BIBLICAL LIBRARIES
Thaneni, but this is what the documentary sources call for and what is natural to the alleged historical circumstances. Moreover, there are two considerations which seem quite conclusive to one who is looking at the matter from the standpoint of the history of libraries, and both of these seem to a student of documents as documents obvious as soon as mentioned. In the first place the greater part of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers can be readily divided up into the brief original documents, of a kind, and with introductions, suitable to the time and circumstances. These are strung together as whole documents often with little or no running narrative connection—the narratives themselves being largely short paragraphs, i.e. narrative documents complete in themselves. No one compiling this material, five or six hundred years latter, from miscellaneous material, would possibly have chosen this registerial form or have been able to carry
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