By Rev. A. F. MACKAY, M.A., Inverness.
THE Bible, in itself, possesses its own authority for belief in its integrity which is considered by the believer to be sufficient. Nevertheless, Archaeology has uncovered from time to time valuable evidence which supports, sometimes in a very striking way, the belief that the books of the Bible are what they claim to be, of divine origin. In recent months a discovery of unusual interest has been reported from the East which is likely to prove to be the most important made for many years in the study of Old Testament documents. Over a year ago some Arabs happened unexpectedly to come across a number of earthenware jars in a cave on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. These jars were wrapped up in linen and covered over with black wax to preserve the contents from damage. When the jars were opened they were found to contain several Hebrew manuscripts, obviously of very ancient date. Many of these manuscripts found their way into the hands of the priests of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark’s in Jerusalem and eventually about the end of last February two members of this community brought four of the manuscripts, two of which were written in parchment and the other two in leather, to the American School of Oriental Research to have them submitted to expert examination. One of the manuscripts was identified as a copy of the Book of Isaiah which the Director of the school pronounced to belong to the first century B.C. A photographic copy of the manuscript was taken and sent to the John Hopkins University of America, where Professor Wm. F. Albright has been carrying out valuable researches into the ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament.
Already there is known to exist a very small fragment of a Hebrew MS. which was discovered some years ago comprising part of the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy including the Ten Commandments. This ancient Hebrew fragment, known as the Nash Papyrus MS., has been judged by scholars from the peculiar type of script in which it is written and other marked characteristics to be of the first century B.C. When Prof. Albright, to whom this fragment was familiar, examined the script of the MS. of Isaiah and compared it with the Nash Papyrus MS. he decided that it was even more ancient, not later at least than the second century B.C. This is an amazing discovery. The oldest known M.S. of Isaiah is a copy made in the ninth century A.D. which, of course, reproduces a text of very much older date. This newly discovered manuscript, however, which contains the complete uniform text of the whole 66 chapters of Isaiah is more than 1000 years older and becomes the oldest known copy of any part of the Old Testament Scriptures now in existence.
The effect that this discovery will have upon the many critical questions about the composition of Isaiah is likely to be very great. As is well known, hostile critics of the Bible reject the view that the book of Isaiah is the work of one author and regard it as a compilation of several separate writings gathered together over many centuries into one book. They divide the book of Isaiah into two main sections, chapters 1-39, and 40 to the end of chapter 66. The first section dealing with the events that fall within the writer’s own lifetime—usually regarded as the latter half of the 8th century B.C.—they allow to be the work of Isaiah, the son of Amos, with the exception of some chapters on prophecy such as chapters 13, 14 and 20 which for some unexplained reason have found their way into this part of the book. The second section is the main subject of assault by the higher critics who say that this is the work of an unknown writer, for convenience sake called Deutero-Isaiah or The Second Isaiah. He is supposed to have imbibed the spirit and carried on the traditional work of Isaiah, writing some two centuries later. This section itself is further broken up and some critics hold that some of the concluding chapters are themselves appendices, added by a very much later hand; the school of Duhm and Cheyne, for example, place them as late as 180 to 150 B.C. These conclusions, of course, are merely conjectural, based on the study of supposed internal evidence such as literary style, etc., and are advanced by rationalistic critics in order to satisfy the theory which discounts every supernatural, prophetic or spiritual element in Scriptures. The Book of Isaiah would thus be reduced to little more than a political treatise compiled by contemporary writers, mostly unknown.
Destructive criticism of this drastic kind which relies entirely upon internal evidence of the books of the Bible, unless confirmed or corrected by external evidence, is of very little value. Such methods leave room for the exercise of prejudice or personal prepossessions or even unbelief. The Science of Archaeology, which was not in existence when the German Higher Critical Schools of Kuenen, Graf, and later Wellhausen were weaving their destructive critical theories about the origin and composition of the Books of the Old Testament, has made extraordinary progress in the present century and can now successfully challenge many of the main conclusions of the Higher Criticism. In his Reminiscences, published shortly before his death in 1923, Prof. Sayce, the eminent Assyriologist of Oxford University, himself in early life an outstanding advocate of the new theories till the discovery of the Tel El-Amarna tablets, for the deciphering of which he was mainly responsible, altered his views, confessed that he had come to the decision that “the merely subjective criticism of ancient literary documents was a worthless pastime.”
This newly discovered manuscript is still under investigation and the full results have not yet been published. Enough is clear, however, to show that the theory of the late date of the concluding part of Isaiah must be immediately abandoned as an absurd assumption, and it is going to become increasingly difficult for Higher Critics to maintain the rest of their destructive theories about the Book of Isaiah.