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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2025
English Catholics are not generally credited with much interest in the Old Testament. Their preference for the Imitation of Christ, say, as spiritual reading is easily intelligible. At the same time one would think that, considered merely as the early history of that unique nation, the Jews, the Old Testament would have a certain claim on the interest of educated people. But it also happens that the history of that nation is equally, for several thousand years, the history of Revelation.
At first sight it is perhaps surprising that in presence of the revelation of the Son of God the religious history of Israel should still keep some element of value. The inevitable tendency to scrap, as far as Christians were concerned, the story of that nation naturally crystallized in a very determined effort. It was made, about the middle of the second century, by that acute heretic, Marcion. Marcion’s theory, says Professor Burkitt in one of his stimulating lectures on The Gospel History and its Transmission “ is a theory of catastrophe : a new God comes down from nowhere, and proclaims true religion for the first time. And closely allied with Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament history as being in any sense the history of true religion was his denial of the reality of our Lord’s body as being in any sense true flesh and blood.” It is a matter of faith that the Old Testament contains true revelation. “ The Church was determined to maintain its claim to be the true heir of the promises of the Old Testament, the promises made of old to the fathers.
* 3rd ed. p. 309.
* Op. cit. p. 307.
* Docetism is always cropping up in some form or other. For an account of the most recent movement to mythologize Jesus Christ see Lagrange : Le Sens du Christianisme d’après l’Exégèse Allemande, p. 309 ff.
* The usual form “ Jehovah ” is certainly wrong, while “ Yahweh ” is almost certainly right.
† The poet here pictures the Israelite sheikhs as they ride in triumphal procession after the victory. As they ride along they are acclaimed by the people lined up. These arc standing among the norias, because places planted with trees are used as meeting-places, and in Palestine plantations of trees need a good water supply. Cf. Lagrange, p. 89. Burney's objection, therefore, to Lagrange's translation—“ it remains an enigma why these military operations should be carried out at the places of drawing water ” (p: 126)—is beside the point ; there is no question in this verse of military operations.
* “Noria. A device for raising water … consisting of a revolving chain of pots which are filled below and discharged when they come to the top … from its extreme simplicity, seems to have been the invention of the most remote antiquity.” (New Oxford Dictionary.)
* These two lines refer, of course, not to the charge, but to the precipitate flight, of the Canaanite chariots.