# The Book of Yahweh (The Yahwist Bible)/Foreword

FOREWORD
Sacred Books before 1000 B. C.
All Europe no doubt was “the wilderness eternal” at this early age, long before the days of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, excepting the southern point of Greece. However, a famous civilization flourished on the coast of Asia Minor under Minos, King of Crete, perhaps the most artistic the world ever has known. Mr. H. G. Wells claims their exquisite art was due to the fact that Cnosos (Κνωσός) had been at peace for over a thousand years!
The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” probably were composed hundreds of years before the first beginnings of the Old Testament. Yet Matthew Arnold says “Homer was rapid, clear, plain, and direct in thought and expression, — and eminently noble.”
And Dr. Eliot says in “The Harvard Classics” that “artistically, in spite of their early date, they are the product of a mature art,” and “stand at the head of the literature of Greece and of the Epic poetry of the world.”
What number of authors in all the world's history have won a greater meed of honor than “The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle”?
Agamemnon rouses the failing courage of his army by assuring them “Father Zeus will never be the protector of liars” and the son of Nestor proclaims that “all mankind hunger after God.” Even if the Greeks were limited in the practice of their ideals by their intensely aristocratic form of government, their ethical ideals, at least, apparently were as lofty in aspiration as our own.
Although the writers of Genesis and Exodus make no mention of the pyramids, we know now that the Sphinx, Chephron, the brother of Cheops, had gazed across the Egyptian plains for over two thousand years before these books were written and ​the Pyramid of Cheops still remains one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Egyptian obelisk that now ornaments Central Park, New York, was erected near the site of Cairo almost one thousand years before the sublime First Chapter of Genesis was written by Jewish priests in captivity by the waters of Babylon.
These obelisks which now stand in the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, on the Thames Embankment in London, and in Central Park, New York, are of such antiquity that Moses and his boyhood friends probably passed them on their way to school, for the two latter stood at the gate of the learned city of Heliopolis.
The superb civilization of Ancient Egypt reached the climax of its splendour in art and science between 3000 and 2400 B. C. At that time some of their portrait sculptures were of so high an order that they are incomparable and in delicacy of modelling never have been surpassed by any modern masterpieces.
It is said to have been due to their religious belief that the souls of human beings returned and dwelt in the statues erected in their honor, that the Egyptian artists attained such marvellous skill in portrait sculpture. So it was necessary to make the likeness as accurate as possible, in order that the “soul of the departed” should recognize at once, the earthly habitation.
The divine thirst for immortality has never been manifested more touchingly than in the ancient mummies of Egypt, that swathed with balsams and aromatic spices to prevent decay, survived for thousands of years, it being their religious belief that the soul could live on after death, only so long as the earthly body with which it had been connected, was preserved.
The great Indian Rishis however taught that the soul was supreme, unlimited by the body after death. So with splendid consistency they burned the body, which the soul had left, to get rid of it as soon as possible, while the Egyptian, on the contrary, strove to preserve it for thousands of years.
The Bible of the ancient Egyptians was the curious magical “Book of the Dead” that describes the strange adventures of their heroes after death, especially the day of judgment, when the heart of man was weighed in the “balance of justice” before Osiris and his judges.
​It is significant that the oldest book in the world is said to be “The Moral Aphorisms of Ptah-Hotep,” which had a deep and widespread influence among the early Egyptians.
The legendary date of the beautiful Zend-Avesta, both Bible and Prayer-book of the Persians, is five thousand years before the Trojan War, but even if it was written no later than the ninth century B. C., and few critics have suggested any later date, it would still be contemporary with the great Yahwist Bible.
By far the most magnificent literary monuments of antiquity are the Vedas and Upanishads written by the ancient Rishis of India, sometime between 2400 and 1200 B. C., according to Dr. Haug. These books are a vast treasury of the deepest philosophy and some of the loftiest religious teachings ever given to the world.
The Upanishads say “Know thine own soul.” To an Indian, religion is the very breath of his life, and the one object of supreme importance in the world is the soul. The man who does not recognize his own soul is not regarded in India, even as a man. The Upanishads say “Know thou the One, the Soul. It is the bridge leading to the immortal being.”
The teachings of the Vedas are that the one end and aim of life is the development of the soul or the union of the individual soul with the Universal Soul of Brahm or God.
The Indian poet chants, “From love the world is born, by love it is sustained, towards love it moves, and into love it enters.”
In the Indian civilization the ideal “flower of humanity” is not the statesman, king, artist or poet, but the Rishi, the one who has attained the supreme soul.
Upon the Rishi the nation bestows an extravagant homage that is never given even to the most illustrious kings.
The Vedas declare, God can be seen and known, and the forest-dwelling Rishis teach “Listen to me, ye sons of the immortal spirit, ye who live in the heavenly abode, I have known the Supreme Person whose light shines forth from beyond the darkness.”
​Prof. Rhys-David, than whom there is no higher authority, says “nowhere else are found the records of a movement stretching uninterruptedly for more than three thousand years; nowhere else has greater earnestness or so much ability been devoted so continuously to religious questions . . . and nowhere else do we find so complete a picture of the tendencies and influences which have brought about the marvelous change from the crude bypotheses of the earliest faith to the sublime conceptions of such original thinkers as those who put the finishing touches to the beautiful picture of the Indian Palace of Truth.”
China generally is believed to be the most ancient nation in the world. Its history extends back no one knows how far into the dim mists of the past. All the other great nations of the ancient times either have been destroyed utterly or have become the vassals of a foreign power. Assyria that was once the terror of the world fell before her old rival and enemy Babylon. The mighty nations of India and Egypt are subject now to a foreign nation. Babylon, once the most wonderful city on the earth, Babylon that even in the days of the patriarch Abram had a history of over a hundred kings, Babylon whose luxury and magnificence never have been rivalled even by Rome at the height of her pomp, Babylon finally fell before Cyrus, ruined not by the Persian army — far from it! — but by the dishonesty and corruption in her own government!
China alone of all the nations of antiquity has kept her independence. To the student of folklore the reason is not far to seek. From the earliest times the Chinese have had a most profound reverence for the Moral Law. In one of her most ancient books, “The Shu King,” that corresponds to our Old Testament, her patriarchs laid down the principles of right and justice upon which a state must be founded if it is to survive the storms of the ages and they pointed out clearly also how their rulers by violation of these principles could bring the state to ruin. It is said that the whole nation has become so deeply permeated with these teachings that no one is allowed even to perform his religious sacrifices until he has paid every debt. The ideal of the Chinese civilization is that “right and justice ​is recognized by everyone as a force higher than physical force” and that moral obligation is of supreme importance.
It is interesting to remember that the distinguished Chinese minister Wu Ting Fang said at the opening of our last war, “So long as there is wrong and injustice, so long will there be wars.”
It is easy to understand how in a national atmosphere like this it has been claimed by an eminent author, Ku Hungming, that “the dominant note of Chinese humanity is gentleness. He explains that he means by this “the absence of hardness, harshness, roughness or violence, in fact of anything that jars upon you.” . . . This gentleness that is “the fundamental characteristic of the real Chinese is the product of the sympathetic intelligence of a people who live almost entirely a life of the heart, — a life of emotion and human affection.” In short, the ideal Chinese is one with the intellect of a man and the heart of a child and “the Chinese spirit, therefore, is the spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national immortality.”
The “deluge myth” evidently was taken by the great Yahwist writer from the celebrated Gilgamesh epic that described the adventures of the old Sumerian king of Erech in his scarch after immortality, and was written in the highly cultured city of Babylon during a revival of literature under the great king Hammurabi. The discovery of the famous statue of this king, the original of which is now in the Louvre, receiving from the Sun God Shamash his code of laws, the most ancient in the world, and which are inscribed in the block of marble underneath, has proved to our surprise that, even in the days of Abram and Sarai, life was as carefully ordered in all its essentials as in the vaunted civilization of our own day.
It is difficult to imagine words expressing a deeper sympathy and tenderness for his people than those of the preamble to the laws of this wonderful monarch of over four thousand years ago. . . .
“I am the pastor, the saviour, whose sceptre is a right one, the good protecting shadow over my city; in my breast I cherish the inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad. By my genius in peace have led them, by my wisdom I have directed them, that the ​strong might not injure the weak, to protect the widow and orphan. . . . By the command of Shamash (the Sun god), the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, let righteousness go forth in the land. . . Let the oppressed who has a case at law come and stand before my image as King of Righteousness, let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words. The inscribed stone will explain his case to him, and make clear the law to him, and his heart, well pleased, will say, “‘Hammurabi is a master, who is as the father who begat his people!’”
The Yahwist writer was the fine flower, not of this Babylonic race, but of their kinsmen, the great nomadic tribe of the star-loving Chaldean Abram, whose home for centuries was the wilderness and whose lives were spent in wandering with their flocks and herds over the vast country that stretched between the two superb civilizations of Egypt and Babylon.
About twelve hundred years after the days of the patriarch Abram this Israelite tribe had expanded into a nation — and had entered the “Promised Land” and built a temple to Yahweh and a palace that was the admiration of the world.
“Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the finest gold. There were six steps to the throne, and the top of the throne was round behind; and there were stays on either side by the place of the seat, and two lions standing beside the stays. And twelve lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps; there was not the like made in any kingdom.”
THE YAHWIST BIBLE
The great Yahwist Bible was written when the Israelites were at the height of their success and prosperity as a nation, just after the notable reign of king Solomon. Three hundred years later came their downfall nationally. Their traitorous king Zedekiah broke his treaty with Nebuchadnezzar in favor of Egypt and the powerful king of Babylon naturally marched against Jerusalem, captured the city, destroyed the temple and palace and deported ten thousand of the leading families to dwell in Babylon by the banks of the Euphrates river.
If the Sacred Ark of the Covenant was rescued from the ​flames by the Jewish priest, its location has never been revealed to the world.
But at the time of the writing of the Yahwist Bible, the world was at the feet of the Jewish king, who had married an Egyptian princess, and formed an alliance with the king of Tyre. The queen of Sheba had come even from Africa “the uttermost parts of the earth,” to do him homage “and hear the wisdom of Solomon,” with her own ears.
The unknown prophet who wrote this primitive document, perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most ancient part of our Scriptures, lived in the ninth century, B. C.
At this time, before the religion had assumed its elaborate ritual, men were on terms of closer intimacy with the Deity, and our author does not hesitate to use his personal name of Yahweh, the tribal God of the Hebrews, as freely as Christians use the name Jesus. His quaint and picturesque document was written centuries before the Pentateuch. Afterward about 400 B. C. came the priestly interpolations, the Elohist scripture, the “Book of the Priests” and Deuteronomy, the whole forming the first Jewish Bible known as the Torah or Pentateuch.
The “Book of the Priests” chiefly laws, ritual, genealogies and editorial comments written after the captivity was evidently deeply influenced by the culture and the gorgeous ritual of the Babylonian religion.
These interpolations added about five hundred years later, not only broke the continuity of thought, but almost utterly destroyed the artistic unity of this perfect little gem of ancient literature, the Yahwist Bible. They were also the source of many bewildering contradictions, especially in the first and second chapters of Genesis.
The explanation of these violent contrasts is very simple. The first chapter of Genesis was written, not by the Yahwist prophets, but by the Jewish priests, and was placed by them before the first chapter of the Yahwist Bible, as the prevailing belief of the people — when the Pentateuch or Torah was compiled, in the days after the Babylonian captivity.
It is especially interesting as marking the wonderful growth of their religious ideals in the years that had elapsed since the days of Solomon. According to Dr. Bennett the Jewish priests ​particularly wished to counteract the ancient belief of the common people in the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.
In the first chapter the Deity is represented as an invisible spirit creating the animals in orderly procedure — and man last of all. “Male and female created he them,” apparently equal. In the second chapter he is pictured as a man kind hearted but irate and living in a beautiful park or garden, creating Adam himself first of all, and the animals afterward to give him pleasure. Eve was not even a separate creation in this first myth, but was moulded from a rib taken from the side of Adam.
In the sixth and seventh chapters there is also an interesting contradiction. In the sixth chapter the animals are pictured as going into the Ark, “two by two.” In the seventh chapter they go in “seven by seven” according to the Yahwist account. A few verses farther on they again are pictured as entering “two by two.” The explanation is that the Jewish priests decided they must have gone in “two by two” and that Noah could not have known the distinction between clean and unclean and so they placed their version before the Yahwist one. As there was no division into chapters until the middle ages this served to counteract the belief that they entered "by sevens." The second mention of their entering “two by two,” Dr. Bennett says was inserted by a mere scribe, to strengthen the position of the priests.
Constant delight has attended upon the task of detaching from their academic later overlay, this series of narratives, revealing in all their primitive beauty the personal charm and distinction of style of their great author.
Freed from this later overlay of interpolations we have a connected narrative of great interest, a partial restoration of the famous document, the great Yahwist Bible.
The unknown Yahwist genius found many of his stories in the works of an earlier day, especially the “Book of Jasher” and the “Book of the Wars of Yahweh.” But his wonderful tales were chiefly the stories the ancient Israelites told under the starry skies around their camp-fires for hundreds of years.
Sir James G. Frazer says: it is the pastoral age depicted “with a clearness of outline and a vividness of colouring which time ​has not dimmed and which under all the changes of modern life still holds the reader spell bound by their ineffable charm.” . . .
The picture of Rachel at the well “with the sheep lying round it in the noontide heat is as vivid in the writer’s words as it is in the colors of Raphael.”
“And to this exquisite picturesqueness in the delineation of human life he adds a charming naïveté, an antique simplicity in his descriptions of the divine. He carries us back to the days of old, when no such awful gulf was supposed to intervene between man and the deity. In his pages we read how God moulded the first man out of clay, as a child shapes his mud baby; how he walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called the shamefaced couple, who had been skulking behind trees; how he made coats of skin to replace the too scanty fig-leaves of our first parents; how he shut the door behind Noah, when the patriarch had entered into the ark; how he sniffed the sweet savour of the burning sacrifice; how he came down to look at the tower of Babel, apparently because viewed from the sky it was beyond his reach of vision; how he conversed with Abraham at the door of his tent, in the heat of the day, under the shadow of the whispering oaks. In short, the whole work of this delightful writer is instinct with a breath of poetry, with something of the freshness and fragrance of the olden time, which invests it with an ineffable and immortal charm.”
NOTE
The compiler wishes to acknowledge the deepest obligation to the great editors of the Century Bible, and to the distinguished author of “The Folklore of the Old Testament,” Sir James G. Frazer, for permission to quote from these books.
The text used in this word is based upon the revised English version of the Bible, although necessarily very much changed.
C. M.