place in the wilderness, the order of the march, the summoning of the
people when camp was to be broken, with all its minute and
circumstantial directions, would be destitute of meaning if it had been
written while the people were living in Palestine, scattered all over
the land, dwelling in their own houses, and engaged in agricultural
pursuits.

The simple, unforced, natural interpretation of these laws takes us
back, I say, to the time of Moses, to the years of the wandering in the
wilderness. The incidental references to the conditions of the
wilderness life are far more convincing than any explicit statement
would have been. Can any one conceive that a writer of laws, living in
Palestine hundreds of years afterwards, could have fabricated these
allusions to the camp life and the tent life of the people? Such a
novelist did not exist among them; and I question whether Professor
Kuenen and Professor Wellhausen, with all their wealth of imagination,
could have done any such thing. Many of these laws were certainly
written in the time of Moses; and I do not believe that any man was
living in the time of Moses who was more competent to write such laws
than was Moses himself. The conclusion of Bleek seems therefore to me
altogether reasonable: "Although the Pentateuch in its present state and
extent may not have been composed by Moses, and also many of the single
laws therein may be the product of a later age, still the legislation
contained in it is genuinely Mosaic in its entire spirit and character."
[Footnote: Vol. i. p. 221.] We are brought, therefore, in our study, to
these inevitable conclusions:

1. The Pentateuch could never have been written by any one man, inspired
or otherwise.