We cannot, then, peremptorily refuse to regard it as possible that what was the law of Judaism may also have been its product; and there are urgent reasons for taking the suggestion into very careful consideration.  It may not be out of place here to refer to personal experience.  In my early student days I was attracted by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourses of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament.  Thanks to such aids as were accessible to me, I even considered that I understood them tolerably, but at the same time was troubled with a bad conscience, as if I were beginning with the roof instead of the foundation; for I had no thorough acquaintance with the Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the basis and postulate of the whole literature.  At last I took courage and made my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and even through Knobel’s Commentary to these books.  But it was in vain that I looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetical books.  On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing.  Even where there were points of contact between it and them, differences also made themselves felt, and I found it impossible to give a candid decision in favour of the priority of the Law.  Dimly I began to perceive that throughout there was between them all the difference that separates two wholly distinct worlds.  Yet, so far from attaining clear conceptions, I only fell into deeper confusion, which was worse confounded by the explanations of Ewald in the second volume of history of Israel.  At last, in the course of a casual visit in Gottingen in the summer of 1867, I learned through Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself thc possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah.

The hypothesis usually associated with Graf’s name is really not his, but-that of his teacher, Eduard Reuss.  It would be still more correct to call it after Leopold Gcorge and Wiihelm Vatke, who, independent alike of Reuss and of each other, were the first to give it literary currency.  All three, again, are disciples of Martin Lebrecht de Wette, the epochmaking pioneer of historical criticism in this field./1/