and appealed to in proof of a stupendous miracle.  The commentator could not tell what the Moon had to do with it; yet he has quoted honestly.—­This presently led me to observe other marks that the narrative has been made up, at least in part, out of old poetry.  Of these the most important are in Exodus xv. and Num. xxi., in the latter of which three different poetical fragments are quoted, and one of them is expressly said to be from “the book of the wars of Jehovah,” apparently a poem descriptive of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.  As for Exodus xv. it appeared to me (in that stage, and after so abundant proof of error,) almost certain that Moses’ song is the primitive authority, out of which the prose narrative of the passage of the Red Sea has been worked up.  Especially since, after the song, the writer adds:  v. 19.  “For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them:  but the children of Israel went on dry land in the midst of the sea.”  This comment scarcely could have been added, if the detailed account of ch. xiv. had been written previously.  The song of Moses implies no miracle at all:  it is merely high poetry.  A later prosaic age took the hyperbolic phrases of v. 8 literally, and so generated the comment of v. 19, and a still later time expanded this into the elaborate 14th chapter.

Other proofs crowded upon me, that cannot here be enlarged upon.  Granting then (for argument) that the four first books of the Pentateuch are a compilation, made long after the event, I tried for a while to support the very arbitrary opinion, that Deuteronomy (all but its last chapter) which seemed to be a more homogeneous composition, was alone and really the production of Moses.  This however needed some definite proof:  for if tradition was not sufficient to guarantee the whole Pentateuch, it could not guarantee to me Deuteronomy alone.  I proceeded to investigate the external history of the Pentateuch, and in so doing, came to the story, how the book of the Law was found in the reign of the young king Josiah, nearly at the end of the Jewish monarchy.  As I considered the narrative, my eyes were opened.  If the book had previously been the received sacred law, it could not possibly have been so lost, that its contents were unknown, and the fact of its loss forgotten:  it was therefore evidently then first compiled, or at least then first produced and made authoritative to the nation.[6] And with this the general course of the history best agrees, and all the phenomena of the books themselves.