Article November 1, 2013

Search the Scriptures

Originally published in the April 28, 1909 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

The Pharisees had searched the Scriptures diligently. Their knowledge of the letter of the Law, and of the Prophets, was irreproachable. Under the prophets, it must be remembered, they included the historical books of the Old Testament as well as what we are accustomed to describe as the purely prophetical writings, differentiating them as the earlier and the later prophets, so that their knowledge was historical as well as ceremonial. More than this, they dwelt with scrupulous care on the figurative interpretation of the text. This comes out with remarkable clearness in the phrase “and the rest of the acts,” which recurs persistently in the historical books of the Old Testament. What it means is this, that the Hebrew chronicler seized upon the acts, no matter what their insignificance, in the reigns of the Kings, from which it was possible to draw a moral lesson of any sort, and recorded them whilst rejecting others which an ordinary chronicler would have regarded as of supreme national importance.

An example of this occurs in the account of the reign of Omri which, in spite of its being one of the greatest in the history of Israel, is dismissed in four verses. “No historian,” writes one of the finest living scholars, “would have dreamt of omitting all mention of Omri’s conquest of Edom, which we know from the Moabite stone, or of his relations with Damascus, which we learn incidentally from the conversation between Ahab and Benhadad related in Kings. The natural inference is that the compiler of Kings was not attempting to write a history (in our sense of the term), but to give an account of Jehovah’s dealings with Israel, deriving his material from documents which he believed to be historical.”

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