the striking phenomenon of duplicate or even triplicate narratives.  The creation of man is three times told.  The account of the Flood is made up out of two discrepant originals, marked by the names Elohim and Jehovah; of which one makes Noah take into the ark seven pairs of clean, and single (or double?) pairs of unclean, beasts; while the other gives him two and two of all kinds, without distinguishing the clean.  The two documents may indeed in this narrative be almost re-discovered by mechanical separation.  The triple statement of Abraham and Isaac passing off a wife for a sister was next in interest; and here also the two which concern Abraham are contrasted as Jehovistic and Elohistic.  A similar double account is given of the origin of circumcision, of the names Isaac, Israel, Bethel, Beersheba.  Still more was I struck by the positive declaration in Exodus (vi. 3) that God was NOT known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by the name Jehovah; while the book of Genesis abounds with the contrary fact.  This alone convinced me beyond all dispute, that these books did not come from one and the same hand, but are conglomerates formed out of older materials, unartistically and mechanically joined.

Indeed a fuller examination showed in Exodus and Numbers a twofold miracle of the quails, of which the latter is so told as to indicate entire unacquaintance with the former.  There is a double description of the manna, a needless second appointment of Elders of the congregation:  water is twice brought out of the rock by the rod of Moses, whose faith is perfect the first time and fails the second time.  The name of Meribah is twice bestowed.  There is a double promise of a guardian angel, a double consecration of Aaron and his sons:  indeed, I seemed to find a double or even threefold[4] copy of the Decalogue.  Comprising Deuteronomy within my view, I met two utterly incompatible accounts of Aaron’s death; for Deuteronomy makes him die before reaching Meribah Kadesh, where, according to Numbers, he sinned and incurred the penalty of death (Num. xx. 24, Deut x. 6:  cf Num. xxxiii. 31, 38).

That there was error on a great scale in all this, was undeniable; and I began to see at least one source of the error.  The celebrated miracle of “the sun standing still” has long been felt as too violent a derangement of the whole globe to be used by the most High as a means of discomfiting an army:  and I had acquiesced in the idea that the miracle was ocular only.  But in reading the passage, (Josh. x. 12-14,) I for the first time observed that the narrative rests on the authority of a poetical book which bears the name of Jasher.[5] He who composed—­“Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!”—­like other poets, called on the Sun and Moon to stand and look on Joshua’s deeds; but he could not anticipate that his words would be hardened into fact by a prosaic interpreter,