stics he had considerable
affinity.

In 1829 appeared his first historical work, the 'History of the Jews,'
a work which excited a violent storm of theological indignation. The
crime of Milman was that he applied to Jewish history the usual canons
of historical criticism--sifting evidence, discriminating between
documents, pointing out the parallelisms between Jewish conditions and
those of other Oriental nations, and attempting to separate in the
sacred writings the parts which were essential and revealed from those
which were merely human and fallible. In a remarkable preface to a
revised and enlarged edition of this work, which was published thirty
years later, he laid down very clearly the principles that had guided
him. The Jewish writers, in his opinion, were 'men of their age and
country who, as they spoke the language, so they thought the thoughts
of their nation and their time.... They had no special knowledge on
any subject but moral and religious truth to distinguish them from
other men, and were as fallible as others on all questions of science,
and even of history, extraneous to their religious teaching.... Their
one paramount object being instruction and enlightenment in religion,
they left their hearers uninstructed and unenlightened as before in
other things.... In all other respects society, civilisation,
developed itself according to its usual laws. The Hebrew in the
wilderness, excepting as far as the law modified his manners and
habits, was an Arab of the desert. Abraham, except in his worship and
intercourse with the one true God, was a nomad Sheik.... The moral and
religious truth, and this alone, I apprehend, is "the word of God"
contained in the sacred writings.'

It must also, he contended, be always remembered that the Semitic
records are of an 'essentially Oriental, figurative, poetical cast,'
and that it is therefore wholly erroneous to suppose that every word
can be construed with the precision of an Act of Parliament or of a
simple modern historical narrative.

His attitude towards the miraculous was carefully defined. He observed
the absolute impossibility of evading the conclusion that the Jewish
writers, whether eye-witnesses or not, implicitly believed in 'the
supernaturalism, the divine or miraculous agency almost throughout the
older history of the Jews,' and that it is 'an integral, inseparable
part of the narrative.' Sometimes it is possible 'with more or less
probability to det