Outside England, the deist impulse led to some very scathing attacks on Christianity and the Bible. The Frenchman Voltaire (1694–1778) never tired of pointing out what he called the absurdities, inconsistencies, and low morality found in the Bible. To claim that God was its author was to make “of God a bad geographer, a bad chronologist, a bad physicist; it makes him no better a naturalist.”129 To claim that Moses wrote the Pentateuch was to claim Moses to be a fool. Voltaire suggested that much of the Old Testament was borrowed by the Jews from other peoples, and proposed that Moses may have never lived: “If there only were some honest and natural deeds in the myth of Moses, one could believe fully that such a personage did exist.”130 The significance of Voltaire was his popularization, in caustic language, of many of the issues that had previously been the concerns of erudite scholars. Voltaire, however, approached the Bible and its historical materials not so much as a critic but as an assassin.
In Germany, the impact of deism can be seen in the work of H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), who, at his death, left behind what the philosopher Lessing published as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. One of these fragments was an essay on “the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.”131 Reimarus sought to show the impossibilities in a literal interpretation of the biblical description of the crossing of the sea. According to Exod 12:37–38, about six hundred thousand Hebrew men left Egypt, not counting the women, children, and mixed multitude and animals that accompanied them. Reimarus says this would give a figure of about three million people, three hundred thousand oxen and cows, and six hundred thousand sheep and goats. Approximately five thousand wagons would have been needed to carry provisions and three hundred thousand tents would have been required to house the people at ten per tent. Had the multitude marched ten abreast, the three million would have formed a column one hundred and eighty miles long. It would have required nine days as a minimum for such a group to march through the parted sea. Reimarus’s arguments, and there were others who made similar points, hit at the very heart of those who took the Bible as literally inspired and as factually infallible.
Among the founding fathers of the United States were many with deistic leanings. Jefferson edited a version of the New Testament devoid of any miracles and concluding with the death of Jesus. Thomas Paine, an Englishman who spent several years in the U.S. supporting the Revolutionary War and some time in France in exile, was a brutal controversialist in his attack upon the Bible. Paine’s peculiarity consists in the “freshness with which he comes upon very old discoveries, and the vehemence with which he announces them.”132 In his book The Age of Reason, Paine wrote:
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.133
The significance of the deistic movement and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was not in the area of historiography per se.The deists, in their discussions of the Bible and the history portrayed in the Bible, presented the issues of biblical criticism to the general public. In addition, their scathing attacks on the defences supporting a factual, literal reading of the text were devastating. It would never again be easy to present Israelite and Judean history by simply retelling and amplifying the biblical narratives.
Several developments, in addition to the deistic controversy, occurred in the eighteenth century, which should be noted since they were greatly to affect the study of Israelite and Judean history. The use of ancient literature in comparative studies of the Old Testament became more common and less apologetic. In 1685, John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, published his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus in which he compared the ritual laws of the Old Testament with relevant material from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Comparative study, as the deists demonstrated,could cut in two directions; it could be used to support either the uniqueness or the dependency of the biblical materials. The study of Palestinian geography was advanced by Hadrian Reland’s Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) and the pioneer work in Palestinian antiquities, Compendium antiquitatum Hebraeorum, by Johann David Michaelis, appeared in 1753.
The basic elements in the documentary criticism of the Old Testament were established during this time. The German pastor Henning Bernhard Witter (1683–1715) and the French physician Jean Astruc (1684–1766) laid down some of the criteria for source criticism of the Pentateuch. The classic four-source theory of the Pentateuch was to be worked out in the nineteenth century but the five pillars of documentary criticism were established in the eighteenth. These pillars are: (1) the use of different names for the deity, (2) varieties of language and style, (3) contradictions and divergences, (4) repetitions and duplications, and (5) indications of composite structure.
A third phenomenon to be noted is the maturation of the science of Old Testament introduction. Pioneers in this area were Michaelis and Johann Salomo Semler.134 Both of these men were influenced by English deism.135 With Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1780–83), the basic problems of Old Testament introduction—growth of the canon, history of the text, and origin and nature of the individual books—were discussed in handbook form. With Eichhorn, the humanistic argument that the literature of the Old Testament should be investigated like any other literature was integrated into the mainstream of Protestant biblical study.
A fourth factor in the eighteenth century was the poetic or ‘romantic’ reaction to the classicism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. In Old Testament studies, this movement is most closely associated with the work and thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who was influenced by such figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), and Robert Lowth (1710–87). The latter’s De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753) studied Hebrew poetry along the lines of research applied to Greek and Latin poetry, arguing that poetry represented humandkind’s earliest form of speech and was as expressive of truth as philosophy. The pietist Hamann had also expressed an emphasis on poetry as the mother-tongue of the human race and, like most pietists, stressed the reader’s immediacy to the biblical materials. Rousseau glorified primitive humandkind as a free and happy being living in accordance with nature and instinct, and for whom language was his basic expression of the natural and communal spirit.136 Herder emphasized the necessity of entering empathically into the human world out of which the Bible had come, rather than seeking understanding merely through critical and technical analysis. He was more interested in the group than the individual and in the manner in which the group gave expression to its distinctive culture, not necessarily according to any universal laws. Cultures are like plants that grow in unique ways dependent upon the situation of the place, the circumstances of the times and the generative character of the people. Whatever can take place among humankind does take place; life does not operate along rationalistic lines. Herder’s approach to the human past stressed an appreciative and imaginative relationship to the ‘spirit’ and not a rational, judgmental relationship.137
A final development in eighteenth-century Old Testament research was the introduction of mythological study. The systematic study of classical mythology originated with the German classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) who argued that myth was one of primitive humandkind’s basic modes of expressing the experiences and understanding of life and nature. The first application of mythological studies to the Old Testament was made by Eichhorn, a student of Heyne at Göttingen, who published a work on Genesis 1–3 titled Die Urgeschichte (1779). Eichhorn’s work, which was greatly influenced by Lowth, was taken up by Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826). The concept of myth, when applied to parts of the Old Testament, greatly