It is strange that these inconsistencies were left to European scholars of the nineteenth century to discover, and that neither the contemporaries of Ezra, who allowed themselves to be bound to the yoke of a law which they believed to be divine, nor the Samaritan rivals of the Jews, should have ever perceived them. The fact seems to the historian to throw some doubt on their real existence, and he can leave them to the tender mercies of Dr. Baxter, who has met the literary critics on their own ground, and seriously damaged their house of cards.[140] The historian can have nothing to do with a theory which not only requires the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament to be rewritten in accordance with it, but also declares at once every passage which tells against it to be a gloss and interpolation. History, like science, is not built on subjective judgments. At the same time, there is an element of truth in the work of the ‘literary analysis.’ Years of labour on the part of able and learned scholars cannot be absolutely without result, even though the labourers may have been led astray by the will-o’-the-wisp of a false theory and have followed a wrong line of research. The minute examination to which they have subjected the text has revealed much that had never before been suspected; and they have made it clear that the historical books of the Old Testament are compilations, not free, moreover, from later interpolations, even though we cannot share the confidence with which they separate and distinguish the different elements. They have made it impossible ever to return to the old conception of the Hebrew Scriptures and the old method of treating Hebrew history. Where they have been successful has been on the negative rather than on the reconstructive side. For reconstruction, the scientific instrument of comparison was wanted, and this the literary analysts did not possess. The Old Testament books themselves make no secret of the fact that they are compilations. The books of the Kings name the sources from which a large part of them has been drawn, and the books of Samuel (2 Sam. i. 18) quote David’s ‘Song of the Bow’ from the book of Jasher. The same work is referred to in the book of Joshua (x. 13), and in Numbers (xxi. 14) we have an extract from the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord. Old poems are introduced into the text, like the Song of Deborah or the Blessing of Jacob; even an Amorite song of triumph is cited in Numbers xxi. 27-30. The so-called ‘Book of the Covenant’ of the literary critics takes its name from a real ‘book of the covenant’ in which the first legislation promulgated at Sinai was written down by Moses, according to Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, and read by him ‘in the audience of the people;’ while the Song of Deborah expressly states that the forces of Zebulun, which took part in the war against Sisera, were accompanied by scribes, like the armies of Egypt or Assyria.