the boast of Josephus in his day that, "through all the ages that had passed none had ventured to add to or to take away from, or to transpose aught of the sacred writings." This reverence manifests itself in the rules laid down for the guidance of copyists in making the rolls for use in the synagogue service. They descend to minute particulars. The quality of the ink was prescribed. The parchment must be prepared by a Jew, from the skin of a clean animal, and fastened by strings made from skins of clean animals. The number, length, and breadth of the columns; the number of lines in each column, and the number of words in each line were given. No word must be written till the copyist had first inspected it in the copy before him, and pronounced it aloud; before writing the name of God he must wash his pen; all redundance or defect of letters must be carefully avoided; prose must not be written as verse, or verse as prose; and when the copy was completed it had to undergo a critical examination to test its correctness. The number of words and letters in each book were counted and known.

However superstitious or unimportant some of these regulations may appear, they testify to the fidelity with which their copies were made. That this veneration for the Divine Word permeated the hearts of the

people, may be learned from a circumstance recorded in the eighth chapter of Nehemiah, where we read that when on the return from the captivity, when Ezra took the Book of the Law in the sight of the people, and stood up to read, "and when he opened it, all the people stood up."

This book may be justly regarded as a continuation of the Pentateuch. The lifetime of Joshua covers the period of both. Hence the time included in the latter is about twenty-five or thirty years.

The name Joshua, or Yehoshua, some of its syllables being taken from the Divine. name, Jehovah, is, as is well known, the Hebrew form of the Greek name Jesus. And in him, as the great leader who took the tribes of Israel into the Promised Land, allotting their inheritances therein, we can see a striking prophetic type of our Lord and Saviour in His leadership of the tribes of Christian Israel, and their planting in the places of their Heavenly inheritance.

The Divine character of the book is felt from the very beginning. It opens with the words, "Now after the death of Moses the servant of Jehovah it came to pass, that Jehovah spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' Minister, saying,--." Then fol

lows, verses 2-9, the Divine commission and promise, closing with the words, "Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for Jehovah thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.' This opening passage should receive attentive study. From it we learn that, like Moses, Joshua was a prophet, a seer, gifted, at proper times, with open vision into the eternal world: that he received personal communications from Jehovah through an Angel infilled with the Divine presence, as Moses had done. All this might have been inferred from his official setting apart at the Divine command, by the hand of Moses, NUMB. XXVii. 18-25. But we have repeated assurances of it throughout the Book; as at the beginning of chapters iv., viii., xiii. and xx. From chapter v. 13-15, we learn the additional fact that the Angel so communicating was sometimes distinctly visible to his opened sight. Its authority is confirmed by the reference, in other books of Holy Scripture, to the events which are related in it; as Ps. lxxviii. 53-65; Is. xxviii. 21; HAB. iii. 11-13; ACTS vii. 45; HEB. iv. 8; xi. 30-32; JAMES ii. 25. Its place in the canon has never been disputed. In regard to its contents it may be divided into three parts. The first contains the history of the conquest of Canaan, including the preparations, on the east of Jordan, for the

war, the passage of the river, the capture of Jericho, the conquest of the south, the conquest of the north, with a recapitulation of the whole, ending with chap. xii.

The second part, occupying the next ten chapters, gives the partition of Canaan, or its allotment to the several tribes, the appointment of six cities of refuge, the assignment of forty-eight cities to the Levites, and the departure of the trans-Jordanic tribes to their homes. The third part, chaps. xxiii. and xxiv., contains Joshua's farewell, his convocation of the people, his two discourses, and an account of his death. The attempts of some modern critics to impair its historical validity, or make it appear to be a comparatively modern work, may safely be said to have failed entirely. As in the case of Moses and the Pentateuch, we may follow the ancient and general belief, which ascribes the authorship to Joshua himself. The history of the conquest must have been written by an eyewitness. The apportionment of the land must have been a matter of official action and record at the time. The language, the style, the incidental allusions, all refer its authorship to that period. In chap. vi. ver. 25, we read,- "And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father's household, and all that she had: and she dwelleth in Israel unto this day." Clearly showing that when the account was written

Rahab was still living. The history has that flow and continuity, and indeed the whole book exhibits a unity of style and purpose, which indicate a single hand.

This does not imply that no subsequent hand may have added marginal notes which some transcriber may have incorporated into the text, or that some authorized person may have inserted here and there an explanatory word into the original work itself. But indications of this kind are very few, and on the whole not very probable. In chap. xxiv. 26, we are told, "And Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jehovah." Some critics would limit the application of the phrase "these words," to the short address Joshua had just then uttered at Shechem. This limitation however does not fall in well with the whole previous history. We have seen that from the first part of the journey in the desert, ample provision was made for a public, official, and divinely superintended account of every transaction to be recorded in detail; and Joshua had been publicly installed as the continuator of the work which Moses had begun. And here in this book we have the actual continuation of that record. The clear implication of the history as a whole, to our minds, is that Joshua added the whole of his own book,