That Moses could not have written the account of his own death was discovered even by the Jewish rabbis; and references to the ‘Book of the Covenant’ and the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ prove that the Pentateuch in its present form has not come down to us from the Mosaic age. The materials may be Mosaic; it may thus be substantially the work of the great Hebrew lawgiver, but the actual work itself is of later date. How far may we trust the accuracy of the traditional Hebrew text? Modern criticism has been inclined to pronounce the text corrupt, not unfrequently because the critic himself cannot understand it, and to deal pretty freely in conjectural emendations. The Greek text of the Septuagint is invoked against it, and undue weight is often given to its variant readings or omissions, as, for instance, in the case of the history of Saul. Doubtless the Septuagint text is of great value; it goes back to a period centuries older than the oldest Hebrew MS. that has survived to us; but it was made by Jews of Alexandria, whose knowledge of the sacred language of their nation was not always complete or exact. The recent discovery of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus has gone far to shake our confidence in the readings of the Septuagint, as a comparison of it with the Greek translation made only two generations later has shown that passages are omitted in the latter, through simple carelessness, or perhaps inability to understand them. The discovery has also not been in favour of the emendations of literary and philological criticism, not one of the many attempts made to restore the lost Hebrew original having turned out to be correct.[141]