The narratives of the Pentateuch appear to have been accepted as properly historical by our editor. He did not, any more than the commentators who came after him almost to our own day, see them as mythical tales about individuals who lived, if they lived at all, and events that occurred, if they ever did occur, thousands--tens of thousands of years before any account of them could possibly have assumed the shape of legend, much less have been committed to writing. He has little, however, to say on the five books ascribed to Moses, and those of the quasi-historical complexion that follow them. Still his note on the words put into the mouth of Balaam, which tell of _a star to come out of Jacob and a sceptre to arise out of Israel_, is important. The prediction, as he interprets it, applies immediately to King David, though it has a farther prospective reference to Christ, with whose advent, as we know, it has long been all but exclusively connected. Our editor, however, was not helped by his superior knowledge of the stars to surmise that the writing was of a date long posterior to the reputed days of Balaam, the soothsayer of Mesopotamia, and Balak, king of Moab; that the predictions put into the mouth of the seer were all made after the events they pretend to foretell, and that King David had lived and died long before a word of the text was written; neither did he see that the writer who had King David in his eye could not have been thinking of an anointed king or captain who was only to appear some six or seven hundred years after Israel’s second sovereign had been gathered to his fathers. Villanovanus is much more copious when he comes to the Psalms. The words in the second of our collection of these sacred lyrics, so much made of in dogmatic lore, _Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.... Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee_--he explains thus: ‘On the day when David had escaped from his enemy (Saul) he said, This day do I begin to live; at length I am king.’ The words in the fifth verse of that fine Psalm, the eighth, _For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with honour and glory_, he also refers immediately to King David, who, in times of persecution, abased himself; but, subsequently victorious, was crowned at last. The passages, _In Jehovah I put my trust_, and _How say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain_, of Psalm xi., he refers to the time when David in fear of Saul escaped from the land of Judah. The comment on the sixteenth verse of Psalm xxii., _They pierced my hands and my feet_, is again applied to David, when, flying from his enemies, and scrambling like a four-footed beast over rugged and thorny places, his hands and feet were lacerated--_fugiente David per abrupta, instar quadrupedis, manus ejus et pedes lacerabantur_.