and satisfactory solution of this interesting problem. If anything has been suggested tending to a clearer and a more correct appreciation of the general subject, this may serve to excuse the crude and superficial form in which it has been here presented, and the slight attention which we may have seemed to bestow upon the valuable work before us.

ART. VI.-A Commentary on the Book of Joshua. By CHARLES FREDERICK KEIL, Doctor of Philosophy and Theology, Professor of Exegesis and Oriental Languages in the Imperial University at Dorpat, and Member of the German Oriental Society. Erlangen: 1847. 8vo, pp. 411.*

THE book of Joshua contains one of the most interesting and important portions of Israelitish history. Treating of the period of their establishment as a nation, it contains the grand denouement of which Genesis was prophetic and the rest of the Pentateuch immediately preparatory. The books of Moses without Joshua, would resemble an unfinished building; the plan, the dimensions all visible, much of the work accomplished, enough to lead one to anticipate precisely what is to follow, yet never completed. It would be an imposing commencement with no corresponding conclusion. And as this book is the top-stone of the Pentateuch, so it is the foundation of the books that follow. It presents us with the ripened fruit of seed sown ages before, itself containing the seeds of events for ages to come. A failure to have recorded the events of this period would therefore have left a gap in the sacred history, which nothing could supply. Without it, what precedes would have been imperfect, what follows unexplained. The sacred writer was directed, under the guidance of inspiration, to fill this chasm; and in so doing, there was given him as his theme the Conquest and the Division of Canaan. It is not the life of Joshua which he undertakes to record; not Joshua's public acts or military exploits; not the history of Israel during Joshua's life; but simply the conquest and the division of Canaan. If this be kept distinctly in mind, it will explain fully and satisfactorily the selection and arrangement of the materials; we can then understand why he records what he does; why he relates some events with extreme particularity and minuteness, merely glances at others, and then again passes over whole years in silence. It is not because nothing occurred then, nor because he did not know what occurred,

*Commentar über das Buch Josua. Von Karl Friedrich Keil u. s. w.

but simply because he was writing with a definite plan before his mind, and related whatever fell into that plan; what did not, he omitted. There can be no greater mistake than that which refers the chasms of the Scripture history to chance, or to caprice, or to the writer's having lived at a time when all knowledge of what happened in the period of which he fails to give an account had been lost. The historians of the Bible were not mere journalists or chroniclers writing at random, or with the view of telling every thing which they could recollect; they did not write for the sake of gratifying those who in future ages might be fond of historical research, nor for the sake of detailing interesting and memorable events to their contemporaries. They are theocratical historians; their object is to trace the development and progress of the kingdom of God, to mark its epochs, and to record events important to their own and to coming generations in a religious aspect. Thus in the book before us, take as the plan of it what we have stated it to be, and every thing as to the choice or rejection of materials is clear. All that the book contains ranges itself about that plan; what is omitted would have been plainly irrelevant. The book opens with the Divine direction to Joshua, who had already been designated Moses' successor, to go over Jordan and take the land which God had sworn to their fathers to give to them, and divide it to the people for an inheritance, with the promise that if he faithfully observed the laws given by Moses, God would be with him as he had been with Moses, and not a man should be able to stand before him all the days of his life. These introductory verses furnish the key to the whole book. Joshua's execution of these commands, in obedience to the Divine direction, and God's gracious bestowal of his promised assistance, are the sum of what it contains. The first twelve chapters embrace the conquest; not a detailed account of all the marches of every campaign, but the prominent particulars only, are seized upon to be minutely related, those which really mark the progress of events,-those which bring most clearly to view God's miraculous help, and how necessary the condition of obedience was to its being furnished. Other events belonging to the conquest, the battles, the capture of cities, and even long expeditions, which had nothing remarkable about them, are only mentioned summarily, in such a way as not to weary with a recital of what is unimportant, and yet at the same time so as to give a general view of the whole line of operations, with their ultimate success. In chapters xiii.-xxi. we have the division of the land among the several tribes. In chapter xxii. the two tribes and a half, who had assisted their brethren in the conquest, and stood by them in the division of

Canaan, return in peace to their own respective possessions. Then we pass over an interval of several years, during which Israel was settled in the land, and which consequently fell not within the scope of the writer, until we come to the closing scene of Joshua's life, when that great and good man gathered Israel once more around him by their representatives, to rehearse to them what God had done for them in giving them that goodly land, and to engage them to renewed pledges of obedience to him. And thus the book closes with this solemn recapitulation of what the Lord had done in faithfulness to the promise with which it had opened, and a public covenant engagement of the people to serve the Lord, who had driven out the Amorites, and all those other nations from before them.

Joshua receives the Divine command to possess the land. He immediately sends out two spies as preparatory to the execution. The book minutely records what befell them, not from the interest attaching to their hazardous adventure and lucky escape, but vividly to represent how, in conformity with the Divine promise, the terror of Israel had fallen on the Canaanites. The anxious precautions of the king of Jericho, the pursuit of the spies, the language of Rahab to the spies, and of the spies to Joshua on their return-all bear on this point. Then follows the passage of the Jordan, whose waters, though unusually high, were supernaturally dried up before them. What, it may be asked, was the design of this miracle? There are no trifling, frivolous miracles in the Bible. God does not suspend the established order of nature without just reason, nor unless some important end is to be answered by it. Where, then, was the necessity of emptying the bed of the Jordan in order to get the people to the other side? The same thing could have been accomplished by natural means, without requiring the interference of Omnipotence. Though the river was too high then to admit of its being forded, especially by women and children, boats might have been prepared or bridges constructed, by which they could have crossed the stream in the same manner as other armies have done both before and since, with only the unimportant delay of a few days. The same inquiry may be made as to the necessity of dividing the Red Sea, bringing water from the rock, giving manna from heaven, &c. There was no need of their going through the Red Sea, penetrating so deeply into the desert, or crossing the Jordan at all, in order to pass from Egypt into Canaan. There is a route vastly more expeditious, as well as practicable by natural means, which travellers are every day passing over. These questions are instantly answered, however, as soon as we gain a correct view of the design of these miracles. Their necessity, and indeed that of every other miracle recorded in the Bible,

was not a physical, but a moral one. The object of them is the revelation of God's power and grace. The laws of nature, which God established in the beginning, are sufficient to accomplish every important physical end; it is only to meet our moral necessities that they are interfered with. Israel could have been taken into Canaan without a miracle; but then there would have been no such striking displays to them of God's omnipotence, of his grace, of his nearness to them. The stupendous miracles wrought in Egypt, in the wilderness, and in the subjugation of Canaan, were to teach Israel, and to teach all nations, that while the gods of the heathen were no gods, and could neither do good nor do evil, Jehovah was the living and the Almighty God of the whole earth. They were to be made sensible of his power and grace, and of their own dependence. Therefore they were brought into straits from which they could not extricate themselves, in order that they might see it to be God who delivered them. They were to be made to see that it was neither their own sword nor their own bow which saved them, but the Lord's right hand and his mighty arm had gotten them the victory; Canaan was not their conquest, but God's gift. But besides this general aim of all the miracles, of which this period, as one that specially needed them, was so full, and this general solution of their stupendous character, as contrasted, for instance, with the milder type and the more contracted scale of our Saviour's miracles, there seems a special fitness in this particular miracle, in God's interfering visibly on their behalf at this particular time. God opens by it, as it were, the doors of the land, which he had promised to give them, and conducts them in. He pledges by it the subjugation of the land which followed. At the same time, as this was the first public act of Joshua, in his new capacity as leader of the people, it gave Divine legitimacy to his office in their eyes, and was, in comparison with the cisely similar miracle under Moses, a striking attestation to the Divine word: "As I have been with Moses, so will I be with thee."

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The circumcising of the people and the celebration of the passover follows next; these belong to the history of the conquest, for the conquest was conditioned on the punctilious observance of all that Moses had commanded. But how came it to pass that the people were not circumcised? Their migratory condition, to which some have referred it, does not furnish an adequate explanation. Nor can we find the reason in the sinful neglect of the people. Bad as the character of the adult generation that left Egypt undoubtedly was, frequent as were their murmurings and their rebellions against the Lord, repeatedly as they fell into even gross idolatry in the desert, we

cannot charge them with so thorough and so continued a disregard of God's worship as it would have evinced for them thus to have given up entirely the very badge of the covenant during the whole of these forty successive years. Or if this might possibly have been the case with a part of the people, would not the rest, the less wicked portion, would not at any rate the pious among them, have perpetuated it in their families? And why did Moses never rebuke the people for this great sin of neglecting the covenant seal? Why did not the new and more godly generation attend to it sooner themselves? Or why did not Joshua direct it in the plains of Moab without its being deferred until the people were passed over Jordan?

The true reason seems to be that the seal of the covenant shared the fate of the covenant itself. When Israel, after repeated provocations, at length consummated their rebellion by despising the promised land and refusing to enter it, God sware that none but two of that generation should be permitted to enter Canaan. All were condemned to fall in the wilderness; and their children should wander about bearing their fathers' iniquities until the whole of them had perished. While this sentence lasted, therefore, they were a rejected people, and had no right to the seals of the covenant. They were not now God's people, and had no right to mark themselves as such. A gracious God, it is true, did not utterly withdraw from them every token of his favour. The manna, the pillar of cloud, the tabernacle, were still continued to them as so many tokens that the Lord had not finally abandoned them; that though he was angry with them for a season, his favour would again return; that though he had cast off the fathers, he would deal mercifully with their children. Hence we see why this ordinance was not resumed until Israel had crossed the Jordan. Then first the period of the sentence was complete. The mighty miracle then wrought gave assurance that God was again with them, and again regarded them as his people. They were now, therefore, once more fit subjects for the covenant seal. And thus the reproach of Egypt was rolled away. During the years of Israel's rejection, there seemed some ground for the Egyptians' reproaches, that the Lord had brought Israel out for mischief to consume them (Exod. xxxii. 12.) But now all occasion for such reproaches was taken away by the Lord's returning to them again, restoring to them the lost seal of his gracious covenant, and recommencing his mighty wonders in the midst of them.

To the cavils that so great a multitude of people could not have been circumcised in so short a time, and that if circumcised on the eleventh of the month, that is, the day after passing the river, they would not have recovered from it by the