was Jesus Christ, appears to be expressly identified with the Lord God, with Jehovah. Again, that David should say: 'The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool,'[1]—does seem a prodigy of prediction to the same effect. And so long as these prophecies stand as they are here given, they no doubt bring to Christianity all the support (and with the mass of mankind this is by no means inconsiderable) which it can derive from the display of supernatural prescience.
But who will dispute that it more and more becomes known, that these prophecies[2] cannot stand as we have here given them? Manifestly, it more and more becomes known, that the passage from Genesis, with its mysterious Shiloh and the gathering of the people to him, is rightly to be rendered as follows: 'The pre-eminence shall not depart from Judah so long as the people resort to Shiloh (the national sanctuary before Jerusalem was won); and the nations (the heathen Canaanites) shall obey him.' We here purposely leave out of sight any such consideration as that our actual books of the Old Testament came first together through the instrumentality of the house of Judah, and when the destiny of Judah was already traced; and that to say roundly and confidently: 'Jacob was enabled to foretell, The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,' is wholly inadmissible. For this consideration is of force, indeed, but it is a consideration drawn from the rules of literary history and criticism, and not likely to have
- ↑ Ps. cx, 1.
- ↑ A real prediction of Jesus Christ's Godhead, of the kind that popular religion desires, is to be found in Benjamin's prophecy of the coming, in the last days, of the King of Heaven to judge Israel, 'because when God came to them in the flesh they did not believe in him as their deliverer.' But this prediction occurs in an apocryphal Christian writing of the end of the first century, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. See Fabricius, Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, vol. ii, p. 745.
