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The Fundamentals the ten commandments were composed in the time of Manas- seh. No! the more moderate writers say that Moses is a historical character. I t was in Midian that he learned about Jah, the tribal god of the Kenites ; and he determined with this divinity to liberate his people. Elijah is simply a myth; or he was some unfortunate prophet who had perhaps been struck by lightning. And so, too, this modem criticism knows for sure that it was not Solomon, but a wholly unknown king, living after the time of Ezra, who wrote Ecclesiastes ; also that there never was a Daniel, but that again some unknown author wrote the book bearing that name. Moreover, Kautsch tells us that this book first made its appearance in January, 164 B. G, while other critics are positive that it was in 165. Query : Why could not that unknown author have been named Daniel ? So also Wellhausen knows of twenty-two different au thors—all of them, to be sure, unknown—for the books of Moses, while Kuenen is satisfied with sixteen. The noted English critic, Canon Cheyne, is said to have taken great pains to tear the book of Isaiah’s prophecies into one hundred and sixty pieces, all by unknown writers; which pieces were scattered through ten different epochs including four a n i a half centuries ( “Modern Puritan,” 1907, p. 400). Likewise this critic knows that the first chapter of 1 Samuel originated with an unknown writer living some five hundred years after the time of that prophet; also that Hannah’s glory-song, as found m 2 Kings, was written by. some other “unknown.” That EH ruled over Israel for forty years is, “in all likeli hood,” the unauthentic statement of a later day (Hastings’ Bible Dictionary). Why so? we may ask.—The book of Deuteronomy was written, we are told, in 561 B. C., and Ecclesiastes in 264 B. C. ; and a German critic, Budde, is certain that the book of Job has somehow lost its last chapter, and that fifty-nine verses of this book should be wholly ex punged.
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