EducT July July 17, 1934) 798,86.750 LIBRARY Boston COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ALFRed dwight sheffield ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November 1910 The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS U.S.A PREFACE THIS book offers substantially the entire Old Testament nartive, arranged in its due sequence as a history of Israel from e earliest times to the rededication of the temple by the Macbees. Passages which in the received text are duplicated it ves but once; parallel versions of the same tradition it gives gether, setting the later or less interesting one in a footnote. n editing this narrative for the school and the general reader, have assumed that two considerations should be uppermost: 1) the translation should do it justice as literature; (2) footnotes should give only such matters of fact as either explain the text or supplement it. The former consideration almost requires the use of the King James version, which is still unapproached as at once a renlering of an ancient text and an English prose classic. I must isclaim, however, the kind of veneration that seems to take iterally Jowett's remark about it as more inspired than the riginal." No "literary" study of the Bible is worth considerng which does not aim at appreciating what its original writers neant; and what they meant and wrote often does not appear n the King James translation. The traditional Hebrew text rom which both the King James and the Revised versions were nade, is in scores of passages-especially in the important ooks of Samuel-obscured by the accumulated copyists' errors of centuries. Where the work of modern textual scholarship has nade it possible to remove such errors, it is no longer excusable o pass them on to future readers. I have therefore cut out palable glosses, restored (in 1 Sam. xiv. 41 and elsewhere) original eadings that have dropped out of the Hebrew but are preserved n the Greek, and used corrected renderings where the received version is seriously misleading. Most of these changes, put*ing, for example, 'asherah' for 'grove,' Edom' for 'Syria' Aram), 'oak' for 'plain,' etc., can hardly be said to affect the style, except as they make for clearness; and they give a text which, I hope, will deliver the average reader from his present lilemma between a correct but non-literary translation, and a litrary one which requires continual recourse to a commentary. Two minor passages I have omitted as not of enough value to offset an objection pudoris causa; but elsewhere I did not feel that anything warranted bowdlerizing. I have followed the Revised version in putting its' for 'his' when not referring to persons, since in several places the change prevents ambiguity; and I have modernized the few obsolete spellings' plaster' for 'plaister,' 'basin' for 'bason,' 'assuaged' for 'asswaged,' etc. which survive in our Bibles largely by the chance of the printing house. The archaic charm of Jacobean idiom is not enhanced by a scattering of merely quaint-looking forms. The second consideration - - that footnotes should give such matters of fact as explain or supplement the text requires that the assured results of recent excavations in Bible lands should be briefly subjoined wherever they are pertinent. In February, 1909, the National Conference on Uniform Entrance Requirements in English placed the chief narratives of the Old Testament at the head of its list for school reading. Its action followed a conviction, still growing, that the ignorance of the Bible common in our schools is not creditable to the community. The Old Testament stories are not only a source of continual allusion in other literature read at school; in the classic King James translation they are an abiding standard of taste and elevated feeling. It is part of the aim of this book to set them at an advantage for school use. My debt to Haupt's Sacred Books of the Old Testament is greater than appears in the limited scope I have allowed myself for textual changes. Among other authorities I must make special acknowledgment to the following commentaries: Canon Driver's Genesis, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Daniel; A. H. McNeile's Exodus; G. B. Gray's Numbers; G. F. Moore's Judges; H. P. Smith's Samuel; A. R. S. Kennedy's Samuel; Professor Skinner's Kings; L. B. Paton's Esther. I am indebted to Professor Torrey's discussion of the Ezra story in the American Journal of Semitic Languages for July, 1909 (now republished in his Ezra Studies), and repeatedly to C. F. Kent's Student's Old Testament, for help in questions of sequence. In Egyptian names and dates I have followed Breasted's History of the Ancient Egyptians (Scribner's, 1908). I have been able to check a number of my summaries from the reports of Palestine exploration by Canon Driver's Schweich lectures on Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible. ALFRED DWIGHT SHEFFIeld. Cambridge, Mass. The Migration to Canaan-Sarai and Abimelech - Sepa- ration of Abram and Lot- Abram's Rescue of Lot Sarai, Hagar, and the Promised Seed - The Destruction of Sodom - Hagar and Ishmael Cast Off-The Trial of Birth of Esau and Jacob Esau Sells his Birthright-The Joseph Sold into Egypt-Joseph and Potiphar's Wife- Joseph as Interpreter of Dreams-Joseph as Governor Increase of the Israelites - The Youth of Moses - Moses' The Commandments - The Golden Calf-Renewal of the ter from the Rock - The Fight with Amalek — Discour- - 115 |