26. ‘‘To the Text and to the Testimony!”

‘‘To the Text and to the Testimony!” That a word occurs in the Old Testament but once and then reappears five hundred or a thousand years later in an Aramaic document written by Jews is to be expected. To say that such a word may have been in the spoken Aramaic before ever the Hebrew document was written, but that it did not appear in writing till A.D. 200, may be met by affirming that it may have existed in the spoken Hebrew for a thousand years before it was written. When we once attempt to argue on the basis of what is not contained in documents, one man’s conjecture is just about as good as another’s. I am willing to leave all such cases to the written testimony found in the documents we possess, and I demand that the assailants of the Scriptures confine themselves in like manner to that which has been written. To the text and to the testimony! By these let us stand or fall.