ty to suppose that these were afterwards added officially and in
good faith, as matters of public interest; or, as some think, that the
book itself is an arrangement by a later hand of writings left by
Nehemiah, perhaps also by Ezra; so that while its contents belong, in
every essential respect, to them, it received its present form after
their death. Respecting the question when the canon of the Old Testament
received its finishing stroke, a question which the wisdom of God has
left in obscurity, we must speak with diffidence. We know with certainty
that our present Hebrew canon is identical with that collection of
sacred writings to which our Saviour and his apostles constantly
appealed as invested throughout with divine authority, and this is a
firm basis for our faith.

The attempt has been made, but without success, to show that a
portion of the Psalms belongs to the Maccabean age. The words of
the Psalmist (Psa. 74:8) rendered in our version: "They have
burned up all the synagogues of God in the land," have no
reference to the synagogues of a later age, as is now generally
admitted. The Hebrew word denotes _places of assembly_, and was
never applied by the later Jews to their synagogues. The
Psalmist wrote, moreover, in immediate connection with the
burning of the temple--"they have cast fire into thy sanctuary,
they have defiled by casting down the dwelling-place of thy name
to the ground"--and this fixes the date of the Psalm to the
Chaldean invasion (2 Kings 25:9); for the temple was not burned,
but only profaned, in the days of the Maccabees. By "the
assemblies of God," we are probably to understand the ancient
sacred places, such as Ramah, Bethel, and Gilgal, where the
people were accustomed to meet, though in a somewhat irregular
way, for the worship of God. But whether this interpretation be
correct or not, the words have no reference to the buildings of
a later age called synagogues.

Some of the apocryphal writings, as, for example, the book of
Wisdom, the book of Ecclesiasticus, the first book of Maccabees,
were highly valued by the ancient Jews. But they were never
received into the Hebrew canon, because their authors lived
_after_ "the exact succession of the prophets," which ended with
Malachi. They knew how to make the just distinction between
books of human wisdom and books written "by inspirati