Semitic Exaggeration

After all, who did kill Goliath? Elmer Davis, letting his imagination zoom, said in his novel Giant Killer that it was not David, but his sturdy nephew Joab. Stumbling on the huge carcass, David made bold to slice off the head and stagger back with it to camp, claiming a victory that was not his.

On the other hand, cautious scholars who have no imagination have been troubled by the statement in II Samuel 21:19 where the killing of "Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam" is ascribed to one Elhanan. To smooth over the discrepancy, the passage is often made to read "the brother of Goliath the Gittite."

Last week a new Commentary on the Holy Scripture, published in England under the direction of Dr. Charles Gore, onetime Bishop of Oxford and famed as perhaps the greatest theologian in the Church of England, came out flatly in favor of Elhanan.

Go Down, Moses. Not only David's victory over Goliath but other marvelous episodes from Old Testament narrative--Jonah and his voyage in the whale, Methuselah and his ripe old age, Belshazzar and his feast--were ranked by Dr. Gore and his more than 50 collaborators as no more than Hebrew Nights' Entertainments. .They were explained as "products of the Semitic habit of exaggeration."

Moses did not write the Pentateuch.

The story of the Deluge was probably an hysterical account of a local flood at Babylon. The world and the waters and the sky were not created in seven days. The picture of Moses on Mt. Sinai was probably the hallucination of one scared by a thunderclap.

Such beliefs as these have been advocated more or less openly for at least the last 100 years, in Protestant circles. That finally eminent theologians should take the trouble to advance them in a book amused some Unitarians, some independent admirers of a man Jesus, who have put by all supernatural elements in Scripture as fictional. They came as a shock only to hardfast fundamentalists of the evangelistic type, like Dr. John Roach Straton, who insist that every phrase in the Bible is "gospel truth," inerrant.

Lazarus. It was not the intention of Dr. Gore and his associates to undermine belief in the supernatural. They declared that evidence for the actual existence of Christ and his Resurrection was "overwhelming." The account of the raising of Lazarus "is accepted with all its implications as the climax of all the miracles of healing." They warned against any tendency to explain away the vital points in Christian faith.

By theologians who take this attitude the doctrine of "inerrancy of the Scriptures" is given another meaning. Much of rhe material in the Old and New Testament is accepted as true in the historical sense, the rest of it is considered true in a symbolical sense. It is true inasmuch as the moral or mystical meaning which it symbolizes is true.

The Roman Catholic Church, although commonly ranked as "fundamentalist" and although insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture, maintains this attitude. It does not deny the supernatural; and certain episodes, after careful study, are qualified by the Pope, speaking as head of the Church in ecclesiastical matters, as factual. But the use of "day" in the Genesia-cal story of creation is interpreted as meaning an indefinite period of time. Likewise the entire Apocalypse is understood as symbolical.

Support. Agreement with the conclusions of Dr. Gore and his associates was urged on Episcopalians of the "Catholic" or "high church" type* by Rev. William A. Nichols of the Church of the Ascension, Brooklyn. Said he: "At the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, thought by some to be too 'high,' it has been taught for two decades that the Old Testament consists of myths, 'literature,' history and allegory."

It is the fault of the clergy that these beliefs are not already generally accepted, according to Rev. Guy Emery Shipler, editor of The Churchman. "They don't wish to disturb older members of their congregations with modern ideas."

* Dr. Gore was delegate to the Malines Conversations, when means toward reunion of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England were discussed.