There is yet another reason why the new theory of the origin of the Mosaic Law stands self-condemned. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient East as if they were modern German professors and their literary audience. The author of the Priestly Code is supposed to go to work with scissors and paste, and with a particular object in view, like a rather wooden and unimaginative compiler of to-day. And so closely did the minds and methods of the authors of the Hexateuch resemble those of their modern European critics, that in spite of their efforts to conceal the piecemeal nature of their work, as well as of the fact that it actually deceived their countrymen to whom it was addressed, to the European scholar of to-day it all lies open and revealed. When, however, we turn to other products of Oriental thought, whether ancient or modern, we do not find that this is the way in which the authors of them have written history, or what purports to be history, neither do we find their readers to be at all like those for whom the Hexateuch is supposed to have been compiled. The point of view of an Oriental is still essentially different from that of a European, at all events so far as history and literature are concerned; and the attempt to transform the ancient Israelitish historians into somewhat inferior German compilers proves only a strange want of familiarity with Eastern modes of thought. But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is violated by the endeavour to foist philological speculations into the treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language; it is moreover a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is preserved in the Old Testament, and the errors of copyists and the corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which is questionable; there are numerous others in the case of which it is certainly wrong; and there is passage after passage in which the translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see them through a glass darkly. Not unfrequently the reading of the Septuagint—the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text—differs entirely from the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the Hexateuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently-discovered Hebrew text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is not altogether justified.