And yet it was just this narrative, which we are now told bears so plainly on its face the marks of its late age and sacerdotal character, that hardly twenty years ago was declared by the critics themselves to be the oldest portion of the Hexateuch! By this time the Hexateuch was nearly ready to become the Pentateuch, which should be read by Ezra before the Jewish community as ‘the law of God’ (Nem. viii. 8), and be accepted by the hostile Samaritans as alone authoritative among the sacred books of Israel. All that was needed further was to combine the existing books into a whole, smoothing over the inconsistencies between them and supplying links of connection. The ‘final Redactor’ who accomplished this task lived shortly after the Exile, and has been identified with Ezra by some of the critics. Whoever he was, he was naturally more in harmony with the spirit and ideas of the Priestly Code than he was with those of the Prophetic Redaction, or even of Deuteronomy; indeed, it is hard to understand why he should have troubled himself about the Prophetic Redaction at all. Between the Jewish religion of the days of Asa or Jehoshaphat and that of the period after the Exile a great gulf was fixed. It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch is justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a dark and illiterate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would be historically valueless. Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the Israelitish tribes in Canaan. Doubt is thrown even on their residence in Egypt and subsequent escape from ‘the house of bondage.’ Moses himself becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose sepulchre was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no need of indicating contradictions—real or otherwise—in the details of the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve; the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been discovered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the question.[127]