as a supremely great literature. Yet, when we open our ordinary versions, we look in vain for the lyrics, epics, dramas, essays, sonnets, treatises, which make the other great literatures of the world; instead of these the eye catches nothing but a monotonous uniformity of numbered sentences, more suggestive of an itemised legal instrument than of what we understand as literature. Now it is clear that this strange form of our bibles was not given to them by the sacred writers themselves. The Bible goes back to a remote antiquity, when literature indeed was at its highest development, but when there was no corresponding development in the art of writing such as would enable manuscripts to reflect differences of literary form. The most ancient manuscripts are unable to distinguish verse and prose; in prose they make no distinctions of sentences, still less of paragraphs; in verse they have no distinctions of metre, nor can they discriminate speeches in drama or suggest the names of speakers. Many of them have not even divisions of words; and as a whole they are as barren of form as a stenographer's note book. Not then the original authors of the books of Scripture, but their successors at the time when manuscripts began to discriminate literary form, must be held responsible for the arrangement of our bibles. Now those who intervene between ourselves and the sacred authors-scribes, rabbis, mediæval doctors may all be summed up under the one description of commentators. They have rendered infinite service to the world by the care with which they have preserved the words of Scripture; but its literary character would have been the last thing they would have considered. When therefore the advance in the art of writing enabled manuscripts to distinguish varieties of literature, the form these commentators gave to Scripture was, naturally, that of 'texts' for comment. And in this mediæval form of numbered texts the Bible has come down to our own day. I instance a very simple passage: more adequate illustrations would be too long to cite. Such a passage as Hosea, chapter xiv, verses 5-8, would in |