destructive critics.
Although these critical writings are full of high-sounding technical discussions about vocabulary and style, the real underlying presuppositions of such writers are as follows:
1 Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, because writing was unknown in his day (and, if Moses' books had to be moved to a late date, the others, that accepted Moses' authorship, had to be moved to still later dates).
2 The evolutionary theory of man's cultural developments precluded attainment of high civilizations and literary abilities as early in Israel's history as the Bible indicated.
3 The miracle stories of Genesis, Exodus, Kings, Jonah, etc., were derived from ancient mythologies. This must be so, since miracles are impossible scientifically.
4 Fulfilled prophecy is also a miracle, and therefore impossible.
But all these presuppositions are false! In recent decades, many archaeological discoveries have confirmed that writing was very common, even among tradesmen and housewives, before even the time of Abraham. The boyhood home of the latter, Ur of the Chaldees, for example, has yielded thousands of stone volumes from its excavated library. Similarly, a great collection of business documents was unearthed at Nuzi, a city of the Horites, from the time of Abraham. The Ras Shamra tablets are examples of alphabetic cuneiform writing in the days of Moses. The Tel-el-Amarna letters have also shown widespread use of cuneiform writing at that time.
What is true of writing is also true of civilizations and literature. Even if evolution had been proved true (and exactly the opposite is the case), it certainly had attained a high state of culture long before Moses. More evidence comes in almost daily of an advanced state of technology in very ancient times, not only in Bible lands, but even in western Europe, America, the far East, and other areas.
As far as miracles and fulfilled prophecies are concerned, a bias against miracles and prophecy is, of course, a bias against God. To say miracles are impossible is atheism. The idea that the biblical miracles were derived from similar tales in other nations is pure assumption. Many such similarities (e.g., legends of the great Flood, the long day, etc.) are best accounted for as dim recollections of real events, the records of which are preserved accurately only in the Bible. Every one of the more local Bible miracles is very credible, in terms of both testimony and divine purpose, and there is no reason to reject any of them.
The higher critics deal at great length with details of grammar, vocabulary, and style, but none of these speculations can offset the universal testimony of the Jews and the Early Church, and especially that of Christ himself, that the writings are authentic. As far as style is concerned, it is pure presumption to think that one can distinguish different authors merely by their styles. The style and vocabulary of a single writer may and do vary widely from one book to another, depending on the subject being discussed and the purpose of writing. The style and vocabulary of the present writer's engineering publications, for example, are very different from those of this book, but they both have the same author!
With respect to the Book of Genesis, however, it is probable that differences in style and vocabulary actually are partly attributable to different writers. These are not the mysterious J, E, P, and D, however, but Adam, Noah, Shem, and the other patriarchs. The divisions of Genesis are marked off by the phrase "these are the generations of (author)." It is quite possible that these sections were thus originally written on tablets of stone by the patriarchal eyewitnesses themselves, handed down, and then finally compiled and edited by Moses.
Discussions of details of grammar and vocabulary are beyond the scope of our present purpose. It should be noted, however, that all such critical speculations have been thoroughly answered and refuted by conservative Bible scholars. The fact that these refutations have been completely ignored by liberals means only that such critics are either too lazy or too arrogant to read them, for they are unanswerable.
One such scholar was Dr. Robert Dick Wilson, long-time professor of Semitic philology at Princeton Seminary. Dr. Wilson was proficient in some 45 languages and dialects, and was probably more intimately familiar with the Hebrew Old Testament than any man of his generation. He died in 1930 after 50 years of continuous scholarly contributions to the study of the Old Testament. His devastating critiques of the higher criticism in all its details have never been answered.
Wilson was not alone. Numerous other conservative Old Testament authorities — men such as W.H. Green, A.H. Finn, James Orr, Oswald Allis, Melvin G. Kyle, Edward J. Young, and many others — have thoroughly answered and demolished every claim of the higher critics, if the critics would only read their writings! Dr. Wilson summarizes the situation as follows:
In conclusion, we claim that the assaults upon the integrity and trustworthiness of the Old Testament along the line of language have utterly failed. The critics have not succeeded in a single line of attack in showing that the diction and style of any part of the Old Testament are not in harmony with the ideas and aims of writers who lived at, or near, the time when the events occurred that are recorded in the various documents…. We boldly challenge these Goliaths of ex-cathedra theories to come down into the field of ordinary concordances, dictionaries, and literature, and fight a fight to the finish on the level ground of the facts and the evidence.[6]
The Geographical and Historical Accuracy of the Old Testament
There is no reason at all to question on a linguistic basis that Moses could have written the Pentateuch, that Daniel could have written the book that bears his name, or that any of the books of the Old Testament could have been written by their traditional authors at the time and places claimed. This contention is still further strengthened by the amazing historical accuracy of the Bible narratives, wherever they can be checked.
Critics, of course, are far more eager to cast doubt on the accuracy of the Bible than on that of any other ancient book, and they have systematically refused to accept its historicity at any point unless there is a large amount of external supporting evidence. Instead of assuming it to be true until proved false, almost invariably they assume it to be false until the incoming evidence compels them to change their minds.
The 19th century higher critics, for example, used to deny the historicity of the Hittites, the Horites, the Edomites, and various other peoples, nations, and cities mentioned in the Bible, for the expressed reason that other ancient historians did not mention them. This "argument from silence," however, has long since been silenced itself by the archaeologist's spade, and few critics any longer dare to question the geographical and ethnological reliability of the Bible.
The same is true of the histories of kings and empires. The Davidic-Solomonic empire, the histories of the kings of Israel and Judah, the Babylonian captivity, and the return from exile are all now considered to be historical, whereas once they were questioned or denied.
It is significant that the names of over 40 different kings of various countries, mentioned at various times in the Old Testament, have also been found in contemporary documents and inscriptions outside of the Old Testament, always consistently with the times and places associated with them in the Bible. By comparison with gross errors in such matters known to exist in other ancient histories, it becomes obvious that the writers of the Bible narratives not only were contemporaries of the people and events so named, but that they were extremely careful in what they wrote, and furthermore, all those who later copied and transmitted their writings were also extremely careful. Nothing at all exists in ancient literature which has been even remotely as well-confirmed in accuracy as has the Bible. Even those names which once were doubted by the critics (e.g., Belshazzar, Darius, etc.) have now long since been confirmed.
One of the earliest biblical events of sufficient geographical extent to be of possible interest to non-biblical historians is the record of the confederation of kings from
