22. Were the “Redactors” Slipshod Editors?

Were the “Redactors” Slipshod Editors? That there should be apparent contradictions among so many laws was inevitable. Some of these are doubtless due to errors of transmission, especially if, as seems probable, the original was written in cuneiform and afterwards transferred to an alphabetic system of writing. Some of them appear contradictory, but really relate to different persons or circumstances. Certainly, if they were as contradictory and irreconcilable as the critics suppose, we have a right to express our astonishment that such contradictions were not removed by one or another of those numerous and canny redactors, editors, and diaskeuasts (revisers), of unknown but blessed memory, whom the critics allege and assume to have labored for centuries upon the elaboration of these laws. Surely, these alleged contradictions cannot have escaped their notice. Surely, they cannot have seemed incongruous to the priests of the second temple and to the Scribes and Pharisees who put them into execution. Surely, if real contradictions exist in the laws it is more likely that they were not in the ancient documents and that they arose in the process of transmission through the vicissitudes of many centuries, than that they should have been inserted in the time of Jeremiah, or of Ezra, that ready scribe in the Law of Moses.