A perfect illustration of this which I have called the "scissors and paste" method, is afforded by the first two chapters of Genesis, and the way in which the Elohistic and Jehovistic narratives are so strangely interblended throughout the Pentateuch. No attempt is made to blend the two narratives into one harmonious and consistent whole, but excerpts, sometimes from one and sometimes from the other, are placed together without any attempt to explain away the evident contradictions. Clearly the same hand could not have written both narratives, and the compilation must have been made by some subsequent editor, or editors, for there is conclusive proof that the final edition, as it has come down to us, could not have been made until after the Exile. Thus in Leviticus xxvi. we find, "I will scatter you among the heathen, and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste," and "they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' land." And in Deuteronomy xxix., "And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is to this day." Even in Genesis, which professes to be the earliest Book, we find (xii. 6), "and the Canaanite was then in the land." This could not have been written until the memory of the Canaanite had become a tradition of a remote past, and this could not have been until after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, for we find from the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah that the Canaanites were then still in the land, and the Jewish leaders, and even priests and Levites, were intermarrying freely with Canaanite wives. The Apocryphal Book of Esdras contains a legend that the sacred books of the Law having been lost or destroyed when Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar, they were re-written miraculously by Ezra dictating to five ready writers at once in a wonderfully short time. This is a counterpart of the legend of the Septuagint being a translation of the Hebrew text into Greek, made by seventy different translators, whose separate versions agreed down to the minutest particular. This legend, in the case of the Septuagint, is based on an historical fact that there really was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Sacred Books made by order of Ptolemy _Philadelphus_; and it may well be that the legend of Esdras contains some reminiscence of an actual fact, that a new and complete edition of the old writings was made and stamped with a sacred character among the other reforms introduced by Ezra.