was that they should have a good running hand, only a very few brains, some inventive faculty, and that they should be liars. They did the whole thing in forty days. If they had taken an extra ten days, they might have made a better job of it; but God seems satisfied, and why should not I?
One indispensable in Bible-writing is ambiguity; and, in the vague, equivocal, and obscure, Ezra was a perfect master. In writing a human book it is necessary to make it convey some specific meaning; but, in writing a divine book, care has to be taken to give it no meaning in particular: make it mean anything or nothing, and always leave a loophole through which the apologist can slip out and explain away whatever may oppose the particular position for which he contends. If you are writing a Bible and find yourself degenerating into anything like explicable common sense, it is incumbent on you to mix your sentence up with candlesticks and wheat, and beasts and chariots, and horns, and souls of men, and trumpets and millstones, and dragons and stars, and phials and earthquakes, till no sane person would write such a passage and no sane person would read it; then it will have all the better chance to pass unchallenged as "the word of God." A God or an oracle should never utter anything that has not, at least, two meanings.
Gods and oracles have usually observed this rule. Bible readers do not require to be directed to any particular instance of Jehovah's divine ambiguity, and classical readers will readily remember the cleverly equivocal utterances of the Delphic Oracle. Pyrrhus desired to know what would be the result of his projected expedition against Rome. The Oracle replied:—
"Credo te, Æacida, Romanos vincere posse."[1]
The same Oracle replied to Crœsus, King of Lydia:—
Χροισος Ἀλυν διαθας, μεγαλην αρχην διαλυσει.[2]
- ↑ This reads either, "I believe that thou wilt conquer the Romans," or "I believe that the Romans will conquer thee." Pyrrhus was defeated and slain; but the Oracle held that its infallibility was unshaken, and that it was no fault of its that Pyrrhus had adopted the former reading and rejected the latter.
- ↑ If Crœsus pass over the Halys, he will destroy a great empire." And so he did; but that great empire was his own.
