This page needs to be proofread.
Still less can this evidence be set aside or rendered doubtful by the objection, offered by Vaihinger, that “Moses cannot have related his own death and burial (Deu. 34); and yet the account of these forms an essential part of the work as we possess it now, and in language and style bears a close resemblance to Num. 27:12-23.” The words in Gen. 31:24, “When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the end,” are a sufficient proof of themselves that the account of his death was added by a different hand, without its needing to be distinctly stated.[1]
The argument, moreover, retains
- ↑ The weakness of the argument against the Mosaic authorship of the Thorah, founded upon the account of the death and burial of Moses, may be seen from the analogous case cited by Hengstenberg in his Dissertations on the Pentateuch. In the last book of the Commentarii de statu religionis et republicae Carolo V. Caesare, by J. Sleidanus, the account of Charles having abdicated and sailed to Spain is followed, without any break, by the words: “Octobris die ultimo Joannes Sleidanus, J. U. L., vir et propter eximias animi dotes et singularem doctrinam omni laude dignus, Argentorati e vita decedit, atque ibidem honorifice sepelitur.” This account of the death and burial of Sleidan is given in every edition of his Commentarii, containing the 26th book, which the author added to the 25 books of the first edition of April 1555, for the purpose of bringing down the life of Charles V. to his abdication in September 1556. Even in the very first edition, Argentorati 1558, it is added without a break, and inserted in the table of contents as an integral part of the book, without the least intimation that it is by a different hand. “No doubt the writer thought that it was quite unnecessary to distinguish himself from the author of the work, as everybody would know that a man could not possibly write an account of his own death and burial.” Yet any one who should appeal to this as a proof that Sleidan was not the author of the Commentarii, would make himself ridiculous in the eyes of every student of history.
