Prolegomena   By: Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918)

to the

HISTORY OF ISRAEL.

WITH A REPRINT OF THE ARTICLE "ISRAEL" FROM THE "ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA."

by

JULIUS WELLHAUSEN, PROFESSOR OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MARBURG.

TRANSLATED FR0M THE GERMAN, UNDER THE AUTHOR'S SUPERVISION, by J. SUTHERLAND BLACK, M.A., and ALLAN MENZIES, B.D.

with a preface by PROF. W. ROBERTSON SMITH.

P R E F A C E.

The work which forms the greater part of the present volume first appeared in 1878 under the title "History of Israel. By J. Wellhausen. In two volumes. Volume I." The book produced a great impression throughout Europe, and its main thesis, that "the Mosaic history is not the starting point for the history of ancient Israel, but for the history of Judaism," was felt to be so powerfully maintained that many of the leading Hebrew teachers of Germany who had till then stood aloof from the so called "Grafian hypothesis" the doctrine, that is, that the Levitical Law and connected parts of the Pentateuch were not written till after the fall of the kingdom of Judah, and that the Pentateuch in its present compass was not publicly accepted as authoritative till the reformation of Ezra declared themselves convinced by Wellhausen's arguments. Before 1878 the Grafian hypothesis was neglected or treated as a paradox in most German universities, although some individual scholars of great name were known to have reached by independent inquiry similar views to those for which Graf was the recognised sponsor, and although in Holland the writings of Professor Kuenen, who has been aptly termed Graf's goel, had shown in an admirable and conclusive manner that the objections usually taken to Graf's arguments did not touch the substance of the thesis for which he contended. Since 1878, partly through the growing influence of Kuenen, but mainly through the impression produced by Wellhausen's book, all this has been changed. Almost every younger scholar of mark is on the side of Vatke and Reuss, Lagarde and Graf, Kuenen and Wellhausen, and the renewed interest in Old Testament study which is making itself felt throughout all the schools of Europe must be traced almost entirely to the stimulus derived from a new view of the history of the Law which sets all Old Testament problems in a new light.

Our author, who since 1878 had been largely engaged in the study of other parts of Semitic antiquity, has not yet given to the world his promised second volume. But the first volume was a complete book in itself; the plan was to reserve the whole narrative of the history of Israel for vol.ii., so that vol.i. was entirely occupied in laying the critical foundations on which alone a real history of the Hebrew nation could be built. Accordingly, the second edition of the History, vol.i., appeared in 1883 (Berlin, Reimer), under the new title of "Prolegomena to the History of Israel." In this form it is professedly, as it really was before, a complete and self contained work; and this is the form of which a translation, carefully revised by the author, is now offered to the public.